“A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.” JRR Tolkein
Photo by Josué Soto on Unsplash
My very first grad school post was about a dream I had the evening after our first class meetings. In the dream, I was facing a team of people – a church choir – that needed to undergo change if they wanted to attract new members. However, I saw myself as a divisive leader. My solution was to step down as the single leader and to develop a team of people. When I woke up, I was pretty proud of my dreamstate problem solving. At this time I had been reading the book Blended (Horn & Staker, 2015) and was deep in the chapter on the type of team to develop to enact disruptive innovation. However, as I reflect on the readings and videos in this discussion, my thinking has shifted.
Start with WHY
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” (Sinek, 2009). I’ve seen this talk over a dozen times, and each time I glean something meaningful. Each time I watch, I watch through a different lens. In this instance, I was looking through the lens of leading meaningful change. In his famous TED Talk Start with Why, Simon Sinek (2009) explains that innovation must start with why. A company, individual, or team needs to understand why and how they do what they do and communicate that information in order to effect change. By speaking to the why and how change leaders can communicate with the part of the brain that is rooted in instinct and feeling: The limbic brain or lizard brain. This “inside out” communication turns mere “power holders” into inspiring leaders who people actually want to follow.
Facts vs. truth
I tried to wrap my head around the concept of starting with why while working through more course materials. Tom Askar’s TED Talk Why TED Talks Don’t Change People offered some insight (2014). In his talk, Askar shares the broken metaphor comparing humankind to computers. In my blog post titled What a strange machine man is! I go into more detail on this metaphor. For this purpose, I focused more on why “The Why” is so important to change. It comes back to the concept of fact vs. truth. In this talk, Askar quotes Robert McKee: “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens” (2014). Ankar said, “We make decisions based on facts, but only if they support our personal truths” (2014). But what is a “personal truth?”
Quantum Psychology
Author, futurist, and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson says that “all perception is a gamble” (2008) and refers to the concept of naive realism. Naive realism is the idea that one person’s perspective encompasses the whole of reality. Wilson argues that this thinking is incomplete, as everyone is looking at reality through their own “reality tunnel,” that is filtered through past experiences, social constructs, and our location space-time. Any observation cannot be separated from the observer. This means that if I make an observation, my thoughts, experiences, and ideas affect that observation. I cannot separate it from who I am.
With all of this in mind, to enact change requires moving beyond the facts and the frontal lobe and reaching into the feelings and limbic brain of the people you serve.
Dream State
How would I solve the problem posed in my dream now? Instead of giving up and delegating, it was time for me to lean into the discomfort and develop a sense of urgency amongst the people I was serving. How? Start with Why. Tap into the stories the people in the choir were telling about themselves. Create a reality that all of us can stand behind. Develop a sense of why we needed to grow as a church choir.
The same is true for my innovation proposal, Paperless Office, Paperless District. I need to lean into the discomfort I have around leading change. I can do this by creating a reality that everyone in my district can stand behind. I’m glad that our first assignment is to develop our Why around our proposals because I have a lot of questions for myself moving forward:
- Why am I going to grad school?
- Why did I choose Paperless Office? How will it lead to a Paperless District? What are the implications?
- What story am I telling myself about myself?
Most importantly: Why should anyone listen?
References
Askar, T. (2014, June 30). Why TED Talks don’t change people’s behaviors: Tom Asacker at TEDxCambridge 2014. YouTube. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://youtu.be/W0jTZ-GP0N4
Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why — how great leaders inspire action | Simon Sinek | TEDxPugetSound. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
Staker, H., Horn, M. B., & Christensen, C. M. (2014). Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. Wiley.
Wilson, R. A. (2008, September 17). Robert Anton Wilson On Reality. YouTube. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuOplymDx4I