In a world that’s obsessed with data and measurement, it’s easy for our minds to be overloaded with the stress of targets and goals. In our image, The Tyranny of the Explicit, the heroine is so overburdened with data, targets and analysis that her body contorts.
When we become disembodied in that way, we lose a lot of the intuitive intelligence
we rely on for survival. Our last newsletter shared an article about embodied intelligence, highlighting the need to bring movement and touch into meetings.
And a new book, The Power of Not Thinking by Simon Roberts, explores more of the power of embodiment.
It includes a fascinating exploration of how we learn by practice, often bypassing analysis. Although most of us can ride a bike, even expert scientists struggle to explain how we do it. We often can’t think our way to actions, we have to test, prototype, practice. You will often hear us say “it’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
What we do as humans is fundamentally different from how computers process the world. Roberts describes the challenge of designing autonomous cars as a way of exploring this:
“Our perception is not about the accumulation of piecemeal bits of sensory input but emerges as a coherent whole, which cannot be easily disaggregated into its component pieces for further analysis… It is like a piece of music: the notes get their meaning from being part of a whole, rather than the melody being built up of recognisable individual notes. It is the fact that we perceive the world as a meaningful whole that makes our powers of pattern recognition both powerful and hard to replicate.”
This is why we’re wary of many models and five-step processes. They can be useful, but easily lure us into a simpler understanding of what happens in groups than is real. This is even more significant online, when so many normal means of sensing each other are disrupted.
It’s not about the baton
Beyond processes, our performance – voice, tone, movement etc – influences the meetings we host, in-person and online. We loved this description of the conductor Simon Rattle:
“Witness Rattle’s face as he takes his orchestra through a piece of music and you will see that the baton almost seems irrelevant in his performance. As one music critic wrote, there’s a correlation between his body language and the sound of the orchestra: ‘Ease is also key to Rattle’s musical language, and his body language reflects this. Rarely without a smile on the podium, he has an unmistakable enthusiasm to communicate his love for the music in the making, and thereby creates a sound that is plush, confident and certain in human warmth.’”
There are great parallels for facilitators here: let’s not fixate on the baton, our knowledge and processes. We need to stay aware of all the ways our embodied performance can affect a meeting. And online, we must not allow our bodies to quietly contract with the stress of screen and keyboard. At its simplest, we need to get out of our chairs and move more.