Coloured glasses
The more you wear them, the easier it is to forget to take them off
“Everyone takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” — Arthur Schopenhauer. 1
Have you ever used a hammer, a saw, or a chisel?
How about riding a bicycle, chauffeuring a punt, or driving a car?
Or maybe you play the piano, saxophone, or guitar?
Do you remember how unwieldy it felt when you first got to grips with any of the above?
How your attention was fully focused on the tool, vehicle, or instrument — trying to get it to do what you wanted?
But then how, as you persevered, you became more familiar with using it over time, gradually paying less focal attention to the equipment itself, and attending more to what you could do with it?
Professor Michael Polanyi,2 who made significant contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy, commented on this as follows:
“When I use a hammer to drive in a nail, I attend to both nail and hammer, but in a different way. I watch the effect of my strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling of the hammer in the palm of my hand which is merged into the focal awareness of my driving in the nail.” 3
We’re used to thinking of a hammer as a tool.
But for Polanyi, anything we use to achieve an outcome is a tool, and becomes embodied in a similar way as the hammer.
Polanyi coined a term for this embodied form of knowledge — tacit knowing.
The more we use a tool, the more our tacit knowledge grows, and the more our focal awareness shifts away from the tool and onto the effect of the tool.
At the same time, the feel of using the tool shifts from our focal awareness into our subsidiary awareness.
Probably one of the most familiar examples of the above is learning to drive a car.
When we start out, we’re faced with a confusing array of switches, levers, and pedals that we need to master in order to drive the car.
Over time, as everything gradually becomes more familiar, we embody the skill of driving and the various controls shift from focal awareness to subsidiary awareness.
Eventually, everything becomes sufficiently automatic that we can get in the car, drive somewhere, and not even remember which route we took… 4
When guitar maestros like Brian May, Angus Young or Matt Bellamy are on stage, they don’t focus on which fingers they need to put where on the strings and frets.
They learned how to do all of that many years ago.
They now have a subsidiary awareness of their fingers on the guitar, merged within the focal awareness of playing Bohemian Rhapsody, Thunderstruck or Knights of Cydonia.
And, were you to draw their focal awareness onto the instrument mid-performance by asking which strings and frets they were using, they’d likely mess up the tune. 5
Polanyi’s insights about tacit knowing, focal awareness, and subsidiary awareness don’t just apply just to physical tools like hammers, cars, and guitars. They also apply to the conceptual tools we use in our mental processes.
When we adopt and apply a formula, model, or method, it colours what we see — as though we’ve put on coloured glasses.
The more we use that mental tooling, the more deeply it becomes embodied as tacit knowledge in our subsidiary awareness.
Our focal awareness shifts more and more to the output we produce, and what we see becomes increasingly and more deeply coloured as our skill level increases.
Which is fine until the context changes, and what we’ve become accustomed to seeing is no longer what really matters.
This turns out to be one of the greatest challenges in creating a future-fit entrepreneurial culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Many of our default tools, methods, and mindsets are rooted in tacit knowledge that was acquired in, and appropriate for, the more certain, predictable world of the past.
And, despite Polanyi having written his magnum opus Personal Knowledge more than 60 years ago, very few people today grasp the vital role of tacit knowledge.
That’s particularly problematic when it comes to culture change, because a lot of ‘the way we do things round here’ is deeply rooted in tacit, not explicit knowledge.
This legacy tacit knowledge was an asset back when it became embodied and embedded.
However, much of it has now become a liability, impeding the emergence of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness characteristic of a future-fit culture.
Legacy coloured glasses
Some examples of outdated legacy tacit knowledge, usually seen as self-evidently correct, and therefore largely remaining unexamined, include:
Leadership is something done by top management 6
“Senior executive” is synonymous with “decision maker” 7
“Decision maker” is synonymous with “leader” 8
“Culture” is an organisation’s shared values 9
Mainstream management consulting firms are a safe pair of hands 10
What gets measured gets done 11
Our people could never do that 12
You can’t change people’s mindsets 13
Culture change is complex, messy, and invariably fails 14
Questions for Reflection
Which of the legacy coloured glasses listed above do you suspect are holding your organisation back?
Where are the biggest problems with outdated tacit knowledge in your organisation?
What outdated personal tacit knowledge is most preventing you from achieving your aims and objectives?
Within Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, the section 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.”
Polanyi was a Hungarian chemist who moved to the UK in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He held the chair in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester for 15 years before the university created a chair for him in his new passion, the social sciences, which he held from 1948 until 1958. Wikipedia entry on Polanyi.
From Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi (p55) 1998 edition by Routledge — ISBN 9780415151498.
This happens even more often when we rely on satnav. Which leads to interesting problems such as when former world snooker champion Neil Robertson programmed in the wrong Barnsley and ending up heading towards the one in Gloucestershire, thereby missing and forfeiting his World Open snooker match in 2019.
See also The Centipede’s Dilemma.
See this previous article: “Leadership, not leaders”
See this previous article: “Senior executives must give up their decision rights”
Ibid - “Leadership not leaders”
See this previous article: “The toxic myth of culture as shared values”
When creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, mainstream management consulting firms are Hired Help that Hinders — the fifth and most systemically reinforcing of The Five Fatal Habits that have consistently impeded progress for more than 30 years. Download my 22-page summary of The Five Fatal Habits here.
The more accurate version of this well-worn saying is “What gets measured gets manipulated”.
If you believe that, then it will be true. See this previous article: “The power of expectancy”
You can, and it’s not as difficult as it may seem, so long as you Focus on key influencers
Not if you know how and where to look. See this previous article: Seeing Culture