A fellow pilgrim in the world of learning and development has reminded me how much we depend on models to try to render comprehensible the challenges of leadership and organisations.
Read her blog here
She is quite right to point out that the model itself is not the place where meaning is stored. It is the reflection prompted by the model, the interaction of hope and experience with the model, that may bring to the surface important learning, useful insight or just a sparky idea.
Some clients are keen to discredit the model, to find flaws in it, to challenge it. That is all good fun. Others might try to force a whole world view into its little boxes and circles and arrows. That can lead to narrow outcomes.
I am a diagramatic thinker; I can see shapes and colours in sentences and words. For me, models can usefully capture the ephemeral understanding of things, can grasp and fix a concept. But like a holiday snap, whilst they might freeze the memory of a rich experience, in the end they don’t fully convey the real depth and variety of what was going on.