Forty answers to one question that led to six questions
Forty practitioners, one question about making change last. Almost no one answered with a method. They talked about seeing, and that discovery led to Forward Thinking Workplaces and to The Perception Miracle.
You subscribed to Forward Thinking Workplaces because you care about how work changes, and what makes change last.
That was my question too. Between 2011 and 2014 before I created Forward Thinking Workplaces, I asked forty practitioners the same thing: what is your best process improvement strategy? I expected methods. Most of them talked about seeing. Listen first. Find out where you actually are. Notice what people already know.
Those answers became six questions, and those six questions became Forward Thinking Workplaces, the conversations you’ve been reading.
In 2014, Joseph Jaworski told a room of us that if we could see reality more as it is, what to do would become obvious. I had no answer. Ten years later, I lived one.
Here’s where seventeen years and more than 150 conversations led me: we don’t respond to what happens. We respond to what we’ve already decided it means. A leader who sees a team as resistant can create the very defensiveness that proves it. The method was rarely the missing piece. The seeing was.
That discovery became The Perception Miracle. Online, it isn’t only a book you read. It recreates the workshop three groups went through this past year: an image first, a pause, then a question about your own seeing, across thirteen doorways. You move through it at your own pace, the way the groups did together.
If you’d rather begin with a conversation, I’m hosting a special Odyssey session tomorrow, Thursday, at 11 am ET / 4 pm CET. It’s free and lasts 54 minutes. Reply to this email for an invite.
Bill
P.S. If you’d like the longer story behind this letter, it’s in three short pieces:
Forty Answers to One Question: what the interviews were really saying.
Before I Knew What to Call It: the first interview, and the question underneath all of them.
The Autopilot We Never Notice: Jaworski’s question, and the decade it took to answer.