Presence is more than just being there (Malcolm Forbes)
Yesterday, I was very conscious that I had to change tack a number of times; different tasks, sectors, groups, and areas of focus. I felt the need to apologise in advance to someone that I might not always be as present as I would like at the moment. By that I didn’t just mean showing up, I meant showing up, being focused, and fully contributing when needed. I think this is a particular challenge at the moment when we cannot physically be in the same space, and we are adapting our working processes to radically altered home lives.
Presence can be thought of in three ways, it’s physical, it’s emotional and it’s autobiographical in that we bring our backstories, it includes our identity. It is also an important aspect of being a change agent, it is a factor in enabling us to be aware of both letting things go and allowing new things to arrive.
…we began to appreciate presence as deep listening, of being open to one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense. (Senge et al., 2004: 13)
Noticing one’s preconceptions and underlying assumptions (something I’ll pick up in the next blog post) can be really helpful while everything is in flux. If my preconception of a team is a group of people being physically co-located and working on a common goal this has to be radically adapted now if I’m to work within this new context. Now a team might be defined as a physically distanced group of people working semi-autonomously and self-organising. I need to be conscious of how I shift my awareness to understand this change and be present in this new environment.
Normally our thoughts have us rather than we have them. (David Bohm)
On a personal level I have a set of reflective questions that I find useful to notice the state of my presence and what is supporting or interrupting it.
- What are you doing right now?
- Where are your thoughts?
- Where are your emotions?
- Where are your hands and your body?
- What are you holding on to right now?
Reflecting on yesterday’s post I also noticed how some of those pointers can apply to helping us ‘be there’ too.
All that said I think virtual presence adds a new layer of challenge, I recently experienced an artist’s talk and there were multiple glitches with the technology. I’m afraid it didn’t take long for my presence to slip away as voices crackled in and out, screen sharing froze, and the chat filled with notes of frustration.
“virtual presence…a psychological state in which the virtuality of experience is unnoticed.” (Lee, 2004)
I’m not sure many of us have experienced that level of virtual presence in our organisational lives just yet, the technology is often too intrusive. I saw a great post yesterday when someone likened being in Zoom meetings with the scene from the Muppet’s Movie. It made me laugh but also gave me a new way of thinking about staring at the screen! As some of you know I love a bit of irreverence and am mindful of taking ourselves too seriously sometimes. This might not help with being present in your next video conference, but it might give you a smile too!
Dawn & Susan
References
LEE, K. M. 2004. Presence, explicated. Communication theory, 14, 27-50.
SENGE, P. M., SCHARMER, C. O., JAWORSKI, J. & FLOWERS, B. S. 2004. Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future, SoL Cambridge, MA.