How Important is Metathinking and Thinking Management Achieving SDGs, and in Your Organisational, Economic and Environmental Management Success?

We still live in a world in which we are cultured to treat knowledge with greater importance than thinking and in which we closely associate performance in companies, organisations and economies more with knowledge than with thinking. Where thinking is considered, it is only given superficial attention. This is in contrast to the days of the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Learnado Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Kekule, Nikolai Tesla, Greggor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Archimedes, Marie Curie, Crick Watson, Thomas Edison and others, the periods of great thinking, imagination, inventions, knowledge creation and sharing, philosophy and with all this the great inventions, innovations and discoveries. This was a period of intellectual freedom; a period where people where regarded for their thinking more than their knowledge and also where, if one knew, it was most likely that they knew from first hand, from personal discovery or from improving on the knowledge of others. For example;

Socrates was Plato’s teacher and Plato was Aristotle’s teacher. The order was important because the teacher generated knowledge, ideas and theories and he would teach these to her students. The teacher was not a mere transmitter of other people’s idea. The teacher was, therefore a master to his students in the true sense of being a master. The key here is that;

The teacher was first and fore most an original thinker, a philosopher as well as a student of his own subject; she was not just a conduit of other people’s theories and ideas and knowledge. Both the teachers and the students put a premium on thinking. This is exactly the reason why there where so many fierce intellectual debates during the time, with some recorded to last for days and even years as people challenged each other’s thinking, each other’s theories and each other’s ideas. All this, sadly, has been to a large extent been exterminated and replaced by rot learning and thinking has been replaced by hypnotic recitation of other people’s knowledge, ideas, principles, opinions and assumptions. Original thinking has been subdued and with this subduction a growing myriad of global challenges and situations that cannot be solved neither by our current body of knowledge nor by any subject matter knowledge but by original thinking.

In the reality of things, there are only two sources of human problems and challenges. The first is forces of nature beyond human control such as floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes and landslides and others. The second source is the human being. How do human beings create problems?

In general we say humans create problems through behaviour, which is generally correct. However, mental activity drives human behaviour. In other words, behaviours are a result of mental activity and mental patterns. This mental activity can be deliberate and conscious or it can be automatic and unconscious. Mental activity is what I equate here to thinking, although I am aware we could further refine it into emotion and cognition.

Our thinking creates all the non-physical problems we face. Our thinking is also the most powerful weapon in preventing the problems we create and in solving the problems that we create. Our knowledge is only as important as it supports our thinking. Our skills are directed by our thinking. When we ignore our thinking we ignore the most vital part of solutions and problem solving.?The quality, magnitude and ecology of our thinking determines our performance and results in our organisations and economies and in dealing with the environmental, social and economic challenges that we face.

1.??Poor thinking leads to poor outcomes

2.??Bad thinking produces bad results

The Power of the Unconscious Mental Activity

The power and importance of understanding thinking become even more apparent when we study psychology and especially studies of how the human brain works. And this is a subject that decision-makers and their teachers and advisors must familiarise themselves with but that, regrettably, they don’t. Here are the scary parts of it all;

1.??That the human brain operates beyond our conscious awareness as much as 80 percent of the times including in making decisions. This means that we rarely know or control with precision how we make our decisions even the most serious ones.

2.??Emotions, not logic, plays the greater part in making decisions even for top decision makers in situations where logic is important. Knowing this you will never be surprised why poor and bad decisions are so common in places of top decision-making and more so in politics.

3.??Factual knowledge does not directly control our mental and physical action-generating mental system; the reason why we often make decisions and take actions that are not consistent with our knowledge.

The Problem of Hakirasis

The world’s overall capacity to generate solutions, to create new knowledge and to solve the complex and difficult social, environmental and economic problems we face has degenerated drastically over time. This degeneration does not mean the genetic power and capacity of the human brain to think has gone down. Instead, the degenerated capacity is socially triggered through the development of a poor and mistaken culture of placing knowledge ahead of thinking.

When humans think they know; they engage much less in thinking. When the brain does not engaged in enough serious thinking; its capacity to goes dormant. This is a simple brain principle that what you do not pay attention to often, or what you do not use often, you lose its power. This is the same principle in operation when you lose your muscles when you stop exercising them. ?This has happened and is happening in the world. The world’s capacity to think is atrophying. The global human brain is thinking less and less as more and more is also being automated through technology.

There is also a thinking disease called hakirasis which is now a global pandemic. Hakirasis is the hypnotic acceptance of knowledge, ideas, results, assumptions, solutions, information and situations by humans. This is happening everywhere and the operating model is very simple;

1.??????You have a guru or opinion leader or influencer

2.??????The guru, opinion leader or influence pushes his ideas, knowledge, assumptions or perspectives

3.??????Their followers hypnotically take and accept the ideas, knowledge, assumptions or perspectives like, hooker and sinker without questioning and simply on the basis of them being from a guru or “world leading expert” or “influencer”. They also spread the same to the world without any question and without any thinking about it or through it.

This phenomenon is now a global thinking pandemic and is creating all sorts of new problems while undermining the world’s capacity to generate solutions for the current and future problems; problems that need thinking.

In companies, organisations and economies, a simple shift from knowledge to thinking will bring dramatic changes in performance, results and problem solving capacity.

1.??Thinking solves more problems than knowledge.

2.??Many of the most important problems are not solved by knowledge or experience but by thinking.

The world urgently needs to change. Knowledge is important but more important is thinking. The time to start investing more in metathinking and in thinking management is now. Metathinking and thinking management must be a mandatory part of the global educational curriculum straight from kindergarten to the highest level of education. By ignoring this, we are creating a global time bomb or ourselves by having more and more problems the collective global knowledge won’t solve and only thinking can solve.

[email protected] ?+263-77-444-74-38

?Simon Bere, 2023