Unlocking the Unconscious: Unlearning & Transformative Leadership (Part 1)

This week’s newsletter brings a brand new episode of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast, featuring Nippin Anand.

This extensive interview (in two parts) with Nippin explores his transformation from a master mariner to a risk management and decision-making consultant, emphasizing the power of unlearning and the importance of intuition over purely rational thought. Nippin advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to understanding human behavior and organizational dynamics, highlighting how actions are shaped unconsciously through shared symbols, metaphors, and narratives.

He introduces somatic mapping as a method to surface these unconscious elements and foster shared understanding within organizations, contrasting this with traditional, often ineffective, blame-focused approaches to incidents.

Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android).

The podcast episode is also available here for free:

I had the immense pleasure of diving deep with Nippin Anand, whose journey from master mariner to a leading consultant in risk management and decision-making is nothing short of fascinating. Nippin's unique multidisciplinary approach, drawing from social sciences, anthropology, and cognitive psychology, offers profound insights into how we learn, unlearn, and make decisions – insights incredibly pertinent for technology practitioners, executives, and entrepreneurs to develop a new lens to view their own organizations.

Our conversation went into a wide range of topics cutting across multiple disciplines. In the first part, Nippin starts with his personal experience that eventually led him to research social sciences and anthropology, shifting his perspective from objective truths to the power of narratives in understanding events. This is very much aligned with my philosophy of not blaming humans for cybersecurity incidents.

Let’s dive in…

Nippin's transformative journey began after an unfortunate near-miss at sea where the narrative framed him as the sole cause. This personal crisis led him to research and academia in 2006, where he pursued a PhD in social sciences and anthropology at Cardiff University.

He realized that unlike the engineering and tech. world, which often presents an "objective truth," life is lived in "narratives” and stories, even accident stories, can be told in many different ways, with every perspective holding importance. This realization sparked his interest in anthropology and culture, leading him to the popular anthropological phrase: "making the familiar strange and the strange familiar". For the past 19 years, he has been deeply engaged in this process.

One of Nippin's most captivating fascinations is the ‘power of unlearning’. He observes that people find it incredibly difficult to "let go of things that no longer work for you," including old beliefs, worldviews, operating systems, language, and habits.

So, why is unlearning so hard, especially for leaders? Nippin explained that a professional's past experience and profession offer three key things:

1. Autonomy: The ability to make one's own decisions.

2. Remuneration: Compensation that sets them apart.

3. Pride & Honor: The sense of self-esteem associated with the profession.

These elements contribute significantly to one's self-esteem and identity. In the Western world, people often identify themselves by their job title or rank, genuinely believing "that's who they are". This deep association makes it incredibly difficult to let go and explore other aspects of the self. Nipping makes the case that the comfort of autonomy, respect, money, and social status often removes the "real drive" to unlearn.

If unlearning is so challenging, what makes people finally "snap out of it"? This, Nippin admits, is a "million-dollar question" with no definitive answer. However, he notes that "radical uncertainty" can often be the catalyst, as it was in his own case and for many others.

He referenced a book as a valuable read on this topic. Open-minded individuals, those willing to let go and jump into the unknown, are often those who have faced some form of radical uncertainty and are no longer afraid to release their grip on a particular ego.

Nippin also highlighted Leon Festinger's concept of cognitive dissonance, clarifying that it's often misunderstood as confirmation bias. True cognitive dissonance is when an individual is "pushed to the limits of their worldview". At this breaking point, two things can happen:

1. Reinforce the Worldview: They might reinforce their existing beliefs, perhaps even more strongly, similar to how cults operate.

2. Leap of Faith: They might "close their eyes and jump into the ocean," taking a leap of faith into a new worldview. Nippin suggested that once you take this leap and look back, the previous "meaningless life" becomes apparent, and you never want to return.

A central theme of our conversation was Nippin's profound shift in understanding true learning. He believes that true knowledge or true learning is “the all-round development of the mind," not just about employability, though that can be a consequence. For organizations, he argues that "learning and unlearning should be a goal" in itself.

Nippin challenged the traditional "Cartesian man" view of intelligence, which emphasizes the brain, logical thinking, and rational articulation. He noted that this is "only one part of intelligence". A vast, largely untapped aspect of intelligence "lives in the body," not solely the brain.

Our focus on education and training has predominantly catered to the rational, logical mind, neglecting the need to make people "intuitively intelligent" and help them "rely more on their intuitions". Risk and uncertainty, he argues, can only be truly tackled through imagination, which stems from the unconscious.

Nippin playfully challenged the corporate obsession with numbers and Excel sheets by simply asking leaders: "How did you make your last important decision?" – whether it was marrying the love of their life or choosing a career. These fundamental life choices are rarely spreadsheet-driven, highlighting the unconscious basis of most decisions. He stressed that through careful listening, people often realize how much of their decisions, even in business, weren't based on the Excel sheet they thought they relied on.

So, how can we consciously develop the "skill" of using the unconscious decision-making? Nippin described his approach as working as a coach or mentor, creating a space for genuine listening. His method, called somatic mapping, involves listening to people's metaphors and visually mapping them on a whiteboard.

Somatic mapping is:

• Verbal: Deep, metaphorical listening.

• Visual: Mapping speech and symbols on a whiteboard without strict structure, using colors and free association. This process involves the "whole body," which is the "source of all intuition".

• Relational: The interaction between the coach and the individual, where genuine interest draws out unconscious insights.

The core idea is to draw from the unconscious, which is "the source of all decision making". This method helps individuals literally "see their biases, their metaphors, their words, their language, their symbols" mapped out, bringing implicit, tacit knowledge to the surface. Nippin emphasized that expertise in organizations is often tacit, and his method unlocks this potential by truly listening. He gave an example of how catching a single key phrase or metaphor from someone can unlock hours of valuable insights.

Somatic mapping can be scaled within organizations. Nippin shared how one organization with 30,000 people adopted this method. He provided an example of a "black swan incident" metaphor that was used throughout an organization. By opening up this metaphor and exploring it across departments, hierarchies, and geographies, it became clear that the original message from "the ivory tower" was "totally lost" or interpreted differently by various "subcultures". Somatic mapping brings these misunderstandings to the surface, fostering a ‘shared understanding’.

Addressing the common challenge of workshop insights not translating into real-world action (where the "rubber meets the road"), Nippin offered two crucial points:

1. Strategic Participant Selection: Not everyone is a natural listener, nor is everyone interested or prepared for this kind of process. Organizations must be strategic in selecting individuals who are genuinely motivated for personal development.

2. Intuitive, Practice-Based Learning: Move away from purely theoretical or academic ideas. True intelligence often lies with operators and practitioners who work from intuition. Learning should be "kinesthetic" (learning by doing), practice-based, fun, and involve the body, not just the head.

Nippin's insights underscore the profound importance of looking beyond the superficial, embracing the multidisciplinary, and recognizing that true intelligence encompasses far more than just what resides in our rational minds. It’s about unlocking the wisdom that lives within our entire being. That’s it for Part 1.

In Part 2, we dive into his next book, "Three Semiotic Walks," in which he takes people to a Presbyterian Church, a Hindu Temple, and an Apple Store to foster intuitive learning and to make "the strange familiar and the familiar strange".

What specific organizational metaphor is currently causing internal disconnect or misinterpretation in your team/organization?

For all premium-tier subscribers, here is a handy list of links to the books mentioned/referenced in the conversation…