Business lessons from the AT part 4 intelligence and sensemaking

Dr Ian McGilchrist author of The Master and His Emissary and most recently The Matter with Things says that the world has been becoming more “left hemisphere of the brain” dominated while true intelligence resides largely in the right, that would suggest humanity is becoming dumber, loosing intelligence, right??One would think so except for the fact that standardized intelligence test scores have been on the rise for decades, so there’s something that doesn’t square here, what’s going on? This intelligence quandary is complicated, and the mystery lies partly in our daily activities and our perception of a world we have helped co-create. The other has to do with a lopsided preoccupation we have in trying to architect a world solely from our own design, our way of processing reality, and the perspective of only one hemisphere of the brain (in this case the left).?It turns out Dr McGilchrist’s assertions are right, humanity is perilously out of balance and off course.?Are we short-changing ourselves as a species and becoming dangerously dumber in the process??What do we stand to lose? For one thing the shot at a more comprehensive sentient intelligence, universal wisdom, and an awareness which could save us and our planet. It appears however that we are not able (or arrogantly refuse) to see what’s happening or to be interested. After all, we did (collectively) stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, right? That’s a joke. So what’s the answer for countering hubris, finding balance, and getting on a more sustainable path? It’s complicated, but maybe it’s to first find one.

In the Spring of 2022 my son and I decided to start an annual father/son tradition of hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT), the longest continual foot trail in North America spanning some 2200 miles from the states of Georgia to Maine, we’ve completed 250 miles so far.?When you’re on the AT hiking you don’t have the luxury of creation regarding things like intelligent design, reality, or truth, nature and the universe reserve those rights. Don’t get me wrong, you are part of these things and contribute to their creation, but they’re not exclusive to you. You didn’t create them any more than you create a snow shower in March. In this environment intelligence takes a truer form, more balanced and wholistic, and if you don’t use all of yours to intuit, leverage, and flow with this larger intelligence and the role you play in it, you’re likely to suffer in some significant way.?The good news here is that decisions are simple, you adjust, or perish, there are no other choices. The bad news about life off the trail is that we have many more less natural choices and don’t have checks and balances, cues from a higher intelligence and other intelligences. These messages become muddled, and we’re sheltered and protected from them, they can be comfortably ignored. The proof is that we continuously (and helplessly) suffer greatly, and needlessly cause unnoticed and indifferent suffering on others while pursuing a utopia of our design.??

What follows is an ongoing discussion comparing everyday life as we experience it with a less characteristic, “un-everyday” life on a trail in the woods, in this case the Appalachian Trail.?What would you do if you had to share your “reality” with other intelligences, including your own? This month we look at intelligence and sensemaking.?A special note. This article heavily leverages in reference one of my heroes Dr Iain McGilchrist and his ongoing work in human consciousness and the neuroscience of the brain. Also Karl Weick and his ground-breaking work on sense-making. I encourage you to follow the links and learn more about these researchers and their important work.?

Intelligence

I said a curious thing a moment ago, did you catch it? I said, share your reality with other intelligences, “even your own,” what do I mean??In The Matter with Things Dr McGilchrist mentions two kinds of intelligence, crystalized and fluid, and the hemispheres of the brain (left and right respectively) take on the task of dispensing these types of intelligence and the uniquely different views of the world they offer.?Crystalized intelligence is a type of intelligence acculturated in its surroundings and specific to what its people are doing, think of it like expert knowledge in a specific field, like a surgeon or a computer programmer. I’ve suggested what our intelligence on the trail is like (more wholistic), and why it’s better than the crystalized intelligence we predominately use in our manmade world.?This intelligence, fluid intelligence, is a unifier of the brain’s hemispheres and a conduit to a truer reality. Specifically why is fluid intelligence better? For one thing it’s not culture bound or anchored to any one subject or memorized data sets. Instead it’s the ability to pull in and process any data, even that which might be completely new or disparate, that’s a great tool to have in the wild, and arguably anywhere. Here’s a question, are there people who regularly use the utility of crystalized intelligence with the resilience, real time awareness, and sentience of fluid intelligence in everyday professions? Yes. There are those who quietly reject the divorce of science and philosophy, and technology from art, and elegantly leverage the union of both, they’re called pilots.

While the two hemispheres of the brain are not meant to be mutually exclusive and should complement and support one another in concert this isn’t usually the case, and it’s getting worse.?At least one side (the left hemisphere) frequently acts as if it has the whole picture, shutting down and stifling the other, and though the two sides could operate independently the results are anywhere from sub-par to downright disastrous. What’s each hemisphere’s take on the world? Let’s look.?

The left hemisphere of the brain, where crystalized intelligence resides, has a disposition for the mechanical and as an example sees the world as an assemblage of parts. It prefers a decontextualized lifeless world, has a narrow, sharply focused attention to detail, and offers clarity and power to manipulate that which is known, fixed, static and things which are explicit and physical in nature. The left hemisphere is also where tools are coded for use, hear Dr McGilchrist’s say it in his own words here. It prefers to rely on preconceived reasoning and closed, familiar systems.

Fluid intelligence on the other hand, is the domain of the right hemisphere and maintains a sustained and broad vigilance. It reserves an open alertness for implicit meaning in an embodied living world situated in the context of its natural surroundings. It’s emotional, plays devil’s advocate, understands metaphor, and has a disposition for the living. Although the left hemisphere also understands metaphor it prefers simplified ones in the form of models, and, importantly, for the last two hundred years it has preferred the model of the “machine” and corresponding metaphors relating to mechanical operation. By contrast, the right hemisphere prefers models and metaphors relating to the natural world, e.g. rivers, or trees, weather, or the behavior of animals, families, or societies, these are much older models. Einstein said the models we use change us, influencing what we see and look for. With this in mind it’s easy to see how hiking in the wilderness can influence one’s intelligence differently as our models and our metaphors quickly change from those of mechanized and static mechanical pieces to ones of continually flowing and connected complete complex living systems as found in a creek or river. The right hemispheres world is incarnate, evolving, interconnected, and exists in relationships, continually changing and never fully graspable. In such a world, the truest objectivity reveals itself as an inter-subjectivity between many things.?

Left and right

Some people can use the best of both intelligences (crystalized and fluid) to surf the perfect wave whether they’re immersed in nature or navigating a city street and I mentioned pilots as being one cohort as flying is part technical expertise and part art form. I suspect Todd Riddle is one of those people. Todd is a USAF Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II fighter pilot. The A-10 is affectionately known as the “Warthog” by its operators and is basically a flying tank. With a stall speed approaching that of a glider and great maneuverability, its unmatched for close air support (CAS), its electronics, wings, engines, and guns. After talking with Todd on other collaborative projects and reading his recently published book Faith, Family, and Fighter Jets , how to live life to the full with grace and grit, I came to a surprising conclusion, surprising because I hadn’t thought of it before. It proved for me that Todd was not only an alpha left hemisphere thinker, but also a powerful right hemisphere person, and it had to do with the idea of faith. A devout Christian, Todd writes a lot about the concept of faith in his book, a word whose definition means among other things “a confidence trust and belief in something which cannot or does not need to be based on proof.” The idea, that Todd is in the one percentile of highly technical professions (very left hemisphere competencies) and held a strong belief in faith intrigued me.?A belief in, and practice of faith can only come from the right hemispheres’ perspective. The paradigm of the left would never entertain much less tolerate the existence of anything which could not be physically proven, objective, defined, explainable, and manipulated. Yet here Todd, the pilot of a sophisticated 29,000-pound machine in a time when the mechanized model is humanities favored operating manual, believed in something he could neither control nor verify. In this left hemisphere dominant time in history he also believes (has faith) in something which can’t be conclusively physically proven, at least not for the time being. Leaving open a space in the mind for possibility and what could be, embracing the unexplained, or the unexplainable, requires different cognitive processes than those required to command a jet, Todd uses both. I commend Colonel Riddle for courageously residing on the leading edge of evolving consciousness, reality, and cognitive thought.?

So it’s important we know which hemisphere of our brain is providing its unique perspective upon our world as we travel through it.?In a perfect world and in the perfect human, it would be a seamless integration of both hemispheres’ view, but few of us are that perfect.?The best we could hope to achieve are moments of perfect, glimpses of brilliance and perhaps if we hit the marks often enough, that’s perfect.?Like swimming in a pool on a summer day, maybe perfect isn’t floating with our head above water, nor swimming below the surface with our breath held, but instead sinking to the bottom, and then launching upward from the floor, breaching the surface thrusting ourselves into the open air for one glorious moment, and repeating the process. We cannot solely afford to own reality, but we try. It is my daily challenge to forget myself and remember everything else. If we are to be in concert with both sides of our intellect, and the larger intelligence of others and the universe, harnessing collective wisdom, we must first consider the struggles we face within. What should intelligence look like in a group, how should it feel? Maybe it should feel like a partnership instead of a stalwart idea by an individual with others in captive tow. Something residing outside of any one person, a collaborative best course for everyone, not the loudest, dogmatic, the boldest or officially appointed. One sign of collective intelligence is accurately making sense of our surroundings in an inter-subjective way.?

Sensemaking, and reality

You’ve been doing sensemaking your whole life but may not be familiar with the concept in an academic sense where its heavily laden with interpretation. Most extensively written about by researcher Karl Weick, sensemaking literally means “the making of sense”, in a process in which we continually interpret the reality around us. Weick once famously quoted the question of an anonymous young girl who asked “how can I know what I think until I see what I said” suggesting that we only know what we’re doing after we’ve done it and that making sense of things (the construction of reality) is a partnership between an experience, thought, and action, only when all three are done can we then settle on a reality. Interestingly, Weick also says any intellectually conceived object and action instantly becomes relegated to the past and is by this virtue unreal.?I.e. the utilitarian and functional perception we use every day to make sense of our world is a form of memory, in the past, not real. The closest to truest reality we experience is one we experience from moment to moment and is the moment of vision before intellectualization (thought) takes place says Weick. ?So a “real” reality is one continual moment as we approach that moment, experience it, and then move past it. Reality as we characterize it is part what we experience, part what we think of the experience reflectively in our memory of it, and part the action we take on it in some peculiar way. It’s no wonder science relies so heavily on diagrams, theories, and maps, these are representations of the real world. The “representation” of something is not a direct presentation, it’s not the experience of its presence in real time but a re-presentation of it, a cognitive function of the left hemisphere. ?Presence, on the other hand, that which is presented in real time is the domain of the brain’s right hemisphere. Whether on a trail in the woods or the everyday trail of a city sidewalk, think about the hand you play in the “sense” making of our world.?

Sensemaking is also never a solitary experience because everything we do is influenced by or contingent upon others. If you think about it even monologues (one way communication) presume an imaginary audience and the monologue changes as the audience changes. Making sense of our world is also embedded in that unique worlds culture. What does this mean? Something profound which, if used correctly, can help you surf reality in remarkably successful, universally productive, and satisfying ways. In a now famous story, Weick tells of a Hungarian army platoon lost in the Swiss Alps while on maneuvers. When an unexpected snowstorm hit, they feared themselves lost without hope of return. Not familiar with the mountain range, the soldiers became disheartened, until one of them produced a map from their coat pocket. Encouraged, they set up camp to wait out the storm and discussed the map, their orientation, and reflected on their steps and the future actions they would take, they now felt confident they knew the way out. The next day, they marched out of the mountains and back to the fort. Upon return they told their story to the commandant of the fort, producing the saving map. After studying it, the commandant announced that this was not a map of the Swiss Alps but in fact a map of the Pyrenees mountains of France. They had used the map from a completely different mountain range to successfully find their way out. The map, albeit wrong, had provided the cues and sensemaking needed for them to create a strategic plan and strategic plans, according to Weick, “animate people.” Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes that helped them discover what was occurring and what should be done next, proving that when you’re lost any map will do. What's the takeaway? Data doesn’t have to be perfect; arguably, it rarely is. It’s never an end but rather a beginning. It only has to generate questions, and action, which lead to better answers.?

Waffles

Herzwaffeln is a German word meaning “heart waffles.” Waffles was also the trail name of Maurice, a German hiker Anthony and I met on the AT. Waffles was accompanied on the trail by his hiking partner Jeremy “Space-pants” (named for his celestial stretch pants) who is a retired U.S. Army veteran with two tours in Afghanistan to his credit.??

I never asked Waffles how he got his name, but I could take a guess. How Waffles and Space pants became friends while hiking the AT wasn’t that much of a curiosity because random strangers often meet and form strong bonds on the trail. But what was, was how waffles, a SW engineer, could take so much time off from work to hike the trail.?Maurice was able to take the necessary 6 months (minimum) sabbatical from work in part because his work encouraged it.?As it turns out his company was not only okay with the idea, they also gave him a stipend to subsidize the trip with the request he share what he learned in a business sense from his experiences with the company upon return.??

In an American sort of way my company can also be bucketed into this open-mindedness category, but not to the degree that Maurice’s was, it took some negotiating. Working with me to clear my schedule for an agreed upon time (a month), and encouraging me to pursue it, they were politely respectful of something I thought was important. Remember, America invented the concept of pragmatism, once said to be our countries greatest contribution to the world, something I now find dubious at best. Where is Waffles now? Last month he finished the entire 2200 miles and has a fresh perspective on life and work to share.

Wrapping things up

Whats the point regarding intelligence, sensemaking, and the world? Here’s a few points in summary to help you along your way. I hope you enjoyed the article; your thoughts and feedback are always welcome.

Intelligence

We’re measuring, rewarding, and paying attention to the wrong kind of intelligence, get out into nature and your models (along with your metaphors) will change and your right hemisphere will get more opportunity to have a voice and contribute. Be wary of the machine model, it doesn’t explain everything, look for new ones. Einstein said the model we choose influences us, so mix them up.

Questions

Ask questions, lots of them. Questions lead to better questions which eventually can lead you to best answers. Look into something called Action Learning and learn how to change your paradigms by changing ?your brain. And if you need help, ask me, I know a few people.

Faith

Keep an open mind and have faith. Reserve a “big” open place in your mind for the what ifs, the what abouts, and the what’s next? ?Yes, learn to do something specific (left hemisphere) and learn to do it well.?But also save a space for the unexplained and unexplainable, for questions, doubts, for the I-don’t-knows, wonder and wonderment, and a belief in things and intelligences you can’t (yet) touch, understand, or master.

The bigger picture

Get the whole perspective before you act. There’s “yours,” “yours,” “theirs,” and “its.” The left hemisphere will try to isolate you and take the reins, it’s millions of years of evolution, don’t let it.

Objectivity

Be inter-subjective. The truest objectivity is inter-subjectivity.

Domo arigato misuta Robotto?

For the last two hundred years the machine model has underlain the ways in which we make sense of the world, particularly in biology. You may not be thinking of it but it’s there, in the background, influencing our biases and decisions, what we see and don’t see, and how we see those things. It turns out Pink Floyd was right, you don’t need to dream, “they’ll tell you what to dream.” Resist, and dream some new dreams.

Balance

Last, bring back balance. Neuroscientist Rudy Tanzi says, “you are not your brain you’re the user of your brain.” Too often we get pulled around by an unruly mind. Practice this mindfulness exercise: Imagine standing outside yourself, observing yourself and your thoughts, how would you direct and advise you? Treat your brain like you would a faithful dog. Care for it, feed it, play with it, train it, explore with it, keep it out of the neighbor’s trash, and from getting into fights with skunks or other dogs, and love it. It loves you and would do anything for you, show it what to do and how to do it right. See you on the trail.?

Dr. Zabiegalski is available to talk to your organization or venue about ambidexterity research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, business neuroscience, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, Action Learning, and storytelling. Contact Eric about a talk, keynote presentation, hike, or workshop today!