Sense making for innovation
Creating new value by widening ways of knowing
“What is required is a synthesis of both intuition and imagination with reason: the imagined place — though one that is nonetheless with discipline achievable — where each is at its best, standing in equitable relation to each of the others, and informed, where relevant, by science.” — Dr Iain McGilchrist 1
Being in control
When I was studying for my electronics engineering degree I decided to specialise in digital, as opposed to analogue systems.
Although I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, I chose digital electronics because it gave a comforting feeling of being in control.
There are only two states a digital signal can be in — on or off — and it’s rare that you need to worry about other possibilities.
Digital electronics is basically binary mathematics made manifest in silicon.
What steered me away from analogue electronics in general, and radio frequency analogue in particular, were all the additional problems it brings in terms of noise, interference, crosstalk, etc. 2
In simple terms, when you design digital systems, so long as you don’t make basic errors, signals tend to go pretty much where you want them.
But in the analogue domain — and especially at radio frequencies — signals often go where they want, not where you want.
There’s a black art to designing radio frequency analogue circuitry, where simply bending a wire slightly can make all the difference to whether a signal behaves or misbehaves.
And I wasn’t having any of that unruliness, thank you very much.
Old scientific habits die hard
With hindsight I can see that this attraction to control was cultivated at school when studying science, specifically mathematics and physics.
Although we did get taught about relativity and quantum theories — where giants like Einstein, Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg had 70 years previously seen beyond the rigid structures and strictures of the Newtonian machine paradigm — most of the curriculum emphasised the latter.
This mechanistic thinking also appeared to be what was wanted and rewarded at the top-down command & control engineering firms I worked for after graduation, first British Aerospace and then the BBC.
I’d been tempted away from British Aerospace in 1982 by the BBC who were about to invest heavily in digitising their studio and transmission chains.
They needed digital engineers like me to complement their traditional analogue focus.
The prospect of getting in on the ground floor of a massive investment in digital tools and development platforms made it hard to resist, so I signed up…
Unfortunately, by the time I’d worked my notice period and turned up at the BBC, the top brass had deferred their digital investment for several years, leaving me as a digital fish in an overwhelmingly analogue pond.
So after floundering around for a few months, I left in early 1983 to join one of the world’s leading open innovation labs here in Cambridge UK. 3
Cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
After a few years working on and managing various digital real-time hardware and software design projects, I was asked to lead the Digital Systems Group.
The experience of increasing responsibility for the human side of value creation consolidated a shift I’d been sensing since moving to Cambridge.
This shift was away from ‘in control’ rigid ways of making sense of the world and much more towards the cultivation of innovation — involving insight, intuition and imagination alongside the applied science of engineering.
This soon evolved into the career path I’ve been on for 35 years — helping people in organisations throughout Europe, Asia and the US create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness where sense making, decision making & action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation. 4
The unfolding of this journey was brought to mind again recently whilst reading Iain McGilchrist’s magnum opus “The Matter With Things - Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World” (2021).
What resonated in particular was his explanation of the ways in which we can come to know the world, “encompassed under the very broad, and to some extent overlapping, headings of science, reason, intuition, and imagination”.5
McGilchrist’s main contribution to our increased understanding of sense making has been to reveal insights from applied neuroscience into the complementary roles of the two brain hemispheres in how we construct our experience of the world.
The 1970’s dodgy pop science view that the left hemisphere deals with logic and language, whilst the right handles art and creativity has long been debunked, but as part of the debunking the rather obvious fact that the brain does indeed have two hemispheres, and presumably for good reasons, became a no go area for career-minded neuroscientists.
Fortunately, McGilchrist is not easily put off and has spent 30 years painstakingly exploring, documenting, and describing this fascinating and vitally important frontier.
Reality and representation
His well-evidenced hypothesis is that both hemispheres are actively involved in just about everything — including science, reason, intuition, and imagination — but that each attends to the world differently:
“The single most profound difference between the hemispheres, which I will have cause to return to repeatedly, is the distinction between the experience of something as it ‘presences’ to us in the right hemisphere, and as it is ‘re-presented’ to us in the left.
Just because we so rarely deal with the world nowadays except as it is represented, and because we are used to mistaking the representation for the thing itself, the full significance of this may not be apparent.
Yet as our awareness moves from one to the other, an extraordinary transformation takes place, like moving from a photo album into the living space that was photographed.
The two are not necessarily in conflict, but neither are they at all the same kind of experience.” 6
The left hemisphere deals in maps, schema, models, concepts, frameworks, etc. that literally re-present a reduced version of reality — just like a photo captures a flat, dimensionally impoverished and lifeless representation of the living natural world:
“The process of re-presentation, of (literally) striving to make something present again as it were ‘after the event’, ignores the significance of time. This is already a considerable step away from reality.
When we think about time, only a massive effort of will can prevent us substituting a one-dimensional representation – time as a line in space – for the full experience that is understood only through our embodied intercourse with the world as it presences.
Space, too, is reduced to the world’s two-dimensional representation – as if projected on a screen.
We are so used to giving in to this virtualising and distorting process that we don’t even notice that we are doing it. Since space and time are where we live, that is a pretty important fact”. 7
McGilchrist’s work provides solid research-based explanations for what I’ve repeatedly seen to be at the very centre of creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — namely the fact that we each only ever grasp a narrow, biased, one-sided, two-dimensional perspective on the actual reality that we can never fully see or capture in a description.
Hence the practice of sense making for innovation is essentially about clarifying and communicating our own 2D take on things and, along with that, at the same time, cultivating genuine curiosity for, and skills to elicit more effectively, the 2D perspectives of others. 8
When we remain restricted by our own left hemisphere 2D take on 3D reality we’re like the proverbial blind men who each grasp part of the elephant and falsely extrapolate it into the whole.
The one grasping just the trunk infers the elephant is like a snake; the one with the tusk a spear; the ear a fan; the side a wall; the leg a tree trunk, and the tail a rope.
Only by combining different diverse partial perspectives from multiple people can organisations create more than a fraction of the value in the world revealed through the sense making capacity at their disposal.
In my experience, and as McGilchrist’s work helps explain, successful innovators readily draw upon individual and collective intuition and imagination alongside science and reason to gain greater insight into how to continuously create new value in new ways.
Unfortunately, intuition and imagination have been so downplayed and devalued in our education systems and organisations, that showing your working and providing measurable data are commonly mistaken for the only valid forms of knowing.
Intuition
Yes, intuition can be mistaken — but then so can eyesight.
Look at Adelson’s Checker Shadow Illusion and you’ll not believe that the two checker squares are the same colour, even when it’s been proved to you that they are (try the interactive demo of the illusion here).
Just because your eyes can be deceived in this way doesn’t mean you’ll decide to never use them again — so, McGilchrist convincingly argues, why take that attitude towards intuition..?
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am”. — Albert Einstein 9
To become more confident in using intuition, it’s important to recognise that like a physical muscle, it must be exercised to build up its strength and confidence in its ability to take some of the load.
You’d be foolish to try lifting a 24kg kettlebell above your head unless you were confident you won’t drop it — so it makes sense to start out lifting a lighter load and work your way up.
Capability and confidence in intuition can be developed in the same way — starting out using it for small things and gradually using it to do more heavy lifting over time.
Imagination
The main problem most people have with using their imagination more is that it’s often confused with and disparaged as fantasy.
McGilchrist again:
“I also want to emphasise that the scientific process cannot be free from assumptions, or values; that its advance requires imagination, as well as serendipity — not merely the stolid adherence to a procedure; and that it represents a rich creative process, always provisional, requiring breadth and depth of thinking, and that that is why we rightly value it so highly.
Here again one sees the contrast between how the left hemisphere would conceive science and how the right hemisphere would do so.” 10
The left hemisphere, which reduces reality to schematic re-presentations, schema, maps, and models — things that we’ve been conditioned to trust more than our intuition or imagination — turns out to be the hemisphere that indulges in fantasy - or as Coleridge called it “the fancy”:
“The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space”. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge 11
Contrast this with the right hemisphere’s approach to imagination, which is perhaps most famously captured in Einstein’s statement:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”. 12
Questions for reflection
How could you use, and encourage others to use, more intuition as part of sense making, testing this out through decision making & action taking and iterating to make greater sense of what you discover?
How could you use, and encourage others to use, more imagination as part of sense making, testing this out through decision making & action taking and again iterating to make greater sense of what you discover?
Where is your organisation trapped, constrained, or confused by the seeming need to always provide solid provable data before it can make decisions?
How much is the organisation held back by “one best way” thinking — taking so long to analyse the best way to tackle a situation that by the time you’re ready to take action the world has moved on and the “best” way is no longer relevant? 13
What experimental action could you decide to take in order to flush out new sense making insights by taking appropriate real-world action?
The Matter With Things (Kindle version location 18,659)
Crosstalk is when a signal in one circuit or channel of a system creates an undesired effect in another circuit or channel.
For more detail, check out my LinkedIn profile.
Ibid Kindle version location 9,284
Ibid Kindle version location 9.312
Ibid Kindle version location 9.349
This six minute video describes the 2D3D mindset and 2D3D thinking tool that have been at the heart of my practice for 25 years.
Ibid Kindle version location 10,370. This echoes a central finding of Michael Polanyi from 70+ years ago that science relies on assumptions that (in true left hemisphere fashion) are often not only overlooked but actively denied by its less rigorously scientific proponents.
Coleridge Biographia Literaria (1817) Chapter XIII
Ibid Viereck interview (1929).
One Best Way Thinking is one of the Five Fatal Habits that consistently stifle, smother, and strangle organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. Download my 22-page report on the Five Fatal Habits here.