Are we eating our own poison?

You only have to take a quick browse through the pages of today’s business books to realise how much we’ve been getting things wrong. And for so long.

But we are waking up. We’re finally seeing the ‘old system’ – the one that many of us have been a part of for almost our entire careers - just isn’t working any more.

Bottom line: traditional ways of doing business are unsustainable, both for the planet and for us.

And yet so often, in our attempts to problem-solve and innovate, to break out of out-dated, dead-end situations, to transform business culture, we turn to conventional thinking, strategising, and planning, whilst physically encased in our familiar, urban-based, office environments!

But wasn’t it Einstein who said,

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”?

The problem with how we think

In a controversial, new film, “The Divided Brain”, released earlier this year, psychiatrist and philosopher, Dr Iain McGilchrist, presents his radical theory: that the left hemisphere of the brain is gradually colonising our experience of the world - with potentially catastrophic consequences!

The left side of the brain holds a perspective on life that is largely mechanistic and reductive.  It favours a narrow, detailed, short-term view and sees things in isolated parts. It looks for patterns and consistency between these parts in order to simplify and generalise. It tries to make things easier to express through language, and so clearer to act upon.

And, according to this theory, while the right hemisphere of the brain has an important balancing role to play, yielding a more holistic, more systemic, interconnected way of experiencing the world, the left-brain hemisphere has taken the predominant role, in moulding our history, culture and society.

You don’t have to look far to find evidence that this could be true:  in UK’s relentless march headlong into the economic, political and cultural abyss that is Brexit;  in organisations where micro-management and control mechanisms override and erode trust; in the institutions where rules and bureaucracy trump innovation and stifle human creativity; in the market’s insistence that sales and profit growth are legitimate and primary measures of success; in the theoretical models and frameworks that permeate our thinking and act as a substitute for skill and judgement; in the treatment of talented people as no more than cogs in giant machine; in the exploitation of the natural world as a resource to be plundered for the sake of human gain, etc…

How our thinking creates our reality

As we have evolved an ever more powerful left-brain orientation, so we have created a system which is increasingly linear, controlled and self-serving.

And the more we are surrounded and immersed in this kind of world, the more we become conditioned by it to support and perpetuate it.

So we see an ever rising human population migrating towards sprawling urban jungles that hardly existed a decade ago; we see big business exploiting the land we left behind on an industrial scale; we see children as young as three years old, spending more time indoors watching TV and on digital devices than playing outside or engaging with their family members; and across all generations we see stress, anxiety and suicide rates rocketing while the hamster wheel continues to turn at an ever quickening pace.

And all the time, the planet that supports us along with all other living species, is becoming steadily transformed into a veritable wasteland.

Is there a more resourceful way?

As much as the left brain’s role is to find, grasp and hold on to a vision of certainty; the right brain can hold and ‘be with’ an expanded range of possibility.  The right hemisphere holds a broader, evolving, implicit, complex, non-mechanistic view of reality that isn’t wedded to proving that it’s right.

But, despite its superior capacities for seeing and understanding the wider context of our existence, the right brain has become subordinated to the left.  Meanwhile, we keep going around and around in circles creating more of the same.

Yet, if we are ever to break-out of these ever-recurring mind traps, we need to engage this more resourceful side of ourselves.

Whether or not you can agree with Dr Gilchrist’s interpretation of brain science; it is hard to deny there is a prevailing world view at play in today’s culture that is ultimately destructive in its impact – both to ourselves and to the planet.

As my friend, Joao Perre Viana of Walking Mentorship said to me recently,

“We are eating our own poison!”

We must change. We must find a way to break this destructive cycle and recover the balance.

Dr McGilchrist might well be on to something when he says the answer lies in our thinking.

Let the landscape re-balance our brains

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the right brain hemisphere represents a perspective that is more attuned to the natural world, where there is no certainty, permanence or isolation.  

The land and her non-human inhabitants have no need to control, or to take more than is needed to suffice, or do anything other than survive and flourish - interdependently.

There is no egoic drive to fix or to compete or to know all the answers. To battle with the intellect. There is no envy, or bitterness or revenge. No judgement or comparison.

There is only creation. And co-creation.

Einstein also said,

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

And so why not take a new approach to your challenges – business or otherwise?  Why not book your “creative time” away from the office and go walking in, and with, the natural landscape?

Important: Do this not as a mind-numbing escape from the craziness of your everyday existence. Do this not as a straight swap for your office routine, where you simply gather up your models and tools and transport them to the outdoors. Do this not to re-think, re-order and further rationalise your thoughts.

Surrender yourself to the wild beauty of the land and the diversity of life that it supports. Allow yourself to be drawn to a place that hasn’t been prepared and manicured by humans and their machines. Allow yourself to appreciate and become immersed in its richness, to open all your senses and to fully embody the real-ness of the natural world.

And listen.

Let the land share with you its stories and its wisdom. 

She might just have some answers that surprise you.