1 Decision-Making in The New Reality Complexity, Knowledge and Knowing by Dr. Alex Bennet Dr. David Bennet Mountain Quest Institute MQIPress (2013) Frost, West Virginia ISBN 978-0-9798459-5-6 The New Reality Series 2 Table of Contents Cover Table of Contents 2 Table and Figures 3 Appreciation 4 Preface 5 Section I: BUILDING A FOUNDATION 9 Chapter 1: The New Reality 10 Chapter 2: Systems and Complexity 15 Systems Principles 23 Chapter 3: An Introduction to Knowledge 26 Section II: COMPLEX DECISION-MAKING IN A COMPLEX ENVIRONMENT 32 Chapter 4: The Complexity of Situations 33 Chapter 5: The Complexity of Decisions 39 Chapter 6: The Complexity of Actions 48 Guiding Principles 50 Chapter 7: Complex Decision-Making 52 Chapter 8: Dealing with Complex Adaptive Organizations 58 Section III: DECISION-MAKING FROM THE INSIDE-OUT 63 Chapter 9: The View from the Inside Out 64 Chapter 10: Hierarchy as a Basic Property of the Decision-Making System 67 Chapter 11: Advanced Decision-Making: The Cortex 69 Section IV: ENGAGING TACIT KNOWLEDGE 71 Chapter 12: Differentiating Tacit Knowledge 72 Chapter 13: The Aspects of Tacit Knowledge 75 Chapter 14: Building Extraordinary Consciousness 81 Chapter 15: Decision-Making and Tacit Knowledge 88 Section V: THE NEW WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWING 91 Chapter 16: The Art of Knowing 92 Principles of Knowing 94 Chapter 17: The New Decision-Makers 106 Chapter 18: A Guess about the Future 115 Appendix A: From Knowledge to Wisdom 118 Appendix B: Parable of the Watchmakers 123 References 124 About Mountain Quest 132 3 Table and Figures Table 1: Systems in terms of complexity 17 Figure 1: The systems space 20 Figure 2: Cone of acceptable outcomes 27 Figure 3: Brief descriptions of systems 31 Figure 4: Organizational knowledge needs 40 Figure 5: The decision-making strategy 52 Figure 6: Neurons in the mind/brain 64 Figure 7: Continuum of awareness 74 Figure 8: Embodied tacit knowledge 76 Figure 9: Intuitive tacit knowledge 77 Figure 10: Affective tacit knowledge 78 Figure 11: Spiritual tacit knowledge 79 Figure 12: Building extraordinary consciousness 82 Figure 13: Eternal loop of knowledge and knowing 93 Figure 14: New ways of thinking 111 Figure 15: Old and new paradigms 112 Figure 16: Knowledge and consciousness 122 4 In Appreciation Life is so amazing. Along the way we meet so many people who change our lives. As we were finishing this book, we took the time to reflect on our journey. There was one person who kept leaping to the top of our thoughts, our mentor, Dr. Charles Seashore, or, to all those who have learned from him and loved him, Charlie. Among so many other things, Charlie was a systems man, taking every opportunity to lead students at Fielding Graduate University through the Systems Knowledge Area, giving them an experience that was one of a kind. Several of these sessions were held here at Mountain Quest, during which we had the good fortune to participate in unforgettable experiences. Charlie has moved on to greater fields now; no doubt he is applauding our efforts from afar. Charlie, we honor you, we thank you, we love you. This book is dedicated to you. There are many to thank for helping to bring this book into Reality. First, our sincere thanks to those who gave so freely of their time to read and comment on parts of this text, especially Bob Turner, Jonathan Lakes, and Dr. Boyd Smith; and to Dr. Joyce Avedisian, whose work contributed to our discussion of values. Second, as always, we could not think the thoughts we think and act on them without the day-to- day support of Andrew Dean, the Manager of the Inn at Mountain Quest, and our son. And finally, our deep appreciation for all those whose lives we have touched along the journey, and from whom we have learned as we moved through our professional careers in the government and private sectors. We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it! 5 Preface Through the past 20 years we have engaged in a great deal of research—much of it experiential in nature—which has led us to break through life-long perceived limits and shift and expand our beliefs about Life and the world of which we are a part. The advent of self-publishing virtual books has opened the door to share this learning with the public at large. Right up front we offer the following assumptions: Assumption 1: Knowledge is the capacity (potential or actual) to take effective action. As a functional definition, knowledge is considered the capacity (potential or actual) to take effective action in varied and uncertain situations (Bennet and Bennet, 2004), and consists of understanding, insights, meaning, intuition, creativity, judgment, and the ability to anticipate the outcome of our actions. Knowledge itself is neither true nor false, and its value in terms of good or poor is difficult to measure other than by the outcomes of its actions. Hence, good knowledge would have a high probability of producing the desired (anticipated) outcome, and poor knowledge would have a low probability of producing the expected result. For complex situations the quality of knowledge (from good to poor) may be hard to estimate before the action is taken because of the system’s unpredictability. After the outcome has occurred, the quality of knowledge can be assessed by comparing the actual outcome to the expected outcome. See Section I for an in-depth treatment of knowledge and its role in decision-making. Chapter 3 will introduce you to the core knowledge concepts and language used throughout this book. Assumption 2: Human beings and the organizations they create are complex adaptive systems. A complex adaptive system (CAS) contains many parts (in the case of an organization, people, etc.) that interact with each other. Complex adaptive systems are partially ordered systems that unfold and evolve through time. They are mostly self-organizing, learning and adaptive (thus their name). To survive they are always creating new ideas, scanning the environment, trying new approaches, observing the results, and changing the way they operate. To continuously adapt they must operate in perpetual disequilibrium, which results in some unpredictable behavior. Having nonlinear relationships, the CAS creates global properties that are called emergent because they seem to emerge from the multitude of elements within the system and their relationships. They typically cannot be understood through analysis and logic because of the large number of elements and relationships. Examples are life, ecosystems, economies, organizations and cultures. Further discussion of complex systems is included in Section II of this book. Assumption 3: The human mind is an associative patterner that is continuously re-creating knowledge for the situation at hand. Knowledge exists in the human brain in the form of stored or expressed neural patterns that may be selected, activated, mixed and/or reflected upon through thought. Incoming information is associated with stored information. From this mixing process new patterns are created that may represent understanding, meaning and the capacity to anticipate (to various degrees) the results of potential actions. Thus knowledge is context sensitive and situation dependent, with the mind continuously growing, restructuring and creating increased organization (information) and knowledge for the moment at hand. Further discussion of these concepts is included in Chapter 3 and Section III of this book. 6 Assumption 4: Every decision-maker has a self-organizing, hierarchical set of theories (and consistent relationships among those theories) that guide their decision-making process. Theories, beliefs and assumptions are the core essence of thoughts and experiences that are repeated over and over again. Theories that are invariant forms at the highest hierarchal level of the prefrontal cortex significantly influence decision-making. These invariant theories are continuously integrated across complementary sensing modes (visual, auditory, somatic, etc.) and through a downward feedback loop provide the decision-maker with the capacity to anticipate the outcome of actions. The larger the number of, and connections among, invariant forms developed through experience and learning, the more robust the spectrum of theories available to the decision-maker. Thus the workings of our mind/brain provide a model for decision-making in a complex situation. Further discussion of these concepts is included in Section III of this book. Assumption 5: The unconscious mind is multidimensional and, given a healthy mind and body, has a vast store of tacit knowledge available to us. It has only been in the past few decades that cognitive psychology and neuroscience have begun to seriously explore unconscious mental life. Polanyi felt that tacit knowledge consisted of a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that could be used to make sense of a situation or event (Hodgkin, 1991; Smith, 2003). He was right. The unconscious mind is incredibly powerful, on the order of a million times more powerful than the conscious stream of thought. The challenge is to make better use of our tacit knowledge through creating greater connections with the unconscious, building and expanding the resources stored in the unconscious, deepening areas of resonance, and sharing tacit resources among individuals. Further discussion of these concepts is included in Section IV of this book. Assumption 6: There are still vast workings of the human mind and its connections to higher-order energies that we do not understand. The limitations we as humans place on our decision-making capacities and capabilities are created from past reference points, that which has been developed primarily through the rationale and logical workings of the mechanical functioning of our mind/brain, an understanding that has come through extensive intellectual effort.