Order for Living Creatively
Order is a Synthesis of Experience, Knowledge, Perception, and Purpose. It is a Whole perspective that provides us a way to make sense of all that we encounter in the world.
I am not a multi-tasker. But I keep putting myself in situations that require me to not only multitask but to be creative in doing so. The other day, I rented a room at our local co-working space, The Masthead, to spend the afternoon creating order for my multiple projects. I was planning for the remainder of this year.
Order
Order is not balance, discipline, or habits. They are the fruits of order. Your life can be balanced, disciplined, and filled with healthy habits, and you still fail because you did not have order in your life.
Order is larger and more comprehensive. It envelopes us, indwells within us, and carries us through times of challenge and change.
Order is greater than the sum of its parts. It is more than a schedule and a contact list. It isn’t your office, computer, or smartphone. Those are the tools of order.
When you have order in your life, you know that it transcends the minutia and trivialities of each day with a genuine sense of wholeness that has a comprehensive purpose.
Order creates the conditions for focus. This focus isn’t rational. Order is not a step-by-step, paint-by-numbers, follow-the-instructions kind of living. It is not like assembling a table or bookcase. It isn’t like mowing the grass every Saturday morning or walking the dog before you go to bed at night.
Order is more intuitive. It is like having things that you carry with you on a long journey. You climb to the top of a hill at sunset. You step back. You quickly turn around before the light is gone. You see the whole horizon. Order is the path forward.
Order is like the skill of orienteering. It is both skills and perception. It is how we see where we are and where we want to be next, a thousand steps into the unknown, and then know which trail to take as it branches off.
Order is the organizing force of structure. Order serves a purpose that transcends the structure. In his classic essay, The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan says, “We make our tools, and then our tools make us.”
Order shows us whether our social or organizational structures fulfill the purpose of their design. Structure is many things. It is social, organizational, and mechanical. It is the inanimate representation of form. It is Order that defines its purpose. The two should never be confused.
Order is a higher order of value than structure.
Order is our living system of purpose and execution.
Change
Order is the context of change.
Change is the transition of experience in time.
Change is an essential part of Order.
Without Change, there is no Order
My Design for Order
When I spent my afternoon creating order, I began with a comprehensive picture. On the wall, I put the ideas and sentences that represent the work that I have done over the past three decades. I include the following.
Circle of Impact Model of Leadership
The Five Questions that Every One Must Ask:
The Circle of Impact Guiding Principles
All Leadership Begins with Personal Initiative To Create Impact.
Start Small. Act Locally. Share Globally. Take the Long View.
Culture of Simulation and Culture of Reality: The Spectacle of the Real
Books:
Circle of Impact - 2018
All Crises are Local - 2020
Impact Starts With Me - 2020
Where Did Trust Go? - 2020
May Your No Be A Yes - 2021
Solving Problems - 2021
Circle of Impact: You have Everything that You Need (Africa edition) - Comimg May 2023
Content Development:
Business Leadership Column - 2004-2010
Leading Questions Blog - 2004-2018
Leading with Impact Blog - 2018-2022
The Future of Leadership Substack -2022-present
The Eddy Network Podcast - 2023
This is the Order of my Creative Output. I need to see the Whole of it in order to decide where I go from here. I have started a lot of projects. These are the ones that came to define who I am. Because I am a creator, not a maintainer, I have to build on and up from what I have done. There is no resting on past work because we are all in transition, all the time. Therefore, the future is to be created.
If you were to create this list, think of it as a list of the important milestones of your career. You list your different roles, the projects, the relationships, and the companies where you worked. If you are a Creative, you’d list your works of creative endeavor that represent your growth as an artist. Recognize that you want to see in this list of milestones your transition. Here you are answering, quite possibly, the first three questions of the Five Questions That Every One Must Ask.
The Question
What I have not said which is essential even before creating a Catalog of Milestones is asking the right question that initiates this process. My question is …
“What have I learned in the past five years since the publication of Circle of Impact in 2018, and what am I to do with that understanding?”
The question was initiated by the feeling that I needed to write a follow-up to Circle of Impact. That feeling was expressed in the Synthetic / Synthesis series. The outcome was the realization that I have a lot of study to do before I could write that book. My goals were to produce something for my 70th birthday in June. However, the time is not there to do what I want to do.
The Purpose is to see our lives as something Whole.
Add to our list the People and Places that have contributed to developing who we are. The people to include should be described as having a part in creating a particular change in who I am. It is made up of people who had a positive effect and those whose negative impact created positive growth in my life.
You can see that what I am doing is answering the first question of the Five Questions That Every One Must Ask: What has changed? How am I in Transition?
I have personally taken myself through this process twice in the past two years. I am doing this to grasp a whole picture of what I am doing. I don’t want to be lost in the particulars of my life. I want to Synthesize all these aspects of my life, past, present, and future, in ORDER to create the Order I need for the next stage of my work
The Impetus for Order
For many of you, you are thinking, “I can see some value in doing this. But it seems like a lot of work for something that I already know.”
Hmmm.
You see … that is the problem. We think we already know what we need to know. Even if we don’t, we just need to read a book to catch up. This is what Structure does to us. It binds us to ways of thinking that are regimented and restricted. There is no thinking out-of-the-box. Even when there is thinking out-of-the-box, we are not thinking outside of the box of Structure. We keep thinking very derivatively of what has been the conventional way. We need to see that real out-of-the-box learning is iterative and emergent.
Structure is rational, and therefore, is narrow and exclusive. What it excludes is a rationalization of what is true because it is what makes us comfortable.
Here is what I have seen from some of the people who I have encountered with the Circle of Impact. They say, “I do not understand it. It is too complicated. Not practical enough” If this is you, I say,
“You can’t understand it because you have been trained, programmed, and socialized into very narrow, binary habits of thought. You make quick decisions about relevance based on how it makes you feel and whether it fits within your already preprogrammed perception of the way the world works. You acquired this prejudicial approach to ideas from the Institutional Structures of your world. They have trained you to be a master practitioner of cognitive dissonance. You are not stronger, safer, more secure, or more successful as a result”
Many others have found the Circle of Impact helpful. You tell me about how you use it to solve problems, evaluate situations and explain the strategies of your business. The problem is that if you are a mid-level manager gaining leadership capacity by utilizing the model, you will begin to stand out. If upper management is insecure in their position, you will be viewed as a threat. I learned this when at my annual performance review I was told, “You are being too presidential.” “NO! I am doing my job!” I knew then that it was time for me to leave.
SEE: This is how Structures function to dumb down and restrict personal initiative.
In ORDER to break out of this narrow, reactive mindset, we need to see the WHOLE picture of our lives or as much of it as we can recollect. The trail of Milestones throughout your career points towards the future of your life and work. This is why “We are All in Transition. Every One of Us. All the time.”
Where I am today - right now, as I am writing this post - is the product of two personal change decisions. The first came in November 2014 when I decided, at the age of 61, to start my career over. The second came in August 2019, at the age of 66, when I decided that I need to expand my reach beyond explaining the Circle of Impact.
You can see the difference in these two moments of decision in the posts at my Leading for Impact blog and my Substack.
I didn’t know where the second of these decisions to change would take me. Within a few months, I found myself conducting leadership training in Kenya, Uganda, and Benin, followed by the writing of seven short books, the formation of the Global Impact Network, the establishment of my Substack, the creation of The Eddy Network Podcast, and the publication of a revision of Circle of Impact for distribution throughout Africa. All of this is possible because I have worked to see my life and my work as something whole and integrated rather than something conventional and balanced.
What I am describing here are the building blocks of Order.
What is this Order?
Order is a Synthesis of Experience, Knowledge, Perception, and Purpose.
It is a Whole perspective that provides us with a way to make sense of all that we encounter in the world.
It isn’t just putting things in the correct place. It is rather seeing our lives as a Whole, not as a group of Particulars. Michael Polanyi in his four McEnerney lectures (audio available here.) talks about the relation between particulars and wholes. He tells a story of a physician who identifies a disease without knowing any of the particulars of the disease in the patient. Polanyi describes this perception as Tacit knowing or “knowing more than we can tell.” He says we are aware of things as wholes or as a comprehensive phenomenon because of this way of bringing together ideas and meanings that we have that we don’t know how we came to have them.
From my experience, our sense of identity, our sense of purpose, our sense of right and wrong, what it means to fall in love, and when we sense danger, are forms of Tacit knowledge. We make decisions all the time based on reasons that we can not identify. We have a gut feeling about who to trust and who not to trust. All these are functions of Tacit knowledge.
My exercise in creating Order is an attempt to capture this Tacit understanding of my life. The problem as Polanyi describes is what happens when we begin to focus on the Particulars instead of the Whole.
The Particulars we know directly. The Whole we know Tacitly.
The problem is that when we begin to focus on the Particular we lose sight of the Comprehensive Whole. We only see that which we know directly. But this direct knowledge is not a picture of reality. Tacit knowledge, seeing the Whole of a thing, is where we discover reality.
Polanyi describes this Tacit knowledge as Personal Knowledge.
“I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skillful knowing and doing is … the personal participation of the knower in all sorts of understanding. … Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous.”
Polanyi describes his pathway to discovery.
It seemed to me then that our whole civilization was pervaded by the dissonance of an extreme critical lucidity and an intense moral conscience, and that this combination had generated both our tight lipped modern revolutions and the tormented self-doubt of modern man outside revolutionary movements. So I resolved to inquire into the roots of this condition.
My search led me to a novel idea of human knowledge from which harmonious view of thought and existence, rooted in the universe, seems to emerge.
I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.
There is an old adage that perception is reality. We perceive reality which is how we come to establish Order, by attending to and observing ourselves in the world. Polanyi uses the term Tacit knowing as the outcome of this perception of the world.
Not only do we know more things than we can tell,
we know things that we cannot say how we came to know them.
What we are doing through this Tacit knowing is experiencing the Order of the world.
This perception of the world is embodied through learning and discovery, and indwells within us as Tacit knowledge.
The identification of tacit knowing with indwelling involves a shift of emphasis in our conception of tacit knowing. We had envisaged tacit knowing in the first place as a way to know more than we can tell. We identified the two terms of tacit knowing, the proximal and the distal, and recognized the way we attend from the first to the second, thus acheiving an integration of particulars to a coherent entity to which we are attending. Since we were not attending to the particulars in themselves, we could not identify them: but if we now regard the integration of particulars as an interiorization, it takes on a more positive character. … instead of observing them in themselves, we may be aware of them in their bearing on the comprehensive entity which they constitute. It brings home to us that it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning.
You look at someone’s face, and you know whether they are happy or confused. No one taught you this. You learned it through thousands of encounters with people. This sense is an intuitive apprehension of that person’s real state. Intuition is the product of Tact knowing.
My planning exercise above had the intention of integrating all the Milestones of my work into something new and whole. I had a Tacit sense last fall that all these particulars in my thinking and work were becoming more integrated. However, because I was so focused on the particular of the next Substack post, and the development of my podcast, I could not see, as is said, the forest for the trees. It is from this inner sense of a need to capture the Whole of what I was experiencing that the idea of Synthesis emerged to be the organizing idea for this project.
Order,
therefore,
is Personal Knowledge
integrated within each of us as
the Synthesis of Experience, Knowledge, Perception, and Purpose.
It is a Whole perspective that provides us with a way to make sense of all the Particulars that we encounter in the world.
Next Steps
Step One: Impact Day
Much of what I have described here is part of a program that I call Impact Day. It is a process where I help people establish clarity about themselves and their future. It is a valuable process. Impact Day was developed as a way to help people apply the Circle of Impact in their lives.
It is now time to turn my Impact Day program into a manual for applying the Circle of Impact. This will be my next book.
I want to write this book in the context of an active process of taking people through it. If you are interested in participating, become a paid subscriber to my Substack. And you’ll be invited into a group to discuss this process.
Sign up before April 1 as I am going to raise my subscription rates as my costs are growing. I anticipate this process taking about six months.
Step Two: Synthesis
Having gone through this process of creating Order, I had determined that I will write a book under the working title of “Synthesis.” It will be a follow-up book to Circle of Impact. I am going to give myself a year to produce this book.
If you are interested in working with me on this project, let me know by email. I don’t know what that looks like. But I would like to be in deep communication about what I am trying to convey.
Step Three: Order for Impact
The Order that I have described here provides the structure I need to achieve my goals. This means not just the creation of two new books, but also continued writing here at Substack, and the production of The Eddy Network Podcast.
Order of this kind is for the purpose of putting ourselves in the best position possible to fulfill our purpose for impact. Instead of having to figure out what I am to do next, I have created an Order for my life as a Whole, and expressed it through the Particular’s of each day, so that I can fulfill my purpose for impact.