Innovation is far from a neat, linear journey
By: Kathleen Dey
As we met again in Immersion 2 with a cohort of Fellows who really did not know how deep their learning would go, we discovered a group of young leaders in the NGO sector grappling with the ripple effect that asking questions about innovation can bring to an organisation. The step-by-step framing of the assignment that the faculty gave them after Immersion 1 gave Fellows the misleading impression that following an internal line of inquiry as an organisation is a linear and orderly process. Instead, they found that it can be revelatory, life-changing, and messy.
For starters, Fellows realised that once you start asking questions, you can’t or don’t stop because you quickly realise that one question leads to another. The core question itself changes and changes again, because you don’t realise how everything fits together in a problem until you’re in question.
What this does is unearth some scary things: the cans of worms best left unopened are opened, a lack of harmony and containment surfaces, and there is a feeling of threat. Some found that coming back into the organisation after Immersion 1 with deeper questions created a division, a barrier, an in-group out-group situation, a feeling of them and us, and a breakdown in collegiality. Honouring the process of sensing deeply into a problem or an issue without jumping to solutions left others feeling separated from the usual way of doing things. The status quo was changing. Doing this while feeling time-strapped, juggling schedules, and dealing with the competing demands and priorities of organisational life only added to the difficulty.
For many Fellow pairs, their immediate instinct was to make the questioning process collective rather than trying to convince their organisations of what questions to ask. Trying to create a collective space where all voices could be heard and everyone could see for themselves what the issues were grounded them.
Fellows learned that amid organisational volatility, choosing to work with those people most affected by a problem, careful preparation, and careful articulation can help you endure the small fires that questioning and uncertainty bring, in the hope that there will be longer-term gains in doing so. Allowing different ways of seeing to come together and tapping into generative themes where strong emotions are evoked can be very bonding. Fellows learned to ask the right questions to the right people. Brewing over a common question allows people to think futuristically in a spirit of communality. An interesting question can be a wellspring of inspiration, motivation, love, and commitment even amid a difficult process.
Some Fellows found it amazing to get to know their fellow Fellows and their work, not having worked so closely as colleagues before. Others found their personal life also changed as they started seeing things differently and asking not only why but also, “For the sake of what?”
Lots of tears were shed by some in coaching. It is very confronting when you can’t escape yourself. You need to confront yourself to be whole. You can’t pour from a broken cup. Fellows spoke about how they learned to love the coaching process, tough as it was, because they came to discover how off track some of their assumptions were. When that happens, it feels as though the ground falls out from under your feet, and that leaves you with deep emotions and deep waters to navigate. The love comes when you realise that your wrong assumptions could have led you to poor judgment about the problem you are trying to solve, which could have hurt your organisation, and that you avoided that by looking deeper. As you realise this, you grow and become more and more conscious of how your way of being determines the assumptions that you make how you show up.
And that makes all the difference.