We create the world we live in by the attention we give to the particulars. In organizations, most people focus on profit and loss as the bottom line, but if people are our best resources, then it seems we need a new measurement, which I propose as G&D: Gifts and Deficiencies.
When I was a classroom teacher, I was fundamentally changed by our response to difficult students. Rather than give them greater attention and trying to understand the reason for their behaviours, the school response is to isolate them from their peers. We remove them from the classroom, or in more severe cases, from the school through suspension or expulsion. Rather than surround the child with more attention, we ignore them somehow thinking the problem will solve itself; that the child will miraculously figure it out; or that they will find more support elsewhere (often sending them back home to the very places that are contributing to the behaviours we want corrected.
We cast out the problem, thinking that it is for the greater good of the whole. We learn to do this in our schools and continue its practice in our justice systems. This is at the heart of the restorative vs. retributive justice positions.
I can never forget the look on my student’s faces when they would find out they couldn’t come to school; that they would be forced to stay home. Difficult as school might have been; for many of them, it was much better than staying home. Years later, I see the same practices of removal in our communities and workplaces. Why?
It is easier to focus on the negative, rather than the positive. Even more so, it is easier to focus on our deficiencies rather than our gifts.
. . . please let that soak in, and consider how often this is our response to other people.
The reason is that problems are often easier to solve, and they make our egos feel better when we do. Problems require solutions. Gifts require possibilities. Gifts focus on the action of another, whereas problems often focus on own response. Gifts are about a horizon net yet known to any one, whereas problems and their solutions are often based in the past. And while gifts require a particular generosity; strangely, the focus on fixing the problem seems to create further suffering rather than alleviate it.
Focusing on the gifts of others requires much more of us; whereas focus on the problems of others requires so much less of us. When we open ourselves up to the gifts of others, we open ourselves up to change because their gifts will bring about new possibilities that affect us all. In contrast to the problem which allows the status quo/ourselves to continue on our same path. The problem is a problem according to what already exists as acceptable.
Great courage is required to focus on possibilities more than problems. It goes against our natural tendency to protect ourselves, but it is also the only way that we will solve the most complex problems of our time. This is true for individuals as well as organizations. When an organization becomes more complex you find that you cannot cut your way out of a deficit; rather, you grow your way out. You diversify revenue streams and find new resources. People, as well as organizations, that operate out of a place of fear or defence will, at best, breakeven. It is only the organizations that are willing to risk that actually get ahead of the problem. This is to say, the people who find a way to recognize and harness the attributes of a gift.
As people organize themselves, the shift is that we do so not with a focus on our response to the problems or how we solve our “losses”, but how we benefit (and indeed profit) from a focus on our gifts.