When Your World Shifts

Toronto - late 1999

I was on the train into Toronto to help facilitate a strategy and change session with a pretty large group of middle to senior managers.

I had worked a lot with systems thinking over the past number of years and this session had a large component of those ideas.

On the train I was also reading one of the earlier books by Ralph Stacey. It had been recommended to me by a close colleague. When I started the book I didn't know how much Stacey challenged the ideas of systems thinking.

I was nearing the end of the book as the train pulled into the Toronto station. I also had the first uncomfortable feelings that I was also nearing the end of my journey using systems thinking.

But I didn't really have a clue where the journey may lead next. I knew now though, that systems thinking was not going to be a big part of that journey.

But I had a two day session to run, with systems thinking being a big part of that! Yikes.

The session went very well.

I was acting, and interacting, into uncertainty and beginning to figure out what the next part of my journey might be. Not really comfortable, but not lost either.

Isn't this kind of what we all do when our world's shift? It would be nice if we could all accept this as more normal than what we are told...