The Power of Owning Up by Bob Dunham and Sameer Dua

Preface: Getting Generative

We are all on a life journey. We inform our life journey with the learning journey that it contains. Our life and learning journeys are not avoidable, they generate our lives, our living, and our experiences.
We have found that many in our culture have equated learning with their school experience and may want to be done with that experience. But learning is part of life, not just an activity in schools. The learning that we do in life opens or closes our possibilities, shapes what we see, what we choose, what we do, and what we produce. It shapes our life experience and whether we experience a good life or a life of burden lacking value, satisfaction, and meaning.
So we are inviting you in this exploration of responsibility and accountability to explore your own life choices and how new perspectives can open your possibilities. But the context of our conversation with you is not just a tour of possibilities. it is also an engagement in life learning to enable you to make new choices, take new actions, and generate new results that matter to you. We call this path being “generative.”

What do we generate? We generate outcomes and results. We generate the future. We generate our impact in the world, and in fact together we are generating our shared world.

We have made our life’s work to focus on the challenges and opportunities of how we all create the future, the world, and our outcomes together in life. This is a journey that we call leadership. This is why we have named our discipline Generative Leadership and our companies The Institute for Generative Leadership. In our view leadership is not just a role or title, it is something we all do. We all act in ways that affect the future with others. We are just mostly unaware of how we do it, unaware of our choices, and unaware of how to do better. We invite everyone to include their leadership in their life and learning journeys.

We don’t hold the term “generative” as just a branding word, but as a reference to the fact that every human being is generating their lives, their relationships, and their impact on others and the world. We have found that the awareness that we are generative as human beings and how we do it is a blind spot in our culture. Since we are all already generating, with learning we can generate even better outcomes. What outcomes? The outcomes that matter to us, the outcomes that we care about.

So our context in this conversation is the life, learning, and leadership journey that we all share as human beings. We are committed in this learning and leadership journey to create a world in which everyone thrives. Since we are already creating the world together, we invite everyone to include this possibility and to share this commitment to learning.

We invite you to this path of learning. We call it generative learning and becoming generative. This is the context for our conversation in this book about responsibility and accountability for leaders and coaches. And for people who want to elevate their ability to generate a better life and a better world.

This particular book addresses a confusion that we have found to be pervasive in organizations between responsibility and accountability This confusion is not just a conceptual problem. It affects the performance and results of teams, organizations, and people in significant and unavoidable ways. This confusion is wasting the energies, potential, and hard work we find in organizational life.

We have also found that clarifying the difference between responsibility and accountability reshapes the conversations, actions, and outcomes in teams and organizations in a positive way, often dramatically. We are pleased to share with you our findings, the perspectives that enable positive shifts in leadership, teamwork, and performance, and actions that you can take immediately to empower the future that you are creating with others.

Welcome to this conversation and may it enhance your journeys in life, learning, and leadership.

Bob and Sameer

Chapter 1
Stepping onto the Verandah of Responsibility

There is a crucial step in life. You can take it or not. Everyone has this step available, even if you’re not aware of it.
In ancient Chinese “inner wisdom,” this step makes us the [1.1]Emperor or Empress of our lives. It makes you one who chooses your life rather than living a life of “Drift” driven by external circumstances and limited by the past. It allows us to step into our power and create a life, instead of simply living through it – or worse, being a victim of it. It’s a courageous and powerful step.
So what is this step? It’s the step of taking responsibility for your life, regardless of your circumstances.
Two Chinese characters are used to represent it. The first shows two feet, meaning the capacity to move, to walk, and to choose our next step. The next character shows a Verandah, meaning the Verandah of responsibility for our own lives. Together, the characters are interpreted as the act of “stepping onto the Verandah,” sometimes translated as “stepping onto the emperor’s (or empress’s) Verandah.” It stands for harnessing our power to make intentional choices in life, refusing to passively go along with choices made for us by other people or circumstances. Once we take this step, we begin a new and empowered chapter on our lives. We become the Emperor or Empress of our lives – the one who chooses.
However, at this point, what we will make of this empowered step and where we will go with it may not be clear. There are four more steps on this journey. What is key is to take the first step – not because we know what we will do or where we will go, but because we want to embrace life and our own path in it, regardless of circumstance. We commit to navigating life not just as a character in our story, but as the author of it. We just haven’t written the story yet.

This is the moment where we Choose to Choose.

It is an act of taking responsibility—taking ownership for our capacity to choose, to face life as it is, and to be a generator of our path instead of a prisoner on it. It is opening up to life and aliveness with all that comes with it, with no guarantees and no assurances.
The best way to find the power of our own choice is by exercising it. By stepping onto our Verandah, we recast who we are on our life journey, what paths are available to us, how we will relate to possibility, and how we will see our reality and ourselves.

We choose to be responsible.
We take responsibility for the steps that follow, regardless of what they may be and regardless of the challenges that may come. From this point on, our lives’ journey will be now shaped by our internal journey—of how we choose to be in life before we take action or react to our external world.
There are more key steps in this path. But this wisdom shows that our power comes from our very first step of taking responsibility for ourselves and our choices, not waiting for it to be granted from outside.

Not Knowing
Stepping into our responsibility by stepping onto the Verandah is not done because we already know how to take responsibility or because we know what we will do with it. We don’t yet know. We are stepping into the unknown.
This often becomes a barrier for many of us. Especially for those that have embodied the context that “I need to know before I act; I have to figure it out; I need to know what and how first.” Then they wait. But they don’t see that they are trying to pack life and an ocean of possibilities into the very small room of what they already know. They avoid learning, experimenting, exploring, and trying new experiences. Thus, they become closed to anything beyond what they already know.
In this ancient wisdom, the step into the unknown is followed by a second step of receiving a gift. This is the gift of life, or rather, a piece of life that is ours alone. The image is one of being granted a plot of land or a fiefdom, where our choices matter. We are given something to care about – to cultivate and to take care of. We realize that life has granted us a mandate, a purpose, a calling, a core concern that is ours and ours alone – the mandate is to be true to ourselves. Here, too, we are not yet sure exactly what that being “ourselves” looks like.
It’s like receiving a gift box but we don’t know what’s inside the box yet. We do know, however, that it will open up possibilities for us and change life as we know it. The mood that then inhabits us is gratitude. We don’t know yet what is coming, but our gesture is of a bow towards life – of respect and gratitude for having the gifts of care and the power of choice.

What we are granted with this second step is something to take care of, something that matters to us. This is our gift – but it is still new, unclear, and unfamiliar. Bob experienced this at the age of 63. He spent two weeks in a forest in southern Chile and returned deeply affected by it. Something had shifted. Something was calling him. But he wasn’t sure what it was. After conversations about this experience with his wife, she took a statue that had its hands out in an offering pose and put a small gift box in the hands. It was a representation of this feeling of disquiet as a gift from life that hasn’t yet been opened.
Bob was aware he had been given a gift, but stayed with the state of not-knowing. After an initial period of anxiety, he settled into curiosity, openness, anticipation, and continued gratitude. This new sense was opening up his life as possibilities with new choices.

Receptivity and Illumination
The third step in the journey is to open ourselves to possibilities. We enter the state of receptivity and openness in calmness, even stillness. We don’t move from knowing, we open to what can show up to us in this space of openness. In this step we advance in life’s journey without having a map handed to us first. It may seem like we’re navigating in the dark, but if we wait without impatience, worry, or contraction, illumination will follow from our openness. We will learn to be receptive. We will learn to enter the unknown with trust in the power of our relationship with possibility. We will learn to make our path by walking it.
The next, fourth step of this wisdom path is where we encounter illumination. Here, our purpose becomes clear. We find ourselves and our place in life. We find out what it is we really care about. We are infused with the radiance of settled purpose. While the specifics such as an action plan may still elude us, we finally find our compass in life. At this stage, we are ready to design and shape our actions, to make our lives our own work of art and to take care of what we care about.
Only in the next, the fifth step, four steps after stepping onto the Verandah, do we become clear about what we are committed to in action. Now we can plan, act, and are ready to take on challenges and opportunities in the world. We’re finally ready to make our contribution.
And this is only possible because we stepped onto the Verandah of responsibility in the first place.

Facing Our Verandah
For some, the awareness of choice, the choice of stepping onto the Verandah, is threatening and frightening. To choose outside of the old Drift has repercussions, challenges our identity, and evokes reactions from friends, family, and even employers. It may seem comforting to withdraw into the old Drift and keep our heads down. We may give up and even avoid our capacity to have our own voice and our own choice. We may make ourselves fit into a life defined by others. Ultimately, we refuse to step onto our Verandah.
But then we awaken to the possibility of the step into responsibility. We face the choice about choice.
Taking our step into responsibility doesn’t mean rejecting our history, social norms, or habits. It does not mean turning away from who we are. In fact, quite the opposite. Once we take this step, we awaken to our true, authentic selves and the power of our choices. We see the journey of our lives not as commands that we cannot decline or as prisons that we cannot break out of.
It is the beginning of the life journey in which we enter, aware and free, into new relationships with our world, with others, and with ourselves – as choices, not as predetermined defaults.

New Complexity and New Possibilities
The comfort of old social norms and stories is that they told us what to do. There were a lot of rules, requirements, and directions about how to choose. Now, we are stepping out of just accepting the old rules and stories. We are going to choose for ourselves. We are going to choose to choose.
Now we see a world with more complexity. We see social norms and historical habits, and exercise the power to choose them or to choose otherwise. We see other people in the context of their social norms and histories. We see that what to do, how to look, and how to be is not a matter of simple rules but heavily shaped by the context of each situation. We see the significance of choices, as well as their consequences, and we learn to identify the choices and consequences that are consistent with the things we care about most deeply. We begin to be a designer in a dance with life.

Still, we are new to this step of the journey. We don’t have a lot of experience and competence. We are still learning, still finding out what we can learn and how much. We can experiment. We can invent. We can fail, learn, and succeed in new possibilities, actions, and outcomes. We may find ourselves stepping off the Verandah and make the choice to be responsible again and again.

This is also the time for receptivity. The kind of receptivity where we zoom out beyond our own thoughts, emotions, habitual interpretations, and habits. We look at the world with wonder. We look at what possibilities are open to us. We learn that we can step into new possibilities and actions that aren’t repetitions of the past. We learn to trust that we can create.
We also learn that this is not a one-time journey to solve a problem so that we can be done with the journey. This journey comes again and again with every significant new possibility. It becomes a familiar, safe, and powerful recurring practice, to take responsibility for our subsequent choices. It becomes our new reality, this relationship with the possibilities that the unknown offers. Here, we choose to continually and consciously step beyond the known, the habits, the past and commit to learning, designing, and creating our future for the sake of taking care of what we care about. On the Verandah, we chart a new life.