1. First-rate intelligence?
I came to the conclusion that the very essence or starting point for integrative thinking is this great old F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. Something that's so famous that everybody's heard of it. I actually didn't know what the next sentence was until I went back to check that I got the quote exactly right. And I love it; it's magical. It almost brings tears to my eyes. “One should for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise”. That ends up being the thing that was singularly most common among all of these highly successful leaders that I interviewed. And the only thing that I think I disagree with F. Scott Fitzgerald on, although he's no longer with us, so I can't check, is the expression “first-rate intelligence”—I think is tends to be associated with one's sort of God given brain size. That's how it's typically used and I just don't agree with. From what I've now seen in terms of the learning of students, I don't think it's a matter of having a gigantic brain. It is a matter of skills and practice. So that would be the only thing that I potentially disagree with F. Scott Fitzgerald on.
2. Clashing models
So the question would be “why is it so damn hard?”, if that's what F. Scott Fitzgerald is saying. It's really hard, so there's an exemplary few that can do this. Why would it be so hard? And I've come to believe that it has to do with how we perceive and understand the world. Which I think is the key, so it's not a choice of model or not model, we always model, but we're often unaware of the fact that we are engaging in a modeling process. So what's the implication of that? I think that the implication of that is the following: life naturally creates clashing models. So we look at that picture, and this is one person's model of that picture, metaphorically, and this is the next person's model of that picture. And in some sense, they're unaware of the fact that they are modelling and in general, people will say, I'm looking at reality. So that makes clashing models a scary thing, an inherently scary thing. Right? Because if we're looking at reality, and somebody else thinks differently, what are they? Wrong. Right? And so what it creates as a natural behaviour that we all tend to engage in, is this: that we make one of two fundamental choices when we hit model clash of any sort. We either fear and avoid it. Right. Why? Because we're looking at reality. They're seeing something different, so we're just going to have a food fight. We're going to argue. I'm going to have to convince them that they're wrong or maybe they'll overpower me because they're my superior and so what we tend to do is try to avoid model clash because we're fearful of it. And what is the time-tested, super methodology for avoiding model clash? Don't invite them to the meeting. Right? Don't invite them to the meeting. Then you won't have model clash. Right? If you know that they're going to say and think something differently than you, you just don't invite them to the meeting, make the choices and go forward. So rather than dealing productively with model clash, fear and avoid is one choice.
The other choice is what I think of as the technocratic approach to it, which is to view model clashes as the clash between options. And so we have everybody come to the meeting and they each put their options on the table and you do some analysis and choose from among the options. And in some sense, choose the “least worse” option. And say: “well that's as best as it gets”. And move on from that. So I would argue that most of us, most of the world exists most of the time in this world in the face of model clash. And it is back to: why? It's because we forget that we're modeling crea