This is the last of three articles looking at the process of imagination, and the role it plays it how we, as human beings, attend to the world around us. To illustrate imagination, we previously looked at expertise, and aging. In both cases, the ability to imagine something beyond what is already known and has previously been experienced ensures that the universe remains dynamic and evolving, not static and lifeless. Imagination keeps us alert to potential and possibility, and not looking to fit everything into pre-existing categories.
Imagination helps us see the bigger picture, to escape the limits of our current knowledge and experience (Klein, 2011). Intuition alerts us, tacitly, to the felt sense of the external environment. These feelings, created by an encounter with the external environment, generate emotions, a sense what is right and wrong, what objects and features need to be foregrounded, and what needs to be backgrounded (Klein, 2011, Whitehead, 2010, McGilchrist, 2021). If intuition is listened to then we can imagine what the significance of this feeling is. The natural neurological processes of intuition and imagination alert us to subtle changes in the external environment, they allow us to react spontaneously (McGilchrist, 2012).
However, we can reduce experience to processes and categories by oppressing and reducing spontaneous interaction with the external world to preconceived ideas. As a result, the world becomes static. Radically reducing the external world to processes and categories lies at the heart of schizophrenia. McGilchrist, quoted directly below explains eloquently
“Schizophrenia has nothing to do with split personality. The phrase might be better rendered as ‘shattered mind’. Indeed, the word ‘shattered’ picks up well one of the condition’s cardinal features: the loss of the faculty of seeing things as a whole – the loss, to use the old psychological term, of the Gestalt – so that the whole of reality becomes, like Coleridge’s description of the cosmos, ‘an immense heap of little things’. Everything has to be broken down into parts. Thought processes lose their coherence; emotions are absent altogether or, similarly, fail to cohere. Most strikingly, there is an altered relationship with external reality, characterised by delusions and hallucinations: what is ‘real’ becomes uncertain, nothing can be trusted, the world becomes frightening and alien”
McGilchrist (2022) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n21/iain-mcgilchrist/it-s-not-so-much-thinking-out-what-to-do-it-s-the-doing-of-it-that-sticks-me
With the above in mind, the emotions that intuition generates are not present or do not make sense. The external world becomes difficult to feel. However, something needs to make sense of the world, and what fills the void is hyper rationality (McGilchrist, 2019).
The words that McGilchrist uses to explain the life of a schizophrenic could also apply to an organisation. For example, if an organisation has a large gap between those who design strategies and those who implement strategies then a disconnect takes place. Those who implement strategies are in touch with the external world, they know what happens to strategies when they meet reality (Klein, 2013). However, those who create strategies do not receive the feeling and emotions which their strategies generate on the frontline. As a result, strategy makers can develop delusions about the external environment, and keep creating strategies which are disconnected from reality. There are numerous cultural and technical problems why this takes place.
An organisation operating in the above way can become schizophrenic, disconnected from feeling and emotion, while highly connected to strategic steps. This condition perhaps lies at the heart of why an ailing government is assailed with accusations of being out of touch, they have lost their ability to feel the effects of their policies as they touch reality.
Imagination, unlike illusion and delusion, is a connection to the external environment. It involves intuitive reaction to how things are going, what is significant and what can be put aside for now, a wondering of what things mean in terms of relevance (Vervaeke et al, 2012, McGilchrist, 2019). A schizophrenic presentation involves a disconnection from intuition and imagination. Subtle changes in the external world are not noticed, and spontaneous adaption cannot take place. In other words, staying in touch is essential to healthy functioning at all levels of culture.
In closing, the hallmark of an effective strategy is adaption (Freedman, 2013). Adaption requires that procedural steps are modified as they engage with reality. The modifications need to be fed back swiftly to those making the strategy. This is true for individuals and organisations; we need to feel the effects of our plans and ideas and respond to these feelings. This connection creates contact with reality.
Reading
Klein, G (2011) Streetlights and Shadows. Bradford Books.
Klein, G. (2013). Seeing what others don’t: The remarkable ways we gain insights. New York, NY: PublicAffairs
Vervaeke, John & Lillicrap, Timothy & Richards, Blake. (2012). Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science. J. Log.
(McGilchrist, 2022) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n21/iain-mcgilchrist/it-s-not-so-much-thinking-out-what-to-do-it-s-the-doing-of-it-that-sticks-me
McGilchrist, I. (2019) The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press; Expanded Edition.
McGilchrist, I (2021) The Matter of Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva
Freedman, L. (2013) Strategy: A History. Oxford University Press.
