The Field of Connection: Moods and Emotional Contagion [2]

Just in case you're not convinced that one person can make that much of difference in the mood and emotions of a group, have you ever been to a party that just wasn’t happening; not much energy, no one having a very good time, and then suddenly someone walks in and the party lights up?  And on the flipside, have you ever been to a party that just wasn't’ happening; not much energy, no one having a very good time.  Then suddenly someone leaves and the party lights up!  As a colleague of mine says, “It's your choice, you can be a headlight or a tail light!”

It’s our connection to one another, our common link to the field around us that makes this experience possible. This connection to one another and the field is impacted by subtle energy—like our mood—or to more obvious energy—like the words and tone of voice that comes out of our mouths.

Maya Angelou once said that words become the energy that fills a room, home, an environment and then, our beings.  She described how words stick to the walls, the furniture, and even our clothing.  It is for this reason that she is very particular about who is welcome in her home and what kinds of conversations she allows in her presence.

What kind of energy do you bring to your home, office, or environment? Do you want to be a headlight or a tail light?

The Field of Connection: Moods and Emotional Contagion

We are contagious to one another in what we think and dream about, as well as in our moods and emotions. This can happen on the subway with strangers or while waiting for a flight in an airport. When we are exposed to the emotions of others around us, they impact our individual states of mind. The impact is more pronounced, however, in our more familiar groupings, in our fields of connection. 

Think about it for a moment.

You can no doubt recall times when someone in a bad mood changed the course of a meeting you were attending, perhaps definitively impacting the decisions that were made or shutting down the process all together. Negative moods and emotions can also have a daily ongoing impact on a team or an organizational environment.  It may be one person who constantly ‘rains’ on everyone’s parade, or it can be just the way we all pass along our moods to one another, and they go ‘viral.’

In client work, I’ve seen over and over how one person can bring the productivity of a team, a department, or a small organization to its knees.  Toxic emotions from one person can poison the water cooler.  We are that connected.

Thankfully, the impact can go the other way as well. We can spread more positive emotions as well. Why is that important?

In the realm of neuroscience, studies of the brain are showing that the more we focus on problems and a negative mental frame, the more our brains trigger fear responses, embedding the problem thinking in the neural circuitry and lowering our ability to find solutions. [Sharon Begley, How The Brain Is Wired, 01.19.07, TIME]

Research on high performing teams conducted by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada [AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 2005] concluded that the critical variable accounting for the teams’ success was the ratio of positive to negative talk, in excess of 2.9 to 1.  Similar research shows that married couples [5 to 1] and individuals also come closer to flourishing with a higher degree of positive to negative thought and talk.  

Fredrickson has advanced a “broaden and build” hypothesis based on her findings over the past ten years in which she posits that a more positive emotional frame enables us to access greater memory, cognitive skills, and attention.  In addition to healing from old lingering emotional wounds, positive emotions help us become more resilient.  A positive frame allows us to be more in touch with our own strengths, which in turn, helps us attend to and appreciate the strengths of others and see the potential in our situations.  Better for us, better for our organizations, better for our communities. [From Barbara L. Fredrickson, Positivity, 2009.] You can see a sampling of your own positivity ratio on the linked webpage.

Barsade concluded that both kinds of emotion, positive and negative, are highly contagious, but that positive emotions stimulate a group to be cooperative and make more positive choices in decision making, while the reverse held true for negative emotion. [From Lynne McTaggart, The Bond]

So, my mood today and yours, and the way we spread it around, matters to the fields of connection on which we play.

Connective Dynamics: Fields of Connection and Wholeness

“…latest evidence from many disciplines—from neuroscience and biology to quantum physics—suggests that nature’s most basic drive is not competition, as classic evolutionary theory maintains, but wholeness….new research demonstrating that all living beings, have been hardwired to seek connection above virtually any other impulse—even at personal cost… ‘The individual’ is only the sum of an infinite number of inexactly defined parts, and the parts as we currently understand them are shifting and transforming at every moment…Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness.” [Lynne McTaggert, The Bond]

What does what we’re learning about fields and wholeness mean for organizations? For communities?

More and more, it means changing the way we have operated, moving from just coordination among individuals to actively seeking to bring minds together to take advantage of that natural connection and opportunity for better solutions. 

When issues and challenges are very big [meta-challenges] or very new [emergent shifts], no one person has the whole solution.  We need the intelligence of the collective, the tapping of everyone’s brain and heart.  We need the whole for big projects, big solutions, big changes of heart, bigger ways of understanding our systems and our place in them.  That happens together—we can’t get there on our own.

For big things, we have to invite the whole consciously onto the field of connection and play.

Just this summer, we are becoming more fully aware, all of us, that the weather is changing, whether or not man has had anything to do with causing the change. The New York Times published an article last week about the stressors on aging infrastructure in the US from heat and storms; in another piece, the author noted that something like a third of the food-producing areas of the US are considered disaster areas because of drought conditions and crop loss.  Mindful responses to issues this large cannot be successfully addressed by one agency, company, or community. Sharing ideas, knowledge, and strengths is the only way through.  How do we effectively do that, inviting ourselves and one another onto a field of connection and consciousness?  Seeing ourselves as  part of it all and co-accountable for outcomes?

But, dealing with systemic and structural breakdowns needs greater coordination, shared knowledge, co-learning. We respond to big issues by showing up together on the field of connection, ready to roll up our sleeves.

Have you experienced that in your own life, in your own organization and around areas of passionate interest and concern? Where with focused group energy, you were able to transcend personal limitations, whether those were intellectual, emotional, or limits of perspective and scope? When you felt yourself connect up and solutions surfaced, perhaps solutions that had been unforeseen?

We are all dealing with these issues anyway. If quantum physics theorists are correct, we are connected up anyway. So, we can draw on that. We can connect up intentionally. We can invite our best intelligence to join together, knowing that we are smarter together, and the stakes are often very high.

There are lots of ways to facilitate this, but these are some basic elements of co-creating and connecting to fields:

--Multiplicity: the desire for multiplicity, an intention to gather greater knowledge through connecting stakeholders;

--Engagement: clear intention and invitation to include, an invitation to engage; an environment that facilitates thinking together

--Thinking Together: a process to attune to one another in dialogue and engage the purpose [those I-We-It connective dynamics again]

--Aligned Action and activation: the knowledge that solutions that can be acted on and ways to implement found, that sponsorship and resources can be  tapped.

We will be examining these META elements in greater detail over the next months as they are core to connective, collaborative, and collective process.

When intentional connections and field building don’t work so well and the invitation to the magic of collective intelligence does not occur, it’s usually at the level of engagement and intention where we have not done our prep work.

But if we do fully enter into the process of creating and nurturing fields of connection on behalf of topics of importance, we will notice our values begin to shift:

• ·      We begin to value other perspectives and points of view, more than we value full agreement;
• ·      We begin to value the transparency between us, more than our individual self-protective cocoons;
• ·      We begin to value the wisdom available to us, and to put greater value on the collective rather than only individual good;
• ·      We begin to value wholeness.

Connective Dynamics: A ‘Field’ of Connection

“A field can be described as a non-material region of influence that structures the energy of a system, like the field around a magnet.  Judy Cannato, Fields of Compassion.

Most of us [in the West, at least] were brought up on the idea of individualism, that we are all singular and somewhat isolated beings, working to overcome our natural separation. We think of ourselves as distinct closed-off minds trying to learn to collaborate, acutely aware of a sense of separation and self-containment.

But what if our individual minds are not really so separate?  What if we are more connected than we are generally aware of and have the possibility of even greater access to one another’s thoughts, ideas, intentions and moods?

“The latest evidence form quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of cooperation…a vast quantum web of connection.”  [Lynne McTaggart, The Bond]

We are learning that nested within that vast web are more intimate links and ‘fields’ of connection: our families, our organizations, our networks and communities of practice. And, these fields grow, deepen, and open the more we sit together, think together, feel together and share insights. Our individual boundaries can become more porous and our work more powerful.

“Groups have minds. They show signs of true consciousness and intelligence. I watched as fields of influence grew around the courses I was teaching, the learning taking place in one semester influencing the learning taking place in subsequent semesters.   [Christopher Bache, The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness]

How we set up our companies matters in terms of how accessible and available the field of connection can become on behalf of organizational missions. It matters in terms of the group intelligence, web of knowledge and wholeness that is always there waiting to be tapped. 

Stay tuned for more conversations about fields of connection and how to nurture them.

Connective Dynamics: Connecting to “It” at Every Level

What does connective dynamics mean for the “daily grind?” A lot! It can answer the question of how to fully engage the people who do important work like entering data, crunching number and assembling products.

One of the reasons people in workplaces do NOT stay engaged is because of the way the ‘It’ gets defined for them and because of the information that is shared—or not shared—with them.  When ‘It’ is presented as a narrow task focus out of the context of the larger picture, then in and of itself, ‘It’ (or the task) is relatively meaningless and therefore not important to them. It doesn’t connect to the overall purpose. 

For example, suppose management creates a better payment system for customers that will make it easier and cheaper for them to purchase a needed product.  When presented to employees, they are simply told there is a new system: here’s how you do it, this is your job now.  For employees who are entering data, crunching numbers and sending out bills, perhaps not much has changed except a few minor differences at their end, which may or may not be more convenient for them. At best they make the changes and go on. At worst, they complain about meaningless changes made by management or extra work for no reason: they are less engaged, morale declines. The connective dynamics aren’t gathering momentum.

On the other hand, imagine management including these employees in the dialogue at the outset (creating an “I-We-It” dynamic) and asking: how can we make our payment system easier and cheaper for customers so they can purchase these needed items?  And how might we do it so it takes less effort internally as well?  They might end up with the same new design, or something even better.  The real benefit, however, is they will arrive at the change with employees fully engaged with the changes and with their effort to serve the customer.  They now see their work connected to happy customers, the importance of the changes, and the value they added to those changes.

On a daily basis, we could create greater engagement simply by spending more time on what we actually want to accomplish together. In planning meetings, we can ask: is everyone who is connected to this work present? What is at stake? What shared outcome do we want?

Question: How can you intentionally connect with 'It' as a daily activity so that you stay engaged with what is important for you and the larger ‘We’??

Connective Dynamics: Attracting and framing the ‘It’ [Purpose]

 The I-We-It dynamic helps access the energy of collective intelligence through our connection to one another and to our purpose/topic.

The ‘it’, the topic of importance or purpose, carries energy, vibration and power. When we are in the process of clarifying the ‘it’ in our connective dynamics, we might ask ourselves these questions:

·      What vision do we hold about our purpose, our desire?

·      What do we want more of?

·      What can we align on?

·      What is capturing our hearts?

And/or we can look more specifically at these areas:

           

STAKES AND EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

A topic of importance has high stakes--a high need for resolution; usually, time is of 

the essence.

Where there are high stakes, there’s also an emotional connection. The right topics 

compel us forward.  Topics need to not only have collective desire at the center but 

also to be expressed in a way that creates possibilities, anticipation, and investment 

rather than pessimism and blame throwing.

Ask yourself and others:

·      Is the solution highly desired?

·      How am I/are we connected to this topic?

·      How does this matter to me?

STAKEHOLDERS

A topic of importance creates the glue of common purpose. Everyone involved has a 

stake in it; everyone can relate to and contribute to it. Because we fall in love with and 

move in the direction of what we continually focus on, choosing, framing, and 

presenting the topic for collective dialogue is a key determinant of the outcome.

Ask ourselves:

·      Do I have a stake in the outcomes of this group’s work, really?

·      Who else will be impacted by what we think together?

·      Who else do we need to connect with? Are all the stakeholders here?  If not, how will 

     we reach them, connect to them, represent them?

CALL TO INNOVATE AND IMAGE OF THE FUTURE

Compelling topics form at the nexus of two questions:

·      What are we most curious about?

·      What do we most want to see increase in this group, organization or community?

If just stating the topic begins to create an image of a workable solution, a compelling 

future, it is probably on track. 

·    What images come up for you when you think about a topic you are being asked 

    to dialogue about?

·    Does this topic energize and mobilize movement toward a desired future?

·    Can you begin to see that desired future?

In these group experiences, people have access to a kind of knowing that's bigger than what we normally experience with each other.  You feel the presence of the sacred, and you sense that everybody else in the group is also feeling that. There's a sense of openness and awareness of something larger than yourself. Your ability to communicate seems broader. What is astounding to people is how much creativity comes forth in a setting like that. You have a sense that the whole group is creating together, and you don't quite exactly know how.

Carol Frenier, as quoted in Craig Hamilton’s Come Together in WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? Magazine, May—June 2004

Connective Dynamics: I—We—It [Purpose]

“Collective clarity of purpose is the invisible leader.”  Mary Parker Follett

 On these posts, we have been discussing research showing that humans have an inherent connective capacity. But what helps us best access and use it? What creates the centrifugal force that allows a group of individuals to become a coherent ‘we’ and invite collective intelligence, even for a short period of time? What attracts us to the energetic spin of connection, collaboration, and the collective ‘we’?

What is ‘It’?

 The ‘it’ in the connective  spin is the topic or purpose for a group or team coming together.

In preparing for collective work around a theme or topic, we need to ask ourselves what this work is in service of, what the stakes are, what the desired outcome is.  The right topic creates a an attractor that draws in and engages those with wisdom and experience to share.  A topic of importance brings in the resonance of common purpose. It can pull us out past ourselves to make our best contributions, thus the "I-WE-IT".

Creating a common sense of purpose seems easy, but in fact, framing topics that fire our imaginations and feel important for us individually, as well as for us collectively, whether an organization or community, takes real focus and  both attention and intention. 

The right topics compel us forward.  The ‘It’ acts on us; it is itself an actor in connective dynamics. Topics need to not only have collective desire at the center but also need to be expressed and framed in a way that creates possibilities, anticipation, and investment rather than pessimism and blame throwing.  If just stating the topic [our purposeful ‘it'] begins to create an image of a workable future, it is probably on track and will energize our connections.