Jim Michmerhuizen writes: "What's particularly interesting about your
story is that it also relates to an earlier thread about names. It seems
as though your intentions, in the story, were of the best. Is it possible
that you had not completely rendered your methods "nameless" (in the sense
of my post from a couple of weeks ago)? Residual self-consciousness, from
a set of thoughts that have not yet been perfectly assimilated into
action, can leave you far more "transparent" than you would think. This
may be what the executives saw in you. There may have been inauthenticity
too, of course; but that is at least a different issue."
Ah yes, Jim, "manipulation", like "resistance" seems always to reside in
"them" but - as several have pointed out in different ways - reflect
recognition of our own practices which we are unwilling to name.
The particular practice here - which we called Aikido but which called up
in the participants "manipulation" - depends, as Marilyn Darling and Diane
Weston have pointed out, on genuine respect for the other. It may be
argued (I think, fudnamentally, it's your point of view) that we presented
this as a technique without the "whole" of it (respect) because we didn't
trust, or perhaps we even feared, the executives for whom the training was
designed, and their unmasking it as manipulation exposed US and our lack
of trust.
Some of us (the design/training team) actually gave voice to some of these
ideas, but we were unable or unwilling to resolve our own issues around
this in the time frames we had for repairing the training, and we focused
instead on "fixes", which of course all dead-ended. Two or three of US
learned more from this episode (than we wanted to?) than any of the
"target" learners...
One severe consequence of all this is that the "change piece" was severely
weakened, and senior management has been left without good models for
understanding change and managing the enterprise as it changes...
--Jack Hirschfeld What do you see when you turn out the lights? jack@his.com