Ep218: An answer for everything with Andrew Barrett

Safety on Tap

Full show notes: www.safetyontap.com/ep218

You seem to have answers for everything, he said to me. He was 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time. This is a podcast about how that can be, and how you can engage with better answers.

Hey, it’s Andrew, and this is Safety on Tap.

Since you're listening in, you must be a leader wanting to grow yourself and drastically improve health and safety along the way. Welcome to you, you're in the right place. If this is your first time listening in, thanks for joining us and well done for trying something different to improve! And of course welcome back to all of you wonderful regular listeners.

Before you think that this episode will be a gratuitous brag about how good I think I am wrapped up in some parable of a story, stay with me for a few minutes.

When he said to me, 'you seem to have answers for everything', he WAS both right and wrong at the same time.

He was right because to him, it did seem that I had answers for lots of the things we were talking about and working through in our coaching together. He was wrong, because I wasn't really giving him answers in the way that questions are usually asked, or problems are usually solved with solutions. What I was giving him was responses. Responses to his question, to his story, to his context.

Responses aren't answers. Responses are what we do when it's our turn, in a dialogue two or more people engage in a turn-taking exchange. Dialogue is an ancient word, very central to modern human experience, which comes from two Greek words put together: dia- translates to through, and logos translated to meaning, dialogos, or dialogue, the movement of flow of meaning through the people involved.

You can see turn taking all the time, which isn’t dialogue. It's more like tennis. One person serves, another receives and returns the ball. The object of tennis, and the object of a huge proportion of our interactions with other people, is to get to the end, to resolve the point, usually in favour of one person or the other.