Rigged

The guy waving his flag outside Parliament today, told me ‘it’s all rigged’. He meant the system, politics, our democracy. I'm hearing it a lot these days, about politics.

After listening, I had to agree - 'not with everything', I said, but yeah his central idea. That the system is always rigged, in one way or another. The fundamental principles and assumptions that lie behind the system, often invisible, make any system resilient to real change. The more we try to change, the more things can stay the same.

We can dedicate a lot of resources and effort to change, only to find that we end up with only variations to a familiar theme. Rather than solving a problem, we can end up only moving it somewhere else. Or creating a new problem. I know that there are other reasons that we fail to change - misunderstanding the situation, poor design, ineffective implementation and unintended consequences.

But how about looking at mindset - individually and collectively?

Mindsets are shaped by our own experiences and the meaning we've made of them. Often unconsciously. Yet, beneath the surface of all our working and living lurk hidden assumptions, beliefs, fears that in turn shape entrenched patterns of thinking and behaving. Even what we see and value. This is the scaffolding for the way we live our lives according to unspoken rules. And we get what we've always got, and haven't got. We wonder why it is that we are here again, in familiar patterns. We develop as people and a professionals, when we learn to recognise our patterns and unravel how they came about.

Escape velocity from old patterns, once seen,can only really be achieved through regular, robust and genuine exploration being prepared to challenge old perspectives and be open to new ones that's best done with those wise others around us, who we trust.

Can you get out of your own rigging?