Learnings at the Edge: Knowing in a Complex World
Every explorer, whether on land, sea, or space, has utilized or invented new methods of discovery to investigate the great expanses of the unknown. Theory emerges from the imaginative mind of the scientist. We enhance scientific understanding by tapping into hunches, feelings or desires to move gone beyond the objective truth. This is especially true in the social sciences, when what draws the interest of researchers influences what they study and how they illuminate the subjective social worlds we inhabit.
The late theoretical physicist David Bohm predicted, “This division of art and science is temporary. It didn’t exist in the past, and there’s no reason why it should go on in the future.” Just as art does not consist simply of works of art but of an “attitude, the artistic spirit,” science does not consist solely in the accumulation of knowledge but in the creation of fresh modes of perception.
This is also true across business and is especially obvious in the technology sector where high science meets design aesthetics; the inner workings of a mobile phone are only sellable if the design accommodates user tastes. Interior design and architecture also illustrate the importance of aesthetics in shaping our lives. Aesthetic choices are foundational, not ancillary, to the experience of whether or not we enjoy spending time at a particular resort or working in a particular office space. How inhabiting a space makes us feel matters as much as its functionality.
Art, too, as we have come to know, is used to elicit feelings, build compassion and elucidate social issues, as is aptly demonstrated by artist-in-residence programs. For example, in the 1970s the first artist in residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, used performance art to showcase the value of the efforts of sanitation workers who, until then, were largely invisible to the majority of city residents. Examples such as this also bring home the fact that even though the term artist is typically used when talking about painters or sculptors, in reality an artist is any person with an artful attitude. In that spirit, art comprises anything that is created or invented, and that makes all of us potential artists.
By elevating the importance of creative and subjective views of the world, noticing differently becomes possible and “the ability to notice or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained,” Bohm explained. Nowhere is this more profoundly clear than in the discipline of philosophy.
Philosophy teaches us to question, reason and think, not to solve the unanswerable question. Even though we know the question is unanswerable at the outset, the point is to develop subjective understanding. Somewhat ironically, we can also pull from the part of the scientific method that focuses on discovery: experimentation. However, philosophical thinkers proceed not with the intention of narrowing down to the right answer, but to increase understanding of a phenomenon.
Unfortunately, we are often used to pitting different types of knowing against each other:
Science or arts
Knowledge or perception
Objective or subjective
We have gotten so used to categorizing these modes of thinking against one another that we seem to have forgotten that we truly need to appreciate different types of knowing in a complex world. By choosing one type over another, we create an either-or mentality that will only serve to keep us from leveraging the fullness of what these disciplines can offer. By converging disparate and perhaps unrelated ideas in an interdisciplinary fashion, we venture into the area of consilience, which is the idea that uniting knowledge across disciplines can lead to stronger understanding and conclusions. Linking together different bodies of knowledge builds better and more profound theories. This means science, knowledge, and the objective remain important, but we cannot let the pendulum swing too far from all the other important contributions to intelligence like the arts, perception and subjective understanding.
Embrace your wider knowing
Fortunately, we have brains, bodies and emotions that are exceptional receptors for perception building. Listening, tapping in and leveraging our innate human instrument is a step to more awareness we can all activate.
Our physical sensations give us information about our surroundings. We also have our instincts and gut feelings to guide us. These automatic responses are always giving us information about potential choices to make our way successfully in the world. Our bodies, brains and emotions have profound wisdom waiting to be tapped; when we seek to widen our perception, our sensitivity to the subtle grows. Cultivating this wisdom is a discipline, a deliberate practice to hone our sensitivity for the purposes of being more effective in our lives, including at work.
By examining your relationship to your perceptual awareness, you widen your wisdom and adaptability. By identifying entrenched mindsets and taking clues from your body, emotion and intuition, you can form new insights. Experiential reality is unique to each person, so the world you sense will be different based on your unique make-up and shaped by your body/mind connection. There is evidence that the way our brains process stimuli from the eye results in images unique to each viewer, so we may not be observing the same tree, even when we are objectively looking at the same tree. This upends the idea that there is one objective truth that we should be seeking.
Instead, our diversity in ways of seeing the world can bring newfound opportunities to widen our lens on the world. Innovation is possible by seeking insight greater than ourselves, being open to different perspectives, and seeing connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
The future of work lies in a shift to more awareness and responsiveness, rather than rational knowledge as we understand it.
