Seven Learning Disabilities
- How Decision-Makers Fail to Understand

Bad decisions are made everyday in companies and government institutions. The headlines are constantly filled with examples of things going wrong for governments and corporations because of bad decisions, which includes the covering up of bad decisions with yet further bad decisions. In spite of all this, there are always a few intelligent and reasonably competent people who want our institutions and companies to work better for the well-being of everyone within and around them. Not all consultancies are like the Arthur Andersons for the Enrons who want to rip-off their shareholders with virtual insider-trading schemes of various ways of cooking the books. Sometimes consultants are hired to actually improve organizational performance. When this happens, as it occasionally does, the main task of the consultants and the managers or administrators they consult is to help everyone think and plan better, which means helping them to overcome their adult learning disabilities.

The first step toward overcoming individual and group barriers to understanding is for all to learn to recognize learning disabilities for what they really are when they see them in themselves and others. Let's take a look at some common ways that learning is blocked in decision-makers and see where it leads us.

1. Staying in the Respectable Ruts.

Every organization has its established ways of meeting and planning, which includes its usual routines for failing to meet or plan properly. This is therefore not an issue of whether meeting or planning are useful in the manner they are assumed to exist or not exist. The learning disability here is that people are mentally lazy and will try to copy what they assume are successful models of good thinking and decision making without having to do any original and creative thinking and planning, whether individually or as a group. So, they carry on with routine ways of doing things that are either obsolete or misunderstood. In this state, decision-makers are voluntary prisoners of what they imagine to be valuable thoughts and actions shared by them as an assumed potency. In this psychological condition, they cannot conceive that bad results they continue to get in the real world are traceable to their own agreed ways of thinking and planning. They have become hi-tech savages carrying out useless rituals that are never questioned.

2. Failures Through Adherence to a Single Economic or Management Theory

Governments, public institutions and companies often cling to an over-simplified belief system, which gives them emotional impetus and keeps people working and struggling for what they assume is the "good cause", even if it is something demonstrably insane, such as Communism or Privatization.

Companies also tend to cling to some shared management theory which is obviously incomplete, but which solved one type of problem at one time. So what happens here is that we see decision-makers saying and doing things which seem to them to be totally reasonable, but which lack the knowledge framework which would take them into greater effectiveness beyond the boundaries of their belief-system. Whole organizations, even blocks of nations, are thus often in a state resembling practical cults. Clinging to an old pattern in the brain, an inadequate model of Reality, they are unable to undergo the paradigm shifts that would enable regular updating of their individual and shared cognitive system. These people fear the kind of information they would have to include in their cognitive system for their decisions to really work. When things go wrong, they never look at the real reason for it: their belief system about themselves and their world.

3. Following What is Most Exciting and Talked-about Rather Than Looking into the Real Problems and Opportunities, Weaknesses and Strengths.

These are people who are more interested in manipulating the herd for selfish aims or being members of the herd for silly social aims. Sheep like being driven over the cliff and false shepherds like driving them. People want to become rich and famous somehow, or the rich and famous want more control for even greater wealth and power when they are already abusing with the wealth and power they have already got. The objective needs of the world or the relevant situation are thus set aside for short-term greedy excitements. People are seeking things that have nothing to do with the genuine viability of themselves or the organizations in which they are supposedly working. In this state, decision-makers find any real personal or group learning process rather daunting and boring, because the process does not cultivate the ways in which they are driven.

4. Wanting More and More Information to be Able to Decide.

These are people who vacillate and underperform through confusion and postponement based on what they have decided is a lack of requisite quantities of information, knowledge or even some form of rigid training. They have decided that they do not have to be clear and decisive with the information they already have. They seem to believe that memorizing a library on some subject would be the right substitute for real thinking. Some of this stems from the idiotic education they got in school and university where the student is rated on how much they have memorized and can reproduce on a test without having to be a creative thinker and without having to understand how a genuine learning process actually works. These people have been hypnotized by dull authorities into believing that information is more important than thought and consciousness.

Sometimes these people are also dissembling in that they do not want to own up to responsibility for something, like when the government does a "study" of a problem rather than undertaking a solution. If the solution is not in the government's nefarious "interests", the only way to ignore the problem is to have it endlessly "studied".

5. Imagining that all New Insights, Breakthroughs or Experiences are Useful.

People like to get excited about their personal cognitive vicissitudes. They also want to share that excitement about themselves with yet others who are hopefully impressed or at least excited in a similar way about themselves. This learning disability is rooted in the overestimating of one's own level of intelligence and personal significance. Decision-makers often feel slighted or frustrated if they are not being regarded by others as creative geniuses with earth-shaking insights into how it all works. What these people do not understand is the necessity for certain insights and breakthroughs to come in the right order or sequence for higher intelligence to actually develop beyond the present rather low level. What matters is the order of cognitive events and the preparedness of the decision-maker to actually learn from what happens. Most individuals and groups lack perspective on their cognitive processes so that they overestimate their apparent "progress" and keep covering up the important areas where learning has not yet even begun.

6. Self-imposed Difficulties From Trying to Learn by Oneself.

It is an actual fact that there are certain kinds of things that can only be learned as a student of a teacher in a learning situation with fellow students. But we live in the Age of Propaganda that tries to train every half-wit on Earth to believe they are people of "free will" who can "think for themselves" and that anyone but the Government suggesting the things to be pursued in life must be a "cult guru" who wants to "brainwash" them. Victims of mass hypnosis and conditioning therefore become afraid that someone might "hypnotize and condition" them! The fact is that there are a great many people beyond your level of intelligence and human development who could help you increase your intelligence and human development in a way you can never accomplish through your own unguided, independent efforts. This is a fact, a Law of the Cognitive Universe, no matter who you are or what your level of outer authority is. There are certain important areas of learning you will never be able to teach yourself. This is true not just for you, but for everyone, though you will find it most dramatically hard to accept for yourself personally. The reason people need teachers, trainers, facilitators and consultants or counselors is because help from a more intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced or developed human being is indispensable in more than one field of endeavor. There are people, therefore, always far more advanced in comparison to your present mediocre level, who you will never recognize--let alone meet--if you continue to imagine you are not basically mediocre in the cognitive areas that count the most. And if reading these kind of statements is personally upsetting to you, try to see what that might mean if virtually anyone you know would also become personally upset. Then try to picture someone who is not upset, but awakens to the horror of this learning disability of pseudo-independent mediocrity.

7. Groups Who Have Formed Themselves Through Mutual Imagination of Being Advanced.

The organizers of these groups, even though they may be working with the best of intentions and not just exploiting for money and fame, are those who lack the consciousness and perception to really know what profile of individuals could actually learn and develop their abilities from what kind of processes. There are all sorts of consultants and trainers or facilitators who have some skill in "running a group" who know virtually nothing at all about the real learning process of groups or individuals. Organizations spend billions every year on what are all too often half-baked group training and facilitated meetings that lead to virtually nothing but an inculcated "feel good " factor from being "challenged" in some emotional way by people who know how to create emotional arousal about "current strategic issues" and so on. Participation in such groups or helping to organize them is itself a learning disability. Working with the false and shallow is a barrier to the true and deep.

There's more. If we now combine the factor of everybody imagining they are a do-it-yourself kit of free-will thinking-for-oneself, the term "facilitator" has come into being to reassure that there is no superior intelligence and wisdom present to teach the "way up", but something like a running-of-groups specialist who is on the same level of intelligence and personal evolution as the people he is facilitating. In this way, the participants feel reassured that they are not being subjected to a "guru" who might "indoctrinate" them against the indoctrination they have already received from the government, the media and other mass social mechanisms. The most successful false group learning or strategy gigs will always emotionally reinforce unquestioned assumptions that are being juggled on white boards or flip charts. These so-called "facilitators" will always hold out that there is some fresh new configuration of unquestioned assumptions that is giving some "breakthrough". Of course a real breakthrough that actually does successfully question assumptions will inevitably question the authority that rules over the assumptions and that is pretty scary stuff. Organizations will pay more money to have their assumptions reconfigured than they will to have them broken down for the sake of real learning and better decision-making.

This group of seven basic learning disabilities is not exhaustive of all learning disabilities, but if these seven cannot be understood and corrected there will be no basis for bringing up and tackling what are rather subtler learning difficulties. We have to learn to walk before we can be trained to run.