The Logic Leap: Recent Episodes
Ferdi van Heerden
On an Aeroflot flight from London to Moscow in 2004 something struck me as extremely odd. Looking up at the air vent above my seat, there was a hair spray painted onto the air conditioning grid. Not only this, but the grid was also clearly manufactured by hand. The more I investigated the interior of the old Ilyushin 86, the more I became aware of the remnants of the hands who had manufactured this plane.
After years of flying in the machined plastic interiors of Boeing and Airbus planes, this evidence of manual work on the plane left me shocked at first. It looked shoddy and unprofessional. It made me wonder what the wiring looked like and if there were other hairs or cracks in areas of the plane of more consequence than the air ducts.
Then my thinking shifted. After all, these planes were the legacy of a communist system. Perhaps these overt symbols of handy work was a testament of hard, honest contact with a comrade.
The people who made the plane were made visible by these tiny artefacts. And in so doing their work was recognized.
You were not flying alone.
Many years while watching the vampire movie “only Lovers left alive” I was reminded of this flight, and these thoughts.
Jim Jarmousch’s genius elegantly writes a new magic power to the lore of vampires. Not only do they absorb the karma of the people they drink blood from, they can sense and absorb the physical history of objects.
They know exactly how and where a box was manufactured. They know through who’s hands it has passed. As we dive deeper into the world of quantum physics, these kinds of energy signatures, embedded in objects can become imaginable. With the right kind of sensing equipment and algorithms to interpret the data, we too may one day see the energy fingerprints that people leave all around them.
We too may see the whole process in the artefact.
Which brings me to the last mini-ice age. As a child we used to have placemats with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of the seasons. I grew up thinking that the scene with hunters returning in the snow simply was the way Europe looked.
I observed the scene without understanding the system that made it possible.
The latest scientific measurements tell a far deeper and more sinister tale behind these classic images of white Christmases and snow filled landscapes.
The most critical part of this ice age was between 1645 and 1715 where winter temperatures were estimated to be about 2 lower than at present. This cooling at the time when industrialization was just kicking in, has puzzled scientist for decades. Everything from sun spots to tidal shifts in the Atlantic have been blamed.
With more sophisticated measurements, better scanning and algorithms, we can now see the actors in the system more clearly.
As Europeans started to have contact with the Americas after 1492 there was a massive depopulation and redistribution of land use across the two continents. It is estimated that 56 million people died between 1492 and 1600. Vast empires disappeared leading to massive reforestation at an immense scale (estimated at 55.8 Mha).
The fast-growing trees that sprouted in the areas where farmers had kept them in check before consumed so much carbon dioxide that it reduced the global CO2 count by 3.5 ppm.
When we now look at these images of Europe, we should also see the wholesale destruction of the American cultures, wisdom and civilizations. The hunters walking through the snow are only possible because there were no more hunters walking through the snow in North America.
The pineapples and coffee celebrated in European courts being the symptoms and symbols of contamination. Advanced, evolved bio-engineering feasted upon by people living in the petri-dish of cholera, smallpox and measles.
In some ways we see echoes of this in the current reverberation of the Omicron tsunami.
Contaminating cultures
For far too long Western countries have turned blind eye to the drastic inequality in global healthcare systems. Poorer countries are somehow deemed not equal in their needs and requirements for standards of care.
This neglect caused the preconditions to breed a super variant that has now come back to bite the systems that viewed themselves as superior.
Another quote from Donella H Meadows:
“There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
When the purposes are political, the definition if system boundaries will be artificially constrained by cultural concepts such as voter rights or political borders.
A virus does not read a constitution. A xenophobic political system based on the concept of exceptionalism does not protect you from a pandemic. As Meadows again so succinctly summarizes: “You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.”
And what is the consequence of our systemic blending and hyper globalized accelerated infection?
Contact kinetics
In the “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow unpack how European societies were changed fundamentally when they encountered the true freedom and foresight of native American societies.
Americans were stunned at Europeans’ lack of compassion and subservience. They could not understand how humans could be so blind to the suffering of their fellow humans.
Subsequent generations have worked at reducing and erasing this philosophical and intellectual impact, claiming that such idealism is the naïve holdout of “primitive” societies. That progress demands hierarchy and inequality.
A post rationalization of the destruction and extractive mindset that Europe imposed on the world.
Yes, we may have committed genocide, but we brought you electricity and bureaucracy!
Or along such lines the consequences of a selfish individualism are justified.
The inability to see systems has fed a consumerist mindset fed by short term extractive economic choices. A society that poisons its water, air and land is the purest symbol of system blindness.
Has our ability to see the system behind the signs improved at all over the last 600 years?
Surround sight
In a sense blockchain is starting to capture the karma of artefacts. By storing the entire history of transactions and agreements, you can dive into and feel the flow of a system in the fingerprints on its data.
My friend Karl’s project to build an “internet of impact” has received a welcome official boost by being promoted by the Scottish government. We are beginning to use the connectivity of a digital paradigm to stitch together the (elegant) digital equivalent of “spray painted hairs on the air vent”; to see the people and processes behind our products and services.
Can we educate a new generation to see beyond the dazzling allure of now and instant gratification to fully appreciate the processes and systems behind their clicks and likes? Can we invite the full value chain into our appreciation of an event?
Many years ago I read a quote that shaped my thinking profoundly:
The weight of a temporal moment is determined by how much of the past and future are present within it.
When we start adding the mass of the moment to bounded bits, we may just begin to develop “system-sight.”
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
1. Sense
What information do you include in your appreciation of a product? How broad is your awareness of the total cost of delivering convenience and service?
2. See
Do you have clear visual references of what it has taken to make what is in front of you possible? What exactly does the farm look like that your chicken salad was harvested at?
3. Show
As part of a system you are both recipient and source. How do you show up on someone else’s dashboard? How does the system change based on your partictipation?
P.S, the audio on this newsletter tells a totally different story (:
Get full access to The Logic Leap at logicleap.substack.com/subscribe
This week I wanted to start with a thought experiment.
Imagine you are a primitive stone-age hunter, walking into the ruins of a library. You have never heard of reading and writing so the shapes and symbols in the books have no meaning to you.
In fact, you have never come across anything that looks like a book, so these fine leaves have one useful purpose for you: to make a good fire.
They burn really well and there are so many of them stacked around. For your needs and purposes, they are doing an excellent service in keeping the cold at bay. You, the hunter, are captivated by what a book does (burns), not what it means (cultural repository)
As someone who started his career in marketing, the concept of origin stories has often fascinated me. The mythology around Ben & Jerry’s. The fake origin of Häagen-Dazs. We put a lot of stock in where we think something comes from. Over the last 20 years, as global supply chains have become more complex and everything has essentially been produced by a faceless army of drones in grey box factory, the mythology around origins has taken center stage in marketing brands.
And with this flood of origin fluff the true originals keep cutting the line others will follow.
Why is it that to this day, adidas Super Stars and Stan Smiths still outsell their younger siblings who have the benefit of massive budgets and sophisticated marketing. The same holds true for Nike’s Air Max. Why is it that Queen is still one of the biggest bands on spotify?
Could it be that the way in which something is conceived can have a lasting influence on the impact it has in the world? Or does the system into which it is fed make all the difference in the sustained resonance it finds in cultural currency?
During the time I was at adidas the raging new new idea was “feet you wear” – a clunky and awkward marketing idea that shoes are like feet. The marketing budgets were enormous and millions of posters, ads and events were created to burn the image into the collective retina.
What I found really odd was that there was no real patience or persistence in building the concept. Every retailer wanted to be different from the others, so they demanded a “special make up” – a colour combination or feature that could only be found in Foot Locker or Decathlon or wherever. And then everything had to change every three months… later everything had to change every month.
The reason we were given by the retailers was that consumers needed a reason to visit the store on a more regular basis. By having a new colourway or detail launched every month there would be “excitement” around the brand.
This is the same trap that led Nokia into a drowning pit of complexity. Every phone carrier wanted some detail to be different or slightly unique from the phones everyone else was selling.
Hidden Cost of Novelty
The craziest conversation I had with a Nokia product logistics manager was about how AT&T forced them to hide the camera in their phone.
AT&T demanded a certain form factor at a specific price point. It was cheaper for Nokia to just change the back cover to hide the camera hardware, than to remove the camera hardware from the phone circuitry. Thousands of American consumers had a far more advanced phone in their pockets that they knew, and the Nokia brand was driven to destruction through a thousand cuts of compromise.
The phone users like the stone-age hunter oblivious to the precious gift in their hands.
This week I heard a shocking German statistic. 40% of all clothing that gets made never gets sold. Of all the clothes that do get sold, another 40% is either not worn or worn once.
In an attempt to provide consumers with the “pile it high and sell it cheap” experience, retailers like H&M, primark and others are creating massive piles of non-recyclable waste. Intentionally.
And why? Just to ultimately sell another Stan Smith, Levi’s 501 or classic design that was invented 50 years ago.
The paradox we clutch on to is that there is a constant demand for “novelty” that ultimately just reenforces the known. Anything that challenges the paradigm is not recognized or rewarded.
Disruption by Design
This week we had some interesting feedback from a venture capital broker. He pointed out that their funds were looking to achieve hyper scalability, and that manufacturing hardware was a “barrier.”
This is a fascinating insight into the paradigm in which these funds are operating. Keep in mind that they plan on the fact that 8-9/10 investments will fail or fail to return a significant return. So that one investment has to deliver the magical 10+X to cover the losses and earn a return for the fund.
They are looking for the next Google or Facebook without understanding that the next Google or Facebook will not look anything like them at all.
They focus on what the company does (or in this case looks like), not what it means.
In “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned,” Kenneth Stanley presents the data on how pattern recognizing/generating AI fails to deliver innovation if you set the objective of innovation.
If every step in the iteration process is measured against the ultimate outcome it is supposed to deliver (does it look like meta) it takes much longer to achieve that objective.
Quite simply, a butterfly does not look like a butterfly until it breaks out of the cocoon. It actually has to dissolve the entire caterpillar into a soup of genetic potential before the new body can be built. In the same way, the design process has to incubate and incorporate randomness to evolve.
In the same way that you can’t hunt for disruptive business models by judging them by the standards of old patterns, you cannot create new sustainable fashion successes by replicating the old.
You need a system that incubates a reconfiguration of the innovation DNA, not simply a superficial copy and paste.
Second Sight
Now, imagine a highly advanced civilization lived on earth 1 000 000 years ago. In their wisdom they created a back-up of their knowledge, technology, and culture. But where would you place such a treasure trove to be secured against asteroid impact and solar flares. You can’t store it electronically because just one magnetic field shift and it will all be wiped. So, a scientist comes up with a dense substance that can store terabytes of information in one drop. A liquid interface that can be used in multiple systems without a rigid data frame. Where do you place this massive ocean of information.
The cultural researchers and ethics philosophers have years of debate and finally decide, we need to store it deep inside the earth. Only a civilization that is advanced enough to probe the core of the earth will have the technology to decode the data we have stored there.
Then modern humans discover oil and burn it for our base needs. We know what it does (creates almost everything we touch), but not what it means (we are living on dinosaur blood).
To this day we do not fully understand how it was formed, what it tells us about civilization and the mass extinctions before us. Yet we burn it like the primitive in a library.
How might we take the shift in our understanding. How might we see the one pair of jeans in our hands in its entirety, as it relates to the 3 or four other shoes that will be burnt for this one sale? How might we refocus on the meaning of origins to align our value chains accordingly?
Let’s take that leap.
Three key take-outs:
1. Pointing
Is your origin a source of orientation? Are you pointing towards or away from its meaning? Is that a conscious choice?
2. Process
Have you established or engaged with rituals, processes and relationships that support the development of meaning? Is your process purely functional or can it be revelatory?
3. Priceless
Can you understand the value of a true original? Are you focussed on what it does (excite, engage, enrich) or what it means?
P.S, the audio on this newsletter tells a totally different story (:
Get full access to The Logic Leap at logicleap.substack.com/subscribe
That took a lot longer than expected! But the journey has been a rewarding one.
Between edition 49 and this week's newsletter, I've been to Cameroon, getting my feet and hands dirty with the raw challenges of launching COOKO.
In a sense, it also provided me with first-hand lived experiences of the type of tribal and traditional hierarchies that John referred to in our interview.
As he put it: “The Niuean word for respect is “Lilifu” and depending on the context “lilifu” is also honour, status, and humility. The act of respect is “Fakalilifu," which means to give or receive respect. In the Pacific world view, respect is based on our collective mindset and values, and sustained by cultural norms.”
This complements the perspective we took last time, where the focus was on the reflexive nature of respect. The "RE" part of the word. This time we look at the second part.
"SPECT" deals with the perspective or point of vantage we take on the situation, person or conversation. Quite often, where you stand or sit determines what you see.
Embedded
John: Respect is a value that some Pacific Islands cultures practise to maintain social structures and systems. These values in the context of community life including-
Ancestors and the knowledge transfer,
cultural and genealogical ties,
family, church and village,
the natural environment - the land, sky and sea,
spiritual, cultural, social systems and structures,
In conversations with John, the image of respect evolved into a twofold entity in my mind:
1. Form/vessel/symbol: This is the overt structure of power hierarchies that confers respect upon the holders of a space or position in the system. Status is based on where you sit in this hierarchy.
2. Energy/spirit/meaning: The inherent nature, behaviour, meaning or what we would call the character of an individual, action or movement.
There is a symbiotic relationship between these two levels. The form cannot function without the spirit, and the spirit cannot manifest without form. For "respect" to transform a situation, it needs both levels, and this is where the friction starts.
John: “Personally, I find the way leadership is approached by the different communities is intriguing - where respect is based on a person's title and status, regardless of ability.
I grew up in a culture which doesn't look to social structures and titles as a birth-right, respect is based on one's experience, knowledge, community work and character. You respect your elders because of their knowledge and experience (expressions of character).
I see respect in its purest form in communities with simple and basic living conditions, with limited or no assets. They are happy and content with their lives.”
Duality
Growing up, John could experience first-hand how the duality of "respect" could deliver confusing and contradictory outcomes.
His mother was the first woman to enter the seminary and become a Minister in the church, previously an all-male domain.
John: “Watching the resistance to change from some parts of the church and the community was frustratingly fascinating, it brought out the best and worst in people.”
When our expectations of form and spirit do not match, it becomes confusing and disorienting. We smell a rat when people cling to the overt, external symbols of power to overcompensate for lack of the true spirit of respect.
At a deeper level, we all understand that respect is a two-way street. The respect you get and give needs to be in balance, and this works up and down the hierarchy.
One particular aspect that brings this into relief is mutual respect's role in making communities sustainable. The older generation needs to have respect for the younger generation's energy, challenges and ideas.
The younger generation has to have respect for the older generation's context, understanding and framing.
Only when both have a mutual and balanced respect can they transcend their individual expectations. If a community don't adopt new ideas, they will stagnate and become their own worst enemy as younger generations reject old ways.
On the other hand, if a community jumps onto every new idea without profoundly reflecting on the impacts and costs of adaptation, they may lose their unifying identity, value and values.
Mutual respect plays the pivotal role in balancing permanence and transience to manifest potential.
As I was travelling through Cameroon the structures and signs of respect were all-pervasive. Looking back, the one symbol from the trip that sticks most firmly in my mind is the leather sofa.
In all formal contexts, the person's status, and hence the respect afforded by the position, were measurable by the size and value of the sofas.
The outlier village chief had a small set with velour. The senior minister had two separate waiting rooms. The first had three large leather sofas, the second was an enormous living room with 6 ornate leather sofas. The sofa says who you are.
These overt symbols of status are implicit cues that signal the respect required. They become guide ropes to set out the protocols and flow of the dialogue.
The irony of a sofa being the ultimate status symbol is its role in stagnating and ossifying systems. The sofa is not a dynamic symbol.
You will slumber into seated sedateness.
The ossification of such power dynamics means that a disproportionate effort is placed on making people feel comfortable about how things were, rather than engaging people in how things could be.
As John put it: "When respect is used to keep people focused on and living in the past, when we should use the learnings of the past to anchor and light the way for the future.
When respect is used to keep people from moving forward is when we see significant disparities in income and wealth."
The officials, business leaders and authorities who mask and cloak their intentions in the finery of respect, demand the formal rewards of power without the spirit of respect. This asymmetry cannot support a sustainable, evolving community because it doesn't serve adaptation.
Deceptive deference
The COVID pandemic has highlighted this coercion of respect in clouding sensemaking. In dealing with a radically new situation pundits of all designs have clung to cultural and societal symbols of respect to reinforce their messages.
Hiding behind the masks that projected certainty when in fact there was none.
In many ways, both the scientists and the fear mongers were inviting us to their sofas. The bigger and grander the sofa, the less likely we would be to contradict, question or guide the conversation to uncertainty. The sofas looked solid, even though the science, theories and political slogans were not.
Respect requires engagement. We cannot ignore or falsify the spirit inherent in mutual honour and shared power. Any attempt at short term gains at the expense of the other, will be felt in the keen cutting anger of disrespect.
Let's create dynamic structures that learn from the fringe AND honour the core. Let's get out of the sofa and onto the dance floor.
Let's take that Leap
Three key take-outs:
1. in-SPECT
What are your biases and unspoken expectations regarding respect? What are the lenses that might distort the way this is interpreted and understood?
2. retro-SPECT
Are you looking forward or backwards when you interpret respect? Do you place a disproportionate value on the past or do you aim to build a forward looking framework for mutual respect?
3. su-SPECT
Are you navigating by the overt symbols of respect or the inherent spirit of respect? How does the situation change if you suspect the motives to be respectful?
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Empathy has become a very charged term in these days of integration and identity. Through mindfulness and non-violent communication, we seek ways to engage and anticipate the emotional realities of our counterparts.
Surprisingly, the word empathy is relatively new. It traces its roots back to 1858 when the German philosopher Rudolf Lotze started using the concept of “empatheia.” It was the Greek expression of the German “Einfühlung” – literally to feel within. To be inside the emotion.
The directionality of the term opens a very revealing challenge and shortcoming in the way we use it in modern discourse. If we attempt to be “in the emotion,”
…are we using empathy as a mirror or a window?
Sweating the details
Ovetta Sampson’s powerful article on Medium at the end of 2020 titled “Stop Bastardizing Design with False Empathy,” is a great place to start the discussion.
Ovetta walks through Goleman’s three levels of empathy to describe how we fool ourselves into believing that we are deeply connected to the reality of another person. The 3 levels are:
Cognitive: you understand what the other person is feeling
Emotional: feeling along with the other person
Compassionate: beyond the first two we are compelled to help when needed
The design thinking hype has led many people into a space where they believe they are applying empathy, because they understand the predicament of the person they are designing for. As Ovetta points out, quite often companies will even substitute “the person they are designing for” with a so-called (fictitious) “persona.”
This persona more often than not reflects the bias of the designers. It is a static model of their imagined user.
In other words, this “empathy” is mirror.
Going to the next level often requires dedicated “empathy exercises.” These are activities designed to elicit the same or similar emotional state that the target user is experiencing. Quite often you need to create a totally different scenario to bring people into the same space.
For example, if you want people to experience what it feels like to be blind, the first reaction is to cover people’s eyes. This won’t create the same emotional state though because for the “designer” it will be a novel state. For someone who is blind, this is their default state and they have adapted to being operational in this.
It might be more useful to paint everything a monotone colour to hide the descriptions or visual information we rely on. This will more closely resemble the frustration experienced by a blind person navigating their way in a world designed for the seeing.
So the calibration of the emotion has to be adapted for the person who is seeking empathy. We need to understand what reference inside them will trigger the same emotions being experienced by the other person.
There is a massive danger in this too.
As I point out in the audio section, this can be a lot of fun and very useful. It is also very very dangerous as I found out. In one exercise we wanted nurses to experience the helplessness and disorientation felt by women going through labour, when they are left alone by staff or the staff do not respond to their calls.
We sent them on a treasure hunt, communicating only via SMS. Whenever they asked for instructions or wanted to know what to do next our response was: “just hold on a minute, we just have to sort something out and we’ll be right with you.” We had taken this line from a response they were providing on a regular basis.
Needless to say, when the group returned to the design session, they were ready to explode. The exercise had worked perfectly but unfortunately, the overwhelming nature of the emotions completely blinded their ability to design from it. They were in a rage.
You can see the limits of applying empathy when you need to for instance design for people who have experienced trauma or are in a debilitating psychological condition like schizophrenia.
The fact is that we can become so blinded by our own emotional response that we substitute the actual feelings of the other person, for the intensity of our own awe, disgust, hopelessness or whatever feeling has been triggered by the exposure.
So the second level is also at risk of being a mirror rather than a window.
Tasting the tears
Goleman’s third level I find problematic as well.
When we were launching ReDI in 2015, it was at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis. In the presentations we held to build support for the cause, we noticed something that we ended up calling “refugee porn.”
Often, we’d run into people who were listening to our story with the expectation of some kind of sensationalized insight. In essence, there was a group of people who were listening to the story for their own gratification. In a weird way, they wanted us to excite their emotions through sensationalism in order to motivate them to act.
To be clear, Outrage ≠ Empathy
We found this dynamic to be fundamentally unethical too. You cannot use people’s strife, disposition, or stroke of fate as a marketing line. Emotional clickbait to fool people into thinking that feeling outraged is the same as doing something about the core issue.
The so-called “white saviour complex” is another version of this. The core flaw in this approach is the way it places the experiences on different levels. The “other” is reduced to an “object” that must be pitied, protected, patronized with guilt and apology.
This is the opposite of empathy. By doing this, one does not enter into the emotion, one is simply projecting emotion onto an individual. The intensity of our emotional experience is not the same as accuracy in the emotions we experience.
So is it possible for empathy to function as a window instead of a mirror? Can we break out of the hold of our emotional experience to calibrate towards a bigger and inclusive under-standing?
I would suggest that the foundation of empathy should be respect. Our motivation to act has to be driven by a basic respect for the humanity in which we share.
Respecting that what our counterpart experiences as “being helpful,” may not be our help. We need to calibrate at a deeper level.
The Sea-change
On a course I attended many years ago, the instructor made an interesting analogy. The challenge of navigating the experience of empathy is like two ships on one ocean. Both are moved by the same waves, both feel the same currents but their response will be very different.
We have to understand that our ship is not their ship. That we own our emotions and should not confuse the two.
But we can go deeper into the ocean to understand the common connection we share. Acknowledge the currents and feel the ripples. Through this, we can see that each individual is a manifestation of a different experience of the same humanity.
In this, we can find true empathy. Understanding that my experience is not higher or lower than yours. That the completion of our “oneness” comes from the respect for our difference.
Let’s take that Leap.
Three key take-outs:
Sweat
Are you doing the work to deeply connect with the reality of the person you seek to establish empathy with? Are you walking in their shoes, in a way that is truthful and honest to their experience?
Tears
Have you progressed beyond the point of simply understanding with your mind, to a point that you can connect with your heart? Are you feeling tears driven by your emotional needs or their emotional reality?
The Sea
Can you respect the other person as a complete being, not damaged, defunct or in any way diminished? Can you find respect in your common humanity?
This week’s inspiration: The weight of the world
For Joachim. Born 28/6/21, Died 28/6/21
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I woke up to yoga quite late in life. Living in NYC I could never take the mat-bearing yogis spinning through the lunchtime rotating door at the local yoga studio seriously. How could the 20-minute session they had, be meaningful?
Until I met ZanZan in Bali. Our sunrise sessions at his temple introduced a depth and meaning to yoga that was not apparent through the lycra and latex symbols flashed at me in the city.
The importance of breath and “in-tension” becomes clear when you are looking up at the jungle and feeling the first rays of sunshine.
Working with different styles and approaches, in different settings over the last years I have always been fascinated by how adaptable and profound the yoga practice can be.
Circumscribing success
You can have a room with a mix of complete novices and newbies together with yogis who have practiced for 20 or more years and each one will have an experience at the limit of their capacity.
The same postures and moves can unfold with infinite complexity to provide ever deeper and more intense challenges. And that is the key, surfing at the edge of your capacity.
For the novice, just looking like you are standing more or less in the right shape is a supreme challenge. For the advanced yogi the exact alignment of hips, feet, back with the inner muscular “bandas” can keep them at their edge. Going further even the fine-tuning of breathwork over movement may be the biggest challenge you face that day.
Everybody leaves the room equally sweaty and feeling like they advanced.
Compare this to almost any other activity. As a workshop facilitator, I was often confronted with the challenges of keeping the entire room engaged. How do we get a group of 40-50 people to surf that edge of challenge and joy? How do we maintain their flow? How do we elicit courage?
The exertion of yoga brings you to a point of discomfort. The heat and energy you generate from moving about, stretching, and doing push-ups have to go somewhere.
Growth happens at the boundary, fuelled by the heat of your core.
It has always been the most fascinating experience for me to see how people respond when their discomfort and energy meet this boundary.
3 Strategies
One response is to channel the energy into “drama.” A “look at me” signal where the person loudly moans or groans. Perhaps they overtly make a gesture to indicate their hands hurt or they are feeling discomfort. The effect is to draw others’ attention to them almost like an energy vampire.
In others there is avoidance. Staying just inside the comfort level so that they will not be challenged or stretched into the unknown. Their stance is just a little bit higher. The posture is held just a little bit shorter and, in the end, there was no risk, but also no reward.
And then there is acceptance. When you “breathe” through the boundary, you enter a space outside your comfort zone. You feel the pain, but you do not treat it like a stop sign or a badge of honour. You find out what happens when you let go of your preconceived notions of limits.
Breaking the thres-hold
This is in line with recent (2020) findings regarding elite athletes and their ability to process pain thresholds, compared to non-athletes. Working for two global sports brands I was often in conversation with elite athletes like Michael Phelps.
You could often see a playful urge in their nature to find that edge with precision, and play with it.
Muhammad Ali famously said he didn’t know how many sit-ups he does because: “I only start counting when it hurts.”
These elite athletes certainly are not scared of what lays beyond their comfort. Through years of practice and with great respect they have become the master navigators of what lies just slightly outside the space most of us recoil from.
And therein lies the root of excellence.
We look at these amazing accomplishments and are astounded by the precision and perfection with which they guide their bodies to a level of performance we couldn’t imagine. It is their zone.
And this for me a great analogy for courage. The root meaning of courage comes from the word for “heart;” the seat of our emotions. So “courageous action,” is an action that has been led by the heart and authentically expresses our true emotions.
We look at the image of “tank man” and see someone whose heart has compelled them to take a stand. Certainly, outside their comfort zone. This courage is contrasted even more strongly when he climbs on top of the tank and hails the people inside to be people and not just anonymous soldiers shielded inside the safe zone of tonnes of steel.
Yet, for others, the same leap of courage may take on a very different form. To an outside person contradicting a boss or simply saying no to a romantic partner may not seem like a big deal. Yet, this might be way outside their comfort zone. The pattern of abuse or neglect in these relationships may be just as hard to break through as the shell of a tank.
The heart’s architecture
As in the yoga class, we are all navigating our boundaries. And just like the yoga class, we are all finding the resolution and definition of our courage.
For this reason, I think it is important to reflect on what we view as courage, and what the lived experience of courage is for the person involved.
This places a different requirement on us when we provide “en-courage-ment.” In essence, it is not about the external act or behaviour, we have to focus on the internal posture and attitude. Where does their heart lie in the action?
Encouragement simply means, helping the person find and believe their heart. How can we help others break out of the cocoon of comfort with courage? Let’s swim in the unknown by knowing our heart.
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
I
Do you know and consciously expand your boundaries of comfort, growth and knowledge? Can you tolerate the ambivalence of difference and discomfort long enough to learn from it?
Heart
What feels natural in purpose and direction? Can you navigate the quality of heart and mind that helps you face challenges without fear?
You
How do you engage in the encouragement of others? Do you recognise and reward their actions based on what you fear, or see as a challenge? Or are you able to understand their level of discomfort and ambition?
This week’s inspiration: Pink Bowie:
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I have, the always insightful, Christine De Lille to thank for the wonderful gift of Anthony Brand and David Eagleman’s “Runaway species.” It is an excellent book that unpicks the essence of human creativity.
Their core thesis is that humans innovate by doing three things:
1. Breaking
2. Blending
3. Bending
The stone age techniques still serve us well in defining new ideas and testing the limits of current ones. Just like we used to bend and blend wicker branches to weave a basket, we now bend and blend code to create a blockchain.
We break things into smaller parts and then rearrange them in new ways to create totally different solutions. We used to break the branches from trees to build a shelter. Now we break value chains and create Ubereats.
The chain of thought
The insight from the book also had a very deep and personal connection with me. There has been a lot of chatter the last couple of weeks about “Surviving IDEO.” People have been sharing their stories about a toxic workplace that is very different from the PR (and then again which workplace lives up to the PR?).
Hiring me was pretty controversial I later found out. I don’t have an MBA and I did my business degree before Excel was even invented. In my first job, only the group assistant had a computer. And that was used to type up meeting notes.
So, I was a bit of a dinosaur that only brought the experience of having started my own company and sitting on two board seats.
The rest of the business designers found me to be a bit lightweight with no experience in discovery-driven planning or unit economics (and other new-fangled business trends).
Yet the workshop I led during the interview process quickly unleashed a deeper understanding of the business value and new business models underlying the case.
I suppose “Think different” works in any context.
Years later Tom Hulme told me that he defended the hire saying: “If all he does is ‘value chaining’ I’m OK with that.” The idea was that I would be able to look at a value chain and find interesting business opportunities by creatively rearranging and changing the steps. A kind of LEGO-level strategic consultation.
Breaking the system
Which brings me to COOKO (Bantu word for ‘Source’); a totally in-the-box thinking, conventional innovation that will upend the industry.
The Cocoa industry is at once highly concentrated and highly fragmented. 82% of all cocoa is harvested in 5 countries in Africa. Ivory Coast leads the pack with about a third of ALL global cocoa.
On the other hand, the nature of the tree and its pods resists mechanical farming. This means the harvesting step is a highly fragmented artisanal labour-intensive process with little oversight or governance.
This is why the industry suffers deeply from slave labour, child labour, and massive deforestation. In Ivory Coast alone more than 90% of the forest coverage has been lost in the last 30 years due to the extractive pursuit of cocoa riches.
Traceability has been written large on the agendas of all international cocoa trading bodies for the last 20 years, yet, as Patrick Stroop’s recent technical report on traceability in Western Africa highlights, very little progress has been made.
Farmers are caught in an economic trap of earning less than $1 a day. This means they lack the capital to invest in better processing. This means the only way they can earn more is to chop down more trees.
Breaking the chains
The slave process is also deeply embedded. Slaves as young as 13 are smuggled in from Burkina Faso. They work for 5 to 6 years as slaves to earn a plot of land that they will farm with the use of slaves.
African cocoa also suffers from deep quality issues. Routinely importers have to throw away about 20% of what they bought because it contains sticks, has not been properly refined, and has fungal infections.
I was looking at this situation with Augustine (who helped me on a 2017 pro-bono project on African refugee migration for Angela Merkel’s Chancellery. You can download the presentation here) when I discovered a simple yet profound solution.
By changing one step in the value-chain, we can substantively change the entire system.
Currently, the process is as follows:
- Farmer chops the pod from a tree
- Chops open the pod and piles all the beans in a pile in the jungle
- The pile grows over a couple of days and is covered with banana leaves
- Being afraid of theft, the farmers will move the beans from the sun drying and fermenting piles to a safe space at night. This requires a lot of labour because we are talking one to three tonnes.
- The dried beans are then bagged and shipped on huge trucks to a Coop where they enter the visible supply chain.
No proper refinement takes place, and they carry a risk with 10 days of exposure. The beans can be stolen, eaten by animals or rot with fungi in the bush.
This is a far cry from Latin America where the farmer usually drives their beans to a Beneficiario (refinery) after harvest. The better-capitalised infrastructure means more qualified people are looking after a sensitive part of the quality and flavour enhancement.
So what is the earth-shattering idea? A box.
Augustine and I have now submitted the provisional patent (ZA2021/03610) for a box that does a couple of fun things.
It provides the ideal environment for anaerobic fermentation. This is the fermentation where you cut the culture off from oxygen. Simply put, you close the lid, airtight.
When you close the beans in a box, you create a uniquely identifiable product that can be geo-tagged, tracked, and verified. Because anaerobic fermentation has to happen in a sealed container, we can guarantee a chain of custody for the beans.
No one is currently doing this. Patrick Stroop who I spoke to today should know, he just completed a technical brief for IDH and all the major Cocoa industry bodies.
So, how does life change for the farmer? Instead of sitting on the beans for 10 days, we now take it off them on the first day. We can pay them $1 for the so-called wet beans, instead of $1 for dry beans ten days later.
How would your job change if you got paid the amount you would have earned in ten days on the first day?
We strip the need for extra labour because they are not shifting 1-3 tonnes of beans every day.
We provide jobs in the formal sector at the “Beneficiario” where the beans are fermented and dried in a controlled setting.
In essence, the farmer’s role becomes true land stewardship instead of (poorly qualified and undercapitalized) cocoa refining. The incentives for caring for the bio-diversity of their farm and the health of the trees will take centre stage.
Life also changes for the buyers of cocoa. They get a much higher grade of bean, that is traceable to its source. The current paper trail of “book and claim” is made redundant by a physically embedded tracking process.
And the consumer. When you see the: Source Fermented” label, you will know exactly where the chocolate, cake or ice cream came from. You will know that the farmer was paid very well and that we are making a contribution to protecting the environment. No more obscuring and mixing illegally farmed beans with authentically sourced.
The business will also serve as a platform for a massive network of social franchises. We are creating jobs for a while raft of new intermediaries who will do everything from financing, small scale logistics and training for IoT and mechanical engineering support.
Welcome to the future of Cocoa, brought to you in a box.
I have worked in the innovation space for quite a while now. Never have I come across such a simple idea that will change so much. That is why I’m dedicating myself to this full time now. (Don’t worry, the Logic Leap will still come out every two weeks).
Augustine is currently working with 30 farmers to refine 600Kg of beans over a three-week period. The taste test will tell us just how big the quality leap is.
In addition, we are sounding out cultural and habit barriers to adopting a new practice. When you look at the history of productivity jumps they have always created social friction. How can we ensure that the freed time and energy is really directed towards social good?
On our website, I’ll be posting updates on the test results and the evolving team.
Let’s continue to break, blend and bend the current paradigm to produce regenerative solutions for people and planet.
Let’s take that leap.
Three key take-outs:
1. Break
What are the component parts? What happens if you slice the cake differently? Has your bias inserted the wrong braking points?
2. Bend
How far does the idea stretch? What happens when you invert your assumptions? Can you bend it all the way around?
3. Blend
We live in an era of mash-ups, copy and paste, and sampling. Digital solutions make it easier than ever to blend totally unrelated industries to create completely new value.
If you would like further background on the state of the industry, I highly recommend this investigative report:
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Last year archaeologists revealed a stunning find in Mexico. A set of footprints, more than 12 000 years old revealed a mystery and a drama.
We are not sure who this prehistoric individual was, perhaps a woman aged about 12 or a young man, but we do know they were in a hurry. The scientists could calculate that the person was rushing at a sustained pace of 6.12 km/h. Through marshland.
The tracks form an almost dead straight line across the swampy expanse. It was clear that the individual was critically focused on reaching a raised piece of land in the middle of the marshy surroundings (the muddy landscape is the reason we have such well-preserved prints).
So far so good. Then another detail pops into the equation. At one point the person’s tracks are joined by a smaller set. A 3-year-old.
The quick pace means that carrying the toddler was essential or they would be progressing too slowly.
And then the break.
Either the person was tired, or the toddler had to conduct ablutions, we’ll never know. Through this break in the pattern, we get insight into a whole new dimension of the drama.
The tracks back are preserved too. We know the person returned without the toddler about an hour later (reduction in weight can be read in the depression depth). In the interim, one of prehistory’s fiercest animals, the giant sloth (no comparison to the docile modern sloths) crossed over the old prints.
What drama, what mystery is revealed by this simple break in the pattern. Was it their child or did they steal it from another tribe? Was it taken to safety or sacrifice? And most crucially, why did they make this journey through tough terrain alone and without the tribe?
We’ll never know the answers to this mystery that is twice as old as the pyramids. But that small break, the set of small footprints next to the track connects with our human hearts in a way that a straight series of tracks never could.
Cognitus Interruptus
The breaks, disruptions, and shifts in patterns are always the points at which we gain the most information. If someone comes to work on time, every day, you get nervous five minutes after they don’t arrive.
Parents know this too well. When the house gets quiet, you know the kids are up to no good.
It is no well known that taking a break, especially where we allow ourselves to wallow in boredom, can be the true fuel of creativity. As Banksy famously says:
If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.
These pauses where we recharge the batteries can make the essential difference between taking a break and being broken.
But we also fear the break. A break in the pattern is the door into an unknown.
Scare city
In my twenties, I had a vision of life. I imagined this giant ball with invisible threads running between the surface and the core. Tiny beads were bouncing back and forth between the core and surface. Some were stationary... While imagining this sphere I realised it was a metaphor for our life trajectory.
Most people will spend their life either rushing towards (the core) or away from what their parents created in them.
In your twenties you see many people rushing headlong to prove everything their parents believe wrong. In your 40s you see the same people rushing to affirm everything their parents lived.
The sad reality of this metaphor is that most people are so consumed by this trajectory that they never jump off the thin line they are fixated upon. How many people are able to free themselves from this line?
Like the prehistoric child-bearer, they are fixated in one direction or the other. Rushing towards what they believe is certainty, safety, clarity, for whatever deficit they carry.
I found an Island in your arms…
Where can you break? How do you take the quantum jump to a new orbit?
One step is looking at the difference between an abundance and a scarcity mindset. The scarcity mindset is fixated on proving something right or wrong. Believing there is only one option that can be proven right or wrong, locks the mind into the invisible thread.
The abundance mindset understands that the options we see are limited by the perspective we take. Change your point of view (or space in the sphere) and the whole landscape of options changes.
The operative question here is not: “Is this right or wrong?” but rather “What has led me to believe that this is the only option? – what have I excluded?”
Understanding the space around your mindset makes breaking the line easier, but not less risky.
Re-cord-Breaking
Starting out in Germany 25 years ago I was constantly reminded of the supreme importance of a gap-free CV. Any space that was not filled with productive activity was the kiss of death for an interview. A smooth, unbroken trajectory of ever-rising responsibility and status was the golden ticket.
The certainty and predictability of conformity serve as the snuggle blanket for our frightened souls. Too scared to put our feet in the mud and have our footprints count. Too scared of our dent in the universe.
Will you be remembered as the loyal employee that never took a sick day, never contradicted your boss, never missed a socially conformed meme? As MacArthur said: “We are remembered for the rules we break.”
Breaking the pattern is where the information and the energy lies. How many times have you seen friends gushing after a break-up? The unbounded energy and opportunity that is released from breaking out of a dysfunctional relationship that had you caught in a tension web.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not being a proponent for the “Move fast and break things” school of thought. I’ve always considered Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra as a myopic ego trip. Unable to demonstrate true empathy, the exploration of his own curiosity is lived out at the cost of others.
When breaking our trust, our friendships, and our social fabric are simply collateral damage to building vast advertising wealth, there is a clear misalignment of value/values.
Breaking things shift trajectory and gravity.
This week we had our first Corona death in the building where I live. A single mother committed suicide. This is the dark face of the breaking point. When we step into a void beyond the certainty of polarity. When our physical and mental capacity reaches a point beyond which we simply cannot grasp.
We all have this deep fear of the unknown. What lies beyond our certainties?
Scarred Issues
The truth is that after the broken moment, nothing looks the same anymore. We cannot simply put the kintsugi pieces together and call it golden lipstick on a pig. We have to fundamentally redesign.
In a sense that is what is being called for with our slow motion eco-cide. Our approach to the planet is broken. We have spent the last 500 years moving fast and breaking things. And now it is broken.
The golden threads of tech fixes (nothing more than scaffolding for sustaining the old extractive economic models) have to be rejected just as firmly as the fantasy that we can return to Eden. We can break free from the mindsets of the past.
We have to imagine a new relationship. We have to discover the hidden child in the trajectory that gives every new step a deeper meaning.
Let’s take that leap.
Three key take-outs:
1. Point break
Can you define the point at which you’ll take a break? Or will it define you?
2. Shining line
Are you aware of the constraints you have adopted due to your current trajectory? What are you running to? What are you running from? What happens when you let go of the polarity?
3. Broken
Can you reconfigure your options anew after a break-up? Or are you still using the framework that defined the od relation-Ship?
Side Note:
COOKO is cracking on. cooko.co
Cooko is a new venture which aims to improve the situation for cacao farmers. The industry is currently one of the world’s biggest contributors to human slavery and environmental degradation.
Please reach out if you’d like to know more and invest.
Get full access to The Logic Leap at logicleap.substack.com/subscribe
Ipley Cross in England’s New Forest is notorious for being the UK’s most dangerous crossing for cyclists. The particular angle of the intersection gives rise to a phenomenon known as “constant bearing, decreasing range.”
In essence a the angle will have the car just out of the cyclists’ visual range, up until the point where they crash. At the same time, the car driver will not see the cyclist because they will constantly be inside the visual shadow of the car’s A-pillar (the pillar next to the windshield.
Both motorist and cyclist won’t see each other until the final moment where they crash, with deadly consequences for the cyclist.
Both people may be absolutely alert and focussed on the road ahead, but neither will see death approach directly down their path.
Focus or Flounder
I find this analogy particularly interesting against the backdrop of years of business consulting advice that claims “focus” to be the highest good in strategy.
We fear that a diffused perspective will scatter energy and reduce our ability to achieve results. Like a magnifying glass concentrating the energy of the sun, only a strategy with clear focus can consolidate the organisation’s energy to catch fire.
Thus the mainstay of McKinsey style consulting has been consolidation, rationalisation, and divesting anything with a whiff of distraction. I’ve personally been involved in a few outsourcing and reorganisation processes where we were encouraged to “cut the fat.”.
The logic usually states that a company that focuses on doing just one thing will be more cost-effective than your internal department, trying to juggle multiple roles.
The core mantra of Western economics: division and specialisation of labour.
Objective = lens/filter
And there is some evidence that providing focus to a team works. One study, in particular, gave the same coding task to different teams with different top priorities. In other words, one team might have been told that on-time delivery was their top priority. The other was told that usability was key.
Surprise surprise, teams performed according to their top priorities. The old saying: “What gets measured gets done” serving as the business-friendly version of “Energy flows where attention goes.”
The flipside of the learning however was that such a focus came at a cost. There were always unintended consequences as teams simply did not have a holistic perspective when their objective was to prioritise.
In addition, the selective perception associated with this focus also constrained and narrowed the learning path of the team. Missing out on new or relevant trends because they were focused on the established objectives.
Okonomiyaki
It’s interesting then to see how Asian firms and the Korean Chaebol’s, in particular, stand out in contrast against this obsession with reductionistic “focus.”. LG does everything from communication satellites to trains and dishwashers. Samsung provides your phone, industrial chemicals, and much much more.
I’ve always wondered if it was an engineer from the train engine department who provided the spark of inspiration to do away with the belt drive in the washing machines.
When we look at the cost and consequences of focus nature provides an interesting analogy.
I always say that diversity is the intelligence of a system. But diversity also provides the capacity for sustainability. Look at how expensive it becomes to maintain a monoculture.
The model of date palm or soy (or any industrially farmed commodity for that matter) sees diversity as a cost. You need to buy herbicides to kill the encroaching plants and the congestion will make it harder to harvest and sort the money paying crop.
But as the soil gets depleted (due to lack of microbiome) the farmer gets caught in a trap of having to buy fertiliser and other expensive supplements to sustain the productivity of his crop.
In the same way, a team or company that has become hyper specialised, will pay dearly for the lack of exchange and exposure to other ways of thinking and approaches to solving problems.
In AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee describes how Chinese companies grow. The Chinese business ecosystem is extremely competitive, just purely due to the low cost of entry and the sheer number of people ready to take your place. Launch an app and within twelve hours you’ll have clones operating.
This makes one-trick pony companies very easy to supplant. To counter this challenge, the companies will quickly vertically integrate to own as much of the customer interface as possible.
The amount of innovation that has come from companies like Alibaba and Tencent has been astounding, but in retrospect quite understandable given their pressure to survive.
They have to offer an integrated and diversified offering to own the interface.
When a food delivery app launched they quickly had to build a fleet of drivers and even kitchens to out-compete the clones who were simply passing on orders to the restaurants and relying on their delivery services.
A western VC would have praised the second approach for making smart use of existing infrastructure = Focus on core competency.
A real-world competitor would praise this vertical integration as a way to secure customer satisfaction.
Fuzzy, furry and incomplete
So perhaps the issue isn’t focus so much as where and on what you focus?
As we begin to understand the working of our brain better, we also understand that conscious focus comes at a high price. We burn a lot of calories on our attention span.
That is why the biggest majority of our processing happens below our conscious attention. We do not “focus” on the way we walk, chew, or sense slight changes in wind direction and flavours.
The biology of our body is however finely tuned to translate these signals into emotional cues to shift our focus towards relevant “focus” areas.
Blending focussed and unfocused learning has been shown to increase creativity and results. We bring in a far bigger and more ancient wisdom when we dive below focussed attention.
Our mind however relies on the trick of verbal communication to translate these thoughts and experiences into ideas that can be communicated. And that is the true bottleneck
In the same way that when soy or palm oil are seen as the only valuable species because they earn money, the thoughts in our range of focus receive a premium because they can be communicated.
The fuzzy, non-verbal hunches and ideas get played down and rationalised away, even though they may be far more important, decisive and urgent than the things that can be formulated as a target or objective.
I hope our society is at a point now where we can evolve our concept of focus to include the fuzzy awareness and depth of our full wisdom. Let’s harness our full potential and engage others more deeply in building a diversified and vital perspective.
Let’s take that leap.
P.S. The audio text contains a lot of information not covered in the text. Please feel free to listen to the podcast for more background information and perspective.
Three key take-outs:
1. Depth of field
How might we broaden our field of view? Include a broader set of senses and feelings to inform your focus.
2. Finding range
How do we test and calibrate our focus to ensure we are not blinded by it? What are your control/sounding board/contrast and compare protocols?
3. Multiple lenses
Can you define objectives in a way that encourages learning and adaptation? Can your harness the power of focus at the right time and in the right domains, yet be expansive and inclusive?
Side Note:
This week we launched cooko.co
Cooko is a new venture which aims to improve the situation for cacao farmers. The industry is currently one of the world’s biggest contributors to human slavery and environmental degradation.
Please reach out if you’d like to know more and invest.
Get full access to The Logic Leap at logicleap.substack.com/subscribe
When dealing with a group of children it can be a Herculean task to manage their energy and chaotic whims. Many years ago, I got some very valuable advice from a kindergarten teacher.
When I asked her how they do it, she said: “Simple, constrain the choices.”
Instead of starting the conversation with “What do you kids want to do today?” you start with: “OK, shall we start with the slides or the swings today?”
By coating all of this in the mantle of democracy, the children feel like they have taken part in an important decision. Their voices have been heard! 4 kids voted to start with slides and 2 kids voted to start with swings. And you know what, after we’re done with the slides, we’ll do swings as well. Yeah!
This immediately channels the unbounded energy into a simple-to-manage conversation about sequencing.
Pretty much like the American (or for that matter any) election process.
Hardly ever do you get into a conversation about why painting and reading were not on the agenda? The awareness and consciousness have been bounded within a constrained set.
For most of us, this is how we interpret choices. A vs. B. Swipe left, swipe right. We then pride ourselves (or potentially feel the shame) on making good choices that have led to our success.
We praise a senior manager who climbed through the ranks and made it to her position by consistently making good choices. When the employees bring their proposals to her, she has the wisdom of Sheeba to divine left or right towards the correct outcome.
In this way, we become reinforced in our belief that our decisions are the things that have created our success (or shame).
We fall into the trap that choices reflect character. Dumbledore sums up conventional wisdom when he says to Harry Potter: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
Like the Kindergarten children, we are blissfully unaware of the fact that in most cases, what we consider to be a choice, is in fact simply a response to a constrained set of options.
The Matrix
After experiencing the horrors of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, Philip Zimbardo spent his life studying why supposedly nice and rational people end up making really terrible choices. The genocide in Ruwanda, the Holocast… how did aparently ‘normal’ people end up making monsterous decisions.
In that instant, in their context, they chose what they thought was right, given the options.
Being caught in such a decision matrix leaves you no options outside the convensions of your community pr the pressure of your peers. This phenomenon is one of the key reasons we can’t conquer obesity or polution.
Conventional wisdom that says ‘your choices reflect your character’ squarely put the blame on the consumer, victim or purpotrator. Often turning the victim into a villian.
The increased focus on ‘the lottery of birth’ and systemic privilege over the last couple of years, highlights how where you start off in the system will constrain the options available. The choices and actions you can take inside the system often have very little to do with your character or ability.
This structural awareness is also important when we consider how AI will be rolled out, and the role we give it in our decision-making context.
The interaction between humans and AI in the decision-making process is usually described in terms of loops, mostly variations of OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loops:
We can use these models to help us think about how we make our choices. Should you really be in the loop on every decision? Are you in the loop on the key decisions that influence your health and happiness? Which decisions should you delegate?
There is the learning from the airbase colonel. The military is based on a very hierarchical decision-making structure. Yet, the decision on if planes will take off and land on a particular day is made by the low-ranking private who goes out to the end of the runway to verify visibility.
In the strictly hierarchical structure of the military, they understand the disasterous consequences of making a decision without the relevant facts.
More importantly, the colonel is making a choice at the level of outcomes, not actions.
Another story illustrates this point very well.
Event horizon
The receptionist at a hotel in downtown Manhattan gets a call from room 114. The air-conditioning unit is broken (in mid-August). In the baking heat of downtown Manhattan, this is an unbearable situation so the shift manager calls the local electrician. $300 and three hours later, room 114 is a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit (being America) again.
Customer Happy, Shift Manager Happy -> Gets a promotion
Now the shift manager is the general manager for the hotel and realises: “Holy Moly, we are spending thousands on repairs for those outdated window-mounted air-condition units.” Her new horizon of choices includes swapping out all the individual units for a central air-conditioning unit.
The new unit doesn’t break down and customer satisfaction increases: better views and less noise! And no disruptive visits from the air-con mechanics!
Customers Happy, Business Owner Happy, General Manager Happy -> Gets a promotion
Now the general manager becomes global head operations for the whole hotel group and realises: “Holy Moly, our hotels are outdated, expensive to run, and an environmental liability. Our customers want green and clean.” She decides to do away with air-cons entirely by using the latest passive building climate management techniques.
The chain wins global awards for its great eco-friendly profile and attracts a higher paying more exclusive set of customers…
Customers Happy, Business Owners Happy, Planet Happy
Where you stand in the system fundamentally shifts what you think a good decision is. You see completely different options depending on how you set your time horizon and stakeholder definition.
The question I’ll leave you with is: Would the shift manager have gotten the promotion if they suggested passive building climate management?
So our perception of choice is highly affected by our position in a system. Our cumulative experiences also form a kind of learning and evaluation framework that can distort choices just as much.
Blinded by experience
We all suffer from the illusion that we learn from experience. We take a look at the choices we made, then judge them as having been either good or bad choices.
In reality, the consequences of these choices are often vastly removed in time and space from the moment and context in which we made them. As in the case with the hotel chain, we often only see the consequences of our choices when we recalibrate for time.
I often joke about senior managers moving faster than their disaster, in other words staying two steps ahead of the chaos they have created.
The story often goes like this:
Business is in trouble. Declining sales, loss of public trust and bad image.
Enter the hero
Reorganises, fires old consultants, brings in new consultants and agencies. Cuts costs and generally revs up the engines
Sales increase because the world notices the changes
Hero gets the recognition and attention
Hero gets headhunted to another company
Unsustainable cost-cutting, reduced product quality and stretched organisation that lost its institutional memory crashes down
Business is in trouble…
The reality is that the “Hero” never sees the full cost or consequences of their actions. The economic metabolic rate of the system is too slow to confront the person with the true “karma” of their actions.
They will forever live in the illusion that they are the hero, as long as they move faster than their disaster.
Choice without real feedback is simply Ego.
Many consultancies and agencies live this illusion to the extreme. Due to the fact that they never see the minutiae of implementation, they think a round of applause at the final presentation = success. Not seeing or knowing the impacts and consequences of your choices means you never learn from experience.
They are fundamentally confusing reactions for results. Confusing an emotional response to a situation for the fundamental shift in energy.
Think about that great job interview, where you had such amazing energy and people were so nice. Only to be told on the call that you didn’t fit the profile, or another candidate was better suited.
Reaction ≠ Results
If you are navigating by reactions instead of results, you are simply moving faster than your disaster.
And quite often you are artificially reducing your set of options because of the anticipated “reactions.”
Prototype and Iterate
I love Regina Dugan’s famous TED talk. Her core provocation is: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
What Regina does beautifully, is to reframe what a choice is. It is not a destination; it is the start of a learning journey. By pursuing a course of action, we can gather the data about that course of action. Not to justify the choice (and stroke our ego) but to see how the system changes. By doing so, we can uncover new options and choices.
Reframe the decision as a step in a learning journey, rather than a confirmation of your character, ego or agency.
Can we reframe our approach to the way we make choices to be more expansive and responsible? Can we include the future outcomes and look beyond the comforting reactions of the known, to probe into the generative, scary, and challenging unknown?
I’d like to believe that we can improve the choices we make by looking at our place in the ecosystem anew, by shifting our perspective on the outcomes we achieve, and including the right stakeholders to frame the issue.
Let’s take that leap.
Three key take-outs:
What’s the choice?
Are you clear about what you are making a choice about? Quite often reframing the question will open up a whole new world of opportunity and ways to break out of a seemingly unsolvable dilemma. Break out of the constrained set.
When to and who should choose?
Do you know when the best time is to make the decision? Choosing too early loses out on the additional data that might influence the choice. Choosing too late might miss the window of opportunity to learn from the consequences. Someone else in your team might be closer to the optimum time and data. Let them make the choice.
Reactions vs results
Are you clear about the evaluation matrix for your choice? Are you tracking for real results over time or the immediate reactions of your peers, clients, and friends? Often the right choice will be unpopular, uncomfortable, and unwelcome when measured by reactions.
Get full access to The Logic Leap at logicleap.substack.com/subscribe
This week, Lynne Twist’s comment about money really stopped me dead in my tracks:
We totally forgot that we invented it.
As more and more of our lives become financialised, it is hard to imagine a world beyond money. The price of everything is shoved into our faces in every direction. With NFT’s I’m pretty sure the sunrise will soon carry a price tag.
As Jacob Needleman says in Money and the meaning of Life; “we live in a world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
For something that is so pervasive, we are surprisingly uncritical about our understanding of and approach to money.
For a start, talking about money has become almost taboo. We hold the assumption that polite society doesn’t talk about money, or that somehow if you ask about the price, you cannot afford it.
The topic of Money carries a lot of shame, fear, and uncertainty. Which ends up keeping most people ignorant and holding onto false assumptions.
Inter-rest
Let’s take the origin of money. If you studied economics, you were taught that money was invented to solve a trading problem with barter economies. The story goes that I have fish and want shoes. The guy who sells shoes doesn’t want fish so I have a problem. Hey presto, money!
It is fungible, divisible, and transportable. A great store of value.
The only problem is, this story is a myth. If you move outside the confines of the hallowed halls of economics, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists will tell you this never happened.
As David Graeber describes in his book “Debt: the first 5000 years” – it would be totally illogical for our ancestors to operate that way.
Tribal and ancient societies build their economies on trust and abundance. As he describes, you knew the person you traded with and the kind of spot trades described in the economic fiction didn’t occur.
More likely you spoke to a neighbour and said, “Wow, I really like your sheep and need one to make a bag and feed my family.” “No problem,” the neighbour said and gave it to you.
Now you were in debt to your neighbour. And that’s a good thing.
Being a trust-based economy, your neighbour could call on that debt, and the social pressure to recompense her for her generosity was enough to ensure you didn’t default.
Being a cheapskate, in other words, giving your neighbour a rabbit for the sheep made sure you quickly lost opportunities to trade in the village.
So “generosity and abundance” was the predominant paradigm.
Mercenary position
So where does money come from?
As Graeber discovered, the root of money is violence.
It’s a two step process. First things have to have a set price, and secondly you need a denominated coinage.
In a trust based society there was no need to have an accurate and enumerated currency of exchange. The picture changes when someone gets upset and violence enters the equation.
All ancient civilisations had a very comprehensive and specifically enumerated set of penalties and fines for doing harm to someone. If, in a fight for instance, you cut someone’s ear off, it had a certain price, killing two hens had a price, etc. Violence turns transactions into a numbers game.
He also notes that coinage was invented for, and used by, soldiers. Marauding armies could not build up credit systems based on trust, so they had to use pieces of gold and silver to settle their transactions.
Governments soon understood that physical money was a way to feed and finance their armies. The rest of the population didn’t need coins because they trusted each other and operated on credit.
In order to get the rest of the population to accept the pieces of gold and silver, the government introduced taxes, which had to be paid in the pieces of gold and silver used by the soldiers.
Governments in China, India, and the Middle East created markets for their currency by introducing taxes. Fundamentally, to feed their armies.
Current sea
Originally coins carried the images of deities and natural gods. Around the time of the roman empire, they started minting coins with the emperor. Man became god.
And now, money has become god.
We ascribe and assign many of the attributes that once belonged to gods, to money. It is all-pervasive. It creates and destroys. It is the source of abundance and great hardship.
We have fully adopted the mantra: Money makes the world go round.
Yet, as Lynne Twist said, we invented it! Which means, we also have the means to change the way it works for society.
As Adam Smith said, currency operates in a circulatory system. We use the language of hydraulics to talk about money. Pools of capital, cashflows and turbulence in the market.
We understand inherently that currency has its roots in currents, the flows of energy, attention, and connection which are at the root of our human experience. Yet money has turned this into a discreet, anonymous and disconnected, even disembodied phenomenon.
And if you look really closely it’s a complete fiction.
Fictional reserve banking
Money doesn’t exist until someone (an individual, a corporation, or the state) incurs a debt. When you go into a bank and ask for a loan, the bank doesn’t look in their vaults to see if they have €50 000 to give you. They type a few numbers into the computer, and presto, €50 000 that didn’t exist ten seconds ago, are suddenly conjured into existence.
When you pay off that debt, a few strokes of the keyboard, and the Euros cease to exist (or become retired in the technical language).
So modern money in some ways is finding its way back to the origins. A fluid, mutual securitization in trust. Money exists because of the promises we make to each other.
This realisation has led to numerous movements in the last years calling into question who has the authority to issue currency. In the same way, we are moving towards non-violent communication, is there an alternative to state-backed fiat money that can be non-violent money?
I’m not talking about Bitcoin and its copycats. In many ways they are simply too reactionary to the current paradigm to be revolutionary.
True shifts can only be achieved once we break free from the scarcity mindset.
Circular currencies
By reframing money as a limitless resource, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) provides a new lens through which to view our relationship with money.
MMT argues that the state has no limit on the amount of money it can produce, so there should be no scarcity. As they have demonstarted during the pandemic, trillions can be conjured out of thin air to be spent on supporting people and businesses in need.
The key constraint for the MMT theorists is inflation, which occurs when money is taken out of productive circulation. In other words, when money gets hoarded. (or as we see with Bitcoin, becomes the object of speculation)
The fact that we have not seen inflation rise with all the stimulus in play, indicates that we are not close to productive capacity. Money is circulating and creating new value.
For me, the great thing about MMT is how it aligns money with the environmental and more specifically the regenerative mindset.
Ecological and social outcomes are part of the productive capacityof an economy.
This system of flow mirrors natural systems. Cells that hoard resources die. In fact, many diseases are caused by reducing cells’ ability to exchange vital nutrients and waste products.
Healthy pressence
By shifting our focus to the interactions of exchange, rather than the scope of accumulation, we can finally align the economy with what is valuable to the planet and her people.
We can build a regenerative economy on a set of principles that operate in the zero growth future because interest and speculation become the circulatory disease that can be exorcised.
Imagine a future where the health of the economy is defined by flow:hoarding ratios rather than debt:GDP ratios.
We can reintroduce pressence and the connectedness of the current moment to the currency of exchange.
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
Connection
How do you measure your currency? How do you understand and evaluate your connection to the flow of economic and social activity?
Flow
What is your Flow : Hoarding ratio? Are you generous with your accumilated experience, knowledge, insight and wealth? How do you stimulate a process of regeneration?
Value
What is the currency you use to express your value? How do you measure the most valuable things in your life? Can you see yourself beyond the financialised modern mindset?
This week’s inspiration: Dollar Brand - the music you are about to hear, is only your inner ear.
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Walk past your expensive car (or bicycle) and scratch the side. When you return tomorrow the scratch is still there, as it will be in a year (unless you have someone fix it).
Yet, scratch your arm, knee or leg and the process of healing immediately starts. The body responds to the new information with instant reactions and processes reconstructing the tissue and closing the wound.
Healing is incredibly special, yet we take so much of it for granted.
The scar tissue from this wound does not remain only on the skin or surface, we also construct the memory of the scar in our minds. The process of constant adaptation, integration and restoration is a lifelong quality of our bodies and minds.
The scarring changes our body, and our behaviour. Next time we’ll be more cautious around that rose and potentially the smell of roses will heighten our awareness of the thorns. This is learning at a biological level.
Recent studies have shown that through epigenetics this awareness of the roses and their thorns can even be passed on to our next generations.
Epigenetics has been called the molecular machinery that deals with the deposition and removal of epigenetic marks, and how these marks can be manipulated to regulate memory formation.
Learning is literally written into the core operating system and fabric of our body. It’s the healing process that kicks in when our settled state of mind bumps into something sharp and unexpected. The process of adaptation and internalisation forms new pathways and structures in the brain, not dissimilar from scar tissue.
Corporeal Corporations
If we view the organisation as a single body, we can apply and adopt many of the same principles for organisational change. Organisational transformation truly is a full-body contact sport.
For this reason, it is a missed opportunity that most consultants still see organisational transformation as a process of streamlining org charts and transforming money into PowerPoint slides.
This approach to organisational transformation and team learning is based on a false assumption:
the idea that learning is about the transfer of information.
It’s easy to see why they make this mistake. Most of us think about our school and university days as a series of exams and tests. If we played back the information taught to us as written in the textbooks, we passed the exams.
By extension, if people understand their job descriptions and parrot the company line, the restructure is viewed as a success.
Training and teambuilding retreats become an exercise of slicing and dicing the information to make it as digestible as required by the employees. It’s seen as a one-way process. Shoving and pushing that job description or strategy paper into an employee’s head.
It is useful to remember that the root of the word “educate” in Latin is ‘ducere’ - the same as ‘duct’ i.e. to lead along a channel. This implies an outside-in approach, whereby the ‘student’ has to be coaxed, formed and ‘trained’ according to an external schema.
No wonder that traditional education design focuses on the curriculum (the external framework or path) and not the student. And that organisational transformation strategies fail to promote learning.
The corporate “body” is seen as a receptacle into which information must be pushed, rather than a vital, inherently learning and living organism.
Corporate epigenetics
In redesigning the learning framework for Microsoft’s digital media academy in 2013, I was struck by a completely different insight. Learning is not about the transfer of information at all, it’s about behaviour change.
Behavioural adaptation as the situation and society demands.
Your peers and the context reinforce the importance and relevance of new behaviours, be they the ability to read and count or the development of complex philosophical constructs. Social and environmental feedback mechanisms anchor the momentum and persistence of memories and adaptation (learning).
We learn and grow according to the questions and challenges we have to master in our environment. If all your peers think reading is not cool, it won’t be something you invest in.
There have been numerous experiments where schools tried to improve the grades of underperforming classes by shifting better-performing students to that cohort. The result was that the top student’s grades soon dropped as they normed their behaviour to the context.
The emotional context is just as important as the physical context for learning. Having the right books and learning materials does not compensate for fear, apathy, and a lack of relevance.
You have to set the ‘epigenetic markers’ that signal learning behaviours and reinforce the learning experience at an emotional level.
Peer to Peer Mastery
Bloom’s hierarchy of learning outcomes provides a great framework for not only making learning overt but also, used correctly, turning a learning system into a regenerative process. These layers can become a kind of ‘corporate learning’ epigenetics.
Most people view the hierarchy as different types of testing methods. You start off with basic comprehension tests and multiple-choice quizzes and end up with PhD’s developing a thesis to “add to the body of knowledge.”
I see its real power as a behavioural and relational map.
If you view the learning journey as a behaviour change construct, you open up a whole different perspective of the resources, system and context you have at your disposal.
Who can remember what we’re supposed to do? Who understands the new process? Has anyone tried to apply this contract for this context?
Seeking answers from other people is the most natural way for us to learn and improve. It also cements learning in an emotional context.
At ReDI school we quickly noticed that student attendance and performance were directly related to the relations in the peer group and the social bonds of peer to peer learning.
Online learning platforms providing the same courses are lucky if 10% of their students finish the course (compared to our near 100%). They might have all the videos, support materials and FAQ’s their budget can produce, but they cannot replicate the emotional and embodied knowledge relationship.
Plus, they cannot solve the most vexing challenge in education design: the half-life of facts.
Circular mastery
Most learning materials constantly need to be updated as facts change. Solutions and case studies often lose relevance before the teaching materials have been produced.
For Microsoft, I designed a system of knowledge stewardship, whereby people demonstrated their competence by serving a function in the learning organisation.
In an information-centric learning model such as most universities, the stewardship role is a stepladder. If we look at ancient learning contexts however we see that the masters pay disproportionate attention to the entrants.
By having your most advanced learners introduce novices to a subject, you create a regenerative dynamic whereby the masters are constantly refreshed and inspired by new energy.
The sharing schedule we designed, and the case-based group discussions meant that the body of knowledge was constantly evolving and adapting. This was essential in a field such as digital media technology where the players and strategies change almost on a monthly basis.
The experts at the top of the pyramid attained that status by creating new learning experiences for the rest of the organisation. They were rewarded for how they made the rest of the team smarter.
Peer review and supervision partnerships in the middle section meant that people were for example sharpening their analytical skills by teaching others to apply the knowledge. You quickly build a deeper appreciation of the core concepts and relationships when you watch someone mess up the application of those concepts.
This is vastly different from the extractive education model of most universities, where a professor delegates teaching duties to the junior staff. Slides are recycled for decades without updates.
The faculty of one
If we understand that learning happens inside us, if we realise that just like healing, it is a cognitive adaptation to a disruption, we’ll begin to respond very differently to the discomfort and tension we feel when we are confronted by a contrarian view, or a new way of looking at things.
Our body’s faculties are our teaching faculty. They teach us through the rich flood of new sensations, stimuli, and feedback we receive. If we align people with the depth of skills and abilities we aspire to, we can design a dynamic set of regenerative learning relationships.
The flipside of this relational model is that you only get better by making others better. Learning relationships run up and down the skills ladder. If you neglect those who are newer to the field or come from a different frame of mind, you are cutting yourself off from the most valuable sources of intellectual renewal.
Set and measure your learning markers and know who can help you remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create knowledge, or better yet, wisdom.
Embrace the scratch, and make sure to stop and smell the roses, with all your faculties. Let’s make learning a full-body sport again. For ourselves, and our organisations.
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
Doing is learning
Our bodies are hardcoded to build ‘muscle memory’ around what we DO. We remember something better for example when we have engaged the action of writing it down. Build innovative and relevant actions around your learning journey.
Bodies of knowledge
What is your organisations social learning strategy? Have you built an environment of trust where people can openly ask for help and advice? By asking and explaining we deepen the organisational muscle memory. Playbooks, training videos and online quizzes are scalable but not relatable.
Mastery
Are you ‘subject matter experts’ defined by the thesis they wrote at university or the contribution they are making to the team’s collective, growing, intelligence? Are you creating and promoting forums for sharing new knowledge? Do the most junior people in the organisation benefit from the invisible wisdom of experience?
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