It wasn’t until my early thirties that I realised that I wasn’t anywhere near as smart as my mum had told me I was. But by then it was too late to back any other horse: my whole life had been geared towards changing the world by coming up with something revolutionary.
So I was effectively screwed – and I can’t say that it sat that well with me!
I really didn’t enjoy the realisation that I was, in fact, little more than average in the brains department.
But then…
Everything changed in 1997, because that’s the year that I stumbled on Eli Goldratt’s “Critical Chain”. (amazon.com, audible.com, fishpond.co.nz, bookdepository.com)
Critical Chain blew my mind!
It’s a business novel, focused on project management, that introduces TOC – the Theory of Constraints. The cool thing about TOC is that it provides thinking tools – that anyone can learn to use – to generate real breakthroughs, in a deliberate and systematic way.
Perhaps there was a chance for me to make a dent, after all. Perhaps I could come up with something worthwhile, compensating for inadequacies in the brilliance department with sweat and time.
I read everything I could on TOC. ‘Did a TOC Jonah Programme. ‘Applied TOC to everything.
I thought that TOC was the solution to everything, but felt that it was too technical for – and inaccessible to – the average corporate exec. And it
didn’t have many ready-made solutions for white-collar workers. And those that it did have were hard to apply and implement.
Applying thinking technology to thinking technology
So I set about enhancing and simplifying TOC – in order to make it more suitable and accessible to executives and organisations in white-collar industries, as a prelude to introducing it into other parts of our civilisation.
In the process, I came across other amazing methodologies, like Systems Dynamics and Systems Thinking; TRIZ and ASIT; NLP and Tony Robbins’ NAC; Lateral Thinking and Creative Thinking.
This stumped me for a while, because I couldn’t work out which was the best method. But, after a few days (or weeks!) of vacillating back and forth, I decided that each had critical perspectives to offer – and began integrating the key elements of all of them into a single, more powerful method – applying key elements of each of them on themselves and each other.
Going backwards to go forwards
In spite of having made each methodology more accessible and compelling and increasing overall intervention power, the integrated method was turning out to be at least as complex, technical and inaccessible as each of the individual technologies was on its own.
It was more a hotchpotch of techniques than a single, simple methodology.
This was not what I was after!
I was getting exceptional results, though, and so was invited to present at the International Conference on Thinking – with the likes of Edward De Bono and Peter Senge.
I struggled for weeks – with the sound-boarding support of my wife, Lynne – to work out how to convey the new, “integrated” method in an easily accessible and memorable way – within a 40-minute presentation.
I wanted to do the genius of each of the methodologies justice, but was going round in circles and couldn’t work out why. I could present each of the techniques on it’s own coherently enough. But presenting on all of them in one presentation was harder than it looked.
It didn’t help that advocates and practitioners of each methodology were adversarial to, competitive with and dismissive of the others!
The insight
A blinding flash of insight struck one morning, however, as the final paper submission date loomed closer: what if I was battling because I was trying to distinguish between the various methods when, in reality, they were more similar, than they were different?
What if they were actually versions of the same – deeper – insight? After all, they are all addressing the same things: the interactions that drive and constrain performance.
This was a shock – because, until then, I’d viewed them as compatible at some level, but uniquely and distinctly brilliant. (I still think that they’re uniquely and distinctly brilliant.)
But perhaps their brilliance stems from an even deeper, simpler and more amazing reality? Perhaps they’re only unique and distinct because they’re focusing on different perspectives of the same thing?
The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became and the more evidence emerged to support the idea: they are all versions of a deeper, simpler, even more powerful and accessible insight. (I’ll post on their similarities at some point.)
How could it have taken me so long to realise that they had more in common than in difference? It was so obvious, in hindsight– and yet so elusive in foresight.
Was there perhaps similarity and commonality elsewhere in the chaos of our complex world that our civilisation is blind to, for some reason?
Confirmation
Well, it turns out that there was – is. A lot of it!
More importantly – from a scientific method point of view – we were unable to find a single case in which there wasn’t a single underlying interaction-pattern.
Even better, these interaction patterns were easier to find than we had thought they would be – once you got the hang of it.
It was like putting on a pair of special glasses that exposed hidden patterns and similarities – a whole new reality, hidden from normal eyes.
Not only was there commonality that had been invisible to us before (and presumably to others – and, possibly, to the whole of our civilisation), but this commonality repeated throughout and across domains that had previously been siloed in our (and possibly everyone else’s) thinking.
Was – is – our society so obsessed with difference that it’s blind to similarity and commonality?
And, if so, what treasure troves of opportunity are hiding in plain sight, right in front of us?
I’ll continue the saga in my next post, before showing you how to expose and unlock the wealth of opportunity that’s hidden by our education-fueled obsession to compare, contrast and rank options and insights.
‘Let me know if you’ve found this post interesting…
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