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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Miki Kashtan

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Leading where you stand

Peace Pilgrim looks into the camera, smiling gently. She is an older, white-haird woman in a dark tee that reads "PEACE PILGRIM" in white all-caps letters. She is walking along the side of a major road.
Photo credit: James B. Burton/Courtesy of Friends Of Peace Pilgrim (ht: NPR)

In June, I wrote about organizational charts as a very limited representation of the way power, influence, and contribution flow in and around institutions. Our significance as people and value as community members don’t hinge on our job titles or institutional roles, I said.

So Miki Kashtan’s comments on leadership beyond influence and the power to enforce stood out to me tonight. Kashtan, who I’ve been reading on and off since May, uses nonviolent communication principles to design group dynamics that enable all group members to claim responsibility for their group and its outcomes: the ability to author isn’t limited to the people at the top of the pyramid.

What actions count as exhibiting leadership? Speaking up, for example, when others are nervously noticing something going on and saying nothing, can be a form of leadership…

If we are committed to the whole, we are fully open to being influenced, not only to influencing others. When we take on a leadership stance, we act with the intention to serve the whole, and whatever that means—even if it means changing our own preferences or desired outcomes—is what we choose to do.

…So much of the definition of leadership revolves around influence because the people who write about leadership are immersed in the organizational world, which is mostly organized with one person on top leading the rest, mostly in the form of making all or most of the decisions that affect the whole.

I don’t have any faith that this model is going to take us into a future that works… I see the way forward to be many more of us taking on the active, empowered stance of leading, wherever we are, and whatever our official position may be.” —Miki Kashtan, Reweaving Our Human Fabric, pp. 178-179

This approach to leadership insists that we all belong and that there are ways for each of us to contribute. It acknowledges the power those beyond the organizational chart hold, and it also threatens to disrupt the power of those smoothly running the system as it already is.

In Kashtan’s vision, organizational leaders who might otherwise command and expect it to stand fast can gain the experience of receiving collaborative feedback. Organizational members used to being overrun and dominated can gain the experience of having their perspectives solicited and fairly considered. And each person can gain the experience of acting with the whole in mind.

“We can improve the outcomes for all of us” is the heart of this approach, and there’s been no better time in history than to give it a try.

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Shadow-boxing

When we see others as evil, unable to care, or in some fundamental way immune to transformation, then, if they can’t be ignored, the only available strategy is to overpower and vanquish them.” —Miki Kashtan

During the spring and early summer when the birds in this region are nesting, a few things happen.

First, we invest extra money in seed. There are more than eighteen bird species that live around our house, and they eat everything by the pound.

Second, the male birds become extra territorial.

Most of the birdfeeders are near windows so that anyone in the house can watch the birds from indoors. But this also means that birds sometimes see their reflections in the glass as they fly up to eat.

For some reason, smaller birds seem especially prone to the illusion that another bird is just a glance away, looking at them, staring them down, and menacing.

Every so often at this time of year, we hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of a bird ramming itself into a window with wings extended, trying to play chicken with its mirror image.

Thunk. That’ll teach him!

Thunk. Who does he think he is, flying up on me like that?

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. 

And a bird can easily thunk himself unconscious doing this.

I empathize.

Two small red-and grey-feathered birds eat sesame and sunflower seeds from a blue plastic birdfeeder. Behind them is a large lawn with criss-crossing mower lines. Toward the back of the photo is a road.
Two finches at breakfast. Photo © Keisha E. McKenzie

If I’d like to eat from life’s buffet in peace rather than bash myself unconscious, I need to come to terms with my own reflection. I can’t make progress if I can’t recognize and accept myself, if I catch glimpses of myself as I navigate the world yet render myself a threat to be overpowered and vanquished.

The biggest danger to the nesting bird is not the external predator or competitor. It is his own reflection.

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Life Skills: Non-defensive listening

Photo: Nick de la Force via Unsplash.com | Photo of Australian dark tan sand dunes. The sun is below the horizon; the sky is very light blue and bright yellow.
Photo: Nick de la Force via Unsplash

Once upon a time, one of my mentors said to me, “When you hear something new, use the Three Heap method.

“Heap 1 is for things you accept.
“Heap 2 is for things you reject.
“And Heap 3 is for things you don’t have enough info on, things you’re going to just hold for now.”

My mentor said, “Keisha, Heap 3 should be your biggest heap. You can’t learn anything from Heap 1 since you’ve already swallowed it.
“And you can’t learn anything from Heap 2, since you’ve already spat it out.
“But Heap 3, you can still learn something from.
So hold it.”

Non-defensive listening is fundamental to learning and it’s also a cornerstone of non-violence. I call it a life skill because it opens the way for a quality of life with others that transcends the perception of threat and moves to diminish and demonize.

Listening makes it possible for us to stretch beyond the world that we each build with our own private perceptions and experiences. It allows us to account for the worlds that others around us live in and incorporate their knowledge into our own. We live on the same planet as each other, and yet we live in different conceptual worlds. Those differences aren’t trivial, and genuine community, community that has passed beyond the pseudo stage of shallow approval, creates and cultivates space for threshing those differences for whatever wheat might be hidden in the chaff.

Listening non-defensively and holding that third heap doesn’t at all mean that we’ll ultimately agree: there’s a second heap for good reason! Some things are simply too toxic to be consumed and should be spat out for health’s sake. Communities determine for themselves which dynamics are unacceptable to them and their membership.

What’s critical, even in that process, is that we practice how to look beyond the debate to the real human needs underlying people’s attachments to their beliefs or ideas. This can’t become a world that works for all if we keep on masking human needs behind appeals to power, authority, and the right to exclude. We have to practice the vulnerability involved in articulating our needs and asserting responsibility for meeting them in ways that don’t require others to suffer.

Here’s Miki Kashtan on how to directly engage someone with whom you deeply disagree:

Judging someone is an indication that a need of ours is not met. The first step in transforming judgments is to recognize and connect with our unmet needs.

The action we’re judging is itself an attempt to meet needs. The second step is connecting with the needs of the person we’re judging so that we can open our hearts with compassion.

When we experience challenge in transforming our judgments, we can reflect on what needs we might be trying to meet by holding on to our judgments. Connecting with this set of needs may be essential to enable the previous two steps to proceed.” –Miki Kashtan, Transforming Judgments and Enemy Images

Discover more in Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future.

Listen. Listen deeply. And be willing to reply.