First, mandatory thinking training
The history of intellectual training is as long as that of intellectual education. In ancient times, people's intellectual training was confused with the imparting of knowledge. Even today, the formal education in many countries still keeps the habit of treating intellectual education as intellectual education, and thinks that the amount of knowledge is directly proportional to the level of intelligence. In fact, this has been proved to be a wrong educational concept. Historically, Jews were the first to realize that intellectual education and intellectual education are not the same thing. Jews attach importance to the study of knowledge, but pay more attention to the cultivation of wisdom. They think that people who have only knowledge but no wisdom are like donkeys carrying books. Unusual educational ideas have nurtured countless great thinkers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs and politicians. According to statistics, during the period of 190 1-200 1 year, there were ***680 winners, of whom 65438 were Jews or of Jewish descent. The total number of Jews accounts for less than 0.3% of the world's total population, which is an incredible proportion. Jews account for 23% of the top 400 wealthy families in the United States. If it is limited to the top 40, then 40% are actually Jews. Although statistics is abstract and boring, the amazing secrets it reveals are worth pondering.
For a long time, because people know little about the mystery of thinking, they have been unable to find an effective way to cultivate and train their intelligence. In desperation, people only attribute genius's extraordinary intelligence to genetic talent, and think that intelligence can't be taught and learned on a large scale through acquired systematic education like knowledge. This situation lasted until the middle of last century, with the emergence of a large number of breakthrough research results in thinking science. With the propaganda and promotion of countless people of insight, today people not only know that intelligence can be rapidly improved through acquired education and training, but also widely put this concept into practice. Whether it is prenatal education for infants, thinking skills training for primary and secondary school students, or creative development of enterprise teams, the improvement of leaders' ability to analyze and solve problems is actually the concrete practice and application of strong intelligent thinking training.
Strong thinking training is divided into two major areas: individual and organization. Because there are many books on this subject in the market, I won't introduce this book here. Below we will focus on how to cultivate and train organizational wisdom.
Organizational intelligence training, as its name implies, is to improve organizational intelligence through thinking training. Generally, organizational strong intelligence training includes four main aspects:
1) intelligent team building-what kind of team helps to improve the intelligence of the organization? Such as the innovation team.
2) Intelligent position design-what kind of position is helpful to improve the intelligence of the organization? For example, marketing planning positions.
3) Design of intelligent department-what kind of department is helpful to improve the intelligence of the organization? For example, the strategy department and the research and development department.
4) the choice of intelligent mechanism-what kind of mechanism is helpful to enhance the intelligence of the organization? Such as the borderless management mechanism.
Organizations also have intelligence, which may be a novel view for many people. In fact, if you can use a little imagination, it is not difficult to find complex organizations such as enterprises, armies, political parties, societies, governments, cities, countries and societies. Like animals or people, they can think, have intelligence, flexibly adjust their behavior patterns according to changes in the external environment, know how to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, know how to compete and play games, and know how to develop and evolve. In these organizations, everyone is like a neuron, and many people form a complete nervous system, which creates the thinking of the organization and makes the organization have certain intelligence. What is organizational thinking and wisdom will be elaborated in the following chapters, and will not be explained here. I only briefly introduce some mature cases of organizing strong intelligence training to help you understand our familiar world from the perspective of intelligence and gain insight into the mystery of success or failure.
First of all, let's look at the construction of intelligent teams. The brainstorming method developed by Osborne, the father of American famous creationism, may be the first method in human history that can be quantitatively proved to improve team creativity. Thinking in this way can effectively stimulate the inspiration of participants and get many practical ideas in a short time. Many people think that the intellectual training of an organization is the intellectual training of everyone in the organization. Actually, this is a misunderstanding. Just as the overall combat effectiveness of the army does not depend on individual combat skills, but on collective cooperation and coordination, the improvement of team intelligence is the result of collective cooperation and mutual support first, and it is not something that one's extraordinary intelligence can obtain. No matter how high the individual intelligence is, if they can't cooperate with each other, the three Zhuge Liang may not be as good as a cobbler. Only internal friction can reduce the intelligence of the team to below the level of individual intelligence. Brainstorming is famous because it sets a set of standardized rules and procedures for collective thinking. Although this method does not improve a person's intelligence, its rules and procedures can ensure that the collective creative intelligence of the team can be fully exerted. Therefore, when building an intelligent team, the first thing to consider is the macro organizational intelligence training, followed by the micro personal intelligence training.
The setting of intelligent posts is somewhat similar to that of intelligent departments, and both belong to a strong intelligent way of adding new intelligent factors to the organizational system. With the development of organization scale and structure, the evolution of thinking function will inevitably occur, and some new intelligence will be derived, which is no different from the evolutionary development track of animal intelligence. When the animal's nervous system gradually evolves from nerve bundle system-nerve group system-cranial nerve system-cranial nerve system, its thinking function becomes more and more complex and powerful, and the types of intelligence become more and more advanced and diverse. Similarly, when an enterprise is established, all the thinking functions of the organization may be concentrated in the leader's mind. However, when the scale of the enterprise is expanding, the management level is getting higher and higher, and the competitors are getting stronger and stronger, the thinking function of the organization will inevitably evolve along the track of one-person thinking, multi-person thinking, post thinking and departmental thinking, and the division of organizational thinking will be more detailed and professional. For example, the emergence of intelligence agents to intelligence departments, staff officers to staff departments, and commanders to operational command centers is the intelligent posts and departments that military organizations have emerged to meet the needs of expanding the scale of operations and accelerating the pace of operations, which were not available in the early military establishment. Coincidentally, the emergence from market researcher to information consulting department, from advertising planner to marketing planning department, from designer to R&D department, from assistant manager to strategic planning department is also the inevitable result of the expansion of enterprise scale and fierce and complicated market competition.
The reason why organizations have evolved to the top of the intelligent pyramid like animals is the result of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Only the smartest animals are qualified to occupy the top of the food chain, and only the smartest organizations can survive in the fierce competition and become the final winners. Generally speaking, the strong intelligence training of intelligent posts and departments is "tailor-made" according to the scale, level and competitive environment of the organization, setting and cultivating the best new intelligence elements to enhance the intelligent competitiveness of the organization's survival and development.
Is the organization's mechanism intelligent? Many people will be surprised. In fact, it is not difficult for us to understand this somewhat "weird" view from another angle. A good mechanism will turn lazy people into diligent people, and a bad mechanism will turn diligent people into lazy people; A good mechanism will eliminate problems, and a bad mechanism will create problems; A good mechanism will make the organization sensitive to environmental changes, and a bad mechanism will make the organization slow to respond to environmental changes; A good mechanism will select the sage to suppress the villain, and a bad mechanism will select the villain to suppress the sage; A good mechanism will make the organization self-innovate and evolve, and a bad mechanism will make the organization self-solidify and rigid ... Here, a good mechanism is a smart mechanism and a high-intelligence mechanism, and a bad mechanism is a stupid mechanism and a low-intelligence mechanism. In essence, the development of feudal social system to capitalist social system, the innovation of systematic management mechanism to borderless management mechanism, and the transformation of collectivized military establishment to miniaturized military establishment all imply that organizations with high intelligence replace low intelligence organization mechanism, but they can't meet the needs of environmental development, and they are either eliminated naturally by the environment or eliminated by their opponents in the competition. The thinking training of intelligent mechanism is to choose a smarter and wiser organizational mechanism to replace the outdated organizational mechanism. Of course, the mechanism replacement of any organization is not as simple and direct as upgrading computer software. It is a huge system engineering, and it must go through long-term preparation, difficult integration and reconstruction, and thinking training of all staff to finally achieve the expected good results.
In the evolution of the earth for hundreds of millions of years, those creatures that can't adapt to environmental changes have disappeared, and those animals that can't mutate and upgrade their intelligence have fallen behind. The biological competition in the natural environment is like this, and so is the organizational competition in the social environment!
Second, brain control thinking training
Brain control is an uncomfortable concept, because no one likes to be controlled by others, but unfortunately, in reality, most people's thoughts are the racecourse of others' thoughts, which is a cruel and true fact, whether we want to admit it or not.
However, we don't need to be depressed, because "brain control" is essentially a neutral word. Just like an uncontrolled car will drive wildly, causing countless car accidents, an uncontrolled mind will act in disorder and make all kinds of mistakes. Mind control training is actually an inevitable experience for an ignorant natural person to grow into a mature social person.
When we were young, our parents would train our brains and tell us to wash our hands before meals and take a bath before going to bed. Cross the road to see the traffic lights, and don't make any noise when watching movies; It is wrong to lie and cheat, but it is right to be honest and trustworthy; What is beauty and what is ugliness; What is good and what is evil; What can and can't be done ...
After entering the school, the teacher will train our minds and tell us that people evolved from apes and that the universe is composed of time and space; Materialism is correct and idealism is wrong; How to analyze and reason when encountering problems, and how to conceive the layout of a good article; Loving the motherland is the duty of citizens, and there is no doubt about scientific knowledge. ...
After entering the society, reality will train our minds and tell us that money is not everything, but we can't do anything without money; Justice and fairness exist, but many evils will run rampant in the world under the guise of name; Adhering to ideals is a painful and difficult life, but without ideals, it is an empty and boring life; Success requires unremitting efforts, but without innovation, you will always be a follower; Breaking the law is a crime, but some laws are crimes themselves; What is correct is not necessarily reasonable, but it must be reasonable. ...
In this way, from birth to the end of life, everyone will receive countless brain control trainings in a long life, including good brain control training and bad brain control training, both controlled and self-controlled training. It is brain control training that makes our minds slowly build an independent, orderly and rich ideological world from the blank chaos.
On the basis of understanding that "brain control" is a neutral word, let's talk about the basic principle of brain control training and its application in personal thinking and organizational thinking.
To decipher the mystery of brain control training, we first need to define what "thought" is. In this book, thought refers to the thinking world created by people copying the objective world. This world is a virtual world composed of feelings, experiences, concepts, knowledge and many other factors. It exists in the human brain, invisible and intangible, but each of us can feel its existence. In our daily life and work, the thoughts that have been formed in our minds are like a multidimensional thinking map, which plays a coordinate role in our thinking and behavior. When people encounter problems and are ready to think or act, they will first be invisibly influenced by the thinking map in their minds, and make their own correct choices and judgments according to the thinking path and thinking situation depicted by the thinking map.
The ideological world is complex, so far we know little about its essence and formation mechanism. According to the "thinking map hypothesis" in thinking training, thinking is a thinking map composed of three elements: thinking concept, thinking principle and thinking path. As long as we understand them, we can follow the map and explore the mysterious ideological and spiritual world.
Concept of thinking-a rational system that defines what XX is.
On the surface, an idea can be a concept or a sentence, but if we go deep into it, we will find that it is a complex system. It's like an office building is just a point or a line from a distance. Walking in, you will find that it is a complex system composed of foundation, columns, walls, elevators, underground garages, offices and so on. Take the concept of success as an example. When communicating, everyone seems to know its meaning very well, so they can use it freely without special explanation and definition. However, after in-depth investigation, it can be found that everyone has their own different definitions and understandings of "success", which constitutes everyone's conceptual system of "success", which is composed of arguments, arguments, cases, experiences and other factors.
Thinking principle-a reasonable rule to judge whether XX is right or wrong.
In organizational thinking, the principles may be manifested in the reward and punishment system of enterprises, the military discipline regulations of the army, the articles of association of associations, the traffic rules of cities, the laws and regulations of the state, the moral traditions of society and so on. Principles stipulate what people can and cannot do; What is right and what is wrong. Under the principle of * * *, discrete people can get together in an orderly way to form a harmonious and stable work or life organization. Principles are also reflected in various rules and principles in personal thinking, some of which come from the objective world, such as watching traffic lights when crossing the road and observing professional ethics; Some come from subjective imagination, such as experts' authority is truth, people's poverty, Gui You's previous life practice decision and so on. Other principles come from physiological instinct, such as self-centeredness, caring for and nurturing the next generation.
The logical path of thinking-the logical path to achieve the goal of XX.
Rational path is a thinking path or action path that has been proved to be effective again and again in people's long-term practical activities. These paths accumulate in the mind and gradually form a fixed pattern, just like the road stepped out in the wilderness. When people encounter similar problems, they will naturally think along the most obvious path instead of opening a new way of thinking. In organizational thinking, the management path is represented by manual or natural work flow, personnel flow, production flow and financial flow within the organization. These mature processes deal with various problems that organizations encounter every day according to fixed and orderly operation steps. In personal thinking, the principle path is generally manifested in the thinking habits of dealing with problems, such as consumption thinking habits, work thinking habits, life thinking habits, learning thinking habits, language thinking habits and so on.
In order to let people know more clearly how thinking ideas, thinking principles and thinking paths play a role and affect people's thinking and behavior, let's take a look at their relationship through a case.
Comparison between men's and women's consumption thinking maps: men's and women's consumption thinking concepts need whatever they like. The principle of consumption thinking is that shopping without goals is a waste of time. Shopping without a goal is a way to enjoy life, find a goal, pay the bill and leave. Find the target and shop around. Through the above simple consumption thinking map model, we can sum up some general laws about ideas:
1) Thinking idea and thinking principle have the greatest influence on thinking, and both of them control the path of thinking principle.
2) No matter the change of thinking concept or thinking principle, it will lead to the change of thinking principle.
3) It is the most difficult to change the concept of thinking, and it is a long process to cultivate new concepts to replace old ones.
4) It is relatively easy to change the principle of thinking, and people generally don't refuse to exchange the old for the new.
5) The new principle can be parallel to the old principle, and there is no obstacle. But ideas are unique. Only when old ideas are destroyed can new ideas be born.
6) The thinking theory has a certain restriction and supplementary effect on the thinking concept, so that the thinking concept can flexibly adapt to the needs of objective and subjective environmental changes.
7) The easiest way to change the thinking path is to add a new thinking principle, which is the so-called expedient measure for ideas, and the last thing people like is to use expedient measures to make excuses for their unconventional behavior.
8) Thinking concepts, principles and principles are like three intersecting circles. Generally speaking, they are independent of each other. However, in some special cases, ideas, principles and paths overlap with each other and have the same origin but different names. For example, "defeating the enemy without fighting" is not only a concept of war thinking, but also a principle of strategic thinking and a path of tactical thinking.
In particular, the real world of thought is not as simple as that described in the "Thought Map Hypothesis". Even in thinking training, if you want to analyze an idea accurately, you need to draw a multi-faceted and multi-level thinking map systematically. Generally speaking, the more complex the thought, the more complex the thought map and the simpler the thought. Therefore, the thinking map of adults is more complicated than that of children, that of managers is more complicated than that of employees, that of countries is more complicated than that of enterprises, and that of society is more complicated than that of economy. ...
After understanding the basic principle of brain control training, let's take a look at the wide application of brain control training in reality. In the past, large-scale and professional brain control training was mostly manifested in the education and promotion of religious ideas and school concepts, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, science, Marxism-Leninism, etc., which were widely popularized with the strong support of professional religious organizations, academic organizations or state forces. Today, with the great communication power of TV, radio, internet, books and newspapers, the function of brain control training has been brought to an unprecedented peak by commercial organizations. Before the birth of a new product, merchants began to think about how to locate the layout in consumers' minds, from product creativity, functional design, appearance packaging and brand building to advertising, channel selection, on-site promotion and after-sales service. In the meantime, businesses will consider how to control brain consumers in order to. In the eyes of first-class business marketing experts, customers are not God, brands are God, and customers are just believers who need to be domesticated. If you can understand this, you can easily see that brain control training is everywhere in today's society. Sometimes you control others, but more often others control you. ...
Finally, I want to say one more thing: controlling the brain is not terrible, and it is not necessarily a bad thing. The key is to distinguish between good brain control and bad brain control, and to know how to control your mind at important moments and important fields!
Third, self-positioning thinking training.
"Heart" in thinking training and "heart" in physiology are two completely different concepts. The former refers to abstract emotions, while the latter refers to concrete hearts. It can be seen that the same vocabulary has different concept definitions in different academic fields. In the explanation of the principle of self-aligning training, there are many familiar but redefined concepts, which I hope readers can distinguish and understand carefully when reading.
As we defined before, self-regulation training refers to the cultivation and training of emotions. Emotion here refers to both personal emotion and organizational emotion. What needs special explanation is that in this book, emotion is defined as a special kind of thought, which is created by intelligence and belongs to the ideological world, but it is higher than the ideological world. Use an image metaphor to illustrate that emotions are essentially like people. Born in heaven and earth, human beings belong to all things in nature, but they are far higher than all things in nature. Humans can not only use their own wisdom to create tools, words, cities and planes that do not exist in nature, but also fly to distant space, beyond the cradle of life-the bondage of the earth. This is the position of "emotion" in the ideological circle. If we want to divide it accurately, the thought world = inner thought world (my emotional world)+outer thought world (my created thought world+human created thought world).
The importance of emotion as a special thought is beyond doubt, which everyone has personal experience. There are many things in this world that intelligence (wisdom, alertness and cleverness) can't do, but emotion (love, courage and perseverance) can! In order to better understand what self-adjustment training is, let's study three important aspects of "emotion": personality, personality and emotion.
Personality, the essence of emotion, is manifested as socialized emotional quality. For example, good and evil character.
Personality-the form of emotion, manifested as stable emotional habits. Such as optimistic and pessimistic personality.
Emotion-the representation of emotion, manifested as an instantaneous emotional response. For example, happiness, anger, sadness, joy, worry and fear.
Character is often called character when it comes to people. Personality in English comes from persona in ancient Greece. It first refers to the mask worn by the actor, and then refers to the actor himself, a person with special attributes. Modern psychology follows the meaning of persona and transforms it into personality. It contains two meanings: first, it refers to a person's words and deeds on the stage of life, and a person's response to the requirements of social and cultural customs. That is, the "shell" of personality, just like the mask worn on the stage according to the requirements of the role, reflects a person's external performance. Second, it refers to the personality component that a person does not want to show for some reason, that is, the true self behind the mask, which is the internal feature of personality. Personality is not only superficial and deep, but also combines with social occupation to derive professional personality such as manager personality, artist personality, scientist personality, educator personality, politician personality and so on. Both basic personality and professional personality represent a qualification. The former is a person's qualification in a civilized society, and the latter is a person's qualification in a professional post. This qualification is an emotional quality formed in the long-term socialization process. Sun Tzu, a great militarist in ancient China, summed up Wei Dao as "wisdom, faithfulness, benevolence, courage and strictness", which he considered to be five qualities necessary for a soldier, but also five qualities.
One of the most common forms of self-regulation training is psychological counseling. In the past, people mistakenly thought that only people with abnormal personality and incomplete personality needed psychological counseling. With the popularization of psychological knowledge, more and more people realize that consulting normal people is also an important part of self-regulation training, which can help children's personality mature, leaders' personality perfect and ordinary people's personality rich. Today, besides being applied in the personal field, self-alignment training also plays an important role in the organizational field, such as inculcating corporate culture, tempering military style and shaping national image.
Personality and character are two sides of emotion, so there are many intersections between them. Many times, it is difficult for us to absolutely distinguish whether an emotion belongs to character or character, such as friendliness, perseverance, courage, tolerance, independence, adventure and so on. It can be said that they represent personality and can also be classified as personality. In general, we define the emotional habit formed by physiological instinct as personality, and the emotional quality formed by social needs as personality. Because the formation process of any kind of emotion is inevitably influenced by both physiological instinct and social needs, whether an emotion belongs to character or character can only be judged from which aspect its origin is more focused and combined with specific circumstances. For example, occupational character, a financial officer, requires honesty and integrity, while occupational character requires caution. Obviously, honesty here belongs to a character, not a character; Caution is a character, not a character. Compared with the particularity and complexity of the thinking field, the target language system of human beings is obviously lacking and simple, and some accurate new concepts have not been created to explain the mystery of the thinking world. We can only use some old concepts and old words to express and define new things, which may not be scientific enough, but it can only be the only alternative expedient.
Personality is an important field of psychological research, and there are many theories about the classification of personality. Hippocrates, a famous ancient Greek doctor, believed that there are four different body fluids in the human body, namely blood, mucus, yellow bile and black bile. In the mixture of these four kinds of body fluids, which one is dominant belongs to the nature of body fluids. Four-fluid theory divides people's personality into three types: choleric type, mucinous type, depressed type and sanguine type. In ancient China, people divided people's personalities into gold, wood, water, fire and earth according to the Five Elements Theory. Holland, a famous American career guidance expert, put forward the theory of career mutual choice with wide social influence in 1959. According to this theory, workers are divided into six basic personality types: realistic, research, artistic, social, enterprise and conventional. He believes that the higher the fit between an employee's personality and his career, the more he can find a suitable job, and his talents and enthusiasm will be brought into full play. There are also nine personality types, blood type personality, constellation personality and zodiac personality.
Napoleon, a famous strategist and politician, once said: "There are only small differences between people, but this small difference can produce huge differences. The small difference is a positive attitude or a negative attitude, and the huge difference is success and failure. " People not only realize the great influence of personality on life, but also begin to put it into action. Through professional personality training, they help themselves to be more liked by others and more competitive in society. Nowadays, professional personality adjustment training can be seen everywhere, whether in life or in the workplace. It includes a series of professional personality training designs, from the release of children's nature in parent-child park, military training for college students, psychological counseling and assistance for depression, to the devil training for salesmen, the expansion of enterprise team fields, and the strengthening of psychological quality in battlefield simulation.
Emotion, also known as emotion, refers to a state of physical and mental excitement after an individual is stimulated. According to the intensity, duration and tension of emotions, emotions can be divided into three States: mood, passion and pressure. Emotion is a weak, diffuse and lasting emotion, that is, the usual emotion. Passion is a violent, rapid and short-lived emotion, similar to the excitement in peacetime. Stress is a purely physiological or habitual response to external environmental stimuli. When emotions produce psychological experience, the related physiological organs will also show corresponding changes and reactions. Generally speaking, physiology is the basis of emotion, and environmental stimulus and ideology are the external and internal causes of emotion. People used to think that a person's emotions were completely personal and had nothing to do with others. However, scientific research has proved that personal emotions have strong communication skills. A good mood will create a healthy, relaxed and pleasant atmosphere, while a bad mood will create an atmosphere of tension, annoyance and even hostility. Emotional pollution refers to the bad mood of other people or teams around under the influence of personal bad emotions. Modern medicine tells us that most people's diseases are often caused by bad emotions and psychological imbalance. Therefore, people should attach importance to emotional pollution as much as environmental pollution. To prevent emotional pollution, first of all, everyone should start from himself and try not to spread bad emotions to family, friends, colleagues and society. Secondly, we should learn and improve the skills of regulating emotions, and be good at self-relief and enhance psychological endurance when encountering troubles and setbacks. In addition, don't bring bad feelings home. Once the family members are in a bad mood, we should do a good job of persuasion and resolution in time to turn the atmosphere into a positive effect. Alice, the founder of ABC theory, believes that it is precisely because of some unreasonable beliefs that we often have emotional troubles. If these unreasonable beliefs are allowed to develop freely over time, they will also cause emotional disorders.
With the deepening of scientific exploration of emotion generation mechanism, many research results of emotion control and training have been widely used in film and television plot design, entertainment program production, speech and campaign atmosphere mobilization, social public opinion emotion guidance and other fields. In addition, the cultivation of some special talents needs professional and long-term emotional training, such as actor's role emotional play, salesman's anti-frustration, athlete's competitive emotional stability training, military commander's impatience restraint, host's on-site emotional mobilization, politician's speech emotional incitement, negotiator's emotional control over criminals, and psychological counselor's transformation of bad emotions. Some of these special talents need to learn how to control their emotions, while others need to master the self-regulation skills of quickly mobilizing, inducing and controlling others' emotions.
The power that the "heart" can produce in its generation is sacred and great, and the source of this power is emotion. A thinking world without emotion is like a nature without human beings. Although it is vast and prosperous, it lacks spirituality and vitality. With the advent of the era of innovation and imagination, "heart" plays an increasingly important role in people's work, life and study. It helps people live a happier life and have a more successful career. I believe more and more people will realize that cultivating their emotional strength is a compulsory course for modern people to survive and develop in a fiercely competitive society.
Excerpted from The Cultivation of Flexible Thinking published by Yuan Jinsong Qingdao Publishing House.