How To Learn When You Feel There's Nothing To Learn

An excerpt from the book "Presence: An Exploration Of Profund Change In People, Organizations, and Society" By: Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, & Betty Sue Flowers.

(pp. 28)

In the early 1980s, executives from U.S. auto companies started making regular trips to Japan to find out why the Japanese automakers were outperforming their U.S. counterparts. Speaking with one Detroit executive after such a visit, Peter could see that the executive hadn't been impressed by the competition. "They didn't show us real plants," the Detroit executive said.

"Why do you say that?" Peter Asked.

"Because there were no inventories. I've seen plenty of assemply facilities in my life, and these were not real plants. They'd been staged for our tour."

Within a few years, it became painfully obvious how wrong this assessment was. These managers had been exposed to a radically different type of "just-in-time" production system, and they were not prepared to see what they were being exposed to. They were unprepared for an assembly faciulity that didn't have huge piles of inventory. What they saw was bounded by what they alreadyt knew. They hadn't developed the capacity for seeing with fresh eyes.

Seeing freshly starts with stopping our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. This is called "suspending." To suspend your common thoughts and perceiving processes is a choice one makes in order to take on a brand new view of life that provides a radical context for seeing a new reality.