In the 2010’s, I helped kick off two programs that had a tremendous impact on my professional experience and on the people who participated; a listening circle training and mentoring program in California state prisons and a global employee wellness program for a significant tech “unicorn.”

These were exciting, transformational, and moving for all involved.  

My experiences and learning and the feeling of success in this work deeply moved me, and I know this was true for most who were involved.

I also vividly remember a former prison warden commenting on the prison work: “we are just putting window dressings on the cell walls.”

I wanted to dismiss the comment as the words of a tired cynic, but they stick with me still. There was, and remains, truth in it.

We did great work in creating spaces for listening and connection. We helped open hearts and minds.  We participated in the personal healing work needed worldwide in many different contexts.  But we only did half the job.  

We were helping make a new wine, but the skins (the social, cultural, and economic structures) remained largely untouched. It took a  great leap of imagination to believe that our impact in these circles would materially change the circumstances of either situation. It was okay with me that this wasn’t the point of our work, until it wasn’t.

The inmates would leave our meetings and return to prison yards that are, with few exceptions, sites of a cold or hot war between the “good” officers and the “bad” inmates (as well as between races, gangs, and individuals in the inmate population). All sides are playing a game that cannot be won.

The corporate staff would return to the rat wheel of life and work driven by profit and a closed system of achievement (climbing the corporate ladder, filling the bank account, adding notches to a resume, and even competing over the strength of the value signal). Many of these employees worked for many years, regurgitating company lines, building workplace community, dedicating the vast majority of their life energy to the company, and have now been laid off.

In both situations, the intentions of everyone involved were good, but the gap between what we wanted to be doing, what we said we were doing, and what was happening, was huge.

In fact, I believe our programs were part of maintaining a broken system, rather than working on the root causes of the problems we said our programs were solving (disconnection, overwhelm, overwork, depression - all of which have increased since the pandemic).  We were only temporarily relieving the pain symptoms that created the need for these programs in the first place.

We were putting new window dressings on the cell walls. New wine, in old skins.

On the other hand, plenty of consultants, activists, politicians, and leaders focus on changing the structures and practices of society, organizations, and teams, but disregard the internal, psychological, and cultural shifts that make these changes stick, or that these changes actually instigate. They put the old wine in new skins.

Think of all the great solutions to social, economic, organizational, and team issues.  How many water cooler conversations have solved the problems of an organization?  How many celebrity experts espouse how people should lead in their books and social feeds?  How many great systems for organizing teams, countries, and economies have created as much pain as they have good? All of them?

The external solutions don’t touch the inner lives and inter-relationships of the people that comprise the system the change. In fact, they too often increase the sense of disenfranchisement, powerlessness, and disengagement from the change process because they invite too little participation, if any.

We are Open Circle was born to solve what we experienced as the great inadequacy of the either/or approach to change.  We work on the inner experience and connection and trust of the team or group before we work on systems change. We develop a capacity to turn toward tension (and conflict) rather than away from it. We examine a broad range of possibilities in power, decision-making, and structures. The structures start to shift on their own because participation and awareness grow. Then, when deliberate structural and systemic intervention happens, the participants in the change are ready, and these transformations support the ongoing community and team building.

It is a cycle that is renewed from within, not from outside or from the top.  

“We are open” because while we have our principles and toolbox of methodologies, we are always learning, and striving to meet each situation with a spirit of not knowing when we start what will be best by the time we end..  Rather, we strive to be ready and available for whatever we encounter, to serve a group’s or team’s evolution in the direction they are already changing.

We sew the skin as we make the wine, together.