Seeing the same elephant

In the Indian parable of the six blind men and the elephant, each is very convinced about what he is facing from the way he is interacting with it. Yet when they share with each other what each thinks the strange creature they are facing is, it is clear there is no cohesion in their views.

This often happens in organizations. A team is asked to deal with a challenge, but people are hesitant to ask questions for fear of looking incompetent or unsure. After all, we are paid to solve problems, so when we are given one, we need to deal with it. A few days or weeks or months later, gaps and cracks start to appear. The solutions are not really working. What HR thought is not really compatible with what the production or the finance team has in mind. A lot of bickering appears about whose solution is better and why this or that won't work. Very rarely does the team go back to the starting point: what is the problem we are dealing with ?

That is a critical phase we spend a lot of time on when we apply the Action Learning methodology with a team facing a challenge. In fact, we will not talk about or suggest solutions, until the team has reached a shared understanding of what the problem is, and has written it down. Only then will the team go into looking for appropriate solutions. Spending time to reach this key point has clear advantages, as was demonstrated again in a recent experience.

The team had already spent 2 sessions (1/2 day each time) to work on the challenge, to look at it from different angles. Asking questions and identifying actions each of them took after the session, to try and get a better understanding. A better understanding of the problem the organization is facing, not a better understanding of solutions. And when, during the 3rd session, the team came to a consensus about what the real root cause of the problem was (and wrote it out in full, see the picture), two things happened:

(1) there was a real sense of achievement and of having made progress ...
(2) with a clear agreement of the problem, the solutions became almost obvious - although maybe not easy to implement.

The first point about sense of achievement is really critical. After all, the team had "only" reached a shared agreement of the problem ! They hadn't even solved it yet !! However, the positive energy that had built up in the earlier sessions, and the clear consensus of where the root cause lay, ensured that the team could quickly come up with a very comprehensive list of proposals (in the 4th and final session) that was proposed to management. And it was a clear team effort, with everyone feeling 100% at ease with the solutions.

When you keep on dealing with the same problem year after year, ask yourself the question: is my team really seeing the same elephant ?

A Window on Your Self

The Johari window has been around since the middle of the last century. It is a tool to help people think about themselves, and how others see them. The term comes from the first names of the psychologists who developed it, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham.

The first quadrant is the "open" space, with the things others know about us, and we also know about ourselves. The "hidden" space is that which we keep private: we are aware of these elements but chose to keep them secret with certain people.

In the "blind" space are those aspects that others know about me, but I don't see myself. These are my blind spots. I may think of myself as a strong decision-maker, but others might agree I do not genuinely listen to inputs. You cannot become aware about your blind spots by yourself. Discovering blind spots is difficult because our first reaction to discovering something unknown about ourselves, from someone else, will be denial. Or justification ... "Well, I might be like that but that's because ...".

For the "hidden" space, the choice is with us whether to disclose information about ourselves to the people we work with. For the "blind" space, it is up to others to decide whether they want to help us discover our blind space. It happens all too often that "everyone" in the office agrees that the boss does this or that, and lots of stories go around between the team members. Yet when you ask if anyone has ever given the feedback about this particular behavior, the reply is often that people assume the boss probably knows but does not care to change.

The word Jahori is made up from the names Joseph and Harrington. But apparently it is also a name in Swahili and means "something of value". Self-awareness is a key value in developing yourself. Self-awareness also includes discovering your blind space. Whether you manage to become aware of your blind space depends on the relations you have created with your team members, and how you make them feel about giving you feedback.