Our (mis)guided beliefs can create powerful things

First, I want to do a shoutout to Sig, who did this amazing shadow play on the “dark room”:

It is part of my bucket list as a teacher to some day use the content of Sig and my artist friends as part of my learning sessions. Tonight, my doctoral class applied critical realism in trying to explain how the “dark room” came to be (critical realist morphogenesis), how it maintains its existence (morphostasis), and its potential outcomes using multiple theoretical lenses (e.g., deterrence theory, punishment theory, narrative theory, etc.)

One insight (of many!) that stood out from our discussions is how our beliefs, appropriate or misguided, can affect the power of things we’re supposed to believe in. In Sig’s shadow play, the (mis)guided beliefs and fear of the students allowed a seemingly normal janitor’s room into a “dark room” filled with monsters and crocodiles.

Individual beliefs can be a means to endorse or promote norms in such a way that what was individual before gradually becomes collective. Our beliefs can feed into reinforcing cycles that can empower things or entities. In that sense, our belief is very powerful.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to remain critical and creative so that we can see where our beliefs can take us and how our beliefs frame our reality. Just as the merchants in the gospel saw the church as a marketplace rather than a divine place of worship, we can be susceptible to misguided interpretations of the things we experience and perceive.

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John 2:13-22. ‘He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”’

[DAILY GOSPEL INSIGHTS AND REFLECTION FOR MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 313: NOVEMBER 9, 2022]

Faith is not something to have, but something to hone

If the analogy is that our faith is like the mustard seed, then it is better to think about faith as an ongoing process rather than something that either one has or not.

Faith is not necessarily a demand for blind obedience, but rather, it is an invitation for mutual humility and harmony. It is a virtuous cycle where a parent and child loves each other, a mentor and student raise each other, and leader and follower serve each other.

Luke 17:1-6. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…

[DAILY GOSPEL INSIGHTS AND REFLECTION FOR MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 311: NOVEMBER 7, 2022]

Can we “pilot” trust?

How can one be trusting but not gullible?

I connect the principles of the lean startup with today’s gospel about trustworthiness. The lean startup principle can be summed by using pilots and rapid prototyping of products (minimum viable products) to manage risk, avoid “one time big time” investments and distribute risk across multiple smaller cycles, and accelerate learning.

If we transfer this to the way we approach trust, we can “test” trust in small ways (i.e., “pilot” trust) with smaller prices to pay. If our trust is betrayed, we only lose little.

Thus, in this sense, we can let trusting be a reasonable default within contexts where the price at stake is something we can manage.

Luke 16:9-15. Trustworthiness in small matters leads to trustworthiness in greater matters.

[DAILY GOSPEL INSIGHTS AND REFLECTION FOR MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 309: NOVEMBER 5, 2022]

We do pathbreaking work so that we can help ourselves and others find the way

A quick Google search of pathbreaking leads to this definition: “pioneering; innovative; trailblazing”. Finding or creating new paths where there is none before sounds very exciting but it is very challenging. It is full of risks and it demands time, material, and even political resources to effectively pursue.

Pathbreaking work, as we have learned in doing action research, is messy, iterative, and non-linear. It is not comfortable; it is not for the faint of heart. Pathbreaking work requires courage and stamina to try and try again even if the short term is filled with so much pain and so little gain.

A very practical person can reasonably conclude that there may be no need to reinvent the wheel; why fix something that ain’t broken?

But that is the danger of getting too used to routines. In pursuit of efficiency, we may be mistaking ourselves to be robots instead of humans who need meaning and purpose. And to see ourselves as mere cogs in the machine is to feel lost; and in a way, this is more dangerous, because we fool ourselves into thinking we know the way when we really do not.

Moreover, the vocation of the pathbreaker is to resist the temptation to keep the spoils and treasures for oneself and not bring others to the newly discovered or created path. The vocation of the pathbreaker is not to claim power with an iron fist, but to reclaim our collective humanity by extending a helping hand.

Luke 15:1-10. Who would not look for the lost?

[DAILY GOSPEL INSIGHTS AND REFLECTION FOR MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION 307: NOVEMBER 3, 2022]