The Wonder of How People Tick
How people are, the range of how they see things, the sheer breathtaking depth of what makes them tick – is wondrous!
I want to peel back the lid on this a little and show how it relates to the coaching work I’m driven to do and what it means for a leadership team at work.
Mind You Don’t Kill It
There’s a danger to peeling back the lid. Because if you start peering around inside people with a focus that’s too sharp, you can kill the wonder of the whole.
Here’s how it works for me, when I do manage to keep the wonder but also manage to get under the lid of what makes people tick. It starts with a curiosity: What organises them? What are they making meaning from? What are they orienting by, often without knowing it themselves?
Importantly, this is not a technique, not something I switch on at the useful moment. It’s just where my attention naturally lives. The wonder of how people actually work is the most interesting thing in any room to me, and I have never found the bottom of it.
Wonder is a quiet, deliberate, almost zen-like state, even when it does take your breath away. It’s a quality of attention you choose to bring, and then stay inside. You hold people in genuine curiosity – and this is what goes beyond curiosity – you also hold the possibility that they will amaze you. And you keep holding it.
Attending to people this way opens them rather than reducing them. A lot of our working culture assumes the reverse, that to understand someone is to file them, to type them, to have them sorted and therefore done with. A kind of dissection. In my experience this is mostly not useful.
So what should you look for, if you want to discover some of that wonder in what makes people and teams tick, and peel back the lid on it a bit? And do that in a way that helps them?
Start with Aliveness
Aliveness is the first thing I look for. How alive does someone seem, right now. And what brings them more to life. And what puts out that light.
People might ask you, “Oh what are the tells, the little twitches that show how alive someone is?” And that is absolutely the wrong kind of question, because the moment you are hunting for aliveness in those details is the moment you have stopped really looking. Stay in the wonder, the curiosity and the possibility of being amazed, and you will see it.
Once you get a feel for what impacts someone’s aliveness, you begin to get a flavour of what they are filtering for, what they notice and reach toward, even when they don’t know they are doing it. This is at the very heart of what makes people tick.
And you don’t even have to guess at it from the outside. You can simply ask them. “I noticed you came alive when we talked about X. What’s important to you about that?” Even if you have to ask a few times, going deeper each time, they will tell you. It’s like people are just wating to hand over the keys to who they are, to be properly seen and held in wonder.
A small practical example:
A senior team I worked with had a member everyone had quietly decided was disengaged. Sat back, said little. But when I observed him, I didn’t think his aliveness was flat. It was more like a beehive, buzzing away inside, but you could only hear it up close. I caught it when a colleague turned and asked what he thought. He became alive. So I followed it up, and what mattered to him was being genuinely asked, his judgement actively wanted. The disengagement everyone had seen was nothing of the sort. He was waiting to be asked, in a room where being asked had real meaning for him.
There is more beyond that, and I won’t lay all of it out here. What’s necessary first, before they can feel alive at work. What that leads to, or makes possible. Those are straying into techniques and part of a job like mine is to be unconsciously-competent enough with them that they show the wonder, not kill it.
What an Artist Sees in a Masterpiece
A friend of mine is going to an event with the artist Lachlan Goudie in conversation with the historian Simon Schama, on what makes a masterpiece. The premise has stayed with me, because it holds a similar risk.
The risk is that learning to read a great painting might cost you the wonder of it. That once you can name the composition, place the period and explain the technique, you have turned a living thing into a problem you have solved, and you stop seeing it.
Goudie’s approach answers that. The first question he asks of a painting is not why it was made but how. For him the struggle between the artist and their materials is not incidental to the work. It is the work. Going that deep leaves him more in awe of the painting, not less. Schama calls the result an epic of what humanity is capable of.
That is what I am claiming for people. Read someone all the way down, their aliveness, what they filter for, what they value, the evidence of it, and if you do it in wonder rather than to have them sorted, you come out as Goudie does in front of the painting. More in wonder that something as intricate as a person can be revealed at all.
Teams are People Too – Really
Another thing that really helps is to think of the team itself as a person, who you might also find wondrous. A collective being that is the sum of them and somehow also its own thing.
I first met this idea on an ORSC course, where it is called the Third Entity. That methodology tends to read the collective as a system. And whilst I love systems thinking, I also don’t want to reduce a room of wondrous people to a mere system. So I see that team as a person, living and breathing. That is synergy in action.
Another small example:
I remember asking a team to consider what they were leaving behind for the people who would follow them. The room gave a kind of collective gasp, a single breath taken all at once. That was the team-person, showing itself. Briefly heard in something that brought them alive.
Teams of course have their own collective way of doing things, their behavioural ‘strategy’. How they run their meetings, how they delegate, how they hold one another to account. And if a team can see clearly the things that increase its collective aliveness, it can make different choices about the elements of that strategy, or simply be more willing to put its shoulders to the one it already has.
I have been doing this work a long time. And even when you can get under the lid with quite a degree of experience and insight, there is still no bottom to it. People and teams will still amaze you. They will still leave you in awe of them. This is the test of whether you are reading them in the right spirit. Not how accurate the reading is, but whether the curiosity, and the openness to being amazed, leave you with more wonder about how people tick. And on the good days, that is what I find.
