Or perhaps you may fear that by going deeper everything could change including how you define yourself, your opponent, and the issues. It is dangerous to be honest because that gives the other person the right to be equally honest with you.
Posts Tagged: conversational intelligence
Just as learning’s greatest enemy is not ignorance, but what your are sure you are already know; the greatest challenge to listening is letting go of what you are certain of so that you can allow another person’s experience lead you to a higher, more integrated, and composite truth.
Leaders who feel they must come up with the perfect plan endure huge pressure. In playing the role of the heroic leader they become the organisational bottle neck. In telling everyone that they know the way forward; they disempower everyone around them. This mind set is the main obstacle to agility.
In addition to our ability to analyse and predict we need to learn to engage directly with what is happening now so that we can learn faster from what just happened. Organisational strategy becomes “just-in-time” and “just-in-case” supported by more investment in general knowledge, diversity, the ability to do a quick study and the capacity to respond to intuition.
What may look like a people problem is often an environment, situation, or system problem. Organisations are brimming with misdiagnosed problems. Just as a caged bird is so close to the bars that it does not know it is in a cage, we too do not recognise the structures that surround us. Rather we just find ourselves conditioned to behave in certain ways.
In his brilliant book The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene writes in praise of what he calls ‘reality groups’ – groups that are infused with a functional and healthy dynamic arising from their ability to maintain a tight relationship with reality.