The Circle Way

A Leader in Every Chair

Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781605092560
• eBook ISBN: 9781605097732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

An authoritative and accessible guide to this foundational form of collaborative decision-making Uses images, stories and step-by-step instructions to teach the basics of circle and explore it's deeper meanings Written by two pioneers in reviving, standardizing and popularizing circle processMore and more organizations are looking for alternatives to rigid, top-down hierarchy. Even the most old-school now realize that good ideas can come from anywhere and that fostering collaboration and group cohesion is vital to any healthy enterprise. But what approach can best create an environment that ensures clear speaking, compassionate listening, and the making of well-grounded decisions? The most ancient one: the circle.The circle was the form of original gathering that taught human beings how to create social patterns. All modern group processes open to collaboration or to flattening the hierarchy are based in some way on circle practices. Here two veteran practitioners offer a comprehensive guide to this foundational form of human interaction The Circle Way lays out the basics of circle conversation based on the original work of the coauthors, who have studied and standardized the essential elements of circle practice and have been implementing them in a variety of organizations for over fifteen years. It opens with a unique visual guide to circle and then presents both structure and story so that readers understand how these elements come into play and how they are interrelated and interactive. Baldwin and Linnea include detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving conflicts. And they delve into the deeper aspects of circle, illuminating the profound transformation the process has on people who participate in it.

PART
I
The Circle Way

CHAPTER
1
Where Circle Comes From and Where It Can Take Us

The room sizzles with tension. Emotions are high, opinions are formed, polarities harden, and alliances and divisions are drawn. Twelve women and men dressed in the current armor of business are about to engage one another on the battlefield of a contentious meeting. In the next two hours, they will decide things that shape their organization’s future. The agenda is overfull, and there will be insufficient time for discussion or consideration of consequences. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, as the decisions have essentially been made through background e-mails, late and early cell phone calls, text messages, and side conversations in the catacomb of cubicles and corner offices. The players wander in: the CEO, the guy from accounting, department managers, and supervisors. The boss’s assistant sets up coffee, flip charts, and related papers and gets ready to take notes.

These are good people.

These are the people who keep business running—in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, China, Australia and the Pacific nations, Latin and South America, and Africa. Wherever there is enough stability in society to hold together commerce and community, some variation of these people gather, around the clock, around the world. They have spouses and partners and children they love whom they send off to school in the mornings and cheer at soccer games. They walk the dog, pet the cat, read the paper, watch television, and enjoy a good meal and perhaps a glass of wine or a cup of tea to draw a line through the end of the day. They put the kids to bed and often head back to their laptops or hand-helds to tend to correspondence they have no time for in the rush of their workday.

“Two to three hundred e-mails a day,” they tell us, “and we’re required to have our BlackBerrys on 24/7.” Another one says, “I get up every night at two A.M. to see if the early meetings have been changed—sometimes we have to be here by six A.M., and I have an hour commute. Then I have to wake my husband and negotiate how we’re doing the kids if I’m gone by five—surprising how many other road warriors are on the freeway that time of day.” A man laughs sardonically: “I sometimes think of myself as a six-figure lemming rushing toward the cliff. I was going to transition out, but my financial parachute burned up back in 2009. Now I’m just grateful to have made it through the layoffs.”

Underneath their resignation is tremendous frustration at what it takes to run the world this way—and to be run by the world. And the place that much of this underlying discontent shows up is in how we run our meetings—how we greet and treat each other and how we wield interpersonal power in the attempt to hold on to some sphere of influence that satisfies our desires to make a difference. This world, however, the world of human interaction and participation, is our world to mold and change to fit our needs. What is about to happen here in this room is not predestined; we can redesign it. There is another way: the circle way.

Where Circle Comes From

When humanity’s ancestors began to control the use of fire and to carry the embers of warmth and cooking and light along with them from site to site, fire brought a new experience into being: the need for social organization. We speak of this imagined scene many times in circle, awakening our connections to the dreamtime of human origin.

The man is wet to the skin and shivers. The lifeless body of a rabbit bounces against his shoulder as he hurries through the twilight. The woman trotting at his side pauses in the fading light to gather a few leaves, scratch a surface root free with her toe, and deposit it in the skin pouch at her waist. They move in this fashion along a trail they hope will lead to welcome, warmth, and company for the night. They smell smoke before they can see it, and then hear voices. Finally, they round a bend and there it is—fire glow on a cave wall. Other travelers have already gathered. Not wanting to be mistaken for prey or foe, the man grunts loudly, making the sound for “man-friend.” The people at the fire are alerted now and shush each other, listening cautiously. There is chatter; then one among them grunts back, “Man-friend, man-friend.” The woman opens her throat and ululates the haunting cry of female welcome. The women at the fire call back to her. They have two things to offer: food and story.¹

With flame, hominid scavengers could provide one another with increased safety, warmth, and food. These elements allowed hominids to cluster in larger groups, and larger groups required an increased capacity for complex social behavior. Evidence of the controlled use of fire dates back to the Lower Paleolithic, some 200,000 to 400,000 years ago, when Homo erectus, a now extinct hominid, was first exploring its way out of Africa. The skilled use of fire seems to have been passed along to Homo sapiens sapiens—us—who arrived about 165,000 years ago. Solid archaeological evidence of hearth rings has been excavated in South Africa and dated back 125,000 years.

What makes this interesting in a book about collaborative conversation is the supposition that language as a social tool developed alongside the use of fire and the sophistication of hand tools. Just as archaeologists and anthropologists can verify the progressive development of tools, neurolinguists such as Stephen Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, can verify the brain pattern of a developed language center faintly etched in the frontal lobe on the inside of fossilized Homo sapiens crania. Based on this evidence, Pinker states, “All Homo sapiens talk, and all Homo sapiens use language as the way they interpret and filter the world around them.”² This combination—fire, which provided the capacity for extending physical gathering; tools, which supported hunting and gathering and eventually agriculture and architecture; and language, which provided a way to organize experience, transmit knowledge, and process human thought and feeling—has proved to be an unbeatable combination.

Once upon a time, fire led our ancestors into the circle. It made sense to put the fire in the center and to gather around it. A circle defined physical space by creating a rim with a common source of sustenance lighting up the center. These ancestors needed the circle for survival—food, warmth, defense—and they discovered that the circle could help design social order.

This may seem like quite a leap of imagination, but it seems less so when we notice how strongly the impulse toward circle remains active, almost instinctual, in human beings today. When people are engaged in dialogue and relationships, we generally arrange ourselves in a circular formation. This automatic behavior is based on the need to be able to see and hear each other and to communicate our intentions through body language and facial expressions as well as through words. The dialogue may be heated, with emotions roused, or it may be comforting, with emotions relaxed; nevertheless, we still stand where we can keep an eye on each other and on what we and they are saying. This social patterning comes from somewhere and has obviously been of service since it has been maintained in the psychosocial lineage of how we behave together. The seminal researcher who articulated the sources of psychosocial lineage was the twentieth-century Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, who lived from 1875 to 1961.

Jung hypothesized that all human beings share a number of images that seem to spring from a common imagination deep within the human psyche. Jung called this source the collective unconscious and noted that it was filled with recurring and universal mythic symbols he named archetypes. Archetypes are expressed culturally but are deeper than culture. For example, the archetypal image that arises when you read the words wise old man is influenced by race, religion, and cultural origin—you may imagine Merlin, the Dalai Lama, James Earl Jones, or Black Elk; the point is that calling up an image is universal. Speak an archetypal phrase to a group, and everybody will imagine something. Jung studied the power of circle by examining anthropological evidence and making psychological corollaries; we discovered the power of circle by noticing what happens when people sit in a circular shape.

To understand the power of circle as a collaborative conversation model and the kinds of insights that can pour into this group process, it is helpful to understand that when we circle up in a ring of chairs, we are activating an archetype. Archetypal energy tends to make our experiences seem bigger, brighter or darker; our words become imbued with shades of meaning, and our dialogue, decisions, and actions take on a sense of significance. This is part of the attraction to circle process: the archetypal energy can magnify issues among the group and help transform them.

People who have experienced circle often refer to this archetypal energy as the “magic of circle” that occurs when the best (or sometimes the worst) comes out of us and we find ourselves capable of responding with a level of creativity, innovation, problem solving, and visioning that astound us. Others talk about circle as an experience of synergy, as being able to tap into something they didn’t know was in them and could not have predicted as a possible outcome at the start of a circle meeting.

In Germany a few years ago, we were offering a four-day training to sixteen sophisticated consultants from five countries. One of our participants was a leading scholar and academician who wrote and edited journals on political theory and the legacy of Carl Jung in European pedagogy. He pressed us constantly for cognitive information. It was a very helpful interaction for all of us, especially working cross-culturally and choosing English words we hoped would translate meaningfully into German.

The second day into our conversation, something happened that sparked the group and took our learning into insight—we don’t remember the particulars of the moment but do remember how urgently this man leaned forward and said, “Stop. Stop—right now, what is happening? What is this energy?” He gestured into the space between us, eighteen people sitting in a room at the back of a little retreat center outside Frankfurt on a sunny spring day. He looked at Ann on one side of the room and across the circle at Christina on the other side. “You, what are the two of you doing? How does this happen?”

“It’s not the two of us,” we told him. “It’s all of us and the circle itself.” Synergy is the experience of interaction between elements or people that when combined produces a total effect greater than the sum of the individual parts. The man’s question led us into a rousing discussion on synergy, with clarifications being offered in several languages. After a while, satisfied with their explorations, the participants moved on. Later that evening, with a mischievous smile on his face, our colleague brought a pitcher of beer and a bowl of pretzels to our dinner table and popped the next question: “OK, now I want to discuss from where comes synergy?”

Circle as an Archetype of Group Process

Even though the wheel as a tool wasn’t invented until about 5,500 years ago, the circle as a symbol appears in cave paintings and carvings dating back 35,000 years to the Late Paleolithic era. In his research, Jung discovered that the circle, often in the form of the sun wheel (a pie cut into eight equal pieces), is represented in cultures that developed in complete isolation from each other. The circle shows up around the world as the medicine wheel, the wheel of law, the wheel of the year, the Catherine wheel, the dharma wheel, the Kabbalah wheel or tree of life, the mandala, the zodiac, the Uroboros, the triad cross, the Celtic cross, and many other variations. When we pull the chairs away from the table and out of the rows and into a ring where we face each other, we are turning ourselves into a sun wheel. We assume the shape of the symbol itself—and synergy comes with us.

Since the 1990s, when PeerSpirit began offering circle process in an increasing variety of mainstream settings, experimenting with the circle’s ability to hold conversation in social settings that range from North America to Europe to South Africa, we have remained consistently aware that the ancient, ever-present circle archetype is evident in the modern methodology. We have repeatedly seen people surprised by their own capacities to access insights and come to decisions no one had imagined when their meeting started. They have asked, “How did we just do that? We didn’t get into power struggles. We came up with a course of action no one had seen as possible before.” Or they comment, “The director came into this room with ‘my mind is made up’ written all over his face. Twenty minutes later, he’s at the flip chart diagramming options.” And people begin to wonder, just as we do, “Is there something about the circle itself that encourages us to newness? Could this process work where folks are really stuck? Could slowing down and talking together really make us more productive? Could circle make our work lives more sustainable?”

Not everyone in the room needs to be interested in or thinking about synergy, archetypes, or social evolution for circle to work. However, group process is strengthened when a few thoughtful participants understand that we are playing with the fires that made us who we are. These fire tenders can then help a group remain steady through the kinds of experiences circle elicits, many of which are shared in stories throughout this book.

Circle may start as one small shift that turns out to be a tipping point. Often we suggest that people introduce a bit of circle process by offering a round of check-in, using the first ten or fifteen minutes of a meeting to invite each participant to share a short relevant story that relates to the group’s purpose—essentially, to let the group members know how they appear to each other. Sometimes people worry that the exercise is taking time away from the agenda, and yet this simple routine gathers people’s attention and focuses everyone on the purpose of the meeting. And sometimes the power and wisdom of the archetype shows up.

In the late 1990s, when PeerSpirit worked with the Center for Nursing Leadership (CNL), we had an experience of archetype streaming through and changing check-in. Founded in 1996 by members of the American Organization of Nurse Executives and funded by a grant from the Hill-Rom Company, CNL developed a one-year educational and midcareer renewal program called Journey Toward Mastery. Founding members had read Christina’s book Calling the Circle and were incorporating PeerSpirit methodology into their meetings. We were invited to join them to strengthen their understanding of circle practice. In the first few minutes, we offered the following check-in suggestion: “Tell us the story of how you came to enter the profession of nursing.”

We watched in amazement how the power of the right question can open a group’s synergy. The two of us, coming in as sensitively as we could yet outside the profession we were serving, expected people to check in fairly succinctly. We expected participants to offer a brief anecdote that would better inform us of the motivation behind their career choice and lead into our teaching design for the morning session.

Instead, we witnessed stories of great heart. One person explained that she was the first girl in her large family to go to college; others grew up in small towns and rural areas where their grandmothers had delivered most of the babies. One knew as a child that she had healing abilities that she couldn’t talk about; another had a sense of being called at an early age to serve humanity; another’s father had died when she was fourteen, and her experience of caring nurses during that time made her determined to become such a caregiver. People listened with rapt attention and without interrupting as one by one they reached into their personal histories and brought forward the memory of the moment they had chosen their path. They laughed with one another and cried with one another, and by the time we had finished check-in, the morning was over.

The experience of circle that morning was a far more powerful lesson than we could have provided talking about circle methodology. And after lunch, when we began a more cognitive conversation about how circle process could influence learning within the cohort group and among the nurse leaders in their organizations, everyone had a profound reference point. This is another aspect of circle that constantly informs us: that the process can hold great depth, that it can survive and resolve long-standing conflicts, provide a space for healing, and then shape-shift into an efficient, peer-led, agenda-based meeting. All this happened at CNL in the course of a few hours.

Three archetypes were activated in this experience: the healer that shaped the participants’ life journeys, the circle that provided a learning ground different from any they had previously experienced, and the leader that guided them into the fullness of their careers.

Years later, we still meet these w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword When Did We Forget This?
• Preface The Origin of the PeerSpirit Circle Process
• Part I The Circle Way
• Part II Circles at Work in the World
• Part III The Art of Presence in Circle
• Part IV Circle as Paradigm Shift
• Afterword Circle in the Heart ofStone Christina Baldwin
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography and Resources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index