Robert Kegan - How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work Flashcards
What can we do, if we want deeper understanding of the prospect of change?
If we want deeper understanding of the prospect of change, we must pay closer attention to our own powerful inclinations not to change.
This attention may help us discover within ourselves the force and beauty of a hidden immune system, the dynamic process by which we tend to prevent change, by which we manufacture continuously the antigens of change.
If we can unlock this system, we release new energies on behalf of new ways of seeing and being.
What are 4 daunting recognitions of leadership regarding change?
- Leading inevitably involves trying to effect significant changes.
- It is very hard to bring about significant changes in any human group without changes in individual behaviors.
- It is very hard to sustain significant changes in behavior without significant changes in individuals’ underlying meanings that may give rise to their behaviors.
- It is very hard to lead on behalf of other people’s changes in their underlying ways of making meaning without considering the possibility that we ourselves must also change.
What are the three powerful forces in nature?
1) When it comes to forces of nature, the most widely addressed and understood is what physicists call entrophy.
2) The very opposite of entropy, what physicists call negentropy.
3) The third force we call dynamic equilibrium.
Describe the natural force: entropy.
The process by which dynamic systems (such as people, organizations, automobiles, or solar systems) gradually fall apart.
Entropy names the motion of increasing disorder, randomness, or dissipation of energy.
Our bodies, our cars, our solar system, and of course our organizations are all wearing down.
Recite Robert Frost’s words in “Fire and Ice” as an unconscious ode to entropy.
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice . . .
I hold with those who favor fire
but if I had to perish twice . . .
I know that for destruction ice
is also great and would suffice.
Describe the natural force: negentropy.
It is the very opposite of entropy.
Our bodies are running down, but at the same time, with good luck and effective supports, our minds might be “running up.”
Our eyesight is deteriorating; we need corrective lenses as we age. But at the same time, our capacity to see into our situations and ourselves may become more acute; we may be able to discard previous psychological lenses of distortion or myopia.
It is a distinguishing and heroic feature of living things that they participate not only in deteriorative processes of declining complexity, order, choice, concentration, and power but also in processes that lead to greater complexity, order, choice, concentration, and power.
Einstein said: “We will never be able to solve our problems…
at the same order of complexity we used to create our problems.”
Describe the processes of dynamic equilibrium.
The processes of dynamic equilibrium, which, like an immune system, powerfully and mysteriously tend to keep things pretty much as they are.
The third force is not about standing still, about stasis or inertia, about fixity or the lack of motion.
It is also about motion. More precisely, it is about a system of countervailing motions that maintains a remarkably hearty balance, an equilibrating process continuously manufacturing immunity to change.
The process of dynamic equilibrium eventually just throws out its enormous arms in response and before long waves itself back into familiar, upright balance.
Which are the four new languages as tools, you build a technology that gradually introduces you to your own immune system, your own dynamic equilibrium, the forces that keep the immune system in place, and the possibilities of transcending it?
- From the language of complaint to the language of commitment.
- From the language of blame to the language of personal re-sponsibility.
- From the language of “New Year’s Resolutions” to the language of competing commitments.
- From the language of big assumptions that hold us to the lan-guage of assumptions that we hold.
A Confucian text says: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember;…
…but directly involve me, and I’ll make it my own.”
Name three more languages that maintain and continuously upgrade a powerful means of personal learning as leaders thinking about how to enhance dramatically the learning that goes on in our organizations.
- From the language of prizes and praising to the language of on-going regard.
- From the language of rules and policies to the language of pub-lic agreement.
- From the language of constructive criticism to the language of deconstructive criticism.
What are the Ground Rule for You as Speaker?
How much or how little you want to let your partner (or partners) in on during these reflections is continuously up to you and you alone.
What is the Ground Rule for You as Listener?
It is not your job to point out to someone something you think he or she may be missing.
What is the Ground Rule for You in Choosing a Talk Partner?
It is preferable not to have talk partners with whom you have a subordinate or reporting relationship.
The late William Perry, a teacher said: “Whenever someone comes to me for help, I listen very hard and ask myself… ‘
…and what will they do to keep from getting it?’”
