Temenos Retreat – Finding Humanity in the Workplace

We laughed in amazement towards the end of the retreat after we posed to take this group picture with my selfie-stick. Why? Because we only had to take one shot to get a perfect one. There was no awkwardness or hesitation in creating this picture. Everyone is at ease, smiling, eager to create the memory of our together time.  

My first Temenos Retreat facilitation took place on May 7th, 2017.  Seven participants joined with me in an intense day of reflection, sharing and learning.  I am grateful and honored to have hosted so many amazing people who were willing to be vulnerable in order to learn with others. I’ve written this post to reflect on seven ways in which the Temenos Leadership retreat improves our ability to experience humanity at work:

Connections with Others

The foundation of connection in Temenos is the story telling we do with Influence Maps at the beginning of the retreat. From this we find the rich threads of shared experience by recognizing and acknowledging what others have done, how they have been influenced, and how they have overcome their struggles.  Temenos takes us back to quality relationships as we practice sharing our personal history and building our shared vision in small group settings.  Taking these practices back to the workplace means that we can now model this connection-making in the teams we work with, manage or coach. 

Intuition/Feelings/Self Awareness

The biggest taboo in business is to expose one’s feelings. Businesses and people could thrive if there were safe ways to express emotion. Organizations that wish to thrive need the kind of leaders who can pave the way for this. Such leaders must learn to become self aware and confident in sharing their feelings and intuitions. In addition these leaders learn to listen for for what is alive in others. Temenos participants become more able to do this as they witness others doing so. 

Meditation

We can think of Temenos retreats as a way of rebooting ourselves, meditating with others about our own life and work/life. It’s an emptying of our past disappointments and an appreciation of what is happening right now.  Breathing in and out, and cleaning the slate for renewal.  

Confidence Building

Temenos ‘containers’ are the spaces we create in relationship with others in a pair or group. Much as a child learns to walk (falling, and trying again) with the loving surrounding of parents and siblings, adults can also be more influential with the support of others.  A workplace that fosters love is one where the network of support is strong, people know each other like a family and also support each other without blame or placating.  We gain confidence acting in an environment of support. 

Risk-taking

Leadership means going beyond what might be ‘normative’ at work, and taking a risk to do something a little differently. When we encounter stress at work, we might often revert to past habits that are not effective.  In my version of the Temenos retreat, we learn about the work of Virginia Satir and her Congruence Model to explore this angle. At the end of the retreat we practice scenarios from work, learning how to improve our responses to stressful interactions.

Doing the Right Thing

Congruent Leadership meshes well with the idea of ‘Doing the Right Thing’.  Congruence means that we act and speak in accordance with our feelings, our intuition, as well as in balance with the context of our environment.  In Temenos, the context is the social container we are in and considers our self-acknowledged strengths and the feedback we get from others as well.  Doing the Right Thing means not only listening to one’s own feelings, but listening to the needs of others and striking a balance – but not running from conflict, discomfort, or uncertainty.  In the end, in any toxic, rigid, or politically plagued office environment, we learn to have more joy when we have ‘agency’ – meaning the power of choice in how we react to other people.  

Collaborative Mindset

In Temenos and with other tools that I care about such as Clean Language and Non Violent Communication, sharing and listening lay the basic foundation of collaborative work. The more personal sharing we do, the more supportive, empathetic and creative we can be with one another. We can dare to build on each other’s great qualities and to experiment with our ideas when we are bonded and aware of each other’s humanity.  

Temenos Retreat – A Journey of Change

View from Kayser Ridge log cabin

Temenos

Temenos is a retreat experience created and inspired by the life work of Siraj Sirajuddin, who is also my personal coach. Siraj has been using the Temenos retreat format in his work with organizations that are undergoing change.  This past weekend a group of 5, including Siraj, headed up to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, to beautiful mountaintop log cabin called Kayser Ridge that is used throughout the year for various sorts of retreats.  The group itself was not formerly connected through a work setting – we had all chosen to join in this experience to 1.) Learn Siraj’s techniques for facilitating group change through experiencing them as a group and 2.) Explore our own life journey and our own dreams and visions for the future of our individual work

Backing up a bit, let me explain a bit about the concept of this retreat. Temenos means container in Greek.  The container can be thought of in this context as the space, energy and interactions created between people. A marriage is a container. A group at work is a container. A set of people on a retreat is a container. Just use your imagination to think of all the containers you step into and out of in your daily work.  The significance and usefulness of this concept lies in the acknowledgement and respect given to the container while contributing to the development of its potential.  What I mean by this is that by ‘naming’ and using the word ‘container’, we have consciously acknowledged that we are more than loosely networked individuals – we have purpose as a group and goals to reach.  While we are in the container, we give our full attention to its purpose and growth.

As a change agent sharing this technique, Siraj both observes the container and participates within the container. Siraj moved in and out of these two roles, guiding the container and modeling the techniques for us to practice and learn.  On the retreat, Siraj was mostly inside the container – as he modeled the activities and responded to others as a participant, but at times he would stop us and say he was stepping outside the container to give us the meta-level view of what he was observing about our container. As a change agent, practicing the meta-level view of observation of course requires an extra level of thinking and abstraction. And even purely just as a participant, the listening required during the entire weekend (11 or 12 hours each day) was intense.

A short blog can’t possibly do justice to the experience of the Temenos retreat. However, I would like to share some of the techniques and learnings.

Check In

This was our ‘entry’ mechanism – a familiar round of introductions by each member of our group. We shared briefly our inspiration for coming and hopes for the session.

Introduction

Siraj gave an introduction to the timeline for our work and introduced us to his big-picture model for change agency. Suffice it to say that within the introductory framework, there was something called Personal Vision. To achieve personal vision, one starts by creating an Influence Map, which we did next.

Influence Maps

Influence Maps are pictorial representations of our life stories. Each person independently reflects and draws the events of his or her life that they feel compelled to share. The maps can be depicted in any way and with text if desired. When everyone is done, we take turns telling our life stories. Each person in our retreat took 1.5 to 2 hours for the sharing portion, including time for some open questions at the end.  You have to experience this to know – but what happens is that a web of incredible emotional, intellectual, and social connections is built between all the members of the container. We found not only during this exercise, but emanating from this exercise over the course of the weekend, that connection points between us spanned experiences of pain, growth, struggles, places, relationships, and much more. One person commented at the end:  ‘It is absolutely riveting to realize how little we know about other people.’

After completing the maps, we stepped outside the container to briefly record our learning from this exercise. I noticed

• Listening is a form of respect and is an art and a discipline.
• Influence Maps involves intense storytelling of a very personal nature. These create empathy hooks between people and connect the space between the members of the container.
• Small changes in awareness of the person that sits opposite you have a large impact on how you interact with them in the present and the future.
• Later presentations are more intense – I believe this is due to the slow build of safety in the container – that people feel more able to share more about their past and think of things they might not have initially depicted on their own maps. I like to say of this phenomenon: ‘the connections become thicker’.

Clean Slate

The next exercise we did was Clean Slate. Clean Slate is an essential element of the change process. It combines a look back over your past and a hard look at the present. So here is how it works. Each person answers first this question: How have, in the past, one or more of the ‘container’ systems you have been in failed you? You answer this with 5 or 6 examples and then continue with answering this question: How have you failed these container systems? The group reassembles and shares the results… This process clears the air through acknowledgement and forgiveness and allows you to move into a better pattern. In some organizations Siraj has coached, the organization has benefitted from this cleansing activity so much that they have implemented variants of ‘Clean Slate’ on a regular basis (similar to say a retrospective) with incredible success.  My learning from this section was entirely related to the second question and how it interplays with the dysfunctions described in my answers to the first question. I was able to explore my own accountability as a player in the ‘containers’ that I perceived as having failed me.

Personal Vision

After Clean Slate, we went on to draw our Mandalas. Mandalas are picture/symbolic representations of our future. How do we see our personal future in a  picture without words?  Each drew and we followed with presentation, comments and feedback. At this point, the container was so resilient and comfortable for everyone that I sensed a vested interest by each participant in the future vision of each other person. This aspect of the retreat was extremely intense for that reason.  As a group that had JUST come together, that did not know each other well, we were able to bond over the network of shared past-history story elements to appreciate fully the future visions and positive outcomes for each other.

Compelling Shared Vision

The next step break up into pairs to create a picture of our Compelling Shared Vision. In an organization this would pertain to the organizational container represented by the people doing the drawing. In our case, we paired with people we knew from our retreat without an organizational context, but we still came up with amazing shared visions of a future that we might support each other with. We brought forth all those shared personal connections from the Influence Maps to weave a new tapestry for the future. These maps combined the personal and the shared into one.  It was a little hard to get started since we are not related to each other through a work environment, but we did achieve beautiful shared visions anyway. Each team of two shared its drawing and explained it to the others. We ran out of time to then create a shared Mandala which would have represented our more global shared vision for all four of us. You can imagine how this might be useful with an executive leadership group in an organization.  This was very powerful sharing and visioning.

At this point day 2 was almost over and some people had to leave early. We wrapped up by exploring the process of ‘exiting’ a container and re-entering a different container. Based on the changes we experienced in our ‘retreat’ container, how would entering back into our ‘family’ containers be difficult or different and how would we ease that process.  This discussion helped us understand the impact of change on the surrounding environments and how other containers could benefit from our changes, but only if respecting the new (container) – the one we were entering back to.  My take away from this and the whole weekend in general was that the web and sphere of influence is complex. It is an interaction of containers with each other, of a container with its participants, and of the participants with each other within a container. All of these interactions are dynamic and changing over time and over space.

We also covered some more advanced concepts of Siraj’s work:

• attributes of a container (too many to mention and we only covered the surface of each)
• typical archetypes (influencers in service of the container) in organizations

Exit

We each checked out by summarizing our appreciations to each person and wondering how we would absorb all of this into our professional and personal lives. It is really the beginning of a fascinating journey of change.  We will stay in support of each other and reconnect through social media.

To my fellow participants, thanks for a wonderful experience!

To readers who want another participant’s view of this retreat, please read this blog by Peter Stevens, Scrum Coach and Trainer!