9. LEARNING HARD LESSONS
HOW DO WE FILL THE WORLD WITH CONTEMPORARY SAGES AND KICK-ASS SAINTS, WHO ARE AS ADEPT AT SURRENDERING THEMSELVES TO THE SILENCE AS THEY ARE AT INNOVATING INITIATIVES OF BREATHTAKING POWER?
– Robert Rabbin
After my encounter with the mountain lion, I began an intense period of reflection, looking back at all that had occurred since that moment of commitment in Baja, especially my founding of GLI and the demonstration projects. I came away with two core lessons. First, I learned about the power of sudden illumination: when strong intimations arise, as they did on that high bluff in Baja, go with them. Don’t get caught up in thinking about them, but be open and allow yourself to be used “as a force of nature,” as George Bernard Shaw put it. Second, and most important, I learned that the conscious development of facilitators is paramount.
My sensitivity to this crucial element was raised by reading a memorandum sent to Zaid Hassan, a colleague of mine in Generon with whom I closely worked during the years of the demonstration projects. It came from Robert Rabbin, an acquaintance of Zaid and a recognized authority on personal development and self-awareness:
I know that you have addressed the issue of constant “presencing” even after that phase of the process is over, and I love this attention to Silence you have given in the Global Leadership Change Lab. I wonder if you have accounted for something that could happen: though Senge, et al., have not pointed this out, there is (in my experiences and to use their U model) a little doorway at the bottom of the U that is like a rabbit hole to non-being. If one slips through that doorway and is taken by non-being, one cannot be certain that the upward curve of the U will still be valid when being kicks in. When people fall into the rabbit hole of non-being, the nature of their being is changed. The nature of their will is changed. The nature of their speaking is changed. We come to words like “surrender” and “devotion.” We come to the intersection of time and timelessness, of effort and grace, of doing and non-doing – of living beyond defining dualities and the seeming invincibility of our ideas…. Will this be spoken about in your Lab, and will it be demonstrated? Will your facilitators have the qualities and character to embody and transmit this great true and simple thing that since the beginning of time has set fire to souls and aroused their infinite capacities to build arks, and not for animals, but for love?[Emphasis added.]
I’m thinking of a story that is supposed to be true: … During the partition the violence in Calcutta was terrible, and Gandhi was broken hearted. He went to the city, took up residence on the verandah of a large house, and sent out the word that he was going to fast until death, or until all of the violence had stopped. Day after day, his aid[e]s reported a lessening of violence, urging him to eat. He wouldn’t. He was already old and frail, but he did not waver. The word spread of his vow. Slowly, the violence dissipated. After a few days, only sporadic attacks. His aid[e]s begged him to eat. No. Not until ALL the violence stopped. Finally, it did. Everyone laid down their hatred, their fear, their weapons. The violence stopped. It was as if Gandhi’s incredible spiritual force lifted everyone else up to an equivalent place.
Will the Global Leadership Change Lab make these kinds of “legendary” leaders who, by their very presence, will call people and cause people to rise up to their higher selves in real and telling ways? I wonder if the “missing” element in your draft is around the qualities and character of your facilitators. Perhaps a component of the curriculum could include studying Rumi, Hafiz and others? Case studies such as the one above? Perhaps my caution is to use the models and process, but not to be used by them. How do we fill the world with contemporary sages and kick-ass saints, who are as adept at surrendering themselves to the Silence as they are at innovating initiatives of breathtaking power? How do emerging leaders keep pace with being and non-being at the same time? I have an idea that emerging leaders should be the very embodiment of such a process, much the same way as Gandhi on the verandah.
– Robert Rabbin
Rabbin raised the central question that defined how I would focus my life energy in the years to come: the development of people who are of sufficient maturity to enable connection to Brian’s “deeper place of knowing.”
One of Generon’s founding partners, Bill O’Brien, often told me that “the success of an intervention is dependent on the inner state of the intervener.” By this time, a number of books and articles and many workshops worldwide had grown out of experiments with the U-process, and there was a continuing interest in the process and the U-theory as well as in what enables the U-process to produce remarkable results. But I became convinced that we were paying insufficient attention to O’Brien’s injunction.
During this entire time, from 2000 through 2007, I remained vaguely unsettled. For me, the explanations of the U-theory in hundreds of pages of books and articles were missing something vital, particularly when they attempted to describe what happens at the “bottom” of the U. At times, we came close to an adequate explanation – but then we fell back into overanalytic ways of describing what occurs there. As my colleagues and I wrote about “redirection” in Presence, a book published during that time, I kept thinking, “Something this fundamental is deeply important. We need to understand how people can access and utilize this force at the bottom of the U.”
The pattern of success in the three demonstration projects served to reinforce this conviction. We commissioned a “learning history” for each project. These learning histories reflected the remarkable results each project had produced; but it was clear that the Food Lab and Meadowlark had achieved a greater level of initial success than the PCN. Both the Food Lab and the PCN had a “moonshot” quality about them in terms of their sheer size and complexity. But while the Food Lab had met our highest expectations, the PCN had not. The learning histories and our own assessment were clear: we had put greater time and attention into the development of the facilitators and workshop leaders in the Food Lab than had been possible in the PCN.
A lead funder of the Food Lab project was the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, one of the world’s largest private foundations. The night before we made our presentation for funding to the senior officers of the foundation, we were invited for dinner at the home of the head of agricultural programs at Kellogg, Oran Hesterman, and his wife Linda. The senior vice president, a board member who was principally responsible for approving the largest grants, was also present that evening.
As we began dinner, Oran asked about the distinguishing features of our approach to the Food Lab – what made the Lab such a powerful tool for collective innovation and problem solving. For some reason, instead of giving the standard low-key response, I began telling Oran about our meeting with Brian and the work he did in Hong Kong with his Taoist teacher to prepare himself for gaining access to “that deeper place of knowing.” Rather than the look of puzzlement I almost expected, both Oran and Linda expressed complete understanding of what Brian was describing and what we had designed into the Lab.
As it turned out, both Oran and Linda had been studying this domain for years – how one or many can gain access to sudden illumination by choosing to follow a disciplined path toward self-realization through contemplative practices: meditation, yoga, qigong, and direct exposure to the generative processes of nature.
A profoundly deep dialogue about these matters took place over several hours at Oran’s home that night. The presentations the next morning, as it turned out, were a mere formality. The decision had been made that night over dinner. Kellogg effectively joined Unilever as a lead funder for the entire undertaking. Oran joined as an active champion for enrolling other key funders and sponsors, ensuring the success of the organizational phase of the SFL.
One of the early sessions of the Food Lab was a multiday Innovation Retreat similar to the one we used during the Alliance project to correspond to Brian’s “retreat and reflect – go to that deeper place of knowing.” Those participating were representatives of the thirty or so founding participants – the multisector group representing a microcosm of the whole system in question. We had “the system in the room,” so to speak.
The retreat took place in the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona and was co-led by Susan, whose responsibilities included serving as Generon’s Director of Retreats. Brian and other members of the Generon team were also there. Susan had trained with John Milton over the previous three years. John had told me that during the first day of her awareness training, he had the intuition to give her the advanced awareness training. Susan, through years of individual practice and personal discipline, had refined her capacity for other ways of knowing that superseded the ordinary. So with Susan and Brian deeply involved with the design and delivery of the early elements of the Lab, including the retreat, the core Lab team had the foundational training required for the superior success of the project. The experience of the team on the retreat set the tone for the entire Lab.
During the retreat, the team had a two-night solo experience in the wilderness where the solo tents of the team members were separated by about a half mile. At the conclusion of the solo, the team gathered in a circle to share their experience, just as we have designed all of our Lab retreats. As the team went around the circle, reporting one by one, it occurred that two of the participants had precisely the same dream on the solo. That was just one indicator of the deep interconnectedness the team shared, enabling them to powerfully focus on solving the problem at hand as “a single intelligence.”
Of that experience, Oran reported later to the learning historian: “I have never seen a process quite like this for bringing a very diverse group to a profound place of connection with one another and with what it is we are here to do.”