Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Three Conversations with Parker J. Palmer

Today, three outstanding conversations – featuring Parker J. Palmer – from the REBOOT podcast

#14 – Shadow and Leadership – with Parker J. Palmer (2015)

Episode Description

Who are you? What do you believe to be true?  What do you bring consciously to the world? And, even more interesting, what do you bring unconsciously to your work, your organization, your relationships? How does that which you have either denied about yourself, or feel uncomfortable about, shape your life, either positively or negatively?   What lies in this unseen shadow?  And why is it important for you to explore?

The work of today’s guest shows up in just about everything we do here at Reboot so we are thrilled to have one of our key teachers, Parker Palmer, join Jerry for a discussion on a very important and powerful topic: Shadow and Leadership

___________________

#42 – Building Relational Trust – with Parker Palmer (2016)

Episode Description

Parker Palmer is a man whose teachings mean so much to us and our work at Reboot, so it’s wonderful to welcome him back to the podcast for a new conversation with Jerry.  Jerry invited Parker back to explore some important questions: 

• What is the role of community in responding to a toxic environment?
• How do I respond when my leader hasn’t done their work and is leading from that place of shadow?
• What does it mean when a leader is using organization to resolve unconscious issues?

As is always the case when Parker and Jerry get together, this is a conversation packed full of deep lessons on leadership, the shadow, the importance of relational trust, and the incredible power present in community. This episode will leave you with new, profound questions and answers about yourself, your role in your organization, and the power you hold, but may not yet accept. 

“The effort to help a leader look at themselves in the mirror and see their own shadow at work is likely to result in punitive action sooner or later.” – Parker Palmer

“The question is how to build (in an organization) the kind of community that creates more resilience in these personal encounters, especially of the tough kind.” – Parker Palmer

“Good leaders are aware of two things: 1) whether they know it or not, they do have a shadow. 2) They need to build a trustworthy network of relationships where people can tell them the truth.” – Parker Palmer

___________________

#86 – How Have You Lived Your Life? – With Parker J. Palmer (2018)

Episode Description

Aging, the continuous passage of time, is a journey upon which we must all embark. As life unfolds before us, we may be naturally drawn towards a state of inquiry in attempt to discern the purpose and meaning in our soul. For many leaders, the draw can be to gaze upon external outcomes as a manifestation of our life’s meaning, allowing our worthiness to be derived from our relationship between mean and end. But what if we were to allow ourselves to abandon the question, “Does my life have meaning?” and instead consider, “How have I lived?”

In this episode, Jerry is joined by speaker, activist, and friend of the Reboot Podcast, Parker J. Palmer, author of the On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. Over the course of their conversation, Jerry and Parker contemplate the insights they’ve gained in the process of aging, the power of living life with kindness and gratitude, and the importance of remaining open to being human together.

Finally, Sheila Pritchard offers some thoughts on Palmer's most recent book, which still sits on my bookshelf, unread. 

The Leaders Mind, and Other Important Qualities

“We're bombarded by our mobile devices and our ability to pay attention is declining—and extensive research on leadership shows a crisis of engagement in the workforce. Leaders are not satisfying their employees’ needs to find engagement and happiness in what they do, yet many executive salaries continue to rise. You’ll be surprised to hear of the three most important qualities a leader needs to help solve this crisis.”

I enjoyed this recent episode of Australia’s Radio National show All in the Mind. You can listen or download here.

One of the books referenced in the conversations was the 2018 publication: The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results. Another I highly recommend, and one that explores similar themes is Leadership Material: How Personal Experience Shapes Executive Presence by Diana Jones from New Zealand.

Stanley Hauerwas – Theological Existence Today

In March 2018, Dr. Stanley Hauerwas visited Regent College in Vancouver BC to deliver the 2018 Laing lectures, on the topic of "Theological Existence Today."

A: The Christian Message in the World Today 

After WWII, Karl Barth’s writings urged the European church to free itself from bondage to the societal and cultural status it had in the past. Rather than maintain its attachment to its own history, the church must root itself in the ultimate historical event—the incarnation of Christ. With Barth’s insights as a foundation, Hauerwas turns to the North American church, suggesting provocatively that perhaps we have not left Christendom behind so thoroughly as we might think—suggesting that we, like post-war Europeans, need to carefully consider where we may have mistaken devotion to nation for devotion to Christ.

B: The Christian Message and Humanism

In this lecture, Hauerwas turns his focus onto Karl Barth’s response to the “new humanism” of the late 1940s. At this time, many sought ways of re-establishing Enlightenment humanism in the face of the war’s worst atrocities. Barth would have none of it. It is not the return of a secular optimism toward humankind that we need, Barth argued, but rather the “humanism of God.” In contrast to the new humanism, Barth contended that all things human are to be regarded only from the cross. In today's context as in Barth's, only with anthropology planted firmly in Christ can the church find its lost theological voice amidst a fading Christendom.

C: The Church and Civil Society 

For Hauerwas, as for Karl Barth, the state is one of God’s redeemed creatures. Even a state that has rebelled against its divine calling can’t fully escape the reality of God’s purposes. And if the state is redeemed, then church must not wash its hands of it as it once washed its hands of Christ. Instead the church must learn to speak about Christ truthfully and boldly in the world. Hauerwas, grounded again in Barth, puts forward one method of how to do so: by anchoring our own political ideals not in this or that “ism,” but on what has been revealed to us of the workings of Christ’s Kingdom.

You’ll find details of the recordings of these lectures here, and a short video overview of Hauerwas’ visit to Regent here.

Mark Shriver: testing the Vatican's commitment to change

Sounds like an interesting book, albeit it cops some criticism from reviewers along the way, and one does wonder, why another book when similar ones exist.

“…In the end, Pilgrimage sheds sparks, rather than shards of light, over what we already know about Francis; yet it brings him into focus better than many of the weightier tomes out there. And as a readable, enjoyable, accessible portrait of an extraordinary man, it is hard to beat…” – Austen Ivereigh (full review here), author of the very good The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, which is one of those books I’d say is similar though not identical in its focus.

“The church sex abuse crisis has rocked the faith of millions of Catholics.

A Pew study found that, in the United States alone, 40 per cent of people raised Catholic have left the church.

For one member of America’s most famous Catholic family, the crisis has been especially painful.

Mark Shriver is the nephew of JFK and the son of Sargent Shriver, a legendary humanitarian who ran the Peace Corps and the war on poverty in the 60s.

In an effort to rescue his faith, he set out to test the Vatican’s commitment to change. The result is his new book, Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis.” A nicely hardcover book, it was published 29^th November 2016.

You’ll find a conversation with Mark Shriver here. It aired on Australian radio on Good Friday, 14^th April 2017.

From Liquid to Social: Bauman, Bergoglio, and Wiesel

Yesterday I featured Professor Emeritus of Sociology (Leeds University) Zygmunt Bauman (born in Poland on the 19th November 1925).

One of the online interviews I drew attention to was No More Walls In Europe: Tear them down! In that interview Bauman drew attention to a speech delivered by Pope Francis to mark the conferral of the Charlemagne Prize (Friday 6th May 2016). Bauman highlighted Pope Francis’ “impeccable insights” Earlier on he commented that we “need to study, memorize, and do our best to draw practical conclusions from Pope Francis’ analysis”.

And so, after reading Bauman’s interview, I read Pope Francis’ speech, and it is indeed worthy of wider discussion and engagement. So, today, I want to highlight that speech, while at the same time belatedly marking the passing of Elie Wiesel, whom Pope Francis mentions in his speech.

I want to draw an explicit line between the three of them, juxtaposing each of their individual contributions upon that of the others, i.e. I want to create an ever widening and profoundly needed conversation between the living and the dead – these three, plus the many others of good will who have been, or are, committed to the tasks of construction, reformation, and renewal; those committed to the difficult and deep work of moving from what Pope Francis calls [the] “liquid” (economies – but it’s not just economics. Its every level of, discipline (all the constituent elements of a deeply humane and just society), and practice within the contemporary local, national, and international) to the “social”.

Here’s the concluding section of Pope Francis’ May 2016 speech (you will find the complete speech here):

“With mind and heart, with hope and without vain nostalgia, like a son who rediscovers in Mother Europe his roots of life and faith, I dream of a new European humanism, one that involves “a constant work of humanization” and calls for “memory, courage, [and] a sound and humane utopian vision”. I dream of a Europe that is young, still capable of being a mother: a mother who has life because she respects life and offers hope for life. I dream of a Europe that cares for children, that offers fraternal help to the poor and those newcomers seeking acceptance because they have lost everything and need shelter. I dream of a Europe that is attentive to and concerned for the infirm and the elderly, lest they be simply set aside as useless. I dream of a Europe where being a migrant is not a crime but a summons to greater commitment on behalf of the dignity of every human being. I dream of a Europe where young people breathe the pure air of honesty, where they love the beauty of a culture and a simple life undefiled by the insatiable needs of consumerism, where getting married and having children is a responsibility and a great joy, not a problem due to the lack of stable employment. I dream of a Europe of families, with truly effective policies concentrated on faces rather than numbers, on birth rates more than rates of consumption. I dream of a Europe that promotes and protects the rights of everyone, without neglecting its duties towards all. I dream of a Europe of which it will not be said that its commitment to human rights was its last utopia.”

While the focus of the Pope's speech is Europe, it could easily apply to the UK, USA, and indeed to us here in NZ.

Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor, writer, and Nobel Peace prizewinner died this month (2nd July 2016) at the age of 87.

Ed Catmull on Leadership

Ed Catmull is the President of Pixar and Disney Animation. About leadership Ed Catmull writes:

"I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear."

"My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it."

Via Chris Erdman (Excerpted from Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (pub. 2014)

Forbes review of the book here.

Beyond Measure

I picked up and am in the process of reading Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes by Margaret Heffernan, and published by TED (pub. 2015). It’s a book about culture change, a book that takes seriously the importance of social capital, the weakness of hierarchies, the physicality of thinking, and workplaces as complex systems.

While written for a business audience, it has much wider application and could be profitably read by church leaders, not for profits etc.

You can watch Heffernan deliver her latest TED talk (May 2015) below:

Transitions

Steve Taylor is a friend, and we’ve interacted face-to-face, a good many times over the years; less so since he’s been in Australia. 

We’re different personalities, but we’ve always gotten along well. I’ve followed his blog since it’s inception, and followed along with all the changes of focus and emphasis. I often reflect on those changes, both those in my own life and journey, and in Steve’s. 

Neither of our blogs are the same as when we started out at very similar times – over 10-years ago…  They’ve been built week-by-week and year-by-year.

My blog has changed as my journey, priorities, focus, and needs have changed.  So has Steve’s. And because we’ve both regularly and consistently updated our blogs over that period, it’s always been interesting to me to reflect, longitudinally, on our respective journeys, the overlaps and the differences.  Both blogs have consistently recorded facets of our respective journeys. Behind every marker is a story.

As I look back there are many and diverse markers of where we’ve each been; the uncharted terrain we’ve traversed as life has unfolded. I’m grateful for friends, for difference, for diverse journey’s, for emergence, convergence, and divergence.

Leading and facilitating change processes has always been one of Steve’s strengths and now Steve (and his family) face another transition, as they prepare to leave Australia and move back to New Zealand.

I was therefore interested, yesterday, to read his summation of the transition process that will be operating over the next few months at Uniting College. Adelaide.

You’ll find the post here. It’s well worth a read.

Discernment: The Importance of the Other. The Importance of Difference.

Communal or collaborative discernment and its practice is something I’ve long found fascinating. There’s much to be said for a collective approach, especially when we think of the complexity we face everyday, especially when we think of the sheer scale of data that is available to us today. How do we make decisions? How do we listen well? How do we work in healthy ways with difference and conflict? How do we bring discernment into business? Can we actually even bring the practices of discernment into business? 

The following is an excerpt from an article on the paradigm out of which Pope Francis operates; a paradigm very different from the approach so many of us are very used to: somebody higher up in the hierarchy makes a decision and our task is to implement it. Tell us what to do and we will do it. So, the author of the article I’m referencing can write, “…The previous two Popes made decisions the rest of the Church was expected to implement…” It’s a truism, but its not just true of the Catholic Church.

Just prior to typing this I had been engaging with a documentary on economics; on the increasing disparity between the “haves” and the “have not’s” (for Kiwi readers, the documentary was in the very good Nigel Latta TV series Nigel Latta(see TV1 on demand, here). How do we make practical sense of the information we are given in a show like this? How do we engage widely (i.e. collectively), creatively, intelligently, imaginatively, courageously and passionately to the challenges of creating a different economic paradigm?

I need others to read the signs of the times. I know I don’t need sameness. I know I need to join with others, in all their richness and diversity, to wisely attend to my own micro-challenges and those of the wider macro-context, of which I am a part.  

“…Discernment is necessary if one is going to read the signs of the times. It is no secret that the Catholic Church faces major problems that need to be assessed and responded to in an appropriate way. An appropriate response is not simply to change everything in order to “get with the times”. On the other hand an appropriate response may also not be simply reaffirming everything as it has been. A process of discernment should empower the Church to assess critically where things are and how, at this time, it could and should respond. Maybe change is necessary – maybe things need tweaking.

And, it is not unusual for there to be many different ideas and some ‘messiness’ when one does embark upon a process of communal discernment. This should not give rise to anxiety and defense – which leads to division – but rather a sense that there really is something that needs to be carefully discerned which is critical for the future.

[Pope] Francis has opted for a “Jesuit way of proceeding”. This is rooted in the teachings of St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits. To discern means to engage in a process of trying to discover the will or desire of God in a given situation. Discernment includes a time of reflection, prayer, talking, listening, some division, and even some debate so that different perspectives can emerge. At the opening of the recent Synod, the Pope asked all present to speak boldly and listen with openness – two key concepts in communal discernment…”

Source. 

An Ignatian Approach to Leadership

Recently I've been doing a lot of thinking around what leadership is, and the role of leadership. One consequence of that interest is that I’ve been doing some fascinating reading (and some listening) on the subject of a specifically Ignatian approach to leadership.

The primary source has been two books by former Jesuit Seminarian and JP. Morgan Managing Director Chris Lowney. The first book was his 2003 publication: Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World, while the second is his recently released publication Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads (pub. Oct. 2013 / brief review here). 

“Drawing on interviews with people who knew him as Father Jorge Bergoglio, SJ, Lowney [in this latest book] challenges assumptions about what it takes to be a great leader. In so doing, he reveals the “other-centered” leadership style of a man whose passion is to be with people rather than set apart. Lowney offers a stirring vision of leadership to which we can all aspire in our communities, churches, companies, and families.” 

Joseph Tetlow SJ, himself a well regarded author, writes “Pope Francis by Chris Lowney is that rare and splendid work that leaves you keenly excited and spiritually moved. The writing is lucid, vivid, inviting, and rich. It’s a major achievement. I strongly recommend it to any Christian in a leadership role.”  

Both are highly regards texts.

Some of you might find this summary of an Ignatian approach to leadership helpful.  See also this more detailed paper – Enriching Management Education Using Tools from Ignatian Spirituality.

Also helpful were these two podcasts featuring Chris Lowney. Here and here.