Search Results for: what you want

If someone were to ask you what your situation is, you’d have a general understanding of what they meant. We tend to think we’re always in some situation or other. But are we? Are you in a situation right now?

Situation seems like an easy word to define and therefore take for granted. But taking things for granted or at face value leads to making assumptions, and then to acting based on those assumptions, many of which are bound to be wrong.

Situational Awareness

I got interested in figuring out what a situation is after encountering the concept of situational awareness, which at the most basic level means knowing what is going on around us. More explicitly, it means (1) perceiving information in the environment, (2) understanding what that information means, and (3) running a mental simulation to imagine what the logical outcome of an event is likely to be.

Perception  —>  Comprehension  —>  Projection

Generally speaking, we’re more situationally aware in urgent or fraught situations, such as being late for an important appointment and trying to figure out the fastest route to our destination. We focus on the time, the traffic, maybe the amount of gas in the tank, or coming up with an acceptable excuse for our tardiness. We’re more likely to achieve our objective if we pay attention to relevant factors rather than to the newly flowering fruit trees or what’s on the radio.

I was struck by the assumption inherent in the three-step process above that we automatically pay attention to relevant information. Evidence suggests otherwise. The brain tends to pay attention to what it habitually pays attention to—and vice versa, to not pay attention to what it habitually does not pay attention to. This means that in order to develop good situational awareness, we have to start by directing our attention to the relevant factors, so we know what to observe and what to ignore.

Attention  —>  Perception  —>  Comprehension  —>  Projection

Situation

One definition of situation is a set of circumstances in which one finds oneself. I would amend the definition to say that a situation is the subset of circumstances that are relevant (or salient) to a desired outcome.

In order to have a situation, we have to first decide we want something or want to create something or go somewhere. As philosopher Alain Badiou says, we must elucidate a choice. Once we do that, we can identify the circumstances we need to consider and monitor.

So we don’t “find ourselves” in situations; we create them by virtue of identifying what we want. While we are always in the midst of circumstances, we are not always in a situation.

Situated

Another definition of situation is the location and surroundings of a place. To be situated means to be located or established in one place; not moving about.

A house is situated on a piece of property in a particular geographic location. People who do not roam far from home could also be said to be situated.

As a result of the pandemic, many of us have been far more situated than we are used to being or want to be.

Being in a situation in the context of circumstances indicates movement toward change, but being situated in the context of place indicates a diminished prospect of change.

Being situated in a place, no matter how idyllic, tends to narrow horizons and dull the mind. It can also be dangerous, as it allows us to become set in our ways and complacent about our actions as well as our thinking: to take things for granted.

And we can be situated in a frame of mind with or without being situated in a place.

UNsituated

Trickster, that mythological agent of change and denizen of liminal space, is rarely situated and almost always on the move. As Lewis Hyde says:

The landscape is constant potential for that traveling intelligence, because the present situation is always dissolving and things that the horizon once obscured are coming into view.

Trickster can be found on the road, in the marketplace, on the border or boundary, at the crossroads, or on the threshold. For a change of view, a fresh perspective, a chance encounter, or a new idea, we need to be able to roam. Being unsituated allows us to see things differently as well as to see different things.

Rather than being set in his ways, Coyote, one Native American representation of Trickster, is said to have the way of no way.

Perhaps having no way … means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world. —Lewis Hyde

The universe is in a constant state of flux. It’s the nature of reality that we can’t ever really be situated no matter how hard we try. And it isn’t just Coyote the Trickster who recognizes and represents the value of being unsituated. M.I.T. researcher Serena Chan, writing about complex adaptive systems, says:

Systems that are forced to explore their space of possibilities will create different structures and new patterns of relationships.

If you’re not in a situation now, why not take this opportunity to create one? Identify a juicy desired outcome, unsituate yourself, expand your horizons and  your perspective—and explore your space of possibilities!

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman uses the acronym WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) to refer to the fact that when System 1, the unconscious, constructs a story to interpret or explain something, it can only base the story on the information it is aware of—that is, what it sees.

System 1 is very good at creating coherent, convincing stories; after all, each of us fully inhabits the role we are playing in The Story of Us as told by our Inner Narrator. We have a well-developed capacity for suspending disbelief.

System 1 aims to construct the best possible story based on the available information. That information may be incomplete, false or inaccurate, poorly understood, or even tangential. But information of poor quality or limited quantity does not deter System 1 from coming up with a story. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, so it fails to recognize gaps or faulty or illogical conclusions.

For the most part, neither do we. In fact, as research repeatedly reveals the less we know, the easier it is for us to construct a coherent story—a good example of ignorance being bliss.

Cognitive Ease Is Compelling

A coherent and consistent story generates a feeling of confidence. And we tend to believe that the degree of confidence we feel about something is an indicator of its accuracy. But confidence is a feeling. It is also highly subjective, more an indicator of cognitive ease than of anything else. We like cognitive ease because, among other things, it gives us a sense of safety and familiarity.

So as long as the story delivered by System 1 provides coherence and consistency, we are good to go! Although System 2 (consciousness) could challenge or even veto any of System 1’s stories, it rarely does. You might think System 2, being the analytical and critical thinker, would notice gaps or faulty logic. But System 1 has another trick up its sleeve, which is the suppression of ambiguity or doubt. Certainty is easier on the brain than uncertainty, and our brain is all for taking the path of least resistance. As a result, most of System 1’s stories go unquestioned.

We tend to take System 1’s stories at face value—as if they’re entirely factual. We may, and do, question other people and their stories, but we tend not to question our own beliefs, cognitive biases, or assumptions. We take our perceptions at face value (WYSIWYG). We’re quite confident we know who we are, where we are, and what is going on around us.

By design, the modern human mind craves knowledge, especially in places where we can find none. When faced with an absence of information, we’ll make something up—we will believe and assume. This tendency appears to be universal. —Peter Ralston, The Book of Not Knowing

We think it’s what we know that matters. So why bother asking ourselves what we don’t know? Well, because it is more likely than not that there are things we don’t know, the knowing of which would alter our understanding—and our subsequent actions—perhaps significantly.

You Are Here

Here’s a current example. For many years I’ve been aware that people have a difficult time identifying what I call juicy desired outcomes: the changes they want to make to their status quo. That’s one of the reasons I focused three Monthly Meetings on the topic last year. I believed that was the greatest challenge to creating transformational change. There is lots of evidence to support that conclusion. I assumed identifying the current status quo was the easy part, given it consists of knowable factors. But that assumption was wrong. First, not all aspects of the status quo are in fact knowable. Second, even if they are knowable, they are not necessarily known.

So accurately identifying who we are and where we are may be even more difficult than identifying our desired outcomes.

This realization came about because my clients and I were engaged in an inquiry. We were curious and open to the possibility of learning or discovering something new. Now we’re running experiments to identify tools that can help us get a better handle on the status quo. This is a useful exploration because if we don’t know our starting point, we’re going to have a hard time mapping the route to our desired destination.

We can’t know what external events will take place in the future. We don’t know how our perception will change once we stop planning and start taking action. We don’t know whether our endeavors will succeed or fail. We don’t know what other people are thinking or feeling. We don’t know why we hold certain beliefs. We don’t know everything about anything. We can’t count on the accuracy or veracity of our memories. In short, the sum of what we don’t know is far, far greater—and always will be—than the sum of what we know.

What Else Is It Telling Me?

Another Nobel Prize winner, Jim Allison, says that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. The data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, What else is it telling me?

That’s exactly the kind of question that can expand our perceptual field and burst the bubbles of both WYSIWYG and WYSIATI.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes
for a Satisfying and Meaningful
New Year!

Here are the links to all of the documents (in pdf format), including the instructions for using them, so you can conduct an inventory of your Big Picture Wants and determine what you want to focus on creating in 2021.

Note that you can print the version of MindMap B that matches the number of Big Picture Wants you have.

(After clicking on a document and printing it, use the back button to return to this page.)

Big Picture Wants 2021 Instructions

Big Picture Wants 2021 Assessment

Intentions 2021

MindMap A 2021

MindMap B 2021 (13)

MindMap B 2021 (12)

MindMap B 2021 (11)

MindMap B 2021 (10)

MindMap B 2021 (9)

Desired Outcome 2021

Putting Up With 2021

Satisfied With 2021

This page will be accessible through February 2021.

…there wouldn’t be a YOU making choices. The unconscious mental processes that make most of your choices also create your sense of self. It’s an endless loop. Your brain uses your sense of self to predict the choices to make (and make them). And the choices you make reinforce your sense of self.

That’s why one of the biggest impediment to creating positive sustained change is the belief that we always have a choice: that regardless of our circumstances, we can always choose how to think, feel, and react. If we want to change something, all we have to do is make a different choice.

This belief is meant both to empower us and to remind us that responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, moment-to-moment, rests squarely on us. It’s a double-edged sword at best, though.  If you could change an outcome simply by making a different choice, why don’t you just do that?

It isn’t really empowering; nor is it true—at least in the way it’s used. But this is true:

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. —Donald Berwick

Moment-to-moment, our thoughts, feelings, and actions are the result of what neuroscientist David Eagleman refers to as zombie systems and alien subroutines: systems that routinely produce dependable results. We may not like the results, we may not want them or approve of them, but they’re the outcome of systems that are doing exactly what they are designed to do. By the time we experience those results, we have little, if any, immediate control over them; it would be more accurate to say we’re at the effect of them.

In spite of the fact that neuroscientists estimate we spend 95% of our lives operating on autopilot, we are loathe to give up the idea that we always have a choice. We worship the idea of choice to such an extent that we would rather believe we’re making bad or dumb choices intentionally than that our behavior and experiences are a result of well-oiled unconscious systems.

Our belief in the value of having options and of keeping our options open keeps us from creating consistently satisfying and meaningful lives and getting what we want.

You can have what really matters to you—or you can have the freedom to NOT have it—but you can’t have both.

The only way to consistently get what you really want is to create systems that support those results. Moment-to-moment choice just gets in the way.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I previously determined that walking a certain amount of time every day contributes significantly to my sense of vitality and to stable heart function, two things I really want. There are plenty of days when walking—or walking the full amount of time—is not what I feel like doing. At all. I’m tired; I have too much work to do; I have some physical issue; I just don’t want to. But I have walked for 785 consecutive days because I have taken choice out of the equation. Walking every day is the natural result of a system that produces a consistent result, not through willpower or self-discipline, but automatically.

That’s what the Inner Architect can do: design a system that gets you what you really want by taking away the moment-to-moment choice to NOT get it. These systems can build on each other, too. Architect Ole Scheeren suggests we could think of architecture as complex systems of relationships, both in a programmatic and functional way and in an experiential and emotive or social way.

The system that has produced my 785 consecutive days of walking connects with other systems. In fact, it makes creating new systems easier.

Of course before you can train your Inner Architect to create systems that produce consistently great outcomes for you, you have to know what you want.

Fixing or repairing something that is broken or not working means taking action to make it work again. It means getting it to work the way it was originally intended to work. It means a return to the status quo, be it societal, psychological, or mechanical.

Fixing or repairing something might include making improvements to the way a thing works. But it doesn’t involve any fundamental changes in structure, function, or operation.

Some fixes are minor adjustments; some are quite elaborate. Sometimes a small fix applied to a small problem does the trick quite nicely. But most fixes applied to big problems are inadequate, incomplete, and temporary. As such, they’re not only a waste of time, effort, energy, and good intentions—they also exacerbate the problems they’re intended to address.

So why do we keep trying to fix things that clearly need to be transformed? Well, for one thing it’s a heck of a lot easier! It also makes us feel like we’re doing something. But the primary motivation to fix is that it relieves the psychological tension that results from dissatisfaction or a disruption to the status quo.

It’s an understatement to say we dislike psychological tension. The fact is that we will do almost anything to eliminate it, and by we I mean individuals, groups, and entire societies.

I don’t believe it’s a stretch to say that much of the world is powered by the desire to relieve psychological tension.

How It Works

This is a process that is easily observed everywhere and that has highly predictable results.

1. A disruption to our status quo that can’t be ignored or accommodated generates psychological tension.
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2. The discrepancy between our current state of affairs and the state of affairs we would prefer motivates us to take action.
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3. We identify the problem we think needs fixing.
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4. If the actions we take in response are effective in the short-term, our psychological tension is relieved. (If we don’t take action or our actions aren’t effective, we find other ways to relieve psychological tension that don’t directly address the problem.)
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5. Once our psychological tension is relieved, we are no longer motivated to take action to fix the problem.
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6. Once we stop taking action to fix the problem, we stop paying attention to it. (It sinks below our level of awareness.)
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7. When we stop paying attention to it, we eventually find ourselves not only back where we started from but often even worse off than we were before—not to mention dismayed at being faced with this problem again.

But of course the problem was never accurately identified in the first place, so there was very little likelihood any fixes we applied would have significant impact on it.

All we really want to do, anyway, is make it go away. We don’t want to have to think about it. We don’t want to experience all that psychological tension.

But what if the wide variety of problems we have identified in ourselves, in each other, in society, and in the world are not problems that can be solved in this manner—or at this level of change? What if the way we operate is a much more fundamental problem—one that repeatedly undermines our most well-intended efforts?

What’s the solution to that problem?