The Fieldwork Method
Awareness. Character. Capacity.
and the Evolutionary Ethic™
I help lawyers learn to love themselves, love their work, love their colleagues (and their adversaries), love their lives, and make the highest contribution to culture of which they are capable.
The Fieldwork Method is a systematic way to achieve these results. It is a distillation of a decade of research and experimentation to find ways to help lawyers change for the better, and live lives that are freer, fuller, more aligned with their highest potential, and of greater service to their clients and their communities.
The Fieldwork Method.
I’ve created a 9-step method to move us safely and securely through and beyond an invisible ceiling that’s keeping lawyers fixed in place. This process can be engaged in on an individual level, or in a group context. Any time you spend taking these steps will be given back to you ten fold in increased capacity to do your legal work, or any other work that life is calling you towards.
I’ve developed a system that helps lawyers grow up. Personal development does take time. Yet any time you invest in your own development will be nowhere near the phenomenal amounts of time lawyers now spend doing things that they are not paid for.
The Big Job We Are Spending Our Time On That We Don’t Get Paid For.
Some experts believe that we spend as much as half our time ungainfully self-employed in a massive, complex, shadow career that has no correlation whatsoever with providing services to a client as a lawyer. Instead, many of us are unconsciously going to work every day for what I call the 4 ‘F’s or the Big 4, and not our paying clients. We go to work for the Big 4 any time we spend our hours:
- Fighting
- Fleeing
- Freezing
- Fawning (making a display to affect impressions)
Fighting by arguing with colleagues; creating unnecessary disputes with other lawyers; shouting, dominating or bullying to hide our weaknesses; arguing at home; and even worse, submitting to the vast drain on our cognitive energies fighting someone in our minds with all of those violent fantasies and mental arguments.
Fleeing to mindless hours in front of the television; time spent drinking and recovering; sick days; net surfing; procrastinating; taking expensive trips to get away, only to return to the same situation; or worst of all, quitting in place as we go through the motions of work with less than our full attention, think about a different, unlived life, or
Freezing by spending time in mind-fog; covering up errors; being confused because we’re afraid to admit we don’t understand and ask for help; unable to work because of a negative emotion; or managing meaninglessness.
Fawning is every single thing that we do to in an attempt to manage other peoples impressions of us. Things like developing and maintaining a fake ‘professional persona’—a mask that we hide behind. Brownnosing superiors. Playing politics. Acting tough, or nice, to create an impression. Looking very busy. Looking important. Worrying about our image, our wardrobe, the size of our office, or the kind of car we drive. All of these can be seen as fawning activities that attempt to manage how others see us. The list goes on an on.
It’s exhausting and time consuming to go to work every day for the Big 4. And the real tragedy of it is that we are not paid for a single minute of it by our clients, or in any form of currency that brings a larger life. Not paid in better health, in greater well-being, greater intelligence, greater capacity, larger forms of service, or by new awareness that will help us grow up and get out of this situation.
It’s a tragedy for the best minds in America. This situation is an ethical violation.
It’s a violation of the ethics of our highest potential, of the plain duties that we owe to ourselves, to our clients and to our culture to become all that we can be, and instruments of a better future.
Do our clients want you to spend half your time working for the Big 4?. No. Clients don’t want you to waste your time or their money. And neither do our judges, juries, children, spouses, friends, partners, bosses, secretaries, lovers, or anyone you might meet on the street.
It turns out that all of these people want something else.
They actually want you.
Your presence, your attention, your skills, your character, your view, your truth, your goodness and what’s great about you.
The Fieldwork Method is designed to give everyone in your world what they want: the best of you.
Are you ready to get to the job at hand? We have to evolve out of this situation. That’s what the Fieldwork Method is all about.
9 Ethical Principles.
Ethics require action. The nine action steps of the Fieldwork Method are divided into three triads. You can can think of them as a tool box with three layers. The first layer puts within handy reach the tools that we need to use every day. The second has the tools that are frequently used. The third layer holds the more advanced tools for a master craftsman.
The first triad promises personal victory. It involves inner work that embraces an awareness ethic. This ethic makes you safer, less burdened by internal impedance, and brings forth the capacity to choose how we occur in the world.
The second triad promises interpersonal victory that embraces an advanced character ethic. This ethic values presence and attention, clear interpretations of situations, and responsibility for the quality of our interactions. This triad brings forth the capacity to create positive experiences which make everyone want to do more business with us.
The third triad promises cultural victory. It involves public work that embraces a new evolutionary ethic. This ethic values becoming an archetype of success that others can emulate, and the creation of a culture that allows all of us to continue to grow. It promises the capacity to be free for the highest potential of everyone in one’s field of influence. This is the master key to becoming influential.
Triad One – Personal Victory.
1. Create safety.
All developmental experts agree on one thing: that safety and security is the very foundation upon which all else is built. Without it, we simply can’t grow up to be everything that we might be.
In our legal context, we are exposed to psychological forces that are as real as any physical threat, and our bodies interpret them as physical threats. These are the psychological forces of conflict, verbal violence, negativity, intimidation, overwhelming responsibility, time pressure, small mistakes with big consequences, pressures to project a persona, and many more.
Everything I’ve learned leads me to this straightforward truth about how we can become more safe:
Safety is created by seeing and being seen.
I know that this truth is a big pill to swallow for lawyers who live in a guarded adversarial world. But it is the truth. We’re all afraid that if we reveal ourselves, we will be judged harshly. We try to obtain desired impressions by hiding, putting on a persona, and managing just which aspects of us we are going to allow the world to see.
We are spending all of our time playing defense, but this is the wrong strategy.
If we want to get better results, we have to go on offense. You don’t have control over other people’s impressions. What you do have control of is the way you see others. Once your claim this power, it’s big magic.
What this section of the work will teach you to do is to see into people and discover what’s great about them, what their limitations are, and what potentials can be brought forth. The person across from you wants you to see the best person they can be. They want you to see what is great about them and their potential. They will know it when you have seen it.
Once you begin to see people, a simple law of cause and effect kicks in. Since you have fulfilled your side of the unspoken bargain to see and be seen, the person across from you—limited, biased, and closed as they still may be—will begin to see you in a new and more positive light. You have done them a solid and have fulfilled a primary need for them. You’ve made their world a little bit safer. They will be inclined to do the same thing for you. In fact, they will run to do this, because in order to get more ‘seeing’ from you, they will have to form a reciprocal alliance, and see you the way you would like to be seen.
This process of seeing all can be done without revealing a single thing about yourself. But after a while, your social surround will be so much safer that you won’t need to.
2. Bring energy.
In this segment of the Fieldwork we’ll address a fundamental life task: finding energy for your work. We’ll also address the complete failure of a coping strategy called work/life balance as a tool to address the energetic problems of burnout, meaninglessness, and mind fog.
Work/life balance as a solution assumes that work is some fixed, non-evolving energy-draining thing that we go and do, which has to be balanced somehow with ‘life’ to remain sustainable.
We could address the improbability of the task of balancing the boulder of a 60 hour work week with the bowling ball of a little self-care and family time. But attempting such a project reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of energy.
Energy for our work is not created by balance.
Energy is created by alignment.
Our work must come into alignment with the natural progression of growth and development that we require to remain fully alive.
The real career-killer is when our work is no longer aligned with the absorbing errand of our life-creating project. This misalignment is created when our work is not in sync with our values, and our mission and purpose. We now understand that these values are not fixed and will change over time. When our work stays fixed, it becomes misaligned with the demands of our evolution, we do not experience joy and flow in our work.
The Fieldwork Method offers tools to change how we experience work by placing it within the context of a larger mission. This mission is the absorbing errand of becoming more of the person we are meant to be.
3. Choose how to occur.
Helping us show up right as a lawyer in a community is one of the primary tasks of our profession. Yet, very few of us are aware of the actual mechanism which gives an individual the power to change behavior. In this section of the Fieldwork Method, we advance a hypothesis about such a mechanism. Here it is:
We change how we occur by making what is now subject into an object.
What do I mean by this?
Consider the difference between a professional golfer and an ordinary hacker. For the hacker, a golf swing is mostly a subjective experience. They just get up there and swing at the ball, and don’t have any real knowledge about why the ball goes left, right, curves as it does, is missed entirely, or emerges as the random perfect shot.
On the other hand, a professional golfer has taken the time and attention to completely objectify every aspect of his/her swing. The stance is an object. So is the takeaway, backswing, hip rotation, weight shift, wrist snap, swing plane and follow through. The professional sees his/her swing as a combination of objectified behaviors, each of which the professional can see in detail and modify to produce a certain type of shot. When they’ve hit a bad shot, the professional usually knows why.
Another way of saying this is that a professional has a swing. He or she owns that swing, and it is at his/her command. In contrast, the hackers swing has him. He’s trapped within his ineffective swing, because he can’t see it objectively. All he can do is to continue to flail away, develop a mood, and conclude that he is terrible at golf.
What does this mean for lawyers? Well, you won’t find the axiom “Learn To Objectify Your Behavior and Modify It” in any rule of professional ethics. Yet this is the essential tool!
The process of seeing what was once subject as object is the master key to the freedom to choose how we occur. It’s the primary responsibility and freedom of an adult.
An array of methodologies exist to help professionals develop objective awareness. Just what we choose to become once we see ourselves is the subject of the next section of our work.
Triad 2 – Interpersonal Victory.
4. Be present and attentive.
It’s a plain fact that lawyers sell their presence and attention, measured in units of time. It’s the only product we have. We are not selling our physical beauty, our great inventions, or our skills at running a football. We are selling presence and attention, a mental phenomenon, coupled with expertise.
The sort of sustained, focused attention to linguistic detail that our work requires is simply unnatural. It’s important to know this—that what we do every day is not what our bodies were originally designed to do. We weren’t built for this, and have to acquire it through training, which is what all of that reading and writing that we did in law school is all about.
Because of our training, lawyers have the potential to generate vast amounts of presence and attention. There are few groups that even comes close to us in terms of our potential for presence and attention over time.
Unfortunately, nothing in our training teaches us how to preserve and enhance our primary asset over time. We pay more attention to the preservation maintenance of our stock portfolios than we do to our primary asset. We simply assume attention will flow if people pay us enough for it, which to some degree is true.
The result? We burn out.
I’ve done extensive research into the nature of presence and attention, and have come to see it as a naturally-occurring phenomenon that can be vastly enhanced. We’re at a point where we can advance this hypothesis:
Presence and attention is an emergent capacity that flows when impedance is removed.
In order to master presence and attention, it’s important to understand two things about it: first, it’s source, and second, the things that impede its flow. We offer the tools and insights essential for these tasks.
5. Use generative interpretations.
Let’s imagine a teenage boy. We’ll call him Sam. Every time he sees a red-headed girl named Janet, he feels a tingling in his body, his stomach churning a bit, his salivation increases, his eyes dilate, he feels nervous, aroused, wonderful and awful all at the same time.
Sam is having an experience.
He keeps having this experience over and over again, until one day he gets the courage to go up to Janet. Standing there in terror and wonder, Sam blurts out this phrase:
“Janet, I think I’m in love with you.”
What has just happened? Sam has offered to Janet an interpretation of his experience—his version of what all of those feelings mean for him.
Just what happens next will determine whether Sam’s interpretation is going to go anywhere—specifically, whether Janet might reveal that she is having a similar experience, and interprets it in the same way.
Let’s see how this goes.
Janet 1: “Sam, you seem to be a really nice guy, and I’d love to be friends with you, but I just don’t feel the same way. I’ve never really felt that way about anyone.”
Sam is crushed. Janet is not having the same experience.
Janet 2: “Sam, I know just how you feel! I feel the same way whenever I see a movie starring Brad Pitt! You know, like that Trojan one where he was running around with his shirt off all of the time, Achilles or whatever. Man, is he hot! I get crushes on hot guys all of the time. It’s just a passing infatuation though. I really don’t think it’s love. Love is something else entirely.”
Sam is again crushed. Janet is having the same experience he is having, but interprets what the experience means in an entirely different way.
Janet 3: “Sam, I was hoping that you would finally come up to me and tell me. I had a hunch that you felt this way by the way that you were looking at me. You know, I’ve felt the same way about you for a long time now, but just didn’t have the courage to tell you. I think I might be in love with you too!”
Ta da! Sam and Janet are having the same experience and interpreting it the same way. Now they can begin the long process of figuring out what love and relationship mean to them, what behaviors the interpretation that ‘they are in love’ demands or implies, where it’s leading them, and whether this interpretation will last. We can only wish them the best of luck on this perilous journey.
All of us have experiences, and all of us also interpret these experiences. We make a cognitive jump that solidifies what these experiences mean.
In the Fieldwork, we offer an ethic of interpretation. We are encouraged to become aware of our interpretations, and choose them consciously. So, we have them, instead of them having us.
Our responsibility over our interpretations can be expressed in this ethical injunction:
We choose our interpretations and use them as subtle objects with creative power.
The evolutionary ethic requires us to see our interpretations, and make conscious decisions about them. Our interpretations are best seen as objects that are placed into an interaction, which determine the course of the interaction just like the placement of a chair or table determines how people move about in a room. This ethic requires us to choose interpretations that are generative. This means that the interpretation needs to be accurate, to be as benign as we can make it, and lead to someplace better.
Gaining control of interpretations, and using them creatively is one of the most powerful ways to become influential. It’s big magic.
You can use your way of seeing to create, which is what we’ll turn to next.
6. Create positive experience.
One of our professional groups recently took a survey of several hundred client-users. They were trying to uncover the reasons why some mediators were selected over others, and why some mediators got all of the business, while others with similar qualifications got very little. What was the #1 factor? Prior Positive Experience. Having prior positive experience was more important that all other factors combined: resume, expertise, marketing, website—the works.
I believe that this is true for all of us. Generating positive experience with clients is the #1 thing that we can do to have a successful career. It’s something that has a very long tail, and will generate business year over year.
So just how do we generate such positive experience? A careful look at the previous five sections of the Fieldwork Method is a roadmap. If you can create safety for your clients, bring energy, show up well, be present and attentive, and interpret the experience the client is having that shows them a path forward, you will be far ahead of most of your peers.
So with this foundation, it’s time to lay out the master tool for positive experience:
Positive experience is created by distinction within a field of comparators.
In an interview a while back, the tennis legend Andre Agassi asked how he became one of the top tennis players in the world. His response? “I never think about being a top tennis player. I just think about being a better tennis player than the guy opposite me on a given day. I don’t have to be the best. I just have to be better than this guy.”
The key to positive experience is just this. If you are distinguished in some way in a field of comparators, what you do will be considered a positive experience by your client.
The key to this is to become aware of the field of comparators you are in, and pick a field of comparators that makes you stand out.
Finding your field of comparators, and living in such a field in work and life, is essential. Life is too short not to find the place where you fit, and can be the go-to person in a given environment.
Once this is found, the character, attention, and evolutionary ethic taught in the Fieldwork Method should be sufficient to create remarkable distinction. Regardless of wealth, position, breeding or educational level, who you are is always a distinction. There is only one of you, and you show up as the best this person can be, positive experience is what will follow. This experience breeds itself over and over again.
Triad 3 – Cultural Victory.
7. Make success ordinary.
A developmental perspective will let you see that success has many different definitions. It changes with each developmental level. Some levels are focused on money and external appearances, others are not. Some levels value character. Some value your ability to relate to others. Some value your ability to lead, see the big picture, and move culture where it needs to go.
At each of these levels, there is a way of being that is valued. This way of being is what we’re after. The embodiment of a way of being, the realization of it in you, as you, is the absorbing life errand that we’re speaking about. When this occurs, you have become what we call an archetype, a fully realized form that can and will be copied by others.
Successful ways of being human will be copied. Any mathematician will tell you that simple copying can lead to substantial numbers over time. It goes like this: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512,1,204, 2,048. 4,096, 8,192, 16,384….. This geometric sequence runs ahead even faster if we start with a group of 100 which yields 1.63 million in the same amount of time. We all know that some people are examples for millions.
This reality leads to this insight:
Success is embodiment of an valued archetype.
As we are using the term here, an archetype is simply the cohesion of a level of complexity— a person that has fully cohered a way of being human.
Our absorbing life errand is to become an archetype, and specifically one that can be copied. Andy says: “If Joe can do it, so can I!” This is literally true. And it’s actually much easier for Andy, since Joe has done most of the hard work for him already, and all Andy has to do is follow in Joe’s footsteps.
The creation of ourselves as a pattern worthy of emulation is the goal of the Fieldwork Method.
Learning how to do this is one way that everyone can make a difference.
8. Build evolving contexts.
Every completion point is in fact only a new beginning. It’s the nature of cultural evolution to build upon the successes of the past, and create new things that the past could hardly imagine.
It’s possible of course, that the whole thing will come to a grinding halt, and that culture will not continue to evolve. But I don’t think this is the case. 13.8 billion years of evolution, with all of it’s setbacks, tells a different story.
We all find ways to create contexts where our way of life can thrive. By a context, I mean a home, a firm, a city, a nation. Our continued progress depends on the creation of contexts that are open-ended, and that do not have fixed outcomes. This is what a free society does. It’s why freedom succeeds in ways that no planned system can. It innovates. It creates novel emergents. It changes. It grows.
Our legal environment is a kind of cultural conservancy. It conserves the best of the past, and so we naturally are a bit slower moving than other parts of culture. But this feature is our greatest strength. We know how to evolve within constraint, preserving the best of the past as a foundation. So with this in mind, consider the following hypothesis:
Context drives outcomes.
Every high level organizational consultant I know tells me that it’s the culture of an organization, not its strategy, that ultimately determines its success or failure. A great strategy without the culture to enact it is just words on paper.
It’s my belief that the non-evolving nature of our legal context, our culture, is at the heart of nearly all problems that lawyers face today. It’s time that we created our firms as deliberately developmental platforms. If we don’t do this, the best of us will simply leave. To do what? To grow.
The Fieldwork Method teaches lawyers how to design their lives as evolving contexts and create firms that support the evolution of their members.
9. Be free for the highest potential.
Cultures that bring forth the highest potential of all their individual components are successful cultures.
One example of such a culture was the U.S. military culture in World War II. We often think of a military hierarchy as the most ossified structure imaginable. But in a situation where failure meant the loss literally of millions of lives, and the potential end of the free world, that rigid structure began to flex, and at least for a short while, morphed from a domination hierarchy based on rank and tenure to what could be called an actualization hierarchy.
This type of organization doesn’t have time for slow progressions. They have to find the right ‘man’ for the right job right now, put him into it, and see how he does. If he succeeds, he moves up. He’s measured by what he actualizes, or has the ability to make real, with no other impediments.
Inside such an environment, an army Major from Kansas named Dwight Eisenhower rose from the rank of major to Supreme Commander of the allied forces in Europe in a span of just five years. In the process he passed up all the other majors, colonels, 1, 2, 3, and 4 star generals in every army in the free world. This is something like having a job running the customer service department of Facebook, and then becoming the head of Facebook, Google, and Apple combined in less than 1,000 days. This can’t happen anywhere except in an actualization hierarchy.
An organization created as an actualization hierarchy sees potential. If that potential cannot be enacted within the organization as it is, the organization grows to accommodate that potential. If it can’t make such a shift, it actively springboards the person into an environment where their talents can be realized. That person remains an alumni, and returns as a client, business partner, and promoter. An actualization hierarchy never really loses anybody.
If actualization is the goal, there is nothing artificial, no racial or sexist bias, no doctrinal litmus test, no pre-conceived notion of what people can or can’t do that stands in the way. This is the way it’s supposed to be in America. It’s time to make this mythology progressively more real. It’s time to create a culture that sees what is, tells the truth, honors developmental levels, and is interested in realities. In an actualization hierarchy, there is no one to blame, nothing to hide, no fiefdoms to protect. An actualization hierarchy just tells the truth about all this. It’s a culture that is free for the highest potential of everyone involved.
Our final hypothesis is this:
Highest potential is brought forward within actualization hierarchies.
People are happier where they can contribute, are seen, and are appreciated. In the end, everyone wants to be all that they can be, and make a contribution. They also want to be in jobs that are not over their heads, and that they can actually do. Why would anyone create any artificial impediments to making this happen? What sane person would not want a world where the highest potential of each person is being brought forth? It’s not only good sense, it’s good business.
If this were not enough, I’ll close with this observation: Being free for the highest potential in another is a practical, workable definition of love. And perhaps, in the end, love is the final authority.