Leading the Change Within
Leading change in schools or in any other context begins with ourselves, which is generally the most difficult place to begin. Typically when we think about change, we think about a particular problem or situation that needs to be resolved. There’s a cartoon I’ve come across that shows a leader asking a group of people, “Who wants change?” and everyone raises their hand. In the second panel, the leader asks, “Who wants to change?” and there’s no response.
Otto Scharmer talks about this tendency as the main reason the change efforts struggle to take root in Chapter 2 of his book about Theory U. He writes of a conversation he had with Bill O’Brien, the former CEO of Hanover Insurance. After years of conducting organizational learning projects and facilitating corporate change, O’Brien’s greatest insight was: “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”
Practicing deeper more expansive ways of seeing
How do we begin to address our interior conditions? Addressing the interior space can seem so far removed from the problem at hand. Particularly in schools where we are juggling content, life stories, grading, meetings, and relationships, it can be challenging to cultivate an environment for looking at our work and our interior condition. So often, the problem at hand seems to demand an immediate solution, and not one that can wait for the sort of reflectivity needed for interior evolution.
However, if we are not willing to approach situations from a space of reflection, then we will never get at the roots of the problem. It is our job as educators to cultivate spaces for good things to grow, and this means digging deeper. Learning to see beyond the surface of things to the root is a skill that we can strengthen over time with practice and attention.
In Theory U, the left side of the U is all about moving into deeper and more expansive understandings of reality from seeing, to sensing, to presencing. Seeing is characterized by more of an objective, data-gathering space, and sensing links our understanding of that data to our beliefs, values, and identities from more of a feeling space. Moving further down into the left side of the U, we let go of actions and attitudes dictated by our past, and into a sense of ourselves and our vocation in the world.
The shape of your horn
Sometimes when I talk about this with my graduate students, I can begin to see their eyes glaze over. Talking like this about the effusive, hidden biases that guide our actions and assumptions can feel pretty fuzzy, particularly after a long day of student teaching. So I like to share this cartoon by Turkish cartoonist Selçuk Erdem:
I love this graphic because it quickly exposes something very true about the way that we tend to see the world — with a huge horn in front of our face! We imagine that every thing we observe also has this horn, because it is hard to separate our own perspective from what we perceive.
They laugh when they see the graphic, and then I ask them, “What is your horn?” This is a hard question! How do we begin to expose this, when it feels like the horn is genuinely a part of our reality? We can never really get rid of our horn, but we can begin to define its shape.
My own horn is largely shaped by the religious upbringing of my childhood, and my parents’ decision to homeschool me and my siblings, both of which are related to my identity as a white cisgender woman. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian culture, with rare exposure to socialization outside of this realm, and consequently, little exposure to alternative worldviews. I used to joke that my primary socialization was with books, but there is a lot of truth in this perspective. My religious upbringing also came with dogmatism, and a belief that there was “only one right way” to be and believe, which led me to develop a binary perspective of right and wrong, and harsh internal and external attitudes of criticism.
The Enneagram as a system of seeing yourself more clearly
My understanding of how my religious and cultural upbringing shaped my horn has been greatly supported by my knowledge of the system of the Enneagram. I first became acquainted with this system when I was in college, and have since devoted many hours to exploring its truths. The Enneagram is sometimes compared to other personality typing systems like Myers-Briggs, which has been used by organizations to help members develop an appreciation of their strengths. The main difference with the Enneagram is that it’s a tool not designed to put you in a box, but to help you develop an awareness of your habitual responses. The idea is that when you begin to see these kinds of unconscious habits that we enact in our everyday interactions, just noticing them is enough to begin to let them go.
Ennea means nine and gram means drawing, so literally, the Enneagram is a drawing with nine points. Each of the nine points represents a different kind of inclination for each of the different personalities. The Enneagram has its roots in a variety of spiritual backgrounds including Sufism, Judaism and Christianity.
In Facets of Unity, philosopher and spiritualist A. H. Almaas describes the development of personality through the lens of Winnicott’s concept of “the holding environment.” The idea of the holding environment is that when we were in our earliest stage of human development, we existed in this perfect, all-providing, all-encompassing space. In that environment, everything was perfect and we received whatever we needed as soon as the need arose.
This is the stage of undifferentiated unity, when we are with our primary caregiver, and they are with us, and we are totally safe and cared for. But we cannot stay in this space forever. As we grow and begin to move away from our primary caregiver, we also become acquainted with the pain of separation, and the reality of loss and lack. Even the best caretakers cannot prevent us from experiencing the pain that comes from separation. Typically, in our youth, we experience a significant lack in our holding environment. Something we felt we deeply needed, we just did not receive. What happens as a result of that is personality begins to form to compensate for that lack.
All personalities reflect this overcompensation, and genuinely helped us to get through whatever issues presented in our childhood. Over time, our personality becomes shaped by all kinds of habitual responses and unconscious beliefs. The Enneagram begins to help create language to describe these patterns and recognize if they are serving us in each present moment we encounter.
For me, the Enneagram was the most helpful tool to begin to describe the shape of my own horn. The way I previously understood reality was that there was only one right way to exist in the world. When I learned about Enneagram it was like, Whoa, wait a minute! I began to recognize that there are all these other ways of approaching reality, and all these other ways of being, each of these manifesting different strengths and uniquenesses. This enabled me to let go of the judgment and some of my own righteousness about my actions, which turned out to bring a sense of relief. Letting go of some of my ego fixations enables me to offer my perspectives with more humility and ironically, is more effective way of participating in the unfoldingness of the universe.
The Enneagram is a fairly complicated system even at a glance, and although it’s been the most useful to me personally, there are other similar frameworks that we can utilize more simply to develop deeper awareness of ourselves as we seek to lead the change within.
The dimensions of our realities through the AQAL Map
The second structure that may serve you is the integral theory, a so-called “theory of everything” that first emerged from Ken Wilbur in the 1970s. In fact, this system is far more complicated than the Enneagram, but I want to highlight the basic structure which can be easily depicted by the following 2x2 matrix:
The left side of the matrix represents the interior aspects of reality, the individual experience as well as the communal experience. The right side represents the exterior realities. The “exterior individual” quadrant represents behaviors and objects. The “exterior collective” quadrant refers to structures, systems, and institutions.
Each of these quadrants reflects different dimensions of reality that are happening simultaneously in every single interaction. For example, as I compose this article, I am having my own individual moment sitting on my front porch, reflecting on my life, beliefs, and experiences. I’m interacting with a voice recorder as I focus on the task of organizing my thoughts. In the interior collective space, I imagine that I am connected to educational leaders as a part of my educational community. I’m also enacting all of this through the institution of the University of San Diego, and beyond that, there’s the political system of the United States, and the economic systems that I occupy that have given me access to these communities and this work and these thoughts. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This is just this single moment that I am personally having. And as you read this, you’re occupying a different moment that contains each of these distinct dimensions.
The AQAL matrix can be a helpful way to deepen our awareness of reality, but also, understanding the quadrants can help you realize yourself in a new way. As we go through life, each of us has one quadrant that feels like home. It’s the quadrant where you find the least resistance and feels the most comfortable. As you examined the matrix, you probably immediately felt drawn to one or two.
My favorite quadrant is the “interior individual” or the “I,” which makes a great deal of sense given what I’ve already told you about my upbringing. As a child, I became quite at home in my solitude, so that now, reflecting quietly feels like breathing. So my challenge is to live outside of myself, to connect with others in community, and interact more with the exterior realities that coexist in my interior spaces.
For you, it might be different. If you begin to read social interactions through these quadrants, you can see people engaging with different communication styles through the lens of the quadrant where they feel most at home. Those differences can either be threatening or they can be generative, but recognizing their existence helps you begin to understand people differently, and perhaps, more helpfully.
This is just the tip of the iceberg
Freud likened our conscious and unconscious minds to a tip of the iceberg, and suggested that much of our experience lies below the surface of the water. In addressing the interior conditions of our lives and preparing ourselves to lead change, there are numerous ways of peering down into the darkness and exposing what we often overlook. Scholars Noah Borrero and Christine Yeh from the University of San Francisco have developed a pedagogical strategy they call “ecological asset mapping” to help preservice teachers describe the social and cultural spaces they occupy through a strengths-based lens. Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilman have developed a conflicts styles diagnostic (which has been adapted for use with staff or students) to unsurface our typical ways of managing ourselves in conflict situations. We can also practice journaling, meditation, and reflective conversation with trusted peers to help us see ourselves in new ways.
For educators, each day of teaching can help us to begin to see ourselves through new lenses, as we encounter new individuals in our classroom every year. Educator and writer Parker Palmer describes it this way, “The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge — and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.”
Gradually cultivating space for more awareness is a way to confront our unconscious biases and deepen our experience of presence in the world. It doesn’t have to be a heavy hand, or be a change accompanied with shame or a sense of inadequacy. Awareness itself begins the transformation process. Once we create this space for ourselves, we can begin to invite others into this space as well.
Further Explorations:
“Using Ecological Asset Mapping to Investigate Pre-Service Teachers’ Cultural Assets” by Noah Borrero & Christine Yeh
“The Heart of a Teacher” by Parker Palmer
Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types by Don Riso and Russ Hudson
Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges by C. Otto Scharmer
Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jarkowski, & Betty Sue Flowers
A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science & Spirituality by Ken Wilbur
