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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
UPDATE: This entry was unfinished, and accidently posted, so many apologies. Here is the version that should be been published but languished in draft form on my server.
Making the Invisible Visible: An Emerging Capability
More and more, a key skill and capability is to make visible the invisible. Quite simply, this is because many of the most powerful insights lurk here. Powerful both at the individual level -- that is, the leverage we get when we're more conscious of the unconscious influences (both internally and externally mediated) on our thoughts and actions. But also powerful at the strategic and innovation level because of the many driving forces increasing the invisibility of things, such as: the gradual dematerialization of our economy into bits and bytes; the shift to knowledge-based industries and thus "intangibles" as the main driver of wealth creation; the fact that the locus of power in society is becoming more complex, relying just as much on the manipulation of abstractions and symbols and soft power methods as the traditional tools of coercion and control, something that NGOs and networks like Al Queda have figured out.
Derrida, a key postmodern thinker, a French intellectual, who recently passed away in Paris, saw these drivers we now take for granted and gave us some intellectual hand-rails from which to make-sense of these. He underscored the new reality -- that we live in an uncertain, multi-textured, increasingly complex, pluralistic world -- well before it was appreciated by the mainstream. Only now are the professional classes catching up, incorporating these ideas into their tools and practices, mostly unawares of where these came from.
The work I do and many worldchangers do, then, has been at the vanguard, without many us really knowing it, so caught up we have been within the swells and eddies of deeper waves of change. Still misunderstood and fringe-like, still provoking quizzical looks, still fighting against legacy thinking stemming from the Cartesian, pre-quantum world, we're called a variety of things: "scenario planners", "futurists", "strategic foresight practitioners", "navigators of uncertainty", "contextual risk" specialists, "social entrepreneurs" and so on. Whatever you call us -- language still falling behind reality -- I believe that now and in the future the most valued consultants, advisors, change agents will have the remit to help leaders and organizations surface these invisible drivers and show them how certain assumptions are shifting and in decline. Only then can they make better "win-win" choices in an uncertain, complex, rapidly changing world. A little self-serving, perhaps, this observation. But so be it. It doesn't make me wrong, and I've had a habit of being on the new curve of change before most. (If only I could learn to capitalize of this sense more readily.)
Having said this, perhaps, this kind of role isn't so new and has always been thus, a timeless skill set only with different tools and methods, the big difference being scale and magnitude of what we're being asked to surface and make sense of. In fact, thinking back to genesis of scenario-planning going mainstream, it really started with Pierre Wack, the Alsatian "heretic" who brought this into Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s. I can't help but think he must have been influenced by this thinking, maybe knew Derrida himself, given his Paris base for much of his life. Perhaps Napier Collyns, one his collaborators at Shell, might know. Napier, any thoughts on this speculation?
In event event, I think it's timely to reflect and recognize that we owe much of our intellectual foundations to people like Derrida. That out of seemingly fuzzy, abstract, confusing, much misunderstood and derided thinking, can come very useful, practical, frameworks that improve our lives and make a difference in how we see the world -- something that's often forgotten in our short ROI, relevance-obsessed world, so easy we are to dismiss things we don't understand and things on the periphery of conventional thinking.
Reconstructing Derrida: Pros and Cons of Post-modern Thinking
It's commonly lamented, somewhat nostalgically, the simpler world that existed before post-modern thinking came in to blow away and challenge all of the established verities. Many people who study identity politics note the cognitive dissonance and dislocation people feel without the secure foundations of big T, "Truths" to anchor them. And some of this may be true. I empathize with this, in part. It's much harder work to be in a deconstructed world. However, there are many positive aspects to the postmodern project that are often overlooked.
Don Michael, in Planning to Learn and Learning to Plan, 2nd Edition (1997), put this well. The whole movement to deconstruct our language helped us recognize that we play an active part in constructing our own social reality, which in turn "opens possibilities for major changes in our beliefs about the feasibility of apparently unlikely changes, such as future-responsive social learning." In his view, the sum value, then, of this body of literature and way seeing the world is what Michael's calls "boundary demolition". More specifically, this means:
The emphasis on stories in this literature also supports the scenario-planning genre. Because, in Michael's words, "stories describe what humans do or could or should behave. Stories are the ineluctable context and stimuli to thinking and acting, for changing and maintaining boundaries." This is also something Jay Ogilvy, a GBN co-founder and former Yale philosopher professor (a Hegelian specialist), often points out. His piece, "What Strategists Can Learn from Sartre" in Strategy+Business, is excellent.
All of this connects to my earlier post on Adversarial Politics. Perhaps a way to dialogue and create a shared space is to dismantle these boundaries so that they can be reconstructed in a more collaborative way?
But there are down-sides. Every boundary-spanner destroys and invades an established territory, and thus often creates the opposite reaction: boundary defenders. This is what Al Queda is all about, not to mention the extreme Christian right. And in Michael's estimation the primary disadvantage is that "the deconstructionist story is insufficient to under-grid society." Another problem is that most human beings can't engage in this "generous way of thinking" -- a sound reality-check to my hopes around a new model for communication. Also, a major preoccupation of Michael (I should mention a brief but dear mentor of mine before he passed) was that this modus operandi overlooks the powerful role of unconscious fears, rages, needs, etc. I'm not so sure Michael was right about this later point. I think postmodern thinking can actually acknowledge these, which is a theme that's picked up in some the many tributes to Derrida, all of which seem to ironically "reconstruct" the fragmented interpretations of his work.
I enjoyed this Op Ed in the New York Times, "What Derrida Really Meant" by Mark C. Taylor (October 14, 2004.) I quote him at length, since it echoes my thoughts above, and especially now since the article can only be purchased, which to put it mildly, is not very blog-friendly:
When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clichés often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out.Posted by nicole at October 29, 2004 07:23 PMHe showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.
Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection.
Fortunately, he also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open.