The Community Pool - Talk 6 of 25

Topic: The Community Pool

Theme: Community

Author: Barry Sweet

Date: January 7, 2018

Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com

This is the Community Pool… Into the Community Pool we can pour kindness or cruelty, selflessness or selfishness, we first or me first, clean water, polluted water, fresh water, dirty water, good juju, bad juju. 

It doesn't matter what you pour into the community pool, it will determine the quality of our mutual swim. 

And so there's some mindfulness about what to pour into the Community Pool.  And all we've learned is that morale is a choice, not an accident. 

It doesn't just happen. The community is built on what's contributed to the Community Pool. It's a simple thing it just boils down to math. If we get 7 billion people pouring kindness and selflessness and altruism into the Community Pool, it's going to be a great swim. If we get 7 billion people with myopia, self-centeredness, and selfishness pouring into the Community Pool, we'll end up with a world like that. It's just all math. It's all simple math. The most important thing that we think we can do is to create a Community Pool that's based on the idea of the Safe Place. I learned about the concept of the Safe Place from my friend Nancy (the mom) telling the story about her daughter Amy who came home from Junior High crying and saying “Mom those girls are so mean. They say things just to hurt and cut” and Nancy put her arms around her daughter Amy and said, “Hey just remember that you can always be yourself at home and be fully known and fully loved”. 

And home is a Safe Place. And so we take that concept at the Safe Place and try to infuse it into our workplaces and our home lives so that our homes are Safe Places and our work is a Safe Place. And when you've got a Safe Place, you can have trusted friends and you can make progress on your areas of stuckness and you can find solutions that you never knew were there.

People ask “How do you do that thing you do down there at the Wilderness Office? And that thing we do doesn't really have a lot of definition. But I've tried to get at those definitions. And one of them is that we hire people that understand that it's their obligation to make positive contributions to the community pool… as many a day as possible because it makes this great place to swim. 

People have said “Wow, you are very respectful because you're all very diverse and different… different religions, different sexual orientations, different… males, females, ages…” You know my best year there I had a 16-year-old that worked there and a 77-year-old, and I was always proud of that. But they all get along and it's not because of tolerance, because I think that's sort of an exclusive word. It's more out of this “respect” that we have just for each other's journey. 

We're trying to find out the best way to live our lives and we share that with each other and we respect listening in to another person's story because it informs our own.  And so then when we are in small groups thinking about solutions to problems, there is the power of GroupThink, because I'm just a guy with tunnel vision. I might be the guy that's trying to come up with solutions that we're going to use in the end, but in the end, I'm just a guy with tunnel vision and I need people that can think outside my frame of reference and help me to see things that I can't see things that I haven't seen ever and probably wouldn't have a chance of it, if people didn't vocalize what they were thinking, so there's power in GroupThink and we sort of mobilize that power and seize it and use it.

One of the examples of this… is an exercise that we use call “Sink the Ship”. Let's say that I'm charged with instituting bear canisters Park-wide for the National Park. Well, I go upstairs in my office, I come up with a plan and I bring it downstairs. I have everyone sit in a circle shoulder to shoulder. Nobody one inch back to show their level of non-involvement. But everybody with equal standing. And I take my idea set it in the middle of the circle and then I say “OK we're going to play ‘Sink the Ship’ and everybody takes pot shots at my idea of how we're going to institute bear canisters Park-wide. And then, when we're done, I pick up the leaking idea the dripping idea, I take it back upstairs. 

I rework it for two weeks and then I bring it down again. And I set it in the center. And I say “Okay! Round two of ‘Sink the Ship’” and everybody shoots holes in my ship… my idea of how we're going to institute Park-wide. I go back upstairs rework it, plug all those holes and then I have an idea that I can take to our Management Leadership Team that has already had people sink it… and they look at the idea and they go “This is really great work!” So I'm using the power of all the people around me and they say things to me like “You know Barry, I worked for you ten years ago and I'll never forget those sessions of ‘Sink the Ship’... how fun it was… how we all owned it. It was ours and we made the decision together”. 

And I'm thinking “And how I needed your eyes because I can't make these decisions on my own. I need your voice, your eyes your vision and how we then become greater than just one person. And our vision can come up with great solutions rather than mediocre solutions”.

And so that's all part of the Community Pool. But if we have people that come into the office and do three contributions above baseline (bringing cookies, bringing fresh flowers that go on a desk, and giving a word of encouragement to each other…) it makes this incredible Community Pool that we swim in. If we have people that undermine and look for ways to hurt and cut. It becomes a dirty pool and a very acid pool to swim in. 

And that's what we're trying to achieve on one hand and not achieve on the other.

And we call these things PDC’s… our Positive Daily Contributions. 

And we all come to work with Positive Daily Contributions to bring to the Community Pool. And it's not like we're doing the scout motto and doing three good deeds a day, but it's kind of like that… We're making three Positive Daily Contributions to the Community Pool… and what, what is that times 10 people?  30?  It makes the swim absolutely pristine and crystalline and beautiful. That's the nature of the Community Pool.