Building a community voice to re-balance professional decision making.

How can we share deep sense, insights and meaning without context?

How can we build trusted relationships without doing things together?

How can we share and collaborate without identity and belonging with a community?

To set a context in which to share ideas people often start conversations with “In the olden days…” or “Back in my time…” or “Once upon a time…” or by contrast “In modern times…” Without context, it is very difficult to interpret what someone means. Even in setting context, shared insights, opinions and perspectives can easily be misread because the readers experiences, and therefore their sense-making and interpretation processes, come for a different framework.

Traditional education in the western world for a long time has tried to manage this by trying to get everyone to think and interpret the same. It teaches us, from the day we are born, what is right and what is wrong, how to colour between the lines, to write THE answer in the box and display your workings in maths, so that the teacher can see that you have followed the taught formula. This helps us towards groupthink, find a soul mate with the same mindset, produce 2.3 children, respect the hierarchy and “live happily ever after.” Or does it?

Although there is nothing wrong with this as such, there are limitations to “being normal”. Fitting into the familiar patterns helps us to be more efficient and adopt cultural norms, respect our peers, refine “best-practices” etc. This makes us feel comfortable because we know what is happening and we can plan ahead. However, this assumes a simple world in which everything remains the same. Our reality is that change is constant. Over the past few decades, the world has shifted from the standardisation of everything into processes and ensuring people comply, by documenting and auditing what they did (and comparison to the predetermined KPI’s). Society reluctantly and slowly moved towards making occasional changes (shifting the current status slightly). Then we started doing periodic transformations (shifting what we do and how) to update to new trends. However, we are now existing in a constant state of transformation. That is, everything is shifting all the time and in short timeframes. By the time you think you have “THE answer”, the question has changed, and opportunity has transformed into something else.

So how do we prepare ourselves to perform in this new reality?

Perhaps more importantly, how do our future leaders confidently read this unpredictable modern world and take us on an enjoyable wave towards sustained success?

The exciting thing is as children, we already know! However, our outdated way of educating our future generations removes this from their experiences. Ever watched what a child does when they see a sign “Wet Paint”? Of course, children wander over and put their finger on it to test the “assumption”. If it is wet, they learn something. If it is dry, they learn something. They subconsciously understand some critical analysis set in a real context, and backed by action stimulates learning. They naturally challenge a theoretical statement (that may have been true at one point in time, but now is not) is a good way to make sense of “What Is”. This exploratory mindset enables them to learn and develop at the fastest rate possible in our lives. However, in order to “mould them into good society adults”, we replace this more unpredictable natural and social style of learning into one that is quantitative and highly structured. Not wrong as such, just suboptimal and imbalanced, because it favours predetermined answers and behaviours over adaptability and creativity. Ultimately, this standardised approach to discovering the right answer is limited by what we already know. A more unstructured and exploratory (divergent) approach to learning leads us away from “What IS” towards “What is POSSIBLE”.

This mindset shift is critical to success because those who define the new possibilities of human endeavour are those that dominate the culture and thinking (and commerce too). They disrupt existing patterns, dominate thinking, markets and what we do on a daily basis. In less than 10 years, smartphones have transformed how people socialise, interact, travel, make decisions, purchase products and services and find their soul mates. Whilst this has pro’s and con’s, it is our new reality and it continues to shift rapidly. In order to cope, or even better flourish, in our mysterious complex ecosystem, we need to develop back those child capabilities we stamped out – natural curiosity stimulating actions of critical analysis to generate a range of creative options. BUT HOW?

Well, if I now went onto say I know THE ANSWER to this, I would be a hypocrite wouldn’t I?

It is through experiences of taking actions in uncertainty that we develop confidence in the complex environments we face on a daily basis. One possible way forward is to design exploratory life experiences that stimulate new possibilities by exchanging a range of ideas for different people with divergent options. This life changing experience is what we have designed for you and others to share together at Creative Melbourne. We don’t know what it sill produce specifically, but we do know your presence will change that and participation will change you. This is one way to ensure you remain agile and relevant.

We hope you can engage with us to generate CoCreated Projects Worth Doing and in doing so you will enhance your own performance and make social contributions to our collective future. Feel you don’t have time - challenge your patterned thinking with these thoughts.

Discover why you don’t have time to NOT engage!