The Incoherence of Our Thought
This article is a part of my Foundational Series for startup founders, team members, and anyone working together towards a world changing goal. These chapters contain foundational principles and practices I’ve collected through starting 3 startups, and pass on to the founders at startups I advise. The introduction to the entire series is here, I recommend you start there, if this is your first Tim Schwab experience.
Full Table of Contents for my foundational series can be found here.
Mental Models are the pictures and beliefs we have about how things work, why things are the way they are, and what has to be done to get what we want.
I wrote an intro to the discipline of working with Mental Models here.
Today we are talking about surfacing and unearthing mental models in ourselves and others in such a way that is productive and does not trigger defensive behavior.
We begin with the two distinct ways we communicate with one another.
Dialogue vs discussion
All of us have had a taste of dialogue, but it is rare. We spend most of our time in discussions.
Discussion, sharing a root word with percussion and concussion, is the act of heaving ideas and conclusions at one another in a winner takes all fashion.
Dialogue, on the other hand, is achieved when we suspend our assumptions and mental models in front of us and open them up to be examined by the group in a productive way.
Examples of things I say to set the conditions for dialogue below
“I assume you’re on board with this plan, but I haven’t asked…will help me with this?”
“But the opposite may also be true”
“I feel some defensiveness coming up, where do you think it’s coming from?”
Clearly, the spirit in which these are delivered account for 80%+ of your results
In dialogue there is a free flowing of ideas, a cool energy, and often revelations that could never have happened in isolation.
Jazz musicians and improvisational artists of all professions often feel or experience this when jamming together — the notes play themselves, the music takes a life of its own, and we all feel more connected.
At some point, discussion is necessary to reach a concise conclusion and plan of action. Because we spend so much time in discussions, the leverage in adopting this practice is distinguishing between the two and learning to use them appropriately.
Quantum physicist David Bohm wrote that the universe is by nature an “indivisible whole”. From this perspective we can begin to understand how we truly need each other to formulate the most accurate and effective mental models to get what we want.
Bohm wrote at length about what he called the “incoherence of our thought”. His first principle was that thinking is a separate process from thoughts.
Thinking is an ongoing process.
Thoughts are the result of thinking.
Your thoughts are not your thoughts
Bohm suggests that thought is collective in nature, though it adamantly professes the opposite. It’s denial of this is empirically evident in emotionally charged situations where it is our thoughts that are in conflict, not us.
Bohms conclusion of the indivisible whole in which we live echo sounds of the song psychologist Carl Jung sung over a hundred years ago regarding the collective unconscious we all share.
Together, this can be understood as the ocean of our collective thought or unconscious, which flows into our individual rivers and streams of ongoing thinking, eventually evaporating into cloudes of “thoughts” or “thought bubbles”, which then rain back into the ocean of our collective thoughts.
The accuracy of this mental model is not as important as the results gained by adopting it. It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.
From this perspective, we begin to understand our thoughts originate from nowhere. The opposite is also true — our thoughts originate from everywhere. Just like water, rain, and rivers.
Claiming ownership over an idea is just as ridiculous as imagining individual clouds taking ownership for making it rain, looking contemptuously at their brethren and ocean with equal entitlement.
Secondly, Bohm suggested that thinking can be equally incoherent. Not only is it influenced by our unique emotional soup at any given time, it also stops tracking reality, working on old data, leading to less and less coherent thinking and thoughts.
This resembles notes from the discipline of personal mastery and the practice of tracking current reality in order to generate the creative tension and energy to get what we want and bring reality closer to our vision.
Finally, we can also hear the familiar sounds of systems intelligence, where events are caused by the structures we create and find ourselves in, and individual events are thus everyone’s fault, or no ones fault. Thought belongs to all of us, or none of us.
The practice of mental models is practiced through adopting the mental models provided here and mastered through consistent, conscious use in everyday life.
May the force be with you.
Questions? Comment, yo. I adore feedback and respond to 100% of it.
