Recently I found myself at a gathering of health professionals. I felt a little out of my comfort zone. Increasingly commonly I think I have something valuable to share and I get blank stares. I thought it was me.
But then it hit me.. it’s not only me. There’s a paradigm out there that’s pretty self contained and if you say anything that exposes or challenges its assumptions you often get the “you’re a bit mad” look, or blankness.
Since we were doing exercises and workshops at this gathering, I mused about testing my theory that I’m in a minority group.
Here’s my proposed exercise- designed for groups of up to several thousand.
Run this cold… any explanation or pre-loading will corrupt the results.
“Turn to your neighbour/s. In pairs or small groups have a discussion where you ask yourself “How patriarchal is my thinking?” Use your group to help clarify your answer. You have about 2-3 minutes for this.”
“Then, when I ring the bell move into one of four groups”..
Group A – “Not very”
Group B- “About average”
Group C- “Quite”
Group D- “Don’t know”
I think I’d be in Group A, but I’m not sure. I wonder how many would be in Group D?
A followup exercise- How ready are you to subvert the dominant paradigm? (groups based on the same answers)