Crazy paving?

From my home office desk I am watching a highly skilled team at work. Three builders are laying a flagstone patio. One manoeuvres the heavy slabs of reclaimed stone onto the site until he has sufficient inventory of possible pieces for this large outdoor jig-saw puzzle. Another team member mixes up grey mortar in a drum, sifting and churning his ingredients like cake mixture. The team leader contemplates the size of the problem, ties string levels and makes scratch marks with his toe on the sand 'blinded' base that the team has already levelled. Planning, resources, roles and a vision all begin to come together without unnecessary words being exchanged.

The first great flag goes down. It is carefully 'spotted' on five lumps of the mortar mixture and gently tapped into place with a rubber mallett wielded by the leader with the percussive precision of a conductor's baton. The second flag is selected and slots into place alongside the first in a perfectly balanced and yet asymetrical relationship. These two founding flags will now never be moved - like many projects this first relationship provides the base line and the axis from and around which all the subsequent patterns grow. From here on it is about fitting in and recognising the hierarchy.

The team works smoothly. New flagstones are identifed, cut and chiselled to fit the emerging pattern of regular irregularity. No two flags are identical in their mineral shades or rectangular proportions. Each appears to have a separate history of weathering, traffic wear and load bearing. Nature, nurture and the environment have treated them differently on their path to serve a common purpose. Today there is no one right way of assembling the pieces and many wrong ways of geting them misaligned. In the end the 'right' configuration is simply the final way - the one that looks good to the eye, satisfies the spirit level and feels right underfoot.

And on the team the roles begin to flex and flow. The team leader gives up his baton mallett and wields a chisel, the mortar mixer plans the next two slab sizes and their positioning and the hod carrier becomes the chief catering officer for the all important morning tea ceremony. Over tea the job is admired and critiqued in equal measure, 'Bit too much sand in the grouting, mind how close you get to the wall, remember the rule of three, I told you we'd ordered too much.' Feedback, continuous improvement, learning on the job, accountability.

Back in my office it's time to talk with my team.

The Democracy of the Dark

I enjoy fairly decent eyesight. On occasions a pair of reading glasses comes in handy as a more practical solution than a longer pair of arms. Sometimes my eyes grow tired and itchy after long hours staring at pixels on a screen such as this one. As a facilitator of corporate workshops I always insist on a strong natural light source in the rooms that I choose to work in - it seems to boost both my energy and the concentration span of my participants.

I have been fortunate enough to work under some wondrous natural light conditions during my travels with organisations around the world. I like to conclude my workshops by asking people to look out of and beyond the room where we have been working and turn their eyes and thoughts to what lies ahead. I can remember gazing over the hazy Valley of a Thousand Hills in Zululand, squinting up against the brilliant Alpine glare of the Matterhorn and most recently letting the mind dance in the dappled shadows of a 19th century bricked courtyard in the middle of Singapore.

Until this most recent workshop in Singapore however, I had never facilitated in complete darkness. For although we ended in courtyard light, we had started our journey in pitch darkness under the auspices of a remarkable organisation, 'Dialogue in the Dark'. Many extraordinary people - blind, visually impaired and sighted - have collaborated to create this organisation under the banner of 'Dialogue Social Enterprise' which today offers sightless experiences to the sighted as an integral element in any leadership development programme designed to stretch managers of people. Inside the specially constructed 'black box' environment of a perfectly blacked out seminar room, there is endless room for self-discovery.

My experience left me with some profound reflections on the nature of communication itself and far more possibilities and questions than certainties. As part of my own training to assist in the facilitation of a morning's workshop for twenty-five financial services executives, I had met the lead trainer for Dialogue in the Dark. Blind from the age of six, she has built a formidable portfolio of skills in the business of guiding, instructing, coaching and challenging sighted participants in any of the many exhibitions, workshops and customised experiences that her clients require. She took my arm and began breaking me in, gently in places, to the world and the culture of the dark.

Being led by an able, sympathetic guide is one of the great trust experiences we can give ourselves. Sometimes it's a single, simple act of necessity (like getting into a taxi), sometimes a complicated and fraught series of choices over time (like marriage). With Daniela, it was both simple and complicated at once. I seemed to be experiencing two conflicting responses simultaneously. One the one hand, I felt myself reduced to shuffling, fearful, almost foetal distress while on the other a whole world of open space exploded in my head and forced me to breathe deeply and luxuriously. It reminded me of my first drag of oxygen underwater - that heady mixture of adrenaline-fuelled panic.

Slowly the warm blanket of the darkness begins to take effect. My guide is striding around using her colourful voice to chivvy and tease me into position. The white cane that I have been issued with taps ineffectually in a sort of minesweeping circle around my feet and is soon abandoned as I become more comfortable and attuned. Silence in the dark is both essential and impossible. Switching off the soundtrack in my head for a minute or two, I try to tune into the frequency of my new surroundings. Slowly the static buzz clears and the slight hum of a distant compressor and the tinkling of a nearby air-conditioning unit take its place. Increasingly the trickling, clinking, ticking of my own body makes itself heard. Silence is never silent and never before had it been so full of rich texture for me.

After this period of adjustment, we launched ourselves into a series of problem-solving and team-building exercises. Now I have built rafts to cross rivers real and imaginary on five different continents, constructed any number of unlikely metaphors out of drinking straws and paper clips, jumped and splashed through hoops and under spiderwebs, even dashed across hot coals - all in the name of corporate bonding and the quest for leadership credibility - but always with my eyes wide open and my head swivelling wildly for every visual clue I could get. In the dark, the fingertips, the nose and the fine variations of voice and tone take over. 'Build a railway', 'form a circle' or 'find the missing pieces' become strange and bewildering instructions accompanied by blundering chaos and a rising crescendo of frustrated noise as twenty-five highly experienced project managers, pathfinders, process control engineers and the like all thrash around using the tools and the calls of the sighted in the land of the blind.

And then the noise abates - sometimes naturally hushed out of respect for a new reality, a changed playing field - sometimes quelled by the loudest voice in the room - an agent for change in a perceived time of crisis. Both voices, the 'shusher' and the 'shouter' have the same demand at their core, the same instinctive need to be heard, to be freed to listen, to hear the still quiet voices of reason, logic, humour and warmth that have been temporarily drowned out in the tumult and uncertainty. As a metaphor for what's happening in management teams around the globe today, constructing a true dialogue in the dark takes some beating.

Emerging blinking into the new light of reflection, there is time to think about what a huge part light and the refractive indices of colour play in our whole translation of stimulus into language and back again through experience. Words like 'vision' 'insight' 'blue sky' 'picture' (imagine a corporate workshop without those four staples) all take on a fresh resonance after being rinsed and wrung out in the dark. The very way in which language weaves its fine tapestry with the threads of our five primary senses is profoundly enhanced through even a brief encounter with friendly darkness. The dark takes away but it also gives richly.

And what of leaders returning from the 'black box' experience of encountering some of their own shortcomings and clumsily overplayed strengths in the dark? Speaking for myself, I found myself a few days later at the end of a demanding programme talking about vulnerability, humility, trust and seeing differences in a new light.

Somewhere through the hum of Singapore traffic, I could feel Daniela's light touch on my arm and hear her silvery laughter.

http://365ways.blogspot.com/2008/06/dialogue-in-dark.html
www.dialogue-in-the-dark.com