Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Field two
: Instability in the field - break-down in the container. Participants
seek dominance, battle with each other, oppose or withdraw, get angry. The
leader's task is to fashion new ways of acting that allow people to think, reflect
and be together differently.
•
Field three
: Enquiry in the field and the flowering of reflective dialogue. People
express their own thoughts, admit not knowing and exhibit a spirit of curiosity.
Meaning unfolds through conversation, exploration and the free flow of ideas.
From fragmentation emerge new creative spaces and possibilities.
•
Field four
: Creativity in the field - generative dialogue. A rare space where par-
ticipants are aware of the significance of the whole, where new rules for interaction
are fashioned and where people experience synchronicities, connections, and
individual and collective 'flow'.
Having experienced the fourth field, problems may arise when participants leave
the dialogic space and return to their 'real' worlds. The key to this re-entry is for
people to learn to let the meaning of this familiar world change, observing critically,
evaluatively and sensitively the frames and spaces in which others operate most of
the time. As Isaacs notes, 'leadership emerges when an individual or a group
understands the shape of the world, and so is not deceived or overly intoxicated by
any particular arrangement of its features' (1999: 287). The task of the leader is to
ensure that people come together so that talk does not drive people apart, enabling
them to learn to listen to others and to suspend preconceptions and assumptions so
as to encourage flexibility and creativity in thought and expression. Thus, people
are able to genuinely enter into dialogue when they demonstrate qualities of:
•
listening
, not only to others, but to ourselves, dropping our assumptions, resistance
and reactions;
•
respecting
different viewpoints;
•
suspending
our opinions, stepping back, changing direction and seeing with new
eyes; and
•
voicing
: speaking genuinely, discovering our own authority and relinquishing
any need to dominate.
Different leadership skills are required within each field. For example, in field one,
the leader or convener needs to relate to each person differently in order to draw
them out, develop a predisposition to deep listening and to suspend judgement; in
field two, the leader needs to help people learn by facilitating conversation between
different perspectives; in field three the leader must model reflective enquiry and
listen out for emerging themes; and in field four the leader must become the servant
to the group, encouraging deep reflection and seeking paths and possibilities for
future action and resolution. In field four the leadership function may change, but
the essence is for all to see the whole as primary - the sum is greater than its indi-
vidual parts. Dialogue facilitates participation and the development of richer and
potentially wiser interpretations of the world and ways to change it. Indeed, through
dialogue and participation new possibilities are not only created and made real, but
those who have facilitated their emergence may sense among group members a
growing commitment and ownership of the process. Knowledge management theorists
Ikujiro Nonaka and Ryoko Toyama call the phenomenological time and space where
