Employing Differences, Episode 14: What does _____ mean to us?

Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis,

Karen: 0:17

and I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is"What does____ mean to us?

Karen: 0:28

We probably should start with explaining that question a little bit. What we're toying with here is the frequency with which we see groups that are using a word that's a Big Word, that's important to them, that's a values-laden word, and there's not actually agreement about what it means. There's an assumption that we all know what we mean by that, and we're all in support of it, and we all are on the same page about this when actually, if you sort of look underneath it and get sort of into the detail of what does that word mean, that in fact, there's a lot of diversity within that.

Paul: 1:07

For example,"diversity" is one of those words, right? Sustainability, autonomy, freedom– there are lots of these concepts that we think we know what we mean by them, and when we talk with somebody else who also uses those words, it can be really easy to assume that we mean the same thing by them. It's not just big things either. It can be little things. Last year, my wife and I were planning a trip with my parents. We were doing this stuff together and we wanted to make sure that we were going to be able to figure out what we could do when we were on this vacation together and what things we should do separately. Because we recognized there were things where our approaches might be compatible and there were things where no, we should each go our own way and do a thing and come back together. They were gonna make a list of things they wanted to do,we were gonna make a list of things we were going to do, and we were going to compare them. I was getting together with my parents to go through this. My wife was not going to be there. She said to me,"So how are we going to handle the case where we're using the same word to mean different things?" And just hit me. That happens all the time. And then in the actual planning, that exactly happened– where it was"Oh yeah. We want to explore this particular area." And so my Spidey-senses went off and, I went,"Okay, how do we find out what we mean by that? Do we mean the same thing?" It turn out, no, we meant completely different things. What my parents meant was,"Oh yeah, we'd hire a guide and a Jeep to drive us around that area". My wife and I met,"Oh, we were just going to go hiking for a couple of days in that area." And as soon we said that, my mom said,"Well, maybe we should do that separately." But I think we often don't slow down to have the conversations to discover that we mean different things by the same word. We leap over that. We assume that because we've used the same word, we must mean the same thing.

Karen: 3:19

Yep. One of the things that I think that story illustrates so beautifully is that it's not essential that we come to agreement. Like it's actually really okay that we mean different things. The danger is when we don't know that will mean different things. So in that story, if you hadn't had that conversation, it was like,"Okay, we're going to explore the canyon," and your mom had just gone and rented a Jeep for everybody, now you're going to be in trouble about it. Whereas revealing the difference, it was like,"Okay, so that's the thing we're not going to do together." And that's okay, there is a really easy solution to working through that. I think that happens in business settings and in community settings all the time where we can work on two overlapping agendas or things that are moving in the same way, in the same direction in two different ways, two different strategies for reaching the same goal, and that can actually be perfectly fine as long as I'm not going along saying"How come you're not helping me? when you're not helping me because my focus or my direction or my particular path is very different than yours. We can get clear about, okay, we really have differences. Sometimes it will happen that actually we are so different in what we're intending that this is probably not the place for us to collaborate and we can work through what that means. But it's a much cleaner kind of conversation if you're understanding each other t han just if you're missing each other.

Paul: 4:59

Yeah. The net result of that whole conversation about what are we going to do was that at one point I just kind of said,"So it sounds like what's important to all of us is that we get together at the end of the day and have dinner together and talk about what we did." And, everybody went,"Yeah, that's actually what we want." We didn't have to do everything together, but we needed that touch point. We didn't want to spend a whole day not seeing each other at all. We wanted to have that moment where we came together. That's what a family vacation– that was the big concept that we were struggling with– a"family vacation" meant we all got to do things that we wanted to do and we came together as a family to talk about what we did and share and have a meal together. But we very easily could have never come to that conclusion and made each other miserable for six days.

Karen: 5:53

I think what you're pointing to is that what was important to be aligned on was the underlying value. So there, there was for your family, a value around spending time together and sharing. There was also a value around autonomy and people doing their own things and those values were shared. The differences in terms of how you wanted to go about implementing this plan turned out not to be a big deal because you identified them.

Paul: 6:24

Yeah. Now I'll point to a thing in that, which is, I think often the reason why we don't have the conversation about what do these things mean to us. One is we can make the assumption that we're using the same words, they mean the same things. The other is we may be afraid that we discover different things are important to each other. One of the concerns we had had when we were thinking through this, about having this conversation was, what if a family vacation means to one set of people that– Griswold-style– we all pile into the station wagon and do everything together, and for the other part of the group, it's more of"I need to have me time and do the things that I enjoy" things like that. What if we discover that we don't have those shared values, those compatible, approaches to it? That made approaching that conversation a little difficult and scary sometimes. And this was just a family vacation! Although sometimes in coaching we say that your family is the final exam for all of this stuff. But imagine how it is when you're undertaking a large collaborative project in an organization or all kinds of different things. Those conversations can be even more intimidating because you might be worried about what you might find.

Karen: 7:50

Related to that is the piece about what I call"company manners." That we stay in the polite space. One way to think about that is we talk about the weather but we don't talk about politics. We stay at that really generalized level of"We adopt sustainability as a value." None of us wants to destroy the planet. But what if sustainability to one person means"We get really diligent about personal choices for recycling and car sharing and things like that, and we support that in our company in some way." And to somebody else it means"We make capital investments in solar panels that don't impact my personal behavior or my life every day." One has a bigger impact on budget, one has a bigger impact on personal lifestyle choices and how time is spent. Those are really different. And I think that if we're not getting vulnerable, if we're not talking values about all kinds of things, it is that fear place that you're talking about, but also just habitual. We don't go deep and the differences can happen in the deep. That's also where I think that the most fundamental tying values happen is the deep. Realizing that we're all passionate, we just have different applications. I think that shared passion that gets discovered is the thing that keeps us connected enough to work through the differences.

Paul: 9:32

There's two pieces about that shared passion that I think are valuable. One of them is,"Hey, we recognize that this other person also believes deeply in this thing that we believe deeply in, even if it manifests in some slightly different ways." So we recognize we have that in common and so that allows us to grow together a bit. And also there's a cognitive piece to that when we disagree about how we're going to achieve that, we can at least come back and go,"Wait, we are both trying to achieve the same underlying thing. This person's way of going about it isn't making sense to me." Because I may not see how it's connected to sustainability. It's like, you're suggesting this thing and I'm going,"Wait, I thought we wanted– okay, let me back up. Let me assume for a moment that you're suggesting this because you see it as a way to promote our shared v alue o f sustainability. How might that be? Oh! Okay, I can see that." It's sort of a doorway into the other person's thought process and curiosity, because we've actually agreed that we do have this thing in common It c ould both help relationally, but it also can help at the cognitive level. It can help me get curious about,"Oh yeah, I see why you're suggesting that. I don't think it works that way, but now we can have a conversation about that." That's a much easier conversation when we recognize that we do have this thing in common and we're proposing different ways of achieving it.

Karen: 11:05

I think most of the time you can find common ground around. Sometimes the common ground is we're not in conflict. I'm going to work on it my way and you're going to work on it your way, and we're not going to disrupt that, but we're also not going to expect a ton of mutual support and that's all fine. Or it might be that things get revealed and there may be shifts in beliefs or expectations that can happen. And in the rare case it happens that actually fundamentally, we want to do two different things– they're good things, they just aren't compatible within the capacity of the organization– then we figure out,"Okay, well, what are we going to do about that, tn whatever way?"

Paul: 11:57

So what we're saying here today is that we often don't go to that place of exploring what we mean by the same word, sometimes just because we don't think we need to and we're not used to it. We don't have that habit of exploring it. We don't have the habit of going for depth. As a result of not having that habit, sometimes we're afraid of what we might find. But what we can find there is a really powerful way of working through whatever else is going to come up later on. You can do it now, or you can do it later. It's probably easier and cheaper to do it now rather than waiting until everything has gotten into a tangled mess and now we have to try and follow the thread back to the beginning.

Karen: 12:49

I think that's going to do it for us today until next time. I'm Karen Gimnig

Paul: 12:53

And I'm Paul Tevis, and this has been Employing Differences.