Reconstructing Auto-Contexts (Switching Paradigms):
Like Crossing the Chasm Between Pinnacles

Topic highlights:  

▪ Visualize Auto-Contexts as "Pinnacles"   

▪ Counterintuitive Impacts of Auto-Contexts 

▪ Our Current Performance-Improvement Pinnacle Teeters on the Brink 

▪ Reaching the Pinnacle of Performance Improvement

▪ Cross the Performance-Improvement Chasm to a Solid Pinnacle 

▪ Structure of the New Performance-Improvement Pinnacle 

▪ Redefining the Pinnacle of Performance 

▪ If You Don't like the Way Things Are, Use Your Mind for a Change

Contextual Pinnacles don't describe what we know;
they enable and constrain what we are able to know.

Visualize Auto-Contexts as "Pinnacles"

To distinguish between two meanings, we use "Pinnacle" (with capital P) to represent an enabling and constraining auto-context. We use "pinnacle" when we mean peak or paramount. Hence, crossing the chasm to the new performance-improvement Pinnacle will enable you to reach the pinnacle of performance.

Each Pinnacle represents one of our auto-contexts. Our thinking-self can roam freely on the surface of a contextual Pinnacle. Hence, it can understand and process topics within the confines of the relevant auto-context as represented by the boundaries of the top of the Pinnacle. If the foundation of a Pinnacle starts to crumble, we uncontrollably attempt to prop it up because the Pinnacle we currently occupy appears to us not as a constructed reality but as the reality about topics it covers. It provides the contextual foundation that frames how we perceive and conceive within its boundaries. When we finally realize a Pinnacle has destabilized beyond repair, we can't just mosey off to another spot on the same Pinnacle. We must leap to another Pinnacle where we can now move around freely on a new surface with new boundaries that handles all the issues the old Pinnacle did plus the issues it could not manage. We need to become much better at recognizing when a contextual Pinnacle becomes untenable so we can cross the chasm to another, more effective, Pinnacle. Making this leap allows us to manage important issues that we were unable to deal with effectively in our obsolete auto-context.

Counterintuitive Impacts of Auto-Contexts

Here is an example of how our implicit assumptions about the mind frames the way we think. I had my naive implicit assumption of a single-level, uniform mind suddenly shattered when I was 11 years old. While at a Saturday matinee at our local theater, a newsreel between the double features presented a clip about Niels Bohr, who had received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the structure of the atom. The commentator lamented that Bohr never made any other breakthrough discoveries after his initial surge in his youth. The commentator went on to generalize about how puzzling and unfortunate it was that most great works occur when people are young and that they never repeat their innovative flair as they get older. I was dumbfounded even at my young age. How could it be possible that as people accumulate new knowledge and acquire more experience they also become less innovative? The commentator made a correct observation, but he could not explain it. From the perspective of our bipartite model of the mind, we now understand why this happens and how to overcome this apparent obstacle to continued success. Successes create Pinnacles in scientific discovery and in business. These Pinnacles provide a solid framework for continued incremental successes. But, they also inherently limit breakout successes. Bohr's discovery created a new Pinnacle, which he proudly occupied. He made incremental improvements within that Pinnacle, but he could not construct another Pinnacle so he did not create any new earthshaking advances. That is why younger people or people switching fields who are not yet entrapped on the top of the current professional Pinnacle are best able to construct a new Pinnacle.

After successes, companies commonly fall into the same trap. Because of the nature of auto-contexts, successes sow the seeds of future failure by constructing a "success" Pinnacle that prevents most companies from crossing the chasm to a new business-model Pinnacle when the business environment changes, which usually leads to failure. This is often why boards bring in new CEOs. The new CEO may not be smarter and probably has less knowledge of the business than the former CEO has, but the new CEO is not trapped on the cultural Pinnacle and can envision an alternative Pinnacle and lead the company to cross the chasm to it. The same culture-lock is happening today with performance improvement. People and organizations that fail to cross the chasm to a performance-improvement Pinnacle that explicitly handles automatic human activities will increasingly become laggards in the drive for sustained success.

We will now use the "Pinnacle" metaphor to create better visibility to new possibilities for improving performance. The Pinnacle concept provides better insight into auto-contexts (paradigms), which play a key role in determining success.

Our Current Performance-Improvement Pinnacle Teeters

In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn identified the "accumulation of anomalies" within an existing paradigm as the signal that we need to switch paradigms. More mundanely, when too many important topics become unexplainable and unmanageable, we need to create a new framework for dealing effectively with these previously unmanaged or inadequately managed topics while continuing to handle those topics addressed from within the boundaries of the old Pinnacle.

A couple of historical examples will illustrate how contextual Pinnacles become untenable, requiring us to replace them. We will then identify why the current Pinnacle that supports human aspects of business success has become unstable.

In the mid-16th century, the predominant belief was that the Sun and planets orbited the Earth. The ability to make increasingly precise measurements revealed problems with the geocentric model, requiring so many adjustments and readjustments to accommodate the new data that the model degenerated into absurd complexity. The Pinnacle that supported the geocentric view of the universe began to crumble and finally collapsed when Nicolaus Copernicus overcame the escalating complexity by challenging the geocentric assumption. He described the motions of bodies in our Solar System more simply by assuming the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of our Solar System. For Copernicus's contemporaries, this was not simply an intellectual alternative. From atop their cosmology Pinnacle, they could not imagine the Earth was not the center of the universe, as it appeared to the casual observer and was believed "always, everywhere, and by all." Life moved much slower then, so it took several generations to complete the construction of the new Pinnacle on which the West now bases its understanding of our Solar System.

A similar Pinnacle collapse took place toward the end of the 19th century regarding the age of the Earth. The existing Pinnacle of that era held that the Earth was about 6000 years old. However, in multiple places around the world, geologists started noticing similar sedimentary layers. They also observed how long it took to create these layers. Finally, so many issues arose that the young-earth Pinnacle could not accommodate (anomalies), that the Pinnacle became unstable and eventually collapsed. It was necessary to cross the chasm to a new Pinnacle that assumes the Earth is very old. Today, the concepts of an old Earth and heliocentric (Sun centered) Solar System do not cause angst. We have these auto-contexts constructed in us in our youth. This shows thatbeing different isn't the problem;becoming different is. Using our metaphor, occupying a different Pinnacle isn't the issue; crossing the chasm to a new Pinnacle creates discomfort in the form of reality vertigo, so we involuntarily avoid making the leap no matter how great the peril. That is true for crossing self-image chasms, which are specific to each person. It is often painfully true with business cultures, which are shared auto-contexts. It has been true with crossing the performance-improvement chasm, which is the challenge we face now if we are to move systematically to higher levels of performance.

Reaching the Pinnacle of Performance Improvement

Our current shared auto-context about human performance has destabilized beyond repair. We need to cross the chasm to the Pinnacle of success that has the assumption of a bipartite mind as the foundation, the auto-self as the new surface on which the thinking-self can roam, the properties of the auto-self as the map of the new terrain, and the transformation techniques built upon these properties as the tools to reconfigure the surface of the new Pinnacle. There is no way to get to the new Pinnacle comfortably or incrementally. The current and new Pinnacles are two different structures with distinct foundations and two different, incompatible, surfaces that define the boundaries of what our thinking-self can understand or even conceive. No stability exists between the Pinnacles, and we need stable auto-contexts to make sense of our world. Changing the performance-improvement auto-context requires a singular event. We can't maintain two incompatible assumptions at the same time, such as that the mind is both uniform and bipartite, just as we can't simultaneously assume that the Solar System is both geocentric and heliocentric. We must manage our fears and cross the chasm to the new Pinnacle to maximize performance and sustain success.

Decades ago, Kuhn understood auto-contexts, which he called "paradigms." He packaged his vision in terms of scientific innovation, but his insight was into the inner workings of the auto-context part of the mind. Unfortunately, while his development created new insights for many people, it never became a paradigm itself, especially in the business community. Kuhn was a philosopher of science, so his insights were descriptive and focused on revolutionary scientific innovation. I am a business executive turned performance theorist and transformational coach, so my insights are prescriptive and aimed at the specific target of improving business-related performance. I created the Pinnacle metaphor for auto-contexts to provide better insights into the isolation of competing auto-contexts and the difficulty of switching between them. Hopefully, this makes the gap between alternative auto-contexts easier to visualize than Kuhn's "incommensurability" between competing paradigms. Crossing the chasm to a new contextual Pinnacle should also make it easier to visualize than what we discussed elsewhere as "recontextualizing."

Cross the Performance-Improvement Chasm to a Solid Pinnacle

Dysfunctional behaviors and inadequate execution that companies tolerated in the past become unbearable burdens when we must face widening global competition and increasing economic stresses. Also, we no longer can maintain most of our auto-contexts throughout our careers because business and professional environments now change too rapidly.

How do we overcome these new structural obstacles to success? The first challenge is to recognize that the current performance-improvement Pinnacle has destabilized beyond repair and to brace ourselves for the heroic leap to cross the chasm to a new Pinnacle. However, before we leap, we face a second challenge. Because the current performance-improvement Pinnacle increasingly fails to meet business needs, people have constructed many new success Pinnacles in varying attempts to handle the automatic side of human performance. These candidates for the new performance-improvement Pinnacle include some pragmatic ones, seemingly endless self-help programs, many theories built on mystical quicksand such as mental energy waves, and other forms of simplistic solutions.

Although alternative Pinnacles always appear foggy from the existing Pinnacle, we still must look before we leap. We will encounter devastating trouble if we jump to a Pinnacle that does not have a solid foundation. The recontextualization process creates such discomfort that we don't want to end up on another ineffective Pinnacle. Most proposed alternative success Pinnacles do not adequately solve current performance improvement anomalies, so we should reject them as the successor to our current Pinnacle. However, humans have a built-in mechanism that causes us to reject reflexively all alternative Pinnacles. We do it with our self-image, we do it with our business culture, and we do it with our attitudes. Most people are doing it now with their auto-context that frames their understanding of peak performance and performance improvement. This results in uncontrollably defending an obsolete success model. To counteract the Comfort Imperative, which causes us to resist crossing an auto-context chasm, we must feel the penalties of our failure to improve performance adequately with our current performance-improvement Pinnacle and the rewards available with the new Pinnacle.

Sam is the VP of operations for the East Coast software services company. He had the wisdom and fortitude to conduct leadership performance surveys, and he identified flaws in some members of his team that he wanted to improve. However, he was not getting the results he wanted, as he explains: "At first, my HR Director, Rachel, and I gave each of my direct reports constructive face-to-face feedback and asked them to improve their identified deficiencies. A few of them successfully made some minor improvements. After a few months, we decided to send three of them to 'charm school,' but too many performance issues remained. As my frustration grew, I started getting more aggressive with some of my direct reports. I felt like they were just being obstinate and refusing to make the needed changes. I was determined to improve our overall performance so we could gain a competitive advantage, but my anger kept rising as some members of my team just refused to change. We were reaching a crisis stage when Rachel and I finally agreed that I wasn't going to beat these guys into submission. I was creating resentment instead of the improvements I wanted to see. In searching for a better way to improve their performance, Rachel learned about the 'bipartite' model of the mind. When she told me about it, I asked her, 'bi-what' mind? Things weren't going so poorly that we had to result to psychological mumbo-jumbo about the mind."

As normally happens when we encounter a concept that is foreign to our current contextual Pinnacle, Sam recoiled from Rachel's suggestion that he consider assuming a second part of the mind controls the behaviors he was trying to change. After a struggle, Sam ended up taking the path of least discomfort, as he discusses. "I seemed to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. I didn't want to start thinking about how the mind works, but I also wasn't making progress on fixing some important performance issues and I was butting heads with some crucial team members. Something had to give. The thought occurred to me that maybe I needed to change also. Rachel made the effort to understand the second, automatic part of the mind. Once she understood it, she drove me through enough of the details for me to get the point. The existence of this second, robot-like part of the mind became a much-needed revelation to me. I finally understood why people who did so many things well also did other things so poorly. And, I finally realized they weren't just refusing to change – they didn't know how to change. Frankly, I don't want to know much about the mind. However, it helps me to understand the existence of the involuntary mode of activity and to know there are people I can count on who do understand it well enough to help our key leaders change." Rachel ended up sending three people to leadership development workshops to improve some leadership skills, and we coached two of them to overcome some behavioral issues. Rachel crossed the bipartite-mind divide, and then she helped Sam across so they could effect the improvements he sought. Now they are in a much better position to maximize performance in the future.

The accumulation of success factors that the current performance-improvement Pinnacle cannot support has undermined its foundations beyond repair. We need to occupy a new success Pinnacle with a more solid foundation. Our new performance-improvement Pinnacle taps a rich auto-self mother lode – the veins of which wend through previously hidden strata of human activities. Significant performance improvements are there for mining. However, we must remain vigilant to avoid the many proposed performance-improvement Pinnacles that only provide mystical fool's gold.

Structure of the New Performance-Improvement Pinnacle

We are now in a position to provide stark side-by-side comparisons of the current performance-improvement Pinnacle that yields only faint glimpses of automatic human activities and the new success Pinnacle that explicitly recognizes, methodically describes, and systematically manages the auto-self.

As you can see from this evidence, the new auto-context for framing how we improve performance provides overwhelming advantages over our current performance-improvement Pinnacle, which lives on due to the inherent persistence of auto-contexts in spite of increasing and irreversible inadequacies.

Redefining the Pinnacle of Performance

There is something fundamentally different about the new performance-improvement Pinnacle. Part of this new Pinnacle is that we must contextualize what auto-contexts, or Pinnacles, mean. (In technical terms, it is a meta-Pinnacle – a Pinnacle about Pinnacles as opposed to, for example, a Pinnacle about cosmology or evolution).

Reaching a new contextual Pinnacle does not just make us think differently; we contextualize differently. The new lens through which we visualize and interpret a topic becomes different. It appears to us as a new way that things "really are." For the new performance-improvement Pinnacle, the goal is not to think that we may have dual natures and the auto-self may exist. The goal is to interpret performance excellence and performance improvement through the new lens of the bipartite mind and the auto-self in action. That is, we must use the new context explicitly until it automatically and imperceptibly migrates to a new auto-context, such that it governs how we perceive the human aspects of success.

The bipartite-mind theory of performance excellence and improvement reveals the fundamental mechanisms that control many previously elusive aspects of success. It addresses behavior excesses, execution deficiencies, skills development, and the nature of expertise. In addition, it creates a new Pinnacle that describes the nature of Pinnacles and how to manage them for sustained success. The following table outlines the advantages the new bipartite-mind Pinnacle offers over the uniform-mind Pinnacle with respect to managing auto-contexts.

Pinnacle Management from the New Performance-Improvement Pinnacle

We need to move the struggle from defending and patching the current obsolete performance-improvement Pinnacle to evaluating candidates for replacement. Trapped within the current contextual Pinnacle (theory, mental model, paradigm, auto-context, "box"), people lack the ability to ask the crucial question, "Does the current performance-improvement Pinnacle still make sense?" Individuals and organizations can reach a new pinnacle of performance once the culture of the organization crosses the chasm to the new performance-improvement Pinnacle that enables explicit management of the auto-self. The current performance-improvement Pinnacle constricts management of the automatic aspects of human performance to a trickling stream. Our new Pinnacle opens the floodgates that will unleash a raging river of new performance improvement techniques and results.

If You Don't Like the Way Things Are,

Use Your Mind for a Change

Many people will continue to occupy their obsolete performance-improvement Pinnacle that ignores our dual natures, refuses to consider how the mind works, claims feelings don't have any place in business, and scoffs at the so-called "soft" success factors. However, as leaders struggling against the tide contextualize the bipartite model of the mind, they will enjoy a competitive advantage.

We are at a new frontier that will open vast new opportunities as soon as we pass through it. Cultures have crossed many contextual chasms before, only previously they did not realize that's what they were doing. Any contextual Pinnacle that provides the basis of business performance improvement, including handling the "anomalies" with the existing Pinnacle, must address constructing new Pinnacles and crossing the chasm to new Pinnacles, which our new theory does. Now we have the opportunity to manage auto-context chasm crossings instead of having them happen to us. Ancient civilizations believed that deities controlled "natural phenomena" at their whims. We now occupy a scientific Pinnacle that enables us to model and control much of the physical world. Once the West crossed the chasm to the scientific Pinnacle, we benefited enormously. We face the same empowering opportunity now for understanding and managing human performance. Most people implicitly believe that we have a uniform mind. A colleague of mine once tried to redirect my effort when he asserted, "business executives will not discuss the mind." Really? Successful leaders have at least an implicit model of the mind that they use to handle "soft" success factors. They recognize something elusive exists, but they don't understand it well and many manage it by the seat-of-the-pants. How can we expect people in organizations to achieve at the peak of their potential if their leaders don't understand the underlying mental mechanisms that control crucial aspects of performance? Those who cross the chasm to the new performance-improvement Pinnacle will enjoy a competitive advantage due to maximized performance.

Future generations will comfortably embrace a reality world where assuming dual natures and the auto-self feels natural just as we comfortably embrace science and enjoy the many benefits it provides. The challenge for the current generation of businesspeople is to cross the chasm to the new contextual Pinnacle to achieve peak performance as a key factor in achieving and maintaining success.

This web page focused on the nature and mechanics of auto-contexts, used the Pinnacle metaphor as the way to visualize auto-contexts, and employed performance improvement as the central illustrative example. The next web page focuses on the bipartite model of the mind and lays out compelling arguments for why we must abandon the uniform-mind model and accept the bipartite theory of performance improvement. It uses examples from the business literature to demonstrate the necessity of crossing the chasm to the new performance improvement pinnacle. The pinnacle (peak) of human performance awaits those who cross the chasm to the new Pinnacle (auto-context) of understanding and managing dual human natures and the auto-self.

Pay attention to the clarion call to cross the performance-improvement chasm.