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Random Development begins with something real that has caught your attention, such as solving challenges becoming more of a struggle than it used to be. What then? Get curious in a new way, perhaps by examining SEEING. It can be as simple as experimenting with the question, What am I not seeing?, and noticing what you discover.
How you experiment is up to you. There is no right place to begin, and nothing to work through from beginning to end. Start with whatever you are drawn to, and notice what resonates with you and what proves useful. The key is to go beyond thinking about the way you approach challenges, and genuinely experiment with new ideas.
A project is slipping. One team keeps missing hand-offs, another seems resistant to a change, and meetings are getting tense. It does not take long for an explanation to form in my mind. (Some call them stories, because they really just exist in my head, until I have checked them against the reality around me. We'll come back to this.) So I may be thinking; People are not taking ownership, priorities are unclear, someone needs to step up.
Once that explanation, or story, feels right, I start seeing the whole situation through it. (It is as if I have already decided that that story is correct and complete.) I notice what confirms it, and I act on it. At the same time, I easily miss or dismiss whatever doesn't fit. (The frame through which I observe the world has gotten more narrow -- imagine zooming in on a scene with your camera -- so it is inevitable that I simply do not see the parts of reality that sit outside the frame I am using.)
How I think about the problem matters. Perhaps it is not about ownership at all. Maybe there are competing priorities that nobody has reconciled, or a decision had been made somewhere else in the organization, there are dependencies between teams, information is not travelling, or a relationship is under strain, or a bunch of assumptions had been built into the way the work is set up.
The facts may not have changed, but widening the view can change what the facts mean. Seeing, as a developmental practice, can help bring to your attention the relevant parts of the picture that you had not been aware of. You can look at the problem from someone else's position, zoom out, appreciate relationships as well as individuals, or ask what evidence might put our favourite explanation to a test.
That small interruption can be powerful. You do not simply learn another way to solve the problem; the mind with which you consider the problem begins expanding, changing what becomes possible next.
Seeing is not about gathering more information about the problem we are facing. It is really about becoming more aware of the frame through which we are interpreting the information we have.
We can develop our capacity to distinguish what happened from what we think it means, hold our first explanation a little less tightly, notice patterns and relationships rather than isolated events, and move between close-up and wider-system views. Over time, rather than being a question to remember to ask yourself, What am I not seeing? can become a way our mind immerses in the world's complexity. See how these ways of seeing might serve you:
Begin with what actually happened before deciding what it means. Not what you thought the person meant when they said something, but the words they actually used. Not "she is mad at me, I may be getting fired," just "I noticed a frown on her face" (which can mean many things, and may have nothing to do with me). You may discover that your mind brings in bias and assumptions and unwarranted fears, inferring meaning without checking what is really going on. And that is dangerous territory full of misunderstandings, jumping to conclusions, which can easily affect not just your mood, but your work and relationships.
Explore the situation earnestly from the position of another person: client, student, colleague. Their view may not be more correct, but it may contain something not easily available from where you stand. A friend's suggestion to try a nice restaurant may irritate you as a waste of money, while they may be thinking that you can use a little break from your busy life. Catch your thoughts before responding, and explore what positive intent could lie behind the friend's suggestion. Same at work: Get curious about your colleague's idea before you dismiss it (which they may experience as being dismissed themselves).
Look beyond the immediate person or event, and get curious about possible dependencies, structures, relationships, and effects that did not initially come to mind. A decision that seems like it's no one else's business may have profound implications on something that simply is not on your radar when you are focused on your own work. You helping a client in need by bending the rules a little may make things unfair for others and indefensible if challenged, by sending mixed messages and using up resources in unplanned ways. Zooming out will help you see how your decisions may affect the larger system or organization.
Look backwards for the past events and decisions that may have produced the present situation, and look forward to examine the potential long-term effects of what you are contemplating. Something very sensible today can look quite different from six months away, so consider both the immediate and longer-term consequences. The future can be unpredictable -- something to ponder as well.
Once we have formed a belief about something, made a decision, or taken action, our minds like to help us feel good about ourselves by paying attention to information that lend support to our decision. If I have decided to move to Portugal, I will take news articles about the quality of life as evidence that I had made the right decision. And I may ignore or dismiss news pieces about heavy rain or barking dogs. I don't want to hear what could mess up my neat plan. (Maybe I tell myself those pieces do not matter. But do they?) If I care about having a well-informed, balanced view of things, I need to remind myself to pay equal attention to information that does not support the view I had formed. Those details may be more developmentally useful than another confirmation.
Ask what else could plausibly produce what you are observing. A silence in class may mean the students have not done the readings. But it can also be a sign of deep thinking before the students have formulated answers in their minds. And in some cases, it may mean students have learned that it is not safe to take risks by venturing guesses when uncertain. Each of these situations calls for a different response: Review main concepts together, offer more time, or invite curiosity, experimentation, and partial answers. No reaction to "Any questions?" can mean all is clear, but it can also signal the students' confusion or overwhelm.
Choose something real that is puzzling, frustrating, disappointing, or simply not working as you intended. Ideally, it's something for which you already have a fairly convincing explanation.
The aim is not to prove yourself wrong or manufacture doubt. It is to loosen the first explanation enough to discover whether there might be more to the situation than you are currently seeing.
Write only what you have actually observed, heard, or recorded. Leave your explanation of why it happened aside for a moment.
What story have you created in your mind from those observations? Say it plainly and with enough detail so you can examine it.
What makes this explanation easy, convincing, or familiar? What experience, interests, assumptions, or identity may make it so comfortable to you?
Think of at least three other explanations that could plausibly fit what you know. They do not have to seem correct, just be possible.
Try another person's viewpoint, another level of the organization, a wider system boundary, or a longer timescale. Notice what becomes visible from there that was harder to see from your original position.
Ask what your favourite explanation does not explain particularly well, or completely. Consider what evidence, if you encountered it, would genuinely make you reconsider.
Identify a question, observation, or piece of information that could enlarge your view before you take major action. Go for something realistic enough that you can actually do it.
Ask what you might now do differently, not because you have achieved certainty but because you are seeing more of the situation. Pay attention to whether the wider picture changes the choice itself.
The objective is not to replace one confident explanation with another. It is to become more capable of honouring a wider range of possibilities.
When you begin looking, you will find the dynamic in all kinds of situations. Something attracts your attention, and your mind makes sense of it. That first impression will seem robust, and the impulse for how you should respond perfectly reasonable. Yet, slowing down and looking again can open a whole universe of competing possibilities.
You may think they are not vested enough in the company's success. But, what might make the existing way of working sensible from where the team sits? Looking again might reveal competing demands, anticipated losses, earlier experiences, or fears that were invisible from your viewpoint as the leader.
The behaviour may reflect disengagement. But several other possibilities could produce what looks similar from the outside: Uncertainty, no personal relevance, worry about getting it wrong, overload, the coach's style, or something completely outside the room may change how the situation is understood.
It is easy to feel hurt or upset when clients get critical of a product or service your team designed with love and care. But our ideals and expectations vary, so a bicycle storage can attract criticism when it is functional but an eyesore, and a beautiful bathroom mirror can be perceived as useless under harsh ceiling light. Following the user's experience before, during, and after the new creation is introduced to them may expose barriers and relationships that the designers in a studio could not have envisioned.
Perhaps it isn't, but are you seeing the opportunity through who you are looking to become, or just who you used to be? Are you seeing it as a chance to create something new, rather than as evidence of the things you already know how to do well? Are you following your passion, or a career path others had set for you? Looking again can help you separate what is actually wrong with the opportunity from what no longer fits an earlier mental model of yourself.
Zooming out may shift your attention from individual team members' performance to the workflow, incentives, decision rights, information flows, relationships, opportunities to learn from one another, and the demands surrounding it all. The quest can move from "fixing" the team by imposing strict KPIs or work conditions (no home office, for example) to discovering together what in the larger system may be producing the performance we see.
Be on the lookout for a situation worthy of experimenting this week. As it shows up, resist acting right away, based on your first instinct. Deliberately change one aspect of your viewpoint: Talk with someone who sees the situation from a different angle, look for evidence that contradicts what you believe about the situation, or ask a question you routinely skip or avoid.
Then notice what happens. You may discover a new way of approaching the situation and arriving at a surprising resolution. Or you may end up exactly where you were headed first. Except, genuinely examining the range of possibilities will make a difference: You will be more confident in the answer, satisfied that you considered the relevant stakeholders, values and reasonable approaches, and ultimately seen as more diligent and caring.
Research helps us see patterns in past situations and make sense of them, and it can help guide our seeing in future situations. It does not tell us exactly what to see or do, but it illuminates why widening the view can matter. The studies below are starting points for curiosity rather than a reading list you need to complete.
Actively open-minded thinking includes willingness to consider alternative opinions, attend to evidence that contradicts current beliefs, postpone closure, and think reflectively. Those capacities fit closely with the developmental interruption invited by What am I not seeing?
Stanovich, K. E., & Toplak, M. E. (2023). Actively Open-Minded Thinking and Its Measurement. Journal of Intelligence, 11(2), 27. DOI: 10.3390/jintelligence11020027.
Across two organizational studies, leaders' actively open-minded thinking was positively associated with several outcomes rated by employees, including decision-making quality, intellectual humility, and team psychological safety. The findings are correlational, but they suggest that how a leader thinks may become visible in the environment other people experience.
Erceg, N., Galić, Z., & Buljan Šiber, A. (2023). Testing the Theory of Good Thinking and Deciding in Organizational Setting: Many Benefits of Leader's Actively Open-minded Thinking. Studia Psychologica, 65(3), 230–245. DOI: 10.31577/sp.2023.03.877.
Research on engineers' approaches to complex problems highlights the importance of considering not only different parts of a problem but also the relationships among them, including social, technical, contextual, and temporal dimensions. Particularly interesting is the finding that contextual aspects and relationships among aspects were often less visible in people's accounts of complex problem solving.
Dugan, K. E., Mosyjowski, E. A., Daly, S. R., & Lattuca, L. R. (2024). Leveraging a comprehensive systems thinking framework to analyze engineer complex problem-solving approaches. Journal of Engineering Education, 113(1), 53–74. DOI: 10.1002/jee.20565.
Across studies involving interpersonal and workplace conflict, intellectual humility — awareness that one's own understanding may be fallible — was associated with more constructive and less destructive responses to conflict. That makes humility especially relevant when seeing more requires entertaining the possibility that our own reading of a situation may be incomplete.
Koetke, J., Schumann, K., Welker, K., & Coleman, P. T. (2024). Intellectual humility is reliably associated with constructive responses to conflict. PLOS ONE, 19(9), e0309848. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309848.
Looking again often leads to more questions. As the other Random Development pages gradually become available, further avenues for continuing to explore will open up:
What in me may be shaping what I notice?
What becomes visible when I look at what is happening between us?
If I see the situation differently, what changes in the decision?
As you go through your days, notice situations worth exploring, try moving the frame through which you are looking at it, and see what becomes possible from there.
Another random moment will arrive soon enough, and you may meet it with a mind capable of seeing a little more. That's Random Development.
