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We rely very heavily on professional judgment in decision making, which explains why so many decisions turn out to be stupid, incompetent and just plain bad. What goes wrong with professional judgment is that it is wholly based on accumulated knowledge and experience as a locked-in cognitive pattern of memory, which is the past. Professional judgment is not based on the new, which is the changing factors and boundaries of the emergent situation, nor is it based on innovative learning and thinking that build future viability and success.
Professional judgment is a learning disability. It cannot understand or cope with change. In fact, it is filled with resistance to change, which is both an individual and organizational problem. It predictably rejects strange information and unusual subjects. It will try to avoid truly intelligent and innovative individuals or groups who are comfortable with new knowledge and radical changes. It will speak forcibly against web-sites, for instance, that handle new perspectives or more advanced forms of cognition beyond dull, boring and professional or seemingly correct and proper presentations or appearances.
Companies with vague goals of long-range strategic success and organizational viability often exhibit genuine strategic and organizational incompetence through massive stuckness in patterns of professional judgment and too-busy-to-think managerial activity. Lip service is given to “creativity”, “learning” and “better decision-making”, but these have become nothing but shared cover-up slogans for remaining heedless of urgently important unusual information or threatening new realities people do not want to face, which heedlessness indicates a raging case of Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome, where all can neatly and comfortably bury their heads in the sand as the politically correct thing to do.
Professional judgment will try to tell us that we cannot be in business successfully if we do not conform to the avoidance of reality that pervades the world of management. We must not, according to it, be in any way colorful, creative, or strangely unique. Everything must conform to conservative norms and established terminologies of consulting, management and decision making even where it is obviously these old ruts and their standardized look-and-feel that are reinforcing organizational and global failure, destruction and pain. Professional judgment is thus like the Titanic pressing full-steam toward a dangerous iceberg without the ability to turn quickly and adjust course flexibly.
Genuine goal-oriented problem solving and scenario planning are, for instance, still heavily resisted and under-budgeted in business and government, as are other urgently needed forms of group thinking, planning and creative action. Because of this, those managers who understand all this become isolated and unpopular within their company or administration as if they are “trouble makers”. They have to be careful that they not offer too much thought or unusual information to the meeting table of professional judgment, which is predominately a gathering of boring idiots suffering in actual fact from quite serious learning blockages and gross lack of creativity, intuition and super-productive weirdness. We have to be careful here on the Planet of the Apes that we remain within the hard boundaries of crude left-brained professionalism. In this kind of conservative environment, only emotionally appealing forms of oversimplified newness will be acceptable. Because the emotionally appealing forms of newness are failures of deeper extended thinking and learning, they will only grease the wheels of on-going bad decision making and mindless busyness. The more acceptable something is to professional judgment, the less it is worth. Companies for instance, will easily hire a standard big name consultancy for a wasteful million pound project that will reinforce some strategic or organizational error before they will pay a small, innovative and super-competent consultancy a hundred thousand pounds to achieve a new strategic or organizational competency that would save the company millions. Professional judgment always turns to other forms of professional judgment when help is needed, whereas what would really help is treated with suspicion and ridicule higher up.
Everyday sees hundreds of thoughtful and creative articles published on the Web and in magazines or journals that could provisionally stimulate some small beginning of innovative learning, but professional judgment is too busy to read it or too stupid to understand it when it does make some slight effort to grapple with it. Usefully thought-provoking knowledge is out there, but it is woefully unappreciated and only rarely followed up on or put into action. And the more advanced it is, the more it is treated as “impractical” or unacceptably bizarre. So the entire circus of bad and wasteful decision making continues everywhere throughout our world and in our companies.
Can we slow down a little at this point and ask ourselves what the real problem is in our situation of concern? Or will we continue to feverishly work the mechanisms of our professional judgment? Can we look at our real state of cognitive psychology, both individually and on our team which meets for the purpose of planning and organizing, creating a system, for success and viability? Can we question our assumptions? Can we step beyond the trap we have become for ourselves in our habitual nature? Can we stop being paranoid apes who foolishly demand that everybody and everything conform to our limited, left-brained false thinking and false creativity? Can we learn how to learn? Can we learn to ask ourselves these and similar questions of awakening intelligence and emergent higher intuition? Can we aspire to evolve, develop and improve our decision making as a new and better sense of direction?
Professional judgment is indeed an endless failure to learn. Its demands for conformity to its arrogant idiocy will not help it even when others conform to it. Professional judgment needs to shut up and learn to listen. Professional judgment needs to learn respect for its cognitive and psychological superiors. Professional judgment must train itself to suspend itself in favor of higher and better perceptions, investments and activities. But it will generally not change its attitude in these needed ways. And if anyone tells consultants or managers that they are truly stuck in linear black-hat thinking and anti-creativity, they can easily explode emotionally in your face, for they have, after all, spent years investing in their present beliefs and their self-esteem over old successes that are no longer relevant. One must be incredibly cautious about telling professional judgment the truth of itself. It is a very emotionally reactive centre of egotism. It hates the idea that it has a lot to learn from people who seem weird, whacky and wrong. And, above all, it is afraid that its personally comfortable and even idealistic worldview may indeed turn out to be the futile pile of over-simplified crap that it is.
The real truth of all this cannot become popular precisely because it is the real truth of all this. The average professional person does not want to see that he or she is a deluded member of a deluded society conforming to deluded norms. Truly enlightened, conscious and innovative individuals will always seem too far-out, too unacceptable to professional judgment. The rare free spirits in the world do as best they can to share the real thing with beginners, but most beginners in real thinking and planning are beaten before they start through fear of being different. It takes extraordinary courage to be a genuinely creative and competent manager, consultant, learner, teacher or facilitator. Organized professional judgment, like an organism, has an immune system which will react against anything foreign and alien to it, even if the foreign or alien entity is a positive benefit—-a true booster of the learning process. Professional judgment in fact does not want a real learning process, for it would have to lose face by admitting that it needs one. So it just feverishly plans and plots within its remit of trying to replace the innovative with the normal and acceptable. Thus it kills real potential for meaningful success, like a mad robot bursting upon any unusual scene to download its normal but useless criticisms of anyone or anything seemingly too different, far-out or threatening to its limited information system.
Yes, we are going to say it now: Professional judgment is robotic, mechanical, stupid and unworthy of the truly intelligent and innovative rare individuals who try to help out on this God-forsaken planet of neurotic dull normalcy. The more it tries to get Real People to conform to it, the further it gets from both personal and organizational viability. And of course it is boring and meaningless professional judgment that says we must not have provocative lateral thinking devices on our professional websites. This is because professional judgment is repressive toward the cognitive principles of generative thinking.
The message of Innovative Learning to professional judgment is: “If you can’t take it, you won’t make it!”
This of course causes a lot of paranoia and sour-grapes from our professional associates, who are like moths attracted to the flame of higher learning, which singes their wings of conservative professionalism. They are afraid they might become Hippies or Conspiracy Cranks. They are afraid they might stop dressing right and talking right for acceptance in the shit world of wrong decision making and incompetent strategies that are fixated in actual anti-learning.
Fixated anti-learning is the normal position of human consciousness. This position is constantly reinforced by peer pressure, desire for societal acceptance and the need to get paid for work, even if it is only the wrong kind of work that employers will pay to have done. We all thus live in a world, on a planet, where so-called “values” are nothing but the ordinary pursuits and activities that comprise evolutionary failure and inability to learn. Hence, money is treated as an actual value rather than something like, say, great craftsmanship or non-normal ranges of perception or ability, such as intuition or telepathy, as if “believing” or “not believing” in such things has some sort of relevance. Normal so-called “values” of fixated consciousness or pattern lock of the brain, are in real terms anti-values. There is an immense sociological pressure on the planet to maintain the conformity demands of professional judgment to the point of wanting a police state governed by the corrupt super-rich. Innovative learning in the future will probably be treated as an “Enemy of the State”. Professional judgment is so desperate to believe it is “right” that it will go to great lengths to suffocate anything unusual.
Professional judgment likes respectable “Think Tanks” where real thinking is avoided in favor of the politically correct, expedient and corrupt policies where thinkers must not seek a real investigation of the true sources of international terrorism, possibly within Western governments themselves, nor ever question global privitization by crony capitalism that works brutally through corrupt international control mechanisms, nor treat global warming as the obvious world environmental catastrophe it is becoming, and certainly not complain about the increasing surveillance police state trends in America, Britain and Europe. It seems that the building of realistic scenarios based on real global trends is too politically controversial for professional judgment. Professional judgment thus keeps itself either hopelessly naïve or involved in outright complicity toward abuse of power.
Can anyone sincerely picture innovative learning in companies that are the beneficiaries of political corruption? This is itself one of the root causes for the tendency of professional judgment to be oppressive toward unusual individuals possessing unusual information and knowledge. The political and sociological atmosphere of the world calls for it. Wrong doing by people in power demands that all professional people remain hypnotized victims of propaganda or willing purveyors of it.
Again, let us pause and think as to the nature of our world and the kind of people who presently govern nation-states and run the giant corporations. If we look at all that with clear eyes, free from propaganda, our eyes are wide open rather than the eyes wide shut of professional judgment.
Professional judgment must be bashed in every possible way if there is to be hope of improved decision making in our companies or for issues affecting our world as a whole. Professional judgment is the obvious enemy of a rich and rewarding future for any organization or the individuals in it. Professional judgment renders potentially creative, intuitive and intelligent learners into useless automata blabbering strategic platitudes to one another.
Whoever would attempt to defend professional judgment against the truth of it is obviously brain dead and an unfree spirit, a mere biological robot, an artificial intelligence at best. Such unreal people become the proponents of Eliminative Materialism or adherents of foolish religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Jainism or Buddhism. Professional judgment is always wedded to negative or positive prejudice in one form or another. That is why it is so easily hypnotized and manipulated by propaganda techniques. And that is why it cannot learn: It is the cognitive trap of the sequence of information and experience accumulated over time as conditioning. Conditioned thinking is obviously not thinking at all, but a cheap substitute for thinking, which is dogmatic prejudice.
Professional judgment is fundamentally dishonest and self-deceptive. That is why it fights so hard to keep itself intact. It easily goes to pieces under just the slightest real scrutiny. So it must live in a state of self-enclosed tension and backbiting criticism of truly creative and spiritual people or innovative learners, holistic planners, harmonious evolutionary beings. It cannot handle the fact that it is in essence an unhappy, pretentious asshole. It will never admit that it is itself its real problem rather than the problems it announces to others.
Now, if we have come this far, which is doubtful in most cases, why not simply merely mention things like Extraterrestrial Intelligence or Out-of-the-Body-Experiences and listen to professional judgment vomit all over itself that such subjects are “unprofessional”. Even if such subjects are highly crucial for understanding the real future of humanity, they are not to be mentioned even speculatively within Scenario Planning. Why is this? Because respectable decision makers have adjudged such subjects to be unreal or at best rather irrelevant subject material applicable to the uneducated masses. The education of a professional person on our planet implies membership in a kind of Flatland where anything Other Dimensional is considered insane. Such professional people will of course say they are “open minded”, but this is of course a preposterous lie. What kind open-mindedness is it where there are all sorts of taboo subjects, undiscussables and defensive routines?
Professional judgment lives in a pseudo “real world” or first paradigm, a final vocabulary—a socially constructed reality shared with other professional, hopelessly conditioned and prejudiced people. It cannot see that it needs to learn to dwell in an open-ended multiverse, a boundless world of multiple realities, an infinite diversity of perspectives, cultures, races and worlds. It cannot develop a cosmic perspective, but insists on remaining petty, insular and local. It is therefore not surprising that it does not want any real lateral thinking (see Edward de Bono) on business websites or in business meetings. And it is therefore predictable that it will continue to screw up in a variety of critically important areas, for no one’s real effectiveness can ever be greater than the scope of mental world they live from.
The awakening of intelligence begins with the voluntary suspension of professional judgment. All real consulting, planning and action begin on this basis and no other. There can be no compromise on this point.
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