Straddling Ideas (Or The Reality Of Today)
It’s generally difficult for us to hold two contrasting ideas in our heads.
We have a tendency to move towards a specific interpretation, whether it relates to events, places or people. Something is either good or bad, someone is either smart or stupid, people should or should not be trusted.
We see this in our conversations around politics, where we sit either on the left or the right. We see this in our discussions at work around strategy, people and plans. We even experience this at home as we think about our partners and our kids.
Of course, the real world isn’t quite like that. It’s rare for anything to be quite so black or white and the fact is that we, ourselves, tend to sit closer towards the center than perhaps we’d like to admit.
Much of this is conditioning - ideas and opinions we’ve held over the years, many of which have been ‘handed down’ to us through our communities, others that we have fashioned for ourselves in response to what we see around us, sometimes logically but many times, imperfectly (because we are human, after all).
Of course, plenty of this is conditioned by our media choices - which (unless you’re judicious in your choices) are designed to enhance specific agendas and points of view. Good news simply doesn’t sell - fewer clicks, fewer views, fewer returning customers, fewer Dollars.
The antidote, at least in my mind, has to be a healthy dose of skepticism, in a positive sense i.e. a willingness to think critically about what is being said as well as a willingness to challenge the way we ourselves think. In other words, let’s not take our own views for granted. And to be clear here, I don’t mean cynicism, which is essentially a loss of hope. Rather, I’m referring to the need to search for common ground, to try and understand the other point of view, to find the positive benefit that the other side is searching for. This means we should ask different questions and try to understand why someone might think differently from us.
Foundational principles are essential to this journey. Agreement (or at understanding at least) as to what we are trying to achieve - our end goals - is critical. Let’s first agree on our end state and then we can discuss the path to get there.
In addition, it should go without saying that a key prerequisite is also a conscious commitment to not becoming entrenched in our own stance at all costs. If we start with the premise that this or that view is always right, there is no movement, no possibility of compromise. For some, that’s a dirty word, but if we aren’t willing to offer anything in return, then there’s only stalemate. (Values are, of course, different.)
The other (related) requirement is a suspension of judgement, which is often the hardest thing to do. We need to refrain from qualitative assessments of good versus bad, wrong versus right, before we’ve done our homework. The problem is that this is instinctive, a reflex, but one we have to retrain ourselves to stop doing.
None of this is easy, of course, but so many of the problems we face today are rooted in this inability to straddle opposing points of view.
The effort - and the patience needed to exercise that effort - is essential.
