A crisis and its secret charms.

This moment currently referred to as Crisis, if analyzed apart from its usual formatting, opens unexpected opportunities for us to choose our future.

Opportunities for professional growth, opportunities for new deals, political opportunities, opportunities to redraw the geographies inside and outside of us and opportunities to surprise ourselves with who we really are.

Attracting or persuading companies to respond strategically to the downsizing of markets is a global challenge that grows exponentially here because of a communication problem, fed by the culture’s ideological system.

We’d like to highlight a peculiarity of the situation of companies operating in Brazil: the possibility of finding new opportunities and niches, just by exploring global perplexity. Creating products, reformulating concepts and procedures, launching new trends and needs, reconceptualizing businesses and partnerships, creating new networks. Our question is: why on earth isn’t this possibility explored? Why doesn’t the media open space to this new exploratory mindset?

Rethinking strategically demands the banishment of illusions.

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 Soviet bureaucrat and the American CEO

The political processes and cultural factors dominating the 1920’s Soviet Union have given birth to a social layer known as bureaucracy. It’s worth mentioning the fact that such layer already had its political and social importance in the former regime, prior to the revolution in 1917.

Let’s now highlight what this social group meant until the fall of the regime. Its role in economy, for example. All institutions were either managed or monitored by the Soviet bureaucracy. The bureaucrats didn’t own the company – it belonged to the state, remember? –, just ran it. Their privileges were of a different nature. Besides being granted with this special percentage of the results and also with other forms of distribution, they also had the power of deciding who was entitled to the privileges.

In a quite close parallel to this state of things in the Soviet Union, a very analogous process was taking place in American companies. The growth of businesses and the consequent expansion of plants, complexity of markets and technologies made room to the birth of a social layer of executives and CEOs (Chief Executive Officers), without which this institution we know as the American company would barely exist. It is astonishing to verify the number of analogies between the so-called high ranking executives in the capitalist company and their equivalents in the companies “on the other side”.

The Methodology of Transformative ReThinking

“We are yet to come to the world
The world is yet to be
The things are yet to be made
The reason of being is yet to be found.”

Antonin Artaud

The methodology of transformative thinking is the progressive, integrated and harmonious mobilization of critical thinking, creative process and strategic thinking.

The decision-maker triggers this mobilization at the very mapping of the challenge, which is “that moment when the passive contemplation of the situation becomes the first signal of the will to intervene in reality.”

Once having processed the scenario and afterwards the strategical challenge, the decision-maker (a person or a group) takes on the proper measures of divergence with extreme rigor. There is no talking, no mentioning examples or invocating theories, no influence of the current or usual opinions and points of view. This procedure can be easily qualified as innocent and radical. Intelligence works with this innocent eye looking at things, and not with memory.

The very core of transformative thought is “exercising thinking processes by alternating divergence and convergence”.