Being less foolish, fitting better

Organizations are agents in the world. So, naturally, the better they understand the world around, the more effectively they can act in the world.

This article spells out a little more what I mean by that, and how it connects to the three areas of this project:

• internal operating (how organizations are organized internally)
• access to the prism of truth (how to include other forms of knowing)
• external fittedness (how the organization is fitted into its environment)

Foolishness is more than just ignorance (lack of knowing); it’s a failure to apply wisdom in decision-making. This failure is marked by self-deception and harmful choices.

Internal operating

Ironically, those stem from the same cognitive abilities that enable human adaptability and intelligence. Analytical, “logical” thinking is at the same time our strength an our downfall.

Essentially, the traits that allow us to solve complex problems can also lead us to deceive ourselves and make unwise decisions, highlighting a complex aspect of human cognition that can foster both remarkable insight and significant error. As an example, sometimes you can see very smart people who are miserable because they use their excellent intellect to deconstruct the world around them. They think they see through things but really their thinking just removes them from the world, leading more alienation and anxiety.

In a way, our intelligence needs to be managed. Iain McGilchrist calls the right hemisphere (holistical thinking) the “master,” while the left brain (analytical thinking) is just the “emissary.” The emissary doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, making it really easy to fool itself in its self-perceived grandeur.

The same happens in organization where their “brain” – the management – thinks they know everything and forget to take a more humble and holistic approach that factors in more data than their perfect, glossy strategic brain child.

Better information flow and local decision-making can improve the internal operating and “de-center” the management, just like more focus on the right brain can “de-center” the self-centered left brain thinking.

Access to the prism of truth

An organization needs to build its own checks and balances to make sure people don’t just cherry-pick data from its surrounding. Paying unbiased attention to the world around us is virtually impossible (infinite data!) so this is not a matter of perfection. Instead, organizations need to try as much as possible to include other forms of knowing to mitigate the default self-centeredness and confirmation bias.

Any social process that helps people step out of current frames allows room for new thoughts. Since that’s easy – doing things different is not a trivial task – appropriate social technologies are useful, for example like Theory U.

Truth or reality might never be accessed fully or untaintedly but we can inch our way closer in that direction, so we can make better choices.

External fittedness

I’m personally really curious about this category because I’m not sure what we’ll find.

The basic idea is that even a purpose-driven organization is “selfish” and only cares about its ecosystem as a “market” or “potential audience.” That’s not only true in for-profits but also in nonprofits that often have to prove their worth in impact metric. This is even more true in impact-driven or mission-driven nonprofits.

But that’s now how wisdom works. Wisdom takes into consideration the good of the whole. Wisdom recognizes the interdependence of everyone.

For example, if an organization pollutes a river, that’s smart (because it drives revenue or increases impact metrics) – but it’s not wise.

A thriving ecosystem is characterized by mutualism and symbiosis, where each entity, while pursuing its own survival, also contributes to the health and sustainability of the larger system. For an organization to be truly fitted into its environment, it must understand its role not just as a competitor or service provider but as a participant in a larger network of relationships.

It seems that this kind of thinking is the closest to neither sector but a 4th sector – the commons. Only if we see everything as connected and worthy in its own right can we steward and live in interrelatedness with our ecosystem.

This requires two things – good boundaries. For example, a cell has a membrane. Without a membrane, it cannot survive. In the same way, Elinor Ostrom found that having a clear definition of the inside and outside or an organization matters. With a clear boundary come opportunities for transactions. In our lungs, oxygen enters bloodstream, and carbon dioxide exits. It’s a transaction with a clear interface.

The other side is how the organization contributes to the whole. It requires a shift from viewing the environment as a resource to be exploited to seeing it as a community to be engaged with. It means recognizing that the organization’s long-term success is intertwined with the health of the community, the economy, and the planet. The organization is at the same time separate and not-separate, a part of the flow of life.

Any organization needs to understand that relationship for itself. The concept of external fittedness, therefore, involves moving beyond the traditional metrics of success to include measures of how well an organization harmonizes with and contributes to the vitality of its surroundings. How might we do that?