Limits on memory, attention, and computing speed mean the brain can only process a fraction of the information that might be relevant in any given situation. Achor (2010) states that while the human brain receives eleven million pieces of information every second from our environment, it can process only forty bits per second. This means the brain has to choose what tiny percentage of this input to process and what huge chunk to dismiss or ignore. This fact means we take cognitive shortcuts—rules of thumb and mental models—to cut down what can seem chaotic to a more manageable state. Our cognitive biases—often nonconscious and based on existing beliefs, expectations, and values—incline us to welcome only information that confirms them and ignore or reject what doesn’t.
In a simple world, or even a complicated but relatively orderly one, horizontal learning—the accumulation of knowledge about specific and general topics relevant to our area of expertise, is usually adequate. But the world that leaders in the twenty-first century inhabit is characterized by VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, an acronym pointing toward the unpredictability inherent in facing situations that are in flux and tasks that are increasingly unbounded (Garvey Berger, p. 9). Leading in a VUCA world demands vertical or transformational learning, which is learning that focuses on the ways people think and act—the development of their “action logics”—in qualitatively more complex and integrated ways (Rooke & Torbert, 2006). Which raises the pressing question: what tools will best help to accomplish that?
Like a Fish Finding Water
Vertical or transformational learning requires what has been termed “inner reconnaissance” (Hyman, 2019). Leaders need to develop familiarity with how their own inner processes—sensory, emotional, cognitive, and narrative—shape the way they see the world around them; they need to develop self-awareness and self-knowledge. In adult developmental terminology, they need to move from subject—that which you cannot yet see because you are fused with it—to object—that which you can see and make decisions about because you have gained more distance from it (Garvey Berger, p. 18).
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