Life on the margins

I spent much of yesterday catching up on the blogosphere, and found this interesting post on Faith, Fiction, Friends.  You should definitely read the post -- it's an excellent one -- but essentially he's talking about a quote from Wendell Berry which he encountered in L.L. Barkat's latest book, God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us.

Berry is speaking about marginal land – land where things don’t easily grow because the soil is poor or eroded or the land doesn’t get much rainfall or is exhausted from overfarming. This is what Berry said:

“It is at the margins that the weaknesses of an enterprise will show first and most dramatically.” 

For writer Glynn Young, this quote was a huge eye-opener, and his open eyes helped to open mine as well.  Like me, Young is a career communications professional: his job in life has been to help communications flow from corporations and organizations out to the constituencies they do -- or could -- serve and, in turn, to help communications flow back into the organizations.

Young's revelation is that communications professionals live at the margins almost by definition.  I'm visualizing it as a sort of osmosis, you know, where the outer edges of a cell become semi-permeable so oxygen can flow from one side to the other.  But of course, when you live on those outer edges, removed from the core of an organization, it's much easier to see the disconnect between what the constituents want and what the organization actually offers; between the organization's declared mission and what it's actually accomplishing.

But my experience has been that when you try to carry that information back to the core you run the risk of some serious shoot-the-messenger behavior.  And, more importantly -- for me, at least -- those margins are a pretty lonely place to live.  You are not safely tucked into the bosom of the organization because you need the distance in order to observe effectively -- and, because of what you observe and then communicate, you are often unwelcome in the corporate bosom.  But you're not really part of the outside world either; the constituency and customers tend to assume that you espouse the goals -- and flaws -- of the organization you serve.

Well, duh!  No wonder those jobs were so uncomfortable for me!

And yet -- in some ways, I feel that I am conditioned to live on the margins; to be that permeable membrane, to understand both sides of the issue, and to communicate in both directions.  But surely there must be another, less painful way to honor my makeup and calling; to serve both sides rather than offending both sides.

I suspect that's why I'm in school: it's a conscious effort to reapply those skills in a less combative environment; to become more involved with service than with selling and spinning.  It feels like Organizational Development and coaching would be a much more productive use of this skillset.

But who knows; time will tell how this plays out.  In the meantime, I'm still loving what I'm learning!