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Do clients need to fit into your bed? Here's a process to decrease the number of Procrustean professionals

 

Procrustean Bed

Procrustes had an odd way of showing hospitality: He kidnapped people and then fed them dinner. But he did not stop with the dining; he gave his guests a bed in which to sleep. If his visitors did not fit in the bed, he would either stretch them or chop off inches from their legs to adapt height to bed length. This accommodating host met his end when one of his guests turned out to be Theseus, a god who possessed great courage. After having Procrustes lie in his own bed, Theseus made him fit. His method? Decapitation.

Greek mythology includes some novel solutions, with marvelous lessons. Procrustes might make some of us stop and think about the problems with one-size-fits-all methods. One definition of Procrustean given by Merriam-Webster is "marked by arbitrary often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances." I don't know anyone who would like to have his method of client service described as Procrustean and yet I think Procrustes lives in some mediators, lawyers, physicians, and other professionals. Have you met Procrustes?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his The Bed of Procrustes:

[W]e humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit—but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers.

To act as a Procrustean practitioner or professional usually would not be an effective method of client service. Would you want to hire a Procrustean lawyer, mediator, physician, therapist, engineer, minister, or accountant? I have met many but would not want to work with any.

Fortunately there are many methods to counteract being a Procrustean practitioner, including being very aware or certain kinds of mindful. In this post I will begin to introduce a method that will help you to adapt your methods of service to each client. This particular method or lens can accommodate the differences in clients listed below (and many more differences, too). This list will be specific to mediators or lawyers but with slight modification in wording can apply to all professions.

This method helps professionals to assess and adapt to these differences in clients:

Labs researching the writing of life stories

My memories of teaching classes on writing life stories are tinged with great delight for the stories I heard and deep appreciation for the writers' contributions of whimsy, intrigue, beauty in day-to-day life, and courage. For all those stories, I am grateful.

Many of my friends and colleagues share my interest in the writing of life stories or of memoirs and know of the benefits of that genre of writing. For all of you who have that interest, here are a couple of resources. These labs study life stories and you can learn more by clicking their research links.

• University of Florida Life Story Lab
• University of Twente Life Story Lab
• University of Sussex Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research
  

I am sure there are other labs with the same focus. Please let me know of those I have missed and I will add them to the list.

Note (added later on August 23, 2013): A couple of related links:

• "Exploring Psychological Themes Through Life-Narrative Accounts"-chapter by Dan McAdams from Varieties of Narrative Analysis
• "The Life Story Interview" by Dan McAdams
• "Personality Narratives and the Life Story"- chapter by Dan McAdams from Handbook of Personality

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experiencing a shortfall of inspiration or inventiveness? Here's what I did to boost my imagination

Denver Botanic Gardens

I resist creativity tools and toys. Why? They seem silly—until I have been forced to use them. For example, years ago an old friend regularly taught the Six Thinking Hats method and invited me to sit in on one of his day-long programs. Because I truly liked and admired the friend, and was somewhat curious, I accepted. My conclusion at the end of the day: Great technique to spur new thinking.

Lately I have been working on several new projects and sometimes feel bored, even burned out, with my own concepts and views. When I find myself spent and disenchanted, a blazing boost of brilliance is required (and yearned for).

"Time to consult some silliness," I said to myself this morning. Then I SCAMPERed and maneuvered an obstacle course in my mind. Doing so helped with my ruts and going-nowhere routine. In case you need to be intellectually invigorated, I will tell you what I did. These easy, dippy exercises, simple enough to be recommended for use with kids, may bring you a great notion.

SCAMPER, my first activity, is a mnemonic to remind me of a series of questions to ask myself about something I am trying to improve, whether that be a product, service, or idea. The letters stand for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse. Click for complete instructions on how to use SCAMPER (MindTools). That link includes several questions to ask about each letter or step.

Obstacles, my next method, is a game with the goal of increasing or at least exercising players' creativity. From "Obstacles as a Path to Creativity" (Unwrapping the Gifted):

The game's stack of obstacles includes things like a swamp, a wall, a maze, a blizzard, an ogre, and a dark tunnel. Each player is dealt some (we used up to 8 each) random tools, such as a lever, fireflies, a stick of butter, a shower curtain, a copper pipe, and an umbrella. The players then - competitively or cooperatively - create ways to conquer each successive obstacle using the few tools they have available when encountering each obstacle.

Although the randomness of actually playing the game would be fun, today I made up a list of my own obstacles (ones I am really experiencing) and then used the "Other Lists" setting on my word generator app to create a list of tools. I was surprised that some of the solutions seemed workable. They just may facilitate a new direction, or maybe a new pathway in my mind. Although I had fun doing this alone, I think it would be entertaining and beneficial to do with a few other people someday.

Those were my early-morning adventures. What are your most productive activities for generating new ways of thinking?

What's your story, learner? Teacher? Trainer? Some reasons to write your memoir of learning

Photo taken in Annapolis, MD

If you are working with clients who are parties involved in disputes, writing or relating your conflict story is often very important to clear, conscious, and careful client service. Deep wisdom and finely attuned judgment are derived partly from self-knowledge, and writing our conflict story facilitates invaluable awareness.

And if we are working with clients making decisions about money, it is important to recollect our money story, our money history, too. As I wrote last year:

Most of us have strong feelings and attitudes about money. Some of us are very aware of those feelings; many of us are not. For those of us in the ranks of service professionals (e.g., lawyers, mediators, accountants) unawareness can impact how we work with clients who are making money-related decisions. Might part of excellent client service be our own clarity about the way we perceive money, wealth, and monetary earning? To have an unclouded view of our underlying assumptions? Our values? Our prejudices? Our biases? Our personal money stories?

The benefits of this degree of clarity applies to many topics. Even beginning or experienced photographers! In fact, earlier this month I recommended to attendees at a program that I presented on photography that they write their photography story. I gave them a long list of questions to help them get started and was pleased and admiring of their introspection as they applied it to the process of using their cameras in new ways.

I just learned of another use of this kind of themed memoir and doing so resulted in a slap-my-forehead-and-say-duh moment. Why wouldn't those of use who are interested in improving both how we learn and how we teach write our learning history?

The idea came to me from Well-Chosen Words. In this book, the author recommends to teachers that they recall report cards and other instances of assessments from their own schooling. This exercise can assist teachers in considering what might be helpful when communicating assessments of their students.

I began to think of my own learning history: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I revised some questions I use for money, conflict, and photography stories in my training programs (see a few below), and thought about my answers. Just as recalling and pondering my conflict and money stories have helped me in work with clients, I think the process of recreating my learning story will help me to be a more self-aware teacher, trainer, and adult learner. If you write or in other ways memorialize your learning story, I would enjoy hearing from you.

A dozen of the many questions I asked myself:

Call for Proposals—Scaling New Heights: Field Placements and the Reform of Legal Education

Next February in Denver, a conference on legal externships will be taking place at U of Denver Law. Excerpt from the Call for Proposals:

Scaling New Heights: Field Placements and the Reform of Legal Education

The Organizing Committee for Externships 7 invites proposals for the seventh national and international conference on legal externships. The Conference will occur from February 27 – March 2, 2014, hosted by the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, in Denver, Colorado.

The conference focuses on the role of field placements in reforming legal education. The momentum for reform has increased in recent years, spurred by the Carnegie and Best Practices initiatives and changes in the market for new law graduates. The call for “practice-ready” law graduates has come while schools have struggled to define that goal in an era of scarce resources.

At the same time, the number and diversity of field placement programs has expanded rapidly. Externship programs work at the cutting edge of the reform of legal education, offering programmatic and pedagogical pathways to alter how law schools pursue their mission. The Organizing Committee seeks proposals that explore how field placement programs might advance the cause of reform, through distinctive pedagogies, thoughtful design, creative integration into the curriculum and productive relationships with the practicing bar.

We seek proposals from externship clinicians, other clinicians, non-clinical legal educators and administrators, career services professionals, field supervisors, and others with an interest in how field placement clinics might advance legal education reform. We also seek participation from the international community, where field placement programs have played a distinct role in developing clinical education.

Click to read the rest.

Keynote at this year's Purposeful Planning Institute Rendezvous: Are you a professional or an expert?

 

John A. Warnick and Jay Hughes talking yesterday at the PPI Rendezvous. The attendees were listening from many points of view.

Frequently and for years, I have been recommending Robert Kegan's In Over Our Heads so was delighted when Jay Hughes referred to the book in yesterday morning's keynote address. For that and other reasons, I appreciated the talk enough to go through the somewhat tedious task of typing up my notes so you too can perhaps benefit from his thoughts. His presentation began the first whole day at the third annual Purposeful Planning Institute Rendezvous and was titled "Will the Four Noble Professions Thrive? Survive? or Regenerate?  And What Will the Families They Serve Face in the Next Twenty Years." (His bio is about halfway down here.)

Here are most of my notes from the keynote address.

Jay began by asking us to imagine ourselves as secular priests, living with the virtue of magnanimity. He quoted Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" about two roads diverging in a wood and explained that it related to our professional journey.

In the 60s when he began the practice of law at Coudert Brothers, partners did not leave the firm and clients were also with the firm for life, which is not the current state of the profession. The four noble professions have changed since then.

He said that some professionals are pilgrims today and that being one necessarily brings with it loneliness: "If you are not lonely, you are not a pilgrim." He clarified that this is an existential loneliness. And he asked, "Who can we walk with?"

To partly answer his question, he described the pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales who tell each other their stories as they travel.

The four noble professions according to Hughes are ministry, medicine, high academia, and law.* You can read his description of each here about three-fourths of the way down. He believes any functioning community needs all four of these roles.

Briefly, the function of medicine is to ease suffering and increase the physical and mental health of the