The Conscious Self

“Who are you?”

Are you a name that others around you call you by...

Or are you a set of behavioral traits that you perceive yourself to exhibit…

Or are you a mere collection of biological particles like atoms, genes, nerves, limbs and other body parts…

Or are you defined by the work you do to earn a living…

Or are you a personality profile identified by someone years ago…

Or are you a person defined by your beliefs in an overarching set of rules…

Does the answer to this question depend on the context in which it is asked? Absolutely…

Does it even make sense to have an answer to this question? Maybe not…

All these questions exhibit a spark of inquiry – we are seeking information by being curious and thinking about multiple perspectives.

As we grow from being a child to a human, we’ve all known to be asking lesser questions thereby stagnating our understanding and beginning to perceive things around us based on known answers to the initial questions we asked as a child.

So, who are we really and how do we function as an entity?

Identity and Abstraction

We are an entity of information and are powered by an internal decision engine – let’s call this our “consciousness”.

Our internal consciousness is an algorithm that is continuously learning in a dual mode – supervised & unsupervised. It is supervised when new information or experiences or interactions pass through an existing mental model or belief that we have in place. It is unsupervised when information is collected and resides within the sub-conscious and our mental models then pick it up and make meaning out of it.

When we are first brought into this world, lot of what we see around is unstructured but then as we interacted with people and/or experienced schooling we then were able to put more structure to the things happening around us. Over time this algorithm got to experience more and more things and is now able to help us make decisions every moment.

Most of our consciousness is still a black-box because we haven’t tried to break down how it works – in order to do that we would need to learn the ability to abstract.

What is abstraction – When we see, perceive and make meaning of things, we are using an interconnected network of senses (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) working with our inner engine that could be biased. To truly abstract and get a different perspective of things, place a version of yourself at a different vantage point to oversee what you do and perceive it from that perspective (this is like the concepts of god/satan/big brother/google/facebook/your own organization watching your every move closely and “stealthily”). This is very similar to the concept of empathy – being in others’ shoes, feeling what they feel of themselves and extending it to their feeling of you.

Knowing and molding your identity through continuous abstraction of information (data) shapes our consciousness both an individual or as an organization.

In an individual context, data transforms to meaningful information to then as knowledge and ultimately resides in our consciousness as wisdom.

In an organizational context, data transforms to a meaningful finding to then as an insight to driving a change in behavior and ultimately resides in its consciousness as an outcome.

The evolution of today

Abstracting a very generic theme of what is happening in the world, we can’t help but notice that identity is becoming important. The strive for proving one’s own existence and preventing extinction is on the rise.

This is true in individuals – we want to be noticed through social media, we want to let others have a good opinion of us as defined by us, we want to keep earning to feed ourselves, we want to experience more things and keep accumulating them either as physical objects or etched as memories…

…as well as in organizations – wanting to innovate products/service offerings, tapping into more of the market share, staying differentiated from competitors, having a cultural identity within the organization, acquiring more customers/consumers by displaying what the organization stands for in ethical practices, climate change, etc.

This behavior of individuals and organizations is analogous to imagined realities like religion and countries. The invention of religion made categories of people believe in a common set of rules set through stories and it helped humans and civilization progress. Then countries and borders were invented and today every nation has an identity that it stands for – this is either through making things great again or having a stance for humanity in general or to fight climate or through religion. This nationalism mindset has creeped into organizations too as they fight for identity through supremacy or by reducing dependencies and doing things by themselves or not letting any genetic transformation of the organization’s legacy beliefs to happen.

A lot of emphasis is given to the past and to the evolution of individuals and organizations and how much ever we force ourselves to say that we’ve been constant since the start, we are only lying to ourselves.

It is obvious that things are getting more and more complex and both individuals and organizations need to learn to acknowledge, embrace and eventually thrive in complexity.

Living in the moment

History will teach us that there was always an order in disorder – beyond just etymology. After something has happened, a deep-dive analysis will tell us of a pattern that existed but if you ask the individual at that moment in time – the common answer would have been that it all seemed too random and uncertain to them.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between order and disorder is where pleasure, satisfaction and inner peace lies. Too much of order – we feel disinterested and redundant and too much of disorder – we have nothing to be interested in. This spectrum is measured by a well-known thermodynamic term and recently popular philosophical term – entropy. The word comes from Greek where en means “in” and trope means “transformation”.

Disorder is not just present in broader abstraction of things, it is also present in the smallest of life structures – genes. The disorder in genes can be caused both by mutations as well as transfer by virus and other organisms.

Genes are known to be carriers of pre-packaged information across generations in organisms – they carry with them a set of instructions to create the physical body and along with it create a v1.0 of our consciousness which is meant to be curious, look at things in an objective manner and question everything around us. If genes are biological information progeny for individuals, then what is it for organizations? How can the soul of the organization carry with it all the learnings across the lifecycle of its CEOs? A legacy corporation operating for 100+ years carries with it a consciousness to be able to survive, maintain identity and safeguard itself from extinction by continuing to disrupt, innovate and provide for its customers. How do we tap into that as the senior leadership keeps changing? The founder can only survive until biology lets them. A typical analogy would be the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. At what point in time during the replacement of parts does it cease to be the “Ship of Theseus” or does it depend on having the same workers who built the original to make the modifications. This is a brilliant thought experiment on how identity and abstraction play with our mind.

Our universe was itself formed by this random collision of forces and life was formed by random collision of cells – and on the same lines – transformation, disruption, innovation and creativity are all formed by collision of ideas within individuals or between entities or within/between organizations.

Fitting culture in your consciousness

What is culture – It is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do. Within an individual, culture is about having a shared goal despite multiple schools of thought. Within an organization, culture is the soul that powers the core to operate in a duality between being at the centre to form a strategy and being at the edge to execute.

Today, tolerance for self, for others and for ideas is reducing thereby creating a lot of mental tension and anxiety. This happens in all individuals and thereby organizations also suffer the consequences of it. You will notice that most organizations today will have people engagement as one of their core strategies: this is to tackle a wide array of things like mental health, depression, anxiety as well as strengthening the connection to the organization’s vision, code of practice, keeping them relevant thereby the culture.

Depression is the regret of the past and anxiety is the concern of the future. If we do have a lot of choices, then we worry about the right choice to make and if we don’t have many choices then we’re forced to accept “what is”. It then comes down to our inner consciousness which operates with a mix of logical and heuristic factors and of course a degree of randomness (also known as error term). If you train it by replaying every past decision with a regret outcome then it leaves you in the state of depression but if you train it to accept whatever outcomes are, it makes you resilient. The concept of stoicism is particularly worth mentioning here – it is about abstraction of everything as a set of controllable and uncontrollable factors – focus on the things in your control and learn to live with the ones that are not. This mindset holds true for both individuals and organizations.

Let go of bureaucracy – In individuals, this is about not letting your pre-existing beliefs or heuristics solely making a decision but letting your most updated version of consciousness make a decision. In organizations, this is about instilling the owner’s mindset that embraces speed and accountability on the front-line rather than a command and conquer approach.

Willingness to experiment and fail – In individuals and organizations, it means the same thing. The only to be relevant and continuously learn in today’s world is to have the willingness to experiment and embrace failure.

Create a psychologically safe & a brutally candid environment – Within our minds, this is to not shut down any thought but to patiently listen to it and analyse it to embrace its shortcomings no matter how contrary it is to one own’s opinion or to public opinion. In an organization, this is about letting people be vulnerable in front of others and thereby build a sense of trust and collaboration. This is about being candid about feedback without hurting or being abrasive or brash. An objective discussion without any feelings or emotions tagged. Difficult but important.

No tolerance for incompetence – While the prior statements were relatively easy to understand and even implement, this one is hard and doesn’t allow mediocrity to survive and keep the benchmark high. In individuals, this is about having a rigorous discipline and high-quality standards for oneself. Acknowledging one’s own shortcomings and creating a plan to overcome it. In organizations, there should be no tolerance for mediocre technical skills, sloppy thinking and poor communication skills and the individuals should either be let go or moved to roles where their skills will fit.

Instil a shared vision but with pointed accountability – Make decisions and be accountable for them. Collaborate on gathering input and feedback and review decisions but the onus should be on certain individuals to make the final decision. In individuals, the vision is driven by guiding principles. The principles may evolve over time but at any moment in time, decisions are to be made with the vision in mind. In organizations, if the vision is to be a low-cost service, it must show in every decision made by everyone in the organization.

Culture is the genetic schema for your consciousness to run.

So, who are you now…