His talk at TED in 2006 was a revelation. It explained what had been bugging us. Why managers  were so biased towards a mechanistic way of thinking, why mistakes are considered the worst things we can do instead of allowing imagination to explore new ways. His explanation was that the process of education, at school and University was built over the last century and more,  to support industrialism (and it’s done that brilliantly). Sir Ken then explained that education is built in the image of industrialism. This was the insight we needed.

We realised that this is why managers so value using measurement (targets, objectives, time plans, linear thinking, accounts, analysis and prediction). That’s OK, however there are other things it might be useful to do. For us that includes knowing how to deal with trust, self-belief, making meaning, self-esteem, positive attitudes, different viewpoints, inspiration, authenticity, intuition, relating to others and much more.

These humanistic things are central to how a good manager works.

It is clear to me that because education doesn’t support humanistic development, most people have real difficulty in this areaI. I’m researching for a PhD, and I’ve found the exceptions to this mechanistic bias are those individuals who have had their education supplemented by, for instance, a family with values, a mentor with wisdom about people, the chance to read books about relationships and many other routes — although not available to, or not used by the great majority.

The other insight was from Malcolm Parlett (one time Editor of the British Gestalt Journal). He described this mechanistic way of thinking (in 1991) as the ‘dominant epistemology’. In other words the way of thinking for most people. To change a widespread way of thinking, we know, is a major struggle. I’m pleased to be one of a group who are doing all we can to to re-balance the way we understand and deal with the world – how we can bring people centre-stage, and deal with them as people rather than resources.

I wish I’d though about this when I got my first job as a Personnel Manager in 1970. Damn!

These become visible when we speak and when we act.
Because it is not possible for people to communicate every aspectof their inner selves all the time we have developed a human capacity to interpret, to make assumptions and to analyse situations. We need to make sense of people’s behaviour in order to interactand so we begin the process.

This process can lead to misinterpretation and mis-assumption. If both people then assume that their interpretations are right, if the continue interacting without adapting and adjusting their view of each other, without revealing their inner thoughts and feelings, the quality of contact will diminish and the relationship will become difficult.
If both people in this struggle continue to avoid communicating their inner selves, what can then happen is an expectation that ‘the other’ will need to change for the relationship to improve.
In truth we cannot change other people we can only change ourselves;

• we can act differently so that other people respond differently towards us
• we can let other people know more about our invisible selves
• we can give other people feedback about how we are interpreting them so that they can correct us if we are wrong
• we can invite other people to tell us more about themselves
• we can become more authentic in ourselves; the more authentic we are the more we will show others our true self

Sometimes we ovoid looking inside ourselves because we are afraid that what we will see we won’t like.

(this is from my book ‘Simply People’ available at Amazon)

When I look around me I realise that I am not alone in this, most people have been caught in the web of ‘not knowing’ at some time in their lives.
Some typical behaviours that I see of ‘not knowing’ are:

• lack of authenticity
• blaming others for personal difficulties
• criticising and judging others
• expecting others to know us
• acting out of the constraints of habit, rather than the freedom of choice
• feeling and staying stuck

These behaviours and attitudes diminish the quality and the life of our interactions.

Knowing ourselves is a reflective process of continuous learning and discovery. What we don’t know about ourselves remains a mystery until insight brings it into our self-awareness.

(this is from my book ‘Simply People’ available at Amazon)

We can unwittingly undermine other peoples confidence by directly relating what people DO with WHO they are as a person when they have done something wrong.

For example:

Two year old Zoe has been writing on the wall, her mother comes in and says that she is a bad girl, Zoe’s confidence is affected because she relates badness to who she is rather than what she has been doing — and this becomes the pattern of her life if mother and authority figures continue to give her feedback in this way.

If her mother had said “we do not write on walls, that is not allowed, we write on paper, let’s go and find some then Zoe learns that writing on walls is bad, not Zoe. In fact she probably feels good about herself because Mum is prepared to give her the time and find something that she can write on even though she did something that was wrong. The message is still ‘I’m OK even when I do something wrong’.

When we have been brought up feeling repeatedly bad about ourselves our self confidence becomes diminished. In adult life if we take challenging feedback as criticism we reinforce the process that was set up as a child.

Developing self-confidence means differentiating between objective feedback (what I DO) and subjective feedback (who and how I AM), relishing the delights of ‘selfness’.

(this is from my book ‘Simply People’ available at Amazon)

For instance if you are fairly chaotic in the way that you live your life you might find yourself with a partner who consistently acts in a highly organised manner.

These extremes can have a balancing effect on a relationship as well as providing the relationship with a much wider range of skills and understanding than each individual has on their own.This means that relationships at their best gain an essence that is much more than the sum of the individuals. It also means that we can learn from each other.

A few more examples of polar opposite behaviours are:

• outgoing and inward looking
• intellectual and artistic
• easy going and anxious
• talkative and quiet
• grandiose and humble
• differentiated and conforming
• pedantic and laid back

In truth many polar opposite behaviours can be an irritant in our relationships, when we fail to see their value our relationships will not ‘add up’ to their best.

(this is from my book ‘Simply People’ available at Amazon)

We also need to balance this by looking at ourselves in relation to others, by treating our world as one great big mirror  in which we can see many reflections of ourselves.Without others we are unable to see these reflections. We experience this reflective behaviour in many ways, much of the time out of our awareness.

For example;

• if we enjoy debate people will engage with us in debate and discussion
• if we are lively and full of fun, then the chances are that we will evoke fun and liveliness in others; they will enjoy our company:
• if we care about ourselves other people will care about us too.The opposite also happens; if we don’t care about ourselves then we might find that others don’t give us the level of caring that we would like to have;
• if we are feeling stressed, some people around us will probably show signs of stress also;
• if we deny certain feelings and emotions in ourselves the chancesare that when we see these emotions in others we will feel uncomfortable.

A client of mine shared with me that he felt uncomfortable talking about himself in front of other people, although he claimed that he felt alright in one-to-one conversation. When asked, he also realised that when other people talk openly about themselves in a group, especially their innermost selves, that he feels a strong sense of dislike towards them.

My client had a number of relationship difficulties that he had not understood. His awareness of himself helped him to understand how he was contributing to his own struggles.

This mirroring process moulds and shapes our relationships. It also reinforces who we are.

Our response to others and their response to us is what makes us
the people that we are today; we are the sum of all our relationships.

(this is from my book ‘Simply People’ available at Amazon)