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The following thoughts were prompted by David Schmaltz, author of The Blind Men and the Elephant, who was wondering aloud on his mailing list about the relevance of synchronicity to project work. Synchronicity is that thing you get from time to time, where you come across just the right book, just the right person to get you unstuck from a pressing problem - at precisely the moment you were least expecting it, which simultaneously turns out to be just the right moment for it to happen.

I think of synchronicity primarily in terms of "noticing", the event or activity whereby the focus of our attention jumps, unbidden, from one object to the next.

There's always a million things happening around us (and within us), several of which will provide an appropriate articulation for making sense of whatever is puzzling us at the moment. So it's really no surprise that synchronous events seem to appear at "just the right time" - they appear because it is just the right time.

Just how noticing happens is a vexing problem. It's so infuriating when you think about it. A hallmark of rationality is consistent sequencing, ordering our thoughts in a deductive sequence. A hallmark of consciousness is its linearity - we are aware of one thing at a time. Noticing is unconscious and irrational; there are no formalizable rules for what things we notice - yet noticing is precisely how we pull together the various elements of a rational solution to any given problem.

In that connection I like Daniel Dennett's ideas on consciousness, especially what he calls the Multiple Drafts model, and his presenting the linearity of consciousness as a "user illusion" - by analogy with modern OS design which fakes a multi-processing paradigm on top of a single processor, deluding the user. Consciousness is the reverse illusion - it is massively parallel but we experience it as linear because that's what best fits the uses to which we put it. (Or perhaps "best fit" - for all we know the illusion may have arisen in the past and retained for historical reasons.)

At the moment I'm interested in the topic of "self-organizing teams", and one of the things I have experimented with is the deliberate blurring of attentional focus by each individual in a group, so that at some point the group seems to become capable of a collective decision without needing to first acknowledge a designated leader. This is a more systematic use of synchronicity - powerful stuff, too, since this kind of "distributed cognition" gives us the benefits of teams without the attendant coordination costs.

In the laboratory - i.e. the workshop my colleage Emmanuel Gaillot and I have run, twice, to explore this effect - we get good results by using physical exercises, inspired by theatrical practice, to model the things we suppose happen within teams of knowledge workers. Another respondent to David's comment mentioned the use of Aikido to help people explore related insights.

It seems that we have particular expectations about the workings of our minds, which get relaxed somewhat when our bodies are involved instead. Strange that it should be so, since our bodies are bound to grosser laws of physics than our minds...