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The ultimate freedom lies in our attitude which is our posture or relationship towards our Experience. There really is no Experience apart from our relationship to our experience.
The ultimate freedom lies in our attitude which is our posture or relationship towards our Experience. There really is no Experience apart from our relationship to our experience. (Our relationship to our Experience is our Experience). Thus when solving for the Network Experience all any of can really do is put our own Life-masks on First.
As Victor Frankl put it in a Nazi prison camp deprived of all dignity by sadistic guards he realized that in the space between Stimulus and response lies Choice. And therein lies Dignity and Freedom. In the case of Frankl these were one and the same: for his choice was to make sure that his suffering served the greater good. His ability to view it through that lens gave him resilience and hope as all around him perished.
Step into freedom
Very few things that we feel we are constrained by in life are in fact real constraints. That is very few constraints are laws of physics. Most of us forget this and so as the zen saying goes “bind ourselves with no ropes”. Worse, research on Learned Helplessness* shows that even when what used to be a constraint goes away, people and animals act as though the constraint is still there. In studies, flies or bees kept in a jar with a lid long enough, will never fly above the height of the jar once the lid is removed. (other example Dog on leash and artificial rabbit. Dog stops at 25 foot)
As we saw in Chapter 1 the lid is coming off the jar. The ceiling on performance is being redefined in every domain. We have a bright digital future, a veritable cornocupia of abundance in terms of an explosion in capability. And as we saw with the Factory Managers, it is too easy to remain in existing paradigms “to bind ourselves with no ropes” when technology removes the limiting constraints in the real world but not in our minds.
Certainly, leaders can do smart things like looking at new technologies and imagining what constraints they could remove in our processes and our business model designs. But it is helpful to do something much more fundamental first, to make a global shift to living outside of perceived constraints as opposed to inside of them*. (the old getting out of the box problem shows how difficult this is to do)
These constraints are only world ”views” (not worlds) and we know that. Yet we reify them every step of the way by inhabiting them so fully as if they were true, we are prone to Confirmation Bias where we only see the data that confirms what we already know and causes us to miss that which we do not.
When we inhabit our ideas as though they are reality in this way, they become prisons.
We often think we have become cynical that we don’t believe in anything anymore. But to the contrary psychologists tell us that unless we are actively engaged in real problems directly in front of us, we retreat into Ideology.
Vince's work has always been about the Possibility or the Power that Opens up when we are not standing in our own way.
Stepping into freedom involves stepping out of frame, any frame, into no game at all.
Why is this so important? As Adam Grant points out in his latest book Think Again, in age of Acceleration, a new skill Unlearning is more important skill than Learning. (It may sound easy but it is not. Adam Grant shows us that wildfire fighters routinely die in situations they could avoid if they just dropped their equipment. But they are trained not to as firefighters)
Given this, Not Knowing just got a whole heck of a lot more useful or adaptive than it ever has been. Think back on your own history. For most of our lives in school and at work, we were punished for not knowing and rewarded for Knowing. (Next Level Leadership is strange like that. What was down is up and what was up is now down). But as you will see, it is not easy to just decide to step into not knowing.
Getting past frame bias
When people say “get out of the box”, what they are really talking about is getting past frame bias. Getting into not knowing. Frame bias is tricky because as the classic” get out of the box” challenge demonstrates – we are framed by situations continuously and unconsciously*. As you saw in the research example above – children were primed to do worse just by hearing their genders performed poorly. Likewise having visual prompts of strong female STEM figures in a testing room causes woman’s scores to rise.
Learn more about a frame bias called the Story Box that is created through conflating facts with interpretations about facts. Click here.
In the classic “think outside the box” puzzle people are asked to connect 9 dots with four lines without crossing lines, retracing or lifting the pencil. Most people have by now seen this problem but if you never have it can be instructive to wrestle with it. Below are some of the frustrated configurations you might find.
Like a zen koan this problem can’t be solved on the plane in which you are attacking it (This is what zen koans teach). In this case, the prison is entirely in your mind - the frame of staying inside the lines – and the solution of course is jumping out of this box frame that the 9 dots implied to our minds.
Separating data and interpretation is helpful but only takes us so far. Why?
Given that this problem of frame bias is continuously arising based on prompts in our landscape, it is not enough to “become self aware” or to realize we have always had a false belief about ourselves. As liberating as this can be, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
We have to dive into the projector of the Story Box – the source of meaning-making itself. We must dive into our meta-cognition or our Thinking about our Thinking*. And come up with a way to explicitly evolve it – much faster than we are accustomed to. Solving the Nike Challenge starts here.
*In the words of systems thinker Derke Carrerra, Avoiding reality bias involves two things. First, it involves recognizing that mental models play a role in everything we think about the world around us. Indeed, the mental models we have lead directly to our behavior. If we think the world is a certain way, even if it is not that way, we will act upon that erroneous belief. So realizing that we experience the world indirectly through the lens of our mental models is the first step. Second, we must develop metacognition
Step out of the Tyranny of the Intellect. Stand in Imagination.
Don’t focus on improving What Is. Invent what isn’t. Most of life adapts to what is. And stays there. Psychologists have a word for this and decades of studies to back up the idea of Learned Helplessness. As we showed with the Plant managers and the Easter Islanders, we humans ancient and modern individual and collective have a tendency to get stuck in what is. Again what is remarkable about humans is the fact that we can create at all in the sense that our tools and worlds actually evolve (unlike any other animal).
Data is great for improving what is but we want to stand in Imagination and invent what isn’t. Imagination -This is a Giant Reason to Step out of the Tryanny of the Intellect.
From Imagination we can Stand in a new Starting Place with Conviction
It is critical that we do so because we have discussed “Possibilities” do not exist in reality. So data by definition doesn’t show them to us. Now we can hold them up to the Skylight (as in the example of the Skylight quote about Accounting) and in that we will find the difference between wizardly insight.
As we have seen Standing in this Place is its own Reward. It is the place where Intrinsic and Extrinsic come together. Now it is up to us to cultivate discernment above all. The Growth Mindset and Ray Dalio's Sellf 2 Tradeoffs are remarkably similar .
A new starting place: Coming from our Commitments (coming from our commitments not a “should” kind of way but from an Inside-Out that is the only Authentic Way to practice Inside Out Leadership.
Wave-Jumping (keeping up with the Disruptive Waves of Innovation) requires: upgrading our Is, I and Because.
Is, I and Because are not fixed and immutable. They never were. But the fact that how we relate to reality changes it is more true than it ever has been before.
For example, Dr. Martine Rothblatt developed a drug and a drub company to address her daughter’s debilitating disease. Dr. Rothblatt didn’t take any obstacles from the world of existence as obstacles. She observied- one – a solution must exist. 2. I will find it 3. I will develop it. She found a solution already patented at a drug company but undeveloped because the market was tiny and until that time the most anyone had paid for a course of a drug was $10 per year which made the economics unassailable based on past practice. But Dr Rothblatt came instead from her Commitments.
With the lid coming off of the jar of possibilities at an Exponential pace, now more than ever we must be guided less by our past and more by our future – the future we intend to see come to pass, ie our Vision and our commitments.
The more tools nature puts in our hands, the more likely that any previously perceived boundary is no longer there. Think of it in terms of scaling your network- in a world of abundance, the answer already exists, it is just a matter of connecting to it – just as Dr. Rothblatt did with her daughter’s rare illness.
Dr Rotthblatt is a Next-Level Leader in nearly everyway. She has pioneered an international agreement on Shared Value Creation for Genetic property ensuring that a people whose genetic material are used for life-changing science are in fact compensated for their contribution in the form of a percentage royalty on all revenues. This is in addition to having a created a Guiness Record for first electic helicopter and having started Sirius satellite. She is an trans-gender and robots rights advocate.
Freedom has many dimensions. No need to be binary:
- No Reason to make it an Either/Or. You can be a Hybrid. You can always be a Hybrid.
- You can now afford Fulfillment
The Narcissus Problem and the Keys to Performance
“in my culture, names are considered a form of cage” – bird person in Rick and Morty
Identity is a master key to both and Learning and Unlearning.
As we saw this part of our brain that thinks in terms of a self and others and narratives about past and future – can be a major source of advantage - The main way it drives us forward is through Identification with a Vision and with a Future Self consonant with that vision.
It can be a source of pain and poor performance. Let’s explore how that is.
The relationship of identity, suffering and effectiveness.
Neuroscience experiments show that if I tap your hand repeatedly under a table at the same time tapping the table, after a few minutes if I strike the table, your galvanic skin response will show a reaction identical to that of if you have been struck. This is because “Neurons that fire together wire together.” It is this ability to identify with an input which makes humans ready-made cyborgs. This allows us to “play the game” of life. And it is this ability to identify has allowed us to create the shared intention that allowed us to dominate the planet.
But as these neuroscience experiment show this ability to identify is not only a source of effectiveness. It is also a source of suffering (and as we shall see an obstacle towards transformation). As the buddha put it, there are two kinds of arrows in life. The first is a physical arrow. There is nothing I can do about that one the buddha said. But there is a second arrow – “the damn I got shot by an arrow” reaction. And that one is entirely optional* (and as we shall see saving the energy we would have spent on it doesn’t just make us feel better it makes the world positively luminous).
If you remember the story of Narcicus, he was a god who became trapped when he fell in love with his image in the pool. This is the cardinal error. As they say, Narcicus was a god. But he forgot his divinity when he fell in love with his form.
Seeing that You are no thing that you identify with is to cut through the Gordian Knot of Stress associated with being a self in the world. You are already Free of all Identifications*
*As they say in Buddhism, there is no liberation apart from the fact that despite all of our grasping, we were never attached to anything in the first place. In this Buddhism and science agree as it is the case that there is just experience arising in your awareness. There is no little person inside arising that it is happening to
This is important because as Wharton professor Adam Grant points out, Identification is the master impediment to reinvention. To underscore this, Grant shares stories of Firefighters who burn to death holding their equipment in fires they could have easily outrun had they dropped their equipment. But they don’t because it is so trained into their identity of who they are to hang onto their equipment at all costs. This is what it means to be a firefighter.
Like Narcissus, you, as awareness, are not a thing at all but rather an Emergent property of the universe. Something that doesn’t seem to have existed at the beginning but arisen alongside greater and greater complexity in the outside world. Seeing that you are “no thing” is to cut through the Gordian Knot of stress.
To see that you are no thing is to Trans-rational - to evolve beyond identifying with the Avatar in your head. Evolution proceeds from sensation to symbol to concept to rule to bundles of rules or personality and so it is that evolution can logically proceed beyond the level of personality.
This is what some cognitive scientists now believe is what enlightenment experiences are pointing to: To be able to access one’s perspective. To be able to think. And not be driven by it.
See the paradigms that are driving you
Until you see the paradigms that are driving you, it is very difficult to drop hem. And knowing when to drop a paradigm is incredibly powerful. But as humans find dropping the past to be exceedingly challenging.