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.
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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.
What you read, watch, and listen toWho you speak with, and what aboutWhat you repeatedly choose to do and not doAll of these shaping you into the kind of person you are.You're being made by your actions and what you give attention to.It's easy to think that because you are a particular way you're doing what you obviously must do. But this misses that what you're doing shapes who you are too. So it's not only that you do what a person like you does, but that you become the kind of person who does what you do.This can be revelatory when you find yourself stuck in a situation that feels constraining.Are you unsupported because people are untrustworthy? Or are you becoming someone who does not trust because you're not trusting?Are you resentful that others seem to keep such distance from you? Or are others keeping distance because of your resentment?And are you busy and rushed because you have so much to do?Or have you become someone who has so much to do because of the way you insist on busying and rushing all the time?
Are moods really positive or negative? It's easy to conclude that they are, and so discount a wide range of them as irrelevant or destructive.I think that's a mistake, because every mood brings something of value to the fore that we might otherwise miss:
It’s common practice in many organisations for people to demand, with some force, a ‘take away’ from every learning experience, course, workshop or coaching session.Perhaps it seems obvious, at least to start with, that this should be the case. After all aren’t we busy, productive, results-oriented people? Why would we do anything unless it obviously moves us forward, to the next step, the next project, the next success?By insisting on this we’ve confused learning with other, more familiar, activities. And we’ve profoundly misunderstood the nature of any learning that’s really worth our while.Firstly, the confusion. Learning is not like going to a meeting, finishing a project plan, coming to an agreement, or delivering a product. When we insist that learning be like every other activity in our working culture we’re not really engaging in learning at all. We’re confusing learning with deciding, or getting things done, both of which are worthwhile activities in themselves, but don’t change us much.Secondly, we’ve misunderstood or wilfully redefined what learning can be. We’ve reduced it to knowing a fact, understanding a step-by-step process, or knowing about a clever technique. We want to learn with the minimum of our own involvement, in a trouble-free, predictable, and narrow way. We want it recognisable in form and structure. We do not wish to be too troubled. And all of this is insufficient for learning that really does something.Unless we want our learning to keep us within our habitual, predictable boundaries (and I am arguing that this is not learning at all) we have to give up our demands that it be familiar. We have to allow it to confuse us as well as inspire us, to dissolve our existing categories and rigidity, and to confound our everyday understanding so it can show us something new. We have to allow it to render us unskilful for a while so that we can embody new skills that in turn open new worlds of possibility. And we have to allow ourselves to feel many things - elation, excitement, frustration, disappointment, wonder, surprise, boredom, joy - so that we can be affected by the experience and not just observe it in a detached way.Good learning undoes us.And for that reason the ‘take aways’ we demanded at the start may be quite different from what actually happens. And what lives on in us as a result may not appear at the moment we walk out of the room, but as the product, over time, of living with, practicing and inquiring into what we’ve only just begun to see.By demanding we know what learning will do before we begin, we’re hardly learning at all.