Process Values

On July 16, I preached a sermon at my church, the first in just over a year. Now before all you non- and anti-religious readers click off, let me hasten to say I am not a minister, I am a lay preacher, and then hasten once again to add that you are not likely to ever encounter a lay preacher who is a bigger atheist than I. But atheist is a relative term. I recently concluded the epilogue to a major rewrite of one of my early books, Seeking God, with this advice: "J ust because you can’t believe in someone else’s god doesn’t mean you can’t believe in something. Go and seek your own God." I don't believe in the anthropomorphic benign puppet master deity that is the bread and butter of Abrahamic religious communities. What I do believe in is the Word of God. My definition of God is the source of the Word of God. To me the word of God has many layers. The first layer is the quantum laws that say our Universe was inevitable and therefore it happened. The second layer is the...

I'm back. I apologize to all my loyal followers for having missed a week. Two weeks ago I talked about getting participants involved in taking responsibility for process in addition to content. That is not just a good way to get them to take ownership of what the group is doing, it may be the best way to get them to leave their positions and focus on concerns, considerations, and constraints. This month is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Training Laboratory which later became the international organization known as the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. In the summer of 1946, Kurt Lewin and a group of colleagues were doing academic research on a collaborative approach known as Action Research . In an action research effort, the actors in a situation are enlisted in jointly planning a study of their situation, jointly collecting data and processing the data collected, jointly interpreting the research results and jointly formulating recommendations ...

I have run out of the blog posts that I write ahead. I have no idea which direction to take this blog next. But I have found that, when you don't know how to say something, you don't know where to start, the best thing to do is to talk about your stuckness, or about your confusion, or about how difficult the topic is to broach. If you don't know where to start, talk about not knowing where to start. Is that a process? I think so. In writing, doing that with your audience is inviting them to tacitly wait while you work through issues. But in facilitation, it is even more important. It is inviting the participants to take a role not only in shaping the content but in shaping the process. It is inviting them to share the facilitator's role. I used to be active in the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), even serving for a time on the Association Coordinating Team (ACT), what the IAF calls their board of directors. I was serving during the time that the IAF ca...

This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at cooking. I am not a professional chef. There was one break point in my career when I might have taken that route. I was recently widowed, disillusioned with my job, and looking for a new direction. I consulted a career coach who administered the Strong Interest Survey. It had one question on cooking: “Do you enjoy experimenting with recipes?” I answered “no.” I don’t play with recipes. Recipes are about content. My cooking is all about process. But because I answered “no” to the only cooking question, the career coach did not recommend that I become a chef. My stepdaughter bakes with a food scale. She doesn’t measure ingredients, she weighs them. It is a much faster and more accurate way of cooking, and it allows her to keep up ...

This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at prayer. Praying seems to be almost ubiquitous. Even Buddhists, who don’t believe in a deity who is a being, pray. Who are they praying to? No one. Then why are they praying? Carl Jung says that there is a part of the psyche that needs to deal with the spiritual, the divine, the ineffable. “It doesn’t matter whether God created that part of the psyche or that part of the psyche created God, we ignore that part or our psyche at the risk of our mental and emotional health.” Prayer is the process of paying attention to that part of our psyche. The content of the prayer perhaps doesn’t matter. If you believe in a deity that has a physical reality and is capable of affecting physical reality, you may pray certain content, for ph...

Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. In other words: Give a person content, you give them nothing. Give a person process, you give them everything. This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at teaching. Our church is recruiting Sunday School teachers for our summer time schedule. “All curricula and materials are provided. All you have to do is show up and teach.” That’s all. That’s a lot. I used to try and teach Sunday school. Sure, they provided me all the content I needed. But they never provided process. Most of our church’s Sunday School teachers are also teachers. The rest have been teaching Sunday School for so long that they are accomplished teachers. It never occurs to any of them that they need to ...

This month we are going to look at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are going to look at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at the writing process, particularly the process of writing fiction. I recently completed my first novel. (Actually, at 42,000 words, some would call it a novelette.) It deals with the healing process after rape. It is the only novel I have been able to find (with my admittedly weak research skills) in which the victim is the main character, not simply a pawn in a chess game between the perp and the criminal justice system. When I was writing the story, I took the advice of Ann Lamott, Erica Jong, and many other writers and let my character tell her story. I was surprised when she told me a story of rape and healing. No woman chooses to be raped. I asked my character why she chose to tell me a story of rape. She said th...