RSA – The Consulting Artist

A Review of ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ by Brene Brown

Brene Brown – The Power of Vulnerability – 2013

Happy Friday? Sad Friday? Fearful Friday? Blame Friday? Creative Friday? Loving Friday? Hateful Friday? Empathic Friday? Vulnerable Friday? Me Too Friday?

Friday represents the end of the working week for many people, and often there’s a lift in the mood as we think ‘yay – here comes the weekend’ or similar. And just as often, Friday, or any other day in the week for that matter, represents all kinds of other challenges and questions too, questions to which we often don’t have answers for. Today’s post is much more about questions and much less about answers.

I wasn’t in the room for this latest RSA talk – but the live stream worked just fine and so I got to listen to one of my favourite speakers update us on her thinking and research into vulnerability. Here’s some of what I heard.

Scarcity

Brene Brown (BB from now on) started by asking us to ask ourselves two questions:

1 What should I be afraid of today?

2 Who is to blame?

Or put another way, what should scare me and whose fault is it? BB suggests these are dangerous questions that we often centre our lives around – and they come from a culture of not enough, of scarcity. When you open a newspaper – typically the news will say, ‘here is why you should be afraid and here’s whose fault it is’. These questions often become the focus of conversation at work, ‘Who hasn’t worked in an office where this is asked?’ No one’s hand goes up.

At the heart of this problem is that we believe there’s never enough. Never perfect enough, never relevant enough, never good enough, never loved enough, never extraordinary enough. An ordinary life has become synonymous with meaningless.

Armour Up

BB then asks, ‘So how do we deal with this? We respond by putting on armour – we go out and kick some ass and stay safe, not showing our true selves.’ She suggests we get lost in perfectionism, intellectualising. For example, BB’s TEDx talk – The Power of Vulnerability, was going to be called something like, ‘Variables Mitigating Self Actualising…’ blah blah, blah, she lost me before the end of the previous, awfully dull, intellectualised title, which I thought was a great way to make the point. We armour up to protect ourselves from being hurt.

And the worst news from BB’s research – our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken hearted.

Crushing Creativity

Vulnerability is the path to love, to belonging, to innovation, trust and creativity. 85% of interviewees for BB’s research (13,000 people interviewed in total) can recall a time in school that was so shaming it forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners – 50% of those recollections related to art and creativity.

Empathy is the Casualty

Empathy is greatest casualty of vulnerability. BB asked the audience, ‘When you share vulnerability and the other person gets it, how do you feel?’ People replied with words like ‘Awesome’ ‘Reassured’. Opposite feelings surfaced when the other person doesn’t get it, and that drives scarcity.

Empathy fuels connection sympathy drives disconnection

What is empathy? Empathy – is perspective, is staying out of judgment, is recognising emotion in others and communicating that, feeling with people.

Blame

A lack of empathy drives blame.

Blame – Brene drops a cup on a tile floor, smashes into a million pieces and sends coffee everywhere. She immediately thinks, ‘Damn you Steve!’ Steve is Brene’s husband and last night, he got home late, which in turn made me oversleep, late, rushed, dropped the cup.

Blame gives us a semblance of control, but blame is simply discharging discomfort and pain (anger), and has an inverse relationship with accountability.

Blame = we don’t listen because prepping our blame story.

Back to Empathy

Empathy is being present with someone. Rarely does an empathic response begin with the words ‘at least’ – that’s just silver lining it.

I had a miscarriage. At least you can get pregnant.
My marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage

You don’t have to have the answer, very often something like ‘I don’t even know what to say right now except that I’m so glad you told me’, is just what we need to hear.

We worry about saying the right thing and being helpful – sometimes a hand on a hand is just what you need…followed by two simple powerful words. Me too.

BB sits down to enthusiastic applause.

Q&A

These last few lines are snippets of the Q&A that followed. I’m a fan of RSA talks, but I think they could be improved by encouraging the Chair to get the conversation going between audience and speaker more quickly. Too often – the Chair goes on a bit and the audience stuff gets compressed in the end. So – this next bit is very sketchy, sorry but I was losing concentration and I can’t really recall what the questions were that drove these comments – blush – but I felt they were worth including.

Shame – perceived as weakness.

Shame and guilt are different things. Shame – I am bad. Guilt – I did something bad.

Social media is like fire, use it to warm yourself when freezing, use it to burn down the barn. Live tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Social media is great for communicating. Connection happens between people in person, don’t mistake communication for connection.

I ask for what I need. This feels inherently vulnerable, and do it.

I really enjoyed listening to Brene Brown speak. Not only is her subject one that fascinates me, but she is funny, she engaged the audience really well, and shared lots of new stuff too, resisting the temptation to replay earlier success. I’ve not tried to draw any conclusions from what I heard – I just wanted to play it back so you can enjoy investing a bit of time thinking about vulnerability. If you are interested – you can see the unedited video (just over 1 hour in total) of the talk here.

photo credit

Vulnerability – A Hot Ticket

Vulnerability – this exciting, scary, beautiful and yet somehow oddly misshapen word has been featuring in my mind and work a lot lately. When we think of doing something that makes us feel vulnerable, we typically associate vulnerability with weakness, and when we see someone sharing their vulnerability, we usually associate that with courage. When it comes to vulnerability and how we roll with it, we’re our own worst enemy.

I think vulnerability is an important part of doing authentic work, and as someone who likes to challenge the way people work, and to lead by example in encouraging people to do things differently, I’m familiar with the anxiety it brings. It’s an essential ingredient of creativity, just ask anyone who has stared at a beautiful, pristine sheet of gloriously white, flat, smooth 200 gsm paper with a pencil in hand just prior to bringing the two together, and they’ll give you a sense of what vulnerability feels like. And although it’s nerve racking, vulnerability can be exciting too.

Speaking of exciting – we have a rare opportunity to experience cutting edge thinking on vulnerability today. Dr Brene Brown, who was catapulted into the front line of vulnerability thinking after her 2010 TEDx talk on the subject went viral, is speaking on vulnerability at The RSA today at 1pm UK time. Understandably the auditorium is full, but the good people at The RSA are live streaming the talk. I know where I’ll be at 1pm today, how about you?

photo credit

How to Change Education – from the ground up?

Today’s blog post title may look slightly familiar. I recently wrote about a talk to be given by Sir Ken Robinson at the RSA about changing education, then my name popped to the top of the waiting list and I was offered a ticket, so I rolled into London on Monday July 1st to have a listen. The talk took place in the recently refurbished Great Room (the room struck me as more ‘very nice’ than great – though that’s not such a snappy title eh?), and was live streamed too. The room was full, I’d guess it holds about 120 people. At 1pm the CEO of the RSA Matthew Taylor took to the stage to introduce Sir Ken Robinson. Matthew said that the two hot tickets in the last few days were this one, and the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury. He mawkishly went on to suggest that what we were about to receive was somehow the winner in this two horse race and oddly used the word ‘elite’ to introduce a talk about change from the ground up for education. Hmmm? Anyway, to keep the rock theme going for just a moment longer, if Matthew Taylor was in Spinal Tap, he would have just turned the smarm all the way up to eleven. On with the show…

Confusing intelligence with academic capability

Sir Ken Robinson (I’ll refer to him as SKR from now on) started by telling us how the current model of education confuses and conflates intelligence with academic capability. There is a misapprehension within government that education at the highest level = Oxford and Cambridge. We can’t all go there, and many of us don’t want to – so this aspiration is a disastrous waste of human talent. SKR talked about how education is built around an outdated factory model. Every 40 minutes the bell rings and we all change rooms. He suggests that were we to run a business like this, we’d be broke in a week. I didn’t think broke, I thought of sweat shops.

The factory model is wrong

This factory, or industrial model which works as if humans are machines is wrong at every level. Governments everywhere seek to mechanise people through their approach, SKR asks us to listen to policy makers language, they believe that you can deliver a system improvement by shouting commands at it. Input equals output. In part, the task is to persuade politicians to do things differently, and because they have short time horizons, they are unlikely to change. But if we do things differently first, they will follow.

SKR then briefly referred to the STEM principle – the in vogue focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as being necessary and not sufficient to prepare learners for what comes next in the world. So what other things need focussing on?

Economics – education is vital, and powerful for economic advancement, but not if education continues to follow an outdated industrial model. SKR referenced research by IBM who asked companies in 18 countries what keeps you up at night? 2nd most popular response was the need for adaptability, and here SKR used the Kodak story to illustrate how an essential brand can become redundant through failing to adapt to a changing market. The most popular response was the need for creativity, and here SKR believes that education currently enacts a systematic quashing of the appetite for creativity.

Culture – most conflict is this way inclined, conflict around ideologies. We need to understand cultural identities – the arts, languages etc. Then SKR read a glib quote about being British these days means driving home in a German car, having an Indian takeaway in front of a Japanese TV etc. before ending on, the most British thing of all is suspicion of anything foreign. This got a lot of laughs but I’m not sure it was a particularly helpful point.

Social – communities matter more than ever, politics is disenfranchised. SKR referenced Emily Davison who famously stepped in front of the King’s horse at Epsom race course in 1913 as part of her campaign for votes for women. The injuries caused by her actions led to her death four days later. And here we are a hundred years on with fewer and fewer people voting. Civil discourse is important.

Participation – education needs to be more personal – about people, different talents, interests etc. Diversity is nuanced, education is not. 30% of USA kids don’t finish high school.

Theatre of education

SKR got round to a bit more government bashing, saying that top down directives don’t work. The government cannot improve education through vilifying teachers, their involvement and support is what’s needed. He asked, what can you take away from education to get back to the core? By way of an analogy, SKR said that theatre is the relationship between performer and audience. The same goes for education. Children have voracious appetite for learning, and yet they don’t need to be taught everything. We don’t teach kids to learn how to speak, they learn how to. Education currently dissipates this appetite for learning and the conceit of education is to think we can do this (teaching) better.

Teaching is currently just a delivery system. It should be revered as an art form, you need to know your stuff sure, and beyond that you must excite people to learn – that is the gift. How? Get the kids involved. Harvard is starting to flip the classroom to become much less dependant on the lecturer, increasingly students are learning from and with each other. You can change this now yourself don’t wait to be told. School needs to be a community of reciprocating individuals.

Habits and habitat

Complex adaptive systems – involves loads of different people reciprocating. Do something different and when it works it will grow. Tend to your own microclimate. Values can change, ground up only. Rock n roll, the Internet, these are not government initiatives. iPhone – when it launched there were 800 apps, now 750000. Unplanned – these things just just took off. Organic growth is cultural and already happening, system is adapting but not at government level, SKR hopes they realise and respond. A loving relationship is not command and control, but climate control. Change the micro climate.

Creativity in learning

We need to know how to play the instrument but not top to bottom – creativity is about finding other people who know more chords. Recognise individual learning styles, dissolve more learning down to the individual. Schools that engage and inspire are better. Acknowledge the power of ‘I don’t know’, facilitate more, ask more questions encourage collaboration, balancing instruction with intrigue. Standardised testing is wrong, testing should be a support for education not the point of it.
Quality of teaching and learning – that’s what matters, structure is much less important, gather round the quality aspect.

Breaking the system

SKR asks, is government trying to break public education by stealth, in order to privatise the whole thing? He feels this would be a disaster and if it’s part of the plan then tell us so we can have an informed disagreement about it.

SKR sits down to huge applause, then takes a few questions, all of which were broadly in agreement with his assertions, followed by a very long queue of people buying books and having them signed. I’m afraid I didn’t join the queue.

Reflections

I confess that I enjoyed listening to SKR speak – he is an engaging speaker, and though his humour was at times a little bitchy, he was also very funny. But – having been provoked and excited by the animated version of his previous RSA talk on Changing Education Paradigms, I was expecting something much more radical from SKR. I left the Salon of Disappointment (sorry, the Great Room), feeling…underwhelmed. I felt the talk was aimed more at trying to bolster the egos of teachers, and less about changing the system from the bottom up. A more robust challenge might have been to question whether we need the vast school infrastructure with all of its cost and inflexibility. Home schooling didn’t even get a mention, despite acknowledging the power of community in the talk. This wasn’t so much about changing education, more like a little bit of light tinkering.