Leaving India and thinking how best to summarise my time. Words are so limited, and often very useless when you have to articulate moments of epiphany … and I had so many epiphanies in these two weeks but here’s one.
You see in this picture a charioteer and a warrior in conversation along with the chariot moving full speed ahead towards the battleground. This is the Hindu deity Krishna in conversation with the warrior Arjuna.
Arjuna is confused. He can’t see the point in going to war against his own cousins, it’s a pathway to destruction and killing. The warrior is seeking clarity and that’s when the deity invites him to a Conversation – the essence of the epic Bhagwan Gita.
But this is no ordinary conversation. The deity represents the conscious mind and the warrior symbolises the unconscious nature of our everyday life. I see this as a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious mind.
One can draw so much from this picture alone about the nature of conversation in a high-risk context. The future is uncertain, one has to move forward, doing nothing is not an option because inaction also counts as action and therefore, there is no escape from decisions and actions.
So my question is this. When it comes to critical decisions how often do we slow down and engage in a conversation? Do we make space for dissent? Who do we choose to interact with? Those who agree with us because they are scared that they will offend our egos or those who care for us, challenge our thinking and bring us clarity of thought.
98% of our decisions are made in the unconscious mind. We need to have conversations to surface our biases and improve the quality of our decisions.
It is unfortunate that we have lost the art and practice of conversations. In many organisations, we don’t even use the word conversation anymore. Instead, we keep moaning about communication and we mix between communication and conversations.
Communication is one way traffic, you can tell someone what they should or shouldn’t do. Communication does not even require the other person to participate. And in most organisations, all that we see is one-sided communication (both formal and informal). But communication is NOT conversation because it takes at least two people to have a conversation.
A beautiful picture that reminds us of the power of a conversation.
