The Challenge
The Challenge
Whether we like it or not, humanity has entered a period of deep uncertainty where we are confronting, and having to manage, complexity and uncertainty driven by forces such as emergent technologies, balancing short and long-term goals and achieving meaningful social and economic sustainability. For some, this increased complexity is leading to lower-quality decision-making and potential burnout, due to negative impact on things like workload, sense of control, reward, community, fairness, and values.
Competently navigating this complexity demands an upgrade in our ability to read and navigate uncertain environments and consciously drive the highest-quality decision processes. Complex problems don’t exist somewhere ‘out there’ in the external world. They exist as stories we have built through our interaction with our environment. This interaction includes all of our personal learning history, which creates a lens through which we see the problem. If we are unconscious of the lenses we bring to the problems we face, we are at high risk of unconsciously landing on low-quality solutions that are heavily biased by our history of learning.
We can learn to work with complex problems from a place of flow by developing flexible and sensitive attention to how we show up. Attention flexibility is a skill that takes time to develop, and it is not a skill we are generally taught. This is the area of expertise I have developed over decades of research and development.