We need written descriptions, yet they are not always fit for purpose. I recognise that the descriptions and sets of instructions on how to do one of the Totemics routines can be off putting, just seeming too tricky to contemplate.
All kinds of our day to day activities can sound tricky in a set of written instructions, a good example being on how to tie a shoelace. I was reading a book where the author, a mathematician, was intent upon encouraging us all to be more curious and confident in undertaking mathematical exploration. He used the example of the shoelace to make a point on how much easier it is to learn by doing. The book was an enjoyable read, and much that he wrote is also as true when we are working to design, create and innovate.
Another example of a tricky written description might be on how to ride a bike, just consider the degree of complexity that would be necessary, and similarly to the shoelace example, we no doubt learned as a child, without ever reading a manual.
It is important to remember here the significance of the emotional aspect in both learning and doing, particularly in doing. It begins as soon as we are born and ramps up in childhood, we are intent on gaining skills so that we can join in, belong and become a valued part of a group. And if we think about the emotions that are experienced as we master bike riding, misery when we fall, frustration when we can almost do it, elation when we succeed. The emotional range is wide and multi facetted, and it doesn’t leave us, most of us stubbornly persevere with tricky things until we have the longed for mastery.
It is worth pausing on that word, mastery, because it rarely arrives quietly. We tend to remember the moment we finally rode the bike unaided far more vividly than the weeks of instruction that preceded it. That is not an accident. Instruction gives us the shape of a thing, but experience gives us the feel of it, and it is the feel that actually sticks. This is precisely why a Totemics routine can look unremarkable on paper and yet land powerfully in the room. The written description was never meant to carry the whole weight of the exercise, it is the doing of it, together, that does that.
Our Emotional Selves Also Go to Work
Acknowledging the emotional content of what we do is vital, because we do not leave this aspect of ourselves at home. Not only can we not leave it neatly waiting at home, but it is an essential, if rarely spoken about, feature of how we do what we do when we go to work.
Emotion rarely gains a proper legitimacy in the workplace, and when it is named, it is usually with an emphasis on those less than joyful aspects, stress, abuse of power, and mental health.
The emotions mentioned earlier that are a part of learning and doing, for example persistence, elation, obsessiveness, patience, and empathy, are the ones that a team or department need to be sure that they are acknowledging. To varying degrees, we all recognise the power of these emotions, they are, or can be, a healthy power for good, these are creative emotions. It is more when they go unacknowledged, silenced, that they affect the way each of us uses our own and others’ knowledge, particularly when the issues require something to be redefined, something entirely new, or even merely altered. The silence creates a roadblock.
None of this is a call to turn the workplace into group therapy. It is simply an argument for honesty, that persistence looks like persistence and not stubbornness, that elation is allowed to be elation and not dismissed as overexcitement, that patience is recognised as a skill in its own right rather than passivity. When a team can name what it is actually feeling as it works, rather than only what it is thinking, it tends to move through difficulty rather than around it.
[This piece will continue in Learning from Lévi-Strauss, where we look at where the name Totemics actually comes from. – COMING SOON]