Free Willy?

Lets's begin with the admission that, for all we have learned in the past fifty years, for all our advances—particularly in how many actions, reactions, styles, preferences and apparent choices are rooted in pre-determined hard wiring—the outcomes may not be concrete givens.

Marrying tenets of Jungian psychology with growing understandings of the major classifications of style and preference is valid and useful, as well as critical tools in the leader's box of Craftsman and DeWalt of hard-working solutions to challenges in the workplace.

Some professional sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers have taken the core understandings to far-off places. There is a growing movement that contends, given all we think we know, that the brain's wiring has so prescribed decisions and behavior that moral options, the exercise of so-called free will, no longer exists (and never did).

Some of this speculation is well-intentioned, a reasoned extension of an existing body of knowledge; some is clearly the promotion and advancement of an agenda, a "progressive" concept that absolves people of responsibility for their most demented actions. In that universe, a mass murderer is suffering with a disease, incapable of altering his or her genetic heritage.

This, imho, is a gross misconception and misapprehension. The classification of individual styles and preferences is only a predominance or proclivity, and by no means an absolute, a foreordained specific outcome. Further, all individuals carry within their proclivities elements of all styles and preferences, and have the capacity to—understanding themselves—choose a path other than the dominant trail through the forest.

What our advanced understandings do give us is an ability not shared with other creatures, and that is the ability to reason through a rich variety of options to make a moral—or not—choice. So, we do have free will, and to a degree not known outside our species. Bad choices, therefore, are not a disease that excuses us from any consequences. Philosopher Steven Cave explores the question clearly in a recent issue of The Atlantic. 

As a result of our better understandings and accountabilities, we can take a deep breath and deal graciously with an apparently insane customer who is demanding the impossible after an irreversible event. We can approach a perpetually problematic supply chain partner to ask how we might become a better—and more reliable—supplier or customer or independent resource.

Our more prevalent disease is one in which we believe that doing what we've always done, only more intensely, will yield a different outcome. The difference is likely to be a more intensely disappointing result.

In short, know thyself and thy several selves, in order to present the self most likely to contribute to a good outcome, and to make a decision that you and yours can be proud of.