Executive Coaching Expertise- Dr. Karen Otazo

There is no objective reality. We each see the world through our own experiences and culture. If you live in Chinese Asia and you’re standing in a line if there is a space big enough to squeeze in a person there is no line in that space. It’s fair game for someone to squeeze in. The first time I went into China in 1983 I was standing in front of the empty counter with the characters for the city, Zhanjiang, I was going to. I was very early so waited for quite a while. A local came along and stepped right in front of me. That’s when I “got it.” If I wasn’t smack up against a counter I was not in line. So I squeezed in front of him which didn’t bother him at all. This was not a “New York” moment where push equals shove. It was a different view of the world where a small space in line was languaged as “there is no line.”

I had been fascinated by how we each see the world since getting two plus degrees in linguistics. When I read the seminal book, Language, Thought and Reality, by Benjamin Lee Whorf, my world was never the same again. The Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses is that all so-called reality is filtered through the language that we use to describe what we’re observing. Edward Sapir and Whorf were teacher and student. The lack of objectivity in observations is obvious with every newscast and political pronouncement.

The late, great, reporter “Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question for all time when she observed in 1993, ‘The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects the way I see the world. There's no way in hell that I'm going to see anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who's ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there's no such thing as objectivity.’ (1)“

Then how can we tell the news or do a performance assessment that is objective? The answer: We can’t. We can only guess at what the words mean to other people and perhaps test them out to make sure we’re not way off the market. I love to ask executives for observable evidence to help them make the right decisions. Yet even eye witnesses “see” different realities. Remember that the next time you have a heated debate about “the truth.”

See Dr. Otazo's scheduled speaking engagements here

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