In the Skilled Facilitator Field Book, there is a discussion of a ‘unilateral control model’ which describes a default position in the process of learning – where a growing sense of being outside one’s ‘comfort zone’ leads to defaulting to a set of strategies which are sub-optimal (in creating the conditions for learning) but optimal in maintaining control of a situation (or at least the felt experience of the illusion of control). So, my sub optimal strategies are likely to include:
- Advocating my position – telling others what the ‘answer’ is: the incipient answer being ‘agree with me…join me in my position’
- Keeping my reasoning private (I don’t say why I think what I think because it may expose contradictions, and reveal that I don’t have ‘reasons’ for what I advocate; the explanation for what I advocate is that I cannot bear…I cannot cope with….I have little or no experience of mutual learning. So what I think is – partly – away of avoiding what you might be thinking and feeling because were I away of it, I would be changing in ways that I could not control. We would be getting down to some intimate innovation.
- I don’t ask you about your reasoning – I judge your conclusions; if I was closer to you, if I knew more about you and your reasoning, I would be drawn in to our relating.
- I ‘ease in’ – I tell you what I think in an indirect way – ‘I was wondering about….’ or ‘do you think it would be a good idea if….’. When I do this, I am indirectly advocating my position: I am rejecting the efficiency of being direct for the soft-soaping stance of persuading you.
- And, of course I tend to ‘save face’ – rather than what? Waste face….spend face….lose face….this idiom suggests that (to the extent that my ‘face’ is an image of identity – and the ‘window on the soul’) that my impulse to control my own emotions and maintain continuity of my identity prevents me from getting into the position (in relation to you) where I might change my mind.
In effect, in this way of seeing things, I do all I can to avoid ‘feeling vulnerable’ since that would mean I am more likely to change.
And this synaptic dynamic is at the core of learning and leading – are leaders supposed to change their minds? Are they allowed to be vulnerable – visibly vulnerable? Or is part of what my society requires of its leaders, that they do not show their vulnerability, and they remind me of my own, but in ways which mean I feel I do not need to use my vulnerability in order to change; I cocoon myself in the sense of identity that keeps things as they have been. As such, a leader can be seen as a parody of an evocative object – a leader (say in denying complexity) leads me to feel sanctioned in simplifying the world.
Slingshot