Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Can dogs see colours...?

I woke up today, thinking about our world view" - how we see the world...our perspectives.

There are a number of factors that influence this - our upbringing, education and training, our own experience , view points of authority figures etc etc. ....we don't really have that many original thoughts!

What gets us into trouble is when we think that our world view is the "correct one." I used to work closely with someone with strong finance skills and we always argued because he would look at something from a totally different perspective to mine. Most times we agreed to disagree and tolerated each other. We would also have judgements about each other, he would say that I was a "naive" and that I was too " optimistic" and that I was not being pragmatic. I would say that he was rigid and was looking at things only from a finance perspective, which was to me at that time , a narrow view of the world. ( actually I used to call him a "wet blanket.") This was until i read ,Edward De Bono's , Six thinking Hats, where he uses coloured hats to describe the way someone thinks.

I know I tend to wear green and yellow hats, I am always focusing on opportunity, growth as I tend to have an optimistic outlook most times, sometimes I wear a red hat because I am involved and quite passionate about things which also means that I can get quite irritable when someone does not see my view point. I used to dislike those who wore a black hat to ask the " what if it does not work " questions , i felt they were pouring cold water on my ideas. In a non-biased world without personal agenda, a leader needs to draw in people with various strengths to make sound decisions and appreciate inputs that are different to his/hers.
When we hold meetings, its interesting to see what coloured hats each person tends to wear and we can make the group thought process more robust by adding the hats that are missing.

Most people tend to work from their preferences and strengths. If someone could follow us around and record what we say , I am quite sure that we will repeat a thought /view we have many times to several people. I listen carefully to what people around me are saying about their world view especially when I interview someone for a job to work with me. I ask them " what kind of a world do you think this is" Sometimes I get answers like " you cannot trust anyone" "its a dog eat dog world" Its also interesting how someone "owns" a sentence, whilst others say it in third party language , when they don't own the sentence , it tells me that its either an idea that they are processing and have not internalised yet or perhaps its a mindset that they have inherited from a parent or grand parent.

I also believe that when i hire someone, I hire their great grand parents because some of the values and beliefs they bring with them to work are not theirs alone. I guess the question we need to ask is , if some of these beliefs are still relevant and how it supports our world view today. I used to work with someone who had quite an abrasive way of dealing with her team members, I could tell that she still cared about them but it just the way she learnt how to communicate with people around her. One day, I sat her down and asked her at what age she learnt to communicate the way she does and who she learnt that from, we spoke about how she would have needed to learn that as a "survival strategy" for the environment that she was in at that time. She realised on her own that she learnt these strategies when she was 12 and at the age of 28, she didn't need them anymore to survive as her environment had changed and that she needed to update her beliefs. If we don't update our beliefs, we become outdated and not relevant.

My world view ... well, its a dog's life...no just joking .... its my playground and test bed for ideas...a perfect place for a wandering dog...well most times! Ever heard of the saying " Be realistic...Plan for a Miracle?"...this is true in my world, what I put out in terms of my thoughts or world view is what I get in return.

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