Work Different

I fear to put any notes about religion here because, in the case of religion, people can become so crazed, they’ll want to kill you over it. (sic) I just thought – that should say “me” but for some reason I said “you.” 😉

In any case, while I started this thread, Nedup started asking me the meaning of “Contradiction” – just as I was thinking about this very point. I explained it to him in terms he’d understand from his study, that is, in terms of Debate and Logic. He gave the example in monastic debate in which someone might say “the cup is white” and the opposing debater might argue that the cup is not really white but appears white – and so that being an example of contradiction.

The trouble comes in when we’re so attached to the notion that it *is white* that we suddenly want to kill over it. Why would we want to kill someone who does not think the same way we do?

My practical experience shows that people become very grumbly and argumentative about how you do things. As a result, *this* becomes the challenge when you are trying to experiment with Agile framework techniques. It isn’t what we’re used to. It isn’t what’s safe. I think this is why teams Norm and Storm before they Perform.

In the same way, people who have subscribed to a methodology or religion feel they have a set of rules by which they can guide their lives and by which they can understand reality. It must be very disconcerting to have those rules tested and challenged because then we’d have to think that the way we’ve been living our very lives might not be… correct. On top of that, we might have chosen our Master and we might feel that the person testing our framework is trying to make themselves our master – impose their taste in music on our ears.

They want us to like it, but we don’t.

So how to achieve this flexible mind? How to become willing to listen to someone else’s music? As i’ve been writing about elsehwere here, I think it may get back to the fractal. The framework the person is communicating may not be necessarily “wrong” but the skillful means for a set of circumstances, for a set of causes and conditions. In Buddhism we say the Buddha taught ways to enlightenment according to the needs of beings, according to what they are ready to hear within their own circumstances.

Perhaps seeing in this way we too can have flexible mind.

This entry was posted on January 15, 2011 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Buddhism, Methodology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.