A Fine Frenzy

A FINE FRENZY ~ DISRUPTION & TRANSFORMATION

There was a fabulous movie made in the 1980s called True Stories made by and starring David Byrne of Talking Heads fame. Essentially the film takes a quirky and affectionate view of life in a Texan flatland community and spotlights (along with the true stories drawn from press coverage of people’s lives e.g. the woman who never rises out of bed for years until true love came knocking) the minutia that forms the backdrop of the resident’s lives. At the end of the movie Byrne says something along the lines of “we have to go away to remember” ~ and for anyone that enters another country is immediately alerted to the difference of the post boxes, street signs, smells & sound. If we stay away from ‘home’ for a time then as Byrne reminds us we are alerted to our own post box, street signs, sounds and smells when we return.

Having worked with many organisations that seek to develop and change, it seems to me that the first step towards transformation should begin with ourselves. To disrupt our sense of the normal and everyday. If we want to do things differently, we must learn to experience things differently ~ sometimes by doing different things but more fundamentally by understanding (and often challenging) the way we choose to perceive, judge and make sense of our experiences.

Some readers may recognise one of the central principles of gestalt here ~ the reawakening of the senses and with this frenzy of awareness, the ability to recognise and reframe the patterns of perceiving, believing and behaving that are acting as barriers to our ability to change.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we can’t simply dismiss all organising categories as the result (I should imagine) would be some kind of endless flow of white noise ~ not dissimilar from another movie reference point, the scene in “2001 A Space Odyssey” where we travel through evolution and time at great speed. So, we must learn to both become aware of and if necessary suspend our default ways of organizing our experience. Some people are more able than others to achieve this and if you have ever used the MBTI (myers-briggs type inventory), those with a TJ in their profile (Thinking, Judging) might have more difficulty suspending the default approach than those with FP in the profile (Feeling, Perceiving). But we can work on that!

It’s not that our accustomed ways of seeing and understanding are wrong or bad, and indeed crossing the road might become a tad tricky if we massively reorganize our perception of what’s happening with the traffic. But the depth of challenge we face in transforming ourselves, our organisations and our communities demands a creativity of approach that is of equivalent depth.

Many readers will be familiar with the work of Howard Gardner and his pioneering work on multiple intelligences (1983). This new way of understanding intelligence ~ logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic & existential ~ was a significant challenge to the pre-existing theories of intelligence that focused only on an aptitude for the cognitive. There may be less awareness of “Project Zero”, where Gardner’s research on the breadth of multiple personalities identified a cohort of 0-4 year olds as 100% on the genius range of measurement, a cohort of 4-20 year olds where 10% were genius and finally measuring only 2% of the sample of those 20+ as genius. So, what was going on here? Commentators have agreed that essentially as we get older we limit our ability to experience and understand in ways that shut down our ability to be creative and reframe those experiences!

How might we better incubate the conditions for personal transformation?

Vary your ways of ‘seeing’ ~ I’m using seeing as shorthand for most of the human senses here. But if you walk home a regular route, change it and find different streets that you can walk down. If you walk in the park, stop and sniff the roses, especially if you find yourself thinking “Oh, those roses look nice”. If a tree looks like it has interesting bark or leaves ~ get closer and touch them.

Focus your awareness ~ if you are sitting in a room as you are reading this blog, stop for a minute or two and close your eyes. Now listen. What have you been shutting out? Try to focus on each sound separately then bring them together into a range of combinations.

Consider your usual approach ~ how you react to lateness, traffic, rain, people who don’t dress like you, people who don’t share your politics ~ and reflect on whether you might feel, think and respond in a different way from usual.

Listen more ~ seek to hear more about how other people feel, think & behave and how this impacts on your own perception.

Recognise and Challenge Groupthink ~ there is comfort and companionship when a group of people are all of one mind and agreement. But question the assumptions that are being made, whether or not agreement is a shortcut to blocking out other possibilities.

And finally ~ Learn to understand the basis upon which you are challenging your own default approaches and assumptions. What I’m getting at here is checking whether or not you are constantly replacing one patterned mindset with another one. Transformation rests on fluidity, flexibility and adaptability. It rests on personal disruption!

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