In the face of uncertainty, current models no longer work, and that's what drives us crazy.
Anyone who takes their head out of confinement can only be struck by the violence of public debate, when there is debate. It seems that we share less and less things collectively. Even subjects that once had relatively consensus, such as secularism, state action or Christmas trees, are now the object of deep divisions and it seems that not a single subject, however trivial it may be, does not escape controversy.
But this tension is also felt within organizations, large and small, confronted with challenges that go well beyond the management of a very uncertain and very complex situation, into which no one can project themselves. In the face of uncertainty, current models no longer work, and that's what drives us crazy.
MENTAL MODELS: WE SEE WITH OUR BRAIN
Take a good look at the image below. What do you see ?
Our brain needs to make sense of what our eyes see
For most of you it's pretty obvious: you see a smiley face. You also see three birds flying in this very special configuration. You see both at the same time. And yet you know that there is no face, just birds or rather a picture of birds.
What is going on ? Very simple: it is your brain that makes this image. From a flow transmitted by your eyes, it is this which gives meaning to it. Conclusion: we see with the brain, not with the eyes.
The ability of our brain to make sense of images transmitted by the eyes comes from a long way off. Fifty thousand years ago, when our ancestors were hunting, it was very important for them to identify very quickly whether what was moving in the distance was an enemy or a friend, or something edible. Their survival depended on it. We have therefore developed an extraordinary capacity for classification: as soon as we see something, our brain puts it in a box.
Once the box has been identified, we can act. Game? We go hunting. Predator: maybe it's safer to slip away. We thus devote a very large part of our intellectual capacity to put what we see in boxes. Each has a series of routines that allow us to manage the identified and categorized situation almost automatically.
This is important because the routine saves our energy, which is a factor of survival. When we get up to go and make a coffee, we hardly consciously think about what to do next. This is the case with thousands of actions that we take every day.
FACED WITH THE UNPRECEDENTED: MODEL FAILURE
The difficulty arises when what we see does not match any square. This is the unprecedented event. Without a box, our brain cannot act. Concern rises sharply, our survival is at stake. We have to create a new square, but on what basis? Creating a new box, a new category in our brain, takes time, which requires experiments, some of which are dangerous: how do we know if this new berry is toxic?
In the past, the only way to find out was to have a member of the tribe taste it and wait for the result. The means of developing new boxes, that is to say what we now call innovation, was in the past treated statistically at the level of the population: each year we lost a certain number of members of the the tribe by trying certain things. The learning, the creation of new huts, was done at the collective level, with a very important immediate cost.
Faced with this envisaged cost, our brain has developed a very effective approach. Very reluctant to take risks and waste energy unnecessarily, he does what seems natural: he will force the novel in a known box. What we see there is not a deer, but it looks like it enough, and so we're going to treat it like a deer.
Once the novelty is housed in the box, we return to the normal routine state, our relieved brain can rest. This approach is very powerful because it can handle most situations that are not really new. We are in the rough, we thus increase our capacity to manage the diversity of the situations which present themselves to us.
But obviously, it happens that the new is really new, and forcing it into an existing box is a mistake, because that amounts to ignoring what makes it really specific. So that puts us in danger. We choose a bad analogy.
We saw this danger in February, when doctors explained to us that Covid-19 was nothing more than a bad flu and therefore we should not be worried. This resulted in a delayed response to the epidemic, which resulted in severe loss of life.
In the face of uncertainty, finding the right analogy is one of the most difficult and dangerous things. I always recommend to those who try their hand at the exercise to note, for each analogy considered, the similarities but also the differences between the event considered and the analogy envisaged.
WITHOUT A MODEL, OUR BRAINS GO CRAZY
The important thing here, however, is the confusion of our brain when the unprecedented is observed because by definition, no box corresponds to what is observed and experienced. We observe and we live a situation but our brain is unable to give it a meaning, to connect the thread of the different events.
It's like an impressionist portrait seen too close: full of color, full of brushstrokes, but no pattern emerges. We try, as we saw above, to tackle known boxes on this stranger, but we feel that it does not work. Case after case, our explanations fail. Concern is mounting.
This is what, I believe, explains the crazy situation we are experiencing at the moment. Too many of our certainties are shattered. Unthinkable things become our daily life. We are slowly becoming aware of it. We are exasperated by those of our contemporaries who, for their part, still cling to their models. They are exasperated by our skepticism, because they still want to believe it and know vaguely that if they let go, they will find themselves facing a great void, this great void that we who have already let go, now contemplate. And everyone is going crazy. Unable to put words into what we are going through, to create new boxes, we become aggressive.
I already had the opportunity to write it a few months ago, this great void of mental models is extremely dangerous. As Clarissa Estès pointed out in her preface to Joseph Campbell's work on mythology, The Hero with a Thousand and One Faces , these are not facts that our mind wants, but stories . Without a world story, we go crazy. Now there can be no history of a world that is dissolving; there can only be history of a world that is being created, but it takes time and above all, it does not happen by itself.
And this is where the danger lies. Without a history of the world, our brains fall back on the known boxes, that is to say on the primary notions of survival. This explains the aggressiveness that we are currently experiencing. Desperately looking for a story, we are at the mercy of adventurers, messiahs and encounter soldiers, an Adolf, a general, or worse, a philosopher, who will offer us a story, a set of key mental models in hand, to which we will subscribe with relief. Equipped with a new explanatory box, our brain will finally be able to calm down and resume its routines.
This story will be complete: a cosmogony to explain why this is so, an ideal to be achieved which will explain our sufferings and make us forget our present, faults to atone in order to gain paradise, an enemy to be destroyed who will relieve our bad conscience, and we'll be off for a ride.
TAKE HOLD OF THE MENTAL MODELS
But none of this is inevitable, because we can create this story ourselves. This is why the key to mental models is so important. It allows us to decipher speeches, to dismantle arguments but above all to reconstruct the meaning that we want to give to an era of profound transformation. Because the worst is never certain.
The important thing in a time of crisis is not the crisis itself but what we do with it.
I don't want to wage any war against the ugly. I don't want to accuse, I don't even want to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only negation! And, in everything and for everything, and in large: I want, in any circumstance, to be nothing other than someone who says yes. - Nietzsche
So what to do? It is the experience of the author of these lines that getting your head out of the trench is risky. The mistake would be to mount your white horse and attack head-on the harmful mental models that abound, because the protective reaction is always very strong. Nothing is more violent than a system that dies and feels attacked.
Perhaps we should take inspiration from the Hippocratic oath: above all, do no harm. This requires developing an awareness of one's action, which together with Béatrice Rousset in our work Strategy mental model we call exposing and testing our mental models: to what extent does my action feed the madness and violence of the world, despite my good intentions?
What could I do otherwise to, on the contrary, participate in the construction of something else? Perhaps it is necessary, contrary to Camus who estimated that the revolt began when a man said no, to follow Nietzsche and on the contrary only say yes ? Less exhausting yourself on what does not work and who will die, and focusing your energy on what works, even if it is small, and making it grow? In short, to be less philosophers and more entrepreneurs?
-
yes is true🤔