Last month I began the story of where my idea of Generative Communication came from and how it’s inextricably linked to my early life on the farm, my active life married with children coupled with my academic studies, and the launch of my career. [Read part I]
There’s clearly more to the story as I further explored my emerging idea of Generative Communication through my work and life experiences.
My first official J.O.B.—my husband’s suggestion for my next “degree” following the gradual completion of my B.A. and M.A. degrees—was with the local electric utility company. Opportunities for using my education and life-learning experiences about human interaction were endless, first as a human resources development specialist and later as the department manager.
Whether teaching in-house classes on wide-ranging topics, facilitating strategy planning sessions or supporting a major continuous quality improvement initiative in the nuclear power station, human communication practices were front and center.
I had convinced myself for years that I could stand apart from the “systems,” i.e., departments, divisions, and entire companies as a skilled transformative change agent. I thought I could objectively analyze an entity’s operations and associated problems and then prescribe the best course of action needed to achieve the desired improvement change goals. Because that’s what consultants do!
However, as I studied complexity science perspectives of human interaction, I recognized that no one involved with the interactive dynamics of a group of people can “stand outside” the processes they participate in, including managers. We were part of a dynamic entity and had to manage ourselves and our own interactions within the group as part of the generative processes of changing our thinking and behavior from the inside out.
I learned to recognize conflicting lifeviews that blocked a shared understanding of a situation and prevented individuals from seeing what was really going on within and around them.
Take Dennis, for example, who was belligerent and unwilling to work collaboratively with the public relations team to which he’d been recently transferred. After working with his new team members who had learned to really listen to each other’s expert contributions and lifeviews, Dennis was heard and began to recognize his teammates’ capabilities. He gradually learned to relax his obstinance and work collaboratively with the public relations team and other key stakeholders who were often included in problem-solving processes. Often, Generative Communication requires individuals to start by communicating within themselves to find their integrity and communicate with others authentically.
I remember once being acknowledged by senior management at an all-hands meeting. “We owe our thanks to Mary Ferdig for being the conscience of our organization.” I nodded; it was not the time to speak the response that was screaming in my head: “I can’t possibly be anyone’s conscience! We all need to pay attention to our personal integrity and speak authentically to more effectively tackle the issues in this power plant.”
Generative Communication, by its very definition, must be real, authentic, and absolutely trustworthy, which starts with one’s communication within.
Throughout my 30-plus years of working professionally with others, I conducted both formal and informal action research studies. Action research is a philosophy and methodology of research that seeks transformative changes through the simultaneous processes of 1) working with others to create improvement actions and 2) simultaneously doing research by way of systematic observation and critical analysis. Much of what I’ve learned about Generative Communication is the result of action research from one project to the next and recording, and occasionally publishing, my findings. [Read Publication Sample]
Each new situation I encountered during my career, both as an employee and later as an independent consultant, gave me ample opportunities to observe people interacting and the failures and successes that resulted. Each encounter also gave me the opportunity to observe myself as a consultant and practice putting my growing understanding of human communication from a generative perspective to good use. I watched myself evolve from “the expert giving advice and managing my client’s interactions and action for achieving predetermined outcomes” (often spelled out in contract promises).
I learned to let go of the expert’s need to control problem-solving, strategy-planning and conflict-resolving group conversations. Instead, I trusted my knowledge-informed instincts and the wisdom of people who had a stake in finding workable solutions. My job was to set the stage for people to engage authentically with one another and their issues. While their passions sometimes lead to heated disagreements, I refrained from intervening and steering them in a more conciliatory direction toward the desirable outcomes I had preconceived. I understood that glossing over the tough conversations deprived people of getting to the heart of their concerns which inevitably led to new insights and expanded thinking on everyone’s part.
A bicycling accident on the Austin Texas Veloway cracked my helmet and laid me flat on the ground, unconscious. The neurological docs diagnosed a contra-coup traumatic brain injury that left me unable to think straight, much less resume my work as a competent professional.
Suddenly, I was forced to live the theories I’d been studying and practicing. Long after my initial recovery in the frightening first months of what was to be a five-year recovery, I was able to observe my cognitive deficiencies in action. I had been eager to get back to work and tried to do so within the first year yet found myself floundering with the interactive skills I had previously taken for granted.
My internal communication processes—my emotions, thoughts, and judgments—were flawed and as a result, my interactions with others often missed the mark, dramatically. I observed myself clamoring for the right words to say what I wanted to say. My frustration, and sometimes, anger and paranoia were visible when things didn’t go as I had planned. I measured my competence based on my previous standards of performance I could no longer achieve.
I could see my identity shifting from a competent professional to a mediocre wannabe. My confidence abandoned me as I observed my inadequacies. It was easy to conclude I was washed up. Done. My dreams of helping others see the critical importance of their communication competence on multiple levels, about which I’d devoted my study and work, were never to be realized.
But wait a minute! Central to the communication theories I’d been studying and applying to my work prior to the accident were, indeed, the practices of self-observation and self-evaluation—but also, self-responsibility and self-management. At some point, I realized I was short-circuiting my ability to take responsibility for my self-talk and self-managed behaviors. I was giving up the only control I had over my injury and the unpredictable process of healing. It was time for me to practice what I preached and be more mindful of myself and my circumstances.
While my enlightened self-reminder was no panacea, I began to practice shifting my point of view. Yes. I could observe my deficiencies, but I was doing the best I could. I still struggled and disappointed myself time and again as I gradually improved. But I cut myself some slack, gave myself the rest I needed to heal, practiced meditation to stay in touch with the things that matter—life, the loving support of others, the figuring-things-out-capability of the human brain able to forge new neuropathways to replace damaged ones. Gratitude and patience became my mantra as my brain gradually renewed itself for the important work that lay ahead.
During this time, I renewed my study of Alan Watts’s take on Buddhism, not as a religion but as a philosophy, a method of rediscovering the experience of being alive:
“To ‘know’ reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.”
– Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
There is much about the philosophy of Buddhism that informed my ideas of Generative Communication. Enough so that I will dedicate a future blog to the topic.
Maybe it was the whack on the side of the head that led me to start writing. How do I convey to others this critical, new (yet grounded in ancient teachings) way of thinking about human interaction? What must I say to help people understand and utilize our inherent gifts to genuinely participate—responsibly, with an eye for much more than our individual self-interests—in co-creating the realities we long for as a human community? I’ve been writing ever since. Endless drafts of paragraphs, then pages, and later manuscripts. Material that’s too theoretical, too autobiographical, too academic, too long, too complex, and so on.
Somewhere in the process of describing this new way of thinking about and practicing human communication—of evolving ourselves to a new level of consciousness for resolving insurmountable challenges through conscious human interaction—the term hit me like a ton of bricks: Generative Communication.
1 Since I named my idea, I’ve learned about and connected with Luca Toschi, founder of the Center for Generative Communication at the University of Florence, Italy. Toschi and his team explore the full spectrum of communication technology in all aspects of our global political economy. Guided by the equally new and intriguing field of complexity theory and dedicated to the ideals of global sustainability and a culture of peace, they define GC as “an individual and collective source of positive energy in society.” We share complementary philosophies and ideals as well as non-mechanistic approaches to problem-solving. The term “generative communication” is also found in the literature related to generative artificial intelligence (AI). There are few, if any, similarities related to the form of “Generative Communication” revealed in my research.
2 Comments
Thank you for your honesty and authenticity in sharing your story, your struggles, your break throughs. You have so much to offer the world.
Thanks for your generous comment. Isn’t it exciting to imagine how much we can jointly offer the world when we engage in generative communication?