Interpretations of The Fifth Discipline Part 2
I read The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter Senge. Last published in 2006, this is a well-known book for learning about Systems Thinking and applying those principles to both your work and your personal life. In part of the book, he touches upon this idea of “leaps of abstraction”, where people make a generalization based on observed behavior and then make that generalization a fact without testing it. It’s an important topic when talking about interpersonal relationships between authors.
Mr. Senge relays a direct story about Laura, who doesn’t make eye contact when talking to people, who doesn’t take part in office events, and who tries to keep conversations short. He explains the generalizations that her coworkers make about her, namely that she doesn’t care very much about people. These additional facts become the basis of their interactions with her. So, they don’t invite her to events or to lunch, and they gossip about her when an anonymous person turns them into the manager for something they did. “That’s the sort of thing someone like Laura would do.” They pull away, she pulls away. But the actual truth, Peter tells us, is that she’s hard of hearing. She’s not looking away because she’s uninterested in the conversation. She’s angling her good ear to better understand what the other person is saying. She avoids events with a lot of activity because she feels like she can’t keep up with the conversations. And this resonates with me, reader.
As a person with ASD, I find it difficult to look people in the eye when speaking with them. I find small-talk uncomfortable, not that I don’t want to try, I just prefer a deeper conversation. I’m more comfortable talking about subjects I know about and am interested in. Not that I don’t care about things you’re interested in, but I do not know what to say on those topics that I have limited knowledge of. Unless I’m grilling you with twenty questions, which is just as uncomfortable. I prefer to speak one-on-one with someone instead of in a group. There’s the old introvert joke: I don’t want to go, but I want to be asked.
And you don’t have to be neurodivergent to feel this way. Some of us are just not sociable. Maybe I had a bad day and want to sit quietly at a writing event and just listen. Or maybe I’m new to a writing genre or style and am afraid to admit it or look incompetent (I have another article about this). For most of us, especially those with invisible disabilities, we do care. We want to feel included. Whether we act on that inclusion depends on whether we are feeling insecure or if we really have a million other things to do and just can’t make the time to take part. So, please, don’t give up on communicating with us. The more you pull back, the more we pull back. We’re not prone to taking the first step, even if we’d like to be. And making unsubstantiated assumptions about other authors can be a quick way to alienate them from the community.
