Chapter 4
Practice Patience ~ Rumi
Boston: 1993–1995. I returned to Forum that February at the behest of a former colleague, Mimi Bennett. In the few months I’d been at the Cambridge energy consultancy, Forum had fallen on hard times; a former executive actually warned me not to go back because, he said, the firm might not survive. But the opportunity to be back in a reasonably cheerful setting was too appealing to pass up. Plus, I liked Mimi. Previously she had been in charge of client-tailored programs, and I’d been her editor on many projects. Now, she was director of product development. In fact, she was Product Development. Determined to keep up R&D despite the financial struggles, the executive team had commissioned a new research study on selling skills and charged Mimi with building a related training product; the recent round of layoffs, however, had made her a group of one. In need of an all-purpose helper, she called me.
For the next year and a half, I worked alongside Mimi as a full-time contractor. We developed the sales product (eventually titled Dynamic Selling) and several other programs as well. My skill set was editing, but, “I always think everyone can do everything,” Mimi said, and she demonstrated that belief to me every day. She let me follow her to design team meetings, client meetings, vendor meetings, and numerous pilot tests in various cities. There were other contractors working on her projects, but they were more senior and expensive—and in a few cases, more of a pain to deal with—so she made me her Girl Friday. The whole time I was watching, listening, and learning.
But I wasn’t relegated to taking notes and editing documents. I quickly discovered that whenever I said, “How about if I . . .?” Mimi’s answer would be, “Go ahead.” I offered to write a workbook; she said yes. I proposed a design idea for a program module that was giving us trouble; she loved it. I offered to fly around the country supervising video shoots; she was happy for me to take charge. I certainly wasn’t qualified to do any of these things when I first started doing them, but Mimi seemed to have infinite patience with me as I learned and infinite faith that I would learn. After a year or so, when the powers on high finally noticed that I was working 50 hours a week and that therefore it would be cheaper to hire me back as an employee, she fought to get me a salary nearly twice what I’d been making before. “People can’t make jumps like that,” said the HR director. “I don’t know what to tell you,” said Mimi. “This person has.”
In 1995, she decided to take a career break to spend time with her two young children. By then I was heading up an R&D project of my own, and in her final week, Mimi made sure to inform my incoming boss and everyone else within earshot that I had the project well in hand and should be trusted to get on with it.
At Mimi’s going-away party, Forum co-founder and CEO John Humphrey made his way through the crowd of well-wishers. I heard him say, “Mimi, you’re one of those people who have shaped our culture. I don’t know how that happened. But you’re one of them.”
I wanted to tell him, “I know how it happened. Our culture is all about being the best place to learn and grow. Well, Mimi helps people learn and grow.”
Flash forward to January 31, 2013: my last day at Forum after more than two decades there. I emailed a farewell message to a number of colleagues and ex-colleagues, reminiscing about old times. Mimi and I had been out of touch for years, but she replied to the email, saying it brought back fond memories. I thanked her for all her help in those early days.
“I learned so much from you,” I said.
She wrote back: “The learning went both ways.”
The Laziest Son
A man on his deathbed left instructions
for dividing up his goods among his three sons . . .
He told the town judge,
“Whichever of my sons is the laziest,
Give him all the inheritance.” (“The Night Air”)1
Rumi, born in the thirteenth-century Persian empire, is one of the most-read poets in the world today (see “The Sage: Rumi,” here). While scholarly translations of his multivolume works can be opaque, the translations of Coleman Barks, begun in the 1990s, are far more accessible and have done much for the Sufi thinker’s present-day popularity. Out of his hundreds of poems, I’ve chosen one to represent his ideas about quiet influence.
“The Night Air” tells the story of a dying man who leaves instructions with a judge for dividing his estate among his three sons. He tells the judge to give the inheritance, all of it, to whichever son is the laziest. The man dies, and the judge proceeds to ask the three sons to give an account of their laziness. “I need to understand how you are lazy,” he says. (The poem’s narrator interjects, “Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it, because they see God working all around them: the harvest keeps coming in, yet they never even did the plowing.”) “Come on,” says the judge. “Say something about the ways you are lazy.”
Before the sons reply, we get the following brief meditation on speaking and listening:
Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self,
A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice
of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns.
Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong,
the listener hears the source. One breeze comes
from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap . . .
Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot.
You learn what’s for supper. Though some people
can know just by the smell . . .
Speech is a covering, a curtain, a lid. It conceals the inner self; unless, that is, an adept listener pierces the covering, flicks the curtain, or lifts the lid to perceive what is beyond or behind or underneath. Deep listening, Rumi suggests, involves all five senses. The listener “hears the source” but also puts an eye to a gap to see “hundreds of exploding suns” (a dazzling sight) and sniffs the air wafting from garden (nice) or ash heap (not so nice). In lifting a cover off a cooking pot, the senses of touch, sight, and taste are in play: we pick up the hot lid, lean over to see what’s within, give the contents a stir or two and raise the spoon to our lips. But some people, says the narrator, can know what’s for dinner just by the smell: a molasses-sweet stew or a vinegar-sour soup. And then it’s back to the sense of hearing: “A man taps a clay pot before he buys it to know by the sound if it has a crack.”
For Rumi, listening to the presented self is superficial. We must listen, rather, for the real self: the stew inside the pot, the crack in the ceramic. The latter sort of listening takes time and concentration and therefore doesn’t seem a bit lazy, but we might call it incredibly receptive. Moreover, Rumi suggests, one can become expert at receptivity—at taking things in rather than dealing them out, in observing the world rather than manipulating it. Receptivity is the mystic’s craft. The mystic knows how to sit back and let the harvest roll in. And indeed, it’s an uncommon ability: how many airline passengers ever really sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight? Perhaps the “laziest” son deserves all the inheritance because he’s the only one who can sit back, relax, and enjoy it.
The Sage: Rumi
Rumi (1207 – 1273) wasn’t known by that name until his teens, when his family moved from Afghanistan to Turkey; the name means “from Roman Anatolia.” He grew up to be a legal and religious scholar. At age 37 he met a wandering holy man named Shams who, legend has it, posed him a question: Who was greater, Muhammed or Bestami? (The latter was a Persian Sufi.) Rumi answered that Muhammed was greater because “Bestami had taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there, whereas for Muhammed the way was always unfolding.”2 This answer, according to translator Barks, propelled Rumi and Shams “into a region of pure conversation,” where they remained for months until Shams, perhaps concerned that he was keeping Rumi from his students, left as suddenly as he had arrived. It was then that Rumi became a poet and, like his friend, a practitioner of the mystical discipline known as the Turn. Later, he tracked Shams to Damascus; upon their reunion, the two fell at each other’s feet. Rumi persuaded Shams to return and live with him, but on the night of December 5, 1248, Shams was called to the back door, left the house, and was never seen again. Most likely, says Barks, he was murdered at the direction of Rumi’s son. Rumi titled his vast collection of poems The Works of Shams of Tabriz.
“The Night Air” continues with the eldest brother giving an account of his laziness. He tells the judge, “I can know a man by his voice, and if he won’t speak, I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively.” A different translation has, “I can know a man in a moment by the movements of his mouth”3—which, read in light of the preceding lines, suggests that this brother listens with his eyes as well as his ears. I like that he seems fully prepared for someone not to speak and has a plan for what to do in that case: wait and observe, for days if necessary, and let intuition do the heavy lifting. The eldest brother sounds like one of those restful people with whom you can sit, working or reading or just watching the world go by, with neither of you feeling any need to talk. His attitude seems admirably lazy.
Then the second brother chimes in: “I know him when he speaks,” he says, “and if he won’t talk, I strike up a conversation.” This brother won’t permit a non-talker to waste his time for days on end; he’ll take the initiative, striking up a conversation on the spot. A little impatient, we might think, and certainly not lazy. On the other hand, if you want to get to know someone who seems shy, isn’t starting a conversation the natural thing to do? The eldest brother might be accused of treating the nontalker like a scientific specimen or zoo animal—an object to be observed and hypothesized about. The second brother, though perhaps a bit overeager, at least recognizes the non-talker as a person, someone with a point of view and things to say.
Each of the two brothers’ responses, by itself, is inadequate. Combined, however, they generate our next influence practice: “Taking time to develop a shared outlook.” The first brother exemplifies patience; the second, dialogue. Throughout any collaboration, but especially at the start, patience and dialogue are critical—and are too often shoved aside in our haste to get it done, whatever it is. “Enough chitchat,” we say; “time’s a-wastin’!” But time spent on developing a shared outlook is never time wasted. This sort of laziness pays off in the end.
The youngest brother will take the concepts of patience and dialogue one step further. But before we go there, let’s spend some time with this influence practice.
Quiet Influence Practice 4: Taking time to develop a shared outlook
Many of us who worked on the Forum Influence seminar back in the day remember the “Martha Weld” case study. Facilitator Paul Garces recalls:
There was a case I found very powerful: Martha Weld. As the story opens, the heroine has just taken over the information systems group at a large corporation. She has the blessing of the CEO to go look at all the computers being used throughout the company and do some sort of analysis. She sends out a memo to the IT managers: “Harrington wants this. Please take a look at your data needs and get back to me by end of month.” She hears crickets.
“She comes across as authoritarian, trying to use power she doesn’t really have,” Paul continues. “The name-dropping accrues bad currency in her account.” That was indeed one point of the case, but another important point is Martha’s failure to take time up front to create shared understanding with her stakeholders.
When I went back and reread the case, I was mildly surprised to find that Martha isn’t in fact the head of information systems; she’s an internal consultant tasked with working across all the plants and subsidiaries, each with its own way of doing things. She reports to a vice president of finance who has given her “wide latitude” to seek ways to “consolidate MIS resources.” Her initial idea is that all data-transmission costs should be reviewed at the corporate level so that spending patterns can be identified. (The case is set in the early 1980s, when Management Information Systems was seen not as a hub of innovation but as a kind of souped-up clerical function.) “Dear MIS Managers,” Martha’s memo begins, “The president has authorized a modification in monitoring data transmission.” She goes on to explain the new usage-reporting policy, saying it will provide a foundation for wider network coordination and help “us” to consolidate “our” collective buying strength. She closes with, “In this way, all of our interests, both individually and collectively, will be served.”4
Martha is in a classic influence situation: she has zero authority over the group whose help she needs. Moreover, there is no group; there’s just a bunch of individuals, each with distinct, perhaps even competing, plans and perspectives.
We tend to underestimate the lack of cohesion that marks the start of most initiatives. We’re put in charge of a project that requires cooperation, and in our imagination a group magically coalesces. “These are my Black Diamonds,” I used to say, back when I was rolling out a new training product and had identified a set of people I thought could be the experts in selling and delivering it. (Despite not being a skier, I liked using ski-trail metaphors.) Truth was, I never put any effort into bringing the so-called Black Diamonds together as a team, so they were a team only in my mind. In the same way, although Martha Weld assumes there is an “us” to receive her message, the MIS managers are not an “us,” hence her talk of “our interests” is meaningless. Equally meaningless is her reference to individual interests, given that she has never met any of the memo recipients and has no idea what their individual interests are. The name-dropping is certainly off-putting (“the president has authorized . . .”); the bigger problem, however, is her belief that naming a group creates a group.
As the case unfolds, Martha receives some replies along the lines of “message received, happy to help.” But not one IT manager actually sends her a data-usage report. Months pass, and in the end, “reports from other corporate managers indicated that the subsidiaries were busy . . . and the usual procedures for that time of year were being followed.”5 Cue the crickets.
So what do we do if, like Martha Weld, we’ve been authorized to lead a game and no one is playing? The two elder brothers of “The Night Air” know what to do: exercise patience, and engage in dialogue. Like them, we should take time—even at the risk of feeling we’re wasting time—to develop a shared outlook. This process doesn’t require any special facilitation skills; we don’t need a counseling degree, and nobody has to open up about their childhood. (Remember, influence isn’t about singing “Kumbaya.”) We simply need to allow and encourage the discussions—some relevant to the project, some not—that take place naturally as people are finding their feet. In other words, we need to be a little lazy.
Some of my Forum colleagues had a mantra: “The conversation is the work.” I used to scoff at that. “No, the work is the work,” I’d say. But I have to admit they were right in one key respect: at the start of any group endeavor, when our main job is simply to help people feel like members of a group, conversation is the main vehicle for that job (see “Influence in Brief: Patience for the Dialogue,” here).
The workplace of the early 1990s was all about teams. Western organizations were rushing to imitate Japanese kaizen (continuous improvement) and the team-based structures that were its backbone. Research on teamwork and team leadership flourished. At Forum an entire consulting practice, Customer-Focused Quality, grew out of our training for process improvement teams, and our efforts to behave more like a consulting firm as opposed to a training vendor resulted in a new project management process, dubbed the “Do-Si-Do” because it emphasized the handoffs back and forth between sales team and project team. All such endeavors were about developing a more rigorous body of knowledge around a type of relationship—call it influence, lateral leadership, or what you will—which in every sphere was fast overshadowing the traditional boss-subordinate relationship. And within that body of knowledge, the concept of greatest interest was team formation. Before, the only team anyone had had to form was a softball team at the annual company picnic. Suddenly it seemed a new team was needed every day, and you had to know how to create one.
Influence in Brief: Patience for the Dialogue
What I found again and again is that the issue of membership is not attended to. People are first and foremost task-focused. Talking about “Why are we all here?” never happens. There’s an assumption that we know why we are all here: it’s a one-hour meeting, we started late, let’s get going. There is no time spent on the front end just to have a conversation.
–Carol Kane
Once we were running an Influence seminar for a large manufacturer. On the last day of the session we got a call from the instructor at 11:00 a.m.; she had something wrong with her eye and couldn’t see. She gave the group an early lunch, and I came in for the last half day. I said, “OK, this team just shifted. We have to go through Membership again. What questions do you have for me?” I needed to honor the bond the group had established. And they appreciated the approach; it worked well.
–Galina Jeffrey
“Be patient while others are learning” is my favorite influence practice. It’s essential, because we often are not. We don’t get that it is part of our job. People’s thinking will change, but you have to be patient while they are becoming aware of their thinking. We underestimate the extent to which we are learning or teaching, all the time; if you want to get aligned with someone, you have to dig into their experience, understand where they are coming from. To be effective at influencing others, you need to pay attention to the evolution of their thinking.
–Joan Bragar
In Zen, one of the concepts for a master is always to have “beginner’s mind.” Who do you learn from? From the people all around you.
–Galina Jeffrey
Today, most people assume project teams will pop into existence when needed and dissolve when needed no longer. It’s not that project managers are lazy. Quite the opposite: they assume their job is to drive the bus, not laze around waiting for everyone to climb aboard. It was different for us late-twentieth-century workers; we had the advantage of taking nothing about the bus-boarding process for granted. Like Rumi’s judge who said, “Come, tell me how you are lazy,” we knew there was a “how” we had to master when it came to team formation. We knew it would take time and finesse.
Among the team-formation tools we learned to use back then were launch meetings, ground rules, mission statements, stakeholder maps, and role-definition charts. All were useful, and today a quick internet search will turn up detailed instructions and templates for them. With hindsight, however, I can see that these tools’ real value lay in the structure and legitimacy they gave to upfront talk that otherwise would have been seen as idle. Team ground rules, for example, were always the same (“Listen to each other,” “Be on time”) and were rarely referred to after they’d been laid down, but here’s the thing: we had gone around the room, each person had had a chance to speak, and each person’s suggestion had been respectfully written on the flip chart. “Our Ground Rules,” circulated later via interoffice memo, would mark us as a team.
Bruce Thomas, a former Forum account executive who sold and taught many Influence programs, describes how he still applies these team-building lessons today in his work with global technology companies:
I go into meetings: a roomful of IT experts and a program manager who’s maybe 29. I’m the business development guy, 55 years old. The program manager starts going through the presentation for the customer. I just listen, and then in the middle I say, “Stop. Let’s talk about what’s going to happen with this client.” Then I model the approach of having others talk, listening, and asking the quiet person what’s going on for them. I’m not the team leader, but they appreciate it, because I include everyone. I demonstrate that leadership doesn’t come from a title. I just model that skill of bringing a team together.
Western Pitfall 4: Learning about rather than from
So far, the judge in Rumi’s “Night Air” has asked the three brothers to give an account of their laziness, which they’ve taken to mean their way of understanding someone—especially someone who refuses to talk. The first brother has said he waits three days and then intuits what the person is all about. The second brother has said he strikes up a conversation.
“But what if he [the quiet person] knows that trick?” says the judge. This, he says, reminds him of a parable. There was a mother who told her child, “When you’re walking through the graveyard at night, and you see a boogeyman,* run at it, and it will go away.” The child replies, “But what if the boogeyman’s mother has told it to do the same thing? Boogeymen have mothers, too, you know.”
If we regard other human beings as things to manage, our attempts at dialogue are no better than tricks. Striking up a conversation under these conditions is like running at a boogeyman to scare him away; it’s a method that probably works often enough, but it takes no account of the likelihood that boogeymen too have thoughts and feelings, strategies and plans, histories and families—including mothers who teach them how to deal with threatening strangers in lonely places. People (and boogeymen, presumably) are subjects, not objects. While we’re managing them, they’re managing us. While we’re running at them, they’re running back.*
The Western pitfall for this chapter, then, is “learning about rather than from.” Like the pitfall of Chapter 2 (“assuming causes instead of conditions”), it has its basis in Western science, which sees the world as a collection of objects to be dissected and examined. Eastern philosophies, in contrast, see fields of phenomena that partake of both subjectivity and objectivity. Objects can be learned about; subjects can be learned about and from. Human beings are subjects, so learning-about, no matter how thorough, is an incomplete approach. Learning-from, if we want truly to know and relate to another, is also necessary. A person can’t be figured out like a Rubik’s cube, yet Western metaphors, many mechanical or invasive, tend to encourage this delusion. “What makes her tick?” “I’m trying to get inside his head.” “We’ve done an X-ray on the client.” Questioning is the word we use for police interrogations of criminal suspects, and in the West, our let-me-understand-you conversations can all too easily become interrogations; moreover, we may fail to notice the other person shining their own interrogation lamp right back in our eyes.
Rumi the Mystic offers a different view. One of his oft-explored ideas, according to Barks, is “how presences flow, evolve, and create in tandem.”6 Presence is a good word, I think, since it blurs the subject-object line in a characteristically Eastern way. When I strive to be present with others and to let them be present for me, is there not more potential in such encounters than when I go tap-tap-tapping on the clay pot, listening for cracks?
The elder two brothers of “The Night Air” are clever at pot-tapping. They have patience and, like any effective salesperson, know how to pose good questions, listen well, and interpret the responses. But when the judge asks, “What if your colleague knows that strike-up-a-conversation trick?” neither has an answer. They’ve exhausted their methods.
So the judge turns to the youngest brother and asks again, “What if a man cannot be made to say anything? How do you learn his hidden nature?” Here is the brother’s beautiful reply:
“I sit in front of him in silence,
and set up a ladder made of patience,
and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest,
I know that his soul is as deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.
And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,
and how I say it, because there’s a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings.”
How do we really know another person? How do we know if they’re smart, or kind, or funny? Superficially, by what they say and do; more deeply, by their effect on us. The smartest person in the room is not the person with the best ideas, but rather the person who draws out everyone else’s best ideas. A truly kind person amplifies the kindness of others. The most delightful friends are not the ones who tell a lot of jokes, but the ones who take delight in our jokes. This isn’t just a matter of flattery; there’s a big difference between the smoke-blowers (“Dahling, you look mahvelous”) and the people in whose presence we speak, think, and behave better—whose presence causes us to be better. We know their greatness by the greatness they elicit from us. And the same is true for those in whose presence we grow mean or bitter or afraid: we know their smallness by how small we become when we’re with them.
If we want to be one of those presences that brings out the best in others—a “bright star Canopus rising over Yemen”—then we should balance our typical practice, which is to learn about other people and then try to get them to learn from us, with a complementary practice, namely to tell them about ourselves and then seek to learn from them. The first practice sounds like this: “Tell me about you! . . . How fascinating. OK, now that I know you, here’s my advice for you.” The second practice sounds like this: “Let me tell you a little about me and how I like to work . . . OK, now that you know what I’m about, what advice do you have for me?”
Achieving a balance, of course, is the key. It’s no good to be one of those people who yammers on about me-me-me and never asks a question. It’s almost as bad, however, to be one of those people who rigorously “explores needs” until he decides he’s completed that chore and can move on to the “providing solutions” phase of the conversation. The latter approach can work all right in sales situations (although salespeople should realize that today’s buyers are, like the boogeyman child, mostly wise to the consultative-selling bag of tricks). If we want to go beyond selling to create a genuine dialogue, and ultimately a shared outlook, we need to blend learning-about with learning-from. We need to be ready to take advice, not just dole it out.
Marian Thier, an expert in interpersonal communication, has researched listening habits and brain patterns. “I don’t start with, ‘What do you need to do differently?’ ” she says, describing how she coaches people to become better listeners. “I start with, ‘What do you need others to know about you, so they can communicate better with you? And then, what are the questions you need to ask them about their communication styles, so you can work together?’ ”
This approach isn’t just more respectful; it’s also more effective, because it melds the wisdom of both parties (or should I say presences), enabling the co-creation of something new. Marian describes the goal of such a process in Buddhist terms: “It’s about looking for shared meaning; looking at the gem you both hold before you.”
Or, as Rumi would have it, it’s about opening a window to let the night air flow.
At Mimi’s going-away party in 1995, CEO John Humphrey said she had been a strong influence on Forum’s culture. I thought it was because she’d done such a fine job of developing people. Mimi was a coach and mentor to me and many others: letting us loose on challenges, giving us good advice, and showing plenty of patience as we came together and developed a shared outlook. Working with her I felt myself stretch, and, “I learned so much from you,” I told her in an email decades later.
But when I received her reply, I saw a deeper truth. The reason we all learned so much from Mimi is that, for her, the learning always went both ways.
The next quiet influence practice is Converting adversaries to allies by aligning interests.