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Catalyzing Conscious Leadership
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"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars."
Les Brown
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Decisions, Decisions
Anna Muoio interviewed 11 decisive leaders about decision making in an article for Fast Company in October 1998. One of those she interviewed was W. Brian Arthur. Brian's answer is here below. To read the whole article go to Fast Compny's article location, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/18/one.html
W. Brian Arthur
Citibank Professor
Santa Fe Institute
Santa Fe, New Mexico
I received my PhD in operations research, which is a highly scientific, mathematical way of strategizing and of making decisions. I once thought that I could make any decision, whether professional or personal, by using decision trees, game theory, and optimization. Over time, I've changed my mind. For the day-to-day work of running a business - scheduling a fleet of oil tankers, choosing where to open a new factory - scientific decision theory works pretty well. But for just about every other kind of decision, it doesn't work at all.
For the big decisions in life, you need to reach a deeper region of consciousness. Making decisions then becomes not so much about "deciding" as about letting an inner wisdom emerge. We've been bamboozled into believing that cognition is rational - that our mind is a gigantic computer, or a blackboard on which we can reach a decision by calculating pluses and minuses. Recent research on cognition shows that our minds rarely make strictly logical deductions. Instead, we rely on patterns - and on feelings associated with those patterns.
So for those big decisions - Should I marry this person? Should I follow that career? Should I sell my company? When should we go public? - let patterns develop in your mind. Let clues and evidence emerge from your environment. This approach to decision making requires time, patience, and another key ingredient: courage. It takes courage to listen to your inner wisdom. But once you hear that wisdom, making a decision becomes fairly easy.
W. Brian Arthur's work on the economics of increasing returns and their role in technology-based industries has won him international recognition in the scientific and business communities. He is a pioneer of the new science of complexity and the author of The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II ( Addison-Wesley, 1997 ).
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Rúnora, LLC. Conscious Leadership Consulting
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