Friedman\u2019s A Failure of Nerve is just the text needed for further invigorating \u2013 rather than truncating \u2013 conversation encouraging a robust engagement between a universally interconnected moral coding (however, nuanced) and civic participation.\u00a0Of course, reading anything related to \u201cuniversal\u201d puts a lot of peoples’ radar on high alert with\u00a0warning sirens flashing and resounding in the background of their minds and hearts.\u00a0Based on much historical precedent, this is as it should be.\u00a0However, as with many things, too often the pendulum swings too far and we have been tending to miss valuable insights over concern that such suggested connectivity might just diminish the viability of variation.\u00a0Of course, there is that infuriating conundrum (he wrote wryly) known as \u201chumanity\u201d as \u201cbeing human\u201d that tends to throw a wrench into the process of too radical a separation.\u00a0In Friedman\u2019s text on leadership, I read him as walking this line well.\u00a0 He argues for necessary self-differentiation in order to best establish and maintain healthy social functionality.<\/p>\n
Friedman passed on in 1997 and this text comes to us by way of a 2007 publishing that took an unfinished manuscript and offered us words from a long-standing public\/professional figure who had participated in management, psychology\/counseling, religion (a rabbi), and more.\u00a0Friedman\u2019s work was significantly conducted in and around Washington, D.C. providing him with a wide variety of cultural examples from around the globe.\u00a0However, Friedman argues that while there of course are cultural variations, these variations at times tend to mask a much deeper, interconnected emotional core of human interactivity.<\/p>\n
One of the aspects that Friedman focuses on is our inordinate use of quantitative data that he suggests keeps us from focusing on the more salient aspects of the emotive undercurrents that drive the creation of such data that is being mined.\u00a0 Essentially, he writes that we miss the forest for the trees.\u00a0Friedman is much more interested in producing sustainable, healthy change than he is in recording data that becomes obsolete with the shifting of a few parameters \u2013 which can then be reevaluated\/remeasured ad infinitum.<\/p>\n
Another aspect that Friedman considers is imaginatively gridlocked systems.[1]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0 To look at this, Friedman considers Europe at the \u00a0end of the 15th<\/sup> century (essentially the beginning of the 1500\u2019s) and notes that it was not primarily a cognitive shift in orientation that brought about newfound cultural vitality, but the emotional release of imagination that occurred through Europeans discovering (for themselves for the first time) the \u201cNew World.\u201d\u00a0Friedman notes that for stultification to become reinvigorated, one of the key components will be the need to move an organization to valuing adventure over certainty and to see that in the midst of such a grandiose journey mistakes become largely unimportant in comparison with the possibility of serendipitous new understanding.\u00a0I greatly appreciate this quote and this alone is something for all leaders and organizations to consider for some time to come,<\/p>\n The great lesson here for all imaginatively gridlocked systems is that the acceptance and even cherishing of uncertainty is critical to keeping the human mind from voyaging into the delusion of omniscience. The willingness to encounter serendipity is the best antidote we have for the arrogance of thinking we know. Exposing oneself to chance is often the only way to provide the kind of mind-jarring experience of novelty that can make us realize that what we thought was reality was only a mirror of our minds. Related here is the necessity of preserving ambiguity in artistic expression since, if the viewer\u2019s imagination is to flower, it is important not to solve the problem in advance.[2]<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n In reading Friedman\u2019s A Failure of Nerve<\/i> (I first encountered Friedman years ago when reading his Friedman\u2019s Fables<\/i>) I simply resonated again and again with his descriptions and explanations. Over the years both in my own life and in hearing about dynamics occurring in the lives of friends and colleagues \u2013 whether it was working on boards, as part of churches, in various leadership roles in organizations, etc. \u2013 Friedman\u2019s concern about \u201cherding,\u201d what he notes to be a regressive evolutionary technique that keeps people and organizations from thriving because those with the most anxious personalities, the least mature orientations coerce others to have to spend much of their time placating their concerns rather than facilitating the system into further thriving.\u00a0 This is where Friedman notes that what normally might be community actually becomes cult-like.\u00a0Instead of healthy togetherness, Friedman relays that this becomes more like \u201cstuck-togetherness.\u201d[3]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0For there to be healthy community there must also be healthy individuation. \u00a0Thus Friedman notes that for organizations of any kind (corporations, synagogues, families, etc.) that people must be able to separate so they do not have to \u201cseparate\u201d (as in the sense of divorce, disbanding, etc.).[4]<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m all for community, but not for the claustrophobizing effects that make community disturbingly cultic (that is, not in the academically anthropological sense, but in the “it was just Halloween” sense).\u00a0This is a reason, for example, that I like Quaker fellowship.\u00a0As an example, during every meeting\/service there is a time of silence (there are differences as to how this looks in \u2018programmed\u2019 and \u2018unprogrammed\u2019 meetings, but those are characteristics which don\u2019t change the point here) during which it is understood to be incumbent upon a person to stand and speak if they believe they are being led to do so by the Spirit with a word for the entire congregation.\u00a0Then it is also expected that such a person who has spoken release themselves emotionally from the statement and let the rest of the people gathered at the meeting decide whether it was a helpful\/healthy statement for the gathering or not.\u00a0For me, this offers one reasonable\u00a0representation of Friedman\u2019s emphasis on both the importance of self-individuation and of community as\u00a0shown to healthily manifest in an organizational setting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Normal false EN-US <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \/* Style Definitions *\/ <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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