I loved the unpleasant familiarity of Gretchen Rubin’s Seven things to say in a meeting to make yourself look good and someone else look bad. Sometimes we really shoot ourselves in the foot, don’t we?

What I’ve been mulling over ever since reading her post is one of the comments (the fourth one), which repositions each of the statements with a high trust interpretation.

For example, given the statement “I don’t need all the details. Let’s just get to the bottom line,” Gretchen offers the interpretation: “You imply that others are quibblers and small-minded technicians, while deflecting the possible need to master complicated details yourself.”

The commenter offers the alternative high trust interpretation: “I trust you did your job perfectly. I need to hear only your conclusion.”

Ever since reading that, I’ve been noticing what my default interpretation of someone’s statement is, and then asking myself what the high trust interpretation would be. It’s been educational – uncomfortably so – to realize how foreign the high trust interpretation is for me in some contexts. I’m making a conscious effort to have that high trust interpretation come as my first (or, at least, my dominant) reaction.

I’ve been reading Fierce Conversations. The preface opens with:

When you think of a fierce conversation, think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration. Think cultural transformation.

Think of leadership.

I’ve been slow to post lately, and part of it is because I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly I have been learning about working in and with groups. I know the learning is happening, because I’m seeing changes in myself as both a facilitator and a participant. As I read over Susan Scott’s principles for fierce conversation, I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s it. I am engaging in conversations in a fiercer way [think passion, integrity, authenticity, collaboration].”

Here are, from the book, Scott’s Seven Principles of Fierce Conversations:

1. Master the courage to interrogate reality.
2. Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.
3. Be here, prepared to be nowhere else.
4. Tackle your toughest challenge today.
5. Obey your instincts.
6. Take responsibility for your emotional wake.
7. Let silence do the heavy lifting.

Reread the above list. Are you ready to incorporate one of those principles – or all of those principles – into some of your conversations today?

I’ve posted earlier on some listening frameworks (here and here). The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) training added another framework, three parts this time.

Level one: Listening within your own head

Similar to the level one listening from Scharmer, this listening is all about you. As a coach, if you’re listening from within your own head, you aren’t really hearing what’s being said. You’re hearing your own inner voice wondering what question you’ll ask next, if you’re adding any value for this client, that you’ve heard all this before, that you need to pick up vegetables on the way home…

Level two: “Hard focus”

CTI calls this “hard focus” listening; it means focusing completely on the other person (i.e. the client). The other person is taking up all of your listening to the extent that it’s almost as if there is a bubble around you. We saw a few demonstrations of this type of listening from the expert coaches teaching our course – where they coached someone in front of the rest of us, but were so intent in their listening that it was as if the rest of us weren’t there.

Level three: “global listening”

Level three listening is also known as a “softer focus”, and there’s a place for it in coaching as well. With the level three listening, the coach listens to the edges around and the atmosphere within the bubble – so to speak – of the coach and client. At this level you listen for the emotion and energetic sense of the person, but also are aware of what’s going on in the room, the environment. For example, if there’s a fire truck going by, alarms blaring, during a particularly intense part of the coaching conversation, listening at level three means you’ll acknowledge it rather than pretending it’s not going on and intruding on the conversation.

I think the level three listening is a good one for group facilitators to think about in terms of distractions – I’ve often seen facilitators try (and have tried myself) to ignore distractions and proceed as if they’re not happening, forging on ahead in a loud voice and extra energy while half the group is distracted watching the facility staff arrive and set up a new flipchart (or some other interruption). Better to acknowledge, “Okay, we’re getting a new flipchart. Let’s get that set up.” It probably only requires ten seconds of acknowledged attention, but without that ten seconds of acknowledgement you’ve lost the group’s attention for a full minute or two. With that ten seconds acknowledgement, you can draw the group’s attention back and then carry forward.

In the past two weeks I’ve started two projects that feel like a great fit.

In line with my interest in organizational culture and organizational understanding, I’ve taken on a contract to write an organizational history for Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB). We’re looking forward to collecting so many of the stories that have made the history and culture of this organization what it is, and I’m heading up the work to compile all of this and more into book form. This week I’m loving the way this combines my skills in anthropology, background in psychology, and love for writing – I’m eager to sink my teeth into this for a few months to come.

Secondly, last weekend I took a phenomenal Coaches Training course. The model of Co-Active coaching taught at the Coaches Training Institute felt like home to me – assuming the coaching client is “creative, resourceful, and whole”, the expert on their own life, with the coach available with tools and processes to help the client dig deeper in understanding what’s meaningful to him/her and creating a life in line with that. It’s familiar because it’s how I approach facilitation – that the group is the expert, the group has the answers within it, and it’s the facilitator’s role to provide the process and space and support for the group to find their answers.

I’ve decided to take the leap: I will continue the coaching training and complete the four remaining training courses required in order to start the International Coaching Federation certification process. I’m looking forward to putting these new skills to work, starting by taking on clients at reduced rates in order to practice my developing skills. So far, the experiences have been good, and inspiring. Hearing people talk about what really matters to them is an utterly rewarding way to spend one’s days.

Toronto’s St. Stephen’s Conflict Resolution Service offers community mediation, workplace mediation, professional conflict resolution training, restorative justice mediation, and co-parenting mediation. I took their 40 hour certificate course in interpersonal mediation last week – probably one of the best courses I’ve taken for its balance of theory and practice and its range of applicability.

We spent our first day with the building blocks: exploring our own approaches to conflict (completing statements such as “When someone disagrees with me, I find it hardest to handle when the person approaches me this way…”), distinguishing mediation from other forms of alternative dispute resolution, and discussing the differences between rights-based, rules-based, and interests-based resolution.

In role plays, we practiced active listening to an extent I’ve never seen a training workshop go to before, doing exercise after exercise of encouraging the speaker, asking clarifying questions, restating key points, reflecting feelings, and validating.

With our grounding in interests-based approaches and active listening skills sharpened, we were ready to look at the mediation model itself:

Phase 1: Goal: Each disputant feels the mediator understands his/her concerns.

After initial interviews conducted separately with each disputant, disputants and mediators evaluate the appropriateness of mediation. If all parties agree that it is appropriate, that they are willing to listen to each other, and that they are participating voluntarily, the disputants are invited to Phase 1. Phase 1 consists of disputants sitting side by side across from the co-mediators, as the co-mediators alternate active listening with each disputant to gain a full understanding of the disputants concerns, feelings, and interests. In this phase, the disputants do not address each other, but speak only to the co-mediators. Co-mediators do not try to problem-solve, identify solutions, or pursue any agenda other than to actively listen to the disputants. Phase 1 concludes when each disputant says that he/she feels the mediators have a full understanding of his/her concerns.

Phase 2: Goal: Each disputant feels the other disputant understands what is important to him/her.

Mediators take a short break before Phase 2 to identify the top issues that each disputant needs the other disputant to understand. Then it’s an art form to plan the order in which disputants will speak, how to phrase the prompts to have them speak about their concerns, and how to encourage each disputant to truly listen to the concerns the other disputant expresses. In Phase 2, the disputants speak to each other rather than to the mediators. After each disputant speaks to one of their concerns, the other disputant is asked, “Can you repeat back to [disputant A] what you heard him/her say?”

Phase 2 Example:

Mediators: Disputant A, tell disputant B how you reacted when you came home and saw the new fence.

Disputant A: [responds]

Mediators: Disputant B, can you tell Disputant A what you heard him/her say.

Disputant B: [responds]

Mediators: Disputant A, do you feel that Disputant B understood you?

Active listening happens because each disputant has to express the concern of the other party, and Phase 2 promotes understanding and, eventually, some goodwill between participants as they express each other’s concerns. Phase 2 ends when each disputant feels that the other disputant understands his/her concerns.

Phase 3: Goal: A clearly expressed agreement that fully resolves the conflict for each disputant.

In phase 3, co-mediators list the interests of each disputant and ask disputants to brainstorm creative alternatives that address the interests of both. Specific, balanced, accountable agreements are reached and written down for both parties to keep. Throughout the process, the problem-solving, idea generation, and evaluation is in the hands of the disputants: the mediator is not there to suggest solutions or arbitrate, but to guide the disputants through the process. It might seem that disputants could have just started in Phase 3 – brainstorming solutions – but what we saw over and over throughout the week is that it was the process of going through Phase 1 – feeling understood and having your concerns validated – and Phase 2 – listening to and understanding each other’s concerns – that disputants came to a point where they could jointly problem-solve and consider each other’s interests.

Summary

The above description is a very thin outline of a comprehensive process – we explored each section of it in detail, in both theory and in role plays, experiencing the perspective of the disputants and the mediators alternately from day-to-day. The course included discussions and activities around the finer details of when mediation is appropriate, mediation adjustments for individuals from a variety of languages, cultures, and/or approaches to conflict, power dynamics between disputants, how to identify disputant interests, how to draft a workable agreement, and how to respond to all sorts of common issues: disputants insulting each other, accusing each other, blaming each other, not listening to or speaking to each other, and even disagreements between co-mediators.

I left with a greater understanding of my own tendencies in conflict situations, and a greater ability to set my tendencies aside to prioritize the needs of the disputants. I received excellent feedback from others in the course about how they responded and reacted to my active listening, realizing that some individuals liked to hear their concerns reflected in a language of “You think…”, “what’s important to you is…”, and others felt more understood when I said “You feel…”, “you value…” (Myers Briggs all over again). Finally, I left with a mind spinning with ideas about how the mediation model could be used in workplace conflict situations, and a feeling that despite all the time we spend together, very few of us spend much of that time truly listening, or truly feeling understood.

After the fantastic experience of attending a plenary session led by Otto Scharmer and getting to talk with him during a dinner break, I’m revisiting the post I made earlier in which I described Otto’s classification of four ways of listening. The understanding I got from Kahane’s book isn’t very complete (and probably my new understanding is far from complete), but here’s a better explanation.

Otto’s working assumption for his presentation is that we do not understand the essence of leadership. That there is a blindspot in leadership and the blindspot is around understanding the inner source from which leaders operate when they do their best work. His proposition is that the success of a leader depends on the inner source from which the leader operates (and that two people could do exactly the same thing with different results if they are acting from different inner sources). Our leadership challenge, therefore, is to shift the inner place from which we operate.

Otto illustrated this shift with the example of listening. He outlined the listening example at the level of the individual, the group, the institution, and the system – below just outlines the individual level.

If I am represented by a circle, then the first level of listening (downloading, or “I and me” listening), is when I am listening from the centre of my own circle, from within my own walls. Everything I hear is filtered through my own boundaries and limitations, and really I am only hearing that which reconfirms what I know to be true.

The second level of listening has me move to the outline of my circle – I am listening from my external wall, looking out the window. Listening from the inside but looking at what is outside, a more objective listening. Otto called this factual listening, or “I and it” listening.

The third level of listening he called empathic listening, or “I and you” listening. At this level, you are outside the walls of your circle, your circle boundaries become a dotted line, and you listen from outside yourself, from the perspective of another. “An everyday version of an out-of-body experience”, he described it. It happens when we listen from outside of our own boundaries and forget our own agenda. We listen from the perspective of another person. As a facilitator, this is the level of listening with which I most identified – listening from the perspective of another, or from the perspective of a group. This perspective is what coaches try to see, when they look out at the coachee’s perspective and try to understand the coachee’s reality from his/her point of view.

But here is the challenging level, the level that takes real effort to achieve. The fourth level, which Otto called listening from the emerging future, or “I and now” listening. Here you are listening not just from a particular spot outside your own circle, but from a field of possibility – a field of spots outside your own circle, a field of spots of future possibilities, a field of your potential future selves. Otto described it as “connecting with that which is just about to happen now”.

For groups (rather than individuals), these four levels are termed downloading (conversation coming from within, from an internal agenda); debate (we start to speak our mind and objectively debate; we look at possibilities but still are stuck within our own viewpoint); dialogue (where the group achieves the capacity to see itself from without, to see the larger system we collectively enact, seeing the system from outside and how we are part of the system); and collective creativity, where we can listen from a realm of future possibilities.

And all of those are just the listening examples! What Otto drew it back to was leadership and the inner source of leadership. How do we identify the inner place from which we are leading? Are we leading from inside the boundaries of our own preconceived notions? Are we leading from our own boundaries, but considering objective possibilities that are out there? Are we leading from outside of ourselves, or our group, and looking back at ourselves from another perspective? And is it possible that the best place to lead would be from the emerging future, from what is just about to happen now, leading from a field of possibilities that we create together?

As a management consultant told me, an employee will never achieve more than the possibilities that their manager has imagined for them, because in imagining those possibilities the manager is limiting the possibilities for the employee to realize his/her potential. In very real ways, the fields of possibilities we imagine can determine what we are able to do; or, we could always be limited by what we imagine as future potentials. The flipside is that if we’re able to shift to include a larger field of potential future possibilities, we expand the range of what actually is possible.

Kahane’s “Solving Tough Problems” is recommended reading by a few management/consultant groups I’ve talked to. On pg. 129-130, Kahane offers ten suggestions for opening up, the beginning step for solving tough problems (below is direct quote):

1. Pay attention to your state of being and to how you are talking and listening. Notice your own assumptions, reactions, contractions, anxieties, prejudices, and projections.

2. Speak up. Notice and say what you are thinking, feeling, and wanting.

3. Remember that you don’t know the truth about anything. When you think that you are absolutely certain about the way things are, add “in my opinion” to your sentence. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

4. Engage with and listen to others who have a stake in the system. Seek out people who have different, even opposing, perspectives from yours. Stretch beyond your comfort zone.

5. Reflect on your own role in the system. Examine how what you are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the way they are.

6. Listen with empathy. Look at the system through the eyes of the other. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the other.

7. Listen to what is being said not just by yourself and others but through all of you. Listen to what is emerging in the system as a whole. Listen with your heart. Speak from your heart.

8. Stop talking. Camp out beside the questions and let answers come to you.

9. Relax and be fully present. Open up your mind and heart and will. Open yourself up to being touched and transformed.

10. Try out these suggestions and notice what happens. Sense what shifts in your relationships with others, with yourself, and with the world. Keep on practicing.

Next week I’m attending the Authentic Leadership in Action regional intensive hosted by the Shambhala Institute. One of the speakers, Otto Scharmer, outlines four ways of listening. I read Scharmer’s take on listening in Adam Kahane’s book “Solving Tough Problems”.

Scharmer’s four ways of listening:

1. downloading, or “listening from within our own story”. In downloading, we start with our own perception and understanding, and only listen for what confirms what we already believe. We listen for evidence of our own belief system.

2. debating, or “listening from the outside”. In debating, we exchange information from an objective perspective, rather than being a part of the exchange.

3. reflective dialogue. In reflective dialogue, our listening is starting to include a personal engagement. We listen to ourselves, and we listen to others, listening “from the inside”.

4. generative dialogue. In generative dialogue, we listen from within the whole – ourselves, others, and the system we create together.

As Kahane describes Scharmer’s listening taxonomy, downloading and debating are “insufficient to create new social realities”. But when we can listen from within ourselves, open up to others, and perceive from within the system, then new realities can emerge.