An Objective Mind

Being objective means having an open mind to gain the insight and foresight of circumstances, being learning agile to shape the new thinking box and being positive to push the world forward, not backward.

Organizations and the world become over-complex and uncertain, business leaders and digital professionals have to do self-reflection by pondering: “Can I make decisions effectively & objectively; how to make the judgment without bias”? or “shall I step out of my ‘box’"?  How can you know when you are operating in a box, and what steps can you take to get out of it? Perhaps a corollary question might be, "Why would you want to get outside your box?" These questions sound innocent and easy enough to address, but the more you think about them, the more intriguing they become.

Understanding the filters that influence one’s unconscious biases is critical to the choice you make or the life you live. Once you express the opinion and make choices, you make your biases known. In life, you reach a point when you have your own mind and from there choose what and who shapes you. Choice means freedom. Beliefs, emotional state, expectation, and focus are four major filters that change the way you experience reality. It is not possible to experience life unfiltered, your minds are not built to absorb the unfiltered raw data the five senses gather. The best you can do is to be consciously aware that data is filtered and do your best to make sure your filters support thriving. While this is true of many because experiences create automatic programming that occurs below the level of conscious thought--where biases impact the way you think and feel, so an objective mind will consciously aware such bias and proactively "reprogram" the thought process.

Experience and programming do form your minds but also your choices. More often experience dictates the way you confront a situation; it is only when you make a conscious effort (out of the box thinking) that you deliberately change to new ‘programming’ process. This adds to the experience and if done deliberately over a period of time, the experience guides you to react that way. To begin with such “out-of-the-box” thinking, let's define what is "in a box": You are in a box when you are imposing some kind of walls or barriers that contain you and prevent the freedom to do things that would enrich your life in some way. With that broad definition, every person is in some kind of a box every day of his or her life, however, some with growth mind can break down the old box, and shape the new or bigger box; whereas others with static mind continue to stick into the same old box which is the bias coming from.

You need to judge situations with a conscious bias to the greater good for all those affected. Collect and assess the variables for the decision without bias. But make decisions as a leader with biased consideration for the predominant perspective of the largest populous the decision will impact. It is possible to deliberately adjust the programming of the automatic processes so that the biases increase one's ability to achieve their potential and reduce their negative impact. But, when you get back to it, deliberate acts to reprogram the automatic processes so that they serve one better results in creating experiences (even if those experiences are only in one’s minds) that result in the new programming of the automatic processes. The challenge is objectivity doesn't just spawn from the "in one’s mind" place. It is actually a power greater than the mind and something impossible to accomplish in one’s thought only, it is embedded in the collective mind which is culture or the whole ecosystem of the things.

Being objective is the next step in our human evolution and is very simple but not easy to accomplish. Some say objectivity is a bias in itself in that it regards all variables at face value without emotion. The fact is, more often, when the decisions made only by easy logical choices...but would have a significant negative effect if made without regard to emotional, social, or situational variables that pure objectivity would ignore...Still, fundamentally, being objective means the open mind to gain the insight and foresight of circumstances, being learning agile to shape the new thinking box and being positive to push the business and the world forward, not backward.

Posted in: Decision Making,Digital Balance,Future of Leadership,Mindshift