From Understanding to Transforming the Auto-Self

Most of what you have seen up to this point is information and mental mechanisms to get you to understand the absolutely crucial role our automatic activities play in our successes, well-being, and shared positive values. I have used some repetition because besides seeing aspects of 2Selfs Theory, you need to have 2Selfs Worldview embedded in an auto-context to truly understand and use 2Selfs Theory. It is one thing to recognize that we have an auto-self and to understand some of its properties. However, it is quite a different matter to recognize auto-self characteristics, either your own unique ones or ones you share with an affiliated group, so that you have a chance to transform them if they don’t align with your goals. The next section outlines processes to reveal the contents of auto-self characteristics.

Revelations

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Revealing Auto-Context Contents:

Opacity: We all suffer an enormous handicap when we want to understand the profile of the many aspects of our auto-self characteristics. As you have seen several times, auto-self activities are both elusive and illusive. That is, unlike for our transparent thinking-self-based explicit knowledge and intentions, most of our auto-self characteristics are opaque to us.

• Auto-Behaviors: The surprising thing here is that we do not recognize most of our auto-behaviors including those activities we habitually fail to enact in a timely manner and those actions we take that bother other people. It is surprising because other people readily notice our counterproductive or dysfunctional auto-behaviors and often experience them painfully.

• Auto-Contexts: This is the emperor of auto-self elusiveness and illusiveness. The two main auto-context classes of worldviews and certainty illusions elude our normal detection – we just cannot look internally and gain direct access to most of them. They are also extremely illusive because we often apply worldviews outside of their domain of effectiveness and by definition certainty illusions can deceive us and certainty delusions do deceive us including in the form of something we deeply believe and experience as “true” that is often disconnected from any realities in the world outside of our mind.

• Auto-Skills: These are the auto-self characteristics that we see best. However, our thinking self plays a very small role and we have no way to look internally to see how skillful we are at some type of activity. We recognize our auto-skills by the results not by direct internal observations.

• Auto-Expertise: We can notice this type of extremely elusive capabilities by their effects, but those possessing them normally do not realize that they have them, don’t even know where their insights come from, and no amount of internal inspection will give visibility to these characteristics.

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Anomalies:

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Expanding Kuhn’s “Anomalies”: We can all gain much better control over our successes, well-being, and positive-values definitions and maintenance if we periodically take stock of our certainties. Thomas Kuhn, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, identified anomalies (or rather the accumulation of anomalies; i.e., outcomes that do not fit predictions of a science theory) as the sign that a science worldview (his paradigm) is reaching the end of its effectiveness. When too many anomalies emerge, that signals the need for a determined search for a new worldview foundation. With 2Selfs Theory, we can now see that Kuhnian anomalies apply not just to science theories but also to the fit of any “in here” auto-context (whether underpinning a theory, an assertion, an assumption, or a belief) with the facts of the world “out there.” It is a good idea (but a difficult challenge) to step back periodically from our certainties and make a judgment regarding the level of anomalies we can (or should) tolerate before we recognize we have a dysfunctional worldview (or certainty illusion or delusion) constructed within our auto-self. You can understand this process of recognizing the accumulation of anomalies by noticing them in the three social segments we have examined in this article. The auto-self has decisive impacts on many aspects of our human activities including our most prominent social segments. I could have chosen from a number of our social systems, but I chose the three specific social segments because the majority of Westerners participate in or are directly affected by them. These three social segments have profound impacts on our successes and well-being, are suffering greatly from our current inability to understand and manage automatic human activities (i.e., the mental world and particularly auto-contexts), and they provide enormous opportunities for a better future for us once we conquer the auto-self. Please pause here! Before examining the examples of anomalies listed below, you can enhance your ability to understand human nature from a Spaceland perspective if you make a concerted effort in trying to identify some anomalies you already can recognize (especially after reading this far) in current business, political, and religion theories, assertions, assumptions, or beliefs.

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Business Anomalies: 

“Sustainable Success” Anomalies: Phil Rosenzweig (The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers) provided us a great service by pointing out fundamental methodological flaws in the “best practices” genre of books that purported to “discover” some specific “practices” that would enable companies to achieve “lasting success.” However, Rosenzweig was operating within the enabling and constraining boundaries of the Thinking-Self (Flatland) Age worldview foundation. We can now see his keen insights differently, and in important respects more powerfully, by viewing many of his observations as anomalies from a “Spaceland” perspective. Rosenzweig states, “Start with In Search of Excellence, draw a line to Built to Last, link it to What Really Works, and then extend it all the way to Good to Great. What pattern do we see when we connect these dots? Each successive study made a bolder set of claims – to have gathered more data, to have consulted more experts, to have been more exhaustive in its research and more thorough in its analysis than the previous studies. Each claimed to boldly go where no research had gone before, to do what had never been done, and to have a greater claim to the truth. By the time we get to the last two, there are grandiose claims about virtual guarantees of success and immutable laws of physics. The one that started it all, Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, seems almost modest by contrast, a quaint throwback to a less pretentious age. But for all their claims of rigor and science, not one of the studies crack the nut at the center of the puzzle. Not one of them recognize the central problem that robs them of validity – namely, that relying on articles from the popular press, on business school case studies, and on retrospective interviews, their data were compromised by the Halo Effect” (p.127). In the 2Selfs Theory terms, growing discomfort at recognizing so-called “soft” success factors and struggling to understand and manage them (including making timely culture changes to accommodate technology and competition disruptions) led massive numbers of otherwise sophisticated business people to fall for the simplistic-solutions promulgated by these “sustainable success” books. Also, the exuberant press reports and grandiose claims by authors eventually constructed the “sustainable success” worldview within a huge number of business people. This worldview continued over decades to support the popularity and widespread embrace of multiple incarnations of “best practices” books because people neglected to recognize an overwhelming number of anomalies in the form of repeated failures to achieve the “guaranteed” successes advertised. We can usefully view much of Rosenzweig’s Halo book as providing us a large number of anomalies to the basic “theory” (or maybe “fantasy” in today’s hyper-changing business environment) of finding a static formula for “sustainable success.”

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Empirical Theory Anomalies:  The empirical theories are much more effective than the “sustainable success” books, which provide not so much theories as lists. I call this set of theories “empirical” because they are based on careful observations about the growing negative effects of auto-self activities. Since they are empirical and not based on a solid, root-cause (i.e., auto-self) foundation, they operate within a Φ2, mentally enabled worldview foundation. Because they (indirectly) address "soft" (i.e., auto-self) success factors, these empirical theories have created great value in managing many previously opaque auto-self issues. Prominent among the auto-self success factors these empirical theories successfully address are culture change (or Deep Change according to Robert E. Quinn), the people process (Execution), tacit knowledge (The Knowledge-Creating Company), and many insights into the currently amorphous concept of leadership. We can recognize anomalies here by the fact that although progress has occurred, we still have many companies failing because they cannot make timely culture changes, and the need for such changes keeps accelerating. Tacit knowledge conflates auto-contexts, auto-expertise, and even auto-behaviors, which makes explaining and managing generic “Flatland” tacit knowledge quite difficult. The authors of the book Execution identify the people process as crucial, but they do not define it well nor explain how to manage it adequately. We still don’t have a clear definition of the distinction between management and leadership or direct, auto-self-based processes to develop leadership. Anomalies are bound to continue arising whenever we use a Φ2 (empirical, mentally enabling) worldview and processes and the problems we must manage keep getting more difficult.

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Structural Anomalies in Business: Businesses are trapped within a whirlwind of disruptive changes from new types of technology, increasingly rapid arrival of new technologies, domestic startups, and growing global competition. As a result, their mission, their value propositions, and their overall strategies will experience increasingly short lifespans. These strategic elements do not just reside on paper or in thinking-self knowledge; they become embedded in the business culture – that is, in the shared auto-contexts of the power brokers of a company. As a result, anomalies in the details of a company’s culture eventually arise because the environment changes to the point where the (auto-context-based) assumptions of the culture no longer align with the realities of the business environment. Unfortunately, this misalignment happens incrementally year by year and increasingly month by month. Fundamental assumptions start becoming slightly misaligned, then they become seriously misaligned, and then inevitably the misalignment of the deep assumptions buried in the company culture and the realities of the business environment become so great that companies descend onto a dysfunctional path of increasing failure. Because the misalignment usually advances incrementally and periodically, it makes the already enormously difficult process of checking for anomalies between our auto-contexts “in here” and the environment “out there” even more difficult. As a result, companies should periodically set aside time to work through a formal assessment of how their business beliefs align with their environment (and indeed go through the difficult process of making explicit the many elements of their business beliefs – culture). You will see below a recommendation for companies to hold annual retreats to reconstruct elements of their culture, and these would be the place to go through the anomalies-evaluation process.

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Politics Anomalies:

Did Duper Don Keep His Promises? One of the very few things that Duper Don is actually good at is constructing auto-contexts. He understands that constant repetition with feelings constructs “truths” in a large number of people. The only way for sober citizens to recognize whether these certainty illusions that he constructs “in here” correspond with facts in the world or are just standalone certainty delusions is to search for correspondence with facts “out there.” Thus, we determine whether Duper Don’s “promises made, promises kept” mantra corresponds with actual reality by checking alignment with facts. “For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, his party enjoyed unified control of Washington. Despite that – and despite Trump’s reelection campaign refrain of “promises made, promises kept” – almost none of his proposed 100-day legislative agenda has seen the light of day, even 1,000 days into his presidency.”* If you look at that article, it indicates that he partially kept one out of his 10 promises. To have a successful future, to escape our Flatland naïveté about such manipulations and ascend to a Spaceland environment where we can test our certainty illusions against facts, we should all start sobering up about anomalies in theories and assertions.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/25/three-years-later-evaluating-laws-trump-said-hed-pass-his-first-days/

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Assessing an Assertion: “Does Grisham [Stephanie Grisham, White House press secretary and communications director] think Trump ever lies? After all, as of Aug. 5 [2019], The Washington Post Fact Checker had documented 12,019 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his presidency. ‘No,’ she responds without hesitation. ‘I don’t think they’re lies. . . . I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with.’”* Maybe she can excuse away some of his massive number of lies as “just kidding,” but even if you get rid of 90% of them (and what a joker and disingenuous communicator that would make him!), he still had over a thousand lies. Duper Don tweets out anomalous assertions almost daily, so it seems that his suite of worldviews does not include one that uses to the correspondence form of truth. Within his manipulative worldview that guides his behavior; aligning his assertions with facts in the world does not even occur to him. It appears he learned well from his early-life mentor, the infamous Roy Cohn, that “truth” is whatever you can construct in other people. As a result, Duper Don lives (and has caused many of his blindly obedient acolytes to live) in a fantasy world of his own constructed “truths.” His chronic lies may not be obvious to many of his followers who live within the constrained “Flatland” worldviews for such topics, but they will become obvious to citizens of 2Selfs Age where we will be able to view such disinformation and Big Lies from a “Spaceland” perspective.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/stephanie-grisham-is-trumps-communications-czar-only-most-people-wouldnt-know-it/2019/08/27/b79656ba-c44b-11e9-b5e4-54aa56d5b7ce_story.html

Religion Anomalies:

I repeat some points you saw previously, in a new anomalies context, and add a few new observations.

Inerrant Bible Anomalies: The book, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, by Kreeft and Tacelli could be renamed Handbook of Biblical-Inerrancy Anomalies because this book indirectly identifies for us a huge set of anomalies for the biblical-inerrancy assertion. Even better, we have an “encyclopedia” of a massive array of inerrant-Bible anomalies in the book, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Gleason Archer. That compendium of biblical-inerrancy anomalies starts the Foreword with, “Dr. Gleason Archer has written this encyclopedia to show that there is nothing in the Bible inconsistent with the claim that it is the inerrant Word of God.” Really? This is a great example of the depth of pretending the West engaged in during our Flatland era. The book goes on to analyze over 400 pages worth of anomalies. It contains an index with 11 double-column pages of “difficulties” (or in terms of what we are assessing here, “anomalies”). Additionally, the book contains over 12 pages of triple-column entries of Bible passages in which the author finds “difficulties.” These books inadvertently make it easy for anyone to locate inerrant-Bible anomalies that careful observers have identified and tried to explain away. Some of the explanations are quite reasonable. However, as the massive number of anomalies suggests, the “biblical inerrancy” assertion succumbs to overwhelming evidence against it. When science theories start encountering anomalies, some workarounds seem plausible and others start to look quite tortured. If a science theory encountered even 1% of the anomalies in the “encyclopedia” above, the science discipline would reject it. Actually, in spite of this recurrent “inerrancy” proclamation, nobody actually uses the entire Bible, at least not literally – they cannot because of too many contradictions, universally rejected stories about the geocentric universe, and negative values (including explicit support of slavery) we have moved past. No matter how inspired some of the writers of the stories of the Bible may have been, at least some of them did not see beyond the views of the universe current at the times they wrote nor transcend many of the specific, highly negative (by our standards) values of their times. Instead of using the whole Bible literally, each individual, group, or religious leader selects specific passages and interprets those passages to serve their purposes, which results in a massive number of metabibles; that is, sectarian stories about what they decide the Bible actually says. Believers create their metabibles by selectively omitting unhelpful passages (including the many specifying a geocentric universe, unsavory values statements that don’t play very well in our current times, and the huge number of verses that contradict other passages). Then they interpret (and sometimes radically plus often quite differently from other metabibles) some of the remaining passages to suit their needs. Metabibles are not a bad thing. They are required to make the Bible relevant to believers in today’s world. However, the huge numbers of different metabibles are also obvious signs of anomalies in the inerrant-Bible assertion.

Creationism Anomalies: When one starts with an ancient (pre-science) story that was trying to make sense of how the universe, earth, life, and humans originated, the number of anomalies will inevitably keep growing. Biblical creationism stories are among many ancient myths about origins.* The Bible opens with two incompatible “origins” versions (Genesis 1:1-2:3 completes “creation” in six days and God (Yahweh) rests on the seventh day; then inexplicably [actually, biblical scholars do explain where and when these two distinct stories likely originated], “Lord God” (Elohim) immediately starts creation all over, this time with a different order and introducing Adam and Eve – Genesis 2:4-2:23). Tortured explanations of why these two ancient origins myths are not incompatible with each other and both with science just add to our list of creationism anomalies. Science keeps discovering ever more details about the physical world, so the number of anomalies inevitably keeps growing. Also, when the public goes to natural-history museums, sees explanations of the formation of features in many national parks, watches TV documentaries on the origins of the universe, the earth, continents, and life (including humans), they should notice the enormous number of anomalies for the biblical creation stories. We also know through many science disciplines including biology (evolution), geology (sedimentary stratification and plate tectonics), physics (radiometric chronologies), and astronomy (independent time measures, including Cepheid variables and redshift), that the biblical creation time frame (based on the many “begats” and other evidence that careful observers have determined places the “origin of everything” about 6000 years ago) is vastly wrong. Creationism probably holds the world’s record for the number of anomalies. Any creationists who have a general interest in learning how to test the correspondence of any of their “in here” certainties with the world “out there” (i.e., outside of their internal auto-context mental states) will never find a better area to practice checking for anomalies than on this topic.

* see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths for a long list

Anomalies in Defining/Maintaining Shared Values: The clergy in the US South well attested to the pro-slavery passages of the Bible when they repeatedly cited and vigorously defended the Bible-based, Christian, moral imperative of slavery, as you saw previously. Additionally, we have been systematically overcoming some of the more brutal Old Testament values including capital punishment for a large variety of activities such as children being disrespectful to their parents (Ex 21:17; Lev 20:9) and working on the Sabbath (Ex 31:14; 35:2; Num 15:32-36). Also, I assume (hope!) most metabibles exclude a straightforward reading of pro-genocide passages (e.g., Joshua 6:21, 10:40; Deut 2:33-34; 1 Samuel 15:2-3). Widespread anomalies also exist regarding the assertion that our shared values are Christian (or religion) based because powerful religious leaders and groups argue forcefully on both sides of all controversial values issues. Also, you saw earlier from the Christianity Today article regarding the moral bankruptcy of Duper Don and the responses from other prominent evangelical leaders that even the large self-identified evangelical Christian community uses widely differing metabibles with respect to values, which displays unmistakable values-anomalies for us. In January 2020, leaders of the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, announced a plan that would split the church, citing “fundamental differences” over same-sex marriage and gay clergy. Apparently, after years of debate and no doubt much prayerful attention, this very large Christian denomination could not reach an agreement on what to put in their metabible regarding gay rights, so they resolved that dilemma by splitting into two new denominations that each have their own metabible regarding gay rights. This is yet another example of a glaring anomaly in the assertion that Christianity provides consistent moral values and another dramatic confirmation of the moral relativism of Christianity as a whole. How much overwhelming evidence does it take to get people to stop pretending that somehow Christianity as a whole currently provides overall moral guidance? Maybe recognizing such obvious anomalies is too much to expect from within our crumbling “Flatland” environment because this is just a specific example of the general deficiency (dysfunction!) where we resort to widespread pretending when we have important problems to solve. On an even broader scale, this is another demonstration that we need discontinuously greater capabilities to manage our automatic activities, which we will acquire when we launch ourselves into our new “Spaceland” worldview foundation.

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Formulating Shared Positive Values: We cannot have a successful, honorable future if we keep willfully ignoring anomalies in many aspects of our lives, including the above anomalies in religious activities. We must stop pretending so much, especially on topics related to success, well-being, and shared positive values! Western societies as a whole should have no valid concern with the other-worldly aspects of the many religious groups. However, we all (other religious sects and secular society) have keen interest in some here-and-now aspects of religions that impact our successes, well-being, and shared positive values. This includes the two major topics we have discussed in this article of constructing antiscience creationism and negative values (and we have much work to do on agreeing what that means) into the auto-contexts of citizens. What is missing and what religious organizations should strive for as they unavoidably leave (either constructively self-ascending or being drug along as happened during the Lineland to Flatland transformation) our Flatland environment and move into our Spaceland foundation is to establish criteria for creating their metabibles. Right now, we have so many metabible versions because we live in a Flatland “roll your own” values environment. A constructive project to embrace as we transform ourselves into 2Selfs Age will be to focus on explicitly identifying positive aspirational values goals (a thinking-self activity). As we reach widespread convergence on specific aspirational values, we can then move to the next phase of constructing them into the auto-contexts of citizens (an auto-self activity). It would be extremely helpful to have religious organizations (and particularly Christianity, which, in its many varying forms, continues to be the dominant religion of the West) to participate actively and constructively in this endeavor. We even should benefit from just having an open, candid discussion regarding the difference between positive and negative aspirational values. As part of that discussion, my 2Selfs Revolution book makes a specific proposal for a criterion to create positive-values metabibles.

With a Little Help from Our Friends:

Opening Up to Candid Feedback – Multi-Rater Surveys: Most people, in spite of considerable positive feedback, become incredulous and often even angry when they receive multi-rater (a.k.a., 360°) feedback that contradicts their own self-image. This is yet another case of the certainty illusion because a major part of our self-image resides in an auto-context. We normally do not notice most of our auto-self characteristics because we execute them automatically without any thinking-self intentions. However, those around us notice and experience many of our auto-self activities. Instead of getting all worked up over the negative aspects of multi-rater feedback, people will do well to leverage the feedback that aligns with their (often previously at least partially implicit) self-image and accept feedback that does not align with their self-image as anomalies to the worldview they maintain about their auto-self characteristics. Normally when we find anomalies in our “in here” worldviews, we need to go through an auto-context reconstruction process to align it with realities “out there.” However, for our self-image, we can have some control over the “out there” realities (i.e., our auto-behaviors that others see and experience), so we often want to reconstruct our auto-behavior characteristics that don’t align with our self-image (if it is a positive, aspirational one). The opposite situation also occurs. Sometimes multi-rater feedback indicates that those who know a person find her or him to have auto-self characteristics that show much better attributes than that person’s self-image. The anomalies in this case indicate that the person’s self-image is too anemic, so an auto-context reconstruction to a more positive self-image should occur; this will reset the self-image and lay the foundation for still greater achievement by the person.

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Getting Past the Elusiveness and Illusiveness of Auto-Contexts: Auto-context reconstructions share with auto-behavior reconstructions barriers to success based on the Comfort Imperative, which creates a level of discomfort that normally causes people to stop the process before they produce enduring results. However, auto-context reconstructions have a massive additional problem that normally blocks people from even attempting the uncomfortable reconstruction activity. By now, you should understand this barrier well. We don’t have easy access to the contents of our auto-contexts. Additionally, the foggy process we have causes us to experience our auto-contexts as “certain,” “true,” “obvious,” or “the way things are.” As such, we not only don’t want to challenge them; we deeply want not to investigate and challenge them. The following experience of a client of mine should help you understand this difficulty.

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How Auto-Contexts Appear to Us: Shared auto-contexts form the basis of cultures that both enable and disable critical business factors such as the mission of a business, and they control our professional norms. While I was conducting a four-session workshop for top management of a company on making commitments and holding people accountable for their commitments, I was leading the audience through how auto-contexts operate. One of the participants, Chris, who was the director of one of the design functions, got an “ah ha” moment and he courageously shared it with us. He said that an intern came to him some time ago to ask him why they used a specific process. Chris said he explained to the intern, “That is how we do it here.” When the intern asked him again later, Chris reported being annoyed and telling him, “That’s just the way we do it, stop worrying about it, and get on with your assignment.” The intern had the courage to come back a third time; this time he told Chris that he realized he was just an intern but that he was there to learn and he just could not figure out why they used the process the way they did. He said that he would appreciate it if Chris would take the time to explain it to him. Chris reported that finally out of frustration he decided to sit down with the intern and explain it to him so that the intern will get off his back. This is where Chris bravely revealed to the assembled group of his peers and his boss his astonishment to realize he could not explain it at all. He said it was obvious to him that the current process was the correct one to use, but when he examined it closely, he couldn’t explain why. Chris finally figured out that he had probably learned the process when he started with the company many years earlier and just accepted it without question. When Chris finally made his hidden assumptions explicit, he was able to analyze them with the intern and realize that although the process did work, or else they would have noticed a problem with results, it wasn’t optimum and a better process was available. Chris said that learning about auto-contexts enabled him to understand what happened to him because when it occurred he was dumbstruck about it. I was able to use Chris’s gutsy disclosure to help others at the workshop understand that auto-contexts, and particularly shared auto-contexts in the form of professional worldviews or organizational cultures, are hidden assumptions and beliefs that appear to us as the way things “really are” or as “the way we do it.” Chris’s story also helped the participants understand that once we can make our hidden assumptions explicit, we have the opportunity to test them and reconstruct them if needed. A general principle we can draw from this encounter is that we should all actively challenge each other’s hidden assumptions (even the deepest “certainties”), and we need to do our best to pay attention and bravely examine our own assumptions when others challenge them or ask for explanations. 

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Growing Up! The biggest part of growing up from Flatland to Spaceland problem solvers and explicit positive-values constructors and maintainers is learning to manage our elusive and illusive auto-contexts. To do that, we must make them visible to us and find ways to determine whether they correspond with realities in the world outside of our minds. You have just seen some paths toward revealing the contents of our auto-contexts in the form of searching for anomalies for theories and assumptions that seem obviously “true,” being open to multi-rater feedback, and challenging each other’s basic assumptions. We cannot have a successful future unless we achieve many supraevolutionary ascents, including at the top level for the West. Most people are complacent in the Flatland environment, but we are no longer struggling through a slow demise but rather are in the process of crashing into the Manipulation Age. The only way we can resurrect the greatness of the West is to learn to explicitly recognize, comprehensively understand, and systematically manage automatic human activities. Symbolically, we need to ascend to Spaceland where we can clearly see and effectively manage many of the shadowy foibles and deceptive dysfunctions of our Flatland existence.

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Transformations

The previous segment gave an overview of how we gain access to some of our auto-self characteristics so we can determine whether they align with our needs. Now, we segue to a brief overview of how we go about transforming undesired or downright dysfunctional auto-self characteristics.

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The Transformation Process:

We Must Finally Ascend to an Adult Level of Problem Solving (and Positive-Values Definition and Maintenance): It is time to put on our big-boy and big-girl pants and learn to become adult problem solvers – stop pretending; stop settling for shadowy metaphors and partial views of auto-self activities; stop trying to use simplistic solutions to solve increasingly complex problems in our rapidly changing social world. The key here is to focus our amazing thinking-self powers to verify or negate correspondence of our beliefs, deepest assumptions, and auto-contexts-based certainty illusions (and delusions!) with facts in the world outside of our mind as best we can determine them through straightforward analysis.

2Selfs Theory vs. 2Selfs Worldview:2Selfs Theory has many elements that are understandable and improvement processes we can apply from within the Thinking-Self Age (Flatland) worldview foundation, many of which you have seen in this article. 2Selfs Worldview, which provides the auto-context foundation to clearly visualize, robustly understand, and effectively manage the auto-self, is a 2Selfs (Spaceland) Age concept that is extremely difficult to understand from within the “Flatland” worldview foundation. Auto-context management will even create challenges when we all reach “Spaceland” because we will always struggle to see the contents of our auto-contexts (including our worldviews and certainty illusions); we will mainly recognize them by the effects they produce – but only if we learn how to look, as you just saw above. That elusive and illusive opacity is debilitating from within our “Flatland” foundation; it will be challenging but achievable within our “Spaceland” foundation, not only for auto-contexts but also for other types of auto-self activities (especially auto-expertise).

Overcoming Auto-Self Barriers to Success: Most of this article to this point has focused on overcoming the elusive and illusive nature of the auto-self so we can understand the decisive role it is playing in the demise of the greatness of the West and the opportunity it provides to resurrect the West’s greatness. We particularly focused on understanding auto-behaviors (the ramifications of the Comfort Imperative) and auto-contexts (the ramifications of worldviews and certainty illusions). That is the necessary opening bid to get into the game of managing our auto-self as well as we have long managed our thinking-self. As if understanding the auto-self is not difficult enough, we must also find ways to transform crucial aspects of auto-self activities when they do not align with our success, well-being, and positive-values needs. Just as understanding auto-self activities requires a different “Spaceland” worldview than the “Flatland” perspective for understanding thinking-self activities, so also does improving auto-self activities require different types of processes than those used for improving thinking-self activities. Improving our thinking-self capabilities requires acquiring knowledge, and we normally do that explicitly so we recognize when we do it. Also, while amassing sufficient knowledge to become effective problem solvers can be tedious, it does not usually create discomfort that blocks our progress. Improving our auto-self management capabilities requires very different types of processes, and these often do create considerable discomfort in addition to being elusive and illusive. I now provide you a very brief overview of the challenges we will face as we learn to manage our auto-self to make discontinuous improvements in our successes, well-being, and positive-values selection and maintenance.

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Transforming Auto-Behaviors:

Unfair Fights: Discomfort blocks auto-behavior (and auto-context) reconstructions. These auto-self reconstructions fail due to an unfair fight because auto-self-driven discomfort eventually overwhelms thinking-self intentions to transform. Since we will lose most unfair fights, and since we have a huge and growing need to transform auto-self characteristics, we must create a different way to attack this problem. That different way is to create feelings that counteract the auto-self-driven feelings that block our needed auto-self transformations.

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The Counteracting Principle: Rather than repeatedly failing to make our desired auto-self reconstructions due to these unfair fights, we need to learn to fight fire with fire. That is, we need to use our thinking-self intentions to construct feelings that counteract the negative feelings associated with auto-behavior and auto-context reconstructions. This unfair fight is a major reason why most self-help attempts to transform our auto-self characteristics fail. It doesn’t matter how helpful the self-help processes may look, auto-self-based discomforts generally grind down our best intentions and even our strongest willpower when we try to change ourselves at the auto-self level (especially when attempting to reconstruct auto-behaviors and auto-contexts, which our technology-driven social changes will increasingly require). We can try to create counteracting processes on our own, and that will enable us to reconstruct a larger percentage of auto-self characteristics than just pitting thinking-self intentions against auto-self discomforts. However, to reconstruct auto-behaviors (and auto-contexts) that stand in our way of repeated successes, we normally will need external help from time to time from transformation coaches. In 2Selfs Age, smaller organizations will probably need to rely on external providers. Larger organizations should have their own internal coaching capabilities but may need to rely on external service providers to bootstrap their internal capabilities. Because the West, including its businesses, has been viewing coaching through the Flatland lens, it has been difficult to understand clearly the distinction between types of coaching that focus on the thinking-self and those that focus on the auto-self. You can understand that distinction and some of the nuances of coaching for auto-self transformations from a Spaceland perspective here.

Reliable 2Selfs Path to Incorporating Innovations

I titled the last section “Reconstructing Auto-Behaviors,” so you might expect me to title this section “Reconstructing Auto-Contexts.” However, as you now know, auto-contexts are massively complex, elusive, and illusive, so I will just give an example in one domain here. The 2Selfs Revolution book discusses possibilities for how multi-discipline activities in universities can help drive the auto-context reconstruction process. I expect that as 2Selfs Theory takes hold and 2Selfs Worldview spreads throughout Western societies, that many investigators will create additional auto-context reconstruction processes for their own domains.

The Status Quo Is Not What It Used To Be: 2Selfs Theory provides systematic techniques to avoid a major cause of company failures – the innovation deathtrap – by transforming obsolete auto-contexts in the form of a company culture. The status quo (a Flatland concept) will never again be what it used to be because now a reliable, systematic (Spaceland) process exists to disrupt a fossilized company culture. Successful companies no longer need to succumb to the innovation deathtrap as Kodak and so many other once-great companies have done because they did not have a reliable Φ3 process to infuse revolutionary innovations repeatedly into the organization’s culture. Depending on the size of your company, these 2Selfs Theory culture-reconstruction processes can be worth millions or even billions of dollars to your company if you understand them and employ them periodically to escape the innovation deathtrap that buries so many companies with long histories of success. Evolutionary innovations, generally in the form of new products using existing technologies aimed at current markets for a company, do not invite our attention here because they do not require a shift in the company culture (shared auto-contexts), which is the underlying killer of innovations. Companies don’t fail for lack of these evolutionary innovations; smart people produce a steady stream of those and companies easily incorporate them into their existing culture. The challenge is to incorporate revolutionary innovations because that requires overcoming “culture lock” or the “status quo,” which is the cause of innovation deathtraps. Revolutionary innovations must pass through three stages to achieve success:

1. Create (imagine, invent) the innovation

2. Recognize the importance and potential of the innovation

3. Relentlessly drive innovation to success achievement (the culture change process)

Stage 1 of Realizing Innovation Benefits – Creation:

Identifying Revolutionary Innovations Is Not the Biggest Problem: Stage 1 may seem like the most difficult part of the innovation process because somebody needs to invent something that is discontinuously new to the company, but it is actually the easiest part. Companies always have internal entrepreneurs who are searching for new ways to make money for their company. These people may be new to the company and therefore not yet constrained by the culture. They may be people who read technical articles, go to technical conferences, or find a way to tinker with new ideas. They may be members of a dedicated internal research group or “skunk works” where people are allowed to work on innovative projects while flying under the radar of budget cutters. I cannot think of a single instance of a company failure where there were not people inside the company who clearly saw the threats and opportunities, and had innovative solutions to address them.

Stage 2 of Realizing Innovation Benefits – Recognition:

Automatic Rejection of Revolutionary Innovations: Busy leaders are consumed focusing on meeting deadlines, achieving their numbers, attending endless meetings to reconcile issues, handling operations issues, and dealing with the occasional personnel problems that they usually do not have time or interest to pay attention to mavericks in an organization who propose radical new ideas. Leaders are quick to embrace incremental improvements to the business they run. However, present them with innovations that are outside of their ability to understand (i.e., outside of their current auto-contexts as embedded in the company culture) and they will normally dismiss them and maybe even punish the innovator for wasting time on such nonsense that doesn’t fit the company mold.

Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreats: For the vast majority of readers, this will be the first time you had an explicit understanding of the underlying cause of the innovation deathtrap and therefore the first time you will have had the opportunity to use explicit processes to make your company repeatedly and discontinuously innovative. An excellent mechanism to escape innovation deathtraps is to turn the annual strategy formation activity into something that produces valuable results. Instead of a normal pro forma strategy creation exercise often driven by a staff person that produces a wonderful binder that goes on bookshelves to gather dust for the next year, you can use the annual gathering of top management to make a crucial, perhaps life and death for your company, difference. The real value of an annual strategic planning retreat does not come from identifying incremental improvements; each operating unit and functional area is capable of doing that on their own. An annual retreat of top management can serve an enormously useful function if it focuses on searching out revolutionary innovative ideas and product concepts within the company and using potent processes to ensure that the best ones get turned into new profit streams for the business. Most companies fail to recognize that transformational change is the best purpose of a strategy planning retreat, and if they do recognize that, they fail to execute it effectively (because they have not explicitly understood the blocking power and resurrecting possibilities of auto-contexts). Accordingly, identifying these annual gatherings as Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreats can focus on the real deep purpose. As stated previously, these retreats are also a great opportunity, as part of preparing to reconstruct obsolete cultural elements, to focus on the elusive and illusive process of searching out anomalies between the company culture and the business environment.

Secret Sauce: With what you have already learned, what are the underlying sources of the barrier to a culture reconstruction, and which principle from 2Selfs Theory do we need to apply to create the culture reconstructions that will enable innovative new products to flourish? Now I will give you an outline of my recipe for the “secret sauce” of how to turn normally impotent annual strategy retreats into a systematic process for creating the birth of discontinuously new products and profit streams based on internal disruptive innovations. We know that it is very difficult to take innovative concepts through the process of making them new profit streams in established companies. The first barrier is the moat that surrounds the fortress of the status quo in the form of the certainty illusion. That barrier is so formidable that people rarely have any interest in trying to cross it. If company leaders somehow build a bridge over the seemingly impassible certainty-illusion moat, they then run smack into a giant gate that seems impenetrable in the form of the unfair fight associated with encountering the Comfort Imperative when attempting to reconstruct a key element of the company culture. This is where we need auto-context-focused Φ3 processes because most people seem to believe, at least implicitly, that this is a thinking-self activity. However, you now understand well that the Comfort Imperative is involved, which leads to an unfair fight that normally causes discontinuous product innovations to fail. To reconstruct the culture (shared auto-contexts) to enable the successful launching of innovative new products, we need to employ the counteracting principle, just as we do when we need to reconstruct auto-behaviors.

Employing the Counteracting Principle: Avoiding the innovation deathtrap is not primarily an intellectual exercise. As by now you know well, the auto-self is the main culprit through certainty illusion (and delusion) self-deceptions and the Comfort Imperative. Therefore, to create a reliable formula for repeatedly escaping innovation deathtraps, we need to find ways to reveal and challenge our certainty illusions and overcome the feelings that block reconstructing a culture. As part of that, we must induce counteracting feelings in order to achieve success. The person who creates an innovation will normally not be the one who can lead the charge to turn it into a new business for her or his company. Force (yes, no voting or avoiding) every senior manager who has the privilege of attending the Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreat to sponsor at least one internal innovation. Each senior leader will be responsible for working with internal innovators to make the business case for why a specific product idea will provide benefits to the corporation and how to make that happen. The entrepreneurs will present their innovation at the Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreat with strong support from one or more sponsoring executive. The participants at the retreat rate executives, using secret ballots, on how well they support the entrepreneur and on the business case they make for the innovation. You should now recognize that we are using the counteracting principle to compel leaders to support innovations. Each executive will feel significant discomfort if they fail to make a credible business case, in front of the CEO and their peers, for the discontinuous innovation they sponsor. They also will feel great pleasure if the business case they sponsored receives a high rating by the participants at the Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreat.

Surfacing Revolutionary Innovations: Many mechanisms exist to surface innovations that entrepreneurs are nurturing within a company. One obvious mechanism is to have the internal entrepreneurs submit their innovations for consideration prior to the annual retreat in a form that will entice executives to sponsor them. Another mechanism to surface internal innovations and sign-up sponsors is to have a meeting well in advance (1/2 year works great if all candidate innovations can be handled in one session, otherwise multiple sessions would be required) of the Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreat. These sessions provide entrepreneurs the opportunity to present their innovations and the executives can discuss each one, and they have the obligation to sign up as sponsors for one or more new product concept. At the end of the Annual Culture Reconstruction Retreat that follows the Stage 2 process, it will become obvious to the CEO and senior staff exactly where the company has its major vulnerabilities and opportunities.

Stage 3 of Realizing Innovation Benefits – Culture Reconstruction:

Executive Ownership of Selected Innovations: After entrepreneurs have identified potential discontinuously new products, services, or processes and the executive team has rank-ordered them in terms of business potential, the next challenge is to get the company to do something about it. By the end of the Culture Reconstruction Retreat, the executive team led by the CEO and CFO needs to determine how many new initiatives the company can afford or must find a way to launch. Once that is accomplished, the next stage is to assign a senior manager to have the responsibility to launch each new business. That leader could be one of the sponsors of the innovation at the retreat, but it may fit better with another executive’s business. The important thing is that the CEO must select an executive and he or she must be held accountable for the success of the new initiative. The process requires reconstructing part of the company’s culture, so it will require a strong leader, and rewards and career setbacks must be associated with the success or failure of launching the new business. The leader has to be “all in” because the culture reconstruction process is almost always difficult.

Stop Trying to “Wing” It: It does not matter how smart you are, how much knowledge you have, or how forceful your personality is, you suffer from the certainty illusion and the Comfort Imperative just as everyone else does. The important point is to follow processes, including those identified in the Revelations section above, plus those that others will create, to reveal the contents of auto-contexts and use the counteracting principle as effective paths to overcome the innovation deathtrap. This innovation-deathtrap failure mechanism is unfortunately an inherent byproduct the human mind where successes automatically construct certainty illusions that sow the seeds of failure by inoculating organization cultures against future disruptive innovations. The certainty illusion dupes us all and the Comfort Imperative repels all of us. You now know how to reveal the tenaciously hidden and deceptive auto-contexts contents and how to create counteracting processes to overcome the innovation deathtrap – use them!

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