Being blind because we won't see
Here is Garand, my eternal dragon person, looking but not seeing the falling sky he has jinxed on himself.
A focus on one agenda or a lack of being open will blind us to important things. I had a lovely meeting yesterday with Kevin where the general purpose was to talk about how I was going to tell his story about overcoming his learning disability in Trusted Space in a couple of weeks time.
But while we dealt with this we also dug deeper and we are now looking at a series of environmental projects that Kevin could lead. As we did this, I began to feel that this might be where Kevin might take his life. If we had been efficient, we would have missed this - missed maybe a turning point in his life.
Is both "busyness" and efficiency and hence being closed the bane of our time? Is this why we find solving our complex problems so hard?
Dave has a neat story about the policeman worrying about speeding in a rush hour jam where all cars were crawling while missing the fact that most of the cars in the Commuter lane that had to have more than one passenger, only had one. He then goes on to make the larger point that by having too narrow a focus on a planned result, we may miss very important things. Nice Snip-
I write a lot about the importance of learning to pay attention, to really see. But sometimes we can be just too focused, to the point incredible opportunities are missed.
There's a related phenomenon, one that comes not from focusing too intently but from not knowing what to look for, or not knowing how to 'make sense' of what we are seeing. An example: On at least a half-dozen occasions, with different people, friends I've been visiting have complained about their dog's 'annoying habit' of running right in front of them when they're walking and getting underfoot, or cornering the cat, or nipping ankles, or chasing cars. They tell me they've done everything to try to 'correct' this behaviour, and are convinced their dog is either stupid or doing it deliberately to annoy them. To me it's obvious: What we're witnessing is the dog's inherent herding behaviour. The poor dog is trying to herd his or her people, to get them together where s/he can keep an eye on them. Likewise the poor cat is a substitute lamb, and the car a substitute steer. If these owners could witness their dog's response to a small group of sheep, they would immediately say Aha! and understand what they'd been witnessing. They just didn't know what they were seeing.
The consequences of missing the obvious are profound: Having the perfect career opportunity pass you by. Not noticing the potential love of your life looking with interest your way. Neglecting to consider the innovation that could solve a huge and intractable problem, when it was right in front of you. Ignoring the self-evident (but alas, only to others) opportunity for Let-Self-Change that could make you incredibly happy, or incredibly useful to society.
The most frightening thing about missing the obvious is that, unless someone else catches it and tells us, we'll probably never know what we missed.
What can we do to prevent, or at least minimize the chance of this happening to us? How can we learn to pay attention without losing track of the forest for the trees? How can we better prepare ourselves to know what to look for, and to make good sense of what we're seeing? Is this what friends are for?
Johnnie adds this and a comment from Dave Snowden:
When I'm talking about facilitation, I often find myself saying that the effort to be efficient is what makes meetings inefficient.
By setting agendas which assume that groups of people work on issues in a logical, efficient manner, we constrain the kind of complex but non-linear thinking that often gives us the best results. Dave Snowden puts his finger on the problem: Sin, thy name is efficiency
Efficiency is all about stripping away all apparently superfluous functionality so that all that is left is what you really need. It is at the heart of BPR and its modern successor Six Sigma. The problem is that the definition of what is superfluous at any one time is very specific to the context of that time and the knowable future. Focusing on efficiency is great for aspects of an organisation that are process based, but not for the more fluid and complex areas of innovation, service etc etc. There the issue is to be effective which implies a degree of planned inefficiency, the grit in the oyster, that provides adaptive capacity over time. Efficiency is all well and good for stable environments, but for all other context we need to focus on resilience.
When we impose these linear models on our meetings we strangle the expressiveness and the connection of the people in the room. If my mind naturally roves to another interesting aspect of the issue not on the agenda, I can't share what's going on which seems to me to risk depleting the collective intelligence. At worst, we cut ourselves off from our reality; our language is not directly related to our experience so we're not actually present to our experience - which can be a kind of madness.
Reminds me of the post I made a while ago about the waterfall model of problem-solving and its drawbacks.
