Lean Musings and other stuff...

Deconstruction

I don’t know about your experience, but I know that a substantial amount of who I was in early adulthood was based on perceptions or instructions inherited from my upbringing – family, friends, community, culture all played a role. I was at least in my late 20’s when I realized this and was still discovering some remnants of that inherited thinking as recently as my late 40’s. It’s ironic just how independent and “different” I thought I was from my family as a teenager and twentysomething.

Oh silly Jim.

Once I became aware of this, it began a multidecade search for all the assumptions I was carrying around mostly unchallenged. Once discovered though, another activity kicked in that I didn’t have a name for yet.

Deconstruction – a critical analysis that involves breaking down something into its parts to better understand it’s meaning with the intent of reconstruction of those separate parts in a clearer more intentional way?

What started as a philosophical pursuit, mainly used to understand thought processes, its structure was quickly applied to other areas like art, politics, and spirituality. In these areas where orthodoxy (a set of beliefs about something) and orthopraxy (the practices of a belief) were critical to how well or poorly the idea was expressed, Deconstruction allowed people to better understand and eventually “own” a point of view and its consequences. By deconstructing, you created an opportunity to reconstruct with an intentionality that wasn’t present for beliefs you simply picked up along the way.

This isn’t to say that some of the values, beliefs, and habits they form are all “bad”. It is to say that you can inadvertently make choices on a day-to-day basis without fully understanding why or how they are impacting your life. Those inherited beliefs can affect your view on relationships/marriage, vocation and the role of work, friends and having a community, and the way you see the role of wealth, comfort, and security in your life. ?

This is based on the neuroscience studies showing the causal connection between values, beliefs, choices, and action.

• Your values inform what’s important to you – these things are important to me
• Your beliefs inform why those things are important to you – this is why they are important to me
• Your choices are motivated by acquiring and protecting those things that you believe in – these are the things I will choose to align to what I believe
• And lastly, your actions are an extension of the choices you’ve made – these are the actions necessary based on my choices

That is a logic chain. In a logic chain, each statement is both informed by the last statement and informs the next. So, if any of them are unknowingly “inherited” they can corrupt the rest of the chain. And, that’s why examining why you value what you value, why you believe what you believe about it, and what choices you believe it requires can be so powerful. In order to examine each of those, deconstruction can be the way to better understand and choose for yourself.

A few last thoughts on deconstruction. One, deconstruction is not destruction. Taking apart a belief system is done to better reassemble it, not leave it in ruins with no valid replacement. That’s how you end up lost. Two, you often land in a very similar place from where you started. That’s okay, you at least now fully own those beliefs, values, choices, and actions.

As Problem Solver’s, we are aske dot often challenge how others “have always done it”. Honestly, that’s not the barrier toi change. It’s all the perceived risks to their ability to choose, what they believe about that, or how it will challenge their what they hold valuable. Being good at helping others “deconstruct” can be the beginning of real, authentic change.

The kind of change that sticks.

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