Torrey Orton
Sept 30, 2014
I have always been clearly an
intuitive thinker, but I am not without logic. The right thing to do springs
into my awareness automatically and years of being an object of my own commands
has largely worked. In a current consulting assignment I have been “making it
up as I go” for three months, week to week, and I’m open with the clients (a
family of 5 in one business) about the fact. One effect is that I am including
them in the design of my interventions, which also ensures they are “on board
with it” as this week’s make up turns into next week’s activities. For an
average of six contact hours a week I generate another couple of days thinking,
mostly consciously done at night, spurred into action by an intuition coming
into view at 3am or so and recorded on double sized post-its on the bedside
table under torch guidance.
This is an unusual experience for me. I can do conscious thinking about technical matters in training or therapy once the target / objective / direction has been intuitively formulated. In what matters to this client family, the targeting is always in doubt because I am having to do it for them and then test it each week. So, for some as yet unclear reason I am able in the dark to lie there and work slowly thru the week’s development challenge in a manner mixing intuitive and analytic. This looks like the following:
A direction for
action presents itself such as getting them to appreciate each other’s life a
bit. Entry level tools for this already exist – mapping a group’s history with
current and past players present, if necessary. With the family all the players
are present. So what to do to map it? Try it out with them on a segment of the
history which is big enough to show a pattern and small enough to be graspable.
What these time quanta are is a matter of importance, but can be revised as we
go. What the contents of the map should be is also revisable in retrospect, as
patterns and time chunks assume useful shapes. But, the choice of starting content
labels (the basis for the content eliciting questions which frame the exercise
of mapping) is critical to the viability of the process. The specification of
desired contents has to be sharp enough to matter and loose enough to give
personal wriggle room in the early stages as trust is explored and built. And,
the content needs to be elaborated from events to purpose(s) so the meaning is
shared as well as the ‘facts’. A sheet of butcher’s paper for each time segment
(e.g. decade) may be appropriate as the data recording system, allowing all
participants to record items themselves at times and the whole map to be
visible as it emerges.
So, that’s what I worked thru bit
by bit (there was a lot more, but...) in a slow, pick-a-brick-and-try-it-for-fit
kind of building way. Intuitive grasp with mixed salad of analytic components.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve only given the results not the feel of the process
here, which means I’m more in the analytic than the intuitive but there ya go. One
characteristic of intuition is that it is a not-to-be-summoned-by-will kind of
process.
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