04

Be smarter

Have you ever had the experience of being in an important meeting when you suddenly go blank, forgetting everything you’ve rehearsed? Have you ever nipped out of the office to get something and been so distracted that you’ve stopped dead in your tracks while you try to remember what you had nipped out for? Have you ever needed to focus on a certain task and project but found it impossible to think straight? Do you find that some days you are ‘on fire’ and other days you couldn’t come up with a good idea if your life depended on it? Are you tired of telling your people to ‘think outside the box’ even though you’re not sure where the box is or what’s outside it? Have you ever made decisions or barked out orders that you later regret? Do you ever wonder if your anger or volatility are negatively affecting your decision making but have no idea how to change it? If so, you’re not alone.

Most of us have had the experience of reading a book or business report and ended up having to read the same page over and over again because it’s just not sinking in. In business we are called upon to adapt constantly in response to changing market conditions, changing economies, industries, legislation, changing technology and the ever more sophisticated demands of our customers. We need to come up with new, great ideas only sometimes we can’t come up with any idea, never mind a great one! And why is it we can never think of that smart comment or comeback in the middle of an argument? Why do seemingly smart people occasionally blurt out something completely inappropriate or inane in a meeting? Sometimes they don’t even seem to notice, sometimes they even look quite pleased with themselves, as though they have impressed themselves with their contribution.

How could very successful businessman Gerald Ratner, CEO at the time of a major British jewellery business, make such a catastrophic error of judgement in his speech at the Institute of Directors in 1991? His comments are now so famous that ‘doing a Ratner’ has entered business vernacular and for good reason. In a last minute attempt to inject some humour into his speech Ratner said, ‘We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve drinks on – all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?” I say, “Because it’s total crap.”’ As if that wasn’t bad enough he then went on to talk about some of the earrings his cut-price jewellery empire stocked, adding they were, ‘cheaper than an M&S [Marks & Spencer] prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long’. Ratner’s inappropriate remarks wiped an estimated £500 million off the share value of the company and he was forced to resign.

Or what about some of the bizarre answers given by contestants on TV quiz shows like The Weakest Link or Family Fortunes. The contestants are usually intelligent, articulate individuals yet after a frosty stare from compere Anne Robinson their brains turn to jelly – ‘In traffic, what “j” is where two roads meet?’ Answer: ‘Jool carriageway.’ Under the lights and pressure of Family Fortunes contestants have also been known to come out with a few classics – ‘We asked 100 people to name something you put in a jacket potato.’ Answer: ‘Jam!’ Or, ‘We asked 100 people to name something blue.’ Answer: ‘My jumper!’

Growing a business requires clarity of thought, or at least better thinking than the competition. But the content and the quality of our consciousness is determined by our physiology. This chapter explores what drives thinking, both the content (ie WHAT we think) and the quality (ie HOW WELL we think it). We will discover that our physiology doesn’t just impact on our energy levels, health and happiness but also our ability to think and clearly articulate our point of view – a fact not lost on G4S’s former CEO Nick Buckles, who was able to use his mastery of many of the techniques in this book to deliver a much more coherent performance the second time he faced the Home Affairs Select Committee investigation. He notes that:

[the techniques] helped me to project myself better and, as a result, I was better able to get the key points across… and to be more positive and to channel energy away from being apologetic. I focused on what we had done to rectify the problems, without being arrogant. In this kind of situation, if you show any fear it is very easy to allow others to take control of the situation.

Companies need people who can think high-quality thoughts on a consistent basis. They need innovators, able to generate great ideas, spot opportunities and define the things that provide a competitive advantage. Without innovation and really smart thinking, executives just come up with the same ideas, strategies and products that someone else has already thought of. If we look at the companies that dominate their markets, like Apple, they employ the best thinkers available, capable of disruptive innovation. So the way we really get ahead and stay ahead is to become smarter than everyone else. And that starts with physiology.

The DIY lobotomy

Under pressure people don’t think straight. Everyone has experienced this at some point or another. Most of us can remember going through the pressure of exams for example. Endless hours of revision can evaporate the moment we turn over the question paper and the stress causes our brain to shut down – we experience a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) lobotomy.

Two hundred thousand years ago when humans first stood up, brain shut-down under pressure gave us a distinct survival advantage. When our ancestors were wandering across the savannah and they encountered a lion, they didn’t need clever thinking. If they stood in front of the lion musing on whether the lion was fully grown or whether it looked hungry then they would probably have been killed. So in an emergency, human beings evolved a mechanism for shutting down all the clever thinking parts of the brain to leave only two options: fight/flight (adrenaline driven) or play dead (acetylcholine driven). In the face of real danger our brain goes binary to save our life.

The problem is that here we are 200,000 years later still using the same mechanism. We are using 200,000-year-old software and we’ve never had an upgrade. We don’t meet lions on the savannah anymore. We meet each other. We meet demanding bosses, difficult colleagues, agitated partners and angry customers. They are the lions of today. But our brain doesn’t distinguish a difficult boss or colleague from the predator of primitive times, causing a DIY lobotomy just as effectively as the lion ever did.

And to make matters worse, once our brain has shut down we often don’t even realize it, because we don’t have enough remaining perceptual awareness to notice we’ve lobotomized ourselves. We think we are still functioning well when in fact we have lost focus, drifted off the point, become confused or even started to babble incoherently. Because of the pressure that we are now under every day at work, many people are wandering around corporate offices the world over with a partial, or in some cases almost complete, self-induced lobotomy that is massively impacting their cognitive ability and therefore their performance.

Clearly this is not career enhancing. Stupidity may have saved our life once upon a time but now it impairs our success and our ability to deliver results. And it’s not always easy to tell who has been lobotomized – particularly when it’s you! Unfortunately once we have triggered our own lobotomy we can’t think our way out of it. To stop self-inflicted brain shut-down we must control physiology.

What we often fail to appreciate is that the thoughts we think don’t happen in a vacuum. There isn’t a series of bubbles coming out of our head like in the comic books. Our thoughts occur in the context of our physiology. When we think, our heart is always beating, our guts are always digesting, our muscles are always moving, and these physiological signals can have a profound effect on what we think and how well we think it.

This is why it is so imperative to build coherence from the ground up, starting with physiology, because without physiological coherence emotional coherence is almost impossible and without emotional coherence consistent, high-quality thinking is also much more difficult.

When people make mistakes, be it in an exam, in a shareholder meeting or when being interviewed by a journalist, we usually shrug our shoulders and dismiss this phenomenon with a statement such as ‘these things happen’ or it was ‘human error’ as though such phenomena are unavoidable, or worse, normal or acceptable. They may be common but they are completely avoidable.

Many senior executives try to minimize the possibility of making stupid blunders by putting themselves under stress ahead of time in the mistaken belief that this may stop the blunder from happening. It won’t. The biology is too powerful. Practising a speech is of course helpful, but it is not enough to stop us going blank when we get a tricky question from an analyst during the Q and A at the end. No matter how much we have practised we are still susceptible to brain shut-down if our brain goes binary under the pressure.

With hindsight we have all made decisions or taken action that we later find utterly bewildering. But it’s not bewildering if we understand what’s actually happening. The human brain is constantly getting a signal from all the bodily systems but particularly from the heart via the vagus nerve. When we are under pressure our heart rate variability (HRV) becomes super-chaotic, which causes ‘cortical inhibition’, and the frontal lobes of the brain shut down (Figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1 The HRV pattern of someone under pressure

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I demonstrated this in a TEDx talk I did in 2012 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q06YIWCR2Js?v=q06YIWCR2Js). My brave volunteer Neil came up on stage and I attached a small clip to his earlobe to measure his HRV, which was then displayed on a big screen behind him. Initially Neil’s heart rate was pretty normal at about 75 bpm. But then I asked him to perform a maths challenge. I gave him a number and all he had to do was subtract three from that number and give me the new answer and then subtract three again. Pretty straightforward, especially as Neil assured me that he was ‘quite good’ at maths. Interestingly as soon as he said ‘quite good’ his heart rate spiked, which indicated he perhaps wasn’t as confident as he was telling me. I started him at 300 and immediately he set off well, ‘297’, ‘294’. Then I started to feed him the wrong answers and he soon became flustered and his heart rate was going crazy on the screen behind him. Neil himself still looked calm and confident but his brain stopped working because I had put him under pressure that caused his heart rate to become chaotic and initiate a DIY lobotomy. In a matter of a few seconds I had shut Neil’s brain down and a normally smart person became dumb.

Neil didn’t want this to happen – it just happened. And for the record he still looked composed and confident. So when you call an emergency crisis meeting to deal with a breaking news story or a faulty product and are reassured that your senior team appear composed and rational – don’t be. If you were to attach an HRV clip to their ear, their physiology would probably tell a very different story. Just because someone looks composed and calm on the outside does not mean they are composed and calm on the inside. And if their HRV is totally erratic then what’s really happening is your people have lobotomized themselves under the pressure of the crisis and you don’t even realize it!

When we cut off access to our frontal lobes through a chaotic HRV (Figure 4.2) we can experience many of the same shortfalls – albeit temporarily. The frontal lobes are the ‘executive part’ of our brain that gives us greater cognitive resources than our Neanderthal ancestors. Losing frontal lobe function therefore takes us back to very primitive function and capabilities.

FIGURE 4.2 Schematic for the effect of physiology on brain function

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A chaotic signal from the heart:

  • impairs perceptual awareness;
  • reduces mental clarity;
  • reduces creativity;
  • impairs problem solving;
  • reduces the ability to make effective decisions.

A coherent signal from the heart:

  • enhances clarity;
  • enhances creativity;
  • enhances reaction speed;
  • enhances thinking and decision making.

The evolution of the brain

In the 1950s neurologist Paul MacLean proposed that we did not have one brain but that we actually had three. Expanding on the work of James Papez, MacLean hypothesized that we have three layers of brain, each a direct response to evolutionary requirements representing the stages of human development. He called this the ‘triune brain’ and stated that the three brains operate like three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory (MacLean, 1990).

The three brains in order of evolutionary appearance are referred to as:

  1. Reptilian.
  2. Limbic or midbrain.
  3. Neocortex.

Prior to MacLean’s research, science had assumed that the most highly evolved part of the brain, the neocortex, was in charge. MacLean showed this was not the case and that the emotional control centres that make up the limbic system were actually more powerful.

Just very briefly, the reptilian part of the brain is the oldest. Physiologically it consists of the brain stem, medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon and the oldest basal nuclei – the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs. It is responsible for coordination, unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation, and body movement.

The limbic system is the middle layer of the brain, which evolved over the top of the reptilian brain. It is also known as the mammalian brain because it’s most highly evolved in mammals. The midbrain is concerned with the ‘four Fs’ – fight, flight, feeding and fornication – and it’s the home of our autonomic nervous system. Physiologically it includes the hypothalamus, hippocampus, the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala (which we explored in the last chapter). The amygdala (Latin for almond-shaped; there are two, one on each side of the brain) has been the focus of intensive research. The amygdala has been called the ‘fear centre’ and is associated with emotional memory. When the frontal lobes shut down, several authors have referred to this as the amygdala ‘hijacking’ the neocortex. This is not strictly true. The amygdala doesn’t take over the frontal lobes under pressure; it’s just that the frontal lobes stop working and we can’t think straight. Nevertheless the limbic system has vast interconnections with the neocortex, which means that brain function is neither purely limbic nor purely cortical but a mixture of both, as evidenced by conditioning.

And finally, the neocortex is the most recent layer of the brain, evolving over the limbic brain. The neocortex makes up two-thirds of the total brain mass and is responsible for the higher cognitive functions that distinguish human beings from many other species. It is home to free will and is what allows us to think, learn and rationalize. MacLean referred to the neocortex as ‘the mother of invention and father of abstract thought’.

The neocortex is divided into two hemispheres, right and left, and across each hemisphere there are four regions known as lobes: the frontal lobes, parietal lobe, temporal lobe and occipital lobe. As a quick guide, the frontal lobes, which are affected when heart rate is chaotic and we can’t think straight, are responsible for intentional action and our ability to focus our attention. The reason we can sometimes be ‘lost for words’ when under pressure is because volitional language is also directed from the frontal lobes and the chaotic cardiac signal of the heart can make it next to impossible to access it properly. The parietal lobe is responsible for sensory perception. The temporal lobe is responsible for audio perception and the occipital lobe is responsible for visual perception (Dispenza, 2007).

In order to fully appreciate the importance of frontal lobe function and the need to avoid a functional DIY lobotomy in a business setting, it’s worth exploring what happens to people when they suffer a head injury in a car crash and damage their frontal lobes. Functional frontal lobe shut-down can produce many of the same problems that occur in real frontal lobe damage following a car accident. Specifically frontal lobe damage can result in:

  • severely impaired planning and organization capabilities;
  • increased risk-taking behaviour;
  • more aggressive and antisocial behaviour;
  • disrupted timelines and sequencing;
  • impaired attention shifting leading to perseverance with faulty answers;
  • impaired working memory;
  • the inability to inhibit responses – an individual will tend to become socially inappropriate.

The three layers of the brain develop in order of age. During development from the embryo to the foetus the reptilian brain is formed first, then the limbic system and finally the neocortex. At birth the first two layers of the brain are almost fully developed whereas the neocortex is not (Figure 4.3).

FIGURE 4.3 Brain development: level of connectivity at 0–2 years

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MacLean assumed that the neocortex simply overrides the mammalian and reptilian brain, but it’s actually a two-way street and the reptilian and mammalian brain can also inhibit the function of the neocortex. So if we want to get the most out of our ‘smart’ neocortex we must understand how the relationships between the different evolutionary layers of the brain really work. The subtlety and sophistication of these interactions is in fact central to understanding how executives make decisions and also what ultimately drives behaviour and our ability to make meaning.

One of the world’s leading experts on the subtle and dynamic relationships within the human brain is neurophysiologist Karl Pribram. His research over the last 50 years is so groundbreaking that most neuroscientists are still coming to terms with it today. Pribram developed a theory that was able to explain the brain’s incredible data storage capability. This theory also goes right to the heart of what may cause smart executives to make stupid calls and also of what enables some of the most advanced functions of the human mind.

The holographic brain

In the early 1940s Pribram became interested in the idea of where memory was stored. At the time the prevailing scientific view was that memories were stored like files in a filing cabinet somewhere in the brain and it was just a matter of time before the boffins discovered where that filing cabinet was located. But in 1946 Pribram went to work with eminent neuropsychologist Karl Lashley, who had also been investigating the location of memory. What they discovered completely changed our understanding of how the brain works. Lashley had performed a series of experiments where he had taught rats to run a maze. Then he surgically removed parts of a rat’s brain to see if it could still remember how to run the maze. The experiment was then repeated over and over again until the rat had lost most of its brain mass and yet it could still run the maze. The rats did become clumsier and it sometimes took them longer to run the maze but their memory of the maze was not impaired in any way.

Pribram was fascinated by these results. If memories were stored in filing cabinets in the brain but you removed all the locations where the filing cabinets could be and the rats could still remember how to run the maze, then memory was clearly not stored in a specific location in the brain. Plus the sheer volume of memory that a person must accumulate in a lifetime would have required millions of filing cabinets, and how was it even possible to store that volume of data in the six inches between our ears?

Pribram felt sure that memory was somehow distributed through the brain and ‘pulled down’ when needed by some sort of mechanism he didn’t understand. In 1948 he went to work at Yale but continued to be puzzled by this phenomenon, especially as he studied patients who had lost portions of their brain and yet their memories were not impaired. But again he couldn’t figure out how this was possible. Then, as Pribram read an article in the mid-1960s documenting the first construction of a hologram, he suddenly became very excited. What if the brain was holographic in nature? (Talbot, 1991).

Pribram discovered that one of the most interesting things about a hologram is that if we cut a hologram of say, an apple, in half we don’t have two halves of an apple; rather we have two holograms of the complete apple. If we then cut those two halves in half we would get four complete apples. And this phenomenon continues with every cut providing increasingly small yet complete apples. This occurs because a hologram is actually a phenomenal data-compression system, so even when we half the hologram we still have enough information to reconstruct the entire apple.

If we look at a real holographic plate containing the data of an apple we don’t actually see an apple. Instead we see what’s known as ‘interference’ in the shape of lots of concentric overlapping circles. Think of it like the ripples that occur when a pebble is dropped into water – the pebble creates lots of concentric circles that move out from the place the pebble was dropped. If two pebbles are dropped into a pond at the same time, one from the right hand and the other from the left hand then two series of concentric circles that will pass through each other are created. Those waves that move out from the pebble and cross each other are known as the ‘interference pattern’. Any type of wave can create an interference pattern: waves in water, light waves or radio waves. If you looked at a holographic plate – that’s what you’d see (Figure 4.4).

FIGURE 4.4 Schematic of hologram construction

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If we shine a light through the interference pattern – the apple magically reappears. But not just any light. If we shone a light bulb through a holographic plate we would not see the hologram; we might see something emerge but it would be very poor quality. However if we shone the pure, coherent light of a laser through a holographic plate, the hologram of the apple would appear, so clear and perfect we would feel as though we could reach out and take a bite.

This holographic property would not only account for the fact that memory didn’t seem to be situated in any particular location of the brain and was distributed equally throughout the brain. It also explained how it’s possible to store so much information. It didn’t matter that the physical brain was removed from the rats because the information was still stored in the interference patterns in what was left of the brain, and from even a fraction of the original information it was possible to recreate the entire data set or memory. Memories or information are not stored in mental filing cabinets at all; they are compressed, like zipped files on our computer. The file will only decompress to give us access to that memory or information when the right ‘light’ is shone through the plate.

But what has all this to do with our ability to make decisions or the fact that under pressure we give ourselves a DIY lobotomy? At Complete Coherence we believe that the heart plays a critical role within the human system. The heart is capable of generating a chaotic, incoherent signal that, when applied to the contents of the brain, is about as potent as applying the diffused light of a light bulb to a holographic plate. If however we develop cardiac coherence, using a technique such as BREATHE, outlined in Chapter 1, then it is akin to applying the pure coherent light of a laser to the holographic plate and all of what we are and all that we know becomes accessible to us.

In fact recent research from a number of US universities testifies to the distributed nature of innovative thinking. This research provides a more precisely nuanced explanation for how innovation actually happens in the brain involving a number of different brain centres. The evidence suggests that just prior to the apprehension of a new idea by the frontal lobes a burst of alpha activity inhibits the visual data coming out of the occipital lobes (Kounios et al, 2006). This ‘cognitive blink’ is followed by a burst of gamma activity in the right superior temporal lobe (Ellamil et al, 2012). The right superior temporal lobe, through its much greater level of connectivity compared with the left, co-opts several other brain regions to contribute data that is necessary for the creation of a new idea. This information is submitted to the frontal lobes. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies suggest that, rather than a huge burst of diffuse frontal lobe activity, there is a quieter, more focused activation of the frontal lobes (Jung et al, 2009). This supports the idea that focused coherent activation may be at play, rather than there being the prefrontal shut-down suggested by some authors (Limb and Braun, 2008). Such coherent activation allows the frontal lobes to access information that was previously unconscious or lost in the noise or diffuse interference.

The power of a coherent signal

When we are angry or feeling under pressure, our erratic, unpredictable and chaotic heart signal (HRV) travels up the vagus nerve and hits the ‘holographic plate’ of the brain, but because the ‘light’ is chaotic we don’t get full access to the information stored holographically in the brain. If that signal is coherent however then, even in intensely pressurized situations, we can keep our frontal lobes turned on and maintain access to the smartest parts of our brain. When we generate coherent signals from all our bodily systems more of the time then our thinking becomes clearer, we become much more perceptive, more innovative and we have far greater access to all of our innate cleverness regardless of how tough the market conditions are. In short, we can become brilliant every day and give ourselves a massive competitive advantage.

All our memories, all the information we’ve accumulated, the knowledge and experience we’ve gathered is not stored in mental filing cabinets; it’s stored as interference patterns in our brain and it is the physiological signals from our body, especially our heart, that may hold the key to whether we can access that information or not.

Some people have even suggested that creating a coherent signal may even allow us to tap into collective consciousness or the wisdom of crowds (Talbot, 1991). What’s clear is that it is the quality of our physiology and our emotions that determines the quality of our thinking, not the other way around.

When we experience the DIY lobotomy or seem to have taken a ‘stupid pill’, it’s not because we’ve suddenly become stupid; it’s because we are trying to access our intelligence by candle light! If we try to view the hologram by shining a candle light through the holographic plate we won’t see anything but the interference patterns. But all we need to do to convert the candle to a laser is to stabilize our system through smooth rhythmic breathing and become emotionally literate enough to recognize and manage the emotional signals circulating through our body at any given moment. That’s why the signal from our body to our brain is critical in giving us access to what is in our brain.

Have you ever wondered where a good idea was two seconds before you had it? It was already in your mind, circling like an aeroplane waiting to land. When it comes to cognitive ability, creativity and problem solving, the problem is rarely that we can’t think of the idea or solution; it’s that we can’t land it. When we change the physiological conditions, suddenly the things that we couldn’t quite retrieve or access or tap into suddenly start landing like airplanes on the main runway at Heathrow airport. When we are ‘on fire’, metaphorically speaking, ideas are flowing easily and we’re on a roll, planes are landing every couple of minutes. What I think is happening physiologically is that we are creating a coherent physiological state that’s facilitating our very best thinking.

The development of maturity

The primary task in front of us if we really want to be smarter is to ‘wake up’ and ‘grow up’. Physiological and emotional coherence will certainly facilitate a significant improvement in cognitive function and ability, but if we are to make a quantum leap then vertical development of adult maturity is the only way. If we are to prosper and genuinely thrive in a VUCA world, we need to expand our awareness and maturity so as to raise the calibre of leadership exponentially – Shaun Usmar, one of the most energetic and innovative financial leaders I’ve ever worked with, is clear on the importance of leadership. Reflecting on Enlightened Leadership and his time as Chief Financial Officer for Xstrata Nickel – the world’s fourth largest nickel producer – Shaun explains:

We put aside lots of time to help mostly inexperienced managers and vice presidents who had grown up in technical functional roles to think more broadly. We would dedicate half a day or a full day to work through scenarios. We also broadened out the attendees and included people who were not necessarily the most senior, but who had good promise or something to contribute to a particular part of the discussion. Having worked through those scenarios, our people had the ability to think through what might happen or what course of action or decision we might need to take when things got tough… We used very different thinking and tried to challenge each other, not to be destructive but to get people to stretch their thinking. We worked on helping them to think from a broader, macro perspective and to understand how decisions interrelated and how their decision could impact on the whole business. The most senior people at the centre don’t have the monopoly on brains. We discovered that if you combine challenging discussions with decent models and data then you can make profound changes… We entered the financial crisis in the upper third quartile on costs in our industry, but we exited in the lower second quartile – we had leapfrogged the competition.

You can read Shaun’s full case study at www.coherence-book.com.

In the last chapter we explored how consciousness emerged and how that emergence is inextricably entwined with emotion and our sense of self. But awareness or even self-awareness is not simply an on/off phenomenon; there are many levels and degrees of sophistication that we must evolve through. The way that we think and lead an organization is fundamentally altered by the level of consciousness, awareness or maturity we operate from at any given time. These levels literally transform our ability to succeed (Rooke and Torbert, 2005).

Everyone understands that children go through key stages of development – physically, emotionally, cognitively and morally. These stages are often visible and very obvious. Most of us, as parents or aunts or uncles, have witnessed this development first hand. Infants wake up to the world around them and figure out their place in that world as they physically grow up. When most human beings reach the level of development of the average 14-year-old they have most of the necessary skills and capabilities they require to function in an adult world. In most cases there is no ‘burning platform’ or strong need for them to develop further. A few years later, they leave school or university and believe they’ve finished their development. But in reality they’ve just completed one stage of development. The next stage is where the real magic happens. Once we reach physical maturity – that’s when the really important adult development work should begin. It is this internal, invisible work that is critical to vertical development and holds the key to unlocking the vast reservoir of human potential.

Adult development is an invitation to become more sophisticated, not just physically but energetically, emotionally and mentally. This vertical development facilitates a broader, deeper, more mature perspective. When we expand our awareness in this way it can radically alter behaviour and results, not to mention health and well-being.

Most corporate training or leadership programmes focus on horizontal development or the acquisition of knowledge, skills and experience. Although worthwhile, horizontal development creates incremental shifts at best and does not result in much expanded awareness or increased maturity. Just because someone looks ‘all grown up’ on the outside doesn’t mean they are ‘all grown up’ on the inside. Remember the successful female executive from Chapter 1 who was given additional horizontal development; because she hadn’t woken up to the world around her and grown up as an adult human being, the horizontal development just made her a more sophisticated manipulator. She was the same person, just more knowledgeable at how to get her own way. That’s not helpful.

The horizontal development journey is just the beginning – it gets us to the starting line not the finish line. The vertical development journey is the real journey and it can create quantum leaps in development that can immeasurably expand capacity, creativity and productivity. And yet most organizations are blissfully unaware of the significant academic literature on adult development. Most companies have not yet realized that the future of their businesses and their leaders fundamentally depends on their ability to develop vertically.

When it comes to adult development and maturity there have been many significant contributions, from the early days of Piaget (1972), Kohlberg (1981) and Loevinger (L-Xufn Hy, Loevinger and Le Xuan Hy, 1996) to luminaries such as Ken Wilber, Susanne Cook-Greuter, William Torbert and Clare Graves. Each describes the vertical evolution of maturity and adult development from a slightly different perspective (Table 4.1). Wilber, whom we’ll unpack in a moment, looks at the evolution of awareness or consciousness of self. This is especially useful when considering how to be smarter and how to elevate our own personal levels of maturity. Cook-Greuter takes the perspective of ego development, which is similar to self and helps to explain maturity. Torbert’s ‘Action Logics’ look at how those stages play out in business; this can be especially insightful when looking at behaviour and will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. And finally Graves’s model of ‘Spiral Dynamics’, which will be explored in more depth in Chapter 6, is especially relevant to individual and collective values and explains how businesses and cultures evolve. See Table for 4.1 for comparisons.

TABLE 4.1 Comparison of key adult development frameworks

Wilber’s self-awareness

Graves’s spiral dynamics1

Cook-Greuter’s ego development2

Torbert’s action logic3

World view

World %Pop4

10 Non-dual

 

 

 

 

 

9 Pure awareness

 

 

 

 

 

8 Unity in duality

 

Unitive (6)

Ironist (<1%)

Post-post conv. Cosmocentric

 

7 Pure being (walk the walk)

Harmonizing TIER 2 Turquoise (1%)

Magician (5/6)

Alchemist (2%)

Post conventional Worldcentric

10%

6 Integrated self (walk the talk)

Integrative TIER 2 Yellow (12%)

Strategist (5)

Strategist (4%)

5 Transpersonal self (talk the walk)

Inclusive TIER 1 Green (10%)

Pluralist (4/5)

Individualist (10%)

Individualistic TIER 1 Orange (34%)

Achiever (4)

Achiever (30%)

Conventional Ethnocentric

75%

 

Expert (3/4)

Expert (38%)

Absolutist TIER 1 Blue (19%)

Conformist (3)

Diplomat (12%)

4 Concrete self (talk the talk)

Egocentric TIER 1 Red (24%)

Self-protective (2/3)

Opportunist (5%)

Pre-conventional Egocentric

10%

3 Concrete self

Magical TIER 1 Purple (5%)

Impulsive (2)

Impulsive (<1%)

Pre-Egoic

2 Emotional self

Instinctive TIER 1 Beige (0%)

Undifferentiated

1 Physical self

These models offer us clear and elegant frameworks for understanding some profound truths and insights into how life works. Or as Graves puts it, their purpose is to illustrate:

that the psychology of the mature human being is [an] unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behaviour systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a stage through which people pass on their way to other states of being. When the human is centralized in one stage of existence, he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning systems… conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, and political theory and practice are all appropriate to that state (Graves, 1981).

Regardless of which academic theorist we adhere to or which aspect of vertical development fires our imagination, there are various processes that will or can occur in the transition from one level to the next. As Goethe once said, ‘Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution’ (Phipps, 2012).

Behavioural scientists have also confirmed Goethe’s original insight. Progress is almost always followed by faltering, stagnation or regression (Prochaska, Norcross and Diclemente, 1994). The early stages of each new level are unstable so they can feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. So being clear about the different stages of vertical maturity can help to stabilize each new level so that additional transformational development is possible and regression is avoided.

The process of moving through the levels involves:

  1. Differentiation: understanding how this stage differs from the previous stage.
  2. Integration: internalizing the learning of this new stage.
  3. Consolidation: increasing comfort and identification with the stage.
  4. Realization: something’s missing and becoming restless with the status quo.
  5. Transformation: moving into the next stage.
  6. Regression: backslide to previous level if proper consolidation doesn’t occur.

The rules of adult development

In addition to the process of evolution through the levels, all of these vertical development theories share the following ‘rules’. These rules or observations are the ‘physics of vertical development’ and none of us escape their gravity (Cook-Greuter, 2004):

To succeed in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, leaders will need to develop more sophisticated, systematic thinking. They will need to master collaboration and effective change management, and these are all abilities that only start to become really sophisticated at Level 6 and above (see Table 4.2). Unfortunately, Torbert reported in the Harvard Business Review that a whopping 85 per cent of leaders are currently operating just at that level or below (Rooke and Torbert, 2005). A little over half of all leaders (55 per cent) are currently operating at a level of sophistication that is insufficient if their business is to prosper today and into the future. Although this probably goes some way to explain the levels of stress in modern business, it can all be changed with genuine vertical development.

TABLE 4.2 The 10 stages of consciousness

Level of awareness

Average age of first bloom

Key characteristics

10. Non-dual

 

Same as 9 but with an evolutionary spin; vast transcendent blissful emptiness, immediacy, pure presence.

9. Pure awareness

 

Pure awareness, direct experience where ‘observer’ has gone, transcends subject–object relationship, transcends time, space and concepts of such. ‘Formless union’. Tinged with bliss.

8. Unity in duality

 

Experience of ‘divine’ union, ‘oneness’ with an object (God, golf ball, lover), but subject and object remain. Can foster an obsession with the focus of the ‘union’. Duality as there is a witness observing the union.

7. Pure being (walk the walk)

 

More consistent ‘being’ state, with nourishing personal presence, phenomenal energy and powers of concentration, incredible selflessness. Experienced by others as a ‘spiritual person’.

6. Integrated self (walk the talk)

 

Major development work completed, emotional baggage resolved and ‘shadow’ integrated.

5. Transpersonal self (talk the walk)

11–15 yrs

and many adults

Interior world opens up properly for the first time. Thinking about thinking emerges, abstraction and algebra become possible.

4. Concrete self (talk the talk)

7–11 yrs

and most adults

Clearly recognizable ‘consciousness’ or awareness. Engagement with the material world. Rules and roles drive behaviour (cf The Matrix).

3. Conceptual self

3–6 yrs

Three-dimensional representation of the world. Language is the main gain here and the ability to label the world.

2. Emotional self

2–3 yrs

Two-dimensional, emotions give depth to experience. Formal self-identity starts to emerge based in how ‘I’ feel. And ‘I’ may feel different things from ‘you’.

1. Physical self

~1 yr

One-dimensional, experience dominated by physical needs and driven by physiology. Realization that ‘I’ am separate from ‘you’.

Our level of maturity or awareness is therefore fundamental to our ability to be smarter because it effectively creates a lens through which we view and interact with the world. The truth is that most people are completely unaware that they are looking at the world from one rigid perspective through one particular lens that is determined by their own individual level of maturity. Only once we ‘wake up’ to that fact can we truly ‘grow up’ and mature.

Think of it like a fish swimming in water. The fish has no idea it’s even in water and yet its entire life is determined and dictated by the water. Its very existence depends on the water. Human beings are the same, in that we are swimming around in our own particular pool of consciousness or maturity and we assume that everyone else is swimming in the same pool and seeing the same things, thinking the same things and viewing the world in exactly the same way. We’re not.

What we experience and think about, and the depth and breadth of those thoughts, is very much dependent therefore on what pool we are swimming in. It can therefore be extremely helpful to understand what pool we are in or what level of consciousness or maturity we are currently operating from, so we can understand where we are (if we don’t know where we are then we are lost) and appreciate the next step of our evolutionary journey of vertical development.

The 10 stages of consciousness

Living things may become consciously aware of their environment at the level of 20,000 neurons (Hameroff and Penrose, 2003) but as human beings we have 7 billion neurons in our head, not to mention the neural networks elsewhere in the body. Such a network is capable of extremely sophisticated consciousness and human beings are therefore capable of developing vertically up 10 distinct levels (Table 4.2) (Wilber, 2001).

A number of leaders who have started to develop their self-awareness and have started to reflect on the quality of their own thinking have found new meaning in the 1999 movie The Matrix. The Warchowski brothers, who wrote this sci-fi trilogy, were big fans of the anime genre, and while the film works as a basic boys’ ‘shoot ‘em up’ action movie it is also an insightful commentary on human consciousness. Computer hacker Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, discovers a reference to the Matrix in computer code and seeks out the answers. By way of messages on his computer screen he is encouraged to ‘Wake Up Neo’ and follow a ‘white rabbit’, itself a reference to Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland story on altered states of consciousness. Eventually Neo meets Morpheus who offers him the choice between a red and a blue pill. Choosing the red pill, he then becomes aware of a deeper ‘unseen’ reality – billions of people connected to a machine that is harvesting their energy while they experience a simulated virtual reality. Each of these individuals effectively chose the blue pill and they believe they are walking around, talking to friends and living a normal, fun life. But it’s all really an illusion and Neo sees the truth because he chose the red pill.

As human beings develop they experience something similar, because at each stage of development we feel sure that we are experiencing reality as it really is. We’re not; we’re experiencing reality from that level of consciousness only. If we want to massively shift our thinking into a totally different dimension of depth, perception and insight, then we must understand consciousness and actively develop consciousness so we expand our awareness beyond the ordinary. When we vertically develop our awareness we are able to tap into an extreme competitive advantage. With each level we expand our perception still further, making us smarter and smarter and finally giving us access to the ideas and innovation outside that famous box everyone (even those in The Matrix) is talking about! As we develop we see more of what’s really going on, and with that knowledge comes power to change the game.

Below is a brief description of each of the 10 levels Wilber has described.

Level 1 consciousness: the physical self

The first level in conscious evolution is the development of the physical self. This normally occurs within the first year of life when an infant bites his thumb and bites his blanket and realizes that biting his thumb hurts and biting his blanket doesn’t! The first level of conscious awareness is therefore rooted in physical sensation. ‘I am the thing that hurts when I bite it.’ Prior to this there is no ‘self’ and there is little discrimination of an external world or other people. It is all just ‘me’. Even at this first level of consciousness the world is still pretty one-dimensional and awareness of anything other than physical needs and bodily functions is largely absent. This stage is grounded in physiology.

The emergence of the physical ‘self’ is beautifully illustrated when you put a baby in front of a mirror. Before they have developed a sense of their own physical existence they will look at their own image and not realize they are looking at themselves. It is always a very special moment to witness the first awaking of self. Initially there is indifference then confusion, after a while the baby will move and see the same movement reflected back to them, then a moment of recognition lights up their face as they finally realize the person they are looking at is ‘me’.

Level 2 consciousness: the emotional self

Once the physical self becomes stabilized and recognizes itself as separate from others then, sometime in the second year, the emotional self also starts to emerge as separate, although these early stages may vary in when they blossom. At this stage infants begin to realize that they are not only physically separate from others but that they may not be experiencing the same emotions as others. For example, children may be bawling their eyes out in frustration at having their needs thwarted by their parents and be completely baffled as to why their parents are not also crying at the injustice of it all.

Prior to this differentiation children do not really make a distinction between their emotional needs and the emotional needs of others. So an infant would think, ‘If I’m hungry the world must be hungry.’ So they shout and complain because they can’t understand why we would not be satisfying their hunger. This phase has often been referred to as the ‘terrible twos’ because of the tantrums that occur in an attempt to control the environment and have their needs met. However, it is really only a developmental stage.

At this early stage, because of the lack of separation, infants are emotionally contagious. They easily spark each other into tears or laughter and they are also easily influenced by the mood of the adults around them. They are incredibly egocentric as they want their emotional needs met.

Once this separation begins, however, they realize that their self-map does not match their map of others, particularly in relation to emotions. When this emotional self develops, suddenly the world has more depth; it has become two-dimensional. Entering this second dimension is a magical time for children. There is as yet no real responsibility and no great understanding of what makes the world work. They are physically and emotionally separate entities from the world around them but their thinking is still magical – to a child of this age the clouds seem to follow them.

Level 3 consciousness: the conceptual self

Once a child is two to three years old the evolution of the self takes a third step. Here consciousness starts to use language, images, symbols and concepts to represent the world, and this stage often lasts until the child is about six years old.

Children acquire words at a phenomenal rate during these early years; roughly six new words a day are absorbed. They start to label everything and this helps them navigate their world. They develop feelings as the emotions previously experienced are represented conceptually and start to be consciously appreciated as belonging to them. The world becomes three-dimensional and the thinking moves from magical to mythical – they know that they can’t order the world around (magical) but someone can (mythical). This can be a little frightening as a child realizes that s/he is no longer in charge of the world; someone else is. Nightmares can start to occur. At this stage feelings are central.

Level 4 consciousness: the concrete self

At the fourth level of consciousness, as most people would recognize it, both self-consciousness and consciousness of the self start to emerge. The three-dimensional world becomes much more concrete. There are rules and regulations that govern the world and these must be followed. Children often become much more conformist and develop a belief in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. They start to rehearse various social scripts as a way of learning the social rules or ways of behaving. There is a strong need to belong and children succumb to peer pressure and herd mentality. Rationality and ‘self-talk’ begin as we become much more sophisticated in justifying our behaviour. This stage normally starts to develop at five or six years old and continues to eight or nine years old.

This is the first level where there is some, albeit limited, sophistication in the thinking. It is also the level that Einstein refers to when he suggested that human beings are boxed in by the boundary conditions of their thinking. Level four consciousness is where the box that boxes us in is created, and unfortunately this is where the journey ends for many people as they live out their days in this concrete three-dimensional world, with rules and regulations to be followed or ignored. There is a degree of consciousness of self at this level, but life is very concrete and materialistic. It’s about working out the rules and following them, doing a good job; taking care of needs and ‘getting through’ is the primary objective. The recipe for life at this stage of consciousness is:

    HAVE

    DO

    BE

So, ‘If I have enough money, I will be able to do what I want and then I will be happy.’ Or ‘If I have enough time, I will be able to do my job and I will be successful.’ Or ‘If I did not have parents on my case all the time I would have the freedom to do the things I like doing and then I would be less trouble.’ There are many versions of this recipe.

Most of us have encountered plenty of people in businesses who are still operating from this level of maturity. They are following the rules laid down by their industry, company or boss, and most of the time they conform to those rules without question or they deliberately ‘break the rules’ to operate ‘out of the box’, which ironically has itself become a rule for how to operate!

People may be 40 years old on the outside but on the inside they may developmentally be still operating at a much younger level. Perhaps you’ve witnessed managers behaving like children in an attempt to assert their own egocentric needs. This is really a combination of a Level 3 desire to have needs met fuelled by an egocentric rule that ‘I am the boss so I should be able to satisfy my needs.’ Playground behaviour such as bullying can also occur when a manager has not grown beyond this level. This is the level of The Matrix where the manager has swallowed the blue pill. We think we know how the game is played and we are following the rules, largely unaware that we are following the rules. We may be breaking the rules but in a way that also still stays within the confines of the rules for rule breaking. At this level leaders are not really awake or able to appreciate that there is something going on, a more sophisticated version of reality, although in almost every case executives at this level already believe they are aware.

It’s worth pointing out however that Einstein also said that you can’t solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. When people get stuck at Level 4 consciousness it’s almost impossible to find new, creative and innovative solutions to challenges because they can’t exit the level of consciousness that created the problem in the first place – they literally can’t think outside the box.

At Level 4 individuals are said to ‘talk the talk’. They are talking about stuff but it’s not necessarily the right stuff or appropriate stuff and they are certainly not doing anything about that stuff.

Level 5 consciousness: the transpersonal self

Between the ages of 9 and 14 the individual starts to become aware that something else is going on, and as a result there are various sub-stages to this level.

In the swampy foothills of the fifth level the tribal, ethnocentric herd mentality of the third dimension collapses. There is a realization that it is no longer just about ‘me’. Individual awareness becomes more ‘transpersonal’ and the ability to think about thinking emerges. The frontal lobes and nerve tracts have become fully myelinated, which allows high-speed ‘broadband’ connections within the frontal cortex and with other brain regions. This drives more sophisticated thinking and abstraction becomes possible. As a result children can learn algebra.

If you ask an eight-year-old child ‘4B=16, what does “B” equal?’ they will look at you with baffled amusement. Ask a 12-year-old and they can hold the ‘B’ in abstraction while they resolve the relationship between ‘4’ and ‘16’. Once they realize that the answer is ‘x4’ then they retrieve the ‘B’ from abstraction to generate the answer ‘B=x4’.

These new cognitive functions cause the interior world to open up for the first time. As such, a fourth dimension is accessed. Self-reflection becomes possible, even desirable. This is a watershed moment because the physical world is no longer three-dimensional, as it at first appeared. There is a realization that it is possible to transcend the concrete rules and roles, that there is more to life than following the roles laid down by other people, generations or society. The ability to judge and criticize comes to the fore, so individuals at this level initially become very critical, judgemental and intolerant of both themselves and others.

This angst may remind you of another stage within this level – the teenage years! A surge in curiosity about how the world really works means that teenagers think more. No longer constrained by solely meeting their own egocentric needs, they start to question the rules and test the boundaries. This is often a source of significant parent–teenager conflict. A battle of wills often ensues as smart teenagers start to realize that the rule book given to them by their parents is almost exclusively fabricated and arbitrary. At this stage the teenager has bitten off a corner of the red pill and is beginning to see the world as it really is. The battles on rules, roles and teenage identity can rage on for years, particularly if neither side realizes that this is a normal developmental stage not a game of ‘chicken’.

Regardless of who wins that particular battle, when the young adult leaves home they encounter a much more powerful parent called ‘society’, which imposes its own rules: ‘get a job’, ‘get a qualification’, ‘get married’, ‘earn money’, ‘have kids’, ‘be a good citizen’. The inability to break free of this omnipotent ‘parent’ often causes despondency and hopelessness that pushes the young adult back into Level 4 consciousness and the concrete world. Effectively they fail to fully consume the red pill and instead unwittingly choose the blue pill and the course of least resistance. They conform, follow the masses, assume safety in numbers and slavishly follow societal conventions and social norms. The alternative is often too scary so they become unconscious again, ‘forget’ the glimpses of reality they were privy to and plug back into the Matrix.

For those who have dropped back down into the concrete self, life can become very stereotypical as the rules and roles take control once again.

It is during the transpersonal that we are invited to pull back the veil and think about the nature of thought. What is it? Where do thoughts come from? What determines what we think and what determines how well we think it? The quality of our thoughts is not just dependent on our knowledge and experience and our access to that data; it is also dependent on the content of our consciousness or how aware we are.

Waking up – the disease of meaning

The conformity of Level 4 is however often interspersed by glimpses of transpersonal stage awareness. If our life is just not conforming to some set of rules, be they societal, organizational or some alternative group, then we may have entered the trials and tribulations of the lower fifth transpersonal level. The first sign that we have entered this new level is that we feel uncomfortable. The world is no longer safe or secure or as stable as we thought it was. Something is wrong but we don’t know what it is. Unfortunately, being slightly out of our comfort zone is insufficient to wake most people up.

If the individual is really lucky something happens to fully waken them or shock them from the slumber of their concrete world. Most often this is a personal crisis in the form of a loss such as the loss of a job, the loss of a marriage, the loss of a loved one, the loss of purpose or the loss of self-esteem through a period of depression. This usually occurs in mid-life and the crisis marks the entry into the ‘disease of meaning’. Individuals then start to realize that they have been following a set of rules and playing certain roles for decades on the implicit ‘understanding’ that it would yield a certain reward. Only the health, wealth and happiness they were ‘promised’ didn’t materialize!

When inflicted with the disease of meaning, people ask themselves, ‘What’s the point?’ They feel despondent because they kept their side of the bargain. They believe they have been a dutiful husband/wife, father/mother, leader, worker, friend and colleague and it still didn’t work out. They feel cheated. After all they played their part – they followed the rules but the reward never arrived or if it did it wasn’t nearly as good as they were led to believe! I have seen this sense of injustice so often in business. It often occurs during a merger or acquisition where one side feels they have been hard done by or when one side isn’t ‘playing by the rules’. It also occurs when someone is suddenly made redundant after 25 years of loyal service. They didn’t quite make it to the board and were then just cast aside. It often comes as a terrible shock that they could be treated this way, because they never even considered that their organization would be so callous and inhumane. And yet we hear stories all the time of people being marched out of the building by security guards as soon as they become surplus to the new requirements regardless of how long they have been working for the company.

Not everyone catches the disease of meaning through an acute crisis; for some it creeps up on them as a growing sense of dissatisfaction and a recognition that something’s not working. At this stage people feel as though their life has not turned out as they expected it would, that somehow they are missing out on something. Sometimes the pain of this realization can be very sharp indeed. In religious terms this sub-stage is often referred to as purgatory or ‘hell on earth’.

Many people spend their life stuck in this ‘meaningless’ swamp of early transpersonal awareness without realizing that it’s just a developmental stage. Instead of moving on to higher levels of consciousness, they wrongly believe it’s something they have to live with and set out on a quest to dull the pain. The two most popular strategies to dull the pain are:

Anaesthetizing the pain usually takes the form of excessive alcohol or drug consumptions – prescription or otherwise. Alcohol is especially popular with busy executives, who frequently get by with a glass of wine or whisky every lunch time or every evening.

The range of distraction strategies and games that people play to avoid facing the issue of meaning are numerous. The commonest example of the ‘mid-life crisis’ is having an affair. During the excitement of deception or the act of physical intimacy, individuals may be distracted from the perceived lack of real meaning in their life. Unfortunately affairs end or the novelty wears off and the pain returns, only now it’s amplified by remorse and guilt. And repeated or multiple simultaneous affairs don’t solve the problem either.

Materialism is another common distraction strategy. When you are roaring around in a new Ferrari you are too exhilarated to consider the deeper meaning of life and why you are doing what you are doing. For a few weeks your life may actually take on new meaning as you tend to your beloved car, driving fast and showing off to colleagues, family and friends. But again, it soon wears off, the car is dented or scratched and you get used to the speed and envious looks. Before long it’s just another car and the disease of meaning has flared up again. Spending money on any major purchase or shopping until you literally can’t carry another bag is another common distraction strategy that delivers nothing more than a temporary balm and an inflated credit card bill.

Obsessive exercise is another beautiful distraction strategy, where executives turn into ‘gym bunnies’ obsessed with the ‘body beautiful’. When they are ‘feeling the burn’ on the stair-master they do not have to think about meaning. Unfortunately the preoccupation with exercise wears off too and the disease of meaning returns.

All these strategies are seeking to find meaning using the Have, Do, Be recipe and they just don’t work. The only real solution is to fully wake up and start growing up the levels of consciousness.

At some point the pain of the mid-life crisis becomes very intense; often this is necessary in order to facilitate a breakthrough. People hit ‘rock bottom’ and enter a very dark phase; they appreciate that their life isn’t working and perhaps most importantly that nobody is coming to help. There is no white knight charging in on a majestic steed to save the day.

This is the most important moment in any life. When we finally realize that our parents aren’t going to fix it, our boss isn’t going to fix it, society or the government aren’t going to fix it and that it’s down to us to fix it – we finally take ownership, we evolve and we expand our awareness and our potential exponentially. At this stage individuals are forced to turn their attention from the outside to the inside. They finally realize that the blame and recrimination they have directed toward other people, situations or events has not helped to change the situation. It has kept them stuck in the meaninglessness of purgatory, and so they finally let go of the idea that someone else is to blame and look inside. As they do they swallow the red pill they ignored 20 years earlier and finally unplug from the Matrix. This is what Joseph Campbell (2012) called ‘crossing the threshold’ – the liberating realization that the move from ignorance to enlightenment is down to us and us alone. Just as I am responsible for my personal growth and vertical development, you are responsible for your personal growth and vertical development.

At Level 5 individuals are said to ‘talk the walk’. People at the early stage of this level have read a few books, attended a few courses, they may be saying things like, ‘Well of course we all have to be more emotionally intelligent.’ But really they have ‘aboutism’: ie they know ‘about’ the subject they are discussing. Unfortunately they are not actually that emotionally intelligent because they have not internalized the knowledge. All they’ve done is regurgitated a few industry buzz words or some latest offering from the HBR or management journals so they can look like they know what they are talking about. Usually in these situations a few well-directed questions can highlight that there is no deeper intellectual understanding, they have not converted the knowledge into wisdom (Kaipa and Radjou, 2013) and put the knowledge into practice in their lives, despite their protestations that they have.

Level 6 consciousness: the integrated self

Moving on to the sixth level requires considerable effort and personal development. The upper reaches of Level 5 are consumed by the need to do some serious personal vertical development. This may take many forms. In the early days of the upper reaches of Level 5 the individual may start to read personal development books, explore religion or take classes in psychology, yoga and philosophy as they try to figure out what will make them happy and what they want to do with their life. For some it’s not as ordered or structured as courses or books, but rather just a growing awareness of their own behaviour, a matter of having time to reflect on their life, the decisions they’ve made and why they made them. Some business executives take a career break or a sabbatical. If this is just another distraction strategy little may be gained, but if there is genuine insight there may be developmental progress. Critical to reaching the sixth level of awareness is the ability to own up to our own unhelpful patterns or the dark side of our nature. It can be as simple as recognizing when we were wrong and owning those errors. But to really make it to Level 6 there has to be a deeper understanding of why those errors occurred and how to prevent them occurring in the future. This is often called ‘shadow work’ (Bly, 2001). It involves working on those aspects of ourselves that are not easy to see, let alone address and ultimately heal.

But there are real dangers in the personal development journey of the upper fifth level. There are many dead ends, there are many guides who tempt us with promises of the ‘summit’, but they can’t actually take us there as they have not done the journey themselves. Many executive coaches would argue that they don’t need to have made the journey in order to be an effective guide, and whilst that may be true for the time management of some operational component it is not true of the personal vertical development journey. Remember the rule cited earlier: ‘Someone at a later stage can understand the issues facing someone at an earlier stage, but an earlier stage traveller has no way of conceptualizing the challenges or thought processes of someone at a later stage.’ If an executive is already at a later stage than the coach who is coaching him or her, then the coach will have no way of conceptualizing the challenges and thought processes of the executive and so is totally unable to help that executive move up to an even more sophisticated level. As a result, few people make it out of the forest of the upper fifth level of consciousness because there are very few guides or executive coaches who can actually help us get out.

I have witnessed many people who have been stuck in the forest of personal development for 20 or 30 years. They are still attending all manner of courses and, sadly, they are still unpleasant to their spouse or themselves. In order to exit this stage, the development has to actually work. The individual actually has to change, to transcend the patterns of the old and become an integrated human being. At this level the individual is no longer constrained by the scars of the past; they are aware of all aspects of self, good and bad, and have taken ownership of those traits. They have healed themselves and are free to make different choices, instead of being locked into reactive behaviours driven by early life conditioning.

In the conditioning example in the last chapter, had William transcended to Level 6 consciousness or above and achieved physiological and emotional coherence he would not have reacted to the interview candidate in the yellow shirt without knowing why. Instead his frontal lobes would have been fully ‘on’, allowing him to draw on all his skills, knowledge and experience to assess the candidate’s suitability and find the right person for the role.

At Level 6 consciousness the individual ceases to be a victim and realizes that there is no merit in allowing other people to control their emotions. This can be an incredibly joyful and liberating experience because we come to appreciate that we really do have free will and it is not just a trite sound bite from the personal development industry.

Demonstrating Level 6 awareness, Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent’ (Roosevelt, 1960). As explained in the previous chapter we can’t control what others do or what they say but we can always control what we make those things mean. Without this expanded awareness or emotional self-management, we are at the mercy of other people and their actions and reactions. When someone says something hurtful, they’ve behaved badly; it is therefore their issue, not ours. If we choose to feel upset about that, then we punish ourselves for someone else’s transgression. That doesn’t make sense. If we have the power to create the upset we also have the power to ‘un-create’ it, or even better just not to create it in the first place.

When we don’t appreciate our own free will at a deep level we give people we don’t even know, or people we don’t like or respect, permission to ruin our entire day. And knowing what you now know about emotions and how toxic negative emotions can be for your health, are you really going to let someone else fur up your arteries? When we realize we don’t have to give that permission and that if someone behaves badly it’s their issue and not ours, then we have achieved ownership and emotional sovereignty. Life never improves and we will never be content for an enduring period of time until we take that ownership and master emotional sovereignty. At Level 6 there is complete ownership of all aspects of ‘self’.

This moment of ownership is a paradigmatic shift – the clumsy caterpillar has transformed into the butterfly capable of flying above the crowd. When we cross the threshold, we leave the world as we knew it behind. Of course, it doesn’t stop our children or other people from behaving badly, but we can choose how we feel about it.

Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl talks about this moment during his experience in a Nazi concentration camp (Frankl, 1959). The Nazis took everything from him, including his wife, brother, parents and his life’s work – a manuscript that had been sewn into the lining of his jacket. He experienced unspeakable horror and a daily struggle to survive, but he also realized that they could not take his self-esteem or his ability to choose how to feel about what was happening. When Frankl was eventually liberated by the Americans in 1945 he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning and developed a type of existential therapy that helped millions of people to find meaning in their own lives – regardless of the challenges they faced.

As I said in the last chapter, if we want to be responsible human beings, we have to learn to be response-able; in other words to be able to respond rather than to react. We choose the response – as opposed to victimhood. Or as Frankl said, ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

At Level 6 individuals are said to ‘walk the talk’. These people start to convert ‘aboutism’ into action by putting the things they read about or know about into practice. In other words they are not just talking about being compassionate, they are compassionate. But they are not necessarily compassionate all the time. Like anyone else they have good days and bad days, although they are often aware of the bad days and can self-correct much more rapidly.

Level 7 consciousness: pure being

Individuals at this level have dealt with all their baggage so that they are a living example of what they’ve learnt. There is a warm radiance to these people. They have a nourishing personal presence, phenomenal energy and powers of concentration as well as incredible selflessness.

This is the way people describe meeting the Dalai Lama for example. I remember talking to Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s right-hand man in Europe, and he was talking about witnessing the difference between the queue going in and the queue coming out from seeing the Dalai Lama. Going in, people were full of their own importance and preening themselves, adjusting their ties or brushing their hair – all fluffed up in their finery. And they’d all come out in tears. His Holiness just melted them.

I experienced this myself when I and a colleague of mine spent an evening with Matthieu and his mum in their tiny little house in the Dordogne. We were conducting a research study with Tibetan monks and looking specifically at their physiology when they were in different types of meditative states (Watkins, Young and Barrow, 2013). Matthieu’s mum had also converted to Tibetan Buddhism and is also a brilliant painter in her own right. So there we were sitting in their little, humble home chatting around the table. After about 30 minutes I realized I was talking to two of the most spiritually important people on the planet and we were getting on like a house on fire. Both Matthieu and his mum were so utterly unconcerned with their own importance and it really emphasized one of the key personal qualities of this level – selflessness.

Nelson Mandela is another powerful example of Level 7 consciousness. He too has a nourishing personal presence and selflessness that is beguiling. When Mandela was having his 90th birthday celebrations a host of celebrities and international dignitaries flew in from all over the world for a photo. Mandela patiently and graciously went through the motions of doing what everyone else wanted although it probably wasn’t actually what he wanted. The story goes that when it was all over he turned to the photographer who had been taking pictures all day and asked him if he would like a photo. To Mandela the photographer was no more or no less important than the people who had been visiting all day. But Mandela wasn’t always this selfless or gracious. When he went to prison he was an angry man, yet he emerged after 27 years an extraordinary mediator, philosopher and president-in-waiting. He could have emerged even angrier but instead he did the personal development soul-searching work necessary to evolve as a human being.

The Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are two extreme examples but Level 7 consciousness can also be experienced with less well-known individuals who are non-judgemental, incredibly perceptive and loving. When we meet these people it can feel as though they really ‘get’ us – they see the warts and all and it’s OK; all that exists is a profound loving empathy without criticism. That’s what happens to the people in the queue to see the Dalai Lama. They feel understood and appreciated just for who they are and the energetic boost this creates can sustain them for weeks if not years!

And finally because these individuals have actually evolved and developed as human beings, not just physically from childhood to adulthood, they have incredible energy levels because they are not draining their energy tanks with frustrations, judgement and negative emotion. Their mind is no longer fogged up and they don’t lobotomize themselves, so they demonstrate crystal clarity and impressive powers of concentration.

At Level 7 individuals are said to ‘walk the walk’. These people have fully integrated the knowledge and personal growth they’ve accumulated and are living expressions of whom they seek to be. They are for example compassionate virtually all the time, not just now and then.

Level 8 consciousness: unity in duality

Unity in duality used to be considered as the ultimate state of consciousness. In the East it was called ‘classical nirvana’ – the ultimate destination of the spiritual journey when the student has achieved a joyful union with the ‘divine’.

Many people will have experienced a glimpse of unity at some point of their life. Where and how that glimpse is experienced can alter their life forever because it can profoundly influence what they become interested in. It might for example occur as the person looks at the magnificence of the Grand Canyon. In that moment of awe their ego disappears and they merge with the Grand Canyon. Often these nature-induced experiences can feel semi-spiritual and can ignite a passion for the environment.

Others experience this moment of unity through sport. The reason some people become obsessed with golf, for example, is because they experienced the ‘perfect shot’, one moment where they struck the ball so perfectly in the sweet spot that they merged with the ball and become ‘one with the ball’. This blissful glimpse was so moving that they then spend the rest of their golfing life trying to recreate that moment of unity. The same happens in all sports – the perfect backhand in tennis, the perfect strike in football or the killer wave in surfing.

For others, they experience moments of unity in church and people will describe it as ‘seeing the face of God’ so they become devout Christians, Muslims or Hindus – or whatever denomination they experienced unity in.

The vast majority of people on the planet have however never experienced unity in any other form than during sex. Individuals literally forget themselves at the peak of orgasm, which is one of the key reasons why sex becomes the primary and most powerful motivator for human beings – because it’s the only time they ever experience unity.

But all of these experiences are not a pure unity. They are a unity in duality. So there is a realization that even if we have experienced unity it’s not complete unity because there is an internal observer, observing the unity experience. As soon as we label an experience we separate ourselves from that experience. The person looking at the Grand Canyon can feel unity for a moment but as soon as s/he mentally or verbally acknowledges the magnificence of that spectacle s/he immediately creates duality in the unity by splitting the observer from the observed – subjective (I) is separate from objective (Grand Canyon).

Even at Level 8 consciousness it can be difficult to describe the experience, but we know if we have experienced it. And that is definitely the case at Level 9.

Level 9 consciousness: pure awareness

Any attempt to describe Level 9 awareness immediately drops us into Level 8 because we become the observer observing again. So to really understand these higher levels we have to physically experience them because it’s a bit difficult to capture them with the rational mind.

But let’s have a go. Pure awareness: the Tibetans call it nothingness or emptiness, which frightens a lot of people. Vast blue sky: so there is no longer an observer observing; there is just the experience of ‘formless union’. There is not someone noticing that they are looking at the Grand Canyon, just the individual and the Grand Canyon in a formless union that transcends the subject–object relationship. When someone experiences Level 9 they also transcend time and space: ie they start to realize that time is a construct and there is no time. Space too is infinite, there are no boundaries to space and the person is connected to the entire universe – a universe without end. There isn’t an observer making this observation; there is just the experience of it.

‘I’ stops being in here and ‘everything else’ out there – it’s all one. Pure awareness is a first-hand experience that we are all that is. It’s a massively expanded state of consciousness.

When we are in Level 9 the good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, up/down duality of life is seen for what it really is – an artificial construction of lower levels of consciousness. There is no duality, no right, no wrong – it just is.

The ramifications of this viewpoint were driven home to me when I watched an episode of Life on Earth and the brilliant David Attenborough explained that if we shrink the evolution of the planet and all living things into one year, living organisms didn’t emerge until August. At the beginning of November back-boned creatures emerged and left the water to colonize the land. By the beginning of December those back-boned creatures broke their dependence on water and by the middle of the same month they could generate heat in their body and the scales turned to feathers. On 25th December the dinosaurs disappeared and mammals and furry animals emerged. In the early morning of the 31st December apes arrived and human beings arrived two minutes before midnight (Attenborough, 1979).

Surely, it’s difficult to get terribly upset about anything when we realize that human beings have been around for about two minutes! But Level 9 is not really about knowing that fact intellectually but experiencing it in our body. To say that we are in our infancy in terms of human development would be a vast understatement and yet we strut around thinking we’ve got the whole world all figured out. We haven’t.

When seen from this perspective, the slights, upsets, challenges, disasters and traumas – large and small – are just tides of stuff. At pure awareness we cease to have preferences and transcend dualistic concepts of good/bad, right/wrong, etc. They are all just lesser conscious states to help us interpret the world, but actually the world is much more expanded and is all those things. It’s everything. This is a blissful state of being. It’s not someone observing the bliss, it’s just bliss – a vast space with a tinge of blissful delight. This does not mean we cannot make a choice; we still can, but the way we perceive choices is completely different.

Level 10 consciousness: non-dual

This is very similar to Level 9 consciousness only Level 10 also has an evolutionary spin. When an individual transcends time and space, it’s not as if they cease to exist. There is still a desk, an office and they can still see themselves in the mirror. But the relationship to the notion of desk, office and self is completely different – we are those things and see those things and experience those things, but we are also not those things.

In Level 10 it’s still pure awareness but the universe is evolving so it’s not just static being; it’s being in motion. There is momentum and things are changing and evolving all the time so the awareness is in motion.

Where are you?

A preliminary indication of what level individuals are at can be gauged when they read the above descriptions. The minute an individual thinks, ‘What the hell is this guy talking about?’ is a pretty good indication that they operate at one or two levels before that level!

If you are resting in your garden and you notice a line of ants carrying a leaf back to base, you see the ants and understand what the ants are doing because you see the scene from a bigger, broader and more expanded perspective. The ants on the other hand are oblivious to you. They are busy with their task and they simply don’t have the perspective to appreciate that they are being watched. Even if you could speak ‘ant’ and tell them that you were watching them, they would still not understand what you were talking about because they don’t have the necessary frame of reference. Their experience of human beings is usually short-lived, as they are stood on or their tasks are interrupted in some way, but even if you decided to flick the leaf away they wouldn’t understand what had happened. We can’t understand the stages beyond our own development any more than the ant can understand you watching him and his mates carrying the leaf. If you have reached one of the upper levels of maturity (which means you definitely didn’t deliberately stand on the ants and probably didn’t flick the leaf away either) then you can understand all the levels of maturity that you evolved through on your way to your current level but someone on a lower level can’t understand someone on a higher level.

Everyone on the planet can relate to all the levels up to Level 5 because all adults have made the physical development that coincides with that journey. Most adults therefore reach Level 5 without any thought or consideration on their part – it just happens by virtue of the passing years. Most drop back into Level 4 and others get stuck in the foothills of Level 5 forever, never finding enough motivation to engage in genuine vertical development.

These people may have a conceptual understanding of higher levels of consciousness but no real experience of them. They may get glimpses or realize there is something very special and different about the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela but they don’t recognize those qualities in themselves. In truth very few people experientially understand beyond Level 8. What really matters in the context of adult development and maturity, however, is that we appreciate that adults develop differently from children and that a certain amount of effort and self-reflection is required to develop maturity, which can in turn transform thinking, behaviour and therefore results.

These maturity models are not a competition or an assessment of bad, better, best. The ant is no better or worse than a human being – just different, operating at different levels of awareness. A monkey is no better than a rock – just different, operating at different levels of awareness. A rock is still very useful in the right situation – if you want to break a coconut for example, a rock is considerably more useful than a monkey.

The same is true of people. These levels of maturity and adult development are not bad, better, best – their merit is in giving human beings a framework for development rather than a tool for comparison. They simply relate to the various ways human beings gain wisdom and maturity and make meaning. Each stage of maturity is more comprehensive, with increasing levels of differentiation that in turn allow an individual to deal more effectively with elevating levels of complexity from baby to adolescent to adult to mature adult. The self-centred life of an infant is, after all, considerably less complicated than the life of a global CEO.

At Complete Coherence we work with CEOs and business leaders to unlock the potential from vertical development, using a number of assessment processes and tailored coaching programmes. One of the most profound metrics for helping leaders assess their current location and where they could progress to is the Leadership Maturity Profile (LMP). The LMP uses Susanne Cook-Greuter’s sentence-completion questionnaire to measure maturity – the most rigorously developed, tested, unbiased and reliable stage measure currently in existence. Unlike many questionnaires it’s not possible to ‘fix’ or ‘game’ the right answers to the questions, because there are no right answers to the questions. Nonetheless the LMP provides leaders with an accurate insight into their own leadership maturity and personal integration and that of their individual team members. When leaders know the characteristics and behaviours associated with each level of adult maturity and how they manifest in business, much of the dysfunction in modern business is immediately explained. The LMP allows the leader to locate their own and their team’s collective centre of gravity for personal and group maturity. This indicates where individuals operate from normally, where they can fall back to under pressure and where their opportunity for greatest growth lies. As a result the LMP often explains individual performance short-falls, why a team isn’t working as well as it might or why it seems to be stuck in a destructive or unhelpful holding pattern and, perhaps most importantly, what to do about it.

Whose rules are they anyway?

Transformations of consciousness or awareness that alter an individual’s world view or perspective are infinitely more powerful than the accumulation of more skills, knowledge and experience. It is these transformations that elevate thinking to a whole new level. Marcel Proust clearly understood vertical development when he said, ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ When we see the world through new eyes, the world itself is changed, and this awakening changes our interpretations, experiences, thoughts, feelings, behaviour and results.

What we therefore must appreciate is that our experience of the world, and specifically business, may be nothing more than the result of following a very sophisticated set of rules about the nature of business, and we are in fact stuck in concrete consciousness. These rules may lead us to believe that ‘it’s a dog-eat-dog world’, and ‘every man for himself’, you need to ‘muscle your way to the top’, ‘it’s about shareholder return.’ The list of ‘rules’ on how to successfully run a company, team or division is endless and most executives subscribe to them even though no one really knows where they came from, who wrote them or when they were created. And these rules are very rarely questioned. As soon as leaders reach the ‘C-suite’ they quickly learn all the rules of the C-suite and behave accordingly. It takes a huge amount of leadership to pull back and say, ‘Hang on a minute, what rules are we following and are they the best rules for this company?’

For example Paul Poleman, CEO of Unilever, took a step back and stopped reporting quarterly to the City because he believed it was distorting behaviour in the company. He realized that his senior team were spending a huge amount of time producing documents to keep the City happy instead of developing the business to make the customers happy. He effectively stopped playing by that rule because it didn’t serve his business. That was an act of Enlightened Leadership that took courage and a willingness to break out of the Matrix.

The truth is the stereotypes are not working. Based on the evidence, executives the world over are reaching middle age burnt out and miserable; they don’t know their partners anymore and rarely see their kids. They’ve followed a set of rules and live firmly rooted in the concrete awareness, only to discover that the promised rewards did not materialize. They’ve worked their hearts out (sometimes literally) only to learn the ‘promise’ never really materializes. The rewards didn’t come, or if they came they also came at a huge personal cost either through the loss of important relationships with their family and friends or the loss of their health.

If we as a species have only been around for a couple of minutes in the context of all life on earth, then surely it’s realistic to consider that as a species we’ve not finished evolving. We may have physically grown into adults, we have clearly mastered the accumulation of information, knowledge, skills and experience (horizontal development) but we have barely begun our vertical development journey. If we don’t first wake up to that reality then there may be very little growing up and meaningful progress in our lifetime.

And the only way we can do that is to push through the transpersonal swamps so we can learn what happiness is really about and how to live a life of service. We need to grow up to the realization that the rules don’t always deliver what they promised. Part of growing up is owning up to our ‘shadow’ or the unhelpful, destructive and unpleasant behaviours we have previously engaged in. When someone owns up to their shadow and really integrates that healing on the inside, that will always influence how that individual then shows up on the outside, in the world.

Anyone can show up as a powerful executive, full of their own importance, overly assertive and plugged into the Matrix. They can follow a set of rules blissfully unaware of that fact because everyone else is also playing to the same rules. Such executives are probably unconscious – going through the motions. If such leaders realize that they must find a new way so as to elevate performance and function more effectively in a fast-moving world, then they begin to ‘wake up’. Once they are permanently awake they begin to ‘show up’ differently. As their own personal development journey unfolds and they ‘grow up’, they begin to ‘show up’ very differently. And if they ‘grow up’ and really ‘own up’ to their previous unhelpful behaviour and tactics, embrace all that they are and genuinely change themselves, then they become Enlightened Leaders capable of having a profound impact.

Enlightened Leaders show up differently. They cultivate the ability to really think, and pull back from the day-to-day short-termism of modern business. They cultivate the ability to pull back the veil and really question the corporate rules, culture and myths and ask the hard questions, and they are willing to go against the grain if that position serves the long-term good of the business, society and the planet.

The influence of values on thinking

One of the key internal lines of development that alter and impact smart thinking is personal values. Values will be unpacked in much more detail in Chapter 6 because not only do they influence what we think about but they significantly alter our relationships and the way we interact with others.

One of the critical principles that underpin Enlightened Leadership across all lines of development is the need and drive toward greater and greater differentiation. Differentiation is the critical middle step necessary for evolution of anything, and business is certainly no exception. In fact one of the reasons I believe that business gets into so much trouble or fails to live up to its highest potential is that we collectively have not refined our ability to differentiate within the lexicon of business itself. If we asked a hundred senior leaders the difference between vision and mission or mission and ambition or ambition and purpose we would get a hundred different answers or interpretations. If we asked a different hundred leaders the difference between values and beliefs or beliefs and attitudes or attitudes and culture we would get the same variety of answers.

Some years ago I was asked by one of the big five global consultancies to talk at their values day. They shut their London office for a day and 400 people attended the event to discuss culture and values. I asked the group in a breakout session, ‘What are the values in this company?’ No one answered. I said that I assumed as no one answered they must have no values, but then someone responded by saying that the company had six values. The person who spoke up was the leader of the London office. The overriding value of that company was evident in the reaction to my question – it was fear. No one wanted to speak before he did. The first true value in that system was fear. Then when the leader of the London office told me of the values of their organization, three were behaviours, two were instructions and one was an operational standard; not a single one of what they thought were their ‘values’ was actually a value. This was pretty disconcerting considering this consultancy advised other organizations on values.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a fundamental part of the problem. We can’t have an educated and productive conversation about anything unless we are all clear that we are actually talking about the same thing. If two people are talking about wine for example and one only has the differentiation capability to tell white from red and red from rosé while the other could tell everything from country of origin to the altitude the grape was grown at as well as the type of grape, then the conversation will be pretty short and unproductive. The discrepancy between the level and quality of thinking in this conversation will however be very clear to both parties within about two minutes because the expert will start using specific wine-based terminology to describe his or her experience. The same is not true in business because most senior leaders already use the business lexicon fluently; it’s just that the definition of the specific words and phrases has never been really nailed down and collectively agreed upon – even within MBA circles and business schools!

The result is two people can be having a conversation about values or vision, each thinking the other person’s definition is exactly the same as theirs. Unfortunately, unless they’ve asked the question it’s almost certainly not the same and this creates unnecessary frustration and confusion in business. To help alleviate this confusion we have created nine different definitions of internal phenomena that influence thinking, behaviour, results and our ability to connect and function with others. A huge amount of time is wasted in business because of our collective inability to discriminate between the following terms and agree a universally understood meaning.

Values

While values and beliefs are both clusters of thinking and feeling, the degree of thought and feeling varies in each. A value is a feeling or quality that is defined by a thought or principle. So in the yin/yang symbol in Figure 4.5, the pearl in the value ‘oyster’ is a feeling (F) that is then wrapped or defined by a thought (T).

FIGURE 4.5 Composition of a value and a belief

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Values are a feeling and the wrapping is the thought or the principles that define that feeling. So we might go into a company and notice they have a list of aspirational values on the wall that talk of honesty and integrity. And yet if we go into the business and wander around or work there for a week or so, we quickly realize the real values bear no resemblance to the list on the wall.

Anyone who visited Enron before its spectacular fall from grace would have discovered that Enron had a ‘Vision and Values’ statement proclaiming Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence. Apparently Respect included the following detail: ‘We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness, and arrogance don’t belong here’ (Christensen, Allworth and Dillon, 2012).

When forest fires shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated and were caught on tape saying, ‘Burn, baby, burn. That’s a beautiful thing’ (Elkind and McLean, 2003). Clearly, the Enron traders didn’t get the memo about Respect, Integrity, Communication or Excellence!

Belief

A belief is the opposite of a value, in that a belief is a thought or idea that is powered by emotion. So again in the yin/yang symbol in Figure 4.5, the pearl in the belief ‘oyster’ is a thought that is then wrapped and powered by emotion.

So for example two people may have the thought: ‘Women should stay in the home.’ For one it’s a really emotive issue and that person expresses the view vocally and passionately. That’s a powerful belief because the emotion that is driving it is powerful. The second person may also have that thought but is not emotionally attached to it; there is no energy around that belief, so it’s either a very weak belief or it’s not a belief at all, depending on the intensity of the emotion. It’s the same thought in both cases, but what alters the intensity in each person is the emotional charge that wraps around the thought and converts it into a belief.

Both values and beliefs represent an evolution of complexity. Thoughts and feelings are quite easy to change but when they are combined to create values and beliefs they are harder to change.

Attitudes

An attitude is a collection of values and beliefs that determine the way an individual sees things, thinks, reacts and behaves.

Attitudes represent a cluster of values and beliefs (Figure 4.6), and as such they are more complex and sophisticated than a value or a belief, and consequently they are even harder to change.

FIGURE 4.6 Composition of an attitude

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Culture

Culture is the collective attitudes within a group (Figure 4.7), team or organization, and they manifest in:

FIGURE 4.7 Composition of culture

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The reason that some of these things are increasingly difficult to change, especially in business, is their complexity. Changing the way a senior leader thinks and feels about a colleague is one thing; changing the values and beliefs that a senior leader holds about his colleague is another. Changing the leader’s attitude to the senior colleague is even harder, and changing the culture of the team or business within which the senior colleague functions is even harder still. Culture is not only a collection of customs, rituals and so forth, it is a collection of disparate and often competing attitudes, values, beliefs, thoughts and feelings! No wonder it poses so many challenges for business leaders.

In his case study detailed in full at www.coherence-book.com, Matt Simister, one of the rising stars of retail and Food Sourcing Director of Tesco, discusses the importance of culture and its ability to derail even the best business innovations. Talking about the initiative he led to centralize food purchasing within Tesco, Matt concedes,

‘In the end, the business rationale for change was compelling – it was likely to be the people and the fiercely decentralized, functionally driven culture of the business that would get in the way.’

Using an Enlightened Leadership approach and some of the tools discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, Matt did however make serious progress:

Not only did Alan help me to apply more rationality to the stakeholder mapping and influencing process, but he also helped me put much more emotion into the story telling. My thinking and communication became clearer and more effective. Gradually the concept of consolidating our supply capability started to be seen as a key enabler in helping us to meet customer needs in an increasingly dynamic, multi-channel world.

How to be smarter

Good-quality thinking is critical in any business; new ideas, new products, creative problem solving, the ability to see the future before it arrives and adapt accordingly are all cognitive functions that offer a vast opportunity for strategic advantage and growth.

I’m incredibly optimistic about human potential because I know that once we get control of our physiology, appreciate emotion and integrate it into our commercial experience whilst also managing it to avoid the DIY lobotomy, expand our consciousness and develop our level of maturity, we will finally realize that we are significantly more complex, more sophisticated and more capable than we have been led to believe.

Building on the physical skills outlined in Chapter 1 and the personal skills of Chapter 2, the next step toward smarter thinking and consistently brilliant performance is cognitive coherence. Cognitive coherence is facilitated by changing the energy within your system to unlock greater perceptual awareness, and this can be done using the SHIFT skill. In his case study at www.coherence-book.com, John Browett, CEO of Monsoon Accessorize, discusses the importance of combining the rational with the human side of business, stating:

In business, you’re dealing with people and people aren’t rational machines. You may not make what is technically the perfect decision because you know it will cause more problems that it would solve. Instead perhaps there will be another solution that everyone is happy with and that gets you 80 per cent of the way there… If you’re really cold and calculating, people won’t like you, and being liked in business is helpful. That’s not to say you shy away from difficult decisions, but you reserve them for a time when it really matters. Taking people with you is critical… In the end, it’s like water flowing in a river; if you do the right thing, there’s only one direction it’s going to go.

The SHIFT skill facilitates productive interaction and cooperation, as John reiterates:

Your little thinker, the little ego inside you, can be nervous, worried and unhappy. It is for me most of the time. So learning to operate from a position of inner peace and calmness is transformational. In a transcendent state you are going to be more capable of helping people. I can think of so many examples where I’ve been able to put myself into that state and it has been incredibly helpful and powerful.

Cognitive coherence – emotional resilience: the SHIFT skill

How do we develop a new level of thinking? Imagine someone is in the middle of writing an important report or tricky e-mail and they get stuck on how best to phrase a critical point or argument. What do people do to come up with a new idea? Some people stop and go for a coffee. Others may go out for a walk to clear their head. Some will delay making a decision so they can sleep on it. Some prefer to exercise, and in the gym the new idea may appear. Some listen to music, have a glass of wine or phone a friend. All of these techniques work sometimes, which is why they are still widely used and recommended. However, they do not work every time. They are hit and miss solutions. Plus, perhaps most importantly, they can’t all be done at work and they can’t all be done in the heat of the moment. If we are in the middle of a board meeting we can’t nip out for a five-mile run or dismiss everyone until we’ve slept on it, or start pouring the whisky at 10 am. But if we look at why these techniques work, on the occasions when they do work, we discover something interesting – a common active ingredient. From this analysis the SHIFT skill was born.

The SHIFT process

Work through the following instructions:

  1. First describe an area in your life or work that is currently challenging you. Write down the associated:
    –  thoughts;
    –  feelings;
    –  current behaviour.
  2. Once you have made a note of your thoughts, feelings and behaviour, work through the shift process. SHIFT is an acronym and the process takes you through each stage as follows:
    –  Stop everything that you are doing and simply shift your attention to your…
    –  Heart, breathe through this area of your chest to…
    –  Induce a positive emotion.
    –  Feel it in your body, enjoy how it moves through your body for a good 40 seconds or so and allow it to…
    –  Turn the brain back on. Notice your insights and write them at the bottom of the page.

How did it go? Do you see a difference in what you wrote at the top of the page and the bottom of the page? Did your perception of the issue change or shift? What did you learn?

I will try and explain how the SHIFT process works. Say for example you’ve got to write a letter to an employee and it’s awkward and you don’t know how to phrase the letter. It may be that you’ve already agonized over it for 30 minutes and you still can’t get the words right.

Shifting your attention

The first thing to do in any problem is stop what you’re doing and shift (S) your attention. If you are struggling with the e-mail for example, you may get up and move away from the keyboard and move your attention to something else. You might shift your attention by going for a coffee, a walk, a cigarette, calling a friend, counting to 10, exercising, doing something else – anything else. All these techniques result in the same thing – your shifting your attention from the issue to something else.

Inducing a positive emotion

This conscious shift in your attention may, if you’re lucky, induce (I) a positive emotion. When going for a walk you may notice the beauty of a tree, a certain way the light hits the pavement, the gentle breeze on your skin, the far-off laughter of people enjoying themselves. When you phone a friend they may lift your spirits by recounting an amusing story of their own woes. When you sip your macchiato you may experience the simple pleasure of a good warm drink. Again all of these different experiences are helpful because they induce a positive emotion.

Feel it in your body

It’s not enough that the emotion has changed; you have to really feel the change in energy and feel (F) the positive emotion in your body. The more you can feel the feeling, the joy, the connection, the more you can sustain that energetic state, the more your physiology changes and this physiological change will affect your brain function.

Turn the brain back on

So as you feel the feeling, you shift into a state of biological coherence and your thinking shifts too; your brain turns (T) back on. And once you’ve turned your brain back on you will have far greater access to your cognitive capabilities and a new thought or perspective will emerge.

You will no doubt already have experienced this process in action. Perhaps you were confused about how to fix a problem. You had been stewing over it for days and then one evening an old friend calls and this exchange shifts your attention away from the problem. You end up laughing about a shared memory and as you put the phone down, smile plastered across your face, you suddenly have an epiphany that solves your problem. This was no coincidence or accident; it was simply the predictable consequence of shifting your emotional state from a negative to a positive state.

As I explained, SHIFT is an acronym, so you may have noticed that the explanation above misses out the H. The missing ingredient is to engage the heart (H). If we breathe smoothly and rhythmically while focusing on our heart in the way I explained in Chapter 2, then we rely only on ourselves. And we can do this anytime, anywhere. Remember our heart is the location of most of our positive emotions, so paying attention to our heart will help to induce a positive emotion (I). Once we have ‘hold’ of that positive emotion we need to feel (F) the emotion in our body, which will in turn switch our brain back on (T) – giving us answers we could not access only a few minutes earlier.

This process allows us to shift from a negative emotion to any one of the positive emotions that we’ve mastered through the emotional MASTERY skill from the previous chapter. Just like the executive who learnt to shift to contentment to improve his business decisions, we can also shift into a helpful and constructive emotional state that will give us access to our full cognitive capacity and drive cognitive coherence.

Once we have embodied the new positive state and held on to it for 30 seconds, we will then get access to new insights. After just 30 seconds we can then go back to the challenge we were facing and write down any new ideas or insights that emerge.

This exercise is often very revealing for people because they can immediately see the difference between the initial explanation of the challenge and the insights that follow once emotional coherence has been achieved – even for as little as 30 seconds. The solution they have access to now seems simple and obvious, but without coherence it was obscured by a negative emotional state. The fact is, human beings are brilliant and we already know the answers to almost all our problems. It’s just that we can’t access those answers until we SHIFT out of a negative state and into a positive one.

Collect positive emotions

Having developed emotional literacy, we may now be very familiar with 15 or so different positive emotions. The MASTERY skill helps us to be increasingly familiar with the biological landscape of those positive emotions. Think of these positive emotional states as different outfits that can be worn at different times for different occasions. No one in their right mind would go to an important function in their shorts and slippers, so why would we consider going to an important meeting frustrated or angry?

Or think of these different emotions as different CDs in your music collection. If someone was feeling upset about the state of their marriage it wouldn’t be helpful to listen to power ballads, and they are not going to be in a constructive emotional state to fix the problems if they listen to thrash metal all day long! They need to change the record. Break the negative emotional state by listening to more inspiring, positive upbeat music and they will get access to more of their own intelligence and creativity so they can solve the challenges they face.

Emotional MASTERY adds to our collection of positive emotions so we can SHIFT into that emotion when we need it rather than just hoping it shows up. Of course it’s not enough to have the positive CD – we need to play it. This means that we need to practise shifting from the emotional state that we are in to a more positive, constructive emotional state.

We will always experience emotional triggers in our daily life. We will still feel irritated and frustrated and angry, but these emotional skills mean that we are finally in control of how we respond. If we are aware of our negative emotional state, we will have the emotional flexibility to step back for a moment and re-adjust our state so we can move forward confidently in the right direction.

The good news is that we already shift emotional states very easily. If you are frustrated, for example after a particularly pointless meeting, you may get in your car to drive to see a client. As you are listening to the radio your favourite song comes on and you turn up the volume, singing along at the top of your voice. By the time the song has finished you are feeling completely different and you have a smile on your face. The music just shifted your emotional state. Or perhaps you get a letter from your boss informing you of a large bonus – that shifts your emotional state into delight. Then you realize the letter isn’t addressed to you and you shift again, only this time you feel offended. You are constantly shifting your emotional state – you’re just not currently doing it consciously. At the moment you are at the mercy of external events, people and situations that will shift your emotional state whether you want them to or not.

What we need to do is take back control so that we decide what we feel, not our boss or our partner or our kids or our clients or our colleagues. Shifting emotional state itself is not difficult; doing it deliberately when we need to does however require practice.

Cognitive coherence facilitates behavioural coherence

Enlightened Leadership emerges when we develop coherence across all the various critical internal and external lines of development (Figure 4.8) – each one strengthening and facilitating the next. In this chapter we have explored the last three internal lines of development – cognition, maturity and values.

FIGURE 4.8 Lines of development

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Companies succeed or fail based on their collective awareness and on their ability to consistently access the very best thinking possible. Business needs to foster the ability, particularly within the C-suite, to come up with better answers to commercial challenges than their competitors; they need to be more creative and more innovative and they need to expand their perceptual awareness because that is what ultimately differentiates the winners from the losers.

The cumulative benefit of access to more energy and better energy utilization, emotional intelligence and literacy combined with vertically developed cognitive ability and maturity can have a profound impact on the quality of thought and, ultimately, business success. Being smarter is only possible when we systematically improve all internal lines of development. Each line builds on and facilitates the next. The emotional MASTERY skill provides us with emotional resilience, a quality that can massively impact performance and bottom line results. When applied, emotional MASTERY can ensure that we have permanent access to our frontal lobes! When we also expand our awareness and understand our values, then we facilitate cognitive coherence. Physiological coherence facilitates emotional coherence, which facilitates cognitive coherence, and cognitive coherence facilitates behavioural coherence, which we will explore next.

Summary of key points

If you don’t remember everything in this chapter, remember this:

Notes for Table 4.1

1 The percentages denote the distribution of middle to senior executives in largely multinational corporations in our database (n = ~1,700) who have completed our Leadership Values Profile™ (LVP). We do not assess Beige on the assumption that executives have evolved past this level. The seniority of these leaders has led to a much higher percentage of leaders scoring in the second tier (Yellow and Turquoise) compared to Graves and others’ global estimates (12 per cent in our database versus ~1 per cent in others)

2 The numbers in brackets denote Cook-Greuter’s stages of adult development. She considers that there are six main stages and some of them are intermediary between more well established stages.

3 The percentages denote the number of managers identified at each level from an Action Logic research sample as reported in Seven Transformations of Leadership by David Rooke and William R Torbert (Harvard Business Review).

4 Denotes the average percentage (merging multiple author estimates) of people within each tier.