Employing Differences, Episode 91: Where did that come from?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, the conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:15

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Where did that come from?"

Paul: 0:27

So about four years ago, I was at a retreat for 10 days, where part of the purpose was to build some intentionality around the community we wanted to create together in the 10 days that the 60 or so of us were going to be spending time together. There was skill building that was going on, but there was also a lot about relationships, and how we wanted to be together in a way that would foster the skill building and the relationships that we wanted to create. And so one of the things that one of the facilitators did during the first day was talk about different systems that exist and in different structures that exist in organizations and in communities. So these are things like systems for decision making(how do we decide what we're going to do), systems for information sharing (how does information get to peoplel; who knows what), systems for learning, for feedback, for conflict, for resource allocation (deciding who gets what). And then the really important point that got made was, "If we do not have conversations about how we want these systems to work, we will inherit the default from our larger cultural context." So if we don't actually talk about how we're going to resolve conflicts, or how we're going to work through decision making, then we'll just fall back on whatever our larger cultural experience or our larger surrounding cultural context is, which may not get us the result we want in terms of the community or the type of organization that we want to be. And so Karen and I were talking about this, and we wanted to explore a little bit today how we get these things. These things sneak in the door. The idea of "Where did that come from?" What are the things that we unconsciously end up importing into groups, into teams, into organizations, and what might we do about that if we don't want them there?

Karen: 2:29

So the premise here is very much that an awful lot about how we show up with each other, how we talk to each other, how we do things together what we might call our community culture or organizational culture an awful lot of that arrives with us, unseen, unnoticed, unthought about. It just shows up there. And then something isn't going as smoothly as we'd like, or our team isn't working as well as we'd like, or conflict is showing up in ways we didn't expect. People are behaving differently than well, different than I thought they were going to behave. And I'm like, "Where did that come from?" And where it came from is it rode right along with us, because when we walked in the door, we brought our mainstream culture with us. And if we don't really actively pay attention to what we're bringing, we don't notice how it's coming along, until it causes a problem and maybe not even then. We don't notice what we're bringing. And so we thought that we might just play with this idea around cultural norms around giving and receiving, because this is one that I see a lot in communities. We show up in community telling ourselves that we want to be a place where we share things, where we do things for each other, where we're very collaborative. And then we start keeping track of who's contributed the most or who has done this the most, or we bring in mainstream norms around,"it's not okay to ask for something." It's great to give something it's great to help somebody else. But I should only ask for something if I really, really need it. And so you get all of this sort of tag-along baggage around giving and receiving that, in fact, inhibits the flow of shared stuff, shared ideas, shared favors, that this thing that we think we're going to get when we move into community, or I think as a corollary, if we come into a collaborative team where we think things are going to flow and ideas and pieces of work and you know, here's the thing that I built that you can use too we don't get that sharing flow because we brought with us all of this baggage around, "I shouldn't ask. If I receive I'm the poor, weak, incapable incompetent one." And we only want to be in the role of a giver because they're so wonderful and generous and fabulous.

Paul: 5:05

And all that stuff lives below the surface. When we don't realize we're carrying it with us, we don't realize we're bringing it because we don't realize the degree to which it is affecting our behavior. We talked in in a recent episode about how do I do something different? How do I change behavior? And we talked a lot about, "Hey, these are unconscious patterns and habits that you've carried with you." And so I think the first step to that is always making it conscious. You brought up the example of collaborative teams, which is a thing that I do a lot of work with. And I know you do a lot of work in community and that idea that it's mutual without being reciprocal. It's not a tit-for-tat. It's a case of where we're all contributing to this in a way that we're not keeping track of. And when we don't do that, it doesn't work very well. And we don't realize how much we are keeping track until we start to have the conversation about it. And so one of the things that's useful when you're starting to uncover as a group, "What are the things that we don't want to bring with us?" is thinking about, "Well, how might those show up? How would we notice that they were here?" In collaboration, for example, it's very easy to say we want to be collaborative. And we think that because we've set that intention, it's just going to happen. But I think it's very useful to explore in the group,"So when we say we want to be collaborative, what would that look like? What would we be doing? And how would we notice if we weren't doing it?" And then start to tease apart, well, what are the what are the things, what are the unconscious assumptions or beliefs or things like that might fuel the behaviors that are gonna pull us away from that. That's often a place when I work with groups, and we're trying to create in a lot of ways an explicitly counter-cultural space, we have to actually talk about, "What are the elements that we don't want to inherit from the larger culture? How will we know that they're showing up? And what do we do when they start to?" Because they will.

Karen: 7:20

Yes, they will. Yeah, but and to follow with the giving and receiving element in that and there are many others, but just to keep us within one episode timeframe here I think to really be thinking about, Okay, so if I look over the last week, and think about all the times that my life or my work could have been easier if somebody else had 'fill in the

blank': 7:46

covered for me for an hour, or taken me somewhere, or loaned me a thing that they had. What are the ways in which my life, my work would have been easier, smoother, better, even only for me? We're not measuring this by good for the team at this moment. But ask myself the question, "What are the ways over the last week that my life could have been better if someone else had done a thing for me?" And of those, how many did I ask for? And if the answer is almost none of them which on the average day would be my answer to get really curious about what's going on in me. What are the stories I'm telling myself about what it means to ask for a thing that would help me? And I want to differentiate, most of us within some kind of relationship contexts get reasonably good at asking for things we really need. Or there are certain categories of "Can I borrow a pencil?" We don't really think about that. Or the neighbors cup of sugar is the classic example. There are certain things that are for whatever the reason okay in the mainstream culture, but as soon as we step outside that box, what are the stories that start to come up? I find they have a lot to do with individualism, ("I can take care of myself, and what's wrong with me if I can't") or greediness("I will be perceived as greedy of I ask for things"), selfish if I ask for things, demanding if I ask for things. There's a huge vulnerability in asking for a thing, because they might say no, and then I'm disappointed and what does it do the relationship. All of that mess gets in there. So if I can identify all of those for me, what is the story that's my particular one. And most of us have a favorite, I'll just say. Maybe all of that resonates but most of us have a favorite. And then if I ask myself, "Okay, so that's the story I'm telling myself if I ask Paul for a thing. How would I feel about Paul asking me for that thing? What would I want his story to be that he's telling himself as he's sitting over there wishing I could do that thing or a similar thing for him? What would I want him to be thinking?" And what I always give to is, "I love it when people ask me for things! I love it when I have a chance to help!" And of course, if I am able to say no, that's another episode. When you ask, there needs to be a genuine possibility of yes or no. And when you answer, there needs to be a genuine possibility of yes or no. But an awful lot of the time, a thing that would help me a ton costs Paul a tiny bit. And that trade is a net win over and over and over again. And if we're not trying to keep track, and we're not trying to keep score, the benefits add up dramatically. And we tend to see that pretty well. At least I do, if I'm being asked for something. But I don't ever do the asking, because it's uncomfortable in all of those ways. So I think there's this point to really think about this giving and receiving dynamic. How have I been playing out in that? What's going on in me? And then what if that was going on in the person across from me? What would I want there?

Paul: 11:34

One of the things that you're pointing to there is recognizing the stories that are there and then what are the different stories we could tell? How can we transform those stories? Story and narrative is a huge part of culture. Because in organizational culture is certainly and community cultures there is that deep level of culture, which is the unconscious, unspoken beliefs and assumptions about what works. What works either for producing the result we're trying to create, or the kind of group we want to be. And so we tell ourselves these stories about what works and what doesn't and that's all based on our past experience and then, in order to change what we're doing, to change the behavior is in that in that culture as we actually see them, we actually have to start to shift those beliefs and those understandings and those assumptions about what works and what doesn't. But it requires us to examine them first, and then to put them out for us as a communityand as a group to work. Because there is a gap between the things that we say our sort of espoused theory of how things work and then the the unconscious theory that we're actually working from when we actually do it. It's that incongruity that we see both in individuals and in groups as well. And it's not hypocrisy. It's actually that we just don't realize that the way we talk about collaboration or sharing, or working together, or giving and receiving we can say one thing, and then do another and it's because of the unconscious stories that we have that are at odds with the words that we use, with the way we talk about it. So how can we start to bring those into more congruity, so that we can actually start to shift the unconscious stories to be something that more matches the words that we use when we talk about how we want it to be.

Karen: 13:46

You're talking about it in the frame of an individual working on it, which, absolutely, the individual work has to be there, and particularly if we are in a group that is largely from the same mainstream culture this breaks up some of you get folks from very different background cultures, but when you're in a largely similar, largely homogeneous group, in terms of the culture they came from the tendency is we've all brought the same baggage. We've all brought that same set of sort of misaligned incongruous culture bits with us. And so there is a particular courage that's required to be the first one that says, "Okay, we've named this as our value. We've said, this is a place where we do things for each other..." but to be the first one who puts out on the listserv or the Slack channel and says, "Hey, can anybody do this thing for me?" That takes real courage, but it is the place where the culture shift begins. And if you want others to ask, or any kind of culture shift, but we're talking about this one as an example, but if you want that culture shift to begin, when one person does the really vulnerable thing, and they survive, and in fact that people respond, it's like, oh, that thing that in, in the mainstream culture wasn't okay. And maybe even I read it and I'm like, "Paul's asking for what? Oh, it's totally fine. Wait, it feels good that Paul's asking." Oh, all of my little alarm bells from outside culture are saying no, but when I look around within this culture, yes. And that's, I think how that shift kind of spreads. But I really want to name how scary and vulnerable it feels when you're the first one in the pool.

Paul: 15:42

And it's absolutely the sort of thing where if you want that to continue to shift and spread, you need to point at those examples of people taking those risks, of being vulnerable in ways that the thing you have all said you want is actually being embodied, and encourage it. The worst thing you could do is to respond negatively to that. Because the person is afraid that it's not going to go the way that you're all hoping it's going to go. All of their prior experiences telling them it's not going to go the way that you're hoping it's going. When it does and when they are thanked for taking that risk, when they're rewarded for being vulnerable in that way, that is the thing that starts to shift our understanding, at least in this group. Because that's often the thing about these small cultural shifts. Okay, maybe I fully believe that the larger culture that I came from the organization, I used to work at, that's never going to change. It's always going to be a place where it's always better to give than to receive, where you can never ask for what you need. But I might start to come to believe that here, amongst these people, amongst this group, this is different, because of the interactions that I've had, that I have seen here. So I can start to tell two different stories. There's the story of out there and elsewhere, and the story of here. And that allows me to actually live into that more collaborative, that giving and receiving culture that we say we actually want here.

Karen: 17:26

Yeah. And I think that piece of noticing and appreciating the vulnerable behavior. And I can think of times that I have said to someone, "I am so glad you asked me for that. I actually can't do it. I actually can't help you." The result is I can't do it."But I'm so glad you asked me. Please ask me again the next time." I'm not available that day, or whatever the thing is. But the difference just between a flat "No," and a "No, but it's absolutely a safe place to ask," is huge in the culture shift. Because if all you get is the"No," of course, then you don't know is that because it wasn't actually okay to ask is that somebody mad at me. I mean there's all sorts of layers of that. So being thoughtful of,"Ooh, somebody is doing something different in this culture. Let's think about how we want to respond to that." Because that cultural feedback that we get is actually way more powerful than any rule we're gonna write. That social capital thing is going on there big. And so if you can notice, "Ooh, somebody is doing something that's new and different. And by the way, I'm a little uncomfortable with it. But wait, it's a good thing." Talking through that experience, and naming all the aspects of that, and encouraging it, as you said, turns out to be really valuable.

Paul: 18:47

Yeah, yeah. So to track sort of where I think we've been on this, we're talking about when we're in a group that is trying to do something that is at odds with the the larger norms of the cultures that we've come, from the organization's we've part of in the past, the other experiences we've had when we want to do something that is different, that we want to be collaborative, we want to have a different attitude and behaviors around sharing and receiving, we want to create a learning organization, any of those types of things, we have to recognize that it is at odds with our past experience in our larger culture. And we have to recognize that just saying that we want it isn't going to get it. We're going to be bringing things from that past experience and that larger culture in. We have to expect that and we need to prepare for it. We need to recognize that those come from deep patterns and stories we've told ourselves around what these things mean and how we are supposed to be. Once we can recognize what those are both individually and also collectively both individually in myself but also in the larger group then we can to start to see where are the edges of that behavior? What's the behavior we want to be getting, that we might not be getting? And how do we start to encourage that when we see it? Because stepping outside of those bounds that we have lived in for so long is scary. It's vulnerable. It's a risk. And the way that we get more of that, and we get more of that shift is by encouraging and appreciating when people are actually doing that, when they're actually living the way that we say we want them to that we all want to. Because that's the thing that starts to help us shift those stories and makes those behaviors easier and easier and easier as we move into the future.

Karen: 20:42

Absolutely. I think that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 20:48

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.