Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 20: Is this still working?

September 29, 2020 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 20: Is this still working?
Show Notes Transcript

"One of the challenges is recognizing when the thing that has helped us get to where we are isn't useful for the context that we're in anymore. It was useful and things have now changed, so we need to change what we're doing. It's a thing that would work for us in another situation and probably will work for us in another situation in the future –and it's stopped working now. When it is something that's so comfortable, so routine, such a habit for us that can be really, really hard to see, much less admit."

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Karen:

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

Paul:

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is,"Is this still working?"

Karen:

I love the inflection you put on that. And really what we're pointing here to is that"it" can be almost anything. Particularly, we want to look at the things that are most comfortable, most familiar, most integral– the things we do every day, that we do every time, that we do routinely– especially if we do them so routinely that we really don't even notice that we're doing them. These are the things that we're talking about in this question today, of the importance of pausing now and again, to say, is this still working?

Paul:

In some ways, the hardest thing is to ask the question. There's a lot of reasons for that. One is that every group that I've ever worked with, every organization I've ever been part of, and every person that I've ever worked with has always been in that place of feeling like they have more to do than they can get done. Stopping to reflect on what they're doing? It's hard in those situations to give yourself the space to do it. We set often these expectations on ourselves, or we feel we have these expectations on us to get more done. One of the first things that gets crowded out is just even asking the question,"Is this working?"

Karen:

Related to that is when we're in that space of"we have so much to do, we have more to do than we can get done," we're sort of in that drowning and our l ifeboats are these routine things that we know how to do that we've been doing that are comfortable, that are familiar. Like that's the ease in our day. That's the space where we feel like we're good. So the last thing in the world we want to do is question whether we should keep them.

Paul:

Yeah, one of the challenges is recognizing when the thing that has helped us get to where we are isn't useful for the context that we're in anymore. It was useful and things have now changed, so we need to change what we're doing. It's a thing that would work for us in another situation and probably will work for us in another situation in the future–and it's stopped working now. When it is something that's so comfortable, so routine, such a habit for us that can be really, really hard to see, much less admit.

Karen:

I think the thing that makes us see it– usually totally against our will and lacking intention– is when someone new comes in. Whether that's a new member of the team or a new member of a community or an outside consultant that we bring in specifically for this purpose– that's actually probably the most useful thing outside consultants do is see the things we no longer see– and usually when that happens, it shows up to some degree in some of sort of conflict."This new person is trying to change everything! They just don't understand us!" And the new person is saying,"I thought you wanted all my new ideas and I'm trying to bring them and you won't change anything!" And everybody's right. All of that is happening.

Paul:

There is a degree to which that resistance to hearing that the thing is no longer working comes from the person who's pointing it out maybe not being the most skillful in pointing it out. This is certainly a trap that I have fallen into in the past, working with groups where they're like,"We want to get better at this thing." And I'm like,"Great, here are all the things you're doing wrong." And they're like,"How dare you?" And it's because I said it in a not particularly useful way, not actually acknowledging that those things used to work, that those things were valuable. And that's because as a new person, I don't have that temporal context. I don't know the history. I don't know how things got to be the way that they are and how those things were helpful and why my questioning of them can be seen as a threat or an attack.

Karen:

The corollary thing that almost always happens, I think in conjunction with that is that as I'm questioning the way things are, I'm saying,"Let's do this thing," completely ignorant that that thing has already been tried. And so they're like,"You have all these ideas, we've already tried those things." And the truth is that probably there were reasons those things didn't work. They may still be good ideas worth exploring, but as you're saying, when the new person's coming in with,"We should do this thing," without the history of knowing how that thing has been tried or how something similar to that has been tried or how painful it was when we tried it the last time, that you don't quite get to what we're really looking at, which is collectively, as a group with all voices on the table, can we have this conversation about,"Is the thing working?" The question isn't"Did it used to work?" The question is,"Is it working now?" We can totally acknowledge it used to work. It was the thing that saved us once upon a time. It can have all kinds of emotional weight and still not be the thing that's working now.

Paul:

Yeah. One of the things that I like to do with groups when we're able to have the conversation about,"Okay, so what might we consider changing?" I like to start from that place of,"So what's the result you want to get? What's the outcome that you want to get that you're not getting now?" We're going to start there because if we can't generate alignment around that, it's not worth having the conversation about what to do differently. Once we can have the conversation, we can look at it through the lens of what is it we're trying to get. We can start to have a conversation about"How would we know if something was still working or not? What are the things that we would all notice or that we could discuss that would tell us whether or not something was working?" And it's about– in cases where I'm brought in from the outside– stopping that place of my judgements of"This is working or not," getting curious about what are the things that I am noticing that's telling me that something is or is not working, and actually moving that conversation outwards to the group. And just saying,"If there was something that wasn't working, how would we know?" And then we can sort of collectively have that conversation– align on that before we then go to,"So given that, what are we noticing that might not be working now that might used to have been working?" And that conversation is very different because it means that the group is actually coming to that conclusion about what's not working rather than me saying,"I'm going to tell you what's not working."

Karen:

Right. And I think the other piece I want to make sure we track here is that sometimes there are very comfortable, very routine, very unconscious kinds of things that absolutely are working. And they may be working and doing things that we don't quite realize that they're doing. They may be creating group cohesion. They may be holding group identity. They may be having a connection kind of thing that happens. So every meeting, we start with this moment of silence thing, and somebody new comes in and says,"Why are we wasting a minute on a moment of silence?" But in fact, that's part of how, as a group, we know that we're here in this group. It really is the thing that what we need to do is get the new folks integrated into that. But they need to hear the story, they need to know where it came from, they need to be invited into that identity in a really meaningful way. So I want both point to, yes, it's often the most comfortable things that we should really look at, and sometimes when we look at them, the answer is"Absolutely, we should keep them."

Paul:

Yeah. What that leads to is the thing that I often recommend to groups to do is try doing something different, but don't commit to it. Like, what would happen if we didn't start our meetings with a moment of silence for like a week or two, however long is meaningful to give us some information about it and then we'll reflect on it. But we're not saying,"Alright, we think it's not working, so we're just going to stop." One of the ways we can find out"Is this still working?" is by stopping doing it and seeing what's different. Now, the thing is that the first thing that will be different is it's going to feel weird and uncomfortable, because those are well worn paths, in our brains and in our environment, and so it's gonna feel weird. Then we can sort of reflect on the learning, like,"What did we notice about that?" And maybe it's we still go back to doing that, but we do it in a slightly different way based on what we learned from our experiment. I find getting groups to buy into,"Hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to bound this experiment. We're going to try this one thing for this limited period of time. And then we will revisit the decision." People are much more willing to commit to that than they're willing to say,"We're going to stop doing this thing."

Karen:

So just to sort of summarize the various both-ands of where we've been: I think what we're saying is that it's both important to ask the question and to allow either answer to emerge. Is it still working? It could be yes, could be no. It's important for newcomers, who are often the source of information about this, both for them to be sensitive to what has been, and for those who've been here for a while to be sensitive to the sort of new and excited energy and how to integrate that, so it's the both sides of that. And that we really want to make this both an intentional kind of practice that we stop and look, and we ask some questions in certain ways, and also that we're aware of it when it just shows up– despite our intentions– that we can make use of it when it is live, however it arrives.

Paul:

Yeah. Well, that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.