No one person can answer the question of meaning in this world
today. It is in thinking together, under strong conditions of serious
search, that a new understanding can be approached. Group
communication, group pondering, is the real art form of our time.
JACOB NEEDLEMAN
If we cannot express our assumptions explicitly in ways that others
can understand and build upon, there can be no larger process of
testing those assumptions and building public knowledge.
PETER SENGE
An American businessman was visiting a Mexican coastal village and
encountered a fisherman on the dock. He had just unloaded his stash of
tuna for the day, and the businessman asked him how long it took him
to catch them.
The fisherman said, “Just a little while.”
The businessman then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more, to which the fisherman responded he didn’t need more. He had caught enough for his family’s needs. “But what do you do now, with all the rest of your time?” asked the businessman.
“I take a nap, I play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, and I walk to the village in the evening, sip a little wine, and play music with my friends,” said the fisherman. The American scoffed. “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you.
You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy a fleet of boats and open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise.” When the fisherman asked how long all that would take, the businessman said, “Fifteen to twenty years. And then you could sell your company stock to the public and become a millionaire.”
“But what then?” asked the fisherman.
“Then you could retire, move to a coastal fishing village, fish a little, nap a lot, play with your kids, enjoy time with your wife, and go to the village at night to play music with your friends.” This is an example of how our assumptions tumble out of us, beckoned or not. We enter into a situation, assess it from our own personal worldview, and generously offer suggestions for improvement that were never invited in the first place. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes: “Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. We do not “have” mental models. We “are” our mental models…The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.”
Turning the mirror inward is a required discipline for original thinkers, since the primary labor of originality is to unearth the insight that is unique to us. Our experiences and relationships are the wellsprings of our embodied and embedded wisdom. The piece of knowledge that we hold is different from what anyone else holds since none other has felt our feelings, loved what we loved, suffered what we suffered. And once we learn to mine these experiences, to process them with an understanding that they have led us to where we are today— once we are willing to forgive what we must forgive, to clear ourselves and others of guilt or blame—then we are free to harvest the jewels of insight that await us like butter within the cream.
Most of us don’t even know what our assumptions are until we see what actions emerge from their engagement. If anyone had asked the businessman on the dock what were his assumptions, he probably wouldn’t have had an answer. But from his actions, we can see that he assumed he knew more than the fisherman; he assumed the fisherman wanted to make more money; he assumed that the life the fisherman had created for himself and his family was somehow lacking or broken, and he knew how to fix it. Underpinning every action we take is an assumption that we’ve incorporated from somewhere, consciously or not. The common phrase “you can’t fight city hall” comes from an assumption of personal powerlessness and bureaucratic impenetrability. It is neither true nor empowering, but it is such a part of our social vernacular that many people have come to believe it. And once we buy into a belief that
supports our own powerlessness, something dies in us. Our vitality diminishes, our imaginations dull, the excitement of experiencing ourselves as creators of our circumstances turns to a dread and fear of being victims of our circumstances.
Individuals, organizations, and businesses operate on assumptions that are rarely conscious, but that affect their outcomes in major ways. Questioning our own assumptions or the assumptions running rampant through our organizations is key to understanding why we’re getting the responses we’re getting from the people we encounter, our employees, or our customers. To think this has nothing to do with the bottom line is naïve and short-sighted. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, spent a lot of time visiting different businesses and talking with the employees. “When they used the word ‘they,’ I knew it was one kind of business,” said Reich. “When they used the word ‘we,’ I knew it was a whole other kind of business.”
“You can see the corporation as a machine for producing money, or you can see it as a human community,” according to Senge, but if you prefer the community idea, you want people to be saying “we.” And in order to foster this sensibility of community, every leader in the organization has to believe it, feel it, be it, and speak it. And underneath this must be a foundational assumption that is so rooted in reality that no one can mistake it. If you do assume that people are honest, that they give their best when they are most encouraged, that any expenditure of resources for their well-being will result in work and attitudes that benefit the organization, then those assumptions will be apparent in your actions and you will be seen as a person of integrity. If those are not your assumptions, but you try to act as if they are, your dishonesty will be discerned immediately.
We become the most powerful communicators when every word and action is consistent with our root assumptions, so for us to be clear on what they are, and to help others clarify what theirs are, is a critical part of thought leadership and original thinking. When Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” this is the kind of unraveling and examining he was talking about. It’s coming to terms with what you think is true about human nature, about your own possibilities, about your power in the matters of cause and creativity. Believing is seeing, and what we believe to be true ends up being the very reality we enter into. In the play My Fair Lady, the transformation of Eliza Doolittle was directly related to Henry Higgins’ dual assumptions: one, his own power to make a difference; and two, her power to make a change. This phenomenon plays out in every classroom, living room, and boardroom as we enable or disable the people in our midst based on the assumptions that fuel our words and actions. Here are a few questions that will help you see
some of your underlying assumptions:
Do you believe that what you do really matters?
Do you believe you’re doing your fair share to make this a better world for everyone?
Do you believe if something goes wrong there’s someone to blame?
Do you believe that it’s profitable for businesses to be socially responsible?
Do you believe that people have faith in you?
Do you believe that someone else is responsible for your successes or failures?
Do you believe that people can see your values by watching what you do?
Do you believe that your words and actions can empower or disempower another?
Do you believe that your children are well-served by the choices you make?
Do you believe that if you died tomorrow, you would go with pride knowing you had done the best you could have done?
These are the kinds of questions that help us unearth our assumptions so we can rout out those that were imposed upon us, or that we once held to but no longer believe. We are organisms in a constant state of flux, exposed to an ever-changing environment, and the more we inquire into our own state of consciousness and notice the evolution of our own ideas, the more aware we become of our place in the family of things. As a civilization, we are shifting out of an industrial, assembly-line mindset of isolated units into an organic, knowledge-based network of communities. There is a tectonic shift of consciousness occurring and an evolutionary tendency away from the mechanical and back toward the natural. This may be seen as Mother Nature’s mid-course correction. As the thinking neurons of the planet, biologically oriented toward survival, we are finding ways of connecting and communicating with unimaginable speed and precision. Someone has calculated that we can globally transmit the contents of the Library of Congress across a single fiber optic line in 1.6 seconds. Science and nature have announced their engagement.
today. It is in thinking together, under strong conditions of serious
search, that a new understanding can be approached. Group
communication, group pondering, is the real art form of our time.
JACOB NEEDLEMAN
If we cannot express our assumptions explicitly in ways that others
can understand and build upon, there can be no larger process of
testing those assumptions and building public knowledge.
PETER SENGE
An American businessman was visiting a Mexican coastal village and
encountered a fisherman on the dock. He had just unloaded his stash of
tuna for the day, and the businessman asked him how long it took him
to catch them.
The fisherman said, “Just a little while.”
The businessman then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more, to which the fisherman responded he didn’t need more. He had caught enough for his family’s needs. “But what do you do now, with all the rest of your time?” asked the businessman.
“I take a nap, I play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, and I walk to the village in the evening, sip a little wine, and play music with my friends,” said the fisherman. The American scoffed. “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you.
You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy a fleet of boats and open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise.” When the fisherman asked how long all that would take, the businessman said, “Fifteen to twenty years. And then you could sell your company stock to the public and become a millionaire.”
“But what then?” asked the fisherman.
“Then you could retire, move to a coastal fishing village, fish a little, nap a lot, play with your kids, enjoy time with your wife, and go to the village at night to play music with your friends.” This is an example of how our assumptions tumble out of us, beckoned or not. We enter into a situation, assess it from our own personal worldview, and generously offer suggestions for improvement that were never invited in the first place. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes: “Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. We do not “have” mental models. We “are” our mental models…The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.”
Turning the mirror inward is a required discipline for original thinkers, since the primary labor of originality is to unearth the insight that is unique to us. Our experiences and relationships are the wellsprings of our embodied and embedded wisdom. The piece of knowledge that we hold is different from what anyone else holds since none other has felt our feelings, loved what we loved, suffered what we suffered. And once we learn to mine these experiences, to process them with an understanding that they have led us to where we are today— once we are willing to forgive what we must forgive, to clear ourselves and others of guilt or blame—then we are free to harvest the jewels of insight that await us like butter within the cream.
Most of us don’t even know what our assumptions are until we see what actions emerge from their engagement. If anyone had asked the businessman on the dock what were his assumptions, he probably wouldn’t have had an answer. But from his actions, we can see that he assumed he knew more than the fisherman; he assumed the fisherman wanted to make more money; he assumed that the life the fisherman had created for himself and his family was somehow lacking or broken, and he knew how to fix it. Underpinning every action we take is an assumption that we’ve incorporated from somewhere, consciously or not. The common phrase “you can’t fight city hall” comes from an assumption of personal powerlessness and bureaucratic impenetrability. It is neither true nor empowering, but it is such a part of our social vernacular that many people have come to believe it. And once we buy into a belief that
supports our own powerlessness, something dies in us. Our vitality diminishes, our imaginations dull, the excitement of experiencing ourselves as creators of our circumstances turns to a dread and fear of being victims of our circumstances.
Individuals, organizations, and businesses operate on assumptions that are rarely conscious, but that affect their outcomes in major ways. Questioning our own assumptions or the assumptions running rampant through our organizations is key to understanding why we’re getting the responses we’re getting from the people we encounter, our employees, or our customers. To think this has nothing to do with the bottom line is naïve and short-sighted. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, spent a lot of time visiting different businesses and talking with the employees. “When they used the word ‘they,’ I knew it was one kind of business,” said Reich. “When they used the word ‘we,’ I knew it was a whole other kind of business.”
“You can see the corporation as a machine for producing money, or you can see it as a human community,” according to Senge, but if you prefer the community idea, you want people to be saying “we.” And in order to foster this sensibility of community, every leader in the organization has to believe it, feel it, be it, and speak it. And underneath this must be a foundational assumption that is so rooted in reality that no one can mistake it. If you do assume that people are honest, that they give their best when they are most encouraged, that any expenditure of resources for their well-being will result in work and attitudes that benefit the organization, then those assumptions will be apparent in your actions and you will be seen as a person of integrity. If those are not your assumptions, but you try to act as if they are, your dishonesty will be discerned immediately.
We become the most powerful communicators when every word and action is consistent with our root assumptions, so for us to be clear on what they are, and to help others clarify what theirs are, is a critical part of thought leadership and original thinking. When Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” this is the kind of unraveling and examining he was talking about. It’s coming to terms with what you think is true about human nature, about your own possibilities, about your power in the matters of cause and creativity. Believing is seeing, and what we believe to be true ends up being the very reality we enter into. In the play My Fair Lady, the transformation of Eliza Doolittle was directly related to Henry Higgins’ dual assumptions: one, his own power to make a difference; and two, her power to make a change. This phenomenon plays out in every classroom, living room, and boardroom as we enable or disable the people in our midst based on the assumptions that fuel our words and actions. Here are a few questions that will help you see
some of your underlying assumptions:
Do you believe that what you do really matters?
Do you believe you’re doing your fair share to make this a better world for everyone?
Do you believe if something goes wrong there’s someone to blame?
Do you believe that it’s profitable for businesses to be socially responsible?
Do you believe that people have faith in you?
Do you believe that someone else is responsible for your successes or failures?
Do you believe that people can see your values by watching what you do?
Do you believe that your words and actions can empower or disempower another?
Do you believe that your children are well-served by the choices you make?
Do you believe that if you died tomorrow, you would go with pride knowing you had done the best you could have done?
These are the kinds of questions that help us unearth our assumptions so we can rout out those that were imposed upon us, or that we once held to but no longer believe. We are organisms in a constant state of flux, exposed to an ever-changing environment, and the more we inquire into our own state of consciousness and notice the evolution of our own ideas, the more aware we become of our place in the family of things. As a civilization, we are shifting out of an industrial, assembly-line mindset of isolated units into an organic, knowledge-based network of communities. There is a tectonic shift of consciousness occurring and an evolutionary tendency away from the mechanical and back toward the natural. This may be seen as Mother Nature’s mid-course correction. As the thinking neurons of the planet, biologically oriented toward survival, we are finding ways of connecting and communicating with unimaginable speed and precision. Someone has calculated that we can globally transmit the contents of the Library of Congress across a single fiber optic line in 1.6 seconds. Science and nature have announced their engagement.
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