An evening with Robert P Crosby
The Spiritual Dimension of LIOS
In 1953 and 54 as I was experiencing my first two T-groups at Boston University, I was also in the presence of Howard Thurman the American Baptist mystic. He is also called a prophet as the word is used when speaking of the Hebrew Prophets: Literally to “speak forth about social justice.” He has been called by many of his nine biographers, “the godfather of the civil rights movement.”
He was a mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. One of his biographers said that if you want to experience jazz and cadence at its finest you would hear a sermon delivered by Howard Thurman! I would add and then that evening join 15 or so other students with Thurman sitting on his desk engaging us with his contagious religious dynamic and his infectious laughter. The T-group was invented in 1946. Carl Rogers called it the most powerful social invention of the 20th century!
Soon church leaders would begin to realize that people were experiencing more of the beloved community that Religions in the world seek with their constituents then those Religions could deliver with their rituals, liturgies, and dogmas. Howard Thurman saw the religious as contagious! In one of his many glorious quotes he talked about how people experienced something profound, put it in a test tube, and then pulled it out as Religion (with a capital ‘R’) that is institutionalized and then that became dogma and propaganda! For him the religious (with a small ‘r’) experience is contagious! It’s spread with excitement and could never be contained by an institution!
The word religious itself comes from the Latin word relegare, to bind back. Legare is the root word for ligament. So religious means “to connect.” When folks become aware of group processes and of self-differentiation in reference to the group, may I say “the beloved community” where striving for authenticity and compassion reign along with the drive for social justice, then they have discovered the T-group and Organization Development. My upcoming article to be published in the Organization Development Review is called Love as a Vital Force in Organization Development!
The T-group originally started while working on fair employment in Connecticut! This is the T-group that I attempted to bring to LIOS! This is the educational experience that I believe will be manifested in the restarted LIOS infused with Friedman’s self-differentiation, with Kurt Lewin’s deep principles as described in several of Gil‘s books, such as his Planned Change.
The graduate program will include specific interpersonal skill sets that John Wallen taught us. And students will leave the program with the skill sets of third-party conflict, project management in our style which is far more than what engineers are taught, how to break dysfunctional triangles, and many others as detailed in Chris’s three books.
The spiritual dimension, as Howard Thurman and the great spiritual leaders across all faiths of history taught, is that the deepest mysteries of life must be experienced, not just read or heard about.
That’s what LIOS brings.
I don’t want to be limited by what I’ve written in our upcoming evening session, but I would love to kick around what I’ve written with you!
Robert P Crosby
Robert P. Crosby is an author, poet, singer, and organization development practitioner. In 1969 he founded the Leadership Institute of Spokane (later Seattle) – aka LIOS. An ordained Methodist, he was named a distinguished alumnus by Boston University, and received an LHD from Bastyr University. Crosby has three business books written out of his experience in organizations, along with his career "Memoir of a Change Agent" (called a "must read" by Edgar Schein), two spiritual books from his passion for non-dogmatic meaning and social justice, a poetry book, and, with his wife Patricia, a pictorial diary of a month in his beloved Volpaia, Tuscany, a village of 52 in Italy. In October 2014 you would have heard him in concert in the ancient church there. At age 86 you would have met him still working with two of his sons in their OD consultancy. And on October 1, at age 94, he sang a concert of secular and sacred music.
In 1953 he began his immersion in the budding T-group and organization development movements, was personally mentored for decades by Ronald Lippitt, while simultaneously learning from the "godfather of the civil rights movement", mystic Howard Thurman, who famously impacted the young MLK Jr.