An Interview with Liz Morrison

By Colin Whitby

Liz and I first met whilst working in a central government office in the UK where we had completely different roles, she in communications and myself as a deployment manager for one of the projects there.

It was only when I attended a workshop run by Soleira Green that I met one of Liz’s friends who said she knew someone working in the same department. I thought how likely was it that I would know her friend in a department of several thousand people, but yes not only did I know her, but she and I had worked together a number of times.

For me this shows that many of us may think we are working alone with this new energy when in fact, just down the corridor, is someone else who may be thinking the same way. This signals a move from keeping this kind of discussion under wraps with a select few trusted souls to a more open dialogue.

So this interview is a result of these synchronistic meetings, I hope you enjoy.

Colin.

Colin: I love the interesting way we discovered we were both working with the new energy, but in different ways, how would you describe what you do?

Liz: The other day I was speaking at an NLP type of conference to a hundred or so people and prior to the meeting I had sent through a powerpoint presentation (expecting some projection facilities to be provided). However on arrival there was no projector so I set about photocoping a photograph that I was going to use in my presentation and distributed it to the audience; it was a picture of my horse.

I am interested in using different ways of communicating with the issues that are going on in the world and the example I use is our relationship with animals.

So I asked the audience to look at the picture and just imagine what it is like to be a horse. For example a horse is a prey animal, whereas we are predators, so we look straight ahead with a fairly limited angle of vision whereas horses have nearly 360° vision, with their eyes on the side of their head they have blind spots immediately in front and behind them.

Then I talked about how sensitive their other senses were, like smell and taste. As modern humans we barely use our senses of taste and smell, whereas the horse has very keen senses in these areas. The horse also has very sensitive skin and can flick off a fly virtually anywhere on their body whereas we would have much trouble twitching our skin.

So we seem to think we are above animals and yet here is one which is using all it’s senses to their full. A horse’s hearing for example is very keen, their ears are right on top of their heads and can move them 180°, and can also be used to show their emotions.

When the audience were thinking how it was to be a horse I asked if anyone was getting anything about this horse, anything about her body condition, emotional state, her temperament, her character, what was it like to be inside this horse’s body.

What intrigued me was that about five people immediately connected to the fact that this horse was pregnant, yet the picture was taken about 4 years previously, way before the pregnancy was established.

So that just shows that with a very gentle process of asking people to step into another consciousness, or being, that they were able to get current information about that horse, and in a public setting.

When I spoke to the people afterwards they were adamant that this was the very first thought that had popped into their heads, ‘this horse is pregnant’, then of course they dismissed it, which is quite important. This is something we all do, we dismiss our intuition as not relevant.

The interesting thing is just how this tuning in is possible and how important it is to start listening to stuff that we have naturally dismissed because it does not meet our conscious working world criteria.

Colin: Yes I think we can all relate to that example, where we often dismiss our first thought which is invariably right. How do you bring this kind of thinking to work, to this government department, for example.

Liz: Many of my friends ask me why I work in a large government department, we’ll never be able to change that system. I’ve done a lot of work on one to one change but I’m also very interested in systemic change, how do you get huge systems, huge organisations, to connect into bigger issues and take a more holistic view, how and were do we intervene.

With the many issues we have, whether we call them new age, sustainability, change management, business re-engineering, the actual process has to be ‘how do we make change happen’. So this is a fundamental element to everything I am doing, I am doing this job to teach me more about real complexity and started looking at the job from that point of view.

For example, what energy can I bring to this meeting so that people take and interest and participate. So I am learning and testing my way of being in order to create little spaces for this kind of thinking to spread. We could have a discussion about the example of the horse and the photograph over a coffee, then go further into how do we ‘know what we don’t know’ in the context of a big IT project.

Colin: It seems that we need to choose the most appropriate language for the context in which we are working.

Liz: Yes, and it is so easy to fall into the thought that it’s all someone else’s problem and it’s not my fault, so the question is ‘how on earth can we start to take the responsibility individually to start making these little changes’. It’s no use making huge sweeping statements like saying ‘you’ll never change government its corrupt’, which absolves us from taking any responsibility in every situation. It would be very easy to criticise as opposed to finding solutions, and the solution comes in your way of being in each situation.

Colin: It’s amazing how many people have an opinion as to where the right place to be is, I have been asked many times how it is I am working with organisations that have such dense energies, would I not be better to move to more enlightened organisations? So my key challenge has been how to we bring this kind of energy and thinking to the workplace, which in this case just happens to be in large organisations.

Liz: Yes and I think we have all got to rise to the challenge of ‘oh it’s too big, it’s hopeless’, of going into these environments and making these apparently tiny changes and just raise people’s awareness of their responsibility. There’s also something here about being in a continuous learning space ourselves, of not going into that ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ situation. The question would be ‘are you tolerant enough to tolerate intolerance?’. In order to ‘be’ we need to be enough in control to let go. It’s so easy to say, ‘I’m being and you’re not, I’m good and you’re bad’ and to put a value judgement onto people’s behaviours, so our challenge is to be completely detached from the measurement, from the good/bad, I’m better than you kind of thinking.

So to go with the changes that are coming our way we need to go with the flow, it’s like riding a horse, we cannot resist the movement to make something happen. There are a lot of activism that wants to change the direction of energy by pulling or blocking, whereas I think we need to sense where the energy is going and then, by our way of being, guide it in a new state. So there is a whole thing there about our congruence in our behaviour and attitude, so that we ‘be the change we want to see in the world’.

Unless we understand another person’s perspective, like stepping into that horse, we are never going to be enough to have these universal connections.

Colin: That’s great Liz, thanks very much for your time.

Your can read more about Liz and her different approaches at:-

http://www.sportingtactics.co.uk/
http://www.sustainabletactics.co.uk/