Beyond Win-Win is Flow

In 2009, Elwyn Wilson, while watching the inauguration of President Barack Obama, saw iconic civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis. Mr. Lewis was sitting behind the President on the inaugural stage. Wilson stirred to action, contacted Congressman Lewis, offering him an apology. Forty years earlier, during the Freedom Rides, which helped bring about the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, Wilson was the one who had beaten Mr. Lewis at a bus terminal in South Carolina. The Congressman remembered their encounter and accepted his apology, inviting him to Washington for a meeting and starting an unlikely friendship.

Meeting in Lewis’s office, “the two men prayed together and talked about life, hope, and redemption.” During a later appearance on Oprah’s TV show, Lewis said, “He’s the first and only person who ever apologized to me.”

In this story, Lewis and the other Freedom Riders are the Heros with a capital H. But Wilson’s act of humility demonstrates a strength of character we should spend time to honor and uplift. If more people acted from the place Wilson did in 2009, rather than from a place of hate and violence in 1961 when he beat Lewis, there would be less need for people like John Lewis to give so much to become the Heroes they become.

What was Wilson’s motive in reconciliation? Freedom Ride biographer Raymond Arsenault documents that Wilson had long felt regret for the violence he perpetrated. Seeing Lewis on the stage at the highest office forty years later initiated something inside him that called for action, an action of a different sort than most of what happens in our lives. This type of action is initiated deep inside of us, and it has its own purpose in coming forth.

It is the urge to get it right with ourselves. We can imagine the impact on Wilson’s life by coming forward publicly in his regret and shame, yet a force inside of him was undeterred. This type of action is available to us all the time. It comes to us when we make space in our lives to consider what is truly important to us. It is the source of our best moments, the ones we remember for the rest of our lives, the ones we look back on with pride when we are at the end of our lives.

In my book “Leap to Wholeness: How the world is programmed to help us grow, heal and adapt,” I start with the observation that the answers we get out of life, reflect the questions we ask. The idea of win-win, popularized by Fisher, Ury, and Patton in the iconic book “Getting to Yes,” is a great answer to the question, “How do we make sure everybody wins?” But this question is embedded within a culture of perpetual gain, one that we find hard to see clearly because we are like fish swimming in it.

What we can easily miss is the underlying assumption we make: that “winning” is the common goal. We ask, “How could everybody winning be bad?”, and the question seems to answer itself and shut down the debate. Who wouldn’t want to do well? Here’s the thing: It’s not that there are people who want to do badly. It’s more like, “Is it possible for there to be people who aren’t thinking about whether they are doing well?”
This is what the flow state is like. In a state of flow, there is no negotiation in the first place. There are no sides. Instead, there is just synergistic action, communication, and relationship. There is the exploration of similarities and differences, and the awe and wonder that such discovery generates. In flow, our sense of self dissolves, so how could we possibly be thinking about our own gain?

It’s natural to think about self-preservation, so I don’t think we should be hard on ourselves about it. It is a premise of our culture, something we collectively take for granted and reinforce. But noticing that we are thinking in terms of self-preservation can be a great clue that we are NOT in flow. It’s an indication that something better awaits you.

When John Lewis wrote on his application to be a Freedom Rider, “This is the most important decision in my whole life, to decide to give up all if necessary for Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South,” he was acting from a different question. When Elwyn Wilson called Lewis to apologize, he too was coming from a different question.
For Lewis, the motivation to act responded to a question about human dignity. For Wilson, it was a question about his own dignity. In both cases, self-preservation was not a consideration. The question, “How can I optimize the outcome for myself?” did not occur to them. Nor did the question, “How can I optimize the outcome for myself and others?” It seems like the question was more like, “How do I get it right with myself?”

Historian Arsenault says about Lewis, “I regard these conversations as a gift from a great man who, without a hint of pretense or self-importance, offered me a life-affirming glimpse of his plan to ‘redeem the soul of America.’” Both Lewis and his one-time abuser Wilson demonstrate the unreserved power for greater well-being, justice, and human connection that our conscience can pour into the world when we invite it with the right question.

By letting go of an old assumption—that everybody is trying to win—we can catch sight of so many more possibilities.