This is the “IDG Challenge” | 9

#IDG?#InnerDevelopmentGoals

Thinking — Cognitive Skills

Developing our cognitive skills by taking different perspectives, evaluating information and making sense of the world as an interconnected whole is essential for wise decision-making.

#Thinking?#CognitiveSkills

I hope you get me right on that one ...

Sense-Making

Skills in seeing patterns, structuring the unknown and being able to consciously create stories.

#SenseMaking

In my musings on complexity awareness, I have already touched a bit upon the ability to see patterns. So I would like to emphasise here to be really careful when to change from a perception mode to a projecting mode. From describing to prescribing. From being aware to make (!) sense.

Back to the brain, our “sense making machine”.

Our neurological functions are really great in “filling in the blanks”. Like the phenomenon of pareidolia, the tendency to see animals, faces, objects in e.g. cloud formations or other random “data”. It only needs a minimum stimulus to see immediately something meaningful. We make sense where there is none. And it happens so fast, we do not even think about it, we just “get” it.

Or take confirmation bias, the propensity to overvalue information supporting our thinking and to undervalue or even neglect what might contradict it.

Again the motto is: suspend judgment. At least we need to be aware that these things happen inevitably. And that it takes a second, a third, a fourth look, and maybe from different angles, with different filters, by different people, to see what really emerges as useful information.

Structure the unknown, yes. But not in my / your / our own image …

Same goes for creating stories.

We all know stories do not contain only pure and complete information. There are always the elements of self-revelation (of the storyteller), of relationship (between the speaker and the listener), and of appeal (what the speaker wants from the listener). These elements might be phrased unconsciously and reflect very much the communication style of the speaker. Which might be different from the communication style of the listener. What is the preferred channel of the speaker ? What the one of the listener ?

Options for misunderstanding abound …

There is the saying that the listener is always right in their understanding and the speaker has all the responsibility to bring the message across.

This is where consciousness becomes so important. Consciousness of all these risks that impede proper understanding. Consciousness for the responsibility we have when we want to share a story about the structure we have seen as a pattern in the unknown.

So that when we make sense, it makes sense for us all.