Hear from me (occasionally).

The Beast Behind the Listening Face

One of you wrote me recently about a time you brought up Marx in a group conversation. “I am not a Marxist at all. But he had insights that we can still use. Someone in the group turned to me and said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Writing my reply email drew my mind back to early May and a workshop I hosted with a few dozen senior leaders at Oxford. The title of the workshop was “challenging our world view”, and my idea was to take them on a guided, whirlwind tour around the university (conceptually) and just look at this moment we are in through the eyes of various different researchers. Each of them is attending to this moment very differently—and each has amassed rigorous, peer-reviewed reasons for believing what they see. Hopping through their perspectives is a good way to see more of what all this moment is.

But we didn’t start with the tour. We started with me confessing to them a time from my professional practice last year when I failed to challenge a client’s worldview—when I really should have.

I’ll tell you the long version if you’re interested (just let me know), but the short version is: the client heard something they really didn’t want to hear, got furious, and I spent the rest of the day apologizing. It was re: a presentation my head of research had just given (he’s a Middle East scholar), which featured his own gloomy assessment of Middle East instability and the increased likelihood of war breaking out between the US and Iran, given the results of the 2024 US presidential election.

My takeaway to the room was: “We say we want to ‘challenge our world view’...but how do we greet that challenge when it comes?”

There’s no point hearing perspectives we don’t normally hear, if we don’t first do that meta-reckoning with how we’re likely to hear them. I talk about this stuff all the time and yet I’m constantly noticing my own rush to dismiss the perspective that, to admit it, would ruin my beautiful plans. The perspectives that challenge me the most (and thus, be very useful to my own growth) can also be the hardest ones for me to hear.

It was an honest conversation for that roomful of peers to begin with: the challenge of challenging our world view. My confession resonated, and many of them opened up with their own story. By the time we got around to my “tour of the university”, we were all primed to react, not to what perspective X was bringing (some, say from environmental scientists, are very challenging to the CEO who feels the pressure to hasten her company’s AI adoption at all costs), but to what the perspective was bringing up inside them.

Steal this conversation-starter, the next time your task is to stretch minds. Just let me know what happens?

Reckoning together,
Chris