Reflections, Week #4: The Lies We Tell

Most of us did not get to share our stories with the class last night. I am talking about the stories we wove to our partners during the exercise we did at the end of the class; the stories we told about a recent problem and the stories we told about insight we have into our consulting style.

I have a confession and it is this: I. lie. to. myself. all. the. time.

After hearing Rachel's story and Dr. Carter's inquiry and thoughts, I reflected on my own consulting style. I had started to share with my partner Jinny a recent experience in which I was asked to "consult" internally with a management team that oversees our homeless programming at the place I work. Over the last year, their program has had to change in response to external variables including changing demographics of service population and resulting in shorter length of programming and less depth in service activities. This has caused them to rethink their program goals and the measures of program performance. They asked me to aid them in redesigning these measures.

I had an idea in my head about the nature of their problem prior to this meeting. I had read up on their program performance and outcome measures and had engaged in extensive "exploratory" dialogue with at least 3 people on their management team. My style is typically to ask questions (I realize after reading Schein that these questions quickly become exploratory/diagnostic questions that tend more towards the "what did you do then?" and "why do you think he/she/you did that?" than affective "how did that make you feel?"). And then I begin to summarize what I think I'm hearing. I tell myself I am being as "pure" as I can during the summarizing, that I am merely reflecting back what I hear for confirmation or correction. But this is one of the lies I tell myself, because I may select to include certain data or comments in the summary that fit my notion of the "problem" and leave others out. In this subtle way, I am injecting into the meeting thoughts from my head and, ultimately, being what I am now dubbing"passively confrontive" in my inquiry. I am guiding the others towards what I still believe is the real problem and ignoring signs, data to the contrary.

One way I know that I am doing this is that I become quite smug. One way I know that I am being present with the group and the data they present me is that I am surprised and impressed with the insight they have into their own problems, insight that they had and that I did not.

When I was a little girl, I used to wonder how adults could tell that children were lying. How could they possibly know what was true or false? The facts and lies were inside my head and my parents could certainly NOT open up my head to see what was there.

Now I know that the peril is not in if others know or not that I fool myself. The peril comes when I stop knowing that I am a master of self-deception and that I do it, all the time.