What our doings do: A conversation recalling the origins of between us
Theodore Taptiklis and Bernhard Resch on how they came to their senses, and why the unseen consequences of our behavior are more important than what we actually do.
It is an unusually temperate summer day in Sydney (meaning slightly above 30°C). With a sigh, Bernhard and Theodore sink into an office couch. After a week of teaching business school first-years ‘collaboration’ the weird-o-meter that they had put on the classroom walls had finally dropped beneath the 70s mark. With ample distance to New Zealand — the place where the swerving began — they look back at the unsettling but soulful experiences that made them part of Between Us.
Bernhard: Teddy, you made an extraordinary decision. You left your successful career as a corporate strategist and organizational developer to become an ‘independent researcher’ ─ a precarious species. In fact, I came to know you as a traveler between the worlds of business, indigeneity, and academia. What did it take?
Theodore: 25 years ago, I commissioned a large-scale survey of people’s lives in New Zealand, and discovered a pervasive sense of isolation and resignation. Convinced that they had the moral duty to shape their own lives, people were left alone with a deep feeling of guilt as they struggled through their lives. Today, after 50 years of neoliberal politics and managerial organizing separation and individualism seem like the natural order of things. All the shame and frustration that people have had to swallow during their lifetime, though, has been bubbling deep down and is now burping up as right-wing populism, Trump, & co.
Bernhard: You called this lack of belonging, community, and relationship ‘the Big Missing.’ In your book Unmanaging, you talk about opening up organizations to their unspoken knowledge. Did I get it right that in your research you discovered a space between us, a whole world of relational dynamics that we have unlearned to see and forgotten how to talk about?
Theodore: As someone who was socialized into management consulting, data, arguments, and rationalization it took me many years to recognize the Big Missing. And honestly to this day, I’m struggling to find a resonant language to describe it. Or rather I believe it’s not so much about talking at all, but about being affected by different and fuller forms of togetherness. Take my experience at Toi Whakaari. That’s the New Zealand Drama School, an institution whose teaching is heavily influenced by Te Ao Māori (the indigenous world of Māori people). In a practice called kōiwi 150 students and a group of teachers are gathered in a level studio ─ no PowerPoint, no chairs; everyone is sitting on the floor. They don’t talk about an external set of ideas. It was always about something that was going on in the life of the school and in the activities of a group of students. One teacher might be engaged in a face to face discussion with a particular group of students, while the other teachers were paying attention to what was going on in the room, and then directing the activities of their colleague to address an issue that was arising in relation to everyone else. So, there were multiple exchanges going on conducted by a group of teachers who themselves were interacting very strongly. Stunningly, the teachers conveyed messages to one another by simple gestures, or movements of their eyes, rather than by spoken language. I could see that the students were beginning to do the same thing. So by repetition, what was emerging was an extremely sensitive pattern of collaborative activity. Something I had never seen before. It was extraordinarily moving to witness this quality of relationship, concentration, and flow.
Unspoken Theodore: As I describe this experience to Bernhard, the feeling of a particularly striking moment takes hold of me. One morning I joined a kōiwi gathering that began with a vigorous warm-up exercise. Some of the Samoan students began a powerful drumbeat with music that got everyone moving. A few people were pulled to the center to dance with wild gestures encouraging everyone else. I was one of those pulled to the center. Gyrating in stockinged feet on the polished studio floor, I suddenly lost my balance and crashed to the ground, at that moment feeling incredibly foolish and a sense of shame. Down there on the floor, I’m asking myself: What am I doing, trying to match these kids who are 50 years my junior? Then ─ in what seemed a nanosecond ─ everyone around me crashed to the floor as well! This seemed like an instinctive move, designed to normalize my fall and cover up my hurt feelings. But it was done with such grace and good humor that I immediately understood it as a product of the increased sensitivity and physicality that the students had been learning.
Bernhard: That reminds me of my first encounter with Enspiral ─ a New Zealand-based social entrepreneurial network whose collaborative practices I researched; also the place where we met. I got to this picturesque valley outside of Wellington, where the thirty or so core members held their annual retreat. I was a stranger to the country, to the language, to the group and got blown away. Similarly to your teachers who were co-teaching, the Enspiral members subtly co-facilitated their workshops. I was not only struck by the neat facilitation tools, like open spaces, post-it clustering, and graphic recording, but by the intimacy of this work setting. Small cues, such as “speak more from the I” or “thanks for sharing” flew into each other. People used hand signs to show support or to make small decisions. They were attentive to their bodily needs: someone silently getting up to open the doors letting in fresh air, offering an older member a seat, or handing out a brief massage. That is not to say that it was all flowery and cozy. One member, for example, frankly voiced his frustration with how his thoroughly-prepared initiative had been dismissed. To be honest, up to this point in my career I had never witnessed such a candid expression of uncomfortable emotions. And it didn’t erupt, it wasn’t judgmental or overpowering.
Theodore: We call it radical sharing. I had to learn how the normalization of talking about emotions and sensations can break a tension and shift the conversation to a different, more productive level. In our modern world, we have forgotten that there is an embodied layer to our interactions. We have severed our connection to the physicality of being.
In a way, we obsessively try to make sense of the world with our thoughts. But the rational mind is only one of many faculties we possess. If we come to our senses, we realize that our emotions and feelings, our bodily needs and sensations, our connection to place, or the atmosphere that surrounds us hold an incredible wealth of information.
I call this bodysense. We can trust our heads, hearts, and hands. A good way to develop our bodysense collectively is to gather less around problems and solutions and more around stories. Stories invite shared experience and emotional response.
Bernhard: That resonates in my research findings. Precisely because the Enspiral people got so emotionally close and so aware of their bodily needs, they could keep up their aspirational decentralized and collaborative ways of working. Interpersonal problems inevitably built up: Tabooed hierarchies due to the level of social capital people accrued, huge issues around decentralizing care, and a culture of busy and burnout. However, as people had learned to work with their bodysense, they were able to push back against these dynamics. And that’s because in this process they learned to cherish their situatedness or attunement to an unfolding situation as a co-creative resource. Their unspoken differences turned into gifts. As you said, Teddy, stories were absolutely key. Enspiral integrated storytelling routines into their everyday practice: check-ins, sharing circles, homegroups, etc. There, people practiced listening actively, speaking their truth in the midst of others, judging less, and becoming more forgiving with themselves. In a way, they got accustomed to touch the Others and Othernesses around them, and in this process, they sooner or later touched the Otherness in themselves. It is uncomfortable if someone spells out your overbearing behavior, even scary if you are pointed to repercussions of your actions that were unfathomable from your point of experience. We inhabit different spots on a bodysensual landscape, sometimes they feel worlds apart. Working with our gifts or differences is extremely scary. It puts you through a transgressive experience, where you will question your beliefs and capabilities. And it becomes seriously unsettling, when you find the most alien Otherness deep inside yourself, probably repressed or projected outwards.
Theodore: True, but if we sweat it out, we get into meta-thinking, we learn about ourselves and overcome our impulsive and self-destructive behaviors. So contrary to conventional wisdom, we are not the most productive, when we build our groups around sameness, around shared beliefs and behaviors. No, we have to bring our differences together and work from deep mutual appreciation. And, with differences I don’t mean identity or personality, experience or skills; it’s the unique way that every one of us is sensually situated within the world. You are right, Bernhard, it is an utterly scary way of working but we can jump into the unknown from a stable base of belonging. In Te Ao Māori group encounter is extremely carefully prescribed by tradition and learning. Each time one group meets another, there’s an understanding of a whole series of roles of tasks. And people qualify for those roles through their bodysense. Māori tradition recognizes different kinds of habits of being in the world. People learn about them by growing up in a specific place. At the same time, they discover their own tendencies. And you see the ease with which people relate to one another, rather like a highly experienced sports team, except this is not playing a game, this is real. When you see that ease, it’s very tempting to ask, how can we find something that is analogous to that in our lives? That’s a big focus of our work at Between Us. How can we entangle our bodies constructively and creatively?
Unspoken Bernhard: Gazing out of the window into the cloudy Sydney sky, I’m drawn back to feeling a sense of undeserved trust that I received when arriving in New Zealand. Several Enspiral people, among them Teddy, offering kitchenware and furniture to outfit our empty house. What a surprising feeling and invitation to act with the same generosity towards others. Probably small acts of kindness like these emanate a lingering atmosphere in which we feel seen and heard. This sense of welcoming and belonging certainly helped me to pierce the armor that I had built around my emotional life, I kept thinking.
Bernhard: An inevitable mention: entanglement. It has become an important notion in our thinking. Much like in quantum mechanics we see us ─ as bodily beings ─ woven into and through each other. In this perspective, we cannot be ‘described’ independently of others and there is no vantage point outside the entanglement from which we could analyze our constellation and not influence it. In this light, we cannot perceive us as individuals and our bodysense is neither a personal property nor monolithic entity. There is a multiplicity of potential attunements alive at any moment and depending on our relations with others, with places, and materialities they mingle, morph, and meld. Our bodysense continuously emerges within this complex web of relations. The Italian quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli poetically said that we live in a universe of kisses not stones. The key to understanding and harnessing bodysense is thus not to survey a large number of groups, drawing a universal map that helps us to control the outcomes. Instead, we’d better feel our way into the local web around us to glimpse as much as possible of the potential that is building between us. The craft of organizing then is to allow for the right dose of disruption and play to release some of this potential in recurring experiments. Back in New Zealand, the school where my boys went to featured a Māori stream. At school events, we would greet each other with a hongi. You come together very closely, nose and foreheads touching, and take a shared breath. To me, this was an incredibly powerful affirmation of us as relational beings, who share the same air ─ all part of the relational web of life on planet earth. We really miss something like that in our Western culture.
Theodore: A related practice that I started to really appreciate from my exposure to Te Ao Māori was the enormous attention that’s paid to arrivals and departures. Everyone is involved in the practice of beginning and it has a careful sequence of steps and patterns. But leaving is a very important part of the work as well ─ poroporoaki. It has a ceremonial element, it has a reflective element, and it has a physical element. But this is not just a practice that enables collaboration and stronger working together, which it does, but it’s also something that raises the quality of understanding between us. It lifts us to a kind of better self, that’s something I really enjoy. And, it’s becoming a better self by being part of other better selves. If you deliberately slow down things and allow time and space for the work of relationship-building, you get to know much more about yourself. The act of really feeling your way into the world of another person shines a light on your own world in a way that you might not have considered before.
Bernhard: It comes down to facing what our doing does. At Enspiral it was normalized behavior to repeat what the person before you had said or to rephrase it in your own words, emphasizing how you received what had been said. Just making sure: Did I get that right? What did you mean? And how did it resonate with me? This practice called ‘looping’ became part of the very fabric of conversation. To me working collaboratively, the main outcomes are not the product or service that you deliver but it’s the mutual learning and co-development that’s resulting from it.
Theodore: Indeed, what happens at the moment that we move into the world of those around us overshadows the original doing. If we could get into an easeful relationship with the consequences of our behavior, without necessarily judging but just recognizing and knowing and becoming familiar with, then we could not only be more effective in the world but engage in shared mindfulness practice.
Bernhard: In my mind, this is what we want to create with our upcoming research project: The Entangled Bodies Lab. Create a setting in which we make an utterance ─ see what happens, and then get a chance to try it again; then notice the difference. What is your vision for this, Teddy?
Theodore: I hope that we can use the findings from these lab settings to create a transformational learning design for groups to discover their differences and create a language around them. That language doesn’t even have to be verbal, we can hold up two fingers. And when I hold up two fingers, you know: Oh, we’re getting into that corner. Let’s find a way to back out of that.
Bernhard: Let’s bring our full sense-making capacities back to everyday life. I like that.
___
Bernhard Resch is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney. He explores new worlds of work. Therefore, he strolls around coworking spaces, organized networks, and entrepreneurial collectives, where he traces practices of collaborative creation, commoning, care, and emotional work.
Theodore Taptiklis is an intrepid traveler between the worlds of academia, business, and indigeneity. He explores ways to open up the possibilities of the world by changing the way that we meet each other. Theodore is the author of Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to its Own Unspoken Knowledge.
Get in touch with them and like-minded others at www.between-us.net.
