We have a strong tendency, especially in the face of difficulties in our working and organisational lives to ask “Why?” Sometimes being more grounded and asking “What?”, at least as a beginning point, can provide different and more powerful insights.
Mostly, when they get stuck, leaders and managers in organisations simply want to come to grips with the situation, improvise and gradually find a way forward. Too frequently, though, they are led to believe, particularly in more formal training programmes or by “expert” consultancies, that the only way this can occur is through an evidence driven approach. And yet the way we typically go about resolving on next steps and adaptive moves is generally much less precise … but often more effective!
“A lightness in the way we hold thoughts gives us room to learn, to shift perspective, and to keep a rigorous humility of confusion. …. There are depths at which ideas of how the world is put together are so integrated into life that they have become invisible. Those are the ones to watch out for. They sustain other ideas, and ideas about ideas. They seem unchangeable. But, pull a single thread loose and the whole tapestry can be reorganized.”
Bateson, Nora. Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns Triarchy Press. Kindle Edition.
Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. William James
We may be able to articulate what we hope/intend to happen in the future. But we know that things rarely work out precisely the way we had planned. Much of the end product is tied up in the process of implementation. Nonetheless, we crave direction and optimism if not certainty. Conducting a pre-mortem is one way to manage the risk that things will turn out to be vastly different from our original intention.