Paradox 1:

Think about it—how often does your daily grind discourage you from exploring new perspectives and innovative approaches? Routine is a devious invention. It's easy to get focused on mundane tasks that sap motivation and creativity. We soon believe nothing will change and despair that we have no influence over the future.

What if you could change the way you work, your approach to knowledge, and your view of the world? What would convince you to venture from the well-worn path in a new direction? It starts with realizing you’re not making the progress you had hoped. It’s not from your lack of desire or effort; your tools and methods are holding you back. Navigating change and complexity with new tools and methods, like any new skill, gets better through practice.

Paradox 2:

We try to change by necessity, focusing on problems versus solutions. Often those hasty solutions are devised by experts in offices who are isolated from the very communities they're meant to benefit. Then, solutions are implemented in territories that have not identified the roots of their problems. This disconnect leads to new problems instead of meaningful change.

What if, instead, we helped people discover their own need for change? Wouldn’t it be more effective to empower people to come up with their own solutions by equipping them with methods and tools that benefit from their unique – and more accurate – understanding of the situation?

Surely, yes. But this approach requires humility—creating spaces built on trust, where listening and clarity foster genuine understanding and growth. Are we ready to ask questions to help others shape their own thinking and solutions?

Paradox 3:

Another paradox emerges when organizations launch improvement initiatives with great fanfare – introducing new tools and investing in training to support the change. But the company culture is so firmly entrenched that it stifles the efforts of employees to apply the learnings – and nothing changes. In business, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

What if we could create a collective learning space that transcends organizational barriers and create spaces where people who want to operate differently challenge the status quo with a mix of attitude, principles and tools?

How about these?

Blank Space and Open Inquiry: Welcoming a blank page and admitting "We don't understand" is a bold move. We encourage you to intentionally create empty spaces in your schedule for free thinking and dialogue. Use a blank page or board to start listening, visualizing, and questioning. Then, delve into any topic you want to clarify; the outcomes can be remarkable.
Open Inquiry: Ask questions with the intent of uncovering the roots of a concept or sparking a new idea. Embrace ignorance as a driver of curiosity.
Autonomy: Empower people to make their own decisions, reconnecting them with their unique creativity and responsibility. Help them discover new tools to break old habits and form new ones. Help them discover why these tools work.
Dump Your Ideas & Play: It's okay to not have the answer. Accept looking at your chaos and unloading your mind. Represent your ideas in a visual structure so you can connect information and identify your priorities. Unravel topics systematically and globally. Decisions and actions come when things become clearer. If you adopt a trial-error-adjustment mindset, confusion will just be a sign that you are identifying the knots and getting closer to your goal.
Knowledge as a Reorganizing Activity: Our need today is to detect connections, articulations, solidarities, implications, interdependencies, and complexities. We need to understand knowledge as a living and reorganizing activity and recover our exploratory capacity to discover anomalies. We need a method that teaches us to learn—a method that can only be formed in the search. An Anti-Method.
Practice New Languages: Avoid "Excel thinking" and rigid structures, empower people through active listening, discover through exploration, train in interpreting information effectively. Use visual tools like mind maps to put ideas in motion and (re)organize them dynamically. This will naturally simplify the understanding of complexity. Reframe and enhance understanding of any project by placing everything within a global context. Reconcile with drawing as a tool to help capture, clarify, or deepen ideas that you cannot yet verbalize. Let words and images dialogue to synchronize intentions with actions, illustrate possible scenarios, or make complex concepts relatable and actionable. Help people build shared meanings to enable their points of view to converge. Blend words and graphics in a shared experience to chart a direction, to foster ownership, and to align all stakeholders. Use storycreation to structure and communicate ideas and visions. Give people a voice to ensure they are heard.
KM0: Start from where you are and what you have. From this place, build new relationships organically, and encourage iterative adjustments based on feedback and reflection. Embrace the paradox of a method that is inherently undefined, built from the needs of each situation, and evolves through ongoing research and exploration.
Conversation and Human Connection: Prioritize conversation to uncover insights, build relationships, and support collaboration. Foster environments with sensitive listening and empathetic dialogue, ensuring diverse voices are heard. Help people articulate their thoughts openly, enhancing mutual understanding. You will help people bring forth what they don't know they know, and one day they'll tell you: “I can think out loud with you.”

The Anti-Method Atelier community was born from the three paradoxes and its members are committed to these principles. No one envisioned the community as it is now. And we have no idea what it will become tomorrow. We follow no predefined path but rather embrace the journey of discovery and learning.

(And in case you wonder: we chose "Atelier" because it is the perfect place for ideas and practice to meet together with beauty, meaning and joy.)

So, does this resonate with you? Would you like to join this community?

If yes, then let's come back to you: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? How will you get there?

By The Anti-Method Atelier Community

July 9, 2024

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