Strengths-based Collaboration Is A Prerequisite For Healthy Ecosystems

Our lives are made up of multiple social systems:  families, marriages, work, businesses, corporations, churches, friendship circles, clubs.  Like the natural world, these are all ecosystems where everything is inter-related and therefore everything is impacted by the other. There was a fascinating and insightful Linkedin article this week that used examples from nature to describe effective ways we humans can live within our social ecosystems (see "4 Bio-Inspired Tips to Create Better Teams" by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO).  Several of his biology illustrations particularly stood out for me as I work with people and groups in guiding them to a more strengths-based way of living and being.  Here's one of them.

Collaboration

Biologists are finding that

"successful organisms tend to collaborate more than compete."

Birch Trees and Rhododendrons.  For example, birch trees and rhododendrons grow close by each other in the woods, not by accident but for specific purpose. "The birch provides shade to the rhododendron, keeping it from drying out. The rhododendron, in turn, provides the birch with defensive molecules that protect it from being eaten by insects. This symbiotic relationship allows both to survive longer."

A Win-Lose World.  It's amazing how competitive our human social systems so often are.  We've developed this win-lose paradigm:  if I win, someone else has to lose; if someone else wins, that means I automatically lose.

So in this win-lose ecosystem, we end up having to protect ourselves all the time.  Our walls are up.  Our distrust is high.  We're ready to fight to win.  Because at stake is our own survival--there's only one winner.

Our conversations devolve into arguments where we all try to win.  If we don't, we feel less than; we've been bested; we're losers.  So we have to win at all costs.

If a friend gets promoted, we feel like we've lost something.  If our significant other gets recognition, we feel like we've lost, we're diminished.  If someone else's child gets into the best school and our's doesn't, we've lost, they've won.  We're less than, they're more.

A Win-Win World.  But imagine if we could live within our social ecosystems like the birch trees and the rhododendrons--in collaboration where there's a win-win belief and goal and worldview; where we come to each other bringing our best strengths to the system; where we each are contributing our best to each other; where we each embrace and trust the best from each other; where we stay with it long enough to work at developing a win-win outcome, refusing to take the win-lose easy way out.

A Strengths-based Approach.  Imagine collaborative marriage relationships where each situation, need, and goal is approached via both spouse's top strengths.  When a problem is being addressed, you ask your spouse for a "10 minute consult" where he/she uses his/her specific strengths (one or several that you might not have) in order to help bring effective resolution.  Rather than competing, you collaborate; where you approach the relationship and experience mutually instead of hierarchically.  Imagine that.

Imagine developing your specific roles based upon your strengths profile, whether in a marriage, family, work team, congregation; where everyone is asked, encouraged, validated, and affirmed to show up with their best; where people spend more time and energy focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses and deficiencies; where whatever gaps might exist in the relationship, they are overcome with each person leveraging his/her strengths together to effectively overwhelm the gap.

The genius of a strengths-based approach to life is that it's based upon the truth that no one of us is omnicompetent.  We as individuals simply cannot do everything.  We need others if we desire to truly be effective.  We need everyone in our social systems to contribute their best strengths so that all together we can be as strong as possible.  That's what creates a win-win.

Collaboration is a prerequisite for healthy ecosystems!

So are you living with a win-win or win-lose belief system?  Which lens do you tend to look at your life situations through?  Who do you need to collaborate more with from a place of mutual strengths in order to live more effectively?

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If you or someone you know in your organization is looking for keynote speakers or workshop teachers for events in your company, congregation, or association gatherings, I would be happy to come speak on this theme or others like it.  Feel free to email me at greg@gregorypnelson.com.

Why We Need A Better Way of Thinking, Being, and Relating

Athena Doctrine Research There's a tsunami of change building.

Best-selling and award-winning authors John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio surveyed 64,000 women and men in thirteen countries across a wide swath of cultural, political and economic diversity. They gathered data from Canada to Chile and Mexico to Indonesia.  Everywhere they went they asked a lot of questions about life today, about what makes us happy and gives our lives meaning.*

What they discovered was quite sobering.  People are talking as if they live in an age of "extended anxiety".  Among many of the statements surveyed, both men and women weighed in on these:

"There is too much power in the hands of large institutions and corporations."  86% agree "My country cares about its citizens more than it used to."  76% disagree "The world is becoming more fair."  74% disagree "Life will be better for my children than it is for me."  51% disagree

And then two clinchers:

"I’m dissatisfied with the conduct of men in my country."  57% agree

"The world would be a better place if men thought more like women."  66% agree

When the authors began to unpack these responses with the interviewees, what they discovered was not the fomenting of a global gender apocalypse -- where people were dogging and downing one gender more than another -- but rather where people were hungering for expression, a "way of being," a way of living life where certain core values were central to it, where certain fundamental characteristics were front and center to the way we do business and life.

As it turns out, these core values and ways of thinking happen to be characteristically feminine attributes.  Here's the way the authors describe it:

A Growing Shift in Roles and Values

"There’s a growing shift in the roles of masculine and feminine values in the twenty-first century. We live in a world that’s increasingly social, interdependent and transparent. People around the world are showing that traditionally feminine leadership and values are now more popular than the macho paradigm of the past ... Everywhere, people are frustrated by a world long dominated by codes of male thinking and behavior: Codes of control, aggression and black- and-white thinking that have contributed to many of the problems we face today, from wars and income inequality to reckless risk-taking and scandal.  The most innovative among us are breaking away from traditional structures to be more flexible, collaborative and nurturing. And both men and women from Medellin to Nairobi are adopting this style, which emphasizes cooperation, long-term thinking, and flexibility. Informally, and in countless ways, they are following the Athena Doctrine, named after the Greek Goddess, the warrior whose strength came from wisdom and fairness."

Why the Shift Is Happening - What's Broken and Needs to  Be Fixed?

When you consider the major institutions of the world, both current and past, what values have tended to dominate?  How have those institutions primarily engaged the world?  Power has been in the hands of a few rather than the many.  Hierarchical systems prevailed.  Influence was perpetuated by decree perpetuated by status and office.  Conflicts were fought by warriors where the strongest always won and the weak were dominated.  The world was based upon a win-lose paradigm.  Status, wealth, economic advantage, opportunity, education, religious influence, leadership -- all of these were centralized and controlled by a few, all in the name of God, of course -- and the few most often were men.

The "game" of institutional conquest had rules that were stacked in favor of the few or those who had the stomach to enter in and fight their way to the top at whatever cost.  Today's politics is a classic example.

Because women have been devalued in history, many of the characteristics and attributes and ways of thinking and being that women can bring to the world have been correspondingly devalued.  Businesses call them "soft skills" as opposed to hard skills.

So if you highly value things like empathy, collaboration, fairness, flexibility, win-win paradigms, compassion, unselfishness, and transformation, who wants to get into the dominant game with its warrior-like rules and mentalities?  Who wants to feel like you have to "prostitute" yourself in order to play the current game?  Who wants to sacrifice your fundamental core values for the bottom line of money, power, and status as the only end game?  Surely there must be more to life than that?

No wonder women aren't flocking to get into politics, for example.

No wonder so many people feel disenfranchised within religious communities.  Many religions refuse to allow women to fill top leadership positions, including being ordained to ministry, stating, "It's just not God's way" as if men have a corner on how God's will is suppose to be lived out.

As a result, the institutions of the world continue to play the game the way it's always been played, with a few at the top determining the rules and the outcomes and the style.

A Tsunami of Change - Different Values and Ways of Thinking and Being

But what the authors of the The Athena Doctrine are showing in their extensive research is that the game is changing.**  There's a tsunami of hunger and corresponding transformation that is sweeping around the globe.  It's a wave of change that insists on including experiences like delight, beauty, flow, vulnerability, authenticity, social responsibility, intuition, imagination, innovation, cooperation.

Both women and men are standing up and saying, "Enough is enough!  There's another way of doing business and life that centers around a whole different set of values that can be as effective or even more effective as those of the past.  After all, many of the primary institutions of the world are irreparably broken.  The old ways of doing things is over.  Things have to change.  We want to live different values in everything we do!  We want to help make the world a better, more humane, and more equitable place where there's room at the table for everyone, for the sake of each other and our future generations!"

So as Gandhi once said, It's time to "be the change you wish to see in the world."

So how does all this relate to strengths-based living?  Stay tuned.  More to come.  We need a fuller picture.

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* The Athena Doctrine:  How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the World, John Gerzema & MichaeL D’Antonio

** If you would like to see slides of the main parts of their research, go to this link.

Five Ways Relationships Become God's Holy Temple

There's an old rabbinical story that tells about two brothers living "time before time, when the world was young."  They each shared a field and a mill.  Each night they divided evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. Now as it happened, one of the brothers lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family.  One day, the single brother thought to himself:  "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly.  I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed."

So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary to see that he was never without.

But the married brother said to himself one day, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one.  What will he do when he is old?"

So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary.

As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

Then one night the brothers met each other halfway between their two houses, suddenly realized what had been happening, and embraced each other in love.

The story is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, "This is a holy place---a place of love---and here it is that my temple shall be built."

"And so it was.  The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love." *

Here are four ways from this story that our relationships can be turned into holy temples where God chooses to dwell.

First, God's holy place on earth is the intersection between people where love is the center.

Our relationships of love are where God's temple is.  Those relationships are sacred ground.  When people respond to each other from a spirit of love and compassion, a temple of God is raised up.  God is revealed best and most completely within relationships of love.

Second, relationships become centered on love when each person looks at the other in a spirit of compassion and chooses to give what the other needs the most.

The spirit of compassion is antithetical to a competitive, win-lose worldview.  Sacred relationships are based upon a win-win paradigm.  We give what the other needs, not what we need to give.  We love in the language of the other so that our act of love is truly experienced as love by the other.

Third, a relationship of love doesn't necessarily mean both people agree with each other on everything.

Our ability to love each other pragmatically in the midst of our differences creates God's temple.  Contrary to popular opinion, love God's way doesn't mean having to unilaterally agree.  God's way of loving is giving to others no matter what, even when we disagree.

Fourth, people are empowered to love compassionately and generously when they see the other as their brother or sister.

Family members certainly don't all agree with each other---whether politically, theologically, philosophically, sociologically.  Families inherently contain great diversity.  But because they're all family, blood runs thicker than water.  Until we start seeing all others as members of our great global family---children of God, every one---we will continue struggling to give love and compassion graciously and generously to those we disagree with and are  different than.

Fifth, when people are in a relationship of love, they're content to give to the other anonymously, without credit or recognition.

The joy is in the giving because, as A Course In Miracles emphasizes, when a person gives, they always receive.  The New Testament references this reality when it says we reap what we sow.  In this universe, you can never give away something you don't also receive.  So you don't need credit or recognition in order to receive something; you've already received what you've given away.  When you give, you are never in a place of deficit.

When you and I deliberately and intentionally design our relationships to be centered on love, compassion, generosity, and grace---because we recognize and acknowledge our brotherhood and sisterhood with all others---we enter into the holy temple of God, we are on sacred ground.

"And so it was.  The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love."

So how many sacred temples do you have in your life these days?

* Belden C. Lane, "Rabbinical Stories:  A Primer on Theological Method," Christian Century 98:41 (December 16, 1981), pp. 1307-8.