Week #10: I love Peter Block

I thought I loved Edgar Schein when I took the Organizational Learning class. He waxed poetic on leadership and culture, two sides of the same coin--what heady (and tail-y) stuff.I flirted this past spring with Weisbord and his search for a bright future, the whole world in the room searching and creating and finding a new world together. I started to fall back in love with Eddie this Fall and his gentle, do no harm approach to the helping relationship, one he is perpetually involved in. But no, now, and forever, I love Peter Block.

I can remember the first time I laid eyes on him...years ago he spoke to a group of those SHRM people. I will never forget some of the things he said --things like organizational control over those it employees is an illusion. I melted inside. Others seemed revolted and I could not understand.

So when I read Blocks piece on risk, my molecules danced, my face flushed, my toes tingled once more. I think I love him because he sets us free.

Block writes about a world we create that is not the real world at all. It's a contrived world, one he describes well when he writes that "rehearsing the rightness of our position is preparing for a storm that never arrives." It's a world that allows us to "collude" with clients and miss important signals (little cries for help!) that tell us about someone's fears and anxieties. That speak to us about our own. That we ignore in the sterile fairy book tales we create about the human experience, worlds inhabited by ogres (them) and angels (us and all our friends). It's a world in which we are allowed to, forced to forget that the "them" only exist because of how strongly we hold onto the "us", in which we ignore the fact that "them" and "us" are merely creations or perhaps demons of the mind, nightmare creatures. It's a world in which we forget every day that how we are connected is just as important if not more so than how we are distanced. On same days, we may even feel as though we are are part of a one and that the power lies only in that one.

Block allows us to be free from humiliation we impose on others when they have normal and natural human emotions--fear about loss of control, anxiety that we might be left behind or ridiculed or called crazy. Not only are these feelings okay in Block's world but they are necessary for human growth. And true to his sense that none of us can control any other, he writes that the only way we can allow others to approach their natural, normal feelings of fear in a consulting relationship is for us to jump in head first and hope others will follow.

As I have grown older, I have felt a much greater sense of control over my own life even as I have a much greater sense that I have no control over my life. I have felt empowered to be completely responsible for decisions I make without the shackles of needing to explain or justify to anyone else why I make them. Of course, because others are important to me I must also consider their needs and how my actions and reactions and emotions impact them. I acknowledge that I need others to touch me because that is an important and rewarding part of the human experience. The more aware I become of my own life, the more cognizant I am that I make choices about the whos and the whats and the whens and the hows. In an organization, I am responsible for how I contribute to the whole and that just as I have contributed to problems in the past, I am equally able to see those contributions and make different choices that might have different outcomes. And if I dive in head first, if I embrace my humanity with humility but not shame, then I can only hope that others will follow.