Since the beginning of the pandemic, Society has been in transition.
Society is a system.
Homo narrans. Humans are story-tellers. Stories are the way we learn.
The best way to change systems (human ones at least) is to change the stories we tell.
The Nesrine Malik book, ‘We Need New Stories’, recognises this. The book describes six foundational untruths (‘myths’) and how they need to be corrected and evolved.
The Law Of System Completeness has six essential elements.
Nesrine Malik’s six new stories fit the Law. Like this:
COORDINATION (Virtuous Origin) – ‘history is written by the winners’… which means that the stories nations tell have little or no resemblance to the actual reality of what happened in the past. The historical record needs to record truth. When it doesn’t, it lays the seeds of future turbulence and chaos.
ENGINE (Free Speech) – ‘The claim that free speech is under attack is often a mask for other political frustrations and fears’… everyone should have the right to free speech. They should also recognise that every right comes attached to a responsibility
TRANSMISSION (Gender Equality) – ‘the social contract between the state and its female citizens is broken.’
TOOL (Political Correctness) – it is good to be ‘awake’, ‘wokism’ is when we become too awake and over-sensitised to what is happening around us. ‘Cancelling’ people for their unpopular views only makes matters worse. The Tool of positive societal change is all about resolving right-versus-right conflicts in a way that creates higher level (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) truths.
INTERFACE (Identity Politics) – ‘there is simply no electoral benefit to be gained from abandoning identity politics because voters are increasingly sorted it such a way that those who support economically progressive policies are also supportive of racial justice and gender equity’… society is full of contradictions… they should be embraced and challenged (transcended) rather than brushed under the carpet.
SENSOR (Reliable Narrator) – ‘If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true’… journalists, in other words, are the needed objective seekers of truth and voices of reason
8. Looking at the state of the current societal S-curve transition, most politicians seem stuck on a left-right pendulum that tries to solve the problems at one end by reverting to the other. In a complex world this can never work.
9. I’m not certain (m)any of our politicians are ready to recognise the need for new stories, but the System-change roadmap is there when they are. And that feels like a pretty good start.
It’s a cow. I know. But it’s a cow that happens to provide another important clue as to why zebras have stripes. The first thing the SI research team encountered (SIEZ, Issue 113) was the fact that the stripes acted as camouflage and confusion against big predators: when running the stripes turn into a savannah-coloured blur. Principle 19 evolutionary genius.
Now, thanks to some recently published Japanese rearch, we also know the stripes help protect the zebra against much smaller predators. Namely, flies. Here’s what the researchers’ slightly surreal (insert image of lab-coated scientist painting stripes onto a cow here) experiments have revealed:
Experimental and comparative studies suggest that the striped coats of zebras can prevent biting fly attacks. Biting flies are serious pests of livestock that cause economic losses in animal production. We hypothesized that cows painted with black and white stripes on their body could avoid biting fly attacks and show fewer fly-repelling behaviors. Six Japanese Black cows were assigned to treatments using a 3 × 3 Latin-square design. The treatments were black-and-white painted stripes, black painted stripes, and no stripes (all-black body surface). Recorded fly-repelling behaviors were head throw, ear beat, leg stamp, skin twitch, and tail flick. Photo images of the right side of each cow were taken using a commercial digital camera after every observation and biting flies on the body and each leg were counted from the photo images. Here we show that the numbers of biting flies on Japanese Black cows painted with black-and-white stripes were significantly lower than those on non-painted cows and cows painted only with black stripes. The frequencies of fly-repelling behaviors in cows painted with black-and-white stripes were also lower than those in the non-painted and black-striped cows. These results thus suggest that painting black-and-white stripes on livestock such as cattle can prevent biting fly attacks and provide an alternative method of defending livestock against biting flies without using pesticides in animal production, thereby proposing a solution for the problem of pesticide resistance in the environment.
From a contradiction-solving perspective, the stripe solution (a combination of Inventive Principles 32 and 3) seems to correspond closely to the usual strategies deployed by human problem solvers:
It’s still not clear why the stripes put off flies, but that shouldn’t stop us from wondering at the fact that the zebra has managed to evolve a single solution that stops both lions and flies.
In the Winter of 1999, Peter Drucker published an article on “Knowledge Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge.” In it he said,
“The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”
A fifty-times increase in knowledge worker productivity. Something that requires, fairly obviously, a complete paradigm-shift in the way that people are managed. Or rather, ‘lead’. In the article, Drucker identified six major factors determining knowledge-worker productivity:
Knowledge-worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual workers themselves. Knowledge Workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a ”cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.
These six elements, of course, need to form a coherent system, one that satisfies the Law Of System Completeness. Here’s what the six elements look like relative to the six elements that make up the Law:
The article then went on to describe some of the characteristics that these knowledge workers have or need to have in order to be distinguished from others. They include:
“…the burden of further development and innovationwill be put on them…”
“…knowledge work is less standardised and structured…”
“before certain ends result it may be difficult to know whether knowledge workers are working or not”
“knowledge workers basically own their key production mean – brains”
“knowledge workers need tobe committed to and enjoy their jobs”
In so many words, what Drucker was talking about was the creation of Green World. The Twentieth Century transformation, in other words, was all about building Red World, and the business transformation of the Twenty-First is all about building a complementary transformation-delivering Green skills
Rule One at SI-HQ is avoid working with Innovation Capability Maturity Level One organisations whenever possible. We now have a second Rule. It goes something like, especially avoid working with Level One organisations that also require their contractors to be ISO9001 Certified.
This new Rule came about as a result of a recent request from such an organisation. They wanted us, they said, to come and help them create ‘an innovation culture’. The fact that the response questionnaire their bean-counting Purchase people then forwarded to us nigh on dictated that we were only likely to get the work if we could demonstrate that we had the appropriate ISO9001 badge. ISO9001 is bad enough at its intended ‘quality management’ job – providing the perfect illustration that by setting a minimum standard, the world ends up with race-to-the-bottom quality management systems that succeed only in ensuring consistently poor quality – but to think that it has any relevance at all to the innovation story betrays a fundamental understanding of what innovation is. Funnily enough, ISO56000 looks set to do precisely the same thing and it was written precisely to help enterprises to manage their innovation processes. Fortunately, the prospective client didn’t appear to have heard of this ISO. Most likely because there’s no badge to collect yet.
Anyway, that’s another story. This story is about how we went back to the prospective client and told them our (polite version) thoughts about ISO9001, and asked whether our lack of badge would eliminate us from their consideration. ‘Not necessarily,’ came the reply, ‘providing you can send us a copy of your Quality Management System documentation’.
One step forward, one step back. We don’t have any Quality Management System documentation.
Irrespective of our feelings about ISO9001, however, this felt like a hole we needed to feel. We like to think we ‘do’ quality, but how do we all know what we’re doing? Or whether we’re heading in the direction of ‘better’?
It was time to document what we do to see how close to a Quality Management System it might be. Here’s the first version, now, for the moment at least, internally labelled, SIO9001. ‘SIO’ being interpretable as various things, starting with Systematic Innovation Operations, probably ending with Senior Investigating Officer (too much time spent watching Line Of Duty!), and passing through silicon monoxide and a small Danish island. Nearly all of which carry some kind of meaning.
Philosophy
Roots – the roots of SI were formed through fifteen years working in the aerospace industry at Rolls-Royce. The aerospace industry is simultaneously the safest and most innovative industry on the planet (at least until Boeing 737max was certified). As such it has recognised that ISO9001 and related certification standards represent a minimum standard that the industry is so far beyond as to make them irrelevant to the business. Simultaneously, Rolls-Royce has represented a global quality benchmark for over 100 years and as such every client SI has ever worked with subsequently has not attained RR levels of quality. We start, in other words, from very strong foundations.
AntiFragile – humans are the primary source of lack-of-quality in any system. In order to achieve the highest level of quality and safety, the only reliable means is to automate simple processes and remove humans from any and all safety critical position. Where humans are necessary (i.e. in any complicated or complex situation), it is important to build redundant, antifragile systems that ensure quality failures can, first, cause no harm, and, second, when inevitable quality failures do occur, the QMS learns from the failure and becomes stronger.
Qualityism – we are in the innovation business, and as such failure (a.k.a. learning) is an inevitable feature of our work. It is very easily possible to insist on quality measures that inhibit the ability to innovate and also, therefore, detract from the delivered quality. We need to be aware of this phenomenon and always strive to put in place the requisite levels of quality measures to simulataeously maximise overall quality and minimise impedance to innovation.
Humility – one of the biggest challenges to the pursuit of ever high quality is hubris. It is therefore necessary to be constantly challenging our current best practices, and to have the necessary humility to recognise when things are not as they should be. It is always painful to be ‘wrong’ about something, but that pain is an essential precursor to learning. We will actively look for quality-related contradictions and run towards them when they appear. Contradiction solving is the only meaningful way for any system to improve.
Self-Organisation – having now worked with close to 500 MNCs, NGOs and public sector bodies, our desire to always adapt to the needs of the customer, rather than have them adapt to us, has become a living reality. This also applies to QMS. Time is too precious to jump through nugatory certification hoops that add no value to either ourselves or our clients. Beyond that, because our foundations are built from the best experience on the planet, it is a relatively simple procedure to relax behaviours and conventions as and when client needs permit. Our main ‘products’ are innovation ideas, processes and education, and as such the most significant outcome of ‘poor quality’ is we deliver a bad idea. In which case, we don’t get paid. In which case, we learn not to deliver bad ideas in the future.
The SI Quality Management System
Use good judgement in all situations.
If you have any doubt what ‘good judgement’ entails, refer to your client Quality Principles and Practices
If you have any doubt that the client’s version of ‘good judgement’ may be inappropriate to the innovation task at hand, refer to the SIN Handbook.
If you have any doubt over the veracity or appropriateness of the SIN Handbook, raise a concern with the CEO, and the Company will review and evolve the Handbook and/or QMS as appropriate.
I’m reading, ‘Chutzpah: Why Israel Is A Hub Of Innovation & Entrepreneurship’ by Inbal Arieli, and loving some of the novel education strategies helping to make Israel one the top places on the planet for creating entrepreneurs. Look at the statistics for maths and science education and Israel barely makes the Top Fifty. But for the creation of successful start-ups it is Top Three. And, if I interpret what’s happening in terms of creating Red World and Green World people, I’d say the country also creates the highest proportion of people comfortable in Green World.
The book describes a number of traits of Israeli life that help create this outlier-level entrepreneurial performance, but my favourite describes the emergence of a system of ‘informal’ education institutions designed to help students develop and enrich their practical skills. Not just the fact that they exist but that they, have recognised the importance of ‘stuckness’ in the learning process. Hand kids answers on a plate and not much learning takes place. Force them into situations where they are made to be stuck, on the other hand, and we really head into outlier territory. The bigger picture rationale sounds something like this:
“We are not really interested in teaching children to take a skill that they acquired and apply it to another field. Instead, we are focused on increasing the ability to create new skills in realms we are not really aware of today. That is a hard task, and our practice shows that the way to do that is by bringing the children to a place where they are truly stuck, do not know the answer, and no-one will give it to them… therefore true growth, true teaching, comes from that place of not knowing the solution, trying to figure out an answer regardless of whether you find it or not.”
I instinctively love the idea, but I’m also conscious of the importance of creating a sense of progress if kids (or anyone for that matter) are to develop their persistence skills. Which turns out to also have been thought through:
“Assessment methods in these programs are also radical. Rather than measuring the students’ successes, the instructors measure their failures as a better indicator of their learning. “If you manage to solve twenty exercises, I, as an educator, have wasted your time. Since you already knew how to solve [the exercises], you made no progress, you’ve learned nothing.””
Now, I think, we’re in wow territory. The sort of territory that says, ‘damn, I need to go out and set up a school like that’.
Before I do that, though, I thought it might be interesting to look at the problem through the contradiction-solving lens: The Israeli system is trying to increase the entrepreneurial skills of students and what stops them is the likely absence of a sense of progress. Here’s what the 3.0 Business Matrix has to say about how others have resolved this conflict:
And hey, presto, there’s good-old Principle 13, The Other Way Around. Don’t measure success, measure failure. Green World measures for a world that needs more Green World thinking.
There’s an old joke that starts with the question why should you never ask someone whether they are from Yorkshire. Answer: if they are from Yorkshire, they’ll already have told you. If they aren’t from Yorkshire, they’ll be embarrassed.
Which is to say that, seeing as you didn’t ask, I’m from Yorkshire. Born halfway between Valley Parade and the Bronte parsonage to be precise. Or in ‘The North’ if you want to be more precise.
Now I live in North Devon. Strictly speaking, North Devon is in the South West of England, but in reality, it is also in ‘The North’. As in ‘on the right side’ of the North-South divide that still exists in the UK, despite the best efforts of the current ‘government’ to ‘Level Up’. Efforts that so far don’t seem to involve either sending some of the money people in the South have to people in the North, or sending some of the work that people in the North do to the idle rent-seekers in the South.
I have to say that it has been something of an uphill struggle to convince friends that still live in the geographic North that my geographic south-westwern map location is also on the North side of the Great Divide.
Finally, I found the answer to the problem. All it took was a sixteen hundred year journey back in time to a point in history when the North and South looked something like this:
A map that makes clear the North-South Divide has its roots in deep tribal differences. The South from these tribal perspectives means the Anglo-Saxon south-eastern corner of the land; The North means the Britons and Picts occupying everywhere else.
Suddenly, all feels right in the world again.
Now all we need to do is shift the current political arguments for Scottish and maybe also Welsh independence to the far more sensible split of the Union into a south-eastern Angland, and everyone else into a United Britain.
That way everyone will be happy. The golf-club and cravat conservatives in the South West can put their lying populist Clown back in charge (or the two current also-lying replacement candidates*), and the rest of us can install a system of proportional representation and begin to work together for our benefit instead of theirs.
This politics game is a piece of piss.
* both candidates are making claims that they are from The North right now. Liz Truss keeps describing herself as a ‘Yorkshire lass’ when she’s actually from very-Anglo-Saxon, Oxford; and Rishi Sunak thinks that because he represents a Northern constituency that it makes him Northern by association. Not when he lives in a keep-the-plebs-out, trillion-dollar walled-mansion it doesn’t.
One of my favourite social engineering experiments is a computer simulation showing how ghettos form. A simple model of housing markets in which digital sellers are programmed to have a preference for certain types of buyer. If I move into a new housing development situated between, say, Bradford and Leeds, and my neighbours have a bias towards selling to someone from Leeds and against someone from Bradford, then, over time, the development will, horror of horrors, become chock-full of Loiners. The amazing part of the simulation is that it only needs a tiny amount of bias – a seller might have a 51% inclination to sell to another Loiner and a 49% inclination to sell to the Bradfordian – to eventually produce developments that are completely Bradford-free.
Meanwhile, on a separate subject, in theory, this (crisis) time in history is the perfect time for innovation. A few organisations seem to get it, but more don’t. Maybe it only needs a few? I don’t know. From a save-the-planet/save-society perspective, the likelihood is we need a lot more.
So where are they?
A big part of the problem, I think, has to be attached to the forty-plus years of Operational Excellence almost all organisations have been taught is critical to their success. Nothing is that simple of course, the almost complete replacement of actual leaders with meak, anti-brave, rule-following managers is an emergent phenomenon. Which means a conspiracy of multiple contributing factors. Like forty-plus years of ‘continuous improvement’ thinking, forty-plus years of MBA programmes teaching students how to use spreadsheets, draw Gantt charts, Manage By Objectives… I could go on. What the whole shebang ultimately leads to is c-suites crammed full of Red-World thinkers. People that know how to climb s-curves, but have no idea what to do when they hit the top. Or, in most cases, are aware that there is such a thing as a top.
Don’t get me wrong, having the skills to successfully navigate an organisation up the s-curve is important. It creates efficiency, economies of scale, and, for a while at least, impressive sounding EBITDA figures. On the down side, when taken too far, it makes the organisation extremely fragile. Such that when the outside world shifts – a pandemic arrives, for example – and the organisation finds itself thrown off their nice stable s-curve, Red World thinking is no longer going to help. What these organisations need is a healthy dose of Green World thinking. Something that Red World unfortunately fails to recognise. And so what tends to happen is a c-suite that doubles-down on the prevailing problems and becomes even more Red. Doubling down on getting people working harder, chopping costs and flogging the Sales team so they ‘try harder’. This is generally called a slippery-slope. And the thing with slippery slopes is they get slippier if we keep doing the wrong things to get off them.
When the world of management creates c-suites full of rule-followers, it is only a matter of time before things will start going wrong. Exponentially, slippery-slopery wrong. Rules, like almost everything, have a half-life. A half-life that was already past due before the arrival of Covid-19, and now look positively stupid to everyone except, it seems, Red World managers. Which is just about all managers.
How did that happen?
The answer merely requires us to think about how promotion works. The most visible mechanism is hitting KPIs. If I hit (or, better yet) exceed my targets I’m more likely to get promoted than someone that doesn’t hit theirs. Especially if I keep doing it. This gives an immediate problem for people operating in Green World roles, where, very often it makes no sense to set any kind of target. And, when Red World forces a declaration of ‘something to aim for’, Green World people know there’s a more than fair chance we’ll not end up where we said we’d end up when we were forced to make our solemn promise at the quarterly review. Either because something went wrong, or we found a more interesting, more productive direction. If something went wrong, Green World thinking tells us that it was valuable ‘learning’. If we found a better direction, it was also learning and a potentially much bigger prize for the company. Only, as far as Red World is concerned, neither is what we promised we’d do. In Red World, what gets promised had better get done. And getting stuff done repeatedly and reliably is what leads to promotion. Promotion-oriented people rapidly learn, when in Red World do as the Red Worldians do. Apply that logic for a few years and we end up with organisations in which Red Worldians have promoted themselves to fill all the senior positions inside the organisation, they know how to manipulate their personal targets to make sure they’ll be achieved, and they know how to set tough, ‘stretch’ targets for everyone lower in the hierarchy that will – pass or fail – still make them look good. Red World in this sense comes to look like a demented Ponzi scheme. And all the time, like any good Ponzi, the organisation is making itself more and more fragile. Usually with the Green World thinkers looking on with their jaws on the ground. How could managers be so dumb?
Answer: a not-so-winning case of Confirmation Bias. One that means all evidence, irrespective of bigger picture reality, confirms the Red dogma that Red delivers and Green procrastinates. Ergo, always promote Red.
And, worse, now the world has had forty-plus years of this Red Ponzi game, the people at the top of the organisation most likely never found themselves exposed to Green thinking at all. They know only Operational Excellence. They see only continuous improvement. They do not see the cliff-edge at the top of the s-curve. They are Green blind.
To the point, that in the last few years I’ve concluded that, when I’m given the rare opportunity to teach on MBA programmes, I’m giving the high-flying middle-manager students their first awareness that there is such a thing as Green World. Most of them, I know, will have a bit of confused fun during my time with them, but will then forget the message. Some, however, even though they may decide Green-World is not for them, will at least know that it exists and has a vital resilience-building function within any organisation. My hope is that when these people find themselves at the top of the corporate pyramid, they’ll be the first generation of leaders to understand that they need to make sure there’s a critical mass of Green thinking beneath them, so that when times get tough they know its time to bring these people to the front and let them work their rule-re-inventing, get-out-of-Leeds, magic.
A rule about online engagement has floated around the internet for a few years now. It is called the Rule of Participation Inequality, or the 90:9:1 Principle. It goes something like this:
User participation in any online internet community generally follows the 90:9:1 principle:
90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don’t contribute
9% of community members edit or respond to content but don’t create content of their own
1% of community members create new content
I think the Principle applies to quite a lot more than just online communities. In fact, I’m struggling to find situations where it doesn’t apply. Certainly, when innovation attempts are seeking to understand prospective customers better, one of the most effective shortcuts says to go and find the 1% (‘influencers’) and tap into their perspectives and opinions.
Except, not quite. In Innovation World – a place where we’re looking for step-change, ’10x’ solutions – it is always important to remember the (too-)oft used Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Customers, in other words, tend to be step-change-blind. In amongst the myriad other biases we all carry around with us, comes Zero-Sum Bias. This is the bias that encourages us to believe that life is a big game of whack-a-mole. The moment we solve one problem, the next one turns up. Life is win-lose.
The combination of this pair of inherent weaknesses leads to the recognition that, when it comes to innovation, most people’s instincts are, at best, ‘unhelpful’. I have a sneaking suspicion that the pair also forms much of the basis for Carlo Cipolla’s ‘Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity. And especially Law 1: ‘Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation’.
It is with Cipolla’s life-changing (life-affirming? (Cipolla isn’t trying to be cruel)) essay in mind that has caused Systematic Innovation World to implement our own version of the 90:9:1 Principle. Enter the (90:9:1)squared version. Which states that, once you’ve found the 1% of useful ‘content providers’, that 1% is subject to another 90:9:1 split:
90% of the 1% will be irretrievably caught in the Faster-Horse/Zero-Sum traps
9% of the 1% can intellectually accept the traps are escapable
1% of the 1% have successfully escaped the traps at some point in their lives
Or, put another way, about 0.01% of a population are able to provide meaningful innovation insight.
The first implication of this is that, unless we have access to very high numbers of interviewees or surveyees and even better filters, we’re better off not bothering.
The second is that, if you can find the meaning providers, you should try and keep a tight hold of them.
The third is that the tighter you hold, the faster they will escape.
‘What are the most important contradictions?’ A question that comes into the SI Research Team on a regular basis. And one that, perhaps more than any other, warrants the dreaded consultant answer, ‘it depends’. If we’re focusing on tackling climate change, the most important contradictions are different to those we’d select if we were seeking to restore some semblance of trust in the politicians we elect. Or don’t. The answer, too, assuming there is one, also depends on our ability to affect any kind of change, rather than merely working on a problem to achieve the same sort of gratification we get from doing a crossword or playing Wordle. Lots of things – some technical, some business, some psychological – in other words, have an impact on which contradictions we might best spend our time focusing on.
That said, we tried to make a first stab at answering the importance question in the November 2014 SI ezine article, ‘Universal Hierarchy Of Contradictions’. Looking back on that article now, I see two areas of weakness. The first – contradictions associated with morality and ethics – we made a first attempt to address in a much longer article about some of the difficult challenges arising from the Covid pandemic, ‘Covid, Complexity & Contradictions’, that was published in the January 2021 issue of the ezine. The second was the lack of detail at the top of the universal hierarchy, and contradictions associated with the highest level driver, ‘meaning’. Here’s where we get to put a little more flesh on those bones.
Back in 2014, when it came to our attempts to understand human behaviour at a first principles level, we were talking about the ‘ABC’ model, and the idea that the three primary drivers of human behaviour were our parallel desires for Autonomy, Belonging and Competence. ‘Meaning’, and our innate desire to live lives that are ‘meaningful’, was and still is seen as a higher level principle than ABC, but somewhere between 2014 and today, and with some client projects, the ABC model evolved into the ABC-M model.
The Universal Hierarchy of Contradictions article talked about the inherent conflicts and contradictions between Autonomy, Belonging and Competence, but only peripherally discussed the inherent contradictions that also exist between those three and the higher level Meaning they support. Here, after several years worth of incubation is what we think those three ‘top level’ contradictions look like:
And in a little more detail:
Meaning-Autonomy: meaning only derives from the relationships between things. I might find a particular song or a painting or a book meaningful, for example, but what makes them meaningful are some or a combination of the memories of times with significant others they invoke, or my connection to the songwriter, artist or author, or how what they teach me might enable me to become a better person in the minds of the people around me. Our desire for autonomy and to do what I want to do thus conflicts with the fact that we only derive meaning when we focus on doing right by others.
Meaning-Belonging: being a valued member of the ‘tribe’ has, from an evolutionary perspective, been essential to survival. Activities like eating, sleeping or even just being with others are all meaningful acts. The problem comes when we seek new meaning. That comes only when we leave the safety of the tribe and go explore strange new worlds and have new experiences. And so the fundamental contradiction here is that we need to stay in the tribe and leave it. In line with our oft used John Naisbitt quote, ‘don’t get so far ahead of the parade no-one knows you’re in the parade anymore’, the often impossible challenge for the seeker of the new is how much of it they can hope to bring back to the tribe without being cast out because what they’re saying no longer fits with the values of other tribe members.
Meaning-Competence: the easiest way to ensure we feel competent is to avoid leaving our comfort zone. Learning of any description only really happens when we are prepared to be wrong about things and thus able to acknowledge that we are incompetent. The search for new meaning is again where we experience this contradiction in its most direct form: we need to be both inside and outside our comfort zone. New meaning derives only from our willingness to ‘suffer’ the discomfort of being wrong. Potentially for protracted periods of time. Which pretty much sounds like the core of any innovator’s working day. More on that front in this month’s SI ezine.
Here’s a second stab at a difficult conversation article. The first one (Reference 1) didn’t quite managed to get us cancelled, so I thought I’d have another go. Largely prompted by a client, who asked recently, how do you detect whether something is ‘woke’ or not? We like questions like that. Questions, in other words, where there’s a desire to measure something that, it turns out, the world doesn’t appear to have fully understood what it is yet.
In which case, Job 1 is to try and unravel the various different interpretations. Here’s a paraphrase of a commonly used definition:
Woke is an adjective meaning “alert to injustice”. It originated in African-American Vernacular English and was primarily concerned with encouraging people to become awake to racial prejudice. Beginning in the 2010s, it has come to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, Amererican Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice. The phrase ‘stay woke’ had emerged in the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in a recording by Lead Belly. Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the phrase was popularised by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. More recently still, the woke waters have become further muddied by predominantly alt-right bubbles of the Social Media echo chamber and extensions ‘wokery’ and ‘woke-ism’ have been weaponised to criticise people – usually in arguments surrounding identity politics – to dethrone terms like ‘politically correct’ and ‘snowflake’ as the insult du jour for many internet trolls wishing to mock the so-called ‘hypersensitivity’ of the left.
When something has apparently turned into an ‘ism’, it’s a pretty good indication that there’s a Goldilocks Curve somewhere in the vicinity. Which in turn means there’s some kind of contradiction that needs to be, first, recognised, then managed, and ultimately, transcended. Each becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. And definitely doesn’t get helped while the Echo Chamber Machine keeps the two ends of the contradiction from talking to one another.
First up, let’s take a shot at drawing the Goldilocks Curve in order to help reveal the physical contradiction…
…and here’s that physical contradiction – we want high levels of alertness to injustice and we want low levels of alertness to injustice – translated into a Bubble Map:
Having obtained this picture, we’re now in a position to utilise three different approaches to manage, transcend or dissolve the contradiction. Let’s start with the easier option, because this one also allows us to close the loop on the client measurement problem that provoked this investigation:
Managing – the key to managing the woke contradiction starts with the need to be able to work out where the peak of the Goldilocks Curve lies. This challenge in turn takes us right to the heart of the need for a solid definition for woke and wokeism. Here are a couple of candidates:
Punching-Up/Punching-Down – in its original meaning, being awake to injustice also came with a punching-up obligation to challenge those in power to correct those injustices. In it’s ‘ism’ form, the direction of challenge shifts to the somewhat easier punching downward direction. Such as attacking random powerless people that happened to say something that didn’t fit our own view of the world. As if this will somehow make us feel better about ourselves…
…it won’t, of course, because the second ‘ism’ indicator is that individuals cease wanting to be held to account for their inevitably imperfect actions, and, partly through guilt, increasingly decide to hold everybody else to account. A switch most visibly identified by shifts in the types of pronouns found in a person’s narrative: from ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ to ‘it’s not me, it’s you.’ To which the most sensible response is, thankyou Jordan Peterson, “set your own house in perfect order before you criticise the world”
Transcending – here’s where we focus on the central ‘conflict’ part of the Bubble Map and an intention to eliminate rather than ‘optimise’ the problem:
Here the most likely solution directions start from Taking Out the desire to punch-down, increasing Transparency, escaping from Echo Chambers and Merging the other side of the Goldilocks Curve arguments, switching the problem the Other Way Around and putting your own affairs in order, and then helping to establish Self-reinforcing feedback loops that help prevent the formation of dysfunctional vicious cycles (Reference 2).
On that latter front, here’s the usual vicious cycle of despair created when we fall victim to Echo Chamber culture and thus increasingly fail to recognise that another side to our views of the world even exist:
If you only see half the truth, in other words, you also fail to see the Goldilocks Curve and hence fool yourself into thinking that a fundamentally up-down curve only has the up side. Which, if you’re not careful, can easily become a shortcut to mental illness.
References
SIEZ, ‘Difficult Conversations #1: Binary-Non-Binary’, Issue 237, December 2021.
SIEZ, ‘The Morality Of Toast’, Issue 180, March 2017.
