Strong Voices have been lucky enough to have the support, advice, guidance and listening ear of Marc Jones of Rose Tree Associates http://www.rosetree.org.uk/. He is part of our core team and is an invaluable member; enjoying discussions over cups of tea and coffee (and biscuits) just as much as we do!
Below, Marc reflects on his experience to date and shares insights about his time with the Strong Voices team and how this has informed his own practice….and how in turn this has informed ours. Enjoy…..
It is very interesting what happens between people. What happens when we spend time with others is usually more than the sum of its parts. That is to say that if the parts were all that are needed, then our email and phones would be all the tools necessary to copy thoughts from our brains and record them somewhere to the same effect. However they’re not. There are meetings, lots of meetings.
I’ve been lucky this last year to volunteer a few hours per week into the Strong Voices North East team. It’s been a surreal experience moving from someone who works largely alone to being part of a team to exchange and laugh and connect almost constantly. Its been an exciting collaboration on all fronts, working with different people on each project.
What I’ve noticed is the day-to-day for each person on the Steering Group, for example, is utterly fascinating to the rest of the room, and that an amazing thing happens – learning is created. I don’t mean simply the sharing of new information, but the generation of new ideas for all. Given that these are people who already have a shared connection and purpose, this is quite a feat.
So i suppose I became interested in this and started to ask “how does that happen?” How do we create such moments of interest and specialness in and around an organisation that make people think ‘I learned’? I hope that we can explore some ideas that have become apparent to me just by being with the people in this team, but have been explored in philosophy by the like of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana who have inspired some of the language used.
Knowing how to go on
Often in work settings, people use words like goal, aim and target to unify people and gain a collective movement in a particular direction. These are useful, they provide some orientation and a sense of what should be achieved through coming together. We could give these the title ‘functional aims’ and they could look like “Develop progression routes for a project”. What could make this great practice, however is adding what we could term an ‘experiential aim’ that looks like “be excited, creative and explore together”.
Potentially, this changes how we might feel able to relate to the topic. Its a subtle change, but a professional attending a meeting may feel that they are expected to ‘have all the answers’ or ‘know’ what to do next. This little shift adds some energy to how to go about developing a progression route in this context. It might just open the door for someone to ask a new question, to mention what seems like an insignificant detail, or to re-story what has happened so far to create a different sense of moving forward.
Stories lived and told
It’s easy to go through our daily lives in good coordination with others, to have a conversation or a meeting, for example. Sometimes this doing is called a ‘story lived’. Often, however, we might be asked how that conversation went, or what the meeting was like. How we talk about what happened is sometimes called a ‘story told’. There’s a great skill in being able to tell coherent stories, and it is worth taking time to reflect and select details that might weave together. If we simply note a few bullet points about things that happen, we can promote the functional aims adequately (and sometimes this is necessary!), but we might miss out how these points came about, and so the energy behind them. If we can summarize our meetings together, share notes and minutes and have a recap at the start of the next meeting, we help sustain some of the coordination, creative energies and continue to make connections.
Connections that pattern
We have coordinated our energies, created stories about our journey, and perhaps we have just started to notice that some of our stories resonate with each other; almost as if there seems to be a red thread, or a theme to them. Suddenly, with a 1980’s pop out that might say Bam! or Kapow!, the world suddenly aligns in a moment and a bigger, fuller story that feels more complete erupts into the room, and we realise we did learning together.
Of course, the story of this learning can be a precious thing that we then inform our future functional and experiential aims with and so continually reinforce our collective energy of ‘how to go on’ our ‘stories told’ about it and if we are just lucky enough, we might make a new ‘connection’ that takes us forward again.
To go back to the beginning of this article, we talked about how the day-to-day for some people is fascinating to others. We were perhaps hasty to assume that this shouldn’t always be the case. A suggestion could be that it is always fascinating to gain a glimpse into how other people ‘go on’. The key is in the glimpse and how in our busy organisational lives we prepare ourselves to see all the glimpses we can handle.
Strong Voices 