the people are the content
Transcript of this video:
I heard recently about a big corporate’s experience
of executive leadership development programs,
which they’d been sending their top people on.
And what they realised was,
although these programs were very highly rated,
their people weren’t really experiencing a lot
of changes a result.
And what they realised was that essentially the problem was
that their executives were already, as they put it full.
They were already full of ideas and information
and concerns and feelings.
And what these programs were attempting to do was
to shove more ideas in where there wasn’t really any space.
They realised that what their people really needed was
more like a space to unpack what my friend Rob Poynton
and calls a counterspace.
And a lot of my work has been moving in that direction.
I think I made one of these videos a while ago about the
idea that the people are the content: that instead
of arriving with things to tell people,
you wanna find out more about
what they’re already experiencing
and what they already know and feel.
So I guess I’ve been doing that for 12 years
with Unhurried conversations.
I’ve also been going to some conversational experiments run
by my friend Mark McCartney,
where we have long intentional silences.
And the interesting thing is that
after those, when there is space to talk,
people actually talk quite slowly
and you start to feel like you are thinking
with other people.
And there’s a lot less sort of sharing of just data
and information and a lot more reflecting on experience.
And this month too, I’ve been running an Unhurried Practice
Group with my friend Jordan Soliday,
which has been a really satisfying experience.
We very deliberately arrive
with very few ideas about what we want to do.
We open a lot of space for people to talk
and just in the relaxed unpacking of what we’re thinking
and feeling as a group, I start to think differently
about my experience, I come up
with some fresh insights and ideas.
And
nobody’s really telling anybody anything.
We’re in a space where we are discovering together.
As I think my friend Jordan put it,
there’s that delight in,
in actually really thinking like we’re thinking together,
not by exchanging bricks of information,
but by actually feeling our feeling, our thinking happening
live in the space.
So this is gonna be something I plan to do a lot more of.
Photo by Amritanshu Sikdar on Unsplash
