How We See the World

I used to work for a woman who loved for us to play the "Diversity Game". Everyone got dealt a certain number of cards. They had characteristics on them like "serious", "spritiual", "funny", "attention to detail", etc. We'd trade with other people in the meeting to get cards that we thought better described us. Basically there were processes that got us down to 3 or 5 cards that we felt described us fairly well. They had various colors on them and that meant certain things. The idea was to demonstrate how diversity in a team is a good thing.

I had a support call with a salesperson about her Blackberry. She called before wiping out her device with too many bad password attempts, so that was good. She just received the device yesterday and wrote down the password wrong. Now here's the interesting part. We set the password to be the first six characters of a row on the keyboard and then tacked a number at the end. She wrote down the last letter wrong.

This was initially frustrating. But then I realized that everyone sees the world a little bit differently. Some of us are visual and good at patterns. I told a coworker about this and he said that he remembers phone numbers based on their shape on the keypad. This woman clearly does not think that way.

I think of Paul's exhortation to respect the various members of the body.

1 Corinthians 12:14-20 --

14For the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19If all were a single member, where would the body be? 20As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

We all have a part to play. Sometimes it's easier to think that I want everyone to be like me. What an awful world that would be!