The Boats in Boston Harbor
Deeper meaning, knowing, and cognition for creating future-fit organisations
“Our culture has lost touch with deeper ways of knowing.” — John Vervaeke. 1
John Vervaeke is a scientist, philosopher, and professor at the University of Toronto, specialising in perception, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience, popularly known for his mammoth 50-episode series: “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” . 2
As a practitioner of meditation and Tai Chi, his work goes much deeper than the typical academic theorising ungrounded in embodied practice. 3
He’s closely involved in 4E Cognitive Science, which seeks to break free from the constricting, constraining Cartesian conceptions of the mind as a pure logic machine locked inside the head, whose primary function is problem solving. 4
4E Cognitive Science
4E Cognitive Science holds that cognition is: 5
Embodied — we cognise through our physical lived experience of the world.
Embedded — we’re dynamically coupled to the environment, so cognition and the environment mutually unfold. 6
Extended — not contained within the head, especially since most problem-solving is done via distributed cognition in concert with other people, so culture and cognition deeply interpenetrate each other. 7
Enacted — cognition isn’t primarily about argumentation but evolving the sensorimotor loop connecting sense making to action in the world. 8
Another central theme in Vervaeke’s work is that we have four ways of knowing:
1) Propositional Knowing
This is belief-centric, arising in the form of “knowing that…<insert proposition>” — e.g. knowing that a cat is a mammal; knowing that Paris is the capital of France, knowing that Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science, etc.
In propositional knowing, memory is a set of facts you believe to be true.
2) Procedural Knowing
This is “knowing how” to do something — e.g. how to catch a ball, how to understand other people, how to engage in productive conversations, etc. 9
In procedural knowing, memory is not about facts - true or false - but about embodied skills, how apt they are, how well they fit the context.
3) Perspectival Knowing
This is the knowing you have because you’re a conscious being with a perspective on your context. Knowing what it's like to be here right now – situational awareness - including which skills to apply, and/or you need to acquire, and to what degree. 10
In perspectival knowing, memory is about how things are in the foreground and background of your evolving outlook - your salience landscape - enabling you to get an optimal grip on a situation, based on your state of mind.
4) Participatory Knowing
This is the deepest form of knowing and the most backgrounded in your salience landscape. It's your sense of attunement, connectedness, co-identification, of being at home.
In participatory knowing, memory is about how you, your agency, and the arena relate to each other. It's the sense you lose in an alien culture when you, your agency, and the arena aren't quite in sync.
Vervaeke points out that deep understanding requires an alignment of these four ways of knowing.
However, we live in a world obsessed with theory building, assimilating everything into propositional knowing, despite this being the least meaningful of the four. 11
Hence the meaning crisis, of which he says:
“Meaning doesn’t mean the semantic content of your propositions but your fundamental lived sense of how connected you are to yourself, to other people, and to the world.
This meaning is created in the procedural, perspectival, and ultimately the participatory ways of knowing.
Our culture has deeply lost theoretical touch with them and I think in many people's lives they've lost a kind of lived existential touch with them.” 12
Vervaeke’s perspective echoes what I’ve seen repeatedly over 35 years poking about in organisations — people often, and increasingly, find their work lacks real meaning.
Typical efforts to improve this are woefully inadequate — another course, another book, another so-called best practice consulting intervention, etc.
In his famous TED talk Do schools kill creativity? (73M+ views) Sir Ken Robinson described how education systems around the world are heavily biased towards teaching propositional knowledge:
“If you were to visit education as an alien and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.
“And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. Another form of life. But they're rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.”. 13
Some professors, like Vervaeke, do maintain a better balance of theory and practice.
But they’re a minority compared to those resolutely wedded to propositional knowing.
This, Sir Ken further comments, is because:
“Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist…
…And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatised.” 14
In organisations, most theory is woefully lacking in learning from real-world practice — it fails to embrace the sense making, decision making & action taking sensorimotor loop.
Every few years, a new theory comes out in Harvard Business Review, gets picked up and promoted by big consulting firms as a silver bullet panacea, gets written about gushingly in the business media as the latest greatest thing, ultimately fails to shift the needle, and eventually gets replaced by the next fad in the pipeline.
This cycle has been going on for more than 60 years, ever since Douglas McGregor introduced his Theory X and Theory Y perspectives on human nature. 15
Remember all that purpose, mission, vision and values stuff?
Plenty of propositional theories, lots of books and articles — but the conditions for success not put in place, so no scope for people in organisations to engage in participatory and perspectival ways, no development of procedural skills, and so nothing was embodied or embedded in the way we do things round here — just PR spin.
Or more recently the whole Agile thing — what used to be called a culture of innovation, and before that organisational learning. 16
Some theories do start out with a systemic perspective — organisational learning being an obvious example. But systemic change isn’t all that easy to pull off because it challenges cherished positions of power and privilege.
When originally systemic ideas like this gain traction in the organisational discourse, they’re jumped on by big consulting firms who fudge them into one-size-fits-all, so-called best practice methodologies that can mobilise large numbers of inexperienced consultants with minimal supervision. 17
Of course, these silver bullet solutions — the single thing you just need to do to fix everything — inevitably fail, and the original potentially promising but poorly practiced idea becomes discredited and dumped as yet another fad.
Sometimes the new theory is inherently less systemic at the outset anyway.
A prominent recent example of this is Psychological Safety, which became all the rage after Google’s Project Aristotle identified it as important for teamwork. 18
However, psychological safety isn’t a thing you can implement on its own, it’s a phenomenon that emerges when there’s an appropriate learning culture. We’ve known how to create these cultures for more than 30 years, but most organisations still fail to do so. 19
Another example is Radical Candor — which turbocharges the advocacy dimension of dialogue, but leaves out the essential balancing inquiry dimension.
Together, a balance of advocacy & inquiry enables learning. Radical Candor’s singular focus on advocacy simply grants those in positions of power carte blanche to tell everyone else what to do. 20
The problem is not that we don’t have enough theory. The problem is that we have too many theories and not enough real-world practice.
Future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness only emerge when learning is alive in an organisation — expanding understanding, skills, perspectives and relatedness through ongoing sense making, decision making and action taking, with a reciprocal expansion of embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted cognition. 21
Genuine organisational learning develops the organisation whilst at the same time delivering new value to society, as contributions to sustainable widely shared prosperity, measured in terms of human flourishing and wellbeing.
But when organisations instead go for silver bullets, there’s no real change, the approach becomes a fad, and soon gets replaced by another silver bullet, which also fails, so becomes a fad, soon replaced by another, and another…
The fad cycle leads to an endless process of propositional deckchair shuffling on the Titanic, along with a dearth of embodied, enacted, procedural, perspectival, participatory, real-world knowledge of how to actually avoid icebergs...
Early in my 35 year career helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia and the US create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, I was struck by how many of these fad-generating propositional theories seemed to originate from Harvard — both the University and the Business School.
On a trip to Boston, I mentioned this to the head of a local meditation centre, and asked if she had any insights as to why so much Harvard output appears to be intellectually fascinating but lacking in practice.
She smiled and said:
“Geoff, here’s the way to understand the culture round here:
There are two boats in Boston Harbor.
Above the first boat is a sign that says: “Boat to Heaven”.
Above the second boat is a sign that says: “Boat to Seminar on Heaven”.
And there’s a single long line of people, all waiting to board the second boat…”
It’s perhaps a little unfair to pin it all on Harvard, because as Sir Ken Robinson points out, it’s a widespread problem.
But one thing is abundantly clear, we don't need more theories of organisational change, culture, or leadership.
What we need is to enable and engage more of the collective cognitive capacity for insight, ideas, and innovation by ensuring sense making, decision making & action taking are well coupled, actively iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed.
That’s how the human creativity that’s been stifled, sidelined, and suppressed up to now in schools and organisations can be unlocked and unleashed to cultivate the necessary future-fit skills through real-world, embodied, embedded action.
Questions for reflection
What steps are you taking to ensure future-fit cognition for innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted in your organisation?
How are people developing their procedural knowledge — the skills for iterative sense making, decision making & action taking?
How are you creating conditions so people combine their different perspectival knowledge to create continuous new value in new ways?
How are you cultivating participatory knowledge so that sense making, decision making & action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation?
In an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world these are all vitally important questions to be addressing in action, not just theory.
John Vervaeke describes these deeper ways of knowing at 07:55 - 08:10 in this conversation with Iain McGilchrist and David Fuller on Rebel Wisdom from March 2020.
I first came across Vervaeke via Rebel Wisdom and subsequently his “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” video series.
I’ve always learned more from people who practice what they preach and thereby build cognitive muscles as opposed to simply giving good slide. How can you expect to succeed on the racetrack by learning from people who’ve only ever driven a desk..?
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (2018) provides a systematic overview of the field of 4E cognition.
Embedded Cognition is closely related to The Background Awareness of Self in Context (BASiC) — as described in my previous post Back to BASICs.
This is why the 2D3D mindset is so central to a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness — as described in my previous post Unlocking the innovative mindset.
What Vervaeke refers to as the sensorimotor loop is the loop of sense making, decision making & action taking — as described in my previous post From Strategy to Sense Making.
What degree are people in the organisation developing the skills required to do the heavy lifting — as opposed to external advisors — as described in my previous post Expertise — a double-edged sword.
Ibid - 2D3D mindset, in which each of us has an inherently limited, biased, and one-sided two-dimensional take on the bigger picture three-dimensional reality that none of us can ever see in its entirety.
Note this is consistent with Dr Iain McGilchrist’s critique of the dominant left hemisphere way of attending to the world. In a previous post I described how McGilchrist sees the left hemisphere dealing with schema, maps, and models, whilst the right hemisphere presences reality in much richer, more meaningful ways.
Vervaeke describes these four ways of knowing and the meaning crisis in the three minute segment from 05:10 - 08:10 in this conversation on Rebel Wisdom from March 2020.
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk Do schools kill creativity? (73M+ views). This section from 09:12 to 10:12
Ibid - Sir Ken Robinson. This section from 10:51 - 11:55.
Also the agile practices from software development projects were dredged to create approaches supposedly fit for organisation-wide change. How did that turn out..?
For more on the finders, grinders, minders big consulting business model see pages 14-16 in my 22-page report on the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently stifled, smothered, and strangled the emergence of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness over the past 30 years.
New York Times overview of Google’s Project Aristotle highlighting Psychological Safety.
See this image on Amy Edmondson’s website showing that psychological safety is just one dimension of a learning organisation - aka “learning zone” - and therefore insufficient on its own. Some organisations have embraced learning — see my previous article on how Microsoft developed a culture of learning and increased its valuation by 700% in five years.
Two page summary on balancing advocacy & inquiry.
See Vervaeke’s descriptions of these earlier in the article.