Sherpa Alliance

We can easily end up being half-brained, with too much empasis either left or right, each being bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic consequences.

There are 2 key Mental Modes to avoid this Dangerous Detour:

• A Whole-Brain/Whole-Mind/Whole-Person Challenge
• The Power of Visual Tools & Metaphors

 A Whole-Brain/Whole-Mind/Whole-Person Challenge

Being In the Driving Seat of Organizational Agility is a whole-person, whole-mind, whole-brain challenge, just like in the driving seat of our car:

• Whole-Person:  seat-of-the-pants, gut, heart, head, hands and feet.
• Whole-Mind:  our intellectual mind (the new-brain) and our emotional mind (the middle-brain) and our reptilian/survival brain (the old-brain)
• Whole-Brain:  the left-brain (linear, logical, analytical, focused on the parts) and the right-brain (non-linear, intuitive, creative, focused on the whole);

"Left-brained aptitudes are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s backs [the industrial age of factory workers] to an economy built on people’s left brains [the information age of knowledge workers] to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains - the conceptual age. After a few generations in the information age, these (right-brain) muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape. The left-brain is sequential, speacializing in text and analyzing the details.  The right-brain is simultaneous, specializing in context and synthesizing the big picture.  Analysis and synthesis are perhaps the two most fundamental ways of interpreting information. You can break the whole into its components. Or you can weave the components into a whole. Both are essential to human reasoning. But they are guided by different parts of the brain." 

"What’s in greatest demand today isn’t analysis but synthesis – seeing the big picture and crossing boundaries, being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.  Left-brain-style thinking used to be the driver and the right-brain-style thinking the passenger. Now R-Directed thinking is suddenly grabbing the wheel, stepping on the gas, and determining where we’re going and how we will get there. L-Directed aptitudes are still necessary, but they’re no longer sufficient."

("A Whole New Mind - moving from the information age to the conceptual age", Daniel Pink).

 The Power of Visual Tools & Metaphors

Visual tools engage both the left-brain (in the parts) and the right-brain (in the whole) at the same time, leveraging the power of our whole-brain.  Visual tools also provide a team-focus and  group-memory of conversation and dialog. Further more:

"If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. In a complex world, mastery of metaphor has become ever more valuable. Human thought processes are largely metaphorical" ("A Whole New Mind - moving from the information age to the conceptual age", Daniel Pink). 

That’s the power of metaphors, analagies and mental models, to help us move through complexity, mastering it with the elegant simplicity of a metaphor which embeds that complexity.

Early Warning Signals

• Processes which are too tightly numbers, show-me-the-business-case/return-on-investment and payback-within-one-year/short-range oriented
• Processes which are too loosely creative, wishful-thinking and head-in-the clouds/long-range oriented oriented
• Processes which are overwhelmed by paper, spreadhseets, task-lists and under-whelmed by visuals, models and concepts

Potentially Tragic Consequences

The trick is to navigate a middle road with processes which are a combination, not too lose and not too tight.  If we detour off track, we face the dangers of overly-loose plans under-delivering over the short-range and overly-tight plans under-delivering over the long-range, with the associated avoidable-costs and opportunity-costs which could have tragic consequences for the future of our business.