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Writer's pictureMichelle Holliday

The Unexpected Entanglement of Gifts and Wounds

"What may happen with life in organizations if we connect with wounds and gifts and create spaces for healing, love and potential?"


This was the core inquiry for our two OD for Life in-person gatherings this year. And it's an inquiry we are continuing in an open 75-minute call on November 12, 2024, to reflect on what our experiences of it have been. You are warmly invited to witness and contribute to the discussion.


Already, I can tell you: I struggled with this question at first, as you might imagine. This was what I shared within the OD for Life community:

[T]he 8-person hosting team has been in a deeply open-hearted exploration of what our core inquiry should be for these days that we will be together. What has emerged from our exploration is a question that is just at the edge of my comfort. It speaks of wounds and gifts, of love and healing, all within the context of our professional work with organizations. Despite their edginess, I can't deny that these themes seem to get to the root of what it means and what it is likely to take to align more fully with life in our organizations. And I trust completely in our hosting team: I know that this is a conversation we can hold with care across a wide range of readiness among participants, in part because we come to it with genuine curiosity and humility.

We came to this place through conversations with Bruce Anderson, whose Core Gift Institute has been dedicated to related questions for several decades.


It was also a natural extension and deepening of several ongoing threads of inquiry. For example, Onno Geveke and I had written last year about OD for Life in the Appreciative Inquiry Practitioner Journal, noting the core patterns of our community:

Aligning with life. Inquiring together. Practicing care. Welcoming each other’s gifts.
If organisations are to be practice grounds for a more thrivable world, as we believe they must, we likely need to create this kind of practice ground for ourselves – spaces of inquiry, care and the sharing of diverse gifts, all in stewardship of life.

This is already some distance from the hard-nosed, transactional focus on deliverables that characterizes the prevailing concept of organizations. But there's a level of comfort in the positive orientation. "Gifts" seem not so different from "talents" and "strengths,"which the dominant story heartily embraces in service of concrete outcomes.


The conversation ventured a little further from comfort, however, as Monica Boos, Dorothe Liebig, Katherine Long and Erica Neve hosted a series of calls exploring the role of healing and even hospicing in organizational development. In what was an unexpectedly nourishing conversation, they asked:


  • What is our own experience of ‘hospicing’ in our own lives that we draw from?

  • What is our experience of helping organisations to recognise when they can let go?

  • What promising practices are emerging for OD and regenerative practitioners in this space?

But going even further and naming the wound itself, I found, is to plunge headfirst into vulnerability. It is to breach the divide between professional and personal. It is to question the limits of organizational purpose.


There is danger in acknowledging our woundedness.


Yet our hypothesis has been that, if we can stand with courage in this place of danger and vulnerability, there is healing, love and potential that await us there.


Indeed, Brené Brown compellingly assures us that vulnerability is the key to joy and meaningful connection with others. Bruce tells us that each of us is a "wounded healer."

Your Core Gift is always connected to healing. Because it springs from challenges you have faced in your lifetime, each offering of that gift ... restores you and gifts your community back to health by the constant giving.

This is deeply relevant to the practice of "Organizational Development for Life" and the commitment we are making to be "no longer neutral." "There is a regular tapping of each of our not-belonging stories as we are doing our work," Bruce points out. "The 'system' sees that we are doing some dismantling and will rise up against us. You have to face the wound in that. It’s part of the work and [therefore, unexpectedly] a source of joy and gifts."


To explore how some of us have experienced this, we will gather online on November 12th. A small number of us will seed the exploration with a short exchange between us. And then we'll all have the opportunity to reflect with others and to explore common threads in our perspectives and experiences. To join the conversation, find the link to register here.






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