Meta Cognition

Next-level leadership is about upgrading our leadership operating system not once but rather as an ongoing process. And it begins with thinking about our thinking.

The Need for Meta-cognition (thinking about thinking)

How we upgrade our leadership as fast as technology and the world around us begins with the very way we see and think about reality.

For a clue to the answer, we can look at the journey of the introduction of steam turbines. When electric motors replaced steam turbines in industry, plant managers just plunked the electric motor down in the same spot the steam turbine and left it there for over a generation. Factories had been arranged - out of necessity - by proximity to the mechanical drive of the steam turbine. It took a generation of plant managers retiring before factories were laid out according to a new paradigm – the principle of materials flow. So that is one way to upgrade our operating system – wait for a new generation to arrive and the old one to retire -- or we can refute the dangerous idea that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it and retire our proven methods of success by inventing new ones.

The Power of Meta Cognition

Network Thinking offers Speed and simplicity.

Top Athletes don’t have faster reflexes. They have better forward pattern-recognition. 

Think of Laird Hamilton – his response was arguably much faster because he is not holding onto a fixed idea of Form or pattern. And at some level, whatever pattern you are holding, your pattern is wrong.

This is mastering Unlearning. This is Learning to Bow. This is coming from Not-Knowing. The Great Irony of Not-Knowing 

Next level leadership is about upgrading our leadership operating system not once but rather as an ongoing process.   And it begins with thinking about our thinking.

Understanding Cognition

Scientists believe our cognition works in the following way – that we create in the following order:

Salience maps - this is why there is no Seeing independent of Purpose (there is too much info in the world for our nervous systems to relay up in the system. Salience maps help order what gets presented by higher subsystems to see. This is also why marketers look to create Salience through universal triggers like Sex, Threat etc. To this we can add our own Vision or Purpose. We build our Salience map on the following stack of observations:

• Framing
• Figurization
• Foregrounding (We in the West have a bias towards the Protagonist)
• Features

A Presence Landscape – this is the existential mode described consisting above of Agent and Arena such as baseball stadium and baseball player. This is where we can ask Who are We Being? But notice that there is a step before it which determines which Being gets called up – the Framing. ZIZO addresses frame bias by explicitly asking us to choose a perspective to look from and then just as in meditation we can practice looking to and through things. Just as we might look through language so often we forget it shapes our cognition so we can sense through our glasses and forget they are there. By zooming in the machinery of cognition as a starting place, we can be much clearer as we navigate change..

Affordance Map – Things I can do. Actions I can take given the arena to advance the game. Hand and cup. We don’t see detailed data – we see walkway as in “I can walk here”. Again this is why Purpose is so important. It dictates what we see.

A Depth Landscape – Cause and effect relationships in the world that go deeper than what we can see at first blush. Again, when a small child grabs and new object and bangs it on the counter or drops it, they are exploring for hidden properties of the object.

Additional concepts to understand

• Distinctions around the tool of Language
• Network Language (network language offers a lingua Franca) to harness collective intelligence in creating an authentic dialog at scale. This is how we scale our meta-cogntion. This is how we scale our leadership at the speed and scale of innovation itself. This is how we meet the Nike Challenge.