Pegasus Conference - Day 2

Finally, I get to hear Adam Kahane. His book “Solving Tough Problems” made a fundamental shift in my thinking about the possibilities in sharing our deepest thoughts with each other. Today he talked about addressing our toughest social challenges from the perspectives of power and love. He quoted Paul Tillich’s definition of power as the drive in every living thing to realize itself, and of love as the drive to unify the separated. He said that when these are coupled, they are generative, but they are degenerative when they exist independently of each other. Martin Luther King was quoted as saying that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Adam called for us to be bilingual with these, or even bipedal like the scarecrow learning to walk, one foot in front of the other, lurching for awhile but eventually learning to dance in unconscious competence. Like Nashon stepping into the Red Sea just before it parted, some of us will have to stop sitting on the bank and go ahead and get our feet wet.
Anne McGee-Cooper and Gary Looper hosted a session on “Claiming Bold Dreams” and told the story of how Texas Instruments used servant leadership to exceed its own expectations about the cost of resource-conscious design. They gave a brief overview of the concept by comparing a non-servant approach of hired hands, hierarchies, ego and competition to a servant-leader awareness of engaged hearts and minds, mutual trust and shared visions. That trust will allow a collective to see a way out of hard situations, even though if leaders are servants they are not controlling.

Shaunna Black, TI’s VP for Facilities talked about that organization’s decision to build a plant in the US with one eye on the cost that could be realized in the far east and the other on breaking new ground in sustainable design and operations. Once the head shed at TI was made aware of the value of a sustainable approach, they empowered the project team by taking a servant leadership approach that shared the vision, was open about the unknowns and displayed the trust necessary for high innovation. Systems thinking helped them set aside the usual first-cost/operating-cost debate and instead realize huge economies by fundamental alterations in traditional models. In this case, a LEED certification did not cost the oft-cited 20% extra.

Judy Ringer presented on “Managing Conflict with Presence and Power” using Aikido as a basis for taking the negative energy and responding to it with connection rather than resistance. With an eye fixed on what matters, our energy can redirect opposing forces toward that same goal instead of wasting ourselves resisting external circumstances. Although she was using this approach as a way of dealing with conflict, I’m thinking it could also apply to how we hold all the “stuff” that competes with our visions and often overwhelm them.

Peter Senge, Jeff Hollender and Darcy Winslow ended the day with “Purpose Beyond Profit,” a discussion on SOL’s current thinking about transforming the practice of management to one that supports life. Although the sum of all efforts is still a drop in the bucket, businesses are waking up to the fact that not only is climate change happening but that climate change is only part of the story; the real question is becoming one of how we will all live together. Some scientists insist we have only three to four years to make a significant shift, and hope lies in the belief a few small targeted changes will set others in motion. It does not take large majorities to bring about significant change over time, but that does make it incumbent on some of us to get off the dime and lead. Somehow we have to get out of the “eye of the needle” syndrome that suggests we have to give up something, and instead start looking at what we have to gain.

Pegasus has a poet and a musician working with us as a form of reflective capture, and today they closed with “Where did you go? What was the flow? How did you grow? Where did you start? Where did you grow in your heart?”