When I know a person has a strong interest in employee engagement, I like to recommend Peter Block’s Community. If they are interested only on a superficial level, they will let me know by saying, “Well, that book is really about life outside the workplace and really is not relevant to business organizations.” Sometimes, it is best not to offer a path that leads someplace one does not really want to go.
Peter Block offers his readers a new way of thinking about community that is relevant to every aspect of life. He talks about the weaving of social fabric that brings us together, physically but also communally in a more purposeful sense.
What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought were incidental. An after-thought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before.
-Peter Block, Community, 2008, p.9 pb
The metaphor of weaving is apt. The movement is rhythmic, small, intricate and extended over a long period of time. We learn to not be a slave to detail, but to allow detail to move us into the present via our senses. An athlete knows what it is to focus on the threads of a ball to respond from a sensory, kinesthetic mode. The artist knows what it is to focus on color, value, form, or line, instead of the whole. In the workplace, we can see gesture, hear tone of voice, feel energy and we can pay attention to the smallest exchange in odd moments, in order to move from our heads, where we value positions and guard our stakes, into our senses, where we gain awareness of our surroundings. We would do well to consider how the small exchange, over time, can weave a strong fabric of relationship, if we practice moving into the present via our sensory world. Sometimes we must lose our head to find our senses.
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