Thoughtcraft 2-3: The Idea’s Social Environment
The important elements in the environment in which an idea vies for territory are these: the idea itself; other ideas; the idea’s originator; human receivers of the idea; the social groups to which the human agents belong, and the resources needed for the idea’s realization. An idea itself cannot take control of resources; it requires human decisions to allocate resources to an idea.
From the point of view of any idea, other ideas may be friend or foe or simply background; that is, may abet, impede, or be neutral toward the idea in its quest for territory. The conscious mind cannot process many ideas at one time, and conscious thought takes place using symbols and actions, in ways very similar to those by which interpersonal communication takes place. Our dreams are like films—we hear music in our heads, we think through problems using sentences or mathematical formulae, which we most often speak ourselves through internally. We have limited capacity to process thought in these ways; they must usually be processed serially, one at a time.
Thus ideas, even those involved in reverie, which by definition do not vie for any territory beyond the originating thinker, nevertheless compete for the time of the single mind.
For this reason, thoughts are neutral one toward another only in a very limited sense, in that each thought in a sense understands that the thinker must, at times, think unrelated thoughts. As an army on the march must at times eat and rest, expansive thought must at times give way to the demands of maintenance, making the maintenance thought neutral toward the expansive thought.
Expansive thought tends to be aggressive, however, so that it may at times regard maintenance as a competitor. Writers, artists, software engineers, and business executives frequently skip meals and their mental equivalents. Even in the non-obsessive, certain thoughts may take obsessive control, aggressively crowding out other thoughts.
An important action in the idea’s quest for territory is the co-optation of other ideas, which is the turning of neutral ideas into allies.
The groups to which persons belong have an important role to play in an idea’s realization. It is important to remember that these groups are not always properly called organizations, since in many cases they are scarcely or not at all organized. One’s language group, for example, cannot be called an organization, but is a group which affects how one thinks.
Certain groups have a formally defined role toward an idea; for example, work groups exist to formulate new ideas, such as “innovation round tables” in business, or any formal organization at a time when it needs to make a decision. In these cases, the idea may be at the heart of the group’s purpose, and yet the group may be dysfunctional in helping even good ideas come to realization, which is to say, dysfunctional in terms of the group’s stated purpose. These dysfunctions, and their corrections, are discussed in the chapter on realization environments.