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166
Facilitation Skills
discussing an institutionalized program. To attack an established program
will require much effort and probably not yield any changes, so we stop.
Sometimes the solutions associated with the last cause are general. For
example, we may find that someone stopped at “not adequately trained.”
Knowing that the training program is inviolate may cause the team to
offer a solution of retraining without regard for the causes of ineffective
training. To break through this barrier, always go to your collective point
of ignorance on every cause path.
Denial
Denial is the strongest human attribute we have. Its roots are in
groovenation, but it is manifested in many ways. The need to maintain our
own reality is sometimes stronger than the need to learn new cause-andeffect
relationships. Sometimes perceptions intrude upon our “realities”
and cause major conflicts. I recently came across an example of this in the
responses to a National Geographic article on lions feeding at night. One
letter to the editor read as follows:
“I found the photographs very unsettling. They captured the victim
animals at their most private and vulnerable moments—those of terror
and death. I am outraged at your assumption that I want to see these
struggles.”
This person openly stated her wish to deny her perception because
it conflicted with her “reality.” Furthermore, she is “outraged” that someone
else could see a different reality and want to share it.
A different reality was presented in another letter to the editor
regarding the same story.
“My daughter, age four years nine months, looked over my shoulder
as I was reading my August issue. She was so interested in the pictures of
the lions that I had to read all the captions to her with minor deciphering
of difficult words. She now understands that a night in the life of a lion is
not exactly as it is for Simba in the movie The Lion King.”
This parent not only enjoyed the sight of her reality, but shared it
with her child.
While watching a television news magazine, I saw yet another
incredible display of denial and how opinions become fact. The chief
of public health for the state of Kentucky enlightened the viewers with
this logic. “If tobacco sickness were real, we would know by now because
we have been growing tobacco for over two hundred years.” He said this
with the full knowledge that hospitals and other medical facilities treat
hundreds of people each year for tobacco sickness. Tobacco sickness is