It is time to change the way we think about thinking – It often hurts to become wiser
Recently adult development theories and particularly their measures and frameworks have come under critique. One of the critiques is that it is elitist to divide humans into different stages of development and saying that some stages are better than others. And obviously, it is correct that it is elitist to say that somebody at a later stage of development, is better than somebody at an earlier stage of development. We don’t say that a toddler is worth less than a teenager because the teenager is more mature and thus at a later stage of development. However, we do prefer to ask the teenager to go to the shop for flowers instead of the toddler, and the same goes for people we trust with the power to initiate a nuclear attack. The problem, though, lies in a very different place, the problem lies in the way we treat and understand development.
The old paradigm
When computers and computer language emerged after the second world war, so did a new way of understanding human cognition. So called cognitivism replaced the old behaviorist stimuli-response (S-R) paradigm where cognition was solely seen as a process of reacting to stimuli. Cognitivists put a computer Organism between the S and the R (S-O-R). Cognition was now seen as a computational phenomenon which means that the world outside was constructed on the “inside” by representational symbols. Hence, cognition became the function of collecting information and planning an output based on the information gathered. This way of thinking is still the dominating way of thinking, particularly in education, leadership training, and development.
The problem with the paradigm, apart from being disproven by active, action oriented, embodied, and enactive neuroscience and parts of cognitive science, is that it makes development into a trivial problem only consisting of information downloading. We have come to believe that humans, just like computers, passively collects data about the world. And as more and more data are stored on the biological hard drive so it develops.
This is not the case though. Brains are not computers, and not only that, but cognition is also a brain-body-world phenomenon. And the body is crucial here, because contrary to what most of us believe, brains grew out of bodies and even though they grew larger, they still serve to solve the same key problem: how to support, maintain and optimize the body in action.
A new paradigm – the action paradigm
In the classical paradigm information about the world is the primary cognitive concern. In the new paradigm that grows fast and steady at this moment, the body in action and social interaction is the primary cognitive concern. Most of the information about the world we already know. What we often do not know is what to do in relation to the information. We might have hired smart business consultants who told us what to do. But the hard part is not what to do, but how to do it. The actions are the hard part. How to get employees onboard, how to make them understand the key issues, what to say, how to say it, what conversations should we have etc.
Such things are not matters of information and we cannot read about them, because human to human interaction depends on sensorimotor and affective capacity. Not just because we must be able to say the right things at the right moment, but because we come to understand as we interact. Hence, new ways of understanding depend on new ways of acting because the areas of the brain that generate actions are dependent on the very same areas that generate perceptions and vice versa.
In the old cognitivist view, brains could be divided into a speech area, an analysis area, an area for sensory processing and an area for action specification and one for action execution and so on. This view is crumbling because data from MRI´s, EEG’s, PET’s, and electrode recordings show us that distributed networks traversing the whole neural hierarchy (from top to bottom) necessary for a function to be processed. In the classical paradigm there was no disruption and interaction between areas, hence actions did not affect cognitions and so on.
Today we know that to be false. Today we can see that we come to know the world by interacting with it because sensorimotor and affective coupling determines interaction possibilities, and interaction possibilities determine how the world affords itself to us, hence how we perceive it.
Active versus passive development
When developmental theorists look at development, they still tend to look at it as a passive software problem, hence a problem of feeding the human system with enough information for it to grow. The belief is that we must update people´s information about how they ought to think and act, and that it should be sufficient to spark development. In the new active paradigm, humans don’t wait for the world to show itself, they actively engage it from a perspective. We actively seek to actualize our perspective, which is all our beliefs and assumptions about states, events, and objects in the world. If the world does not behave as expected on several accounts, the perspective can change. However, nothing changes without behavioral changes.
Our brains work as control systems trying to defend their perspective by staying within certain sensory, motor, and affective boundaries. We call it action as perception control. We are driven to act in certain ways to achieve certain desired states.
Children will constantly be pushed to go beyond existing boundaries of perception control, and the job of adults is to push them beyond and create a safe environment in which to grow. As children become adults, they settle at the developmental context of most adults around them, which also stops the pushing. If we were to be surrounded by adults who had been in the process of pushing themselves beyond conventional boundaries, we might feel a pull towards more boundary breaking, because our control-based predictions about how the world ought to behave often becomes violated by such people and we become curious and notice that they are doing and saying things beyond our current understanding.
Unfortunately, many developmental programs and developmental teachings linger in the safe space of theory presentation and explaining. It is not enough to be aware that something ought to change, the change in perspective demands changes in actions.
As an active organism action comes before perception. Perceptual violations drive changes in our sensorimotor and affective models and enough changes are what we eventually call a change in developmental stage or action logic.
It often hurts to become wiser
More and more leadership scientists, Barbara Kellerman in particular, have noticed for quite a while that the leadership industry (consultants, lecturers and researchers), did not, in general, deliver what it promised. It promised organizational development and leader development. To the contrary, what we have gained after all these years is more disengaged employees and more toxic organizational environments than we had.
The reason is, for me at least, obvious. We have worked in a passive paradigm, creating illusions about change, without any constructive change really happening. And I can understand why us in the industry have been afraid to embrace the active paradigm, because being active means that we need to push people and pushing does not always feel safe and it does not always render happy and satisfied customers or leaders.
I fear that what we sometimes call elitist, is what we fear to embrace. Snowden and other leadership developers and thinkers have thought out great ideas about what to do, to change organizations. However, the active paradigm calls for ‘how to’ explorations and experiments. How to become the person, the team or the organization who does not just work with a model about complexity-thinking, but who can actually see it. In the passive paradigm complexity is just a matter of enough information. In an active paradigm, we see what the cognitive systems that constructs our reality sees. We do not see beyond the limits of our models of reality. Seeing beyond our limits demands that we break down models and build up new and more complex models.
Information is not objective and there for the taking. Information depends on sensorimotor and affective coupling with structures in the environment. We cannot see what our perceptual systems do not allow us to see. We do not see the level of complexity needed, unless enough structures in the world we are looking at, resonate with the cognitive structures within our brains.
Let me give an example: If people tell me that I am hurting a friend, and I don’t see it, it is not part of my reality, and I will not understand it. If I take the feedback seriously, I can actively engage in conversations with my friend and in time I might learn to notice what the effect of my behavior has on some people. My behavior is driven by sensorimotor models that fire when they couple with something in the environment. We call this the affordance landscape. The world affords something to me that resonates with my sensorimotor models. In this case it could be my friend in certain instances.
I do not see the hurting, I just feel the pull to act in a certain way, in certain situations. When somebody tells me that I am in the wrong, they are not just giving me good advice, they are violating a part of my reality. They violate the feeling of being in the right: the pull to act. When we tell leaders that they need to create more psychological safety, we are stuck in the passive paradigm. In the active paradigm we know that if we do not feel the pull to act in a psychologically safe way, it is not part of our reality to notice when our employees sometimes feel the opposite. I have seen this a lot in my time as a leadership educator, consultant, and researcher. Leaders believe that they create psychological safety at work, whereas their employees beg to differ. None of us can be aware of all the sensorimotor and affective models that govern our behaviour and reality, but we can learn to inquire about the reality of our own reality.
An active and action-oriented revolution
We, at Amara Collaboration, call the method of testing how well our personal reality matches with the “outside” reality Action Inquiry or just (AI). It was developed by one of Amara´s founders, William Torbert. The process of inquiring in action is an active developmental method that creates actual development in the moment. We humans are often very proficient at after action reflection. We are rarely good at in the moment reflection or reflection in action. The problem with after action reflection is that we can only reflect about the parts of reality that we have access to. When we inquire in action, we can grow the limits of our reality in real time.
Instead of assuming that we are good at something, we ask. Instead of assuming why people do what they do, we ask. Instead of assuming what people are thinking, we ask. Instead of assumptions we start to expand our experiences and as our experiences become richer and qualitatively different, so does the maturity from which we see the world. You might call this elitist. I call it a necessity. We have enough assumptions in the world today. We need less assumptions and more action and with more action comes more inquiries.
It often hurts to push the boundaries from which we see the world. We are accustomed to the fact that it hurts to grow muscles. We now need to become accustomed to the fact that the neural “muscles” we use to see the world also needs some training for them to see more. And just as we learn in the gym, it hurts in the beginning and gradually it becomes more fun. Life is not about achieving more stuff, more status, and more positional power. Humans will not evolve unless we as individuals evolve, and individual evolution depends on us collecting the boundary-breaking experiences that grants us the authority necessary for people around us to want us to give back what we learned from our experiences.
Action comes before perception. Learn it and don’t forget it, and you can be the change that changes what needs changing. Enough theorizing and enough explaining. It is time to get our hands dirty, it is time for Inquiry in Action.
This brilliant masterpiece of writing was created by Johan Mellerup Traekjaer who is part of the “Heart of Amara Collaboration“