Intimate Innovation

Iain McGilchrist makes claims about ‘attention’ and how it ‘shapes’ reality – that it changes what kind of things comes into being for us, and in that way it changes the world – it is itself constantly involved in intimate innovation. And in relation to knowledge, perception and what we think is reality (and remember that Bion linked the experience of ‘maternal reverie’ to be a precursor to the development of the capacity to think). Iain McGilchrist spells out how he thinks that we are our ourselves partners in the creation of the world and ourselves:

‘Attention is inescapably bound up with value – unlike what we think of as ‘cognitive functions’, which are neutral in this respect. Values enter through the way in which those functions are exercised: they can be used in different ways for different purposes to different ends. Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.’

Attention is a ‘way in which’, it is a ‘howness’, a something between…can we say that intimate innovation and intimate leadership – in the special organisational sense we are examining – is

• away in which?
• a howness?
• a something between?

…which in turn is a way in which values enter in, become part of us and how we organise? And – fascinatingly – much of McGilchrist’s argument seems to suggest that we can see the relationship between the different types of attention as a way of providing the capacity to relate

• the macro and the micro
• the inside and the outside
• the ‘home’ (inner, private) way of organising to its context

This provides us with an evocative way of understanding priorities – what I attend to is what I value; what I value draws my attention; what I attend to are my priorities; my priorities reflect my values in the act of being attended to. Perhaps I have to modify – through attending to my intimate relation to them – my values in order to shift my priorities.