Starting Point: Future
Unscripted Leadership Project 1/8
Where do we begin to think about the future?
My experience in life focuses on observation, planning, and execution. I have the capacity for seeing patterns of behavior that revealed problems and weaknesses to people and their organizations. This talent and the accompanying skills are not unique. They are widely shared by people all over the world.
It is a grand overstatement to say, “We live in a time of change that we experience as a constant state of transition.” The more I think about this reality, the greater my awareness that predicting the future is educated guess work.
One of the developed capacities that has accompanied this time of change is the growth in belief and importance of consciousness. Scientists and socio-spiritual practitioners have a host of ways to define conscious. For some, it is an awareness from within. For others, it is an awareness of the spiritual context of earth or nature. I have interviewed both kinds on my podcast, The Eddy Network.
I don’t see consciousness as simply a brain function or an awareness rising out of our union of soul and nature. Instead, I see consciousness as the non-verbal language of reality. Awareness is being conscious of what is real. In this sense, it is more like an intuitive or tacit knowledge that is always present for us.
Louis A. Sass in his book Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought writes about consciousness.
If we define rationality in pragmatic or social terms - as a matter of practical efficiency in the attainment of goals generally accepted as being reasonable, as a tendency for one’s perceptions and judgments to agree with general opinion, or as openness to dialogue - then it is practically a tautology to equate insanity with the irrational …
It has been assumed that the madman’s point of view is not simply idiosyncratic but actually incorrect, or otherwise inferior, according to some universal standard; and this inferiority reflects some lack or defect of the define human ability. …
(T)his lack (of reason) has been viewed … as a diminished capacity for logical inference or correct sequencing of ideas; as incapacity for reflexive or introspective self-awareness; as inability to exercise freedom through independent volition; as loss of contemplative detachment from immediate sensory input and instinctual demands; or as a failure of language and symbolic thought …
It is easy to see how predictions of the future by those who are considered sane by some universal standard take on the aura of inevitability. I is thought that the rational person is the one who is the most aware, most conscious of all that needs to be seen to know what the future will be. Sass offers a counter thought to this assumption.
The notion that too much consciousness might be a thoroughgoing illness … has been, then, a common idea in the last two centuries, yet it has had little impact on the understanding of psychoses: the truly insane, it is nearly always assumed, are those who have failed to attain, or else have lapsed or retreated from, the higher levels of mental life. …
Another possibility does suggest itself, however: What if madness were to involve not an escape from but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness … What if madness, in at least some of its forms, were to derive from a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from the emotions, instincts, and the body? This, in essence, is the basic thesis of this book.
I am reading Sass’ book based on the recommendation of Iain McGilchrist. As I have thought about Sass’ thesis, I realize that we cannot know what has not happened. We can observe and see patterns that may lead us to understand the future once it arrives. We can dream and fantacize about what is possible. But we don’t know. We may even be able to plan for the future. After all, we do planning all the time. In this way, the future only exists as an idea of possibilities.
The future for me is not something to know, but rather an eventuality requiring our response. The indeterminacy of the future is one of the reasons that people dislike change. They desire certainty instead of the mystery.
The distinction between knowing what the future will be like and what we need to know to adapt to the future is the key to being prepared for what comes. John Boyd’s OODA Loop provides us a way of anticipating the future. Instead of the future being a fixed object, it is a dynamic context that demands our vigilance in observation and orientation.
Simply assuming that tomorrow will be like today or yesterday sets up for a life of chaos. Instead we need to assume we do not even know what we don’t know that will have a critical effect on our lives in the future. There is not way to be fully prepared. There is only the constant challenge to watch, listen and re-orient to changes that are constantly taking place. Being in transition is not an occasional thing. It is what life in the real world is actually like.
How then do we adapt? Let’s explore this further.