More Hairballs

I promised to blog more about Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie, so here goes. The penultimate chapter in the book is titled “Pool Hall Dog.” MacKenzie describes a scene he witnessed in a pool hall where a playful dog would actually reach his mouth into the pool table to grab a ball (ostensibly to play with). Once he had a grip on the ball, however, he couldn’t remove his mouth from within the pool table. He would just stand there, tail wagging, waiting to begin his play with his newfound prize. The lesson for Mackenzie (and one I resonate with) was about letting go. This is from page 216:

If we do not let go, we make prisoners of ourselves.

To be fully free to create, we must find the courage and willingness to let go:

Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past…
Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions…
Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood…
Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.

You will find it is not a one-shot deal, this letting go. You must do it again and again. It’s kind of like breathing. You can’t breathe just once. Try it: Breathe just once. You’ll pass out.

If you stop letting go, your creative spirit will pass out.

Now when I say let go, I do not mean reject. Because when you let go of something, it will still be there for you when you need it. But because you have stopped clinging, you will have freed yourself up to tap into other possibilities—possibilities that can help you deal with the world of accelerating change.

This is deep stuff. It’s a little bit spiritual, if you ask me. But I think it is also down-to-earth practical and relevant in organizations. That last sentence nails it. We live in a world of accelerating change, yet the model we were fed growing up (during the slow change days) pushed the goal of narrowing things down, finding the singular answer, being right, winning. That model encourages holding on, not letting go. That’s why it is hard to let go of strategies that have worked (but I won with this; it’s a best practice!!). Remember, letting go is not rejecting. You still may pursue that winning strategy for a bit longer, but you can make that choice within a sea of options, rather than merely doing a limited scan of possible challengers to your winner.

So letting go is not about giving up or being without. It is more a question of opening up to possibilities. And opening up will make you faster, more agile, more creative. That’s the paradox. Letting go of your need to be “right” all the time will actually help you be right more often. Letting go of the grievances you have against your boss, or your employee, or your Board member who is not leading/following/working properly, will actually help you see more clearly what YOU need to do about it. Remember, you’re not ignoring the problem, you are simply releasing that righteous clinging you’ve attached to the problem. Try it on some relatively small issues at work, and see what happens.

2 Comments

  1. Steven Walker
    26.07.2005 at 10:03 am

    Like you, I love OTGH, but I have a question. What do we do when others, such as bosses, staff, members or leaders, won’t let go? I know that we need to follow Gandhi’s advice and be the change we wish to see in the world, yet there is almost always a disconnect between the individual optimism that MacKenzie’s and Gandhi’s words engender and the essential pessimism (euphemistically referred to as realism) of too many others who influence our lives and our organizations. The cognitive and emotional demands placed on us as we try to meet those people’s insatiable needs are considerable and, unfortunately, all too often wasted. This is energy we desperately need to conserve so it can be applied in more productive and creative ways.
    So what can we do to invite others to let so they too can see the possibilities?

  2. 01.08.2005 at 9:26 am

    Well, that’s a tough one, obviously. I’m tempted to give the pithy response of inviting you to let go of the need to control whether or not others let go! There is some wisdom there. As a colleague of mine once said, I can’t drag people kicking and screaming into the 21st century. If you are “holding on” to the frustration of their stubbornness, you’ll likely do things to increase the stubbornness.
    I’d look at ways to remove the obstacles to their letting go (as opposed to pushing them harder to let go). Try to remove or alleviate whatever is concerning them. Go a bit deeper into how they are seeing things before talking about an alternative way. I remember learning in the martial art of Aikido that you are safer and can more easily disarm an attack if you move TOWARDS it.