The book “Crashing Through” by New York Times bestselling author Robert Kurson includes innumerable reflections about struggle, collaboration, and victory that also apply to the sphere of facilitation.
Most importantly, the book emphasizes the scientific understanding that pre-existing knowledge affects perception. In other words, what you know changes what you see. The challenges around consensual decision-making are thus amplified by the plurality of the group.
Sight recovery after a lifetime of being visually impaired is extraordinarily rare. Only around 20 people in known history have had their vision restored in adulthood after being visually blind since early youth. As explained by Kurson, he captures Mike May’s “true story of risk, adventure, and the man who dared to see.” Suffice it to say that vision and the brain’s role supporting it is massively complex.
Visually impaired, but not without vision
Keep in mind that Mike May, while blind, established world records in downhill skiing. He also became a co-inventor of the world’s first laser turntable and was the first blind person hired by the CIA (Central Intelligence Unit). In Mike May’s words, “Life with vision is great. But life without vision is great too.”
The optic nerve is technically part of the brain. It can also transmit perfect signals from the cornea region of the eye that can be rendered uniquely in each person’s mind based on what they know when they receive the signal. In other words, two people can look at the same scene and see different things. That’s probably not a surprise if you are a trained facilitator, but it becomes increasingly important that you emphasize the diversity of perception and the simple fact that there is more than one right answer.
Details of perception
The story explores the details and science to support its conclusion that perception relies largely on prior life experiences and the judgments those experiences have brought to each of us. For example, some of May’s problems are related to depth perception. While he saw horizontal lines, most of us would have instantly recognized a stairway, and would not have crashed down or up the stairs, unlike May.
He was largely unable to determine sexual gender by looking only at the face of someone. It’s not important that facilitators discriminate, but it is rather curious and significant that our preconceptions about small details such as eyebrow width or color nuances lead us to conclusions, that may be wrong.
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
