What: Facts can be memorized and recalled.

How: Skills can be practiced and used.

Why: Meaning is ephemeral. It comes and goes as it will. We must petition it to return to us.

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We possess What and How.

Why possesses us.

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Many of us believe only in What and How.

What and How are always at hand when we reach for them, and the fingers of the comprehending mind can wrap comfortably around them. Why is incomprehensible. According to comprehension Why is nonexistent.

Or sometimes What and How conspire to verbalize Why, and then confound the verbal image with that to which it points.

What and How present a pseudo-why of What I must believe and How I must behave.

“Why?” Because of cause and effect. “Why?” Because this is what works best. “Why?” Because that is how it is. “Why?” Because I said so.

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Why is heard and felt. Why moves us to words and actions. But Why is never reducible to words or actions.

Why cannot be justified.

Why justifies.

Why is justification.

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Who — how does this relate to Why, How and What? You’ll rarely see Who discussed when this triad is framed out.

Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis describes a fascinating psychological phenomenon called confabulation:

A second division was discovered by accident in the 1960s when a surgeon began cutting people’s brains in half. The surgeon, Joe Bogen, had a good reason for doing this: He was trying to help people whose lives were destroyed by frequent and massive epileptic seizures. The human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum. Seizures always begin at one spot in the brain and spread to the surrounding brain tissue. If a seizure crosses over the corpus callosum, it can spread to the entire brain, causing the person to lose consciousness, fall down, and writhe uncontrollably. Just as a military leader might blow up a bridge to prevent an enemy from crossing it, Bogen wanted to sever the corpus callosum to prevent the seizures from spreading.

At first glance this was an insane tactic. The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing something important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. Yet research on animals found that, within a few weeks of surgery, the animals were pretty much back to normal. So Bogen took a chance with human patients, and it worked. The intensity of the seizures was greatly reduced.

But was there really no loss of ability? To find out, the surgical team brought in a young psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga, whose job was to look for the after-effects of this “split-brain” surgery. Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres — left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left’s mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”).

Gazzaniga used the brain’s division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, “What did you see?” Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, “A hat.” If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, “What did you see?”, the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, “Nothing.” But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not report verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the language centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand.

When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that “goes with” what he had seen. The patient’s right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, “I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain.” Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, “Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on whatever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self’s behavior. For example, if the word “walk” is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person’s conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.

These dramatic splits of the mind are caused by rare splits of the brain. Normal people are not split-brained. Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Split-brain studies are important for this book because they show in such a dramatic way that one of these modules is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior. Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.

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My current interest in confabulation is related to the everyday conflict I observe in the business world between linear, rational, formal processes (left hemisphere thinking) and nonlinear, informal creative processes (right hemisphere thinking), and the tendency for left hemisphere thinking to explain successes very much in terms of its own contributions, even when the success has little to do with them — or even despite them.  I am thinking about the role of administrators in education, the role of process in research and creative ideation.

One thing that I find nearly impossible to get across to some people is that I never theorize for the sake of theory.

My thinking is urgent. I am trying to find ways to articulate realities that lack language, but which have a deep impact on the quality of my life.

For the majority of people, if you can’t talk straightforwardly about something, it is “subjective”, which means it is non-existent, and outside the bounds of reason. Where words are lacking, no appeals can be made.

My suspicion and hope is that many people experience these realities, but do not experience them as true, because nobody realizes that anyone else experiences them. The same realities sit mute inside all of us, denied all social existence.

Or, sometimes they find a sort of social existence in the realm of literature. There people intimate sharedness of such experiences, but nothing is done to establish them socially, because to do so necessarily coarsens them. But the belief that what is discovered in art, belongs forever in art is to keep our infants imprisoned forever in the nursery out of fear that the weather will toughen their skin. The infant skin of indirect expression must, if it is to have life in the world must toughen up its hide with words that can refer to shared conceptions of roughly analogous realities. And yes — it loses its suppleness and its specificity, but that loss does not come without compensatory gains. As Ricoeur pointed out, polysemy is not a simple lack of precision, but is essential to language. It seems almost cynical to say it, but it might be that the popularity of an idea depends not only on the ability for people to understand it, but also to misunderstand it. It is this that gives it its range. (It is the failure to appreciate the necessity of this misunderstanding that has made so many religions granulate over theological differences.)

Art speaks very specifically about particular things — things that have escaped notice, but which have become significant to the artist — and in doing so inaugurates its reality as something (to some degree) shared. Without shared specific realities, no general realities — no truth — can be conceived, and nothing can be said of it that makes sense to anyone.

We speak to one another about sadness and anger and love all the time, and understand well enough what these words mean, and to refer to them is socially consequential. But whose sadness or anger or love is identical? To find finer identities or to be shown as-yet-unfamiliar nuances of these experiences we go to high art. (To not find them, and to stay strictly within the realm of our own familiar experiences we go to popular art. * See note below.)

So, yes, I know a philosophical handling of delicate things makes them tougher, cruder, more brutish. But this is what it means to mature into something that can survive in a tough, crude, brutish world, and it also represents a fresh infusion of relative suppleness, fineness and humanity to the world outside of art. Art’s loss is the practical world’s gain. And art is inexhaustible, unlike the practical world. Without the perpetually newness of art’s realities the practical world degrades into senility that is somehow simultanously sterile and lecherous.

We need fresh realities.

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Philosophy’s job: To usher inarticulate realities ordinarily found only in art into the practical world.

Picking up the baby trope again, philosophy plays the father role, and art plays the mother role. Art brings young experiential realities into the world, nurtures and protects them while they are small, delicate and vulnerable. Philosophy prepares them for eventual independent life, but the mother doesn’t want to let them go.

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(* NOTE: To not experience the as-yet-tacit — to get the easy, reassuring, reinforcing repetition of the same we consume popular art. The more we live in a popular world and experience things by way of popular expression, the more we all start to see and feel the same. The great value of Facebook is that we no longer just consume popular expression, but participate in it by producing it. This is much more effective way of learning as any constructivist educator will tell you. We live differently when we compose the story of what we are living as we live it. Facebook holds the promise of gently and painlessly eliminating the need for art by simultaneously quietening both the creative impetus and the receptivity for new experiences.)

Merleau-Ponty, from Phenomenology of Perception:

Now there is indeed one human act which at one stroke cuts through all possible doubts to stand in the full light of truth: this act is perception, in the wide sense of knowledge of existences. When I begin to perceive this table, I resolutely contract the thickness of duration which has elapsed while I have been looking at it; I emerge from my individual life by apprehending the object as an object for everybody. I therefore bring together in one operation concordant but discrete experiences which occupy several points of time and several temporalities. We do not blame intellectualism for making use of this decisive act which, within time, does the work of the Spinozist eternity, this ‘original doxa’; what we do complain of, is that it is here used tacitly. There is here a de facto power, as Descartes put it, a quite irresistibly self-evident truth, which, by invoking an absolute truth, brings together the separate phenomena of my present and my past, of my duration and that of others, which, however, must not be severed from its perceptual origins and detached from its ‘facticity’. Philosophy’s task is to reinstate it in the private field of experience from which it arises and elucidate its origin. If, however, this de facto power is used without being explicitly posited, we become incapable of seeing past the rending of separate experiences the phenomenon of perception, and the world born in perception; we dissolve the perceived world into a universe which is nothing but this very world cut off from its constitutive origins, and made manifest because they are forgotten.

I’m finding many parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of falsification of perception and misconceptions of conception that I’ve witnessed. For me, this is not a theoretical problem, but a practical one. To confuse conception with concept is to fail to understand the conditions by which conception can occur.

Ideally, we would all have a place in the world. What each of us is (role) and who each of us is (way of perceiving, conceiving, feeling and acting) would coincide enough that the world would give us a purpose as it took from us our kind of service.

Because of the implicit philosophy we have inherited from three centuries of alienated thought, we no longer have any expectation that this is possible or permissible.

We’re all social deists. We believe that the clockwork of “how things are” will — and must — play itself out according to its own mechanical principles. We’re all as skeptical as scientists with no trust in good faith, but only in inescapably compelling proofs. We believe only when someone is able to force us to believe.

The fact that a moral vision of life cannot be formed in these conditions only proves that moral visions are merely subjective imaginings.

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People who hate philosophy hate it because they are loyal to a philosophy.

Hostility toward philosophy is actually hostilities of philosophies, in the plural.

(Actually, a philosophy that exists without awareness of other philosophies is not really a philosophy, but a totalistic conception of experience, a pre-philosophy.)

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A philosophy is a totalistic conception of experience that knows that it is a totalistic conception of experience, and which, therefore has a transcendent background placed behind it: the possibility of consequential otherwise. Out of concern for this otherwise, it self-examines and attempts to make itself explicit.

A totalistic conception of experience that does not know that it is a totalistic conception of experience — or suspecting it may be, does everything it can to suppress full recognition of the fact — and which grasps no background beyond itself: the universe.

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A philosophy that exists without knowledge of other philosophies is as real and invisible as a subject who exists without knowledge of other subjects.

An autistic person is unaware of subjects beyond himself because all that exists to him is his own subjectivity, and this results in a world of objects.

The Enlightenment was the submergence of humankind in collective autism.

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Around each philosophy is a stretch of hellish oblivion known as perplexity.

Part of why we do not want to acknowledge other philosophies is out of fear of perplexity.

Perplexity corresponds to the state of chaos into which each infant is thrown at birth, which slowly articulates into a world.

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Babies are born into perplexity. That is why they cry.

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If someone claims enlightenment or rebirth or being “born again” ask what their death was like, and about the limbo they endured as they emerged from chaos into this new world they inhabit. Because this is how to distinguish transfiguration of the world and subsequent metanoia from a mere change of opinion about the world and how one ought to behave in it.

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We cannot live as human beings until we transcend the vision of the Enlightenment.

We cannot transcend the Enlightenment until we become willing to endure perplexity.

But we will not become fully perplexed until we start listening to one another and learning. Learning means to redraw the outlines of our knowledge: to reconfigure our gists.

But according to the Enlightenment we already know all we need to know in outline. And to believe this is to preclude learning. This is the circular life of the Enlightenment, and of all stable philosophies.

Every thought thinkable by a solitary individual has already been thought. Future thoughts will arise from the efforts of individuals thinking beyond their own limits with others, and those thoughts will not be comprehended by any one individual. The thought will be something in which the individual participates, and its knowing is one of knowing how to participate in the thought, in it is not graspable by the five fingers of the mind.

Reason is the lingua franca of intuitions.

Break us down to the infinitesimal element, of which all thing are constituted, we are alike. Take us together as constitutive of infinity, we are one.

We identify with extremes of scale when we feel overtaxed and weary and need need relief from incessant betweenness. In our mind, which is a place of its own, we burrow into dust to dissolve among quarks or to fly into heaven and see ourselves converge to zero from the vantage of beyond. Both are ways to desituate ourselves; to stand apart from where we always are.

The same operation can be performed with time, identifying with the deep past and distant future, and again with our existence between the chthonic animal instincts at our roots and the transcendence of mundane life.

We become escapees and exiles from the center, our prison home.

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None of us live at extremes of space, time or self. We can’t even touch them. We are suspended between them, and experience them purely through their tension.

For us, there is only tension, and from that tension fixed points are interpreted.

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Reality is not in entities but in relations. The entities follow from the relationships, but the mind seizes them and commits its characteristic ontic error. They are thinged.

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An object can be comprehended. Our participation in the world is incomprehensible.

Each brick holds in its heart the heat of the kiln.

This morning I shared an observation with a friend of mine who teaches women’s studies: business language tends to reduce relationships to the form subject + transitive verb + direct object. A management consultant never refers to something; he references it.

She pointed out to me that this is the inverse of what happens in science writing. Scientists are encouraged to write in the passive voice, in order to minimize the role of subjects and subjectivity in the content. In science the agents recede as far as possible behind the words in order to focus attention on the objective matter at hand.

Despite the obvious divergence, a commonality exists here: a preference for separating as completely as possible the active role of agents and passive roles of the recipients of action. It is possible to see these two linguistic styles as reflecting a shared preference for exaggerated difference in status between agent and object. This allows business and science to snap together into a complementary system. In business (and technology) an agent performs actions on objects. In science objects are acted upon and observed. In scientific modes of understanding, all entities whether human or material are understood objectively, which means as objects receptive to an agent’s actions.

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It is interesting to note that traditional religious symbol systems invariably assign to the masculine the status of the active and temporal, and to the feminine the passive and spatial.

It is also interesting that conservative political movements tend to idealize highly differentiated sexual roles, where progressive political movements idealize androgyny.

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The real struggle now is not between the powerful few and the powerless many. It is between those who affirm hierarchical power orders where the powerful act upon the less powerful (embraced equally by the powerful and the loyal powerless who identify with those who command them) and those who oppose such hierarchies and who instead prefer a complex matrix of power relationships, where roles of agency and receptivity are variable and contextual.

Some designers focus their attention on the artifact they’re crafting, and believe their craftsmanship will naturally result in an artifact people will love. This type of design is driven by invention. The primary source of inspiration comes from the possibilities of the medium.

Some designers focus their attention on the people for whom the design is intended. The entire activity is oriented by awareness of the person who will experience the artifact. This type of design is driven by insight. The primary source of inspiration comes from shifts in perspective effected by understanding other people.

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Until recently, the invention-driven approach was the most common and readily recognized one. It fits cleanly into the 20th century ideals of objectivity and individualism.

In recent years it has been challenged by the insight-driven approach. However, the insight-driven approach is immature, and still encumbered and distorted by objectivist thinking. Specifically, the methods employed often feel less inspiring than restraining. People who have been exposed to UX methodologies sometimes come away with the feeling that the process makes the design process dryer, more mechanical and less likely to produce brilliance. There is a perception, unfortunately sometimes true, that UX wants to conform designs to the expectations of users, and since these expectations are usually pretty banal, the whole approach is at cross-purposes with innovation and brand differentiation.

But, while this perception is no doubt valid, based as it is in experience, it does not reflect insight-driven design at its best. Research is somewhat similar to design, in that some researchers are better than others, and among the good ones, each had different strengths and weaknesses. An engineering team gains little if a mediocre designer is added to the mix. And if they’ve never worked with a good designer, engineers often do not know how to evaluate designers, and might even prefer mediocre designers, because such designers are less likely to “interfere” with the engineering process by trying to influence it at a fundamental level. They stay at the surface level, making surface improvement to a pre-formed solution, sanding off the rough edges of usability problems, and adding a shiny coat of desirability.

The same is true of design researchers. The best researchers fundamentally change how a design team thinks about the problem it is solving. The research doesn’t diminish the need for craftsmanship or inventiveness, and the insights do not replace designer’s intuition. However, the aims of the craftsmanship, inventiveness and intuition are changed, and when done correctly actually stimulates them.

In this sense, design research parallels brand strategy. The best brand strategists/planners empower the team to innovate meaningfully. Their brand documents are inspirational and not essentially proscriptive, even when they introduce constraints. But when people think about brand they often think about “brand cops” and restricting brand identity manuals. Unfortunately, the latter is much more common.

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The best design research and the best brand strategy sublates the conflict between invention-driven and inspiration-driven design.

Reading Difficult Conversations, it is apparent that navigating differences in opinion is difficult. People perceive situations differently and these divergent perceptions require divergent responses. Letting go of the bottom line result of these perceptions and responses, and examining the subjective factors and processes underlying the differences requires respect, patience and philosophical flexibility. It is unsurprising that constructive conversation often fails to occur.

To make matters worse — and more interesting — I do not believe most conflicts have this symmetrical opinion versus opinion structure. I believe the deeper disagreements are radically asymmetrical, and take the form of formed opinion versus inchoate intuition.

Opinion-versus-opinion as a norm leads to the systematic advantaging of conventional (and non-innovative) thinking. One person has a positive plan and the other has only criticisms of things other people have come up with. The former is ready to get to work and start producing work products while the other is in “analysis paralysis” lost in abstract concepts.

The tactic employed at this point is to impose a line of questioning that reinforces the assumption that conflicts are necessarily between opinion and opinion: “OK, then. You think my opinion is inadequate. Do you have something better?” Or another way this is stated: “Don’t come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions.” The dissenter is framed as a mere malcontent, content to criticize other people’s ideas, but unable or unwilling to advance one of their own.

The implication of all this is that groups cannot explore questions together. It is up to the isolated individual to produce an alternative. In other words, critique and dialogue is ruled out on principle. (This tactic is often used by husbands on  wives to shut down discussion. Because this type of disagreement is difficult to conceptualize — especially in the heat of argument — the wife will leave with the feeling she has been treated unjustly, but in a way she cannot explain. If she raises further objections it only leads to more of the same: “You don’t have a point.” Further, focusing attention on the way the discussion is happening, rather than on the content of the discussion, can be taken as changing the subject from the factual matter at hand, and making things personal and subjective. For whatever reason, women seem more inclined to come to a shared understanding before taking action, where men tend to fight for dominance in order to personally determine the course of action.)

And things are such in many organizations that the positive something always overrides the negative possibility — that is, the group automatically seizes on the first viable concrete option that appears, with the faith that dissatisfaction is in details that can be ironed out. And because this is the only way things are permitted to happen, there is no counter-example available to show the relative ease of proceeding according to a clear vision, versus a muddled attempt to construct a vision piecemeal.

The key to resolving this problem is raising the conflict from the level of opinion versus opinion to the level of method vs method. Of course, the former, who already holds an opinion will argue that no argument is necessary since the group already knows what it ought to do (a.k.a. has an opinion to work from), but at least now the conflict is framed in more positive and symmetrical terms.

Technique regards the world as a space in which things exist. Praxis regards the world as the medium of existence.

In combat, good soldiers forget about causes and fight for one another.

Bad and meaningless causes count on this siloing instinct.

What most people call “best practices” have nothing to do with practice, but with the concrete results of practices. A more accurate term would be “best examples”.

The practices followed by innovators — those who generate original, exemplary work —  differ entirely from the practices of those who like to build up solutions out of best examples. Let’s call them refining imitators.

Innovators take the necessary steps to redefine the problem they are solving, and only afterward dedicate themselves to solving it. They find a new problem space and then settle it, which is why innovation is spoken of in terms of pioneering. The solutions that emerge from this process are fresher, simpler, more focused, more purposeful, more exciting and more soulful than solutions that are pieced together from old solutions. This is why they are imitated.

Refining imitators do not revisit or redefine the problem. If the problem is thought about explicitly, it is accepted as given as the starting point for production of a solution. Thinking is for deciding what to make, planning how to make it, comparing and analyzing best examples, and inventing ways to recombine them and make something better. The focus is entirely on the production of tangible things. The fact that this approach never produces innovation is ignored.

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It’s a genotype/phenotype issue. Best practices are genotypically similar: set generative processes that reliably produce unprecedented forms. Best examples attempt to create phenotypical similarities: the focus is to reproduce a precedented form, by a process different from that which originally generated it, that is through imitation rather than innovation.

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Oddly, the word refining imitators use to describe themselves is “practical”, but that is a misnomer. A more accurate term would “thingly”. A practical person thinks in terms of practices, which necessarily differ according to the task at hand. A thingly person knows only one practice suited to one task: the building of things — assembled piece by piece, in a linear progressive manner. It is a classic case of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If the task is to produce ideas or understandings, the task is conceived in the terms of producing documentation, because that is the one aspect of the work that has the quality of a thing and lends itself to a thing-building approach. Ideas and understandings are abstract and they’re not built up in a linear piece by piece fashion, and so are treated as secondary.

What creatives need is pressurized freedom.

The element of pressure comes from the deadline. — The deadline is not merely the point where the activity must end. The deadline charges time with creative urgency. If you puncture the vessel of creative time with interruptions, the creative pressure is  lost, and replaced with frustration and fear. Fear and urgency are both uncomfortable, but they differ in that urgency is productive and fear is depressive. To plan a creative process with frequent checkpoints to ensure steady linear progress toward a goal is like making an aerosol can out of wire mesh.

The element of freedom comes from the design brief. — Freedom is acting according to one’s own judgment. But judgment is only as good as one’s knowledge. The design brief empowers creatives to exercise judgment, by providing them all relevant knowledge needed for making good judgments, even (and especially) outside the realm of the precedented, where real innovation occurs. A creative team who has not been authorized to judge the new will forced to fall back on imitation of the old, which is better known by the euphemism “best practices.” Best practices  produce at most extremely competent mediocrity.

Just to screw up the tidiness of this line of thought, pressure also comes from the design brief. The best briefs inspire. The inspiration creates positive pressure which presses against the limits of the deadline. (Consider the etymology of inspire. It literally means “breath into”, which suggests pumping air into a tank.) Inspiration comes from vision, and the most reliable source of vision comes from insights into brand and audience — and that comes from qualitative research.