Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Context Blindness

What We Don’t See Will Hurt Us

 

Barry Oshry

 

 

 

 

 

One of the paradoxes of our human condition is that we are systems creatures—much of our lives is spent as components of larger systems—as members within the family, work group, organization, neighborhood, sports team, political party, faith group, nation, and more. On the other side, we are blind to how the structures and processes of these systems affect our everyday lives—our experiences of ourselves and others, our frustrations and satisfactions, and our effectiveness. Our orientation tends to be personal; we see people and not the contexts in which we and they operate. That blindness to context is costly in terms of stress, relationship breakdowns, ...