The Art of Saying Yes and No
"MiniMaxim: Until someone has repeatedly said no and adamantly refuses another word on the subject,
they are in the process of saying yes and don't know it."
~ Dee Hock in Birth of the Chaordic Age
The next learning edge that surfaced on my own chaordic path was around what I started to refer to as Chaordic Dynamics: how do we lead a chaordic system? Funnily enough, the insights that helped me on the way I discovered in a practice that I left behind awhile ago: the world of (impro) theatre.
Patricia Ryan Madson wrote a book titled Improv Wisdom. She reminds us that that being alive, hence being a chaordic system, is like riding a bicycle: we always feel a little off-balance and insecure, but 'in the act of balancing we come alive'.
After years of experience with improvisation theatre, Madson offers this book in which she highlights 13 strategies that she discovered in her practice. They are an irresistable invitation to lighten up, look around and live a chaordic life and can be summarised as The Art of Saying Yes. As she puts it herself: "Life is something we all make up as we go along. No matter how carefully we formulate a "script", it is bound to change when we interact with people with scripts of their own".
I understand those 'scripts' to be the patterns of our behaviour and underlying value systems. And as with chaordic systems, The Art of Saying Yes must be balanced with a healthy practice of The Art of Saying No.
Where the YES - strategies help us to embrace chaos, experience versatility, step into not-knowing, the NO - strategies come in useful for bringing focus and clarity, build structures and rely on what we already know.
And then I saw this video clip...
...and I realised that what gets in the way the most of our authentic ability to lead and to follow, are our fears and limiting beliefs. Therefore a clear next step in my work became to not only design chaordic systems, but to also support people in these systems to lead and to follow by practising the simple strategies of Yes and No. And, in that practice to redirect their fears and limiting beliefs from something that was moving them closer to stifling control or apathy, to a chaordic rhythm of emergence.
