Whether we are speaking about openness in terms of our participation in relationships with others or referring to an internal willingness to renounce preconceptions as we reflect on new information - we can greatly benefit from this attitude.
Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline has observed:
"Nothing undermines openness more surely than certainty. Once we feel as if we have 'the answer' all motivation to question our thinking disappears. But the discipline of systems thinking shows that there simply is 'no right answer' when dealing with complexity.
"It is most accurate to think of openness as a characteristic of relationships [rather than] individuals... openness emerges when two or more individuals become willing to suspend their certainty in each other's presence. They become willing to share their thinking and susceptible to having their thinking influenced by one another."
Clearly, fear has many disguises; one we can recognize is the wish to control others; another can be identified as "the demand for certainty." As Pema Chodron observes:
"To me, the point where people get stuck is exactly here. They have so little trust in their ability to rest with negativity and uncertainty that whenever they detect a hint of paradox or not knowing, they become afraid and do all kinds of conformist, fundamentalist things to become secure again.
"It takes a lot of bravery even to consider that uncertainty is not a threat--The future is uncertain... but such uncertainty lies at the very heart of human creativity."
Complexity
Today, just as we need the paradigm of systems thinking, we need a paradigm that addresses complexity because we are becoming overwhelmed by the interrelationships of phenomena.
Peter Senge:
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