How to think about growth
Chapter 3 - Experiential Growth Method®
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Welcome to thinking about growth!
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The core question here is: how do you define and think about growth?
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Thinking about the concept
A visual thesaurus search is always an excellent starting point to discuss a concept definition:
| GROWTH |
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| https://www.freethesaurus.com/growth |
| DEVELOPMENT |
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| https://www.freethesaurus.com/development |
| PROGRESS |
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| https://www.freethesaurus.com/progress |
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New ways of thinking about growth
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| Traditional ways of thinking about growth |
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| The growth of a person, animal, or plant is its process of increasing in size |
| The act or process, or a manner of growing; growing; development; gradual increase |
| Anticipated progressive growth especially in capital value and income |
| Industry, area, or market which is increasing in size or activity. |
| An increase in the value of goods or services produced and sold by a business or a country |
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| from | to | |
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| Factual thinking | probabilistic thinking | |
| Reductionism is all | a multilevel, nuanced view that includes emergent phenomena | |
| Masterstroke solutions (progress by great leaps) | iterative solutions (progress by careful steps) and an experimenting society | |
| Technocratic decision-making (experts and leaders decide) | deliberative decision-making (collective consultation and consensus-seeking) | |
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The pitfalls of thinking
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For as long as mankind has existed, it has suffered from constructing heaven hooks (Daniel Dennett), thinking that our glorious ideas are suspended high in nothingness and thus prove their greatness. In reality, we have always used - and are still using - cranes firmly anchored in everyday reality to lift our ideas.
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Deep dive
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Key take-aways from previous pages
Dimensional thinking and doing: a summary
What is important, valuable and relevant for you, your organisation or your enterprise?
- What are the patterns that arise from the interests we have?
- What are the principles we live by from the values we hold?
- What are the human-based processes we create from the goals we have?
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Dimensional thinking and doing help us navigate reality by showing us how dimensions interact and create the context we live in.
- The advantage of thinking in dimensions is that it does not pin us down to one fixed value. It highlights that quite a few exist before and after the value we are experiencing now. It allows us to improve.
- The second advantage is that dimensions allow much more connections between points on the dimensions, creating a more prosporous world for us.
- Thirdly. The former two create many more possibilities to find intersections between people's positions.
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Hierarchical thinking
Human beings, like monkeys and apes, are hierarchical creatures exquisitely sensitive to cues of status. Rank, dominance, submission, patterns of gaze, vocal and speech characteristics, posture, body size, age, and height are just a few of the traits all social primates are carefully attuned to. You are wired with specific neural networks to detect them.
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Contextual thinking
Social behavior and human cultures are exemplars of the workings of context-dependent constraints. Economic systems, are coherent wholes, interdependencies enabled by constrained interactions among producers, consumers, and traders of goods and services. These interdependencies, in turn (acting as governing constraints), modify the behavior of those caught up in that. All are patterns of energy, matter, and information flow.
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Do you want to know more?
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Rational Thinking
First and foremost, reality exists.
Ontology
- How things are
Epistemology
- How we know things
Phenomenology
- How we perceive things
Ontology, epistemology and phenomenology can never be 100% aligned, reality will always be a little messy.
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Feeling
Feelings are subjective self-contained phenomenal experiences. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; and feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them". The term feeling is closely related to, but not the same as, emotion. Feeling may for instance refer to the conscious subjective experience of emotions. Feelings are sometimes held to be characteristic of embodied consciousness.
| Intuition | Knowing | Meta-cognition |
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| Intuition is the innate ability to know something without having to consciously think about it. It's often referred to as a “gut feeling” when you “just know” something. | Knowledge is not a rational process but centres around the feeling of knowing which is the net output of competing brain processes. Knowing is a feeling that results from the interactions of the brain’s unconscious and conscious processes and not through the accumulation of facts. | Metacognition refers to a range of processes and strategies used to assess and monitor knowledge. It includes the “feeling of knowing” that accompanies problem solving, the ability to distinguish ideas about which we are confident from those which we doubt (Tarricone, 2011). |
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Everyday thinking
Thinking Fast and Slow
'Thinking Fast and Slow' is not - contrary to common belief - a hard-wired property of the brain, but a psychological property of the way we think in everyday life.
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Induction
Induction combines observations with information to reach a conclusion. It involves generating findings from the specific to the general. For example, I observe a baby speaking its first words at 12 months. I see other babies do this at around the same age and conclude that all babies say their first words by the time they are 12 months old.
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Abduction
Abduction is a way of reasoning in which a person chooses a possible explanation for an (unexpected) phenomenon as the correct one. The reason is then a sufficient condition but not a necessary one. Other explanations are possible. The American philosopher/logician Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term to refer to the process of creating scientific hypotheses. This method helps to compare symmetry or asymmetry of relationship patterns, especially in complex organic (or mental) systems.
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Deduction
Deductive reasoning applies to cause and effect, often as 'if' and 'then' statements. As in, 'if' something is true,' something else must follow or be true. For example, if a sports team beats its competitor, it will move on to the next round of the competition.
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Causal Thinking
Causal Thinking provides insights into to relationships between elements. More than process thinking it is about model thinking.
Model Thinking gives us insights about what relational models yield.
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Bayes Theorem
Why does the experience of the train passengers never match the punctuality statistics of the train company? Because we update our knowledge about the world around us, not in 'new-formed chunks' which can be counted statistically, but in a Bayesian way, updating existing knowledge.
Bayes' theorem is a fundamental result in probability theory that describes the relationship between prior and posterior probabilities. Probability science would lead us far away from this wiki's core intent. So instead, we limit ourselves to Bayesian statistics because it best describes how we statistically think as humans.
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(Thinking about) Complexity
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Thinking about complexity provides answers about why we experience the world around us, how we can cope with that, and what conclusions we can draw.
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Systems Thinking
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Systems Thinking helps us to see how relationships evolve between elements and what they constitute.
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Creative exploration
The process of creative exploration involves establishing the outcome of a problem first and then coevolving the ‘how’ we get to that destination with ‘what’ we need to get there.
For example, we could reimagine the relationship between police and the community in less punitive or oppositional ways in favour of more inclusive and rewarding ways of promoting care, safety and security. To achieve this desirable outcome, we need policy or legislation changes and dialogue sessions with the community and policing as equal stakeholders to imagine a different relationship. The ‘what’ and ‘how’ work together, forming probes into the problem space. These observed actions might lead to exploring new and different means of achieving the desired outcome.
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Practicing sensemaking
This is a motivated and continued effort to understand connections. Sensemaking is the opposite of reductionism (used to analyse apparent problems).
Legitimising constructivism
Contrary to essentialism, constructivism legitimises human and personal experiences as ways of creating knowledge and meaning through human interactions.
Engaging with creative problem-solving
This is a legitimate form of rationality needed alongside other forms of reasoning. Creative problem-solving helps us coevolve our understanding of complex problems and interventions to those problems through processes of inquiry.
Adopting knowledge co-production
This is an inclusive way for researchers to bring in diverse stakeholder voices to reflect on the outcomes they want from the problems they face as a collective.
Shaping Futures
Abductive reasoning can help us form futures, not just inform them. Forming futures needs new ways of framing problems and new frames for seeing possibility, unlocking us from how we currently see, experience and engage with issues.
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