Dawna Markova

Giving without Giving Ourselves Away: An interview with Dawna Markova 
Dawna Markova is the creator of SMARTWired and a renowned educator, researcher, and author who has served as a thinking partner to several Fortune 50 CEOs. She is the author of I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, and The SMART Parenting Revolution, and co-creator of Random Acts of Kindness. In the following interview with Leverage Points editor, Vicky Schubert, she discusses her fascination with building our capacity for cultivating collective wisdom.
LP: In the verse that opens I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, you write, "I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom, and that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit." Is it possible to help people develop that kind of generative outlook, particularly when the turmoil gripping so much of the world right now – whether political, cultural, or climatological – seems to result in a general feeling of apathy or disengagement?
DM: I think that the fragmentation and disengagement we're experiencing now comes, in large part, from the fact that we're living in a culture that doesn't cultivate wisdom. We don't know how to honor questions, and therefore we're not accessing the part of our minds that creates meaning and coherence out of our lives. If you don't cultivate a garden, you don't get fruit.
It's primarily in response to that need that my husband Andy Bryner and I have returned to teaching the study groups we began twenty years ago. We want to explore the question, "How do you risk your significance?" In other words, how can we use the gifts we were given on behalf of what we care deeply about? The format is based on the approach we followed with several communities of commitment, as we called them. They were made up of a mix of people from education, the healing arts, social services, nonprofits, as well as artists from many disciplines. It's a joy to return to them now because, after a decade away, we're able to see how these relationships have endured and resulted in sustained learning. We think it's a powerful model for today.




LP: How was the learning structured?
DM: These groups met for five days every other month for close to twenty years. In order to join the study group a person would have to name one thing in their life they really wanted to do that would be a risking of their significance; something that they couldn't do by themselves, but needed a community to support them.
Over the course of the five days we did multidimensional awareness practices — body work, walking in nature along the ocean — in order to find the central question our lives were asking us. We used music and every variety of the creative arts we could think of to live inside of that question. We used storytelling practices. Different people would come into the center of the circle, and they would move or express their question in some form. Then they'd sit down in the center of the circle and everybody else would stand up and they would mirror back to them what they had seen or felt or heard. Then the focal person stood up and took the question one step further.
After that we formed what I call "thinkubators.” Each of us sat surrounded by four or five people to share our questions and what we had learned thus far about them, and we also shared what our particular talents and assets were. The group then brainstormed resources and ideas to integrate the two.
LP: How do you think this learning model can be effective in helping us cultivate collective wisdom?
DM: I think it's important to understand how our internal awarenesses inform our outer work in the world, and how we integrate the two. One image that helps me reflect on this is a Mobius loop which, as you know, would be a circle except that one twist — what I call the turning point — connects the internal and the external. The kind of learning communities I'm describing, with individual questions at their core, can stimulate our capacity for turning attention inward to integrate internal awareness with external action. From this can come an understanding of how, as author Parker Palmer says, we can discover how to live in an energized way instead of frenzied and rest instead of going inert.
Neuroscience today is rich with fascinating new discoveries about how the brain is neuroplastic — how it can make new synaptic connections throughout our lives. For the last three years, I've been part of a group of 100 neuroscience clinicians and researchers from around the world who are participating in a moderated telecourse to explore this growing edge. One of the things we discovered is that none of us had ever been given or taught a definition of mental health. This is fascinating when you think about it, because if you don't know even what the outcome is, how do you make the journey? I believe this has contributed to the deficit focus we have today about human capacity.
This group has come to a working definition of mental health: The capacity to integrate. And I've been playing with extrapolating that to larger systems and asking "How does a healthy system integrate the forces of standardization and differentiation?" In corporations, we see the same thing that we see in school systems and governments — that healthy systems, as far as we can understand them, are stable, adaptable, flexible, and energized (It spells SAFE). Organic systems are always seeking to balance all four of those conditions.
When a system goes to the extreme of stability it gets rigidly standardized, brittle, and it breaks — which may be where we are right now in the United States. If it gets too far toward the differentiated end of the spectrum it gets overly chaotic. The system has to keep creating a balance, a Mobius loop if you will; a dance between standardization and differentiation. In my work with CEO's, they often said they wanted me to help their leadership teams think well together. But what they were usually talking about was making them all be able to think the same. They didn't understand that it would actually be more effective to help the team differentiate; help them understand how each one carried a unique gift to the rest of them. The more they differentiated, the more they could integrate. Each person understood the unique value he or she brought to the team.
Large systems tend to try to create stability without understanding that the system needs to balance on the differentiating end. They try to create stability through cohesiveness. In mathematics, cohesive is a term that describes a set of things with an impermeable membrane around them. But a healthy system, instead of cohesive, is coherent. In coherence, the membrane around the system is permeable so that the system internally is influenced by what is going on outside. It changes as it integrates.
Now, the healthy human brain is always seeking coherence by integrating right and left hemispheric functioning, rational and intuitive, logical and relational thinking, inner reality and outer. As new elements enter the human field of awareness, the internal field grows. I think this understanding has important implications for creating communities of people who can think together in order to cultivate wisdom.
LP: And as individuals, we have to risk our own significance to get there together?
DM: That's the key question that my life is asking me right now: How do I risk my significance? How do I give without giving myself away? I believe that in living that question we cultivate collective wisdom. We can help each other develop strategies for bringing tomorrow into today's choices by falling in love with beautiful, dangerous, mysterious questions that can't be answered, by reminding one another that what matters to us is important, that our questing does make a difference, and by remembering those who stand behind us.
In a culture as stuck in standardization as this one is, it can be very difficult to get over to the right side of the brain and imagine a possible future. Sometimes, we need to first look back in our lives to a time when we felt fulfilled and did make a difference. Then we can mine that tiny piece of history to think about how we could design a future. What we can conceive, we can create.