“To its credit, the Catholic Church did formally acknowledge that it had badly mistreated Galileo Galilei, and that it had made a grave mistake when it forced him to recant, under threat of death, his belief that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. And it said so in a formal proclamation – in 1983.” (1)

An idea is by definition dangerous. It is dangerous because if it is worthy of its name it threatens the status quo. When new ideas are introduced into the board room or in fact any part of the organisation they are tried by the three principles of skilled unawareness: consensus, self-censure and compromise these are in turn held in place through fear, uncertainty and doubt, an emotional mechanism which hamstrings an organisation’s ability to function.

Skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion is the emotional matrix of afflictive emotions which holds Blind Vision in place. What we discover is that any information, conversation or action which threatens the status quo is ejected both privately in our own mental decision-making processes and socially in group/team processes. This is what Aries de Guess calls the organisation’s auto immune system.

The organisation rejects new information and skilfully seals it-self back up in its protective cocoon of convergence. It is also very important to understand that skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion runs across an organisation’s network of clients, advisors, and key stakeholders. This means that the generally accepted rules that define successful outcomes across Strategy, Communication and Performance are channelled into a set of internal tramlines that lead to commoditisation. The organisation’s collective awareness operates on blind, skilfully maintaining convergent thinking and emotions, whilst convinced that their strategic intention is otherwise.

Good management and good communication are bad for business. Designing Emotion, that is transforming this learned incapacity, the emotional and cognitive pre-established patterns that keep organisations and individuals in orbit around the status quo, is a pre requisite for creating great ideas.

1) Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organisations Intelligence in action, Amacom, 2003 p125.

As the global economy flattens out the advantage of externally-based strategies, corporations are switching to approaches which maximize creativity and innovation to provide new streams of economic growth. Yet the business world is trapped by a set of Cartesian principles which closed the door on the mind 300 hundred years ago and then bricked it up. In what has to be the biggest own goal of western knowledge, it subordinated imagination in favour of reason, a feat of mental conjuring which has ensured that science has little to contribute on the question of what it means to be human. The science of first-person experience, of living, creating, dying, emotion, and meaning has been relegated to the bookshops’ self-help section. Whilst the humanist response can be said to be rightly justified in planning a prison break from the machine/computer view of the world, it still remains in a state of logical paralysis, having failed to provide the tools and techniques to escape to the outside world.

The business of innovation is the business of knowledge, not the knowledge of business. The reference point for creativity is the actualizing of human potential through a process of self-inquiry, self-investigation and self-observation. We have to lift the car bonnet on our Self to discover the logic behind our habits of fixing experience with labels. Innovation and creativity are the result of skills which transform pre-established patterns of thinking, talking and acting. In order to compete in an economy based on ideas, business leaders need to design and implement a new science of the mind located in lived experience and based on logical principles, which provides people with the tools and techniques to help grow and fulfil their potential. Not knowing that experience is organized by labels is like being a physicist who thinks the world is flat. Business leaders need to understand that ignoring this factor will ensure that their organizational immune system will contain a logic which will continue to reject new ideas. Without a deep understanding of this principle, good management and good communication will be bad for business.