Big assumptions reflect the very human manner in which we invent or shape a picture of the world and then take our inventions for reality. This is easiest to see in children. The delight we take in their charming distortions is a kind of celebration that they are actively making sense of the world, even if a bit eccentrically. As one story goes, two youngsters have been learning about Hindu culture and were taken with a representation of the universe in which the world sits atop a giant elephant, and the elephant sits atop an even more giant turtle. “I wonder what the turtle sits on,” says one of the children. “I think from then on,” says the other, “it’s turtles all the way down.”
But deep within our amusement may lurk a note of condescension, an implication that this is what distinguishes children from grown-ups. Their meaning-making is subject to youthful distortions, we assume. Ours represent an accurate map of reality.
But does it? Are we really finished discovering, once we have reached adulthood, that our maps don’t match the territory? The answer is clearly no. In our twenty years of longitudinal and cross-sectional research, we’ve discovered that adults must grow into and out of several qualitatively different views of the world if they are to master the challenges of their life experiences.
A woman we met from Australia told us about her experiences living in the United States for a year. “Not only do you drive on the wrong side of the street over here,” she said, “your steering wheels are on the wrong side, too. I would routinely pile into the right side of the car to drive off, only to discover I needed to get out and walk over to the other side.
“One day,” she continued, “I was thinking about six different things, and I got into the right side of the car, took out my keys, and was prepared to drive off. I looked up and thought to myself, “My God, here in the violent and lawless United States, they are even stealing steering wheels!”
Of course, the countervailing evidence was just an arm’s length to her left, but - and this is the main point - why should she look? Our big assumptions create a disarming and deluding sense of certainty. If we know where a steering wheel belongs, we are unlikely to look for it some place else. If we know what our company, department, boss, or subordinate can and can’t do, why should we look for countervailing data - even if it’s just an arm’s length away?
Source : The Real Reason People Won’t Change, by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Business Review November 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment