To become expert at working on an edge requires two things.
First: practice. The stress of an edge becomes less threatening
with practice. Second, much more complex, difficult, and important: self-knowledge. As we have seen, a willingness to work on the edge goes
hand-in-hand with a complex notion of safety. Here the notion of a secure workspace and a willing-ness to work on the edge come together. Ultimately, the
securi-ty of an artful making workspace arises from self-knowledge, self-trust, and the trust in others that comes from working on an edge together.
Actors first encounter this kind of self-knowledge, and con-sequently improve their ability to work reliably on the edge, through exercises. In the Blind Walk, for example, one person leads a blindfolded person by the hand around a complicated space (the room, the building, the garden). The blindfolded person immediately finds an edge in the amount of trust he or she is willing to accord the leader (“Promise I won’t run into anything?”). The leader will find an edge in his/her follower’s fear (“How come you don’t trust me?”). Actors do this exercise over and over, gradually learning to extend their edge to the point where they can run together at top speed, secure, if edg-ily apprehensive. Another such exercise, the Trust Circle, in which people allow themselves to fall and be caught by other members of the group, extends the idea of releasing to the edge from the individual to the group.11
When leading or catching in the Blind Walk or Trust Circle, you soon resolve to do anything, pay any price, to keep your partner or the faller from harm, to make sure that noth-ing will interfere with his or her safety (and sense of safety).
When you know, deep down know, how fully you’re resolved to prevent any harm, you begin to understand that your part-ners can feel the same way, can make the same resolves. As actors practice the Blind Walk, the Trust Circle, and similar exercises, they gradually become good at working on trust edges by understanding themselves. Ensemble members trust each other because each has learned self-trust. The trust deepens as each realizes the extent of the effort that must be
Chapter 8 • Artful Making Requires a Secure Workspace 125
A psychological, social, or emotional edge requires the same kind of careful but insistent exercise as a physical edge:
learning to be okay with the discomfort of the edge; learn-ing to move the edge outward by releaslearn-ing into discomfort for controlled periods.
made, and makes that effort. The trust becomes mutually reinforcing, interlocking: “If he can do it, so can I”; “If I can do it, so can he”; “If I want her to trust me, I'd better be will-ing to trust her.”
The same kind of understanding extrapolates to the more complex life situations of rehearsal and performance, of meet-ings and conferences. Business teams can benefit from collec-tive experiences that require individuals to extend themselves, and to rely on others. Exercises are one way to achieve this.
But business provides many other opportunities to manage a process in which groups of people are asked to do difficult things together. Management researcher Jeffrey Liker, writing with co-authors, has observed, for example, that Japanese companies and their suppliers intentionally create mutual vul-nerabilities in their relationships, opportunities for each to exploit the other. In doing this, they elicit an apparently para-doxical response in which the parties are loathe to exploit their relationship in any way.12
Learning by Doing
When we think “about” something, we position ourselves at an intellectual distance from it. This is one of the great skills of being human, and we use it to imagine the future on the basis of the past. It’s the heart of planning. We’ve seen the gradual devel-opment in business of a distance between doing (the master machinist) and thinking (the rate clerk with an instruction card).
Commercial pressures have led our culture to separate out and privilege thinking about how to do work over the actual doing of it. We’ve reached a point in this book, though, where we can see ourselves coming full circle, to kinds of work where artful and ancient making meet.
Let’s revisit Hugh and his armory. Hugh had no book of instruc-tions, no rate card, for the task of making a harness of armor. He learned his craft by doing, beginning with simple, ancillary tasks.
He fed the furnace and pumped its bellows, swept up after the animals; he watched intently while Philip hammered and annealed and hammered some more. He watched that work into his own body until he could hardly stand not doing it himself.
When he got the chance, he expressed what he had learned, not by taking a paper-and-pencil exam, but by heating and pounding a piece of iron.
Many steps in an artful making process will demand Hugh’s kind of ancient “thinking” and “learning.” The task, the experience, is incommensurate with language, with intellection. It isn’t a ques-tion of being too complicated to put into words. It’s more than that. Something about it is un-word-able. The same thing applies to the processes of focus and release, of finding and exploring your edges. To tell you about focus and release, we’ve suggested an exercise of focus and release. If you read the instructions with a lively and histrionic imagination, you’ll know something about focus and release, as Hugh knew about blacksmithing from watching Philip. The next step is to create ways actually to do focus and release.