In the pregnant silence of snow,
spring stirs
in the womb of winter.

In the dozens of informal and formal conversations I’m in weekly, it’s often obvious that every word we use emerges from our personal experiences. There are no experience-neutral words, even when we speak in abstractions.

When we talk together about a given idea, problem, event, or opinion, everyone has their own experience of it. There is no absolute “thing” living in space somewhere that everyone is referring to. All that exists is our personal experiences of whatever it is we’re talking about. In the theological realm, as my quantum theologian friend Rick sometimes says: No one prays to the same God.

Good conversations in my world are characterized by everyone’s inquiry in and appreciation for everyone’s unique experience around the common words we use. Conversations become toxic and unproductive when we individually or collectively go in search of meaning that has nothing or little to do with our personal experience. That’s why 10 minutes of speaking in stories and examples is worth more than 100 hours of speaking in abstractions.

In Buddhism, one of the practices is the vow of right speech. This is the practice of being intentional about what we say about others to others in the community. And the intention is an appreciative one, where we let come and go temptations to say things that are true yet deficiency focused. Right speech therefore is expressing things true that cause others to see the beauty of others manifested as their strengths as passions.

On some days, it’s not an easy practice, and with some people, the temptation to do otherwise can seem insurmountable. We do and will fail, but the practice is just holding the intention to learn into the vow.

Interesting conversation last night at the very nice Table d’Hote on 92nd Street in Manhattan. We were talking about the paradox of practicing an appreciative lens while honoring the power of our shadow self. As it turns out, the more appreciative we become in our perspective, the more clearly we see things as they are, including our shadow and light selves. An appreciative lens is not a repression of our shadow, but the light revealing it and the way beyond it to the kind of joy that has no opposite.

Worked with the Appreciative Inquiry Consulting group today in New York, introducing them to the art and science of developing knowledge and collaboration networks. It was an international gathering of amazing talent who were intrigued and jazzed about power of thinking in networks. It was eye-opening and inspiring because people have a deep intuition how the whole world is run by self-organizing networks.

It was easy work with the AI folks who believe that organizations and communities only realize their dreams to the degree that they are well-connected. What was most inspiring for them was the social network wisdom that there are specific intentional ways to help grow networks. And best of all, it’s the same whether you’re from Portugal, Poland, Australia, Denmark, the UK, Canada, or Yonkers.

Working with a fabulous group of Philadelphia area environmental leaders with the Environmental Leadership Program. One of the leaders, RuthAnn Purchase, when inspiring new levels of engagement, asks people two questions: Look out to 2020 and tell me what you’re contributing, and then tell me what were the steps that got you there. It’s a beautiful way to catapault people into new levels of conscious action.

My colleagues and I have been doing a lot of work on trust in organizations, which turns out to be a fairly complex endeavor because of the intangibility of trust and its profound impact on things like speed, creativity, and alignment. In a process that feels like mapping the human genome, my mapping of trust has lead to the following 15 distinctions that I expect will morph given more time and martinis.

1 Appreciative trust - I trust you because you know and engage my strengths and passions
2 Earned trust - I trust you because you make and keep promises that matter to me
3 Regard trust - I trust you because you treat me with courtesy & respect
4 Reciprocal trust - I trust you because you trust me
5 Selective trust - I trust you for specific things in specific situations
6 Trackrecord trust - I trust you because I’ve heard of your achievements
7 Expert trust - I trust you because of your expert knowledge/skill
8 Intentional trust - I trust you to give you an opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness
9 Intuitive trust - I trust you because I have a sense you have a good heart/intention
10 Character trust - I trust you because I’m basically a trusting person (don’t take it personally)
11 Similarity trust - I trust you because we share common qualities, values
12 Associative trust - I trust you because someone I trust trusts you
13 Expedient trust - I trust you because I don’t have the time to do otherwise
14 Crisis trust - I trust you because I have to, given the dire situation
15 Object trust - I trust you because you can be controlled

Thought leader, entrepreneur and management academic, Karen Stephenson, talks about the “quantum theory of trust” in organizations, which reflects that the collective cognitive abilities of organizations depends on the presence of trust in its networks of relationships.

As she says, “People have at their very fingertips, at the tips of their brains, tremendous amounts of tacit knowledge, which are not captured in our computer systems or on paper. Trust is the utility through which this knowledge flows.”

Or one might say, people who don’t share trust are less intelligent together; people who share trust are smarter together.

In “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, author Sharon Begley describes the power and process of neuroplasticity - the brain’s ability to change its structure and functioning as the result of experience.

The Dalai Lama has been inquiring for years into the mind’s ability to impact the brain, something older sciences eschewed as impossible. Now the neurosciences have demonstrated how the quality of our thoughts and attention have a direct impact on the way the brain is structured and functions. Imagine a world where the software coding has a direct impact on the shaping of the hardware!

Good news indeed for those of us who daily practice things like meditation and appreciative perspectives.

(thanks to Bill MacDermott for the recent Wall Street Journal article on this)

One of the more common conclusions I hear in organizations is the notion that “there are some people you’ll never be able to change.” It is usually an easy statement to get popular support for. We’ve tried everything we know and they still persist in disappointing us. We’ve reinvented processes and systems to work around them and have developed enough social cohesion to innoculate ourselves against the toxic affects they create.

In most cases, it’s only accurate to say that “how to change them is something not yet obvious to us.” We can make assumptions about their potentiality based on their actuality, but we may be inaccurate in doing so. Reality is that new ideas could occur to us, leading to the most actionable questions of all: How much faith do we have in our creativity? How capable do we think we are in inventing new approaches to the seemingly impossible?

At the end of the day, how we act is a function of our faith in ourselves. Evidenced by Art Buckwald’s very frank and authentic reflection that the last year of his absolutely amazing life (spent in hospice) was in fact “the best year” of his life. Amazing …