We operate in many instances inside of a designated set of roles in relationship to other human beings:

Service provider—customer

Coach—client

Mother—child

Husband—wife

Partner—partner

Employer—employee

When we conjure in our minds eye each of these roles they bring with them a certain set of unspoken yet very real expectations, ideals, ways of being, codes of conduct, do’s and don’ts. If we dive deeply into and investigate how these roles got devised and from whence these expectations come, we begin to see scarcity at work.

We were working with a colleague, someone who in this case was a service provider to us, Seven Stones Leadership. At some point in our contract we hit a snag, our work was not progressing, our agreement was not being fulfilled.  We paused to assess, reflect and then determine how best to proceed, if at all. We engaged with our provider in a process of evaluation and determined that one part of our work together was in fact a failure of a kind.  We had not achieved the outcomes desired by either party.

Naturally we were not going to pay for results not achieved, right?

To both parties – service provider and client – this seemed immediately obvious. (Enter center stage the unspoken and very real expectations offered by our respective roles in this situation.) However upon further reflection we began to question our own assumptions. To whom could we attribute this failure?  Was the failure hers alone or ours together?  In the language of sufficiency and interconnection we created this failure together.  Certainly we shared responsibility for the intended result.  She could not produce it for us, only with us.  All relationship is co-creation and therefore all success and all failure is interconnected.

If the failure was shared then why were not the consequences of the failure shared as well? Well, in conventional wisdom, she was actually supposed to “provide” something to us and did not.  Therefore, the responsibility rests with her.  She owes us something, is beholden in a certain way that upon further reflection comes directly form scarcity, from either /or, from a model that objectifies and separates.

Inside of sufficiency we ask:

What will be the consequences to her if we do not pay?

What will the impact be on our relatedness if she bears the brunt of the failure without our having considered how we might help ease her pain or share the sufficiency of the failure?

What can we learn and how can we deepen partnership out of failure?

What else can we be accountable for and how will that serve us all?

We invite you to think of a relationship in which these questions went unasked…..and wonder with us what might be different if they were?