In the west are the Women Chiefs. "Maintenance" and "balance" are the key words in their deliberation; they must concern themselves with healing and nurturing, protecting and caring for the tribe. The Council Chiefs in the northwest speak to timing and interrelatedness. In offering their council, they consider the question, "Is this the right time?" In particular, they focus on the flow and turn of events in the life of the tribe. In the north are the Hunter/Worker Chiefs. Their focus is strategy and implementation, their key words "clarity" and "action." Finally in the northeast are the Law Dog Chiefs. They speak to "integrity" and "vitality," and must determine whether the council has spoken sufficiently to reach a decision, or whether the ceremony is incomplete and the wheel must go around again.
The council ceremony always begins in the east and proceeds clockwise around the circle of the medicine wheel, with each chief speaking to the issue before the tribe and representing his or her designated perspective. The talking stick passes from chief to chief; each chief rises to speak and identifies himself or herself, identifies the perspective from which he or she speaks, and then offers wisdom on the issue, usually talking for less than 10 minutes. In the center of the medicine wheel are the Zero Chiefs, whose job is to ensure that the process is honored and that the discussion moves as it should.
Because of the design of the medicine wheel, the quality of the discussion is dramatically different from a traditional Western meeting. Each chief adds to the council from his or her perspective, but none of the chiefs debates with or directly contradicts any other. The ceremony is a council, not an argument; understanding does not come out of conflict but accumulates and then emerges.
Not all council ceremonies lead to consensus. If the ceremony has been completed and the council has not reached an agreement, one of two things can happen. The group can suspend the ceremony while it collects its energy for another attempt. Or if there is an emergency and a decision must be reached, the council can give someone the authority to decide, with the understanding that not everyone is in accord. As WindEagle says: "If there's agreement, that's good. If there's disagreement, at least we've heard it in depth and we can establish what it is. This process is not about positions, it's about people. It's about perspectives and wisdom. It creates relationship, connection, and respect. When you speak and you're different from me, I value your opinion. If we can live that way, we'll be wiser in the actions we take."
What distinguishes the council ceremony as a decision-making technique is the nature and quality of the discussion. The actual protocols are about as different from most corporate decision-making practices as possible. "When the council comes together, it's a cumulative process, rather than a debating process," says RainbowHawk. "Being a chief in the council setting means stepping forward for the whole. Each person adds to it and as each adds, the container of wisdom gets fuller."
It's not difficult to see analogues between the eight perspectives of the chiefs and the kinds of outlooks that could inform better business decisions. What company wouldn't do better if someone analyzed each situation in terms of its "power" and "danger"? But does the council ceremony itself offer benefits to contemporary business practices?
Eric Vogt, 47, has no doubts. Vogt's establishment credentials are impeccable: he is a former Harvard Business School lecturer and a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. Vogt is now president of MicroMentor Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the interactive educational technology company that sponsored the Charles Hotel conference at which RainbowHawk and WindEagle appeared. He is also cofounder and chairman of InterClass, a consortium of large companies looking to explore the most advanced features of organizational learning. Vogt invited RainbowHawk and WindEagle to preside over InterClass's fifth annual meeting, and to run it as a council ceremony.
"Many aspects of ceremony could enhance the quality and process of corporate thinking and decision making," Vogt says. "These include the creation of a space for reflective thinking, the use of storytelling to set a playful and creative mood, the process of tuning up a community of people who feel in harmony with each other, and the balancing of perspectives that need to be incorporated into decision making. Organizations don't have a decision-making methodology that includes all of these aspects. Ceremony brings them all together."
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
July 29, 2009 at 3:54am by Emeri Gent
Because all of this sounds simple it is difficult. This still makes great sense at an individual level because their is deep wisdom and sophisticated nuances in tribal rituals.
If these ways of seeing and thinking are not more common at the individual level, I doubt they will transfer to the group level (unless it is a highly intelligent group).
What is in this article is something that has been passed down over generations and therefore represents a lifetime's work. I always wonder how our modern training systems try to put lifetimes of work into a spoonful of change direction.
Unless one is prepared to study the culture and be more understanding of the sacrifice made by native populations to accommodate those that have since emigrated to lands that they never said they owned but which they understood - an understanding we are rediscovering with the advent of concerns about climate change.
e.g., Diversity of the Original Americans
[Em]