Author: caefu

We imagine there can be nothing smoother than a water droplet running along a pane of glass. From our ordinary perspective it seems to roll as freely as anything possible, yet when watched closely we see that the motion is made of many pixilated jumps, sort of a jerky dance of stops and starts, of wiggling back and forth.

Our days proceed similarly. We jump from thought to thought, often unaware of the many byways and stoppages, the leaping about and the escapes from blockages. We were designed by nature to be machines of both focus and distraction. Without focus, we would never follow through on anything, the rendering of this sentence and reception would both be impossible. Yet, without the natural inclination for our brains to be distractible, we would get stuck any time anything unrecognizable or novel occurs, as it takes this jumping about from thought to thought within our memory to make all the required associations, comparisons and measurements. We also begin to blend past associations with the present in ways that combine multiple fabrications, objects, what have you, to make sense of the unknown that is in front of us.

Our brains are like three dimensional window surfaces with billions of water droplets moving hither on yon, at blinding speeds, and to parts of that surface that have been designated for particular functions, generating a holographic-like gauziness of cognitive array, that gets meshed together in what we call experience. And beyond ourselves, we are like a single droplet in a much larger array of individual people sharing common languages, concepts, events, projects, aspirations, some which complement and some of which conflict. In other words we are individually made up of multiple interactions, and we ourselves are particles of a larger set of interactions, and on every level there is this smooth/jerkiness type processing that enfolds each disparate part.

The Whole System is a mess, and we are part of that mess. And we have much to celebrate. The chaos we try to keep at bay is us, is life itself. Go figure. Granted we need ways of organizing it in our minds so that we can somehow get things done, so out of the millions of years of the churnings of military strategies and philosophical dialogs, we have these residual sets of concepts and practices inhabiting the business world, i.e. those that make up what we call project management and business analysis. Some of these concepts and practices are things we have been trained to do on the job, of course, or through certification programs that work hand-in-hand with what we are doing in a working capacity. Many of the skills, most of them in fact, are things we have brought to our jobs from previous experience, from our formal and informal education up to this point, from our bantering about, and bumping into things. From growing up.

What makes a person unique, exceptional, extra-valuable, is rarely the stuff that gets taught in the formalized programs, the certs and training events, but is the stuff that you’ve learned from adapting, combining ideas from different systems and worlds that you live in. A mathematical or musical background will shape the array of raindrops differently than one more focused on language or mechanics. All your accumulated learnings, habits, and expertise come into play, as soon as you begin to think in a continued state of blending, which helps you adapt to your surroundings, challenges, what it is you are trying to get done.

A formal education is a great thing, as are the specific and focused training events that have given you the tools to operate at your current job according to its description. But none of us really operate according to plan, or are really so neatly described.  We are ever at the edge of the familiar and organized world looking out over the chaos and currently unknowable that we need to navigate, and that is a job for artists. Yes, you are an artist whether you like it or not. We are all artists. And as artists we each have the freedom and responsibility to combine all parts of what we know to create the best value for ourselves, our clients, our world, whether it’s an enhancement to an application, a software implementation or organizational change,  even something vaster, our moment to moment living in the world that we hope we hope is better off because of us.

What is it in that vast mesh of noise, your particular alchemy of ideas and experience that you are made of, that you haven’t combined and tapped yet that will make a difference in your world and in others? What is it that you’re going to do this year that will leave an imprint of excellence either in your current work world, or around the world? This is something we all need to think about, as the world needs you, and after all, it is the beginning of a new year.

OUR world needs you at your best, which may be easier than you think. Instead of the stress and strain, the habits of conflict you may always seem to bring to all you are faced to do, why not think of the jerky smoothness that really gets things done anyway, whether it knows it or not?

In my prior post I spoke about the use of a Surrealist writing technique called automatic writing as a way of getting into cognitive flow states. The point is to write freely, without concern at all for how nonsensical the material you are producing is. Just let the thoughts flow and intertwine through associative connections, and observe what occurs as it’s happening. With practice you may be able to make the observer another one of the actors, so that there will be a self-correcting and evolutionary process that is wholly different from the way most of us think the majority of the time. You will have shaken off the critical voice and habitual constraints that produce normative results and will have, in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, “taken a first step into a larger world.”

Now, some folks are going to ask what does this have to do with business solutions. And they’d be correct to ask that question, in regard to business solutions specifically, especially when it comes to developing a concrete and well-defined solution to either solve a particular problem, or to add value in some way to a particular context. What they might not be thinking, however, is that solutions of any sort come more often from people who have made a habit of thinking outside the ordinary constraints, to quote Yoda, this time, you need to “unlearn what you have learned.” The ability to unlearn the constraints that generally rule the context one is working in can derive from a number of different approaches as have been discussed in previous posts, i.e. observing one’s own thought process, as Steiner recommends, for instance, helps one to gain a meta perspective on the thoughts as they occur, as well as a view of one’s habits. From this viewpoint, you are more capable of making alternative choices on the direction you are moving, and short circuit habits that keep you looping through the same patterns. Automatic writing, because it relies on unconscious processes, frees up a large chunk of conscious awareness allowing one to practice observation. So along with being a way of tapping unconscious connections one may already have made, without being aware, it is way of taking baby steps toward something like a mindfulness practice.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of writing freely and without concern for results, it is time to begin focusing the process on an objective. You still write automatically, but begin to gravitate around a particular central theme. For instance, if you are working on a problem with the interface, in other words, it’s still okay to let thoughts flow about how the interface connects several planets and their inhabitants, and does so through the use of some sort of teleportation chewing gum, or any other absurdity that comes to your mind. You simply let that happen as you spiral in to what is most relevant to the conversation you are having with yourself, slowly working toward a useful outcome. Chances are, the ideas you generate, i.e. teleportation chewing gum, may contain metaphoric hints from your unconscious, or may evolve into something more practical, like the fact that chewing, which is in some ways like speaking, can move things from one place to another, without moving through the space in between and seemingly without observing the physical laws of motion, which is kind of what speaking does in regard to thoughts. In this case, the teleportation chewing gum may be your way of communicating with yourself that the interface requires wireless and satellite and/or internet communication between two or more remote locations, and you therefore need to format messages in a particular way, and manage them sequentially, in case they take different paths and arrive in a different sequence than they were sent.

Now, to take this kind of playfulness into a group setting will make you more powerful than you can ever imagine, but it takes a bit of courage, and an open-minded team, obviously. It’s also not something you just jump into, nor is it something you plan on your meeting agenda. You have to slowly train the people around you in a way that doesn’t seem like anything unusual is occurring. You make a joke now and then, just to lighten up to conversation. And jokes can be the source of ideas as well. But interweaving humor and play in through the entire conversation can be like giving it a spritz of WD40. Be careful, however, as you may get a reputation for being disorderly, irresponsible, unfocused and worst of all, disruptive.

 

Sure, there are numerous mind hacks one can use to get one-time results, but to attain mastery and fluidity at solution generation takes a kind of commitment, and a regular practice. The up side to this is that most people are not going to bother, so if you want to gain an edge you can easily do so, by creating a discipline for yourself. This can take many forms, the key being that you repeatedly challenge your brain to generate novelty on a regular basis.

James Altucher recommends writing 10 new ideas every day. This is good and simple approach, and James kind of believes that idea generation in itself will make one rich and successful. While that may be true in part, my caveat would be that being smart, and being able to generate a lot of ideas, even brilliant ideas, won’t on its own guarantee success. It may in fact make you less popular among your peers, who may envy you, feel threatened or just see you as weird. And you won’t always get credit for your ideas, as others who are better positioned can easily confiscate and take credit for them. Sometimes your great ideas are not going to be understood, as it takes others with open minds and imagination to appreciate a wholly novel and brilliant idea at the outset. It often takes a long time for people to fathom what just happened. The better and more significant your ideas are, the more trouble you can cause for yourself. Just ask Galileo and Tesla.

That said, it is something you can make work for you, not only in your ability to produce more and better ideas and solutions yourself, but to also gain an expertise in recognizing others’ good and great ideas, and how to build on them, and this type of collaboration can grow into something beautiful and unexpected, i.e. great teams, new products and business models that will help people adapt to the shocking acceleration of change we are experiencing during the new century.

It’s my humble but firm opinion (though I don’t have any hard data to back me up on this) that people who have some kind of artistic training or background are going to generally fare better in the idea generation biz, as well as see more clearly the whole system one is working with. I know a business owner who will only hire programmers with a musical background, and it’s been my experience that musicians make the best programmers. Many modern and postmodern poets, writers of fiction and visual artists tend to have an affinity for systemic thinking as their work tends to draw on and mirror complex patterns they have explored in the world around them.

This is perhaps only in part due to any innate talent, as there may really be no real thing we can point to and call talent anyway, but a number of minor propensities that somehow get linked together through practice. We all have the raw materials, it’s just that some are more compelled to explore and utilize them in ways that begin to form consistent mental circuits that may be a bit different from people who do other things with their time. The forming these currents is the key to having a brilliant and useful imagination. But again, this may be no salvation, at least in terms of having a superstar career. It is however a worthy discipline for anyone with the inclination, especially if you’re a geek like me, who thrives on it.

One of my favorite ways of getting the juices flowing is what I call Taking Dictation, which will be not be new to any of you who are familiar with art history at all, primarily Surrealism. In Andre Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, he defined Surrealism as:

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

He prescribed a practice we now call automatic writing, which is a form of writing in which one simply unloads onto the page anything and everything that comes to one’s mind without involving the critical functions. This process can result in some really bizarre nonsense, but keeping it on your regular to-do list can help you tune into your unconscious resources. Sure, you will produce a lot of seemingly useless noise, but you will also begin to discern particular voices, and choruses of voices, that are more useful than others. They will often be associated with particular moods and flow states that you will come to recognize and trust more as you continue to gain in depth. It is a great way gain an affinity and fluidity with that part of oneself that may serve as a font of many great ideas and perspectives, as well as a way to get to know oneself more, and even help to increase emotional intelligence.

It is especially during the moments when it seems like there is a conversation of many voices going on in your head that you can make use of the jam session effect, which can be a thrilling experience as the ideas that come through like a white-water rafting of your brain currents through a rapture of new possibilities. Take it from me, as its the cognitive equivalent of extreme sports – and definitely pays for itself once you get the hang of it.

You can always go back later, into the material you have written, which may seem to those less familiar with the process like sheer lunacy, and extract what is that may be useful that day, or at some point in the future. Sometimes, the gold may be hidden within the apparent nonsense, and that’s where the interpreting process, and the interweaving of present thoughts into the past material, can be a creative adventure as well, a kind of surfing and weaving of your entire sensory and mental representational systems into a mercurial flood of novelty and innovation.

My hat’s off to those who follow the path, because they will be among the folks who are making the future, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Some of you may appreciate those great improvisational moments when rock or jazz musicians go on extended tours of the possibilities of the groove they are riding on. It could be the interactions between two horn players swapping riffs, or the modulating texture of the whole, when the bass, drums, and lead instruments not only synch up, but weave into unknown regions of kinetic force and color. Sparks fly. You may hear things you’ve never heard before, and if you get excited about that kind of thing, it can lead you to some really ecstatic moments.

It’s something you see in sports as well, on the football or soccer field, the basketball court, the split second interactions of players swarming in unexpected and unpredictable variations of common patterns. When it comes to fine distinctions between the players and teams, each with such awesome physical abilities of the players, it’s often the ability to read one’s team and opponents, and improvise on the spot, that makes the minute differences between the winning and losing. And winning and losing is perhaps even a minor part of it, essential, but only the justification for the game as it’s played in real time for our entertainment and our need for engagement in borderlands of chaos. Just as with jazz music, it’s not the score, but how it gets there that enthralls us.

We have these moments in our lives, these entanglements among others that can be quite profound or just infused with enough energy to engage all players, keeping them all focused and alive, following whatever byways that might occur. Solutions are born during these ventures, in the very belly of the unexpected, where the meeting’s agenda recedes into the background and the fire of the present stokes in every which way. Those who have experienced this kind of thing will realize it’s not simply something one can bullet-point in. It rather takes a particularly expertise: willing agitators (or disruptors), who are unafraid go tangential, and managers who can tolerate and navigate the complexities of these open-ended meanderings, make the best use of them, without losing track or one’s patience. It’s also something that needs to be cultivated, just as a jazz band or basketball team needs abundant practice to gain cohesion in ways that can generate and manage the unexpected. Great teams are not just complimentary skill-sets fitted together to make a static whole, but an alchemy of from which the un-thought newly possible may emerge.

In a similar way, we are individually made up of many voices, impulses, with thoughts often in collision and distracting one another.  Our stormy brains can sometimes seem a hazard, rather than asset, when we want to get things done, or simply get some peace.  So why do we insist that brainstorming is the optimal metaphor for idea generational practice? Because the language, in this case naming of the practice, will often set our pre-conscious expectations, naming your practice jamming, and cultivating the jam session practice, with ourselves and with our teams, will yield more desirable results, drawing out more of the collaborative genius of the group, whether that group is a sales or project team, or the swarm of many selves we each individually are.

 

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.

 

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.