Bringing Your Right Brain to Work!

December 3, 2008 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Universalist/Unitarian Church of the Monterey Penninsula

490 Aguajitio Road, Carmel, CA 93923

For over a century, the most workplaces have honored and rewarded a workforce that is deeply rooted in left brain talent and focus. As the world becomes more complex and fast paced, it is increasingly impossible to drive success exclusively from the left brain. The breakdown of America’s and the world’s economic system offers a rare moment to integrate the right brain into the left brain dominant workplace

This workshop explores a model for understanding complexity and the need to balance left and right brain capabilities in the workplace. It is designed to show how the emerging sciences of ethology, cybernetics and systems theory combine to help us better understand the world and the way our organizations can keep up with rapid evolution of everything around us.

Co-Facilitator-Bob Sadler is a management consultant with 30 years of experience in the management of organization development and change. . http://www.sadlerconsulting.net/

Co-Facilitator-Peter Roberson is the founder of Human Insight, LLC which is based in London and is the author of the book “Always Change a Winning Team”. . http://www.human-insight.com/

Cost: $20.00 Donation to UUCMP with Reservations --$30 at the door:
Call Bob Sadler 4156010754

Happy Anniversary!

It's November 20. Yesterday, we celabrated our 42nd anniversary. We dated in our senior year of High School, stayed together while Sharon went to college and I fullfilled my military obligation including a year in Vietnam. We were married in 1966. Our marriage survived the 60's without the benefit of drugs, the 70's without considering divorce (which was all the rage), the 80's without abandoning a home full of teenagers (kids so high on hormones that drugs might have provided relief), the 90's without begging our kids to come home and keep us company, and well into the 2000's in spite of eight of the most destructive years in US history and the resulting feeling of personal futility.

We celabrated with a couple of days at Carmel Valley Ranch. It was delightful. It was a sunny 75 degrees and the fall color was as good as it gets in California. We wandered around village art galleries and ate some of the best food ever.

I look back on 42 years (46 really) with a rush of joy, sorrow, triumph, failure, and, most of all, fullfillment. How did I ever find her? How did she ever find me? How did we ever sustain love and support for each other as our individual identies emerged and grew? I don't know. The warmth of our anniversary will be at the Thanksgiving table next week. I'll give thanks, again, for the bounty.

A Stroke of Insight!

If you haven't seen Jill Bolte Taylor's speech at TED, you really should take 17 minutes and watch it. On a lot of levels, it's worth every minute. It's the most watched speech of the entire TED series. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

If you are as interested as I am, you will then read the book "A Stroke of Insight".

Essentially, the speech is about her sudden discovery of her right brain hemisphere that happened as the result of a stroke that closed down her left brain hemisphere. She had a fully developed left brain hemisphere that served her well as a brain scientist, so she hadn't spent much time and energy developing her right brain....that is, until she suddenly lost most of her left brain hemisphere. It took her eight years to recover her left brain, so now she is fully developed on both sides. As a result, she has a unique ability to be both scientific and artful in her speech and book.

I have met others who have a good balance between left and right brain development, but they are rare. Most of us seem to have developed much more on one side or the other. The people I know from business are left brain dominant, for the most part. The people I know in other careers such as arts and humanities, are more right brain dominant. These two different worlds seem polarized. I can go into either camp and hear very bad things about the other camp. The polarization seems to have become worse as I think back to the beginning of my career. I've worked and thrived in both worlds. I think I'm more right brain dominant with a focus on relationships and creativity at the expense of being logical and sequential. But I do have a lot of affection and respect for left brain people and organizaitons.

Jill Bolte Taylor's video made me suddenly aware that my career has always been focused on working with dominant left brain people who need to use right brain tools, techniques and awareness in order to get something done. So, it's no accident that I've ended up working with mostly engineers and accountants in established corporations. These are the most left brain dominant cultures in the world and they don't welcome right brain dominant employees for very long. So, I get rented, from time to time, to help with something that usually involves relationship building, emotional processing, or creativity and innovation. In short, 'people stuff'.

Once I defined my business proposition this way, everything fell into place . My client list made sense. The lack of competition is understandable (how many right brain people want to spend their time in left brain settings?). The next big challenge became clear.

The next big challenge? It's been in front of me for years and I didn't see it. I have a lot of very left brain dominant clients who have risen in their careers to a point where their jobs have suddenly changed from requiring strong left brain capabilities (plan the work and work the plan) to requiring strong right brain capabilities (set visions, inspire people, create strong relationships). The requirement change is severe and it often happens in just one promotion.

These clients hire me to help with one or two things, but they are overwhelmed and struggling because they need someone with my skills on almost everything they do. I can often shed light on the problem of having too much left brain dominance in a right brain job, but then they want to solve that problem....and, of course they want to solve the problem with a left brain approach. "What book can I read?"

Development of a long dormant right brain hemisphere will require time, immersion, practice and commitment. There are places you can go to get that development, but they are often shrouded in 'new age' style that is the last place any of these left brain dominant people would ever go.

We need a right brain development center and program that makes sense to left brain executives who need to get more balance between left and right brain capability. I've done a search. I don't see an existing resource that I think would work.

So, we've had our own stroke of insight. I'm working on building a right brain development center. We are piloting some programs this winter and I hope we can launch a full blown pilot in the spring.

Thanks to Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight".

Soaring Again

We've been to Big Sur twice in the past two weeks. The fire damage is in full view as soon as you pass by Big Sur village. Whole mountain ranges to the east of Route 1 are ashen. On the west side of Route 1, toward the ocean, is untouched. Route 1 was the fire break.

The Condors must have been forced out of the hills and over to the beach. We saw about a dozen of them and they were flying low. They just stretched out their nine foot wingspan and soared with the updrafts of the sea cliffs. They didn't use any energy flapping those wings. They just stretched the large black and white feathers in every direction.

That's how I feel. I'm starting to stretch out in every direction. I have a huge pent up desire for everything...relationships, exercise, work, photography, painting, church, and politics. I've never felt so alive. My desire is greater than my energy, so I have to be careful. But it feels sooo good!

I'm still not able to work full time, but I'm continuing to make progress. I'm spending a couple of days a week, on the average, at Lawrence Livermore Labs. It looks like I'll do that for at least another year. I'm going back to the Orange County Unified School District to help them with the next strategic plan early next year. I finished a pilot with HP Software that went well and I'll probably do another engagement there before long. I also finished an engagement at Cisco. Every week I'm a little stronger. I work hard for a few days and then I exercise and rest for a few days.

Our move to Pacific Grove is a year old. It was a great move. We feel as though we fit in. The area is small compared to Silicon Valley and London. People are friendly. They reach out. We know enough people, now, that we run into friends wherever we go. The place is physically beautiful and constantly changing with the shifting weather. That was no surprise. What was a surprise was the social intimacy. We love it here! We're soaring!

The Rhythms of Life

For most of my life, I adopted the rhythm of four seasons. In New England, I was inspired by the first few weeks of each new season and ready for a change in the last few weeks of each season.

California seasons are subtle and there are no inspiring renewals. One month marches into another with no definition. One day I notice the hills are browned out with the dryness of summer and before long I notice we are rich with the green of the rainy season. I never know exactly when the changes happened and the changes have little impact.

So, it was natural to fall into the rhythm that cancer generates. I just had my third CT Scan, and the results were great. I'm very relieved. I am inspired. It's like Spring!

As much as I trust that I am cancer free following all the aggressive treatment last year, I need to verify my condition every six months. I am in a trust and verify rhythm. The two seasons of my life are July through December and January through June each year. This rhythm will go on for five years.

I can easily trust that I'm healthy now, but as I get close to the next scan in January my anxiety will grow. "What's that pain in my arm?" "Is that a lump in my thigh?" "Why am I feeling tired." "Have I lost weight?" In the six weeks before the last scan, I was fighting to stay focused on the positive. I was mostly successful, but it was like trying to stand upright at the shoreline with your face toward the sun while a dark, swirling undertow tries to throw you off balance underfoot.

Anyway, I've been scanned in great detail and I'm fine. There is still a pseudo-cyst on my pancreas that is a result of surgery. It's a potential problem, but they often go away on their own, and mine shrunk about 25% in the past six months. That's a good indication that it will continue to dissolve.

Beyond that, I've not lost any more weight. The other side effects like atrial fibrillation and pulmonary emboli are no longer present. My strength is improving and my energy level is good. I managed to walk 18 holes for the first time in July. My gym workouts are more rigorous.

The work that I am able to do is going well. I just finished an engagement at Cisco and another at HP. I managed a business trip to Australia with no ill effect. I'm focused on work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

For ever thing there is a season....

The end of 'news' as we knew it...

I discovered journalism in college. I had two teachers. Mal Salter was my journalism teacher and the college's Public Relations Director. Mal hired me in my sophomore year to work part time in the PR office. When he left the college, Pete Durham replaced him. I continued to work for Pete, and he referred me to the Farmington Valley Herald where I became the editor after graduating from college. I served as editor for two years and did the job part time while I taught school.

Mal and Pete grew up at the Hartford Courant. The Hartford Courant is a serious newspaper and is the oldest newspaper in the United States.

I loved these guys. They were affectionate, family focused, patriotic, skeptical and had a 'bull shit' meter that they wore on their rolled-up sleeves. They worked hard to get the story. They were fair. They wrote good leads, good headlines and made you want to read the whole story. They had trusted sources and used there authenticity to put people at ease as they talked. They believed they were the fourth pillar of the American constitution just behind the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. I absorbed that style like a sponge and it shaped all that I do today.

I grew up with the assumption that the press wouldn't change. Over the past 20 years, I've watched in horror as the fourth estate disintegrated. The last bastion of the that estate was Tim Russert. I hardly ever missed an episode of "Meet the Press" . Tim was Mal Salter and Pete Durham on steroids. He had all the same qualities...just larger than life.

As the American audience developed a giant case of attention deficit disorder, TV news went to entertainment and finally split into left and right wing info-tainment outlets. All the prinicpals of journalism are gone. Pretty faces read garbage....over and over again. Newspapers are shrinking and giving way to blogs which have no value for the principals of journalism.

Tim Russert was the last journalist standing...and, now he is gone. He can't be replaced. There was no succession plan. Tom Brokaw will come back for a few months to let us down genltly. Then, Tom will fade out.

When Tom fades out, there should be a funeral for journalism.

It's a new day!

There is something about the Clinton's that made me queasy. I wanted to like them. After all, they are liberal democrats. Bill presided over the country during some great years. But I always felt that he was recklessly ambitious and that Hilary was right there with him. I didn't trust them. Yes, I was happy the Republicans weren't in office, but I had to hold my nose for those eight years. I felt that they were a big bubble...just like the housing bubble. I couldn't understand what power inflated that bubble.


And then came Bush. He was so bad that he made the Clinton's look good.

We watched Barrack Obama speak at Kerry's Democratic convention and thought, "Wow! he'll be a player before long." I never thought for a moment it would be this soon.

Then we read " The Audacity of Hope" and we were really hooked. When Obama decided to run this year, I thought it would be a dry run. Then, the Clinton's made me remember why I wanted to hold my nose. I think it was when Hillary said that she though John McCain would be a better President than Barrack Obama. Good lord, talk about recklessly ambitious!

I began to wish for a miracle. I've never been right about politics in America. I thought Bill Clinton would lose both elections. I thought George Bush would lose both elections. So, I stopped predicting. I'm too out of touch with mainstream America. I can't believe that more than half of the country refuses to believe in evolution. I can't imagine that the 99 channels on cable TV actually have an audience.

Even early this past week I thought the Clinton's would do something slick and postpone a conclusion. I felt the same way the last time the Red Sox won the World Series. I was so used to them losing that I expected them to lose in spite of the evidence. Yesterday, the bubble burst.

Well, here we are. We have a black Presidential nominee. It's also clear that the country is ready for a female Presidential nominee even though Hillary lost this opportunity. And, now, despite all the evidence, I won't predict that Obama will win. John McCain is an interesting guy. I don't think he would be as bad as he is promising to be, but it's time for the next generation to jump into leadership roles. This is a new day. The country needs to make a break with big money vested interests. I don't know if it will happen. I'll can only hope!