What We're Thinking
Five steps toward coherent conversation and authentic exchanges.
We humans come together in different ways whenever we want to accomplish something. This is called organizing and it puts us in a relationship with one another. These relationships are built on, moved by, and sustained through conversation.
Fear is a signal you might be about to learn something
In an earlier post, I wrote about the connection between uncertainty and learning. There I tried to make the point that uncertainty is a condition that is pre-requisite to learning, and that the present moment is the most uncertain place we can inhabit because we never know what is going to happen next.
There is another aspect to uncertainty, one that has to do with our reaction when we find ourselves confronted by it.
What is the opposite of certainty?
I’ve started to play around with an idea I’m calling “group awareness”. My working definition is in two parts. A collection of people has group awareness when they have developed 1) the ability to learn about where they are and what they are doing at any given moment, and 2) clarity about what they want to do next.
This seems so simplistic.
It’s all about the learning.
For some time now, I’ve been noticing a change in the way teams operate. When I was first learning my craft, the typical metaphor for a high performing team was often a sports team, or a symphony orchestra, if I was in a place where drawing parallels to sports was unwelcome or misunderstood. These metaphors are less and less applicable in many of today’s dynamic organizational environments.
