Month: October 2015

When I mention intuition in the context of making business decisions, practical problem solving and idea generation in general, folks may often look at me funny, like I spent too much time at the hookah or ashram, but what I’m actually talking about is something different. I’m not even talking about the intuition one supposedly develops after years of martial arts training or Zen meditation, though I am sure those experiences are useful as well.

What I am talking about when I say intuition, at least for today, is a process of taking alternative perspectives on thinking and perceiving that can help work through difficult patches, when seeking alternatives to unusual, or even everyday challenges. The approaches we will be looking at derive from the ideas of Henri Bergson and Rudolf Steiner. It’s important to remember that a nebulous term like intuition is going to elicit different definitions, depending on whom you talk to. In some ways, there are sharp contrasts to the way the term is defined by Bergson and Steiner, but there is enough commonality between them to work with, and something exceedingly pragmatic one can gain from at least a partial understanding of their ideas on this topic. Another important point is that both Bergson’s and Steiner’s understandings of what intuition is and does are quite expansive and reach into some very complex territory. We will only touch on them with a degree of simplicity that will be useful to us in practical situations.

Both lived from about the mid to late 19th century into the early 20th century. Bergson was a French philosopher of considerable importance during his time, and who has reemerged in popularity among late twentieth century critical thinkers, especially because of his unique approach to the understanding of time. He was also a friend with and influence on William James, and so influenced some of James’ development of Pragmatism and his work in psychology, which was critical to the development of current cognitive theory and psychological methodologies.

Steiner, while dabbling in philosophy and metaphysics, is remembered more for developing the Waldorf Education system, biodynamic agriculture (which gave birth to organic farming), and for the way his intuitional model influenced developments in the fields of medicine, social justice, engineering and architecture, particularly in Europe.

I will discuss briefly some of the main components of their intuitional styles here, and develop practical applications in later posts. This initial post will focus on Bergson, and later posts will discuss Steiner as well as further developments, and combinations of approaches.

Bergson’s Intuition

Stating of the Problem

For Bergson, a solution to a problem most succinctly arrives when the problem is well-stated, primarily by eliminating all false problems that may arise due to distortions of language. An example of a false problem from a philosophical perspective would be to ask why things exist rather than nothing. To Bergson, the term nonbeing is merely a negation of something that has being, an imagined lack, and therefore is a false problem that only occurs because of the way language allows us to state things, rather than the way things occur in actuality. Such statements are fine to make during ordinary conversation, but can be a hindrance to really defining and stating a problem and solution. An example in the practical world is a reminder that something like software gaps are in themselves not real events, but imaginary contrasts to how the software actually behaves. That doesn’t mean the work does not need to be done to produce the desired results, but there is a difference in one’s approach between working with an absence, and creating something new. The latter definition tends to set a more open-ended frame with which to work, and so can be used when one is stuck in the absence, or lack, frame.

Differences in Quantity vs. Differences of Quality

At times I may look at things with differences of kind, and assume they are the same thing but in different measure. Various colored lights may seem to give off different levels of intensity, while it is actually the differences in color that make me perceive it so. When comparing apples and oranges we don’t say that an apple is more intensely apple, or that it has a greater appleness, than the orange does, unless perhaps we are writing poetry. We don’t even compare their component features, such as their degrees of citrus-ness or section-ality. We respect their differences of type and quality, and do not place them on a sliding scale.

This is especially important when evaluating the people one is working with, all of whom have various talents and tendencies. One skill-set or personality should not be undermined when an illegitimate comparison is made to another’s, as one person’s value is a complex network of connections that unfolds differently and uniquely.

The same can be said for software applications, of course. An accounting program should not be judged harshly because it doesn’t make a good trading system. It’s important when faced with difficult problems to be able to adopt this frame, not only so that one can understand proper use and context for something like an accounting program, but also so that you can understand better what would need to be done to transform it into a trading system if one needed to.

Duration

Most significant is Bergson’s approach to time. We have a habit, with the use of timelines, Gantt Charts, calendars in general, of spatializing time, and thinking our way through time visually. This is useful for planning and scheduling, something which we would not be able to live without, but there are times we get stuck in that mode and it makes it hard to understand a problem in greater clarity.

Bergson uses the idea of sugar dissolving in water as an example of how we can better understand how duration allows a better intuitive grasp of process. While we can imagine sugar in various fixed states, one understands the process of sugar dissolving from a more direct, or less abstract perspective, when one has to actually sit and wait and experience the duration it takes for it to happen. Because all things occur and exist in time, both the problem and solution do as well. To hold a problem in one’s mind as a fixed and timeless iconic object is a sure way to get stuck with it continuing to be a problem because one is extending the fixation through duration, i.e. the passage of time. A perspective from the point of view of duration understands it instead as a temporal event that one can disrupt and redirect as it occurs.

Your ability to flexibly respond to chaos and the unexpected is your number 1 asset; it’s the quality that can never be automated, or codified into a certification program or “best practices” standard that can be easily transferred by rote to anyone globally, independent of actual skill-level and working experience.

A chaosophist is a problem solver, but not just someone identified as the go-to person for a particular class of solutions. As a chaosophist you ride the surf of the problematic and take on anything that comes, regardless of what your role may be. Someone slated as the communal problem solver may have a role that is delineated to solutions within the application you are working with, or the linkages to other applications, but as chaosophist you are the unspecified solution maven who not only tinkers around with the product, the implementation and workflow peripherals, but things like the perceptions the client may have of you and your team, expectations and delays, emotional outbursts or meltdowns of your teammates.

If you are a business analyst or are in any sort of project role, you may already be a chaosophist without realizing it. If you are successfully applying waterfall or spiral methodologies (essentially variations on neo-Aristotelian composition methods) to lived events, you are a chaosophist, and quite inventive, as well. Once you realize the templates are just that, and that you know how to make use of them and get real results, you have increased your leverage and power. You can begin to construct your own methodologies, add a step during the inception where you begin to design your own template out of the things you know, have learned, that is more appropriate to the outcomes you have set for yourself.

It may have aspects of waterfall, and include the cybernetic looping of spiral models (there always is anyway), even the Chaos Model, but there’s no reason to stop there, since you have an entire life of learning and experience to draw from. It’s something you already do perhaps without being aware of the extent of it. You are always inventing, designing, responding and innovating because as 20th century artist Joseph Beuys said, “Everyone is an artist.” He didn’t mean that everyone is Picasso or Rembrandt, but that the worlds we live in demand a high degree of inventiveness from you just to survive and flourish. His dictum “Kapital = Kunst” (art is capital) is a reminder that the true capital of the world is not held in banks and material goods, but in your very actions as you live and work every day.

So continue to go on and think for yourself. Draw on resources from every corner of your life, and add to them always. This process of becoming aware will keep you supple, deft, light on your feet, no matter what happens in the environment. You will be able to meet the challenge. You will be able to redefine what the challenge is, and give it a heart.

 

Each row of your project plan is a cartoon, a hieroglyph representing a virtual state you set as an attractor. It stares back at out at you from a two dimensional plane that doesn’t really even materially exist, but is a projection you use to externalize your internal hallucinations built around your understanding of an outcome that has become attached to you. You know you need to attach behavior to it as well, some set of meaningful actions that attempt to accomplish something that is part of a bigger something, whether it’s ship building, restoring a masterpiece, or extending the functionality of software.

Each line of the imaginary grid is actually a circle, or rather an ellipse that feeds back upon itself. You assign it to someone, or some part of it to someone. A BA, who will define the development that needs to be done, a developer who will trace the definition into code that will behave in a specific way. You keep revisiting, cycling around to check on the status. The BA will return again and again to the same sets of symbology, to see how it is shaping up, the developer too, will code and test, and check with the BA, who will check back with the client, to see if the understanding of the requirement is on target.

But nothing ever goes as planned. Some other row on the plan erupts, perhaps something you thought accomplished weeks ago turns out to be undone, done incorrectly, or not to the subjective understanding of the client, a rift of subjective understanding two or more parties that creates a conflict with the way current work is progressing. You had it all imagined in detail before you had begun, in its palatial totality, whatever the work was supposed to be, the pile of rows and the way they were to bleed into each other and construct a whole.

You need to readjust, go back to your pile of rows and recolor them, make them mean different things, ever so slightly. Some are tenser than others, attracting attention from management, going from green to yellow to red. You feign control, but really, you have none. Someone is sick today, and someone has gone on vacation or has taken a new job. Information or knowledge has disappeared, either temporarily or permanently, and you can’t do it yourself, as you have enough to do just to keep the rows in order. You get on the telephone to talk to a number of specialists, each of whom has another piece of the puzzle, but not every piece, not enough pieces to form an image. You have a blur. The great hall and its byways have become a madhouse, full of off-kilter braces and columns, fully equipped with its own wrecking ball and demolition materials.

But you thrive in this environment. You love it just because nothing fits neatly and you can see it through even though it is too big, too dark to see, too kaleidoscopic and ever-shifting to grapple with, because something in you knows what to do. Even though the Whole System confounds you, you embrace it, dance with it, and it dances with you. You know what to do, even though what you do is nowhere on the project plan. It flashes out of you like light in a generator. Because amid all the whorls of chaos that storm around, you are chaos as well. You are a Chaosophist.

 

You’re not always going to be 100% aligned with your management. You’re not going to be in synch with their vision, impetus, and how they make decisions. There are times they are going to be the bull in the china shop, barreling through delicate systems they don’t have the power to see because they are looking at things from such an abstract distance. And depending on the size of your organization, you and your world might be some unseen minutia, a numerical representation of some sort sent by the Mars Rover Curiosity. Indeed, you may be nothing more than a curiosity, a tiny blip on the radar, if anything at all. Leaders don’t get it, and their not supposed to get it. In many ways, your career is going to be about enduring their decisions.

And that’s good. Any time they make a sudden move, it will make you sweat. Things they do may do damage, disrupt lives, cost jobs, utterly destroy things it took years of hard work and careful patience to develop, but in the chaos,  the frenzy panic and disarray, you’ll have some of the best opportunities to do beautiful work, if only to triage the valuables you can rescue. Often, in the wake of the tsunami, you will find the opportunities to build things you hadn’t dreamed of before.

It doesn’t mean you have to like it. But in the midst of the storm, there will be enough material flying around, lines on maps disintegrating, org charts teetering, that you will be able to step forward and stake out new claims, build a career that wasn’t possible until then.

It was right after 9/11 when the broker-dealer I was working for, absorbed another broker-dealer’s operations within our clearance services. It was the largest client we had taken on to date, and it was messy. For months I attended meetings of representatives from each department affected by the changes, and all people did was yell at each other. It was an exquisitely painful sequence of events for a lot of people which made the careers of some people, and ended others.

A couple of years after that, we went into a merger deal with a major regional bank. A number of us were thrown into a reorganizational whirlwind without much guidance. We had to feel our way through changes that seemed absurd, if not outright destructive. But it was during that period that I gained the experience and differentiation that allowed me to pursue my current career, as a subject matter expert and change agent at a leader in the software industry. Now my job is 100% about ungluing the foundations of people’s work lives and forming them anew, and better. The opportunity was good for me then, and the fall-out from dealing with my team is good for the people who have to endure the changes we bring help them about. Yes, it’s stressful, to some degree, and to some it will seem as though we are there simply to create unnecessary work and havoc. But the residual effect is a gain in gray matter and knowledge that these people end up accruing. They will plunge into the depths of the world they are living in, the purpose and functions of every action and nuance of their work days. They will be giving themselves an education more valuable than any certification or MBA program.

At some point in the process it may seem as though one has entered a hospital’s psychiatric ward. People will either completely zone out and stare at the walls, or they will act out hysterically. It is especially important for those of us working for the software vendor, for some the enemy and harbinger of crisis, to go from patient to orderly as quickly as possible. But it is a good idea for the people working for the client enduring the change to do so as well. When we do, we form bonds that are lasting, and we do great work together. We participate in the Whole System and create worlds, treasures, unknowable until then.

There is plenty of content about innovation out on the web, plenty of books on the business shelves of book stores, on Amazon – it’s everywhere you look. The problem with most of it, is that it is an attempt to sell people on methodologies that will lead them right back into their most habitual modes of thinking: where innovation is least likely to happen. They often include step-by-step procedures, with arbitrary cause-effect justifications, the sort of things that have gotten you blocked to begin with.

You’re a natural. You just need to get out of your way, and should be able to reel off ideas endlessly and effortlessly, in kaleidoscopal meshes and varieties, and never be caught without a solution. The problem is we have been expertly taught, programmed  may be a better term, to rigidify our thinking along the lines of countless structures that have been sold to us, either by the education systems we’ve encountered, or the processes we have in place at work. Many of these methodologies are created with the best intentions, and they were themselves innovations. But after a while their sole function is to allow for the creation of cottage industries, opportunities for income for the trainers and owners who have trademarked their own versions of them. People will pay for certifications and to have the acronyms dangling off the end of their names, but everything these programs teach, if not used wisely, will just become more grit in the gears and make your intelligence go bye-bye.

You shouldn’t need certifications. It’s okay to have them, but they are really made up of the parts of things you already have access to from a rudimentary public education, and from living. And most of what these programs teach are structures that need to be taken apart, piece by piece, and adapted to your purposes, anyway, so you really end up with the parts you started with, perhaps with a new set of connections to refer to, at best. Sure, to a certain extent, more grist for the mill is always a good thing, but there is an endless supply of resources outside the business toolkit bookshelf. You have the entire Western Canon, for one thing, and every other foolish thing that’s ever been written.

You shouldn’t need certifications because everything they teach is something you can make up, with a little ingenuity, utilizing the things you’ve learned from observation, books, from having accomplished things, with perhaps the experience of having to have endured working with people who have been OCD about making sure you have followed the correct procedures.

We are hypnotized by “process.” I’m not saying that things like the Waterfall and Scrum methodologies you’re using are wrong. In fact, you are not likely using them 100%, more likely a blend, with elements of other things, conditions that have been imposed upon you, contractual obligations, a particular sales strategy, the leadership styles within the organization. It is not the structured methodologies you have been trained in that define your value, however, but how you veer from the playbook, adapt, and apply everything you know, whether it is a well-identified business strategy, a habit you picked up when you were young, or something gleaned from a movie you most recently viewed.

The certifications each imply a story about how things get done, and that’s fine because stories are how we learn things best, from the time you were getting indoctrinated with a work-ethic via The Three Little Pigs, to how the founding fathers envisioned the US constitution, and how the graphical user interface evolved residually, in part, as a battle between the egos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

You don’t innovate by telling the same story you told about every other project you’ve done in the past, only changing the name of one of the characters to Innovation, expecting the word to somehow yield a magical vibratory effect over the behavior of your team and the results of your efforts. You don’t innovate by scheduling innovation sessions into the tried and true, fixed narrative of your project methodology. You innovate by writing a completely different story altogether.