Ontological Breakdowns

THINKING TOOLS – Models and Frameworks

An ontological breakdown is an unwanted interruption in the flow of your emotional preferences, a disruption in how you prefer people and circumstances to be.

The concept of “breakdowns” is drawn from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.  It is a way of looking at what interrupts the anticipated flow of daily living that is initially hidden from us. This is because the cause of the disappointment or disruption is not the event itself, but the way we choose to see it. Something unexpected will have happened that interrupted what you were expecting to see or feel.  It is known colloquially as an “Oh Shit !” or an “Oh Great !” moment.  The resulting change can generate positive or negative emotions to fit a specific context.  This involves “emotioning“, not rational thinking.

When you get to a certain age you start to forget names or cannot recall them instantly. This is a “breakdown” in the normal flow of life and it generates an emotional concern. You start to question if it’s the first signs of dementia or other medical problems. Perhaps you are doing too much and putting your body under stress. The good news is that you are aware of the breakdown. Sometimes you are “blind” to your forgetfulness and you rely on a friend or loved one to point it out to you.

The thing about a “breakdown” is that you perceive the trigger to be “out there” but it’s your assessment of it that disrupts your sense of reality and what you would prefer to be experiencing. These “breakdowns” live in the ears, eyes, and body of you the observer – your Reality Creators.  So, a “breakdown” is a sign that you are not taking care of what you care about. You may not even be aware of what the concern is actually, as it’s just a feeling that you decide to act on based on disappointment, disagreement, or disruption.

It’s helpful to understand that you live in a world of “background commitments” that influence how you interpret what you are observing. You are, therefore a walking set of concerns that you are constantly seeking to resolve in your daily life.  The problem is that you are largely unaware of them from moment to moment until you pause to reflect, review and renew your action to achieve greater satisfaction from the way you are being in the world.

You may have deleted a report by mistake, have won some money on the lottery, your commuter train was delayed and you arrive late for a very important meeting, you get the break you wanted, or you slip and twist your ankle. They are all mini breakdowns in the flow of daily life.

When you say to yourself “something must be done”,  the flow of activity has been interrupted by something else that you feel unable to address. The result can be hesitation or confusion. You know it’s something you need to address but have not made it a priority.  When you say to yourself, “I will sort that out tomorrow”, you have already identified something you could do, but haven’t committed yourself to do anything about it. These are just excuses or possibilities that you haven’t fully evaluated – as of now.

Disruptions

From an ontological perspective, breakdowns can be good or bad. They are interruptions or surprises that break the flow so we can consider alternatives and see things differently.  They are powerful wake-up calls, alerting us when our habitual way of thinking and acting gets disrupted and no longer works for us. We are prompted to reflect (have a conversation) to clarify what we know and consider to be the possibility of doing things differently.

A breakdown can be a blind spot, a concern, a disaster, or a reason for celebration.  It generates “possibility space” for us to pause and revisit the validity or sense of an assessment and lead to a declaration to act differently in the future. Breakdowns give us the chance to access our conscience, compassion, or resilience. Disruptions in the normal flow or view of your life can take many forms.

Just making a promise extends our knowledge or experience to the point where we over-commit and do not know if we can deliver. Often this motivates us to become more committed and seek help from others.  We are forced out of our comfort zone where we have to reframe our reality, access our inner resources, and practice new skills to avoid failure and embarrassment.

The danger is that we make unreasonable requests of others which puts pressure on relationships and we make promises we cannot rely on.  This leaves us vulnerable as we question long-held assumptions, but unreasonable requests can transform the future by challenging fixed assumptions. We find ourselves questioning our assertions from the past and bringing them into our assessments in the present to shape our declarations for the future.

Often the need to make requests is hidden from us by our concerns.  By listening for specific concerns and paying attention to desired results they can be turned into declarations.  This makes the concern potentially solvable and keeps it in mind as a source of viable action.  By asking:  “What would you like me to do? What request do you have to make? Do you see a way to resolve this concern?

Leaders who pay attention to concerns reflect on the story they are telling themselves that does not fit their best selves. This creates a mood state that prompts new action to get a different result that will resolve the concern. Using these “breakdowns” in the flow of everyday life requires practice and an awareness that acting on a promise you make to yourself develops your integrity and creates a new future in your mind.  You always have a choice over which concerns you pay attention to that you care about most.

Blindness

When your way of thinking and doing things leaves you unaware of possible consequences, you are then “blind” to things that you might otherwise see when in an unfamiliar environment. The philosopher Martin Heidegger referred to this “blindness” as habitual behaviour. You don’t see it because it is “transparent” to you, like the glass in a window frame.  If we are not aware of the language, emotions, actions and reactions we use we are not aware of how your ontology could serve us better.  Breakdowns open your eyes to your “transparency”, so you can see yourself and the behaviour of others differently. The source of your “transparency” is our Way of Being. You do not realise what you are saying, why you react over-emotionally or adopt a given body posture.

Breakdowns open your eyes to this  “transparency”, so you can observe yourself and others differently. A source of your “transparency” is your Way of Being. We do not always realise what we are saying, see ourselves over-reacting or see our own body posture.  Life Leaders set out to break down the “transparency” in other people’s way of seeing as well as questioning their own so that facts can emerge and be faced.

Circumstances

You might say something that you failed to notice that could cause offense in a particular situation. It could be an innocent comment among friends, but be offensive in a work context. It may not be the outcome you intended and a new “possibility space” has to be created to allow your embarrassment to be accepted and an apology made.  On the other hand, your choice to use strong language may have been a conscious attempt to disrupt habitual reactions. This creates space to prompt new thoughts about how alternative perspectives might improve a situation. This behaviour is used consistently by leaders to disrupt old thinking, be a stimulus for innovation, and create the initial conditions for a breakthrough.

As you can see from the diagram above, something is missing between feeling the need (past experience plus circumstances now) to doing something different (new declarations and actions). You are moving from “NOW to NEW”.  What’s missing is what it is possible to change – what is next—not what’s wrong. Leadership can involve a strategy for dealing with breakdowns, even creating them to promote new thinking, clarity of focus, and new insights. It can also generate resistance to change and reassert old habits.

It seems you are continuously navigating your way through and around daily breakdowns, at home and at work. What you need is a commitment to test out a different Way of Being that enables you to take these breakdowns in your stride, resolve them or act to avoid a negative impact.

The Big Win

When a “breakdown” of this type happens, your lifestyle will have changed in some way, and adjustment is needed. This is not a psychological, communication or operational breakdown.  The type of “breakdown” referred to above is more likely to result from a VUCA environment involving confusion, or overconfidence. It may result from excitement, a challenge or an opportunity. In a world where the need to change rapidly is thrust upon us, our way of being and seeing is constantly being disrupted. The danger is that we allow ourselves to drift into a mood of resentment and anxiety.

The green part of the diagram below shows how the actions we take can produce unexpected results that can be disappointing or disruptive to your thinking. The natural response is a “Quick Fix” in an attempt to change the action by adding more skill, a better attitude or new knowledge. But the problem keeps coming back because of a “breakdown” in the thinking of those choosing the action.  Only when a new perspective or way of observing is considered as a possibility can a new action be tried to produce a more satisfactory result.

This is a call to take more thoughtful action and deliver what Bob Dunham calls a “Big Win”, as shown in the blue part of the diagram.

You are the Reality Creator.  When you learn of a major restructuring at work, you receive an irate call from a customer you have let down or you slip and twist your ankle, then your mood changes, and the way you see your world changes. The flow of your daily life has been broken down. You are challenged to manage your mood and produce a new life movie that accommodates the changes you need to make. This cannot happen unless you are able to observe how your new reality will require new action.

An “ontological breakdown” can be felt in your Way of Being as a concern.  It is not always obvious what you should do about it. Martin Heidegger referred to this as “transparency” where something is so familiar to you in your daily existence that you are only aware of it when you feel disappointed with yourself. Concerns keep recurring until they come to the forefront of your mind and disrupt the normal flow of your daily life.

Case Example

For example, I had a client who used to get defensive and moody every time his boss commented on his work. He had been reprimanded a few times for being non-cooperative and claiming his boss was not being respectful or appreciative. When things got too much for him he moved on, but this was only a “quick fix”, as the “problem” he was experiencing kept returning. The recurring “breakdown” led him to find a “big win”.

As a child, he would walk away when confronted. When forced to deal with a challenging situation he would become over-emotional and aggressive. He clearly had not learned to deal with his “fight or flight” emotional reaction. He was trying to get others to change, remaining blind to the fact that he could control his own reaction and needed to take responsibility to find a Way of Being that served him better.  A better understanding of his way of being and seeing reality enabled him to “know-in-action” what skills he could apply to cope with challenges from authority.

He is now able to break down what is concerning him by observing and interpreting what is possible to change in the way he speaks, listens, feels, senses, relates and presents himself in stressful situations.

The value of an Ontological Approach is that you can imagine or actually create a “breakdown” to help you observe a scenario as an inner movie, something that you can see clearly that you were previously blind to. What was “transparent” now becomes apparent and lays the ground for developing a more effective behavioural response because it now makes sense.   It’s done for the sake of learning so that you, or your client, can shift their Way of Being. It just requires a trigger and the practicing of some new action.

So What makes this “transparency” a breakdown?

Breakdowns live in the eyes, ears and body of the observer’s Way of Being.  This makes breakdowns the result of us continuously assessing what we truly care about and take care of matters to us. It helps us generate insights and uncover what we didn’t know before. If the result is not what we wanted, we programmed neuro-linguistically to pay attention to it because it concerns us. This disruption can be perceived as a  potential threat to our identity and well-being.  This is our nervous system operating in the background – our Reality Creator. We are obliged to question the assumptions and habits that are no longer working for us.

The Outside-In Illusion

When we blame someone or something else for our problems we see the source of the breakdown as an event existing in the outside world. The energy to change is perceived to come at us from the “outside” in  But seen from an ontological perspective, we actually make sense of the event and produce our response to it “inside” our nervous system. Something may have happened “out there” but when we pay attention to it we bring our Inner Producer, Director and Scriptwriter, into play. The meaning lies in the observer, not the event. It’s how the observer interprets the event, the distinctions made, the emotions generated and the response we take into the outside world. It becomes our Life Movie.

Now What?

1. Declare the breakdown. Accept its existence as a useful opportunity to learn the skills of a Mood Manager
2. Identify what we need to commit to, to address the concern or opportunity related to the breakdown.
3. Draw a distinction between what we experience (perception) is missing and what seems to be wrong/right (assessment).
4. Explore the range of possibilities available to us that the breakdown presents.
5. Choose actions that will support our commitment to address the breakdown.
6. Discover to whom you can direct requests, especially requests to assist you.

References

The Last Word on Power by Tracy Goss. Rosetta Books 1995

Coaching to the Human Soul Vol 1 by Alan Sieler.  Newfield Australia 2003

Understanding Computers and Cognition by Terry Winograd & Fernando Flores.  Ablex 1990