Finding Common Ground with Other Departments: The Tricky Business

We are often working around people who does the same of us or at least are linked to our Department.

During one year I have been aside a colleague totally not related to my Department.

Here, some key lessons I learned from the atypical set-up.

1. We often see thing through the optic of our Department

Like Rino we see the world how we see things, but the world is not like we think it's.

Rino sees a mountain in every landscape.

The mountain does not exist.

Listening other Departments can help us to portrait a more realistic picture.

2.Deductions & Deductions

I have done a Training together other colleagues from multiple Departments, we had a reflection exercise that exploded my mind.

Nobody was able to give the correct answer.

We were asked to look to a scene like the woman below, first thing to do was to write down what we were seeing.

Multiple and diverse answers were given:

"I see someone isolated, sad, stressed, frustrated, etc"

The second exercise was to write down what we think based on what we were seeing.

Actually all the answers were wrong, because what we see is just a woman quiet. We are just deducting she is stressed, frustrated, whatever....

No one was able to give the right answers and simply say what we were seeing.

Taking this point, we went to the 2nd exercise already based on our wrong answers, reflecting about what we think about the situation already considering we were seeing stuff that was deduction from our own perspective.

Ryan Holiday mentions it in his Best-Seller "Discipline is the way", we jump into conclusions too fast.

3.We use the "Fast Way" too much

The book "Think Fast and Slow" from Daniel Kahneman, scientifically present us 2 ways of thinking the "slow way" and the "fast way".

Being for too much time focused on the same activity in your career can let you to get used only with the "fast way" which is often not the best psychological approach for analyzing complex situations.

Discussing with work colleagues who are not related to you core-business can give insights where we can be blind sometimes.

My advise to avoid falling in those traps would be at least 3 simple actions:

1. Keep on-going contact with someone from another Department, but meaningful contact, not small coffee talk

2. The same with someone from competition or other company

3. The same with a friend with the same age or similar time of work experience

Hope it helps!

Kind Regards