a cross post from our new work website

David Pargeter and I participated in some professional development a few months ago, around how we have conversations across the work environment. Fierce Conversations takes some basic principles about how healthy relationships are maintained, and applies them across a raft of conversational contexts: a coaching conversation, team conversations, delegation conversations and confrontational conversations.

It was amazing training – quite transformative – and I’ve thought about it every day since. I’m so grateful for how it’s changing the way I work.

One of the key ideas behind the model is the saying ‘All conversations are with yourself – and sometimes they are with other people’. Basically, every conversation is filtered through our belief systems, and we will only hear the parts of a conversation that match our beliefs. We forget to stay listening to what’s actually being said. And mostly, almost always, it happens unconsciously. Physiologically, it makes sense. It takes great physical energy to learn something new. Our brains are looking for shortcuts all the time, for the things that fit the patterns we are familiar with.

It makes sense of why, in a meeting this morning, I heard three entirely different accounts of a presentation, each from people who were there, each of whom swore they heard what they heard. The best truth we heard in this morning’s meeting, was from the person who said ‘I know I was hearing the presentation through the lens of what I already knew. That means I could well have heard it wrong.’

For pure practical reasons, we can’t live and work in environments where we are, in every conversation, reconstructing our knowledge base. We can’t operate in hypotheticals. We don’t have the time – or energy – it takes to unearth our beliefs and filters at every turn. But in our minds we need to hold the knowledge that our [often untested] beliefs will be the filter through which we are interpreting what is being said, and that they will inevitably distort what we hear.

In Fierce Conversations, the challenge was to measure the effectiveness of a conversation by whether I come away from it knowing more, not from our traditional measure of whether I’ve been able to convince others of what I already know. In other words, it’s a good conversation if I make space for the other person – and their beliefs – to be equal partners in the conversation. Hence, ‘all conversations are with yourself – and sometimes they are with other people’.

We’re facing tricky times in the church. We all know that. And we’re going to have to be good at conversations to get through it. We’re going to have to be ready to be wrong, because we will be. We’re going to have to remember that sometimes we’ll be in the same place, and we’ll swear we weren’t part of the same conversation. We’re going to have to give grace and curiosity a chance before giving judgement. Or else we’ll be committing a great injustice ourselves.

Be kind, Phyllo of Alexandria said, for we are all fighting a great battle. I just pray we’ll work out a way to fight it from the same side.

Our Fringe Festival basement installation was held last weekend.

The team who do these installations are brilliant. Putting on these spaces is such hard work – physically, emotionally, communally. Working with this team is such a gift. We were light on, on Saturday, due to babies and weddings, but got some amazing extra help from a couple of people, and we even had 15 minutes breathing space before the space opened. I am in awe of their energy, humour, creativity, pragmatism and commitment. Putting these spaces on is bloody hard work. Luckily, it’s pretty rewarding in return.

What we always hope for, from the spaces, is that people will encounter a moment of transformation; where they can put their story against a bigger story of life; where they can have their story held and honoured. There’s only a tiny part of that equation that we have control over. My nervousness in advance isn’t ever about whether we have prepared a gorgeous space [that's a given, with this team!]; it’s about whether we have prepared the kind of space that people can enter into and make their own. Over this last weekend we saw people changing in the space – coming in boisterous and belligerent for example, leaving hopeful and calm. We heard whispered stories of grief and promise and confusion. We had repeat visitors from people who just wanted to keep coming back, because they’d thought of another story they wanted to tell, or a truth they wanted to whisper: I think I might be gay… my girlfriend has just found out she’s pregnant… am I ever going to do more than this?

It was a beautiful space… and it went something like this:

at the entry we had three black plinths.

Written on the plinths, in tiny font, to be read with magnifying glass, were the following words:

We are here by virtue of an infinite number of stories
that have collided and colluded to bring us to this moment

It’s your space to do with as you will
You are welcome.

Below are images from the space inside, which was set up with more black plinths. Some were interactive: add your longing for the world [black ink dripped into a large vase of water, we filmed the water from inside the plinth and projected the ink dropping and dispersing onto the wall]; hold a worry doll and if you can let the anxieties that hold you go, leave it here; write the beliefs by which you live your life with the cut up words from the bible. People were invited to tweet their stories, which were displayed via visible tweets onto the wall. We had a gorgeous old dictionary, in which people were invited to sew a knot in the words that tie knots in them…

They say we rework our memories of each day
to fit the truth we have already decided about ourselves
and each other;

Leave them for us to name for you, when you can’t for yourself.

… Hold a worry doll,
and with it take hold of the worries that have always been part of your story.

If now is the time to let them go, leave it here.
If you aren’t yet able, take them with you…

Our lives are a constant dismantling and reconstruction
of truths and beliefs.

or write your prayer or longing for truth
in its place

This water – like all water –
has been part of the world
forever.

write or draw your prayer or dream or hope for the world
into the water that already holds its stories

Other spaces were just for contemplation – a lovely projection onto supermarket receipts that had been doctored with a reflection on the tiny lies that add up to us having no credit, an upside down plinth hung from the ceiling, made of fabric, behind which there were voices – playing on ipods – whispering the secrets the walls might hold, a slow motion loop, back and forth, of a wine glass smashing with a written reflection next to it about the moments in our lives that we replay and reconstruct over and over in the hope that this time they might end differently:

We all have those moments that we replay
over and over
in desperate hope that this time it will end
with who we were still whole

but no matter how often we relive the moment -
how often we tell the story again -
it always ends with the sharp edges of who we are
shattered on the floor around us
and we can’t tell whether they will cut our truths or our lies to shreds
if we so much as try to pick them up.

I always love a space where people don’t just say ‘this was lovely’ as they leave, but where they tell you why it’s made an impact on them. The really moving thing about this space was that as people were leaving, everyone pointed to a different part of the installation as being the thing that made the most impact on them. And their stories of interaction, and reflections on the spaces, were incredibly moving.

I get feedback sometimes that what we do is a bit pretentious, a bit too cultured. The feedback we got over the weekend – from the three lads from the outskirts of Melbourne who were in Melbourne for a night of drinking, and kept coming down from their hotel room to go through the space again because ‘this is more interesting than drinking’; from the young vietnamese woman who so proudly showed us her tiny tweeted story as it projected onto the wall; from the people who talked about bits of their lives that were smashing around them as they watched the wineglass smash over and over – is that pretentious or not, this works.

And I have to say, there’s something incredibly moving about watching people be moved by a space you’ve been part of creating, that holds a bit of your story as well. How very lucky we are to not be alone.

Our Melbourne Fringe Festival installation is on this weekend: Saturday 6th from 6-9pm, and Sunday 7th from 2-5pm

It’s in the basement, 130 Little Collins Street Melbourne
[enter off Coromandel Lane]

I wrote this for our Fringe Festival show, The truth and other tiny stories, but we’re not going to use it.

I always wanted to believe in God.
so i did what you’re meant to do:

sang the hymns
prayed the prayers

wished for a little more proof
while pretending a whole stack of certainty.

I even convinced myself
for quite a while.

I don’t remember when it stopped working
but it must have
because somehow now
that life of faith seems like the lover
whose long ago presence
bewilders me…

But i grieve now
in the space that faith would fill
wishing i could trust the things that
would make this world
and our lives
OK.

But i want to say this is faith too
for those who can’t believe:
the grief
the longing
the fear

all wrapped with the hopeless truth
that we simply don’t have what it takes.

I don’t think I create anything. I’m really serious – I discover the ideas.

[...]

If you understand how to think… If you have a background of graphic art, and you are a sports fan, and you’re literate, and you’re interested in politics, and you love opera, and ballet’s not bad either, and if you understand people… and you understand language, and you understand that product, and you understand the competitive products… and you put that all together in about ten minutes – the idea’s there.

George Lois, art director.
[via Maria Popova]

I remember how to have ideas now. It’s 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. You have to do the hard work of being interested in the world; of being in different places, of delving into really complex areas of life, of being interested in other people’s wisdom and experience and way of interacting with their world, of not being an expert. And then the ideas just come.

I wish I didn’t forget that quite so often…

[gratuitous photo from last week's holidays that has nothing to do with this post...]

I’ve been working on contextualising our staff code of conduct for people who work in a particular environment this week. The general codes of conduct that would normally apply don’t quite cover the areas we need them to, so we have to tweak and extend them. None of that really matters, except that I’ve been immersing myself in the language of treating people with dignity and respect.

I love how work areas overlap and feed into each other. I’ve said a number of times that I’m finding a bit of culture shock coming back into church culture in this new role. One of the things that still shocks me [naive, i know] is the way we talk about other groups in the church. I’ve been thinking that it would be lovely to have that same expectation with regards to other bodies within the church and workplace, that we have with the way we talk about other people. We can’t make derogatory comments about another person. We are respected to act with respect towards another person. If we have a complaint about their work, or a comment to make about them, we take it, first of all, to them directly. We should be expected to do that about another part of the church.

Blaming is a dominant characteristic within the church. So many of our conversations are based around the idea that ‘they should… [change, stop, understand, agree]‘ . Coupled with that is an unhealthy tendency to depersonalise – and dehumanise – our structures. We forget that there are people like us, trying with the same passion and commitment as us, to be faithful to their work and their faith. We characterise others as being self-interested and defensive; as having suspicious motives and no grasp on reality. We talk about others’ areas of work as though they can be discarded, not valued. We believe we know best, so can find easy fault with them or offer unsolicited, uneducated advice about how they should be doing their work. We search only for the evidence that will suit our beliefs about them.

Fierce Conversations would ask the question ‘why do you need them to be at fault?’, or ‘how does them being at fault get you off the hook?’. It would ask it with curiosity, holding gently to the answer. And it wouldn’t be rhetorical.

Blaming gives easy solutions to what are complex problems that are still too difficult to have answers to – and as such, they are the wrong solution. And they will always be the wrong solution, because they are created from an culture of lack of ownership, accountability and respect. The new reality created by the solution will be carved from that same culture. It will be marked by lack of trust and respect. And as such it will fail again.

From my experience, without exception, I’ve found that when people take the time to understand and question – with curiosity, not suspicion – another person or group’s motives and work, they come away unable to blame in the way they did before. We are always changed by curious conversations. We become bigger. The conversation going forward is coloured by new truths and perspective. But being curious takes energy, humility and rare courage. It also creates energy, humility and courage: we become the change we were wanting.

So, in my dream code of conduct for groups in the church, I’d include a line that says you don’t get to talk down another part of the church without having talked to them specifically and directly about the issue, and without having been changed by that conversation. And we’d have to do that with a respectful curiosity, knowing that solution to the problem starts to unfold not from an answer, but simply from having the conversation.

Luckily, I’m in a position where I get to act on things like this. [It's funny how difficult it is to step up to the responsiblity to act, even when one has the possibility. It's so much easier to know what you would do in a situation when you don't have the power / responsibility to do it!] As such, I’m going to take this idea to the places where I have a voice. And since that will only work if I model it myself, I guess I’ll have to do that too…

so this is what it means to be human
knowing that not all stories of pain and love
end with the happy,
that sometimes
this point of raw knowing -
that i’m not whole without you
that i need you to breathe
more than i need myself to breathe -

is its own end.

grief comes
when i search for the guidebook
that says how to be here
without aiming for an impossible there
and when the only place i find it
is in you.