“After frustration comes development!”

This is what I told a colleague today, who was frustrated with the technology of her new laptop. And when I thought about it a little longer tonight, I realized how true it actually is.

It is already starts when you grow up from baby to toddler to a child… and so on. Every time before the next development is manifest, there is frustration and whining. And even then, there is often a kind of developmental regression first. (How happy I was as a young parent with a book that described the developmental stages of children!)

And pre-developmental regression is more common. For example, my baseball-playing son suddenly had a few training sessions and a match in a row last year where, in his eyes, he played very bad. But the following week, his game really took a quantum leap forward. He had reached the next level. By the way, I believe that is how it works when he is gaming, since the regression and accompanying frustration can be heard everywhere in our house ;-).

Last year, I experienced it a few times myself. The most prominent example is that I agreed to conduct a one-hour workshop at a conference for systemic colleagues. I had sent an email to the organization with the subject and a short description. The weeks before the conference was to take place, I started the substantive preparations. And I really started to wonder how on earth I could have come up with that subject! I had never done anything related to it before and the inspiration was hard to find. I wrote a draft anyway, shared it with a colleague, and I got a response which read like “hmmm…interesting…”. I translated this to “not good enough by far”, and adjusted the setup. Two days before I had to do the workshop, I showed it to the same colleague again and explained what my plan was. “Hmm Bar, what’s systemic about this?” Grrr … @@##!!@!

Ironically, the subject of the workshop was Flow. It was hard to find, that flow. Back to the drawing board. And then I had it, suddenly I saw through the subject of flow and the interaction of the three mechanisms that are active in systems, and a workshop design resulted.

And now comes the best part, because the frustration brought huge development! This exercise has helped me fathom systemic work at yet a deeper layer. I feel and understand even more clearly what It is that I am doing. As a result, we explain a number of subjects somewhat differently within our institute. As a result, we adapted our basic training. So it was worth the frustration.

Do I feel like another dose of frustration? Well not immediately, but when it presents itself, I just trust it will spur on development…

Barbara Hoogenboom

5 January 2021