Week 47, 2019 — Towards curiosity

Being flown in for workshops is a surreal experience. You’re fully immersed in a bubble, partly of your own making but as an outsider. After a flurry of hard work, intense focus and a slew of unhealthy habits, you drop back into the regular programming at home. A bit like parallel universes. I have multi-day workshops for two different clients in two different countries and it’s giving me a bit of whiplash.

I can’t write about the client assignments so let me record a few thoughts about a book instead. This week I read “From Contempt to Curiosity - Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate” by Caitlin Walker, the originator of Systemic Modelling. It’s the Clean Language approach applied to organizational contexts - a dialog-based process that unearths and then helps us shape the metaphors that underpin our mental models.

It’s a wonderful book and I read it in one sitting, then went back through it again through Kindle Highlights. It’s great to follow the journey of how different hypotheses and experiments over 15 years build upon each other. More of our consulting work should have a stronger red thread - it’s definitely something I want to be more intentional about. The tools seem to be quite rigorous and actionable, so I’m looking forward to digging into further material to see what I can put in practice.

I’ll quote the opening and closing statements here:

"This book is about attention. It explores how the quality of the attention we pay to ourselves, to the stories we hear, to the people we meet and to the world at large, profoundly affects the things we are able to think and therefore the things we are able to do."

"We have an approach for creating the time and space that we need to connect and to collaborate - a process for inspiring capability in ourselves, and in one another, to move away from contempt, towards curiosity, compassion and love. So that more of us are able to be at our best, much more of the time."