Avoiding aboutism by leaning towards experimentation in teams
Transcript of this video:
A friend once told me, that Amazon Kindle apparently keeps very detailed statistics, which they publish, on who’s buying these eBooks? And how much of those books are they actually reading?
And apparently, the category that is, as it were, most bought but least read, are self-help books. Which makes a kind of sense to me because I think the temptation is to buy the book with a title that suggests we can address a challenge, and then not realize that we actually have to go to the trouble of reading the book, and then, of course, doing something with the knowledge that we’ve gained from reading it in order to make any progress.
And it seems like a lot of people buy the title and then pretty much give up. And there’s an organizational version of it, which was talked about in a book published I think about 20 years ago, called “The Knowing-Doing Gap”.
Which captures, I think, the similar problem at an organizational level, that it’s possible to have quite knowledgeable sounding conversations about a challenge, but for nothing practical to actually change.
And it’s a phenomenon I see in the groups I work with. My friend, Lee Ryan, has a term, “aboutism”, which she uses to describe what sometimes happens in groups, where you feel like they’re talking apparently knowledgeably about a challenge.
And yet, you know, you find your attention is starting to drift, and you get a sense that nothing is going to change because we’re just doing aboutism, we’re talking about a thing, without a sense of anything much changing in relation to it.
Now, I have no miracle cures for this, except I think it’s good to name it if you think it’s happening. And I think in my work with groups, I’m always leaning towards, “Well, can we practice that? Can we experiment with that? Can we do some prototypes?”
Even in the group, in the room right now, can we prototype some new behaviour to explore what might happen together, in an experimental way? As a bit of an antidote to what I think otherwise just becomes a kind of analysis-paralysis.
Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash
