One day a man was walking in the deep forest and he came upon a twig in the path. When he picked it up he saw that there was a cocoon hanging from it.
He took it home, put the cocoon into a glass jar and placed it on the kitchen shelf. He watched it carefully for some time and one day saw the cocoon move ever so slightly. He was very anxious to see the unknown butterfly, so he watched it for several hours as it struggled inside its cocoon. Eventually he made a slit in the side of the cocoon and a beautiful, brilliant blue wing popped out. Then the butterfly emerged and crawled along the edge of the table slowly flapping its wings.
After several hours, it was still crawling around so he realised that something wasn’t right.
The next door neighbour was a biology teacher so went and told his story.
“Ah” said the teacher, “I know what the problem is. You see, it’s in the process of struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gains the strength to fly.”
I was reminded of this story recently when reflecting on some recent client work in Queensland – in particular as a group workshopped a collaborative approach in tackling a complex issue.
A couple of the senior staff expressed concern about the impact on their team members – they seemed very keen to protect their staff from some of the confronting revelations that the group were exploring together.
I had seen similar patterns play out in a number of interactions – a desire as a leader to:
- keep their people safe,
- to help them through the difficult patch,
- to smooth out the speed humps,
- to control the situation,
- to reduce the tension,
- to minimise the conflict,
- to manage the dynamics,
While no doubt well intentioned, the risk is that in shielding staff from uncomfortable situations, we may block key insights and unknowingly prevent the uncomfortable practice that leads to new thinking and skills.
Like the butterfly, people need to struggle a bit to exercise their new “muscles” needed to tackle the uncertain and emergent environments.