As a matter of fact, that’s the very reason why rethinking the crisis requires so much critical thinking.
At a first glance, it seems illogical to associate crisis with illusion. A closer look at the origin and the behavior of crises in any field will, however, show us how this association takes place.
Where do crises come from?
Whether in medicine, in corporations or in social and political relationships, a crisis is always “a disbalance that misleads the course of things” or “the sudden change in an apparent state of good health”. Such definitions show us that signs of the crisis preexisted in the context. The view on the matter was short sighted, there was a major failure on the diagnosis or the prognosis. In other words, certain ways of thinking (paradigms, beliefs, entrenched truths and mental bumps), which proved themselves illusionary in that context, were the hatchets that cleared the way for the crisis.
Let’s have a look at some exemplary illusions.
The issue 380 of Carta Capital brings an article by Francesc Petit, called “Solution for the Carless”, in which he comments on the crisis of the automobile matrons Ford, GM and Chrysler. “This scenario can be credited in great part to the fact that the automobile industry is solely focused on one segment of the market, the First World middle class, which means something about 800 million people and simply leaves aside the other 3 billion stuck in the outskirts of economy”. At the time, we hailed the writer’s innovative conceptual approach: “The car should be very much like what we call ‘basics’ in fashion, that is, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.” And we add, “The change calls for learning about the yet-to- be, but the corporations induce their intelligences to work for the past, slaves to the already-implemented.” There’s this tendency in the corporate world of stretching a certain state of things beyond its life cycle. As a consequence, you slip in your own illusion.
Stanford University Press has been promising to publish the book“Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely” , by Ian I. Mitroff and Abraham Silvers, in which they discuss four mistakes originated in the educational system and in professional culture. The first one is regarding as false a true hypothesis and the second is regarding as true a false one. The third one is the title of the book: solving the wrong problems or challenges precisely. The fourth one, becoming more and more common these days, is made by people and organizations that deliberately induce others to face the non-problem. In June 2008, Professor Thomaz Wood Jr published two articles in CartaCapital in which he comments these four mistakes, the first three we chose to call self-mistakes. The fourth is originated by an “ethical” pathology. It’s about time we remembered that the techniques developed in the field of cognitive sciences build up proper defense against these and other illusions.
The situation is real, but the perspectives on the crisis – involved in and permeated by the paradigms and beliefs that led the situation to this “critical point” – are always illusionary. While such perspectives survive, the crisis will remain inevitable and insoluble.
And regarding it as inevitable and insoluble is the illusion that attributes permanence and this aura of reality to the crisis. So, what to do? It’s time to think in other directions, making use of other mental procedures.
However, having an organization decide to fight a crisis with intelligence means that something must have happened with their managers’ acts and thoughts. Something must have been done, for flexibility and plasticity can’t be learned in school.
— “So you mean that all it takes to face crises is to have managers and directors learn the methodology of transformative thinking?”
Be extremely careful with this “all it takes”, for it sounds like one of those ready-made recipes in self-books. We are just pointing that the mere fact that an executive or anyone in a leading position has decided to learn and internalize this methodology is in itself a rupture with the ideological strangleholds of their roles.
There’s this equation in Brazilian society: the higher level of responsability in a person’s decisions, the more closed they are to learning anything new, mainly whatever involves developing the art of thinking. “I don’t need anyone to teach me how to think!”
At the same time, though, this very contingent of professionals gladly welcomes imported conferences with the so-called ‘gurus’, transmitting ideas and thoughts that are cloned and institutionalized.
Learning the methodology of transformative thinking is not a decorative item or a game to play, but a priority for whoever has to face strategical challenges.
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