Be Critical and Ask for Evidence
- tom12973
- Jun 28, 2017
- 3 min read
The last two posts have looked at changing our perspectives about the formal things we do in organizations and the expectations we have about our interactions. Changing our perspective tends to be an internal and reflective process. This post is about taking those perspectives and making them more visible. More visible when confronted with OUCH! producing activities. It is about saying things are full of shit (as noted in the last post) but through gestures that may produce responses that keep things moving forward!
There an awful lot of OUCH! producing activities built into our organizations and thrust upon us by so called ‘experts’. Due to this I think it is best to adopt a critical perspective about most mainstream and formal things that happen in organizations. This way you are constantly looking for the subtleties that so easily can slip by us and end up creating OUCH!. This doesn’t mean you have to be always negative or resistant, just be very sensitive to those things that are asked of us, or we are exposed to that create OUCH!.
What might some of these things be? In terms of the interaction model it will be anything that eliminates or ignores the left facing arrow in the gesture response dynamic, anything that eliminates or ignores the bottom right arrow in the right loop ( the arrow depicting a change of intentions based on present interaction).
When these two parts of the interaction model are eliminated or ignored it is the clearest sign that what you are being asked to do or being exposed to is somehow supposed to create certainty and this means OUCH! at a very real and personal level.
Some common examples of things that do this:
Almost anything that has a certain number of ‘steps’ that when taken are supposed to end up with some concrete result.
Almost anything that has a defined end point that is supposed to be reached by someone who has organizational power.
Almost any single learning event that is supposed to change behavior or produce a concrete result.
Almost any acronym that when applied is supposed to create a result of some kind (this is a variation on the first point).
Almost any set of behaviors that are supposed to create success of some sort.
Given the above you can see why it is good to start off being critical!
From this critical perspective you will readily see the OUCH! causing things we are all exposed to. From here it is good to then ask for evidence that any of these activities will actually do what they are espoused to do.
In my experience when you do ask for evidence there are often two common outcomes:
You will be given evidence based on ‘stories’ of when these activities were done in other organizations and the result was positive. This is very common ‘evidence’ when experts are involved.
Your question gets answered without evidence ever being mentioned but that it is necessary to do something and this something is good. This is very common within the power dynamics of organizational hierarchy.
You now have a choice to make since neither of the above is evidence that these activities will produce what they are supposed to do. Your choice is whether or not you want to push harder and risk entering into conflict or just leave things alone, say this is full of shit in your quiet voice and apply what was discussed in the last two posts.
In my opinion, in our given organizational environments, either choice is viable, sensible and just fine. If you do choose to push harder, you may find you end up with some very positive and powerful interactions. Personally I am finding this is occurring somewhat more often and this is certainly positive but I cannot say why this might be the case. Only you know the details of your situation and which choice would be best.
Now, if you are in a position of organizational power I do think you need to choose to push harder. I do think you need to enter into these interactions about evidence and see where they go; perhaps reducing OUCH!. Keep in mind that when you really dig into this idea of evidence, when it comes to people, you will likely not find much; remember with people it’s always an experiment! Nevertheless, there are choices to be made, things to try, things you think are better to try than others. There is your own left loop of experience and the left lops of others, along with the right loops of intentions that will inform your choices.
Being critical and asking for evidence, exposes OUCH!, after that you move forward doing the best you can, even with very little evidence that your choices will work or not. And that movement forward will be a little less burdened by the expectations of certainty.
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