How do we optimize for ALL ways of knowing?
Most of us make intuitive decisions most of the time. I look at two emails that need responding and I pick the one that I find most relevant. Maybe it's just laziness - I know how to respond to that one but the other needs more thinking. Or maybe it's urgent - one of them needs to be answered today for sure, and the other one can wait. Or I could choose one email because I know I can answer it before my next meeting. Or because I like the co-worker who wrote it and she seemed a little frustrated in our meeting yesterday.
The point here is: we make a lot of decisions all day. And even the simplest little choice comes with a lot of different considerations.
How do we do it then? Most of the time, we make intuitive decisions. Intuition is great because we can process lots of information at once.
If we had to make all decisions explicit by thinking about them, we would never get far. It would take too long, too much effort and be a drag. (See Kahnemann Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow.)
4 ways of knowing
I want to introduce 4 ways of knowing that I took from John Vervaeke's Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. He lists:
Vervaeke discusses four interconnected types of knowing that are crucial for a?comprehensive?understanding of ourselves and the world:
Propositional knowledge
Propositional knowledge is analytical and cerebral. It's language-based. And that's useful for many cases. But if we only make decisions via propositional means, there are two issues:
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Organizations are too "propositional"
Whenever we do things as a group, it's hard to operate on "group intuition." So we often slide into a proposal culture where every step has to be spelled out and talked about.
But if everything gets spelled out, written in a guideline, reported, and measured, it's so much information that our minds are too slow to take it all in. We get paralysed.
On top of that, intuitive decisions and perspectival knowing are often not welcome because they are not "objective" - and we leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
Now what?
Wisdom-bound organizations
In my new project, Wiser Organizations, I look at the balance of all the forms of knowing, and I look at how the advantages of different forms of knowing can be used to serve organizations.
This can mean a lot of different things - here are some examples:
Curious about this approach? Read more.
I've built my project website out more, and you can find other interesting writing pieces there. There are different ways of getting involved - have a look!
Imparo, e poi risolvo problemi.|Non credo ai metodi, solo agli strumenti.
1 年I'm not so sure that organizations are too propositional. When we interact, we make hypotheses about the content of the mind of our peers, by deductive, inductive, but also abductive reasoning, and we build our theory of mind. Isn't all of this mainly in the third and fourth category? We need to use propositional and procedural strategies to solve the tensions and conflicts that are generated by incorrect assumptions, errors in our theory of mind of in our interpretation of the one of other people. And still we miss the role of intuition and instinct in the mix. I suspect that we're trying to linearize processes that are interdependent, nonlinear, complex, because abduction is an imperfect form of reasoning, but it is also the one that differentiates us from algorithms, machines, stochastic AI.
Senior Scientific Software & Electronics Engineer. Born at 321 ppm CO2.
1 年I think of it like this: Each little neuron learns its little bit in the context of billions of other neurons and a body, and at least half of them (the right hemisphere) is attending to learning in the context of the environment to the body. What ony body is up to (which is the task of the left hemisphere) can only become attuned to what others are up to if both hemispheres are participating - and willing to attune to and become part of the team spirit that decided what’s up next. Is the spirit weakened and team actions not awesome anymore? Time time slow down to allow reflection, unlearning and re-attuning - or dissolving the team effort. Is the spirit strengthened and team actions awesome? Time to establish it as knowing by practicing and playing to expand the awesomeness. But all the time, what really goes on is our bias systems in each little neuron attuning to each other. It only operates well if it is allowed to unlearn biases that were not functional. But which egos wants to do that unlearning for a team that is not already awesome, and which awesome team is willing to initiate unlearning when no longer functional? We practice this all our lives. But do we know?