Mark Stringer

Second Circle

This is something that my show is about.

This book - Presence by Patsy Rodenberg.

I’ve read it several times, and each time I’ve sworn to myself that I’m going to avail myself of its wisdom.

And then each time, I’ve found that I didn’t.

Here’s the central idea. There are three ways of communicating.

Third circle (this comes first because it barges in and makes itself know). Third circle is PROJECTING. Third circle is shouting. It is battering people into your way of thinking by way of force. Most politics seems like this now.

Most social media.

Then there’s the opposite of third circle. First circle.

First circle is, if you’re talking at all, talking to yourself. First circle, is, if someone’s talking to you, playing dead. Not arguing.

First circle is nodding when your boss, or your client is talking absolute garbage.

There’s lot of this going on right now. In politics, on social media.

I play dead when people talk about gender issues, mostly. I’m muted in my support for one particular side. I play dead about the middle East conflict. I try not to get snarled up in culture wars. I gloss it so that I don’t alienate people with suspicions of my sympathies.

But there’s another kind of communication. Which isn’t shouting, and it isn’t muttering to yourself or just nodding and saying “whatever.”

This is called “second circle” in Patsy Rodenberg’s books. But it has lots of names in lots of books.

It’s related to the idea that’s in “Zen in the art of Archery” - “being able to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension…without continually asking yourself: Shall I be able to manage it”

It’s like the “Information mode.” In Suzette Haden Elgin’s books about the “Gentle art of self-defence.”

It’s a mode in which levels of emotion are low and actual useful information is being exchanged.

The thing that it took me a long (too long) time to realise. Is that, if you’re used to shouting or being shouted at, or cowering making others cower, your capacity for this kind of second circle communication is going to be limited. It will take practice.

You can’t just decide to be in second circle all the time.

As Rodenberg points out. Having to be in second circle all the time – like perhaps when you first go to prison, or on a first date – or first date in prison! is exhausting.

The thing that I always struggled with, with my writing, was editing. Going back to the stuff that I’d already written.

Where I was with my writing, I only had a certain capacity for this. I needed to extend it. And I started to focus on increasing my capacity to do that to extend my ability to edit what I wrote.

A crucial part of that was finding someone who was willing to read what I was writing.

Another part of it was getting a routine, where every day, I would get up and write – but that included editing.

Another crucial part of this was to understand that anything that I did that would encourage editing kinds of things to happen. Talking out loud in parks! Chopping the text up into lines and then putting them back together. And – this feels like revealing a trade secret – simplifying the language using a decades old work processing tool. Editing is being in second circle with your writing, it’s getting into conversation with it. That’s good, that’s not good. We need more of this. We need to tone this down. This needs to change.

I also realised that in project management, some of the meetings that I had regularly were opportunities for second circle communication. Often, they would start out as shouting matches or grandstanding but there would at least be opportunities for give and take discussions in these meetings. For those who know about Agile, it’s the four meetings standup, show and tell, planning and retro. But also, of course, side conversations.

I’d had an idea about this for years. Sometimes, you manage to have conversations where the people who’ve been yelling at you about meeting the inevitable “aggressive deadline,” look at you differently, and in a different voice ask you if something is actually doable within a certain time. Or they ask you if there are any things that they should be worrying about. I think this is the next thing that I want to explore more. In project management. In writing. This kind of give and take communication. Getting to the level-gazed, honest communication. What are the opportunities for it? Can they be increased? When is it not a good idea? How can you measure your capacity. How can avoid falling for the temptation to think you can simply shift to communicating like that all of the time? What can you do, how can you change things so opportunities for right kind of communication gently increase?