“Human beings are both full of dignity and broken.” My ears pricked up. I am not accustomed in everyday conversation to an acknowledgement of human complexity, and especially, of the darkness in us.
I was listening to a presentation by Dr Mark Strom at the Sydney Facilitators Network. Mark is an Australian, residing in the UK, with a history in senior consulting and change roles, including as CEO of an NZ private college network. He had started the night’s session with a great question “what puzzles you in your work?”. It was a clever question, taking us to the edge of our current practice, that liminal point where we have to step forward into uncertainty and possible incompetence. It is the place where learning and change is possible, and often confronting.
Mark had another story about advising the CEO of a major company who needed to transform its culture. The CEO asked Mark to review his 50 powerpoints – a welter of dot points about the importance of culture, expressed in quite abstract concepts. Mark suggested tossing the powerpoints aside and asking a simple question “In this organisation, of whom are you proud?”
He was insisting on the possibility for deeper, more meaningful conversation. Its an option that is commonly, often incidentally, excluded by an excess of powerpoints and formal presentations.
The suggestion introduced Mark’s key theme – the importance of ‘grounded questions’. He introduced it with a delightful story about our common experience as parents and children doing The School Project. Each of us had the same response to his questions: “when did you do it?” (“the night before it was due”), “who did it?” (“mum and dad”), “where did you do it?” (“on the kitchen table”). You are given a topic (‘Tasmania’) and a large blank cardboard poster. We proceed to fill in that blank space with random facts, pictures cut from magazines (and old encyclopedias), drawings and decorations. We stop when the poster is filled in. In my work, I find a similar experience when standing in front of an audience just talking to fill in the gaps between activities, or responding to a question. I now call it doing the ‘blah blah blah’. It is not a good moment.
Mark trained as a philosopher. He highlighted an enormous bias toward abstraction in our thinking. With Plato and Aristotle emerged the disciplined practice of logical, rational thinking. And Plato in particular with his ‘ideal types’ – a circle is a thing of perfection as an idea that can never quite be realized in the world. A destructive dualism is imported with this idealism – the ‘idea’ is superior, pure and noble and that mere matter is flawed, sullied, inferior.
This logic works its way through a banquet of dualisms, privileging the first term:
Reason vs emotion
Theory vs practice
Leader vs follower
Strategy vs operations
Analysis vs imagination
Knowledge-intensive vs craft work[1]
Logic and rationality are not bad, but they are one-dimensional.
Logical analysis predisposes us toward abstraction in a hunt for certainty. It marries a ‘command and control’ mentality that privileges one-way communication. It puts system and structure before community and culture.
Strom opts for conversation instead of communication – ‘creating shared meaning’ instead of ‘sharing created meaning’. The distinction is a bit precious but makes sense for dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity in complex interactions.
The conclusion is that more enduring value is created in conversations where rich, complex, human stories are shared about deep experiences. And these conversations are triggered by ‘grounded’ questions.
Grounded questions are
-concrete, not abstract
-human, often personal
-open-ended
-appreciative and affirming, not about what needs ‘fixing’
They trigger rich, experiential stories.
Some examples of the mindset involved:
- Don’t ask: “What do we see when we assess our capabilities and culture?” but try “Thinking about how our organisation is travelling, of whom are you really proud?”
- Don’t ask: “What’s our model of leadership?” but try “What does it mean for each of us to be wise here?”
- Don’t ask: “Can we prioritise this list of strategies?” try “What would it mean for us to be wise here?”
- Don’t ask: “What were the key points in our discussion?” but try “What idea did we just avoid, sideline, or dismiss because we are too afraid to ask or say or hear it?”
- Don’t ask: “What’s our action list?” try “What one change could we create that would make a huge difference?”
- “Thinking about (your current practice, or commitments) what is really puzzling you…what are you struggling with?”
- “Looking at our clients, what do we feel when we step into their shoes…
Source: Dr Mark Strom, Lead with Wisdom
And a TedX presentation at