Wherever I Go

In a great blog post, Richard Martin (@IndaloGenesis) explained why you have to experience other people’s viewpoint in order to have a proper understanding of the world around… even if you must be conscious that, doing this, you are still elaborating a perspective that is plainly yours, and, as thus, plainly unique.


While exposure to a diversity of perspectives is essential to any attempt to understand how other people see and interpret the world around them, it is impossible to divest ourselves of all our own accumulated knowledge, experience, culture and filters. To assess someone else’s description or to sit in another’s chair, does not alter the fact that we are still using our own eyes, not theirs.

This text resonates with my own work since I have been working for more than twenty years on a "dual" issue: considering that multi-disciplinary teams (typically in health) are composed of people with very different viewpoints (a viewpoint being the sum of a view angle and a focus point, say a job and a specialty), what kind of "common perspective" (called an "artifact" in the knowledge management jargon) can we provide them so that they can contribute to a common project?

Richard would argue that, as a Neo-Generalist, he is more interested in turning around a vase of flowers :-) Nevertheless, his text contains all the concepts (viewpoints, artifact) to understand why a "record of records" (piling up each others views) will never be a tool for those who have to contribute to the (health or whatever) project of one of their fellow human being.

Back to work on the Ligne de vie ;-)

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