I have been talking with a couple clients recently about creating community brainstorming sessions to see what ideas could be discovered for projects the clients have been working on. I had suggested that there was little to lose and if one good idea came out of the discussion, it would prove very valuable. The cost of pulling this sort of thing together would probably be less than $1000. I couldn’t understand the clients lack of enthusiasm for the idea. Then in talking with parts of the client teams, it came out that the clients wanted to have a better sense of the answers and direction first.
I felt disappointed at the lost opportunity for the clients and me for a bit of work. But I also had a renewed appreciation for the desire to ‘know’ what one is doing or wants before having conversations with broader stakeholders. I’ve seen this in working with city planning bureaus and developers and myself, that there is a resistance to communicate when there isn’t a clear sense of knowing and progress. How do we balance this want to know first with the possible opportunities of engaging in open ended communication that invites discovery and insight and relationship building. I laugh as I know how true this is for me, even in this blog. That I ’should’ communicate some clear insights and knowledge and then I feel shy to share confusion and doubt and ‘unknowing’.
No matter how much experience I have with finding value and insight from being open to the questions and not knowing, I still fight with the internal voice that wants to know and be on top of things. It seems worth bringing more awareness of both of these sides in all of us and the projects we work on. Because it does seem like we need both the knowing and the not knowing to create things in our life that are truly special. The ‘knowing’ stuff helps us get things done. The less familiar ‘not knowing’ is usually where the mysteries and insights and deeper creativity hide out, waiting for the opportunity to be discovered.