Making assumptions based on previous life-experience is what keeps us sane. Without this ability, we would forget how to walk, to drink or eat. Our loved ones’ faces would mean nothing to us. But this mechanism also limits us: we fail to keep our perceptions fresh and ready for surprises. We fall back on stereotypes, including those about ourselves. We summarily judge other people’s behaviour and we stay within our own usual range of behaviours.
IETM will be entering into a new period of its life by challenging its comfort zones, thus allowing itself to see the world differently, to act and react to fresh perceptions with fresh behaviours.
But in order to do this, we first need to be able to identify social codes: our own and those of other people, other cultures, other generations, other societies. As Pascale Reinhardt reminds us, our (and others’) thinking patterns are often formatted by these social codes: in order to see what is really happening, we must consciously practice de-coding. This is an intercultural competence.
The same mechanism of making assumptions, is (arguably!), also linked to intuition. Do we make intuitive jumps or do our mental circuits make short cuts based on previous, if unconscious, nerve-pathways? Erez Tsalik, of SIT ( Systematic Inventive Thinking ) says that intuition can block our ability to innovate; to think creatively. Most of us have to trick our minds in order to get away from mental habits which block our imagination to see creative alternatives.
Do artists have it taped? Is contemporary art the answer? By accepting misunderstanding, as Adi Blum and Beat Mazenauer maintain, as a creative mobilising energy, can we shock our stodgy minds into seeing the world as a different place? Can we see what our habits are, and slip out of them? Can we start to differentiate between the culturally-defined habits of our colleagues and who they really are?
Is professional mobility (displacement) the conduit for sharpening our observations, for practicing ‘code-recognition’, for challenging our habits and changing perceptions?
In this IETM Annual Plenary Meeting in Switzerland, and in subsequent IETM meetings, we invite IETM members, colleagues and friends to join us on this progressive journey. We start with a bang in Zürich, by facing the brick wall (or perhaps the porous, biodegradable fence?) of misunderstanding...

Mary Ann DeVlieg, Secretary General, IETM