Cultural gridlock - a failure of imagination

We all have words or phrases we don’t like or are not allowed, the one in our house is this ‘be careful’. It is the highest sign of disrespect and profanity to use these words. So my wife and I never say it to our kids. And essentially I spend about half of my professional career teaching people not to say it to their teams either. 

And it gets me into trouble all the time. 

Especially when I am around a climbing frame or when my kids are up trees, or they are exploring something or making a fire. And people watch me and then they look at my kids and say ‘be careful.’

It is like a red rag to a bull. ‘Excuse me why are you telling my kids to be careful? What on earth do you think you are doing?’ Right at the moment when my 8 year old is carving up a piece of driftwood with his penknife to throw on to his fire. 

‘Well we are concerned for your children and their well-being. Don’t you know that fires can be dangerous?’

‘Don’t you know that paralysing the creative and imaginative inertia within our children is causing a huge pandemic across our society? Where we have a generation who are unable to think for themselves, make key decisions and help fix some of the biggest problems that face our world. We are effectively teaching out of our children the ability to make useful decisions by making them freeze the moment we insist on ‘being careful’ rather than getting them to think through the actions they are taking and learn to make good decisions in the process often by making some mistakes along the way.’

‘Err sure.’ And then they walk away, and sometimes ring the police and report me. 

It is not that I don’t want my kids to take any care. I really do. But I realised something. The moment I said ‘be careful’ it stopped them dead in their tracks. It made them panic, over-think the situation they were in and fail to weigh properly the choices before them and instead wait for me to tell them what was ok or not. Not only that but they failed to develop key skills for how to do things better.  In short it had the opposite effect on them to what I wanted. I didn’t want them to stop doing everything, I wanted them to learn, but my posture threw such a blanket of fear and anxiety into them that they became paralysed. 

We live in a society where essentially everything around us says ‘be careful’. 

Our news and media outlets say ‘danger lurks behind every corner’, ‘bike accidents on the rise’, ‘kid falls from tree’ - but rather than saying to us ‘think about how you do these things’ what they actually convey to us is ‘don’t do these things at all.’

And we feel the same in our organisations. 

And what I seem to spend most of my time doing with organisations is what I do with my kids, namely at moment of breakdown, chaos, paralysis or concern to help people be brave. 

The surrounding voices around us say ‘oooh don’t do that’ or ‘watch out for this’ or ‘no we can’t do that’. And all they really are is intellectualised ways of saying ‘be careful’. Often people become so convinced that things can’t really change, that despite the pain they feel they are better off where they are (doing something different is way too scary) and that being stuck is better than the unknown. Edwin Friedman referred to some of these postures are imaginative gridlock. 

My highest honour in school was winning an U13 Design Technology competition. It was countywide and the prize was a school computer, we were currently a school that didn’t have a computer so the stakes were high. The brief was simple - using a kit they gave you of various bits of wood, nuts, elastic bands, dowel and wheels and you had to use the elastic band to power the car and the one which goes the furthest wins. The judges said go and we had two hours to build our car. About ten minutes in a film crew came over to interview us and said what did we think of our chances ‘oh we will definitely win.’ How far do you think you can make the car go they queried pointing to the expanse of the sports hall. ’We will crash into the back wall' I said confidently. They laughed at my confidence, but they kept filming the team nonetheless. When the time of the race came the 15 teams dutifully brought their contraptions to the start line and people laughed at the basic nature of ours. A number of teams were intricately winding their cars up and using the kit in a variety of different ways to add propulsion to the wheels. A number of cars had in and the furthest any had travelled was to the middle of the hall until their tightly wound elastic band wound out and the power was gone. It came to our turn we walked to the start line with car in hand and a hammer. We knocked a nail into the floor connected the elastic band to it and the car pulled it back and watched it shoot across the floor and career into the back wall. We won by miles. People cried out cheat but actually something different was going on. We had broken out of the imaginative gridlock that had forced people to think the only way was to try and propel the wheels. What you really needed was to propel the car. 

This gridlock is where the emotional climate around us make us believe things are always the way they are meant to be and stops us thinking creatively and imaginatively amidst the pressure of what everyone else is doing. Friedman (check his book here) looked at issues of imaginative gridlock as characterised by : 

- An unending treadmill of trying harder

The amount or organisations I have seen who have bad practices but are convinced if they only keep trying harder things will be ok is incredible. You look at what these people do and it is exhausting, I am exhausted just watching them. 

- A search for answers rather than reframing questions

The search for answers can be the same as trying harder. One company I know was desperately looking at how do we make our team more productive (sound familiar?). It is a valid question but they had spent the best part of a decade trying to figure it out and had agonised over it. They were encouraged to ask some different questions. ‘How do you get the best out of yourself?’ And ‘How would your team feel most valued?’ These are not unrelated questions but they pulled them, as a group, away from simply focussing on technique and methods that had already been hashed out and tried. The conclusion they came to was this ‘we will give everyone in this organisation a yearly bonus regardless of performance, so long as you take your annual leave.’ 

Over the next two years productivity and efficiency went up and staff sick days went down. What they weren’t trying to do was avoid the issue, but they were aware that they were ‘gridlocked’ by the question. So asked something different. 

- Either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies 

We see many of these in our time and they subtly tyrannise people. Social media, for example, teaches us that if people don’t ‘like’ our posts or pictures then they don’t like us as a person. That somehow tied to this is rejection. We very rarely consider that people may be busy, they may not have checked, they may not actually like our picture but none of these mean they don’t like us. 

And it goes deeper in organisational areas where we fail to hold things in tension often seeing them as simply binary. Can we be risk taking or safety first? Yes. Can we be direct and relational? Can we be organised and relaxed? Can we edgy and trustworthy? I think yes. It doesn’t mean everything is straightforward, but definitely doable. Learning to hold tension and ambiguity is a leadership art form.

But we don’t breakout of this sort of gridlock by accident. It takes intentionality to step off the treadmill and ask different questions, especially in a culture that seems to be hardwired around trying harder and seeking better answers. 

If, like me you grew up in the last century and can ride a bike the likelihood is that you had stabilisers or training wheels on them. If you have a child under 10 now you will know that this is, now, not the thing. Balance bikes are everything. But it took creative imagination to go against the inherited wisdom of a generation. It didn’t ask people to try harder at learning to ride a bike, it reframed the question by asking not ‘how do I learn to peddle’ but instead ‘what is the core to riding a bike’ and it turns out the two are not the same. The art of riding a bike is about balancing. And finally it said there is something broader to consider. It doesn’t simply have to be a bike with stabilisers or not, it could be a bike that doesn’t have peddles.  

What would this look like in our organisations? To run some of our problems through this matrix? To step off the treadmill, if only to breathe, and to ask and reframe different ideas and questions and look at whether our choices are as stark as we think.