if you think in straight lines then you will keep going round in circles
Published by Toby Coop September 29th, 2006 in Uncategorized, Designing Value, Learning, Ideas, Perception, Innovation, Designing ExperienceThe golden thread running through the landmark theories of leadership, strategy, performance, innovation and organisational design for the last 20 to 30 years is the understanding of change and its relationship to the mind. Or, As Otto Scharmer puts it more succinctly, “The blind spot in business is not the WHAT, or the HOW, it’s the WHO”.
And this is where the problem lies. Our common sense view of how the mind works, especially in relation to disciplines like innovation, strategy, creativity and the like are at odds with the way experience is actually constructed.
“Good management was the most powerful reason [leading firms] failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.” (Clayton Christensen, The Innovators’ Dilemma.)
Good management and good communication are paradoxically bad for business. And it is this fundamental paradox of divergence which is at the heart of the problem for business leaders. Unless you understand how the habits of perception and emotion control the appearance of reality then you will always be at the mercy of them. The blind spot is in not understanding that it is the WHO that controls the WHAT and the HOW and not the other way around! Habits work under the power of appearances and when we don’t question what we think, say and do then compulsion drives our destiny.
“A pattern emphasized in the cases in this study [The typewriter, the DC3] IS THE DEGREE to which powerful competitors not only resist innovative threats, but actually resist all efforts to understand them. Preferring to further entrench their positions in the older products. This results in a surge of productivity and performance that may take the old technology to unheard of heights. But in most cases is a sign of impending death.” (James M. Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation.)
As the economies of scale flatten out and weaken the competitive advantage held by top corporations, business leaders are increasingly turning to exploiting their real assets, their people and in particular the minds or the talent of their people. This opens up a Pandora’s Box for corporations. When you make the WHO a form of personal and organisational study then you discover how the governing principles of the WHAT and the HOW are constructed.
In other words you cannot think out of the box unless you know where the edge of the box is! And the edge of the box is based on the rules of perception and emotion that govern the way experience is constructed.
The missing link in current models of personal and organisational development is the relationship between theory and practice. I would argue that most of these frameworks are based on principles that do not adequately take into account the role of perception and emotion in designing experience (see business of the mind entry). Moreover, I would draw the conclusion that unless business academics and corporate executives take into account these issues then in fact they collude in skilfully maintaining convergence. Despite our inherent cultural taboo of subjectivity in the West, brain science can now demonstrate that convergent and divergent thinking are experiences which are subject to causes and conditions. And because they are subject to causes and conditions, we can train our minds to master the principles of divergence. In other words, we can design our experience.
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