Primal Intelligence - You Are Smarter Than You Think

(DESCRIPTION)
Logo, Performance Construction Advisors
Logo drops into the middle of a blue screen.
Host Wayne Rivers appears in front of a white screen and talks to the camera.
On screen text, Wayne Rivers, Performance Construction Advisors

(SPEECH)
WAYNE RIVERS: Hi, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors where We Build Better Contractors.

This week, I want to talk about Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher. One of the problems with me going to my peer group meetings is it costs money. And I don't mean the travel and the lodging and all that. I mean, the peer group says, "Wayne, you got to read this." And I end up spending two or 300 bucks per peer group meeting on new books, so I'm going to inflict this one on you today.

This is a great book, very difficult to read. It's not because he's not a good writer. Fletcher's a fine writer. This book came out '25, by the way. It's just that this is more than one book. This is at least three books, maybe more. It's a book about how special forces think, the military. The second part is it's a how-to so that you can engage your biology into primal thinking. And then the third aspect of it it's a history book, military history, art, literature.

You'll hear in this first passage that I read some of the people that he writes about later on in the book. But he got involved with something called Project Narrative. This was a product of the Fletcher laboratory. "They claimed that they had identified a primordial brain power that drove intuition, imagination, common sense, and smart emotion. This brain power was ignored in modern schools and impossible for computer AI, yet it was the key to the mental gifts of Steve Jobs, Angelou, Tesla, Van Gogh, Marie Curie, Abraham Lincoln, Wayne Gretzky, William Shakespeare." Wow. The list went on. "We call it primal intelligence. Would special operations reject primal as 'magic happy'? Well, no, as it turned out. The training worked. The operators saw the future faster. They healed quicker from trauma, faced with life and death situations. They chose wiser. In 2023, in fact, the army awarded the Fletcher lab with a medal for groundbreaking research formally recognizing the existence of primal thinking. It's a different way of using your brain."

Well, golly, you read those first few pages and you can't wait to dive... This is a difficult book to read. I had to read it three times just to come up with a few... It's so much. I could talk about this book for the next six blocks, easy. So to try to distill it down to one issue was a little tricky, I have to admit.

He talks about the concept of VUCA. We've talked about this in a vlog before, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Okay? Where have you experienced VUCA before? Well, in business, you don't have people trying to eliminate you in business necessarily, but volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, that describes the construction industry, does it not? So dealing with VUCA is potentially just important to those of us in construction as it would be to a special operator.

Okay. "My theory," Angus Fletcher here, "is that the modern world is incorrectly defined intelligence. Intelligence is almost universally defined as logic. Logic is used in casual conversation to refer to any method of thinking that makes sense to a reasonable person." Yeah. "But these operators identify more than two millennia group by the Greek polymath Aristotle. In addition to driving artificial intelligence, they power arithmetic, statistics, design, data analytics, induction, et cetera, et cetera. All logic, just about everything taught and assessed in a 21st century classroom. This logical view of the brain is absurd." Wow. "We are brainwashed to believe it to our own detriment. Logic requires data. And in life, data is almost always in short supply. To handle the unstable dark of worldly existence, our brain had to develop mechanisms for acting smart with little, even no information. Otherwise, intelligence would have been as useful as an empty spreadsheet. The brain has nonlogical intelligence that is not arbitrary. That intelligence evolved over millions of years and certainly predated AI and all these other things."

The four primal senses are intuition, imagination, emotion and common sense. Now, will AI, will machine learning ever have intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense? Maybe. I don't know. You don't know. But certainly those are innate gifts that virtually every human being possesses, correct?

"There's a reason that the brains of our ancestors thought in story." Okay? We talked about this ages ago. The narrative. The brain invents narratives. The brain thinks in narratives. "While logic computes what's probable, story creates what's possible. The possible has two biological advantages over the probable. First, it can accelerate evolution. Instead of sticking cautiously to what worked yesterday, it can leap into the future, grabbing opportunity. Second, it can act with initiative and uncertainty. It doesn't need lots of reliable data. It can operate with slender information, adapting to hazy environments that glitch computers. While logic is infallible at math problems, story can thus outperform it in life problems. It can drive innovation, resilience, and common sense decision making."

Story is the big difference. And ironically, story is the baseline for primal thinking. It's not logic. It's not learning the lessons of some famous general from long ago. It's the four things: intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.

Okay. Fletcher dug deep into planning, and I love this part and I think it applies to so many of our members as they think about their own long-term strategic plans. "In the army, the secret is known as planner, not the plan." It's a reference to a quote from Dwight Eisenhower. Here's the quote, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." I read that quote in another blog ages ago and I really did not understand it. I do now. I'll come to that in a minute. "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. The very definition of emergency is that which is unexpected. Therefore, it's not going to happen the way you're planning. So the first thing you do is take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven't been planning, you can't start to work, intelligently at least. Don't plan in order to make plans. Plan in order to get better at planning so that when something unexpected happens, you can create the plan the situation requires."

The military refers to this as planner, not the plan. And I wish I had been that articulate and that clever. I've always said that the main purpose of doing strategic planning in your organization is not the end product. It's not the paper you produce or the graphs or the charts or the posters. It's none of that. It's getting the best brains in your organization together. And I said it in 100 words. And what I should've said is planner, train the planner, not the plan, because if you have a group of planners, if your organization is built of people who try to foresee the future, try to envision the future and they get good at planning, they develop those planning muscles, it's going to benefit every aspect of the organization from the very top to the very bottom. Planner, not the plan. It's so concise and articulate.

He says that the key to any mission, business mission, military mission, is why? Dennis talked about that when he reviewed the book by Simon Sinek, Why? And to us, why is defined in an organization by mission and purpose. If you don't have your mission and purpose genuinely defined in your organization, you can't always answer very accurately the question, why? The reason you want that is because your people in their hearts want to know the why. If they know the why, they can figure out the how-to, but they need to know the why. What's the objective? What are we here for? Why do we exist? All part of the why.

Okay. Now, venturing into some more dangerous territory. Fletcher talks about cautious leadership and he's not very sparing when he talks about it. "Caution isn't leading, the operators tell me bluntly. It's following." I'm not on board with that statement. He thinks that cautious leadership is wise leadership. "The operators say they don't want cautious leaders. Cautious leaders mortgage the future. They kill your tomorrow by safeguarding your today. When recruits spotted a threat, they usually acted on it. When they spotted an opportunity, they almost never did. 'The recruits reacted faster to threats than opportunities?' he asked. Yes, much faster. They responded to threats immediately, but when they saw opportunities, they hesitated. In fact, they hesitated so long that they usually didn't act until the opportunity had passed. 'Why?' he asked. What was stopping them? They got cautious, but why? The most common explanation they provided in after action reviews what they were thinking critically. And by thinking critically, they convinced themselves that the opportunity was too good to be true. Now I understand critical thinking comes from logic, which doubts anything not proven by data. Since new opportunities have no track record, they're discounting. It makes you feel like you're being safer, the operators observe, but really it's a fatal error. By pausing for more intel instead of seizing opportunity, you deprive your team of a foothold in tomorrow, dooming them to die when the time ticks on. That's why we call it mortgaging the future."

That is a brutal critique of cautious leadership. And I have to say among our members, they're not reckless, but so many of them are the opposite of cautious. I mean, they're the true definition of entrepreneurs. Farther in the organization, perhaps though, you might have cautious leaders and a passage like that could help.

All right. In conclusion, "That's where our tomorrow doesn't lie in design. It lies, as Darwin saw, in the asymmetrical conflicts of biological evolution. That's why our tomorrow doesn't lie in management. It lies in leaders with vision. That's why our tomorrow doesn't lie in computers and their statistical brilliance. It lies as Shakespeare saw in human imagination."
Primal Intelligence, very difficult to read, very difficult to grasp, very difficult to turn into a personal how-to, but I would say well worth your time if you're a leader thinking about where you're going to be in 2030 and beyond. What do you think? Email me [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at PCA where We Build Better Contractors.

(DESCRIPTION)
On screen text, Wayne Rivers, Performance Construction Advisors Performance Construction Advisors logo drops into the middle of a blue screen.