Exploring More Conscious Management

 The biggest problem in management today is that the thinking and planning being done are not real thinking and planning at all, but just interconnected rationalizations of angry or anxious reactions welling up from within the dinosaur region of each manager's brain.  This is an incredibly serious and difficult neurocognitive problem that today's organizations are not even beginning to face.  We need to somehow face this very sad fact that the overwhelming majority of managers and administrators in companies and institutions cannot presently stop themselves from being dinosaur brains driven by unconscious reactions.  So they are wearing each other out with their mutual nonsense rather than consciously coordinating their planning and action on a level of genuine success for themselves and their organizations.  Senior managers have this problem as well as middle management.  Consultants brought in to help usually have this problem also, which can confuse matters even further.

 What, then, is needed?  We will have to go very slowly and deeply into this and see if we cannot gently grope our way into a new and better shared consciousness of all this.  This means that our organization in question will need to install into itself more conscious kinds of management processes that can help managers calm down and do some genuine clear thinking from alternative perspectives instead of remaining tensely driven in the usual neurotic old patterns of the dinosaur brain.  The new processes will be a kind of experimental cognitive therapy for all the participants, which means it will have an uplifting affect on their learning process personally and at home, not just professionally at work.  We cannot become more conscious with a greater ability to learn in just one part of our human life.  Everything in our life becomes better or nothing does.  

 Where have we got to now?  Meetings and relationships of managers with one another need a better, healthier ground of friendly and candid cooperation about what all are struggling to achieve from working and living as total human beings.  If the group psychology is unhealthy, group cognition cannot improve, just as we cannot get better yield from a tree if the roots are rotten.  That is why merely adding better thinking and cognitive facilitation to a group of managers will not yield better understanding and decision action if they are not also becoming more conscious and sincere human beings.  If a group of managers are all tense and boring for one another, if they do not have a certain degree of rapport and attunement to one another about their values and aspirations, it is not going to matter much that a lot of clever ideas are poured out on to white boards and juggled this way or that.  Real improvement of thinking and planning happens only where there is greater consciousness in all the participants as a keen avocation informing the shared vocation.  If people are not becoming more interesting and friendly for one another, how can they think and plan and act more clearly and effectively in matters of practical outcome?  They will not even be able to share real criteria of success or the measurement of it. 

 Better decision-making is grounded in better thinking; better thinking is grounded in better consciousness.  The decisive issue then becomes to get an improvement of consciousness as total human beings in our entire job, studies and life.  And this is not about joining silly New Age fads or the like any more than it is about theoretical cognitive science as such.  What it is about is finding our way into a new movement in our consciousness beyond the usual old patterns of thinking and behaviour.   This is not something esoteric, mystical or weird, but incredibly fundamental and difficult.  Maybe the right word is "evolutionary", but that is so worn-out and humdrum that it has very little value.  De Bono calls it things like "lateral thinking" and even just "creativity", but these are too fad-like and centred in his own little act.   At any rate, there has to be this new movement or function of consciousness beyond our usual trips, whatever we eventually decide to call it to one another in the language game.

    One thing for sure is that the dinosaur brains are going to kick up a fuss that their arrogant conservativism and usual professional judgement are not being respected by new and better consciousness.   They want to go on being tense and inadequate.  They want to go on making trouble for one another and hampering the performance of the organization.  They want to make sure that their organization continues to add to world problems.  They want to continue to incarnate resistance to change.  They want to continue in their shared cover-ups and defensive routines.   They, above all, want to continue to avoid seeing what they are really like.  Yet, if they are gently led to voluntarily participate in the right new processes and ways of meeting together, there can be at least a slight increase in shared new consciousness.   In this business of organization cognition, any real improvement to even a slight degree is a very big thing over time.   We have to look at the big picture when dealing with stubbornly proud and stupid managers who imagine they are intelligent.  This is very patient work with very difficult, unpleasant and unhappy people.  They find it so easy to get upset and so hard to learn that we should not expect any dramatic result, but only a useful one.

    Are we truly beginning to explore greater consciousness in management and decision-making?  That is the question we need to keep asking ourselves repeatedly - not just as a slogan, but as a genuine concern.   If we are not persistently asking this we will not look in the right places and find out the things we need most to be learning about; we will continue to be distracted by secondary issues.  The quality of our consciousness is what matters the most, if we can have the courage to look at it and keep looking at it.  So it is not just a matter of improving consciousness, but of awakening a more comprehensive and persistent consciousness of consciousness.  

 Now, if we have come this far, if we are becoming more conscious of our consciousness so that we are no longer quite so entrenched in the old ruts and patterns in the brain (all those dinosaur problems), we are going to develop some strange new feelings about all this.   We will find ourselves relating with other people differently, for instance.  Where we would normally be angry or afraid, we will find ourselves watchful and interested.  We will be watching mechanical cognitive and behavioural patterns in ourselves and others with a deeply fresh understanding and questioning.  We will be less robotic and therefore less subject to propaganda and lies.   We will be more honest and truthful and more firmly insistent on honesty and truthfulness from others.   We will discover fundamentally patient and gradual improvement of situations without unrealistic expectations.