Got it!

This post is about what I've learned over the last four or five or six years about how groups come together to create great work. The facilitation I do with small teams of health care workers and the Priesting I've done in my spiritual life dovetail beautifully in this area. In each place, I help small groups learn to talk to each other, work together and use their dysfunctions to help make themselves---and the things they create---stronger and better.

Talking to Abe a few weeks ago I got of some of it out, but if I don't write it down either I will go crazy or it will be gone.

Here's the core thought:

It's the relationships that make or break the work.

The obvious thing, the commonsense thing, is for group members to focus their primary efforts on whatever it is they are trying to produce: high quality patient care, a gorgeous, deeply transformative ritual or a training group that births great Priest/esses.

This is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

The most stunningly beautiful results come not from focusing on the goal, the work, the end products themselves, but on the relationships amongst the people who come together to create them.

Focusing on healthy and loving relationships of trust promotes positive transformation among all those involved and creates a powerful, positive egregore.

It's the egregore that creates the work.

So, don't put your primary focus on the details of the work.

Put your primary focus on the creation of powerful, positive relationships of trust that will sustain and feed the group.

Focusing on the work itself is important, but secondary.

If you get the order right, you will create great work.

One big caveat: it's very important, at first, to bring together the right group of people to do the work.

But once this is done, most of the energy then needs to focus on creating and sustaining good relationships amongst them.