Per prediction, the increasingly desperate Conservative government in the UK has taken its next step towards matching Donald Trump’s ‘Nine Syllables That Changed The World’ trick from his 2016 election campaign (Nine Syllables That Changed The World? | Darrell Mann). The first three of the nine magic syllables being ‘Stop The Boats’. The literal UK equivalent to Trump’s ‘Build The Wall’. The same dog-whistle meaning.
Which leaves six more syllables to start appearing in the Conservative lexicon in the coming months. Your job is to work out what they will be before the Tufton Street thinktanks work their distorted magic. Here are a couple of clues to help guide your thinking:
Three syllables attacking the leader of the opposition, and three attacking the Labour equivalent of the ‘swamp’. Probably connecting to the ongoing slow poison of Jeremy Corbyn or Momentum. All six – crucially – needing to tap into the Autonomy-Belonging-Competence Dog-Whistle DNA.
Your time starts now.
Extra bonus marks if you can work out what the Labour Party equivalents are going to be. Bearing in mind that last time around, they completely misunderstood the game (Seven Syllables That Sank Labour? | Darrell Mann). With that dismal memory in mind, here’s a nine-syllable starter: Lockdown Parties. Beach Sewage. Turnips. Or maybe: PPE. Braverman. Tomatoes?
Reading Jeff Schmidt’s 2000 book, Disciplined Minds, recently delivered one of those unsettling blinding flashes of the obvious. The sort that make you question, in my case, several decades of assumptions about how the world works. I opened the book as part of a programme of research into leadership, and specifically and attempt to try and understand why all the leaders seem to have disappeared. Schmidt’s addition to the long list of other reasons is that professionals – people I assumed were first and foremost recruited for their subject matter skills – are more likely to be able to build a career as a result of their ideological skills. By which Schmidt means the closeness of match between the ideology of the individual and those of their employer.
If I look at the situation from the employers perspective, they’re paying the professional salaries they pay not just for the technical knowledge that a professional brings, but also on the understanding that they will also comply with the reasons why the enterprise is working on the things they’re working on. The definition of professional, in other words, is someone that does what they’re employed to do, and buy-in to the ideological constraints that their work involves. Speaking as someone that worked for fifteen years in the defence industry, I get it. Designing boundary-pushing jet engines was exciting, but only possible if I either ignored their purpose, or, better, bought into the belief that the work was being done to ensure the future security of the nation.
Ideology in this context is a good thing. But like everything else in life, it is possible – nay, inevitable – that at some point you realise that you know have too much of that good thing. Ideology, in other words, offers us yet another example of a Goldilocks Curve: The ideology-based constraints imposed upon professionals are both good and not good.
On the too-much end of the spectrum, (corporate) ideologies are rigid systems of belief that can lead to dogmatism, intolerance, and violence. They are often based on false assumptions and – here’s the kicker – prevent individuals from engaging in critical thinking and considering alternative perspectives. Over-ideologised professionals fail to question their own beliefs and stop being open to changing their minds in light of new evidence. Here’s what an ideology/heterodoxy Goldilocks curve might look like for a typical professional:
The point being that, once we’ve recognised the existence of the contradiction, it is incumbent upon the professional to either manage or transcend it. Managing it in this case largely means understanding where the peak of the curve is in space and time and then doing the best we can to remain at that position. Transcending it, I think, means understanding that all ideology is counter to truth-finding, and that if a person (‘professional’) seeks to be in the change or innovation business, truth-finding is essential. And, moreover, largely emerges through the distillation of the world to meaningful first principles.
Schadenfreude is the second cousin of innovation. One of my favourite January sights was a video of German security forces getting stuck in mud during an attempt to disperse a group of protesting wizards. You can find a copy of the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muNtOwLqoO8. In fairness to the victims, by the end of the incident, I think they were also struggling to avoid laughing at one another. Pure slapstick. And yet, such a simple problem. But here we are, ten thousand years since humans first invented footwear, and still we can’t reliably find our way across a muddy field.
Or maybe, strictly speaking, the problem is complicated rather than simple. Complicated because it involves a contradiction: we want to be able to walk across the muddy field, but when we sink into the mud, it forms a pretty good seal, so that when we try and lift our feet, a negative pressure vacuum is formed under the sole of the boot. The more force we try and apply to lift the boot, the bigger the vacuum. Net result: mocking wizards.
Here’s what the Contradiction Matrix has to say about the problem:
Over the years, in fairness to the Schadenfreude-inspired inventors of the world, there have been numerous solutions attempts. All of them, as far as I can see, making elegant use of Inventive Principles 12, Equipotentiality, and 31, Porous Materials (or ‘Holes’). The former sounds fairly obvious as a direction – if a vacuum is being formed, reduce it. Probably a little too obtuse for most tastes. Rather more explicit in terms of working out how to reduce the pressure difference is the second Principle: add holes. One of those often counter-intuitive solutions that requires us to overcome an initial piece of psychological inertia. And that, in this case, is probably something like, ‘if there are holes in the boot, doesn’t that mean my feet will get wet?’ Well, of course, not if we think carefully about where to put the holes. The first hole-based solution I saw came in the form of an interview on a local TV news channel, probably twenty years ago. The inventor in the article, had solved the problem by introducing a hollow tube extending from the heel of the boot up to the rim at the top. I don’t know what happened to it. The TV demonstration looked pretty convincing at the time. Convincing enough that, if I’d been in charge of procurement for the German security forces, I would probably have gone out and order a couple of dozen pairs. As far as I can see, no-one submitted a patent application. Which is a shame because, 2018 saw the submission of another bottom-to-top pressure-relieving tube solution. It’s slightly more complicated than the one I saw twenty years ago, but it uses essentially the same principle. And that is allowing air to be drawn down the tube to relieve the vacuum that would otherwise have formed when the wearer tried to lift their feet. Here’s what the 2018 solution (US20180199662 if you’re interested in reading more) looks like:
In the end, this might just be another case of solving one contradiction creating a good solution, and only when we solve the next contradiction do we turn it into a ‘wow’ solution. All well and good to introduce a pressure-relieving tube, but the combination of ‘tubes’ and ‘mud’ doesn’t sound like a particularly synergistic one. I don’t doubt the negative pressure aspect of the design will be good at ensuring the tube doesn’t block up with mud. But I’m also pretty certain that when I’ve safely round up the annoying wizards and gone back to base, there will be some level of residual mud on the boot and in the tube. If I then allow that mud to dry in readiness for the next wizard protest, the combination of tube and dried mud sounds like a problem I don’t want to have to deal with. But then again, its merely the next contradiction, right? Time to get the patent generation boots on…
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of years talking to enterprises of various sizes about what might just be the dominant business contradiction of the times: the parallel need to maximise near-term operating efficiencies and ensure longer-term survival. The two sides of the contradiction have been encapsulated in Red-World and Green-World analogies. Red-World being all about the mindsets, operating philosophies, methodologies and tools required to deliver the simplification and standardisation necessary to maximise operating efficiencies. And Green World being all about those required to venture into the complex, chaotic unknown future, be able to make sense of it, and then ensure the future resilience of the enterprise. Here are the two world expressed in terms of the Complexity Landscape Model (CLM):
Essentially, enterprises need both Red and Green World capabilities. Which in turn means managing or, ideally, transcending the fundamental contradictions between the two. The simplest contradiction management strategy in effect segments Red World and Green World into two wholly separate entities. This is the Skunkworks model still pervasive in and around the aerospace industry: put all the Red people in one building to ensure the production of safe, standardised, efficient, follow-the-rules, profitable products, and put all the Green people in a completely separate building to do all of the confusion-ridden, going-boldly-where-no-one-has-gone-before, breaking of rules stuff. The big problem with this model is that it continues to be extremely difficult (and expensive) for the exciting new technologies to make the transition out from their Green origins and into their future Red revenue-generating home. In effect, the aerospace industry is able to ‘get-away’ with this difficulty because it is a mature industry with a very slow disruption cadence.
Faster moving industries that have tried the Skunkworks segmentation approach have usually failed to make it work for them. They need something more akin to Red/Green solutions that transcend rather than merely manage the contradiction. Here’s what the contradiction Matrix has to say about how others have successfully evolved these more effective solutions:
The fourth most frequently used strategy, Principle 1, Segmentation, takes us into the world of the 2015 Geoffrey Moore book, ‘Zone to Win’. On one level, the book describes a segmentation model that divides an enterprise into four domains rather than the two found in aerospace. Two of the four correspond directly to the Red-World/Green-World ends of the contradiction spectrum. Taking all four segments together produces a model that looks like this:
It is the third most frequently used solution strategy, Principle 15, Dynamisation (15A: ‘Allow an entity or system to change to achieve optimal operation under different conditions’), however, that takes us to the real essence of Zone To Win. It is one thing to segment Green and Red Worlds, quite another to be able to dynamically shift the emphasis and relative importance of the four zones according to the prevailing and emerging market conditions.
Most insightfully, I think, is Moore’s ‘Transformation Zone’, the place where, in effect, the enterprise must deal with the ‘D’ part of R&D. This is the TRL4-7 transition between Green and Red World, and as such, Moore recognises that this Zone only really gets switched on once either a disruptive threat emerges to jeopardise Red World’s Production Zone, or, if the leadership team are braver, the enterprise decides to proactively become the disruptor.
Moore’s Zoning model doesn’t incorporate the usual circle I’ve drawn in the middle of the 2×2 matrix, but because Zone To Win is written as a playbook for the Senior Leadership Team of an enterprise, it is the place where they sit. In effect, above the four zones, coordinating the transitions between each of them, shifting the relative resources each needs as market conditions shift, and, switching on the Transformation Zone as and when the disruptive threat or opportunity arises.
If there’s a failing to the book it is that, because it is written as a How-To guide for senior leaders, it fails to cover the ‘Why-To’ part of the story. Probably because Moore assumes that only the senior leaders need to worry about that part of the story. And that they’re the only people in the enterprise that ultimately need to know. Part of that knowledge being that disruptive times – whether proactively launched, or reactively responded to – are inherently traumatic to everyone, and probably more so the further down the hierarchy one goes. While I can see the traditional leadership logic of keeping bad news away from people, I also get to see the damage it causes. In many ways that’s why I’ve been evolving the whole Red-World/Green-World story: if a leader genuinely wishes to lead the team through a Hero’s Journey, better to equip them with the necessary skills and mindsets. People love change, they hate being changed. Too often, Red-World gets things done using Parent-Child management strategies, whereas Green-World understands that Heroism works far better when everyone is being treated as an Adult. And therefore knows why they’re there, and has the requisite autonomy to do what needs to be done. Why and when to be Red, and why and when to be Green.
I’m sitting in a depressing Starbucks, drinking an even more depressing Latte. Everything (in the UK) is breaking. I start wondering how long it will be before we hit bottom. A calculation that demands some systems thinking.
Although there are myriad definitions of what a ‘system’ is, there is some kind of consensus to say that it is a combination of elements that ‘do something’. Such that, for example, in order to do something like achieve an Apocalypse, it will require the presence of a system. According to http://systematic-innovation.com/assets/iss-205-apr-19.pdf, there are three kinds of system.
The second of the three types is one that is ‘uncontrolled’. That is, a system that will deliver the desired outcome – ‘Apocalypse’ in this example – but the speed and manner by which the outcome is delivered is not under control. This type of system needs a minimum of four elements: A source of energy (‘Engine’), a means of connecting (‘Transmission’) that energy to a ‘Tool’ that delivers the outcome by acting on an Interface.
The biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, correspond fairly accurately to these four elements. Something like this:
They typically form a self-perpetuating cycle, in this case, something like this:
So far so bad.
There have been several – usually semi-humorous – attempts to identify additional Horsemen. Some have suggested things like climate change, inflation or debt, but my recent favourite has been ‘misinformation’:
What I like about it – although I’m not certain that ‘like’ is the correct expression – is that it points clearly to one of the two elements that would be required to turn an uncontrolled system into one that becomes ‘controlled’. According to the Law Of System Completeness, if someone wanted to achieve a controlled Apocalypse, they would need to add a Sensor and a Coordination element to the Engine, Transmission, Tool and Interface contained within the uncontrolled system. Misinformation fulfils the role of the ‘Sensor’ quite nicely. Which then just leaves us missing the Coordinator:
What might that be, I wonder? Who or what might be the Coordinator of a controlled Apocalypse?
First thoughts head in the direction of the Conservative Government in the UK. Mainly because, per the reason I’m sat in this Starbucks, it feels like everything from the NHS to the transport infrastructure to the fact that I’m told it will be a week before I get an internet signal in the office again, is collapsing around me.
Prior to the disappearance of my internet, the last thing I saw was Rishi Sunak’s, delivered-with-a-knowing-grin, New Year message of doom. Maybe this was a sign? Except no. The UK has already descended into insignificance in global terms. If there’s to be a controlled Apocalypse, I needed to think bigger. What cabal’s of dysfunction is Rishi Sunak connected to? The G7? Not secret enough. How about the World Economic Forum? Here’s what their website currently says:
“The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.”
Hmm. Law Of Unintended Consequence-wise, that seems to fit the bill perfectly. Insert image of a Sixth Horsemen here. It is Klaus Schwab. On a lizard. Wielding a broken abacus and a syringe.
Gotcha. Controlled Apocalypse, come in please, your time is up.
“Telling a story is like building a sandcastle in the sand instead of drawing a line in the sand. You invite curiosity, build interest, and encourage participation so that in their enthuiasm your listeners end up on ‘your side’ without ever having to acknowledge that they’ve crossed a line. Likewise, if you tell a story and it doesn’t engage them, there was no clear ‘no’ and you are free to try again with a new story. Without an us/them line there is no adversary so no one loses.”
Annette Simmons, The Story Factor
Here’s the scenario. We’re trying to engage with an audience we’ve not met before. They are likely to be against the basic premise of what we’ve been asked to talk about (why do we accept these challenges?). Moreover, in our increasingly polarised world, they’re as likely to not agree with one another either. We’re reminded of the expression, ‘people love change, they hate being changed’. Our job is to convince them to change. What do we do?
Here’s what the challenge looks like as a conflict mapped onto the business version of the Contradiction Matrix:
Suggestion 1 (Principle 2, Taking-Out/Separation) – draw a line in the sand and talk to the people on each side of the line separately.
Suggestion 2 (Principle 24, Intermediary) – build a sandcastle.
Whoever builds the best (line-crossing) sandcastle wins.
I have a friend who’s been carrying around this Guardian headline since February. Using the article wherever he can to justify his fervent belief that Electric Vehicles are good for the planet. He hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, quite grasped the concept of confirmation bias. In the same way I suspect the Guardian journalist didn’t allow the small matter of fact get in the way of a heartwarming story for their ‘liberal elite’™ audience.
The constant problem with these kinds of story is that, by redrawing the system boundaries, its always possible to get the answer you want. I’m not sure the journalists quite get it, but I’m very sure the ‘scientists’ behind the scenes do. While I (sometimes) admire their intentions, the right and proper job of science is first and foremost about presenting the objective facts right. Which in turn means framing the right system boundaries, rather than using the boundaries that best make the subjective, political point that ought to be the business of others.
System boundaries are all about defining what we are going to include and what we are going to exclude from our calculations. Most times, system boundaries relate to physical space. Such that, for example, if we draw the EV system boundary around purely urban areas, then EVs are indeed ‘better’ than conventionally powered vehicles. The implication contained within the word ‘better’ is that we mean ‘better for the planet’. That’s where the calculation switches from being merely naïve to active disingenuity. Taking a measure of EVs benefits within a tightly controlled boundary and then extrapolating the result to include everything outside that boundary takes us beyond lies and damned lies. The power needed to charge the batteries has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is all the places outside the urban areas. If do the ‘fair’ thing, we need to include the power stations in the calculation. The reason I imagine the pro-EV lobby are reluctant to do this is because they know that the thermal efficiency of the vast majority of power stations is lower than that of the vast majority of the petrol or diesel engines found in our cars. Which means that, with the system boundary redrawn to include the power stations needed to provide the electricity to charge the batteries, EVs are currently objectively worse than petrol or diesel vehicles.
The pro-EV lobby, would no doubt then come back with another argument. Probably one that says something like, ‘yes, but, in the future, the power grid will be increasingly supplied with renewable energy sources’. And they would be right. We can extend system boundaries in both space and time dimensions, and on the latter front, sure enough, at some point in the future, when renewable energy crosses a threshold percentage of the total grid, EVs will then become ‘better’ again.
Yet, again, though, that’s not the end of the story. Merely another system boundary shift. One that the pro-oil lobby will no doubt rebut with their next ‘yes, but’ challenge. Here’s what such a tit-for-tat sequence of boundary expansions might look like if allowed to play out in full:
If the system boundary is drawn around urban areas, EVs are ‘better’ for the environment than conventional
If the system boundary is extended to include the power stations that generated the electricity to charge the EV batteries, EVs are worse than conventional.
If we extend the system timeframe boundary to include future power generation infrastructure that includes more renewables, EVs are better than conventional.
If we extend the system boundary to include the full renewables story (e.g. the literal insanity of cutting down Canadian forests and shipping woodchips to Drax), EVs are worse than conventional.
If we extend the timeframe again to a time when the transport ecosystem shifts away from private ownership to ‘green-mobility’ (e.g. Uber, Ola, Lyft, etc), EVs are better.
If we extend the system boundary to include the complete battery production story (from finding the lithium and getting it out of the ground), EVs are worse.
If we project into a future where every vehicle is electric and all electricity generation is from genuinely-renewable renewables, EVs are better. (i.e. in the end, per the TRIZ trend, everything evolves to ‘electrical’ rather than mechanical)
Extend the system boundaries to include the full, ‘right’, planetary space and time dimensions and we reach a conclusion that EVs will indeed be better in the long run than oil-based vehicles. I suspect some (TRIZ-aware) scientists know this, and in order to ‘avoid confusing the public’ choose to simplify their arguments. On some level, I can see the sense in this. But, when you know that there is a rival gang of scientists representing a different (partial) view of the world, the only result of telling half-truths is complete falsehood. In other words, define the right boundaries, take out the spin, and tell the right story from the get go.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself with an hour to kill in a satellite town I kind of knew. In the thirty or so years I’ve occasionally visited the town not a lot has changed. The number of actual shops on the high street has gradually gone down, and the number of charity shops has gradually gone up, but that’s about all. Now – post-Covid – someone from the council has decided that there’s a need to get people socialising again. So they’ve taken one of the bits of too-wide pavement and filled the space with a loose circle of benches. Normally I would’ve ignored them, but as I walked through the circle, I noticed that one of the benches had a plaque. The plaque read ‘Happy to Chat’. I was intrigued. I had time to spare. For a change, it wasn’t raining, and there were quite a few people strolling up and down the street. I went over and sat on the bench opposite the Happy To Chat Bench. It was empty, and so were the other two benches. I was the only person sitting down.
A couple of people walked past. I smiled at them. They kind of smiled back. I had half a thought that they’d also speeded up slightly. I was trying to work out how I’d worked this out, when someone else came and sat down on the bench next to mine. We nodded at each other. I took out a book I’d just bought from one of the charity shops.
I’m old these days, but the man sat on the next bench was older. And his dog looked older still.
“what’s his name,” I said, nodding, smling at the dog’s grey muzzle, the bleary, ‘I used to love walkies, but now it all feels like such a faff’ eyes.
The man looked confused. My accent does that sometimes. A lot. Wherever I am, my accent is from somewhere else.
“You from the council?” the man said.
“I’m not, no.”
“You come to look at that,” he nodded toward the Happy To Chat Bench, “you won’t be the first.”
“I didn’t know about it. Before. Is it famous?” I tried to smile, “does anyone ever sit there?”
The man laughed. Loud enough that the dog looked up at him, “not so far as I know. I come here most days. I’ve never seen anyone.” A pause, “you wouldn’t, would you?”
“I guess not,” I nodded back, “unless…”
“I’ve been here when all these other seats have been full. Everyone looking at that one. Daring someone to come and sit on it.”
“What would you’ve done if they had?”
He looked at me, the confused look again, “huh?”
“If someone’d come along and sat on it, while you were all here sat looking at them?”
“Well. I suppose. I never thought about it. Probably squished up on one of the other benches so he could move.”
“Maybe that was the council’s plan?”
“Huh?”
“The best piece of reverse psychology in the history of reverse psychology. No-one would ever sit there because they wanted to chat. Too embarrassing. But they would come and sit on one of these seats and chat about that one.”
The man shook his head, “No. I don’t think the council would do that.”
“There’s probably some research,” I tried.
But already the man was getting to his feet, pulling on the lead, “if there was, that would be a double waste. Waste of time and waste of a good bench.”
I nodded, “nice dog.”
He looked down, yanked at the lead, “time to go, Sid. No conversation to be had here today.”
First triple bluff I’ve experienced in a long time.
I was on Lundy this week. For a small island, it is surprisingly full of examples of how the (British) world of management has a long pedigree of incompetence. Mainly, in the case of Lundy, incompetence of the Victorian kind. Which, given the size of the British Empire at that time, probably says a lot about the more general state of the management art. The most famous example of Lundy management incompetence came when they decided to build a lighthouse on the highest point of the island. I guess, in theory, the thinking went something along the lines that the higher the light, the further away ships would see the three-mile by half-mile obstacle in the Bristol Channel. In practice, sadly, the times when a light was most useful usually coincided with the times it was foggy. And, Lundy being the latitude it is, most of the time it was foggy, the light was just the right height above sea-level that, unlike lower parts of the island, it was lost in the fog.
Eventually, three generations later, the powers that be abandoned the project, built two new lights closer to sea-level at the north and south tips of the island, and turned what was now called the Old Light, into a viewing point. The intricate and cunning combination of candles and mirrors replaced with a pair of folding deckchairs.
My favourite example of management incompetence, however, is less well known, albeit slightly more tragic. It was decided that there should be a cart track built up the spine of the island from the village to the northern point. The island being mainly formed from an inconvenient lump of ex-volcanic granite meant that the track was mainly formed by scraping off the accumulated topsoil and peat to leave the granite exposed. This was probably somewhat sensible, although, given the fact that the track was mainly going to be used by humans and their assorted beasts of burden, I think I would’ve voted for keeping the topsoil in place. I imagine the relative lack of traffic up and down the track might’ve meant a danger the track would disappear, though, and heaven forbid those using the track might have to improvise. As a further guarantee that no-one would stray from the exposed granite, especially at night, it was further decided that they should lay some marker stones along the side of the track.
Here’s where we get to the good bit. The bit that mimicks one of the best scenes in one of the best movies ever, Spinal Tap. In the movie, when the band’s US tour turns out to be going not so well, guitarist, Nigel Tufnel, suggests they should revive one of their earlier classics, Stonehenge. Tufnel sketches out a drawing of the required stone formation and hands it to a handy prop-builder. Come the night of the first show to feature the prop, we get to see an eighteen-inch-high Stonehenge arch being slowly lowered onto the stage. Then a troupe of small-people dance around it. This is still funny after a hundred viewings. But still not quite as funny as the band conference after the event.
Anyway, the gist of the Stonehenge joke is that Tuffnell has got his feet and inches mixed up. He thought he was ordering a more representative of the real thing, eighteen-foot-high Stonehenge. Meanwhile back on Lundy, management had their own equivalent of Nigel Tufnel. Only he got his feet and inches mixed up the other way around. Meaning that a 3-mile-long line of four-inch-high marker stones actually became a 3-mile-long line of four-foot-high marker stones.
Admittedly, over a hundred years later, they still do the track marking job pretty well. No-one quite remembers, though, precisely how many donkeys were killed during the transportation of the monoliths. I suspect it was double figures. I suspect too that, after the first expired donkey incident, the workers had realised something was wrong with the drawings, but none had the bottle to go tell management. That or – more likely – management realised what had happened and didn’t have the humility to admit their mistake. As ever, the overriding Victorian problem-solving strategy was, and to a large extent continues to be, ‘if in doubt, leave things as they are’.
Metaphor makes the world go round. Some metaphors make it go round faster than others. All have their inherent limits. The worst kinds manage to combine half-bakery and high virality. One such example, it seems to me, is the currently highly fashionable unfair-race metaphor.
The basis of this metaphor is that it’s not fair that some people are given a head start in life. In an equal world, the race metaphor tells us, everyone should start at the same point on the same starting line. More recently, some have tried to take the half-bakery a step further by suggesting that the aim should be for all of the competitors to reach the finish line at the same time. This scenario is supposed to represent the idea of ‘equity’. Taken at the metaphorical level, the equitable-finish idea sounds pretty good to many people. And, to those that recognise the deeper fallacy it contains (I might want to win an Olympic sprint gold medal, but that doesn’t mean I should be given an infinite amount of resources to achieve the goal – probably an IronMan exoskeleton and copious amounts of pain killing drugs in my case), they are likely to agree with the slightly more practical goal of having everyone start from the same point on the track. ‘All men created equal’ and other self-evident truths.
But even that image only works up to a certain point. Equality is good, but too much of it definitely isn’t. Or rather equality measures are good, but having too many of them is bad. Equality, like everything else in life, is subject to Goldilocks Law, and the presence of a Goldilocks Curve. Something like this:
This picture perhaps begins to highlight some of the limits of the unfair race metaphor. I’ll come back to them shortly. In the meantime, there’s a bigger flaw with the metaphor. One that relates to the meaning of the finish-line at the end of the race. In the metaphor, as in actual running races, it is clear the first to reach the finish line is the ‘winner’. And, therefore, those that start the race several hundred metres ahead of others are somehow unfairly advantaged.
The finish-line makes sense in the context of a race. But to what extent is life a race? What exactly is the finish-line supposed to represent in the real world beyond the metaphor? Is life a race to have the most money? Or everlasting life? Or good health? Or a high quality of life? A beach house in Malibu? High functioning offspring? What? Until we can answer that question, it’s not really possible to conclude that the person starting the race ahead of others is at an advantage or not. I suspect many people look at the race metaphor and the unfairness of those given a head-start and assume that the race has something to do with material wealth. Many of us live in a capitalism-based economy, and so money is often seen as the goal. The one with the most toys wins, and all that. But is that what life is really about? I can easily imagine that someone with nothing looks at someone who apparently has multiple silver-spoons sticking out of their mouth with some kind of envy. But at the same time, I can also imagine the same person waking up in their 200-room mansion one day having fought to get to the front of the race and realising they now hate their life. Having enough money is good. Having too much rather less so. In other words, the amount of money we end up with is also subject to Goldilocks Law.
So, the unequal-race metaphor fails at this level. The one with the most toys is not the actual winner. But, let’s assume for a moment that it is. The reason being that apart from the finish-line flaw, there’s an even bigger problem with the metaphor.
Let’s think about the runner with the unfair advantage, the person that starts half a mile ahead of everyone else. For them, life is easy. They don’t have to try. They’ve been educated at Eton and then walked into a cushy job in the City, they have attractive members of the opposite sex throwing themselves at them, they get to drive the best cars, sail the biggest yacht and fly the most expensive executive jet. Well done. One might say that their biggest problem is making sure they don’t lose all the wealth and privilege they had handed to them. That probably doesn’t sound like such a big problem to have given the alternatives. But all the evidence tells us that this ‘don’t-screw-up’ mindset pretty well guarantees they will screw-up. We see exactly the same thing inside the enterprises and institutions of the world. As soon as the leadership team start focusing on not being the ones to sink the ship, they make it much more likely they will indeed sink the ship. Protecting what we have puts us in defensive mode. Which is mainly significant because it is the polar opposite of the type of thinking required for innovation.
Innovation, when it comes, almost invariably originates with the person that has nothing to lose. The cash-poor start-up that has to bootstrap anything and everything to make ends meet while they try and work out how to encourage reluctant customers or investors to part with their money. This lack of money is the thing that drives creativity, persistence and the grit required to succeed. The lone entrepreneur doesn’t get angry with the big incumbent companies with their bigger bank balances, they use them as fuel to find better ways of getting things done. These are the people that actually make the world go round. The people that create new value. The people that see the enormous problems present in the world and set about fixing them.
These are the people that, back to the unequal-race metaphor, look at the runners starting half a mile ahead of them, and use the unfairness as a resource. The motivation to find better ways of running the race. Building a jet pack. Maglev running shoes. Anything that allows them to beat those that ‘cheated’ and now spend their time looking backwards rather than forwards. None of this stuff is easy. But then its not supposed to be. Il faut souffrir. Whining about it doesn’t help. Turning the anger and frustration at the unfairness into fuel absolutely does.
Forget equity. Equity leads to communism, and we know that doesn’t work.
Forget equality. Equality leads to lowest common denominator solutions and then communism.
The world needs innovation, and unfairness (aka ‘frustration’) is the mother of innovation. Yes, unfairness is also bound by Goldilocks Law. Meaning there are limits to how unfair things get before those left behind give up rather than fight. But yes, too, we know that giving the disadvantaged free hand-outs and mollycoddling them with blankets and platitudes doesn’t help either. All these things do is make the whole of society weaker. We call that the Law Of Unintended Consequences, and we see it happening everywhere. Well-intentioned governments that end up delivering the precise opposite of what they set out to deliver. Take away unfairness, in other words, and we take away progress.
