life doesn't follow the instructions
Transcript of this video:
Once upon a time, a management consultant
met a millipede, as the millipede was slowly progressing,
across the surface,
and the consultant was fascinated
by the actions of the multiple legs.
What you’re doing is absolutely fascinating.
He said, I, I’d like to be able
to understand more clearly how you do it.
It might be useful. The millipede shrugged
and said, sure, help yourself.
And so for a long period of time,
the consultant minutely studied the actions of the millipede
and went off and produced a model of it
and spread it around the world.
And came back to the millipede a few months later
to thank the creature,
because the model had been enormously successful.
And in fact, he’d been able to turn it into a metaphor
for organisational change in complexity.
And the millipede was a bit puzzled by this
’cause he didn’t really know what organisational change was,
but the consultant said, would you like to see the model?
And the millipede shrugged and said, oh, okay then.
So the millipede stopped to peruse this document,
and was rather startled
and impressed to realise that what it had been doing,
taken for granted, was actually rather complicated.
And after studying this document
for a considerable period period of time, found
that it could no longer walk.
I tell this story because I’m constantly struck
by how often apparently clear, explicit models of how
to do things that are being perpetrated on some
places like LinkedIn.
kind of push my buttons because I read them…
I see that on some level the instructions make sense,
but I have this deep suspicion
that they don’t actually help us to do the performance
that’s being indicated.
Tthis is probably why when it comes
to organisations like, I dunno,
the International Coaching Federation
or the International Association of Facilitators
or whatever, I’m a bit of a Marxist: not a Karl Marxist,
but a Groucho Marxist.
You know, the guy who said, I don’t wanna belong to any club
that would have me as a member
because I read their instructions and codes.
And I feel like, yes, I can see
that in some ways this feels like a good description
of the sort of work that I do,
but my gut is going, no, this isn’t it.
You can reduce complex stuff to a series
of instructions, but in doing so,
I think you often miss the absolute essence of it.
The things that, that I felt are intuitive or visceral.
And one of the reasons I’m working on this idea
of practice groups is that I think the world
of personal development
and training is awash
with apparently attractive instructions
and principles that actually suppress our ability
to experiment and explore and learn.
by practice. That millipede would only recover its capacity
to walk by kind
of forgetting you’d ever learnt the instructions
and going back to first principles
of feeling its way into the movement.
And that’s one of the things that I’m up
to exploring this idea of practice groups.
I.
Photo by Brazil Topno on Unsplash
