We live in a world where innovation, automation, and digital convergence are promoting a true revolution of human skills such as creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion, and negotiation, as well as resilience, flexibility, and complex problem solving, among others.
In this context, training activities are proliferating for the improvement of leaders, professionals and employees to try to close the emerging skills gap that the market demands to cope with the ongoing change.
However, for the most part we have only been able to appropriate the words and not what they mean:
We remain tied to dichotomous thinking, which sees the world in black and white, simplifying the richness and dynamics of reality into dualities (true or false, left or right, all or nothing); externalizing the polarization of the world and of organizations in paralyzing miscommunication processes.
In a historical moment in which knowledge grows from the technological fusion that emerges from the collision of the physical, digital, and biological worlds, creating ever more sophisticated future projection scenarios, we let our beliefs determine what we see and think, evidencing an enormous incapacity to review our most basic models of understanding and acting in the world,(Sense-Making) an essential component for change.
Just as when something goes wrong, we keep looking for culprits, without understanding the adaptive system of which we are a part, composed of interdependent human beings in a dynamic and living organization, in which most problems and opportunities for improvement belong to the system and not to its parts.
Or even when we insist on following success recipes of professionals or organizations mechanically, ignoring the dynamic and temporal complexity, where delayed effects are common, and causes and effects are not necessarily close in time and space. And, the emergent (unexpected) patterns that arise spontaneously from the behavior of the parts changing the whole.
The changes underway are much deeper than we imagine, and they touch our innermost selves, our ability to observe, interpret and understand the world we live in. It is not just a matter of developing new technical skills, but of changing the very basis of knowledge construction.
How to evolve without unlearning?
How can one grow without questioning and letting go of obsolete opinions and ways?
Possibly the inability to evaluate our own knowledge and to recognize the talent and good ideas of others, whether we like them or not, is the cause of many of society's ills, including the denial of climate change; the death of hundreds of children because their parents did not administer a simple vaccine; or the collapse of your company because you did not dare to think differently.
The exercise of self-knowledge, an essential characteristic of learning agility in my opinion, is one of the most important skills for learning from new experiences quickly and continuously.
But we must never forget that we can ignore what we ignore, becoming hostages of the little we know; in this case it is always good to stop talking and open our ears wide.
(Article originally published on February 20, 2020 in the Linkedin)
