Reflections and thoughts from the author of It’s Not What You’re Thinking.
Excerpts
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Is Being In Conflict Human?
“I think, therefore I am” – René Descartes When we look at the issues and concerns in our daily lives and the endless competition, confrontations, and violence in world events, have we accepted or resigned ourselves to the conclusion that conflict is inevitable? In other words, like our cultural acceptance that “to err is human,” have we also accepted that “to be in conflict is human?” If that is so, then our approach to conflict is immediately narrowed to reactively mitigating the manifestations of specific conflicts rather than investigating the mechanism and nature of conflict itself to…
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The Nature of Conflict
“We do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about” – Edgar Schein In the last two posts, we explored how our assumptions create division and conflict, and how this prevents us from seeing, understanding, and solving functional problems. We observed that conflict is intertwined with functional problems and that this distracts our effort towards managing the conflict rather than solving the functional problem. We have an endless portfolio of conflicts, and it is rather pointless to manage specific conflicts and expect anything transformative. As soon as…
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The Conflicted Problem
“We can’t solve problems using the same thinking that created them to begin with” – Albert Einstein One of the biggest challenges we face in clinical transformation is to see the functional problem that is contributing to the systems dysfunction we live or work in. Problems always seem to have associated contradictions and emotional distress, and we are prone to use the terms problem and conflict synonymously. There is undoubtedly a link between problems and conflict, and if we’re going to effectively solve problems, we must explore whether a problem is always a conflict.What is a problem?Examples…
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Beware of Assumptions
“When you’re surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think it’s reality.” – Emily Levine Welcome to the first post of INWYT Unraveled, a blog series dedicated to exploring our approaches to problem solving in healthcare and beyond. As we begin our deep dive, we must understand how assumptions shape our reality, distort our actions, and obscure the actual problems we need to solve. What are Assumptions? Let’s look at some key definitions: We are rooted in assumptions: Assumptions are based on our mental models and conditioning. Assumptions that…