“Success is when everyone wakes up”: Meet Meg Buzzi
In this series, we are spotlighting our community members. In the Adaptive Space, we make room to receive the insights our community members have to offer. This series is where we will discover each other’s gifts! We will be spotlighting one story per week. Please engage with our star of the week by participating in the conversation below.
This week we are highlighting another member of the Building Belonging Mighty Network, Meg Buzzi! Meg is an active practitioner of Theory U and is constantly excited by the diversity and scope of individuals who engage with the content. She hopes that people continue to embrace Theory U to make change in their own personal and professional lives.
Name: Meg Buzzi
Lives: Los Angeles, California
Affiliation: Rah Rah Rah Creative Industries
Superpower: Facilitation
How did you stumble upon your career path?
Since the early 2000s, I’ve been working in public sector technology — everything from web content to massive software implementations. Higher education is where I’ve worked the longest, but I’ve also worked in state government, in the courts, in nonprofits along the way. Working in public sector tech necessarily meant doing work in policy and change management, because tech has become a huge driver for behavioral and structural change in the workplace. Over the course of years, I recognized that an increasing part of my job as a director or program manager was, in fact, coaching and facilitating. Inside each role was the work of being a liaison between groups, drawing out what their cultural differences were or what their requirements were. All of that took an amount of coaching. About seven years ago I got serious about focusing on coaching and facilitation as the work I wanted to do, which kept me in change management but allowed me to move between industries.
Who was the first person who believed in you while on this path?
It was probably my entire team at the university — the people I worked most closely with on a daily basis were some incredible analysts, engineers and designers who encouraged me to lean into my management style and the coaching and facilitation part of my work. They shared the impact it had on them and it spurred me to work harder at it.
How do you define success for yourself?
One of the things that’s really important to me is impact. And when I say that, I mean it broadly. It could start at the individual level, like someone having a moment of clarity because I’ve asked a surprising question. And the impact scales up, ideally so that the moment of clarity leads to a high-performing team, toward a higher-performing organization. Ultimately you’ve got an organization that is deeply aligned with its purpose, that walks its own talk. For me, impact is also about the quality of relationship that emerges from the work. Can a person expand their perspective? Can I help facilitate expansion? The end-all, be-all, best case scenario, is transformation. That’s the grail. For me, success is when everyone wakes up.
What’s your daily routine look like?
I typically spend at least an hour in the morning reading for pleasure. Then, one of things that’s become critical for me is spending time in meditation. Having mindfulness or contemplative practice has really helped me stay clear-headed and open. It keeps me able to hold space in the way that I need to for my clients. Probably because I’m self-employed, but there aren’t any set business hours for me. Sometimes I have planning work that has to get done on the weekends. I also have colleagues all over the world- Europe and South America and Asia, that I work with regularly. So the regular workweek doesn’t quite fit anymore because juggling time zones is crazy in the first place, so I’ve got to stay flexible. The work pattern that’s emerging for me is three to four hours of work followed by a couple hours of break, then another three hours of work and so on. No one is productive for eight or nine hours straight anyway. Working independently has given me the permission to work intensely in phases and then be able to back off. Sometimes in the middle of the day, I get to go for a hike, which is awesome. I’m usually in bed by 11, but then I might read for another couple of hours after that.
What’s the most important skill you’ve learned along your path?
The number one thing is definitely listening — and thinking about it as an art, as a tool set, as something I must devote energy and practice toward. Listening is a muscle. It also feels like one of the foundational deficits in American culture. We often listen without depth of attention, without empathy, without a willingness or openness to difference. I’m intentionally working on exercising that muscle. Every interaction we have is an opportunity to practice. The second thing is setting aside time to reflect. It hasn’t always looked like sitting meditation for me. Sometimes it looks like yoga or something else. But in general, a daily contemplative practice, whatever that looks like, is so crucial. To be able to listen inward to ourselves, to clear out some of the noise. Reflection is related to listening; there’s a rigor and a discipline to both of those things. But it can also be easy — just being in a daily practice of noticing what’s inside us at a given moment.
What’s the greatest challenge that you’ve met along this path?
About 10 years ago I learned about Theory U and began to dig into it at a leadership retreat in Nova Scotia. I came back invigorated, motivated to bring this work to my university, to my team and colleagues. The biggest challenge has been figuring out how to get skeptics on board, because sometimes these techniques fly in the face of conventional workplace dialogue. How do we show people that going deeper works? How do we bring people along with us? And how do we meet people where they’re at without compromising the tools and principles that yield real change? It’s kind of like living in two worlds and having one foot in this world with all of its old paradigms, and one foot in this more expansive world of possibilities where we can be in conversation and work together very differently.
What do you think has been your greatest reward?
What’s most rewarding to me is getting to watch the lightbulbs come on, watching people in moments of wakefulness. That’s not to say that I don’t have my own blind spots or places where I’m asleep. But yeah, seeing that happen is really delicious. And I’ve seen it happen in ways that are incredibly surprising. Seeing what can happen when people are open is what keeps me in the work.
Give us a story that shows us who you are.
In the summer of 2019, I attended the Nature, Art & Habitat Residency in a very small town in northern Italy. A colleague and I created a project about celebrating the interdependence of humans and animals. One aspect was honoring the ecosystem of this particular region. Another aspect was inviting the community to co-create art and practice being in deeper relationship. We didn’t speak Italian, so another creative constraint was finding non-verbal ways to create a fresh sense of community. Engaging people in art-making together is a powerful way to do that. We gathered together the older citizens along with some students and younger people around meals and activities where we were making things with our hands: drawings, collage, stamp making. It felt like a very generative space. It was such a privilege to spend time in deep listening for a few weeks and help create a space for people to feel more connected.
What do you hope to learn from this community of peers?
One of the things that I lean on and appreciate is the rigor of the community around Theory U. We’re all exploring different facets of the theory, whether we’re using particular techniques or specific exercises. It’s nice being in a community of practice where people are actively engaging with the material, and using it out in the real world. I love that both my coaching circle and my hub are composed of different networks and institutions coming together from all over the world. It gives me a sense that this work is applicable anywhere, which is refreshing, being able to watch things come to fruition in so many different settings. It’s reassuring to see there are people in every industry who are invested in a new way of thinking and being. We’re all coming into this new year recognizing that radical change is needed. We’re willing to practice being that change with each other. That’s just like, goosebumps, right? Sometimes it can feel like you’re out there on your own trying to shift the world, so the scope of the Theory U community and the intimacy it helps generate creates a support structure for change makers.
When have you witnessed or helped someone “wake up”? When do you feel like you’ve “woken up” in your own life?
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