From the Discussion Guide for Reinventing Leadership by Edwin H. Friedman

1. The five... characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society (reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership) will always be descriptive of a regressed institution wherever protoplasm colonizes.

2. Whenever any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.

3. All pathogenic—that is, destructive—organisms, forces, and institutions—whether we are considering viruses, malignant cells, chronically troublesome individuals, or totalitarian nations—lack self-regulation and therefore (a) are invasive by nature and (b) cannot be expected to learn from their experience.

4. For terrorists to have power, whether in a family or in the family of nations, three conditions must be fulfilled: (a) the absence of well-defined leadership, (b) a hostage situation to which leaders are particularly vulnerable, and (c) an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.

5. A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.

6. A society’s culture does not determine its emotional processes. Rather, a society’s culture provides the medium through which a society’s emotional processes work their art.

7. The basic tension that must constantly be rebalanced in any family, institution, or society is the conflict between the natural forces of togetherness and self-differentiation.

8. It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.

9. Increasing one’s threshold for others pain helps them mature.

10. Stress (at the extreme, burnout) is relational rather than quantitative, being due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems.

11. In any partnership the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.

12. In any stuck relationship between an over-adequate member and an under-adequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.

13. In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.

14. When people differ, the nature of their differences does not determine the extent or the intensity of the differing.

15. Trauma is more the product of the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism than the product of some outside force or event.

16. The perceived toxicity of an environment is in most cases as much a function of the response of the organism (RO) or the institution as it is a function of the pathogens in the environment.

17. Factors contributing to a well-differentiated RO include stamina, resolve, remaining connected, capacity for self-regulation of reactivity, having horizons beyond what one can actually see, and simply the capacity to be able to think in terms of RO.

18. There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.

19. People who remain cut off from relationship systems, especially their family of origin, do not heal—no matter what their symptom.

20. Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because of some peculiar prescience on our part, but because of the way we function after we make the decision.

22. Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.

23. Clearly defined nonanxious leadership promotes differentiation throughout a system, while highly reactive, peace-over-progress, anxious leadership de-differentiates a system.

24. However, differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well differentiated others in the system.

25. Generally, followers cannot rise above the maturity level of their mentors (no matter what their mentor’s skill and knowledge base).

27. "Madness" cannot be judged from people’s ideas or their values but rather from (a) the extent to which the people interfere in other people’s relationships, (b) the degree to which they constantly try to will others to change, and (c) their inability to continue a relationship with people who disagree with them.

28. People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that, as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.

29. The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty or residue are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.