What Is in a Voice, or How Systems Sing
I have the happy practice of walking our dogs, Eleanor and Beatrice over at Turkey Creek. We do this every day, or at least every day that we don’t have freezing rain. The walk is good for them, good for me, good for getting me away from my computer. While walking, I often listen to podcasts while walking, a favorite being Krista Tippett’s “On Being.” As someone who loves questions, her encouragement to “live the questions” resonates strongly with me.
A few weeks back, I caught a repeat airing of Ms. Tippett’s interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Hempton travels the world, recording soundscapes like desert thunderstorms, the sound of wind in the grass, birdsong in deep forest. I remember first hearing this interview back in 2017 or so, and even then I was so struck with what Hempton was trying to do that I attempted to use his work with one of my teams. (Note: it didn’t go so well. The team called that experiment “log jam” and were kind of weirded out that I was asking them to listen to the sounds of the ocean inside a hollowed cedar log. But I digress.)
The repeated Hempton interview jogged another memory for me, this one of a choir of British military wives. Their husbands had been deployed, and to combat loneliness and to help them find home and connection, they gathered to sing. I don’t remember any of them being trained singers or even having much interest in singing, but coming together to raise their voices in loneliness, in longing provided an outlet that they didn’t even know they needed.
The combination of Hempton’s work with acoustic ecology and a choir of untrained voices made me stop and think about the concept of voice from a coaching perspective. What are the voices in a system? How do we listen to those voices? How do we lift those voices up? And lastly, how can we help people learn to “sing?”
Voice of the System
I completed my Organizational, Relationship, and System Coaching (ORSC) certification in 2021. This was an incredible amount of work in its own right, but work that I was happy to do simply because of how I watched my own coaching transform. My teaching and facilitation became dramatically different as well. Yes, I present new material, but I also challenge my students to interact with that material. I speak less, ask even moreI questions, helping learners tie the new content to their current ways of working. I reflect back to them what they call forth, and I find ways to reveal their systems to them. The result: better teaching, richer learning, increased knowledge retention. And best of all, happier participants.
This is all well and good, but part of certification is deeper learning: principles, tools, practices, reflections, and more. So, before I tackle those big, juicy questions around systems and voices and singing, I think it would be helpful to define just what is meant by the term voice of the system. To do this, the second principle of ORSC is needed:
Every member of the relationship system (team or partnership) is a Voice of the System. Practice Deep Democracy and use input models to hear all voices and opinions.
Let’s break this down.
A relationship system is a couple, a partnership, a team, an organization–anything greater in number than an individual person and in which there is connection, however strong, however tenuous.
The system’s voice can be considered as the behaviors, actions and reactions, responses performed by those within the relationship system. Any and all of these are part of a system’s voice. For me, when I think of a system’s voice, I think of Newton’s Third Law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Whenever something happens in or to the system, the system reacts, giving voice to its response.
Deep Democracy is an ORSC Metaskill, an intentional, evocative space that assists a coach in working with the system. Deep Democracy is a space in which all voices are heard: the quiet voices, the voices that point out unpleasant truths, the loud voices, the shocking voices, the voices that mediate conflict. When coaching a system, all of the voices in that system must be heard for that system’s reality to be represented accurately.
Input models are the tools that we as coaches use to hear what the system is saying. These tools could be a myriad of skills, including reflective listening, asking ever deeper questions of the system, holding a space of psychological safety so that the system can make itself known.
Now that you know what the voice of a system is, let’s talk about its importance to system coaching and how to work with it.
Why Is the Voice of the System Important?
Let’s go back to the beginning, returning to the singing metaphor. The act of singing in a group consists of listening to your own voice, but also of listening to others voices so that you can join the song. A system’s voice is an expression of that system. “Singing with others is a kind of alchemy, an act of expansive magic in which you lose yourself and become part of the whole,” writes Katherine May in her memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Without that expression, the system is cannot be revealed. A system needs its voices just as the voices need the system.
So, what happens when all voices in a system begin to hear one another? Trust. Psychological safety. Connection.
Voice and Psychological Safety
Image describing what psychological safety is and is not.
Much has been written about psychological safety, and far wiser voices than mine will continue to do so. Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard University first introduced the construct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” I think it important to state this: Voices of the system will never sing true without the condition of psychological safety first being met, and how a system expresses itself is a good indicator of psychological safety.
Practice Exercises and Input Models
Explaining a concept is all well and good, but tried-and-tested exercises of how to work with and teach a concept deepen the work. Here are some ways I work with the Voice of the System concept, helping organizations to sing in the process.
Transformative Questions
I once fielded the question of “What happens when the system doesn’t have a voice? The team I’m working with doesn’t say anything.”
Silence is also a voice of a system.
Silence can be an indicator of ease within a system. It is content within itself. However, silence can also be an indicator of a system with fear, retaliation, or shame within its members. Open-ended questions, thoughtfully asked, can help to create a space for voices to speak up.
Influenced by ORSC Coaching
What is this system trying to say?
What voices do you hear in your community?
How do you listen for–or to–those voices?
What is being expressed?
What is emerging?
How is this system struggling? Thriving? Resting?
How do you integrate the quiet or not-so-powerful voices in your system?
What is important about this voice/these voices? This system?
Influenced by Gordon Hempton
That long-ago team might not have been in love with acoustic-ecology questions, but that did not mean that I would give up on this influence. Here are some questions that Gordon Hempton’s work might inspire me to ask.
What is the quality of silence within the system? (If you’re working with a pair or partnership, perhaps modify to “What is the quality of silence between you?”)
What is the pitch/tone/timbre of your words?
From where in your body do you listen?
How do you hear one another?
What is the song that this system wants to sing?
Influenced by Clean Language
Image describing clean-language questions
Clean language is a technique that helps people to discover and to develop their own symbols and metaphors instead of using those of the coach, facilitator, or leader. Clean-language questions, which are simply questions that utilize and follow Clean-language techniques, seek to minimize content that comes from the questioner's "maps": metaphors, assumptions, paradigms, or sensations. In other words, using Clean language while coaching helps me to keep my language and my metaphors to myself. I use the language of the person, team, or organization I am serving, not my own.
As coaches, we want to use clean language with our clients, teams, and organizations, asking clean questions that do the following:
Questions that can be answered easily
Build trust, relationship, and rapport
Space for authentic, genuine response
Allow for better recall by those we serve
Conversely, we want to decrease and reduce the following in our questions:
Presuppositions, assumptions, evaluation, and judgment
Leading or content-heavy questions
Introduced or conflated terms
Bias of any type
Metaphors and Story Cubes
You might have noticed that from the very beginning of this blog post, I leaned into the metaphor of voices of a system as a choir. But that is the metaphor that works for me, not necessarily the system with which you are working. So, as a good coach…take it to the team! The system has its own metaphors, so help them to find the system’s voice by using their own voice.
“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.”
--George Lakoff
There are many ways to access metaphor, but one of my favorites is to use Rory’s Story Cubes. Yes, these cubes are found in toy stores, but they are incredibly useful in helping teams, especially those who might have forgotten what metaphor is. Story cubes can help to bring a sense of lightness, of creativity and imagination, back into the system. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama and poet Tracy K. Smith, “Change is a generative act.” Story cubes can help organizations voice that change, providing a spark to get them started.
500 Miles
I call this exercise 500 miles because of that old Proclaimers’ song, “500 Miles.” (Why yes, I DO remember the ‘90s, and remember them well.) Working with a system’s voice is a two-fold exercise: questions and listening. I have the teams “switch shoes,” giving them a chance to walk in the other’s position. They ask questions of each other, practice reflective listening, and develop a deeper understanding of what it is like to walk those 500 miles in different shoes.
Closing Notes
Metaphor might be my first love, but puns are not far behind. I couldn’t resist one last play on words here as I completed this post.
There is so much to love about the stories that began this blog post, acoustic ecology and a choir of untrained voices connecting through longing, but what I took away from both is how each system has a unique voice, and in order to be fully heard, it requires full expression and our own willingness to listen and to listen differently. Doing this work requires practice and experimentation, and what you’re seeing here is me leaning into that work.
I’m trying something new this year: setting themes for each month as I work through various aspects of coaching. These themes will generally include a blog post, facilitation and teaching plans, learning outcomes, practice exercises, a Mural board image, graphics, and questions that I work with while coaching. Some months might be richer than others, but the intent is to produce monthly content that will help other coaches to deepen their own systems’ work. To receive access to this material, subscribe to this site.
Gratitude
Two people helped to create visuals for this month’s work: Syd Markle, who does amazing work as a coach, Bikablo artist, and co-host of the Agile Austin Coaching meetup, and Heather Foster of Star Street Creative. I’m good with words, but these two women help me to think clearly and creatively about what I want to do with my work. They make it possible to create visual resonance and to share it with others. Gaby Aragon also shares in the credit of the Mural board. She did some of the early work with me, helping to flesh out the concept and how to teach the concepts.
The image used for this blog post was captured byLinda Nickell. Connect with her on Instagram as @coznlinda, or join in on Wednesday evenings for her Happiness Hour. Details, upcoming presentations, and links to past recordings can be found on her site. You can also find her on YouTube.