{"id":333,"date":"2010-12-30T13:33:23","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T21:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/storyresolution.org\/?p=333"},"modified":"2011-01-10T14:32:23","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T22:32:23","slug":"rightest-person-in-the-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/rightest-person-in-the-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Rightest Person in the Room?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Seven of us are gathering around the table. Each of us is bringing considerable skills, each of us is ill prepared for our mutual task, and together our weaknesses are amplified. Crippled by our educational training, from marinating in competitive institutions, years subsumed in a world forged from zero-sum narratives, we sense the burden of our opportunity. It\u2019s another opportunity for co-creation. It\u2019s an opportunity to form community around a shared story, to choose existence <\/em>over essence<\/em><\/span>.<\/span> We\u2019ve learned to feign cooperation, to apply our collegial script as an anodyne for our shame, shame felt when passing life serving opportunities, \u201cshame on our need for validation\u201d, shame on our need for the credit we\u2019ve been taught is the currency of survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our vulnerability<\/em>, our capacity to expose and embrace our ignorance, is the currency required for our cooperation. Our ignorance, a space we\u2019ve been taught to hide, is our only space for discovery. It\u2019s an infinite space, and we feel the fearsome risks of our exposure to it. Our opportunity is our Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma. We enter this commons while asking; will we strive for mutual appreciation, to generate a shared-story resolution, or will we contend for individual credit by coercing others into orbit around our<\/em> story, a story held as our<\/em> possession? Will we co-create or seize what we can? Let the meeting begin.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Have you witnessed such meetings? Have you been a participant? I have, and I have been.<\/p>\n

I recall this particular meeting at a national laboratory with seven scientists. Some close enough to call friends. We met again to confront the arousing dilemma of the unknown. I waited in desire, \u201ccould this meeting be different\u201d, and I wondered: \u201cwhat makes this so hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our institutional narratives trained each of us to be the rightest<\/em>-person-in-the-room. They taught us that \u201cgetting help, or cooperating, is cheating\u201d, that we \u201cshould do our own work\u201d, that \u201cthe merit-of-the-individual is our only path to just rewards\u201d.<\/p>\n

Yet there we were; desiring the safety to commune, to co-create. We were trapped between our opportunity for cooperation and the threat of lost credit, in an institution constructed on a mythology of heroes and on an economy of individual credit. We feel the seduction to escape to our competitive arena.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m saddened to recognize myself in the meeting rooms of my memory. Meetings where I chose existence over essence, chose competition over cooperation, when faced with exposing my ignorance, and when faced with the fear of hearing my idea<\/em> first spoken by another. Unfortunately, since most of our institutions, and much of our culture, are built on zero-sum narratives of credit and competition, each opportunity for essence still requires significant courage. Unmasking this familiar narrative frees me and invites me to serve life, to listen, to reflect, and to contribute.<\/p>\n

Behind each group problem is a meta-problem, an opportunity and a necessity to create community to gain resolution<\/em>. Empathy is a requisite for community, and empathy begins with our accurately hearing the stories carried by others. Community creation is story co-creation, creation of a shared story where each story-holder sees that their needs are met within the shared story. The trust necessary for story-holder participation is initially derived from the community built during shared-story creation.<\/p>\n

Listening is a fearsome task, and we sense the real risks of exposing our ignorance. It\u2019s difficult to listen before we\u2019ve been heard, it\u2019s painful when we feel unheard, and it\u2019s hard for us to hear when the message is unexpected. Someone needs to listen first, and someone needs to risk revealing their ignorance first. Are we willing?<\/p>\n

Our seven-person meeting at the national laboratory was memorable. We struggled, we listened, and we co-created our shared future story. We found resolution to our stated problem through attending to our need to form community around the problem. Our resolution met the primary needs of each story-holder, inspiring each to work toward our mutual benefit. We found resolution free from the costs demanded of the ambient cultural story, the narrative requiring others to begrudgingly crown someone the-rightest-person-in-the-room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven of us are gathering around the table. Each of us is bringing considerable skills, each of us is ill prepared for our mutual task, and together our weaknesses are amplified. Crippled by our educational training, from marinating in competitive … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-stoired-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyresolution.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}