Podcast #126 Resurgence of the Hierarchy Part 2

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Carol’s topic for discussion: Examine the third myth of hierarchies and its usefulness in the workplace and organizational structure.

Review of First and Second Critical Aspects of Thinking- Episode 125

In the previous episode we looked at how a philosophy was sold as best practice by a powerful consultant in the 1930s. We got fooled there also in spite of the fact that this is clearly still playing out across the world as gospel. And the second critical aspect we looked at was also fooling us with more false ideas about how humans work. That idea being that they are born at a level of intelligence and cannot move from there.

Third Critical Myth in our Thinking

  • The third Myth is that humans are organically predisposed to grow and thrive in hierarchies of merit and intelligence. Really power hierarchies couched as intelligence.
  • There are four ways as human that we are fooled by ourselves repeatedly.
    • Mental laziness
    • Addiction to patterns we know
    • Lack or capability developed to make use of the full potential of the brain and even misuse of the brain for lesser important and less meaningful purposes.
    • Our social system process that favors cohesiveness for safety and belonging.

Four Brain Deceiving Errors

  • First, we tend to default to already held ideas and worldviews, a lot, without examining an idea.  We accept the first thing that is offered or shows up is valid. We fall back on rules of thumb or Heuristics; it they are familiar.
  • Second, we are not involved in institutions or processes that develop our human capacity for critical thinking. We will look at that more in a moment.
      • The example here is – we take SAT and IQ tests to see who is better and at what. But they all break things down into traditional logic for the purpose of  knowledge acquisition. Rarely do we try to educate for higher order thinking particularly systems thinking.
  • There is a third trick of the mind. We have a limited perception for the ways we are educated. We see the world, even nature, as static and unchanging, as flat and all in parallel with nothing of a higher order, and as fragmented and unrelated.
  • Lastly is the one that Peterson used and caused him to get lost. We think of humans as pattern following creatures. And we often use analogies to try to find patterns because we’re not taught to see patterns when we have no template.
    • We misunderstand and are misapplying the idea of hierarchies to the physical world when it is really providing us the ableness to see different orders or levels of existence.
      • We have to take time to go deeper. In all of these cases we have to build new ways of thinking, feeling and moving.
  • Imagine four concentric rings or rungs on a ladder. With each ring or rung becoming not only more encompassing in what can be considered, it shifts what the goal is being pursued and outcomes that can be considered. Let’s look at work in an organization.
    • Level One: It is based on what we can see and touch and the thinking we do to accomplish that. Most of the time we try to do it well,  improve productivity, meet the specifications of a client or customer and come back and do that again the next day. It can be interesting work or not, but it is focused on the pretty immediate world of our work.
    • Level Two: Let’s call this level, maintain, meaning, staying a breast and taking into account the world affecting us, and therefore keeping up with it the trends and competing energies.
      • Let’s start with having different functions do this work. First, as you know, the work we have done at Carol Sanford Institute has shown that will capability building processes, everyone can learn to think at multiple levels at the same time.
    • Level Three: Let’s look at the third level. All businesses, organizations and families are embedded in systems that determine how they can move and change.
    • Level Four: The fourth level is what we call Regeneration. Here we look at the Essence of each entity. Start with it as a singularity of understanding them. And how we build their capacity to carry that out.
      • This thinking really helps to slow us down and consider essence more deeply.

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Carol Sanford and Zac Swartout, co-producers