Stop Looking Within. Look Between.

It is natural when two or more things come together, two people, two teams, two businesses, that there is a pause within which adjustments into 'how do we be together' are made.

How smoothly and productively we move through that pause will depend on how flexible each can be in their patterns of thinking and behaviour.

I recently came across the Yolŋu word and metaphor, ganma*. It describes the meeting and mixing of saltwater from the sea and freshwater from the land. When they come together, they interact, change and become something new. As a metaphor it has been used to describe the respectful, two-way learning that happens when two knowledge systems meet, both are enriched, leading to deeper truth. An ancient wisdom and perhaps skill, more often than not forgotton.

I often see unnecessary friction between individuals and between teams causing distress and dysfunction instead of that kind of mutual enrichment. Patterns of devaluing, protecting, avoiding, controlling. Two entities with the same values, the same goals, the same organisational chart and yet the space between them is not nurtured. Because it lives in the between, nobody inside it can quite see it.

What is hiding in the space between individuals, or in the spaces between one team and another? What is stopping smooth, two-way enrichment and the creation of something new?

If you want to explore the patterns that might be getting in the way of something better being created, I would love to help.

Exec Team programs   Between Team programs Workshops/Keynotes

Facilitation Workplace mediation   Exec Coaching

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*Excerpt from http://singing.indigenousknowledge.org/exhibit-1.htmlYolngu people see a powerful metaphor in the meeting and mixing of two streams which flow-one from the land, the other from the sea-into a mangrove lagoon on Caledon Bay in NE Arnhemland. The theory of this confluence, called gaṉma, holds (in part) that the forces of the streams combine and lead to deeper understanding and truth.* It is an ancient metaphor, one which has served Yolngu people well in the past. In recent discussions among the Yolngu and those non-Aboriginal Australians they have chosen to work with them, gaṉma theory has been applied to the meeting of two cultures–Aboriginal and Western. Thus, we may use the term 'ganma' in English to refer to the situation where a river of water from the sea (Western knowledge) and a river of water from the land (Yolngu knowledge) engulf each other on flowing into a common lagoon and becoming one. In coming together, the Streams of water mix at the interface of the two currents, creating foam at the surface, so that the process of ganma is marked by lines of foam. In terms of the ganma metaphor, then, this book is part of the line of foam which marks the boundary of interchange between the current of Yolngu life and the current of Western life in contemporary Australia.