LETTING GO OF ‘WHAT YOU KNOW’ MANAGEMENT THINKING
By
Bill Cottringer

What It’s All About

It’s not about—
How smart you are,
Who you know,
Where you’ve been,
Or what you have;
It’s not about you,
Or what you’ve done,
Or left undone.
Here’s what it’s about:
Your silent surrender—
The understanding,
To feel and be,
To hear and see,
Past your thinking,
What is or what isn’t,
Awakening within,
The simple truth,
The abundant beauty,
On the other side,
Past a sea of illusion;
To let go and give in,
Silencing your mind,
Softening your heart,
Learning what is or isn’t
Living it more fully.
That’s what it’s all about.

For a long time now, I have been growing my own awareness of an important realization—sensing the unfolding of a very important truth about success in general that certainly includes relevancy to current management thinking. This truth is that success at anything involves going through two distinct levels of learning—a simple easy one and a very complex difficult one. These levels are like mastering the science of surviving by adding to your toolbox of management skills so you can learn the art of thriving into your unknown, unlimited potential as a leader, by emptying this same toolbox. This process is wading through the sea of chaos so you can get to the Land of Simple, where paradoxically, abundance multiplies endlessly.

As a writer, I tip toe out the edges of reality to understand common problems in life and work and learn their solutions, just so I can bring them back to real time situations before me and apply this wisdom well enough myself to explain it and make it usable by others. But then something odd occurs somewhere in between—more serious problems suddenly present themselves that really put the solutions to the test, to take learning and understanding to a whole new, much deeper level. It is like going from hopping down one step of stairs to jumping from an airplane.

Perpetual, forward thinking managers are now being forced to embrace and deal with a very strange and uncomfortable reality today which I knew about several years ago but couldn’t put into words—the common idea that has been expressed with the catchphrase, “what got you here won’t get you there.” The reality today is that we are quickly moving into an entirely new territory that doesn’t have a map yet. To be successful in navigating this new territory of work and life, we are going to have to let go of what we think is so, because it is obviously not so, and continuing to believe it is, just delays understanding of how to get there. We are entering the second level of management success, which requires us to pause and share our secrets and suspicions about this very process.

What transitions are occurring in life and work that define this current situation that is making us pause and re-think things—like our basic knowledge base, core values, primary beliefs and fundamental paradigms? I believe we are witnessing a major criss-crossing of the fundamental Yangs and Yins of life and the transition gray area is very nebulous, ambivalent and confusing.

Being uncomfortable with the current chaos overload is just a natural symptom of being in the middle. For instance, we have moved from the Manufacturing Age, with all its definitive and sure standards of performance and known conflict-resolution and problem-solving strategies, to the Information Age, with all its virtual unknowns and uncertainties about everything. Why wouldn’t this be dreadfully uncomfortable? But the purpose of the discomfort is to motivate us to figure out a way out of this gray area that is consuming us.

We have also been witnessing an equally deep shifting from a perspective of focusing on pathology, or failures and what is different and wrong with everything, to a much more positive psychology movement, looking for success, what the common denominators are and what is right about some things in order to make them even better, without any ceiling in sight or much attention to what seems wrong.

Add to these two major transformations, the perpetual ones of the thinking-feeling and separating-rejoining movements we all experience, and you have a whole new territory that is unfamiliar, is in constant flux and doesn’t have a map to navigate through because it is too busy showing us its difference from what we know. If you don’t sense this very real reality yet, you will, because the maps are gradually appearing from those who do understand what is going on here.

In the meantime, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing there is a good and positive process going on and here’s a tentative prescription that has good potential for the management map of choice to increase more familiarity and certainty of where we are going with better management of the Information Age.

UNDERSTAND

The only way to know how to respond to the more difficult problems and conflicts that are confronting us today, is to pause and do a ‘reality check.’ This means to begin the painful process of questioning all the very basic assumptions you have made, especially the big one that what you think you know for sure is in fact really so. It really isn’t and you can’t get unstuck from the unproductive perspective to which you have super-glued yourself, until you admit you no longer have the answers. And that is because the ones you have are from the territory you are leaving.

Even though you may have been highly successful getting to where you are now, you have to give up the thinking and acting that got you here, because it simply won’t get you there, where you want and need to be. This is the hardest insight anyone can learn in management—seeing past the first level of success and surrendering the packaging pride of what you did to master this level. This is not a change in thinking, but a fundamental softening of the heart.

STAY CALM

A real reality check can be very overwhelming and disconcerting because everything then appears to be completely hopeless and the manic panic starts—there are way too many problems and no sure solutions. But success at this new second level, requires moving from partial, realistic optimism to unlimited, ideal optimism—to the effect of, “so what if it is impossible to do, I am still going to do it anyway.” You are lessoning the panic by doing what you can.

All second level successful success shadow-makers know that even when there seems to be a huge, irreconcilable gap between where things are and where they could be, it doesn’t matter because they understand they just need to get a better understanding and the cures will then surface with the problems. And in the Information Age, understanding can only begin with better communication, which begins with better listening to what may be wrong and how to reach cognitive consensus on improving a particular situation at hand, one at a time. This gives birth to the management team practice, where the team can accomplish much more than any of the individual members can alone.

LET GO

Growth and improvement in management is really about emptying your toolbox, not continuing to over-fill it. Great sculptures chip away the irrelevant, unimportant material parts of the block of granite they re working with, to get to the image that already exists inside. Nothing great ever seems to happen in life or work without letting go of something and that ‘something’ is usually so close to you that it is difficult to see, like your own skin and feeling or your own brain and thinking.

In learning how to manage better in this Information Age, there are several things you need to let go of. One is the preferred basic game strategy of you winning and the other person losing. Only win-win solutions can lead us to this second level of success. This means accepting that conflicts usually signal both sides being right and wrong about the desired outcome of the resolution and the means to get it. Another idea that needs letting go of is the one that tells you the leader is wiser than the individual team members and team collectively. That is simply a false belief in the Information Age, because it came from the Manufacturing Age and it is obsolete. And here’s the third of the big trilogy to let go of—Time. Even if time seems to be consistent and measurable by Manufacturing Age standards, that doesn’t mean it can be in the Information Age. Time to let go.

BE PERPETUAL

Realizing you will never complete your final picture puzzle by yourself is a humble beginning in taking the first step to learn about this second level of success and how to go from the science of surviving to the art of thriving. All you can really do to clarify these uncharted waters into which we have already entered, is to resolve to gradually learn where you are and why. Or in other words, re-examine your basic purpose for being where you are in order to see more clearly where you are headed, before you get there and get lost.

Every position in which we find ourselves, is for the purpose of preparing us to move to a slightly better place ahead in our journey, even when it seems we may be uncomfortably backtracking or miserably regressing. Learning, growing and improving our optimism in the journey is our destination and road to get there. And being perpetually perpetual in our approach to seeing and doing in our managing is the only likely guarantee we won’t get to the top rung of our ladders only to find that we have wrongly placed our ladder against the wrong building. Oops…just like the self-esteem proponents in our school and mental health systems found out the hard way (now we have to re-teach real self-esteem to overcome failure fear).

There comes a point in anything, that continuing it past its purpose, takes it back to the mediocrity we chipped away from it in the process of getting to its truth. Such is the case that we can still apply the thinking and doing that got us here to help get us there. The only truthful answers will come from understanding, staying calm, letting go and being perpetual. That is a very tall challenge, but whoever said it was going to be easy?

“You can’t use the same type of thinking to solve the problems that were created by that thinking.” ~Albert Einstein.

Author's Bio: 

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA, along with being a Sport Psychologist, Business Success Coach, Photographer and Writer. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), The Bow-Wow Secrets (Wisdom Tree), and Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers). Also watch for Reality Repair Rx which is coming. Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net