Business ecology report
Meltdown of an iceburg - another inconvenient truth

We all know the iceberg model in describing the human mind. Many consultants, psychologists, psychotherapists and others people-professionals and laymen use the model to describe the idea that we have only a little bit of us visible, whilst the rest, more than 90%, is below the surface and “unconscious”.

We all know that much of what we do goes more or less automatically. Our heart beats automatically; our blood pressure is influenced by our physical and mental state but still is regulated by a system that is quite autonomous. We learned a language, step by step, as a child, but once having experienced our speaking and understanding our native language goes fluent and automatically. That whole process of understanding is going unconscious, so to say.

We also recognize that experiences of the past do influence our behaviour of today. Patterns we learned earlier, decisions we made earlier about how to behave in certain situations are repeated by us over and over again. Mostly that works fine, because we don’t need to reinvent ourselves every moment again, sometimes it works against us, especially if strategies from the past were very effective then, but are out of context today. Many people do this automatically, almost as a routine, as quick as we interpret the words we hear or read and so the notion of an unconscious makes sense, feels like common sense. I agree, I do not have any problem with that.

However, there is a hidden but imminent danger in the concept of the iceberg. It conveys the message that the deeper we dive the more complex things become. It conveys the notion that because the iceberg becomes wider and wider towards the bottom, we must dive deeper and deeper to understand ourselves. The iceberg model is sort of in line with the idea or notion that our unconsciousness is a pool of many drives and instincts, that work underneath in a deep and dark archaic struggle that is difficult to understand. If we like to understand it, we need to do a lot of work of introspection and are likely to be helped by specialists like psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and the like. There is, I think, a lot of common sense, that many people don’t even like to start looking into their unconscious because of the almost mystic aura that hangs above it - as if it would be the realm of the real professionals ever to get down into that abyss, like it was Dante’s hell.

Modern science today has basically abolished this idea of such a complex unconscious system.

Thanks to complexity theory, we know today that we do NOT need a “complex foundation” to create a “complex system”.

For a few centuries, science has lived with an overemphasis of ideas from Newton that caused people to think that all of the world must and could be explained by logical cause-effect relationships. For some considerable time many scientists have thought that complex systems like the weather or economy could be explained by diving deeper and deeper in the details, and the more facts we knew the closer we would get towards understanding the real wheels that turn the weather or the economy. It is this very thinking that also influenced the study of the human mind. All scientists of the first half of the last century couldn’t help that they were steeped into this cause-effect thinking and tried to find explanations for everything they observed in logical cause-effect relationships.

This pattern looks very much like understanding the beauty of a bouquet in a vase full of flowers. The beauty of the flowers, the bouquet, we know today, is called an emergent property. We know, and it is easy to prove to everyone, that the beauty of the bouquet is NOT in a single flower, is NOT solely dependent on a single flower or the number of flowers, but on some basic simple notions that one needs at least a certain number of flowers and a certain pattern and there is the beauty. Some condition must be fulfilled, but once that is OK, the beauty will emerge in an endless number of different variations. There is a logic, but it is no cause-effect logic, it is not a logic we will ever be able to explain.

Much research has done into anthills and again, it shows up that ants themselves are very simple. They do not have a plethora of complex strategies to make an anthill. For sure, the queen is NOT the boss of an anthill regulating everything, nor is there an architect-ant, a design-ant or any ant who regulates this whole system. The system emerges from the fixed simple rules that drive the ants.

Early psychological research and thinking, from pre-Freud to a far stretch in the last century, could be compared with someone trying to explain the beauty of the bouquet of flowers by dissecting every flower into pieces, trying to explain all the relationships of all the smells, textures, colours and the like in order to find a logical cause-effect explanation for beauty, which could in the end lead to the skill of completely reverse engineering a bouquet of flowers and completely predicting it from scratch. Similar to being able to construct the perfect wine, or perfect music by rational processes. Complexity theory has taught us that most of the world we live in is not working that way. Emerging properties are an essential aspect of any living system. We can explain the conditions but we can’t explain, control, or fully predict the result. The good news in all this is that the conditions of all complex systems are not complex. It is the communication, the dynamic interaction, that makes it complex and beautiful, not the parts of it.

So what do we do with the iceberg? For me, I melted down the iceberg and replaced it by the model of the vase of flowers.

The human mind is much easier to explain for me with the vase of flowers in my mind than with the iceberg. The stems are quite simple, comparable with almost ridiculous simple instinctive systems, but the combination of those simple systems with the interaction and gathering of experience in a lifetime, creates a bouquet that shows up in the unique drama of every human life.

We rather see the stories of someone’s life as the flowers of the bouquet and the whole set of stories as the emergent personality.

That does not make it meaningless to understand underneath the stories also the pattern of the instincts, as long as we don’t make it too complex. If a bouquet is made of only blue and yellow flowers, there are still endless unique combinations, but they all do have some common features. If some personality is very matter-attached, which in itself is a very simple instinctive system-pattern, that person will have some basic patterns in his life, but still endless unique features. If some personality is very feedback oriented (exploratory), that person will cybernetically predictably behave in certain ways, but still with an endless bouquet of life stories creating a unique human being.

But we cannot predict from the basic instinctive patterns all of what we see today! Trying to predict people is a bit similar to trying to predict the weather. Yes, we do know a lot, we can predict a lot for a certain period of time and for a certain location and the patterns even for a long time, but never everything, and never everything in controllable detail.

Isn’t it fascinating that the Harvard Business Review, just published one of the biggest pieces of research into leadership and that they came of with NO competency or set of competencies that could define leadership! Their conclusion was…it is the stories that make the leader.

It is the stories that make the bouquet, that emerge the leader and even the HBR couldn’t do anything else than letting go a cause-effect explanation. One can guide a leader, one can guide potentials like one makes a good wine, but one cannot reverse engineer the principle. One cannot fix leadership into a set of competencies and expect leaders to come out.

So in my mind and practical daily work around leadership in all its facets, I have melted down the concept of the iceberg and replaced it with a vase of flowers. The bouquet being the reality, the stems being the instinctive systems. There is a relationship between the two, but that relationship is a far cry from being cause-effect. There is place for beauty, surprise and chance. I am looking for the beauty and the stories, the dramas and the fairy tales, the patterns and of course the consistency in all those stories and the values that emerge from it.

That decision to melt down the iceberg has made life for my clients (and even for myself) much more simple. It might be for some an inconvenient truth - because there is no magic psychological profession anymore to hide behind. I myself, at least, feel that I cannot hide myself anymore behind my profession and telling my clients that I do know much more than they do know. Once I have explained some basic ethological, cybernetical and complexity principles (happily for my profession, I have at least some technical words left over) I cannot see much more else than “let’s go to work”.

Peter Robertson

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