My mind has a couple of images rocking around and this seems like the perfect home to hone my ideas. I’m standing on and balancing this board atop the point of a delta - a teeter-totter plank of my own curiosity.

After reading Hal, Jeffrey, and Don’s postings and thinking back to my experiences of people in organizations I’ve been a part of, the teeter-totter image hit me. The teeter-totter model is Volition – the delta is State of Mind, the plank is Level of Engagement, and the seats are Checked-In and Checked-Out.

In all of the postings the underlying theme seems to point to an individual’s level of engagement – facilitator or participant. My comments really go to the level of the participants’ engagement. For over ten years now, I’ve worked with colleagues who have been completely checked-in. Checked-in looks like: high curiosity, fascination with what could be described as mundane problems, and a willingness to connect and become immersed in the project(s) at hand.

What I’ve think I’m reading in the postings [and I have encountered this behavior too] describes working with individuals who are Checked-out which looks like: low to no curiosity, apathy, and boredom – disengagement.

So now I am faced with the question: how do organizations create legions of curious people (perhaps Jeffrey’s true challenge). It’s probably part of what defines high-performance – this level of engagement. I’m teetering.

If this is on the right track then what we might be dealing with isn’t even in the room. We are meeting with [in the room] the symptom of the real beast. But the problem we as facilitators [or managers] face is how to ‘re-engage’ a disenfranchised group who have had the curiosity beat out of them – tottering.

More later on the state of relationship,
Eruditie