My quest for example of the Correct/True matrix continues. Zen Buddhism seems to contain a rich seam of examples. Albeit there doesn’t always appear to be a great deal of consensus among the community about what any of them actually mean. Maybe that’s the point?
Anyway, here’s one of my favourites:
One day, a novice was told that important guests were expected. Immediately, he set about tending the garden. He removed weeds, pruned tree branches and shrubs. He even brushed the moss. Since it was autumn, the ground was untidy with dry leaves. The novice raked the leaves with great zeal and then painstakingly scooped them all into bags.
All this while, the old master was watching him from across the wall. The novice finished with his labour of love. A look of satisfaction spread across his face. “Doesn’t it look beautiful now?” he said, turning to the master.
“Indeed it does,” replied the master, “but something’s not quite right. Here, give me a hand over this wall and I’ll fix it for you.”
Puzzled, the novice did as he was asked. The old master made his way slowly to a tree in the centre of the garden, gripped its trunk and shook it gently, releasing a small scattering of orange, russet and brown leaves onto the freshly tended ground. “There,” he said, “that’s better.”
The novice in this parable thinks his job is to make the garden ‘tidy’. As in, the correct form of a perfectly tended garden should be mess-less. A garden full of fallen leaves is not correct. One that has had all those fallen leaves removed is. But its only when the master shakes the tree that we achieve a scene that is both correct and true. Something like this:
“When people believe that the form is more important than the Truth, they will not find truth, but will stay with form.” Idries Shah
I was reading The Book Of Five Rings the other day (don’t ask!). Purportedly a book relevant to business strategy, it is essentially the legacy of Miyamoto Musashi’s learnings as Japan’s ‘greatest swordsman’. I’m all for a good analogy, but I’d have to say that there are a lot of things Musashi san recommends, that feel like the precise opposite of good 21st Century business practice. Anyway, taking the perspective that there’s good in everything, two things struck me about the Five Rings.
The first is that it was full of contradictions:
Picking up on these contradictions, rather than being a criticism of the book, I propose is actually its essence. The contradictions are in effect the good questions that force the reader to think.
A warrior should have a teacher and not have a teacher.
They need to understand the peaceful arts as well as the killing arts.
‘The end result of any study is a kind of death before the attainment of perfection.’
The need to devote all available time to being a warrior and also to be knowledgeable of other domains (‘to learn the sword, study the guitar’).
‘There is no purpose in trying to determine whether one is better than another. If anything is anything, then everything is everything.’
‘Do not confuse profit with profitability.’
Rules are rules, but some rules ‘can be changed to suit a particular need.’
Have complete confidence but also have contingency plans.
‘To know ten thousand things, know one thing well.’
The ‘spirit’ should be large and small.
‘The ultimate weapon is “thing-no-thing”.’
‘Timing and rhythm – they are one and the same thing, yet they are different’.
‘See that which cannot be seen.’
They must be alone and interact with society.
‘Learn to see things far away and close up.’
‘Remember, as you submit to the “spirit of the thing”, that the “spirit of the thing” will submit itself to you.’
‘The grip (on the sword) should be both loose and tight at the same time.’
‘An attack must be conducted with quickness, not speed.’
‘Attack with power not strength.’
‘The strategy of “attack-no-attack.”’
Be relentless and direct… but always have an escape route.
‘The warrior first understands being a warrior when he no longer concerns himself with being a warrior.’
‘Become the enemy.’
‘To suffocate a shadow.’
Shout to scare the enemy… but not too much.
All attacks should be direct… but look for and chip away at the weak spots.
‘Thinkof strategy as being a snake’s head and a snake’s tail.’
‘Attitude/no-attitude.’
Your sword should be long… but not too long
‘The spirit of the universe is an emptiness which is no-thing.’
‘In the universe, no-thing-ness is not a thing that is true and not a thing that is not true.’
‘Because all the universe is simply no-thing-ness, there is no reason to pursue any attempt at perfection. Perfection is all there is and when you come to realise this, you will have understood my Way.’
(Not that I’m a big fan of the bible, but I was struck by similarities with the research project identifying all the 400+ contradictions it contains (https://philb61.github.io/index.html). Scanning through the list, it looks like half of the ‘contradictions’ are more like discrepancies (like, how many sons did Absalom have), but the actual contradictions (‘is it okay to covet?’) are there, I think, to make readers think for themselves. Or at least that’s the strategy I would’ve used if I were writing a book designed to make readers think. Hmm.)
Meanwhile, biblical diversion over and back to the Book Of Five Rings, the second thing that struck me was a series of things that I thought were contradictions that Musashi’s warrior philosophy told me weren’t. They include:
There can be no difference between frivolous contests/training and a real fight-to-the-death battle – encounters are only meaningful if physical death is a reality.
There are no shortcuts.
‘All things can only be built from the ground up and in one stage at a time.’
Always have a sword in each hand.
‘Whether on or off the battlefield, there is no difference in spirit. The warrior sees all life as the battlefield.’
‘Always fight with your spine erect and unbent.’
‘Do not show your enemy false bravado.’
‘The only reason to draw your sword is to cut the enemy down.’
‘There is no difference between walking and running into battle or walking and running in everyday life.’
‘Do not be a “righty” or a “lefty”. Become both by practicing your movements from all directions.’
Use your enemy’s strength as your own.
‘Everything emanates from a central core. This is true of all things regardless of their appearance.’
‘An attack of any kind must originate from the centre of the warrior and go direct to the centre of the enemy.’
Always remain calm.
‘Always return your weapon along the same path it travelled out on.’
‘The swordis an extension of the body.’
‘Stick to the enemy like glue.’
‘In fighting itis always best to go straight in.’
‘Do not attempt to be clever with your feet.’
‘Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.’
Ultimately, both strategies – revealing contradictions that are and contradictions that aren’t – in Musashi’s philosophy are intended to achieve the same goal. And that is to force people to do what people normally avoid doing: think. And maybe that’s ends up providing the main connection between being a great warrior and a great business leader?
I just finished reading Albert-László Barabási’s book, The Formula (see review in next month’s SI ezine). The Formula is built around five Laws of success, each of which is cunningly illustrated through a cluster of mini-case study examples. Some of them contain contradictions. One of my favourites concerns the story of the 1945 musical, Carousel, a mid-century update of a failed 1909 play, Liliom, by Ferenc Molnar. In their bid to turn the failure into a success, songwriting duo, Rodgers & Hammerstein, seemed to have instinctively understood that a hit musical needed to comprise the right balance of familiarity and novelty in order to engage audiences. A contradiction that looks something like this:
At a more detailed level, they also understood that one of the main difficulties with the romantic story-line is that the boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back-again dynamic means the happy couple are only allowed to be happy at the end. Great for the purposes of having a big happy song to climax the show, but not so great in terms of making the audience have to wait before getting the ‘big number’. Ideally, the songwriters speculated, the audience got the thrill of the big romantic songs earlier in Act 1. The problem then being that, early in the story, the couple weren’t in love yet. Plus, of course, regular theatre go-ers, wouldn’t be expecting the big numbers at the beginning either. This is a bit of an odd one to map onto the Contradiction Matrix, but here’s how we might best map R&H’s dilemma:
The duo’s solution to the dilemma sounds totally obvious today: give the couple their first big romantic songs at the beginning of the show by having them singing about hoped-for love. I say obvious, because I think its fairly safe to say that just about every romantic musical since Carousel has performed pretty much the same contradiction-solving trick. Back in 1945, however, the elegant convention-break hit the peak of the ‘out-there’ Goldilocks Curve nigh on perfectly. In Matrix terms, Rodgers & Hammerstein did a Principle 10 on the convention-and-innovation challenge.
In 1999, Time magazine named Carousel the best musical of the Twentieth Century. Not bad for a Preliminary Action twist.
Hiding a small action with a big action is a fundamental of magic. A magician makes a big sweeping motion with one hand and releases a dove. Our eyes instinctively follow the hand, then the dove. Meanwhile, the magician does their magic with the other hand. All magicians know this. The fine art of misdirection.
The British media has spent the last few years mastering the opposite version of the trick. A perverse reverse magic in which the small motion hides the big. On one hand you kind of have to admire them. On the other it has now reached a level where society is literally being pulled apart at the seams.
This week’s amazing piece of media perpetrated reverse magic involved BBC newsreader, Huw Edwards. Famous person uses dating app. Links up with an adult. Nothing comes of it, they never meet. The adult threatens to write about it online. Famous person is very angry. Literally not a story at all. And yet somehow, thanks to the inverse sorcery of The Sun, this non-news ends up being the lead item on BBC News. The BBC fell into the trap, and then we all did.
Meanwhile, the real news went unreported. Boris Johnson’s contempt of court. A crime that would put any other citizen in jail. Or, how about, if you were prepared to dig hard enough, it was possible to discover 5% of UK adults reported that in the past two weeks they had ran out of food and had been unable to afford more, Richi Sunak quietly exploded a bomb in the further education sector by capping the numbers of students on ‘low-value’ degrees, and – ‘don’t mention the word ‘Brexit’’ – it was announced that, now we don’t have enough workers for all the jobs that need doing, the Government is exploring a reciprocal visa scheme so that under-35s can work across the EU and Britain. That’s ‘announced’ as in you probably needed to read a French or German newspaper to find out. Your guess is as good as mine regarding the things that happened that never received a mention anywhere in the media.
The small story hides the big. The non-story hides the biggest.
Huw Edwards, Phillip Schofield, Prince Harry, Stop The Boats. Smokescreens all. Innocent chaff. Sacrificing innocent individuals to protect guilty press barons. We see you. We see what you are doing. When the smokescreens dissipates, you will not be forgiven.
At this point in my life, I have zero interest in the following:
NBA
NFL
NHL
Kylian Mbappé
Bolton Wanderers FC
Ruben Dias
Marvel
Ed Sheeran
Nike
A holiday in Fiji
People being overcharged for Uber journeys
Cage fighting
Pokemon trading cards
Solar lighting
Maps of the world re-arranged to look like farm animals
The Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis
A career in healthcare
Innovative blockchain platforms
Spectacular Hawaiian shirts
Fae Farm
WHO Council on the Economics of Health
Colour-changing unicorn mugs
Tesco (or anyone else’s) cucumbers
Disaster Capitalism
The Hankyu Hanshin Express
72 hour deodorants (is there something I should know?)
Sadiq Khan
Simply Red
Digital Marketing News
Moms Against Vaping
Pistachios
SAP
XBrain Total Brain Optimizer®
Videos of people performing the Heimlich manoeuvre
The town of Barnsley
Nigel Fucking Farage
Darren Fucking Grimes
The Order Of St Andrew
The new all-electric Ford Explorer
Pet insurance
The latest jacuzzi innovation
Surveys from people who have no idea how to conduct surveys
The Raina Indian Restaurant in Amsterdam (unless you’re thinking of flying me over?)
Miracle axes
Waterproof silicone shoe covers
Tamil cinema actors
Bears shitting in the woods
Celine Dion
I have nothing against anyone that likes any of these things, and won’t rule out the possibility that, one day in the unknowable future, I might become interested in them, but right now my rather small brain spends most of its time buffering, and generally operating significantly beyond its depressingly meagre capacity for new information.
I mention this because – not sure if you’ve noticed it? – but someone seems to have been tweaking the Twitter algorithm in recent months. Before, if I wanted to find out about something new, the convention was that I did a search for it. Simple. Now, on the other hand, Twitter thinks it has an obligation to prompt me with several dozen shiny new things in my timeline every day. Thus forcing me to spend time telling the algorithm that I’m not interested in any of them. Given that the things I’m not interested in probably outweigh the things that I am interested in by a factor of around 18 million to one (guess), the prospect of having to tell Twitter about each of the millions of things I’m not interested in is somewhat daunting. To the point of recognising that, now I’m spending more time telling Twitter what I’m not interested in than looking at what I am interested in, I’ve reached the point of exhaustion.
I realise too that there is a contradiction here. Sometimes it is a good thing to jump me (and everyone else) out of our comfort zones and have a peak at something new and potentially exciting. This is the way of helping to prevent the problem of getting trapped inside radicalising echo chambers.
I want to be nudged outside my comfort zone and I don’t want to be nudged outside my comfort zone.
This is not a difficult contradiction to solve. Just give people a dial somewhere in their settings where we can select what percentage of wildcard ‘come and look at this’ provocation we get to receive.
When I’m in the middle of a project (and probably shouldn’t be looking at Twitter at all), surprise me, say, 0.01% of the time. When I’m on vacation, or clearly exploring (the algorithms know what I’m doing), then up the wildcard content to, say, 0.04% 😉
It’s not rocket science. It might help restore a little of our collective insanity.
One day, someone needs to make a TRIZ analysis of Nikola Tesla. Even a cursory examination of the myriad inventions he left behind gives a clear impression of a person that knew about TRIZ before there was a TRIZ. Here’s a simple illustration.
The Tesla Valve is a fixed-geometry passive check valve. It allows flow preferentially in one direction, with no moving parts. Tesla was granted US Patent 1,329,559 in 1920 for the invention.
Looked at from a contradiction perspective, the problem Tesla solved looks something like this:
On the one hand, check-valves (traditionally) need moving parts to allow good flow control, on the other, moving parts should be avoided because they reduce reliability. Here’s what the Contradiction Matrix tells us about how people who aren’t Nikola Tesla solved similar control complexity versus reliability problems:
Sure enough, the Inventive Principle recommendations make several connections to the Tesla valve, most notably in bifurcation of the flow (Principle 2) and the division of the valve operation into multiple segments (Principle 1). We might also accept that when the flow is in the blocking direction, one of the flow channels is reversed in order to impinge on the other flow, and hence looks something like a Principle 13 strategy.
Strictly speaking, however, the key to this invention is Principle 14, Spheroidality, and specifically 14C, ‘use rotary motion’. And no matter how else we might interpret the conflict being solved – system complexity, ease of operation, adaptability, etc – a Principle 14 recommendation is nowhere to be seen in the Matrix.
No doubt Tesla’s 1920 invention will now find its way into the Matrix database for future problem-solvers to find. I’m now wondering what his other hundred plus patents might reveal. My suspicion is that if we compiled a league table of inventors using both the most and the most counter-intuitive Inventive Principles, Nikola Tesla is going to be somewhere near the top of the list. Let’s see…
As I was reading Vlatka Hlupic’s book, Humane Capital (see Best-of-the-Month review in the current issue of the SI ezine) I was struck by the apparent similarities between her Emergent Leadership Model (ELM) and our Innovation Capability Maturity Model (ICMM). Both contain five stages, and both recognise that each stage is a step-change jump from the previous stage. Both, too, recognise that the jump from Level 3 to Level 4 is all about making the leap from managing an organisation as a Complicated entity to one that is Complex. From an innovation perspective, Level 3 is called ‘Managed’. In Hlupic’s world it is called Orderly, and in effect describes the leadership modus operandi for to achieve a ‘well-run’ command-and-control hierarchy. The sort of management structure first devised by F.W. Taylor. And the sort still taught in the large majority of MBA programmes around the world today. A big thrust of the Human Capital book is that the shift from Level 3 to Level 4 in effect is about abandoning Taylorism and starting to treat employees as intrinsically motivated, wanting to make a difference, meaning-seeking human beings. And if that sounds kind of scary, that’s kind of the point. Level 4 is a sea-change different to Level 3. Fortunately, Hlupic’s book is written for Orderly Level 3 managers. Primarily by making an evidence-based, Taylor-compatible argument that evolving to Level 4 is good for the business, customers and everyone else in a value ecosystem.
In the Innovation Capability Maturity Model, Level 4 in effect needs a leadership model that matches Level 4 on Hlupic’s scale.
Importantly, that is not the same as saying that an enterprise that achieves Level 4 on the Emergent Leadership scale will also have achieved Level 4 on the ICMM scale. Indeed, the majority of Level 4 companies found in Hlupic’s analysis are nowhere that Level when it comes to innovation. A Level 4 Emergent Leadership Capability, in other words, is necessary but far from sufficient to achieve a Level 4 Innovation Capability Maturity.
In many ways, but particularly when organisations operate at Level 3 or below on either scale, there is very little correlation between Emergent Leadership and ICMM. To the point in fact, where it is probably prudent to consider the two models as orthogonal axes on an overall organisational capability map. A map that might look something like this:
One of the most striking differences between the two models begins with start-up enterprises. From an Innovation Capability perspective, any start-up that is in business to offer the market something new is in effect operating at ICMM Level 0. The Hero’s (Start-Up) Journey book is in effect all about what these start-ups need to do to survive long enough to reach the revenue/profit making goals that help characterise a Level 1 enterprise. It is important to note that there is no Level 0 in the Emergent Leadership Model (ELM). Rather, the start-up leaders Hlupic interviews for her book more often than not already exhibit ‘Collaborative’ Emergent Leadership Level 4 Capability. In that small, cash-hungry, fighting-their-way- through-the-jungle start-ups pretty much by definition need leaders that are able to embrace the complexity and chaos that surrounds (and frequently engulfs) them. They tend to be flexible, agile teams where everyone is expected to get stuck in to whatever needs to be done to keep the boat afloat.
This ICMM/ELM start-up mismatch reveals something of a quandary. Why, if enterprises start as Collaborative Level 4’s, does their survival past the start-up stage cause their Leadership Capability to fall? Or why, expressing things in ICMM terms, is it that once organisations have successfully built a stable, efficient, Operational-Excellence capability do they end up with dysfunctional, Taylorised management hierarchies? Or, to express the quandary in more blunt terms, why did Hlupic need to write her book?
In graphical terms, the problem looks something like this:
The answer to the puzzle, I think, starts with investors. A community of people that tend to look at the apparently ramshackle nature of leadership in the start-ups they’re thinking about investing in and feel a need to make their investment dependent on the recruitment of ‘professional’ managers. A COO. A CFO. Numbers people. Red World people. People with a track record of managing businesses. People – and here comes the second answer to the puzzle – that have a Taylor-merit-badge MBA. People that, not coincidentally, look the same as the investors.
Hlupic’s book is in effect all about how to re-educate those Red World professionals to understand that EQ is massively more important than IQ. And leads to more successful enterprises.
While applauding that ambition, my work is in Innovation World – also known as, noting the added word in the ICMM axis of the above graphs, Resilience World. Given the choice of working with an ICMM Level 2 (I pretty much refuse to work with Level 1 organisations these days) with ELM Level 1, 2 or 3 or one with ICMM Level 2 and ELM Level 4, I will take the latter any day of the week.
That said, sweeping aside the minor problems of an out-of-touch academia and naïve (ELM Level 3 at best) investors for a second, the new ELM/ICMM framework makes me wonder whether the world of work would be a whole lot more productive, profitable, meaningful and fun if we stopped corrupting Collaborative start-up leadership teams and designed a more direct route to Level 4?
As with all things, it’s usual for things to get worse before they get better, but it’s not compulsory.
Quantum mechanics. If you think you understand it, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, you don’t understand it. But just because we don’t understand something doesn’t mean we can’t make something useful out of it. Enter a group of researchers from Caltech and their quantum microscopy by coincidence (QMC) solution for doubling the resolution of microscope imaging. And more specifically, contradiction-wise, without the usual complication of dramatically increasing the amount of energy required to do the job.
The problem they’ve solved is the easy part of the sort of reverse-engineering process conducted by the SI research team. Mapped onto the Contradiction Matrix, QMC looks something like this:
Now for the tricky part. How did the research team solve the conflict?
As far as I can tell, there are three parts to the solution.
The first relates to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that describes correlations between objects – photons in this case – that have a shared history prior to being observed. Or, as the researchers tell it, ‘just as two shoes bought at a store are correlated to fit a right foot and a left foot, particles can be mathematically correlated in a variety of ways too. Only in a quantum system, things like shoes and electrons don’t truly settle on any of those states until they’re observed. They’re merely probabilities best described as a wave of maybes’.
If that hasn’t blown your mind, they go on to say, ‘One photon is sent through the material being studied, while the other photon is analysed. Being entangled, the correlations measured in either photon will also say something about the journey of its partner. It’s the basis of another fairly novel technology called ghost imaging’. From an Inventive Principle perspective, I think this correlation between two photons idea is a fairly clear illustration of Principle 37 in its ‘Relative Change’ form.
(For future reference, the ‘ghost imaging’ quantum phenomenon underpinning the Relative Change measurement, and the idea that one photon carries ‘a memory’ of another sounds like Principle 7, Nested Doll. Or possibly Principle 23, Feedback.)
The second aspect of the solution, meanwhile, is a little easier to describe. Here are the authors again, ‘In QMC, the particles involved were photons, or light particles, which are known as biphotons… a very small fraction of the photons – only around one in a million – are converted into biphotons’. Here’s Principle 3, Local Quality in action.
Finally, the easiest bit… the one-in-a-million biphotons were created by passing a laser light (Principle 28) through a special kind of crystal made from β-barium borate (BBO). Hello, Principle 35, Parameter Changes.
All in all, even though the Matrix knows less about quantum mechanics than me, I’d have to say that it did a pretty good job of identifying the Inventive Principles we can see in the QMC solution. I can’t yet go so far as to say that the Matrix is quantum compatible, but when things like quantum entanglement and ghost imaging sit well within the bounds of the 40 Inventive Principle, I continue to be confident that the $250k reward I’ve been offering for the last decade to anyone that can find me a genuine 41st Principle remains safe.
The general consensus in the SI research team is that there is a Goldilocks curve for just about everything in life. You can’t keep increasing something and expect that the outcome the something is supposed to produce will also keep increasing. What goes up must come down, and all that.
The key to establishing the truth behind such hypotheses – the difference between a Law and a heuristic – is an active search for exceptions. Things that not only don’t fit, but aren’t exceptions that serve to prove the rule either.
Enter the rather lovely and brilliant video from @rogerskaer (https://twitter.com/i/status/1576025818182332416) and his bluntly stated insight that the best way to find stuff out is to fuck-around. And that if we want to find out more, then we need to fuck-around more:
Because the act of ‘fucking-around’ is, by definition, about not trying to be productive. Or perhaps more appropriately, recognising that when it comes to learning something new, the best strategy is to try and turn off the conscious parts of your brain – the parts that think they already know and don’t need to find out any more.
As far as we can tell, thanks to this consciousness constraining element, there is no immediately apparent Goldilocks Curve associated with fucking-around. More leads unendingly to more.
On the one hand, this is quite encouraging. On the other, as we’ve found to our own cost when it comes to missing the promised deadlines for delivering the expected results to clients, the practicalities of life often prevent us from being able to carve-out enough fucking-around time to get where we’d like to be, when we need to get there.
What to do about this problem?
Here’s where we might want to try and evolve Roger’s sage advice. It’s an evolution we think stems from a recognition that not all fucking-around is equal. Some forms of fucking-around are more effective than others. Meaning that if we want to find out faster, we can’t just fuck-around faster, we need to fuck around more effectively. The person (or team) that fucks-around better than other people (or teams) is the one that finds out first.
So, what counts as effective fucking-around?
Well, it starts – we think – from recognising that, unlike the belief held by many in the Complex Adaptive Systems World that the future is completely random. Stupid as humans might be in the short term, in the longer term, all the TRIZ research tells us that things get better. Value goes up. More benefits, less cost, less harm. And, moreover, it also tells us that the very best way to ensure things travel towards the shiny-bright version of better called ‘Ideal Final Result’ and away from the ego-driven delusional-droolings of populist politicians, is to be constantly looking out for conflicts and contradictions. And then, once we find one, to overcome our natural Zero-Sum Bias and actively seek ways to transcend them.
The faster we find and solve contradictions, the faster we find out. So, rather than just randomly fucking-around, we need to spend more of our time fucking-around with contradictions. The fucking-around-finding-out relationship remains linear, but the slope of the line is in our control:
“It might take our producers five minutes to find 60 economists who feared Brexit and five hours to find a sole voice who espoused it. By the time we went on air we simply had one of each – we presented this unequal effort to our audience as balance. It wasn’t.”
Emily Maitlis
Both-sides-ism. I’m a big fan of journalist, Emily Maitlis, especially now she’s free of the BBC editorial shackles. She gave a talk at the TV Festival in Edinburgh last year. During the talk she described some of the impartiality policies at the Corporation. As hinted by the above quote, they didn’t sound good. Presenting a balanced view, it turns out, is not an easy thing. Especially, when we live in a world still dominated by Socratic either/or thinking. And, for the most part, don’t understand the contribution of science and scientific thinking to the story.
Take Maitlis’ challenge of attempting to present a balanced view of Brexit fears. The point she was trying to make in Edinburgh was that if, in the course of trying to find two people to discuss ‘both’ sides of an argument, there were hundreds of people willing and able to talk about one side, and only one or two to discuss the other, the eventual two-sided discussion couldn’t possibly be ‘balanced’.
The key danger with this kind of logic can be seen in the murky waters of climate change science at the moment. ‘97% of climate scientists agree…’ is not a justification for declaring the argument as being settled. That’s not the way science works. Science is supposed to be about actively engaging with the 3% that don’t agree, filtering out the nutjobs, and then actively seeking out the contradictions between the different perspectives in order to begin the work of solving them. Science is specifically not about cancelling the 3% just because we don’t like what they have to say. In this kind of situation, it would be entirely appropriate to create a ‘balanced’ argument involving a representative from the 97% and another from the 3%. Hopefully after filtering out the nutjobs on both sides. That filtering job might actually be the bigger problem, but let’s leave that discussion for another day.
The point here is that just because ‘everyone’ believes the Sun revolves around the Earth doesn’t necessarily mean we should exclude the one or two out-of-sync individuals who believe it is the other way around.
The key to getting ‘balance’ right in this kind of situation starts by thinking about factual correctness. No-one today would argue the case that the Sun rotates around the Earth because we have incontrovertible proof that the Earth rotates around the Sun. There’s no need for ‘balance’ here. Similarly, there is no need for ‘balance’ regarding the question of whether the Earth is flat or spherical. There are some people who still believe the Earth is flat, despite the incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, but we don’t need to include them in the argument because we can prove they are nutjobs. And, much as it can be entertaining to interview nutjobs, I think we currently live in a world where there are more constructive ways of using our collective time.
The same applies when we take another, perhaps to some, more controversial fact-based ‘debate’. Is Boris Johnson a liar? To which the factual answer is, of course he is. His many supporters might not wish to acknowledge the enormous body of evidence demonstrating just how much he lies, but that doesn’t make the evidence go away. Johnson is a habitual liar. He says whatever he needs to say to get through his next five minutes – either to say something ‘pithy’ or, more usually, to weasel his way out of a difficult conversation – and he’ll then worry about the consequences later. Usually by throwing his colleagues under a bus. A big red one with ‘Take Back Control’ written down the side. Meanwhile, the need for ‘balance’ is irrelevant if the question we’re trying to answer is about whether or not lying has occurred.
So far so good. But here’s where matters switch from complicated to complex. If the producers chose to reframe the Boris Johnson lying question into something like, ‘Does it matter that Boris Johnson tells lies?’ then the debate immediately shifts from being a fact-based one into one that centres around morality and ethics. And, as I’ve written elsewhere (‘Covid, Complexity & Contradictions’, http://systematic-innovation.com/assets/iss-225-Jan-21.pdf), when it comes to matters of fairness, liberty and the other elements of a system of morals…
… there is no longer such a thing as an either/or ‘right’ answer any more. The reason being that all of us, to some extent recognise and value all six of these moral components, so none of them can be ignored. Or, put another way, any argument that explicitly or implicitly pits one of the elements against another is futile. A meaningful answer to this kind of either/or question can only ever be ‘both’. And if the argument is allowed to continue, it will quickly devolve into an unanswerable debate about which one might be more or less important than the other. They’re both important, dummy.
The ’does it matter that ClownBoy lies?’ question is a moral one. If we want to pursue a balanced version of a debate on this question, while it might be much more difficult – per Maitlis’ producer challenge – to find a person to argue the ‘it doesn’t matter’ side of the discussion, that doesn’t justify stopping the search. Even if the ratio of does/doesn’t speakers ends up being 1000 to 1, ‘balance’ means both sides of the argument should be allowed to make their case. Nutjobs excepted, of course.
If that message doesn’t sit right with you, the first thing I’d say is ‘welcome to freedom of speech’. A concept that seems to increasingly be forgotten by a lot of very polarised, social-bubble-trapped individuals. Freedom of speech notwithstanding, the other reason the message might not sit right with you is that we’re still stuck in the Socratic thinking paradigm. When what we should be trying to do is solve the contradiction rather than merely try and pretend it hasn’t happened.
The simplest way to do this – or at least to better ‘manage’ the contradiction – is for the journalist to mention the fact that it took them five minutes to find a million people to represent one side of the debate and five hours to find one person to represent the other side. That way the audience is able to make their own informed decision about how much credence to give each side of the debate.
That would be a start. Far better would be to make the shift from Socrates to Hegel and include the missing third voice in the discussion. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. Present the status quo, the Thesis that is currently accepted and widely held, then present the Antithesis, articulating the problems with the Thesis (Hegel also called this phase “the negative.”), then bring in a third voice, a person tasked with generating the Synthesis, a new viewpoint that resolves the contradiction and thus demonstrates that it is possible to escape the tyranny of trade-off thinking.
Now, there’s the kind of debate I’d take time to listen to.
And if there’s a need for volunteers to come and do the third-way part, include me in.
