Latest / Coaches Rising / 291 - Jennifer Garvey Berger & Adam Kahane: Exploring Love, Power and Justice

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291 - Jennifer Garvey Berger & Adam Kahane: Exploring Love, Power and Justice · Coaches Rising

0:01
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you for watching.
0:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I'm just really feeling, I'm trying to contain my excitement.
0:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We've just been checking in around what we're going to talk about.
0:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, we're going to be exploring this topic of love and power.
0:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm joined by you Adam and Jennifer.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, maybe first of all, I can just invite you to see how you are, how's things right now.
0:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could maybe just give a little intro to who you are.
0:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Jennifer, you've been in our podcast a few times.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Adam, you're your first time guests so welcome and yeah maybe you can just introduce yourselves.
0:59
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I'm Adam Kain from Montreal.
1:02
[SPEAKER_04]: Now in Montreal, spent the last 35 years, facilitating conversations amongst problems, all in conversations amongst people that don't often don't agree with or like or trust each other.
1:19
[SPEAKER_04]: all over the world on all kinds of issues and in my spare time writing books about what I've learned from those experiences and from everyday life.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to be here with both of you.
1:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jennifer Garvey Burger and I am a coach and leadership
1:45
[SPEAKER_00]: singer, writer, learner, and I spend my time either coaching senior executives or running leadership programs, those sorts of things.
1:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And I write also about the stuff I learned as we're engaged in.
2:04
[SPEAKER_00]: these activities, particularly at the intersection of how does the in our complexity growing in us meet the complexity of the world outside, what happens when they don't meet and they crash into each other and how do we grow what's going on in us to deal with what's going on out there.
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you asked you all how we were doing and a part of how I'm doing is
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: struggling to grow what's in me to meet all that's coming out there.
2:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you're not alone there, Jennifer.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I'd safe to say that, and of course these two topics feel totally irrelevant for our time.
2:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So we find ourselves in, in fact, I'm going to go there with our first question, but I just want to share, you know, I was just saying this before we hit record that I've been wanting to have Adam on the podcast for quite some time to talk about love and power, and then Jennifer, you reach out and you're like, hey,
3:06
[SPEAKER_01]: would you be open to hosting this conversation?
3:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's kind of been very synchronistic or fortuitous for me, so let me let me actually let me ask you each of you how are you making sense of our times right now then we can I think contextualize a little bit more why love and power feel like such a central ingredients for our times you know I mean it's a huge question I know
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But what are you making sense of in the world?
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: These days, what's going on?
3:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Adam, do you want to start there?
3:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you want me to start?
3:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Clear, let's start.
3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, right, I feel like I'm making sense of a world that's moving really quickly.
4:02
[SPEAKER_00]: to just try to first of all, I feel incredibly excited to be alive right now.
4:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like this is just an unbelievably fascinating and thrilling and terrifying moment in human history.
4:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm trying to breathe it in.
4:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to be with it.
4:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to sit with the anxiety of it and notice what's running through my veins.
4:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm turning to great conversations and walks through the woods and sometimes reading fantasy novels.
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So I feel like right now I'm feeling all the things.
5:02
[SPEAKER_04]: the granddaughter that introduced me the expression, feeling the feels, feeling all the feels and I complimented her on on the expression and the practice that she told me it was not a good thing.
5:14
[SPEAKER_04]: So, or was not a happy thing.
5:24
[SPEAKER_04]: So I actually going to answer by going back to what you said when you introduce yourself, Jennifer, because I, I think I'm coming at this, I don't know, maybe the same way, maybe the opposite way, I can't quite figure it out.
5:42
[SPEAKER_04]: I've always been, I've always paid a lot of attention to current affairs and I've worked.
5:50
[SPEAKER_04]: not on politics, but on political issues, my whole career from South Africa to Columbia to Canada to Myanmar, so these conflicts and what I'm noticing these days and writing about is falling apart.
6:16
[SPEAKER_04]: the phenomena of the phenomenon of falling apart and and and I'm doing this while lots of things are happening in my big boisterous family of and I noticed this rhythm in my family of falling apart
6:47
[SPEAKER_04]: fights or feuds or arguments were very spread out in all kinds of ways geographically and politically and in generations and then coming together.
7:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think I at least conceptually am perfectly comfortable with this rhythm of falling apart and coming together.
7:10
[SPEAKER_04]: But what I think going on in the world is not that kind of rhythm.
7:16
[SPEAKER_04]: And the way I been saying it is falling apart and coming together fine, but falling apart, falling apart, falling apart, falling apart and more falling apart, that kid's dangerous.
7:27
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's what I'm focused on.
7:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I.
7:31
[SPEAKER_04]: One of the podcasts I enjoy listening to is Ezra Klein, and last week or the week before he interviewed, I'm sorry my name ready for names is not very good, I'm a children, and I was very surprised in his introduction.
7:47
[SPEAKER_04]: He talked about himself and getting older, and he said, he said, things are going to keep falling apart and coming back together.
7:58
[SPEAKER_04]: I was really surprised that he was describing what was going on in his life and using the exact words that I'm using to describe the similarity in difference between what I see going on in my life and what I see going on in the bigger world.
8:19
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's the thing I've been noticing
8:29
[SPEAKER_04]: and come together.
8:30
[SPEAKER_04]: And why would they just keep falling apart?
8:34
[SPEAKER_04]: And if that's not how you want things to be, then what can you do about it?
8:42
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's where just a spoiler alert.
8:45
[SPEAKER_04]: I think power
8:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to like keep that cliffhanger just for a little longer because I'd love to just ask a could follow up to each of you around, does it, you know, if things keep falling apart that feels kind of, that feels kind of fall on.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wonder if, and this is my question like that,
9:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Does this feel like a kind of systemic change where the system is perturbed?
9:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously so, you know, like so many different challenges and crises we face, but in that,
9:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But perturbation is the kind of very seeds of what may emerge, you know, like the butt of life from this kind of the goo.
9:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, so it's very difficult to be human right now.
9:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But is the gift in this that that's actually creating the conditions for the kind of change that we might need and we don't know what it'll look like that's the whole point is like it will be something quite different.
10:07
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, you know, there is this very famous poem.
10:14
[SPEAKER_04]: by Yates, which has the expression that many people abuse, things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
10:23
[SPEAKER_04]: So the idea that things are falling apart in a dangerous way is not new, and in fact he wrote that, I think, just after the First World War.
10:33
[SPEAKER_04]: So this may not be
10:39
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe this happens all the time, maybe it happens every so often.
10:42
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, certainly it's possible, I think, that things that can't or shouldn't aren't holding together for all the part, and then they get, they come together in a new and better or at least more suitable way, but I don't think that's guaranteed.
11:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's the question right that that is the cliffhanger we're living in is are we are we finding our way towards a
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: a new chapter in our evolution where we piece things together in a bigger way, you know, development is like this for individuals, right?
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We fall apart and then Adam, this is probably a piece of what you're writing about.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We fall apart and then when we when we piece ourselves
11:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In the best cases, we've not just fallen apart, we've fallen into our next chapter, our next selves.
12:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there are times when people just fall apart and it doesn't get better, they fall apart and it gets worse.
12:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And we certainly know that that kind of falling apart that's kind of permanent and,
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and terrible is also an option.
12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think the question you're asking Adam about whether things are in a longer cycle, so that it looks like they're falling apart, falling apart falling apart on the way to coming together, or whether it's just kind of falling apart all the way down from here, I think I don't know how we wouldn't know.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're living our way into that answer, right?
12:49
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and maybe one of the most important things to say is that it's not the same for everybody, just like we're all, eventually we'll all fall apart and literally, and we're warm food, and others will be born.
13:09
[SPEAKER_04]: So similarly, or analogously,
13:13
[SPEAKER_04]: for some people, things are going to come together in a better way and, and for some people not.
13:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So, that's important.
13:26
[SPEAKER_04]: That's, yeah.
13:28
[SPEAKER_04]: Am I the first person who is used to warm food on this podcast?
13:32
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, that ought to be or something.
13:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that, what if that's like a metaphor analogy, I'm not sure, but if there's been a lot
13:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it is.
13:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, maybe this is a good place to bring in the cliffhanger.
13:49
[SPEAKER_01]: We bring it back.
13:50
[SPEAKER_01]: You said Adam, like love and power, maybe not enough.
13:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I think was that how you said it?
13:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you talk a bit about, or could you set it up to talk about love and power?
14:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, why they're important?
14:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you said, like, then met, they might not be enough to, as a parent.
14:10
[SPEAKER_04]: So let me riff on this for three or four minutes, and then Jennifer, I'm super curious as to, you know, how you understand it, including how you understand differently.
14:26
[SPEAKER_04]: But I'll tell you how I've been thinking about it because I haven't been thinking about it for a long time.
14:39
[SPEAKER_04]: a theory and practice of social change, and it was in that this whole exploration or quest, if I can put it that way, that that I started then and I'm still on now, was inspired by Otto Sharmer handing me a piece of paper.
15:00
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't remember the context, but I remember the piece of paper had printed on it a few
15:09
[SPEAKER_04]: One of the final speeches Martin Luther King Jr. made before he was assassinated, I think was this final speech to the Southern Christian leadership convention.
15:18
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the title of the speech was where do we go from here?
15:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And the sentence in it that that is well-known is he said,
15:37
[SPEAKER_04]: read it.
15:39
[SPEAKER_04]: He says power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose.
15:44
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the strength required to bring about social political and economic change.
15:48
[SPEAKER_04]: And one of the great problems of history is that concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with the resignation of power and power with the denial of love.
16:03
[SPEAKER_04]: Now we've got to get this thing right, what we need to realize is that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
16:13
[SPEAKER_04]: It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality, which constitutes the major crisis of our time.
16:21
[SPEAKER_04]: So sometimes you just read something and you're not even sure you know what it means, but you know it's really important.
16:28
[SPEAKER_04]: So that, what I just read you was the inspiration for writing the book Power and Love.
16:35
[SPEAKER_04]: And because I, what I thought and what I explore in that book is, is this,
16:48
[SPEAKER_04]: this polarization between people who focus on power and think that's the important thing and people who focus on love and think that's the important thing.
17:00
[SPEAKER_04]: What I noticed in my own work and my own experience was I was in the love camp and was seeing the ways in which this was
17:16
[SPEAKER_04]: wanted to know how to balance the two of them, and I saw that a lot in the field of organizational development, multi-stakeholder dialogue, etc.
17:32
[SPEAKER_04]: One of the things I did when I was trying to make sense of that king quote, of course the problem with these words is
17:41
[SPEAKER_04]: power on Lover used in so many different contexts is actually a little hard to talk about the Miggas everybody has a different definition.
17:48
[SPEAKER_04]: But I went to the writing of Paul Tillick because King had wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work of Paul Tillick and I discovered that Paul Tillick had written a book called Love Power and Justice, where he'd offered definitions that I think King had in mind when he said what he said and that exactly fit.
18:14
[SPEAKER_04]: what I was experiencing and trying to understand in my work.
18:18
[SPEAKER_04]: He said, love is the drive to unite the separated and elsewhere.
18:22
[SPEAKER_04]: He says, power is the drive of everything living to realize itself.
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[SPEAKER_04]: So anyway, I'm focused on poltillic.
18:30
[SPEAKER_04]: this German American Protestant existential theologian, not because I'm super interested in German American Protestant existential theology, but because I thought these definitions explain actually everything I was trying to understand.
18:46
[SPEAKER_04]: So I've gone a long way with that, fast forward.
18:51
[SPEAKER_04]: I kept wondering, what's this justice thing?
18:59
[SPEAKER_04]: I know that that sounds like a foolish question because in some ways justice or injustice has been a center of my work throughout, everybody I'm working with is trying to deal with something.
19:12
[SPEAKER_04]: They think it's not fair in the world whether it's in South Africa, Columbia, Canada, or Myanmar.
19:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So justice has always been there, but
19:24
[SPEAKER_04]: But I'm almost finished.
19:26
[SPEAKER_04]: The telepoke is a theology series of theology lectures.
19:33
[SPEAKER_04]: Almost impenetrable for me.
19:37
[SPEAKER_04]: Abstract theology lectures.
19:39
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I'm in this all situation of having a book.
19:43
[SPEAKER_04]: I think I look two or three copies that I'm always looking at, but that I understand and that I know is important.
19:50
[SPEAKER_04]: So.
19:51
[SPEAKER_04]: to conclude or to come to the punchline of the story, I think what's missing is you can talk about balancing power and love and that was how my book power and love ended, talking about the need to balance like like walking on two feet.
20:08
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the analogy I use, but I never
20:15
[SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't balance just because you want it to be balanced.
20:19
[SPEAKER_04]: And the clue in Tillick's book, is he says, just is the form that enables power and love to both be expressed.
20:32
[SPEAKER_04]: So where I have gotten to, where I'm at now, is the missing piece,
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[SPEAKER_04]: The missing piece is the structure or the form, or the culture, or the rules of the game, that enable us to reconcile.
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[SPEAKER_04]: Everybody trying to realize themselves with everybody trying to unite the separate.
20:59
[SPEAKER_04]: You think about that for a few minutes, you realize that's not going
21:05
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, my favorite movie is the Big Lebowski and my favorite line is in the Big Lebowski is where when the dude says, or Walter says, this is not man here, there were rules.
21:18
[SPEAKER_04]: So what are the rules?
21:20
[SPEAKER_04]: What are the rules, what are the structures, what are the ways of organizing ourselves and looking at you, Jennifer, because I'm maybe this spark something in you that enable us to balance everybody trying to do their own thing with everybody trying to be with others.
21:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very excited to reach your new book.
21:45
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm very excited to write it.
21:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good feeling.
21:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That's such a good feeling.
21:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I first came across your book as cultivating leadership was just forming.
22:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the leadership development firm I was starting with a couple of friends.
22:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, uh, not long before your book came out and we were struggling with this question, and one day, one of my friends and co-founders, and now housemate, um, Keith Johnston said, this, this book has the answer.
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to, uh,
22:31
[SPEAKER_00]: everybody has to read this book.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, we read it, we bought a billion copies of it, gave it to our clients that this is the answer to the universe.
22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And we tried to kind of stumble
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: watching the leaning between power and love.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This was before we had come across Barry Johnson's work in polarity management.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was the first polarity ever really looked at in the first way of thinking about polarities ever.
23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: stumbled my way into.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And then over time, you know, Adam, your work plays so beautifully with what are the structures that are needed to hold a thing.
23:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And my work often looks at internal structures, you know, what are the capacities, the internal capacities needed to hold the thing.
23:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And so,
23:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We got incredibly interested in power and love.
23:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Keith thought he would write a book about it.
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We did lots of reading, we did lots of talking, we did lots of exploration.
23:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the people I talked to a lot was Bill Torburn about this question, because Bill Torburn talks about different forms of power as developmental impulses, developmental impulses of power.
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And he and I would talk about, and he often talked with some of his other treasured collaborators about this question of, are there also different developmental impulses for love?
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we're all kind of having this conversation, I began to wonder whether the development or somebody began to wonder, I was amongst the wonders, whether this developmental impulse, so Torbert describes mutually transformative power as kind of the most fully formed internal capacity for power.
24:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and then we started to play with mutually transformative love as the most fully formed capacity for love.
24:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact is they have the inner capacity to do exactly what you say.
25:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They require each other.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't
25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't be mutually transformative if you didn't have both of those features, I think.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I learned so much from you about the outer conditions, what the structures and systems and habits could be that would set these things up, and I think a lot about these
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: this capacity inside us, and of course, those things are completely, um, either self-reinforcing, or self-unreinforcing, right, this question of, can an external structure actually create a capacity in me and can my internal capacities help create external structures?
26:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, I always
26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: in that space because I'm fully convinced that the structures and habits you talk about are developmental and I'm also fully convinced that the structures and habits internal structures and habits that I talk about have a developmental impulse to create these external conditions
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And Joel, now you've got two theorists theorizing together.
26:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you might want to come in and grab this by the ankles and pull us back down to the earth.
26:49
[SPEAKER_01]: For sure, I'd love to, but I think I'd love to right now to see what comes up with, comes up for Adam here.
26:58
[SPEAKER_01]: If anything, yeah.
27:00
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so two questions.
27:05
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess what do you mean by in your work or you're thinking by external and internal structures and habits?
27:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I've got another question, but let's start there.
27:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and what do I now mean?
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is a word structure.
27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe I used to use what I used to mean.
27:35
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think the word structure is very helpful and my little understanding of systems thinking.
27:44
[SPEAKER_04]: The big lesson is that structure matters, but structuring the most general sense of the word.
27:51
[SPEAKER_04]: How things work around here.
27:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Whether it's the physical geography or the laws or the power structures or the myths
28:00
[SPEAKER_04]: So, I'm interested in what you mean by structure externally and internally.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I think we agree on external structures.
28:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think about what's the structure of our meaning making, what are the laws, the rules, the habits, the assumptions,
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It's BJAX that we stumble upon the solutions that arise for us.
28:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I get incredibly interested in this question about how do these external structures create what's possible in our meaning-making?
28:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And then how does our meaning-making begin to create external structures and how
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that work, if you have a really simple idea about a conflict, you have very complex ideas about conflict, but many people are very simple ideas about conflict and punishment and right and wrong and revenge or whatever.
29:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It might come up for people.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Those can be informed by structures that are inside, or they can be informed by habits or laws or ways of being that are outside and those things reinforce each other, I think.
29:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So what you mean by internal structure is,
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The constellation of assumptions, habits, perspectives, those tend to consolidate in ways that are themselves developmental.
29:57
[SPEAKER_04]: The other question I wanted to ask you.
30:02
[SPEAKER_04]: For not very good reasons, I've always had a bit of an allergy to developmental approaches mostly because maybe my, maybe my reason is the trade is my immaturity, but most of the people have talked to me about developmental theories explained to me by the fact that they're at the very highest level, and sorry for the rest of us.
30:30
[SPEAKER_04]: that's always rubbed me the wrong way.
30:33
[SPEAKER_04]: But leaving that aside, I guess it seems to me that if there are developmental stages, then there's a lot of people going down, not up these days.
30:47
[SPEAKER_04]: And a lot of things in the world that are degenerative, rather than generative.
30:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm wondering how
30:58
[SPEAKER_04]: how you think about that.
31:01
[SPEAKER_04]: If your professional work is all about helping people move up, what's why are so many people moving down?
31:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I tend to think about it as for all of us, we have what you talk about it near in your work, too.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You talk about things that are generative and things that are degenerative, right?
31:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tend to think that
31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There are contexts that for each of us would help us be our kind of biggest, most spacious self, maybe even bring us to a next version of ourselves where we're better able to handle.
31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: multiple perspectives, different diversity, conflict, all the things that are hard for us to handle.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to grow into.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there are contexts that tend to, I've gotten really into the nervous system in the last few years, because triggered nervous system, tends to bring a lot of those capacities offline.
32:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And when people's nervous system is triggered as often,
32:09
[SPEAKER_00]: as right now, I'll bring to them, then the response from some kind of earlier place of self-protection or black and white thinking, or whatever it might be that would get us from this like, from the scared or enraged part of ourselves.
32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: take some of our capacity away.
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think context can absolutely remove capacity.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And right now, the context is a lot.
32:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, wherever you are, so it's a lot.
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So the question of what are the systems and structures out there that create
32:57
[SPEAKER_00]: conditions for whatever's in here to be more spacious and capable.
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And then how can what is in here produce something even if it runs against the tide of the current moment to create something more spacious and possible?
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the, this is the, I don't know, curiosity, I'm engaged in life, I'm engaged in.
33:24
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, so what you've just said, I think it's really important and my explanation or my understanding about why we're seeing so much falling apart in so many places in so many domains for so many people is that
33:51
[SPEAKER_04]: and I'm sure you could say this better but that when we're stressed or frightened, most of us tend to retreat.
34:06
[SPEAKER_04]: to a smaller space within ourselves, a smaller group of people who are placed that feels safer and to defend ourselves.
34:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And if lots of people are doing that most of the time, then you get smaller and smaller spaces.
34:37
[SPEAKER_04]: a French economist, a few years ago, a very brilliant man.
34:45
[SPEAKER_04]: And we were talking about the state of the world.
34:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And he said something that I never heard anybody say before.
34:54
[SPEAKER_04]: But I now think it was a very insightful.
34:56
[SPEAKER_04]: He said, I don't think the world's going to come to an end.
34:59
[SPEAKER_04]: But I do think we're entering a period of people working in smaller units.
35:07
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, that global would go to regional, regional would go to national, national, go to local.
35:12
[SPEAKER_04]: I think we're entering that period again.
35:14
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's what I see in this context, this frightening, dangerous context, what we're getting is more people associating with,
35:30
[SPEAKER_04]: more of us associating just with our people and away from those people.
35:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's my simple explanation for this phenomenon of falling apart.
35:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to bring in something here, like a reflection of my own, and then you can, you know, Jennifer, if you want to respond to what Adam said, ignore me, this fine.
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, because what what I'm sat with is, um, I think I was one of those people in that in the love camp, you know, and, and so I, and I've seen around, you know, in the coaching community, spiritual communities that, um,
36:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a lack of impact here because we're not owning that the power side of polarity?
36:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's all these people here are really good at that power side of things.
36:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And they don't really care about what we're saying because they're just doing their thing.
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So we need to get with it.
36:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a kind of bringing together of those two polls.
36:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And,
36:39
[SPEAKER_01]: What I'm sat with and wondering about, therefore, is like the role of justice, because I'm trying to make sense of like in me, I can feel that part of me that wants to retreat.
36:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But I can also feel something being called fourth in me, which is, it's like we have this expression at my art school when the going gets weird, the weird get going.
37:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I've never felt more inspired in my life.
37:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't make sense to me.
37:10
[SPEAKER_01]: because, you know, if I look at the news in the world, I shouldn't feel inspired and around me, I see people, their hearts breaking open and, you know, I feel called to serve.
37:25
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wonder if this, you know, when I think of justice, is this, is this like,
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I'm talking about more by love and power, but there's this like the intelligence of life, which, orients around the good, the true and the beautiful and that feeling, the feels, I don't know if you said that in the live recording, Adam, is like one of the invitations for us to be able to alchemyze the discomfort and reorganize.
37:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess I don't know if there's a question in there, but I'm wondering,
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: what is what is what is just this really like and what is it make possible and how does that link to you know everything you Jennifer and you were saying you know about this internal and external co-emergence you know of all right so just yeah kind of that makes sense or stimulate anything
38:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this question and we don't know what Adam thinks about it yet because we haven't read that book.
38:36
[SPEAKER_04]: And so we just have to ask him, Adam, tell us, yeah, so I think my biography informs my thinking
39:03
[SPEAKER_04]: and so for me, power, the driver, everything living to realize itself is very easy to understand.
39:13
[SPEAKER_04]: And I get it.
39:16
[SPEAKER_04]: I see it all around me, I think if you picked up today's newspaper, you probably would not be able to
39:29
[SPEAKER_04]: if you didn't understand that drive, the drive of everything living to realize itself.
39:36
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm even though my, my, my, my location is a love location.
39:44
[SPEAKER_04]: If love is the drive
39:48
[SPEAKER_04]: that's what a facilitator does.
39:50
[SPEAKER_04]: The facilitator multi-stakeholder diverse groups and conflict, that's it.
39:54
[SPEAKER_04]: Or that's at least the first move.
39:56
[SPEAKER_04]: You're bringing people together who don't want to be together and you're helping them work stuff out.
40:00
[SPEAKER_04]: So I know about love and I'm
40:08
[SPEAKER_04]: And so that's why the king speech or the excerpt from the king speech struck me immediately as yes, this is true and crucial and so a lot of my my writing has been.
40:26
[SPEAKER_04]: trying to get love people to understand power.
40:28
[SPEAKER_04]: And in almost every one of my books, I have included the same quote from James Hillman, a psychologist, who says, why are the conflicts about power so ruthless?
40:41
[SPEAKER_04]: Less so in business and politics, when they're seen as an everyday matter, then in the idealistic professions of clergy medicine, the arts teaching and nursing, through which I would add, and coaching and facilitating.
40:57
[SPEAKER_04]: In business and politics it seems there is less idealism and more sense of shadow, power is not repressed but lived with as a daily companion.
41:07
[SPEAKER_04]: Moreover it is not declared to be the enemy of love.
41:11
[SPEAKER_04]: So long as an ocean of power is itself corrupted by a romantic opposition with love, power will indeed corrupt.
41:18
[SPEAKER_04]: The corruption begins not in power, but in the ignorance of it.
41:22
[SPEAKER_04]: So I see that all the time and so that's why I'm so interested in in this balance and therefore the question of what enables the balance and I'm going to so.
41:49
[SPEAKER_03]: beginning to think that in a conflict between power and love, power will always win.
41:56
[SPEAKER_04]: Because it is not sure, not 100% sure that's correct, but I think it is, and I think it's because it is the drive to everything real, living to realize itself.
42:09
[SPEAKER_04]: It's the, it's the, I'm alive drive.
42:18
[SPEAKER_04]: me uniting with others, or to put it more exactly, I'm going to do the uniting with others at a smaller scale.
42:31
[SPEAKER_04]: And so that's where justice comes in.
42:36
[SPEAKER_04]: Justice in the normal use of the word as a legal concept that it's the rules to work things out.
42:45
[SPEAKER_04]: Constitutions, laws, courts, police.
42:48
[SPEAKER_04]: There's differences, there's conflict whether it's civil or criminal.
42:51
[SPEAKER_04]: And we need a way to work these things out because it comes up literally every day.
42:58
[SPEAKER_04]: But I'm using the word justice in a broader meeting than that, which is not just the legal meeting, but the rules of the game, the culture of stories
43:14
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that enable us to reconcile this permanent tension between each of us wanting to be ourselves and all of us wanting to be connected.
43:26
[SPEAKER_04]: That's not stable.
43:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's my understanding of justice.
43:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you feel therefore that we are being invited to upgrade our sense of the rules of the game?
43:56
[SPEAKER_01]: What is justice?
43:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that kind of part of what is cooking right now?
44:17
[SPEAKER_04]: There's this great article by I think her name is Lydia Paul Green a few days ago the New York Times columnist saying that all of this attention was paid to Steven Miller's assertion about power and this famous line that I'm not going to quote it correctly that
44:45
[SPEAKER_03]: The strong will do what they want and the weak will suffer what they must.
44:52
[SPEAKER_04]: That dislike that this is, if you read the larger text, the author is saying the opposite, that that just doesn't work and that that leads to ruin.
45:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So,
45:12
[SPEAKER_04]: So yes, I think the narrow legal definition of justice is inadequate and the idea of the justice doesn't matter and that might make right is ridiculous.
45:29
[SPEAKER_04]: So in both those senses, I think I guess I had thought of it this way, but I guess what I'm really trying to do is what's the word revalorized justice.
45:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess we'll do you have a following question from there?
45:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven't, I have what book please go ahead, Jennifer.
45:50
[SPEAKER_02]: You go.
45:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It might take us off on a tangent, so actually I will just, you go, you riff with, out of here and I'll, I'll bring in, yeah.
46:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Feel free to stop me or whatever, cut this section out if it's like,
46:10
[SPEAKER_02]: to reliably theoretical, but the thing I've been thinking, Adam, is that in their highest forms, in their most expansive life-giving forms, power and love become inexplicable.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They become so entwined that we use our unity in order to realize ourselves and of course if that impulse is alive.
47:02
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes a much bigger way, right?
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: That makes a larger and larger circle of concern because if that's happening for me and you, then of course we want it to happen for Joel.
47:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course we want it to happen for all of our countries and all of our ecosystems.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we see the fundamental
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: beauty, as Joel was saying, like, the fundamental rightness of that unity.
47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think each of us has like a profound, felt experience of the disunity that you talk about, and how degenerative those are,
47:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, so I can't tell whether the thing you're saying is that when they come into unity that unity is called justice, or whether you're saying they're actually a triangle, power 11 justice, and that the triangular relationship of them brings this higher unity into
48:27
[SPEAKER_04]: Got it.
48:28
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think they are intertwined.
48:30
[SPEAKER_04]: I think they are Yin-Yang literally, I think the definitions or one version of Yin-Yang is the creative and the receptive, the masculine and the feminine.
48:46
[SPEAKER_04]: So yes, I think they are intertwined, but I'm arguing, and this is for me a new argument, I don't know whether it's correct, that they won't just, they can't just reconcile.
48:59
[SPEAKER_04]: They won't stably reconcile, they need a third thing, they need a form or structure or rules or the way we do things around here.
49:14
[SPEAKER_03]: in the absence of that, they'll fall apart.
49:20
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, the riddle I have, and I really don't know the answer and this I'm hoping before this podcast is over you will give me the answer.
49:30
[SPEAKER_04]: One or both of you is, what does that look like?
49:36
[SPEAKER_04]: What is the, if I say form structure rules of the game culture, the way we do things around here,
49:43
[SPEAKER_04]: in a that, that reconciled power and love, that reconciled everybody trying to be themselves and everybody trying to unite at least with certain others.
49:56
[SPEAKER_03]: What does that look like?
50:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I really need that place.
50:01
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the missing chapter.
50:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And so
50:08
[SPEAKER_01]: have an answer, but we're all in.
50:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, that's so just a point.
50:11
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of is this?
50:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so disappointed in you all.
50:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm feeling like my com, but I think why what I want to share is that it's, you know, it feels like you're articulating one of the core tensions, you know, that people are feeling.
50:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me say a bit more like, you know, it feels like we've modernity maybe is kind of like privilege to hyper individualistic sense of self atomized sense of self and there are all kinds of issues with that and, you know, in our disconnection from nature, meaning Christ is what it would,
51:02
[SPEAKER_01]: At least, and again, it's not an answer, but one common thing that I feel and I see people speaking to is, is just this yearning for a deeper communion to recognize our interdependence, but not in a way that squishes that were individuals, but it feels like we've tipped how way too far on one side.
51:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of, it all feels kind of mushed together, but it's like, is it an identity shift that allows the new, that kind of vivocation of justice again, you know, or is it the justice that allows the shift into a kind of more mutually sustainable way of living and thriving that, to a merge.
51:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
52:01
[SPEAKER_00]: solving this problem at um and I'd like to rift just a little bit on a couple of things that we've learned actually not not so much of my organizational work but in my life work here um because you both know that uh
52:23
[SPEAKER_00]: some years ago, a bunch of us bought this big house together and we live in community here.
52:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I sometimes write about are, and people are asking me all the time about, what rules do you follow as you live in community together?
52:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So written about this sum.
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is true that the rules that you follow when living community have to be reforged because the rules that we follow in our everyday modern lives is Joe points out.
52:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Are much more individualistic, much more about my rights, much more about my kind of taking up the space I want, and I'm gonna push it to the edge and to it.
53:15
[SPEAKER_00]: until something prevents me from taking a more space.
53:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But the rules in community are different, but you actually have to consider much more often that the us, you have to consider the us as much as you consider the I.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are always asking,
53:43
[SPEAKER_00]: when they ask us about how does this whole thing work.
53:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You can always hear in there in their questions, like how do you get enough eye, right?
54:00
[SPEAKER_00]: When you move into community, how do you get enough eye?
54:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I've learned since moving here is almost nobody asks that question in the other way about their
54:11
[SPEAKER_00]: their regular, the kind of more ordinary way people live.
54:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody says, oh, I wonder, I wonder how I could consider the we more often when I'm loading the dishwasher.
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so how do you defend your eye space is really like a classic question, but how do we weave together as a much less
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: a much less kind of tripping to the tip of the tongue question.
54:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And it makes me wonder about what you're saying, Joel, is are there a new set of rules, a new justice that needs to be borne in order to correct the overleaning that you're both describing?
55:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's really, really helpful, Dan, for that example.
55:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
55:11
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm not at all a constitutional expert, but I do remember or I do know that in South African jurisprudence, I think unlike American jurisprudence, this question, I think it's called
55:37
[SPEAKER_04]: the right to health, the right to housing.
55:39
[SPEAKER_04]: These are us rights and the idea that the only rights that matter are individual, sorry, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not explaining this accurately, but I think there are, even in the law, there's more than one kind of right and there are societies that balance that legally
56:04
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, and I, so I think your example is super important and to go back to the way Joel asked the question, um, yes, I think the role of justice is to prevent both extremes.
56:22
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, this great myth of Silla and Churabdis.
56:26
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so it's a famous story.
56:28
[SPEAKER_04]: I think Homer, maybe I'm getting it wrong.
56:31
[SPEAKER_04]: Anyhow, there's a certain narrow street of body of water and on one side is a and each side has a monster on it called
56:51
[SPEAKER_04]: You have to steer very carefully because we try to get away from the, if you try in expertly to get away from the rocks, you lend up in the world pool and the opposite.
57:01
[SPEAKER_04]: So this notion of between Silla and Churrib this and I think justice is between Silla and Churrib.
57:08
[SPEAKER_04]: So one of the two social monsters, one monster is everybody is just doing what they want to do and lots of people are getting hurt.
57:19
[SPEAKER_04]: and we see a lot of that in the world these days.
57:21
[SPEAKER_04]: The other social monster is unity and collectivism above all.
57:30
[SPEAKER_04]: And you're in authoritarian or dictatorial or totalitarian.
57:39
[SPEAKER_04]: So so yes, I think justice is about
57:49
[SPEAKER_04]: I think you're both right, that we're used to not trying to safeguard the eye.
58:03
[SPEAKER_04]: And so the adjustment, which may already be present, for example, and so that I've
58:21
[SPEAKER_01]: just this comes from in the sense of, you know, we could use your example Jennifer of the, you know, your community or, or the examples, you know, something I've been thinking about as well is, and I know that's not precisely what we're talking about here, but how can we have a kind of response to injustice that doesn't create more polarization itself, you know, and I
58:48
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of jam things up, you know, because it feels like there's a lot of that going on and, you know, particularly social media has increased that.
58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm just wondering, you know, where, where, where does justice come from then?
59:03
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Jennifer, like, did you sit down, you know, how does it, how might they supply in, just cultural change, societal change or organisations, but did you sit down, Jennifer,
59:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what was that process to, was there a set of rules you created or was it more like heuristics and principles?
59:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in this case, we, we waited to see what kind of rules needed to happen.
59:39
[SPEAKER_00]: where the friction points were, where the difficulties were, we actually didn't make any rules before we, you know, bought the house and moved in, which might sound nuddy.
59:55
[SPEAKER_00]: We created a list of things we didn't want to happen.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we tried to disentangle money from power, for example.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we had these, but I would call those almost values.
1:00:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And then as we found tension points, we started to name the rules that many of us were already starting to live by, but that needed to be spoken aloud in order for us to all like link arms and say, yes, we agree to that.
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't have very many of them and they're almost all about how we balance this question of the I-ness and the we-ness right like how do we how do we how do we manage that and how do we talk about and and make sense of the different forms of power different ones of us.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we, how do we increase, you know, how do he Brooks talks about, like increasing speakability?
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we constantly increase speakability about these things?
1:01:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Because
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I wonder if there's something in this kind of elevated form of justice that makes it possible for more people to speak into and listen into the different perspectives across these differences, because without that.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so we have rules about speaking from sensation and not story, for example, because if I speak about what's true from me in my body before I, you know, pack it with a bunch of stories that are probably about you and how you've harmed me or how you've done something
1:02:07
[SPEAKER_00]: because I don't know how much of it's me and how much of it's you, you know.
1:02:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Between us there's a hundred percent, but I don't know.
1:02:13
[SPEAKER_00]: In the moment, it always feels like it's you and it's not me at all when I'm having a thing.
1:02:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Or for some people, it always feels like it's me and it's not you at all when I'm having it.
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_00]: thing, right?
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So, like, finding a way to negotiate that, we've had to find rules about because there are unusual ways of being in relationship to each other.
1:02:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think we've had to codify some of these unusual ways and say, okay, we're going to agree to them.
1:02:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we agree to that.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But there aren't very many of them for us, not so far.
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We're one, five years in.
1:02:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But there aren't that many of them.
1:02:50
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, so I think it's a wonderful example, Jennifer, really, and you talk about balancing inus and weenus.
1:03:00
[SPEAKER_04]: Here's how I would offer to complicate that, but it might hit, so this is important where I think he's going and I'm curious what this complication brings up for you.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_04]: fullness, which is where each rule's in ourselves.
1:03:20
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the iriness.
1:03:22
[SPEAKER_04]: Partness, the fact that we reach parts of larger holes that confusingly is weeness.
1:03:29
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think there's a third dimension, which is the fact that we're kin, we're interrelated.
1:03:38
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's been helpful for me to separate the fact that I'm part of a larger
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_04]: and we're all needed to make this house work.
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you don't empty the dishwasher, then that's more work for me.
1:03:55
[SPEAKER_04]: That's not the same phenomena as were fellow beings, we're king.
1:04:02
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm talking now about fullness, partners, and interrelated this, which correspond to power love and justice.
1:04:14
[SPEAKER_04]: But I'm just curious.
1:04:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I know that what I've said is abstract, but I'm curious what that third dimension sparks in thinking about your home experiment.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We.
1:04:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if this is the same.
1:04:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The way I hear you is sort of the polarity of independence and deep-pendence, which I think has like a meta-unity and interdependence, is one of the ways I hear you, one of the ways mine mine translates when you're saying.
1:04:58
[SPEAKER_00]: What we talk about is
1:05:03
[SPEAKER_00]: which might be a different way of understanding it.
1:05:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There's me, there's us, and then there's the relationship itself, which is a third thing between us.
1:05:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And
1:05:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I'm helping to nurture one of the things we agree to is we help to nurture this third thing between us.
1:05:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That's part of our commitment.
1:05:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it that third thing is a, like, has deying us?
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and we,
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_00]: We can pour goodness into that beingness or we can starve it.
1:05:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And our agreement is, and turning away from it, you're talking about turning away, turning in, turning away tends to starve the beingness.
1:05:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And so one of our commitments is a turning toward commitment that when we are feeling
1:06:00
[SPEAKER_00]: heapable, which sometimes we're not.
1:06:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, sometimes what you're capable of is going into your room and eating your dinner, your desk, right, and not going down to the big people, downstairs, where we have dinner together every night.
1:06:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you just can't face it because of whatever, and that's okay, too.
1:06:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But the March over time has to be a turning towards March.
1:06:29
[SPEAKER_00]: or else we, because these micro falling together and falling apart moves are fine.
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_00]: They're regular, but you want the meta move to be a together move, the larger arc, you want to be a together arc and not a way arc.
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the reinforcing feedback loops
1:06:59
[SPEAKER_00]: there becomes less and less to turn towards as you turn away.
1:07:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's harder, it's like much less gravitational pull there.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_04]: And I guess you might know that that metaphor is I think the key instruction from John Gottman's marriage books about marriage is starting towards.
1:07:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I'm really looking forward to finding what you've written about that experiment because I think it's a great example.
1:07:46
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the thing we're thinking about differently and there's so many ways to make these lists of three is for me interdependence and kinship are not the same thing.
1:08:00
[SPEAKER_04]: The big question in my family, my extended family, it's not really interdependence.
1:08:07
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not that we are a team and we need each other.
1:08:09
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, in some ways, in some minor ways that's true, but we're together, not because we're a team or that we need each other, we're together because we're family, period.
1:08:33
[SPEAKER_01]: As we come towards the end of our time as well, I think of what is it in you, Jennifer, and you coming together in this community that has you decide to turn toward.
1:08:49
[SPEAKER_01]: rather than a way, and then I think of our species and I think, I don't want to get idealistic or utopian, but I think there is something in me that kind of believes that it even if things get really
1:09:06
[SPEAKER_01]: difficult and challenging, ultimately, we will then decide to turn towards in some way.
1:09:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe even because things got incredibly difficult and we were all turning away and that didn't work.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, I just wonder what that is in you that has you decide to turn towards, you must value
1:09:39
[SPEAKER_02]: think it's a value we're trying to live into.
1:09:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always easier to turn away.
1:09:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always easier to not have the conversation to be pissed off, to atomize into smaller and smaller groups.
1:09:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's so not working, like it's so bad.
1:10:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this commitment that says we're going to pull against the gravitational force of that in order.
1:10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: to see whether you could create something significantly better by simply resisting that form of gravity and trying to, with the force of, I think, maybe this is justice, with the force of habit or rules turn towards a thing that's more difficult.
1:10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that becomes a self-reinforcing.
1:10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: cycle because every time we do that, it actually really does get better.
1:10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Our relationships do get better.
1:10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything gets better.
1:10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And we get bigger.
1:10:47
[SPEAKER_00]: We get more spacious.
1:10:49
[SPEAKER_00]: We get better able to hold each other through the difficulty.
1:10:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And that little feedback loop is
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It is really pleasant, right?
1:11:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes life much, much better.
1:11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is something in me that says, I made this as your justice, that if you have a rule about that and you put your hand over your heart and you say, I believe that this is a good.
1:11:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe that this is hard and I'm gonna try desperately hard to live into it.
1:11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I will fail.
1:11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: on any number of occasions.
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But I will try and I will try and I will try again.
1:11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I will keep turning towards the turning towards.
1:11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the role than it works.
1:11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it's worked so far.
1:11:42
[SPEAKER_04]: So at the risk of ending the podcast on a super difficult
1:11:56
[SPEAKER_04]: I think there's a real question of scale here.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_04]: And so you asked the question, Joel, if things really get, I think you said more or less, isn't it true that when things really get bad, will come towards?
1:12:11
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the general answer is, yes, on a small scale, and Jennifer's answer was a very small scale answer.
1:12:21
[SPEAKER_04]: Some people have chosen to live in a house together.
1:12:25
[SPEAKER_04]: which I think is important, but doesn't all guarantee that this will work at the village level, let alone the national or global level.
1:12:40
[SPEAKER_04]: I was re-reading this morning a book that used to be very famous, it has an odd title, it's by I think Rhino Nibur.
1:12:47
[SPEAKER_04]: who was a contemporary of telek and a book is called Moral Man and Immoral Society.
1:12:54
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that's the time.
1:12:55
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's a shocking book to read because it says that it's all about the fact that you
1:13:10
[SPEAKER_04]: moral and good people in their private or family lives who do terrible things at larger scale.
1:13:19
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's one of these books that's written in a style that isn't fashionable anymore, that's very hard to make your way through, but that idea is important.
1:13:34
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I think that's the, that's the conundrum is we know what this looks like at a small scale, a workshop, a management team, a couple, a communal house.
1:13:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But what would that, how would you do that or how do we do that at larger scales?
1:14:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, maybe that tees-up, you know, part two at some point when we know that, two for us still around at that point.
1:14:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, it's, I love it.
1:14:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I love finishing at that question, you know, it's brilliant.
1:14:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Cause it's the question.
1:14:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the, it's a vital question, isn't it?
1:14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in a way we're living into it and with all the messiness and the,
1:14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: excitement and the adventure and the challenge that it that brings so I just want to thank each of you for being in this conversation and I don't know if you want to point people towards anything like your work or how you want to end if you want to share anything else but it's been a real pleasure for me to be in this dialogue and exploration together.
1:14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been a real pleasure
1:15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, people are interested in more about what I call the French experiment.
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I do write about it on both my personal blog, which is 25,000 dons.com, and also on the cultivating leadership blog, cultivating leadership.com, and you should absolutely read
1:15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have designed cultivating leadership around some of these questions.
1:15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think about them most days.
1:15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a very lasting impact.
1:15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that it just wanna,
1:15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay before we go that the question you're asking at them about how do we do this at bigger skills.
1:15:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We now and I'm not sure we've ever had to figure it out as a species before because I'm not sure we ever had the kind of global investment we have right now.
1:16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the
1:16:09
[SPEAKER_00]: or the capacity to really, you know, it's been these last kind of 100 years that we've had the capacity to really seriously mess things up at a global scale.
1:16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But now you can do it, you know, go team.
1:16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we have to figure out how to answer this question that you're asking.
1:16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, it's the most imperative question of our time.
1:16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm hoping that you are writing every day and that soon your book will guide us home.
1:16:44
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, thank you both.
1:16:48
[SPEAKER_04]: This has been super useful in the video.
1:16:51
[SPEAKER_04]: Probably shows my head down a lot because I've been taking a lot of notes.
1:16:55
[SPEAKER_04]: It's
1:16:57
[SPEAKER_04]: really exceeded my expectations.
1:17:00
[SPEAKER_04]: So thank you both.
1:17:01
[SPEAKER_04]: And I would love to do a follow-up Joel on that question.
1:17:07
[SPEAKER_04]: Because yes, it's true what we what you say about the global level, various global existential threats.
1:17:15
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think we've been dealing with this, you know, it scales smaller than the globe and bigger than the household for a long time.
1:17:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And we're
1:17:28
[SPEAKER_04]: the city, the region, the organization.
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_04]: And I remain fascinated with how cultivating leadership is working with these things in your client organizations, which is another larger scale.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, so there's lots of more to talk about.
1:17:58
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, I'm working on this, but if people are interested in the.
1:18:05
[SPEAKER_04]: The practice that underlies this theorizing, that's what Rios Partners does, RiosPartners.com, and I've written six books leading up to this that are that you'll find on that same website.
1:18:22
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm constantly asking questions and inviting contributions in this exploration, mostly on LinkedIn.
1:18:32
[SPEAKER_04]: So thank you so much, both of you.
1:18:36
[SPEAKER_04]: I wrote down a knowledge, dual, and Jennifer.
1:18:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a pithy to the point, acknowledgement, I love it.
1:18:48
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, I mean in the book, I wrote, but in the book, all right, but you've been doing that.
1:18:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that was it, at the end, thank you.
1:18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That was it, you did it.
1:18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Beautiful.
1:19:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Here we are.
1:19:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We're at the end of the podcast.
1:19:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Just a heads up again.
1:19:03
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coaches rising dot com put your name in the sign up box there.
1:19:12
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll also find some of our other offerings online trainings for coaches there and just want to end by wishing you well and I'll see you again next time.
1:19:36
[UNKNOWN]: You