Resources

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Join us May 16 and 17 at Royal Roads University on beautiful Vancouver Island, BC to learn more about our Adaptive Action Lab Simplifying Complex Change.

If you are like many of us working in fast-paced organizations, you most likely have no shortage of projects needing your attention. When the projects start piling up, you are faced with the difficult question of what to take on and what to put off. But the real challenge in making these decisions is that all these projects appear highly important or at least highly risky to avoid.

How I prioritize my time is a consistent concern for me. It relates to my work, civic engagement and volunteerism, relationships, and to how I take care of myself. When I say, “I’m sorry, I wish I could do XYZ, but I can’t,” there is a voice in my head that tells me, “If you really wanted to, you could. You just have to prioritize it.” This blog isn’t about why I feel this way. Anne Helen Peterson nailed it when she wrote about burnout. This blog is about how I tried (and botched) using Human Systems Dynamics to optimize my time. In that process, however, I gained insight that gives me the energy to move forward.

(With deep gratitude to Michael Bischoff, Mary Nations, and Sam Grant, and others, whose narratives of death have helped me step into this self-reflection.) In the HSD Institute, we host a group on FaceBook where we invite you to join us in exploring Patterns with Death. People come there to share their own perspectives about patterns with death; they share others’ words they have found meaningful; they share questions. As I began to create this blog post, I was drawn to explore the creation of my own narrative of death. I share these thoughts with you as a suggestion and an invitation to create your own narrative around death. My hope is such a narrative might ease, inform, and comfort you and others as you, too, step into this unknown, complex transition of life.

What were you doing in 1977? I was a new assistant professor of anatomy at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. It was the only medical school in a poor and medically underserved State with 23 indigenous Native American tribes and tens of thousands of people living at or below the poverty level along its border with Mexico. The state legislature asked the medical school to address these issues.

Learning a new language often involves as much forgetting or letting go as it does memorizing new words and creating new patterns of speech. On a recent trip to Mexico, I had a chance to renew my Spanish language studies. As I did, I noticed how my mid-life brain struggled to remember and retrieve unfamiliar words, and the surprising things it would do to meet the new demands. As a practitioner of human systems dynamics, I pondered what this experience could teach me about the role of difference in pattern formation. This blog explores some of my reflection.