Charles Starrett and Jung Starrett attended our most recent Presencing Institute u.academy course, Art of Making a True Move:Social Presencing Theater. They have been engaged in u.lab and in other u.academy courses and have been students in my Social Presencing Theater Basics course in Boston. I am always completely delighted to see them and to hear of how they are applying Theory U and Social Presencing Theater in their work of transforming business as a force for good.
We use Sutra as a platform to invite participants to connect and share. Charles wrote this wonderful piece on the Sutra which offers encouragement to others.
Dear fellow alumni!
For about sixteen months, Jung and I, along with a colleague of ours from Brazil, have been running a virtual “Hub” over Zoom called, “Leadership for Business Transformation,” as part of the Presencing Institute community. The Hub has met weekly since May 2020 to gather and grow our collective capacity for transforming business as a force for good. Because the Presencing Institute recently launched the u.lab 1x 2021 course, quite a few people expressed interest in joining today’s Hub gathering. We’ve also been feeling that the Hub would benefit from more embodiment practice.
When Jung and I were “presencing” all of this with a fellow Hub member, Edith Claros, who is also an alum of the November Social Presencing Theater Online course, the three of us came up with a prototype for doing the Field Dance in our Hub.
The rough structure was to have a short “check-in,” followed by a 10-minute “20 Minute Dance,” and then to go into introducing and demonstrating the Field Dance. One other member who came, Olga Gurova, also had experience with the Field Dance. We created four breakout rooms so each room would have one person with some experience (Jung, Edith, Olga, and I). Each room had about six people.
Many mistakes and missteps were made, but we also stressed at the beginning that this was a prototype — an experiment — and we are not “teachers” but fellow learners who wanted to share what we learned last weekend. Jung emphasized letting go of everything we think we know, and to welcome the “not knowing” as we entered into the shared space of the Field Dance.
The response we got from all four breakout rooms was consistent — the participants felt love, connection, belonging, and acceptance. Jung and I had doubts that this was a “good idea” for a gathering where we knew it was going to be a mix of new people and older members. Could we pull this off in 90 minutes? Would everybody just be confused that we didn’t talk more about “leadership and business” and not come back to the Hub next week?
Suspending our doubts, we did it anyway. To my “Surprise” in my breakout room, one new participant specifically said that this experience was the “perfect opening to a new space” for her. (She is new to u.lab and this was her first experience in a Hub in the Presencing Institute community.)
In Jung’s breakout room, two people started their dances at the same time. When the person who went too soon realized what happened, they quickly retreated “off stage” and sat down. Jung saw their face and felt distress. But she remembered what Manish and Arawana shared about allowing the process to unfold even when there are mishaps. So she waited until the end to invite the person to complete their dance if they wished to do so. They did.
During the debrief the person who started their dance out of turn mentioned how ashamed she felt when she realized that it wasn’t her turn, but when she saw a later person’s gesture (one hand on the heart and the other arm extending out with an open palm), she felt forgiven and welcomed back into the space. Another participant shared how beautiful it was to see two people moving at the same time. This sharing sparked a collective appreciation for the serendipitous beauty arising from what someone thought of as a “shameful mistake.”
The “mistake” that happened in the breakout group, inspired a generative dialog on leadership not being about perfecting things, or giving perfect presentations and solutions to people. It’s about accompanying people on the journey, allowing things to happen without the need to pretend that we know everything! If this “mistake” hadn’t happened during the Field Dance, we wouldn’t have seen, felt, or sensed it ourselves. So everyone was grateful to the person who made the “mistake,” and the person who made the “mistake” felt welcomed, received, appreciated, and held.
In retrospect, our prototype Social Presencing Theater experience created exactly the kind of belonging and coherence that Jung and I have wanted our Hub to have, especially with welcoming so many new participants to the space. We had the opportunity to meet each other as human “beings” rather than human “doings” with identities defined by job, title, degrees in education, etc. And when Jung introduced Field Dance as a practice for embodied leadership (thanks to Arawana, Manish, and Angela), I saw a lot of heads nodding along.
Most of all, the space was full of warmth by the time we all said goodbye. Like our learning experience over the weekend, most participants didn’t know each other when they started the 90-minute session. Jung and I feel full of gratitude for everyone’s willingness to try something new and take a leap of faith together!
When we debriefed the experience with Olga afterwards, another learning came. The three of us realized that we’ve all experienced similar contrasts between the online and in-person experiences of Social Presencing Theater. In person, we found that Duets were very comfortable and the Field Dance felt a lot more awkward and scary. In the Zoom breakout rooms, we feel that Duets can be awkward if we don’t know the other person, but with the Field Dance we feel more at ease in the Zoom breakout room than we do in person. An observation I wanted to share as the three of us discovered we had the same experience.
Thank you for reading my long share. Thank you to Arawana, Manish, Angela, Sebastian, and Olaf for your teaching and space-holding. And thank you all for your presence over the three days. I hope our paths cross again!
In gratitude and joy,
