We are likely to find that distal shifts in collective baseline elements are infrequent, given the complex, often turbulent (and even contradictory) way an environment operates at contemporary organizational levels. Forces in one direction are muting forces operating in a different direction—leading to a standoff. Much more frequent shifts are likely to take place at the proximal, personal level as our emotional reactions to ongoing organizational events require adjustments in our polystatic baseline.
Thus, in many complex organizational settings, we are likely to retain a “hybrid” baseline that is always both changing and remaining surprisingly stable. As a thoughtful and effective coach, it is often of great value for us to help our client identify and learn how to ‘live with” hybrid baselines that may lead us to contradictory anticipations: “everything is changing and nothing has really changed!”
Attention Density and Coaching
The self-referencing process serves one other important function in the creation and maintenance of a self-organizing system. When we have gained a clear sense of both personal and collective purpose, then we have a better sense of what we should focus on in our often-complex environment.
In appraising the probable shifts in our immediate environment when determining what to anticipate, it is clear that we can’t focus on everything. We have to be selective in our attention to this environment. This focused attention, in turn, not only influences how we manage our baseline and adjust our anticipations, it also alters the fundamental operations of our brain from moment to moment.
If we could somehow record the attention density process at any one moment and play it back in slow motion, we would find that information from the environment is being assessed to determine if this environment has shifted in some way from what it was a moment before. If a shift has occurred, then the “new” environment is compared to internal information (words, pictures, experiences, concepts) that is organized and presented in part as the psychosocial template and as the self-referencing polystatic baseline.
A quick appraisal is made regarding the extent to which anticipation of what is to occur next in the environment needs to be altered. This very quick process occurs in a specific neural circuit or the tight clustering of neurons in our brain. This circuit may involve centers throughout our neural system. The speed as well as the density of this attentive process is exceptional. It is repeated many times at each stage of feedback-based Polystasis. Multiple adjustments and actions follow the initial appraisal.
As a professional coach, we can assist our clients in determining where they want to focus their attention. Attention density impacts the way in which we are integrating and “making sense of” those aspects of the environment to which we are attending. We see the world differently depending on the density and varied internal and external properties incorporated in our attention.
What we attend to influences (and often determines) our anticipation of what is about to happen in our world. That to which we attend also influences (and often determines) what action, if any, we take in this world. We attend, anticipate, feel, and act into our immediate future. This is what it means to “lean into our immediate future.” And what it means to “learn into our near future.” This concept of attention density also holds major implications for how we lead into the more distant future.
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