the presence, purpose, positioning and power of P

CONTENTS: PAGE NOS


INTRODUCTION 2
PRESENCE 9
POWER 16
PURPOSE 23
POSITIONING 35
PROCESSES 45
POLICIES 57
PHARISEES 58
PLAN 63
PRODUCT 65
POWER 67
PENITENCE AND PARDON 69
PRIESTHOOD 73
PROSPERITY 76
POVERTY 77
POLITICS 79
PLEASURE 82
PERSPECTIVE 83
PRAYERFULNESS 85



THE POWER OF ‘P’

May the Power of P be present with you,
as you prepare your purposes with and for others.
May the power of this purpose, position you in new places.
May you discover in these places the best possible pathways
to all your plans and policies.
May the power of P protect you and perfect you in your processes,
partnership and pro-activity.

INTRODUCTION

This is written for people in organisations – in any sector. It is for people who are reflecting on what is going wrong or what could be much better. It is for people on governance boards and for leaders at any level of the organisation, including those ‘managers’ who aspire to make a real difference with their colleagues, to their tasks and teams.

Too often the important difference between leadership and management is drawn too sharply. Leadership is an attitude. Everyone in an organisation has their own leadership responsibilities and opportunities, however small or large the scope of that. Everyone can, and should, develop a leadership attitude.

So these reflections are for those who feel a responsibility for the whole or parts of the whole. They are for those who like making connections and realise that people and their attitudes are formed as much by the workplace as by home or recreation.

Whatever our context, roles and responsibilities and however much those things limit us or change us, we are still the same person looking in different directions, managing often too many pressures at once. The power of P is offered a something of a framework for your reflections in those different roles and responsibilities.

The author writes out of his own experience of working with organisations in all sectors and in the church. The church has too often distanced itself from organisations. Many will find it difficult to see any connection between how the church behaves and what organisations do. The author uses the word spirituality to capture the connection. Spirituality lives just underneath or alongside the skill agenda which is seen as so important for economic development and business success. It operates where soft skills meet hard skills. It includes the fundamental questions of personality, attitude and motivation, confidence and esteem which make for good or less good work experiences. Spirituality lives in the culture of organisations. It is hidden within this culture and its identification and articulation depends on the interest and ability of people who understand what constitutes culture. Spirituality informs and influences culture. It is culture which creates the ethos and orientation of all behaviours. Culture moves and changes as people change within any organisation. When people align themselves to achieve clear purpose and successful outcomes, they behave in ways that in turn determine the culture. Another word for the culture of an organisation is the personality of the organisation, understood in a way that transcends the sum total of individual behaviours as if they were a collection of isolated individuals. Culture is therefore equal to more than the sum of the parts, but is constituted by them.

Leaders in all sectors are increasingly discovering the ‘power of P’ in the spirituality of organisations. They understand that culture affects values and then behaviours. They understand that the cultural change necessary for organisational improvement is about the transformation of hearts and minds. This transformation requires a strategic alignment of the parts of the power of P and a flexibility to work creatively with people in different and often difficult situations. One part of the power of P is the recognition that strategic leadership solutions can only operate through the reality of individual and group personalities and their attitudes, including the problems they bring with them and the problems others in the organisation give them. Real life is not like a trainer’s flip chart. Strategic process is not a predictable Darwinian straight line that automatically takes an organisation from low to high performance. It winds through the reality of many blocks in the external and internal environment and its systems. These blocks are composed of people and their interaction with systems, people who collude with low expectation; people who prefer complexity and avoidance to simplicity and straightforwardness. Why make a simple decision if you can pass it on to a committee process?

Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the culture of the church as a case study, hopefully which will connect to the challenge facing many other organisations as well. The church is in danger of seeing financial and membership decline as the problem when it is just the symptom. Like any other organisation it needs to address underlying strategic issues and take customer value and reactions seriously. Of course, many in the church deny that it is an organisation – but it makes decisions, good or bad, has leadership, good or bad, has buildings and money that are used in ways that are good or bad. It has beliefs and values – but so do most organisations. Like other organisations it has to ask whether its beliefs and values are aligned with its behaviours. Does the choreography and content of the church’s worship and meetings reflect the creativity of its creator, the forgiving and restoring role of its redeemer, and the inspirational, innovative role of its inspirer, the Holy Spirit? If we believe in these things, why is there a gap between belief and behaviour? In other organisations this would be seen as a dysfunctional culture. It is not enough for the church, or any other organisation, to use human sin and fallibility as an excuse. That is not to say that human fallibility is not real and has this effect of creating cultural dysfunction. There are many other examples. Does the welcome shown on a Sunday morning by clergy or church members reflect the very love and care that is preached and taught by the church? It seems that the church’s behaviours fall far short of even the most average standards of any hotel or service industry whose staff have been through a customer service training programme.

It might me that the church has just become lazy and complacent and has forgotten how to ask these questions. Do closed or rarely used grey buildings in the wrong places best express its beliefs and values about abundant life and a God who created and cares for all? Does the present Monday to Friday activity of clergy best illustrate the purpose of the church? Does their absence from most organisations and their apparent lack of interest in the agendas of most peoples working lives express their beliefs and values?

It would be understandable if the answer given by those ‘customers’ outside the church – who are themselves the focus of God’s concern - is a negative one to these and similar questions. If that is the case, the Church needs to get in touch with this perception and understand it better. It needs to get connected again and move from its rather distant and dislocated positioning into the more mainstream life of organisations and communities. Rather than rush into more “ministry and mission” language it needs to show some humility. The question may not be ‘what is it about them - the world, society or organisations – that needs addressing, but what is it about us’? Maybe we should park the word ministry and mission until we are back in touch with the needs and opportunities of society and located there as active players whose contribution can be taken seriously. The church will never learn so long as the paradigm is built around only “what it can do for others” as if it has all the answers to questions that it’s not even listened to. The church needs to build the right bridges of connectivity and take the trouble to walk across them rather than expecting others to come to us. Until the church positions itself in the right places, it will be hard to listen to the voice of God in the lives of people in their organisational and recreational lives. Until it starts training and learning with others the learning it does in isolation will only further isolate it from society.

So what is the way back and how does the church build the bridges? This little book offers a framework – one amongst many - to encourage organisations to ask the right questions. The power of P is offered to any person in any organisation who wants to reflect on what those questions might be. The questions aren’t rocket science and they are being asked by leaders and consultants in many other organisations. We don’t have to look far to learn from them and there is a hunger and a spirituality for learning from these and related questions.

There are many ways of auditing organisational success and of understanding what drives organisational change. In the cultural change agenda of most organisations, what I have called the P words are fundamental. Leadership, entrepreneurship, strategic thinking are all attitudes of heart and mind and we might add soul and will. It is the emotional intelligence of leaders and the spirituality of the organisation that really matters. Without basic shifts in the culture of an organisation – which always means the attitudes of people – there will be little hope of positive benefit and outcomes. There will also be continuing unhappiness, frustration, anger, depression, loss of motivation and energy – all contributing to poor performance and blocks to organisational success. These are the things that need fixing, so any solutions sought and proposed had better reach down to at least that level. Once the vision is lost or buried, wrapped up in an unhelpful bureaucracy; once the energy is dissipated and dispersed in divergent directions; once the synchronicities are separated; once hope is hung out to dry in the winds of negativity; once the human capital of good will, shared concerns and skill development and fulfilment are all used up, then that point is reached when more of the same won’t fix anything.
Attitudes have to affect whole systems in order for solutions to embed themselves in the whole organisation. Therefore of course solutions are systemic and not just attitudinal and relational, but that is where they begin.

The following P questions are offered to help with those attitudinal changes as a basis for transforming the direction and the content of organisational behaviours. I owe a great debt of thanks to Peter Drucker and Richard Beckardht as my teachers for this process but also to the many practitioners in organisations I have worked with as a hospital, university and industrial chaplain, an assistant head of a community school, a board member of various not for profit organisations, a chair of a CVS, a group of homelessness projects, an NHS Trust and a non – executive on a Health Authority.

What then is the power of P? We begun with a spiritual statement about culture. It may not be your spirituality or language. In that case you may like to skip this section and go straight to page……….On the other hand, you might like to scan this section to see where it might take you.

P is above all for the Presence of God.
Where and When? In all things, lest we reduce God to our own narrow and pious projections and images. God present is still God beyond us. The God who is creator of all and therefore in relationship to all things as creator gives up the distance without giving up the difference which religions have labelled ‘holiness...otherness.’ But this holiness lives in the real world. It is practical divinity. It connects. It matters.

So if God is present then we need to challenge language that separates belief from presence; language that reduces presence. It is a dialectic of moving forward and backward, in and out as we learn or don’t learn from our mistakes. Presence is always incarnational. For God that means risk taking, beyond any imaginable impact assessment. The evidence for the extent and nature of the risk is the cross. The cross as the source of our salvation is the risk taking action of God’s presence with us. The tension in that presence is that it moves in our direction away from itself in order to create and support our freedom. This is not play acting freedom. Salvation, wholeness, freedom, justice cannot be imposed from without, at least not by this God and at least not without great harm to individuals. Leaders who seek to find the solution know they have to work with others. They have to inspire and draw out inspiration from others, as well as themselves, using the ideas and actions which will facilitate solutions, wholeness, freedom, justice and success. The freedom that is in the act of creation when the energy of God becomes the other - which is the condition for matter to exist - is the same freedom as the presence of God within creation in the flesh of one who is mortal and fallible like us. However you understand and experience “presence” – whether or not you can find God in this – you know there is something strangely large, sometimes disturbing and usually impressive, about any experience of presence in another person, group or organisation.

So P is for Presence.
In the work place we need to discover and rediscover this presence, in relationships, - for being present for each other depends on a sense of our own presence and what constitutes it in purpose, - so that we do more than drift or exist, but discover our own presence in a purpose that links us outside of ourselves to the things of creation, the people who are significant for us and need our significance for them in the production of products - human goods and services this sense of significance is important. The significance however, can be a negative or positive experience. Creation does not feel the utility of our humanity with its heave footprints and risks of distortion, disorder, disaffection, dislocation and disease. Our purpose is to make a difference. When we hurt and damage ourselves and others we are having an impact or making a difference, albeit a negative one. Developing and changing our sense of purpose can flip a negative impact into a more positive one.

Purpose comes into its own when it is positioned, for we are not ethereal abstract creatures and our freedom is not found there. As we choose where to be and what to do we discover the responsibility, as well as the rights of freedom. Purpose has ethical implications. Purpose has ethical results when positioned in the right or wrong places. Those who believe in the presence of God sense there is a purpose in that presence. They look for it and it is often hard to find. God’s positioning is called the incarnation. The incarnation is God choosing to be somewhere, risking itself to that place and that time. Where? In Bethlehem. When – when Augustus was the Roman Emperor and Qurinius was the political governor of Syria and Joseph and Mary had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to be registered under the new Roman decree.

Positioning is about TIME and PLACE. What do employees in organisations do? What is their job description and how do they turn that into effective actions and results?

What does this mean for the church? Where are clerics Monday-Friday and when? WHERE do they go? WITH WHOM do they work? WHAT are they doing? The thesis here is that unless we are in the right places, we might be doing the right thing, but it will be largely irrelevant to other people. This requires a review of positioning in order to understand Monday-Friday activity for clerics and to build a new way of working. The thesis is that if clergy are absent from where they could and should be present, then no relationships can be built, no ministry can take place, or more bluntly, no Gospel can be heard. If we only have contact with congregations and people related to baptisms, marriages and funerals, we are leaving 80% of the population who spend 80% of their time at work, untouched by the church’s purpose and presence. We need honesty and courage to face these hard questions, in order to construct new ways of working Monday-Friday. The good news is that new positioning and involvements will lead to higher motivation and sense of purpose. The danger is that we look at positioning only in terms of narrow pastoral understandings of the community and miss out on the opportunities to work alongside and within organisations and partnerships in new ways. If this changes, so would the image of the church. It would be seen to be interested in people’s lives in the workplace and the products and services organisations provide in the community

It is interesting to see how other organisations are facing the same challenge. The Chief Constable of South Wales Police, said recently that too many of her buildings were in the wrong place; too many of her staff and their patterns of work were in the wrong place. Cultural change is about managing organisational shift in the direction of customers – their needs, value and contribution. I learnt from my time with Peter Drucker, that providers in organisations view customers from the perspective of the interests of providers. The customer revolution he helped to inspire insists that we start with customers. In the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is asked the question ‘who is my neighbour?’ Nowadays, he might be asked “who is my customer?”. He then tells the story of how the obvious providers in that kind of society didn’t cross the road in the direction of the one in need. Their very roles and rules, attitudes and outlook as providers prevented them from doing so. The one who crosses the road of culture between different providers and those in need happens to be someone of a very different culture. The paradigm shift is that the neighbour is not defined as a person of the same culture, ethnicity, religious background, interests. These things do not define neighbours. The neighbour is the person who responds to need, even if it that means crossing the road which is composed of very legitimate, cultural blocks. The one who acts in response to need is our neighbour, whatever their background. This paradigm is in fact a customer revolution in itself.

In the church, cold calling on individuals and families in their homes is either not happening, or even where it does happen, can lead to a very superficial sense of ministry given that many, if not most families are unlikely to welcome a knock on the door in the afternoon or evening. The difficulties of the visiting model need to be faced and omitted. New ways of constructing the church’s presence need to be created. New positioning and presence will require new attention to purpose and role. We cannot just “visit” organisations and partnerships without exploring the contribution we wish to make. This will challenge us to re-think Christianity in more practical terms, and to develop the skill base of clergy in order to make positive contributions to society. Once we have explored the implications of re-positioning, we will then be clearer about training and CME needs in relation to that skill base.



Therefore,

1. We need to develop a new, clear vision of the church’s purpose.
2. Based on that clarity, the church needs to look at where it needs to be and with whom.
3. Based on that clarity, the church needs to work out what it should be doing Monday to Friday.
4. It needs to recruit, train and support its staff in relationship to those tasks and not some other.
5. It needs to manage the transition with present clergy and aim to change the culture of the church within one or two generations.

Without a clear lead from church leaders on purpose and task how do we know what to train people to do? More theology is a lifelong learning challenge and pleasure, but theology may no longer be the main need at the training level. The main task seems to be that of equipping people with the soft and hard skills needed to be a cleric or lay person in a church of the future where purpose and positioning must be more closely aligned with the needs and realities of society. This should not be understood in the abstract sense, as is often the case in training modules, but in the specifics of particular organisations and partnerships. This sense and perception of abstraction has gone so far that society now uses the word ‘theology’ in colloquial usage as a euphemism for abstraction, distance from reality and irrelevance. That should have been all the warning the church needed to address these issues robustly and creatively. We have certain beliefs, values and skills to offer, but unless we are aware of where people in organisations are, even the best of those beliefs, skills and values will be irrelevant.

Let me take one particular example. Organisations are increasingly looking for mentoring and coaching support. Because the church is so distant from organisations, it would never occur to organisations to approach the church for those particular skills. Many clergy have much to offer in terms of emotional intelligence, empathy, listening and negotiating skills. If we trained clerics to do this, and it was a mainstream part of the Monday-Friday task for clergy, it would be a win/win for the church.

Ø The church would build new relationships and discover new roles within organisations. Its presence would result in higher profile and relevance.
Ø People would see the best of the church close up in ways that change some of the negative stereotypes.
Ø The church would be providing a useful function in society at a level of great pastoral need – people’s home and work related stresses, journeys, and transitions.
Ø On the basis of this we would be naturally able to talk about spirituality and belief and be witnesses to what God is and can be in these situations – this would force us to translate Christianity into these real terms and situations (situational sacramentalism).
Ø There would be a new income stream for the church. Mentoring, coaching and consultancy would be invoiced at proper rates and the income sent to the local diocese. We would therefore benefit from financial growth, as well as new role and purpose.
Ø Clerics would be better able to understand the world of work so that preaching and praying within Christian liturgy would be more likely to build connections with the real lives of congregations and people in communities.
Ø As individuals, clergy would feel less isolated and more called to new purpose in the Monday-Friday task.

Mainstreaming
There would still be a need for a generalist as well as specialist roles Monday-Friday. However, by increasing specialist capacities, the church would be building on the traditional assumptions about clergy expertise and putting them to better use in practice. It should not be assumed that specialist ministry is the task of sector ministry alone. While sector ministry provides a crucial resource for the Church, more needs to be done to mainstream this.

So much for our case study. We now return to more general reflections.

The Power of P
As we have seen, P is above all for the Presence of God or that which is transcendent of our normal categories and experience, and yet hauntingly present within them. Where and When would we expect to find that presence? This is firstly a religious question, but then one that goes far beyond the normal boundaries of religious language and enquiry. ‘Where’ and ‘When’ are linked with ‘What.’

Ø What is it that still evokes a sense of mystery, beyond the genre of the detective story and its resolution by deduction and exclusion?
Ø What is it that enables the extraordinary to be present in the ordinary?
Ø Where and When do each of us experience a presence that transcends, but inhabits the ordinary things of life?

Before even asking for definitions and causes, before religious language imposes its own categories on this presence, we might ask ourselves, when and where do each of us,

Ø encounter an encounter that transforms us or others, sense that the invisible has become visible in ordinary things,
Ø believe that the visible can carry a special and awesome quality of transcendence, meaning or purpose,
Ø discover a dynamic of energy, hopefulness or openness in situations that seemed exhausted, hopeless or closed,

So if we are to talk of presence in organisations, it must be possible to find this presence in situations and things, as well as people – lest we distance God too far from any created reality; lest we reduce God to our own narrow and pious projections and images. The church may talk about sacraments, but who outside the church understands this unless the church gives back to people a wider and more inclusive view of sacraments as accessible in the work place and in relationship to matter per se. Society desperately needs to know that work is a sacrament, not just because of ethics, values and relationship issues, but because all people handle basic things and are involved in their transformation from raw materials to products or services. Even before we address the ethical issues of what should or should not be produced; and should not be consumed, and how, we need to step back and have a longer, deeper look at the profound significance of handling of things as a process in itself which potentially opens up a new understanding of purpose and presence in our lives.

God present is still God beyond us. The God who is creator of all and all things and therefore in relationship to all things as creator, gives up the distance without giving up the difference which religions have labelled ‘holiness...Otherness...’ But this holiness lives in the real world. It is practical divinity. It connects. It matters. It creates matter and matter can be transparent to ever new glimpses of practical divinity, as created things are transformed into human goods and services. The process itself puts us in touch with our basic Purpose and relationship with the Presence that creates us and then meets us in the creativity of purpose and its processes.

So, if God is present then we need to challenge language that separates belief from presence; language that reduces presence to religious areas of life. Knowing Presence is about a way of looking at things from other perspectives. Many have talked about looking more deeply in order to perceive or look through the significance of things to a greater meaning. Others talk about turning aside and looking tangentially with new angles and approaches at the taken for granted in life. The point is the bush burns from within, even if we don’t turn aside to notice it in the desert of our dislocations and preoccupations. It is a real bush that burns, as all life can – for all life can be a sacrament of the presence that is already before us and waits for us to encounter it. Sometimes, to turn aside, from the business of a busy life, we need to glimpse a particular bush that burns from within without being consumed by the power of that burning. Without these special and precious moments in our lives, how will we understand purpose in relationship to things? How will we deepen our own spirituality? How will we make ourselves vulnerable to new learning where that learning takes us far beyond skill and competency acquisition into unexpected places where through a sharing of personal insight, by mentoring or coaching us into new ways of living, thinking, acting, behaving, another person introduces us to the way that a bush can indeed burn? around us?

Presence is always incarnational – it takes on, lives with and in the ordinary, mortal, finite flesh of experience. For God, that involves risk-taking beyond any controllable impact assessment. If this is not the case, there is no freedom and no true creativity in the creating. The evidence for the extent and nature of the risk is the cross. The cross, as the source of our salvation, is the risk taking action of God’s presence with us. The potential power in that presence is that it moves in our direction away from itself, in order to create and support our freedom. This is not play acting freedom. The freedom that is in the act of creation - when the energy of God becomes the Other which is the conditions for matter to exist - is the same freedom as the presence of God within creation in the flesh of one who is mortal and fallible like us. If we needed reminding about the presence within the gift of creation, created by the presence, then we only have to look at its risk taking form in this humanity. This presence gives us clues about purpose. We sense the presence of purpose as well as its functionality. This presence creates our freedom. It creates and it creates freedom. This presence doesn’t break that freedom by its presence. This presence doesn’t force itself on us, on the things we do or on our beliefs.

Science has made considerable progress in understanding the processes of creation, since freeing itself from the worst excesses of religious dogma. Perhaps the enlightenment explosion of interest in how things work could not have taken place without some aspects of religious thought. The formal church, however, made its dogmatic positions perfectly plain as it opposed practically every new question that challenged its pre Copernican assumptions. The Western church invented its own form of thought police to deter and punish anyone bringing new questions to their basic cosmological package. It took literally centuries for that medieval Catholic Church to admit it might have been wrong in opposing the new thinking of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kant, Hume and many others. The first crucial step to new learning is at the humble sense that presence has more to teach us than we have yet understood. It is alongside this great truth that dogma uncertainly are problems as they easily lead to their own kind of epistemological fundamentalisms.

Science, of course, produced its own dogmas – as anyone who faced the British positivists and other empiricists would know. Yes, the test of falsifiability is important, but no, science can proceed to new hypotheses beyond the present stages of empirical proof. It took some time for e=mc2 to be empirically verified. However, as a step change in our understanding and the framework in its own right for new learning, and as a prompt for new explorations, this was a crucial stage in our learning. Now, in different modern and post modern times, theology and the particle physicists, cosmologists and philosophers can talk to each other, without the inquisition and without narrow dogmatism on either side. At least it would be good to think this is the case, but the dramatic rise in creationist dogmas in parts of Christian fundamentalism in America reminds us of the attractions and dangers of that approach. It is hard to believe that the writers of the creation accounts in Genesis ever intended to shut down future learning and thinking. In fact, we know from their use of Mesopotamian sources and particularly the new inclusive spirit of Persian tolerance which followed the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish priestly writers that as witnessed by the internal evidence within the texts, that this is not the case.

For those who don’t believe and those who do, there is still the question – “who or what detonated the big bang?” What are the primal forces of energy that make possible the conditions for life? What is the source of the energy that gives sub particles and waves their force and life? What is the ‘nothing’ out of which energy appears? We may never know the answer to such questions, but as we approximate to them, then the insights of theology and science can speak to each other. If Christians see God as Love and not limited by space and time, then perhaps it is Love that detonates the energy in the big bang and what follows. The Energy is the Longing of love for the Other to exist, even if existence requires its own autonomy and freedom which Love’s energy longs to create with all its distance, difference and diversity. It is from within that diversity, implicit in the dynamic energy of love, that the diversity of human experience emerges with all the possibility and perhaps inevitability of division and divergence which follows. It is within the diversity of human ingenuity that organisations are formed as social constructs for the expression of human energy – an energy that may partly reflect the love which created it, but may also mar and distort its image and mask its presence.

It is within those organisations and the functioning and flourishing of people within them, that presence is to be found. In the work place we need to discover and rediscover this Presence, in relationships, - for being present for and with each other links us with the self giving of this Presence. It also depends on a sense of our own presence and what creates and constitutes it in so much self giving freedom,

Ø in purpose, - so that we do more than drift or exist; we discover our own Presence in a purpose that links us outside of ourselves to the things of creation and to the people who are significant for our lives and may need our significance for their own lives,
Ø in the production of human aesthetics and utility - human goods and services, without which creation does not feel the presence of our humanity with its light and heavy footprints and the constant risks of distortion, disorder, disaffection, dislocation and disease, as well as their opposites.
Ø in positioning - for we are not ethereal, abstract creatures and our freedom is not found outside of the limits of a particular time and place with all their cultural conditioning. We are born of a mother and father on a particular date and in a particular place, with all the genetic and physiological implications of that. Such conditions do not dictate everything; growing up brings our own understanding of their influence and their limits. Later, as we choose where to be and what to do, we discover the responsibility as well as the rights of freedom. Above all we touch the incarnation which chooses to be a presence somewhere and risks itself to that place and that time in order to be present everywhere, for all time.

SO P IS FOR PRESENCE AND FOR PURPOSE

P is for Purpose
Knowing my purpose, envisioning it and working it out links me to the result of my work. ‘I think therefore I am,’ said Descartes – My purpose is to think. Thinking reflecting, analysing reviewing produces its own sense of identity and purpose. My being produces thoughts and because of that I know that I exist.

Ø What is our purpose?
Ø What is our end?
Ø What ends shall we use in order to achieve that end?
Ø What do we want to be different because of us?

These are the personal and organisational questions that remain important to us, whether at work or in sport and recreation, or in our personal and domestic lives.

What am I about – what is important to me?
What do I hope to contribute to people around me,

Ø to the opportunity given at work and elsewhere,
Ø the unmet need,
Ø the state of society,
Ø the atmosphere and relationships around me,
Ø the leadership opportunities at all levels,
Ø the task of producing different kinds of products
Ø and producing them well?

On the top of Holyrood in Edinburgh the actor Ian Charleson, playing the Scottish runner Eric Liddell, the film ‘Chariots of fire’ said, ‘God has made me and he has made me fast.’ What we do is what we are. We are always more than what we do at any one time, because much remains to be done and discovered. This is what theology calls teleology. This is the meeting point between aspiration and limits, hope and achievements, dreams and details. I or my organisation, my department, my class, my family, my school, my business, my government department, need to be in touch with telos or Purpose. It is more than process. It needs processes – human, systemic, technological, industrial, political, economic, managerial, financial, legal, artistic and creative in order to turn ideas into actions and actions into personal and social benefit. Somewhere in the process, Purpose gets lost or developed, hindered or helped, blocked or opened up, stuck or revised.

Purpose links us to the future, whereas some processes tie us to the Present. The linking of that present with a better future is the place where Purpose language and intention operate, for better or worse. Becoming self aware and articulate about Purpose is therefore one-way of unlocking the doors of the Present to move into the room of the future. There is nothing certain about what we shall find in that room, but we can decide which door to open and when. The door might be large or small, old or new, easy or hard to open and these things are too often set for us, before we even arrive at the place. But the point comes when we have to accept responsibility for making choices within a particular given situation.

Being in touch with Purpose sets our face in a certain direction or directions, it focuses our attention, demands courage and skills and changes or fixes our attitudes. Purpose is about attitude and attitude transformed into commitment. Purpose demands that we commit ourselves. We put ourselves in the picture knowing there is a complicated chemistry involved which may lead to explosive and unforeseen results or outcomes. We may think we are a catalyst only to discover we are the compound which ruins the experiment.
The risk we take with purpose is not only that we choose

Ø the wrong door,
Ø or the wrong time to open the right door,
Ø or the wrong people with whom to enter the room,
Ø or the inappropriate set of skills and mindsets to enter that particular room at that particular time.

It is that until we open the door and enter the room we will never quite be sure, whatever our preparation, research, training, personal development, what it will be and feel like inside;

Ø whether we will meet strangers or friends there;
Ø whether the exits we had seen on the blueprint still exist;
Ø whether the view from the windows is as clear as we hoped.

Even the predicted shape and size of the room may feel different from the inside.

The risk is that we commit ourselves to movement from here to there, with a particular hope and intention in mind. The risk is that this exposes us in our state of readiness or unreadiness, our levels of commitment, our spiritual and emotional capital.

Ø We may have used up far too much spiritual capital in surviving, developing or living with the subsidence in other rooms or being lost in the corridors to take on this next challenge.
Ø We may, once in the room, have to live with the fact that we took the wrong door.
Ø We may have to turn about and quietly retreat or flee in terror.
Ø We may be asked to leave by a present occupant.
Ø We may find ourselves having to stay with an occupant who makes us feel uncomfortable and with whom we are bound to disagree.
Ø We may enter the room and suddenly find ourselves very alone, wishing we had others to share the burdens or travel the onward journey with us.

Identifying, knowing, accepting and developing, committing to and sharing - Purpose is a very long, spiritual journey indeed.

If Purpose is teleological it will help us trace the lines between what we have been and where we have been and where we are now going in order to become something new, for Purpose brings a new context and context usually changes us.

We may think purpose and its articulation is our way of changing others or the world, but mostly it is us that will change if we are to respond to the calling of Purpose. Purpose is about ends. Teleology is about where we are going and the ways we travel in order to move in that direction. Ends are about means and outputs. The end rushes to us even as we construct it in our minds and our behaviours. As we put in place the building blocks of our own visions, we discover new Purpose for our work, hardly dreamt of before. As we seek and live the grand design we discover that the architectural drawing has to be revised several times. Experts will be needed for the detail, but someone has to shape the overall coherence and direction, the feel and the look of the enterprise – all of this is the point of Purpose.

To be purposeful is to live Purpose in such a way that the detail done by others can be aligned in its technical utility. Purpose lives off the experience, gifts, competencies, attitudes and skills of human learning and agency. We care about the end – about quality, about values, about benefit to others as well as ourselves – for selfish Purpose, of itself, will only bring selfish and short term gains. Such gains crumble to dust in our hands very quickly. To build solid, long term houses of Purpose on such disappearing, shifting sand will be impossible. The Purpose that works and works well is rarely as small as our own narrow self image and interests – Purpose puts us in touch with others. Purpose stretches us beyond our normal limits. The purpose that is mechanical and neutral is rarely as rich as our personal dreams.

Adam Smith’s vision of individual self interest saw it as contributing purpose to the wider common good, as if by an ‘invisible hand.’ His book the ‘Wealth of Nations’ written in 1776 depended on the assumptions he set out earlier as professor of philosophy at Glasgow University in his work ‘The moral sentiments.’ He took for granted that society had the right infrastructure and culture as a context for individual self interest. We can no longer make that assumption. We have to discover how individual interests can be part of a larger purpose which aligns itself unintentionally or intentionally with the common good. We may want to call this “mutually enlightened self interest”, but Adam Smith genuinely thought there was something in the functioning of market exchanges which guaranteed that an individual’s role and contribution contributed invisibly and indirectly to the benefit of the whole – presumably both positively and negatively. Can we take his assumptions about culture and infrastructure for granted – if we could, then 24 hour licensing to benefit individual drinkers would not harm the common good, because individuals would not behave like binge drinkers behave. If the ‘moral sentiments’ of the culture do not produce, encourage and support positive individual behaviours, then individual self interests can be very dangerous and destructive.

Adam Smith was influenced by Mandeville’s image of the beehive. Of course, human beings act out levels of self awareness and cultural formation that are hugely more sophisticated than bees. But, there, in the activity of the bee hive he saw individuals contributing to the larger common good through the total of their individual efforts. Whether or not bees psychologically know the altruistic consequences of their activities, is, of course, both unknowable and unlikely. That may have been Adam Smith’s point – even without knowing the direct, let alone indirect consequences of individual self interest, such actions can contribute to a wider purpose or as we might justifiably say undermines it.

So, while every organisation needs to be clear about purpose it must recognise that purpose is also intensely personal to each person within that organisation or society as a whole. For each person there is a need to find a hologram of purposes. There may well be an overall sense of purpose which holds everything else together – that would be a spiritual purpose indeed. There may just be glimpses of partial purpose which get us out of bed one day but leave us feeling lost and hopeless the next. Purpose can attach itself to ordinary activity if we bring a new commitment, ambition or positive attitude to it. We can transform daily chores by fitting them into a picture of greater purpose. If we can see what we do every day – in the ordinary tasks - some connection with something larger, then we can feel ourselves as players again, acting with purpose, fitting into the bigger jig saw puzzle. It’s not so much the size or scale of our purpose, but the sense that it fits somewhere. It does contribute. It enables me to feel in touch with something worthwhile again. It connects me to something more worthwhile than my own life lived in isolation either from creation and things, or people and organisations. Once this happens I will be in touch with the presence that is there in the Purpose of creation itself – at least if we believe that Purpose was the Purpose of love’s longing for the other to exist.

In reality, we need more than one Purpose to engage our humanity and earth it in the rich soil of human flourishing. When I worked with homelessness centres, I saw what lost Purpose did to competent, able, precious people. Without Purpose to hang on to, we spiral downwards into lost places of pity and poverty of spirit. This hurts. It disorientates and destroys our souls. Conversely, I saw marvels worked in the mystery of individual lives, as small engagements in ordinary activities -the rituals and chores of daily living brought back a sense of Purpose and connectedness. As people who had been institutionalised in care for years learnt how to shop, add up, read, wash, cook I saw daily growth and a physical change. The human body can be lit up from within, like the burning bush, by the energy that purpose gives, but that light needs nourishing. It needs others

Ø to give real support at the right times
Ø to find simple ways to show a person who is lost, that indeed they do matter and that tomorrow it can get better
Ø to give practical help which demonstrates human affection and caring.
Ø to facilitate a sense of confidence.
Ø to give the responses which reinforce self worth and esteem.
Ø to encourage and lighten, to challenge and demonstrate that it can get better
Ø to see all this as part of an integrated not a dualistic spirituality.

As people learn to live without drugs or sometimes with them, as people learn to accept their limits and discover a potential hidden within those limits, then growth happens, the face smiles and the back straightens, Body and soul come together again (though they were never really apart). People with dependencies and addictions – and which of us hasn’t some form of these things – learn that a Purpose in life, however small and specific can bring a new perspective. Purpose puts us in touch with other people again. Other people have different views and if we watch and learn, we see how the world can look differently from different angles. We construct out picture of the world by trusting or learning from these site lines. We build block by block. There is no other way of living in a temple of fulfilment, or rising above our situation to get a better view.

I have found that we need more than one Purpose to enjoy life. We need a rhythm and change of Purposes that help us to cope with good and bad days at work, good and bad days in our primal relationships, good and bad days with our health and sense of wellbeing. We need to find a Purpose at work, if our job description or line manager or responsibilities don’t do that for us.

Ø We may have a great job which demands many of our skills, but find ourselves in a terrible situation surrounded by stupidity, bureaucracy, pettiness, jealousy, gossip, abuse, misunderstandings, isolation, lack of recognition, taken for grantedness. Too many people are in this situation and it should make us all angry enough to be determined to transform it.

Ø We may be in a wonderful relational situation, at ease with our colleagues and surrounding by friends, but in a role that is soul destroying and harmful to our inner self. There are hugely important ethical issues facing us not only in the processes we use but about the products we make. Such ethical questions don’t only affect the consumers of products, but also the producers. There are some things we should consume and use differently. There are some things that we should use differently.

We are lucky if the chemistry of the workplace works for all of us in all ways at all times. Maybe we should no expect this, but learn to cope with the times when it doesn’t. However, there is no excuse for the

Ø waste of human spirit at work,
Ø the undermining and undervaluing,
Ø the blocks to innovation and creativity
Ø the appalling lack of valuing and communication that happens.

It is all down to the people who make up the personality of the organisation; their decisions and style. Purpose is about people. Organisational success is about people and the way they treat other people. Ideally role, responsibility, type of product and its ethics, the processes that deliver it and the people around us, all contribute positively to our sense of purpose at work. For far too many, work is only bearable because of the pay packet at the end of the day, the weekend and the holidays. At least 80% of people spend 80% of their lives in the workplace. We’d better get it right. We had better aspire to make it even better. While we depend on the organisation - or rather the people who make it up - to be clear about purpose and communicate it well, we need also to depend upon ourselves. We need to feel that work sets a purpose to our lives – probably more so than we usually acknowledge. We also need to ensure that life is not totally filled with that purpose. There need to be other purposes – at home, in the wide world, with lovers, spouses, partners, children, parents, friends, sports and leisure interests.

A purpose, however small, in any of these areas, can bring greater balance and joy to living. There is still however one thing missing. We need the purpose that a cause will bring to the chemistry of our lives. A busy job and a full home life leave little time for anything else, except a bit of TV, the occasional sporting interest and a hobby or two. Each of these things contribute rich layers of purpose to our lives, but something is missing without that cause – that passion to do something for others, however small, however rarely. It might be to take on something for a neighbour in trouble, using our listening skills, our DIY skills, or just our friendliness with them. There are too many lonely and isolated people locked into their own view of the world, their own personal space, their fear of failure and exposure to others, Being there for people takes many different forms and brings its own rewards. Volunteering in the UK is still at levels beyond our imagining. No one will ever count the true figures or know the quality of caring involved in the quantity of activity.

There is yet something more - to help someone else brings purpose to a human life – our own. Altruism has its own rewards and reasons. There is no point in denying or not celebrating how much giving gives to the giver. This purpose in our life can be one of the most transforming of all. When I worked with hard to reach children and teenagers in a community school – children that police and parents had given up on, we discovered that the best therapy was not more course work, lessons, lectures, penalties, punishments, threats, pleas, tricks, but to give them a responsibility for others. Miracles followed. People discovered purpose. They could do something for someone else. I say unashamedly that this new sense of purpose transformed them and their perspective on life. We all know how dangerous it can be if our motive is to do good to others. We have to check out whether our own agenda is preventing benefit to others. That said, it is time to accept the good we do for ourselves, once we embrace a purpose which moves us away from ourselves in the direction of the needs of others. Of course a risk averse, litigation-mad, culture, reduces the opportunities for this and we have to be careful and responsible, without reducing the value of trust. But the greatest risk of all is to trust someone to learn from discovering their own purpose in life – a purpose which is greater than their own wants and needs, their own locked in lifestyle choices.

I have mentored people in many different situations. I have helped retired people see that there must be more purpose than just the home situation. Interests, domestic responsibilities and causes are a good combination. Unless we feel passionate about human need and nourish, in small or larger ways, our own capacity to do something about something that needs changing, we will never have known what larger purpose is really like.

People have sought to know the beginning and the end of purpose through the study of philosophy, psychology, politics and the arts. I believe that spirituality holds all these searches together. Purpose is hard to find, because it is not an object waiting at the end of a journey but a process that takes us on that journey. Purpose will give the journey a clear direction – that is its main function, but then it will unveil more of itself in the travelling and discovering. There are many questions that remain -

Ø Is partial purpose, with all its pluralisms of choice, our only route to ultimate purpose?
Ø Is ultimate purpose an ideal abstraction, a religious vision, that can only be glimpsed and approached via penultimate and partial forms of purpose?
Ø Who is to say what is partial or choose between different pluralisms?

We can only see through the eyes we have been given or seek to borrow the eyes of others to learn from their experience. Maybe the act of looking from here to there, from somewhere to anywhere is part of the purpose. So we glimpse it in our different glances and seek it in our separate searches. Yet there remains purpose enough for all, even when the maps are hard to decipher or partially damaged.

Having, discovering and rediscovering a sense of purpose puts us back in touch with who we are. It helps us to

Ø feel connected again with society, people and things, relationships, activity, tasks and projects
Ø be in touch with basic drives to achieve something– a deep longing to be someone, to have a sense of worth and to contribute value
Ø know more about our own strengths and skills
Ø to face the frustrations and blocks, the failures and limits of our lives and seek their transformation and the source of transcendence
Ø to know more about who we are, where we fit, what we can do and when
Ø to feel we are earthed and located in relationship to creation around us and creativity within us.

A sense of purpose is a deeply spiritual thing and all spirituality needs to find its place and positioning.

So, P is for Purpose and Positioning

P is for Positioning
P is for positioning. The sense of purpose is part of our spirituality and it starts from within – but it cannot stay there. It longs to burst its banks. It longs to incarnate itself within activity and in relationship to things. Purpose that is not acted out in reality is spiritual death. Locked within our visions or imaginations, it cannot do anything except grow into frustration, disappointment and ultimately its opposite – a lack of purpose with all the low morale and torture that are its sisters.
For purpose to find itself, express itself, be itself, it needs to be located. It needs earthing into practicality. If purpose is a divinely inspired thing, then its divine longings need a praxis. Positioning is the first and crucial stage of this practical divinity. All of us are involved in positioning throughout our lives – we do it intentionally and unintentionally. Personal self awareness is partly about identifying and understanding our internal and external positioning and then discovering how the two influence each other, for better or for worse.

Positioning is where I will be and when I will be in order to allow purpose to touch and speak to others as well as myself. In the searching for it, I will discover new ways to be part of it - for myself and for others. Being part of it enables me to reach out with vision and determination to construct and reconstruct purpose in my words and actions; to find it in others; to explore together how to translate ideas into words and words into actions, so that purpose may take on meaning in the reality of incarnation - of purpose embedded in place. Without positioning, purpose hangs in the air, beyond our grasp, like something on too high a shelf. If we cannot reach it, how will others ever see it, let alone taste it and see how good it is, handle it and feel its weight, play with it to discover innovative ways of using it? If purpose is the engine of our vision, then the train it pulls with it needs positioning and aligning behind it.

Positioning lines up those famous ducks - me, it, others, them, us, globally and locally within organisations, within bits of organisations and between organisations and wider community and society. Complexity of detail can only be assimilated within some kind of framework, however flexible its boundaries might be. Alignment is our response to the purpose behind the positioning and positioning has to encounter, recognise and deal with the diversity and divisions of real life. Positioning links the thought and desires I have as an isolated individual and that which is greater and more complicated than me in the public space. It places me on the plaza for others to spot, where I can sit down on real earth and taste the coffee.

Where am I meant to be? Where - here or there? When - now or later? Place is itself moving in our perception of it,

Ø as our values and expectations change,
Ø as our needs and wants change,
Ø as our relationships change,
Ø as our skills develop,
Ø as our attitudes mature.

As we discover things about ourselves we had forgotten or buried, so we can be inspired not only to find the place and know it for the first time, but to find what it means to be in a place, a role, a position, a responsibility. What it really means to inhabit it, for a short or longer time – we only get one chance within the one chance that is our life, to inhabit one place at one time. To live as if there is connection; as if we own the place we inhabit, as if we fill it with our own humanity. Without this inhabiting, being with, being there to fill the space, it will be empty and the earth less rich a place.

How we fill it will have consequences - it will affect how much that place is enriched or destroyed.

Ø how heavy or light our footprint on it is will affect its sustainability
Ø how creative we are will influence its shape
Ø how skilled we are will fashion its changing beauty
Ø how competent we are will change its utility
Ø how caring we are will change its feeling and look.

This is our spiritual inheritance tax and succession planning. What and how we invest now will already influence tomorrow.

Where and when then, are the focal points of positioning and most of us need to look at the map of the world for a long time, before we find the time and place for our purpose. This is a perceptual map. It is a map of our attitudes, experience, mistakes, hopes, successes, understandings, contacts and connections. It is about possibilities and perceptions rather than simple geography. The geography of our perceptions and hopes is a spiritual geography. That is why most of us need help and advice, support and encouragement in order to navigate in those deep waters. That is why positioning for organisations requires the best of strategic leadership, financial and market sense, personal wisdom, courage and advice, innovation and entrepreneurship, team working and collaboration.

That is why positioning for our personal lives requires the best of friends, mentors and coaches – people to stay with us

Ø when we take the wrong turn, as we certainly will;
Ø when we look backwards rather than forwards, seduced by the false certainties of the past or fearful of being haunted by the ghosts of the past;
Ø when we can’t see through the fog of fear and dare not take the entrepreneurial first steps, to risk ourselves on the next stage of the journey.

The spiritual map and its contours is both organisational and personal. In organisations, the strategic leadership challenge to position an organisation in the right place and in the right direction, in relation to the wider customer and market map, is always based on personal maps. In our personal lives the wisdom and courage needed to fix ourselves and our direction in relation to purpose, to needs and opportunities, needs to be overlaid on the real world of organisations which form and boundary our knowledge, aspirations, skills and choices. They are where we live most of our relational lives. They are where we give back what we have learnt and learn from the giving.

Discovering and articulating Purpose is, for most situations, both therapy and healing. It maps our personality and its potential. It integrates our experience, skills and knowledge. It is the harbinger of hope and the treasury of blessings, hidden within the map of our life on this earth. It is accessible to all. It can be sensed and touched in the menial task and its organisational management. It is a living source of strength that heals many diseases – not just within us but in organisations where melancholy and depression infect the systems and processes of production and spread their viruses of low morale and undervaluing.

We need many different maps for different days and different people and different occasions. Spiritually these maps are more than two dimensional. They can be laid out for our examination, learning and decision making, as if on a table before us. In reality they are porous, one melting and moulding itself into the other. They are multi dimensional. They are holograms of the past, present and future. They locate us on the wider map of human and social complexity.

Purpose longs to map itself in practical situations – to locate itself in place and time. If Purpose is of God and seen in all creation, as the place and time of practical divinity, then our calling is to position purpose and discover its challenges and potential in that positioning.

Time and place matter to presence and purpose. We cannot be everywhere. We learn to accept our mortality, finitude and particularity. There is much we have not chosen, so our choices have to accept their limits within that given context – place of birth, language, parenting skills, early peer group influence, schooling. Our purpose cannot be all things to all people because we cannot be where all people are. Few of us influence the whole world, though the smallest action ripples out and cascades through time to touch other places. The size and significance of the action is important but its purpose and positioning matter more.

We must be open, in a quantum world, to the possibility that place isn’t always what it seems.

Perhaps it is less fixed and dense that we thought - made up of waves as well as particles of meaning. In a post Newtonian world we need a new spirituality, less fixed and dogmatic than even Copernicus would have dreamt of. No wonder the solidity of religious certainty repels many, even as it attracts the few. We need all kinds of emotional, relational and intellectual knowledge in order to understand the spiritual map of the universe and our part in it. But openness and inclusion still have their edges and limits on the map. We are not made of philosophical ether. Our particularity consists of particles as well as waves – and they bump into each other and die, perhaps creating new bozones of possibility and energy as they do so. Perhaps the energy will always be limited by the gravitons, however. We may live in multiverses of ubiquitous big bangs, within us and without, but we are what we see in the mirror of time and place. The place is limited and time is short, so positioning is important and we had better take it seriously if purpose is not to dissipate itself in nightmares and dreams of what could or should have been.

Ø Where are you now?
Ø What are you going to do today?
Ø Why and with whom?
Ø How?
Ø Where and When?

These are the questions that channel our teleology and turn the imagination into a business plan. Take time with each question but don’t get stuck there in separate silos.

You are where you are – and that is also significant for who you are. On the map of the future, that is not a bad place to start, even though hindsight might whisper its disappointment and learning later. You are ‘who’ you are, though little of that may be understood, because of where you have come from. Now, what are you going to do today? With whom, why – for whose benefit and interest?

These could be the questions for a pilgrimage or retreat, but the hoovering needs doing, the children taking to school, the job is waiting with customers, suppliers, bosses and employees wanting to know how well you will do for them today. As you map your day, accept the value of the next small step. Get the small job done and do it well for quality outlasts time and place and turns particularity into something more important. Learn how to distinguish the important from the urgent and don’t let the urgent freeze you into a statue of stress as you chase its shimmering backwards glances.

Position your company and your values where they need to be so that all the managing of detail that will follow this leadership decision will be managing of the right detail for the right purpose. The detail is what we do in the daily task of straightening out the map on the table. The detail can dominate our view and so engross us in the present that we prevent ourselves from seeing that we are in the wrong place. It is no good hovering if you are in the wrong house. It is no good driving children through the terrible traffic to the wrong school. Know which house, school and calling is the right one and then carry on with the tasks that have to be done there in order to get the job done. There is only so much energy in even the best of purposes. We need to spend it in the right place for the right reasons and at the right time, with the right people. Easily said!

But, in real life, it is hardly ever like this. We rely on fate or luck, hoping that randomness and chaos will one day have their meaning and sense will be seen. Sometimes positioning of place needs the perspective of time, advice, training, mentoring, or friendly persuasion. So the map of positioning is about the other conditions of purpose – perspective, persuasion, potential, possibilities, personality, policies and processes that facilitate positioning for the right end.

There is, then, in any organisation and personal life both strategic positioning and operational positioning.

The former is long term and large scale, holistic and inclusive – it sets the context for the parts and produces the processes to manage the parts; it will ensure the overall package and purpose are right and will be strategic about the whole, rather than the parts.

The latter is short term and detailed – it will focus on particulars in order to get completion on each; it will plan for the parts with time, place and processes articulated for each.

Both need each other. Purpose cannot be incarnated in reality with any hope of fulfilment and success without attention to both. The leader knows her task and the manager his. There is an important distinction to be drawn between strategic leadership and operational management, but the literature on this subject sometimes overlooks the reality that all people can be leaders within their field and role. This seems as true generally as in organisations. Whatever your role, others depend on your actions and decision. When you take a decision you take responsibility and leadership is about just that. Leadership then is an attitude and it applies everywhere within an organisation and in every person. This is spiritual leadership.
Some organisations and some families are organised in such a way as to remove that sense of responsibility from some individuals. Some chose to block leadership in others out of fear, lack of trust, insecurity, jealousy, or ignorance and prejudice. In the Hollywood films the myth of the individual messiah battling against all the odds is very persuasive but in reality we need each other and affect each other. We need to create leadership opportunities for others and then give them the right training and support. We need to foster and nourish that sense of responsibility without which life is all ‘rights’ based and dependency culture. That is far too prevalent with devastating personal and social cost.

The way out is to take responsibility for those parts of the map you can and should be responsible for. The leader with the formal responsibility for placing and positioning the whole is not responsible for your part in a particular place on the map, but the knowledge that you are both on the same and the right map is useful and motivating. Taking responsibility for your own positioning is the first spiritual step in the journey around and across the map. It will be obvious from the beginning that the map involves the roles of others. So, the individualisation of positioning which at first seems enough or the dominant model will never work for the good of the whole. Tearing the map up into little bits will only mean that the picture and purpose disappear. Maps can be put back together again – the fractures and tears will always show but sometimes cannot be avoided and can teach their own lessons.

When I sit with a blank canvas, my acrylics by my side, there are infinite choices before me. Whatever the picture forming in my head, as soon as one stroke of the brush touches the empty space, I have reduced some choices and opened up others – unexpected. When I cut into wood to shape something, I destroy one integrity to discover others. Every time I change my positioning in relationship to the time and place of a particular thing, I take aesthetic, moral, economic, political, organisational responsibility for something – this is of the essence of spirituality. I touch or shape something and open up an encounter with new possibilities. I make a decision and it frames the next. It also changes the choices if first thought of. It comes to me as I approach it – decision, canvas, block of wood, departmental structure, organisational future. Positioning becomes a mutuality within its own often surprising pluralisms of possibility. Positioning is an encounter and therefore touches its own holiness, for all encounter is potentially transparent to relationship with the Other who is present in all the others of our experience. Mutuality is the encounter with the holy in the other, even when it is most challenging and inconvenient. Our neighbour, the customer, the stranger comes to us asking us to position ourselves purposefully in relationship to him/her/it. As Martin Buber asserted even the encounters with ‘its’ can be a holy experience.

Positioning is about choice and articulation of choice. Some choices are made for us; some we share in; some we decide for ourselves in the agony and joy of deciding and living with that decision. There is no such thing as an empty canvas or a perfectly untouched piece of wood. There is always history and culture. Experience has already shaped what lies before us on the map. Our intervention in the positioning chosen is a responsibility we can not avoid. We can make it better or worse, but there is little room to pretend the positioning doesn’t take place. Better to articulate intention and role if the intervention is happening already. Better to be clear and learn from the difficulties of clarification. Better to accept that we will make mistakes and know that sometimes it is out of the wrong brush stroke, the slipped chisel cut, the silly decision that we are forced to rethink the whole and counter the mistakes by moving in a new direction. I have never painted a picture or sculpted wood or stone without having to constantly revise the shape in the detailed plan. The purpose remains the same and the hope and vision are still present in the activity. The end result may be different – no usually is different from the idea at the beginning. Positioning may well change the details of the plan if not the purpose. Positioning engages us with the reality of something – we put the pain on the canvas, the chisel into the hardwood, the money gets spent, staff are employed or sacked, job descriptions changed and new products commissioned. The purpose itself may not be completely safe but the ship still has to be strategically steered in the right direction. The purpose itself may be adjusted in the light of positioning and in turn inspire or command a new location on the map.
So P is for purpose and for positioning. It also requires processes to make things happen.

P is for Processes
Purpose positioned in the particular reality of time and place requires process to be created or developed. Without processes people will not know and cannot shape what is happening. The right process enables me to take purpose or a bit of purpose and place it in the right place so that others may contribute to its development, flourishing and nourishment. Process makes clear the positioning and that clarity helps alignment with Purpose.

Without care and attention, processes will dry up into the sand or bump against the hard, rock like places which entomb it in old categories of thought and ineffective actions. Without care and purpose processes are meaningless or harmful - they take on a life and power of their own which normally dominates and stultifies human flourishing and transformation. Processes become prisons and the sign on the door is regulation, rules, rituals, reasons, reactions. What then will open the doors of the prison and enable processes to become servants not slaves, to liberate rather than imprison purpose, to open horizons rather than limit them, to show people the way rather than hide it? Processes can be glass or concrete walls. They can hide or reveal, they can be escalators that speed us through the long corridors of place and positioning or they can be a labyrinth of confusion that exhausts us. They can lighten our load or increase it. They can be weights that drown us or boats that help us ride the waves of our situation. They can be platforms for take-off or steps down into the dungeons of despair and dissolution.

Processes are steps up, rather than down, enabling us to approach the true kingdom of values where people feel encouraged and affirmed, supported and respected. Any rule or regulation that does the opposite should simply be removed. We must live as if there is goodness in people, even if we have to manage for the risk and the cost of being let down. We mustn't put heavy chains round the willing and motivated majority for the sake of the small minority who will let us down. Good management refuses to dumb down to the lowest possible common denominator. It assumes the best in order to role model aspirational attitudes. Check this out with those small processes and procedures. Do they raise the bar or lower it? Do they inspire you to greater responsibility or lock you into your individual and isolating rights?

Leaders encourage management processes to be liberating and affirming. Leaders speak of entrepreneurship and innovation as the processes that will make something happen and make a difference as they lighten the burdens of every day chores and tasks. Leaders long to lift the weights off people’s backs. Leaders long to reduce the weight of regulation so that process will place people closer to purpose.

The Blairite government in 2005 committed itself to reducing those unnecessary administrative burdens of red tape around processes which are causing so many problems for businesses and organisations. They set up “The Best Regulation Executive Commission”. P is also for Paradox. The paradox is, that in order to reduce processes, another process is often established with the risk of creating more bureaucracy. The CBI and the IOD and other organisations have consistently called for the minimum of regulations to maintain basic protections. Belgium even has a Minister for Administrative Simplification! The task is to avoid policies and processes becoming more prescriptive at a time when leadership language is looking for entrepreneurial behaviours. If leadership is an attitude which can express itself positively at every level in organisations, not just in the formal status of leadership roles at the top of an organisation – then processes may be the problem. This is notoriously true in the middle management role where the best intentions of the governance board or chief executive to bring effective change is often met by a great willingness by front delivery staff but blocked by middle management processes.

Processes that only spawn an accumulating complexity of further processes and policies harm organisations and individuals within them. There is no blueprint for balance. There is no universally agreed single point on a scale with maximum and minimum processes at its extremes. Some sectors or sections within sectors prefer more or less process culture. Some people, in some public and voluntary sector organisations, are paid to spend their lives going to meetings about processes and policies. They are professionals in process production. Other organisations could benefit from more processes or greater clarities and equity in making it work. In personal lives we have very few conscious policies or processes. We certainly have hopes, values and beliefs, and we certainly try to modify our behaviour to fit both with our own self-image and cultural pressures around us. This is a complicated and changing dynamic through our lives. Some academics might argue the more self aware we are about transactional processes within and between individuals the more “successful” our relationships and communications will be. This is surely right and therefore a justification in itself for organisations to invest in personal development. In fact, as we have seen in most organisations, it is the soft skills of personal development that really matter and make a difference. This is the new bottom line in organisations. Without a sophisticated investment in personal development and personal behaviours, the traditional bottom line of finance will suffer.

Organisations need to be far more proactive about the new spiritual bottom line. Far too many display all the symptoms of pain and discomfort in this area and it should be a cause of great concern in society that so many people find the work experience a place of abuse, undermining, de-skilling, under valuing and frustration. Human flourishing, in organisations and elsewhere, depends upon the quality of valuing we invest in other people. Strangely, as the Christian church has always declared, the greatest virtue for bottom line success is to focus on the Other and to invest in the value of the Other. By putting the Other first we stand a better chance of creating an environment for positive, personal development and transforming transactions which poison the processes between people in the workplace. These include the lack of forgiveness and trust that seems so prevalent in many organisations. Indeed, too many regulations are an exact reflection of this.

As an Assistant Head of a Community School we refused to introduce regulations to deal with the small proportion of our 200 staff who might exploit or poison our organisational philosophy and culture. We refused to penalise the majority for the sake of minority and so took management decisions which were realistic about the cost of our risk taking policy to restrict processes in this way. We prioritised our policy making, plans and processes around those for whom trust and valuing was enough in itself to motivate those people and to ensure excellence. Believing that trust frees people to be themselves and to be their best can be the bottom line that changes performance. It has its costs and will be exploited, but that belief and the values and behaviours which follow, really do liberate people to best performance. There is then a direct and dynamic relationship between the beliefs, values and behaviours of trust and personal and company performance.

We live in a society where too many will exploit trust and nothing can be taken for granted. We need rules and regulations in order to ensure that we all drive on the left hand side of the road at a sensible speed and stop at red lights. Rules, of course, are made for “the guidance of the wide and the obedience of the foolish”. The problem is that the wise and the foolish live in the same mixed up kind of society and we have to devise a universal framework which applies to everyone. Those, therefore, that would naturally slow down in built up areas near children or schools are penalised by the 30 mile limit regulatory society. As the EU and our own government have produced ever new levels of regulation in order to universalise protection of individuals and their rights as well as enhance the common good, we seem to have somehow produced a society where the small percentage who are likely to exploit trust are now dictating the culture for the rest rather than the other way around. We desperately need to flick the coin and turn negative regulations into positive ones. If society held more reward occasions celebrating good behaviour, perhaps it would need fewer prescriptions of bad behaviour. Again, Christianity is realistic about human nature and takes very seriously the cost to society of those who turn to harming others – perhaps because of their own vulnerabilities or victim-hood in the past. What society finds difficult is to find a way of filling its ‘protection’ concerns with positive processes rather than negative ones. This applies not only to issues of regulation. There is also the delicate task of finding the right level of intervention to protect people from terrorist action by shutting down terrorist ideas and words without undermining the civil liberties of the liberal democracy which terrorists seek to destroy.

It is important for every part of society, every family and organisation to find a way of protecting itself by the use of positive values rather than merely negative ones or regulatory prohibitions. There will always be a place for the latter, without which it is hard to see how imperfect people in imperfect communities and societies could every function. Without flipping the coin, more often than not, in the direction of positive encouragements rather that negative proscriptions, people in communities and organisations will never learn to trust each other and the value of trust as the great motivator of positive behaviours. At the heart of the trust question lie our own personal beliefs about ourselves and other people, shaped by good or bad experiences. Too many bad experiences simply shuts down our trust, except of course in the saints of our times. We certainly need more of those – people who can go on believing the best in ways that are not naïve about human behaviour, but committed to encourage the best in even the most difficult people and situations. If the people who lead our organisations and communities – from politicians to CEOs, as well as the people who parent us and influence us - are those who have overwhelmingly experienced nothing but the worst in human behaviour, then we will end up with values and cultures which chose regulation rather than trust as the dominant paradigm. We should thank God for those who have the emotional and spiritual intelligence and capital to go on trusting and turning trust into organisational behaviours which inspire trust in others. If we pause to think of the people who have done that for us – it is hard of course to know what we have done for others and we may never know – then we will know how much we owe them. As we reflect on this and look at the organisation we spend most of our time in, or the part of it that influences us most, is this what we notice, day by day?

Ø BELIEF

Ø IN THE GOODNESS AND POTENTIAL OF PEOPLE

Ø IN CREATING STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES THAT ENCOURAGE THAT GOODNESS AND POTENTIAL

Ø THAT TRUST IS THE CULTURE WHICH REDUCES RULES AND REGULATIONS AND INCREASES PERFORMANCE

Ø THAT EACH ORGANISATION – INTENTIONALLY OR UNINTENTIONALLY – PRODUCES BELIEFS, VALUES AND BEHAVIOURS SOMEWHERE ALONG THE FOLLOWING CONTINUUM AND CAN CHOSE TO CHANGE THAT POSITIONING BY CHANGING ITS PROCESSES AND POLICIES

TRUST-------------------------------------------------------------- REGULATION


Processes are needed before an organisation enters into crisis. For example, good governance will at least provide some measure of protection against financial insecurity, volatility and lost direction. Clarity about good governance will establish and then protect certain processes, e.g. the importance of good line management support between the chair of the organisation and the chief executive which sets the tone and style for the chief exec’s behaviours with the people he or she line manages. Bypassing well-established processes only creates problems further on, if not immediately. As auditors and regulators will tell you, many financial disasters can be traced back to governance and other processes that have been poorly attended to, established or executed.

Therefore, processes are for our protection. P is also for protection. Following both scandals and recent reports, from Enron to Nolan, Higgs and beyond, the important of good governance is increasingly being recognised. Good means both effective and also responsible. The governance of any organisation, small or large, is responsible for ensuring strategic direction, clear purpose, viability and high performance. Although these are long term concerns, they have to be translated by the executive of an organisation into actuality through different kinds of policies and processes. It is interesting that in The Independent Commission’s work on standards of public governance, chaired by Sir Alan Langlands, the first benchmark in the toolkit for auditing governance is that of purpose. The second is outcomes. In other words, according to that independent commission, every governance body, in whatever sector, of whatever shape, should address issues of purpose as the no 1 priority. Thereafter, of course, it comes down to policies and processes. As we have seen, the alignment of policies and processes in order to deliver effective purpose for the sake of achieving successful performance, is crucial. Such alignment and clarity needs protecting from the natural tendency in too many managers, or governance members, to avoid the real issue, to make simple clarities unnecessary complex and to avoid facing up to reality or making clear decisions which resolve issues and bring things out in the open. I have been a member of various boards as a chair person or non-executive director, including a health trust, a health authority, a large charity with limited company status by guarantee, of homelessness projects, a council for voluntary service, common purpose advisory board, a large, unsuccessful, not for profit social enterprise providing domiciliary care across the central south coast of England. In all these cases, without exception, progress is made when there is proper protection of the right processes and policies. Too often, people are afraid to speak clearly at board meetings and whisper in corridors behind the scenes. Too often, people have not thought through the right strategy for a company’s success and resort to short term operational matters as a distraction. Too often, there is a reluctance of people to grasp the large issues, especially where they involve large amounts of money, whereas they will more happily grasp the small specific which really aren’t governance issues at all. Too often, in the public sector, real decisions about changing culture and performance are avoided or buried in more and more paper and policies based on reviewing the past. Policies are meant not only to protect people from avoiding the real issues, however hard they might be because of the relational issues involved, but to be a framework for clear decision making on the right issues at the right time. So protection should not always be seen as implying avoidance. Without a growing understanding in the 20th century of the importance of public safety issues and the protection of individuals and their rights from practices which exploit, manipulate, oppress or undermine people, we would now be living in a poorer society. From late 19th century public health acts onwards, we have benefited from legislation which protects individuals from the bureaucratic or exploitative behaviours of organisations. Ironically, of course, such legislation brings its own bureaucracies in application, if not in intent or policy crafting. As we have noted elsewhere, one of the challenges for the future is to ensure protection without duplicating processes and policies which only frustrate. Frustration also leads to avoidance and pettiness or disrepute. Regulatory regimes which seem only to fulfil the letter of the law in a tick boxing way, and which only increase the paperwork of many in organisations, small or large, but particularly the former, will lead to such reactions.

These processes are also for enabling and empowering an organisation in such ways that individuals find fulfilment within it. They are the pathways that purpose requires. These pathways are both for take-off and for landing. They are the lights which shine in the dark or the fog of organisational complexity. They are lights that lead the way out of the maze in the dark. They can be the soil from which innovation and creativity springs. They provide the solidity without which many struggles would become futile or dangerous.

Processes enable entrepreneurs to look at risk assessment and measure risk impact. They are good servants and tools but bad masters. When processes become less than pathways to development, growth and success they can be very damaging indeed. Processes are not an end in themselves and should not be allowed the dominant place in the ethos of an organisation. Process creators and monitors make poor leaders. Process creators need to trust reality checkers who test processes to destruction if not themselves to distraction!

In stereotypical terms - often different from reality - the private sector would see the public sector as far too bound by and focused on process production. Processes, and the regulation that go with processes, can often limit creativity and prevent anything actually being done. A good process which lays out a pathway built on experience and knowledge will channel and facilitate effective actions for positive result.

Part of the present debate about regulation in EU or other countries is focused on what level and kind of process is appropriate to organisations in our different member state cultures. As EU regulations apparently multiply themselves, they also give birth to new levels and layers of administrative procedures which can even hinder the very process they are meant to serve. While everyone should defend the importance of health and safety and other forms of compliance which protect individuals and organisations from their own worst excesses and mistakes, no one should defend the distorting and disproportionate amount of red tape which often accompanies such processes. Processes should focus on being positive rather than negative – encouraging the way to do things rather than preventing the action happening.

Before my daughter went to primary school she was a free-spirited, creative person. I like to think that we have given her sensible limits and boundaries, but I could be very wrong. Within a week of primary school her dominant phrase become “am I allowed?” Her life had suddenly become boundaried by this phrase so that anything we would normally have thought of doing with enjoyment, pleasure, fulfilment, learning, creativity and spontaneity in mind, would now be prefaced by a process driving culture in her head, created by the rules and regulations of presumably her teacher and her school environment. The point is that schools, like all organisations, need processes because they have to deal with the responsibility of people’s lives and protect those lives from the risks that accompany peer group and individual behaviours. It took my daughter some time, however, to recover from – and perhaps in one sense she never has - the constrictions of those processes on the innate creativity and spontaneity that made up her personality.

In the interaction between people as individuals within and outside of organisations, there are also processes. Internal processes, as in the case of my daughter, can be affected by and affect organisational processes. It would be a mistake to ascribe all organisational behaviour in terms of the personality of the individuals in that organisation because clearly, organisations are more than this in terms of their own tradition and established culture and developing and changing culture and values.

Ø Consider for a moment what processes you think are essential in your organisation.

Ø Test those against particular experiences and case studies where they have enabled personal development, organisational success.

Ø Now list those which have been in your judgement unnecessary and have been blocks to development and success.

Ø Now stand back from your own personal perspective to look at the organisation’s needs and try and make a judgement between the two.

Ø Having done all of this, you might like to reflect on your own story and try to see where you have managed to deal with difficult processes in your own life; where you have contributed to them being useful or where you have made them increasingly negative experiences for others, if not for yourself.

How much of this do we need and rely upon for our own personal protection and security, and how much hinders that? The story, of course, would go right back to the early years and the culture set by your parents, peer group, friends and eventually, early schooling.

P is also for POLICIES
Establishing appropriate process is how policy gets translated into practice. To be ‘fit for purpose’ an organisation needs the right policies and processes. Policies without process will fall into disuse, dysfunction or discredit by default. Process should therefore be designed and aligned to deliver the content of beliefs and values into behaviours and actions which benefit people and the production and distribution of products. Processes enable wealth to be created and distributed. The wealth and well-being of individuals within organisations and outside them in communities is more than just financial viability, stability or growth. It includes intellectual and emotional growth. It includes culture and values.

Policies are the way to secure some level of cohesion and consistency around human processes. They are the way by which we turn credal statements or beliefs into lives lived in society generally, in groups and organisations. They are the link between beliefs and actions, between words and deeds, between beliefs, values and behaviours. They are our way of seeking to protect and communicate values and beliefs. They are the culture of an organisation in written form. But they should be made for us and not us for them as the Sabbath was made for man and not the other way round. If we get this paradigm the wrong way round we get everything wrong.

Policies incarnate processes into procedures that are either helping or hindering purpose. Policies shape, facilitate, nourish, enhance and contain the beliefs and values around the tasks of production. Policies can also regulate and dictate processes in ways that reduce creativity, innovation and effectiveness.

P is for PHARISEES
A good case study is to look at the Pharisees in the New Testament. Yes, a strange choice for today until we look at their behaviours – at least in Matthew’s record of how Jesus saw them and reacted to them. Then this P comes alive as a real warning to organisations today. This P is surely something the regulators should pay attention to. Strangely, from Christians, there has been very little connection made between Jesus’ comments here and the things being said by many, not just in the business community, about regulations.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the Lord; justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting these others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!…..

Woe to you, scribes, for you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside you are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisees! You first clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean!….. You are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness”

Of course, Matthew was particularly critical of the Pharisees and perhaps something in his own background. The words quoted point out the hypocrisy of those who pay attention to detail but lose a sense of perspective or priority for what really matters. The point is not that all the rule makers in contemporary society are hypocrites, the point that we want to make here is not that contemporary lawmakers in the civil service labyrinths of various government and local authority departments are hypocrites in the way the Pharisees were, but there is a connection between contemporary concerns about the mechanistic rituals of tick boxing – which are probably used to regulate behaviour or monitor performance, but are either constructed or administered in a way as to firstly miss the really important things, perhaps by blocking attention on them, of create a culture which reduces risk taking and produces more bureaucracy based on the correct administration of the details.

Before you dismiss the Pharisees, notice they were the best of policy and process producers in history. They would have a ball in the heart of many large organisations. Every organisation needs their skills but not their dominance. They knew that the only way to protect something was to protect it with regulations. They had a code or a law for everything, small and large. Faced with a real situation they could quote such codes. If there wasn’t a code to hand, they would write a new one to cover the situation next time. The detail became more and more finessed. It wasn’t just what you could eat or when you should eat it, but how you cooked what you ate. It wasn’t just how you cooked, but where you cooked and with whom and at what time of day and using what kind of utensils. Out of a legitimate concern to get things right, they produced more detail to underpin and protect the detail. Eventually the ‘doing of the right thing ‘ was replaced by the doing of the right detail, whether or not it was the right thing that was being done. All perspective on the latter was lost. Perspective slippage happens easily but slowly in ways that those close to it cannot always see.

So trapped in their own obedience to the detail they ended up saying that a person shouldn’t walk across a field on a Sabbath to heal a sick person, because walking was work and you shouldn’t work on a Sabbath. By their own lists of criteria they were of course right. In order to make the Sabbath holy they wanted to list all the activities which might distract from that both practically and ontologically. In making and living by the list and ticking only the boxes within the list, they eventually lost sight of everything else that mattered. They had elevated their box ticking regulations to a level higher than doing the right thing and lost the perspective to chose between breaking the law and healing someone in need. No – one should ever doubt their sincerity or search for perfection in this task. Before we mock, we might notice how easily we trap ourselves within too narrow a regulatory box and loose perspective on the wider world where human flexibility, opportunity and responsibility to do the right thing may all take place within a much larger and open ended box.

Time after time they tried to trap Jesus. Why? Because he was doing the right thing, whether or not he followed all the procedural, regulatory and legal detail. To do the right thing he often had to break the law and demonstrate in powerful ways that the law was to serve a greater purpose not its own. He rose above the traps that detailed regulations set, in order to do the right thing. He lived the perspective that enabled him to see through and break through the codes. He stepped out of the maze, the labyrinth, knowing that once in its seductive and tight patterns nothing else would qualify for living faithfully and effectively except obeying the rules. I suspect Jesus would be just as unpopular now as then for living like this and doing things this way. The irony is that Jesus himself saw the values of rules and the law right up to the point that they became idolatrous, fetishistic, dehumanising, stultifying, life denying. Ultimately if rules, policies and processes are the only criteria for living or for performance in living then we all fail and all are hypocrites unless they accept not only others failures but their own. Rule makers rarely do that.

In organisations do not need extensive policies to drive their decisions and behaviours, language and actions, culture can function in ways that create informal if not formal policies. Look out, then, for language! Notice when there is a shift in the key phrases used, particularly from the top of an organisation. It only takes one or two shifts in language paradigms used or announced by a chief executive to result in significant changes taking place throughout the organisation. In NHS, new language from think tanks and policy advisers create new policies, which in turn create new language at conferences, in documents, memos and announcements, when then are implemented locally. When we talk about leadership in an organisation we often mean not just the role of leadership as an agency for change in terms of actions but also language.

A leader is one who will say the unthinkable as well as do the unexpected. A leader is one who faced with alternatives will make a decision and take responsibility for that decision in order to get a job done better. Often this takes place against the traditions of an organisation, including its language as well as its actions. A wise leader will listen to the views of others, their voices, their language. A wise leader knows that she has to find the right language in order to respond and change the thinking of people around her. The ancients understood that the Word or the logos was constitutive of human reality and had divine significance. Whether this word came from an oracle, an oral tradition, a text, a prophetic utterance, or in the case of Christian belief was part of the divine wisdom itself, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. What better description could there be of the way in which new language embeds itself in organisations and in ways that lead to organisational and individual change. The Word is more than the word of command expecting obedience. Words persuade, conjure, stimulate imagination, communicate enthusiasm, gain and offer support, shift perspective and attitudes. Leadership in any organisation uses a range of insights, imagination and intuition to affect change. Too often reengineering and structural change is seen as the panacea for better performance. New powers, policies or processes alone will do little without this leadership ability to convince by inspiring new attitudes of creativity and commitment. Ultimately leadership is a spiritual task in this sense and there is a spirituality involved in all processes and policies. Without it, they will be dry and mechanistic. Without new spirituality inspiring – literally breathing new life – into organisations they will remain a dry skeleton of structures and rules which will give little hope of effective change or better performance. (see Ezekiel 37. In this and other passages in the Old Testament the one word ruach stood for three English words – breath, life and spirit) These things require cultural engagement at the deeper personal level of our emotional intelligence, not just our skills and competencies. P is for processes and policies and the personality or culture of the organisation on which they depend for organic growth.

P is for PLAN.
One of the criticisms of Government and parts of the public sector is that they never get beyond policies and policies need plans to turn them into effective results. Professionals in education and health have had enough of changing political policies from on high. They long to be given their space for local governance. They long to be treated with respect by politicians.

Before ideas ever get to the stage of plans, a project initiation document is sometimes produced, at least in the public sector. This enables some broad scoping of the issues before proposals are turned into plans. It is inevitable that a project initiation document reflects the complexity of real life. It is crucial that after this complexity a plan focuses an organisation, a team or individual, on what is really important. Plans therefore prioritise actions. Good leaders and managers know how to plan well – for the long term as well as the short term. The technology for planning has improved in ways that make the processes more dynamic, inter reactive and responsive – not least with new software.

There are various models and metaphors for planning. From the mathematical and architectural, through to the process planners who gave us timeframes and action plans. Any meeting or series of meetings which doesn’t end up with a plan is perhaps contributing to a growth in self-awareness and education or improved information and network sharing, and these are valuable in their own right. However, planning channel those things into effective next stages for the sake of other people’s benefit, either in the organisation or outside of it. Good planning therefore helps develop an idea or purpose and the purpose behind an idea into actions which can be agreed, owned, communicated and implemented. By contrast, planning processes can also take on a culture which seems to develop in parallel to, or divergent from, the tasks that need to be done to make a difference. Managing and planning for social result is the key. Social here can be understood in the broader sense as being relational and for colleagues, customers or others. A government’s plans will affect the whole of society. An individual’s work plan might affect just their own performance directly, but that very efficiency and performance will have implications for others. In thinking about planning, individuals might want to ask the following questions:

1. What is the purpose behind this plan?
2. Has that purpose been clarified in terms of outcomes and outputs, as well as inputs?
3. Who are the customers or beneficiaries of the plan?
4. Who are the main collaborators?
5. To whom do certain things need to be delegated down or up in an organisation?
6. How does this plan deliver the governance priorities for the organisation or group?
7. Is this plan really necessary?
8. Can this plan be related to existing plans or policies? Does it enhance them or undermine them?
9. What kind of unanticipated as well as expected consequences will flow from this plan’s implementation?
10.Who needs to know?
11.By when?
12.How?

P is also for PRODUCT
For some product will come first, but here it is, simply because all that has been said applies whatever the product – spiritual, educational, cultural, physical, or service. The product is not insignificant; it is of divine significance. It is the thing we research, produce, finance, develop, package and distribute so that human life will be richer and better, so that human wellbeing will increase, so that the earth will be full of the glory of God, shining through ordinary things. The product is the agency behind as well as the goods or service, shining with the transformation that consumes the burning bush, but doesn't destroy it. The product is the result of purpose positioning, processes policy and plan coming alive and pointing in the same direction and working together as one. The product asks its own questions of us and these are ethical and moral questions on the surface but underneath deeply spiritual ones. No product is spiritual if the processes used to produce it are exploitative or injustice. No product is spiritual if it harms or decreases those who make or use it. No product is spiritual if it destroys human life. No product is spiritual if the processes used to produce it are harmful to creation itself or to local communities or employees.

Of course, we are always in transition - mostly we have to go via the way of risks and failure and that means that no product or process is perfect, however fine the purpose behind it. Early medicine lost as many lives as it saved. Drug testing can still miss things. The bureaucracies that govern such testing can be so slow that lives are lost. Early innovations and technology polluted our planet. This is a hard call. If we are purists we demand that nothing is produced or done that may harm us and yet the aspirin that heals us also has its side affects. We live in a compromised world, because it is full of our humanity. That is no reason to be stuck in fatalism or complacency. We need to see the good as sometimes the best we can do as well as being the enemy of the best. We need to strive for higher and better purpose, processes, positioning and product. That is the purpose of innovation and entrepreneurship. That is why we exist. We exist to co-operate in God’s process of creation and transformation whose centre and sign is the human face of Jesus. Everything we are and do creates its own kind of result or product. The way we care about this reflects the way we care about our neighbours wellbeing. The neighbour can be many things but is always the customer of our own products, production processes and productivity. The neighbour can be close or far, friend or stranger. The processes of production and productivity are sources of concern for the neighbour. Customer care really matters and we are all customers of each other in this higher sense of being good neighbours. In organisations our colleagues are customers of our carefulness, the quality of our processes and production over little or larger things. These are our internal customers. Externally, the customer is everywhere – from suppliers and competitors to purchasers and consumers. We have effects on others that we are ignorant of and these can be for the good or the bad. Therefore we had better pay more attention to the quality of what we produce and the processes used so that those neighbours far away who are customers in the most indirect kind of way – perhaps even in future generations – get the best deal from us and for them.

P is also for POWER.
The paradox of power is that when it is given away it increases. Yes, but the question is how to give it away so that as many as possible benefit and particular individuals flourish as they see the need to become more responsible and innovative. Delegation can be an irresponsible, un-thought out, trendy and lazy act. On the other hand, no leader can manage without it. No team can be built without it. No depth and reach of ownership and motivation can be achieved without it. One of the reasons why there are leaders in the sense of people in charge of a team, a business, a project is to ensure that power is given away appropriately and in line with purpose and positioning. In Christian thought Jesus is the act by which God pushes God's role and power in the direction of others.

In an ironic sense you need to have a leader with power in order that power can be delegated or given to others. If it is not given then often it will be taken, fought over and disputed - all part of the disease that affects too many organisations. Leaders that hold on to power or deprive others of appropriate authority and responsibility are threatened, blind, stupid, jealous, insecure and unwise people. They are spiritually immature and their emotional intelligence is low. They should never have been appointed to the post or have been given early mentoring and line management. This is not so much a training issue - people can't easily be trained out of such attitudes - but more a question of personality and attitude. The language we use betrays and expresses our attitude. Letting go and giving up are attitudes and actions of reluctance. Giving power and empowering imply positive affirmation of the other and the recognition that the other benefits from the responsibility assigned. Amazingly some companies have taken customer focus and value so seriously that they affirm customer and supplier leadership roles in decision-making and innovation. Roles that have been traditionally held by the leader are thus carried out not only by employees but by customers and suppliers. If you are a brain surgeon you don't ask your patient to do the operation but you do engage in a partnership with their own abilities to 'manage' their illness - their personal approach to what the surgeon does and their responsibility for being positive and motivated to hasten recovery and healing are very significant roles indeed.

I led a study visit of the Derby City Partnership to the USA, looking at cities, regeneration and partnerships in Baltimore, Washington and New York. I arranged for Richard Beckhardt to do a master class for the group in a Chinese restaurant in New York. He told a very personal story to illustrate his own approach to leadership which has been so influential in the academic and practitioner world. He was captain of a bomber plane that was shot down in the Philippines during the second world war. They crash landed in a swampy marsh land area on one of the islands. He immediately appointed his rear gunner to lead them out of the situation. This person was only 18 years old, but came from Mississippi and was used to such terrain. The point is twofold.

1. Use the leadership skills of those in the team
2. Make sure you have a leader who can recognise affirm and use these skills to the full. This looks like giving up your own leadership role to enable the leadership of others – but in fact it is a fulfilment of your leadership role to do so. For Christians this is a brilliant illustration of the meaning of the incarnation.

P is for PENITENCE and PARDON.
There are less pious words for these very personal things. In organisations people need forgiveness and reassurance, restoration, reconciliation, renewal. In organisations, people hurt and harm each other through the whole range of human propensities to knowingly and unknowingly do or say the wrong thing as well as not doing the good they should do. Religion has put all of this in its own box with its own language and rituals – literally in the case of the Catholic church. The church has given the impression that penitence and pardon are private matters when in fact they usually involve the whole person in relation to other people in the complex networks of relationships to be found at work and outside of it. The Gospels of Jesus brought their own unique teachings and examples on the reality of how to heal the hurt and harm that we humans so easily do. In many ways the Jesus of the gospels moves a long way from the box of religion and its mechanistic tick boxing approach to commandments and the failure to keep them. At the heart of these commandments was something quite precious. The commandment writers were concerned to cover all bases in order to keep the community ethos safe from the attitudes, actions and words that broke it apart. They based this on the belief that God’s righteousness and holiness was to be replicated in the real issues of personal and community life. The problem was that one commandment led to another in order to cover all the bases. Such a process led to the production of 90 plus detailed laws and even they were not enough. Jesus broke the complexity of a highly regulated view of righteousness. He seemed to be saying, as many say now – the spirit of the law is as important as the letter of the law. Regulations only accumulate and are of themselves not protection against individuals who fall out with other individuals. However many charters and value statements we put up on the walls of our organisations; however many directives the EU produces; however many laws are produced by governments – what seems to be really important is the changing of hearts and minds. Even if all the laws in the world protected human rights and made us a more responsible society, what do we do when people break them. We put in place deterrents and punishments. In some Islamic societies Sharia law would have us cut off the hands of the thief. In other societies the prisons are full to overcrowding and still we don’t know how to restore and rehabilitate in order to change behaviour and reduce the harm we do to each other.

In organisations, it would not be surprising to find that this is also true. Organisations operate like small societies – they need their rules and regulations for behaviour. Too much management and leadership speak assume positive linear development. If we only did ‘a’ then ‘be’ will follow. If we get the right strategy we can change operational delivery. If we reduce regulations we can achieve more entrepreneurial innovation. If we separated leadership off from management then we would have better leaders. The reality is that all of this and much more is of high value and does help to restructure and motivate positive change. But it rarely takes seriously enough the reality of human behaviours. We do so easily allow our humanity to get in the way of the bet visions and plans, processes and performance. Usually, as in most human relationships it is the really small things that go wrong. Of course there are the greater tragedies of war and violence, abuse and neglect. In the organisation on a daily basis there are literally hundreds of subtle and less subtle ways by which we frustrate each other and put unnecessary blocks in the way of human flourishing let alone the successful and effective performance of tasks and processes. The rules seem to be –

Ø if we can make something more complicated why bother to keep it simple.
Ø If we can undermine initiatives by layering on committee processes to postpone clarities why make a decision now
Ø If we can turn effectiveness into the organisational task of either watching paint dry or scraping blancmange off the wall, why not act in this way in order to avoid good quality, risk taking simplicity
Ø If we can bring someone down by gossiping about their human failing, especially when they are successful, then let’s form a network of alliances to do it,
Ø If we can perpetuate the negative myths of a team or company, lets do it rather than celebrate success and positive achievements,
Ø If we can project our own inadequacies or fears onto others, that’s a far better place for them to end up than on our own desk
Ø If we can prosper our own career by putting others down, colluding with unfair rumours, impressions and profiles then that is the way forward,
Ø If we can avoid employing someone better than ourselves, the organisation can only gain,
Ø If we don’t like someone the best thing to do is avoid helping them and store up as many grudges as possible rather than sort it out,
Ø If there is something difficult in our personal relationships with others far better to let it fester than to seek resolution and move on,
Ø If we can get the kudos for the contact, the successful event, the team result far better do that then let the truth be known about how many people contributed to our project,

Given the chance, each of us could tell the exhausting and debilitating stories of how we and others in organisations hurt and harm on a daily basis. Jealousy and envy, hubris, anger, small minded pettiness, lack of imagination or empathy, stubbornness, fears and threats, exploitations and abuses stalk the corridors of any organisation. Most of these things come from our own needs and failings and are compounded in those awkward feelings of half accepted guilt and confusion that make up our complicated psyches. The point is that all of us do it to a lesser or greater extent and all of us need help to break the vicious circles we lock ourselves into. Here is the tragedy. The church has spent two thousand years trying to understand how to turn the vicious circle into a virtuous one. It has produced books that would fill libraries on the subject. Clergy have preached and taught most of their ministries on the subject. At the centre is a Jesus who brings new life and hope through inspirational and creative acts of forgiveness and restoration of human relationships. And yet – all these treasures have been locked up within an increasingly the self referential language and culture of the church. The very gift that was given for the life of the whole world and therefore for organisations has been hijacked by those responsible for its transmission and turned into something for its own members. Worse the church is now seen to be a more judgmental organisation than its founder. It acts as if it put conditions on grace that remind us of the traps in the Old religion Jesus came to transform. It is almost as if we would prefer to be Pharisees and scribes with all their sophisticate expertise in setting out the very religious regulations that lock people up in the prisons of their situation rather than open the doors for them. No wonder it is others and not the clergy who now work with organisations on the realities of forgiveness and freedom, healing and restoration, and coaching people into a new sense of responsible decision making and mentoring people in to better human relationships.

P is for PRIESTHOOD
If P is for the power of all these things, in organisations as well as life generally, then imagine if P was also for priesthood. Imagine if it became the priestly task in organisations for all people to feel a responsibility for the power and presence of P in the purpose, positioning, processes and products of life. Imagine if all people could rediscover their priesthood in taking their particular responsibilities for these things. This is not a proposal for the priesthood of all believers, though they have a crucial role to play. This is not a proposal for more priests, as we see them now in the clerical role. This is not about something separate but something integrated. Not something on the edge, but at the centre of life, of organisational life. This would be a priesthood that gave back to people a picture of their greater importance in relationship to the purposes, processes, products and positing of organisations. The power of P would be seen as having sacramental significance, touched by and delivering a sacramental task. Such priesthood would help us rediscover the grace and gifts of life, within which human personality can create and contribute to community wealth and wellbeing – in all its richness – based on the basic material facts of creation and creativity. We are here to do something with the world around us. This ‘doing’ needs to be thought out, developed, reviewed and re-tuned from time to time. There is no doubt that we have impact on those around us. Too many people deny, avoid or never realise this truth. Too may suicides draw only negative conclusions about the nature and quality of their lives in this sense. Too much depression is caused by a low self esteem and learned helplessness built on the assumption that our lives are worthless and of no value or interest to anyone but ourselves – and then not even that. Too many people have lost any sense of self worth. I have seen young children say to the police or in the cour4ts, to teachers and social workers. ‘I don’t care. Do what you like to me – you can’t make it any worse. I no longer care.’ When most experiences have been or felt abusive, negative, judgmental and my own sense of self is built on failure and frustration, then who indeed can do anything to make matters worse.

A sense of role and of impact is central to the human purpose. Within this world, we inherit responsibilities from parenting to producing things. We are responsible for the decisions we make, for the relationships we develop, for the things we produce and the way we produce them. We are responsible for the breaking of bread in the company of life which is the place of transformation for all the complexity of creation from raw materials to human utility and aesthetics for the greater service of the common good, as well as our own personal and social development. The presence of the power of P requires each of us to know and develop our priestly task. We are here

Ø to take of what we have received and what is around us – opportunities, relationships and things
Ø to treat these things with seriousness and gratitude,
Ø to perceive in them the potential for holiness and wholeness and goodness for ourselves and for others
Ø to offer them up to the great common good
Ø to transform them into new forms of human goods through the combination of complex human agency
Ø to ensure that what has been created is distributed in ways that help not hinder and harm our humanity and the creation it depends on.

We are all both producers and consumers of some thing. We produce in order to create the wealth and wellbeing which can be distributed. We may all be involved in that distribution process without realising it – that is the nature of the webbed and networked world we live in.
The symbiotic relationship between production and distribution is the very purpose of politics, not least through taxation policies but other legislation as well.

We produce in order to contribute to the good life. We consume in order to participate in that good life. Producing, distributing, sharing and consuming all contribute to human pleasure. All are part of what Christians call Eucharist. There in the bread and wine on the altar we (should) acknowledge their prehistory in wheat and grapes, in research and development, in financing and management, production, distribution, retail and consumption. Here, on the altar, is the point where the second person of the trinity - as the agent of creation - meets the second person of the trinity, who is the redeemer and restorer of our humanity in creation. This is a truth, Christians believe, for all people and all creation and not just an isolated religious part of it. The church increasingly looks and behaves like a cult, separate from the ordinary things of production, distribution and consumption. In fact this is a fundamental distortion and corruption of its nature. Its very nature and purpose is found in Eucharist and that points the church always beyond itself and encompasses the good things of life.

P is for PROSPERITY.
Prosperity is good for poor people – for all people. This may seem a strange thing to say, but there are many who talk in ways that legitimise or romanticise poverty. Perhaps they fear the hedonism that can accompany increased prosperity. Perhaps to avoid hedonism, materialism or greed they resist proposals for economic development, regeneration, wealth creation and market success that would aid the poor. Perhaps their own anti – capitalist ideologies prevent them from seeing the benefit of higher levels of market opportunity for the poor.

Of course those market opportunities seem to require their own kinds of inequality to fuel them. For some this will be an inspiration, aspiration and challenge. For others this will be oppressive and disabling. So we need to act wisely in the international community to see our market opportunities which would benefit underdeveloped countries are being blocked by many things – yes the power of developed countries who still insist on their own trade barriers, subsidies and blocs. The US and the EU act in ways that rig the market and prevent any kind of level playing field. Those who believe in fair trade have to address this. Free trade is the best way to fair trade justice if there is a genuine level playing field – if the corrupt governments of developing countries weren’t consuming desperately needed resources (coming from aid and external investment mostly); if tribalism and localism didn’t block off international contacts and opportunities for learning and development; if local resources could be legally protected for local countries needs .. and so on. In the West we know how long it took to move from feudal to industrial and then post industrial societies. Hernando de Soto’s work on the equivalent of this process in Africa and Latin America shows that it is the lack of property rights to register land and businesses that makes development so slow and impossible for so many people. Prosperity needs entrepreneurial vision and determination, good education, family support and infrastructure, support and advice. People without property rights cannot borrow money, invest in their future homes or businesses, or register their assets. The entrepreneurship of people living in shanty towns and worse is not in question. They need the right kind of national and local access and good governance to provide the context they need for translating ability into effective productive and prosperity. It doesn’t just happen without these and other things and it takes time. Creating the conditions for Prosperity remains the best way to help poor people and this may at certain stages mean external aid in money, medicine, aid, disaster relief and above all education.

P is for POVERTY.
Poverty has many faces and levels. There is a poverty of culture and of spirit which affects us all, regardless of our financial assets. Sometimes there the poor are more avaricious than the rich; sometimes it is the other way round. Those who know and fear poverty know its terrible spiritual costs – the pressures to prostitute oneself on the black market and in crime in order to feed debt, substance misuse or to buy oneself the illusion of independence. I once wasted a whole day and exhausted myself searching for a cheaper pair of trousers in charity shops and sales, feeling trapped in a situation of lack of choice. For many years and still partly now the choice for me is now whether I would like to go on this or that holiday; see this or that theatre performance; visit these or those friends in cities far away; buy this or that car – but which can I afford. Poverty reduces choice of cultural and material consumption. For those who have never experienced this, its negative spiritual effect should not be underestimated.

Prosperity inevitably leads to some degrees of inequality. It is inequality that takes the pleasure and the purpose out of prosperity. In the nomadic tribes of the ancient near East, poverty was a daily threat and reality. The Semitic word ‘anim’ – meaning poor in the sense of bowed over, only appeared later at the times of the settlement in Jordan, the establishment of a monarchy and an army. It then became the word for the poor used by the prophets to proclaim against the injustice of a system which created progress and profit for some and deepening poverty for the many.

We can take pleasure in the simplicity of needs and wants and loose it when we ask for more; when we turn wants into needs or when we loose ourselves in greed and the idolatry and illusion of ‘things.’ Pleasure can elude us at any point in our journey, if we choose to ignore its presence in those simple moments, too often taken for granted.

Paradoxically, pleasure is different for every person, despite its cultural conditioning and yet can be felt by the group gathered together in social interaction. It can be seen and sensed as the football crowd rises in joy at a goal scored. It can be present in the silent, personal joy of a poem read or written, a garden dug, a fruit picked, a book finished, a balance sheet that adds up, a strategic decision well taken, a product beautifully finished, a meal enjoyed, a warm breeze on a young or old cheek, a smile in a crowd. It is there mysteriously and unexpectedly within the purposes and processes we have tried to describe. It contributes to the presence and power of our priestly lives. It comes as gift, undeserved and unlooked for and it comes through struggle and self sacrifice in learning and skill development. It produces good things. It helps us recognises the right purpose and place; it rewards the right processes; it affirms who we are as people.

P is for POLITICS
This lovely word for people gathered together and finding their own ways of identity and decision making comes from that ancient Greek world of the polis. The earliest cities developed in Mesopotamia between 4000-3000 BC. There surplus value was created by bringing small holders and farmers together under the protection of walls and the infrastructure of shared values, leadership, kingship and organisation. With surplus value came the advantage, indeed the luxury of spare time. Ideas and culture developed and spread, mostly through trade. Religious myths developed (particularly creation myths produced in the light of natural threats like floods). These early cities had religious buildings at their centre, where politics, kingship and priesthood inter twined. We see the first writing appearing in this region and time.

In the city states of the later Greek period, we know there was a different kind of democracy emerging. Previously the King had represented the good of the whole – making the larger decisions and standing for the presence of God in their midst – through the vice regency of the priest king. Ritual was used to sustain the system and reflected the pre scientific beliefs of the time about human, animal and crop fertility as well as the rhythms of time and season. In the Hebrew scriptures we see something extraordinary happening at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile into the Babylon. This was in the sixth century BC. The writers of the first chapter of Genesis were a priestly group working in this place of exile from all that they held dear. They did something very radical.

Ø They took what they saw of the image of God found in the vice regent, priest kind and in the statues paraded round the temple at the time of the New year Rituals and they transformed this presence of God by democratising it. They claimed that all men and women bore the ‘image and likeness of God.’
Ø They also took the Persian word for God which was plural and used their Hebrew equivalent of it (Elohim) rather than the nationalist Israelite word (Jahweh) in their story of the creation. It seems they had been inspired by the tolerance of the Persians (the edict of toleration) who had conquered Babylon but allowed its minorities to keep their religious identities. Some scholars argues that the order of creation in Genesis reflects the architecture and ethos of the Persian court. They looked back at the beginning (creatio ex nihil) from the perspective of the problems of their time (creation continua) and tried to make sense of it all.

In the Greek city state, the numbers allowed some levels of joint decision making – at least for the propertied, landed and educated classes. They could assemble in the centre of the urban area – the forum and debate together. Later this direct form of democracy gave birth to representative democracy as we saw in the Roman senate. Implicit in the later was the vision of representatives making decisions which benefited the whole – even though people acted out of self interest then as now. There is no point in romanticising the past and we don’t know enough to be sure how this worked in societies without the kinds of public service delivery and expectations we now take for granted. Nor did they have the same kind of media accountability despite word of mouth gossip and myth making. Politics requires many different balancing acts. It has always had to accommodate itself to powerful individuals and groups as well as maintain a longer term perspective on the good of the whole. In modern liberal democracies the attempt is made to create a neutral public space where the views and needs of all can be respected. Of course individual and part self interest and power blur the edges of this space and undermine many of politics best instincts and intentions. This si the space however our tradition respects based on the needs and rights of the individual. It took a reformation, renaissance, enlightenment and revolutions for the rights of individuals to be so respected and enshrined in law (EU charter). Democratic politics had to confront the power of religion, the aristocracy and gender to get to this stage of modernity and it is exactly this kind of modernity which significant parts of Islam find so difficult to accept. It seems that instinctively Islam fits most comfortably in regimes where the mullahs still hold religious power over politics and Sharia law is the framework for all political purpose, law making and policy formation.

The dominant question for the future of politics is how much as well as what kind? The perception is that too much political micro management in local communities and organisations leads to too much process and policy and poor performance. Organisations need to operate within a regulatory framework which carries and expresses the political consensus about the common good. Too much regulation destroys trust and creativity. Individuals and communities need to operate within a balanced sense of rights and responsibilities. Politics needs to recover a way of affirming the latter without denying the former. Politics in the West needs to rediscover its own purpose and processes and leaders to make the right judgements in an age when personality and celebrity status seems more important than policies.

P IS FOR PLEASURE.
Pleasure is the last part of the power of the presence of P. Pleasure is as hard to define and experience as any other part. It is the experience that brings fulfilment and satisfaction in the doing of things. It has some beautiful sisters – happiness and joy. Pleasure is not limited by our material circumstances and context, but it is not separate from these things. Pleasure can come from prosperity. Wellbeing often depends on the capacity of prosperity to both create new employment and purpose in a local area as well as to redistribute the wealth needed to pay for appropriate public services. In the search for wellbeing in organisations, people need to find their own ways of personal fulfilment. Stress that is endemic in the organisation’s processes – leadership, line management, personality and culture will not be solved by bolting on health regimes or healthy living models, important though they are. Endemic stress and tension in an organisation requires mainstream structural change and a new spirituality. Hard work isn’t the problem. The clash between commitment and effort on the one hand and the lack of recognition and valuing on the other is the problem. The wellbeing of organisations relates directly to the leadership style. Are people being managed in ways that give them pleasure and fulfilment? If not there will be emotional faultlines within the organisation. This will not be a happy place to be and little pleasure will be gained from the processes used. Process and task will be at odds with each other. Fulfilment and motivation will fall in the chasm between rhetoric and reality. A place that becomes a pleasure to work in, with and for is a place with purpose for all. Without purpose the people perish and purpose needs articulation and valuing so that all feel a sense of wellbeing from the contribution they are making. This cannot be assumed it has to be designed and implemented on a daily basis.

P IS FOR PERSPECTIVE
Leaders in organisations need to gain and sustain perspective. They need to be able to see the bigger picture, especially when pressures or crises force them into detail decisions about personal, product, or processes.

In religion the mountain has always been a crucial symbol. Early religious architecture tried to reflect this symbolism. Ziggurats and pyramids soared to the heavens. In Greek mythology the Gods dwelt on the top of Mount Olympus hidden by the clouds. In early cosmology the Creator God was above the dome which separated the waters from the earth. In the Hebrew scriptures the creator God – both JHWH and Elohim (normally plural and coming from Persian origins after the time of the exile when the creation story of Genesis 1 was written by a priestly writer) create both the earth and the heavens but pictorially they are ‘up there’.

Moses goes up into the mountain and there sees the glory of the presence of God passing by. This shekinah was probably influenced by Moses upbringing in an Egyptian household. The creator God RA was the Sun. You cannot look at the face of this God and live. In the New Testament Jesus is transfigured before three of his chosen disciples on the mountain.

Going up higher in to a mountain gives immediate perspective each step of the way. Height gives a new perspective of distance and depth. From space Buzz Aldrin saw the planet – a blue and white marble globe against the darkness of space. At that moment – a very spiritual moment – all the pettiness of human relationships and conflicts disappear with the detail. From that height it is one integrated system, not a collection of parts that can be seen. From space the overall strategic view can be seen. Only the larger elements of the human footprint such as the great wall of china can be seen. From a height you can also see into the depths of things – archaeological shapes under crops, rock formations under the sea.

A leader needs to find a place from which he/she can gain perspective. This place might be away from the office. It might be a moment of quiet retreat in nature. It might be a tangential conversation with a friend. It might be a film or book. Perspective puts things back in their place. It allows us to see the overall sculpture of things. There is a laboratory in a Technium in Swansea where one can put on a special jacket and glasses and then look around the hologram of an aeroplane wing, watching the wind flows over and under it from all directions. This technology will be used for medicine allowing the surgeon to look into and around internal organs.

There is a need for holograms in the way we perceive organisations and a leader needs to cultivate the spiritual technology to take such a view. The incarnation of God in Jesus taught us that God makes his dwelling place with our humanity and that gives religion a whole new perspective. But this is the same Jesus who goes up into the mountain to be transfigured and to be seen with new perspective. This is the same Jesus who comes down from the mountain to the valleys of hurt and harm, of humanity at its best and worst. The leader needs to see both and keep both in perspective and balance.

P IS FOR PRAYERFULNESS.
Again, perhaps this may sound like too pious a word. Yet probably everyone prays at some point or another. In organisations, there are moments when quiet and reflection are appropriate; when people can gain from a moment or two of reflective silence – to understand something better, including their own feelings and reactions. In the continuum of thoughts, ideas, words, actions, there is something missing. In between those things, in the silent mysterious space between them, comes the magic of those things. Some of the best ideas emerge from moments of solitude – in the bath, on a walk, travelling. People with responsibilities may leave the place of work, but continue to work in their thoughts and reflections about work situations.

People at work often find the church’s prayers and preaching pass them by as they rarely touch work or organisational concerns. People at work have much to teach the Church and the Church has much to learn.

But what at heart is the meaning of liturgy. Some say it was a word that the early Christians borrowed in those early city states of the Roman Empire. Leitourgeia was the act by which citizens co-operated with each other and contributed something to the greater common good. Working through those straight roads from the edge of the city to its centre, you might well have come across a sign which said leitourgeia and was in fact that place where common goods where made, where plumbing, sewerage, political decision took place. For Christians liturgy became the act through which people could co-operate with the action of God in creating the world. It was our way in to being co-creators, responsible for our own parts of the larger city – a city called to become the kingdom of God. Liturgy was an act of work which drew us closer together and put us back in touch with the source of all work which is the work of creation itself. Within that act of work was to be found the energy of the love of God who creates the conditions within which we can play our part in the organisations and social structures of the created universe. Liturgy is work done with larger purpose and positioning in mind. Liturgy is the process by which the product of a better world was intended. Liturgy is the prayerful prosperity within which the poverty of our nature can be transformed.

The Benedictine monks of Europe taught each other and many others too that laborare est orare. To work is to pray. Of course many thought that meant one should pray as one worked. In agricultural societies no doubt there were particular aids to this prayer – from the birth of spring lambs in green oak filled fields to the sun setting on the harvest; from watching the frost-hard, winter landscape whiten and then burst into bud to seeing the daily and annual cycles of birth and death. To work with repetition in the daily task may have reminded people of the rhythms of Gregorian chant in the Benedictine office – the psalms being said in order once a month with all their own cycles of birth and death; the palatable and unpalatable drama of religion. In fact there always have been people would could find a way of praying, in the heart as well as the mind, in the body as well as the soul as part of daily life. The Russians taught the prayer of the heart based on the early traditions of the philokalia. The Jesus prayer was simple and rhythmic and the idea was to pray unceasingly – which was only possible if the prayer had a rhythm that could wake you up as well as send you to sleep. Unceasing prayer had to be earthed in to the rhythms of breathing and become entirely natural for it to be unceasing. Other traditions broke the day up into segments of prayer, either to be a framework for the whole and the work that had to be done or to kick start it and then to settle it into completion afterwards. Other traditions saw prayer as the only real time and the rest a necessary part of the illusion of daily life that was not as real as the ideal glimpsed and sought in prayer. The Benedictines wisely said to work is to pray. How could that be so? If true it would be true for all people, believers or not. If true it would be true for the drudgery of mucking out a stable as for designing a new bu9lding or writing an opera. The Benedictines understood the nature of work – they did not romanticise it or dismiss it. The point was that if our attitude to work was pointed in the right direction then it was prayer. Work is the place for unselfish generosity; for putting the other first; for achieving something worthwhile. Work is the place where purpose is discovered and that purpose links us to the nature of God who is love. Without being sentimental about it at all, work is the hard won struggle of discovering the meaning of love within the positioning of creation and its purposes. Ultimately producing products is for the benefit of others who use them, whatever we are paid for doing it. The trouble is that being paid has become the fetishist purpose. The trouble is that those producing products may have no sense of the importance of that product to those who use it. We have lost connection in a world that is idolatrous about connection. Unless we adopt an attitude of love that says the point about the energy put into the tasks of work – the energy which literally means work, then it will merely be work as the passing of time, the means to another selfish end. The alienation that work can be is not its drudgery. All work contains activities which are hard, repetitious and meaningless. All work exposes us to the frustrations of organisational dysfunction which need changing and aligning to clarities of purpose. The alienation that really matters is that work is no longer the vehicle for moving away from ourselves in the direction of the needs of others. Of course, we are fully involved in the process – the use of our skills and abilities is crucial for any kind of satisfaction. But ultimately that satisfaction is linked to the unselfish quality of work.

Work is prayer -

when it is done as well as possible;
when it is done for others as much or more than for oneself;
when it is an experience in which we can find joy and for which we can find gratitude.

This kind of work is a celebration of the energy in the presence that is existence.
It puts us in touch with that energy and the presence within it.
This kind of work transcends the drudgery within it.
This kind of work knows that its place and time is part of all place and time because its purpose is to contribute to the ongoing work of creation.
This kind of work is real prayer and it happens wherever it happens.
It is not limited by culture or by profession.
It is personal to everyone who works and who through their work comes to experience the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary sense that there is purpose and work is a key route to that purpose.

Prayer then is to be found and taught in relationship to the workplace. There will be some gems in the traditional hymns, ways of praying and prayers of the church which will help – but because too many of these have been written at some spiritual psychological distance from the workplace, we probably need to look elsewhere as well as hope that religion will expand its borders. Many are already busy writing and teaching the new language of prayer - in consultancy and training sessions, in mentoring and coaching. They are discovering their purpose there in the positioning of people in organisations. They are teaching us how to listen to the Other in the diverse otherness of people and values within the cultures of organisations. They are reaching for beliefs, attitudes and values that underlie the usual mechanistic list of values that emanate from the HR text books. Underneath behaviours that build a positive and purposeful work place culture are the attitudes we hold towards others. Anything that helps us to understand, live with, work with others is part of this spiritual attitudinal development. To really listen to the other as if the listening itself will be the source of new learning and growth is hard but very rewarding and life changing. It is a vital positioning for new learning. To listen is to pray at a deeper level – focusing not so much on our next word or sentence – the expression of self – but openness to that quality of silence which enables the other to be really heard and really present. Strangely, this quality of listening and the stillness it develops often helps the other to know themselves as a valued Other. A valued other rarely acts as aggressively, inappropriately, jealously, nastily as when they feel unvalued. To listen to another through their aggression, their prejudice, nastiness and their difficulties is to enable them to hear the other person inside who is trapped by these things. An organisation where individuals really listen to each other as the other - who might be the source of new learning and growth - is a changed organisation which will need fewer charters of human values on the wall than before. Behavioural consideration in health and safety, in anti discrimination laws, in human rights begins with a new sense of the primacy of the other’s wellbeing. To live and work in order to further that wellbeing in the neighbour next to me at work or the neighbour further away as customer, supplier, consumer of my work’s products and processes is totally transforming of human work. It is to live as if work was prayer, for in prayer we long for this wellbeing to come into being and to play our part in the process.

To ‘listen to the other’ is a phrase often used in religion. But for it to gather meaning it has to make sense out side of the usual boundaries of religion. The energy and purpose required to position our listening in a profound way and sincere concern that what we are and do will benefit others is an essential part of the work of prayer.

There is a growing interest in the spirituality of organisations, at least in some places and this interest is making connections the church used to make. It is time for the church to be there; to reposition itself; to know its purpose in relation to the other that is the world God created in the work and energy of God’s love. This is a radical and controversial thing to say and it may be wrong. It may be wrong because others would argue that the church exists as an alternative to the world, as an alternative to the organisations of the world. It exists to connect with heaven in ways that bypass the world, for that seems to be the dominant paradigm as reflected in the church’s priorities and behaviour. So be it. If they are right, then the world and its organisations and those within them who would seek their own way of being spiritual, will have to manage without the help of the church. The church may continue to argue that it can only be the church within its present positioning, priorities and processes. It may say it needs to maintain its distinctiveness by its separation and absence from the life of organisations. Whatever its motive and meaning, I still work for a different kind of church and long for an articulation of a greater purpose and closer positioning of resources and priorities. Above all, I still hear the Benedictines whispering in my ear – to work is to pray. I choose to believe that they meant all work and therefore all organisations. The problem with this notion is that despite the best efforts of some Benedictines and others, the majority of those at work have never even heard the phrase ‘to work is to pray’ and cannot see how prayer can possibly be relevant to what they are doing. People at work, at least since the industrial revolution onwards, have got the message which the church has directly and indirectly given them. ‘You get on with your business and we will get on with ours – ours is more important.’

It maybe a while before there is a reconnection, before the treasury of spiritual wisdom locked up the traditions of the church can be connected to the growing body of organisational spirituality that seems so crucial to the cultural change agenda. There are even mentors and coaches now who use the label ontological as well as spiritual – they already know that underneath all the behavioural question are the issues of belief. Some in organisations are articulating those beliefs and recognising that belief and purpose provide the platform and praxis for values and behaviour.

So the power of P is a prayerful power unleashing energy for work at work in ways that liberate and fulfil the soft as well as the hard skills of individuals, relationships, teams, groups and companies. It is likely that the power of p will become increasingly important and there will be a new generation of people interested in pursuing its potential in business and leadership retreats and reflective exercises. The present vogue for visionary leadership will hit the rocks unless we discover the spiritual space within which visions can be developed. This space is about the transforming trinity of ‘Eyes,’ through which we see the world differently - imagination, intuition and insights. These three contribute to increasing the capacity and reach of spiritual intelligence. In knowledge based as well as manufacturing societies, the power of P will be important for the emerging spiritual intelligence which informs and develops the emotional and relationship intelligence which are so crucial to successful product development and human fulfilment in the process.



Robin Morrison,
December 2005