Category: New Perspective on Talent

In my January 20, 2016 post I described how upon joining a company, employees are given an incredibly limited perspective of the larger enterprise in which they work – and I referred to this as the dungeon entrance. The question is, how to see beyond our cell?

In order to find our way out of this dungeon, we must first understand something about the composition of its walls and the design of its locks. Clearly, the dungeon is a metaphor is not a real physical prison. It is something subtler. Its walls constrain not our physical bodies, but rather our understanding, so it is our minds that must find the way out.

As humans we inherit sparkling cognitive abilities. Our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, are extraordinarily attuned to perceiving and understanding the physical world around us. Our minds construct from these diverse perceptions an integrated image of the world around us. Take some time and look around you: observe how wonderfully your mind maps sound to source, touch to vision, and constructs a 3-D model out of these inputs. And our skill with language is truly marvelous; watching ourselves use language is like watching spider monkeys swing through trees – we exhibit a degree of grace that defines us as a species.  But our abilities are a solution custom-made to solve the specific challenges presented by the physical world in which we must survive. And like most purpose-built solutions, they fall short when used to solve for a fundamentally novel environment.  Large enterprises present a landscape far more alien and resistant to our comprehension than would any physical prison. This is because the enterprise is invisible, complex, and illusory. In my next posts, I will explain.

 

 

 

The Dungeon Entrance problem from the previous post will be a recurring theme in these pages. It is about the relationship of the individual to the larger system, and it will show up in two ways. The first is the one described above, in which an individual struggles to understand the system in which he or she resides.  The second has to do with how we position our selves mentally in relation to complex systems. The post enlightenment method is to stand at a distance from the system and study it third person. This method likes numbers, diagrams, calculus, statistics. It likes to generalize and classify. For information it turns to instruments.  It is epitomized by science, and has brought us an age of plenty.  I will refer to this method as the process approach. The second method is a first-person approach. It likes narratives. It likes words, colors, sounds and their arrangements. It trusts human senses and attends to not only what those senses perceive, but also how we feel about what we perceive.  I will refer to this as the design approach.  Both are powerful. Both have enormous potential to improve human existence. Both have limitations. They are hard to do at the same time, but as I will make clear, both must be interwoven to completely successful at overthrowing how enterprises think about talent..