Giving Space to the Unconscious
Giving Space to the Unconscious
I’m sticking with the Topic of Time and the value we give different ways of spending time. Yesterday, one of my business partners, Shawn Cunningham, said something that stuck with me: he said that we understand that in order to be creative and productive, we need both focused time and unfocused time, yet in Modern Organisations we often lack the space for the latter. We know that things that we did not finish thinking about linger around in our minds and get chewed over in our subconscious. We can use that in different ways. Either we can make sure we finish a thought or park it, for example by writing it down, so that it does not keep some part of the brain busy. This allows us to fully focus on something else. Or we can purposefully not finish a thought or leave while being in the middle of mulling over a difficult problem and trust that our subconscious will keep working on it “in the background”. It might then “spit out” a New Idea or Way of Looking at Things when we least expect it: at 3am when we wake up, during our Morning Run or while in the shower singing. Yet the Modern Work Environment – or way of working to be precise – does not provide any spaces for the unconscious to mull things over. Only focused and seemingly productive time (see the last edition of this newsletter) is valued. Can I put going on a walk on my time sheet? How do I invoice a client for an idea I had while running or showering?
In his book “Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More”, Chris Bailey writes about two distinct modes of functioning: Hyperfocus and Scatterfocus. The first mode is useful to produce something that requires our full attention - write a book (or newsletter), write code, do maths, etc. When the mind wanders, we struggle to achieve the same level of depth or detail. Scatterfocus on the other hand is actually about cultivating that Wandering Mind. According to Bailey, it boosts creativity and problem solving, and helps us to recharge for more focus. He advocates to consciously build into your daily schedule time for Hyperfocus and time for Scatterfocus (Bailey 2018). So for example Shawn, who got me into thinking about this, pointed out that he stopped pushing admin tasks to the fringes of his days and scatters them throughout his work to give him some space to let his thoughts roam. Equally, he would volunteer to do school runs and run errands during the day.
This is a really difficult problem to solve for organisations. Assume you are the head of an organisation and want to increase creativity and learning within your organisation. At the same time, your staff is generally overworked and struggling to produce all the things they need to produce as part of the commitments with clients your organisation has – or to keep the internal processes running. How can you make an argument that, while you struggle already to get things done, you want to create some spaces for people to Wander Without a Purpose, to put their feed up or to meditate in the woods? On work time! It is this Vicious Circle we often find ourselves in these days. Our ways of working and living are so entangled in different contexts that it is really hard to shift anything at all, particularly when the shifts are pretty fundamental and will affect many other aspects of our work or life.
I experience the same in my own work and life. How can I create more spaces in my day which have no purpose without feeling bad that I’m not either working on a project that generates income or spending time with my family?
How are you experiencing this tension? Have you found a solution? Reply to this email if you feel like sharing.
Robert Laycock, an artist and coach based in Whitley Bay, has come up with a fascinating solution. He has calculated how much time he needs for all the things he wants to do during a normal week, starting not with work but with things like sleeping, exercising and spending time with family and friends. Subsequently, he ended up changing his work-life rhythm in a way that allows him to live a very balanced life with clearly distinct time boxes for work that generates income, for his arts work, and for things like sports and family – understanding that a healthy balance between these things will improve how well you do and feel about each one of them. He has broken out of the constraints that the different contexts of the economy, the society, the family, etc. put down for us and has taken life in his Own Hands. How he managed to resolve the Paradox of Agency is something that he has shared in various talks and is about to publish on my new website about the Paradox of Agency.
Reference: Bailey, Chris. 2018.Hyperfocus: How to Work Less to Achieve More. Pan Macmillan.
The Paper Museum
This week I read a blog post by Mille Bojer from Reos Partners on collaboration and I added a piece of it to my Paper Museum. It really resonated with me because it is in line with one of the contentions I have been having about collaboration among people and organisation: that there is a need for a clear shared purpose and shared values in order to collaborate effectively.
Central to conventional notions of collaboration is the idea that it means working together towards one shared goal, and that everyone will make their own needs (seen as the needs of the “parts”) secondary to the needs of the “whole”. It is true that collaboration requires some shared direction, but in general we tend to think we have to agree more than is actually necessary.
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We do need to agree on key things like budget allocations, timelines, rules, and priorities, and sometimes this requires negotiation across different interests and between the interests of the parts and the needs of the particular whole on which we are working. But we don’t always have to agree on the same list of values, on the nature of the problem, on definitions of concepts, on our interpretations of the past, and so on. In these domains, part of what is going on is that we are desiring agreement because we want to feel justified and to believe we are right. We can allow for diversity here. Often the most sustainable agreements are those that we agree to for different reasons.
Why did I add this to my paper museum? I thought it plays nicely with the notion that sometimes we spend too much time on the ‘shared purpose’ and ‘shared value’ question when engaging in collaboration. This article provides a much more pragmatic view on collaboration that is more in line with the real world complexities of transcontextualities and people coming from different contexts with different histories.
Reference: Bojer, Mille. 2021. “Collaboration with Diverse Others: Why Is It so Difficult?”Medium(blog). May 25, 2021.https://millebojer.medium.com/collaboration-with-diverse-others-why-is-it-so-difficult-6a63aac44597.
More for you to enjoy
- Already last week I wanted to share this piece by Sophie Charrois on time, but her blog was down then: Rivers: Time
- Apropos subconscious: Gordon Brander asks if we can built a second, outsourced version of it in his Substack called Subconsious