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Embracing a New Consciousness

 

Before Newton made his larger than life mark on history, people in western societies viewed life largely through the lens of a cognitive platform laid down by the Church. Of course its representations of reality were grounded in faith rather than in science. The laity was expected to accept these representations without questioning their validity. But Newtonian science changed that. It altered how people both inside and outside of science cognitively connected to the world. Faith may have remained a major influence in many people’s lives, but reason and logic, however imperfectly executed, came to generally have the larger influence on people’s worldviews. 

This has been the case for over three centuries. Never mind that a person is untutored in the ways of science. Faith is not enough for most of us. We still want proof of merit before we vote, buy, or accept someone else’s word about what is true and what is not. It matters little that the proof we accept as golden is often fool’s gold. Our reasoning is not always as fastidious as we would like to believe.

Now, much as happened in the 18th century when an ecclesiastically shaped consciousness gave way to a new consciousness rooted in Newtonian science, a new consciousness is emerging. It is better suited to our times. The diversity, speed and scale of challenges that confront us require a wider field of vision than Newtonian consciousness affords.

As never before, business managers need a consciousness that is more conducive to innovative thinking than Newtonian consciousness is. Newtonian consciousness reflects a bias toward the status quo that can work against finding the best solutions.  It favors the tried and proven over the novel and speculative. But ever since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990s, many great breakthroughs in business have flowed from novel and speculative ventures in the marketplace. And many companies have failed to capitalize on opportunities opened up by the Internet because they viewed it through the narrowly focused lens of Newtonian consciousness.

The present tenuous status of many newspapers across the country testifies to the dangers inherent in applying Newtonian consciousness to contemporary challenges. Who would have imagined just a few years back that that a mostly free classified advertising service could so undermine the economic viability of newspapers as craigslist has?  

The music industry is another industry whose myopic clinging to the status quo has cost it dearly. In fact, well before the Crash of 2008, countless companies in numerous industries were facing their demise because of continuing to view the world in terms of the past. One study showed that about 20 percent of regional malls were failing.

The truth that many companies have yet to successfully grapple with is that the Internet has deeply and forever changed the rules of marketplace engagement. Everyone has heard by now insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results. But lacking a clear vision of what they face, that is just what many companies are doing. Failing to follow Einstein’s dictum that a problem can’t be solved in the same consciousness in which it was created, they keep applying old ways.  

These hapless companies need liberation from Newtonian consciousness. They need a cognitive platform that facilitates innovative thinking, not more ways of applying old solutions to solving problems. In neurological terms, they need a more holistic cognitive platform that integrates the output of left brain (quantitative) and right brain (qualitative) thinking. I refer to this as organic consciousness because it reflects more accurately the natural disposition of the brain to assess matters intuitively (mainly in the right brain) before putting them under the scrutiny of the analytic left brain.

Left brain or Newtonian consciousness discounts the value of qualitative thinking. In so doing, it severely inhibits creativity which relies heavily on intuitive processes. This can prove fatal to a company facing unfamiliar challenges that call for innovative “outside-the-box” thinking. People who view matters through Newtonian consciousness dread going outside the box. They cling to the status quo like a toddler does her blanky. 

In my next post I will cite several examples of companies that benefit from organic consciousness and draw clear comparisons between organic consciousness and Newtonian Consciousness.

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Liberating Management from Newtonian Consciousness

      There has been little argument about the cause of the 2008 Crash: collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, followed by an implosion of financial markets. But those explanations fall short of accounting fully for what precipitated the worst financial crisis 80 years. A solid case can be made that the root cause of the 2008 Crash lies in how we organize and run our businesses, governments and personal lives.

       In negotiating our professional and private we work primarily from a mode of consciousness better suited to the horse and buggy age – perhaps because it originated then. In those days, life unfolded at a slower pace, with less complexity and little change from one year to the next. There was about life a certain mechanistic predictability. The seasons came and went, with little happening to distinguish one year from the next except for experiences that have been part of human life for thousands of years. 

The times we now live in are radically different. They unfold at a pace bewildering to a brain that evolved to accommodate a slower moving and less complex world. These sometimes numbingly challenging times call for a consciousness that heeds Einstein’s wise observation that at times problems arise that cannot be solved in the same consciousness that created them.

       It is not too much to say that human survival could ultimately depend on our ability to enter a new consciousness, one that liberates the human imagination from old, outdated ways of approaching life’s challenges.

For more than two centuries, we have carried on life mainly as seen through the lens of a consciousness drawn from Newtonian science. This consciousness promotes worldviews that are simple and unambiguous. It is rooted in a materialistic conception of life in which nearly everything that happens has a clear-cut cause whose effects can be anticipated. In this way of looking at the world, what cannot be measured is unworthy of attention. Reality is tangible. Nuance and uncertainty exist only in people’s minds, not in how reality unfolds. There are no surprises in Newton’s clockwork universe. When we fail to anticipate an event it is either because we lacked enough information to anticipate it, or it didn’t matter much to us in the first place.

From falling apples to heavenly bodies hurtling through space, Newton believed all motion in inorganic nature occurs in predictable ways. This has inspired scholars for more than two centuries to seek out the Holy Grail of the social sciences: the equivalent of Newton’s three laws of motion that would make people as predictable as comets. No field of study has been more obsessed in this pursuit than economics.

To this day, Newton’s mechanistic view of the universe still influences those who try to divine the twists and turns of markets But alas, no one has yet discovered the basic laws of economics – or more fundamentally and necessary to the task –  the basic laws of human behavior. Lately, however, it seems a growing number of minds are realizing that humans really are unpredictable in any kind of Newtonian sense. We are not stimulus-response organisms whose every act has a direct cause that makes every act predictable. Were it otherwise, free will would be an illusion.

So what drives scholars, analysts and others to strive fruitlessly for over two centuries, doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a testable unified theory of markets? Some wags have joked, “It’s physics envy. Economists want the certainty that physicists can count on.” 

But maybe that’s not much of a joke, after all. We often hear in newscasts after a surprisingly bad day in stocks, “Wall Street hates surprises.” There are no surprises in a Newtonian universe. Natural events in the inorganic world are knowable in advance.  But think about this: if the same were true on Wall Street, there would be no Wall Street. Stock markets are games of chance; surprise is part of the deal.

So there you have it. Untold numbers of very smart people, some of whom have won Nobel prizes for their brilliant output, devoting professional lifetimes to an unobtainable goal: removal of surprises from scenarios involving human behavior in the marketplace and elsewhere.

We would all be served better were more effort spent in figuring better ways to deal with unpredictable events than is common in business. Companies need to liberate themselves from the constraints of linear Newtonian consciousness. They will stand a better chance of surviving by reorganizing themselves to better cope with emergent events – events that cannot be predicted. Professor Jeffrey Goldstein of Adelphi University’s School of Business defines emergence as "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems." Emergent events seem to come from out of nowhere, sometimes with great disruptive power. They do not appear and unfold in linear Newtonian fashion as a consequence of a singular system of causes.

Take the Internet – the most disruptive emergent event perhaps in all of human history. No one anticipated its awe-striking power to transform virtually every facet of  our lives before it began breaking over the shorelines of civilization the world over.  When World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee executed the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet in 1990 no one anticipated that by the end of the decade over a billion people would be doing the same thing.  

The Internet has led to the failure of countless businesses, reshaped entire industries, and radically changed the rules of marketplace engagement. And yet, many businesses, from the very largest to the smallest, remain ill-prepared to survive the effects the Internet is having on their business models and in industries. These companies are frozen in their tracks by the bias of Newtonian consciousness toward the status quo – toward always returning to the way things were successfully done in the past.

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