Beauty Beyond Reason – Just a Thought

Ever wonder why we are literally buried in information today, but it does not seem to reduce uncertainty or resolve our differences? In fact, our obsession with polls, employee surveys and all forms of data gathering coupled with reasoned and logic driven analysis and debate seems to amplify those differences, increase our uncertainty and breakdown civil discourse. The Front Porch Revolution was offered as a path out of this paralyzing condition that unfortunately describes the state of our nation and, too often, our organizations and personal relationships. We have habits of perspective and thought to break – this is the core of our leader work.

Einstein warned us that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Every time I think about this quote, I am reminded ot the Chinese finger traps we played with as children. We place a finger in one end of a woven tube and a second finger in the other end. To escape the trap it seems natural to pull, but when we do the tube just tightens its grip on our fingers. But even as we feel this grip tightening and realize our escape strategy is not working, we continue to pull because it is what we know how to do and it is what we have always done. I remember showing this finger trap example to a president of an AT&T business unit when he broke out in laughter. When I asked him about his reaction, he said his executive team was pulling so hard to escape this trap that they had lost blood circulation in their fingers.

To escape the finger trap, what I eventually called the Bradbury trap, we need new eyes that invite a new level of thinking. Continuing to pull will never let us see that letting go and giving into the trap is the path to escape. A change in perspective is needed, not more information generated in support of our pulling experience. That change involves shifting vision from our busyness to the front porch. Pulling, metaphorically, I called manager work. It is like tuning the center control on binoculars to clarify vision once the choice has been made about where to point the binoculars. Tuning is an intellectual experience that involves pulling out unnecessary information in the form of assumptions to facilitate the application of reason and logic in decision making. The objective is a common sense of truth, an objective truth, that leads to a decision and action.

Letting go and giving into the finger trap is analogous to stepping out of our busyness and onto the front porch. I called this leader work. It is about where to point the binoculars that sets the context for the fine tuning with the center control. If you look at the current state of our country, the hate and acrimony in the political conversations and how difficult it is for organizations to change, it seems obvious we are not getting our leader work done. In the book I suggested that this reality looked like a diverse group of people seeking common music, but getting trapped and disillusioned in the noise of their individual notes. That music is on the front porch, but our search for it has been in our busyness. We pull when we need to push and let go. We try to manage when we need to lead. Choosing where to point the binoculars requires new eyes and a new level of thinking. We used the following quotes in our programs to make this point —

“We can not solve our problems at the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

The pull attraction lures us into the trap because it is focused on achieving an objective intellectual truth that we never seem to find. As a result our intellectual differences get amplified the harder we try to resolve them. If we are sounding like individual notes in our busyness, then playing these notes together in dialogue on the front porch is the source of the music we seek. This music lies hidden in the space between our individual notes that emerges in relationships that are deeply damaged in our current reality. The most profound implication here is that there is no truth in music, but there is beauty. What if we shift our objective from truth to beauty? What if beauty, an aesthetic consciousness, attracts our attention to where we point the binoculars in the first place? What if this attraction is more about what our favorite color is as opposed to the results of a research study? Does it make sense to debate our color preferences? The idea here is that beauty exists beyond reason. To push or lead our way out of the trap we would have let go of our belief in an objective truth and give into the beauty of our possible music? I think this quote captures the essence of this proposition —

“What finally is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies between things.” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The reason we invited artists, musicians and poets into our dialogues is because they speak the language of beauty, not truth. There is no truth in a beautiful sunset or in a beautiful painting, piece of music or poem. In contrast to the discursive language of our intellectual exchanges, the expressive language of beauty fully accepts the legitimacy of the subjective eye of the beholder. If we are going to come together in the pursuit of the music of our best possibility as a nation, organization, neighborhood or family, then it makes sense to start that journey on the front porch, not in our busyness. This is why we often started our dialogues by drawing our situations or viewing those situations though mandalas, poems or injecting energy into our words through singing. The way we typically meet in our busyness invites us to pull, and pull harder when that fails. It is an invitation to insanity that is exhausting, leading to unnecessary stress and burn out.

There is an intriguing idea presented in this post that is challenging and takes time to fully appreciate. The idea is that intellectual understanding of the limits of our intellect gives us new eyes as a basis for a new level of thinking. This presents a philosophical dilemma that accepts paradox as reality. What if we can find what we want and need by just being present with this paradox and not trying to resolve it? There is a spiritual freedom to be had by just letting go of the belief in an objective perfect right answer to anything we face and being present with questions that have no answers. Ultimately it is the things we cannot grasp with our minds that count the most in leading a meaningful and purposeful life. I propose we change the language in our founding documents from the “pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, to simply the “pursuit of beauty.”

I do not want to leave you with what you might initially perceive as an esoteric perspective that has no grounding in real experience. In an article “What Steve Jobs Taught Us About Beauty” Darrow Miller tells us —

“Steve Jobs “wasn’t going to make ugly things that made profits.” For Jobs, beauty took precedence over profits. He understood that human beings are wired for beauty. And when we are confronted with the beautiful–in a sunset, a field of spring flowers, the lovely form of a pregnant mother, or, yes, in a computer–we recognize the beauty. And, if we can escape the tyranny of pride for a moment, it touches something in our soul.”

Let me leave you with a final example that I believe viscerally presents the differences between the reasoned, logical and data driven busyness perspective and the front porch beauty perspective. The video link below begins with a graph displaying the distribution of musical notes in a Bach Prelude (please watch it all the way through). Think of those notes as people holding different intellectual view points – maybe data gathered in employee surveys or from polls. Then as we convene the conversation on the front porch, those notes reveal the music that was always present as a possibility, but hidden in the data. Both perspectives exist simultaneously, but which one attracts our initial attention makes all the difference. The graph is not context for the music, but the music is context for the graph. Doesn’t it make sense that the beauty of what we want to be should be the inspiration for how we think about getting there. It just doesn’t work the other way around.