Paint hope as a window wider forward than back. A vision enthused by self-belief. Risk awaits steering audience into power, manipulation: Exclusion. Glorious forward now a threat. To others.
APPLICATION
The risk described here is underappreciated in leadership communication: the vision that begins as expansive and becomes exclusionary. Narrative is the mechanism. A leader who articulates a compelling forward direction creates a shared frame that motivates action, but that same frame, if it carries implicit assumptions about who belongs to the glorious forward, can become a tool of manipulation and exclusion without any deliberate intent. The discipline this demands is narrative literacy: the ongoing practice of examining the stories an organization tells about itself, about its direction, and about who is included in that direction. The question of how humility is operational, not rhetorical. It asks what structural and communicative practices keep the vision wide enough to remain genuinely collective rather than narrowing into the kind of certainty that marginalizes the voices most likely to see what the leader cannot.
We create and exercise habits in habitable spaces. Inhabitable according to valued habits, habits considered normative. Mme. Swann on her constitutional. What happens inside defines the outside. Marcel himself to the reader. What happens inside defines the outside. Be in the room. Salons hospitable uninhabitable for some. Spaces defining the outside expand now. Spaces defining habitable. So many avenues lined by spectators with no one to gossip with but themselves.
EXCAVATION
Proust In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Mme. Swann with her parasol is magical. Cast forward to times of peace. Fungible projections.
Sartre.
There is another book, another movie (like there is another conversation or options) in the imagination. And if, as Marcel says, the imagination is stimulated by sensuality, then when he finds his conception of aesthetics in disconcert with popular opinion of La Berma, of Bergotte, it is connected with him being unable to recall Gilberte’s face. The other dialogue, the other book, the concern of the moment, closing options, limiting imagination in those times.
Judge the moment, aesthetics, by the feeling which overwhelms -or the focused sensation of a smell, of a memory, of a bite. Be washed over to be in sensuality. To be in imagination, to see possibilities, to hear the unplayed music, “translating an invisible surface.”(p 64) “All work is translation” (paraphrase Tranströmer) the invisible dimensions of the other conversations, of the other options -so personal. Dependent on our senses and the breadth of the connections we make, the dots we can string or feel they can be strung, or even placed in the same room, the same plane, color pallets that match? Or discordant, asynchronous, form a lifetime in a moment or, in a series -even splashed randomly.
EXCAVATION
Proust In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Highest 2 Lowest Spike Lee
And is Charlie Croker Shin Godzilla for the plot -the other plot?
—
How much does it require consonance with a fact pattern, with instrumentalist reality? To be effective, one must jump between the two. To find new possibilities, new options or to control. To be fully an artist? Can’t say. But to be responsible and take care of yourself and your family. And to be able to give material comfort to those around you it’s best to be consonant, extremely consonant.
Shin Godzilla and fiction like A Man in Full, offer plot, material and layers enough to read-in narratives and meaning beyond the surface — pattern making in accordance with the viewer/reader’s mental model, unbound, strictly speaking, by the characters and temporal unfolding of the work itself. There feels sufficient intentionality in the material to claim a surface, a plane from which the viewer/reader can spring into creativity –and there feels sufficient implicit action, connection, non-intentional gestalt to warrant this creativity. These are characteristics shared with useful and enjoyable philosophical works -or works which can otherwise be waxed about philosophically. Or minds which can wax philosophically on a wide range of works. Ditto problem solving in business.
APPLICATION
The pattern-recognition capacity described here, the ability to hold a work, a situation, or a problem with enough loose attention that non-obvious connections become visible, is a trainable cognitive skill relevant to decision making under uncertainty. Traditional analytical frameworks ask you to decompose a problem into its components and evaluate each against a fixed set of criteria. That process is useful for tame problems where the relevant variables are known. For complex and wicked problems, it systematically misses the emergent properties that arise from the interaction of components, the gestalt that cannot be reduced to its parts. The leader who approaches a strategic challenge the way a thoughtful reader approaches Shin Godzilla, staying open to what the material is doing rather than forcing it into a preexisting frame, is more likely to see the option that is not yet on the table. Ditto problem solving in business, indeed.
One attractive element of Hegel is it reaches to describe that which is beyond or as yet unlanguaged or as yet unknown, un precisely described. It creates a headspace where these type of items or this way of thinking can be explored, imagining various positions, outcomes or dynamics. There is a value in exploring and feeling those explorations, the emotions that come with those positions, outcomes, dynamics, etc. Decision making is improved when various emotions have already been explored. When they can be mined, as well, whether in oneself or in the situation. Advantageous opportunities more readily present themselves when one is prepared and can imagine a broad range of paths, actions.
APPLICATION
The practical implication of Hegel’s observation is actionable for decision making under uncertainty: emotional imagining. Before entering a high-stakes negotiation, a difficult conversation, or a consequential choice, deliberately inhabiting the emotional texture of multiple possible outcomes, including the ones you fear, prepares the prefrontal cortex to remain online when the pressure arrives. This is not positive thinking. It is pre-loading. By having already felt what it would be like to lose the deal, to be wrong, to face the unexpected outcome, those experiences lose their power to hijack the decision in the moment. The leader who has imagined broadly arrives at the decision point with a wider option set, lower cortisol, and greater capacity for adaptive response. Hegel’s unlanguaged possibility space is also the space where competitive advantage lives.
The optimism of reading philosophy is that it languages a world outside of accurate instrumentality or expediency (correspondence isn’t a requirement of philosophy).
There’s also the slow dopamine train of prediction involved in interpretation of events, then casting it forward. Especially when one becomes entangled in the forward
Entangled, as in quantum (like languaged, it means being part of a unified wave) in that once a position is committed to, it locks in (and locks out) other positions (for that same observation). The trick is not to become entangled. Which probably means staying out of meetings (making it harder to build audience, publish etc). Of course, with multiple worlds, other positions remain fully correspondent. The trick is to be able to jump into those other spaces.
EXCAVATION
Sean Carroll, The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics , Chapter 5
APPLICATION
The quantum entanglement metaphor here points to a central discipline of strategic decision making: preserving optionality. Once a position is publicly committed to, in a meeting, in a strategy document, in an organizational narrative, the space of other possible positions collapses. This is not merely social pressure. It is a physical and cognitive reality. Commitment forecloses perception and we stop noticing the evidence that would support a different path. The practice of staying philosophically uncommitted for as long as is responsible, what the decision making literature calls the Last Responsible Moment, is not indecision. It is the deliberate preservation of the multiple worlds that Carroll describes. The leader who can hold competing frameworks simultaneously, without the anxiety of needing to resolve them prematurely, is operating in exactly the space where real options have value.
In so, it’s easy to blame. When it’s not the structure of consciousness or the structure of reality. Or it is, because of people’s choices. Choose differently and we can make reality different! Besides, it’s good for washing dishes.
APPLICATION
The move described here, recognizing that blame is a response to the structure of a situation rather than only to the choices within it, is useful for leaders navigating organizational uncertainty. When a project fails, when a strategy does not land, when a team underperforms, the instinct is to locate the failure in a person or a decision. That instinct is often wrong and always incomplete. Complex and wicked problems have emergent properties that no individual choice caused and no individual correction will fix. The leader who can step back from blame and ask instead what structural conditions produced this outcome, and what structural changes could produce a different one, is practicing the kind of systems thinking that uncertainty demands. Choosing differently is possible, but only once you have correctly identified what it is that needs to change.
Nothingness is an a priori assumption. Nothingness can only be part of analysis if consciousness and being are assumed separable from existence. Like the Copenhagen Interpretation isolating the classical from reality / quantum. It’s separable only by assumption. Experience painted so stems from experiences or choices (literary, personal or critical). In that, Sartre is overcome.
EXCAVATION
Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hazel E. Barnes translation
Sean Carroll, The Many Hidden Worlds of Quantum Mechanics , Chapters 1 and 2.
APPLICATION
The argument that nothingness is an assumption rather than a fact, that the separation of consciousness from being is an artifact of a philosophical framework and not a description of reality, has a direct bearing on how leaders relate to uncertainty. Much of the dread that accompanies high-stakes decisions comes from an implicit Cartesian assumption: that the deciding self is isolated, and that the outcome is uncertain in a way that threatens the self’s coherence. But if consciousness and existence are not separable, if being is already in the world rather than peering at it from outside, then uncertainty is not a threat to the self. It is the medium in which an embodied, relational, historically situated person operates. Sartre being overcome here is not a philosophical curiosity. It is a practical reorientation: from decision making as a solitary confrontation with an unknown future, to decision making as the ongoing, adaptive navigation of a world you are already part of.
“In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.” -Frankenstein
Rationality an illusion of madness
Rationality an aspiration of madness
Rationality engenders caring
Adjective of madness, fit no less, of enthusiastic madness tied to a ceiling of power, as far as, was in my power
Responsibility, comfort because I created
MIRROR
Realizing fantasies, rationality comes from madness
No ceilings, all enthusiasm and fits
Responsibility unbound, comfort towards only creating I, my power
BEHIND
Onlookers forget the birth of reason, mistake reality as Truth bound
(Phenomenology, say, no. 239)
JetPack and Jotform communicate: hand waving “quantum effects”
Math problems are low context. Ritual high context, a physicality.
Define the input / collection network, organs. The impressions that can be made (‘medley of sensuous and intellectual representations’).
There’s a fitness between the problem set (the memeset, ideas / concept set, the questions asked -the medley) and the homogeneity required of the chipsets.
The right balance – chipset communicates to chipset: handwaving “Consciousness”
HAT TIP
Edward T. Hall
Phenomenology of Spirit no. 205
APPLICATION
The distinction between low-context and high-context communication, and the observation that ritual carries a physicality that pure information exchange does not, maps directly onto a persistent failure in organizational decision making: confusing the output of a meeting with a real decision. Low-context communication, the slide deck, the email, the analysis, can transfer information with high fidelity. But it cannot do what high-context communication does: create the shared physiological and relational conditions in which people actually commit. The chipset-to-chipset handshake that produces genuine alignment requires presence, attention, and the kind of embodied resonance that Edward T. Hall documented. Leaders who understand this have the potential to stop treating meetings as information transfer vehicles and start designing them as the high-context rituals they actually are, environments where the right medley of sensory and intellectual impressions can produce the genuine convergence that makes a decision real.
