Back to BASICs
The Background Awareness of Self In Context
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances…” – William Shakespeare 1
In the first of his War on Sensemaking conversations with David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom, evolutionary philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger highlighted the importance of perspective taking — a central practice in the shared sense making that’s essential to future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness:
“For me to really try and get where you’re coming from on a topic, I have to really take your perspective.
Well, what is it in me that’s taking your perspective — because it’s not my perspective, right?
It’s actually having to drop the way that I see things to really try and see it the way you see things to make sense of it.
So that means there’s a capacity in me that can witness my perspective that can also witness your perspective. But that is deeper than the current perspective I have — and we all know we can change our beliefs and there’s still something that is ‘us’.
So there’s an ‘us-ness’ that’s deeper than the belief system.
To be able to really try to make sense of someone else, I actually have to move into that level of self that is deeper than belief systems.” 2
What Schmachtenberger is describing above is the thing I found most fascinating when I began my regular practice of meditation over 30 years ago.
Meditation is based on the practice of witnessing — paying close, non-judgemental attention to the content of consciousness — observing it without labelling things as good/bad, wanted/unwanted, right/wrong, etc.
This practice of detached observation is in stark contrast to the dependent observation that occurs when we get caught up in life’s drama and regard our own perspectives as obviously right, and anyone who sees things differently as obviously wrong.
That’s not to say that our perspectives on good/bad, wanted/unwanted, right/wrong, don’t matter — far from it.
The point is that by paying closer attention in a non-judgemental way we’re able to see more aspects, angles and dimensions of what’s actually going on before we form our conclusions and judgements.
In short, it enables us to do better sense making so we can improve our decision making and action taking.
In their book Leadership on the Line, Harvard Professors Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe this practice using a dancing analogy:
“We call this skill ‘getting off the dancefloor and going to the balcony’ — an image that captures the mental activity of stepping back in the midst of action and asking, ‘what’s really going on here?’ ”. 3
Cultivating this practice of detached observation in the midst of our actions and interactions is vitally important in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world where, for an organisation to thrive, sense making, decision making & action taking must become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the whole organisation.
An important contributor in this domain was Canadian social psychologist Erving Goffman, one of the most influential thinkers on the sociology of daily life, social interaction, and the social construction of self.
Goffman adopted and adapted the theme of dramaturgy from the theatre, in his seminal book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 4
His ideas were informed and influenced by Kenneth Burke’s concept of dramatism, which drew on his earlier experience as a literary critic strongly influenced by Shakespeare.
Goffman and Burke both realised, as Shakespeare had 350 years earlier, and Vedic philosophers 2,000 years before that, how we’re all like actors playing our various parts and roles on the ‘stage of life’.
(Burke believed that life was in fact theatre, whereas Goffman viewed “life as theatre” as a useful metaphor. 5 )
Although the difference between adopting an awareness of the roles we play as opposed to the awareness of being the actor playing those roles may seem academic, its practical impact turns out to be enormous, especially if we aspire to play our part in creating future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Our individual and collective sense making becomes massively constrained and curtailed when we allow our awareness of self to become over-invested in the roles we play, rather than remaining in the deeper, more expansive awareness of being the actor playing those roles.
“Every man mistakes the limits of his own field of vision to be the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.” —Arthur Schopenhauer 6
When I began working with this idea in earnest in 1990, it soon became apparent how seriously my own sense making suffered when I strongly identified with particular roles, especially when two of those roles came into conflict.
For many, myself included, the most powerful experience of this occurs during a conflict between ‘work’ and ‘home’ roles.
I’d had an acutely painful experience earlier that year of being torn between going to a client meeting in the Netherlands (very important to my work role) and staying at home in the UK for my son’s first birthday (very important to my father role).
For an outside observer, that’s an easy enough conflict to resolve — just have the party another day. (The alternative of rescheduling the client meeting wasn’t an option as it was the only day all the key participants could meet for several months).
But due to my strong identification with both these roles, I experienced being pulled in opposite directions by powerful forces as my mind flip-flopped between “I should go to the meeting, to the party, to the meeting, to the party...” as my awareness of self in context oscillated back and forth between ‘the professional’ and ‘the dad’…
As I got better at observing which awareness of self was in the driving seat as I found myself in different contexts throughout the day, a subtle shift in my relationship with the different roles I was playing gradually developed…
I wasn’t getting so deeply trapped in the roles I played. I somehow felt more balanced, stable, resourceful. I got less upset when others challenged roles I was playing. I became more assertive but less forceful in my interactions with others, and less emotionally compromised by their unkind, unthinking, or underhand behaviours. 7
Most importantly, I increasingly saw value in the different perspectives of others, even in people whose opinions and ideas I would previously have dismissed or ignored.
Not only that, but I began to see similar phenomena affecting people in the client organisations I was working with.
I could see how some people got themselves caught up in the role of expert, and how this awareness of self in context led them to expect others would defer to their expertise.
As a result, their attitudes and behaviours inhibited the collective sense making that’s crucial for organisational creativity and innovation.
Others, often in senior executive positions, got themselves caught up in the role of decision maker, an awareness of self in context that generated unnecessary stress for themselves (because they ended up being responsible for too many decisions), whilst simultaneously stifling, smothering, and strangling organisational agility and adaptiveness (because others had to wait for decisions and/or second guess and then fix the inevitable misunderstandings, misalignments, and mistakes later).
And others, often in corporate functions like Finance, Legal, or HR, got themselves caught up in the role of controlling access to resources, often developing overly restrictive attitudes and behaviours that then held their organisations back. 8
At a lecture I attended in 1997, Professor Gareth Morgan used this powerful metaphor to illustrate how awareness of self (‘being’) influences perception (‘seeing’): 9
“When a veterinarian sees a pig, the pig looks like a patient.
To a farmer, the same pig looks like money.
To a butcher, it looks like meat.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”.
Morgan’s pig metaphor shines light on two vitally important things.
Firstly, even though each of the observers is looking at the same pig, each sees it differently because each has a different awareness of self in context.
You’ve likely experienced something similar after attending a social event with your partner, hearing them describe it later, and wondering what on earth they’re on about...
Secondly, the awareness of self in context is in the background, not the foreground of consciousness.
The vet isn’t going around consciously thinking “I’m a vet, I’m a vet”. He or she has cultivated the awareness of being a vet over a long period of time, starting many years ago when first considering a career, and gradually developing and reinforcing the background awareness “I’m a vet” over time…
Whether it’s being a vet, a farmer, a butcher, a father, a mother, a professional, an expert, a decision maker, a resource controller or any other role, our mindsets, attitudes, behaviours, actions, and interactions all stem from our own unique and highly personal, and often changing Background Awareness Of Self In Context (BASIC).
When our BASIC is deeply invested in a role, as opposed to being the actor playing the role, we become progressively trapped in the narrow, biased, and one-sided “2D” perspective of that role. 10
But when we focus instead on cultivating a BASIC not based on the role but based on the awareness of being the actor playing the role, we’re less trapped in our own “2D” perspectives. 11
Then we’re much more able to see value in the equally inevitably narrow, biased, one-sided, but importantly different “2D” perspectives of others.
And then, together, we’re able to find more meaningful, impactful, and sustainable ways to co-create new value in the world.
Cultivating this capacity for keeping role separate from self is at the very heart of creating a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — in which people with diverse perspectives, experiences, and values come together collectively so they can cooperate and collaborate to consistently co-create new value.
That’s why, especially when you fall into the trap of thinking “I’m right and you’re wrong”, it’s vitally important to get back to BASICs.
“As You Like It” (1599-1600) Act II Scene VII
It’s well worth watching the whole of War on Sensemaking I (1 hour 50 mins). The extract above starts at 1:36:17 - click here to go to that part of the conversation.
Leadership on the Line - p51.
See Wikipedia’s entries on Dramaturgy and Dramatism.
Schopenhauer published a collection of thoughts in Parerga and Paralipomena - Greek for Appendices and Omissions - in 1851. These were subsequently published in various English collections including Studies in Pessimism, translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders in 1913. Within Studies in Pessimism a section titled Further Psychological Observations includes this full quote [Item 69]: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet. This explains many things, and among them the fact that everyone measures us with his own standard—generally about as long as a tailor's tape, and we have to put up with it: as also that no one will allow us to be taller than himself—a supposition which is once for all taken for granted.”
The experience reminded me of various lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ — “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”… “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”… “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”…] etc.
Such people are often seen as “Jobsworths” from the caricature of the official who refuses access to resources with the justification “It’s more than my job’s worth”. This is conveyed with hilarious irony by Jeremy Taylor in his song of the same title.
Organisational Metaphors are Morgan’s specialism. His 1986 book Images of Organization is a classic.
As with Morgan’s pig metaphor, our awareness of self (‘being’) influences our perception (‘seeing’) and can easily trap us in just one narrow way of seeing things. As this seven minute video explains, these Seeing-Being Traps are the #1 personal barrier to creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
This six minute video describes why innovative 2D3D mindsets are the foundation of a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.