Embrace the irritation

We talk about ‘pearls of wisdom’ – we forget that pearls are an oyster’s response to grit.

We’re taught to be open-minded, to bring ‘positive vibes only’ to our interactions. But the world is gritty, and we are going to get irritated. I like to think through irritation strategically – what does it offer?

Irritation as a participant

In workshops, I am very aware of my own preferences. I like new ideas, sparky people, diving down nerdy rabbit holes. I love the different perspectives on offer from the different attendees. But it’s not all joyous – at some point something’s annoying and I need to do something with that feeling.

I temporarily ignore my internal injunctions to be positive, and allow myself to feel annoyed. Then as I feel it, I always discover a paradoxical wisdom – I need to be more of the thing that’s irritating me.

Some recent examples.

Inner voice: They’re so slow to catch on, could they just please keep up!

What I can learn: I am running too fast. I must slow down.

Inner voice: That is so pedantic, that detail does not matter

What I can learn: I’m not paying enough attention to the details, there’s something I need to learn here.

Inner voice: Why do we keep going back to this issue? We’ve already dealt with that

What I can learn: We haven’t dealt with that issue at all. There is something important that I am not hearing.

Inner voice: You’re so risk averse, why won’t you take a chance!

What I can learn: Have I thought about consequences properly? Is someone other than me affected and I’m not considering them?

If it’s helpful to do so, I will often describe this thought process out loud. Demonstrating the responsiveness to different approaches can encourage a more open conversation.

Irritation as a facilitator

All of the above is true when I am facilitating, but there’s another dimension in watching the other participants’ reactions. Very often, one person will keep banging a single issue drum. That’s a sign to me to take that issue seriously, but it is also helpful to ask the room questions like:

this issue seems to create some frustration for some…

…Could anyone talk about how they see this issue differently to [single issue drummer]?

…Has this issue been unresolved for some time?

…What is your relationship to this issue?

…This is only coming up because one person thinks it is important. Could we invest some time in discussing why they’re the only one?

I did this once when a person was concerned about due process in procurement. Everyone rolled their eyes: Here goes [“Sam”] again about getting three quotes for things when we know who we need to buy from. I asked what was annoying people so much. The responses I got were variations on ’it takes too much effort/time’ and ‘it prevents creativity’.

I challenged the group: why does it take so long? It turned out people were ignoring the process, getting stopped by the Finance team, and having to start again. I asked them how they’d feel if the Finance team opened an Instagram account and began parallel promotion campaigns in a massively off-brand way. And then I waited and the penny dropped.

The concern that creativity being hampered was more interesting. Because this really annoyed [Sam], who said that there were lots of solutions if people would only talk to them about it. I asked the room if they would rather stay grumpy about it, or try to fix it; then I put [Sam] on the Steering Group. And not only did [Sam] completely redesign the procurement process around creative consultants, they made the entire cost management process for projects better, by having visibility of the reality inside the project, and having a deeper investment in its success.

Embracing the irritation that different experts had with each other allowed for new and better approaches to emerge. And I’ve often found that bringing the most challenging perspective inside your governance body is an absolute game-changer.

Irritation for Strategy

There’s often a bit that doesn’t work, that doesn’t fit. It might be in our sensemaking about the external landscape (one stakeholder with a vastly divergent need) or a tension in our initiatives (A requires B to be done first, but B requires investment that only A will generate).

It’s really tempting to eject the contradiction – and I have a story about that failing spectacularly. I worked with a museum organisation where two strategic indicators for one site didn’t fit together at all:

a)?? Rising demand for destination tourism serving heritage storytelling for older people

b)?? Rising demand for festival-esque art/youth focus

These were seen as either-or, and the evidence was 50:50 for either path. Advocates for (a) found the advocates for (b) annoying, and vice versa:

1.?? A youth experience would be disrespectful of the heritage

2.?? a heritage experience would be boring and irrelevant

In the end, no decision was taken, and an uncomfortable middle path has led the institution downwards. But embracing the irritation would’ve given an amazing design brief as a strategic initiative: make this place both respectful and exciting, somehow. From a blank sheet of paper, give us some ideas for small-scale experiments.

It’s been done in other venues through day/night separation (daytime volunteer tours, then sequinned drag performers take over for evening cocktails), spatial separation (heritage on the ground floor, film festival on the roof) and seasonal separation (heritage for cruise ship season, two month-long festivals a year).

But the organisation’s leadership buried the frustrations and made no decision. That organisation trundles along pretty much irrelevantly to this day.

Fin

That’s it for another week. I urge you to embrace and act positively on small irritations – including this little message asking you to like and subscribe ??

See you in a bi week.

Paul

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