After laughing out loud at this one, and firmly pushing back memories of ugh-inducing highschool algebra classes that threatened to emerge, the cartoon made me think of the lessons that cantaloupes a.k.a. Mountain Life Lenses™ have to teach us.

On a bad day Carrot Life Lenses™ (Mountain’s polar opposite) can have their head buried in the sand.  Carrots can be uber-focused on details that are neither important or strategic.  Like not noticing that having 60 cantaloupes is a little odd.

It’s mountains who are likely to say ‘hang on a minute, what’s going on here?!’

Because they can see far ahead, Mountain Life Lenses™ can more easily see the big picture and notice when something is amiss.

Before Mountains get too cocky though, know that every Life Lens™ has its good and bad days.  Mountains, on a bad day, can have their heads in the clouds and conversely, not notice the details.

C’est la vie.

Yin Yang.

In the book Their Eyes Were Watching God author Zora Neale Hurston writes there were years that ask questions and years that answer.

Besides being a sentence that made me jolt to a stop and ponder, it’s a great way to frame the new year.  Which will it be for you?

Which worldview will broaden your horizons and bring you closer to the edge.  The edge of curiousity, of wonder, of exploring ‘other’ (no matter how bravely or cautiously)?

And which worldview will narrow your perspective, reinforcing what you know to be right and true to the exclusion of all other?

Which worldview will quietly or boldly ask questions?  Questions that wrap their curlicue tail around your noggin, leading you to an expanded view, where exclamation marks crackle and pop like a kid’s cereal, leading to new answers and even more questions.

And which worldview will dampen curiousity, stomping on questions, content with the known, the comfortable, the same, the safe?

I wish for you a year with insightful questions and temporary answers.

I love traveling by train so when I found myself on the platform in Amsterdam looking for the right platform I was like a kid looking forward to an ice cream cone on a hot summer’s day.  (The fact that I was headed to Paris didn’t hurt either.)

Despite a well-organized system though I couldn’t find the right track.  I asked someone to point me the way and he replied ‘there, look at the sign, it’s just over there’.  I gazed up expectantly, only to be befuddled as I couldn’t see my train’s name on the sign he was pointing to.  I asked again.  He pointed again.  I befuddled again. Finally a kind soul pointed me the right way and all was well but not before I had a good laugh at myself.

Time for audience participation. Listen to the 5 second clip below and figure out how you’d spell the word I’m saying.

How did you spell the word I mentioned in the clip?

I come from a part of the world where a major telecommunications firm is of the same name.  So when the helpful guy told me to look for ‘tell-us’ I unwittingly looked for how the telecommunications company spells it, namely ‘telus’.

No wonder I couldn’t see what was posted on the sign right in front of my face.  The train company, far from being spelled ‘telus’ and yet while it’s pronounced the same, is spelled ‘thalys’.

We see what we expect to see.  Or as John Lubbock says, “What we see depends mainly on what we look for”.

Are you ready to see clearly?  Check out www.life-lenses.com

The word’s aflutter with the release of the new Harry Potter movie, which made my kids take the opportunity to watch a previous version, specifically the Order of the Phoenix.  We were all snuggled up in bed watching when it occurred to me that the character Dolores Umbridge is a great example of a worldview, specifically a view of an educator, gone very wrong.

Her perspective is all about:

• unquestioned authority
• top down approach
• “I’m the teacher and I know everything”
• “you’re the student and you know nothing” (and I’ll do everything in my power to put you in your place)
• use of coercion and force

It’s a Head Life Lens™ on a very bad day: paying attention to concrete, tangible things in the extreme  with no sensitivity (her use of punishment is down right abusive)

It’s a Destination Life Lens™ on a very bad day: Delores is only concerned with pleasing the Ministry of Magic and getting the school in shape.   She’ll do anything to achieve that goal.  In her mind the end justifies the means.

It’s a Carrot Life Lens™ on a very bad day: attention to minuscule, unimportant details

It’s a Stop Life Lens™ on a very bad day: adherence to tradition for the sake of tradition, no willingness to try anything new

Check out the clip below to see her in action.  If you’ve already had a trainer with this worldview you have my empathy.  Whether or not you have, may you never have one again.

Recently I wrote a post about how to look at the edges of a carpet as a metaphor for life.

You know the bits of a carpet that aren’t neatly sewn up but rather hang there loosely at the edges?  Do you see those bits as fray – as messy, a nuisance and unorganized?

Or do you see them as fringe – as balance to the overall design, an aesthetic that’s a little wild and loose and uncontrolled?

Like life.

If you see see them as fray then perhaps you recognize yourself as someone who likes to tidy up the fray in your life, someone who:

• has different coloured highlights or post-its or colour coded events in your PDA
• gets excited about the new organizational apps for your IPhone
• gets relaxed by focusing on systems (organizing projects, your wardrobe, your big ideas)

All good stuff

except

when you focus too much on tidying the fray and don’t see the beauty in the fringe.

Here’s an example.  A good friend of mine is a coordinator for a community-based arts project.  She is wonderful at viewing life through both the fray AND the fringe.  She is uber organized (fray) AND big, insightful ideas come out of her brain at regular intervals (fringe).

Through combining her fray and fringe skills she recently found the project $38,000.  Yep, $38K in unclaimed grant money that folks had forgotten about.  It took her organizational skills to do it plus her out there, let’s consider this unconsidered possibility kind of thinking.

For those fed up with the fray here’s to a little more fringe in our worldviews.  What would your world look like through the fringe?

Michael Hager, Washburn University, 'Inclusion/Exclusion' woodcut monoprint, 2004

What’s your CQ?  You may be familiar with IQ, social intelligence and emotional intelligence but the new kid on the block is cultural intelligence.

I’m in Rio de Janiero, Brazil at the United Nations World Urban Forum.  I’ve just finished doing a workshop on cultural intelligence, which is a combination of meta-cognition, skills and knowledge, that allows us to move with and through various cultures, including our own, with confidence and flair even.

Fill in the blanks:  ________ are good dancers, _______ are good at math, ________ are bad drivers. Bidden or not, welcome or not, were you able to fill in the spaces?  In all likelihood you were.  That’s because our brains are wired to fill in the gaps.

The Heath brothers, in Made to Stick, call it the curiousity gap.  It’s the same gap that makes us stay up too late watching a TV show we don’t like simply because we want to find out what happens.  Who killed who in the whodunnit. This filling in of the gaps is helpful in some areas of life but not intercultural work.

Too often we fill in the gaps wrong while thinking we are right.  We tend to assume we know up to 90% more about another culture than we actually do. What can help?

1. Have a broad working definition of culture - most of us default to defining culture only by ethnicity.  By including gender, faith, material possessions, time, physical space, personal space and many other cultural elements we are more likely to get a richer picture of the people we are working and playing with.
2. Check assumptions – look for the boxes that we unwittingly put around our thinking that squeeze our brain into road block thinking.
3. Understand your views on conflict – often times working interculturally includes bumping up against conflict.  If you understand your own particular view of conflict you’ll have a more effective starting point.  For example, do you see conflict as a chance to vent, a way to clear the air, or something that is scary, something to be avoided at all costs?
4. Hold a worldview that includes complexity – if you always expect 2 to follow 1, and b to follow a, that is you prefer a linear view of the world you’re likely in for a bumpy ride.  On the other hand if, while working interculturally, you expect a complex ride, with ups, downs and hidden corners, you’ll save yourself a lot of stress.

Cultural intelligence is the new kid on the block and a very much welcome one.  What will you do to welcome him/her?