My friends and I watched the fourth round of the Swedish Melodifestivalen, where Axel Schylström performed Gorgeous. The central message of the song was about how Axel himself learned to love his body image again after climbing on the roof of a train as a young man and being severely burnt by an electric shock to 70 % of his skin. One of my friends commented that he didn't understand why he had to climb up on that train roof in the first place to pretend to be something in the foolishness of youth. Another friend of mine looked at him for a long time and replied that ”maybe he didn't mean to survive”.
My first friend, without knowing the backstory, made the assumption (as I did) that the train roof had been climbed for show. The second, on the other hand, understood that there could be more to the story. A silence ensued, in which my first friend and I engaged in some embarrassed self-reflection.
The worst enemy of knowledge is assumption. Ignorance opens the door to the search for knowledge and ’truth’, assumption gives us the illusion that we already know and therefore there is no need to find out. Assumptions also blind us to the world around us, and thus to the root causes of problems, for example.
Yes, we know what our customers want from us.
We would change, but the resistance to change is too great when people don't want to change.
This model and approach will certainly work for everyone in their daily lives.
Our management knows with certainty what those working at the customer interface need.
The five questions are a key tool for coaches, managers and each of us to access information:
Why?
What?
How?
When?
Where?
When we dare to repeat these enough, we can get to the root causes and stories that would remain unexplored and unheard if we assumed we already knew. These questions are the key tools of the MTTC. We don't have omniscient gurus who come to bring in outside wisdom, but curious people who really want to understand, and thereby help bring forth possible solutions.
As a coach, I often have to fight against my own assumptions, and at the same time try to make my clients face theirs. Exposing assumptions and seeking real knowledge is therefore an absolute must in any development project that aims to bring about real change.
Change can only start where we really are - not where we assume we are.
What can be changed is what really is, not what is supposed to be.
Good practices are those that actually work in the environment, not those that are assumed to work.
