The Overview Effect
“The Overview Effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight ... It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, ‘hanging in the void,’ shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
The Overview Effect is a moment almost too elusive to put into words in which, as with the term ‘love,’ the experience begins to disappear the more you talk about it. The more words, the less Wonder and Awe, the less resonant feeling energy is there. Significance and meaning evaporate in our attempts to define just what the Overview Effect is.
Still, to a degree, and with some regularity, even if not consciously acknowledged, we experience the Overview Effect in nature, in unthinkable collaboration, innovation, intimacy, in business moments of profound change, in kindred spirit relationships, and in cultural shifts not already possible. A friend of ours compared it to the birth of his first child, a consuming moment with no history, an unfathomable experience of mind and body. Another recalled meeting his first love, who came to him with a total positive sensation, as if from a universe he’d never felt before.
The Overview Effect, we suggest, is a way of understanding everyday reality as a ‘Holon’ - something that is simultaneously a whole and a part, an unfathomable context of Universe and a practical gateway to Collaborative Innovation at the same time. This Holon is an anatomy that goes to the heart of human creative potential. It energizes the creative potential of a group of diverse participants to generate breakthrough solutions. In this sense,
The Overview Effect itself has no essence -- it's like spirit, being, or universe. (The word “Holon” was first used by Arthur Koestler in his book, The Ghost in the Machine.) (1967, p. 48) used the Greek word Holon (Greek: ὅλον, "whole") as something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. He concluded that, although it is easy to identify sub-wholes or parts, wholes and parts in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere. An example of a Holon in nature is ‘trees & seeds’. Do seeds contain trees or do trees contain seeds? We could say both are true. Clearly they exist in a symbiotic or interdependent relationship. Likewise In fully conscious collaborative groups there is a simultaneous interdependence between the individuals consciousness and the group’s consciousness that frees the group from the limitations of survival based and incoherent think
Consider, for a moment, that the Overview Effect is a profound abstraction, a distinction that lets us tell the difference between Wonder, Awe and the physical pragmatics of everyday relationships, work and life itself. The Overview Effect is an experience and words never fully capture experience. The Astronaut experience is an incredibly powerful reminder that this experience is possible. Poetry, and Shakespeare get close but many of us don’t often get there.
To practice the Overview Effect is to practice generating the experience of Awe, Wonder, Possibility, Acceptance and Belonging for yourself and others, at home and at work, without losing attention to the job at hand.