The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair

possible.

PREFACE

The Origin of the PeerSpirit Circle Process

This is a book about remembering something basic to human nature—the desire to cooperate and participate in conversations in which we can speak and listen fully. This book reintroduces the use of circle process so that anyone, anywhere, can have a meaningful conversation and rise with support to do what needs to be done.

This body of work arose out of the meeting of two midlife, Middle American women in July 1991 during a five-day summer institute writing seminar that Christina Baldwin was teaching at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The classroom looked out over great lawns and low brick buildings with a view ofLake Superior, the world’s largest lake, an inland, freshwater sea. Sixteen adult learners clustered around the topic of memoir. Ann Linnea came to write about the death of her best friend and to prepare herself to carry a story line through her anticipated adventure kayaking along the perimeter ofLake Superior the following summer.

Ann was a professor’s wife with a bachelor’s degree in botany and a master’s degree in education. She had taught both primary and high school classes and worked as a Forest Service naturalist before she and her husband adopted two children. She was currently dedicated to her parenting and to teaching environmental education to parents, teachers, and students. She was an accomplished amateur athlete who had run and skied in marathons, backpacked in the mountain West, and taken her children for months-long travels in the desert wilderness, a version of home schooling on the road. Her first book, Teaching Kids to Love the Earth, cowritten with several educational colleagues, documented her lifelong devotion to sharing the wonder of nature.

Though she lived with her family in a modest home a few blocks up the hill from the university campus, wilderness was not far from her door. Ann hiked or skied every ravine in town and headed up the North Shore, the Gunflint Trail, the Boundary Waters, and out onto the wild and unpredictable waters of the Great Lake, training for her upcoming rite of passage.

Christina was a freelance writer with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and a master’s in educational psychology who had pioneered the field of journal writing and women’s leadership. When her first book, One to One: Self-Understanding Through Journal Writing, was published in 1977, the Library of Congress had to create a new category for it: personal writing, therapeutic uses thereof. Her second book on journal writing, Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, had just been published that January, and Baldwin was taking a leadership role in what had become a renaissance in private writing and a burgeoning literary genre of diaries, memoir, and autobiography.

She lived at the suburban edge of Minneapolis, walked her dog and rode her bicycle on paved trails, taught at the Loft Literary Center, hung out with writerly friends, and was seeking her next steps forward. The writing of Life’s Companion had opened something in her—a sense of calling that did not yet have a name.

Midforties, midcareers, each with new books out in our fields: we were at a crossroad. Ann had noticed how burned out and overextended her participants often were and was seeking ways to introduce reflection and spirituality that could help sustain parents and activists for the long-haul challenges. Christina wanted to encourage the women and men who had been writing their way to personal healing to connect this inward journey to informed action and engagement with social issues. Our first seminar, offered that fall, combined these skills and interests and drew participants from both our mailing lists. We sat down in the circle.

It was not unusual for us to teach this way. Christina had walked into her first journal-writing class in 1975 and immediately recognized the need to change the chairs so that writers could face each other as they talked about the topics they were putting on the page. Ann had been leading wilderness adventures since age sixteen, integrating campfire councils into her time with younger children, and then adapting the love of speaking around the fire into all her outdoor work. What we had not yet understood was that our use of the circle itself was creating a different kind of experience for us as collaborative teachers and for participants as empowered learners.

Throughout the following year, 1992, we noticed that putting our adult education seminars into a ring of chairs and teaching from within the rim had a profound impact on the depth oflearning. We came to the conclusion that there was something about the use of the circle that transformed groups of people into participatory learners and leaders. We noticed that when the circle was called, it elicited a depth of speaking and listening that seemed to emerge from within the form itself.

People participated in ways that surprised them. They heard themselves speak wisdom, make commitments, and understand ideas or issues at a synergistic level. From these early circle experiences on, participants have felt empowered, connected to a community of practice, and have credited the circle with giving them the ability to change aspects of their lives. They eagerly asked us to codify what we were doing so that they could replicate circle process. In response, we entered the next level of our exploration: to define and name the essential elements that sustain the circle. Christina began writing her first version of Calling the Circle: The First and Future Culture.

Ann circumnavigated Lake Superior in the summer of 1992. She was the first woman to kayak the lake with the largest surface area on the planet: the equivalent of paddling from Duluth, Minnesota, to Miami, Florida, in a 17-foot plastic banana—an Aquaterra Sea Lion, the state-of-the-art kayak at the time. The trip took sixty-five days in what turned out to be the coldest, stormiest summer in a hundred years. It was a profound midlife rite of passage, and she returned to her home, marriage, and children ready to make equally profound changes in the course of her life. That fall, while sorting the impact of what had happened to her in the wilderness, she began transcribing her journal and making notes on her experiences that eventually became her second book, Deep Water Passage: A Spiritual Journey at Midlife.

It was a terribly rough autumn. Ann was going through major challenges incorporating her posttrip self into her pretrip life; Christina was separating from a seventeen-year partnership. We were teaching together occasionally and each trying to figure out new directions for our lives. We continued to explore the potency of circle and tried to research whatever we could find about it. In the pre-Internet, pre-Google days, this was a difficult task. The book was due at Bantam in early 1993. Christina worked hard to meet the deadline and sent the manuscript off on time. Silence from the editor, silence that went on for several months.

Circle was such a new topic, we felt like Helen Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, hand-spelling the word into society’s palm. C-I-R-C-L-E: it means something; it is a way to get somewhere else than where we are. Civil War was raging in the former Yugoslavia, with ethnic cleansing and factions everywhere. Best Picture in the Academy Awards went to Schindlers List. In April, there was a terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center: a truck bomb blew up in the lower-level garage and damaged the building. The city was in a state of shock. C-I-R-C-L-E means something; it is a way to get somewhere else than where we are.

Christina called her editor and after an amicable conversation bought the manuscript back. The publisher didn’t know what to do with the concept and couldn’t imagine who would read the book. So we found ourselves with an unfinished manuscript, no editor, and no publisher. We continued our explorations. That spring, we were teaching at Hollyhock Retreat Centre on Cortes Island, British Columbia, when we met David Kyle, who owned a very small press in Oregon called Swan, Raven & Company. We handed him the manuscript and a few days later he joined us for tea on the deck of the lodge. I think I can help you, he said. I’m intrigued.

In March 1994, Ann and her two children and Christina and her dog all relocated to Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle, Washington. Christina was at work on the next reiteration of the book. Ann was getting her children settled into their new lives. Her memoir about her kayak trip sold, and she bought a house. One step at a time, we were figuring out what we were doing. C-I-R-C-L-E: it means something; it is a way to get somewhere else than where we are. Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa with 60 percent of the vote. The Chunnel opened between France and England. The Internet was not yet a household word or phenomenon, although the technologywas growing behind the scenes in Silicon Valley.

We knew we were not inventing the circle. We were trying to understand its power and how to frame this ancient social lineage in modern language and application. The circle, we were learning, is essentially a gathering of equals, people who set aside external, hierarchical positions that categorize and separate them and sit down in a ring of chairs with a clearly defined intention or purpose symbolically represented in the middle. With the rim and the center in place, each person contributes as a peer to the process of reflection, speaking, consideration, and action. The circle, we were experiencing, is an energetic social container capable of helping a group draw on wellsprings of insight, information, and story that inspire collective wisdom and action. The form itself invites spirit to participate in people’s interactions. Thus the PeerSpirit Circle Process was born and named.

We formed a small educational company, PeerSpirit, Inc., to carry forward our belief that the circle was needed in mainstream culture. The first edition of Christina’s book, in print from 1995 to 1998, sold fifteen thousand copies and connected us to a circle of colleagues with whom we are still in touch. We began training these colleagues in circle process—and learning together many of the deeper insights and practices that appear throughout this book.

In 1997, Christina got a call from an agent who wanted to represent the book to larger presses. He sold it back to the same Bantam editor who reissued the edition of Calling the Circle, which has been available since 1998. Unfortunately, the circle concept was still so edgy that the book was categorized as ritual/psychology and most often shelved in the occult section of the bookstore—not exactly mainstream! Meanwhile, we kept doing our work, expanding our outreach, and through training other facilitators, consultants, and leaders in many fields, kept working to normalize circle as an alternative group process. As Amazon and the Internet came along, the book could be more easily found without people even knowing of its relegation to the back room, and the title took on a second surge.

C-I-R-C-L-E: it means something; it is a way to get somewhere else than where we are. In 1998, we entered the e-mail world and built the first PeerSpirit Web site, reluctantly entering cyberspace as a medium to try to explain the importance of retaining face-to-face communication. Google was founded; the dot-com boom was in full force.

Other books were coming out based on similar explorations of circle. We met Joan Halifax, who had brought the circle process to the Ojai Foundation, and Jack Zimmerman and Gigi Coyle, who worked with Joan and cowrote the book The Way of Council in 1996. We met Sedonia Cahill, coauthor of The Ceremonial Circle (1992), and Charles Garfield and Cindy Spring, who along with Sedonia wrote Wisdom Circles in 1998. One night in a howling rainstorm, we drove to the top of a peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains and met the founders of the Ehama Institute, WindEagle and RainbowHawk (Heart Seeds: A Message from the Ancestors, 2003), who are carriers of a circle lineage traceable back three thousand years. Angeles Arrien had contributed The Fourfold Way (1993). Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote The Millionth Circle (1999), and all these movements were growing in from the edges in attempts to bring circle back to common practice.

We began to feel that we belonged to a tribe of people who had been called in different ways to reinstate the circle in modern culture. We at Peer-Spirit kept focusing on getting the circle from the edge to the center, wanting it out of the occult and into the office. Our training as consultants is experiential; we come from arts, service, and educational backgrounds rather than from business backgrounds; yet we felt compelled to bring the circle into the organizational heart of Middle America because we believe that’s where it is most needed and where social change will arise.

In 2000, through our association with the societal and organizational visionary Margaret Wheatley, PeerSpirit Circle Process started going global in the From the Four Directions network and later in the Berkana Learning Centers and Art of Hosting networks. In 2001, especially in life-affirming reactions to the 9/11 attacks, we found ourselves in an expansive, self-organizing movement to create a culture of conversation. With escalating political, social, and environmental challenges all around us, talking and listening to each other seemed an increasingly vital first step toward sustainable futures. Margaret Wheatley wrote about circles and conversations in Turning to One Another (2002). Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge were taking circle into the court system (Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community, 2003) and training facilitators across North America. Juanita Brown and David Isaacs released their model, The World Café, through a book with that title in 2005. After years of practice and training, the third edition of Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide came out in 2008. And in 2007, Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady compiled a 700-page resource, The Change Handbook, that showcased more than sixty methodologies, many of them using some form of circle process to provide dialogue and feedback for systemic change. We had another tribe. As old and new colleagues and consulting associations began calling on us, we jumped eagerly into the learning curve that is reflected here in this entirely new book on PeerSpirit Circle Process. The infrastructure has stood the test of time and application. The level of practice has deepened, and the breadth of people with an openness to try circle as a way to get somewhere else than where they are in their lives and work has greatly expanded.

Now Berrett-Koehler, a publisher specializing in books on business best practices, leadership, and organizational development, has recognized circle practice as mainstream enough to add The Circle Way to its business group process list. When we pause to reflect on this journey, we are amazed at the rapidity ofsocial and technological change and are deeply gratified to be part of this work and conversation. And now we invite you into the circle—to join this amazing cadre of people who sit at the rim and lead from within the group, who believe that the wisdom we need is in the room and that talking our way forward leads to informed and wise action.

Welcome.

Christina Baldwin

Ann Linnea

Whidbey Island, Washington

November 2009

PART

I

The Circle Way

CHAPTER

1

Where Circle Comes From and Where It Can Take Us

The room sizzles with tension. Emotions are high, opinions are formed, polarities harden, and alliances and divisions are drawn. Twelve women and men dressed in the current armor of business are about to engage one another on the battlefield of a contentious meeting. In the next two hours, they will decide things that shape their organization’s future. The agenda is overfull, and there will be insufficient time for discussion or consideration of consequences. Perhaps this doesn’t matter, as the decisions have essentially been made through background e-mails, late and early cell phone calls, text messages, and side conversations in the catacomb of cubicles and corner offices. The players wander in: the CEO, the guy from accounting, department managers, and supervisors. The boss’s assistant sets up coffee, flip charts, and related papers and gets ready to take notes.

These are good people.

These are the people who keep business running—in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, China, Australia and the Pacific nations, Latin and South America, and Africa. Wherever there is enough stability in society to hold together commerce and community, some variation of these people gather, around the clock, around the world. They have spouses and partners and children they love whom they send off to school in the mornings and cheer at soccer games. They walk the dog, pet the cat, read the paper, watch television, and enjoy a good meal and perhaps a glass of wine or a cup of tea to draw a line through the end of the day. They put the kids to bed and often head back to their laptops or hand-helds to tend to correspondence they have no time for in the rush of their workday.

Two to three hundred e-mails a day, they tell us, and we’re required to have our BlackBerrys on 24/7. Another one says, I get up every night at two A.M. to see if the early meetings have been changed—sometimes we have to be here by six A.M., and I have an hour commute. Then I have to wake my husband and negotiate how we’re doing the kids if I’m gone by five—surprising how many other road warriors are on the freeway that time of day. A man laughs sardonically: I sometimes think of myself as a six-figure lemming rushing toward the cliff. I was going to transition out, but my financial parachute burned up back in 2009. Now I’m just grateful to have made it through the layoffs.

Underneath their resignation is tremendous frustration at what it takes to run the world this way—and to be run by the world. And the place that much of this underlying discontent shows up is in how we run our meetings—how we greet and treat each other and how we wield interpersonal power in the attempt to hold on to some sphere of influence that satisfies our desires to make a difference. This world, however, the world of human interaction and participation, is our world to mold and change to fit our needs. What is about to happen here in this room is not predestined; we can redesign it. There is another way: the circle way.

Where Circle Comes From

When humanity’s ancestors began to control the use of fire and to carry the embers of warmth and cooking and light along with them from site to site, fire brought a new experience into being: the need for social organization. We speak of this imagined scene many times in circle, awakening our connections to the dreamtime of human origin.

The man is wet to the skin and shivers. The lifeless body of a rabbit bounces against his shoulder as he hurries through the twilight. The woman trotting at his side pauses in the fading light to gather a few leaves, scratch a surface root free with her toe, and deposit it in the skin pouch at her waist. They move in this fashion along a trail they hope will lead to welcome, warmth, and company for the night. They smell smoke before they can see it, and then hear voices. Finally, they round a bend and there it is—fire glow on a cave wall. Other travelers have already gathered. Not wanting to be mistaken for prey or foe, the man grunts loudly, making the sound for man-friend. The people at the fire are alerted now and shush each other, listening cautiously. There is chatter; then one among them grunts back, Man-friend, man-friend. The woman opens her throat and ululates the haunting cry of female welcome. The women at the fire call back to her. They have two things to offer: food and story.¹

With flame, hominid scavengers could provide one another with increased safety, warmth, and food. These elements allowed hominids to cluster in larger groups, and larger groups required an increased capacity for complex social behavior. Evidence of the controlled use of fire dates back to the Lower Paleolithic, some 200,000 to 400,000 years ago, when Homo erectus, a now extinct hominid, was first exploring its way out of Africa. The skilled use of fire seems to have been passed along to Homo sapiens sapiens—us—who arrived about 165,000 years ago. Solid archaeological evidence of hearth rings has been excavated in South Africa and dated back 125,000 years.

What makes this interesting in a book about collaborative conversation is the supposition that language as a social tool developed alongside the use of fire and the sophistication of hand tools. Just as archaeologists and anthropologists can verify the progressive development of tools, neurolinguists such as Stephen Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, can verify the brain pattern of a developed language center faintly etched in the frontal lobe on the inside of fossilized Homo sapiens crania. Based on this evidence, Pinker states, "All Homo sapiens talk, and all Homo sapiens use language as the way they interpret and filter the world around them."² This combination—fire, which provided the capacity for extending physical gathering; tools, which supported hunting and gathering and eventually agriculture and architecture; and language, which provided a way to organize experience, transmit knowledge, and process human thought and feeling—has proved to be an unbeatable combination.

Once upon a time, fire led our ancestors into the circle. It made sense to put the fire in the center and to gather around it. A circle defined physical space by creating a rim with a common source of sustenance lighting up the center. These ancestors needed the circle for survival—food, warmth, defense—and they discovered that the circle could help design social order.

This may seem like quite a leap of imagination, but it seems less so when we notice how strongly the impulse toward circle remains active, almost instinctual, in human beings today. When people are engaged in dialogue and relationships, we generally arrange ourselves in a circular formation. This automatic behavior is based on the need to be able to see and hear each other and to communicate our intentions through body language and facial expressions as well as through words. The dialogue may be heated, with emotions roused, or it may be comforting, with emotions relaxed; nevertheless, we still stand where we can keep an eye on each other and on what we and they are saying. This social patterning comes from somewhere and has obviously been of service since it has been maintained in the psychosocial lineage of how we behave together. The seminal researcher who articulated the sources of psychosocial lineage was the twentieth-century Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, who lived from 1875 to 1961.

Jung hypothesized that all human beings share a number of images that seem to spring from a common imagination deep within the human psyche. Jung called this source the collective unconscious and noted that it was filled with recurring and universal mythic symbols he named archetypes. Archetypes are expressed culturally but are deeper than culture. For example, the archetypal image that arises when you read the words wise old man is influenced by race, religion, and cultural origin—you may imagine Merlin, the Dalai Lama, James Earl Jones, or Black Elk; the point is that calling up an image is universal. Speak an archetypal phrase to a group, and everybody will imagine something. Jung studied the power of circle by examining anthropological evidence and making psychological corollaries; we discovered the power of circle by noticing what happens when people sit in a circular shape.

To understand the power of circle as a collaborative conversation model and the kinds of insights that can pour into this group process, it is helpful to understand that when we circle up in a ring of chairs, we are activating an archetype. Archetypal energy tends to make our experiences seem bigger, brighter or darker; our words become imbued with shades of meaning, and our dialogue, decisions, and actions take on a sense of significance. This is part of the attraction to circle process: the archetypal energy can magnify issues among the group and help transform them.

People who have experienced circle often refer to this archetypal energy as the magic of circle that occurs when the best (or sometimes the worst) comes out of us and we find ourselves capable of responding with a level of creativity, innovation, problem solving, and visioning that astound us. Others talk about circle as an experience of synergy, as being able to tap into something they didn’t know was in them and could not have predicted as a possible outcome at the start of a circle meeting.

In Germany a few years ago, we were offering a four-day training to sixteen sophisticated consultants from five countries. One of our participants was a leading scholar and academician who wrote and edited journals on political theory and the legacy of Carl Jung in European pedagogy. He pressed us constantly for cognitive information. It was a very helpful interaction for all of us, especially working cross-culturally and choosing English words we hoped would translate meaningfully into German.

The second day into our conversation, something happened that sparked the group and took our learning into insight—we don’t remember the particulars of the moment but do remember how urgently this man leaned forward and said, Stop. Stop—right now, what is happening? What is this energy? He gestured into the space between us, eighteen people sitting in a room at the back of a little retreat center outside Frankfurt