So here’s the restaurant and here’s the food and here’s the service and in a little while I am going to tell you what I think about them. I am going to give you my opinion. And because I am a well-intentioned person, I am going to give you my best suggestions for what the restaurant owners ought to do with my feedback.

So here’s the restaurant and here’s me and they are separate, distinct. That’s why I can have an opinion about it. IT.

But our lives in our organizations are not like that. Our organizations and we are not separate, distinct. The idea that we might be able to give our feedback on an experience which is ours to judge and theirs to fix is simply a trick of the mind. An illusion. An escape from our culpability.

We are involved. We contribute. By what we think, say and do and what we fail to think say and do, we help make the very thing we then crave to distance from ourselves and offer our opinion on.

The good question is not: ‘what do you think?’ It is ‘what did you do to help make it like you think it is?’ And then another: ‘what would you be willing to do, or stop doing, which would have it be different?’