Change got to come soon.

Personal Mastery and Mental Models in Action-


At 51, I know that I am an accumulation of my education, genetic make up, experiences and environment. These attributes are what creates my personality or the skills I use to get by in life. Peter Senge calls this “personal mastery” and I like this metaphor. Senge also stresses the need for a person to always push, through continuous learning, the boundaries of one’s “personal mastery” so that it is ever expanding. As a life long learner and a person of much curiosity, I enjoy learning and experiencing new things. I have always thought that one of my strengths has been the application of my “personal mastery” to Society-Business challenges and developing inventive ways to approach these problems and make money.

For a person to see these challenges and find solutions, one must feel and understand how an individual’s “personal mastery” provides value into the world at large, i.e., where one sits and fits in the world. We all create what Senge calls “mental models”, which I can further define as the reality framework we all use to rationalize our place and value in society. Without mental models, we could all be really smart learners, but for what. Without personal mastery, we could all understand our place in the world, but be unable to change it or improve on it.

I think both of these attributes are important for individuals and organizations. These attributes are two of the 5 disciplines described in Senge’s famous book, The 5th Discipline. In this book, Senge discusses teams and organizational learning, etc., but I want to focus today these first two attributes, personal mastery and mental models, and how the interrelation of these two seem to be the yin and yang of personal happiness… at least for me. I have been much troubled lately about how technologically advanced we are in the US, but how we lag much of the rest of the world in relating our skills to the broader world. The song writer, John Prine, talks about people being forced to “live in their heads” and I think this means that as we internalized our personal mastery and lose mental models of how to build great things and provide value to society with our skills, we stand to lose balance.

When one of these disciplines weakens or is disrupted, this balance of learning for a purpose, or learning to maintain your mental model, is disrupted. If one is unable to continue to learn, one is certainly stuck in one place, for the world is always changing and requiring you to survive. What happens however when you do have the ability to learn and have a positive mental model for your place and value in the world, and then your external world of your mental model is disrupted?

I have seen several examples of this in my life. The first was when I was struck by a car in my 18th year and my physical world changed forever. One minute you are a fine specimen of a young man, and the next you have a damaged, gimpy leg for the rest of your life. This requires change in “personal mastery” to regain your mental model of where you are going to fit and find joy in life. Obviously, you cannot continue on to your college wrestling career and you must find a different route, through creation of a new mental model to create success and joy. At 18 years of age I was able to do this, thanks to my parents, Elon College, and due to the fact that at 18, we are all fairly pliable and the friction preventing change from your past is not so great. (With only 18 years, one is not so set in their ways)

The second example that I saw was my grandfather Rose, who only had a 3rd grade education and was a craftsman dyer. When there was a technological shift in the dyeing industry that made his craft obsolete, he did not have the education, (personal mastery), to change. He could not adapt. He lost his mental model for value creation because there was no further demand for his skills, and he did not have the self confidence nor the desire to learn a new way of doing. He died of alcohol in his early 50s, a person with little confidence, and too much money to buy alcohol.

The third example was my Pop, who had the education to change but grew so accustomed and set in his ways that as he aged and his health declined, and as the pace of change in business increased, he was unable to find a mental model that fit his aging abilities. He died quite an unhappy person at 72, with feelings of uselessness, feeling that he had a total lack of control over anything, and a very poor self image, and this occurred for a person who could have written a book about the American dream.

At 51, I find myself in a similar situation. My poor old leg requires a knee replacement, I am 30-40 pounds overweight, we have been unable to turn our business around, and I am staring straight into the abyss of my mortality through the death of my father and now the cancer in my Mother. I am seeking to find a mental model for the final quarter of my life. I grapple daily with thinking about how things have changed and how little control all of us have over anything. What is the point of life in America after your have lost your youth? I had hoped to use my personal focus on sustainability and my farm, as a post to which to anchor my mental model. However, the older you get, the less physical work you can really do, and I have become disillusioned with lack of anyone or any organization to seek sustainability. I am afraid that much of what we see advertised as sustainable change is really just another face of marketing and does not represent a rebirth or evolution of capital markets or social behavior.

The wisdom that comes from age is of little use in a technological age where businesses want flexibility, technological savvy within a 5 year business life-cycle. I find that all of these trends are opposed to what I feel is the direction that I need to go, which is to slow down, think, and act: to produce positive change in local environmental and social issues, to be a model of how to live a simple happy life.

I am unable to bring about change with my leg without entering the rat race of the medical system. I will have the surgery and pursue the PT and this is the best I can do. This replacement makes me even more dependent on medicine and doctors for the rest of my life.

There are no longer any changes that I can make in the business that are significant to it. I have shot my wad. My creative juices can no longer flow. We will hold on and continue to attempt to find a niche in which we can prosper, but I no longer have the zeal or believe in the operation of a business as a noble pursuit. I used to think that there was no nobler calling, than to be an ethical businessman. I used to believe that business was the best amplifier for ethical change because it influenced the breadth and depth of society. I think this has been removed from domestic enterprise by globalization.

Global business is a fickle mistress. Hard work, astute ethical management of a business is no longer the key to success in this global economy. Success will be measured on how fast you can get into a business with new ideas or services, build its cash production, and how fast you can liquidate it. There are no longer the profit margins in mature businesses to fund evolution and revolution at the same time. So either you clip your coupons until the coupons cannot be paid and the business dies, or you sell it to free up capital to start the next great thing. You cannot do both in the same business, unless there is great separation between business units. It certainly cannot happen in an SME with limited organizational and economic resources.

So the conundrum is how rapidly can expertise be grown, and how astute can management be in realizing when to liquidate. This also means that much of what they are teaching in MBA schools for excellence in operational management and contribution for an individual should be viewed in 5 year blocks.

The question for me is where to find a place where I can make a contribution for a new business?