Why sticking your head out the window is a good thing!

Did you ever notice when you blow in a dog’s face he gets mad at you? But when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window.
Steve Bluestone

I love this quote. Mostly because it is fun and conjures up an image of several dogs I have known over the years – but also because it  causes me to reflect on how important context is and how significant who or what I am “relating” to is in shaping the response or reaction I have and what we can do together.

Over the past few months I have been working with a number of people who have spoken a great deal about their sense of finding themselves working in situations that feel unfamiliar to them and in which they are having great difficulty making sense of what is going on or knowing what to do and how to act.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that, “… a philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.” It strikes me is that many of the situations these people describe sound very similar. Metaphorically they have found themselves in a “landscape” that, while consisting of familiar elements is hard to find your way about in. For Wittgenstein a good outcome of philosophical discussion was when one could say, “Now I know how to go on.” Similarly a good result in the complex situations managers and leaders find themselves in can be as simple as being able to say, “Now we know how to go on”.

Summarising Wittgenstein’s view of communication John Shotter suggests that it is ” … primarily a matter of people becoming oriented in relation to each other, of them coming to ‘know their way about’ within each other’s worlds and how ‘to go on’ with each other within the shared worlds constructed in their meetings.”

The difference between this and what I might normally have done in the past really gets me thinking. What if, in the past, I had paid more attention to finding my way about within the ‘worlds’ of the people I met in the landscape rather than looking for a guide in prior experience, “best practice” or logical analysis. Looking back it is clear to me now, that whatever success or resolution was achieved in these situations came as we “muddled through”. What made that muddling through work was the conversational “meetings”. Not the formulaic ones so much as the ones “… where there are misunderstandings, speaking at cross purposes, conflicts, and contradictions, with personalised voices stressing different points of view (and sometimes talking at the same time).”

Two questions are significant for me this week:

• What are the “meetings” that might enable me to stick my head out the window into a different context?
• How will I know one of these “meetings” if I stumble across it?