Organizational Healing with Ora Grodsky

Paul Kuttner:

Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore what it takes to reach across the walls that divide us and get people working together to improve our world. I’m Paul Kuttner.

On this episode, we’re talking about organizations. Organizations, by definition, are created to get groups of individuals working together toward a shared purpose. But, as anyone who’s been part of an organization knows, it’s rarely a smooth process. My guest today has spent 25 years as a consultant for social justice organizations. She accompanies them as they plan for the future, adapt to a changing world, and address challenges that are holding them back. She’s learned a lot over the years and has synthesized many of these lessons into a new book.

I really enjoyed our conversation. We talked a lot about healing and health. We discussed how both people and organizations heal and how the health of individuals affects the organizations they’re a part of. We also talked about one of my favorite topics, conflict. As my guest shares, strong organizations don’t avoid conflict, they learn from it and transform it.

So without further ado, here is my conversation with Ora Grodsky.

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Paul: Today, I am excited to be joined in the studio by Ora Grodsky, co-founder of Just Works Consulting. Ora has spent the last 25 years working with organizations that are committed to building a more just world. She supports these organizations as they work to transform themselves and plan for the future. Ora calls what she does transformational consulting and has recently published a book synthesizing her approach entitled Justice, Love, and Organizational Healing. Ora writes that this is the book she would have wanted to have when she was starting out in consulting. It’s packed with wisdom from Ora and from authors and colleagues who have taught her along the way. Ora is a mother and a gardener living here in the Boston area. Ora, thank you so much for joining me on Partnership Work.

Ora Grodsky:

Paul, it’s a great pleasure. Thank you.

Paul: In your book, you refer to yourself as a transformational consultant. I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about transformational consulting and specifically how you describe it to people who are brand new to the kind of work you do.

Ora: Yeah, thank you. So transformational consulting is differentiated from a couple of different other kinds of consulting. We have expert consulting where somebody knows the answer to a problem. I need to have this thing fixed. And we have somebody come in and they fix it for us. And what transformational consulting adds is the dimension of really allowing us to see wider than we have been seeing before. So we’re not just looking to solve what’s called a technical problem. We’re looking to see things in new and nuanced ways.

Transformational consulting is about partnering with people and with organizations, not telling them what to do, but helping them to find their own solutions to problems so that they can figure out new and different ways of being in relationship with each other, new and different ways of understanding the world that they’re in, and new and different ways of understanding their work. Because when working for a more just and sustainable world, we’re looking for solutions that don’t yet exist. So we can’t use the same things that we have been doing. We need to be able to see things differently than we’ve seen them. Right.

Paul: One of the metaphors you used in the book was a midwife. Could you maybe share why, sort of what’s the parallel between what you do and midwifery?

Ora: That was a beautiful thing that somebody said to me many years ago, because a midwife doesn’t have the baby for you. The midwife doesn’t just create a baby and then like, here, here’s your baby, but rather helps you to do what you have the possibility of doing. Maybe they bring some tools or some remedies for you along the way. So you have some inputs that weren’t what you had, but they really help hold you in a process while you give birth to your baby.

Paul: Oh, I love that. That’s beautiful. So at what point in your life did you start to realize that you were good at this kind of work? And like, what were the early signs that this kind of role of helping people through change, of bringing people together, was something that really fit you?

Ora: Quite young in life, I found myself in pretty significant leadership roles. And realizing that I was trying to figure out how to reinvent a wheel. But I loved the idea of how do people come together to do good work without oppressing each other, with really being able to bring out creativity. And it was just really fun for me to do that. And so that led me back to graduate school with that question about what do people know about how people can come together and really create workplaces that work for the people who work there and different outcomes in service in the world. And so that was at some point in my mid-late 20s and then in my early 30s when I went back to graduate school. I’ve been doing this kind of work ever since.

Paul: How do you think, if at all, your early childhood, your background, your culture, may have shaped you in ways that impact the work you do.

Ora: That’s for sure true. I was born into a Jewish family in New York City in the early 1960s, and my family really valued what in Jewish tradition is called tikkun olam, repairing the world. And my parents had a left-wing political perspective. And so I got with my mother’s milk that it’s my responsibility, it’s all of our responsibility while we’re here, to leave the world a better place than we found it. And so that absolutely has been my life quest. All of my work has been involved with the question of how do we be of service? How do human beings create something better for ourselves and the planet.

Paul: You bring up healing. That is a word that’s in the title of your book, as is love. As you note, those are two words that maybe aren’t always the first words when we hear, oh, we’re bringing in a strategic planning consultant or an organizational change consultant. What inspired you to really center ideas of healing and love?

Ora: I’ll talk about them separately, though, of course, they’re very connected. So my first career, I was an acupuncturist and I was the academic dean of the New England School of Acupuncture and was very interested in how do bodies heal, about human health.

And in the very early days of the AIDS epidemic, I was part of creating a clinic for people with AIDS and HIV infection with a group of colleagues That was just a really magical experience of working together with people. But what I noticed in working with people who were HIV-infected, drug-addicted, was how much the societal container impacted their health. And so I became very interested in individual healing, but also collectively healing. How do we create environments that support human healing and health?

And healing, I think, is not really about returning us not to a state of perfection, but helping us to be deeply grounded in ourselves and our connection to each other so that we can make healthy choices and we can do work that supports the world and ourselves.

And also as an acupuncturist, my background as an acupuncturist, it’s about using a body’s own energy to heal, right? Acupuncturists don’t inject something into a body. We use needles to stimulate the body’s own energy. And organizational work is kind of like that, too, transformational consulting. We’re not injecting something into the organization necessarily, although we do bring tools and wisdom in. We’re really helping the organization’s own energy to align and to flow.

So that’s how I think about organizational healing. Love, I think about how important it is that love is part of the equation. And by love, I don’t mean romantic love. I mean, love that is care, that really treats others and ourselves with dignity, with respect, with allowing ourselves to fulfill our potential. And without love, without the care for each other, without care for the world, we are creating solutions that are literally killing our species and killing our planet.

Paul: This podcast is about the work of bridging across the cracks and the fissures that divide people. In your work, it seems like those cracks are often seen within a single organization. What, in your experience, are some of the main divisions or cracks between people that need healing, that need addressing?

Ora: Often we think, “Well, these two people don’t get along or they don’t like each other, they can’t work together.” And I think usually if we look upstream at the context that they’re in, then we can see why those cracks happen. So are their goals clear? Are they clear on what they’re trying to create? Are they clear what they stand for, what their values are? Are they clear on what their roles are? Often when those things aren’t clear, then we as humans get a little contracted.

Maybe our nervous systems get a little dysregulated. And then we come out of good relationship with each other. And so a lot of times those cracks are about the context is not clear enough. And often that can be informed by identity, by is there misunderstanding across race, across gender, misinterpretation? Are there power dynamics that are at play across differences of identity that we also need to look at and make more explicit? it. Oftentimes, people aren’t even aware, people who are perpetuating those, obviously people who are on the receiving end of those kinds of dynamics are very aware that that’s what’s happening usually. But that when we can surface those, people have an opportunity to come into different relationship across difference.

Paul: Right. It would be helpful at this point, maybe to get concrete and hear some examples of some of the work you’ve done Specifically, you keep talking about context. Context is important. I know from when we spoke on the phone before this, you talked about creating a container. You talk in the book about holding space. Maybe tell us a bit about what it looks like for you to create a container where these conversations can happen, where this healing can take place. When does that start? And I’m thinking, you know, long before you get in the room with people, with a group, to have a dialogue, to do planning, like what’s all the run-up that goes into preparing to create that container?

Ora: Yeah, quite a lot. And often it looks very easy and people think, well, you can just come in and do this and run a meeting, run a day-long retreat for us. We don’t need to plan. And it’s really important to plan. I think it’s also really important to note that we have to balance that with adrienne marie brown talks about: more presence, less prep. And I really believe we need to bring, our presence is a huge thing, but we also need to prepare.

So before we even come into a room to talk to each other, we need to clarify what’s called our POP. This is a framework by Leslie Sholl Jaffe and Randall Alford that says that for every process, for everything that we do, we first ask, what’s the purpose? Why are we doing this thing? And then we say, what are the outcomes? When we’re successful at the end, where do we want to be? What do we want to have? And then we can design a process for how we’re going to have that conversation. And what’s often true is we come into a room to talk to each other. I’ve got my agenda, you’ve got your agenda, and we’re in different conversations. But just preparing to really know what is the conversation that this group of people or these two people need to have in this moment and agreeing, yes, this is why we’re meeting. This is what we want to get out of it. And then this is the way it’s going to work for us to have that conversation, not to be rigid, not to be inflexible, but just so that we can know what the expectation is and what we’re working towards together.

Paul: What does it look like for you to actually set up a retreat, a meeting? What are you thinking about? What are you paying attention to when you actually get all these people in the same room?

Ora: Well, always when I’m doing a project, whether it’s just one meeting or a retreat, or it’s an ongoing, you know, multi-year or multi-month change effort, I work with a team. And so that often includes the leader, who’s usually the person who’s brought me, and I often work with a colleague, brought us in. But we want a team of people to plan, to really understand the different interests that are being represented.

So as a consultant, as a transformational consultant, it’s not my agenda, it’s our agenda. And that team helps to design, well, okay, where are we? Where do we want to be at the end of a retreat? Where are you relative to the things that you want to have happen? Is there any preparation you need to do to get, what do you need to do to get everybody in the room ready to have the same conversation at the same time? What’s the culture of that group, what’s going to work for them, what’s not going to work for them, what’s a stretch, a little bit too much of a stretch, what’s the right stretch for them?

And then look at, well, where is this thing going to happen? Is it virtual? Is it in real life? If it’s in real life, what are some of the criteria for a successful location? Space matters a lot. It’s really important that there’s a space where bodies feel comfortable. I’m a big fan of and have an interest in polyvagal theory, which has come out the last few years, thinking about our nervous systems and the condition of our nervous system and how when we’re constricted, when we’re in fight or flight or freeze, we just can’t relax, be in relationship together, think well. We’re really operating out of a dysregulation is what they call it. And so what’s a space that allows our bodies to feel regulated? How can people get there? What do people need? Are there accessibility needs that people have? And also good food. Super important.

Paul: Right. One of the things that I really appreciated about the book was the section on conflict. It came up in the chapter, Transformational Change is Hard Work, which is an excellent title, by the way. In my experience, conflict and disagreement are often left out when we tell a story of a partnership or a campaign. But we know from experiencing it that conflict is always present.

As you write in your book, our instinct is actually often to avoid conflict. It can be very scary. It can put us in that fight or flight space that you just talked about. You’re very honest in the book about the ways that you tried to avoid conflict early in your career, and I definitely related to what you said. So my question is, when did you first realize that you personally needed to change how you addressed conflict in your work?

Ora: I would not say that happened all at once. I would say gradually over time, certainly when I was in graduate school and I first learned about the importance of conflict to growth and noticing in myself my tendencies to avoid conflict or the ways that I avoided conflict. I’d say that that took some time, a repeated exposure to people who really understood those ideas, were patient with me. And then understanding the difference between conflict and harm. That conflict can cause harm depending on how it’s handled, but it’s also necessary for creativity and for growth. So I think I was afraid of conflict because I equated it with harm, with loss of relationship, with harm. And to understand we can be in conflict with and it doesn’t mean violence. It means listening, understanding, being willing to see, again, a wider aperture, a bigger picture of what’s happened.

Paul: Are there specific tools or practices that you like to use when you see conflict arising?

Ora: Well, there’s so many different ways of addressing it. I am a big fan of a process called deep democracy, which their motto is “wisdom in the no,” N-O. And so the theory is that every voice of dissent has some grain of truth in it. There’s something in there to learn, maybe not the whole package of it, but there’s something. And so how do we listen long enough to see where’s the wisdom in the no? It’s not that somebody is completely opposed to this idea. They just want to make sure this really important thing gets included. And when we can slow down and hear that, then we can really create the possibility of people coming along and creating a better outcome than something that misses something really important.

Paul: Right. And in the book, you even put that on yourself. I noticed you talk about resistance, people who are resisting you, resisting the process, And I appreciated it because I think it can be easy to dismiss resistance and explain it away.

Ora: Yes.

Paul: But you really talked about pushing yourself to see what’s the value in the resistance. There’s some knowledge there.

Ora: That’s exactly it.

Paul: Do you have any examples of times when you’ve really been challenged by people in the room and people have really challenged the process and what you learned from that?

Ora: Well, I would say earlier on, but what I’ve really learned mostly is not to come into the room where the meeting has happened before everybody who is going to be there agrees to and understands what’s going to happen. So a lot of that really gets addressed with the prevention of making sure we have the right agenda. We’ve done what we need for people to be in the room.

But, for example, I was facilitating something recently, kind of a favor I was doing to a group for a group as a volunteer. And it came up very quickly, but they really needed a planning retreat pretty quickly. And I did some work with a small committee to make sure we had the right agenda. And I said many times, “Okay, so this is really the goal. This is the thing we’re working on.” Everybody agrees. Can you make sure everybody agrees? And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

And lo and behold, we get in the room and they introduced the thing and somebody raised their hand, “I don’t agree.” And so what I know needs to happen then is that we need to find out why. And so I did a process of going around the room and hearing from everybody kind of how was the proposal landing for them. And we were really able to surface that actually the person who raised their hand and said, “I don’t agree,” really had a small concern about it. And we were able to shift it in such a way that it incorporated his wisdom to the betterment of everybody’s interest.

Paul: Can you tell me about the Conflict Avoidance Escalator?

Ora: Yeah. Thank you for asking about that. That is based on a couple of people’s different work that I put together in a particular way. It’s based both on the Ladder of Inference by Chris Argyris, which basically is a step-by-step process of how we as human beings take in data that really confirms what we already believe. And then we’re kind of in that reinforcing loop of only then taking in more data to reinforce our position. I combined that with Bill Kreidler, who unfortunately died in the early 2000s, late 90s. But he did a lot of work on conflict resolution in schools and talked about a conflict escalator and how conflicts escalate.

So the conflict avoidance escalator, which I developed, talks about what are the consequences of not saying the truth to each other and how that really escalates our disconnection from each other. So maybe it starts really, you know, it’s a small thing happens. I interpret it in my way. You interpret it in your way. But I make up a story. I don’t want to make waves, so I’ll just let that thing go. But then the thing goes and it goes on and I make up more of a story about, well, this is why they’re doing this thing. And it may or may not be true because I haven’t just asked, well, why did that thing happen or let you know the impact on me?

And there are steps in the conflict avoidance escalator that we can see where things become intractable. But really, it’s because we weren’t able to come back down and both ask about what is happening and express the impact on us, and then tensions rise and we lose trust, partnership, collaboration, and authentic relationship from allowing small things to get big.

Paul: Right. Do you find yourself using any of this stuff in your own marriage and your own relationships?

Ora: Of course, because you’re a person in the professional world, you’re a person in the personal world. And so that’s not really different in terms of the skills and tools that help us to be in deep relationship with each other. And so, yes, absolutely. All the skills of listening, all the skills of asking, all the skills of questioning my own assumptions of breathing, of allowing space when there’s a stimulus. That’s not different in my personal or professional life.

Paul: So most of the organizations you discuss in the book seem to be multiracial, at least to some extent, in terms of who makes up the staff, the leadership, the board. Could you talk a bit about how race plays into the dynamics of an organization and how you explicitly address it in your work?

Ora: Yeah. Race plays into the dynamics of everything in the United States of America, this is not a secret. We are deeply rooted in racialized capitalism, racialized ways of assigning value to different people based on our racial identities. And so that shows up everywhere. I’m a white Ashkenazi Jew, and I’ve done a lot of work and continue to do a lot of work to understand how racism, particularly anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, how that lives within me, and to try and not collude with it as much as possible.

And what I understand in working in multiracial organizations is, first of all, there’s just things I’m going to miss through my white lens, that it’s really important for me often to partner with colleagues of color who will see things, who will earn trust that I’m not able to do because of my identity. And also important for me as a white consultant to be able to speak a truth that I see, that sometimes it’s harder for people of color to say it’s riskier or that people will hear from me because of my identity. And so I think it’s always present racial dynamics, even in entirely white organizations. We have to say, “Why, in this moment in history, is this organization all white? What’s happening here?” And so it’s always present.

Paul: One of the big issues that often comes up in these conversations around partnerships and collaborations is power differentials. How hard it can be to get authentic and honest collaboration going when some folks in the room have a lot more access than others to authority or influence or positional power, things like that. How do you work with groups to address kind of differences in positional power? I think one of your main tools was listening. Can you talk about sort of how you explicitly go about addressing listening as it relates to power in organizations?

Ora: I learned that my listening has a volume and that when I’m interested, the volume of my listening is larger and I can tune out if I’m not as interested. And so I’ve worked for many years on really turning up the volume of my listening. And so I think one thing that’s really important is to help other people learn how to listen. And so there are activities you can do around that, deepening our listening.

You asked about my home life, and it’s really important to me that my children, who are no longer children, they are now adults, feel listened to. They understand that their voices are really important, even though as their parent, I had positional power. And I think it’s the similar thing of teaching people the beauty and the power of listening.

I remember doing a workshop years ago with a group of women, and we did something around listening, and they all at the end of the day said, this is going to change. I’m no longer just going to be focused on cooking dinner while my kid is trying to get my attention, but I understand that what they have to say is important. So working with leaders with positional power to help them understand they don’t have to have the answers. They have to be present and really being willing to hear what other people have to say.

I think if you create a committee or a group of people working together across positional power and the people with positional power are not willing to deeply listen, it’s not going to work. And it can be hard because they got to have the positional power often because they did have the answers. It can be a real liberation for leaders to learn, “I don’t always have to have the answers. I need to be able to really listen and then help people figure it out and own my power.” It isn’t just, “I don’t know anything, you all figure it out.” But to both own your power and also share your power, it’s a liberation for a lot of leaders who feel they have the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Paul: That approach is a little different than an approach that really might push organizations to be flatter, to redistribute power in more structural ways. How do you think about the relationship between what you’re talking about in terms of listening and sharing from the top versus sort of more challenging the underlying structure of leadership?

Ora: I would have had a different answer to this years ago. And maybe I’ll think about this differently in the future. Where I am right now is I believe more in hierarchy than I used to. And I understand that hierarchy does not mean oppression. But I do think there are levels of accountability that people have that when we don’t tell the truth about it, it’s burdensome. So I myself worked in a collective years ago, and the truth of the matter was that we pretended we had equal power, but it wasn’t true. And doing that placed a huge burden on the people who were actually doing more of the work. So I do believe in creating environments within which people can do their work in the most creative, engaged way. And I also do believe we can have real relationship and accountability and efficacy across levels of power.

Paul: That’s fascinating. What would surprise someone who’s unfamiliar with your job?

Ora: I would say for me, I don’t know that this is true for other people, how much time I spend taking care of my own nervous system. So really spending time in the mornings, meditating, doing yoga, regulating myself so that in the moment when surprising things happen, I can stay regulated. Because, as I quoted Deb Dana in my book, and I’m paraphrasing her quote, but only when I have a well-regulated nervous system can I hold space for other people to become regulated. And so the amount of time and attention, not in a selfish way, but starting with myself and tending to my own, Regulation is a really important part of the work. It’s not extra or different. And re-regulating because I’m human.

Paul: Right. No, that’s great advice. So that’s the end of my questions. Thank you so much for coming on today, for coming down to the studio. I really enjoyed talking to you. Do you want to just say real quick where people can get this book?

Ora: Sure. Yeah, thanks. And by the way, Paul, this has been a pleasure. For your listeners to know, Paul and I knew each other very briefly many years ago. So it’s just lovely to reconnect. And so you can find Justice, Love and Organizational Healing wherever books are sold. I will say I wrote it with consultants in mind, but it is very appropriate for leaders, managers, all organizational change agents. And so I’m recommending people buy it from bookshop.org or from your local independent bookstore. And my website to find me is just-works.com.

Paul: Fabulous. And I’ll put all that in the show notes, and thank you again.

Ora: Thank you, Paul. It’s been a pleasure. Yeah, it really has been. Thank you.

Paul: Thank you all for joining me today. To see the episode transcript and show notes, head over to partnershipwork.podbeam.com. I’ve included some links to places where you can learn more about today’s guest and the topics we discussed. Partnership Work is an independent podcast created with the incredible support of the nonprofit organization Urban Media Arts here in my hometown of Malden, Massachusetts. Check them out at urbanmediaarts.org. I’ll see you next time. Take care.