At this year’s Academy of Management conference in Montreal, artist and scholar, Nancy Adler shared that she sees her role as “outing other people’s humanity” while speaking at one of several events in her honor. As she reflected on a few colleagues who were closet musicians, visual artists, and/or participated in their community in other generative ways, she challenged us by asking us why we, in business and scholarship, haven’t begun to think about the beautiful?
Nancy Adler Speaking at Academy of Management Dinner in Montreal
Adler followed this with three more provocative questions about beauty and leadership.
- Can we reclaim our ability to see the beauty that’s there?
- Can we reclaim our ability to imagine what’s beautiful?
- Can we reclaim our role as leaders and human beings to make the world a more beautiful place?
If we truly take up Adler’s challenge and surrender to living these particular questions, I believe we cannot help but out our own and each others’ humanity. For as we reclaim our ability to see, imagine and create the beautiful, the artificial barriers that separate our playful self from our serious work self will fall away, as will barriers separating our goal-oriented self, from our process self; our indoor self from our outdoor self, our artist self from our management self, and all of our other dualistic selves.
As a gay person, I have long held the position that to “out someone” is a violation that could potentially put the outed person in serious harm’s way—emotionally, socially, and even physically—depending on the context. In this case, outing should, except in cases of extreme hypocrisy (a vocally anti-gay public figure) be the sole business of the individual.
Adler has gotten me thinking, though. Just as more people take the risk of coming out about their sexual orientation makes the climate safer and more accepting for all (research shows that people who have a close acquaintance or family member who is gay are far more likely to be accepting), should we not be encouraging others to come out around other aspects of their humanity? Will this not make it safer and more acceptable to be human—to bring our whole selves to work, and into all aspects of our lives?
What, then, is our role as leaders, facilitators, and participants in co-creating the space in which it is safe enough to come out?
What beauty might we discover and co-create together when we reclaim this responsibility?
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I love this. So simple and so profound. I love the way Adler poses questions that are not exactly “provocative” but rather… invocative. A word I just made up that I think I’m going to use. They call forth with “earnest desire” for something different, something that will make meaningful change.
I agree with you that “being outed” is different than “encouraging one to out oneself.” Like taking the huge vulnerable leap to come out as gay (or queer, or whatever your identity is), you are inviting affiliation by inviting people to out themselves as more human and poetry-seeking in the work world.
I tried to do this in a small way yesterday — I was having a collaborative conversation with clients about a first draft of a document, where one was very very focused on ticking the boxes on whether this faithfully fulfilled the brief (rather than seeing what was emerging as our collaboration continued). And I noted how the challenge was to find the poetry that captures complexity without complication. And this subtly shifted the conversation from the box-ticking to a shared hope.
Thanks for this, P. Such a lovely invitation.
Pamela, I love your connection to how we encourage gay people to ‘come out’ (“as it makes the climate safer and more accepting for all”) to how we should be encouraging others to come out around other aspects of their humanity. This is a powerful connection that makes sense to me. It isn’t always easy in our culture or in certain subcultures but it is certainly worth the risk. I have personally experienced “getting over myself” and putting who I am out there where it has had such a positive impact on another person or the group and even me. I do think being with our own humanity helps us see and create beauty in the world. And getting to witness others sharing theirs helps us not feel so alone in it. I believe it also invites people into the dance of intimacy (into-me-see) and authenticity. Which are ingredients in the recipe of humanity anyway. What a beautiful world!
[...] Outing Other People’s Humanity | Living the questions – Playspace [...]
[...] Outing Other People's Humanity | Living the questions – Playspace [...]
[...] Outing Other People’s Humanity | Living the questions – Playspace [...]
Hi, Pamela! Just tried to leave this comment for Nancy Adler. Thanks for passing it along! You are amazing!
I applaud Nancy for her ART! I learned about her work via Pamela Meyer, whom I met at the recent American Creativity Conf. Creativity is the one skill that we ALL need to embrace to CREATE the type of world we will want to be living in 10 years from now. My work at CreativelyFit.com is providing individuals and organizations with the system they need to physiologically “work out” their creative muscle. Nancy, I look forward to meeting you! Whitney