If someone were to ask you what the purpose of your brain is, what would you say? If you are like most people, you would likely say some version of, "to think". That may well be a part of your higher purpose, but if you were neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writing as she did in "seven and a half lessons about the brain", your answer would be "body budgeting". The core function of your brain is "allostasis": everything involved in regulating your energy and anticipating the changes in the environment and inside your body that might affect your survival. Without energy we die. Generating energy is the prime directive. Emotion, perception, cognition and action are all derivatives of the basic transactional demands of my physiological metabolism. I can reduce everything that I think or say I want (or don't want for that matter) to sustaining my energy and fulfilling these demands. But it's impossible to do this alone. Without other people, life wouldn't just be less interesting; it would cease to exist.
If asked what the function of a relationship is, I would encounter the same duality of transactional purpose and higher purpose. The most elevated answer is some version of service or contribution or even love, but Lisa would say, something more along the lines of emotional and physiological co-regulation. From the time I was conceived, I've been unseverably bound to other people not just for my identity but for my very survival. What began as an umbilical cord in the simplest of my relationships (with my mother) has expanded into a complex relational ecosystem–a kind of exoskeletal metabolism.
We are all working together to get our needs met, except when we aren't. When I approach my relationships more consciously, I tend to get my emotional and physiological needs met in the service of you getting your needs met. As good will builds in our relationship you will likley respond in kind. Our system spirals upward. The synergy that exists in a relationship system is what sustains the energy of the system. But this does not always happen. Society and the economy have their ups and downs. My business has its ups and downs. Like you, I have my good days and I have my bad days.
As members of a relationship system in constant flux, we don't always operate at our highest and best. Sometimes the world seems like it's against us or we feel sick, tired, overworked or stressed. As our energy drains from the system, we let our more primal survival instincts hijack our collective sense of higher purpose. In this depleted state, we tend to drift unconsciously into getting our needs met at the expense of each other. Synergy collapses. A constructive process of growth and expansion devolves into bald transactional process of self-protection and competition for scarce resources. Our system spirals downward. It's a zero-sum game. How do we reverse the spiral?
•••
In the later part of 2011, I followed my mountain guide Patrick Delaney up an ascent of a frozen waterfall in Jasper National Park called Polar Circus. I attempted it several times as a younger climber but was denied every time. An expert climbing party of two typically completed the route in twelve hours car to car. We did it in a very clean and safe seven hours. For Partick it was a lifetime achievement as a guide and for me a lifetime achievement as an ice climber. I had just turned 47 and had 29 seasons of ice under my belt. At last I was content.
I'm generally content until I want something I don't have or have something I don't want. None of us achieves the really interesting things without some sort of help. I wanted to get to the top of Polar Circus and I needed Patrick to do it. (And it turns out that Patrick wanted to guide Polar Circus and he needed me to do it.)
Marita Fridjohn and Faith Fuller are the designers of a relationships and systems coaching program I took shortly after I completed Polar Circus. Core among their ideas is "the third entity". Prior to that climb Patrick and I had been climbing for several years. We had a achieved a smooth and efficient synergy as partners. I did not climb Polar Circus alone and on that day Patrick did not climb Polar Circus alone either (though he is still very capable solo climbing it). It was Patrick and Keith who climbed Polar Circus car-to-car in seven hours. It took both of us. There is Patrick and there is Keith and there is our third entity Patrick and Keith. It was our synergy that enabled the achievement, not just our invidual strengths and skills as guide and guest. He would not have achieved that with any other guest (his words).
In any given moment a relationship system is content or striving towards something that wants to happen. In my relationship with Patrick, Polar Circus wanted to happen.
•••
The moment you become aware of something that you want and don't have (or have but don't want) you need some sort of support from some person or group to achieve it. The fundamental relationship is between a leader and supporter. In a business relationship, the roles of leader and supporter oscillate from moment to moment and do not necessarily depend on a designation based on a formal power structure and hierarchy.
Imagine the relationship of a CEO and the four members of her senior team. Her board hired her "to get what we want but do not have". She accepted mandate. She might have different reasons to follow the lead of the board, but it is now something that she wants but does not have. She needs her senior team to follow her in the achievement of the objective.
The CEO has a leadership role with the four senior members of her support team. From a third entity perspective, there is the CEO and the there is the senior team and there is the CEO and the senior team. There obviously needs to be a high degree of synergy in the relationship between the CEO and her senior team, if she is to efficiently and safely achieve their mandate.
When we go down a level, we consider the synergy potential within the senior team. How many separate relationships are there in a four person support team? For starters, there are six 1:1 relationships. There is, for example, a COO (chief operations officer) and CFO (chief financial officer) who form a relationship system called the COO-CFO relationship. If this relationship system generates synergy and works well, it is easier for both the CFO-CTO (chief technology officer) relationship to work well and the COO-CTO relationship to work well, setting the tone for the CTO and CMO (chief marketing officer) to work well, etc.
The two people in each of the six 1:1 relationships have an emotional and physiological co-regulation dynamic. The relationship subsystem is either generating synergy and is in an upward spiral or it is devolving into a downward spiral and creating a cascading affect in either case. Synergy is the product of a healthy leader-supporter dynamic where each party operates with the understanding that "the best way to get my needs met is to help you get your needs met". At the transactional level there is a mutual flow of energy and at the relational level a mutual flow of support.
If all of the subsystems are spinning in one direction, the rotalional mementum of the whole system spins in the same direction and with increasing momentum.
What makes this even more complex is the one 4-person subsystem, the four 3-person subsystems and the coalitions of four 3:1 and three 2:2 subsystems. This is total of 18 different relational dynamics; 18 opportunities for greater synergy or greater misalignment. The geaometry goes up exponentially with the addition of each additional person, making for a very large coaching challenge for the CEO. But that is not even the most awesome part of it...
•••
A four-person team as I have described above has 18 different relational dynamics or links. This system at any given moment is creating more energy than it consumes or consuming more energy than it generates. If there is an energetic surplus–synergy to share–the system has energy to invest in other relationship subsystem. And where does that cascade begin?
There are not only 18 relationship susbystems in a four-person relationship system. There are an additional four if we account for the relationship each leader has with their self.
My relationship with myself is the relationship I have between the person I've been and the person I am becoming. I am the synergy that exists between my past and future selves. If I learn to change my spin from positive to negative and increase the my intensity, I can influence the rotational momentum of the system as a whole. If my positive spin is greater than the negative spin of my partner, the net spin of our third entity will be positive, as long as I can maintain my spin long enough to help my partner change their direction.
•••
I met a Yoda-like golf pro named Grant with a very unusual Cancer story. When he received his diagnosis, he understood that his family would have a hard time with the news. That sort of declaration would seem to lead most often to fear and anxiety. That's understandable. But Grant made the counterintuitive a decision. He decided to have fun with his cancer. Who would ever think to do that? He did. It was not long after that that he was in full remission.
The physics term quantum entanglement refers to the way that the behaviour of one part of a system is apparently linked to another. One part takes the lead the other reflexively follows. In an intimate marriage or family system the fusion is obviuous as one partner's foul mood drags the other down or how loving support can drag the other up. When one "particle" reverses its spin the other automatically follows. I strongly suspect that this is more than a metaphor. I think it is the very mechanic of leadership. Up or down, as the leader goes, so does the follower tend. And vice versa. When the supporter takes the conscious inititiave to step up and shift the relationship in a more positive direction, the roles switch and supporter becomes leader.
Human beings evolved with social nervous systems nurtured through constant interaction with both loving caregivers and ill-intentioned enemies. As such, we grew up with a sensitivity to discerning friend from foe and opportunity from threat. The result is a tendency to let events in the world determine how we should feel about something. Someone does or says something and this appears to trigger emotions that fuel certain behaviours and generate outcomes for the better or worse. If someone says or does something I think is mean, I tend to have negative emotions and react with self-protective behaviour. If someone says or does something I think is supportive, I tend to have more positive emotions that "trigger" a more contractive array of activities. In time I associate certain contexts or relationships as either positive or negative. If I attribute positive tone to a leader, I will tend to follow them up. If I attribute negative tone to a leader, I will tend to follow them down. I take my cue from these environments–from external events–and forget that I am the one assigning meaning to what I see and hear, that I am the one having the feeling, that I am the one who behaves one way or the other. While most people would understandably feel afraid and anxious about a cancer diagnosis, Grant decided to take a different tact.
Several years ago, "trigger warnings" started popping up on movies and television shows. I understood that these warning were well-meaning attempts to enhance psychological safety but there is a cost. The assumption of a trigger warning is that the thing that is said or done is fundamentally, deliberately, intentionally and consciously the cause of harm and negative feelings. And sometimes they are; at least in part. If at a subconscious level I detect that some person or some context is unfriendly or threatening I am primed for self-protective behaviours whether defensive or aggressive. Again, understandable. But since our nervous systems have been trained to anticipate threats and unriendly behaviour, I think I need to take responsibility for how I feel and how I react and open myself to the possibility that I am reading something of my own into the situation. Everything is part true and part my projection. I am not willing to become a victim and abandon my agency. I might not be the cause of everything that happens to me but I do have a choice.
My life and business are made up of an endless series of perception-action loops. Each loop begins when I perceive an event. This is the triggering event. My perception is made up of what I see and hear combined with what I preoject into the situation from memory based on my relationship to the person who said or did something. I then take action and that action results in something tangible and intangible–a phyical outcome and a feeling that is either more positive or more negative than when the loop began. This is how my day flows. When I receive constuctive help from my supporters (when their perception-action loops run in synergy with mine), their physical and emotional outcomes become part of my loop. If there is destructive interference from an antagonist it is way more difficult for me to generate positive momentum–harder but not impossible.
The real impact of good loving support is the reversal of downward spirals. If I decide someone is a friend, I'll tend to interpret what they say and do as supportive and I'll change my spin to match theirs. If I am already stuck in a negative spin cycle, I am way more likley to decide that they are an enemy. My self-protective reaction or overreaction simply accelrates a negative spin.
In a complex relationship system the completion of every perception-action loop creates both the result that triggers follow-on loops in a cascading spiral and the emotional energy to drive it up or down. Momentum is hard to change direction and hard to build but way easier to maintain once it is over a critical threshold that all members of the system work to sustain. And all this begins with the intervention of a single person.