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Our second taste of ‘Clean’ this year was at the capable hands of Wendy Sullivan from The Clean Change Company. Her theme was “Growing in uncertainty: a Clean Experience.”
Wendy introduced ‘Clean Language’ acknowledged David Grove, Penny Tompkins and James Lawley and her own part in its development and training. She checked the audience to find out who else knew about it, and related some of her experiences of its power. Then almost immediately we were into an exercise.
One thing we can be sure of, the future is uncertain! Beyond that lies further uncertainty and lots of other stuff we can only hope for or guard against.
How about if we explore the positive aspects of uncertainty and create our own unique ‘Talisman’, or metaphor, to use at moments when we feel particularly unresourceful?
Wendy asked us to think of times when we go out of our way to experience uncertainty. Does it lead to anticipation? Or maybe some other sense, feeling, picture, sound, or thought? Working in two’s, we scored on a scale from 1 - 10 (1 is low, 10 is high) how we are currently experiencing uncertainty.
When we gathered back as a group we found many of us were ‘flipping’ from one end of the scale to the other. Gavin shared his metaphor for this as being like a train track, and hopping from one rail to the other and back again. We discussed ‘choice’ points, moments when this flipping occurred, ‘triggers’ that cause these shifts. We thought this flipping was context related and we thought about looking for ‘patterns’ across contexts.
All this took us towards the break, but not quite there, so the next exercise was begun before and concluded after the break, during which Wendy demonstrated the exercise on a willing volunteer.
So again working in our pairs we were considering uncertainty and helping each other in turns to explore our ‘metaphorical landscape’ by asking “what would you like to have happen?” or, “When things are uncertain and that is exactly how you like them, that is like what?” Wendy had provided us all with the ‘clean questions’ to give us all a taste of having them used on us and using them on someone else. This process moves people very quickly to some great insights and interesting scenarios.
The demonstration during the break was a masterful application of ‘clean’. The willing volunteer asking, “How did you get me so far so fast?”
The exercise took us the rest of the evening, including the wash up and sharing of learnings. Jenny had an interesting time in the eye of a hurricane in the Arizona dessert! Metaphor is a funny thing.
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