“Help me understand …” — how Gene B. relates to Colombo and what the implications may be.
“How often have you washed your rental car”, Gene B. asked. I was puzzled. Well, it seems it s a distant relationship between me and my rental car, or, I am messy. Well, let us talk about the first mess: a relationship and its implications.
Relationships, as they unfold in a theater play right in front of our eyes, relationships which are knitted into a story which we later take home with us. “Try the same by giving someone a script, have them read it and ask after 5 minutes whether they got the ghist of it.”, Gene B. says. Storytelling is about digestion, about the time and the moment where people, themselves, trip over things. “People want to buy, not be told to buy”, Gene B. says in another context. Make people feel smarter, not stupid by implying (hear me saying, “Can I help you?”) they needed to fix something. Oh, and people buy hope, Gene B. cites the late T. Levitt.
So Gene B. calls himself a storyteller, not a systems thinker. A man who started his career with no one less than the late Stafford Beer. Interesting.
Maybe one could call Gene B. a (systems) narrator, guiding individuals and teams to understand actually how smart they are. How? By constantly stimulating them to ask (eachother) questions, discover the system via participation and hence make them feel the ownership — of “everything”. Gene B. says that it does not matter where you start. It is important to start, admitting though that you have a problem and willing to find your own answers. As “everything” is connected, it does not even really matter if you start creating your first relationship model by calling one dot “cat”, another dot “mouse” and connecting the two with an arrow labled “chases”, Gene B. tells in an anecdote. After a few balancing and reinforcing loops, meaning is automatically created for one and shared/presented to many — this is what acting in systems with reflection, advocacy and inquiry is all about. “Aha-truth” will naturally be revealed — through this systems enablement. Giving “just” back a sense, a sense of an approach, independent capacity for understanding is naturally (self-)generated.
In sharp contrast to this approach: giving (expert) answers.
Stakeholders themselves need to understand what the problem is and where it is situated, creating a sense of cohesion, seeing the whole, and generating a sense of committment and responsibilty for ones actions, their implications, understanding relationships and hence understanding who is affected, opening up and re-connecting. Enlightement will follow! Like re-connecting to a long lost friend, maybe. May this friend be labled intution, for real? Or sensing, suspending?
So, “.. and?” what is the influence … “ … and?” the influence of this — we could go endless, not setting any boundaries. We may have to move from qualitative to quantitative when asking questions like “how much …?”, “how long …”, “when …” and start simulating — but for now, we just stick with good old Colombo, who frequently stimulated the murderer to confess by simply asking
“Help me understand.”
