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9. Managing in a Complex World

How To Invent (Almost) Anything > 9. Managing in a Complex World

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If you are only creatively inventing a solution for the kitchen or garden then taking into account your deeper motives or those of others may not be important. But if you are really aim to invent something significant for others, then it is probably worth investing time to look deeply at all the kinds of human factors that may affect not only how you are deriving and developing your ideas, but also how you communicate with and convince others of the value of your inventiveness. If people are going to back you, work with you, support you or simply not resist you then you need to understand your ideas from the outside and the inside. This chapter should help you do this.

The world is a big and complex place and it is remarkable how much sense we are able to make of it. But with our deep needs to understand and explain, coupled with our marvellous patterning brain, we learn to encode the complexities of the outer world into a form by which we are able to understand and hence control our environment.

Fig. 9.1 gives a simple picture (the ‘SIFT’ model) of how we interact with the world that will be explained further in this chapter. The basic cycle is that we create meaning from what our senses tell us. From this, we build an understanding, however imperfect, of how the world works and from this create goals that will help us meet our deep needs that were described in Chapter 8. We then act in ways that we hope will get us closer to achieving our goals. The cycle then starts again, sensing and interpreting how effective our actions were, making corrections and trying again.

However, there is ‘many a slip twixt cup and lip’ and, as we shall see, we make many such slips during the contortions that we go through in order to create meaning out of the sensory bombardment we receive every moment of the day.

Fig. 9.1 The SIFT model of interacting with the world

Sections in this chapter are:

• 9.1. Sensing
  • 9.1.1. Sensing: Uneven Senses
  • 9.1.2. Sensing: The Zoom Lens
  • 9.1.3. Sensing: Attentive Creativity
• 9.2. Inferring Meaning
  • 9.2.1 Inferring: Classification
  • 9.2.2. Inferring: Comparing Interests
  • 9.2.3. Inferring: Comparing With the Future
  • 9.2.4. Inferring: Judging

• 9.3. Deep Thinking

  • 9.3.1 Thinking: The Inner World
  • 9.3.2. Thinking: A Constructed Reality
  • 9.3.3. Thinking: The Emotional State
  • 9.3.4. Thinking: Multiple Personalities
  • 9.3.5. Thinking: Assumptions and Beliefs
  • 9.3.6. Thinking: Values
  • 9.3.7. Thinking: Attitudes
• 9.4. Inner Space
• 9.5. Formulating Intent
  • 9.5.1. Formulating: The Refinement Loop
  • 9.5.2. Formulating: Short-cutting
  • 9.5.3. Formulating: Creating Alternatives
  • 9.5.4. Formulating: Selecting the Best Course of Action
• 9.6. Translating Intent Into Action
  • 9.6.1. Translating: Intent Bias
  • 9.6.2. Words, Music and Dance
• 9.7. Invention 'So What?'

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