On discerning between conditioned response and real choice, and why we cannot do it alone.

I'm not much of a writer, but I've been trying to warm up my writing muscles in order to share more with the world. And I have a story I want to share with you. About how ignoring the signals from my body left me, yet again, in a pickle. And how this served as a humble yet vital reminder of how and why trauma-informed work is really and truly about being in consistent practice, over time, with people practicing alongside you.

Recently, I was in the early-ish stages of a new collaboration. Our first project had been great: energising, tonnes of learning and the sense of potential in the air. Then, subtly and quite quietly at first, things started to change for me. I would leave meetings drained, confused, dissatisfied. I struggled to connect with my inner drive and agency. Yet, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

I did what is in my practice to do; I surfaced the tension, owning it as my experience. My collaborators, well versed in holding complexity and care, met this with curiosity. We made some attempts to shift things. But nothing quite hit the mark. The sense that something was ‘off’ wouldn’t budge.

I depend a lot on honest, direct communication as a way of navigating relationships. And I typically understand myself and my processes pretty well (training in Gestalt Psychotherapy contributes a lot to building self-awareness).

So when I couldn’t identify, let alone articulate clearly, what was going on for me or what my underlying needs were, I got stuck. And in that stuckness, old patterns crept back in.

Old stories of ‘I should be able to figure this out’ and ‘I can’t keep raising a problem without also offering a solution’ took hold. So I just kept going, pushing down the sensations that I couldn’t explain or find a solution to. And that’s where the disconnection started.

We hear and talk a lot about flight, fight, and freeze – perhaps we even know how to spot them, in ourselves or in others. But there is something subtler in the conditioned tendencies of fawn or fix, which can make them harder to catch. Shaped by systems that reward compliance, overstretch and hyperindependence, they can appear like productivity or responsibility. [for more on appeasement as a protection response to hierarchies, listen to this podcast with Nkem Ndefo].

This isn’t to shun productivity or responsibility outright (on the contrary, these can be incredibly valuable qualities). It is rather to invite myself, and perhaps you out there, to pay attention to the difference between stepping into responsibility from a place of connection with self (and thus in choice) and from a place of disconnection (and thus with some element of force, often self-imposed). Because one fuels us forward, the other grinds us down, eventually to a halt.

I’m not saying that those I was in collaboration with were enacting force or in any way doing something ‘wrong’. Just that something in me couldn’t shake my own patterning enough to return to choice. Rather than listening to my body, and taking smaller steps back earlier, I just kept going. Because I couldn’t put a clear label on it, rather than honouring the signals I discredited them. And by the time I started really honouring the signals, the patterns of powerlessness and overstretch were so well-grooved that the only path that remained accessible to me without losing myself was to take space from the collaboration itself.

What helped me step out of this loop was close collaboration with people who know me well, who I’ve been in trauma-informed practice with for many years. People who know me when I am fully present and connected to myself and to life, and when I’m not. People who know my pitfalls and tender edges, and know how to hold me when I need support. One of those people is Anna Kopacz, who through our shared practice field and long-standing relationship, was able to help me give legitimacy to my body’s signals even when I could not.

This is what trauma-informed practice means to me. It’s not about credentials or a somatic grounding practice at the start of a meeting (although that has its place!).

It’s a practice field. A continual coming back to practice, in relation, in community. So that we keep nurturing our capacity to show up, to meet the moment, with as much integrity and presence as we can muster. And to lean on each other to do so.

That practice field is the ground that Anna and I host Trauma-informed Collaboration: Foundations from, as practitioners longing to have more people in that field with us. If you are grappling with similar questions, and want to build your capacity for discernment and for holding complexity and history with care, in yourself and with others, consider joining us.

Greaterthan’s focus is organising structures & cultures that contribute to healthy systems for all. This work is quite tricky to describe in a few words; it is highly emergent, contextual and requires us to navigate many topics and territories. The sweet spot of our work is at the intersection of personal and organisational change (that together support system change).

We have long dreamed of encapsulating our knowledge and perspectives into one “thing” — a simple yet comprehensive model of our grounded theory — that could support:

• our work guiding client organisations along their transformation journeys
• contextualising and developing our practices and offerings (from Academy courses to content creation)
• others seeking some structure in the emergent lands of self-organising systems (newcomers and long-term journeyers alike).

Previous attempts to create such a model proved to be challenging, be that from the overwhelm of trying to crystallise what felt like an ever-moving target, or from the difficulty of securing enough focus time within our busy, online work days. The artefacts we built passed hands several times over the course of a couple of years; each generation adding to a pile of un-finished Google docs, Mural boards and some proto-plates.

Gathering for an in-person squeeze

In November 2022 four of us gathered in a house just outside Paris to work intensively for three days to produce what we now call “the Compass”, from start to finish. We called this crunch gathering a Lenin Squeeze (long story), where we co-live and block out other work. The team was formed by Tomomi Sasaki (Paris), Elena Denaro (London), David Weingartner (Munich) and Manel Heredero (Barcelona). We were warmly hosted and nourishingly fed by Louis-Jean Teitelbaum, to whom we are deeply grateful.

The WhereDoWhyBe Compass

We set sails for making the foundation to our work explicit, for naming the building blocks of healthy organising and system change. Our destination was the guide to Greaterthan’s practice.

We had high expectations for this guide. We were seeking something that could:

• Be comprehensive
• Provide a solid ground for new work and new colleagues
• Maintain alignment as we grow
• Allow for expansion as we learn and develop our practice
• Serve us as an illustration of the work we do

Using the navigational metaphor of a compass, the model points at the four questions every organisation needs coherent answers to, to sustain itself:

• Why are we here together?
• Where are we going?
• Do: How do we coordinate people, resources and information?
• Be: How do we relate and care for each other?

While all organisations will have some answer to these questions, our aim is not just sustainable organising, but sustainable organising for healthy systems. To hold this intention front-and-centre, you’ll find a “scroll” describing the north star the compass is oriented towards.

Within the compass we capture six key areas within healthy organising:

• Purpose & Strategy
• Community & Development
• Decision Making & Governance
• Roles & Workflows
• Knowledge & Information Flows
• Money & Value Flows

Each individual terrain is different. With this model at our service we have what we need to navigate the terrains and waters, to orient ourselves together with our partners in design, to turn a blank canvas into a map. The broader narrative device that the Compass sits within is an Atlas — a collection of maps — and we’ve produced prototypes of different directions that the map-making could take.

We also started a Guide, which is an internal Notion knowledge base for the time being. It introduces each of the six areas, and provides a list of key practices which we actively cultivate within ourselves and practise with our clients and partners.

We are really happy with the work done, and energised by the keen interest, ideas and feedback that our colleagues offered during a mid-way validation session. (Grateful that so many people joined us on short notice, on a Friday night!)

This phase concludes with a clear invitation to fellow Greaterthan members to inquire, Compass in hand, so that we may continue with our discovery journey.

Want to come along for the journey?

This is what we have to offer to you after our Squeeze. We will see in the coming weeks and months how this model holds against practice as we use it.

Are you interested in joining the conversation? Would you like to position yourself on the map of healthy organising? Get in touch!

Tomomi, Elena, David and Manel for the Greaterthan crew. Our host Louis-Jean, with beard and glasses.

Where Do Why Be? was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s rather fitting that the first topic of Greaterthan’s new Lead Together course is all about adult-to-adult relationships — cause here I am, “adulting” up and trying to take my own advice.

I have a pretty big block around writing. And like most fears, it gets worse the longer I don’t engage with the thing that scares me. I have a pretty consistent limiting belief that if I can’t tackle something properly, then it’s best to just wait and address it later, when I have more time, more energy, more resources. But the brutal truth is those are just stories that keep me far away from the thing that scares me. These are strategies that while protecting me aren’t always serving me.

When thinking through this from the lens of parent-adult-child states, I realise the ways in which I behave as a pretty critical parent to myself (and also an avoidant child! who said you can’t be in multiple states at once?!) whilst being a caring parent (taking too much responsibility) towards others.

I wasn’t able to attend much of the first week of the course — I had said this upfront to Susan and Lucia, but I was still grappling with my guilt over this: feeling like I had not shown up the way I wanted for my fellow participants. And yet as I reflected on the readings, I realised that maybe the very lesson I needed to learn in adult-to-adult relating was to accept my limitations, accepted what I was and wasn’t able to give, without overly holding myself responsible.

So there we go — just a few little crumbs of some rushed reflections, but hey, we all got to start somewhere! Let’s see where next week takes us.

Adult-to-Adult: starting small was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I really struggle with decisions. I always have. So when I saw that this week’s individual task was to interrogate our own decision making practices, I was both excited for what could be a very illuminating process of self-examination, but also a little nervous to confront a side of myself that I am a little (read a lot) embarrassed about. It’s no surprise then that I threw myself into the group task while somewhat neglecting this personal one.

In fact, I realise as I write this, that when I say I struggle with decisions, what I really mean is that I struggle with individual decisions. Being involved in collective decision-making, be that consent-based or contributing to advice processes or just more organically as a group: those I’m quite happy to get involved in. I love feeding off of others’ contributions or helping to facilitate a process of mediating different opinions to consolidate and find a common solution with others. What I really don’t like, is making dictatorial or authoritarian decisions (one of the 9 forms we learnt about this week) about myself. This is particularly difficult if that decision has knock-on effects on others (even something as small as expressing what kind of food I feel like eating when deciding what restaurant to go to with friends, is a real challenge for me).

In short, I get a lot of decision anxiety: settling on one thing always feels like I am precluding something else, I can always see things from another point of view, and I struggle to find that inner voice that guides you and tells you: you want x instead of y.

Mapping decisions

So with that slight anxiety and the deadline looming, I sat down and went through it step-by-step, putting my trust in the process.

• Think of an upcoming decision and three past decisions
• Plot them along the risk/duration quadrants
• Name how each decision was made (using the 9 types we discussed in class)
• Reflect on how to approach your upcoming decisions.

Past decisions:

The big glaring one is my recent decision to quit my job and go freelance. VERY HIGH RISK, VERY LONG DURATION.

I wanted to get a feel for the other quadrants though so I also added the decision to cook eggs for breakfast (low risk, low duration) and my recent uptake of daily journaling (low risk, long duration). Both of these were dictatorial/autocratic in nature: one decision-maker deciding alone. As they only really affected me, and were not high risk, no real need for them to be any other way.

Reflect as you go

It is in reflecting about my big decision about quitting my job and going freelance that I see the incredible power of this framing (risk/duration and decision-making types). The first thing to note is that this decision had been “brewing” in me for quite some time (it occurs to me that this is somewhat like the one person equivalent of the “ripening” stage of Generative Decision-Making ).

When I first started having doubts about my job, I did what I often do: a sort of ad-hoc, unstructured advice process. I talk to a lot of people and try to get their input. The advice process is a super valuable tool, in the right circumstance, and if undertaken from the right place. Sometimes when you are grappling with a personal decision, and you struggle (as I do) with connecting to your inner voice to hear what you really want, then most of what it does is add a lot of noise, drowning out that voice even further. I felt a lot of obligation to follow the advice certain people gave, or the approach I thought they wanted me to take. I felt torn and lost all at the same time.

This was both a super risky decision, I had real stakes in the game both in terms of financial consequences but also in terms of the fact I had already de-railed my life once, was I really going to be ok and able to do it again? And it was also super long duration: ok maybe not the going freelance element of it, but it would be pretty hard to un-quit my job once I had done it, so the effects of the decision would be long-lasting. It’s clear that both of those things made it a very weighty and difficult decision, but it wasn’t just that….

When I first started to reflect with the new tools I acquired this week, I thought: I started this decision with an advice approach, but it wasn’t until I shifted into autocratic mode that I was able to actually make a decision. And in some ways that is true: I went back and forth and back and forth and asked a million people for input but it wasn’t until I took charge and discarded a lot of that input and trusted my self and my intuition, that I was able to make the jump.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that that isn’t quite what an autocratic decision is. The end result of an autocratic and an advice-based process is the same: a decision is made by one person. I made the decision to leave my job alone and for myself alone. But I still had a lot of input. The reason why I had struggled so much with this decision wasn’t the fact that I was asking for and receiving advice, it’s that I wasn’t able to filter through that advice… and the reason I wasn’t able to do that is because I had forgotten to include myself in that advice process, as the biggest stakeholder of all.

Now that I look at it from that perspective, I can pinpoint the exact moment I realised that had changed, and I had started listening to myself at least just as much as everyone else. I was talking to my therapist about wanting to take the plunge and hand in my notice, but really struggling with what my parents might think. I was telling her that I felt I needed to have a conversation with my father about this and thinking through how I could frame it to him so he would understand etc… and at one point she almost interrupts me (which she rarely does) and asks if there is anything my father could say that would change my mind. And I pause and think and it just hits me; no. And I notice a calmness and a rootedness I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Our check-out question for the Monday session was all about how a decision feels in our bodies. What a beautiful question; and one that a year or two ago I would not have understood. But I realise as I write this that the way in which I know if a personal decision is right, or even if I feel ok with a collective decision, is how it sits in my body. When I don’t have a sense of my own intuition on it, it feels tight in my chest, like a nervous energy rattling me up. But when I feel secure and strong in my decision, even in a great deal of uncertainty, its like a warm glow radiating down from my chest, grounding me.

I wonder what the collective equivalent of that would be?

Upcoming decision

So how does all this inform how I approach my upcoming decision? I need to decide if I will miss one of our PSM Monday calls in order to attend an event that may help in securing a future consulting opportunity (I’ve labelled this Pitch v PSM in my diagram).

One of the key things I learnt in our group exercise this week, is that context is everything. Much like how in research, the research question determines (or even dictates) the appropriate method; with decision making the nature of the decision, determines the appropriate protocol.

Risk and duration are two key parameters to consider: In my Pitch v PSM, my personal risk is quite high on both sides. On the one hand, I am committed to PSM, it’s only 5 weeks and missing 2 hours of that is a big chunk of time to lose. On the other hand, securing up future income opportunities is really important for me right now. Duration is pretty low (so not a big factor to consider).

But to me there are also two other key parameters:

1. who will need to action the decision
2. who is impacted by the decision

Sometimes the two are one and the same, but not always. In this scenario, I will be doing the action, and I will also be impacted, but my cohort and my facilitators (while not actioning anything) may be impacted by me not being present for a session.

This combo of factors to me calls for a (quick) advice process, to assess how the cohort feels if I would miss a session, and get a sense from them and the facilitators of how much they think they and I would suffer from this. All of this is pretty much in line with what I would instinctively do.

The one very conscious difference I will be making, as a result of this week’s learning and reflection is to block out time to check-in with myself and make sure my inner voice isn’t drowned out in the process of seeking advice and input from others.

PSM Reflections Part 2: Decision-making was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am writing my reflections at my usual hour: the very last minute. Years of promising myself I will never do that again haven’t quite managed to shift this pattern. So instead, I will simply apologise for the stream of consciousness mode in which this will be written, and also hope that by virtue of that fact, it may be a more genuine and useful expression of “thinking out-loud”.

I had been looking forward to the start of Practical Self Management course, lead by Susan Basterfield since early summer. After years of being rather immersed in researching collaborative, self-managed networks (OuiShare primarily), I had been completely out of the loop for the last 2 years (the story of the burnout that led to me staying away will have to be for another day…). After a few months of trying to figure out the best way back in, I realised there’s only one way: head-first. As I transition out of full-time employment, into the work that matters to me and start getting involved in some projects, I couldn’t think of a better way to get up to speed than through PSM.

This first week’s focus was on roles, expectations, agreements and responsibility. After an incredibly stimulating kick-off online workshop, we had two tasks to complete. One solitary: map out our role expectation canvas. And one all-together: create our team agreement. Here are some of the learnings for me this week:

One person; many roles

One of my favourite bits of using the lens of roles over jobs is that each person can hold many roles, and that these are as dynamic as a person is. To me this is a key way in which people are able to bring their “whole selves” to work. So when I sat down to populate my own role canvas it felt really intuitive to me to realise there are two roles I would want to step into: the first is the most obvious, that of the the learner, the curious, intrepid Explorer venturing out to discover new things and experiment, the one that will soak up all the knowledge and learn from the experiences of others and ask all the questions. This role was easy to write; we are on a course and all fill that role, both for ourselves and within and for the group.

The second, what I’ve called the Mirror, is all about reflection. When I was in this “space” a few years ago I remember all the rhetoric of transformation, personal growth and so on. And I ‘got it’ its importance on an intellectual level…but I’m not sure I would have got it got it, without the challenging past few years where that side of things became front and centre for me, and now colours everything I do. I knew that self-managed working environments can act as an incredibly powerful catalysts (if one is open to it) for greater self-awareness and growth. These are spaces where you are almost inevitably confronted with yourself, your limits, strengths, weaknesses, triggers, unhealthy coping mechanisms… And I knew going in that this was one of the things I wanted to get out of the course, and that I would go in with a very clear intention of being curious towards myself and my reactions. That is the mirror to the self. This is important work for my own development, but I also think it can be incredibly valuable to see others doing it, as this can help lift a mirror to yourself; to, in a way, see yourself in someone else’s self-reflection.

But, for me, this mirror has two side: one side points in, the other is an offering outward. To be a mirror is to offer reflection, not in the sense of assessment or judgement or critique, but of pure observation and thoughtful reflection. It is to tell someone what you see, so that maybe they can see themselves in that light. So often we don’t have the time or the perspective to be able to look at ourselves — often judging ourselves far more harshly than we do others, or fully unaware of how we are coming across leading to misinterpretation and frustration. The times that others have held mirrors up for me, to help me see myself as they did, were incredibly powerful, and in such a hands-on learning environment I believe that is a value I would like to try to bring. And very much hope to receive.

The expectation divide

To my mind, in a group like this, there are 4 roles (reminder, roles, not people): the explorer (all us peers learning together), the leaders (the same people, but emerging in moments of leadership in certain moments on certain tasks), the mirrors (a role open to every person, facilitators included) and the guides (these are our hosts, guest speakers and facilitators). The final part of the role expectation canvas is to map the expectation that each role hold of you and you hold of them. It seems simple and clear enough…so much so that I wasn’t expecting the ‘aha’ moment I experienced.

I wrote the expectations that other explorers would have of me, and at first wrote this:

To contribute. To be inquisitive. To bring my own experiences as learnings. To listen, actively. To hold space and to be accepting of their needs and circumstances. To do what I say I will do.

All flowed fairly easily: great, I thought, onto the next! And then I started to write the expectations I had of others:

To contribute, be inquisitive, to offer their own experiences as learnings. To push me in my thinking and in my practice, to challenge me and my assumptions with kindness and without judgement, but also without fear…

I re-read the two and all of a sudden it hit me: We are peers, why would my expectations of them be any different than their expectations of me? I realised I was expecting them to push me more than I was expecting them to ask me to do the same. So I realised I would have to go back and find something that would work both ways; written both in the first person and the third, something that I was just as comfortable to give as I was to ask. This is what I landed on:

To contribute, be inquisitive, to offer our own experiences as learnings. To listen, actively. To hold space. To push each other in our thinking and in our practice, to challenge each other and our assumptions with kindness and without judgement, but also without fear. To hold each other to account. To do what we say we will. To be accepting if someone cannot give as much as they would like. To seek workable solutions, together.

Responsibility is taken, not given.

Integral to the discussion of roles, expectations and team agreements is the issue of accountability and responsibility.

In our call, Susan made a really important distinction that has sat with me as I review my own accountability over this week (I am paraphrasing but hope I capture the idea):

Responsibility is not something you give, it is something you take.*

So as I sit in my mirror role and look at myself and my own behaviours this week I realise one of the key challenges was to hold myself to account. I admit, I was caught a little unprepared: I was not quite aware of the work that would be needed, I had not made enough time and it resulted in me not being able to focus on the tasks with the care and attention I would have wanted.

I know this will be a constant struggle for me, mostly because I am still very much in a full-time job, as well as working freelance along-side. But key learning number one from this week is: plan ahead, schedule time in my calendar for deep, focussed work, prioritise this (which means giving up some other things — bye, bye lindy hop) and be honest with myself and my fellow PSMers when I start to feel overwhelmed. This is and will be a difficult one for me, as I have a tendency to want to do everything and people-please. But here is hoping that by being aware of it going in, by being honest with myself and my group, I will at least catch the pattern as I start to fall into it and course-correct.

I am grateful, going into week two, to know that I am going into it with a group of inspiring, passionate and committed people — and it makes me realise the power of the group in holding you accountable not by telling you off, but by inspiring you to want to step up.

Reflections on practical self-management: week one. was originally published in Greaterthan on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.