Rebel Wisdom
Three thought-provoking explorations of insights relevant to future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age”. - Albert Einstein 1
One of the big discoveries for me during the pandemic lockdown period was the Rebel Wisdom YouTube Channel.
There’s lots of great content, but I’d recommend three pieces in particular.
Tyson Yunkaporta
The first is Alexander Beiner’s interview with Tyson Yunkaporta — “Indigenous Thinking for Troubled Times”.
Yunkaporta is a member of the indigenous Apalech Clan whose homeland is in far north Queensland, Australia.
He’s also a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, and in June 2020, published the bestseller ‘Sand Talk - How indigenous thinking can save the world’. 2
Instead of the usual setup where anthropologists look at indigenous culture from a Western perspective, he flips the mirror and looks at Western society though an indigenous lens.
What he sees is not pretty, as the first three minutes of the interview demonstrates.
Just view that section — and see if you can resist watching the rest of it…
Amongst other things, Yunkaporta is scathing of the simplistic ‘best practice solutions’ often peddled as panaceas for systemic complexity:
"Anybody who thinks they've got a solution or they have a plan or a design or anything like that – they're an idiot. You can't. Dynamic systems don't operate like that. You have a thing called emergence. We know this. We know the science on it and emergence is the only thing that can deal with these kind of complexities. All you can do is foster the conditions for emergence." 3
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The second piece features the other Rebel Wisdom co-founder David Fuller interviewing Daniel Schmachtenberger — The War on Sensemaking.
Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher and founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sense making and dialogue. 4
In the interview he describes how various forces conspire to co-opt our ability to make sense of the world and bias us towards making decisions that benefit other actors — often at the expense of our own best interests.
It’s probably my favourite piece that Rebel Wisdom have put out.
The interview is almost two hours long and explores a range of themes, including:
The world is too complex for any individual to make sense of alone, and requires multiple perspectives from people working well together.
Good sense making requires the development of the necessary cognitive muscles.
The vital roles of truth, truthfulness and representativeness in effective sense making.
Disinformation is the equivalent of pollution - of the information ecology within which we make sense of our world.
Dissing other perspectives is often used to grab unearned attention.
Social media up-regulates memes that gain attention, not ones that are truthful.
Practical steps we can take to improve our own individual and collective sense making
Some of the practical steps Schmachtenberger proposes are very resonant with my own work over the past 35 years.
If you’re familiar with my 2D3D thinking tool, you’ll recognise that thinking in the three minute segment from 1:22:45 - 1:25:50. 5
In the two minute segment from 1:35:13 - 1:37:04 he takes up the risk of being trapped in a 2D perspective — and how to escape the trap. 6
Iain McGilchrist
The third piece is David Fuller’s interview with psychiatrist, writer, and former Oxford literary scholar Dr Iain McGilchrist, exploring his recently published book The Matter with Things.
McGilchrist came to prominence through his previous book The Master and His Emissary (2009), addressing the supposedly debunked idea of hemispheric specialisation in the brain. 7
I say supposedly debunked because, as McGilchrist says, his work “debunks the debunking”.
The previously popular notion that the left hemisphere deals with language, logic, and linear thinking, and the right hemisphere deals with art, music and poetry is indeed, McGilchrist says, largely wrong.
But there are important differences in the ways each hemisphere attends to the world — in all animals, including humans — with the left hemisphere paying sharply focused attention to things it already thinks of as important, whilst the right hemisphere pays broad vigilant attention to the bigger picture context.
In the above interview he addresses how:
The real world is inherently beautiful and intrinsically complex but loses these qualities when attended to with a left hemisphere dominant outlook.
The right hemisphere has greater access to what is present in the moment, whereas the left hemisphere deals in re-presentations — maps of reality as opposed to the reality itself.
These maps, representations, or schema are vital for acting in the world but, when mistaken for the reality, drain life of meaning and vitality.
The Western world suffers from an increasing bias towards left hemisphere ways of attending, leading to false dichotomies such as between: Science & Humanities; Science & Spirituality, Reason and Imagination; Science and Intuition.
The left hemisphere is focused on manipulation of the world; the right hemisphere on understanding the world.
Overall, McGilchrist makes a compelling case that the catastrophes we face in the world, not just in escalating damage to the biosphere but in the loss of joy, hope and meaning, stem from our left hemisphere dominant way of attending to the world.
This has led, he says, to a mesmerised adoration of a way of thinking that evolved to exploit, not understand the world.
Consequently, we’re forcing people to behave more like machines and as narrow, narcissistic, profoundly greedy and atomistic individuals with diminished ability to perceive the beauty and interconnectedness of life.
When prodded by Fuller (at 1:23:40) to offer a suggested course of action McGilchrist says:
“It’s a huge mistake in psychiatry to tell people what to do”.
“When things are awry in this way, telling people what to do never works because unless they can see why they should do it — in which case they’ll probably have already done it — it won’t click with them.”
“It’s only later when they’ve seen why it is that they’re suffering, because they’re thinking in a certain way and doing certain things that they then say “You know, I think I ought to do so and so”.
“When you’re very naïve and clever and young as a psychiatrist you know what people ought to do and you tell them — and it never works. It’s later you have to learn to take them to a place where they can say for themselves “I need to do that” — then they do it”.
“The whole point of me having squandered ten years of my life writing this book is to be able to take people by the hand and say — look at this — because when you see this you will start to think differently about many things. And as we think, we live. We then start to live differently”.
McGilchrist’s life’s work is to help redress the balance we’ve lost by paying overly left hemisphere biased attention to the world.
I’ve consistently seen in organisations throughout Europe, Asia and the US how this imbalance suppresses the flexibility and dynamism required to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
It’s also the underlying root cause of the Five Fatal Habits that have stifled, smothered, and strangled the emergence of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness for more than 30 years. 8
"The Common Language of Science", a broadcast for Science, Conference, London, 28 September 1941. Published in Advancement of Science, London, Vol. 2, No. 5. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954)
Link to the Kindle version of Sand Talk.