What could writing suitable for a VUCA world look like?
Usually when I write something, by the time I’ve worked it out, I have moved on already. Writing is an excellent way of structuring thoughts and killing the unfolding of an idea. It is so annoyingly permanent. When I’ve put it out for the world to see, new information and the process of writing itself has already seeped in and changed me (and my opinion). At the same time I like it, it is useful. It’s slowness allows me to twist, turn and fully interact with my thoughts. By slowing down I can fixate that fast gaze of mine which has a tendency to gloss over ideas, the world, and all of it. It allows me to discover the silence between the notes, that which is the groove. Perhaps that is what it takes to interact with ideas in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. This shifting between fast and slow, the noise intermingled with deep silence? Less ideas, more integration? Let’s explore!
Writing to me is almost per definition the domain of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘left’ hemisphere. Instead of existing in a vectoral, expansive quality sometimes labeled the ‘right’ hemisphere, writing forces me into discreteness and structure. By forcing the dancing, that thinking is to me, into unchangeable signs in a post or a piece of paper, it is irrevocably reduced. Worst case it ends up dead. Best case however it can be anything but dead — alive and vibrant — just unchanging. Great writing has the potential to stick with you for years and be worth returning to, as it is received from different places, unlocking wonderful new perspectives as we progress on our respective paths. The spaces between letters, words and sentences unfold in us depending on our vantage point.
The second point of tension is falling into knowing. In writing, I take a stance, in which I need to sound certain, expressing my perspective. How can I pour my thoughts onto paper and ask for the understanding of the reader (that is you), that while the words are fixed, these ideas and their meaning are unfolding and transforming? How do I communicate that that I understand that you cannot even interact with the ideas I’m writing, you are only hearing their echo in your mind (and body). All I can do is to point, rather than show the thing, and whatever it may be that you need will appear in you, if you are open to it. But how do I then get to find out what happened within you, so that I can better get to know the idea myself? My ambition with writing, when it is at its best, is as the start of a conversation — not the end of one.
This topic has been alive in me long enough. It’s time for me to take the leap and put some preliminary hypotheses out into the world. Perhaps there, in the field of collective intelligence or consciousness I will understand something that will work wonders on these tensions.
This exploration is symbolic. Hopefully pointed enough so that the contours will put us in similar territory while keeping the details fuzzy to allow for your own mind, story and context to recreate it, interpret it, interact with it. The two parameters we’ll take a look at that seem particularly relevant, perhaps even necessary (but not sufficient) is:
Willingness to do the work
Humility
Willingness to do the work
Ideas are easy to come by. But to verify them, to interact rigorously with them and to anchor them into reality, to follow them and let them unfold in you, to see where they take you and what behaviours they create, what states they put you in, that takes work.
Myself as well. I consume frameworks, glance at them, contrast them. But I only fully engage with very few of them.
I’ve recently gone over my own ideas, stories and beliefs with a fine toothed comb (again) inviting myself to really look at them. To “tend to the tiny” as Nora Bateson says. An exploration into the stories that are holding me and where they come from.
I have glimpsed the importance of discovering and accepting where my stories come from. That’s been the start of allowing me to transform from just merely the main character into the storyteller and sometimes even the director. The other parameter in that discovery has been to look closely at why I’m attracted to the story. Why is it so appealing to me? Why does this idea pull me in? What is the job that it’s doing for me, or protecting me from? When I glimpse that, I can open up to other interpretations, new perspectives with compassion. It results in a softening of the boundaries and allows for integration and expansion of my perspectives.
It is hard work to look at ideas. To deconstruct them, carefully looking at what is lost as well as what parts they contain as we peel the onion. If we don’t do that with honesty and curiosity, allowing the story to unfold in us, to unfold us. We will lose the opportunity to understand both the story and ourselves.
The reason I bring this up as the first point is because I see this as fundamental.
Especially in our current moment. However, unless we sit with them, interact with them, participate with them and allow them to participate with us, there is no way to make them useful. That which may come across as trivial may in fact be profound. Of course, just as often the reverse is true.
If we are too quick, the connective tissue, the uncertainty and curiosity never has a chance to investigate the idea. If we don’t think, we are engaged merely in simulated thinking . Instead of trying to understand how the painting (the idea) was created we just take it for what the final version of it looks like and place it in our mental gallery. Once hung, we showcase these paintings as our own, while bleakly regurgitating the contours of a work whose depth we never fully understood. We reduce and criticise, believing that we are de-constructing, and finally we get stuck in empty catchphrases. Missing what would have been available to us if we had shifted our gaze, just a little. Done the work, a bit more diligently.
We lack the time and the skill to translate concepts into a form that we can interact with. Rarely do we engage with concepts in their full complexity, putting them into our own context. That skill takes work. And time. To me personally the reward for going deep, has been vast. Going deep is another way of saying: to seriously play with ideas. By seriously I mean keeping the possibility that an idea will fundamentally transform you, open. Doing that in a playful way means to participate, to submerge yourself into the idea, to be captured by it. Fully. If we allow that to happen a few times — perhaps that will allow us more depth than slightly dipping your toe in many ponds or experiencing many trips to outer space in a continuous string of peak experiences. Perhaps it will tune our senses to receive more of that which is available to us all the time.
If all that is too fluffy for you the possibility remains open if we turn our focus towards the phenomenon of structural coupling in neuroscience. MRI’s have shown (Tania Singer among others) that practicing mindfulness and love and kindness meditation actually structurally changes the brain, in only 3 months. In young people as well as old. The requirement is practice — coming back to it over and over. To commit and allow the practice to change you. The changes are adaptive, they will differ depending on the type and amount of practice, but they lead to similar outcomes. Happier, more connected, more grateful, more compassionate humans. If we care enough to do the work we can in fact physically change our perception.
But why is it so hard? Lisa Feldman talks about our brains as machines suspended in the dark, relying only on sense data to piece together the relevant reactions. We are continuously trying to predict what is coming next based on our past experiences. That is the main thing the brain does. If we can do that, expending as little energy as we can, that counts as efficient processing. It is important to keep in mind because learning, creativity and allowing yourself to structurally change are incredibly energetically, expensive processes. Expensive enough to threaten our entire existence if we engage in it at the wrong time. Hence from an evolutionary perspective, thinking, interacting with ideas, actually spending the energy to do the work, is not what we necessarily want to be doing. Sometimes there is utility in not allowing for those echoes to reverberate but rather let them fall silently to our mental floor, it might even be a better survival strategy. Depending on the context. Yet when we engage and spend that energy, the result is neurochemical fireworks and physical rewards — but it comes at a cost.
What these two researchers are pointing to is that these things are not only ideas, they are underpinned with biological and structural implications. It could give us an indication of why it’s so rewarding to fully engage, why we experience resistance for doing so and they both seem to imply that it is a skill that can be cultivated.
Humility
I recently read a piece making the case that what we need more of in our society is epistemic humility. It’s wonderful, the subtle hint of paradox is not lost on me: to claim to know that what we really need to foster humility about is how we know. But it does match well onto what I believe to be true about the world.
We cannot know what we know, without being grounded in knowing how we know. With the humility to understand that another perspective might enrich your understanding of an issue, almost regardless of how many facts you know about it.
But it’s hard. How does one first do all the work to interact with all these ideas and to then be forced to let go of whatever knowing that interaction might have instilled? And then ride out the storm with deep curiosity, with your senses fully turned on, constantly rebalancing your nervous system so you can stay in sovereignty and dynamic balance. To listen deeply with your full being. So you can sense-make and continuously convey your impressions to those around you that depend on your perspective.
Borrowing from Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk: “The two protocols for protection are: watch out for yourself, watch out for others — there is no such thing as safety.” Safety means something static, static is rigid, rigid is fragile and fragile will break in a changing world. We need dynamic, live players that have agency and confidence to be antifragile and respond. A big part of that relates to sound sensemaking. Ah, there was that word again: sensemake. It’s been completely co opted by the pandemic (at least in my social media flow). Sensemaking has come to mean “a mind heavy process with LOTS of fancy speak” where I just recently had a revelation that there is nothing ‘mindy’ implied at all by the word sensemaking. Perhaps the term co-sensing (Scharmer) is more apt in the context — but they could actually mean almost the same thing.
Full sensory processing takes time. And space. Silence. That which seems scarce in most parts of our society today. That processing, if we let it, might even include listening to that inbetween and beyond us. That which is collective. To do that we need humility. The ability to be humbled, humiliated. Silence and humility are strengths, signs of integrity not laziness or weakness as our current paradigm has us believing.
Summing up, or actually nevermind
Nevermind. That just came to me. I thought it was witty. So another dangerous idea then. Let’s see if it survives the edit. Perhaps that is the perfect executive summary to this entire writing exercise?
Perhaps that is the non-fancy version of saying epistemic humility? My blocks and guards tend to be in my mind. So perhaps Never Mind First? Or Not Only Mind? It doesn’t ring quite as nicely, it’s not as simple. As simple as it gets, but not simpler.
I think for me nevermind is the tattoo I’ll never get and the summary of this article; never mind.
I’ll vouch to act out my programming, do the work, understand as much as I can about the thing, the thing related to the thing, the relationships between the things and me and the thing and perhaps its relationship to all of us, preferably to the extent that it loses its thingness altogether. I’ll go and curiously explore it with people I care about and some people I disagree with. Be humiliated by the thing and recover from the arrogance of knowing back into humility. There at the end of it all, at the peak of the exploration, right before the climax, I’ll let it go. Completely. Suspended.
Never mind! Never mind. Never mind,