Francisco Varela in conversation with the Dalai Lama at a Mind Life Conference said “This idea – that people vary in their abilities as observers of their own experience – may seem completely obvious to you, Your Holiness, but you will be surprised how non-evident, almost revolutionary it is among researchers in the West. Everybody knows that you have to train to be a sportsman, or a musician, or a mathematician. But when it comes to observing one’s experience, it as if there is nothing to learn – it’s just there. You cannot underestimate the degree to which there is a culture of blindness about this”.

Unless we understand “the way we think” then it is the very process of this way of “thinking” which remains the obstacle to achieving our goals. The issue is that our attention is trapped by content (Blind Vision), and we have no awareness of the processes that shape and structure the content. In other words, the blind spot in business is not the “What” or the “How” but the Who?

To create change, business leaders need to come face to face with the question of WHO they are. This is the cultivation and development of Howard Gardner’s 9th intelligence, existential intelligence: “Existential thinking… entails the human capacity to pose and ponder the biggest questions: who are we? Why are we here? What is going to happen to us? Why do we die? What is it all about, in the end?” The root cause of the blind spot, not exploring this WHO, is that our cultural model of scientific objectivity outlaws personal exploration and transformation.

Organisations need to escape the cultural prohibitions of a learning method that traps individuals from investigating their own experience. We need to concentrate on developing skilled observation (Designing Vision) of the labels and objects within experience. Discovering who we are, our vision, and living our dream will become the new role of corporations of the future.