Saturday, January 27, 2007

Suspending our point of view

Yesterday was a busy day, what with blogging, volunteering at our local film festival, and attending a legislative forum on environmental issues. When we arrived at our final destination, a folk concert, my mind was spinning, processing all that had happened during the day. This is what happens when an introvert has a day that looks like an extrovert’s.

A background issue that is always going through my mind lately is: how can we more effectively collaborate? Lots of good people are becoming attracted to the environmental movement. But when we get together in meetings to try to decide on a unified plan of action, conflict, inertia, anger, fussiness, and a whole range of unproductive human responses begin to intervene. In our individualist culture we are so used to being our own masters of the universe, that when we arrive at the group we feel a great sense of un-ease. What to do about this?

I am not entirely sure yet, but a new book is pointing me toward some new ways to look at the issue. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future, by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Betty Sue Flowers, and Joseph Jaworski, discusses how people can work together in organizations, comprehending the whole while they set aside their narrow point of view.

The book seems to offer some directions to expand on some of the things I learned on the tennis court recently. Namely, I have an intuition that my growth and development is linked with that of others, and that I can change how I think about things so that I am not the only one winning, but others win and progress as well. Thinking in this way requires us to suspend our normal point of view, to not only think about me me me me, but to think positively, and with some interest, about the experience of others in the room. It is not always easy to think in this way, but it is definitely an adventure.

Last night at the concert, I tried suspending my point of view in this way: I was finding it difficult to listen to the music because of the traffic going on in my own mind. I decided to try an experiment, projecting my mind into the minds of the 300 or so people who were also attending the concert. So I wasn’t thinking my thoughts, I was trying to be unified with all the other minds. This was a very interesting experience, in that it allowed me to actually begin listening to the music. The song listened to in that way was fantastic! My own mental traffic receded to a very minor position, and the beauty of the music rushed to the fore.

The concert setting is a pretty unthreatening place to experiment with tuning into the collective mind. I’ll report further on my future experiments in more challenging settings, like small groups where personalities and positions are well staked out. I believe that learning how to collaborate and work effectively together is a new frontier, especially for a person like me who has been an independent operator for most of my work life.

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