Everything you take to be true about another person can only ever be part of the situation.For one part, you can only see the other from where you stand, from in amongst the commitments, values, expectations and way of making sense that are particular to you. To see this, just think for a moment about how differently someone's brother or sister, lover, parent, friend, colleague or customer might describe the person in question.For another part, there's much more to every person than any of us can tell. Unfathomable depths, history, hidden intentions and wishes, longing, suffering, hopes, fears - many of which will be available only to the person in question and some hidden even from them. You can only guess at these, and your guesses are just that - a hunch about the inner world of the other. You can easily be wrong about all of this, even when you're feeling most certain.The consequence is that whatever account you have of another is never simple truth but always an interpretation on your part: a fitting together of what you can see and experience directly in a way that makes sense to you, in your world.For any set of observable 'facts' there are a host of coherent interpretations you could choose, each which lead to different places. And there are better and worse interpretations available or, said more simply, better and worse ways of accounting for the other.Some interpretations imprison you, and often the other person too. Interpretations that involve blame, resentment or rigid judgments tend to produce this, committing you to tight circles of action and emotion that cannot easily be broken. These are I-It interpretations, fixing the other as if they're an object rather than a person.Other interpretations can free you both, particularly those that invite curiosity and inquiry on your part. These are I-You interpretations, treating the other as a mystery to be understood rather than as an obstacle to be circumnavigated or a problem to be solved.Which kind of interpretation you choose matters, because each leads to different kinds of action, to different kinds of conversation, and ultimately to different kinds of relationship.
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When there's something important that needs deciding, on the basis of what do you decide?
It seems so obvious that the 'us and them' you're experiencing in your organisation is really down to 'them'.If only they'd
How you understand the nature of human beings matters if you're leading or participating in an organisation, bringing up a family, or taking part in society.We seem to run many organisations as if we're convinced that, just below the surface, people are a dark mass of selfishness, reactivity, laziness, resentment and despondency. How else to account for the ways we push, judge, pressurise, scare, imprison one another? So much of what we call 'best practice' does exactly that, even at the same time as it looks civilised, decent, and obvious.Of course, all of those qualities are present in human beings. But are they our foundational qualities? Should we construct everything primarily as a way of containing them? Should we continue to convince ourselves that any other approach is impossible, futile, or simplistic wishful thinking?What energy we would free up if we attuned ourselves instead towards the natural capacities for communication, connection, reciprocity, generosity, love, and forgiveness that we all possess. And what possibility if we oriented ourselves towards building organisations and societies in which they could reach their full expression.
One of the characteristics of human life is that what is familiar fades into the background. It has to be this way for us to cope with the world. Familiarity, and the background of understanding that it makes possible, is vital for our survival.Imagine if this were not the case. What kind of life could we lead if we were constantly surprised by door handles, pencils, shoelaces, how to greet others, lifts, what to wear, watches, speech, furniture?The complexity of the human worlds that we can construct and move between makes this all the more vital. The world of business, or the world of school, of parenting, of a particular profession - our participation in these require that we develop the kind of background familiarity which enables us to navigate and act without have to learn and relearn every time.But familiarity, while necessary, also hides so much from us. Perhaps you can see this easily if you go to visit a city that’s unknown to you. Suddenly the details of buildings, architecture, language, dress come into view. That which would be unremarkable at home reveals itself in its beauty or in its capacity to confound or in its stupidity. Simple tasks such as buying a train ticket or navigating by bus across town show how complex they are, and how much skill they require.All of these were present in your home town, but your very familiarity with everything had them fade from view.If familiarity helps us to navigate, it also helps to conceal from us what’s there. We stop seeing the wonder and extraordinariness of our environments, tools and practices, just as we stop seeing their limits and costs. We lose sight of the effect of our houses, cars, meeting rooms, money, working hours, conversations, relationship to time, phones, people around us, sleep, and our practices of all kinds. In other words, familiarity is not just a way of coping skilfully with the world, it’s a way of going to sleep to it too.Sometimes we need to undo all of this if we are going to have a chance to do more than sleepwalk from one situation to the next. We need to look at what’s most ordinary as if visitors from afar, or aliens from another world. We need to consciously and actively see what’s most familiar as if it were really quite strange to us.And we need to consider exposing ourselves purposefully to the unfamiliar if we are to wake up from our dream and take the responsibility for our lives, work, organisations - and for each other - that is called for. 
At the entrance to a park near my home is a board which reads
In many work places we've taken up the idea that not feeling too much is the mark of sophisticated business. Feelings make us vulnerable, we conclude. And we can easily imagine a world of unruly, chaotic, hurtful and confusing behaviour if people were to act on their emotions.But feelings are how we distinguish what matters to us, and how we most readily and fully experience connection with other people. Adopting a cool, detached, 'rational' stance robs us of both of these, distancing us from our relationships and from our capacity to decide wisely.Instead of cultivating professional detachment, how much better for us to cultivate deep facility with emotions, so that instead of reacting impulsively (our great fear) we learn to name them accurately, feel them fully, mine them for their wisdom, and respond thoughtfully to what they show us.This is a better way to draw on the fullness of our human faculties in our work. And surely preferable to having our work reduce us to the narrow robotic shadow of ourselves that detachment requires.
This moment, this particular experience arising in your particular body and particular mind, is absolutely unique. And irreplaceable.And yet we rush by life, always in the pursuit of what's next and what's (apparently) going to be better than this.We forget that each moment is already dying away to become something else, even when we're not rushing and pushing and trying to have things happen.Perhaps when we understand this, we'll be ready to slow down enough to pay our lives the attention they deserve.
Mostly, we say we're listening to others, but we're hardly listening at all.Mostly, we're listening to ourselves, even when we look silent. We're attending to our own inner dialogue, or inner critic, to our judgements about what we think is being said and, very often, to the part of us that has already decided what we're going to say next.While we're listening to all this inner chatter we look, superficially, like we're listening to the speaker. But we know, really, that we're not.Real listening involves a radical move: quieting ourselves inside, and setting aside our own concerns for a while. Then we can meet the other as an other, not as a problem to be solved, a way of bolstering our self-esteem, or an obstacle to be overcome.