Lately, I have been enjoying a resurgence of delight driven by synchronicity. It is amazing that there are so many interrelationships between people and thoughts. I have the distinct impression that the ability to achieve higher levels of connectedness is being fostered by social media and the kind of informal learning that is done naturally in our relationships. No wonder the nuns used to warn us about "the company you choose to keep".

From my early days in business after transitioning from social work, I remember reading Napoleon Hill's Think & Grow Rich. One of his recommendations was the formation of a "Master Mind Alliance" as a vehicle to surround yourself with individuals that can sponsor your deepest passion and dreams. Recently, I have been playing with the relationship between happiness, learning, meaning, innovation, purpose and the underlying cognitive and effective processes that support them.

I'm becoming more convinced that the power of story-telling is perhaps one of the greatest vehicles for connecting one's own learning and reflections with the reflections and life experiences of others. The recent literature on social intelligence and collective intelligence is reinforcing this view for me and when I scan the virtual horizon for evidence of the significance of story-telling, I'm not coming up short. Given my religious and spiritual background, there is little doubt of the power of a story to transform lives. The question is really about whether the stories we tell and the stories we attend to are true. Although I am deeply intuitive by nature, I believe that solid evaluation, big data and the scientific method are useful in measuring the stories being told. Along these lines but at a personal level, I think that the work of Byron Katie really brings this to light in a very easy-to-apply manner. At a much more universal level, the Presencing Institute and the on-going work of SOL and MIT have a lot to contribute to how this can be captured in a group context through Theory U.

As perhaps one of the greatest drivers of the synchronicity of great ideas colliding with one another, I have to give my strongest endorsement to TED and their open sharing of the speakers from their conferences. I am facilitating weekly conversations of a single TED talk at work and each speaker seems to be intimately tuned in to something that we need both individually or personally and collectively. These speakers resonate with one another unlike any other collection of thoughts that I have come across and of course, for me, such resonance creates what I call "a true for me vibration" that allows me to hold so many connections as part of a unified worldview which in the end is being socially constructed after all.

Back to the story-telling, our lexicon is as important as the power of the spoken word. Without being too fanatical about it, the stories we tell ourselves really our shaping our experiences. Our language conveys what we find meaningful in our life experiences. So that Don Ruiz's "Choose your words impeccably" makes perfect sense and is perhaps one of the greatest devices of a story-teller.

In principio erat Verbum...(John 1:1)

Organizational Health

I have been fascinated lately with the difference between organizational effectiveness and organization health. In my mind this is taking shape as the competing paradigms between management practice and leadership theory and the movement from the industrial/knowledge ages to the human/talent ages.

The funny thing in my interpretation is that proponents of the organizational effectiveness model are not aware of how organizational health has research support to demonstrate that it actually makes organizations more effective as well. They still try to solve the 2 + x = 4 equation to arrive at improvements in organizational effectiveness (tinkering with the x variable). Meanwhile, practitioners who are adopting organizational health know that organization effectiveness + organization health = higher performance and the subsequent increases in a wide number of resulting organizational/business outcomes.

Just curious to see if anyone else is conceptualizing these competing narrative in the same way.

http://www.healthyworkplaces.info/leadership-2/

ENFJ

In evaluating, my MBTI profile with the model of relationships pictured in evaluating personality type and conflict mode by Percival, Smitheram & Kelly (1992), as an ENFJ, collaboration would be my preferred style with more assertiveness and more cooperativeness. The gender demographic leaves me flat without much insight either way towards competing or compromising (competing = males and compromising = females). If I'm not on some sort of gender spectrum, then I must be on some sort of assertiveness continuum. In the West (and in academia), I think competition is still very much the major venue for conflict resolution in certain contexts and I'm sure I'm as capable as the next competitor.

The interesting thing about types is they inform how we see ourselves and allow us the use of a lens through which others might see us. I think how our behavior plays out with conflict resolution has as much to do with "how much skin we have in the game" as with our MBTI preferences. For instance, I'm more assertive in an academic environment where I am comfortable then on an athletic field where I have little expertise or confidence.

For my team leadership course at Saint Louis University, we have been assigned the most remarkable text entitled Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy by Amy C. Edmondson of the Harvard Business School.

Among the myriad of research insights she presents, in my opinion, her discussion of cognitive frames is one of the most provocative questions for contemporary leaders that can be reflected upon. According to Edmonson (2012), "frames are interpretations that individuals rely on to sense and understand their environment" and she further adds that "most of the time, framing occurs automatically" (p. 112).

I think all of us have heard about self-awareness being the path to leadership development and the importance of self-regulation and self-control in our interactions with others. Nevertheless, the tacit acceptance of our frame of reference or worldview which we often assume is true, is certainly one of the most alienating cognitive processes that influence human behavior.

MBTI Preference and Personality Reflection

I believe I shared elsewhere that my MBTI type preference is ENFJ and regrettably, I haven't seen much fluctuation in my type preferences since I first took the MBTI in spiritual formation in 1983! Versatility is a tremendous advantage for leadership and as both Situational Leadership (Hersey) and Situational Leadership II (Blanchard) point out the leaders job is to diagnosis the appropriate leader behaviors for each interaction. My J dominance is a hurdle in team situations and to top it off my J is 19/1. Nevertheless, it is true that my natural F preference helps to counter the negative outcomes of my decision-making style in long-term relationships (providing the group members can sustain the initial trauma of it all).

In my current Team Leadership course's classroom team at Saint Louis University, I have the only J preference so I am trying to lay back a little but this naturally difficult for me. Our courses introductory handouts on MBTI address the fact that the preference dichotomies grew out of Carl Jung's work on personality types and I thought I wound share that because of my N preference on the information dichotomy, I am naturally drawn to Jung's work. Some nun friends and I were deeply interested in dream work and creative visioning awhile ago and Jung's work on archetypes was very interesting to us. Somehow his work on archetypes was applied to the Tarot cards whose major archana consists of some dominant cross-cultural archetypes.

In this work, my archetype is the hierophant and the characteristics of that archetype are very closely associated to the ENFJ type preference description. In some type descriptions for the ENFJ, they are referred to as teachers and the hierophant is essentially a religious teacher archetype. It gets a little right-brained but my namesake is Stephen who had the good fortune of being the Church's first martyr because of his religious teaching. I don't know enough about types to ascertain if Saint Stephen was an ENFJ but he certainly was a J and a strong one at that. I just take this as a warning about the importance of versatility in certain situations so as not to provoke everyone to stone me.

Pluralism, NYC and Goldwater Memorial Hospital

In the late 80s and early 90s, I was a volunteer chaplain at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in the Protestant chaplaincy. Although I grew up Roman Catholic, at the time I had been received into an Episcopal religious community and was residing with the brothers of the Society of Saint Francis in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn near East New York close to Pennsylvania and Atlantic Avenues.

Goldwater was a unique representation of pluralism that is not as widely known as the City of New York but I wonder how any person, place or thing can be untouched by the diversity of New York. Being a government sponsored hospital, the chaplaincy was broad enough to cover most of the major religious denominations of its patients, many of whom were hospitalized for the duration of their lives for skilled nursing care due to severe injuries and birth defects.

Although my role at Goldwater was that of a volunteer, I was employed by the Sisters of Charity at the New York Foundling Hospital which also operated a skilled nursing facility that I worked in on the Avenue of the Americas that provided care for children with severe injuries and birth defects. Goldwater had a God-wing that consisted of its three chapels, the Roman Catholic chapel, a Jewish "chapel" and the Protestant chapel that was staffed by the Guardian of St. Elizabeth's Friary in Bushwick, a member of the Society of Saint Francis, who was English and had once been an Anglican Benedictine at Alton Abbey. My volunteer chaplaincy duties included serving as Deacon during the Sunday Eucharist Service, visiting the sick with Holy Communion and administering Holy Communion for the patients in the City's only secured TB ward for patients that were non-compliant with their medical treatment.

Religions and people themselves were not the only forms of diversity. The illnesses and injuries of the patients were also widely varied. There were residents who from birth had been hospitalized and some who had even been raised in the New York Foundling Hospital who upon turning 18 were relocated to Goldwater. Goldwater sits on Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Queens and you can travel there by car, bas, subway or sky-tram over the East River.

The hospital is a series of large industrial looking government buildings surrounded by the East River on either side. Off in the distance were the ruins of the TB Asylum, which seemed almost a romantic view in Spring and Summer but quite morbid in the winter. It was always a brutal walk from any of the forms of public transportation. Walking to and from the train or the tram, I often passed other people in religious garb, including many nuns and some Orthodox priests. Sometimes there was a brief nod or wave but as in the hospital itself, pluralism was approached with a sense of respectful boundaries among the various religious folks around.

These were very active days for me, between seminary, the friary and the hospitals. Internally, I was being altered by the environment in many ways. It was my perception that there was deep and untold human suffering hidden on that island, in that hospital and even behind those religious garbs we wore. From the role of mean-maker, I'm not sure that the significance of all that time on Roosevelt Island has been sorted out. 

When my graduate social work assignment came, it was for a practicum at Jersey City Medical Center up the street from Saint Agnes Church. It was more massive than Goldwater and was sat on top of a hill which to me only elevated its bleakness. Time it seemed was bringing the experience to an end and it was shortly after this that I relocated to Florida and all the sun I could handle.

Our Lady of Providence

Whenever I take the opportunity to sit and write a blog post, I regret that I don't write them more frequently. Not for any audience that I might have, which I really do not have, but for my own learning purposes. Blogging is like a public journal and in that I find that there is a call to humility and authenticity to keep things crisp, if not clear for a possible reader.

I am a huge fan of synchronicity, the uncanny chain that brings like thoughts, ideas, events in close proximity to one another. There may be other conditions or causes operating behind the coincidences, like the law of attraction or one's intentionality or focus, but all the same I find it fascinating. In the religious life, we spoke of a similar set of experiences but related it to the term "providence". Having lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, adjacent to Saint Mary's of the Woods, the motherhouse of the Sisters of Providence, it really isn't too much of a stretch to trace the origins of this personal fascination.

Yesterday, I had a morning meeting with a fellow member of the South Florida Diversity Council at Starbucks and we were using the opportunity to share our diversity stories and what we may be able to accomplish in elevating the conversation here in South Florida. Visioning about a more inclusive community and what each of us could do...our shared next steps. In the series of topics we spoke of, I returned to an earlier reflection that I had shared with a group of managers regarding Western female gender roles and the developmental life cycle.

I want to proceed carefully as I am a male, but it has occurred to me over the course of examining change processes and problem-solving that being female might afford an individual an opportunity to approach a set of circumstance much differently than an individual who by gender is male. The Dali Lama was recently reported to have said that his hopes for humanity reside with Western women. (An interesting assertion in its own right that I'm afraid is outside the scope of this blog.) Without knowing the context of his comments, I searched for some assumptions that I could use to explain it based on my perceptions.

Developmentally, the life cycle takes us all through immense changes. Given the complexity of social roles and how they interplay with life cycle changes, it became apparent to me that women play the primary roles in developmental changes that take place over long periods of time starting with pregnancy and child-rearing (around nine months and well over 18 years respectively). Additionally, there are other social roles such as education and care-giving that don't take place in a heart-beat. The moment to moment care of a sick family member or an aging parent stretch over extensive periods of time as well. Deep learning and profound change require time perhaps as much as a developmental changes require time. From this context, I can see the possibility of not jumping to problem-solving to soon or moving into activity without greater analysis or sacrificing the relationship for the task at hand. Given the severe challenges of today's world, where no immediate remedy could possibly be hoped, perhaps we need a more relationship-centered, long-term, mutually beneficial, developmental approach to tackle the challenges.

With reflections like this would it surprise you that last night when my friend and I sat down to watch a movie, we choose to watch a 1999 film entitled "Mary, the Mother of Jesus" and a short documentary of Mary Magdalene? Two iconic historical figures and archetypes of the female in the West. As a child of the seventies, Mary's fiat and the Beatles's song "Let it Be..." never come closer together. The documentary was exceptionally well done in that 9 of the 10 commentators on Mary Magdalene were female (always a step in the right direction). I suspect that one of the learning opportunities for me in all this is the acceptance of the unacceptable. In the movie, Mary was led to accept the circumstances surrounding her virgin birth and the eventual death of her son and Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection. Both are preeminent examples of the triumph of intuition (classically a feminine spirituality in the West) over logic and reason (classically masculine). Western historical commentary on these women, until recently, was a largely male monologue in relation to who each of these women were reflected off the male, Jesus. Entirely missing the point of the story, as per usual...like Jesus said in Jesus Christ Superstar, "Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand, nor the Romans, nor the Jews, nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the priests, nor the scribes, nor doomed Jerusalem itself, understand what power is, understand what glory is, understand at all." The interesting thing about these lyrics is that each reference to a subject that lacks understanding is male in gender.

Thanks to Our Lady of Providence, any given Saturday, can provide the context for greater dialog and an appreciation of everyone's contribution to the on-going development of our understanding of what it means to be human, to be in a state of evolution.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum...