Driving Insights via Processes of Socioemotional Being and Becoming

Introduction

Being able to transcend disciplinarity in the development of effective strategies for the communication of insights in business is pivotal to progressive development and dynamic processes of change management. The unique cultural and situational specificity of military life has a long recognised and multifactorial impact on lives lived in active service and veteran retirement (Cooper et al, 2018). There are reciprocal lessons from both business and the military which have a shared epistemological basis and as such a high degree of relevance to the communication of insights in business. Understanding the nature of ‘self’ is epistemologically determined by human capacity to make meaning of experience, to reflect on the pre-existing of historical memories, and perhaps, most significantly of all, to formulate a reflexive and proactive response to the future (Button, Jinkerson and Bryan, 2017). The situated nature of military service, is such that the fundamental nature of knowledge and ways of knowing, interpretation and processes of meaning making transcend several fields of individual knowledge, such as philosophy, social science, medical science, psychology and faith (Merriman et al, 2017). This chapter will embrace these potentially transferrable facets of praxis to drive discussion of how processes of socioemotional being and becoming can serve to potentially also improve insights in business settings.

The acquisition of knowledge pertaining to the self, forms the basis of epistemological debate which has endured across mankind for thousands of years (Muis, Chevrier and Singh, 2018). Providing a contextual and situational approach to understanding the complexity of military personnel and veteran perceptions of self will be the focus of this chapter rather than engaging in any deep philosophical debate of how, rather than why, knowledge is stored and accessed on a daily basis, and alongside this, how it has the potential to inform processes of immediate and long term decision making as a consequence of making meaning of experience (Campbell, 2018).

Military services have never been more in need of coping mechanisms that accommodate systemic inequity and the need to function effectively on both an individual and collective level (Olson, 2018; Rodd and Sanders, 2018). At the heart of the capacity to establish these coping mechanisms, is the need to address the emotional self in the military workplace (Conley, Durlak and Kirsch, 2015). Awareness of the concept of emotional intelligence has increased radically over the last decade (Kilgore, 2017; Garcia Zea et al, 2019). Intergenerational solidarity and understanding have never been at the fore of positive function across society in an array of differing contexts and correspondingly new approaches to supporting people in reflecting on their experiences have been developed and implemented (Williams-Klotz and Gansemer-Topf, 2017). Belying any holistic wellbeing, whether organisationally or individually, is mental health. As a consequence of this advocating, promoting and facilitating the positive health and wellbeing of staff has been identified as a key priority for address and sustained integration into educational and vocational training practice (Ghiya, 2019; Schonert-Reichl and Roeser, 2016).

The chapter serves to provide an insight into how understanding the concepts of cognition, metacognition and epistemic cognition can be used to frame and define how meaning making of military service, will be integrated, both at the point of experience and after active service is complete. Both are used to form the basis of what, in the longer term, have the potential to become the long-held assumptions and presuppositions usually surrounding internal and external life worlds. Being able to make sense of both is pivotal in supporting and addressing the issues with which military service personnel and veterans present across the societies they have served in active service.

The central aims of this chapter are threefold. Firstly, the authors have aimed to provide a theoretical rather than an applied approach to the context of business, which provides a backdrop of conceptual aspects worthy of consideration around the acquisition of knowledge and ways of knowing. Secondly, the authors aim to provide an insight into the integration of philosophical approaches into the facilitation of critical introspection and reflective practice. The third and final aim of the chapter is to increase an awareness of predisposing factors of a decline in the mental health and wellbeing of military service personnel and military veterans and to highlight the direct relevance of this to business contexts.