Please, Stop Overlooking the Problem.
History repeats itself because we keep overlooking the problem. There is a very real difference between the people who can see the future possibilities and catalyze them to a tangible reality and those who grab the controls once it is built. We talk about “vision” as though we all have it or anyone can be mentored to learn it. If you believe this then your way of thinking about the world is fundamentally flawed.
The world needs visionary people. Companies need them. Governments and institutions need them. Ultimately, every society needs visionaries because they serve as the telescope that can see the landscape that lies ahead. The problem is that hardly anyone understands, in an explainable way, what it means to be “visionary.” To be visionary you must be born with the brain hardware and wiring for intuitive extrapolation.
To ensure we are using the same definition of these terms, the word intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge and insights without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired. This is the process of “making sense out of things” by continuously comparing and contrasting information and observations against a plethora of contexts to derive a conceptual relationship. The term extrapolation is the process of estimating a value beyond the original observation range on the basis of its relationships with other variables. Therefore, intuitive extrapolation means you spend as much time anticipating likely outcomes as you do processing the current information against past and adjacent available information.
If you are of the extrapolative brain wiring type then you know exactly what I mean. Perhaps you “intuitively” already realize you see things differently than many others but never had a framework to understand that difference. You might even be glad that someone is finally writing about this subject head-on.
If you are not wired this way then you have either rejected this article completely because it does not make sense to you, or you are still looking for it to make sense. This means your brain is hardwired for sensing the tangible current reality of the world around you. You interpolate the world in order to make decisions and form opinions. Interpolating is the process of determining a result using known information, such as personal experiences and believed facts.
It is extremely important for everyone to figure out which of the two types of brain hardware they are and to use this invaluable information to leverage strengths and subordinate to their non-strengths.
Just because you are born with the hard wiring for intuitive extrapolation does not make you a “visionary.” Sure, you can extrapolate any situation, but the accuracy may be quite poor. It takes years of experience refining how to improve the clarity of what it is you see as well as the ability to get others to see it, which always adds to the process of accuracy refinement. This is what I call Synapsing.
Being visionary is not something that is “trainable.” It is a capacity given to you from your biological parents. You either have the basic extrapolative hardware or you don’t. If you do not have it then you are, by definition, anti-visionary.
If you are curious, or perhaps even appalled that I just made such a strong statement that everyone falls into one of two “brain buckets,” well, there is plenty of supporting research. The earliest data comes from Hippocrates the founder of clinical medicine to Carl G. Jung the founder of modern analytical psychology, and the resultant Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) that Katharine Cook-Briggs and daughter Isabel Briggs-Myers developed during WWII from Jung’s turn of the century work. If that doesn’t prove it to you, we now have neuroscience with the two streams hypothesis based on fundamental brain cognition research of the dorsal and ventral systems. It is an absolute fact for those of you that need to interpolate this, that our brains are either wired for extrapolative intuition or interpolative sensing.
Something as simple as this fundamental understanding and awareness of ourselves is the literal crux of every problem in every group of people within a team, a company, an institution, or government itself. Yet we still cannot seem to grasp something that is every day evident in every situation of our lives.
Using the plentiful sources of MBTI data, only 25% of the population are intuitive extrapolators, which is designated as ’N’ on the MBTI type description. The remaining 75% of the population are sensing interpolators, designated as ‘S’ according to MBTI. I have my own theory as to how the population has become this skewed. If you are interested in my writing a blog on that topic, message me at Kelly@up-factorllc.com.
Given today’s well-documented statistics, one would think it to be fine if there is a minority of available “telescopes” to guide the direction of the greater good. In theory, of course, this is true, however, we are not societally aligned on it in any way at any organizational level. This is why it is the Ultimate Human Dilemma.
Albert Einstein once said,
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
This statement speaks volumes. But it doesn’t shake the fog away from the clarity of awareness as to the problem itself. It is merely an accurate and poetic clue to a human race-limiting problem of epic proportions (that, by the way, aligns with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.) The world needs and must have both the practical interpolating brains as well as the intuitive extrapolators. We just don’t use them for their ultimate value to human progress and sustainably with the planet itself.
Society is, unfortunately, simply unaware of what this means. Instead of seeing the problem and writing about it, we see, hear, and read only about the symptoms. How many more articles do we need to read with titles like “The Seven Things a CEO Must Do Well” or “The 5 Reasons People Leave their Company” or another book like The Innovator’s Dilemma that gets people excited and talking, yet leads to no real change? We do not need new ways to talk about the symptoms of the problem. We don’t need another catch-phrase like “we need to skate to where the puck is going to be.” This is nothing more than admittance to the lack of telescopes, or that there is an inability to comprehend what the telescopes that are there are trying to say.
At some point, there needs to be a wide-spread acceptance that 25% of the population are intuitive visionary extrapolators and the majority are anti-visionary sensory-based interpolators. The only thing worse than unknowingly placing a person in a role that needs a visionary capacity, like Chief Innovation Officer, is when someone who is in such a role truly believes they are as visionary as anyone else. When, in fact, they are not. They are anti-visionary (in their defense, how could they know this in an interpolative way?). It is the Ultimate Human Dilemma because there is no way to “prove” it to them or to otherwise make it sensory, tangible, and “interpolate-able” that they are, in fact, not visionary.
History repeats itself does it not? Societies rise to eventually fall and companies grow from humble (and intuitively-driven) beginnings to follow the same downward spiral, eventually. The telescope-carrying individuals that helped create them to get lost in the riches of the tangible today. When they try to advocate the cliffs ahead they are easily brushed aside. Why? Because the only way to prove it will happen is to let it happen. By the time it does, what good is the telescope? Think of the word innovation. In order for something to become an innovation, there must be enough people, a quorum of the population, that generally agree, right?
What was it then as someone’s idea?
How many potentially life-improving innovations do you think have been flicked to the ditch or flushed down the proverbial toilet because of the interpolator’s dilemma?
Each one of my blogs will lead you to your opportunity to build a lens to see the Ultimate Human Dilemma. You can begin to understand and read functions, if you choose to, and see the value in your personal and professional life. Like I always say, you can lead a horse to water and you can shove its head into that water but you can never force it to drink.
We are a society that is so distracted that we cannot think deeply about anything. We are either too exhausted or afraid of what it will reveal. Understanding your brain’s hardware is not asking much. Using that knowledge to better yourself will take some level of effort. Learning to read the hardware of others is the first step to take full control of both your own career and life fulfillment, as well as the legacy you want to leave behind you.
As always, if you want to learn more or would like to take your company or team to a new level of both awareness and achievement, just email me at kelly@up-factorllc.com
