Snychronicity: 11/18/08

Synchronicity
Joseph Jaworski
Barrett-Kohler 1998

This leadership book details the life and learning of Joseph Jaworski. He is the son of the Watergate special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. Joseph’s career has gone from being a successful law practice and owner of race horses to the creation of one of the most wide-spread leadership development programs in the United States: The American Leadership Forum. The book ends with his work on scenario development with Shell Oil. It is an insightful journey of one man uncovering the meaning of leadership. He refers a lot to the seminal book, Servant Leader, by Robert Greenleaf.

Preface
“…synchronicity ‘as meaningful coincidence of two of more events, where something other than the probability of chance is involved.’”

“I have come to see this as the most subtle territory of leadership, creating the conditions for ‘predictable miracles’”.

Introduction by Peter Senge
3 “Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.”
10 “…it’s about a shift from seeing a world made up of things to seeing a world that’s open and primarily made up of relationships…” Once we see this, we begin to see that the future is not fixed, that we live in a world of possibilities…But deep down, we’re resigned to being absolutely powerless in the larger world. Yet if we have a world of people who all feel powerless, we have a future that’s predetermined. So we live in hopelessness and helplessness, a state of great despair. And this despair is actually a product of how we think, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.”
12 “Sometimes the greatest acts of commitment involve doing nothing but sitting and waiting until I must know what to do next.”
14 “Lastly, when we are in a state of commitment and surrender, we begin to experience what is sometimes called ‘synchronicity’. In other words, synchronicity is a result.”

Chapter One Watergate
This chapter tells about his experience with his father and the changes experienced after his father’s return from war. It goes on to give an insight to the disillusionment that came from Nixon’s actions. At one point he questions (p.22) “How could someone with such low moral and ethical base ascend to the highest office of the most powerful nation in the world? How could this happen? Who was responsible? How could we prevent this from ever happening again?...(p 23) I was disillusioned with our political leadership, but I recognized that we all bore some personal responsibility for what was happening in Washington. We were getting what we deserved. I began thinking about the role that ordinary citizens like myself should be playing the life of our country.”

Chapter Two Making a Mark
This chapter details his successful rise as a trial lawyer and his immense material success in different areas of his life, including a lucrative quarter horse operation. He ends the chapter with, “The end to this illusion would come to me, as it has for so many, by means of a personal crisis.”

Chapter Three The Journey Begins
Through his personal crisis he was forced to do introspective work. “I began to reflect upon how I was living, where I was heading, and what I wanted out of life…It was to be years later as I looked back at this time of my life that I realized that this was the beginning of a new life journey for me…” pp34-35

Chapter Four Freedom
A divorce and the selling of the horse operations came at this time of his life. “…I found myself thinking about two notions of freedom… The first was “freedom from”, that is freedom to get away from the oppressiveness of circumstances. A great deal of what I was experiencing was the need to break loose from the conformity of my life over the previous fifteen years. But another notion of freedom was… the freedom to follow my life’s purpose with all the commitment I could muster…”p.39

Chapter Five Grand Prix Test Run
“Ever since I was a teenager I had been fascinated by Ferraris, and in later years I enjoyed Grand Prix racing.” p 40
This chapter covers his unique experience around Grand Prix racing in Monza, Italy. This covers his challenges to getting into the racing pits. He meets a unique person (Manny, a former U.S. fighter pilot) who is seminal in helping him to achieve his dream. His question is, how much do we let things happen and how often do we force it to happen?


Chapter Six The Art of Loving
In this chapter he describes the impact of Eric Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving.
p. 46 “I learned that our deepest need is to overcome our aloneness and out separateness…We seek conformity, mistaking it for union.”
“Fromm sets forth the elements of love: care, which is active concern for the life and growth of the one we love; responsibility, which is caring for one’s physical needs as well as one’s higher needs; and respect, which is allowing others to grow as they need to on their own terms.”
p. 47 “It was all a part of my experiment with trust of and patience with the natural flow of life, with being open to the next step, and then taking it when the moment seemed right.”

Chapter Seven Oneness
“Sometimes the oneness happens between a lawyer and a jury. I’ve talked to many of the best trial lawyers, and they acknowledge that there is often a moment, either in the closing argument or the trial itself, where there is nothing between you and the jury. You’re a part of them, and they’re a part of you.” p.53

“I ran into Fran Tarkenton, the former quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings…He and the receiver were in complete accord. Things would slow down and be almost effortless. He knew before the ball ever left his hands that it was a completed pass.” p.54

Chapter Eight The Dream
“…I began to feel that the organizing principle of the universe is ‘relatedness’, and that this is more fundamental than ‘thingness’. It kept occurring to me that this new understanding is what’t missing in how we think about leadership. We’re always talking about what leaders do- about leadership style and function- but we put very little emphasis on the being aspect of leadership.” Pp. 58-59

“”The essence of leadership, says Greenleaf, is the desire to servce one another and to serve something beyond ourselves, a higher purpose. In our traditional way of thinking, “servant leadership” sounds like an oxymoron. But in a world of relationships, where relatedness is the organizing principle of the universe, it makes perfect sense.” p.59

“By the time I left the mountains, I had a basic outline for an institute that would develop servant leadership. Eventually, I would call it the American Leadership Forum. It would be patterned in some ways after the well-known White House Fellowship Program… it would heighten their sense of public responsibility, and it would enhance their capacity to lead in a pluralistic society where no one would ever be “in charge” again. The overarching principle would be one of ‘servant leadership’.”p.60

Chapter Nine Cairo
“Leadership is all about the release of human possibilities. One of the central requirements for good leadership is the capacity to inspire the people in the group to move them and encourage them and pull them into activity, and to help them get centered and focused and operating at peak capacity. A key element of this capacity to inspire is communicating to people that you believe they mater, that you know they have something important to give. The confidence you have in others will to some degree determine the confidence they have in themselves.” p.66

Chapter Ten Collapsing Boundaries
Through a personal tragedy he finds an impetus to move the dream into reality.

Chapter Eleven The Mystery of Commitment
At this point he resigns from the law firm.
“At the moment I walked away from the firm, a strange thing happened. I clearly had no earthly idea how I would proceed. I knew next to nothing about leadership curriculum and development. I knew no one who could help me on the substantive side of things, no network of experts.” p.75

Chapter Twelve The Guide
In this chapter he describes his encounter with one of the world’s eminent theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and how that help guide his next steps. A part of Bohm’s work that impacted him, “This everything in the universe affects everything else because they are all part of the same unbroken whole. Bohm thinks that the current trend towards fragmentation is embedded in the subject-verb-object structure of our grammar, and is reflected at the personal and social levels by our tendency to see individuals and groups as ‘other’ than ourselves, leading to isolation, selfishness, and wars.” p. 78

Chapter Thirteen Synchronicity: The Cubic Centimeter of Chance
At this point he has a “chance” meeting with the woman who would become his wife.
“At the very moment when we are struggling to attain a sense of personal autonomy, we are also caught up in vital forces that are larger than ourselves..” p.88

Chapter Fourteen The Moment of Swing
He begins to detail out the sequence of events that lead him to some of the leading Leadership experts in the United States.
“1. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of self-knowledge.”
2. The trouble with American leaders is their lack of appreciation for the nature of leadership itself.
3. The trouble with American leaders is their focus on concepts that separate…rather than concepts the express our interconnectedness.
4. The trouble with American leaders is their ignorance of the world and of U.S. interdependence- their lack of worldmindedness.
5. The trouble with American leaders is their inattention to values- forgetting to ask “Why?” and “What for?”
6. The trouble with American leaders is that they do not know how to makes changes, to analyze “social architecture”, and to create a team to make something different happen.”
7. The trouble with American leaders is an insufficient appreciation of the relevance of stakeholders; of the implications of pluralism; and of the fact that nobody is in charge; and therefore each leader is partly in charge of the situation as a whole.
8. The trouble with American leaders is that they are not sufficiently aware of the context, or the external environment, of whatever it is they are responsible for doing.”

Chapter 15 The Wilderness Experience: A Gateway to Dialogue
A wilderness experience was included in the design of ALF. It was intended to:
“1. Strengthen the fellows’ power of self-belief, their feeling of self-efficacy, and the belief that they can accomplish what they set forth to do.
2. Encourage the fellows to rely on their inner resources that are so seldom tapped, to use their intuition and the ability to extemporize, and innovate in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.
3. Build deep trust and respect among the group, and help each fellow get beyond the devaluing prejudices that we all hold.
4. Evoke their higher nature and have them experience that we are all connected.
5. Learn…how to be flexible and adapt quickly to change and new environments.” pp.101-102

Chapter 16 Dialogue: The Power of Collective Thinking
“… a great deal of what we discuss is not deeply serious in the sense that there are all sorts of things which are nonnegotiable- the ‘undiscussables’. No one mentions the undiscussables- they’re just there, lying beneath the surface, blocking deep, honest, heart-heart communication.” p.110

Chapter 17 Lessons: Encountering The Traps
“Some who are called to the adventure choose to go. Others may wrestle for years with fearfulness and denial before they are able to transcend fear. We tend to deny our destiny because of our insecurity, our dread of ostracism, our anxiety, and our lack of courage to risk what we have.” p.119
The Trap of Responsibility p.121
The Trap of Dependency p. 123
The Trap of Overactivity p. 127

Chapter 18 The Power of Commitment
“There are two aspects of commitment. There is a commitment to take action… But there is a second more subtle aspect to commitment and will, and that is the ground of being for taking action.” p.133

Chapter 19 The Return- and Venturing Forth Again
He details a description of the beginning of a new chapter in his life: an offer to head Shell’s worldwide scenario planning team.

Chapter 20 Setting the Field
At this point he has joined Shell. “The first task was to set the vision for our team… I was struck, however, from the very outset at how rational the Westerners in the group seemed to be, and how skeptical and even disdainful most of them were of anything that smacked of what they referred to as the ‘soft stuff’- anything that could not be measured or quantified. This was very difficult for me because over the previous then years or so, I had come to see the immeasurable as precisely that which was most real…” pp 151-152

Chapter 21 Barricades
“From the very outset I sought to gain collective agreement on the team about the driving forces that were influencing world events… Eventually we agreed that two interrelated patterns characterized fundamental change around the world: increasing liberalization and increasing globalization.” p.155
Barricades is basically the scenario they agreed is the possible downside of the liberalization and globalization.

Chapter 22 New Frontiers
New Frontiers is about the upside of the liberalization and globalization.
“This title seemed fitting for a scenario of what can occur if the world embraces the unprecedented challenge of securing political and economic freedom for all people in the world.” p.166

Chapter 23 A World of Possibilities
“… the awesome power of these words, “We the People”… I kept thinking about how we the people in fact do create the future through our declarations, our actions, our way of being.” p. 173

Chapter 24 Creating the Future
“The conventional view of leadership emphasizes positional power and conspicuous accomplishment. But true leadership is about creating a domain in which we continually learn and become more capable of participating in our unfolding future.” p.183

Epilogue Bretton Woods and Hadamar
This final chapter describes a powerful gathering of 350 people who were asking, “What next?” in a global sense. A touching story is shared about a woman’s father who died in Auschwitz.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets