Leading by Adventure - 025 - Self-reflection through the ORID model

Take an adventure into your own thinking processes – Use ORID to improve how you engage with conflict

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Why take this challenge?

Become more effective at remaining as the person you want to be

Learn from the situations that lead to frustration and agitation in you

Help your team handle conflict productively and with insight

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

Our greatest adventure is always the one that we take into ourselves. Externally, we may encounter formative challenges, inspiring insights, life-changing experiences. But it is the formative, inspiring, life-changing components of those things that really matter. And those victories are the ones we contend within ourselves.

As with all such things, the victories come easier with experience. They come easier as we can better understand and process what is happening to us. As we develop and adopt methods that help us make sense of what is going on.

ORID is one such model. And it is the subject of this week’s adventure.

ORID is an acronym for the four key steps of making sense of the external and internal components of our adventures, and how they connect.

The ORID Model

Objective consideration of the situation as we experience it – what we read, see, hear, feel, smell, taste.
Reflecting on how we experience that within us – how we feel, our emotional and physiological reactions
Interpreting what is happening through our mental models – the connections and meanings we assign
Deciding on our response – how we choose to act (or not), what we communicate, how we adjust internally

(5) Which may, or may not, impact on the Objective reality we experience

Martin Gilbraith postulates (with reasonable cause) that this is the universal principle of facilitation. It is certainly what good facilitators do, although they may describe it differently, or interpret it through alternative models.

The power of helping individuals or groups explore what is happening in each of these four areas can do much to defuse conflict and build understanding and consensus. Such questions can also help us look ‘under the hood’ at our own internal (combustion?) engine, and to make conscious choices that move us beyond the disabling paradigm that anybody can ‘make us’ feel anything.

As we move forward on our Adventures, ORID will prove a helpful tool to keep in our pack, so this week our Adventure is to equip ourselves to use it.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Personal ORID

Think back to something recent that was a factor in winding up your emotions about something, and use the following questions to revisit it and explore it further:

Objective Questions: What do you actually know about this? What are the facts of the situation? To help you keep your answers objective, try starting them with “I saw …”, “I heard …”, or “I read …”. If you are familiar with 6 Thinking hats, this is very similar to White Hat thinking. Just note them without analysing them.
Reflective Questions: How did you feel about this? What emotions or sensations arose in you? This is where you can contribute your subjective experiences arising from your contact with the situation (c.f. Red Hat). To help you keep your answers subjective, try starting them with “I felt …” Again, just note them without analysing them.
Interpretive Questions: What did this mean to you at the time? How did you interpret this? And what are your options for its meaning now, in hindsight? To help you keep your answers analytical, preface them with “I think … “, “I suspect …”, or “Perhaps …” It may help to list your interpretations at the time, and your current interpretations, separately.
Decisional Questions: What are you going to do about this? What might be the best course of action? Are there things you want to do about the situation itself? Are there things you want to do about how you responded to the situation (internally and/or externally)?

Because of the nature of our Adventures, we have used the ORID model here as a review tool. But through this you can perhaps see how you might begin to adopt it as a self monitoring tool to help you improve your responses in the moment.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Using ORID with your team

If the Green Track has helped you to see the potential of ORID in personal reflection and review, you can probably see its potential in teamwork.

The ORID model, and its distinct separation of the 4 areas, can help a group of people work more constructively together. This is particularly true when discussions move toward conflict, and risk becoming emotional. When this happens, those emotions can cause the group to conflate facts, opinions and interpretations. As a result, the picture becomes more confused and, from some perspectives, inaccurate.

ORID can help to sequentially separate one type of information from another, and enable the correct picture to emerge more inclusively.

The Blue Track then is to adapt the questions from the Green Track for a situation your team is currently facing, and to work with them in:

Gaining clearer shared insight into the situation and what to do about it
Helping them to refine their team processes for future discussion
Providing (safe) insights for people as to their own role in conflict

To help you facilitate this, we have developed an ORID based Virtual Flipchart that you might wish to try out.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Connecting the dots

In your considerations of ORID above, you might reflect on its potential for further developing the Adventure you began in week #022 – “Bringing your best“

The ORID model and Otto Scharmer’s model for ‘monitoring internal condition‘ are complementary in many ways. Scharmer’s model helps us to keep track of what is happening inside us, and to understand the dynamics around us. While the ORID model gives us a means of analysing some of the causality within that, and for systematically beginning to address it.

Your Red Track challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to think about how you might bring these two really useful techniques together in a way that they can better support each other.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
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Useful links:

Introduction to Leading by Adventure  |  What we mean by spirituality?  |  Why Adventure
Adventures to date   |  I did it, but it didn’t work very well   |  How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings   |  Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community   |  Explore Strategic Support options