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.