[ExI] Seeing Through New Lenses

Aware aware at awareresearch.com
Wed Jan 13 17:14:43 UTC 2010


Forwarding an article with relevance to the Extropy list.  It's ironic
that in a forum dedicated to the topic of "extropy" , which might be
interpreted as increasingly meaningful increasing change, there's such
vocal support for hard rationality, simple truth, and seeing the world
the way way it "really is."

- Jef

----------------------


Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Relationships and Dynamics - Seeing
Through New Lenses
<http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2010/01/relationships-and-dynamics-seeing-through-new-lenses.html>

Relationships and Dynamics - Seeing Through New Lenses

Do we all look at the world in the same way? Hardly. We can each look
at the same scene and focus our attention on something completely
different.  Individual idiosyncrasies definitely play a role, but
broader patterns of perception are at work as well. Are certain
patterns of perception more or less helpful in these rapidly changing
times?  Most definitely – in fact, they may determine who succeeds and
who fails.

About five years ago, Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology,
wrote "The Geography of Thought." This fascinating book drew on
extensive research pointing to fundamental cultural differences in how
we see the world. Specifically, he contrasted an East Asian way of
seeing the world with a more traditional Western way of seeing.

While it would be difficult to summarize Nisbett’s rich analysis, I
want to focus on a key distinction that he develops in his analysis of
two cultural ways of perceiving our world.  He suggests that East
Asians focus on relationships as the key dimension of the world around
us while Westerners tend to focus more on isolated objects.  In other
words, East Asians tend to adopt more holistic views of the world
while Westerners are more oriented to reductionist views. This basic
difference plays out in fascinating ways, including the greater
attention by East Asian children to verbs while Western children tend
to learn nouns faster.

One very tangible illustration of this is a simple test reported by
Nisbett. A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to
children – a cow, a chicken and some grass. He asked children from
America which two of the pictures belonged together.  Most of them
grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in
the same category of animals.  Chinese children on the other hand
tended to group the cow and grass together because “cows eat grass” –
they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the
objects themselves.

[Which of these do YOU prefer?  Which of these do you think is closer
to The Truth?  Why?  - Jef]

I found this intriguing in the context of our continuing work at the
Center for the Edge on the Big Shift.  As I indicated in a previous
posting, the Big Shift is a movement from a world where value creation
depends on knowledge stocks to one where value resides in knowledge
flows – in other words, objects versus relationships. Our Western way
of perceiving has been very consistent with a world of knowledge
stocks and short-term transactions.  As we move into a world of
knowledge flows, though, I suspect the East Asian focus on
relationships may be a lot more helpful to orient us (no pun
intended).

Of course, this is not an either/or proposition.  Nisbett holds out
hope that these perspectives might ultimately converge, citing some
promising research evidence:

“So, I believe the twain shall meet by virtue of each moving in the
direction of the other.  East and West may contribute to a blended
world where social and cognitive aspects of both regions are
represented but transformed – like the individual ingredients in a
stew that are recognizable but are altered as they alter the whole. It
may not be too much to hope that this stew will contain the best of
each culture.”

But wait, there is more.  The distinction between perception of
objects and relationships is just one dimension of difference.  In
fact, the East Asian and Western modes of seeing share one common
element: they view the world as largely static. As Nisbett points out,
the Greek philosophers gave us the notion that “the world is
fundamentally static and unchanging.” East Asians tend to focus on
oscillations and cycles which acknowledge change but contain it in
relatively narrow fields – the world is in flux but it does not head
in fundamentally different directions over long periods of time.

So, there is another dimension that differentiates perception – and
this is a point that Nisbett sadly does not explore or develop.  Some
of us tend to view the world in static terms while others focus on the
deep dynamics that lead to fundamental transformations over time.
Many executives, especially in large firms, tend to adopt a static
view of the world.  They want detailed snapshots of their environments
to drive their decision-making.  When they go to distant countries and
markets, they carefully  observe the state of play as it is today, but
they rarely ask for “videos” – detailed analyses of the trajectories
of change that have been playing out over years and are likely to
shape future markets.  Even in the more contemporary world of social
network analysis, this analysis often remains highly static – elegant
maps show the rich structures of these social networks as they exist
today, but they rarely reveal the dynamics that evolve these networks
over time.

Why is this the case? Many factors contribute to this static view of
the world.  Modern enterprise is built on the notion of scalable
efficiency and scalable efficiency requires predictability.
Predictions are much easier in stable or static worlds, so executives
are predisposed to see the world in these terms.  Change can be highly
unpredictable and can rapidly call into question the ability to
predict demand for products or services.  Whether one sees in terms of
objects or relationships, these are much easier to understand and
analyze if they remain stable.  Contemporary economics is largely
built around equilibrium models that are essential if the detailed
econometric analytics are to work. Social networks are complex and
messy as it is, without having to factor in even more complex dynamics
that continually reshape these networks over time. We don’t even have
a very robust set of categories to describe various trajectories that
can play out over time. Let’s face it, life would be a lot simpler if
everything just came to a halt and stayed the way it is right now.

But, of course, it does not stand still.  Our world is constantly
evolving in complex and unexpected ways. And there is evidence that it
is evolving ever more rapidly, generating disruptions that send people
and things careening in new and unanticipated directions. Product life
cycles are compressing across many, if not most, industries.  The
movement from products to services as key drivers of growth reinforces
this trend, since services can often be updated far more frequently
than products. With the growth of outsourcing, new competitors can
enter and scale positions in global markets in ways that simply were
not feasible in the past when capital intensive physical facilities
needed to be built before products could be launched.  Edges of new
innovation rise quickly and gather force to challenge entrenched
positions in the core of our global economy. Black swans pop up with
increasing frequency, seemingly out of nowhere and challenging some of
our most basic assumptions about the world around us.

Yet, we do not have very good lenses or analytic tools to bring these
dynamics to the forefront.  They tend to operate behind the scenes,
rarely seen until it is too late and the latest disruption is
enveloping us.  Survival in this more rapidly changing world requires
developing new modes of perception, ones that put structure in the
background and focus attention on the deep dynamics that are
re-shaping the structures around us.

This is the other key message of the Big Shift work.  We are going
through a profound long-term shift in the way our global business
landscapes are evolving.  We get so caught up in short-term events
that we lose sight of these long-term changes, much less understanding
what is driving them or thinking about their implications for how we
work and live.  As we have emphasized, we must learn to make sense of
the changes unfolding around us before we can make progress.  Even
more fundamentally, we must learn to see these changes, searching them
out where they remain hidden or obscured and penetrating through the
surface currents of change to focus on the deeper dynamics shaping
these currents.

What is required to do this?  Well, first we need to embrace change
rather than dampen or suppress it.  Virginia Postrel wrote "The Future
and Its Enemies" over a decade ago, a fascinating book that described
a persistent and intensifying conflict between stasists, those who
fear and resist change, and dynamists, those who welcome change as an
opportunity to create even more value for more people.  Those who fear
and resist change spend relatively little time understanding change –
all of their energy is focused on blocking it.

By embracing change, we begin to see the opportunities it creates.  We
are motivated to explore the contours of change in ways that moves us
from focusing on what is to what could be. As we begin this migration,
we will need new analytic tools to help us on our way.  Promising
early toolkits can be found in diverse arenas. For example, the Santa
Fe Institute is studying the evolution of  complex adaptive systems
and increasing returns dynamics.  On another front, the revival of
Austrian economics challenges equilibrium analysis and instead focuses
on processes of change unleashed by distributed tacit knowledge,
inspired by the early work of Friedrich Hayek. In yet another arena,
work in the technology world seeks to understand the implications of
continuing exponential improvement in the price/performance of digital
technology as it breeches the boundaries of computing and invades such
diverse arenas as biology, materials science and robotics.

Stepping back from all of this, the challenge is great, especially for
those of us in the West.  We must learn to shift attention from
objects to relationships while at the same time moving from structure
to dynamics as the key lens for perception.  We were not trained this
way.  We generally have not operated in this way. All of our
assumptions tell us that this is the wrong way. Yet, there are
enormous opportunities for those who do make this shift.  Perhaps most
importantly, those of us who remain wedded to the old way of seeing
things will find ourselves increasingly stressed, blindsided and
marginalized in a world that will continue to move on without us.



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