2. A DEEPER REGION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

FOR THE BIG DECISIONS IN LIFE, YOU NEED TO REACH A DEEPER REGION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. MAKING DECISIONS THEN BECOMES NOT SO MUCH ABOUT ‘DECIDING’ AS ABOUT LETTING AN INNER WISDOM EMERGE.
– Brian Arthur

As the session broke up, I found the chief learning officer, Gary Jusela, and, over a three-hour lunch, described to him the opening I saw – to develop a process whereby teams could sense the way the future wants to unfold, and to enable that unfolding. I felt that teams could guide this process by their intention, their way of being, and their choices. I told him we would be on a search for the process by which transformational breakthroughs in any field occur, the creation of knowledge that changes the world as we know it. Gary instantly understood what I was talking about.

The next morning, we went to see Jim Morgan, the joint CEO of the Alliance. I reminded Jim of Tilton’s remarks and of the challenges he had laid down to the senior leaders. I said, “Jim, I can help you develop the entrepreneurial impulse in your people. I need eight months to finish the research, develop the process, and run a pilot. We can create a leadership laboratory, a learning environment that can help these managers ‘act like gazelles,’ enabling them to create significant new growth platforms for the Alliance and to significantly improve their operational performance.” Right there, on the spot, Jim gave Gary and me the green light.

The following day, I flew home to Boston and hired C. Otto Scharmer, who was studying with Peter Senge, with whom I was working at the MIT Organizational Learning Center, recently reorganized and named The Society of Organizational Learning (SoL). In designing the research agenda, Otto and I decided to seek out and interview at least fifty of the most remarkable thinkers and practitioners in the field of innovation, discovery, high performance, and entrepreneurship. We agreed it would be my responsibility to tap the network I had been building since my founding of the American Leadership Forum at the beginning of the 1980s.

That same week, I developed a list of the first twenty people we would see. At the top of the list was Srikumar Rao, who conceived the pioneering course at Columbia Business School, “Creativity and Personal Mastery,” and Michael Ray, Professor of Creativity and Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Another was a noted psychologist, Michael Lipson, Chief Psychologist at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, who had recently been designated by the family of Abraham Maslow to be his authorized biographer and in the process had been given sole access to Maslow’s personal diaries.

Late one night at the office, I created the prioritized list. When I had finished, I packed my briefcase and was on my way out the door when I glanced over at a table in the hallway and noticed a magazine. Its title read Fast Company. On pure impulse, I picked it up and flipped it open. There was a sidebar article about a brief conversation the editor Anna Muoio had had with W. Brian Arthur, a pioneer of the new science of complexity. Arthur had also played an instrumental role in establishing the Santa Fe Institute in 1987, when he was teaching at Stanford. The institute was founded by several of the major figures of twentieth-century science, including Kenneth Arrow (economics), Murray Gell-Mann (physics), and Phillip Anderson (physics), all Nobel laureates, along with George A. Cowan, the former head of research at Los Alamos who had worked in the bomb laboratory until, at age sixty-three, he set out to forge “the sciences of the twenty-first century.” In Arthur’s own words, the mission of the Santa Fe Institute was for science as a whole to achieve a kind of “redemption and rebirth.” Brian was invited by Arrow and Anderson to be the first director of the interdisciplinary economics program at the institute in 1988.

The article in Fast Company recounted Arthur’s early training in operations research, which is a highly scientific, mathematical method of strategy formation and decision making. “I once thought,” Arthur was quoted as saying, “that I could make any decisions, whether professional or personal, by using decision trees, game theory, and optimization. Over time, I’ve changed my mind.”

Arthur said that for the day-to-day work of running a business – scheduling a fleet of oil tankers, choosing where to open a new factory – scientific decision theory works pretty well. But “for the big decisions in life, you need to reach a deeper region of consciousness. Making decisions then becomes not so much about ‘deciding’ as about letting an inner wisdom emerge.” [Emphasis added.] He concluded the interview by noting, “This approach to decision making requires time, patience, and another key ingredient: courage. It takes courage to listen to your inner wisdom. But once you hear that wisdom, making a decision becomes fairly easy.”

The words “deeper region of consciousness” and “inner wisdom” leapt out at me. Brian Arthur had rocketed to the very top of my list. In that moment, I knew that I needed to start with the Santa Fe Institute and proceed from there.