An American businessman was visiting a Mexican coastal village and
encountered a fisherman on the dock. He had just unloaded his stash of tuna for
the day, and the businessman asked him how long it took him to catch them.
The fisherman said, “Just a little while.”
The businessman then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more, to
which the fisherman responded he didn’t need more. He had caught enough for his
family’s needs.
“But what do you do now, with all the rest of your time?” asked the
businessman.
“I take a nap, I play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, and
I walk to the village in the evening, sip a little wine, and play music with my
friends,” said the fisherman.
The American scoffed. “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should
spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the
proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy a fleet of boats and open your own
cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would
need to leave this small village and move to Mexico City, then Los Angeles, and
eventually New York, where you would run your expanding enterprise.”
When the fisherman asked how long all that would take, the businessman said,
“Fifteen to twenty years. And then you could sell your company stock to the
public and become a millionaire.”
“But what then?” asked the fisherman.
“Then you could retire, move to a coastal fishing village, fish a little, nap
a lot, play with your kids, enjoy time with your wife, and go to the village at
night to play music with your friends.”
This is an example of how our assumptions tumble out of us, beckoned or not. We
enter into a situation, assess it from our own personal worldview, and
generously offer suggestions for improvement that were never invited in the
first place. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes: “Mental models are
deeply ingrained assumptions that influence how we understand the world and how
we take action. We do not “have” mental models. We “are” our mental models…The
discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the mirror inward;
learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the
surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.”
(Phillips, Jan, 'The Art of Original Thinking – The Making of a Thought Leader')
http://www.janphillips.com/downloads/ArtofOriginalThinking.pdf
Marsha:
I see "mental models" very close to "static patterns of value". The last
sentence in the above also sets forward a working solution. It is not to
merely accept the thoughts flowing through our consciousness as 'real' or
'true', (whether that be a "creative self", "the pragmatic theory of truth" or
"truth is an idea which represents experience beautifully"). That's the NAIVE
reality accepted by human beings that Lila points to in Chapter 14. I'll take
holding static pattens of value as hypothetical (supposed but not neccesarily
real or true) any day of the week, rather than be one that would act
destructively to prove their world-view to be the "correct one" and use foece
to have everyone else accept it. It's analogy, boys, merely analogy; you do
not hold some objective truth. You talk about the MoQ's new conception of
truth, yet defend it like it is absolute.
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