Stephen Billing’s Blog

I posted earlier about thinking being a silent conversation one has with oneself, and this is an inherently social way of viewing the process of thinking. It is inherently social because it is viewing thinking as a process of silent interaction.

There is another, less obvious way in which this view of thinking is radically social. It is in the make up of the participants in the silent conversation that consitutes thinking.

Who is talking to whom in this silent conversation I am having with myself? Who is doing the talking, and who are they talking to? Please bear with me and see if I can answer this question, drawing on George Herbert Mead and Ralph Stacey.

The answer is that different aspects of the self are talking to each other. "I" am talking to "me." The aspect doing the talking is "I" as the subject, doer or initiator of action.

The aspect being spoken to is "me" as the object, the recipient of the action.

The "I" as the subject doing the talking is the individual in the present moment responding to the "me."

Mead pointed out that as humans we have the capacity to take on the attitude of the other person. In other words, you can perform an imaginative feat in which you experience what it would be like to be in the other person’s place. Mead said that it is because we can imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes that we have human consciousness.

You imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes based on your experience of many social interactions over time – the results you received from these interactions and what they meant to you. These imaginings are therefore socially based because of the social experience you have had. For example, I moved around a lot when I was growing up and so would often have to leave my friends behind and make new ones. If you were brought up by different parents or in a different culture you would have different experiences and so your view of what the other person would be making of you would be different.

Humans also have a tendency to generalise.

The "me" taking part in the silent conversation of thinking is a generalisation that represents your generalised view of what society thinks of you. Society in this case is that group of people whom you identify with.

In a process that utilises both our human tendency to generalise and also our capacity to take on the attitude of the other, we imagine what others think of us. Our imagining of what others think of us is the "me" that is participating in our silent conversation.

This conversation between "I" and "me" is never resolved. It is a conversation in which "I" am constantly responding, in the present moment, to "me." In other words I am constantly responding to the generalised view that I think others have of me.

There, simple eh?

Thinking is a process of silent conversation with oneself and is therefore a social activity.

It makes you more effective when thinking about organisational change to be able to articulate what you think it means to be a person and to think. Why? Because how you think about what people are doing in organisations when they are thinking affects what you do to help influence the course of change. This is so in many subtle ways, whether or not you are aware of your assumptions about human consciousness. If you are aware of your assumptions about what it is to be human, you can be more deliberate in your effectiveness in organisational change.

Most people think of the mind as being something that lives inside a person’s head, something separate from the brain, that controls the actions of the body.

George Herbert Mead talked instead about a conversation of gesture and response in which meaning arises from the gesture and response taken together.

He proposed that thinking was the process of engaging in silent conversation with oneself. This makes sense in terms of our experience in which we do talk to ourselves. As a tennis player I tell myself to do things like hit up through the ball. And I hear other players admonishing themselves to "Concentrate" or "hit it" or "move." The silent conversation is then spoken aloud and in some cases becomes an exasperated shout!

So, this highlights one way in which the process of thinking, because it consists of silent interaction, is a social process.

Instad of thinking about thinking as a property of the individual, think of the mind and its process of thinking as silent conversation. This silent conversation is what constitutes human consciousness, and one of the great benefites of this view is that it means that cognitive processes do not need to remain a mystery as properties of individuals that we can never reveal or become aware of.

Instead, if you realise that thinking is a process of silent conversation, you can become aware of it and engage with others in their process of silent conversation. This will make you more effective as a facilitator of change in your organisation.

I have just been reading my friend Irene Skovgaard Smith’s PhD thesis on how consultants help in organisational change. She suggests that the consultant’s external knowledge is like a spice that when added to the internal people’s knowledge becomes a ’spiced version’ – knowledge that is new and yet still recognisable.

When I think of the projects I have done where I have worked with team leaders and other subject matter experts, the result has always been very much like this spiced version. It contains the information the experts have told me, and together we have reconstituted it, adding my knowledge of how to order things step by step in a useful way to make it clear for people. 

Doing this recently, the expert was surprised how accurate and comprehensive the material we have developed is. I reminded him "It should be, it’s what you told me." He was seeing what he already knew, but in a different way from what he was accustomed to seeing.

Spicy indeed.

I’ll be posting more in future inspired by Irene’s thesis. She is a prize-winning anthropologist who observed consultants implementing change over a long period of time. If you want to read her thesis for yourself (260 pages), click here.