A Fine Frenzy or disruptor disrupt thyself!

There was a fabulous movie made in the 1980s called True Stories made by and starring David Byrne of Talking Heads fame. Essentially the film takes a quirky and affectionate view of life in a Texan flatland community and highlights the minutia that forms the backdrop of the resident’s everyday lives. At the end of the movie David Byrne says something along the lines of “we have to go away to remember” ~ and for many of us that visit another country we become immediately alerted to the difference of for example, the post boxes, street signs, smells & sounds. If we stay away from ‘home’ for a time then as Byrne reminds us we are alerted to our own post box, street signs, sounds and smells when we return home.

Having worked for a few decades with organisations & businesses that seek to develop and change, it seems to me that the first step towards transformation should begin with ourselves. To disrupt our sense of the normal and everyday. If we want to do things differently, we must first learn to experience things differently ~ sometimes by doing different things but more fundamentally by understanding (and often challenging) the way we choose to perceive, judge and make sense of our experiences.

You may recognise one of the central principles of gestalt in this last sentence ~ the reawakening of the senses and with a frenzy of awareness, the ability to recognise and reframe the patterns of perceiving, believing and behaving that are acting as barriers to our ability to move forwards and develop.

Maybe we can’t simply dismiss all our habitual perceptions or the result (I should imagine) would be an endless flow of white noise. Instead, we should learn to become more aware of where and what we choose to focus on and be ready to question our how and why we choose to focus in this way. Some people may be better than others at achieving this and if you have an MBTI profile, those with a TJ in their profile (Thinking, Judging) might have more difficulty suspending the default approach than those with FP (Feeling, Perceiving). But we can work on that!

It’s not that our accustomed ways of seeing and understanding are necessarily wrong , and indeed crossing the road might become a tad tricky if we considerably reframe our perception of what’s happening with the traffic. However, the depth of challenge we face in transforming ourselves, our organisations and our communities demands a creativity of approach that breaks the familiar and business as usual.

Some readers will be familiar with the work of Howard Gardner and his breakthrough work on multiple intelligences (1983). A widening of the bandwidth of intelligence and a challenge to pre-existing theories of that focused only on an aptitude for cognitive intelligence . 

There may be less awareness of “Project Zero”, where Gardner identified a cohort of 0-4 year olds as 100% on the genius range of intelligence measurement, a cohort of 4-20 year olds where 10% were genius and finally measuring only 2% of the sample of those 20+ as genius. So, what was going on? Commentators agree that as we get older we to tend to limit our openness to experience and constrain our creativity.

What steps can we take to disrupt our regular ways of perceiving and experiencing ?

Vary your ways of ‘seeing’~ I’m using seeing as shorthand for a breadth of human senses here, but if you walk home or to work using a regular route, change it and find different streets that you can walk down. If you walk in the park, stop and sniff the roses, especially if you find yourself thinking “Oh, those roses look nice”. If a tree looks like it has interesting bark or leaves ~ get closer and why not touch it!

Focus your awareness ~ if you are sitting in a room as you are reading this article, stop for a minute or two and close your eyes. Now listen. What have you been shutting out? Try to focus on each sound separately then bring them together into a range of combinations.

Consider your usual behaviours & responses~ how do you react to lateness, traffic, rain, people who don’t dress like you, people who don’t share your politics ~ and reflect on whether you might feel, think and respond in a different way from usual.

Listen more~ seek to hear more about how other people feel, think & behave and how this impacts on your own perception.

Recognise (and Challenge) Groupthink~ there is comfort and companionship when a group of people are all of one mind and agreement. But question the assumptions that are being made, whether or not agreement is a shortcut to blocking out other possibilities.

And ~ Understand how you are challenging your own existing approaches and assumptions. What I’m getting at here is checking whether or not you are constantly replacing one patterned mindset with another one. Transformation rests on fluidity, flexibility and adaptability. It starts with personal disruption!

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