In a recent post on LinkedIn, Dr. John Black, DBA shared the following quote from Fritof Capra:
“When it comes to our social and political situation we see that most of the problems that we have in the world today come from the fact that we see things in a fragmented way, that we are unable to focus on the relationships among things…. We have to learn to shift from a perception of objects to a perception of relationships and also a perception of processes.”
The fragmented way we see things is contributing to the friction between law enforcement and the community is some areas. People are only looking at one area of the issues facing people in their community and are blaming the police for all the social ills rather than looking at the “relationships among things” and the processes that contribute to the issues. Society has made the police the default response to almost every problem, then when there is a less desirable outcome some people want to blame the police, punish the police and defund the police rather than looking at the relationships and processes that have led to the police becoming involved. Make it part of your mission to help people in your communities and in your agency shift their perspective.
We see the same issues within agencies where we see things in a fragmented way and as a result we have “us versus them” internally in organizations. This is often between people in senior leadership positions and the frontline personnel and between labor bodies and agency management. It also exists between units and areas of organizations based on workload and funding. It is also an issue when organizations want to lay all the blame for human error on an individual employee and not take ownership for their piece of the systems and processes that may have led to the error and refuse to take a Systems approach to investigating human error. It is important that we break down the silos in agencies, see human error as a starting point of the investigation, not the end point and shift our perceptions to relationships and processes.
The quote could also be talking about training in many academies and agencies. Too often training is viewed and run in a fragmented way and trainers and academies stay locked in to the blocked and siloed methods of training that have been in place for decades. This is despite research and evidence that shows that is not an effective way to deliver training if we are interested in learning, retention, recall, understanding and application of the material we are presenting in training. As trainers you need to help people understand the relationship between all the material being presented in training and look at the training processes that are in place that be setting people up for less desirable responses in the real world.
As trainers, leaders and professionals we must learn to “shift from a perception of objects to a perception of relationships and also a perception of processes”.