Space, staying and knowing
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008So you know how I say my work has three parts? Planning what to do and why, getting the work done, and evaluating results and the relationships we have together? I’m reading a book called Love to the Loveless, by Derek Kidner. Not the warmest title, yet something made me curious, pick it up.
Kidner writes about Hosea, who was told, “at ground level and at painful length…to do the last thing a responsible prophet might expect. ‘Go and marry a prostitute.’” “And Hosea did not gather that he could simply go through a form of marriage, or… [marry] a prostitute with a heart of gold. He married a shallow, mercenary woman, the kind who might walk out on him the moment it suited her; and they started a family. She bore him a son. After that, she had two more children, who were apparently not his. Then she left him.”
Each child is named for the kind of relationship between Hosea and his wife at the time when the child is born. The first, a boy, is named “No space.” The second is named “Unloved.” The third is named, “Unknown.”
This is actually very similar to what happens when people work together and their relationships go wrong! Make space! In a company, one woman I interviewed talked about finger-pointing and blame between coworkers and no space to feel at peace or to have the meetings you need.
Love! I’ve thought a lot about love — what does it mean? The closest definition I came up with was, “To want to be near to all of someone or something.” A 50-year old coworker from Russia several years ago said, “We love people for what we can do for them.” And Sara Bareilles sings, “Only gonna get given what you give away.” Many people say love is an action as well as a noun. Love is not just, “I love you,” or “I fell in love,” but “I am loving you now,” or “I choose to love you.”
In reading this book about Hosea, I think love is “to stay with” someone. Sure, sometimes loving or staying means keeping your distance at times. But if you are still in that love relationship, you feel the distance, just as in that theater game where we wear giant elastic bands around our waists, like enormous rubber bands. When we’re close to each other, bodies nearly touching, the elastic band is slack, so we must hold it lest it fall to the ground. When we’re distant, the band is tense around our bodies, pulling us towards each other. And in this age of so many divorces, if love is not just to be swept off your feet by your partner, perpetually falling head over heels, then love can be literally, “to stay with.”
In companies gone wrong, people don’t give each other space to plan projects, they don’t stay with each other to do the work together, and — Know! — they don’t know what went wrong or what went right or why or who they’re really working with…because they’re off in their own fantasies, no longer with each other, no longer loving, no longer with a room to call their own.
So… Make space by planning - so you have room to work together. Stay together, so you get the work done. Get to know each other, so you can improve as you move forward. Similarly, although with sports instead of personal relationships, John Miller of Gemba Panta Rei’s compares continuous work relationships to a triathalon:
Make space: “1) Swim. Cross deep waters to new shores. In business this is starting something new, like technology or process trials, new product launches, product or process redesign, building expansion, relocation of processes, etc.”
Stay together: “2) Cycle. Once the new product or process is stable, the relay hand off is made to the jishuken teams or kaizen event teams. These teams sprint as fast as they can to cover the most distance in the shortest amount of time, as the cyclists do in a triathlon.”
Know each other: “3) Run. This would be the persistent, daily problem solving…as well as the suggestion systems by all employees, autonomous maintenance activities, etc. to keep improvements pumping along over the long term.”
And I’ll finish this note with some photos I took in a Flagstaff supermarket parking lot.
Make space to move forward. The car needs to move out of the way before the shopping cart can be pushed across the street.
Ironically, in business or personal relationships, you’ll have a group such as four people working together, and each thinks to themself, “We want different things. Jon wants to work hard and make money, Sammy wants to meet his girlfriend tonight, Jose wants to build his motorcycle, and Linda has that baby to take care of.” Yet you’re all in the same place right now, in this case at the supermarket, and you all want the same thing — to get home as soon as possible, together as a family. And the first step is to cross the street. Sure, you might have your head down when you start to cross the street, but don’t look down. Keep looking forward.
Stay together through that space. The guys walk together across the street. That’s the fastest way to all get to their car.
Ironically, often in business or personal relationships, we say, “Jon, you want to make money. And Sammy, you just want to meet your girlfriend. And Jose, you’re obsessed with your motorcycle. So we don’t have any reason to stay together any more.”
Know and raise your family. As you stay together, you start to develop rhythms for crossing the street together. You start to know that Linda has that baby to carry. And Sammy doesn’t mind pushing the shopping cart, and Jon is good at leading the way across the street, and Jose will pick up anything that might fall from the cart and put it back on. Okay, okay, you probably don’t think this all so explicitly, but you develop a life together that works well. You learn that when Linda crosses the street first, she’s watching her baby, and has a hard time seeing cars coming. You learn that Jon gets irritable when he pushes the shopping cart, and then he runs red lights when he drives the car.
So you move forward, and improve for the future. And conversations flare up, and you feel connected to each other, and as that baby grows up and your relationships develop, in unpredictable ways, you keep crossing new streets, and getting things done, and learning about yourself and the people you make space with, and stay with, and know.
