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Article By Thomas Köttner
What is my value proposition?
Professional life is all about delivering expected outcomes and valuable results.
Happy professionals are those of us who are blessed with doing what we like and what we have been gifted with, and that is at the core of our offer
Professional jargon also proposes that we should present ourselves with our Value Proposition, doesn't it ?
Photo: Unsplash
The challenge to define a value proposition is that Value is defined by the receiver, not by who intends to give it.
But in an intent of getting to that, I help persons to think in a more fruitful way, and not get lost in unuseful and energy consuming concerns.
I have always done the same, yet in different domains. As a student, I would challenge my classmates to take new perspectives, to dive into thoughts that might help come up with a new perspective, and thus grow out of the “one version for everybody” acceptance.
As an employee, I would review processes and ways in order to understand why they would take longer and consume more energy than necessary, and would come up with proposals which were of course, not always welcome. Challenging the State Quo is uncomfortable for many.
As an Executive I would look for the ways that would take to the results with the least dissipation of energy. Not looking for shortcuts , but looking for effectiveness.
As a Senior Leader, I would promote those different ways of doing, for a more fluent result and for avoiding getting stuck in unending considerations and boring meetings. I would be always aware of helping people think as leaders themselves, and thus , eventually becoming one. As a consultant, I was passionate, and made people share it.
From such a perspective, my clients have usually valued my ability to connect the dots of a complex situation in order to present it in a new, clearer and more meaningful way, than they were perceiving it to be.
We have learned the Cartesian way of thinking and acting which, in favor of understanding in detail, has taken our observations into pieces, it has fragmented our perception of our way of acting. It has fostered an erroneous perspective on individualism.
We think of towns, cities, states, continents, oceans, the planet and the solar system as different entities and categories in our mind, and we forget that is all contained in just one entity. And this is the way we think about almost everything.
No wonder then that we sometimes make decisions that result inadequate and deliver less than desirable outcomes, only because they contradict the very nature of what we are trying to achieve
Yet, this has also made us work, act, react and think in separate fields and domains, and very often we either make less than good decisions, or struggle significantly to know what we should decide. We think in terms of either/or, and we have separated our thinking of the thinking of others.
We have been stimulated to think individually and decide on our own, that is what strong accomplished persons are supposed to do, right ? But we are all connected and interdependent, there is not such a thing as a self made person, somebody who can do everything on one’s own
While I write this, I depend on many people who are working right now in everything that allows electricity to reach my home. The computer I am using has been invented, designed, integrated, assembled, reviewed and packaged, by many people who delivered it at the retailer who made it available to me, and I could purchase it thanks to the earnings I received from clients who trusted me to be of rewardable benefit for them… I am sitting at a desk which was made by dedicated artisans out of selected woods and was in my fathers office where we held so many conversations that influenced and nurtured my reflection and pursue of the essences of situations…I could go on forever to just make evident that we are all interconnected with everything in life.Past, presente and future.
We are interdependent… but have lost awareness of how everything interacts, by promoting, stabilizing, and standardizing our thinking fragmentation.
That is why we think and talk with each other in a way that suggests that one’s ideas will prevail over other’s ideas, that one position will be right, and show the other wrong… all categories in our minds that make us look into life from a small and scarcity based perspective.
That is probably the reason why Dialogue is such an engaging approach for solving, improving, changing and impacting in our concentric environments, our home, our work site, our society, our world, and system life at large..
Dialogue is the art of thinking together, of creating together, of exploring ideas and possibilities with a common and multi- stakeholder perspective.
It helps in clarifying, in understanding, in identifying wisdom… all of it in such a way that everything starts to make sense and become meaningful.
If all this rings a bell in your mind and soul, let us have a conversation and see how a Dialogic Thinking Partnership could be of benefit and value for you.
