A vision and a hallucinationfour days beforeTalking with one of my colleagues, we found this simple lens. We…Intentionality and meaning

How to get trapped2022As the first step, you must be aware of the fact that…So far, I’ve been talking about intention as a fairly straightforward, singular thing. I have an intention, you have an intention, the bunny has the intention, and so on. As you probably suspected all along, this is at best a gross simplification of “spherical cow” proportions. I am pretty sure I can’t describe the full complexity of what’s actually happening. But here’s a story that tries.

Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…Mental models2022I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured…We live in a world teeming with intentions. We are surrounded by them, we are in them, and they are within us. Intentions permeate us. Many (most?) of these intentions are not easily visible to us. When I was discussing mental models, I used this image of a massively multi-process computer, which might come in handy here. Imagine that our consciousness is a lone terminal connected to this computer. This terminal can only track a tiny fraction of the intentions at a time. Most of them exist in the background, without our awareness.

Stakes2022Why is it that we are attached more to some intentions and…OODA and Intention2021The ability to make predictions is an astounding quality of retained-mode systems.…It would be nice if our intentions operated on some unified model of “what is” and “what ought to be”. But no, turns out that is way too much to ask of a good old human brain. Since mental models are diverse and inconsistent, they produce a dizzying array of intentions pointing in all different directions, creating tensions and friction amongst each other.

Limits2022The third limit is obvious and I am surprised I haven’t noticed…The System of Self2019Existential Fears form the same pairwise polarities, the Existential Struggles, laid over…Touching infinity2022As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately…Sometimes we feel intense suffering of two internal intentions being at odds with one another — and it may take years to recognize that the conflict was entirely due to mental model inconsistency. We may even recognize with sadness that the intentions that caused us so much suffering were one and the same, just viewed through the lenses of two mutually inconsistent mental models. Worse yet, a particularly severe tension might trigger adversarial adaptation within ourselves, where two intentions form entire conflicting parts of us locked in a battle. Through this lens, bad habits and addiction are bits of the infinity-problem sprinkled onto us.

A problem2022To get a more solid grounding of the newly born decision-making framework,…The OODA inside2021Because of the way we humans are wired, the expectation gradient is…Understanding2022Once the notion of a problem is sufficiently semantically disambiguated, we can…Life of a solution2022Looking at the framework in the previous piece, I am noticing that…It’s like we are these cauldrons of intention stew, spiced with infinity. In this stew, intentionality is the practice of observing our own intentions, orienting them in relation to another, and deciding to act on some and not others. This description might trip something in your memory: these are the steps of the OODA loop, known also as the solution loop. And if there’s a solution loop, then there’s definitely a problem lurking about. What is this problem that the practice of intentionality aims to solve? Why would we want to understand our own intentions?

Letting My Purpose Find Me2019In my own clock, I spoke metaphorically about learning to listen to…It is my guess that the problem behind the practice of intentionality is the problem of meaning. This is a big leap, and I am in a thoroughly uncertain territory here. I am definitely intimidated by the largesse of the topic I am gingerly stepping into. Yet, it seems useful to imagine that the more our internal intentions are aligned with one another, the more meaningful our lives feel to us. Conversely, when intentions within us are less aligned, we experience loss of meaning. Put differently, a sense of meaning in our lives is proportional to how well we can navigate the multitude of our internal intentions.

Being Strategic2022It all begins with intention. There’s something in our environment – the…If we believe this, the crisis of meaning that many adults encounter in the second half of their lives might not be due to the lack of intentions, but rather due to their overabundance. If I lived long enough, I would have accumulated a great cache of mental models over the years. And if I didn’t practice intentionality, that would necessarily leave me with a boiling soup of intentions. The sense of being lost and without purpose emerges from every single intention seemingly conflicting with another, like a giant ball of spaghetti. What is up with all the food metaphors? I guess it’s spaghetti soup now.

Model compression and us2022I wonder if the nadir of the hero’s journey is marked by…A Classroom for Humanity2019To gain more insights around these questions, I’ve been looking into the…Model compression2022At the end of each journey in our process of understanding, we…Building on that, if I imagine an environment where compressed mental models are abundant and easily accessible, the crisis of meaning might be something that arrives much sooner than middle age – and becomes much more pervasive. Rapid acquisition of mental models without accompanying intentionality seems like a recipe for disaster. In the age where knowledge is so easily acquired, teaching intentionality becomes paramount.

Polarity of intention, structure, and capacity2022I keep coming back to the post from last year, where I…Triggered, intentional, and spontaneous coherence2021I’ve been chatting about organizational coherence with a few folks, and this…The challenge of coherence2021Part of my work involves spotting challenges across teams within Google. Over…Organizational cartographythree days after, links hereMy sense is that the artifact will be a map of sorts,…If I click the zoom level up from individuals to organizations, I can see how the same applies to organizations. The challenges of coherence that manifest in large, mature organizations might be the result of an overabundance of individual intentions (teams, sub-teams, people, etc.) that do not add up to a single intention that brings the organization together. It is that intention that can only emerge through a rigorous practice of intentionality – both within the organization and individuals that comprise it. We can call this practice by many different names – be that self-reflection, mindfulness, or strategic thinking – but one thing seems fairly certain: without mastering it, we end up in a crisis of meaning.