The Da Vinci Connection -- OS & the Feminine - the dance of leader and follower (long)

Zelle Nelson zelle at knowplacelikehome.com
Thu May 25 19:38:43 PDT 2006


The dance my wife Maureen and I have been talking about in our work  
and in our lives (the same thing for us) for years now is the Dance  
of Leader and Follower. And the Dance of Leader and Follower is Open  
Space:

Look at what it means to be a leader today. And we mean leadership in  
the sense that every one of us is called to be a leader and a  
follower at various times in our day. When you look at leadership  
over centuries, during the 2000 years before Christ, leadership was  
characterized by physical domination. "If I conquer you, you follow  
me." Then we moved into the last 2000 years up till today, which has  
been largely leadership through intellectual domination. "I have the  
information and I'll let you know when it's time for you to know."  
It’s the foundation upon which our corporations, religious  
institutions and governments have been based. The hierarchical  
business models all stem from this thought process.

But, like it or not, we’re moving into a new model of leadership that  
is calling for new foundations to support it. It's one based on what  
we call a Wisdom Web. We’re currently living in an age of information  
overload. If I want to continue to be a hierarchical leader, I’m  
fooling myself to believe I can contain and control all the  
information and decision-making that is required to run a business or  
family today. I need to know when to lead and when to step back and  
encourage others to lead.

Here’s an example. Imagine a time when most of us were in the third  
or fourth grade. Our teacher asks us to write a paper on Martin  
Luther King and we have three weeks to do it. So the first two and a  
half weeks we spend time at the library with our friends looking  
through the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, the card file  
and the encyclopedia. The last few days we write the paper. When we  
come back to class, chances are the teacher still had more  
information on Martin Luther King than we did. And the old style  
hierarchical model says that the teacher, at the head of the class,  
is the most knowledgeable in the room. She'll tell us when it's time  
for us to know.

Now switch your mind to a classroom of fourth graders today having  
the same assignment. They go home the first afternoon and log onto  
the internet. In five minutes they have 537,000 entries on Martin  
Luther King and have to spend the next three weeks sifting through  
information, rather than the gathering of information we had to do. A  
very different skill and one we weren't really taught to think about.  
When they come back to class, chances are at least one of those kids,  
if not more, will have a piece of info on King that the teacher  
doesn't have. In fact someone might have gotten the email address of  
the great grandson of King, emailed him, and found out something no  
one else has ever known. If the teacher goes with the old style model  
of hierarchy, she will shut that student down for knowing more than  
she does. When you operate under the principle that knowledge is  
power, anything that threatens that power is unacceptable. Now it's  
not that the teacher had bad intentions, it's just that the societal  
model said she was to be in control to be considered a successful  
teacher, and control was maintained through gate-keeping knowledge.  
Today's teacher, operating on that old principle, will disengage a  
student faster than you can imagine. We need to begin to let all  
knowledge into the room, any room. And that means stepping back and  
letting others take the lead, or stepping up to lead if we normally  
follow.

We call this transition our world is in, The Dance of Leader and  
Follower. If a man asks Maureen to dance, current rules say that he  
leads and she follows. So that even though they've never met, they  
can pretty much figure it out. Now imagine that those rules were  
thrown out. This gentleman and Maureen get up to dance, but what  
happens next? Well, she needs to stop a second and ask herself the  
question, "What dances do I know? When should I be leading/ 
following?" He needs to ask himself the same thing. Then they need to  
ask each other a series of questions so that they better know the  
other. When the music starts, they now have a good chance that  
they'll do OK. We call the music the culture of the organization or  
the society. Put on any type of music, and as long as we're going  
through those questions, we'll be all right, and it doesn't matter  
what company we work for or who we’re in relationship with.

Because we have so much more knowledge at our fingertips, we can't  
afford to attempt to gain power by controlling it. There's no longer  
any way to do that. And leaders who haven't seen that yet are going  
to eventually fall like the Berlin Wall.

And the only way for me to do The Dance of Leader and Follower is to  
better know myself and where my strengths and passions lie, and then  
to ask the pertinent questions to better know and understand others.  
My knowledge is no longer contained in my head, but in the web of  
people I connect with as well. That’s true power.

So that being said, we are in a time where it's beginning to be  
crucial to better know others and ourselves. The State of Grace  
Document (www.stateofgracedocument.com) is one way to do that. And  
when we ask the questions and exchange the info before the dance  
starts, we're more apt to be successful. If two people start dancing  
without the info, step all over each others feet and get in an  
argument, then stopping to exchange information at that point would  
be a hell of a lot tougher.

Open Space is another way to create a platform through invitation,  
passion and responsibility to better do the Dance of Leader and  
Follower. In fact Open Space is the Dance of Leader and Follower in  
motion. The dance between being and doing - on an individual and  
group level simultaneously.

So, the dance takes us to more dancing - more doing and  being in the  
moment as passion arises, as invitation reaches out and joins us, as  
meditation stills us, as internal knowing moves us to action, as  
action leads us to reflection, as we know ourselves better, then  
share ourselves, new passions emerge and the dance goes on...

Being both Leader and Follower, both Feminine and Masculine, Doing  
and Being  - is the paradox of our transition time.

What comes next is up to us.

with grace and love,

Zelle

Zelle Nelson
Engaging the Soul at Work/State of Grace Document/Know Place Like Home

www.stateofgracedocument.com

zelle at knowplacelikehome.com

work/home: 828.693.0802
mobile: 847.951.7030

Isle of Skye
2021 Greenville Hwy
Flat Rock, NC 28731
USA






On May 25, 2006, at 12:18 PM, Harrison Owen wrote:

> I think it is fair to say that the female/male (feminine/masculine)  
> dance
> has been something of a marathon. Occasionally it really flows, as  
> any good
> dance/dancers might hope for. For myself, I remember those  
> occasions as
> extraordinary moments. But then I love to dance. At other times  
> there are a
> lot of feet that get stepped. And sometimes, one partner or the  
> other simply
> gets swept off the floor and/or chooses to retire -- which makes  
> the dance
> something of an oddity, not to say virtually impossible.
>
> So if Open Space is a dance, where does that take us?
>
> Harrison
>
> Harrison Owen
> 7808 River Falls Drive
> Potomac, Maryland   20854
> Phone 301-365-2093
> Skype hhowen
> Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
> Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
> Personal website www.ho-image.com
> OSLIST: To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the
> archives Visit: www.listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of  
> Pat Black
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 10:05 AM
> To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
> Subject: The Da Vinci Connection -- Open Space and the Feminine
>
> As some of my favorite books are being offered for reading I would  
> like
> to add another.  Layne Remonds's When The Woman Were Drummers has some
> interesting insights about the change in balance.  According to  
> Redmond
> there was also a corresponding change in the relationship to the  
> drum's
> purpose and who played it.  There are many vase pictures of woman
> holding round disk objects.  Before woman had access to the acadamy  
> most
> male archeologists discribed those disks as cakes.  Gimbutus says they
> are drums.  Redmond is a frame drummer herself and I think, quite a
> scholar on the history of the frame drum.  I seem to remember some
> issues between Moses and his sister Miriam before leaving Eygpt.  I am
> no Old Testament scholar but seem to remember that Miriam was a  
> drummer
> and there were some power struggles between her and Moses.  I think it
> was the people that insisted Miriam be included.  That would at least
> date this struggle in the balance between the masculine and  
> feminine to
> that time.
> Pat Black
>
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