Opposing Forces

I had a meeting the other day which really riled me up. It was a simple, run of the mill meeting which I had organised with a customer of the group I’m working in which had been given to me by one of the managers. He’d read my invitation email, replied positively and even agreed to the meeting so when I came face to face with him I was saddened to find that his entire energy was focussed at making the meeting as difficult as he could possibly make it. It didn’t help that it was the morning.

I’m usually good with dealing with difficult people, although I get slightly annoyed when they focus their anger or frustrations on me, I mean I’m here as a casual bystander doing what I’m told and trying to make everything go swimmingly. Some people just have an innate sense of social destruction which courses through every fibre of their being. For them a person with a smile should be crushed, a positive comment should be strangled and a bloke in a thin tie and a funky shirt should be made to feel like nothing; I didn’t though, I know I’m absolutely wonderful ;-)

I am very aware why people act like this; sometimes it’s a control reflex derived from a desire to feel at the epicentre of events. It’s like someone has very little control in the outside world and through the means of institutionalised structure, they can wield their malevolence and ego until they feel their impossible attitude has made a stamp on proceedings. Of course, these people also miss the obvious fact that they look like a complete and total cock to others.

Of course these idiots aren’t the only individuals who conduct themselves like this. Sometimes there is a genuinely different psychological mode of thinking which accompanies such behaviour. I’ve been working with a lovely lady as part of my work recently who explained to me a scale on which different types of thinking can be placed; the KAI scale. The KAI scale is the Kreton Adaptation-Innovation scale and it registers whether you are an ‘adaptive’ thinker, thereby driven by process, order, facts and figures, or an ‘innovative’ thinker driven by emotion, ideas, out of the box reasoning and interaction.

As with most scales identifying thought and behaviour, there is a bell curve which sits over it and the vast majority of people tend to fall in the centre. Some of course fall either side and find it terribly difficult to converse, empathise or communicate with the other side of the scale.

I could go into a lot more detail about clashes of methods of thinking and how behaviour can be theorised to the nth degree but then that could pull up a whole host of other dilemmas such as religious fundamentalism and political agendas, so instead I’ll surmise my thoughts by concluding that it’s obvious that people think radically differently. Not all people think the same, or even remotely in the same way but, in my innovative little mind (and in my rational opinion), that is no reason to be a total cock.