L&C

Beginnings matter.

Those first pages of a book carry more gravity than everything that follows. The same goes for movies, while we may continue watching, how we watch, what we pay attention to, and how we feel is determined by how it begins.

So in a workshop… while we have their attention, what do we most want to say?

And why?

We have the next 2 hours together and the intention is ultimately to support your team during this important phase of reforming.

Behind this simple sentence lies a world of context. Maybe this team is excited for the workshop. Or dreading it. Maybe half their team was just retrenched. Maybe they’re only there because their lead says they should be.

For a few brief moments I have the opportunity to set the tone, to create an opening or risk a closing.

How I continued:

Right at the start, there are two important things I want to name.

[Two things, that’s easy to remember for them and me. Now they’re curious].

Firstly, I know that most of you have been working for many, many years and so it’s highly likely that you’ve already encountered tools like this. Some of you may love this particular tool, some of you may not, there may be mixed feelings. That is totally OK. We are using this purely as a tool for insight. 

It will be a springboard for conversations, and it’s those conversations which will be much more important than the tool itself. We will move from those conversations into places where we create maybe new agreements, actions, who knows what we’ll create, but the goal will be to create something from that insight.

[I named the doubt and welcomed it. I also showed respect, most folks we work don’t need what we bring.]

If it’s a team meeting that happens every week, how are you opening? If it’s a critical client call, what will set the tone?

There is no recipe, no formula. The act of clarifying the opening is as much for them as it is for us.

How do we feel about this workshop? What are we choosing to pay attention to? Where are we directing our attention?

Beginnings matter because they’re where we meet ourselves and the group.

Choose wisely.

The start to one of my favourite books:

“The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed trough the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with coversation and laughter, the clatter and clamour one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of the night. If there had been music…but no, of curse there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. they drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing these they added a small, sullen silenceto the lager, hollow one. it made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone heart that held the heat of a long-dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. and it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a strech of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

The man had true-red hair, red as flame. his eyes was dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.

The Waystone was is, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wapping the other inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind