Conversation

I need a new consulting shtick. Something that builds on sparring, but isn't sparring, and is somehow shaped by/responsive to post-covid reboot conditions 🤔
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My consulting work has been continuing as usual through covid, in fact steadier and stronger than before, but there's a growing sense of surrealism to it, like hypernormalization effect...
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I think it's not just me. All of business is in a barbell mix of surreal operations mode and crisis management mode. Surreal ops may be nominally vectored on the right things (say AI, climate tech, key trends like that) but still not reflect ground realities well.
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"Head oriented, gut not oriented" is a good definition of surreal. Reality coheres in an intellectual sense, but not in a visceral sense. Like, "yeah, the situation is that a wet clock is draped over a clothesline and drying" is a correct read of things, but not a gut feel
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Meaning is a gut thing, not a head thing. Intellectual orientation can at most make for internal consistency and pro forma factfulness. It cannot tell you what a situation means. What its significance is. Many businesses are in a situation of high situation awareness, low meaning
Replying to
there’s no gut, just intuition that’s built subjectively and we lack common language to discuss it. my observation at Microsoft was that people who were not adapt at abstract thinking got f**** because they cannot draw meaning and see patterns from sparse data and project forward
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Replying to
Interesting how this links to Embodied cognition and Enactivism. Head things can be seen as the tip of the meaning iceberg, embedded in the guts/body. A view that has remained marginal since before our time!
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