Coaching, nudging, influencing:A new paradigm for growing people and for creating wealth and values-Part 6(6): Values forming relationships of Synergy

Charles Hampden-Turner

Part 6(6): Values forming relationships of Synergy

This final instalment discusses several examples of how the dilemma reconciliation process is increasingly needed as organizations look to the future. Coaching can enable organizations to develop quality relationships with their customers by using values to form relationships of synergy. This instalment also discusses the implications of new economic trends and how they may be influenced by values.

Much of the inspiration for this book and our entire life’s work comes from this passage in the work of Abraham Maslow. The American psychiatrist was looking at healthy and creative persons who had actualized their own potentials and capacities. He noticed that unlike many other people they had succeeded in bringing these into fine syntheses. He called this synergy from the Greek, syn-ergo to work together and conflict between them disappears because they say the same thing and point to the same conclusion… Certain values in just the right proportions fuse and grow. The excerpt below comes from Motivation and Personality  (1954):

“The age-old opposition between heart and head, reason and instinct, or cognition and connation was seen to disappear in healthy people where they became synergic rather than antagonists… The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears… because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish …Our subjects are simultaneously very spiritual and very pagan and sensual. Duty cannot be contrasted with pleasure or work with play where duty is pleasure, when work is play. Similar findings have been reached for kindness----ruthlessness, concreteness----abstractness, acceptance----rebellion, serious----frivolous, mystic---realistic, active----passive, lust---love, Eros----Agape… and a thousand philosophical dilemmas are discovered to have more than two horns, or paradoxically no horns at all.”       

Can’t beat that moment…

Bill Tolliver was admitted to the Delancey Street Foundation, a halfway house in San Francisco for mostly addicted ex-felons. He had bitten two holes in his tongue and nearly drowned in his own blood. Yet he recovered and over the years became the unofficial ”high priest” in charge of most celebrations and much of the therapy. He told me the following story. “I have also wanted change people. I used to do it by manipulation and that’s hard work! I would exhaust myself and them and it rarely lasted, but recently I’ve learned to do it by the lightest of touches, by my “finger-tips” as it were and some force greater than my own, greater than both of us, takes over. There was a young woman in my “tribe” (family unit), gorgeous to look at but with drug habit and career that had veered from one catastrophe to the next. Her father had just died and we were sitting with her, trying to pick up the pieces. She was very guilty. Their last quarrel had been about her drug-taking and stealing. She was angry with him for leaving her alone. She was weeping by the hour. When I sensed the grief was almost out of her, I said softly. “but there must have been good times too, tell us about those.” She thought for a moment and began to tell and with every memory her voice grew stronger and her eyes brighter and she was smiling through her tears. Finally she jumped to her feet kissed all of us on the cheek and turned to leave the room, looking radiant. “Now you know what you must do in this family,” I told her. “Your father is dead but we have seen him in your spirit, in your smile and in your bearing. You must live among us and any family you create, so that when you die, they will recall you in the same way with all that love inside. She paused and looked back at me. Our eyes met. I kid you not, all the drugs I’ve taken, all the steamy sex, all those towering highs can’t beat that moment and we were not even touching.”    

Coaching poor women to borrow: Taking and Giving 

Micro-financing as described and practiced by Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen bank in Bangladesh is a brilliant example to the world. Never was a Nobel Prize for Peace better deserved. Taken as a whole, micro-financing world-wide has had a patchwork of success and failures but this is because we did not look at what Yunus achieved with sufficient understanding. We believe the lessons are as follows. To be poor is to be unable to give to others or even reciprocate when others help you. It breaks the spirit to be always on the receiving end and compete at relative wretchedness. Repayment of the loan turns you from a beggar and object of charity to an independent business woman supporting her family, an entrepreneur, far more numerous in emerging economies. Lending to mothers and the empowerment of women are other keys, because the money leant will go straight to the body and brains of children and the supplies needed for her to work and keep them nourished. The alternative is to watch helpless while they starve. It is an important condition of loans that the children must be in full-time education, the roof in good repair and the earth toilet at least ten feet from house. Grameen had a 97.5% repayment rate which is the envy of many conventional banks and much, much higher than Bangladeshi banks generally. It made profits for every one of the 21 years Yunus was in charge of it and paid dividends to its owner-customers. It awarded scholarships to the children of customers, took beggars off the streets and supplied mobile phones at cost. While it took money from foundations in its early years it was entirely self-sufficient at its prime. It was resolutely non-bureaucratic with few if any paper records. Each borrower has five other women vouching for her who become eligible for loans if she repays. In practice they will pool resources rather than default, In the picture above the mother has bought a pedal powered sewing machine for $50 and is ten times more productive than before. She is no longer at the mercy of middle-men and loan sharks. The poor if given half a chance are amazingly resourceful to have survived at all. As CK Prahalad put it, there is “a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”, provided that you first care.  

Crowd-funding comes to Prime-time Television

Plastic in the right place

One of the doubtful qualities of plastic is the fact that it virtually indestructible, although it fragments into smaller and smaller pieces and enters the food chain where it does no good either. If we continue as we are doing we will turn our oceans into waste-dumps and cease to derive edible fish from it. The plastic will end up in our own bodies, unless we eschew fish. This bodes ill for the environment and for human health, not to mention the plastics industry. But plastic remains very useful in its right place. Where is this? Its right place Is where proving indestructible is a virtue, to wit building materials. It Is possible to make plastic into bricks by collecting the waste and not letting it enter rivers, seas and oceans. These take myriad forms, three of which a illustrated above. Bricks can be made from plastic bottles joined by mortar. The air and space inside the bottles is a good insulator from hot and cold climates in much the same way as a string vest keeps the body warm by pockets of air. Such a wall is not transparent but it is translucent and walls can provide illumination. Bricks made from plastic are very light, cheap and easy to handle In Columbia do-it-yourself houses have been constructed for as little as $5,500 from plastic waste which would otherwise end in in land-fill. Since bricks are made in moulds, it is possible to construct them like LEGO bricks so they can be joined together. If no longer viable bricks of plastic are easy to disassemble and recycle. The plastics industry needs to be nimble and on its toes. In every crisis there is an opportunity as the Chinese like to say.           

The fiery tombstone of our predatory capitalism

A moment of truth came with the seventy-two lives lost in Grenfell tower fire in North Kensington on June 14 of 2017. It revealed in the starkest terms how very little the Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington, one of the richest in Europe, cared for its own tenants. Even after the fire it could barely speak to them. There was a single spiral staircase for leaving the building, soon full of smoke and expiring bodies. The fatal instructions issued were to stay put so that the compliant all died. The cladding used to make the building more attractive to the eye was made of combustible material because this was cheaper and there were no sprinklers or workable fire-doors for the same reason. The only firemen’s ladders available only reached to the 11th floor of 23 floors. Stacking the poor vertically on top of each other is the most economic use of expensive land. The fast combustion of cladding was known from previous fires and the protest of the Tenants Action Group and its prediction of fatal fire had been ignored. While 11.8 billion pounds had been budgeted only 8.6 billion was spent. Sprinklers would have cost 200,000 pounds. Non-flammable cladding would have cost 2 pounds a panel more. It was a nice little earner. The borough spent 39.8 million pounds and collected 55 from some of the poorest in the land. The grim, charred skeleton stands in silent reproach. As a spokesman put it. “Had we been listened to and respected Grenfell tower would not have happened. It was as simple as that” It is a monument to lost relationships.