Month: November 2015

I have drawn upon Henri Bergson’s definition of intuition to make this point, but it is really something you might see every day if you are in any kind of problem-solving role. I have worked on a long series of organizational changes and software implementations, and it is clear to me that a “solution is a well-stated problem.”

And let’s for a moment understand what we mean by the word problem, because there are many ways we can hear that word, and the way we do will create different emotional responses, each of which will yield different results in the mind of the hearer. For our purposes, a problem is neither negative or positive, not the kind of problem one has when one has missed the bus and will be late for an important meeting, or if one doesn’t have enough money in one’s checking account to cover this month’s rent check. Not like that. What we mean by problem is the difference between where we are at the moment and where we want or need to be. For instance, if where I want to be is being able to play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the violin (something I have watched both my sons solve over different periods of time) then the problem is finding out how and what to practice, how to make time and motivate oneself to do so.

In a sense, a problem isn’t even a problem until it is well-defined and stated. Until then it is an amorphous something-or-other that may or may not really be an issue and arise out of the muck of countless ifs and maybes. Sometimes it will be a high-priority critical issue that comes up and is causing you or a client a major difficulty: a process is perhaps broken, and the results are misrepresenting what is actually occurring in the world. In banking software, this kind of thing is a real problem, and it thankfully does not occur that often. When it does, however, the solution is in a sense already well-defined, at least in part, as there is a well-defined expected result one is not getting. There may be a mystery as to how the software is generating the unexpected aberration, but at least there is a clear end-point in mind. It may take some work by business analysts and developers to drill down into the actual workflow and software processes, to better understand how those results are being generated, but once that is done, the problem then becomes well-stated, and the solution is defined as well.

Where things get a bit muddier, however, is when there isn’t yet a clear understanding of what the results are to be. This is a different kind of problem, in essence, not a problem in the same way as the above issue, but more of loose aspiration that still needs clarity. We arrive again at the point where we need to take a vague concept and transform it into percepts, and those percepts will be the material used to generate a well-stated problem, or objective.

Perhaps a client wants an entirely new process in the software, or wants to automate a manual process. This is where things get interesting, since creating an entirely new process, or automating a manual process, is an entirely different realm of problem from the critical issue, where a clearly defined working process goes awry and needs fixing. In the case of automating manual processes, one can’t just replicate each function a person does, since there are controls in place in the manual process, in order to eliminate or decrease the likelihood of human error, which would not make sense when creating a uniform mechanical process that isn’t smart enough to generate those types of errors. You also need to consider what points actually do require human intervention, for instance, where human judgment of some sort is requisite, and whether a process needs to be put on hold while someone makes a decision, and how that person will be appropriately informed so she can make that decision. There’s a lot to mull over, a lot to comb through and design.

But it’s the new and unexplored territory that gets most interesting. There may be a new business opportunity, or some strategy that someone wants you to put into place. Very often these are the most undefined and fuzzy of the types problems you will encounter, since there’s no functional model to rely on, only, as I said before, an aspiration. When working with this kind of problem, you are best to begin thinking like an artist. You start with a core idea, but you may not really know where you are going. You build it out, generate a number of interconnected ideas, eliminate redundancies, redesign, perhaps hit roadblocks and start over again. The result may not look anything like your starting point, and that’s because each step, each new idea, every interaction you are having with your client who is perhaps asking for this change, is giving you new feedback, changing your perspective as to what it is that needs to be done. It is more of an exploration than other types of solution work. And in this case, the stating of the problem is in itself an ongoing event, an adventure of sorts.

There is a thing called  creativity we generally associate with artistic work, as well as with the generation of solutions and surplus innovations. That said, there is no really good way to define creativity with any kind of specific demarcation from things that are not “creative.” We are told the stories where flashes of brilliance, in which breakthroughs emerge seemingly out of nothing, as in Kerkule’s dream, in which he supposedly discovered the molecular structure of the benzene ring in an image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Or there are the cliches of poetical flight, where a painter or poet is transfixed by their work, and in some state of transport, receive transmissions from divine sources.

Those are fairy tales, for the most part, and if you talk to anyone who is consistently and productively creative, you’ll hear a different story. New ideas rarely come in a single flash, but accrete incrementally, through various extensions of other ideas, and lesser radical leaps. Very often there are blends of preexisting ideas, as in the iPhone, which combined the idea of the personal computer and the cellular phone.

There are people who tend to be more successful than others in generating new and original ideas and products, and do so repeatedly. They tend to be strange and curious folks. Some of them even read poetry, for goodness sakes! And some business leaders even promote things like poetry reading writing as a form of business training.

So it may very well be that excessive creative output tends to arise in people who develop particular habits or interests, and have ways of thinking that are untypical among their less creative peers. It has been the point of my past couple of posts to ascertain various thinking strategies from the work of Henri Bergson and Rudolf Steiner, who were not only exemplary creative thinkers, themselves, but influenced other overtly creative practitioners in multiple fields of endeavor. While the mystery of how this all works may remain unsolved, there are experiments we can attempt in order to increase our own creative productivity, and the next few posts will be about how we may apply Bergson’s and Steiner’s conceptual schema into practical exercises.

How does one actually make use of something like Duration, or Monism, in one’s everyday world, apart from occasional happy accidents? One way is to begin, as I said, with experiments, and that is exactly what I am suggesting we try doing over the next several weeks.

We will begin with Steiner’s concept of Moral Imagination. In my previous post I explained that ordinarily concepts arise from percepts, which are perceptual events received from external sources, such as a sound heard or an image seen, or those created inwardly when remembering or envisioning. Concepts arise when sensory information is reprocessed into generalizations. For instance, when a stone in a field emerges from the background, becomes a thing unto itself in our minds apart from the field, and then becomes categorically one with many stones. Moral Imagination is the ability to take concepts – for Steiner, those concepts that are categorically complex more principles – and reverse the process to imagine new percepts, and therefore map the concepts back into actionable behaviors in the world.

Leaving aside the gravitas of moral principles we can begin to generate percepts from concepts, and make it a regular practice, in order to help engender something like a talent for outside-the-box, or creative, thinking. Accomplishing this is really more straightforward and less mysterious than one might think.

Without going into a lengthy explanation of what NLP or Neuro-linguistic Programming is – in short, a practical approach to studying and working with subjective experience – I am going to suggest we use the NLP Outcome Frame, or Well Formed Outcome Conditions, as a place to begin experimenting.  I have chosen the Outcome Frame because it is a useful guideline when trying to map such an abstract concept such as Moral Imagination. I promise you, these tools can be very useful with the right attitude. In brief the conditions for well-formed outcomes are:

1. The outcome must be stated in positive terms
2. It must be defined in sensory terms
3. It must be something that is under one’s own control
4. It must be ecological
5. It must be properly contextualized

Positive Terms

One can state an objective in the negative without clearly defining where one wants to go. One can say, “I’ve got to get out of New York,” and end up anywhere else in the world, possibly somewhere less accommodating, if one doesn’t choose a specific destination. What is meant by stating things in the positive is just that, choosing the actual destination, so one has a specific direction to move in.

Sensory Terms

If we simply state some abstraction such as “I want to go to Miami” we begin to have a specific target, but we haven’t defined how we accomplish that. What is meant here is imagining all of the sensory details involved in going to Miami, that can be used as as verification. For instance, I may require a taxi to the airport, so I will imagine myself calling a cab service, the ride to the airport, the smell of the jet fuel, the sounds of the engines as you approach. These are the details you typically utilize unconsciously when taking feedback from your sensory experience to assure that you are on your way. To consciously break these down into their component features is a great way to gain awareness and control of the process and generate different, nuanced results, as well as to radically change the outcome approach altogether.

Under One’s Control

Perhaps you don’t have the financial resources to buy the plane tickets and pay the cab fare to get to Miami. Your outcome may then perhaps change to involve the various ways you can begin saving money, by imagining yourself putting more money in your savings account, telling yourself no, when you want to buy some unnecessary luxury item. Or perhaps your objective is based on someone else’s decision, as in getting a new job, a promotion, or having one’s blog post read by a larger audience. These are things one cannot control. Instead you begin to imagine setting outcomes that could make those things more likely. I may not be able to make a particular person choose me over another candidate, but I can find out in more detail what sort of values that employer or others like her have regarding candidates, and begin working towards satisfying those values. For instance, if an employer tends to hire people with particular certifications, your outcome becomes working toward those certifications. In other words, the outcome is something you can do.

Ecological

Simply said, the Ecology Test is a check that the outcome is appropriate. This is perhaps where we can return to the moral part of Steiner’s dictum. Not only do we want our outcome to be a good fit for ourselves, but also for those around us, otherwise it would cause conflict, and may fail or ruin one’s credibility and integrity. Miami may not be the best place for me to vacation, or a particular job may not be a good fit for me. It would also not be a good idea to cheat in some way, in either case, since that would strain relationships with those around me, as well as possibly damage my own principles, and the overall value, and again the credibility, of the thing I am trying to achieve.

Properly Contextualized

Lastly, context is very important. Behaviors can be useful in one context and not useful in others. It may be useful for me to travel to Miami, or wherever I decide to go on vacation, in order to enjoy myself, get the rest I need, and revive, but I need to set proper contextual markers around it. I can go on vacation for the time I have scheduled with my employers, but it may not be a good thing for me to stay on vacation indefinitely, unless it is also desirable to leave my job and home behind. In the same way, it may be useful for me to work on certifications on my free time, but not when I have deliveries at my current job, which may need to take priority.

In Conclusion

The NLP Well-formed Outcome Conditions can be a useful guideline for practicing the generation of focused and detailed plans based on high-level ideas. The above examples were meant to demonstrate its use in the simplest terms, although it is up to the user how complex and how detailed the process is. The key is to begin with the overall concept and build the sensory imaginings, and actions one can take to produce the intended results. For software development, this may involve visualizing the actions that may take place on the screen as you move your cursor and click on particular images. In the case of organization change, one might imagine the new types of interactions that might occur among staff members, as well as the content of their conversations.

These are only tools for thinking, ways of guiding what steps to include in an overall process, but the thinking has to be done by us. By adapting the well-formed conditions into our own thinking and planning, we can begin to plan and generate ideas with greater clarity and leverage. The only way to find out how well this will work for you is to try.

 

In my previous post I introduced Henri Bergson and Rudolf Steiner as two key sources of intuitional cognitive tools for solution generation, and touched on three key factors for applying Bergson’s approach. In this post I will do the same for Steiner. Don’t get me wrong, both Bergson’s and Steiner’s intuitional methodologies are far reaching and what I’m laying out may be seen possibly as a distortion or oversimplification, although my intention is to take from their work, not the entire philosophical system, but useful perspectives that can be applied by anyone, in all areas of their lives, my focus being software implementation and organizational change.

While much of Steiner’s writing, where not specifically topical, about the Waldorf Education, the social structure of bee colonies, farming, or architecture, tends to drift more into esoteric terrain, one book in particular outlines his approach to intuitive thinking, an approach that he as used to develop his many innovations, as well as having had a huge impact on many innovators of notoriety, such as Albert Schweitzer, Wassily Kandinsky, Joseph Beuys, Saul Bellow and Andrei Tarkovsky, just to name a few. In English this book has been alternatively entitled The Philosophy of Freedom and Intuitive Thinking as Spiritual Path. It is a work in which he explores the ramifications of Goethe’s ideas, without making them its central theme. It borrows heavily from the western philosophical tradition to make its arguments, though it doesn’t really work as a book of philosophy. It is more of a journey into thinking about how we think, and how to do it more effectively.

Steiner’s Intuition

Monism vs. Dualism

In dualist thinking there are subjects and objects, and an attempted distinction between subjective and objective thinking. It says that thinking is generally subjective, since the thinker is working within a frame of a limited perspective, taking into consideration only those experiences one can retrieve from memory, sidled with one’s own beliefs and prejudices or expectations. The conclusions are at best partial and distorted, since even disciplines of applied logic and reasoning can be swayed by one’s need to make them conform with expectations and world view. But somewhere out there in the void is an Objective World one aspires to knowing, a Truth, that may be hard or impossible to grapple with, that somehow exists beyond a curtain of our own perceptual and cognitive limitations.

From Steiner’s perspective, no such subjective/objective distinction really exists on its own, but is a product of our thinking. It is like Bergson’s false problem, or a way of thinking that is best to be avoided in order to better understand how we apprehend the world and what to do with it. It’s not that our sensory and mental apparatus is incomplete, broken, or insufficient, but that it was never meant to do the things we have imagined for centuries it was supposed to do.

In fact the whole subject/object distinction falls apart because we are actually part of the system that through our thinking and perceiving is in fact apprehending itself. My thinking about what appears to lie outside myself, in other words, is the world thinking about the world. It is an activity in the world, the Whole System, that doesn’t begin with me, and doesn’t end with me. It is not myself who has formed the language, the concepts and percepts, I use while thinking. The material of my thoughts are acquired from a space outside of the bundle I call myself, which I have received through my education and experience, which I pass back out into the world. In other words, while being an individual, with a powers of perception and the ability to reshape what has come into my awareness, I am also part of a circuit, and my thinking’s main role is not to hit or miss its mark in an objective actuality as much as it is to operate within it, to be part of its own feedback systems and to help manage the system as a whole. It is part of a life system.

This intuition of Steiner’s, like many of his intuitions in general, is in part aligned with current cognitive theory that assumes that our perceptual and cognitive equipment was not designed to determine actuality, but has evolved as a way to promote survival. The objective world was an invention of religion and inherited by science, meant to pose as the something beyond our immediate understanding.

The key difference however is that Steiner is looking from a more monistic perspective, while scientific thinking is by a rule, an attempt at generating some sort of objective conclusions. Instead of objective knowledge, we have direct experience, the perceived world informed by thinking.

Percepts and Concepts

An important distinction for Steiner’s explication of thinking, is that of Percepts and Concepts. For instance, I may throw a ball and watch it rise and fall along a curved line. I may not have a concept for line or curve, but I see a shape of some sort, which is a perception that happens in time and gets stored in my memory. It is what we call a percept. When that shape, the curved line, becomes something I recognize as repeatable and variable, I begin to form a concept, say a curve or arc of the ball. The concept grows as I begin to label it, attach to it the concept of gravity, the mathematical algorithms that can produce a similar shape, but the actual birth of the concept begins when I begin to recognize the path as an arc. It is important to remember, as well, that at no point in time does an actual arc or curve exist, but it is something perceived over the duration of time, which you may remember was a key point in Bergson’s intuitional discipline.

Another example is the process of blooming and wilting of a flower. At no moment can we observe entire process, but only individual moments when the flower starts as a bud, is open partially, fully opens, and begins to decline. In this case, says Steiner, it is our thinking that allows us to have a fuller understanding of the flower, or flower-ness in general, by connecting each state in a stream of causality, since each individual percept is only a fragment of its whole life.

The raw materials of perception are always available, are unavoidable, so the reception of percepts and the forming of concepts can progress more or less on their own, quite passively. And so thinking begins as a passive phenomenon of the natural world, much like the growth of the flower, at least from what we typically think of from the human dichotomy of active/passive behaviors. Choice, or what we typically call free will, is only available through our ability to actually observe of our thinking.

Observation of thought

Freedom and will, or the ability to take a stand, think creatively and generate new approaches to problems, can only arise from self awareness, an observation of one’s own thoughts. Then we can begin to be selective and make modifications to this haphazard and automatic process. Steiner points out that it is not possible to actually observe a thought while we are thinking it, as we cannot observe both the contents of our thinking and the thought simultaneously. There is always a delay. We must look back our thought and begin to think about it, ask ourselves what ways we can change the thought that would result in different results or consequences, perhaps a better approach at apprehending and providing a more useful impetus for action. To some degree this is something we do all the time, what we call meta-cognition.

It is the next step, however, that is the crucial one, the real jump toward freedom of will and creativity, in which we may begin to observe and think about how we observe and think about our thoughts. If that seems like a jumble, understand that it is exactly what you’ve begun to do at this point while reading this text.

If you have come this far, you must have been able to say to yourself something like, “yes, I agree, I realize that I am somehow aware of what I am thinking and am able to modify it, direct my attention differently, take another’s perspective, and come up with a different set of results.” That ability to realize that is the very meta-meta-thinking, the very magic, we are talking about. We practice this type of thinking most often when we are brainstorming, redesigning or rewriting, to some degree, in brief flashes. It is also what innovators and artists do more often than the rest of us. Later posts will include exercises to help you pop out of frame into this type of thinking, and how to recognize when you are doing it.

Moral Imagination

For Steiner, Moral Imagination is the jewel that sits at the top of all we’ve discussed so far. It is the ability to translate principles into actions in sort of a reverse direction from what we’ve discussed earlier. Instead of percepts leading to concepts, it is when we imagine new percepts based on concepts, principles being a type of concept which we attach meaning and value. For instance, the concept of equality led Martin Luther King and other leaders to produce a series of percepts, and those percepts led to the actions that helped to eventuate the Civil Rights Act. It starts with taking a simple idea, and imaging how things can be made different.

Most of us may not be faced with such moral imperatives on a day to day basis, but we can all benefit from the practice of asking what a concept or idea would mean made manifest in a particular situation. We are always faced with practical imperatives, problems that need solutions, and the desire to make things better than they were the last minute. We take the idea, one in a long sequences of changes we plan to make, we see it form in our thoughts, and into the world as we act.