Happy New Year! Here's the 1st of my 50 Ideas to think about for 2025:
Idea 1: Go Beyond 'Agree to Disagree'
Did you just 'survive' the holidays? Did it include a heated debate or argument, where you, mindful of the festive time of the year, and perhaps your responsibilities as a host (and more on that in a future post), decided to 'agree to disagree?'
Of course, there's an argument to be made about the virtue of rhetoric and learning the art of argument: indeed, there's a great book on this called Thank you for Arguing.
However, another approach might be to become curious as to why people think the way they do, what they do, and how their perception of reality has been shaped.
A key word for this sensemaking, or how we make sense of this world. This hinges on a number of factors: (1) our shared sense of narratives and perspectives of the world, shaped by socialization and culture; (2) the ways in which we access knowledge and information about the world; (3) what we might call the producers and regulators of this knowledge and information; (4) how we cognitively and mentally process this knowledge and; and (5) our ongoing experiences of the world. In a nutshell, sensemaking is impacted by society, culture, informational access, knowledge and information brokers, as well as how our brains work.
Here's a useful illustration to explain this from a 2021 report aptly called The Future of Sense Making
What's happened that there seems to be more cause for disagreement, discord, and disruption? Well, for one, there's the distortion - but I prefer the word transformation - of how we access knowledge and information which then impacts our shared sense of narratives and perspectives.
In a world dominated by social media and increasingly automated and artificially-generated content, and in which traditional knowledge brokers such as universities, schools, libraries, traditional/legacy forms of our media face stiff competition from the 'content' available through our phones, sensemaking is increasingly plural, fractured and divided.
Basically, with digital disruption that fragments information inputs and our shared narratives, combined with our shifting experiences of the world, we don't have a shared sense of the world (if we ever did).
What to do about it?
Well, we can flock with birds of a feather. We can disparage others and become upset, disgruntled, cynical and pessimistic.
But, we can also pause and reflect and explore how other inputs and filters to information and knowledge, as the illustration indicates, combined with other peoples' experiences, leads to different assessments and sensibilities of the world.
In that way, 'agree to disagree,' becomes 'Oh, that's why they think they way they do.' And that, could at least to a different, and perhaps more productive conversation and transform the ways you make sense of the world around you.
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