A couple comments from Barry Oshry

Barry Oshry just posted a couple comments to the previous post. I'm posting them here for the benefit of those who don't pay attention to the comments. (This raises a question of how we want conversations to play out in this forum--primarily through comments or through posts. Another good topic for people to post about.)

Barry says:

I'm dealing with the question: "How we empower others in our organization...make them aware of the costs" etc. You need to understand the framework I operate from: education. I never begin with an organization's actual condition, the specific issues it is facing, and so forth. I want to take them away from that specific world to first explore "organization" as it exists EVERYWHERE. For that reason, I always want to start with an exercise like the one we experienced (only at least a day long) or, if a workshop isn't possible, then a presentation on some facet of general (universal) organization life such as "Life in the Middle" or "Why are there no Top Teams?" The point being that there is power in people seeing that the issues they are experiencing are not specific to their organization and are not tied to the personalities of the players. This creates a very different emotional, intellectual, and strategic base for looking at, understanding, and working with their specifics.

With regard to the system pain: systemically-focused workshops and presentations deal with the costs of system blindness - personally, in term os relationships, as well as costs to the system.

And Barry also says:

I'm dealing with the question: "Is victimization something that is culturally learned?" To understand victimization, we need to go back a step. To feel like a victim, we need to believe that there is some powerful person or group who could solve our problems if they chose to. All you have to do is go back to childhood to see how early and powerfully this belief in a "powerful other" is embedded. All we needed to do was whine, and they took care of us. And we also learned that if they didn't come after the first whine, all we had to do was whine louder and more frequently. So it is understandable that our first reflexive reaction to pain is to blame that non-responsive "powerful other." The problem is: Some of us, or all of us some of the time, never get past that first response even though that "powerful other" is no longer around.