When you choose the behaviour, you choose the consequences
All too often we focus on the end game. The result. The success. The failure. The implications. The achievement. The gain. The outcome. The goal. The consequences.
How we get there though, colours the outcome. It is the ‘how’ that people notice and the ‘how’ that people remember. It is the ‘how’ that affirms alignment to our values.
Someone I spoke to today, said they see their role as bringing order to chaos. Now I don’t wish to dismiss this skill. I could probably do with an injection of this ability myself at times, but I do wonder …
… what’s wrong with chaos?
When did we decide chaos was a bad thing, something to be controlled, managed, ordered?
Chaos theory expounds that complex systems, whose behaviour is highly sensitive to slight change in conditions, can generate strikingly great consequences from very small alterations.
That could be a good thing, couldn’t it? Given we are all uniquely complex, given all our human interactions are complex, given our world is complex, maybe we are denying ourselves unimaginable possibilities, inconceivable freedoms, great achievements by setting out to order the chaos?
Maybe instead we should allow more chaos in the order? Let it be?
I’ve spent some time today with some new graduates joining the organisation. It’s day two for them.
Driving to the venue I reflected on being one of them… thirty years ago.
I was now standing in front of them, much as key leaders had been marched out in front of me all that time ago. Then, the leaders were booted and suited. Ties, business suits and highly polished brogues. Today I am in an open neck checked shirt and chinos. Over or under dressed?
I sat on a panel as groups presented their thinking around a business priority. We questioned them, then they questioned us. They seem more worldy wise than I recall being in my time. Great questions about society, change and cultural diversity. A colleague on the panel suggested our pension was in safe hands.
My session with them explored self, authenticity and learning agility. And it seems that although the graduates of today are more connected, more aware, more socially responsible and possibly smarter, they still suffer everyday human frailties. They were still worried about how they came across, still wanting to be reassured, encouraged. They still wanted to be heard, accepted, understood. They discussed self awareness and being themselves, yet they still had limiting beliefs about what was possible, albeit fuelled by a hunger to achieve and succeed.
It seems that whilst much has changed in thirty years, much is the same.
Their very humanity, their vulnerability, their humanness, no different to ours all that time ago.
Maybe that’s a sign of how we need to develop our education, our learning about being human? Maybe the focus on learning ‘stuff’ is strangling our ability to learn about the nature of being human?
The world is changing.
We hear that a lot lately. Technology, society, East catching West, globalisation, consumerism, social media, virtual reality, robotics etc. Much is indeed changing.
But are we changing with it, or are we trapped, caught in our own story? A story spun by the very creators and enablers of the change. Much of what we refer to as change is simply the inevitable out turn of the industrialisation age. These early industrialists promised us: work hard, fit into the schemes of work we define, do what’s asked and you will be looked after, you will get what you want. Factories, mass production, even the idea of management, all born at this time.
Now, we’re caught, in this late-capitalist phase of our society. Our narratives about work remain oriented to this thinking. Work days and weekends. Home and the workplace. Career. Professions. Trades. Status. Money. Recognition. Security. Control. Management. Competition.
We learn, more or less successfully, how to mould ourselves to the categories already on offer in the world – factory worker, administrator, school teacher, manager, accountant, doctor…
For the most part we cope. Some thrive. Many however become disenchanted. Disenfranchised. The system isn’t working for them. The rewards may come, but they’re not enough, or they don’t bring happiness. The ‘have nots’ judge the ‘haves’ – the rewards aren’t fair, equal. Our hearts and souls are stunted by the repeated self-abandonment that fitting in can require of us. Square pegs, round holes. Freedom lost to a defined, managed, measured way to do, to be.
And now, a looming challenge is that many of those roles themselves have gone, are going, or will go in the next twenty years. Falling victim to the very possibilities the Industrial Age and its offspring the Technological Age, have created.
Time for a new way of thinking? A new paradigm?
One with enhanced caring and social responsibility perhaps? One that champions a calling maybe? One that redefines contribution and reward? One that places humanity ahead of hierarchy? Who knows? One thing seems clear though, we need to start to define and move to a new age.
We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity; more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Charles Chaplin
(speech from the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator)
is despondency for?
Watching people get in and out of rowing boats, demonstrates how far we still have to travel as a species.
People totter as if in a drunken stupor, mystified by the unpredictable rocking of this small wooden vessel, which when placed in water seems to break the laws of intellectual motion. Puzzled expressions reveal the cognitive struggle as passengers seek to compute this inexplicable movement which seems to defy understanding and rob mere human beings of basic balance and all dignity.
Other passengers seek to assist, so duos and trios dance in a tentative grippy melee. Each tries to support or save another, but with each slight grip, stagger or reach, the equilibrium is once again threatened and the dance continues as if almost perpetual motion.
Someone reaches for terra ferma. One leg on land adds a new dimension to the dance as new forces come into play and all try to compensate for the mix of wobble and solidity.
We can cure all manner of illness. We can transplant someone’s face. We can send probes to the other side of the universe and we can sense sadness in someone without words to express it, as if by telepathy.
Yet put us in a small boat and we become as fragile and inadequate as a paper spoon.
Does every question have a presupposition?
Well it seems that one does. It’s worded to suggest they do. It presupposes all questions, without exception. It presupposes you know what a question is, or a presupposition indeed.
Some coach colleagues and I were discussing this. Playing a game if you like. Who can come up with a question that is presupposition free? We couldn’t.
Even the simplest questions do. For example, ‘When?’ The question presupposes you have a language for date and time. It presupposes you know what I’m talking about in relation to ‘when?’. It presupposes that I want to know, that you know, and that you want to tell me.
So if every question has a presupposition (and I welcome suggestions of ones which don’t), does that mean that we, the questioner, have a view, a plan, a judgement, a perspective even before we phrase the question? Maybe conscious, maybe outside our awareness?
Does it mean that the question is really in service of us?
The questioner’s need. Could it be that it’s about confirming our prejudice, our view as the questioner? Or could it be about filling in our gaps in knowledge, or about extending our knowing? Or about confirming our map of the world; fitting your world in, for congruence? Or about our belonging or our sense making?
We think of questions as ways in which we expand the perspective of those we throw them at, but maybe they are instead a means to reaffirm our already held perspectives?
A colleague of mine recently copied the team on a document. They failed to copy me. I only discovered this when another colleague asked me for a view on the work.
This was the third time this had happened. The team is only six people and we have been formed for about six months and so I have viewed this as interesting. Actually no, I have viewed it with suspicion. I have started to create stories, in my head, about a hidden intent, tales about a potential dislike or disregard for me. I have been telling myself that once is a mistake, twice is careless, three times is deliberate.
I have of course taken an adult approach to this and spoken to the individual directly. (You know I’m lying here, right?)
Yesterday I was in a team meeting and another colleague began a discussion on a topic they are leading. They referred to the pre-read they had shared. I said I hadn’t received it and they apologised and sent me a link to the soft copy on our systems. I received the email and clicked the link. I didn’t have access rights to the material.
Now my story has legs. It has all the makings of a novel. With characters, twists of plot and an evil back story. I have trapped myself in a fabrication of my own making. I am unconsciously looking for evidence that my tale is correct.
Imagined dragons. Stories of the mind. Myth and truth.
If you clothe someone in orange. Specifically a fluorescent hi-vis orange. Something strange happens.
There’s a secret power that creates a stillness in them. They stand. Sometimes they lean. But always still, like an evil voodoo has robbed them of motion. Often they get trapped in this stupefying state in groups. Threes, fours and more, frozen together. Sometimes they bend down. Sometimes they hold something, such as a sign, or a cigarette, or a clipboard or a tool. Sometimes they gaze collectively at a large piece of paper one holds. The spell only seems to impact on their ability to walk, as speech seems unimpaired.
Orange is my favourite colour, so this secret power it seems to possess, freaks me out a little.
illuminated dandelion 