Changing the conversation
Our social interactions play a role in shaping our brain. We know that repeated experiences sculpt the synaptic connections and rewire our brain. Our relationships gradually frame the neural circuitry. Being chronically depressed by others or being emotionally nourished and enriched has lifelong impacts on us. This is of course unwelcome news to someone whose relationships tend towards the negative but it also points out to where the reparative possibilities might be.
We can no longer see our minds as independent and separate but as thoroughly social. Our mental life is co-created in an interconnected network. The human mind is perhaps amazingly not located and stored in an individual. Rather, what we have called the individual mind is something that arises continuously in relationships between people.
Communication starts with acknowledgement. It is about granting attention to others and making room for them in our lives. Thus how we connect has tremendous significance. Our (management) attention should be on who is talking and who is being silenced? Who is being included and who is being excluded?
Who do I acknowledge and who acknowledges me?
Changing the way we communicate is the way we change organizations. Changing the conversation is not a major program or change process. It is about understanding and influencing participation. It is sometimes about new connections, new conversations, new agendas, and new people taking actively part. It is often about asking different kind of questions and pointing to different kinds of issues.
There can be no change without changes in the patterns of communication.
Organizations of any kind, no matter how large or how small they are, are continuously reproduced and transformed in the ongoing communicative interaction. The patterns of interaction in an organization are highly correlated with its performance.
Thus we should pay much more attention to the strength and number of relationships and wideness and depth of networked thinking.
The distinctive characteristic of a high productivity organization is the capacity to generate expansive emotional states. Low connectivity, self-orientation and negativity can trap organizations and people into rigid patterns of thinking and limiting behaviour. “There is a human habit of getting stuck in a certain way of thinking” as Murray Gell-Mann put it.
The new management challenge is to identify the patterns of interaction behind low productivity and low creativity, and accordingly high productivity and high creativity. It is about analyzing how and when we get stuck and how and when our common movement of thought is fast and fluid. Do we get stuck in advocacy or complacency? Or in self-absorption? Is it a result of general negativity?
The goal is to create emotional spaces that open possibilities for effective action, creativity and learning. It is not about having common goals and sharing the same values. It all starts with acknowledgment and recognition evolving into a more responsive and attuned sense of consciousness between different people having different backgrounds and thus different approaches.
What would it be like to live in a world where acknowledgement was the accepted rule, that we loved to fulfill, any time, any place, and with anybody.
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