Hold the Gold!
essay
It wouldn't be telling tales out of school to mention, skipping the personalized details, one extraordinary moment that occurred in the course of squareONE’s work with a client. This is a good way to showcase examples of how exploratory learning works.
This case involved an impromptu session conducted on behalf of a participant in a business planning group. The gentleman described a conundrum he was faced with in developing his business idea. He was clear about his capabilities and had a visionary business concept. Yet, he was befuddled about how the operational parts fit together.
The standard business planning regimen reinforced the need to fit the parts into a coherent whole yet in doing so, he could no longer easily relate to the concrete result. (I intuited to myself: 'the thread of his personal vision couldn’t survive the process of bringing the parts together.') Alienated from the result, he felt he was doing something incorrectly. He was stuck! It didn’t feel good.
From my perspective, stuckness is always of interest because it is rooted to a specific, activated, set of assumptions. (In my work, assumptions are where the action is!) I wondered about the two dimensions of the problem. The first is the concrete, external mode at which concrete assumptions were operative. In this case the mode required an explicit description of parts to be chained into a coherent 'workable' whole. But this concrete whole no longer captured his vision. His vision had been lost in the translation.
(Note also that the presumptive conceit of many kinds of planning, whether it proceeds from a set of facts 'on the ground' to a general prospect, or, from a general prospect to suppositions about what the facts need to be, is the assumption of deduction or induction as a modes for reasoning about how something unfolds. As Henry Mintzberg pointed out long ago, the primary tacit posit of planning is that the actual facts, finally, don't matter very much.)
The second dimension was the feeling space through which he related to the external mode. Reflecting upon this interior space, it felt to him like he was ‘not getting it’, and, most telling, he felt his personal vision was lost in its translation into a concrete, operational description.
Here I recognized another crucial feature of the challenge. The seeming loss of his vision provoked cognitive dissonance. It was also anxiety provoking because he felt suddenly incapable. He told me, “It isn’t rocket science, so why can't I get it?” This to me, was where we were to start our exploration.
There are several ways to approach this kind of “stuckness”. You can alter the feeling space and hope to evoke an insightful interior re-experience. You start from this feeling space and then do any number of things to track how it moved from positive to negative. In a sense, this is a way of working from the interior space out into the exterior space.
However, it’s often much easier and more efficient to alter the mode of the first (impersonal, external) dimension. One strategy is to alter the problem via a fresh and unfamiliar mode. From this new perspective it may be possible to evoke a totally different feeling space. When the mode shifts, the feeling space may shift. This shift, which occurs at the level of assumptions, very often causes the solution, or insight, to emerge. Ha! If 'cause' is the word for it!
It was my hope the problem would literally disappear should the circumstances of the two dimensions integrate and be transformed into something rich enough to allow my client to continue to resonate to his inspired, visionary idea.
I took a flier. I grabbed some wax candles, some small gift boxes, and told him we would put together a model of his business idea using the objects as stand-ins for the various business parts. We built a model on the top of a table. I began by having him feel and describe for me what ‘outputs’ of the parts and model were really meaningful for him. We brain-stormed together but did not restrict our playing around with ideas about possible outputs to only possibilities that were recognizably concrete, and, businesslike. The resulting conceptual richness brought his visionary concept back into the picture we were now developing together.
In the end he saw that what was most meaningful in his vision was the very “unbusinesslike” nature of what he hoped his business would produce, would 'output'! In this case it was community, information, and interactivity between disparate stakesholders.
Those are very soft and somewhat intangible products, but they also were, for him, very rich and resonant. Once we had those substantial concepts front and center we brainstormed about what the inputs could possibly be.
We brought together this rich data set and then it was easy enough to align the candles and boxes together to depict a business mechanism that would effect the production of the outputs from the inputs. He immediately saw his vision sustained by the new model, and, the old problem vanished.
He was tickled to see his business represented by a table full of household objects. For the first time he could wholly sense just how viable his vision was and how it might be implemented. ...a prototypical “a-ha” built out of candles and boxes.
From my own perspective as coach and facilitator I had reorganized his perspective based in tried and true principals. Among those principles were several decisive ones.
First, I didn’t state what the outcome was going to be.
Second, I told him we were simply going to play around.
Third, I immediately brought into the process objects, not words. In other words, I unhooked him from the problematic dimension and mode.
Fourth, I didn’t implement anything having to do with a businesslike way of viewing the problem. (Quite the contrary...!) The meta-framing was altered from the anticipatory 'I must get this at the level of a business understanding' to: 'what I in fact get at the level of experience'.
Fifth, I not only permitted but enthusiastically supported his creative generation of outputs and inputs in his own words. (In moving back toward experientially salient descriptions, the meaning scheme begun to be transformed.)
Sixth, when we had in hand the rich data, we didn’t reduce it by expressly not proposing that it would now be required to be partly destroyed as matter of businesslike practicality.
Finally, the re-representation of the mechanics of his business in the candles and boxes was implemented to represent a wholistic depiction of his business idea. This made all the difference because only in this way could the richness of his vision be wholly translated too.
The abstract conception I hold here is resonance with 'inherancy' rather than with 'adherancy'.
The crucial design assumptions I silently invoked were: let’s &emdash;above all&emdash; retain richness and an appreciative context as we proceed. In other words, let’s keep the “forest” in positive focus and see if we can keep it in focus all the way through to the end of the process. And, let's move along the path where the value of his vision is appreciated and protected; in other words, let's hold the gold.
In short: hold the gold, play, appreciate, and, bingo! - shift the mode, shift the feeling space. (As the exclamation goes: “wul-lah!”)
(August 2002)