I’ve been meaning to look up the meaning of this word for a couple of months, so today I did.  Here it is:

pertinacity 

Sometimes it’s a good thing to be pertinacious.  Sometimes not.

(I’m continuing my exploration of the beauty of asking questions, though not any question.)

We ask questions because we have a problem or don’t understand something fully or are trying to open up a better future when the present seems dangerously becalmed.

James McQuivey asserts:

‘Companies don’t know how to disrupt themselves, who they’re disrupting for, or what that disruption should look like.’*

This is also true for the individual.

We can find ourselves asking questions about how to keep going or doing what we’re doing: pertinacity.  But questions asked at the wrong time of the wrong thing are not questions at all.

McQuivey follows up his assertion with this:

‘Before you can disrupt your product you have to disrupt your process.’*

Often, we can try and figure out what’s wrong or needing attention in what we’re doing, but leave the underlying system alone.  On a personal level, this would be our values and beliefs and character and personality.

What McQuivey offers as product and process, Peter Senge** points to as being two systems or processes.  There’s the one we running along on the surface – the reinforcing system – and there’s the balancing system, which limits the system we’re focused on.  When we ask our questions, we’re usually asking them of the reinforcing system, when we ought to be asking them of the balancing one.

On a personal level, this might look like someone doing well with their work, but not being passionate about what they do, find it’s taking more and more of their energy to produce the same results (the reinforcing system).  To counter this, at home they find they are more and more tired, so they conserve energy by closing off from interacting or going out – this avoids appearing to be a moaner and it helps to keep work functioning but this balancing system is dangerous, threatening their relationships with their partner and family, and their health.

Where would you ask a disruptive question and what would it be?

Sometimes pertinacity needs stopping in its tracks.

(*From James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.)
(**Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

To make the journey we must ask the right questions at the right times.

First of all there are the big open questions: What if?

These are divergent, and can be random, disconnected, and even bizarre.  Messy!  The aim is to maximise the number of possibilities.

Then there are the focusing questions: Which?

These are identifying in nature, picking out the best and most promising of all the generated possibilities: things which connect with the goal(s) and resonate with the stakeholders.

Finally, there are the narrowing questions: How?

These are critical of the ideas, honing and shaping them towards making something happen – sooner rather than later to be able to fail fast, learn, and improve.

What if?  Which?  How?  They make for a journey of great possibilities, but they can’t be asked in the wrong order.  Some ask How? first and never get to the others.

Different people will be better at asking one or two types of question.  Allow them to lead.  Everyone, though, must (and can) play the game required at each point on the journey.

It begins here:

‘Scratching is not about control and repose.  It’s about unleashing furious mindless energy and watching it bounce off everything in your path.  The hope is that a spark will fly from all that contact and combustion – and it usually does.’*

(*From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.)

And paradoxical.

Words to describe the very near future.

Questions are a part of this, not only changing the culture, but also changing the questioner.

Organisations like Gore Associates trains its employees to ask good questions.  Indeed, in this flat, rather than hierarchical, organisation, people have to learn to ask better questions because there’s no one in charge to ask poor questions of.  Other companies provide employees with time to explore the things they’re fascinated or intrigued by, maybe up to twenty percent of their time.  Any organisation can learn and benefit from their example and courage, and create counterintuitive and paradoxical cultures:

‘the best corporate learning environments have some common elements.  Bringing in outsiders to teach and inspire; encouraging insiders to teach each other; putting employees’ work on the walls to share ideas, especially on work in progress – all invite questioning and feedback from others and encourage greater collaboration.’*

Cultures which intentionally include time for enjoyment and enthusiasm, alongside what must be done, are creating environments for more, including the more which will happen inside us.**

If there’s something at work you don’t like and/or are struggling with, what would it sound like if you asked it as a positive, counterintuitive question?

(*From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**Acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm are three modalities through which our greater awareness and consciousness can be expressed.  Even acceptance of what must be done is a positive modality because it is about finding peace with something.  Eckhart Tolle writes about these in A New Earth.)

Can we afford them?

Won’t allowing anyone in an organisation the opportunity to ask questions get in the way of what ought to be happening?  

Won’t it be chaos?

Question and inquiry are going to happen more and more: natural products of growing consciousness and awareness.  It’s difficult to imagine an ongoing industrial approach to the workplace in which people aren’t encouraged to bring more imagination and creativity.  The organisation which ignores or fails to engage these will disable itself.

‘Awakened doing is the alignment of our outer purpose – what you do – with your inner purpose – awakening and staying awake.’*

Eckhart Tolle suggests three modalities through which greater awareness and consciousness can be expressed.  As I read these, I thought about how they offer the ways and means for cultures of inquiry to be encouraged.

The modalities are: acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.  Who wouldn’t more of these in the workplace?  At any one time at least one of these modalities needs to be expressed.

Many businesses, organisations, and institutions seek only acceptance, but this is the very basic a worker brings.  What they will seek more and more is to contribute their enthusiasm and energy too, such as enthusiasm and energy in shared ownership of a project or in ideas, and enjoyment of being able to fully engage and be present.

It’s a no brainer, or, rather, it’s a total brainer.

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

Science writer Manjit Kumar informs me ‘an atom can be in one place, and then, as if by magic, reappear in another without ever being anywhere in between, by emitting or absorbing a quantum of energy.’*

A “quantum question” is a beautifully simple question which can open the adjacent possibility, otherwise going unrecognised or unseen: a non-linear possibility of existence and operating – whether corporate, collective, or personal.

Some people ask questions to be awkward or because it’s part of what they do.  Others ask questions because they emerge from their being.  They are becoming a question which makes possible a different way to live and contribute.

(*From Manjit Kumar’s Quantum.)

What should we do?
What can we do?

Both these questions are good but have limitations.

What may already be assuming there is a single answer.  Should presumes we know what we ought to be doing.  Can focuses on our resources as we see them in this moment.  We is possibly a limited group of people.  Do anticipates action, sooner rather than later.

Perhaps I’m overcooking these questions but, in comparison, here’s the power of the question: How might we?

To ask how opens up the possibility of more creativity.  Might allows ideas which may or may not work to be offered up.  And there’s we, again, but, as part of this question which has opened things up twice-over, this we likely includes more people.

“The how part assumes there are solutions out there – it provides creative confidence.  Might says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not – either way, it’s okay.  And the we part days we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”*

Life is best when faced with questions which open it up, not close it down.  Without rulebooks and owner’s manuals, life is often more intriguing and beautiful when it emerges from messiness rather than tidiness.

‘Because change is now a constant, the willingness to be comfortable with, and even to embrace, ambiguity is critical for today’s leaders.’**

(*IDEO’s Tim Brown, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

There are as many important questions as there are people.

‘Each person’s life – each life form, in fact – represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself.  And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end – one of countless worlds.’*

These words from Eckhart Tolle remind me of my friend Alex McManus‘s observation, about how we each have a unique perspective on life, a way of seeing no-one else has which is lost when we die.

We must dig deep to find what this might be if we believed the lie that we have no singular contribution to make.

Paypal founder Peter Thiel offers this helpful question: “What is something I believe that nearly no-one agrees with me on?”**

Many are successful who pursue something which matters very much to them.  Start-up business coach David Kashen offers what he feels is a better question: “Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?”.^^

This is about more than what we do: it’s who we are, the contribution we can and must make, and our place in our world’s history.

If you think you’re still searching for what this might be for you, why not do something different, or ask a different question:

‘If you scratch the same way all the time, you’ll end up in the same place with the same old ideas.’^

When I open myself to what you are asking or bring, then I grow and what I must bring, develops.

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.)

Another beautifully simple question from Keith Yamashita.*

When we’re more aware of our naturally recurring talents** (what we love to do and our lives want to do), these are great focusing questions:

‘What does the world need that we are uniquely able to provide?’^

This seeks our deeper answer.  Not the one someone else has told us.  Not the ones organisations have so often told us.  Our purpose is found where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

Instead of our response being, “Someone should do something about this!”, we wonder what we can do.  These questions open up the possibility of amazing contributions.

Coming up with a different but simple question to the ones we normally ask opens the more beautiful possibility.

‘Bold innovation, limitless generosity, and the opportunity to save a life.’^^

(*Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**By “naturally recurring,” I mean talents and abilities we’ve developed through our curiosity and intention, though not necessarily aware of.)
(^From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^The wonderful subtitle to the book End Malaria.)

Sometimes we need to intensely focus on something or someone:

‘Other distracting features fall away when you squint, and it helps you determine what gives the object its objectiveness.’*

Sometimes, though, we need to take a big look, with eyes wide open, seeing the edges of fields and domains and people and where these intersect – where new things can happen:

‘People at the intersection, the, can pursue more ideas in search of the right ones.’**

Perhaps looking intently and closely at one thing for too long can be called a comfort zone.

Michael Heppell claims one of the characteristics of brilliant people is, they leave their comfort zone.  Perhaps, though, comfort is an illusion, being more about what we have to work hard not to see?  (Try it: look at something a few feet away, then squint hard at it and see your field of vision narrow, and notice how much effort this takes.)

James McQuivey suggests we need comfort, but also connection and variety and uniqueness.^  The larger world and truth overtakes and envelops us anyway, eventually: think about how you live your life now to ten years ago or twenty years ago.  So, why not be more intentional about this?

‘Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought.’^^

(*From Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.)
(**From Frans Johannson’s The Medici Effect.)
(^From James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.)
(^^From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

Shared by one of the speakers at the event I mentioned yesterday, dealing with risk and fear and failure.

Order is an illusion.  All the time there are all kinds of forces at play; we are constantly adjusting and aligning to these, often through the contribution or work of others.*

Keith Yamashita (I offered two of his questions yesterday – slightly altered) offers two more really helpful questions.  Again, he is asking these of businesses but they work for the individual:

“Whom must we fearfully become?”
“What is true about us at our core?”**

These two questions offer us important anchors in what is a constantly shifting and more-messy-than-we-dare-to-admit world.

The first anchors in the future and what we hope to be: imagine what you’d have written on your gravestone to sum up your life.

The second identifies who we most essentially are in this moment: which is about presence.

Both involve listening very carefully to what our lives are saying to us – which we can trust when we are constantly seeking to connect with our highest values (including worldviews and gods), with others (“We are Human” before “I am Human”), the world (seeing how everything I do affects the world and vice versa); and my Future Self (who and what I am capable of).

This essential person is shaped by our relentless honesty about ourselves and what we have, and generously contributing for the sake of others.

We become the kind of people who can constantly mix things up in a world which  relentlessly asks new questions of us.  We won’t hide away in our political, philosophical, religious, or relational bubbles.  We anticipate the questions and seek to be ahead of what is happening in a lean-forward attitude, anticipating there is more hope than we dare admit.  We haven’t got anything all-figured-out but we’re willing to bring energy and enthusiasm to our primal efforts.

But we are often surprised by what takes shape in all the messiness.

(*I’m slowly reading through George Friendman’s The Next 100 Years, which is fascinating read because of what Friedman suspected will take place around the world, includwe’ve been seeing taking place in Ukraine – a constant shifting of political powers and players most of us are unaware of.
(**Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)