Introduction
The vital distinction between objective and subjective is much misunderstood, and our principal purpose in this post is to do all that we can in a short article to ensure that you never get confused by these slippery concepts again.
Confuse them for one moment and your change efforts are almost certain to founder, and likewise, if you’re running a business, your strategy could soon be dashed upon the rocks.
If, later in the article, we seem to be banging on about this to an almost tiresome extent, looking at the matter from slightly different angles each time, the reason is this: if there is one vital point in the world worth hammering home, it’s this matter of the relationship of subjective to objective reality.
It is an extremely subtle but correspondingly powerful and practical concept for you to grab ahold of. Grasping this notion properly will not be a walk in the park; it won’t be a piece of cake. But without it we’re lost, so there’s nothing to be done but for us to keep pounding away until it fully sinks in and becomes part or you, and how you look at the world—second nature.
—The Editors
A Piece of Cake: Subjectivity, Objectivity and Strategy
There is an old story told about an international solo hot-air balloon race between the French and the English. The weather over the English Channel turned unexpectedly stormy, visibility was poor, making navigation difficult, and the winds were heavy and gusting wildly and unpredictably.
One of the French contestants, having lost his GPS device and phone overboard somewhere over the Channel and finding himself running dangerously low on fuel, was able to see at last that he was flying over dry farmland, and he managed to land his balloon safely in the middle of a field.
He climbed out of the basket (“gondola”) of his balloon, without the slightest clue where he was, or even which side of the Channel he was on, except that the man out walking his dog, who was staring at him and his balloon from ten metres away, was wearing a tweed suit. flat tweed cap and green Wellington boots, was carrying a walking stick and looked like an Englishman from central casting.
“Do you speak English?” the balloonist asked the walker. “I do,” came the reply, “I am English.” “Ah! Perhaps you can help me,” asked the Frenchman, “Can you kindly tell me, Monsieur, where I am?”
“Why, with pleasure,” replied the Englishman, “You are in a field.”
The Frenchman, somewhat nonplussed, asked in reply, “Are you a management consultant?” “I am actually,” answered the Englishman, now equally nonplussed, “but how the devil did you know?”
“Why it was obvious,” replied the Frenchman, “for your answer to my question was objectively true, verifiable, and unimpugnable, but of no use to me whatsoever.”
In our nine-part Collingwood series last year, starting with “Questioning Truth” and continuing with the 8-part series, “A World of Questions and Answers,” we explored in detail the way in which, within our new epistemology which I call, for short, “E2,” and which I have written about extensively in the pages of Change (and over the past four decades ever since I first coined the term-of-art “E2” in a plenary lecture at a major management conference in 1986), every statement is the answer to an explicit or implicit, very specific question, and what is true or false is not the statement itself but the whole question-and-answer complex, in the way Collingwood elaborated.
It was objectively true and verifiable that the Frenchman in the joke was in a field, as he already knew perfectly well, but that was of course not at all what he was asking. That the Englishman was making an objectively true statement cut no ice at all with the Frenchman. Objectivity, like truth, only gets you so far.
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Subjective and Objective
What is objective is whatever is the way it is irrespective of what anyone may think about it, how anyone may happen to see it or frame it, or opine about it. Objective reality is one and the same for all, and is independent of anyone’s point of view. That’s what “objective” means.
If I say that “this chocolate cake is delicious!” I am making a subjective statement, which is meant merely to reflect my own personal taste, or view, or opinion or assessment.
But if my dinner companion, moments later, tells the server, “James says he thinks your chocolate cake is delicious,” they are making an objective statement, in this case, a statement about my expressed enjoyment of the cake.
Note that just because a proposition is objective, however, doesn’t mean it’s objectively true; for it can equally be objectively false without thereby ceasing to be objective.
So if the cat is not actually on the mat, in point of fact, but is off somewhere playing with a ball of yarn, and yet when I’m asked, “Where is the cat?” I wrongly say, “The cat is on the mat” (whether by mistake, or out of some dogmatic belief that the cat never leaves the mat because I saw it there twice), my objectively false statement, “the cat is on the mat” is not on a different level from the corresponding, objectively true statement, “the cat is not on the mat.”
The two statements in the example above, the objectively true statement “The cat is not on the mat” and the objectively false statement “The cat is on the mat,” are on all fours.
One is a description of a bit of the world correctly described, and the other is a description of a bit of the world wrongly described, that is to say, misdescribed. Both are objective statements (one true, one false), and both are descriptions of a bit of the real world. Neither is a description of something in my head, nor is either intended to be. That’s what makes the statement, whether true or false, objective rather than subjective.
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Objective and Subjective Reality
There is more to it than that, however. For there is not always, and in fact there isn’t usually, an actual opposition between objective reality and subjective reality. Most often, your own or someone else’s subjective reality is merely one’s inherently limited and often highly biased personal selection from objective reality, which, as we have often discussed in the pages of Change, is infinitely re-describable.
When we actually get things right, or failing that, at least don’t get things egregiously wrong, subjective reality is not opposed to objective reality, but is a subset of, a selected portion of, objective reality, at least if all goes well, as I say: that is, if we manage to describe that subset of the objective world in objectively veridical terms, or in other words, if we manage to get our description right, the way the Englishman did who sought (and failed) to “inform” the Frenchman quite correctly that he was in a field. For indeed he was.
But the thing to bear in mind is that subjective reality is not in anyone’s head—it just is a bit of the real world out there as mapped by the person whose subjective reality it is.
If they map it wrong, they’re not describing something personal to them, something in their head, rather they’re describing something out there, but they’re misdescribing it, perhaps even unrecognizably.
Or like the dog-walking Englishman, they are describing something factually and objectively but so irrelevantly as to convey no information at all. In the latter case, we’re back to Stafford Beer’s classic definition of information as “that which changes us.”
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Cake Theory
Enter Cake Theory.
“Cake Theory” is a name I once made up for teaching purposes (and though I generally prefer cookies, I do like cake, especially wherever chocolate, raspberries or blueberries are involved), and I later immortalized the moniker in a philosophical lecture to members of our N-LaBS seminar at Interchange Research some three years ago.
What Cake Theory says, in essence, is this: Your subjective reality is a real slice of cake you can taste and eat right now and get real nourishment from. It is not a distorted or blurry photograph or memory of some cake existing somewhere else.
Your subjective reality is (or leastwise is meant to be) a real cake-slice of the real objective cake, and, the good news, dear readers of Change, is that there’s always more cake! There’s never any shortage of more cake to go ‘round!
Your subjective slice of cake is a real slice of the real objective cake that is the world—at least provided your explicit and especially your tacit assumptions are all correct, and provided your view is objectively true and verifiable. All the same, it’s no more than your own selected (or dished-up-to-you) slice of objective reality. And you can always help yourself to more cake, if you want, a different slice of the same cake, because it’s all yours for the slicing and taking and tasting! Again, reality is infinitely—and objectively, veridically—re-describable.
Anything in the world we can advert to, whether out loud or in our head, provided only that we are describing it objectively (in the sense we discussed above) and veridically (an important caveat!), is an actual slice of the objective, real-world cake, a piece of the objective, real-world territory-as-mapped.
Yet there are myriad other ways to map the territory veridically.
And reality is made up of not only the territory-as-(veridically)-mapped, but that plus how it could, equally well, alternatively (and equally veridically) be mapped, but—and this is a big but—of course minus all the non-veridical stuff that may merely look like cake to the untrained eye.
For, often, if you examine a slice of cake more closely and critically, it turns out to be just Fake Cake—like one of those uncannily real-looking plastic models of a slice of cake that restaurateurs in Japan like to put in the window of their restaurants or use as menu-elaborations—disconcertingly real-looking plastic mock-ups of slices of cake.
The point of Cake Theory is simply to throw light on the much misunderstood distinction between the objective and the subjective, and to remind us that my, your, or anyone’s subjective reality is not something in our respective heads.
It’s rather the real world itself as mapped by someone, and note that it’s the place where they themselves (who may be us!) actually live and move and have their being.
To grasp this better, let’s start from one extreme end of what is an unbroken continuum.
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Confabulation, Distortion, Delusory Worlds, Distorted Memories, and Reality
Now that subjective slice of the world can of course be mapped in a way that is veridical and true, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, it can be mapped in way which objectively bears little relation, or even no relation whatsoever, to the real objective world and is a slice of nothing, a handful of air, and in the latter case it’s a partly or even purely delusory world in which the individual confidently lives and moves and has his being.
Yet it’s still a misdescription of the world outside their head, and not an accurate description of something inside their head.
Even the psychotic patient’s delusory world, or the world as fabricated by someone in a state of delirium, bearing little or no discoverable objective relation to the real world, past or present—is nonetheless “the world out there” in which that benighted individual lives, the outside world as they have construed it.
The same is true of the partly or wholly imaginary past of anyone, psychotic or otherwise, with false memories and a partly or wholly confabulated or fabricated past, or with delusory memories of actual events distorted beyond recognition to form a personal past that never took place that way at all.
This is the same whether the distortions and fabrications of the individual’s own past were made consciously (which is extremely rare), or (far more commonly) were made unconsciously as part of the habitual way the person manages and defends themselves from exceedingly painful unconscious memories, conflicts, desires, impulses, thoughts, fears, experienced threats to their sense of self, and other anxiety-laden personal experiences.
In any of the latter such cases, a distorted narrative past, which is actually far more common amongst the people we meet in daily life than the layman imagines (and most of which cases, unfortunately, never reach a psychoanalyst’s couch), the person’s own unwritten autobiography as they have delusively reconstructed it in their head just is precisely the very real subjective “past” that they now retrospectively relate to, not only emotionally but also in their conscious thought and action, in their planning, and in their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future.
Memory, after all, is not like some kind of neurally captured, encoded recording of what happened, but is a continual present-day reconstruction, as philosophers have known for some long while, and as the psychologists have latterly come to understand. A decades-long longitudinal study carried out at the University of Chicago demonstrated that the same person’s narrative autobiography covering the selfsame years changes dramatically as time passes, when they are asked each year to tell the interviewer the story of their life.
However crazy or just plain mistaken an unconsciously fabricated, retroactive past may be, it now just is the individual’s actual subjective past, which guides their responses to circumstances as they occur in the present and dictates what they anticipate will occur in the future.
It is part of their world as they have lived it, whether they lived it that way at the time or only retrospectively. As we have said before here in the pages of Change, and as Freud taught us, our past affect us, not because it is past, but because it is ours.
The thing to bear in mind, therefore, even in such comparatively extreme instances as these, is that neither an individual’s imaginary world nor their partly or largely distorted, confabulated or fabricated personal past is something existing only in a shadow world somewhere between their ears. On the contrary, it just is the world out there, past or present, as mapped or construed by them—subjectively and in this case falsely and delusively.
And again, their subjective world, present and past, however imaginary, is “out there,” for them, every bit as much as your world is for you or my world is for me, and it is not at all merely something playing out in some private theatre in their head.
The day before I wrote those words, a well-dressed, middle-aged African-American woman joined the queue behind me in a coffee shop in New York, and said to me, with a beaming smile, “Hello!” I smiled a warm and friendly “Hello!” back, though my facial expression must have betrayed the fact that while she was looking at me as if she expected me to recognize her, I had never seen her before in my life.
“I could see you were my cousin,” she explained, almost apologetically, and then asked, now suddenly in a state of some agitation, “Have you seen my robe?”
“Your robe?” I asked. “Yes, my Emperor’s robe,” she clarified, looking all around herself anxiously, and visibly growing increasingly worried and more agitated. Feeling sorry for her, and wishing to relieve her of some of her anxiety, I replied, in a sympathetic voice, that unfortunately I had not seen her robe, but I added cheerfully that she mustn’t worry, for it was sure to turn up.
This indeed seemed to reassure her greatly, as she visibly relaxed and smiled at me gratefully, before bowing regally and leaving the queue to take a seat, smiling and mumbling all kinds of gibberish to herself out loud. A few minutes later she smiled at me and waved a friendly, grateful goodbye when I glanced over at her with a smile as I headed out the door with my coffee and croissant.
As far as the poor, deluded woman was concerned, she was “the Emperor” [sic] and this all around us in NoMad was her Empire, and the loss of her Emperor’s robe was something terrible that had befallen her, and I really was her wise and helpful cousin who was thankfully able to reassure her that there was nothing to worry about because her robe of office would surely turn up.
This was the world in which she was living, however purely delusory it may have been; and yet it was nonetheless as real to her as your world is to you or my world is to me.
The very point in speaking of “subjective reality” is to emphasize that, in some respects at least, it is every bit as “real” as anything else in objective reality—it’s a bit of the world in which that person lives, even if it’s a wholly or partly delusory or even hallucinated world as a result of their own, accidental or unconsciously motivated mis-mapping.
While that basically delusional world undeniably has a special coherence and seeming intractability of its own, it has more than just this. For even though it may be coloured by phantasy, or may even largely consist of pure phantasy, subjective reality is never merely imagination.
Again it was Freud who taught us that our own subjective reality, the world as experienced by us (which he called “psychic reality”), the world as we rightly or wrongly take it to be, just is ‘our world’, for better or for worse, and is, again, the place where we live and move and have our being, the very context and ground of all that we do. We can any of us only ever live in our own subjective reality, which is a cake-slice, veridical or purely delusory or somewhere in between, of the real objective world “out there.”
And as for our “psychic reality” in Freud’s sense, or “subjective reality” as it’s more usually talked about nowadays outside psychoanalysis, to the extent that our world is delusory or our own experienced past is something of an imagined or confabulated or fabricated past, to the extent, that is, that it is built up out of false and/or fantasized or even entirely delusional premisses, and to the extent that it objectively misconstrues what really, objectively happened to us or what we have truly done or what truly exists, it’s still the only world in which we currently live and have been living.
It is the only world in which we ever can live. And that world will only change either through psychotherapy or as the result of the lucky happenstance of an opportune wake-up call from objective reality.
“We are the product of our thoughts.” Which is why the more distorted, illusory or delusory your view of the world, the harder it is to find your way about without tripping up when you find yourself coming up against obstacles that you weren’t expecting.
For these obstacles or tripwires weren’t represented anywhere in the map implicit in your world, your subjective slice of reality, the territory-as-mapped-by-you.
In much the same way that “to the blind all things are sudden,” so to those with a faulty map or out-of-date sat-nav software, or a distorted or delusory or falsely fabricated view or “map” of their world, there can be sudden, and sometimes very unpleasant surprises.
Just as in the saying that “Man proposes, God disposes,” our tiny cake-slice of subjective reality proposes the paths we might follow and the obstacles with which we have to deal; whereas the far more inclusive, big cake of objective reality disposes. We drive where we think the road is, our subjective patch of road, but if it’s dark and rainy and we’re mistaken, where the road actually is will determine whether or not we end up in the ditch.
And that’s the upshot of all this, which applies far beyond the realms of individual, group, social and political psychology.1
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Maps, Territory, Reality, Strategy and Change
For, as those of you in the business world will have realized by now, today’s post, as its title should have alerted you, is in part actually an article about corporate strategy; and a different way to think about strategy.
It’s a dangerous philosophical temptation—both a personally and commercially dangerous philosophical temptation—to think of the relationship of subjective reality to objective reality along the lines of the relationship between, say, a holiday brochure and the resort it advertises, or the relationship between the cold, shiny, tiny little picture of the sweater on the website, and the much bigger, cozy, fluffy item that arrives from Amazon or Uniqlo, or the relationship between my wishful thinking about what is in the beautifully wrapped parcel that arrives for me in the mail, on the one hand, and the actual present hidden inside.
We are tempted to think that the one (my subjective reality) is merely something in my head, or in a slide-deck or management report—a fantasy, an image or a dream, a perception, guess or opinion, a working hypothesis, and in any case something quite intangible and internal, personal to us and at worst, harmless in itself if we don’t take it as gospel truth, and something that is often helpful, perhaps even indispensable as a guide to our world at best. While at the same time we are tempted to think that the other (objective reality) is an actual solid, determinate, palpable piece of the real external world with which we have to deal, the one (subjective reality) being a picture of the other.
To think like that is to make a terrible error with potentially catastrophic consequences.
It is, as I say, not only a mistake but a dangerous mistake to think that your subjective reality is, at worst, a blurry or distorted picture of objective reality, maybe your best take on it, but certainly on a different level from reality itself. Remember, according to Cake Theory, subjective reality is not a blurry picture of a cake, it’s an actual real-world slice of an actual, real-world cake.
This is the case even if I’m dealing with what is, in truth, an objectively real piece of strawberry cheesecake, and I happen to imagine it or hallucinate it to be chocolate fudge cake—perhaps due to myopia, or due to tasting it with a blindfold on, or under the spell of an hypnotic suggestion, or out of wishful thinking if I’m a chocoholic, or because I haven’t yet undone the red-and-white-striped string on the white cardboard cake box.
It’s also important to remember, as we’ve pointed out many times in the pages of Change, that just because you can objectively verify that things are a certain way, doesn’t mean that that’s a useful way, let alone the only correct way to think about them.
There are bound to be ten thousand other, equally veridical ways to think about those same matters. In fact, there are more ways to veridically construe your situation than the number of stars in the galaxy. And here we’re back to our French balloonist in the field, who really was in a field but so what?
What is more, on an occasion when we happen to know that we can conclusively verify that the way we see something just is the way it objectively is, with the data to “prove” it, if someone then says to us,“I know you see it that way, but it’s not like that at all—it’s just your perception,” we are tempted to assume (are we not?) that the other person must simply be mistaken. And as we saw above when we considered delusive conceptions and false memories, the other person may indeed be mistaken.
Or they may not. We may be the deluded one.
Or neither of us may be deluded but we have selected different slices, one or other or neither of which may be the most useful slice to put on your plate amongst all the things you already have on your plate to deal with.
But even if the other person is definitely mistaken and totally deluded about how things are, never forget that that subjective reality of theirs is the world in which they are meanwhile living—a slice of the objective, real-world territory, but mapped mistakenly rather than correctly—every bit as much as ours is the world in which we are meanwhile living.
And again this is true whether we ourselves are right or wrong about how things are.
And even if our way of seeing things can be objectively validated, the other person’s way may not even be entirely mistaken, but may just be a different subjective selection from the infinitely re-describable objective world.
We both may have something to contribute; or neither of us may have anything of value to contribute because both slices of cake actually suck, at least compared to a better slice we might take instead.
Never forget either, that we ourselves may be objectively correct, once again with the data to prove it, yet, like the unhelpful Englishman in the balloonist fable, we can still be dead wrong about where we stand and what we are dealing with.
A lousy map, a misleading map, is normally worse than no map at all, especially if you’ve got the alternative of taking your bearings from a compass.
Now you can still manage to some extent with a lousy map, an incomplete map, an out-of-date map, or even a fanciful map. You can use a London Underground map or a New York Subway map to walk from one place to another, though it’s not as helpful as a different kind of map, namely a street map.
A company of soldiers during WWII managed to pick their way down a treacherous alpine peak in the dark with only a map to guide them, and when they reached base their astonished commanding officer, impressed how they’d managed to find their way down the mountain in the dark with only a map and some flashlights, exclaimed in horrified astonishment, when they showed them the map they had used, “But this isn’t a map of the Alps at all, it’s a map of the Pyrenees!” But with a bad map, that is with the wrong map, you’re not usually quite so lucky as those soldiers, and sooner or later you’re going to come a cropper.
Where Cake Theory comes in, is to remind us that whether someone’s way of mapping the territory is objectively correct or incorrect, or even downright barmy, it delineates the territory-as-mapped, the world in which they actually live and act, benighted though they may be by their delusions and hallucinations, fabrications, confabulations and screwball narratives. And that someone may just be us.
To reinforce my point, just look at the way companies that were run and advised by highly intelligent people behaved before they collapsed, having utterly mistaken the nature of the environment in which they were in fact operating! Remember the 2008 financial crash, anyone? Or Enron?
But equally, because our subjective reality is the only world in which we or anyone can live, even on those occasions when our way of mapping that slice of the territory may be all present and correct, grounded in an objectively veridical mapping that can be demonstrated objectively to be true, and validated by armies of highly paid management consultants, we may still be benighted, because it’s only one small slice of the infinitely richer objective world, after all.
It’s in that case still darn good cake, veridical cake, nothing wrong with that piece of cake, but it’s only a slice, and maybe totally the wrong slice for our purposes. And there’s always plenty more (veridically mapped) cake to help themselves to! That’s where Cake Theory comes to our rescue.
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Kaleidoscopic Cake
In a Minimalist Intervention session at Interchange, under our ceaseless barrage of questioning, the client’s world is constantly shifting, because she’s mapping the territory differently as she responds to our questions.
And slowly, imperceptibly, invisible to her without the psychic equivalent of time-lapse photography, her bit of the world, her slice of cake, is kaleidoscopically shifting and transforming itself, as the coloured glass shards’ relationship to the kaleidoscope’s mirrors are being shaken by our questions.
But a kind of kaleidoscope is our only humanly possible opening onto reality—we can only see reality through our own kaleidoscope. We cannot, even in principle, ever speak about “the territory” tout court, only about the territory-as-mapped, now one way, now another. We can never leave the realm of description.
There’s the selected glass shards, and then there’s the placement of the mirrors inside the kaleidoscope. But it is we ourselves who have previously selected the shards, we ourselves who had placed the mirrors, we ourselves who are now turning the wheel. There is for us no other world. No other reality. Except of course there is—we just need to access it.
So from now on, remember that the world is not only your oyster, it’s also your cake. Keep slicing! That’s where we all tend to get stuck, when we stop slicing. I may be staring at my cake saying, I don’t like this cake. There’s no icing on it, no blueberries in it, no chocolate. But there’s an infinity of other cake for the taking.
And if your friends or clients are complaining that they are starving because they have no bread, well then, let them eat cake! Or stomp all over the slice of cake they’re complaining about, wipe your shoes on the mat (avoiding the cat in case it is, after all, really on the mat this time), and offer them a different slice of cake in its place.2
We talked last time about the phenomenon, in Minimalist Intervention, of amnesia for the problem once it’s been solved, once the epiphany occurs and the previously imperceptible has become obvious. So while we probe and mess around with the client’s tacit assumptions and so forth, while we’re busy doing what we do, the client is looking at their kaleidoscopically shifting slice of cake, what the client thinks she has on her plate. And lo and behold, even though it is constantly shifting kaleidoscopically as we probe with our questions, as we can see from where we ourselves are sitting, yet as far as our client’s concerned it’s still the same piece of cake, because it’s identified by her only as—and she only knows it as—“this piece of cake on my plate.”
Again, Cake Theory also provides us with a metaphor accounting for the constantly changing (as it seems to us) nature of what the client “has on her plate” as an MI session proceeds, while the client only can advert to her assembly as “the cake I’ve got on my plate” and so she doesn’t notice, hardly can notice, that it’s now an altogether different slice—one that is now, pun intended, after all “a piece of cake” by the time our session draws to a close. Hence the amnesia.
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The Fragility of Fact
To recap a rather long account with all its twists and turns:
Cake Theory is summarized in the statement that in our new epistemology E2, the client’s (or yours or mine or anyone’s) subjective reality, to the extent and only to the extent that it is veridical, that is, objectively, truthfully and accurately mapping the real world, that subjective reality, is a real, objective, physical, edible slice of an infinitely larger cake, an actual portion of objective reality, situated right out there in the world and we act within that world; as opposed to the 500-year-old E1 epistemological conception of subjective reality being like a distorted, blurry (unreal) mere photograph of some real cake existing somewhere else, “out there”: objective reality.
In Cake Theory, in E2, subjective and objective reality are, again, “on all fours” as Gilbert Ryle would put it. Just as much on all fours as “the cat is on the mat” when that’s true and “the cat is not on the map” when that’s false.
It’s just that subjective reality is only a small, limited, but otherwise perfectly objective slice of an infinitely bigger cake, and there’s always more cake out there, though you just need to know where to go to find it, or better yet, how to go and find yourself some cake more suited to your taste.
Subjective reality is but a cake slice, that is, an objectively veridical and demonstrably real (but so what?) slice of objective reality—but there’s a whole universe out there of potentially available cake, also objectively real, which may be more useful and relevant, and that’s what you are looking for.
So Cake Theory is about the nature of reality, accounting for the client’s (and armies of management consultants’ and business-school types’) understandable insistence that the thing on their client’s plate—and what patently needs to be done to it to make it palatable or nutritious, or edible at all—are all very real, objective, measurable and demonstrable.
And of course they are! Indeed it’s a real pea and a real mountain and these are the best-in-class techniques available for pushing the pea up the side of the mountain with your nose, right to the peak,—no better way to do that has ever yet been devised. But is that really what you should be doing in the first place?
In the human realm, even the constraints we are trying to lift as we transform patterns across the board, in the ways we have discussed throughout the pages of Change, are only part of a narrative.
All narratives are false, because reality is not narrative in structure, even though we humans tend to think in stories. We impose our narratives on a world that can never be compassed by any narratives of any kind.
When Muriel Rukeyser says that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” she is still right of course, but reality, the universe, is the interference pattern produced by the intersection of myriad narratives, not a single one of them strictly true—the truth and nothing but the truth perhaps, but never the whole truth. Nothing can ever be the whole truth.
Not all narratives are equally false, of course, as we’ve seen, some are nearer than others to throwing light on things, but we always have a choice; we needn’t have our hands tied by the constraints that appear to obtain when seen from within our conscious or unconscious narrative within which we happen haplessly to be operating.
So even the constraints themselves are only limiting, only ‘restrictive’, to the extent that they are ignored, denied, misunderstood or insufficiently or unintelligently incorporated into the designs of our interventions in the world.
For given the nature of human purposes and their infinite plasticity and logically indeterminate character, even these constraints can, through intelligent, creative action, be rendered of no account, transparent to our ultimately omnipotent will.
What’s more, we can slice the cake differently, and design the intervention with respect to a different selection of constraints altogether. There are always more and different ways to slice the cake. When you can only slice the cake one way, you’re doomed to failure.
There is a difference, of course, indeed all the difference in the world, between constraints that are the client’s own—just pieces of the client’s narrative that we can safely ignore—on the one hand, and the constraints we are actually trying to find in an MI session. This is where some of the filtering goes on that we have referred to in so many previous articles here in Change.
In MI, as in other areas of science, as our questions come to be progressively clarified and refined over time, so will even our genuinely ‘final’ explanations (as they truly were at the time we arrived at them) themselves be revealed to have been defeasible after all, with revised questions leading to the discernment of previously unrecognized constraints more pertinent to our precise but previously comparatively ill-framed concerns.
This is the fragility of fact. Once we change the question, and thus the context, the validity of the prior answer may evaporate along with its relevance. Facts are objectively true in one context with respect to one question, but that’s not to say they are still true once we change the question.
Never content yourself with the facts being the facts. Never let yourself be palmed off with mere facts just because they happen to be facts. For your purposes, they need to be precisely the facts that are relevant to precisely what it is you are wanting and needing to know right now. And that depends critically on how you slice the cake.
© Copyright 2021, 2024 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
For those of our readers who are in the psychotherapy field and/or who are primarily interested in the psychological and psychiatric aspects of change, the issues discussed in the above section I discuss in greater depth and at much greater length in “The Pageantry of the Mind,” published in 2013 by the Aalto University Press and available online: http://systemsintelligence.aalto.fi/elamanfilosofi/Wilk_ThePageantryOfTheMind.pdf
I’m reminded here of the psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell’s well-known characterization of neurosis as a failure of imagination.
can i have some coffee with my slice of cake?