Authentic design, innovation, learning and transition, at their core, are much the same. Something outworn or unavailable from the past is left behind, abandoned. Something valuable, also from the past is re-framed, re-imagined, and re-contexted to serve us again, in a new manner. Uncertainty is a constant companion. Exploration, experiments, and imagining based on inklings, nudges, inspirations and passions sketch out a direction. Bets are placed, and choices taken guided by pragmatic, informed hope. If we are fortunate, and chance does play a role in this, we can see a bit more clearly, we are at one with the world, and can make some headway on our deeper purposes for being in this life.
Our shorthand for this is that we will change our minds, our choices and our stories. All three. In any order. Altogether and separately.
Changing Our Minds
We evolved when calories were scarce. Changing a mind takes lots of energy. Nature, in her wisdom, spawned us with a body/mind, a kind of super robot, which inherits and creates patterns of behaviour and perception, called up to serve us as we go about our daily lives with no need to change anything. Cognitive science now reveals that what we perceive is mostly made up of a prediction from our perceptual systems with hints from our eyes and ears and other senses. Most of what we actually see is fabricated by our brain. We see what we are prepared to see, not what is necessarily out there. In order to survive we have to have such a system. By contrast, the conscious, aware system we use is not fast enough to keep us safe. Whether driving a car or riding a bike or dodging a tiger. But we do have this marvellous, slow, brain for taking new things in, evaluating them, creating new frameworks and writing it all down.
The millenniums-old Polynesian traditions of maintaining mental, physical and community health describe the Low Self and the Middle Self. The Low is the vast majority of our being. The meat body, all the senses, all the automata for keeping the status quo, from regulating body temperature to recognizing threats and acting in moments. The Middle is the conscious, aware, relatively slow aspect which evaluates, chooses differently and crafts new stories. Where there is volition. Humans mostly think of ourselves as the middle part. The lower self is really the animal in us. And we are not animals, are we?
Like the wheelhouse of a ship, the Middle Self charts a course, makes plans, provisions the ship and monitors the journey, redesigning things as the adventure unfolds. Often this hits a snag when the wheelhouse calls for something that the crew, the Low Self, is not prepared for. No patterns. No training. No know-how. Depending on the quality of the relationship between wheelhouse and crew, mutiny may follow. The crew starts poisoning the wheelhouse with distractions, floods of hormones, pain, confusion, fear, uncertainty and so on. Forget the storms outside the ship, the real action is the reeling wheelhouse. Or, with a more skilled wheelhouse, an innovative mind change may ensue. The slow brain leads, coach, and endures while the crew resists, eventually comes around, and gets committed to whatever it takes to regain a transformed status quo. If the wheelhouse is really prepared, the change will happen with the least angst, wasted time and motion. And the ship will be wholly better, transformed.
Changing Our Choices
On occasion, life tosses us a curve ball and we must act differently than our usual routine. We are at the African Pan-Asian Louisiana fusion restaurant. We recognise nothing on the menu. We ask the chef to suggest. We get something fabulous made with unpronounceable ingredients, which may involve bugs and filet of lizard. Our body wretches through the first bite, but it is marvellous. A new world of eating opens up. Our mind may be reeling but we will try it again. After some exploration, our mind will be changed.
Or, we go to iTunes and stumble into opera. As a Pink Floyd aficionado, opera ain't our thing. Yet, our hand, without our mind seeming to notice, clicks on a Puccini aria. Sublime. Weird. And no guitars or flying, exploding beds. A month later we stumble on a classical radio station on a drive through Seattle. More opera. We leave the station on until it fades out fifty miles down the road in Olympia. Then come tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Dressing up as a Mikado geisha for Halloween. Weirder yet, but a string of changing choices which reshape the mind and our story of who we are in the bargain as we mature into our new self.
The above are two examples where inner or outer driven transformations, innovations and learnings began with a change of choice.
Just as often, choices follow the mind and story. Our minds change. Or we change how we tell our story to others. Choices will change to fit, given time.
A dedicated artist doesn't just take any choice. The artist works toward a flawless choice. Flawless is impossible. Chance is at work. Nothing is perfect. But it is a worthy hope. And the rise of energetic initiative towards flawless choices is an outward sign of authentic transformative transition. The original people of Hawaii define KÍNÃ'OLE, flawless choice, this way:
"Doing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, for the right reason, with the right feeling … the first time."
The Executive Arts choice work is indifferent to whatever drives us to choose differently. Our inspiration is choice taken to action flawlessly which fully expresses individuals and organisations while serving family, friends, team and customers.
Changing Our Stories
A potent story generates inspiration and the gumption to get up and make the world a better place.
A great story is authentic: it looks hard at objective reality while it makes room for us as flawed, evolving beings. A compelling yarn is inspiring: it portrays us as the best possible people we can be, providing us with practical hope. An energised story gets us down to work: it sets out meaning, risk and opportunity, vision, action steps and our commitment to the cause. A heartfelt story attracts help and resources: others discover the story in themselves, already formed. The idea, the path, the meaning. All resonant.
Our past story is a convenient montage of selected events, designed to explain how we got ourselves, or more likely, others got us, into the mess we are in. OK, call me jaded. But you know I'm right.
Stories of our future range from wishful thinking to magical fantasy to good old hallucinations. Most of us have multiple future scenarios in mind. The official cultural story parroted by the powers that be: work hard, consume, support the troops, marry well, once, in your race and religion, and to the other sex, thank you. There is a doomsday version of some sort - pick your epic fail, loss or disaster. Of course a big win version where our horse comes in first, 26 Red is a winner, over and over, and everything works out in the end. Even death is heroic, perfect, painless and quick. And we get to take the money and the wine collection with us.
Most is projection from the past. This week's tweeted, Facebooked, news cycled story of a bright, shiny, new and improved future is just a dogged repeat of past sins in a doomed attempt to maintain the status quo, or worse, stage a return to the good old days, the pain and suffering of which we have conveniently forgotten.
Well, now that I've trashed the past and future fictions, what is left?
Well, "now" is what remains. The only time we actually have. A useful story serves us right now, this moment of our journey, rather than the destination. The destination is really unknown. If it's going to be worth a damn, it better be. If we can see it from here, we aren't dreaming big enough.
As above, the story may be the last to change. Or it may lead. Either way, without it, the innovation, learning or transition is not yet fully baked.
Executive Arts story work draws the transformed story from the learning edge core. From the essential yearnings of our emergent self, to be engaged with the best of our actual history. It is us acting from an authentic passion and dream, turning the world as we find it to our agenda. And rewriting our past as prologue to this evolved tale.