Friday 29 June 2012

The world we share

I wrote most of the article below more than a decade ago and expanded on the concept in my Changing What's Normal book.

Nothing has changed in our political landscapes!

Please forward to politicians.

As far back as 2003 authors Kouzes and Posner said Collaboration has become the master skill of this age. Our ability to work together will determine mutual failure or mutual success.

How skilled are you?

Very few of our political leaders have the skill or they have the skill just unwilling to use it.

I find politics fascinating from the perspective of how not to be in the modern world.  Almost everything the government says, the opposition fights and vice versa. How incredible that in the age of collaboration, we have to have an opposition!

I listen to parliament in Australia occasionally and did so yesterday during debate about what to do about asylum seekers.  The most basic of actions required to have high value relationships of mutual reward were being ignored by these highly paid so called representatives of ours.

We live in three worlds; the world in here, the world out there, and the world we share. In here our views are just that, out there are other people’s views. In the world we share are the views we agree on.

In any successful relationship the world we share is the critical one.

Human conflict is fundamentally the result of firstly, failure to agree on the goal, and secondly, failure to agree on the strategies to achieve the goal.

This second one often causes all the trouble for our parliamentarians. It seemed they all had the same goal; a more civil universe for all. But do you think they could agree on the strategies to achieve this most noble of purposes?  Not on your life. Every speaker I heard was only interested in the world in here.

I guarantee that today all of our troubles, personal, local, national, and global, are fundamentally based in our perceived need to hang onto the world in here, our issues with the world out there, and, our failure to focus more on the world we share.

In the free countries of planet earth we can express our personal views without fear. What makes life really worthwhile is when we can share our views (without ridiculing one another as these politicians did yesterday) and come together with a shared view, which may mean we let go of things we previously held dear.

I trust that today and every day you will resolve to build more of the world we share and be less precious about the world in here or the world out there.

Be the difference you want to see in the world.
Ian

I work with leaders to conceive and achieve highly successful change initiatives.


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