Shaping Business Reality: Seeing The Mind In Motion

Moment by moment we are witnesses to the process of mutual causality, of creating business reality. But an untrained mind is a somewhat unreliable as witnesses go. We don’t see it, and for good reason.

It is much like watching a movie. We become so wrapped up in the content of the story that we do not stop to observe the underlying process by which it comes into being. It is particularly telling that speed itself feeds into perceptual illusions (called beta movement and phi phenomenon) in the brain. “Motion pictures” are in fact a series of individual images, or frames, shown so rapidly the illusion of motion is created.

May 23rd was the 30th Anniversary of Pacman. In its honor, Google created a celebratory Pacman version of its logo for our entertainment. Users will almost uniformly believe they see Pacman moving left and right, up and down through the Google logo. In the hard-based factual reality of neuroscience, they do not. It is the astonishing complexity of the brain -- more precisely the cognitive process of perception in the brain -- that links a sequence of separate digital images in time and causality. By doing so the brain creates the illusion (or reality) of meaning that we enjoy as a game. The (internal) nature of how the brain functions itself participates in creating the (external) reality.

It is not so terribly different in “real” life, including real business life. These and other cognitive processes combine to create a sense of reality, pulling together an enormously complex universe of data elements. The interdependencies of cause and effect exist in the physical world, in the brain, and in the interconnections between.

Witnessing this process is infinitely more challenging, in “real” life. Unlike playing Pacman on a computer screen, we are the primary actors in the movies of our personal and professional lives. We are hugely vested in the outcomes of the reality being created. This introduces numerous layers of emotion and ego that create attachment and aversion to the story being created. We want the storybook ending to all our strategies and business decisions, reality or not.

If we slow a movie projector down to the point where we can actually see each image, each frame, we can expand the focus of our attention away from the content of the story. By doing so we become aware of the underlying process through which the interconnection of the brain and the film create a story. So it is in real life.

In Strategic Intuition, William Duggan makes a direct link to Buddhist training as the way in which business executives can develop the capacity that creates strategic “glance”. (The) Buddha gives us instruction in the mental discipline to turn an ordinary mind into one that sees a coup d’oeil. In a spiritual sense the Four Noble Truths (the foundation of the Buddha’s teachings) leads to enlightenment, while in a secular sense they prepare your mind for coup d’oeil.”

William Duggan does not provide the depth of instruction available through Buddhist Mindfulness meditation, but the “literal translation of the Pali word sati is ‘to stop’… you have to stop in order to become aware of what you are doing.” (Ruth Denison, Insight Newsletter, Fall/Winter, 2010/11) Sati is the Pali word for Mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is the technique used by Buddhist monks for 2500 years to see into the underlying truth of reality of life. I first heard the analogy of movie frames described by Joseph Goldstein and other teachers while sitting at Insight Meditation Society many years ago.

The other great yogi, Yogi Berra said it best: you can observe a lot just by watching. Developing deeper self awareness as a leader requires the willingness and discipline to pause and observe the inner mental process by which one’s sense of business reality is being created, moment by moment. To stop and use the mind to observe the mind.

Photo at top:  http://youareincontrol.is/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/cameraman1-287x300.jpg

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Shaping Business Reality: Recognizing A New Leadership Meta-Competency

To realize that we don’t just see reality, but in fact are active participants in creating it, requires grasping the implications of the paradigm shift that has already occurred in science. One such implication is that some executives may have a greater capacity to create reality than others. This is critical. In fact, the ability to originate a sense of reality, like Napoleon, may be a differentiating meta-competency for business leaders.


But first, we must recognize that it is even possible for the mind to participate in creating reality.

At the lower end of human performance, it is common to categorize some individuals as being out-of-touch with reality. Abnormal psychology recognizes a range of disorders in which people are described as less and less able to grasp reality -- from neurotic to delusional to psychotic. Here we can clearly see that there is something about the functioning of the mind that creates ones experience of reality. Of course, we think of these as distortions of the true reality.

Two rudimentary systems of brain function are electrical and chemical processes. The basic transmission of a thought through neural connection does not happen without those systems. It is fairly common knowledge that a variety of chemical drugs are capable of producing hallucinations and delusions. Clearly, the chemical composition of the brain participates in our ability to perceive stimulus and build a coherent sense of reality.

We know all this, but for some reason when we look at the upper end of human performance we tend to leave this knowledge aside and take reality as a given, a constant that we all share in common. We marvel at the creative brilliance or strategic insight of certain people, seeing – no actually creating -- opportunities that others have missed. But we do not think much about what is different in their brains. We do not talk of leaders we admire as having an extraordinary ability to create business reality for our organizations. Why not?

The paradigm shift that has now permeated science has not yet reached our understanding of business leadership. It is no wonder, because the old paradigm dominated Western culture for two millennia. The radical dualism of Descartes and other Western philosophers assumes a mind that is totally separated from matter. Our engrained notion of causality presupposes a one way street: A => B, not A<==>B. In this paradigm “reality” is an objective truth that exists outside and the challenge in business is to see it accurately. One way reality. There is virtually no recognition whatsoever that the capacity of the mind itself may be more or less skilled at creating a sense of business reality, one that is more or less well aligned with the business environment and marketplace in which it performs.

Neuroscience has convincingly displaced the old notion that the mind is a passive recipient of one external and objective reality. The mind is an active participant -- moment by moment -- continuously originating a view of reality. Seeing market opportunity, evaluating strategic options, weighing competitive positioning, allocating resources and aligning organizational structures – all are made possible as a result of a leader’s capacity to see cause and effect, and thereby form a sense of business reality.

Photo above:  Mutual Causality (Feed-back) - the expression of a two way exchange of information. When looking at the wave structure of the simple electron with its incoming and outgoing waves we observe a dynamics of Duality & Parity in Union with Reciprocal Proportionality and Mutual Complementarity.



http://emanzipationhumanum.de/english/human/wsm.html

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Shaping Business Reality: One Strategic Mind at a Time

In his books, Napoleon’s Glance, and Strategic Intelligence, William Duggan describes the brilliance of Napoleon at the siege of Toulon in 1783. It is a dramatic example of how the mind of a leader can shape reality and change the course of history. The French general in charge was pursuing a traditional military strategy, that being to storm the primary fortress held by the British on foot with sword and bayonet. Napoleon, at the time only a lower ranking officer, recommended that by capturing a small, nearby fort, the British would leave Toulon. A general, locked into well worn patterns of habitual thought, dismissed him and failed. The next general listened and won.


Napoleon envisioned a possibility that did not yet exist in reality. Studying the contour of the battlefield, Napoleon drew from his knowledge of innovations in weaponry and previous historical battles ranging from Joan of Arc to the American Revolution. He knew that British troops feared being cut off from their naval support, and the nearby fort was the best vantage point from which to threaten that. The brilliance of his mind connected four diverse and seemingly unrelated elements of military knowledge into a new strategy that had no discernible precedent.

Carl von Clausewitz, in his classic book On War, explains the key to Napoleon’s strategic success as coup d’oeil, which means “glance” in French. Duggan states that “today we recognize coup d’oeil as strategic intuition: ordinary intuition is just a feeling, but strategic intuition comes from real knowledge and experience, brought together in a flash of insight to suit the situation.”


Underlying each and every moment of executive decision making is an astonishingly complex mental process whereby the mind interacts with the environment(s) in which it is embedded. In the midst of this interconnectedness a sense of reality is created. After two millennia of existence inside a Western cultural that believes the physical reality of the world is separate from the mind, most of us cannot help but assume that there is one objective reality that is seen by many subjective minds. Furthermore, we have become comfortable believing that the mind somewhat passively receives information through the senses about that tangible world outside. We conclude that we see is caused by natural phenomenon acting upon us from the outside. Neuroscience is suggesting otherwise: the mind does much more to shape reality than we assume. Collectively and individually, we form mental models that shape the reality of what we see. The French general was stuck in one reality; Napoleon’s brilliance was his capacity to see others.

Typically we look to differentiate leadership performance by how astutely different executives perceive the same business environment in which they compete: one reality, many minds. It never occurs to us that the mind of a leader actually participates in the creation of the business reality around it. Yet clearly, some business leaders make new things happen. We need to understand why.

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Grasping Complexity From The Inside Out: Yogi Berra and Indra’s Net

Photo by Doug Brenner, Lavernder Dream.  His photography can be seen at http://www.BetterPhoto.com

What will it take for business leaders to understand the mindset or paradigm shift necessary to navigate Complexity? Exposure to the theoretical content and analytic properties of Complex Adaptive Systems is one approach. Some would argue grasping Complexity is also quite intuitive; if that is the case, it will require a different approach.

Despite the fact that the Western world has become quite familiar with Eastern meditation over the last 40 years, the predominant assumption is the purpose of meditation is for relaxation and stress reduction. True and effective, but only a small part of the story. Tons of research has documented the physiological and psychological benefits of meditation and many an executive overwhelmed by business pressures has been taught mindfulness meditation in stress reduction programs. But a little context here is helpful: practitioners of meditation 2500 years ago in India were not stressed out by the demands of modern society. They didn’t sit for hours on end to reduce their blood pressure. Their motivation was quite different. Balance or calmness in the mind was simply one of many skillful mental factors that lead to deeper realization.

Enter the wisdom of Yogi Berra: “you can observe a lot by just watching.” The Buddha (and many others) developed mental techniques and disciplines that enabled them to observe the nature of human experience from a different level of awareness. They used the mind to observe the mind. As we now know, the brain is a Complex Adaptive System. What is much less known in our Western world today is that the discipline of meditation-- just watching -- led the Buddha to a profound realization of the human experience as a Complex Adaptive System. The Buddha realized the nature of complex causality from the inside out, and this insight came to be known as Dependent Origination.

“Two and a half millennia ago Gotama the Buddha put forth the doctrine of causality called paticca samuppada, or dependent co-arising. It is basic to the Buddhist view of life. Indeed in no other religion we know is a teaching of causation accorded so explicit and fundamental a role. In this vision of reality, the existence of both self and world are seen in terms of mutually conditioning psycho-physical events, which arise and pass away, interdependently.” (p. 25. Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: the Dharma of Natural Systems, Dr. Joanna Macy, State University of New York Press, 1991.)

Indra’s Net

A metaphor to describe the Buddhist view of dependent origination and interpenetration was developed in the 3rd century and is known as Indra's net. It is described by Francis Harold Cook from the perspective of the Huayan school of Buddhism in the book Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra:


“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring”

“Because reality is seen as dependently co-arising, or systemic in nature, each and every act is understood to have an effect on the larger web of life, and the process of development is perceived as multi-dimensional…Being interdependent, these developments do not occur sequentially, in a linear fashion, but synchronously, each abetting and reinforcing the other through multiplicities of contacts and currents, each subtly altering the context in which other events occur.” (Macy, p. xv.)

Even a tiny bit of curiosity leads one to wonder why the simple practice of mindfulness meditation might lead to such profound insight. And if it might prove effective in developing an intuitive understanding of complexity in business -- as well as reducing blood pressure.

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The Leadership Complexity Gap: IBM 2010 CEO Study Part II

http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/ceo/ceostudy2010/index.html



This blog entry will offer a partial summary of IBM’s 2010 CEO Study, covering themes most relevant to Originicity – that being the neuroscientific challenges of a leader’s mind in the face of complexity. (Please use this link for the complete study: ibm.com/CEOStudy.) Subsequent blog entries will continue to build on these themes by exploring the nature of complexity, both in the mind and in the world around us, and some steps leaders might take up the steep learning curve.


Integration and Interdependency

IBM’s study tells us that the common denominator to business complexity is the unprecedented level of interconnection and interdependency in global integration. Whether companies think of themselves global or not, all compete in this “global system of systems”. More and more often threats and opportunities arise that leaders simply don’t see because they have originated through seemingly tenuous connections at deeper levels and with multiple dimensions. One of the critical contributing factors is speed. But equally important is the convergence of multiple factors influencing each other to create entirely unique ‘first-of-a-kind’ situations. Needless to say, all of this leads to much greater ambiguity, uncertainty, and unpredictability that contribute to the significant gap between leadership capacity and escalating complexity.

Characteristics of Leadership in the face of Complexity

Creativity is the leadership characteristic that CEOs have now placed above all others, so much so that it has been elevated to a leadership style. That is a real surprise, and likely indicative of just how dramatic the change of the last 2-3 years has been for leaders. Of all the possible leadership characteristics included in leadership competencies models, creativity has rarely if ever made it to the top. Possibly it landed there because of the linkage between creativity and one’s comfort with ambiguity and experimentation.

Comfort with ambiguity is probably obvious but experimentation deserves some explanation.

1. For one, it has a lot to do with the increased need to act – try something despite uncertainty -- which implies taking some risks. Leaders in particular cannot sit dormant, but will have to take responsibility on their shoulders to push themselves and their organizations through to action.
2. And it has a lot to do with a new mandate for immediacy in decision making. There is a growing sense that in the face of rapid change there is insufficient time for protracted analysis and traditional strategic planning cycles. Instead, it is necessary to hold strategic decision making more like iterative, rapid prototyping in product development. Take an idea and try it quickly; if it’s not working, stop quickly, and try something else -- quickly. And then start all over again, quickly. In other words: real time experimentation in the market.

  Creativity is also the basis for innovation, especially disruptive innovation. There is a growing sense that incremental innovation may not be sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways. This too is a huge change in CEO sentiment as many companies are much more comfortable with incremental innovation. In the face of paradigm shifts, more CEOs are recognizing the need to make bold changes that challenge long held assumptions and disrupt the status quo. Not an easy challenge.

Tightly connected is a leadership capacity for Openness inviting others to challenge assumptions and ideas. This applies within and without. Leaders must model break through thinking and a mindset for questioning; they must show little fear of having their own ideas examined. This applies not just in strategy debates or silo-ed areas of product development, but in the organizational structure and management systems that determine how efficiently work gets done and how quickly companies go to market. At the heart is a discipline of continuous business model innovation where everyone understands that business models are impermanent by nature, just like the markets in which they compete.

If it is not clear already, continuous change is the norm. Leaders of tomorrow must excel in managing change as a way of life, and for most leadership teams, this requires an entirely new set of capabilities.

Given the level of immediacy and interconnectedness of today’s networked world (including partnerships and more tightly integrated co-creation with customers), leadership styles must be much more collaborative by nature, using influence and inspiration. Individual command and control is not effective here, rather strong team skills that encourage shared discovery and shared vision. All of this implies need for a broad set of communication skills across multiple channels.

Is it any wonder the learning curve looks so steep? In fact, looking at all these leadership challenges, there is so much learning going on that learning itself must also be a fundamental leadership capacity in the new world of complexity.

What is not stated explicitly but could easily be assumed is the intellectual capacity for holistic or systems thinking required to lead businesses in complex global systems. This entails the capacity to see patterns and processes across disciplines, industries, etc., to integrate multifaceted interdependencies and interconnections, and to identify broad, systemic solutions.

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The Leadership Complexity Gap: IBM 2010 CEO Study



Click onto picture to access the report

 IBM’s 2010 CEO survey tells us that CEOs now identify the rapid escalation of complexity as their biggest challenge. One could argue that the financial crisis starting in 2008 is the flashpoint or the tipping point that has forced awareness of complexity upon us. Complexity is not at all new; in fact, it is primordial, a characteristic of creation itself. But the fact that business leaders claim complexity has resulted in a gap in leadership capability and they have never faced a learning curve so steep is both new and highly significant.




It is also encouraging. Why? Because it means leaders are looking in the right direction:


 It is absolutely accurate that complexity is the nature of the global marketplace in which business takes place – but business leaders have not always understood it that way or acted accordingly.


 Not only are the social and economic environments of global business competition complex, but so are the companies that compete within them. Businesses themselves are large, complex organizational structures, and as such, require a different kind of awareness and leadership capacity.

 Complexity also describes the very nature of the mind. The brain itself is arguably the most complex natural organism in the universe. A leader’s sense of reality originates within an extraordinarily complex neurological, chemical and electrical system. The internal mental models we use to anticipate and predict business outcomes share common properties with other external complex systems.



The reality is that CEOs experience a gap of understanding in not just one, but several complex systems that are critical to business performance – inside and out. Living in this gap real time, face to face, with heightened awareness of its impact will likely create greater urgency to understanding what complexity is and what to do about it.



To recognize just how steep the learning curve may be is a good first step. But to fill the gap will also require greater openness to learning. Navigating complexity requires questioning some basic assumptions – as recommended by the IBM study – and some re-learning. Understanding complexity demands both a paradigm shift, and a mindset shift.



Much of what is written in business literature refers to complexity in fairly vague terms, but there are sources outside business who have gone at the study of complexity with greater discipline.



For one, there is an emerging science that crosses over all three of these leadership challenges, … and much more broadly across the whole spectrum of sciences. It is the study of “Complex Adaptive Systems” that characterize the very nature of life -- in physics, biology, ecology, etc., etc. There is a growing portion of the business and scientific communities working together to apply the insights of complexity theory to business leadership. Those will be explored in detail in subsequent entries.

Secondly, as Yogi Berra taught, “you can observe a lot by just watching.” Buddhist mindfulness meditation is the science of using the mind to observe the mind. What the Buddha saw – just by watching – is the true nature of human experience as an inseparable part of a Complex Adaptive Systems. At the heart of the Buddha’s insight was the realization of a complex, multi-directional cause and effect, a mutual interdependency – “Dependent Origination”.

Yogi Berra, nicknamed "Yogi" by his child hood friend, Bobby Hoffman, who said Yogi walked like a Hindu Yogi he had seen in a movie.

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With Strategy In Mind: Part VI

4. Paradigm: Rely not on personal intuition, but on the Quality and Independence of Information

When clear, compelling independent data, is available, of course we are foolish to ignore it.

But Fred Smith had no data. There was no market; he created one where none existed. Now there is data, tons of it.

 (Photo:  http://thecprogrammer.com/)

And that too is a problem. We have so much data today that the real challenge is often sorting through it all to make sense of it. To make meaning of data, to turn it into useful information. Only Paul Lauterbur saw meaning in data others thought was useless noise in the system.

The challenge that faces most business leaders today is the abundance, complexity and confusion of multiple, competing sets of data. Take global warming. Putting any political or personal opinions aside, just look at the controversy around the data itself. How does the brain decide between all that conflicting data?

• 
  
  The amygdala senses personal danger, but is not so proficient at detecting aggregate threat. We know full well if our personal mortgage is at risk, but we did not so astutely fight or flee the larger mortgage crisis.   

• If we are to believe what neuroscience tells us, our past experience creates neural connections that categorizes the perception of new data. We actually shape the data we see. This is a bit more troubling: just how independent is the data  

Hawkins, the founder of Palm Pilot and long time student of neurobiology, has posited a thought-provoking new theory of intelligence. He suggests that the real distinction of our neocortex is the human ability to create models of the world, models that help us predict. With some similarities to how the brain categorizes visual (and other) perception, his theory is that over time we assimilate entire models that integrate data into predictions of the next moment, and this is what allows us to navigate our worlds. At the higher regions of the neo-cortex there is less data, fewer neurons, but rather patterns of connectivity in the brain. These patterns are the filters through which we receive and process data at more abstract levels.

Recently Professor Peter Schott, Economics, received the Yale School of Management 2010 Teaching Award. In his acceptance comments, he spoke about the field of macro-economics. He made the point that macro-economics does not make predictions. Macro-economics attempts to make sense of data, and realistically, data that is often only able to be gathered after 3-4 years at best.

Strategy is about prediction. The data itself does not do this, we do this in our brains. This is the role of leadership, a function predominantly residing in the neo-cortex, what Elkhonon Goldberg calls the “Executive Function” of the brain. (The New Executive Brain, Goldberg) It is not without its own form of “cognitive bias”. The emerging field of neuroscience is beginning to confirm that the brain does not exist in a vacuum, passively receiving and processing data that resides cleanly and independently outside.

Instead the intelligence of the brain actively participates in originating reality moment to moment. It is perhaps the uniqueness of being human. Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning psychologist, described the interaction of the brain and world like a pair of scissors -- one blade the brain, the other the world outside. Both blades function simultaneously to make a cut --- to create intelligence, to predict, to think strategically.

The implications are profound for strategic decisions makers in business. The quality of data depends in part on the quality of the mind that brings in and manipulates the data. To sharpen the blades of strategy means sharpening both blades simultaneously: the external gathering of experience in the markets, the quality and clarity of data, feedback systems for meaningful information, etc., etc. But it also means sharpening the neurological blade of the mind inside as well.

And should this last step of neuroscientific theory seem too big a leap, too impractical or not applicable to what ordinary humans can realize for themselves, in closing ponder this intriguing bit of information. As with existence of emotional bias (aversion and attachment) in the mind, the Buddha also quite precisely described the cause-and-effect process through which the mind and world interdependently create a sense of reality.

While strikingly similar to the modern neuroscientific ideas of Hawkins, Simon and others, the insight known as “Dependent Origination” was realized by a simple human being, purely by using the power of the mind to observe the mind. Our minds are active participants in originating the reality of the world around us, and we can see it happen for ourselves.  Indeed, it may well be a key to developing high performing leadership capacity today. This is the hard part, but one that any aspiring leader cannot ignore.

A Buddha Sculpture made from Scissors, Emporio Mall, New Delhi, India, named for designer Rajesh Pratap Singh. The store in the mall is made almost entirely of scissors.

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