When we get lost in the story

For several decades I have been engaged to find a pathway between messy business, team and partnership relationship breakdowns.

All of the pain, anxiety, sleepless nights, stress and heartbreak. Add anger, frustration, withdrawal and all the various responses to tension between. The cost at a personal, health and enterprise level is significant. 

I have been a party to these types of experiences, both as a leader and hence responsible for creating this scenario, and as a participant. 

What I have learned is that the solutions are often incredibly simple. The container that holds the text, or the relationship, is a blurred line of unexpressed or unmet expectations, assumptions made without clarification, power differentials that have not been acknowledged or curtailed, lack of clear vision, inability to address issues when they are minor to prevent them from becoming major, fear of losing control, or indeed never having control, and communications channels that remove the human to human nuance so essential to relationships.

The stories I have heard are the same – different contexts, different characters, different timelines – but feeding from the same well. Misunderstanding. Blame. Justification. Lack of self-awareness. Lack of clarity of roles, accountabilities and responsibilities. When we get lost in the story, we lose the context. The story becomes everything. 

Get the context – the container – in great shape – the enterprise architecture that creates the ecology, and the ecology takes good care of itself.

In Syntropic World, we call that the Trust Manifesto. 

From my broken bones of experience, I would never enter any relationship that matters, without some version of the Trust Manifesto. It dignifies all.

Photo Taken November 5th  2023