IT’S BIG AND IT’S CLEVER…
THINKING versus WISDOM
So how would we THINK in the new paradigm? This brings us to the notion of where thought comes from and how much of it is really ours. There is a lot written now about collective intelligence – intelligence in the ether filters through our brain and we just colour it in with our perception. If this is the case and if so much of our perception is flawed, it might be better to call on some intelligence that hasn’t been tainted by the filtering device.
Let’s look at what happens when we switch our brains off while we are asleep. Everything carries on as normal. Fingernails grow, blood circulates, the vast and complex eco system of our vital organs does its complicated thing without any help from our conscious mind whatsoever.
We have an embodied intelligence, which paradoxically is not in the body…it’s in the expanded self.
We don’t trust it because we don’t trust things that don’t belong to us and yet we crave to be connected to it. Witness artists, musicians, engineers. There is something awe inspiring about watching someone who is completely absorbed in what they are doing. Exactly what substance are they absorbed in? Some kind of holding zone. The Void. ‘The Nothing’ out of which everything emerges.
Consciousness funnily enough hinders not helps. Musicians who play effortlessly find it more difficult as soon as they have an audience and start to focus on what they are doing. Hilarious, engaging children become stilted and contrived as soon as you put a video camera on them. We want to capture the magic of now but we can’t.
So how does this translate to business? Visionary entrepreneurs become absorbed, achieve something wonderful and are then asked by the many how they did it. Usually they don’t really know how but they feel they should know, after all the public want answers. They want a process that can be owned and replicated. They want best practice scenarios. The pressure to make something up is enormous. Management consultants look at the history of events and map them, business books are written and consumed. Data is memorised. Rules are obeyed. Usually it doesn’t work.
‘The Nothing’ won’t scale.
What if there was a bigger game going on? A plan that was more complex than one we could dream up. We’re all a part of the plan, though we don’t control it individually. Old style dictator leadership would have no value. Similarly old style ego driven self-motivation – focus, strive, push, ‘just do it’ would all be an ineffective use of our energy. If we believe there’s an overall plan we just do whatever turns up for us to do without all the drama. We would do the things we care about. Everyone would take their place in the scheme of things and ‘The Nothing’ would create the magic.
We may hate the fact, but we are all connected. Like paper dollies, we look separate on the surface but underneath, we’re all part of the same substrate. The wisdom we have access to lives in the spaces between us if we could just get together. It emerges spontaneously in the now. (What was it the great mystic said about ‘where two or more are gathered together there I am’?)
It can’t be owned, patented, contained or held on to. It’s only relevant now. Ten minutes from now it’s no longer significant, but there’ll be new different wisdom that will be available then, if we learn to trust in ‘The Nothing’. This concept drives our ego completely insane. After all we’re used to owning the things we value, the things we strive for or claim as ours. We put flags in them. We frame them. We lock them up in towers, banks, museums.
But the world is changing rapidly and its problems are getting bigger and more complex. If we want to solve complex problems we need to get comfortable with complexity. In a whole system breakdown we need a whole system response. We’ve tried breaking problems down and making them simpler, that just doesn’t work. (That’s like taking a piece of music, removing the spaces and lining up the dots. It satisfies our need for order, but it won’t play a tune).
We’ve tried standing outside the problem and looking in, but when we remove ourselves energetically, we end the capacity to solve the problem from within, preventing access to the wisdom that wants to emerge between us.
We want to be the hero in our own little world. Stories of heroes are deep and eternal. But we’re on a team now and stakes are raised. Destiny is a whole organism thing. Complex problems are whole organism things. It’s time to drop the Bruce Willis fantasy and get joined up.
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On the Human Race – yes that’s us!
The culture of the ‘street’ is shifting – causing behaviors to change.
Are we awake?
Here’s the thing – I’ve attended several meetings – even this last week – where I have felt compelled to have this discussion. I’ve needed to challenge others in the room – to remind people of my own generation – that it’s worth waking up. Change or die. Just think – I can meet as many new people and businesses I want within a click on my computer. I can do what I want if I want. I am always criticizing the power of the media but I am even getting optimistic about that. The major newspapers are ending their print editions, transitioning to the web. In the process, the entire nature of news and our consumption of it is changing. Thank goodness. TV networks are splitting themselves into more and more segmented ‘sister’ channels and serving specialized interests. That has to be a good trend.
Our ability to decide to live a different life – behave and consume a different way is very real. The border between URLs and TV stations is beginning to disappear. I now have at least 4 different ways of accessing every possible TV channel and web, music and image library I could ever want. I have two televisions, 3 computers and access to over 1000 TV channels, 10,000 music tracks, You Tube via my Apple TV it goes on. I’m on at least 30 social networks, Twittering, Facebooking, blogging and wikiing and yes I do have time to have a good time. I do get out. More. A lot.
Social media is exploding. On-line shopping has never seemed more normal to me. Static text communication being replaced with the dynamism of video. Animation, mash ups, meshing of content and media. Individuals under the title ‘blogger’ are redefining what a ‘journalist’ is. I believe it’s becoming normal, we are embracing these lessons and riding this wave. Our clients sense that we can help them understand and leverage this change. I accept that all this is a very western viewpoint.
We’re seeing a radical revolution, its quite subtle but if you are awake then you can see it accelerating at some speed before our eyes. Many industries are significantly rethinking what they are about – what they do and what they might do differently. We are observing a change of priorities. Sustainability is now realy on the agenda of the businesses at the edge. Outsourcing is again in fashion. Service Experience is being unpicked and redefined because companies see that it is a big issue, we are voting with our feet if the quality isn’t there.
Government agencies are under pressure to cut consulting spend, any spend. Leadership is in the spotlight – forcing them to embrace the talent and skills of the enterprise in real not superficial ways. Topics such as behavioral change and cultural alignment is on the lips as never before. Everyone is searching for new solutions – to many this is uncharted territory and wicked problems. Let’s face it the leaders developing new strategy may not be equipped to lead the new strategy they aim to create – think about that.
These days, everyone I talk to and many of the businesses we work with are talking about the potentially devastating effects that climate change and the economic crisis may have on society. But according to Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau, there’s an evolutionary X factor that most pundits fail to account for when making their linear predictions about what the future has in store –
“I think that there is a third enormous driver of change in addition to the economic crisis and climate crisis, which is the advancement of human enhancement. There is a curve plotting exponential change called Moore’s Law, and the way it is frequently stated is that the amount of computer firepower that you can buy for a dollar will double every eighteen months for as far as the eye can see…. A single iPhone today, for example, has more computer firepower than did the entire North American Air Defense Command back in 1965.
Well, the significance of this, in terms of culture, values and society, is that for the first time our technologies are increasingly aimed inward – at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, and our kids. We’re about to become the first species to genuinely take control of who we are as an organism, to take control of our own evolution, not in some distant science-fiction future but right now, on our watch. And that, I would argue, is going to have a potentially greater impact on society than either the economic crisis or climate change, because we’re talking about fundamentally changing what it means to be human.
We have entered a period of subtle destruction, when new models and new ways of doing things will replace what was formerly considered the norm – concretized, sacrosanct and immutable. Clients don’t care how busy we are – just whether we help them achieve their goals within this tornado of change.
Great to be connected here and I couldn’t agree more. let me ask a couple of questions – connection and consciousness seem to be more closely associated ideas than they end up being don’t they. I often feel disconnected from everything around me BECAUSE I feel conscious.
So Question 1.
Are we in control of any globally collective paradigm anyway?
Question 2.
What are the laws of true team play and how can we in our new world ‘call’ people as they default to re-write them?
Great blog by the way…
John