We usually talk about building a shared vision as it was possible to live without one inside a common environment. During my practice as Coach, more often than I would like it to be, I hear Executives express how they are preparing Communication Plans and Training Workshops to build a shared vision, as if it was something new and not existent before. I think it makes us fall into a lineal thinking process that compromises our ability to understand the complexity of the situation and identify the causes of a destructive shared vision inside our organizational environment.
For me, a shared vision is always in usage: it is the common knowledge about "how we do things around here". It is impossible to conceive a group of people in social interaction without a shared vision. This shared vision is expressed through our language, as our language interprets, defines, expresses, translates and creates our reality (or our experience of our reality). The only problem is that we are not aware of how we use our language in this process, and most of the times we are creating a shared vision that does not add value to the group we interact with and belong.
Albert Chillón, an inspiring and brilliant PhD professor at Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, - and with whom I was lucky to study during my Doctorate course in Barcelona- presented us to a very interesting approach to Communications that proposes a shift of thinking that questions some of our deeper beliefs.
Albert talks about the linguistic awareness. In the first chapter of his book Literatura y Periodismo, he makes us reflect about the way we interact with the world through our language. He gathers brilliant ideas and insights from Humbodlt, Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakhtin, George Steiner, José Maria Valverde, Lluis Duch, and others, and structures a passionate reasoning about this legacy he claims abandoned by most of our social sciences about the implications of this linguistic awareness. The main ideas that impacted me are, in my words:
- Becoming conscious of the linguistic nature of our mind and thoughts – our thoughts are either in words or in search for words;
- Becoming conscious about the rhetoric nature of our language – as words are representations of our sensorial impressions and therefore are tropes;
- Becoming conscious of the logo-mythic nature of language – the language is not just of logical nature, conceiving the word exclusively as logos, an abstract concept which is rational, non sensorial, referential and denotative. Being of logo-mythic nature, implicates that words "unite an abstract concept and a sensorial image, reason and representation, precise denotation and sensorial connotation, analytical reference and synthetic allusion, effectiveness and "affectionness"".*
As we become more conscious of the complexity of our society and brain, it is easier to accept that our language is much more than words we all share their same meaning. It is easy for us to accept the idea that we cannot understand the act of communication without diving into the complexity of the environment in which this communication act is performed as the meaning is constructed socially, through interaction… and I think we may all agree that our understanding happens in a very complex way as we process the information received inside our mind, where our mental models, language knowledge, social skills, emotional intelligence, sensorial perception and so forth play a role to make sense out of it.
Shared Vision? Well, from this perspective it is difficult to conceive a human group that do not share a vision… the big question here is understanding how we can make this shared vision add value to our group experience, business results, innovation processes, quality of life.
I believe a good way to start doing it is by enhancing our awareness of our reasoning strategies: if we will agree that our mind and thoughts are always in words or in search for words, understanding how we reason and which values and beliefs are being used by us and by our group to structure our world view and translate the sensorial impressions into ideas, we will generate means of diminishing our reactive experience and transforming it into a generative learning experience. And by doing so, we will be able to create an inspiring shared vision naturally, as we will understand our responsibility in the process of generating a common meaning.
Fred Kofman** suggests a leader is a person able to create a common narrative that all members of the group are able to relate to and use as reference to guide their path. I totally agree with him and that's why I believe it is so important to us to understand how we use our language to do it.
At Integral-Comm we dream of and help build a world where everyone is able to express their full potential as they master their reasoning ability with ethics, integrity and responsibility.
References:
*Albert Chillon, Literatura y Periodismo, una tradición de relaciones promiscuas, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions, Colecció Aldea Global, 1999.
**Fred Kofman. Seminario Complexity Made Simple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uBCx6Le96M
