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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