By Michael Kline
published in Conway Daily Sun

When I was a kid, we went to church every Sunday morning; I was one of those rare children who enjoyed it, but it mostly felt like an obligation – like some sort of mandatory soft-skills training program, they require you to take at work. The church rules were very clear:  you could leave only after the Priest left the alter; not sneaking out on your way back from communion. To meet the letter of the law, every Sunday we sat as near the back of the church as possible. As soon as Father John’s foot hit the floor, we bolted for the back door and walked as fast as we could to the car, to not get stuck in traffic. This meant we were unfamiliar with the coffee and donut social scene and never knew anyone from church. The good news is we had less time sitting in the car, which is where we did a lot of our fighting. 
 
I understand why people say meetings are a waste of time and training is even worse. Training can be like going to church on Sunday and it’s a waste of time because the next moment, you’re back in real life, getting completely demoralized about your job, wondering why they had the training in the first place!  
 
As a young man, I was often tormented by the contradictions and I suppose I eventually became somewhat cynical, as many of us do, about hope for the real world. In the corporate world, I spent my career working to put training theory into practice. To the extent I was able to implement training wisdom into practice, my teams and I excelled, prospered and reveled in the rewards as advertised. Wherever I failed to implement, whether through my own cynicism or that of my team, results were predictably mediocre at best.  I have spent the last couple of decades studying how to bridge the gap between the theory and the real-life practice both in work settings and regular life.

In the spring of 2010, I got an email from my friend Erin, (kids - email is how we shared jokes and videos with friends in the pre-Facebook era – weird, I know).  Erin was very excited to share a YouTube video about an event called 24
Hours of Kindness, which was produced by Michael Chase in Portland ME.  Michael took his video camera and a
Subaru full of balloons, flowers, free coffee cards and the like and spent 24 hours on the streets of Portland, committing random acts of kindness on unsuspecting strangers.  Erin’s comment that this is a message we need in our schools, really resonated with me. I searched for Michael Chase online, and found the Kindness Center.  We
booked him to come speak at Kennett High school for that fall. With the instant and enthusiastic support of a few local businesses, (Namely, the Red Parka Pub,  The MW Auto Road, Good Vibes Coffee and Kline Seminars), we had a movement underway. As a member of the N. Conway Village Association, we were searching for more events in the village and specifically a way to promote more traffic in the month of May. The rest, as they say, is history. A simple comment can be the inspiration, the strike of a single match, can truly light a thousand candles.

In the corporate world, I have been teaching soft skills – so called emotional intelligence training in one form or another since 1993. When attendance is mandatory, employees can be either cynical or enthusiastic, and the difference is not so always in the attitude of the employee, but the employees’ perception of management’s attitude. 
Employees often say “this stuff will never work here” because they think management does not really believe or act this way in real life.

In the end, these skills are lost if leadership does not engage staff participation in a meaningful way. To bridge the gap between church and real life – between training and practice, we must encourage the development of the participatory skills of all group members, and then develop a collaborative leadership culture to harvest the collective
wisdom.  Gone are the days of the lone genius having all the answers and the magic ability to carrot-and-stick
others to follow. We must learn to include the stakeholders in identifying the problems, the goals and methods and the solutions.  If we want creative solutions to complex problems in business, government, community or family relationships, we must invite each other to choose to believe and to participate because of their interest in the results, not because of mandated obligations.

We must believe it is possible to create a better world. For instance, the Union Leader recently asked me if I thought our local Be Kind Fest could really change the world. I offered the only short answer I have ever given to any question in my life. Yes.

by Michael Kline
Published in Conway Daily Sun

by Michael Kline
Published in Conway Daily Sun

In part 1, we discussed how attitude, responsibility and feedback relate to turning problems into opportunities. Part 2 tackled resources, collaboration and problem solving. As promised, today we will discuss trusting the talent of the group, creating chaos, creating order from chaos, and dealing with the fear of all the above.

Chaos is your friend; that would be nice, if it were credible. The truth is, chaos is the enemy of order and control, which is where we feel safe, productive and efficient, right? This is why so many of us prefer very small committees or even better, a committee of one.  When we invite input from an entire group, we get chaos, arguments, indecision, complaints, negativity, hurt feelings and occasionally a food fight! Ok, we do not usually get the food fight, but we do sometimes get tears and people leaving in disgust and sometimes quitting the group or even their job. It is no wonder we avoid creating chaos at all costs. The cost of avoidance can be great. 

It is through chaos that new growth emerges. It is through control that we extinguish the fires of creativity and passion. Yet, we need to maintain order to meet our goals. What is a modern leader to do, while under pressure to produce predictable results in less time with fewer resources?!  The magic is understanding the difference between control and order.  Picture a continuum – or a line, if you will – or perhaps a tug-of-war rope.  Put Chaos at one end, pulling hard toward total pandemonium. Picture Control at the other end, pulling for domination as if life itself depended on it.  Order, lives in the middle – a balancing act dealing with inevitable change, while accepting the need for systems and best practices.  Without both chaos and control, order cannot exist. The best practices and ideal systems are invented by risking control. This is too scary for most people to endure, thus the slow pace of innovation
for most organizations. We all say we hate the expression “we’ve always done it this way”, yet it remains so common because we only want other people to take risk and create changes and improvements. For ourselves, we prefer to do things the way we know will succeed. We would rather ignore the fact that everything around us has changed, and what “we’ve always done” would have never been done in the first place if things were then, as they are now. 
 
So how do we embrace or even intentionally create just enough chaos to be innovative without losing control? First, leadership must be truly willing to let go of control. This requires the security and confidence to make oneself vulnerable in the eyes of those who associate control with strength. Paying lip service to  group members is not sufficient for building trust and ownership or even creating consensus around the problem, let alone the solution. Before we can expect all stakeholders to participate, we need to prepare ourselves to truly welcome their participation, (which to date, has made us crazy). Real change always starts with ourselves. Then, we can recognize the same need for our members to grow their own participatory skills. Each of these steps will require the creation of the just right questions – often easy questions, but poignant, appropriate and deep nonetheless. The questions open up the potential for chaos, which, with enough established trust and structured facilitation methods, we can work through to re-establish order in a new and better way than we had before.

The deeper answer to this question takes at least a few days of conversation to address. Our favorite source of wisdom on the subject is www.artofhosting.org .  My partners and I have been studying Art of Hosting, which is a suite of facilitation methods taught and used successfully all over the world in business, government, education, healthcare and communities to solve complex problems.  While common in Africa, Europe, Canada and portions of the US, training is rarely offered in the Eastern US, and never in NH. To that end, my partners and I will be bringing the first ever Art of Hosting (Conversations that Matter) training to North Conway this fall.  We expect to draw students from far and wide for the 3 day total immersion program, but we hope to benefit some locals as well.

Still nervous about how any of this could work in real practice?  It works in large and small healthy organizations all over the world, where leadership trusts the wisdom of their staff/members and is willing to embrace the fear and forge ahead through the chaos.