One of the things that I’ve noticed about Power since writing my last blog entry (interesting how distinguishing something makes it more present to your experience, isn’t it?) is that the different roles I “play” require different forms of power for me to “produce” results.  This is something that I need to continue to get clear about and practice daily to effectively be love present and experienced in all my environments.  It may not always be this way, but what I’ve noticed about love present and experienced is that the form power takes is very much outside of my “self”.  It occurs as an outside power where I am the space where other’s power occurs, I’m the reflection of their power.

Being or “playing” different roles often calls forth what you would expect from that role, given your cultural set or world view for what that role entails.  I am many, many different roles throughout the day and each of them are just that, roles.  I wake up as the role of my self, then I notice who I’m next to and I’m the role of husband and as my kids come down the hall I’m the role of father.  When we all get in the car and pick up the other kids I’m a neighbor, a car pool driver, a law abiding citizen, or not depending on how on time I am.

Two roles that I noticed today were my current job role as an Identity and Access Management Infrastructure Engineer Lead and my job role of the future as Independent Organizational Consultant.  Inside of role #1 (current job role) I was also co-worker, employee, client, and customer to name a few.  Who I was being inside of those job roles was not always the possibility of love present and experienced.  I am still on the hook, and mildly excited, to provide the current solution that I’m currently working on.

Being in the position to get something done as co-worker, client, and customer in my current organizational environment left me calling forth some behavior that doesn’t have anything to do with who I am.  Who I am allows space for other people to be magnificent and I get the opportunity to interact with them as the magnificence that they are, which has a timeless essence to it with no constraint on place or time or even result ultimately.  The result is what’s so in the moment, with perhaps a declared result in the future.

Organizations as designed, with the roles they assign to people seem to draw out behaviors that are more in line with the role than with who the human beings are.  In my role as Infrastructure Engineer Lead the behavior that is drawn out is more in line with my “being smart” attribute developed in the spring of the second grade on the grade school parking lot.  This is an automatic way of being cultivated over many years, similar to my already described way of being funny.  While it is useful to be smart and it works well for me, the aftermath often leaves others being less smart than me.  I am expected to have answers, and most of the time I do.  These answers are right.  Other people’s are wrong.

Opinions and knowledge radiate from my being and they spray the less knowledgeable with their fragments and all the while who I am, though not experienced, is loving people.  When you have a vendor from out of town on site who’s only there for a short time and you need to have a system deployed in a short period of time knowing things “seems” to be more useful than allowing space for others magnificence to occur.  If I let that magnificence occur, and I’m not saying it won’t, my deadline appears to be toast.

Much of this, I assert, has more to do with the organization as it’s designed, and the roles that others are in as those roles are designed, than anything to do with the actual people involved.  It’s as if we’re all puppets being controlled by an invisible hand…not from above, but from below where it’s really difficult to notice.

With the training I’ve had in group development, personal development, being with people, Social Constructionism, Appreciative Inquiry, Complex Responsive Process, Intentional Change Theory, Experiential Learning and Emotional and Social Intelligence I know that I can work through the various layers of organization and all the individuals involved to come to a more fluid working state.  I know that we can come up against the same tasks we’re working on and perform them with grace and with ease and with affinity for each other and ultimately with love present and experienced.

Time and space limit one’s ability to impact the immediate past immediately.  I’m three days into this engagement and at least the first phase of it will continue through the middle of April.  Many of the groups I’m currently working with will have done their part (one way or another) and I may not work with them again for a long time.

Toward the end of the day today I began to consider some different ways of being with people, outside of the role that I normally play.  I began to walk around more and communicate more and be present to people more.  Pretty obvious to me as Organizational Consultant…what else is there.  But within role as Systems Engineer Lead, that’s just not the way things get done and it’s not what people expect.  It’s a strong pull to be what’s expected when you’ve been a role as long as I’ve been this role, but making sense of the day through my other role has given me the opportunity to attempt some radical alterations tomorrow.

I’m going to keep turning this role on it’s ear and see what happens.  Maybe I’ll be in that Independent Consultant role sooner rather than later.  Or maybe I’ll start generating some miracles and love will really be present and experienced.  It is all just experiential learning anyway…as long as I’m open to the learning.

With Love,

Ed