Hello – I am Bob Lengel, lead author of A Place For T: Giving Voice to the Tortoise in our Hare-Brained World. I and my co-creators Cindy Teske and Linda Curtis, offer the intriguing idea that this frustrating condition evidenced in such questions is the result of our inability to appreciate and cope with our agreements, not our disagreements. Employing a creative twist on Aesop’s Hare -Tortoise fable, we are competing in a human race that pits our Hare-Brained heads against our Tortoise inspired hearts. We personified the Tortoise in a fictional character ‘T’ who speaks for our hearts and humanity in a human race handicapped to favor our heads and technology. In our obsession with speed and cleverness to satisfy an insatiable hunger for wealth, power, and status, we have eliminated times and places where T can speak. We need T’s voice to value all those impractical and seemingly unnecessary things that don’t count on our Hare-Brained financial statements. These things count, however, in making us civil and respectful human beings and enabling the learning, creativity, innovation, and leadership needed for our organizations to survive. Our agreements, our common ground, needed to move forward together despite our surface disagreements lies hidden in T’s silence.
This ‘Place for T’ website offers a time and place, a metaphorical ‘front porch’, designed to be a rest stop in the human race where we can disturb T’s silence together. Our purpose is to grow a community of learners and leaders, what we call our T-Society, to enrich our lives, make our organizations more effective and possibly collaborate in creating a better world that works for everyone. We need to be thinking and talking about our obligations to be responsible and accountable for the interdependent challenge of taking care of ourselves, each other, our organizations, future generations, and this planet we share. This is our leader work. To help each other accomplish it, we will host ongoing conversations, share ideas, information and resources and offer services to provide a path foreword illuminated by a continuous emerging flow of fresh perspectives, knowledge and questions that you can step onto or out of as your needs and interests require.
