Bowen family systems theory has colonized my thoughts for the last couple of months. Psychiatrist Murray Bowen spent his career creating a more scientific framework for psychology. His framework is radically different from what I’ve been used to, and is causing a fair amount of soul-searching on my part. I’m finding this journey riveting.

Bowen theory (the short version)
In a nutshell, Bowen believes that all groups - families, teams, organizations - form systems based on the anxiety that arises when choosing between our ’self’ and belonging to the group. We pass this anxiety around like a cold: Someone is always infected. In Bowen’s view, our role in this system determines our behavior more than our personal characteristics. Unless and until I’m willing to stop reacting to that underlying anxiety and choose a response that takes everybody’s needs into account - mine included. In this view, autocratic behavior is just another word for anxiety. Always being the one to stay late and do something for a client or the team is too.

What to do about it (in general)
In his approach, you stay connected with everyone in the system and maintain your own integrity. It’s not either-or, it’s both-and. You don’t join others at your expense and you don’t take your marbles and go home. This is not the comfortable choice. It’s more like a crucible out of which comes maturity and growth, not just for you, but for the whole system. But it’s not you righteously modeling a behavior you want others to adopt - it’s you choosing your path and sticking with it while staying connected and available to others, despite the flack they are giving you. You listen, and you connect, and you decide what to do about what others are telling you. This requires thoughtfulness and commitment without shutting others out. Bowen calls this differentiation.

An Example
The best example I can think of is having someone edit your writing. It’s your writing - you are the author. It’s your voice, your point of view, your self-expression. You are the final decision-maker. The editor gives you her opinion, often quite forcefully. As you take it in, you are beset with many thoughts: This editor is an idiot, she doesn’t get me at all. Or: This editor is an expert, I’d better do exactly what she says or my piece won’t be any good. With experience, you know that a good night’s sleep will allow a third voice to enter the conversation in your head: Some of these suggestions are great, even though they’ll require re-working entire sections. Some of them seem picayune, so I’ll ignore them, and other seem over-zealous, and appear to miss my point. I’ve got to talk those over with her.

Bowen’s theory explains so much of what I see in myself and in my clients. And it explains it in a way that doesn’t fence anyone in, which is why I love it. Trouble is, I don’t yet know how to apply it. That’s the tricky thing about theory: No user manual. So, into the lab we go. Let the experiments begin.

What to do about it (the specifics)
Decisions are anxiety-laden. Even simple decisions get complicated by the underlying emotional process that glues us together. It goes like this: I think the decision is mine alone to make and you think I should have consulted you. The leaders I coach often find themselves in this dilemma. They want to build a team, and they want to control the decisions for which they are held responsible. It looks unsolvable, and to some extent it is. By that I mean it’s a dilemma that never goes away. There is no one-size-fits-all approach which means you have to think your way through each decision. Analyze it to see which parts involve others and which are your alone. When we are reactive and wanting primarily to reduce our anxiety, we get this wrong.

Each decision has two aspects: What’s mine alone to decide, and what involves someone else. If I slow my automatic reaction down and go step-by-step, this distinction pops out. When I react automatically, I miss it. They key is to refuse to choose between them and me.

I’ll give you a universal example: A client wants the impossible, and right now. I want to go home on time and have dinner with my friends and play music. On the surface my evening looks doomed. I seem to have been presented with an either or decision: either I do what the client wants, or I have my evening. It’s that self vs. other dilemma. If the client is senior to me, I know what I have to do, at least that’s what our anxious mind says. Or, I may be so angry at these requests and the sacrifices I’ve made to honor them, that I simply say no.

The third way
Virginia Satir, another pioneer in the systems approach to groups, advised her students to never leave their clients with only two choices. She advocated te power of the third way, believing the third option is what took a client out of reactivity and into authentic choice.

The third option in the above situation stands a much better chance of satisfying each of you. Here’s one way it might sound: “I’ve got a dilemma: You want me to stay late tonight to work on this and I have plans I cherish and want to keep. How can we both get what we want?” Your job in the ensuing conversation is to refuse to choose between your needs and their needs. Do not settle for less than meeting both of your needs. This requires you to immunize yourself against their anxiety and increase your tolerance for discomfort - theirs and yours. The pay-off is a stronger relationship with your client, a better solution to the current dilemma, and the delicious surge of energy that comes from standing up to anxiety.

I’m very curious to know what you think about this. What’s your experience with the third way? And, because I’m writing on a topic I’m still digesting, I wonder if I’m making sense. I welcome your feedback.

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Last week, a client emailed me asking for help with facilitation skills. So, I went to youtube.com thinking I could find some high quality training videos in a jiffy. Nope. I found a lot of folks slinging lingo and jousting with jargon, but I didn’t find anyone who could talk about facilitation without slipping into one of two traps:

1. Drowning me in a blizzard of meaningless buzzwords until the room started to spin. If I’d been near an open window, I’d have jumped. Gleefully.

2. Standing in the front of the room with a marker saying things like, “Yes! Action is doing something - very good!” followed by “That’s it! We need a process to do something. You’d be amazed at how many leaders do not understand the need for process.” It was like day care in hell.

I love facilitating meetings, and I was bored to distraction. I know many of the people in those videos love meeting facilitation and the magic of groups too. What is it that makes us so tongue-tied about this key leadership skill? Why do we either bury it in corpo-speak or find ourselves making ringing proclamations of the obvious. Either way, why do we sound like such nitwits?

Because facilitating a meeting is simple. It’s so simple, it doesn’t seem possible that all that power could come from something so simple. So, we over-complicate it with lofty talk or overstate it’s simplicity with an almost psychotic passion.

Wanting to comes first
The raison d’etre of every meeting to to motivate a group of individuals to join forces to get something done. To be come something more than a collection of individuals. It’s not convincing them. It’s not persuading them. It’s not leading them. It’s not making it happen, because motivating someone else isn’t possible. They must motivate themselves. Motivation comes from wanting to do something. Group motivation comes from individuals connecting with each other - igniting each other until they are a great, roaring bonfire. Without the “want to,” you’ve got nothing. In the case of many meetings, you’ve got quite a bit less than nothing as group members spend time getting over the barren wasteland of meeting after meeting without even a spark.

All of which means that meetings are about letting a group talk themselves into wanting to do what needs to be done. That’s best done by asking for their help figuring out how to do it, then getting out of the way while they ignite each other. You’d best be ignited first, either with excitement or frustration or doubt, it doesn’t much matter which. A group that catches fire turns all of those into fuel.

I’ve been in New York for the past week visiting family, eating, walking, going to plays (Grey Gardens - yawn; Spring Awakening - fabulous), walking, playing cards with my uncles, walking through Soho, eating, walking, buying a new pair of MBTs, and walking in Central Park. A satisfying week hanging out in one of my favorite cities.

My first morning home, I woke up vibrating with anxiety. I’d gone to NYC in the middle of a major redesign of my business - new name, new website, new logo. Just a fluke of scheduling and my utter inability to figure out the best time to take a break. Consequently, I’d not only “lost” a week on the biz redesign, I’d lost my momentum, which was much worse. I could hardly bear the tension I was feeling: on one hand there were the deadlines I myself had set with the usual difficulties and delays; on the other there was my blank, sluggish mind. I tried all the strageties that usually work: sleeping in, getting up early, going to the gym, reading voraciously, going back to the gym, taking a walk, going to the office, working from home, drinking a lot o’ tea, sticking to water, journaling, not journaling, talking about it, suffering in silence.

Nothing.

Always precarious, the teeter-totter in my mind had shifted from “of course I can” (hear this in the voice of Glynda the good witch) to “who do you think you are?” (”and your little dog, too!”). Let’s say a fond farewell to my sense of purpose and focus. It must have been my fuzzy-headed jetlag that had driven my favorite quote from authors Steve Chandler and Sam Beckwith out of my mind. Instead, I was stuck trying to create just the right space in my routine into which creativity, focus and copious free time would automatically pour. Waiting for just the right moment, the right feeling, so I’d want to do what I needed to do. Waiting for hours of time to free up. Waiting for Godot.

This makes me wince.

You know this song, I know you do: Every tiny task keeps expanding to fill the time available. Then they started exceeding the time avaiable. Then they started multiplying and turning up everywhere like tribbles on the Enterprise. There is no question of boldly going anywhere. Soon the whole question of time triggers hopelessness and a desire to watch Dancing with the Stars. This lead to more hopelessness - how could it not? It causes a sort of pointlessness hangover. You get more anxious and more stuck. You become convinced your day is measureably shorter than other people’s.

Lucky for me, this always makes me reach for a frame drum, which I learned to play a few years ago. Playing it always makes something shift. This time, I didn’t even have to touch it. As I reached for it I thought “How did I ever find the time to learn to play this?” I was just as busy then as I am now, yet I commited to practice every day, no matter what. I stared at it and I remembered: I wanted to play this drum, more than I wanted anything - sleep, food, vacation time that wasn’t dedicated to workshops. Then I followed through, even if practicing was only 5 minutes a day, even if it freaked out my nearest and dearest (and it did). Soon, an hour and a half was flying by everyday and without losing anything I cared about. I was flying all over the country to study with top players.

It was a fun few years. And, it caused nary a ripple in the pond of my life. My business was booming, I was energized and happy. Same thing when I started exercising - I wanted to be healthy and fit so I commited to doing what it took. I had to replace my physical torpor with dialy exercise and that led to the 11 hours a week I now spend at the gym. Happily. I didn’t have that much time available when I started and I don’t now. The only possible conclusion: time is not what’s required. Desire leading to commitment is. I still remember the first time I heard someone play a frame drum. I had to learn it. I remember the first time I saw my pilates teacher: Tall, muscular, in graceful control of every muscle. Whatever I could have of that, I wanted more than I wanted sleeping in or not looking like a fool.

So, what was I doing, trying to push away the details of life to make a hole in time for the work has so captivated and challenged me? I had it backwards: Nature abhors a vacuum, but she makes way for a passionate commitment. I made one. You’re reading part of it. What a relief! And just in time, as I was running out of tea. Here’s the Chandler-Beckwith quote I alluded to earlier, the one that has made all the difference:

“Discipline is remembering what you want.”