When looking at situations that are complex and messy, it helps to consider that we are exploring to uncover the wider truth. Everyone comes to a listening space with an understanding of part of the wider truth and if we are curious we can find out more about the wider truth from others.
One way to explore the wider truth is to think of a situation as a landscape and individual aspects as elements in that landscape. This helps by focusing on exploring the landscape and find out from others what they see in a landscape, so we can all gain a better knowledge of a landscape.
Let’s think of our landscape as a range of hills. One aspect of a landscape is where we stand in it. Depending on where we stand we see certain hills as bigger than others. Each hill represents an aspect of the wider truth that is important to us. At the same time we need to recognise that if we are standing so close to a hill it may well be blocking our view of other hills, hiding them from us.
Hiding aspects can be a way of actively restricting what we see as elements of the wider truth. Where we stand is determined by many aspects of how we see the world, our beliefs, values, priorities, needs, hopes, concerns and experience.
And just as we stand in a specific place in a landscape, others stand in different places. The aspects that loom large in their landscape and they are not necessarily the same as in our landscape.
How does this help us explore a topic? One way is that we simply acknowledge that a landscape is made up of a number of hills and that where we stand reflects our viewpoints and experiences, and what we have not considered.
A second way is that in order to get a fuller picture of the wider truth, it helps to move around the landscape.
We might be standing in front of a specific hill which gives us a good view of the features of that side of the hill. We might stand close to the hill and see the detail. We might stand a little further away to see more features, but in less detail.
Where we stand gives us a partial picture of a hill. We can build a wider picture by walking around the hill to see it from many angles. When we walk around a hill other hills come into view.
A useful viewpoint is from the air, which lets us see all the hills in the landscape and the higher we get the more we see a truer perspective of the scope of the landscape. The higher we get the better we see the full extent of the landscape, but lose much of the detail.
So the next time you are exploring a topic try asking yourself;