Any leader in an organisation, or entrepreneur has to engage in interactions with others in order to get a business going or keep it running. The entrepreneur or leader may have clear goals in mind, or may be in the process of shaping up his or her intentions, exploring different options and potential paths. Either way, it is through interactions with others that these plans take shape and are brought to fruition. The others that the entrepreneur is interacting with have their own intentions, goals and plans. The entrepreneur has to respond to these different goals and intentions, as they emerge in the course of these interactions with others.

Some of these interactions will take place during meetings that might be quite formal and have agendas that are known in advance, written down and followed quite closely during the meeting. Other important interactions will take place much more informally – sometimes in response to an unexpected opportunity, a chance meeting or as a result of a casual conversation over coffee. It is important for leaders and entrepreneurs to be looking for such opportunities and paying attention to what is going on.

A colleague (Diana Jones) told me the other day that there is quite a lot of interest in so-called agendaless meetings. Rightly so, in my opinion, because most interaction does take place in agendaless meetings, in more informal settings, and through casual conversation during which no formal agenda is ever put together.

But it would be for many people working in organisations, quite risky to get together a group of senior people to meet without having a formal agenda. At the same time, many would find this idea appealing, recognising the opportunity for generating ideas, relatively free flow of information and learning what people really think.

In such meetings, the traditional chairing skills and formal meeting procedure would not be very useful. What is important in such meetings is facilitation, such as making sure everyone has the opportunity to speak, handling conflict productively when it arises, listening to others, expressing your point of view, noticing the patterning of the conversation especially when something new happens, finding ways to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that arise.

Such informal "agendaless" meetings are given far less prominence in the leadership literature compared to the weight placed on presenting and chairing at meetings. This is somewhat strange given that, although leaders and entrepreneurs will have to chair formal meetings with agendas and follow meeting procedure, the bulk of their interactions take place outside such formal settings. And the formality of such settings can reduce the range of acceptable contributions that people make to the meeting.

If you are trying to generate new ideas, innovation or creativity, you actually want to stimulate a range of diverse input, rather than reducing the kinds of contributions that people make through formalising them.

Therefore, as a leader or entrepreneur, do pay attention to the casual conversations you are part of, and recognise how important they are to your results as a leader or entrepreneur. And consider convening some group interactions as "agendaless" meetings to see how you go. Of course, the term "agendaless" refers only to the lack of a formal agenda. There is no such thing as a truly "agendaless" meeting because all the participants will have their own intentions, interests and goals (or agendas) that they want to pursue. This comes with the territory of being a human working in an organisation.

Having a formal agenda doesn’t do away with the goals, interests and intentions of the participants. Such goals, interests and intentions of the participants are unlikely to make it onto the formal agenda of a meeting anyway.

To find more posts on this blog about formal and informal meetings, click here.

I have had more than one situation recently in client organisations where a person "Angelica"  has had a problem with person "Boris" or something they have done. Angelica then emails or talks to Boris’s boss "Charlie," (and sometimes a range of other people) explaining the situation and seeking resolution.

It seems that this "dynamic of three people" frequently occurs in organisations, at all levels of seniority.

It is interesting to consider the effects of this in relationship terms. Angelica may have reached the point where she is so frustrated that this is the only option she can see to resolve an important organisational issue. "I am just being honest" or "I am saying what I honestly think" are common aspects of Angelica’s perspective in this situation.

Angelica’s boss Charlie has an opportunity to put a problem right. Angelica has contacted him, complaining about Boris or his actions. Charlie gets the chance to take some action with Boris to resolve the situation.

What action should Charlie the manager take?

One option for Charlie is to go to Boris, inform him of his transgression and work with Boris to remedy the situation. This is a very tempting option for many managers, as it enables them to be directly involved in solving an issue that perhaps could not otherwise be resolved. The manager is then very clear of his or her own contribution to resolving an issue that otherwise might not have a resolution.

I feel for all three participants in this situation. Consider Boris, who all too often is unaware that Angelica even has a problem with him. Seemingly out of the blue, Charlie is discussing an issue with Boris that Boris did not have any opportunity to attempt to resolve.

Another option for Charlie is to respond to Angelica by asking her to talk to Boris and see if they can resolve the issue prior to Charlie getting involved.

Then, at least Charlie only gets involved when Boris is aware that there is an issue and that Angelica and Boris have not been able to resolve the issue together.

And for Angelica, she would have reinforcement of the lesson that the first step in resolving an issue is with the person concerned, and then to go to the manager if resolution is not possible.

From a relationship perspective, I am interested in two aspects – the actions of Charlie the manager and the relationship between Angelica and Boris.

To me, Charlie the manager has to consider the relationship between Angelica and Boris and ensure they have made attempts to resolve the situation before becoming involved. Anything other response will make working with Angelica and Boris difficult in future, regardless of who is "at fault" in this situation.

Angelica’s very act of going to her manager Charlie will sour the relationship with Boris. So Angelica must be on very sure ground prior to approaching Charlie. Although by the time she has raised the issue with Charlie Angelica is so annoyed by what Boris has done that she is not thinking about the longer term relationship with Boris.

Now, Boris may (or may not) have been to blame for the original incident, but from the information provided by Angelica, Charlie wouldn’t be able to tell for certain, and this is commonly the case for managers like Charlie who are approached by staff members like Angelica – Charlie just doesn’t know how much of what he is told that he can reliably take action on.

So, if you are Angelica, try to resolve the issue with Boris before escalating to Charlie.

If you are Boris approaoched by Angelica, be grateful that Angelica has approached you before going to your boss, and work hard to resolve the issue. If you are Boris approached by Charlie, ask Charlie if he can give you some time to tlak to Angelica to attempt to resolve the issue (this happened to me once with a good result although Charlie was initially quite surprised at my request but quickly saw the logic of it).

If you are Charlie approached by Angelica, then encourage Angelica to discuss and resolve the issue with Charlie. If this is not possible from Angelica’s point of view  (i.e she thinks the situation is too far gone to raise it with Boris hersefl directly), offer to faciltate a discussion between tbe two.

Do not say that you’ll take it on and resolve it for her. If you do, you are not demonstrating that you are taking all the points of view seriously. That way lie monsters…

And that’s as prescriptive as I get!

The users of your service do not pay for it. Instead a central funding organisation contracts you to provide certain services to certain numbers of service users for a fee. Imagine that you are providing long term residential services to elderly people who experience mental illness. Over periods of 10 years or more your staff providing the care would develop deep relationships with these users of your services.

Now, imagine you are funded by a contract that is renewed annually. The process of negotiating the contract takes several months so you start negotiations for your June contract in February in order to have everything finalised for the new financial year starting in July. You have some tweaking and improvements you want to make to the contract so you signal them early.

Your contract is one of many for the procurement person you deal with, and because it still has four months to run you are not on their priority list. Weeks go by without response from your contract / relationship manager. Things get urgent, but eventually the contract expiry date passes and a new contract is still not finalised.

You carry on providing services (the alternative is to make vulnerable people find a new place to live), perhaps securing a temporary extension of the contract to enable this happen. The extension also runs out before finalising the next contract.

Eventually your new annual contract is finally signed by both parties, just in time to start negotiating the next year’s contract.

This time there has been a change in personnel in the procurement group of your funding organisation and the new person has no experience of mental health. You find yourself explaining in detail the services you offer, sometimes to what seem like deaf ears.

The new person knows nothing about the agreement in principle you had with the previous contract manager for improvements to the services and you find you have to start all over again. But you are not back to square one. You are at square zero, because the new person does not have experience of your sector, you have to explain context, history, unique factors of your sector, and go over, once again, prior discussions you had with their predecessor.

According to research published this year by Platform, which is a connector of NGOs providing mental health and addiction services, this is a relatively typical experience of a mental health / addiction NGO with a funding organisation – typically a District Health Board.

It is certainly typical of those mental health NGOs I have worked with. Imagine what it must be like to be a CEO of an organisation working in such an environment. The uncertainty is palpable, and because the clients are not the ones who pay for your service, you have many masters. As you can imagine, this environment makes mental health (and other) NGOs extremely vulnerable.

I take my hat off to those CEOs and senior leaders in NGOs who are able to keep their organisations stable and productive in such unconducive conditions. And I take my hat off to the support workers who are so pivotal in the lives of those who experience mental illness. Support workers develop long term relationships with those they support. Sometimes these people are very hard to relate to, and support workers develop relationships which may be as close as, or closer than family relationships. What an accomplishment!

The romantic stage began to wane toward the end of the 19th century. As expansionist markets and mass production started to emerge, the sciences, with their imperatives to objective evidence and rational utility gained favour. These concepts went against the romantic ideals of feeling, soul, will, and the driving forces of the deep interior which were so much a part of the romantic view.

Science: objective versus Romantic: deep inner core (subjective). The battle lines were drawn.

Science gave precedence to reason and observation. Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was a synthesis of the latest thinking into an argument outlining the development of the various species from a scientific point of view.

In the early 1900s philosophers like Bertrand Russell started to consider how scientific procedure used in chemistry and physics could be applied to human affairs hoping to provide a science of human affairs as precise of that of Newton’s physics.

It wasn’t long before Frederick Taylor was scientifically measuring how long it took workers to assemble a car, and the profession of management consulting was born ("I can help you do that task faster"). Likewise, the acceptance of psychology as a science to study the mind increased its popularity throughout the 20th century.

Scientific management then, is a logical and natural expression of modernist thinking, through the application of scientific procedure to the world of human work. 

The grand narrative of modernism is that through the power of logical thinking, there would be a continuous, upward movement of growth, improvement and achievement toward certain goals. After all science had enabled breakthroughs towards goals such as travel through the air and in space, cures to disease, and transmission of words and pictures through space.

During the modernist period it was thought that because reason and observation could reign superior, a single form of economic system – capitalism or communism – or form of government such as democracy would be the best approach for dealing with the problems of humankind.

The modernist grand narrative was accompanied by a suspicion of the past, and questioning of tradition, leading to a desire to wipe out whatever had gone before. 

Accompanying the modernist period was the rise of the machine which could accelerate the upward movement of progress. The machine metaphor pervaded human life – even study and learning could be seen like as the result of knowledge factories – scholars and their research could be seen as productive or profitable in the same way machines are. 

By comparison with the romantic notion of hidden depths that lie beyond our ability to know them, the modernist view of the self revealed cognitive processes similar to the workings of the ulitmate machine, the computer.The essence of the human mind was its rationality.

You can see the ultimate expression of modernism in the concept of a human as a rational economic unit moving through life seeking to maximise economic outcomes by evaluating benefits and weighing them up against costs.

So there is a shift from the romantic view of the self as deep well of passions and emotions through to the modernist view of the logical, rational self, knowable through rational process. We can see the imprint of both these ways of thinking about humans nowadays – seeking to get to know the essence of the human through the application of rational tests such as personality instruments.

This post is based on chapter 2 of Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self.

• Romantic
• Modern
• Post-Modern

This post considers the Romantic stage and the residue it has left on our current thinking about leadership.

Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.

An early exemplar of the romantic period was Goethe’s "The Sufferings of Young Werther." This is the story of a young man, Werther, who is hopelessly in love with a young woman who is married to an older man. His love goes unrequited and Werther has months of agonising over the conflict between passion and morality.

This conflict summarises in a nutshell the elements of the concerns of the Romantic period – the conflict deep inside the person, between the passions of the spirit, and what it is right to do.

This depth of the psyche was not just words though, it was a call to action. In the story, Werther takes his own life. In the 21st century this would be seen as a futile act, but in the book at the time of publication this was seen instead as heroic. Because the way they saw it during the Romantic period, his heart was the source of all his strength, bliss and misery. Without being able to have the object of his love, taking his own life was an act of self-actualisation, long before Maslow ever thought of the term and put self-actualisation at the top of his hierarchy of needs.

Apparently Goethe’s work was so popular and influential that a wave of suicides followed its publication.
The Romantic period, then, is the source of our ideas today about humans having a deep interior. Artists and philosophers in those days were exploring the make up of this psychological depth. For example, William Blake elevated the imagination over mere experience because imagination enabled people to escape from mundane life and in Blake’s drug-induced poetry, imagination became a spiritual sensation, as it did also in Keats.

The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that the human will was at the centre of the deep interior that controlled the actions of individual human beings. Edgar Allan Poe was writing stories positing that a dark core of inner evil inhabited our deep interior. Edvard Munch’s faces were contorted with anguish from an eternal wellspring deep inside (e.g. "The Scream"). He and other artists were creating paintings which were expressions of inner emotion, rather than as illustrations of the real world.

The Romantic view was also the source of the idea of the soul which in Romantic times was not seen as a fictional aspect of the self, but as an aspect of nature given by God.

This Romantic view lives on today in our ideas of people being true to that deep inner core, and the concept of being authentic – acting in harmony with that inner essence. We especially expect this of leaders – leaders with character are seen as being true to themselves and passionate about their organisation or team. Qualities of this inner self, such as integrity and trust, courage, ethics and values, compassion, and fairness are now articulated as competencies, generic attributes that can be developed intentionally.
We also attempt to get to know that deep inner core of leaders through the use of personality questionnaires to identify the kind of inner essence that our leaders have, and to develop these in the service of their organisation.

I do hope though, that our leaders are not now expected to die for their passion for their organisation like young Werther! This may be due to the influence of the modern thinking stage which came after Romanticism, and is discussed in the next post.

I am currently reading The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen. In it, he discusses the impacts of burgeoning technology on our identity – i.e. how we experience who we are. He says that through technology we are now bombarded by many disparate voices of humanity – both harmonious and alien.

He demonstrates how the scientisation of human behaviour has led to an explosion of terms to describe mental health deficits in the 20th century. Terms such as low self esteem, repressed, authoritarian, obsessive-compulsive, bulimic, sadomasochistic and post-traumatic stress disorder have only come into being relatively recently, and they all refer to problems, shortcomings or incapacities – mental deficits.

He is pointing out that we now have countless ways of locating faults within ourselves and others that were unavailable even to our grandparents. He says that as psychiatrists and psychologists have worked out ways to explain undesirable behaviour, they have generated a technical vocabulary of deficit.

This language has become increasingly disseminated to the broader public as they become aware of these issues. People have increasingly come to see self and others in these deficit terms. He uses this process as an illustration of how the language of the self is malleable – that is to say, it changes gradually over time, and thus how we see ourselves changes over time.

Implications for Leaders

I am struck by how the same process is operating in terms of leadership. One of the side effects of the proliferation of tools such as competencies, 360 degree feedback, climate surveys, engagement surveys, personality questionnaires, emotional intelligence is the corresponding increase in the number of deficit terms we now have for leaders. For example I have on many occasions recently heard people described as "low in emotional intelligence." Our performance management systems provide lists of competencies and behavioural indicators in categories of differing levels of deficit, and even overuse.

Just as in the mental health example given by Gergen, the proliferation of deficit terms for leaders has been the result of the "scientising" of leadership. This scientising process involves attempts to break leadership down into its constituent parts and make these attributes more amenable to control. For example, the development of particular personal attributes such as listening skills, in the service of the organisation.

So, the language of leadership is malleable, it has changed gradually over time. Even the concept of leadership is relatively new – having emerged in the twentieth century.  It is still not conclusively determined what leadership actually consists of (or indeed whether there is even such a thing as leadership).

But one thing we can be sure of is that the leadership tools have nevertheless introduced plenty of language terms to point out deficits in the personal characteristics of those who lead in organisations. 

In my consulting work I often find that clients who tell me of a problem or issue they want to resolve, often have great difficulty explaining what is going on and what it is that they see as the problem. They know that there is a problem and they know roughly what it is – they definitely know who is involved. It’s just so darned hard to articulate the multitude of factors and the complexity of the problem(s)

The challenge seems to be in explaining the situation to someone who is not intimately involved. At one point I used to think that this meant that the person must be not very competent if they couldn’t describe what’s happening. But then a colleague graciously pointed out that I have the same difficulty in explaining my own practice. I had to admit that there are so many nuances that are difficult to explain, and I started to appreciate that explaining our practice is difficult for everyone. You end up repeating yourself, skirting around the issue and providing a picture that is not very coherent. It becomes like an onion where you are trying to unravel the layers and it makes you cry while you’re doing it, if you’re not careful.

It can be just as hard for your people to explain to you what is going on in their work situations, especially if you are not intimately involved in their work and lives. Their efforts to explain can seem bumbling and incompetent.

Why is it so hard for people to explain what is going on in their everyday experience?

The attempt to explain what is going on to a non-judgemental listener can be helpfully therapeutic for the person doing the explaining; after all, providing a forum for people to explain what is going on in their internal world is the idea on which the whole world of therapy is based! But here I want to concentrate on why it is that it is so difficult to explain what is going on and why this is important for managers.

I turn to the insights of social researchers, who spend their time asking questions to try to find out what is going on in various aspects of social and organisational life. Managers and consultants have a lot in common with social researchers, who are also asking questions, and using the answers to help make sense of the world.

The main difference is that as a manager you have to act in your organisation based on the sense you make of what is going on. Social researchers have as a first priority the necessity to write about what they learn, rather than act to influence and change what is going on. But both are seeking to understand what are primarily social processes.

By the way, the sense you make of what is going on is based on what you observe, what others tell you, and your own experience. These are all accounts of what is going on. They are not really objective reality, even though they can seem very compelling. How good are you at distinguishing between interpretation and “the facts?” Helping your people to make this distinction can be a very powerful act of leadership.

But I digress. Back to the question of why it is so hard to articulate what is going on.

Anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has something to offer here. He says that for Western social researchers asking questions about a group of people, for example, a group of African tribespeople, there is a lot that is taken for granted in the answers given, a lot that is not said by the tribespeople. The tacit assumptions, taken-for-granted ways of thinking and "models" that the tribespeople use are important, but are left unsaid.

In other words, for the tribespeople, when talking about their customs and practices, they are talking about things that are so familiar that they do not really notice them any more. The tribespeople are not able to talk about them because they do not notice them, and so important assumptions are left unsaid. I suppose it’s a bit like the fish that does not notice the water it’s swimming in. Or like the air that we breathe that we do not notice from moment to moment, unless it’s not there (e.g. asthma).

Managers are in the same boat, as are leadership researchers and consultants. When leaders are asked about their leadership, and when staff are asked questions by their managers, they find themselves in a world of familiarity, and hence a lot gets left unsaid. This is by necessity, not by design. After all, you couldn’t spend days and days explaining every single nuance. But, also, you often are not aware of the nuances until you are in a situation where the nuances become important – for example when you find out that one of your managers has given their people an incorrect view of the changes you are instigating because there was an important detail or nuance that you took for granted and left out of your briefing to them. You can’t predict every eventuality.

Or perhaps when a staff member seems slightly out of sorts but you can’t pin your finger on why, so you let it go just like you have other times, only this time the situation erupts into a conflict.

I was talking to a senior manager the other day about how I could help in a situation of deep seated, long-lived conflict in a group he had just started managing. He explained some of the difficulties he was experiencing and how, when attempting to address the issue, he had to be careful not to inflame it into open warfare. He wanted to get to the bottom of the situation and resolve it. But a direct approach was not possible without destroying what fragile relationships currently exist. The total situation and a mix of direct and indirect approaches had to be considered.

I think that often these tacit assumptions are addressed either in a mechanical way (e.g. "n-step" change processes) or ways that are overly structured in order to handle the fear that these could erupt into open conflict. For example, it is tempting, as the person trying to find out what is going on, to ask a set of structured questions. This has the appeal of directing the conversation the way you want it to go. You can then appear to keep a conversation "on track." It also has the risk that the participants can feel manipulated.

In my consulting work, I’ve had to get good at finding out quickly what is going on, in complex situations. Experience of similar situations in the past is helpful, and over time this has moved me away from the structured questions approach. I’ll never forget being a “user representative” for a potential Customer Relationship Management system in one place where I worked. I was invited to participate in an interview where the project team were talking to users to try to specify the requirements for the system. They asked me so many closed questions based on their predetermined options that we both got frustrated with each other because where I wanted to go didn’t fit into any of the alternatives they were exploring.

I resolved not to fall into that trap myself when I was seeking information from others. But the answer is not simply to stay away from closed questions.

Managers need to understand that it is difficult for people to explain the world in which they live, because it is so familiar that the everyday assumptions under which they operate become invisible until they are needed for a specific situation. Structured questioning then will not work in the sense that it will identify these “unthought-of” assumptions – structured questioning will not help you as a manager make sense of the world of those in your team.

Instead, seek to enter into joint enquiry with others. Seek to encourage them to talk about their reality and realise that they will usually talk about it in a round about way, because they have no choice due to the unspoken assumptions that are invisible like the air they breathe. Then probe into areas of what they have said that are different from your perspective. Perhaps there are things they say that are not clear, or that seem to have holes or discrepancies from your point of view, or where you identify potentially fruitful possibilities based on your perspective.

That way, your perspective will be able to help the other person to become aware of previously taken-for-granted assumptions, and you also might become aware of some of your own assumptions. If so, you will be able to create a new joint understanding from which something new will emerge. This is the essence of organisational change.

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends."

During the conversations that take place during these meetings, participants make choices about what to bring into the public domain and what to leave unspoken. Thus, organisational participants are always negotiating a balance between what to reveal and what to conceal in their organisational conversations. Such matters as the status of your love life, your living conditions or issues in your family are obvious matters for judicious revealing and concealing.

But so are matters such as what you really think of the CEO’s presentation on customer service,  whether you think this change initiative will blow over and be superceded by something else, or whether you are thinking of looking for a new job.

What you think of your colleague’s idea for your current project is no less the subject for judicious revealing and concealing. After all, your relationships are subject to power relationships that both enable you and constrain you at the same time. So frustrating!

All conversations are subject to power relations that enable and constrain at the same time. Hence, your people are always determining what it is safe to reveal and what to conceal – perhaps not consciously. You are subject to the same dynamics. By which I mean that you as a senior manager are also negotiating what to reveal and what to conceal in each of your myriad interactions during the course of a day.

I contend that choices not to bring issues into the public domain tend to foster consistency and support the status quo (i.e. "no change"), while choices to bring issues up for discussion, which can be risky, perhaps even career-destroying, create the opportunity for new patterns of interaction to arise.

In other words, as a leader, your choices about what is acceptable for discussion – what you proactively raise as a legitimate subject for discussion, has a direct impact on the potential for change to occur in your organisation.

Your mundane day to day conversations with others have a big impact on the change potential of your organisation. If you’re thinking about the change you want in your organisation (and who isn’t?), ask yourself, "What topics am I legitimating," and "What topics are undiscussable?" Your intuition may tell you the answer.

Check out your intuition with someone you trust.Or else get someone from outside to help.

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project.

When I heard Margaret Moth’s statement, I was immediately transported to a tennis interclub doubles match I played the other day, and one of the serves I returned from a very good player (currently top 40 in NZ). He served it wide to my forehand, I was slow to read it and I just managed to get my racquet onto it, hitting it late. It hurtled down the line, past the outstretched racquet of his partner and landed just inside the line for a clean winner. That wasn’t where I was aiming it at all, but I liked the result. Perhaps the fact that it was a return from such a good player made it memorable for me too.

Then I remembered another serve in my subsequent singles match in which the serve came pretty much straight to me, quite fast and I dumped the return into the net. Seeing it was match point, I lost the match.

In both of these situations, the ball was served to me, I reacted as best I could, but with quite different results in each case. I had a choice, and my choice was to hit the ball back, preferably for a winner or at least a difficult shot for the other player.

My execution however was not entirely under my control. In the first situation, objectively speaking, the serve was very good and could easily have been an ace – it was a lucky return that went in – it could equally have gone out – but I was not in much control at all. In the second, it was a much more straightforward serve that I just didn’t return well. In both situations though, I had to react to the speed, direction and spin on the ball. Also there was the pressure of the match situation – the psychology of the game and how I responded in that situation. Another factor was the choice made by the server in the context of the match, to go wide or to serve straight at me, how hard to serve, what spin to put on, what he thought I might be expecting, what he thought my weaknesses were.

But the choices made by the other player and by me are not made independently of each other. They are part of a pattern that has built up over the course of the match, and from other matches we’d played before in different circumstances. 

So it is in change situations. You introduce change, and although you don’t control people’s reactions, they seem to fit familiar-seeming patterns. These patterns are specific to your circumstances, but are recognisable as the result of interdependent interactions, nevertheless. Some authors have categorised these patterns, for example as stages in a grief cycle. But even though the patterns are familiar (ball goes in, ball goes out), you cannot predict in any particular circumstance, what the result will be.

Will you hit a winner, or will you dump it in the net? It’s not entirely up to you.