The Green Growing Edge

What is your green growing edge?

I’ve been facilitating meetings of large groups of stakeholders with a Client in their strategic planning process.  In each two-hour session, I ask three questions developed by the leadership team and me.  With each question, participants first have time for personal reflection, then talk it over with a partner and then discuss it in small groups before presenting a summary of their thoughts to the full group.   

The participants impressed me with their engagement and their willingness to lean into the process.  They said things like:  “We need to be prepared to be changed.”  “We need to be willing to listen to our community and to find out what they want.”  “We need to be thinking out into the future.  We are planting seeds that won’t be harvested in our lifetime.”  As Client and Process Consultant, together we are learning towards wisdom.

When I imagine wisdom, my mind flies to towering rocks, gray-haired sages in flowing robes, handwritten notes in the margins of stained family cookbooks, and seasoned old wood.  I associate wisdom with age and experience.  Howard Thurman, a Black academic and theologian, thought of wisdom in a different way:

The hard thing when you get old is to keep your horizons open. The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.

As Process Consultants, we walk alongside Clients in discovering the “green growing edge.” Both personally and organizationally, wisdom comes with experience and in developing systems that work.  Unfortunately, a Client may get stuck in a rut and need some help to discover again what is important, what are the complexities, how to adapt, and how to do transformative work that benefits others out into the future. 

Using Thurman’s metaphor of the "green growing edge," here are some lessons I’ve learned as a Process Consultant: 

1. Look for some “green."  Green shows a possibility for growth.  Does the Client demonstrate an openness to growth?  Receptive Clients who have an awareness of the need for change and a willingness to support and embrace the change have the best potential to learn together towards wisdom,  They may not know the “How”, but they are ready to take on the challenge.
   
   
2. Remember the faith it takes to plant a tree. We plant trees for our grandchildren. In learning towards wisdom, Process Consultants facilitate strategic planning, succession planning, and value building with organizations that will have an impact on future generations beyond the horizon.  Clients hire Process Consultants to get help with higher-level and longer-term ways of operating.  
   
   
3. Remember your own “green growing edge." As a Process Consultant, there comes a time when you have the vocational freedom to select the Clients you will walk alongside. Some potential Clients are ready to do the transformative work that will benefit the world in future generations. Other Clients are not yet functioning at that level.  If your goal as a Process Consultant is to contribute to a thriving, vibrant world beyond your lifetime, then learning together towards wisdom will move you both in that direction.  Wisdom is a direction and not a final destination.

What is your green growing edge?  What will be your legacy as a Client or a Process Consultant?  

Walking alongside,

Jeanne

Jeanne Zimmerly Jantzi
Design Group International
Senior Design Partner

The core competencies of process consulting have been developed and are taught by the Society for Process Consulting. If you are interested in receiving your credential in process consulting please visit our website.