4.
LET GO
“By holding on, we destroy what we hope to preserve; by letting go,we feel secure in accepting what is.”
A photograph by artist Yves Klein, Leap Into the Void, is an iconic image of taking a leap into what seems like certain injury, into a street several feet below. Yet Klein’s figure has a smile on his face. The artist was a trained martial artist and knew how to fall without incurring injury. The image of jumping into a liminal space is evocative. It is a powerful metaphor for leaving the security of the “ground,” and for a time experiencing “ground-lessness.” Being in a space in which there is no certainty can also be a place of possibility, where different choices can be made. It can be a place of transformation. Imagine the skilled gymnast who seems to hover in space. She can choose any range of possible moves before coming back to land on her feet.
Steven: I wanted to experience what it was like to do my own ‘leap into the void’ and experience groundlessness. To do that I enrolled in a “Flying Trapeze” class in Regents Park, London. Since a child I have been scared of heights, so arriving at the class and seeing half a dozen people, some beginners like me, who would jump for the first time, seemed much more than theory. We were given the ground rules for safety. Although they sounded simple, they reminded me of what is needed to enter into the unknown. It is not a case of blindly following rules but finding what would best help support.
Rather than going straight to the 40ft trapeze, I started by practising on a trapeze that was only a few feet from the ground. I learnt to lift my body, raise my knees over the bar to hang and then again lower my feet and come back to the ground. I was then strapped up and began the climb up the ladder to do the jump. What struck me was that whilst I felt terrified, there were three school children, perhaps 11 years old, who were joking, seemingly at ease with the situation. I could see how seriously I was taking the activity and yet if I had the attitude of these younger boys I could have seen the challenge as play. Climbing up and being strapped in with safety ropes, I felt a trembling in my body, slight vertigo and nausea, but also excitement. Standing at the top, I thought I’ve committed myself now and there’s no way back.
The call to jump came quicker than expected. How I would have wanted to jump on my own terms. Yet often we are called to jump before we are ready and we leap. As I leapt off the board there was a free-falling experience and then complete exhilaration as I flew through the air. All of the weight of my body was in my hands as I held on to the trapeze bar. At the top of the arc there is a place of least gravity and this is the time when it is best to lift the legs and hook them over the bar. I hooked my legs over. Not with ease, but I let gravity pull me backwards, lifting my hands off the bar and hanging from my knees. I was completely pulled by the movement with no effort on my part. This for me represented complete letting go and going with the movement rather than fighting it. It was the most exhilarating moment of the whole experience. I then raised my hands again and tried to descend gracefully with a back flip as instructed. That didn’t happen! I fell to the safety of a matt below.
Jumping into the unknown is a practice. The jumpers who had done it before were better the second time and improved. I noticed my fear kick in and my fixed mindset that I’m just not good at this new skill. I’ve tried it once, but did not want to do it again. I believe this is my real challenge. Not to jump once, but to do so again and again till I can use that moment of space in a creative way.
As we have seen in previous chapters, organizations and teams have expectations of the people in charge. This is hard-wired into us. When we find ourselves at the edge, unsure and confused, we are in danger of reverting to a dependent relationship with those in authority. We look to them to take responsibility away from us, to sort things out, to protect us. When our usual ways are no longer enough, when we haven’t been here before, we don’t readily tolerate people in authority Not Knowing.
When we move beyond our competence and approach the edge, we need to renegotiate the expectations that people may have on us. Peter King from Energeticos created a culture where staff relied on each other to set goals and stay accountable to those goals. By acknowledging that he didn’t have all the answers, he left space for staff to develop their own approaches and to make their own decisions.
In spite of the risks, providing less direction allows for more learning and creativity. A study carried out in 2009 by scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences took 48 children between the ages of three and six and presented them with a toy that had a variety of functions. Among other functions it could squeak, play notes, and reflect images. To one set of children only a single attribute was shown before they were allowed to play with the toy. For the other, no information was given about the toy. This group ended up playing for longer and discovering an average of six attributes of the toy, compared with the group that was told what to do, who discovered only four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, argues that if you programme a robot with instructions, when the unexpected occurs it will freeze. But if you give it many options and then encourage it to learn from mistakes, it can meet fresh challenges.69
The challenge of leadership is to deliberately dissolve the illusion of knowledge and control that traditionally surrounds those in charge. When we can’t solve our challenges alone, we need to engage and mobilize others, to help tackle the issues together.
So rather than taking up a predictable role of showing the way, jumping in to answer a question or solve a problem, we can try something different. When we are silent, we allow others to come in and perhaps take control. If we share our point of view after everyone has spoken, there may be more room for creativity. When we don’t indicate what we think or prefer to happen, we create the space for a different conversation.
Over the past 15 years Beth Jandernoa, an organizational learning consultant with the Presencing Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has seen many organizational change projects not go according to plan and she is an expert in the process involved in letting go.
One particular project stands out for her. It involved a global technology company that had been the industry leader for decades, but was losing its competitive edge. New nimble competitors were eating away at their market share. The company was desperate for innovative ideas, looking for a dramatic shift from “business as usual.” Everyone in the organization shared a commitment to shift to a new way of operating. The executives took a risk; they opened their usually closed strategic planning process to involve 130 people in giving input and making decisions about where the division would go and how it would get there. It was the first time in the history of the company that suppliers, customers, and employees all along the value chain had participated in planning the future of the North American distribution. The executives had promised employees that their input would shape and influence the future design of the work processes, how the organization would then relate to customers and suppliers, and how decisions would be made.
It was a couple of days before the last conference, in which collective agreements on the strategy would be made. Four weeks had passed since the prior conference and Beth was on a call with her team to finalize the design. However, in their check-in the client representatives related some shocking news. Two weeks after the second conference, the executives received an ultimatum from the company’s senior executive team to make some critical decisions earlier than had been expected. This meant jumping ahead of the timeline agreed upon with the employees, and making important decisions without the final input of the strategic planning participants. The representatives relayed the fact that rumors were flying around and that many employees were outraged, since they perceived this move to be a betrayal of the promise to include them in the process.
“I hadn’t seen this coming and in the moment I could taste the fear of failure and imagine scenes of angry employees. In this place of Not Knowing I realized that I had to hold steady and to draw on skills and resources that I hadn’t used before. As a team we knew we had to ‘pull a rabbit out of a hat’; in other words, we had to find a path that would take us into new territory. We had to let go of our design and create a process to confront the perceived betrayal in a way that would re-build trust and commitment.”
The team virtually stepped back, erased the agenda and began to design a way for employees and management to step into each other’s shoes and to understand why management had taken the steps that they had and to hear the interpretation that the employees had made. Suddenly all the creative juices started to flow. They ordered two tall ladders to use in the conference: one for a manager to climb while answering questions, representing the story of management, and the second for an employee to climb while representing employees’ reactions.
When the conference opened you could feel the tension in the room. But, instead of avoiding it, the team invited a manager and employee to come to the front of the room to represent the feelings and thoughts of each group. The room fell silent as the manager began to share her story of the urgency and pressure management was feeling and then the union employee revealed his view of the incident. As the manager and employee took each step up the ladder as they answered questions about what assumptions had driven their actions, what conclusions they had drawn, and what beliefs they were operating from, members of the audience, managers and employees alike, participated by calling out their answers to the questions as the two representatives climbed each step.
What became apparent to everyone were the good intentions displayed by each side and the misunderstandings that had driven people’s actions. Once this was revealed, the mood of the whole group changed palpably. Trust that had become frayed was renewed and deepened, and the division went on to generate new pathways informed by this seeming disruption.
“My team and I learned the importance of letting go and attending to the reality that is happening now rather than sticking to an agenda. We faced our own fear of failing and leapt into the unknown. We found that we were actually grateful for the mess that had arisen, since it built new muscle in the organization for facing differences along the uncertain path ahead.”
Rather than seeing strategy as a way to control a process or to expect a particular outcome, we can step back and attend to the current reality of what is. Rather than follow slavishly what we have planned, we can work with what we already have. One of the keys to this is giving voice to what is unsaid, so that people can be heard. What can seem to be a silent blockage to change can suddenly become known and worked with, through dialogue.
A word of caution, though. We need to be careful about what we let go of. Tied up in that are complexities concerning our agency and competency. Sometimes the temptation is to throw out too much of what we know. When a colleague of Diana’s started in a role that was new to her, requiring her to develop new skills and expertise, she felt that everything she had accrued that had got her to that point was no longer useful in her new context. She had assumed that all the things she had learnt in the previous position, such as management and strategy, had no place now. Only later did she realize that she had thrown out too much and had stopped trusting what she knew. This had an impact on her confidence and ability to contribute the breadth of her experience.