Why going round ’n’ round might be one of the best things we can learn to do
This past weekend, the Marginalian’s Maria Popova shared,
It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live—a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the bottomless question of why you are here.
Whenever you wake up, however you wake up, you find yourself on a path no one else can walk for you, a path you must make by walking. Still, you can find signposts that keep you from losing your way in loneliness.
For the past few days, the “something” that keeps coming up for me is the circle. As you’ll see in the piece that follows, I’ve been thinking in, and about, circles a lot of late. Circles, I’ve begun to realize, have actually opened my eyes to a whole range of new insights—insights that are helping me to find a positive path forward. While we often hear people suggest that we learn to “think out of the box,” I can’t remember anyone ever advising that we “think in circles.” As we work through the challenges of our historical moment, this might well be the time to start.
I’m not totally sure what it was that first got me so focused on the subject of circles, but now that I’ve been thinking about them, I can see that there was an abundance of signposts. Maybe it was the fact that this week, a few minutes after midnight on what was technically Monday morning, there was a stunning, full “Hunter’s Moon” here in Southeast Michigan. It could also, I suppose, have started with the T-shirt I had on the other day—it comes from the British punk-folk-anarchist band Ancient Hostility and shows a beautiful, round (or, we could say, circular) cross section of a tree trunk. Or it could be that I’ve been working on the next pamphlet, which is all about the metaphorical organizational ecosystem model—so perhaps immersing myself in images of nature has me thinking about natural annual cycles.
It’s also possible that my circular reflections emerged, almost unconsciously, out of my excitement about the electoral victory of the Student List in Serbia on Sunday night. As I wrote last spring, the students’ anarchistic embrace of consensus decision-making, rejection of hierarchy, elevation of everyone involved into leadership roles, emphasis on direct democracy, and inclusive plenum model of governance have all been a big inspiration to me. That they won the election after nearly two years of peaceful protest is, as one demonstrator said at the celebration Sunday night, “surreal. I laughed. I cried. I screamed. I jumped. It’s just unbelievable. … We are finally free.” One of the candidates on the Student List said, “This is a victory of courage over fear, a victory over unrest. Serbia can and must be different.” The Serbian students’ symbol? The number 3, with its lovely, rounded, curving lines that are almost, but not quite, a set of circles, one resting softly atop the other.
All that said, I also know that circles still get a bad rap in industrial-era management conversations. Many people in mainstream power positions regularly say stuff like, “He’s talking in circles,” or, “This sucks! We’re just going in circles,” or, “She’s stuck in some serious circular thinking.” All carry very negative connotations. Worse still, check out recent headlines, where, rather than circles, you’ll see a wealth of confrontational framing—the phrase “candidates face off” shows up over and over again! Open an org chart or a financial statement, and you’ll almost definitely see a lot more straight lines, too.
I’m certainly not here to suggest that simply working with circles will be the answer to all our problems. Rather, it’s just that, in a significant number of situations, thinking about things in circular ways—rather than with our much more typical straight lines, boxes, and rectangles—may very well open our minds to some pretty positive new ways to work.
To be clear, I’m not down on straight lines; they surely serve their purpose. They do, though, show up in nature less frequently—and they’re not, it turns out, very pleasing to the eye. In an essay for BBC Science Focus, Manuel Lima—Portuguese designer, expert in visual culture, and author of The Book of Circles—notes that humans have a natural bias toward rounded, curved shapes:
As with many other areas of human aesthetics, the circle’s inescapable beauty seems deeply rooted in our biology. … Circles are truly everywhere. We can witness this elemental shape in faraway planets and stars; in earth formations, such as mounds, craters, and small lakes; in the sections of tree trunks and plant stems; in the moving ripples on the surface of water; in a variety of leaves, fruits, shells, rocks, and pebbles; in the eyes of our fellow humans and other animals; as well as in cells, bacteria, and microscopic organisms. …
A preference for circular shapes is deeply ingrained in all of us from birth. A 2011 eye-tracking study found that at five months of age, before they utter a word or scribble a drawing, infants already show a clear visual preference for contoured lines over straight lines. … In a 1921 study conducted by the Swedish psychologist Helge Lundholm, subjects were asked to draw lines representing a set of emotional adjectives. While angular lines were used to depict adjectives like hard, harsh, and cruel, curved lines were the popular choice for adjectives like gentle, quiet, and mild.
The great scientist and animal welfare advocate Temple Grandin found much the same to be true with cattle, writing, “Round crowd pens and curved single file chutes work better than straight ones.” The straight pens, she showed, increased stress, while the rounded alternatives reduced it. And many of us are familiar with the calming, uplifting hope expressed in the early-20th-century spiritual (later made famous by the Carter Family) “Can the Circle Be Unbroken?”
If rounded edges do, indeed, engender calm so effectively, it makes sense, then, that so many ancient cultures constructed round dwellings. And yet it’s curious to me that the vast majority of modern buildings we construct have squared-off corners. Why would so much of what we design in the modern world be based on straight-lined boxes and 90-degree angles? A big reason, of course, is that squares and rectangles seem to better maximize the use of space. Now, though, I’ve been wondering if maybe that approach isn’t all too inclined to the unnatural? If perhaps it’s quietly contributing to the high levels of stress and dis-ease in the modern era? There are, after all, many round shapes in nature, but fewer that are straight-sided. And as Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka taught us, violating nature never ends well: “If we shove Mother Nature out the door, she will come back through the window with a pitchfork.”
All of which, I’m realizing now, reminds me that a circular economy is an ecologically sound, desirably self-sufficient model of management in which all materials are repeatedly worked back into the system. This stands in stark contrast, of course, to the more common construct of an extraction-based, linear economy.
Reading and listening to the work of John Paul Lederach of late has reinforced for me the import of circles in creating sustainable settings. Lederach, a devout Mennonite who has done “groundbreaking work in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict transformation,” repeatedly demonstrates the benefit of steering clear of straight lines and shifting, instead, to circles. Even the title of his newly released book, the centuries wrap around us, offers readers an image of rounded shapes. Lederach teaches us that in some cases, thinking about things in a circular fashion—and letting go of the idea of automatically squaring everything off—can, and very often will, open us up to new and unexpected opportunities.
One of Lederach’s most insightful concepts is his depiction of “change as a circle.” While most of us in the Western world have been taught to approach the subject of change (and most subjects) as a linear continuum, often in the form of a timeline, Lederach turns us back in a different direction. As he explains, his alternative approach
identifies four common experiences in the circular journey of change. Each of these experiences is very different, wrapped up with the other, and part of the circle of change. Sometimes we feel as if desired change is happening, as if there is progress. At other times we feel as if we have reached an impasse. Then there are times when the change processes seem to be going backwards. Then there are times when we feel as though we are living through a complete breakdown.
All these experiences, though not always in the same chronological order, are normal parts of the change circle. Understanding change as circular helps us to know and anticipate this. The circle recognizes that no one point in time determines the broader pattern. Rather, change encompasses different sets of patterns and directions as part of the whole.
Lederach’s “change circle” looks like this:
(Credit: John Paul Lederach)
In The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, he writes,
The circle reminds us that change is not evenly paced, nor is it one-directional. … There are times when the change processes seem to be going backwards. We feel as if what has been achieved is now being undone. We hear language like, “In a single stroke, years of work have been set back.” We experience “swimming against the tide” or “heading upstream.” These metaphors underscore the reality that change—even positive change— includes periods of going backward as much as going forward.
On a very practical level, one thing we learned here at Zingerman’s many years ago from Stas’ Kazmierski—the man who taught us what we came to call “visioning” and also “Bottom-Line Change”—is to set up all our meetings and classes in some sort of circular form. The rounded shape helps everyone feel included, and there’s little or no implied hierarchy. As Lederach writes in the new book,
Circles never proffer in fragmentation. From wherever we are seated in the circle, it is possible to see the center. No matter your location in the circle, alongsideness is felt. In the circle, there is always a wholeness to how quests and questions are held.
Lederach is, we might say, part of a metaphorical circle of wise men and women who use circles in their work with a high degree of both frequency and effectiveness. In “The Warmth of Circle” the wonderful philosopher and progressive business writer Margaret Wheatley writes that circles can be used to break destructive cycles, creating instead “islands of sanity”:
Whenever hominids began using fire intentionally, we know they sat in Circle. There was no other way for everyone to be warm. … And so it is today. If we want people to feel warmly welcomed, let us return to Circle. Let us rely on Circle as the form that invites contribution from everyone, that evokes individual and collective wisdom, that creates the conditions for us to resolve our afflictions and create new possibilities. Let us rely on Circle to awaken our innate human qualities of generosity, creativity, and kindness.
Back in 1983, a year after we opened the Deli, Wheatley worked with Australian management consultant Tim Dalmau to create yet another model of organizational change that relies on circles:
(Credit: Library Leadership & Management/CC BY 4.0)
Rather than having each of the six elements exist as an isolated box, one can show them inside circles, visually overlapping and impacting the others. Wheatley and Dalmau’s key point, though, is that we tend to think mainly about the three elements in the top half of the figure—and to do so in mostly linear ways. The two authors make clear that without altering the elements within the three circles in the bottom half of the drawing—relationships, information, and identity—we’re unlikely to make meaningful cultural change. As Wheatley and Dalmau write, “The goal is to focus on and nurture all six circles because they are always at play.”
Circles can also be an effective means to bring calm. In a 2004 essay entitled “Solving, Not Attacking, Complex Problems,” Wheatley writes,
Imagine your most recent experience in a conflicted situation. Most likely, people were arguing their position, not listening, raising their voices, acting out, doing power plays—in essence, acting aggressively. … Now imagine what might have been possible if someone had intervened with a process to lessen the drama, to cool down the situation. [We can do that] by using an ancient, pacifying form, the circle. … To pacify a highly conflicted group, you have to move into a circle (or a number of small circles). As soon as you sit in this form and it becomes clear that everyone will have a chance to speak, things quiet down. Anyone who persists in being dramatic or loud in a circle soon looks like a fool. Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realize that their voice is welcome. As the drama drains, people will still speak passionately, but more quietly and earnestly.
This circular approach to organizing healthy conversations was most definitely deeply embedded in Indigenous cultures. As the organization Restorative Solutions Inc. explains in a 2017 article titled “The Indigenous Origins of Circles and How Non-Natives Learned About Them,”
The Circle process that many non-Native people are using today is rooted in the tradition of talking Circles that Indigenous Peoples in North America use and have used for millennia. Different Native Peoples practice different forms of the Circle process. … In these traditions, Circles are far more than a technique; they are a way of life.
Thinking of circles like this reminds me of going to the renowned Goodman Theatre in Chicago many years ago as a young boy. My mother used to take my slightly younger sister and me to see plays when we were kids. I don’t remember all that much about which shows we saw (one was Peter Pan), but I definitely do remember that the Goodman was, as my mother told us, “a theater in the round”: instead of the actors facing off with the audience, those in attendance took in the show from every side of the stage.
Up until now, though, I didn’t know anything about the Goodman Theatre’s history. In yet another sign for me that the time is right to follow my intuition and write about the significance of circles, I’ve since learned that the Goodman opened its doors for the first time exactly 101 years ago last week—on the 20th of October, 1925. In fact, as with the Serbian students a century later, its entire existence emerged from creative thinkers trying to get people to perceive the world differently and flatten a playing field that had been dominated by the very wealthy.
The Goodman Theatre, I now know, was created by the parents of Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, a young playwright whose death from the Spanish flu pandemic in late November 1918 ended his then-budding career. His parents paid for the project as a way to keep their son’s memory alive. Back then, the Goodman was known for being part of the Little Theater Movement. In our era, we have Slow Food—with its slogan, “Good, clean, and fair food for all”—and local farm-to-table restaurants are the talk of almost any town’s culinary community. A century ago, much the same sentiment guided the Little Theater Movement. Historian Nasrullah Mambrol writes,
The rise of the “little theater” movement was a reaction to the traditional practices of the American stage prior to 1910. Although the smallest towns had theater buildings and vaudeville houses in which well-worn plays and players kept up a lively brand of theatrical entertainment, new works [nearly always] came out of New York’s theaters. Little theaters were a first important step toward moving the American theater away from the exclusivity of the New York stage … to encourage new playwrights and designers experimenting with innovative staging and scenic techniques, and actors and directors testing new theories of their art.
Anarchist Emma Goldman actively expressed her support for the Little Theater Movement and its commitment to bringing theater to the people. In keeping with her sense of the world, theater no longer had to be positioned only as a pastime for the elite; it could and should be, she said, for everyone. As Emma expressed in her 1914 treatise The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, “[Theater] is the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction.” At the end of World War I, the Little Theater Movement reached the Black community as well, with W. E. B. DuBois becoming a big supporter.
In a 1917 book, The Little Theatre in the United States, author Constance D’Arcy explained that the movement offered “the newest, freest, most potent, and most democratic forces in the art of the American stage.” Similar things were said, too, about the idea of theater in the round. Both were ways to bring theater to the level of everyday people—and to elevate the work of artists on the edge, who might not have fit the conventional mold of mainstream theater. As award-winning set designer Clint Ramos says of theater in the round, “It’s truly egalitarian, it’s truly equitable theater.”
Thinking in circles has also brought me back to the remarkable work of 20th-century Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. In a country where this past weekend’s voting moved things in his preferred direction of democratic inclusion, Freire’s longtime work in education was truly exceptional. Born in Brazil in 1921—four years before the Goodman Theatre was founded in Chicago—he was considered one of the most important educational theorists of the modern era. Like the Catalan Francesc Ferrer, Emma Goldman, and John Dewey before him, Freire advocated that everyone should have access to education, not just the nation’s elite. In an experiment he ran in 1962, he effectively taught 300 illiterate workers from the sugar fields how to read in less than seven weeks. Building on that example, Freire then led the establishment of thousands of “culture circles,” in which previously illiterate people could gain a workable level of literacy in very short periods of time. After the military overthrew the duly elected civilian government in 1964, Freire was imprisoned for two months, and eventually expelled from the country. In 1968, his classic text Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published.
The culture circles Freire founded had a huge impact on Brazil. As scholar Fred van Amstel writes,
Culture circles is a participatory educational method … to foster literacy and critical consciousness through dialogue. It emphasizes horizontal, dialogical learning, where participants and facilitators engage as equals in analyzing their lived experiences and co-creating knowledge. The term “circle” underscores this horizontal structure, symbolizing equality among participants and rejecting the top-down dynamics of conventional education.
A key aspect of the culture circles method is its redefinition of culture as something created and shaped by all people, regardless of their literacy or educational background. In this method, participants are encouraged to see themselves not only as consumers of culture but as producers of it, capable of critically analyzing and transforming their realities. Freire believed that even those marginalized by systems of education and literacy possessed valuable cultural knowledge and experiences.
It was also a model of a circle that first opened my mind to understanding anarchism in a poli sci class I took at the University of Michigan, taught by A. F. K. “Ken” Organski. Organski, I know now, was born in Rome back in 1923. He came to the US in 1939, along with his parents, Menasce and Anna Organski, and his brother, Guido, to flee Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws. He earned his PhD in political science at NYU in 1951 and arrived in Ann Arbor to teach at U of M in 1965.
At some point in the middle of my semester in his course, Organski unexpectedly altered my entire understanding of anarchism. “Most people,” he said, “imagine that communism and fascism are completely opposed to each other.” He drew a line on the board, showing the two worldviews on opposite ends of a continuum. “That’s incorrect,” he added adamantly. A more accurate explanation, he offered, is that they are two points on a circle, and are actually to be found right next to each other. Both fascism and communism deny the individual; any single human being is almost irrelevant, and only the group matters (in the former case, the nation; in the latter, one’s class). “On the opposite edge of the circle,” Organski explained, “is anarchism.” Something clicked when he said that: I suddenly understood with great clarity how anarchism fit into the grand historical political discourse—when it had all too often been dismissed as some sort of fringe footnote. And as you can tell, what I learned from Ken Organski’s well-conceived, circularly shaped model has been a major influence on my life’s philosophy.
As I wrote last month, the Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky used to say that “everything starts from a dot.” Expanding from there, he remarked, “The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, [the circle] points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”
American artist Howardena Pindell’s career very definitely did begin with a dot. As a child traveling through the South with her family, Pindell would ask her father why the plates and glasses in restaurants had small, colored dots on them. The little circles, he explained, were a way for racist restaurateurs to demarcate dishware being used by Black customers, so it could be segregated from that being used by whites. Pindell took that painful experience of exclusion and inverted it into the basis of an incredible large-scale installation, Autobiography: Circles, unveiled at the University of Texas at Austin earlier this year. The transformative power of circles, she shows us, can shift everything!
In theory, it would seem that one can’t turn a circle inside out. But in practice, that’s exactly what Howardena Pindell appears to have pulled off. My friend Shawn Askinosie (see below for more on his new chili-spiced chocolate bar) says that our childhood wound will later be inverted and end up as our vocation—which is, indeed, what happened with Pindell’s life story. Incorporating circles into various parts of our work could well change our own lives, too.
I hope, then, that this essay’s exploration of the possibilities of thinking in circles might have you feeling inspired. I know it’s got my mind going. If you find yourself or your colleagues facing a situation or challenge that you’ve been stuck on for far longer than you’d like, consider, perhaps, whether turning straight lines into circles might open the door to new thinking and creative solutions. Let me know what you learn. We can, in good circular fashion, trade emails and make discoveries together!
Coming back—full circle, so to speak—to Maria Popova from the Marginalian, it turns out she has a tattoo on one of her forearms that reads, “What to Focus On.” Below those words is inked a bull’s-eye set of circles, and in the middle of the central circle is another word: “Happy.” What drove her to put this image on her arm?
When I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life, I decided it was one of those simple, enormous truths we so easily forget, and a wonderful incantation of sorts to wake up to. To make it as inescapable as possible in beginning each day, I put it on my arm.
The message here seems clear: in the right settings, well-designed circles can lead you straight to happiness! And lo and behold, returning to the circle research of Manuel Lima, he cites a 1978 study involving several participants which revealed that
expressions of happiness were conveyed by expansive, outward curved patterns (arched cheeks, eyes, and mouth). In other words, happy faces resembled an expansive circle, while angry faces resembled a downward triangle.
I’ll leave you with these lines I first read in the Marginalian many years ago, from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who might well have already practiced all this more than 100 years ago:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.