Category: Irregular ideas

Professor Johan Mackenbach, of Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, believes that the greatest medical advancement of the last few hundred years doesn’t have anything to do with medicine. He could have chosen the invention of the contraceptive pill, the vaccination of children, the discovery of the structure of DNA or the use of computer technology in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, but instead he choose the sanitation reforms of Edwin Chadwick from the early nineteenth century.

Chadwick didn’t even understand the problem. He thought diseases like cholera and typhoid were airborne and he was actually trying to prevent men from getting sick because they needed to be going to work. But still, implementing his ideas for piped water and flushed sewer systems cleaned up London, set the course for building sanitation systems across the globe, and prevented the deaths of millions of people. So sewers are regarded as a great medical advancement.

That’s the thing about problems; they are hard to truly understand, difficult to explain, and almost impossible to predict the outcome of any given solution. Our traditional approach to problem solving is to define, analyse, and solve a distinct problem in sequential steps. Charles Franklin Kettering, Head of Research at General Motors, thought it was a good approach. He thought that “a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved”. But maybe he didn’t understand the problem with problems. Really, every problem is always an interconnected mess of lots of problems.

Russel Ackoff, organizational theorist, consultant and professor, coined the phrase “mess” to describe these dynamic situations with changing problems interacting with each other. He understood problems differently. He argued that taking the traditional approach was only one way to tackle problems, and named four ways: We can ‘absolve’ ourselves of the problem – give it time to solve itself, ‘resolve’ the problem – look to the past to find a solution that is good enough to use now, ‘solve’ it – use research and experiments to figure out the best thing to do in the current circumstances, or ‘dissolve’ the problem – redesign the system so the problem no longer exists.

Lets redesign a system.

More than 15 million general practice appointments are missed every year at a cost of £216 million. The solution suggested by the NHS is for patients to let the NHS know if they cannot attend an appointment. Sounds good. Obvious, simple, puts the solution in the hands of the people with the information. But hang on… Don’t those people who booked the appointment still need to see a doctor? Wouldn’t a better solution be to help more people not miss appointments by attending their appointment? What if the problems that caused people to not be able to attend were fixed? What if those with caring responsibilities had support to look after their children, parents, grandparents, so they could attend the appointment? What if those who couldn’t afford taxi fare’s had another way to get to the appointment? What if those who suffer from conditions and disabilities that make leaving their home difficult had a way for doctors to visit them? What if there were more drop-in sessions so that people didn’t need an appointment? What if GP surgeries had better bus routes or more parking? We could go on and on thinking of ways to make it easier to attend appointments.

Professor Mackenbach draws three conclusions from Chadwick’s sewers that we can check against our thinking about redesigning the system to dissolve the problem. First, he says, you don’t need to know very much about the cause of a problem to intervene effectively. We don’t need to know why patients are missing appointments, we just want to make it easy as possible for patients to get to their appointment. Second, changing the environment in which the problem occurs can be more effective than trying to persuade individuals to change their behaviour. Our approach isn’t about getting the patient to do something different or extra, such as contacting the NHS, it is about changing the circumstances that surround and lead up to the appointment. And third, interventions targeted at all the people may be more effective than those aimed at particular groups. Making it easier to attend appointments makes it easier for everyone to attend appointments.

Will this be a quick fix? Definitely not. Problems take time to be completely ‘solved’. Solving the problem of water supplies being contaminated with disease-causing micro-organisms started thousands of years ago with the Nazcas and Mesopotamians. The Romans constructed systems of aqueducts and pipes to provide indoor plumbing, and Chadwick brought sewers to the streets of London. Yet today, many settlements in many countries still don’t have effective water treatment and sanitation. Solutions have a leading edge, where they might be seen as innovative, but they also have a trailing edge that means it can take a long time for everyone to get the benefits. Why? Because, as Ackoff reminded us, problems are always a mess of lots of problems. Sanitation problems are also economic and financial problems, skills and resources problems, beliefs and assumptions problems.

So, if you want to solve a problem, even one far less messy than sewers or GP appointments, don’t spend lots of time defining and analysing it as if it were an isolated thing, but do recognise that it is connected to and affected by everything going on around it, and that you can make changes to some of those things that dissolve the problem you were facing.

Stop solving problems. Start redesigning systems so the problem no longer exists.

Have you ever paid good money to watch a bad film? Me too. But it was the only film showing at the time, it was raining outside, and the kids were bored. Still, I wonder to this day if we could know if films are worth watching before we watch them, whether books are worth reading before we read them, whether courses are worth studying before we study them.

This is the information goods problem. We don’t know what we’ll get out of consuming the information until after we’ve done it. So how can we know if it’s worth doing? How much time and money could we save if we could know what we need to know when we need to know it?

It’s different for physical goods. Before you eat an apple you can see if it’s rotten, estimate how much it’ll fill you up, know how much you like apples, and be able to weigh up those benefits against how much you pay for the apple. Information goods aren’t like that.

In economics, information goods are “commodities that provide value to consumers as a result of the information it contains and refers to any good or service that can be digitalized.” Information goods, like movies, ebooks, software, elearning courses, all have similar characteristics. They are durable, which means the movie isn’t destroyed when someone watches it, whereas when someone eats an apple, no more apple. They are non-rivalrous, which means one person watching a movie doesn’t stop another person from doing so, unlike apples which can only be consumed by one person. They are cheap to reproduce, which means once the movie is made it can be sent to as many cinemas (or straight to DVD if you’re old enough to get the reference) as the producer wants, but apples take a long time and a lot of effort to turn into more apples. So, information goods are very different from physical goods.

Sellers have problems with information goods. If you’re an author trying to sell your book, how do you convince someone it’s worth reading without giving it away for free? If you’re a college lecturer, how do convince students to learn what you teach? If you’re a software salesperson, how do you convince a customer of the value that software will provide over it’s lifespan?

Creators have problems too. In the modern information economy, workers do two things; create new information and collate & curate existing information. For that information to be sellable it has to be packaged into digital files that show films or reproduce books, but for that information to be valuable it has to become knowledge.

Maybe the reason the information goods problem hasn’t been solved is because it’s really a knowledge problem.

And information and knowledge are two very different things. We talk about them as the same, but they are different. Information is what’s in the digital file that the film projector uses to show the film, knowledge is your experience and understanding of what makes a good film. Information is durable, non-rivalrous, and reproduceable. Knowledge is non-transmittable, can be explicit or tacit, and changes over time.

Knowledge can’t be transferred from one person to another, but it can be converted into information and that communicated to others. When delivering a lecture, the lecturer doesn’t share their knowledge with the students. They package their knowledge into information and the students can take in the information, learn from it and turn it into their own knowledge, but it’s different knowledge, it’s theirs, not the lecturer’s. Knowledge can be explicit, like instructions for how to fix a bike. And it can be tacit, like knowing how to ride a bike, something you can do but can’t explain how you do it. Knowledge changes as we learn new things, challenge assumptions and consider new information.

So, with increasing amounts of information available to us, our challenge is turning information into knowledge.

Maybe better knowledge gives us better judgement. If more lecturers knew that just providing information doesn’t mean they are passing on knowledge, they might focus more on how students interpret information to create their own knowledge. If authors knew what value people get out of reading their books, they might help readers make informed choices about buying books. And if I’d have known that independently produced, computer-animated musical comedy mystery films that mix folklore with crime drama are likely to be bad, I might not have gone to the cinema that day.

Your knowledge is unique to you. Treasure it, develop it, use it. You are the only one that understands what you know in the way that you know it. No one else can have your knowledge.

It’s the uniqueness of your knowledge that gives it power.

What do we do when someone tells us something we don’t quite believe? We Google it. We get out our phones and search the internet for some reliable information. We turn to the computers to tell us whether we should believe or not. We expect them to tell us the truth. We expect computers to always be right.

Maybe the Post Office fell into the same trap when it prosecuted 736 subpostmasters and postmistresses for theft, fraud and false accounting, when they had done nothing wrong. In fact, the Post Office’s faulty computer system was to blame for the accounting errors. But the Post Office believed the computer was right.

A system of record, like Google’s indexing of websites, the Post Office’s accounting software, your bank, or the annual leave booking process where you work, is a means of storing and retrieving information. They have been relied on throughout the history of civilisation to mediate relationships between individuals and institutions. When Gods and kings could no longer provide a single source of truth for us, we created systems of record instead.

In ancient Mesopotamia, clay tablets were used to create a central system of public administration. With the recording of who owed what to whom and who promised what pay in return for what work, larger scale civilisation could emerge. Smaller groups could remember for themselves, but larger groups needed a way to externalise that memory. The system of record held our promises and obligations, the contracts that bound us over time.

But to be effective, any system of record has to be recognised as authoritative and it has to be legitimate. A centralised institution must have the power to say, ‘this is how we keep records here, and this is what happens to you if you don’t abide by what the records say’. And the system has to hold unique records which can be traced to a source to demonstrate its integrity and validity.

When Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper, bitcoin was referred to as an “electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” Bitcoin aimed to solve the problems created by relying on third-parties to maintain systems of record, problems such as non-transparent transactions that make it impossible for postmistresses to challenge accounting software. That vision, looking a little tarnished at the moment for sure, aims to replace trust with proof, to make the system of record more reliable and verifiable, so we can believe the computers are right with a even more certainty.

From clay tablets to blockchains, as society has became more complex we have required and relied upon increasingly complex systems of record. Not one system of record, but many. Every institution an individual interactions with has it’s own system of record. These institutions are, and always have been, the owners of those systems, and so the power to mediate our relationship with them is, and has always been, theirs.

That these are many separate systems of record is what prevents their power from being absolute. Were there to be one single system of record, a system of systems of record, we would have no choice but to accept what it tells us.

But we know that all of the systems of records together do not create a complete and trusted representation of what they claim to be. They are often mistrusted, have incorrect information, between them they have different information. The computers aren’t always right. And it is in these gaps where the power of the individual lays. It’s good that Google can’t tell us everything. Good that sometimes the bank shows errors on our statement. Good that organisations can learn that software is fallible.

There is not, and never will be again, a single source of truth. And that’s good for all of us.

Mother cheetahs stay with their cubs for two years after they are born, teaching them all the skills they’ll need for adult life, how to hunt, where to find water. That young cheetah will grow up to teach the same skills to her offspring. Generation after generation the skills each cheetah needs are passed down from their mother.

According to Durkheim, a French sociologist writing at the turn of the twentieth century, this was the purpose of education for humans as well as cheetahs; to convey knowledge and skills to the next generation. He believed that schools were one of the few institutions that were uniquely placed to socialize children into the new mainstream industrial economy. He thought schools should be places of rules, discipline, punishment, all in the name of teaching people to conform when they reached the workplace.

It was Durkheim and his fellow functionalists who gave us our now traditional model of education. And since then many have critiqued and argued against this approach, saying that education should be about freedom, creativity, imagination and independence. Durkheim’s view of how education should work was of it’s time and existed for only a brief period of human history. Education has changed since then, and continues to change. Should then, this idea of strict functional education really be the reference point from which we reconsider education for the future?

Many commentators talk about the future of education as requiring a radical shift away from the education of the past. New theories, new institutions, new approaches. Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Perhaps education doesn’t need to change as much as those selling the change might like to suggest. If the purpose of education has always been to prepare us as members of society, then as society changes, so there is a need for what it prepares us to be to change, but it’s fundamental purpose remains.

Those changes often appear as sudden inflection points that catalyse a step change in human potential. We see this trend in the introduction of many new technologies. The invention of the printing press and more readily available books caused low literacy to be recognised as a social issue that before the new technology arrived just wasn’t a concern. Education was society’s response, and now the global literacy rate is 90.0% for all males and 82.7% for females.

The coming technological change that has many people thinking about the education of the children of the future, is artificial intelligence. What will we teach when machines think more, better, faster than we can? It seems rather dull thinking to say we’ll just educate people in whatever is the opposite of what the machines can do. Teach them to be creative, imaginative, collaborative. As if we’ll be able to tell the difference between human art and machine art.

We need an education system that expands to embrace the new, not that retracts in response to change. The education system we need now and in the future includes all types learning about every possible subject, using all of the available methods. People will learn throughout their life, in school, at work, as hobbies. They’ll learn from big institutions and from individuals with something to teach. They’ll learn by attending lectures, watching videos, programming games, playing sports.

This will without doubt, bring its own challenges. Chomsky talks about education as providing the thinking skills needed to evaluate what we see when all the information in the world is at our finger tips. A self-directed journey through the internet quickly takes one to radical places where the sheer overwhelming volume of information causes critical thinking to break down. How do we handle this information overload when the algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

Like or not, for better or worse, our society is now an interdependent network that relies on people performing specialised tasks, thinking big ideas, painting beautiful pictures, and writing weird little newsletters. We need education to match.

When introducing the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs referred to it as a revolutionary product that would change everything. He was more right than he knew.

Before Jobs was even born, Harold Innis, the Canadian media and communication theorist, wrote about how the shift in our storytelling media causes disruptions in the power structures of society. Innis identified four temporal periods of civilizational impact: oral, scribal, print and electronic. The stories we told each other to pass on lessons changed drastically when they were written down by the religious institutions of the day, putting knowledge and power in the hands of those who could read and write. The balance of power that comes from having knowledge changed again when printed books replaced hand written scrolls, making knowledge more readily available, and again when mainstream broadcast media started to put the choices of what knowledge to provide in the hands of corporations with commercial interests.

And then came computers and the internet. To a computer all mediums are the same, all just digital information. A spoken story is the same as a written poem is the same as recorded music is the same as a filmed movie. All are just ones and zeros on a hard-disk. Kay and Goldberg, the progenitors of laptop computing in 1977, called the computer the first ‘metamedium’ because they recognised how computers would change how we handle digital media, just like Jobs did.

Once it was digital, all media could be databased. Stored, sorted, organised, filtered, and relationships established that might have never existed. The stories that we used to tell each other using books and films were replaced with tweets and TikTok videos. They went from being linear narratives told to maintain continuity to being out-of-context disconnected parts. They went from long and focused to quick and throw-away. And with digital media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and TikTok we see the power for controlling knowledge shifting to big tech companies.

The apps that display media in this way, as an infinite barrage of content we can’t possible keep up with, are designed to give our brains a dopamine hit and keep us coming back to give them more of our attention. It’s easy to think of ourselves as the consumers of media, but less comfortable to think of the platforms as the consumers of our attention. So, not only did digital media platforms shift power in the way Innis talked about, they also shifted their purpose away from providing knowledge to taking attention. And they didn’t tell us they were doing it.

With shorter attention spans and databased digital media we lose our ability to tell stories. Without stories we lose our knowledge of things past and we cannot tell our future.

Alex McDowell, the narrative designer and creative director, talks about worldbuilding as a design practice with a holistic and collaborative structure. It supports organic and fluid narratives that are embedded within and driven by the intricate world surrounding us. As the Production Designer on Spielberg’s Minority Report, McDowell began conceiving of the world in which the story would take place before the script was written. His imagined world allowed the story to evolve in ways that would have been impossible otherwise. Within the worlds we build we can explore societal, technological, economic and environmental changes.

We need stories. Stories let us build worlds. And worlds are containers for the narratives that allow us to connect and comprehend everything.

Hello to all the witizens out there.

A witizen, in case you aren’t one/didn’t know, is a citizen of Wirtland. Founded in 2008, it claims to be the world’s first internet-based sovereign country. Wirtland thinks of itself as a real country with real people, where the only thing that is virtual is the soil. It is not correct to interpret Wirtland as an imaginary virtual world, witizens say.

But why not? Why couldn’t citizenship be entirely virtual and independent of location? Why should nationality and geography be so closely tied? The answer, of course, is that they are that way purely because we’ve never had the means for it to be any other way. But now we do. In the future, switching nationality could be like switching bank accounts.

In 1933, when the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States was written, the delegates came up with four qualifications for being a nation; a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. It’s really only the second criteria, having a defined territory, that poses a problem for purely virtual nations. There was no internet in 1933 so no one at the convention could even imagine a nation without land, but since then micronations have been started on abandoned oil rigs and artificial floating islands. So perhaps nations don’t need land after all, and virtual nations start to look like more of a reality.

In fact, virtual nations are nothing new. Estonia offers e-residency, a kind of digital citizenship that allows entrepreneurs to set up and run a company entirely online. So that’s a start. But when sovereign nation states talk about becoming virtual they think of it as the online version of the offline nation. They miss the point. Virtual nationality has so much more potential.

Let’s make this vision of the future of virtual nationality a little easier to comprehend, let’s use the countries we’re familiar with today.

You might live in Brazil but you’re not happy with the policies of the Brazilian government. You don’t like how much they spend on healthcare, so choose to virtually emigrate to Bulgaria which has policies you agree with more. As a Bulgarian citizen (who just happens to physically live in Brazil) you pay your taxes to Bulgaria and Bulgaria purchases public services such as policing, waste collection and healthcare on your behalf to enact their policies on Brazilian soil. If you want better healthcare whilst living in Brazil, and Bulgaria has committed to providing it, why shouldn’t become a Bulgarian citizen.

In this future, all governments are split between the virtual and the physical. Virtual government decides on it’s nations policies. Physical government manages the real world public services which are made available to all virtual nations. So, in our example the part of Brazilian government that is responsible for providing services in the real world is incentivised to provide high quality public services so they can sell them for higher value to other governments. Any virtual nation can purchase services from any physical nation and provide them to their citizens.

Citizens get better services. Nations get more taxes. Nationality-as-a-service, over the internet. Everybody wins… right?

But what about all those people who don’t have high paying jobs who can be charged taxes, do they still get to switch nationality? What would incentivise governments to accept them? What would incentivise governments to offer better health care if they thought it would mean an influx of citizens unable to pay towards it?

Nationality should be virtual. And it almost certainly will be in the not too distant future, but we need to wary of creating it in the way that doesn’t work for everyone. Markets only work for those with buying power. They don’t treat those without it in the same way, and often exclude them all together. Creating a marketplace for nationality, or free speech, or anything necessary to participate in the life of a citizen, will always result in unequal power. That’s the nature of markets. They don’t work for managing nations.

If nations exist to improve the lives of their citizens, then that should include all their citizens, whether the nations are virtual or not.

One evening, a very long time ago, Chuang Tzu laid his head down to sleep. Asleep, he dreamt he was a butterfly. He flittered from flower to flower, felt the gentle breeze carry him, free to enjoy the warm spring sun on his wings. He was quite sure he was a butterfly. Until he awoke. Then all certainty left him and he asked himself, am I a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly now dreaming he is a man.

If he wasn’t sure about the nature of his existence then, what might Chuang Tzu make of the life we live now? Our lives are lived increasingly virtually. Work meetings have gone from sitting in rooms with real people to watching videos. Paying has gone from handing over little metallic objects to tapping our phones. Entertainment has gone from making an event of going to the cinema to streaming more than a lifetime’s worth of TV to our laptops. And the virtualisation of our reality is a one way street. Our real lives will never be this real again.

Virtual Reality is next.

Putting on that virtual reality headset will bring about a huge shift in the very nature of our relationship with technology. No longer will we regard it simply as a tool that we pick up and manipulate through our hands, just as humans have since we picked up sticks and shaped stones into axe heads. No longer will we interface with our technology through our hands. This is a threshold. This changes everything. With VR, the interface blurs out of existence. We are immersed in the technology. We become part of it.

How then might we understand our new full, convincing, immersive virtual world.

Virtual reality has to be inherently skeuomorphic. We only understand the virtual world because it looks similar and feels familiar to the real world. Up is still up, some things appear nearer than others, so the relationships we understand from our physical reality still stand. But a purely virtual world the law of gravity isn’t a physical law programmed into the nature of the universe, it’s a choice programmed into the code of the virtual experience, which means it can be changed. Does up still mean the same thing to us when we can immediately fly to where up used to be?

Virtual reality has to have object relationships. The philosopher Philip Brey argues that anything that is socially constructed, things such as financial assets, property, legal obligations, credentials and social status, can be reconstructed virtually. So we can expect these non-physical things to have an existence in our virtual worlds and to continue to mean only what they mean in our minds. Money is only valuable if we say it is and marriages only mean something if we want them to. But in a virtual world rules and relationships can be changed. They start as transplants from the physical world as we know it, but they can become whatever the virtual rule makers choose. Virtual money could be decoupled from real world currency and earned through attention rather than effort or skill. Marriages could be between human and avatar, or between a group to create shared resources. Do rules mean the same when those we have made up can be remade for a virtual world?

It’s this flexibility and changeability of how our virtual worlds are constructed that will define how we come to understand them. Everything can be any way someone wants it to be, and can be changed as often as they choose. If things feel like they’ve changed quickly in the recent past of our physical world, we’re in for a shock for how quickly they will change in our virtual worlds in the future.

The question for virtual reality isn’t about telling the difference between the virtual and the real, it’s about how it will create an order of magnitude more change than we’ve experienced so far. Chuang Tzu won’t have time to ask whether he was dreaming or not, he’ll be too busy dealing with the pace of change.

In a virtual reality, future shock becomes the norm.

Don’t like ads on YouTube or Spotify? No problem, you can pay to have them removed. Of course, they won’t stop collecting your data, but they’ll happily take your money. Even if you aren’t seeing ads they’ll still use your data to target ads at other users. It’s win win for them. They get your money and your data. Money is nice but you can only spend it once. Data can be used again and again. It’s far more valuable than your monthly subscription fee, and that’s why they won’t ever give up collecting data.

With huge amounts of data, and increasingly sophisticated ways of using it, comes great power. And with great power comes great influence. Unfortunately, in the case of big tech firms, it doesn’t come with great responsibility.

Which is where governments try to step in. Society’s defence against commercial big tech and its use of data to influence and affect the running of people’s lives is to enforce the taking of responsibility through policy and regulation.

The ‘regulate commercial big tech’ narrative often seems to loose sight of the outcome it’s trying to achieve. The goal isn’t really to regulate tech, it’s to make digital societies and online spaces safe and useful places for everyone. Unfortunately, regulation is the only tool available to governments for achieving this. But it is a blunt old-world tool that isn’t fit for purpose in the information age. It may have worked in a world of physical goods where manufacturers could be inspected to see if they have fitted safety equipment, but isn’t sufficient for an online world of algorithms that generate unexpected and unpredictable results.

Even recent regulation aimed at technology has struggled to grasp the difference data makes to big tech business models. The EU Antitrust policy defines setting prices at a loss-making level as an abuse of a dominant position as it makes it more difficult for other companies to compete in the same market. But you can use YouTube for free. The UK Online Harms Bill seeks to place responsibility for moderating content onto the platform provider. But women will continue to receive abusive messages on Instagram from men who don’t care if their throwaway account gets banned.

Making big tech responsible in ways that is counter to a business model of using data to drive engagement is a bad idea. It won’t work. It isn’t even expecting them to mark their own homework, it’s accepting them saying their dog ate it.

How we want society to work, and in the twenty-first century that means society on the internet, is an ethical choice, not just an economic one. Do we want to live in online worlds that are heavily swayed in favour of the companies providing them? Or do we want the digital places we visit to balance everyone’s needs. If we want that, we’ll have to fight fire with fire.

To paraphrase James Plunkett, “We can’t tweak policy, we need to build new institutions”. Those new institutions will define how government should work in digital spaces, and what different approaches they could deploy in balancing the needs of citizens and companies.

In a cyber war, cyber soldiers use digital weapons to attack online targets. They know the difference between online and offline. They know how the internet works. And they know the real world affect their attacks can have. If a nation’s military has the sophistication to operate effectively online, then other parts of government have a lot of catching up to do.

Government departments of the future will behave more like big tech companies than the governments of today. They won’t passively rely of regulation to incentivise and fine companies, they’ll proactively go looking for policy breaches. They will develop and deploy artificial intelligence tools that interact with and affect the internet systems of commercial big tech in service of policy aims. Competition won’t only exist between company and company, it’ll exist between companies and government to enact policy in real-time. They’ll have to if we want to achieve a balanced society on the internet.

What if only big tech can keep big tech in check?

Christopher Reilly thought he had a choice. He didn’t choose his genes or the biochemistry of his brain, or his parents or upbringing, or the educational opportunities that were available to him, or the social deprivation and levels of unemployment that affected where he lived, or the influence mass media and his peers had on him, but he thought he chose to break into a house to find the keys for the car he wanted to steal. And the court agreed with him when in December 2020 it convicted him of burglary. He was held personally responsible for that choice without any recognition of how predetermined that choice might have been for him.

Free will is complicated. Philosophers, theologians, policy makers and academics have struggled for millennia to answer the question of whether a person is free to make their own choices. Increasingly, the scientific answer looks like a resounding ‘no’. We are not free to make our own choices, in fact our actions are the result of the systems we interact with.

Think for a moment about the systems, what Donella Meadows defines as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something”, that affected you today. It’s highly likely that along with a whole load of other systems, you were affected by the bio-chemical systems in your brain, how your digestive system responds to certain types of food, the educational system and how it taught you to think, the social systems of people you interact with, the economy, the political system, laws, weather, and the movement of the planet around the sun. So many systems. Each of these systems exists to achieve particular things, but they don’t do that in isolation, they also all affect each other, and us.

Recognising all these systems is one thing, recognising the effect they have on us is much harder. We may like to think of ourselves as individuals, separate from the world we inhabit, and distinct from all the systems we interact with, acting of our own volition, doing what we want to do. We may think that, but in fact we are just a collection of systems within systems interacting with other systems.

So, why isn’t it common knowledge? Why do we continue to believe in the illusion of free will?

Maybe believing you’re free is part of being controlled. Deleuze wrote about what he called ‘Societies of Control’ and how society is moving away from controlling people by physical enclosure to where the mere possibility of being watched, analysed, judged, becomes the mechanism for controlling the choices of the populace, and for getting people to do what society wants them to do. And in 21st century western capitalist societies, what society wants amounts to two things: work, to make money, and shop, to spend money. Give people more freedom and they can choose to work and shop more.

Maybe determinism is dangerous for society. That’s what the philosopher Saul Smilansky says. If everyone realised that their actions are the result of interactions with systems rather than their own choice, then all of the institutions that are based on free will and personal responsibility might come tumbling down. How can the court hold Christopher accountable and punish him for his actions, if he had no other choice but to burgle that house?

Maybe believing in free will is good for you. Not believing in free will has been shown to reduce creativity, make people more likely to conform, more likely to behave immorally, and less likely to learn from mistakes. Vohs and Schooler concluded that people who believe in free will are better at their jobs, have more successful relationships, and are happier, because along with believing in one’s freedom of choice comes a sense of responsibility and accomplishment.

So, can we accept the paradox that all of our actions are the effect of systems acting on us but continue to believe in ourselves as free individuals, that we have no choice but that we should live as if we do?

Having a choice and making a choice are two very different things.

He didn’t believe it was possible, but that didn’t stop him from doing it. Wilbur Wright said, in 1901, that man would not fly for another fifty years. Two years later he and brother Orville made the first successful flight in the history of self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Since then, jet engines, breaking the sound barrier, commercial air traffic, and space flight. All in less than a hundred years.

Our technologies show us the history of our ability to solve problems. All built on the inventiveness and discoveries of those who went looking for new ways to solve interesting problems. But all to quickly, the creativity that led to those discoveries gets distilled down into a framework to be packaged for others to use, freeing them from the need for their own creative thought or discovery.

Perhaps there is a demand for such pre-packaged thought. Perhaps there is an over-reliance on it. But Orville and Wilbur didn’t follow The Six Steps For Inventing Flight. They discovered a way forward, they created a solution. As did those who invented the jet engine, and built planes that could fly faster than the speed of sound or carry lots of people long distances, and those that created rockets to take people to the moon.

Maybe, because so many problems have already been solved and because we aren’t solving such ground-breaking problems, we tend to believe that there are no new problems and that every problem can be solved by applying someone else’s solution. Maybe we aren’t very good at telling the difference between problems that can be solved in that way and those that can’t.

Henry Mintzberg, professor of management, draws a distinction between what he calls ‘pat puzzles’ and ‘puzzling puzzles’ when it comes to solving problems. In pat puzzles the pieces are supplied, each is clean-cut, they fit together perfectly and they come with a picture on the box so you know what you’re making. Whereas in puzzling puzzles, the pieces have to be discovered or created, each appears obscure, like a fragment, they need to connect, although never neatly, and there is no future state picture to guide the construction. Frameworks are like pat puzzles. They are whole and complete, with a picture of where you’re trying to get to and all the pieces ready to be used. They provide a shortcut in thinking, but they also fix our thinking, limiting our ideas, allowing only what the framework already includes.

And if we tell ourselves that the problems we’re trying to solve are simple and so don’t require creativity and discovery to solve, then perhaps frameworks are a shortcut to a solution. However, it may be that far more problems are puzzling puzzles than we appreciate. If this is the first time in history that a particular combination of people, skills, technologies, resources, limitations and opportunities have occurred then it is a new problem. Attempting to solve new problems with frameworks as if they are pat puzzles reaches ineffective and unsatisfactory solutions. And then we blame the framework for falling us when really the failure was that we tried to use a framework in the first place. Creativity and discovery are search problems. How do we find new solutions when we don’t know what we’re looking for, or even where to look?

Kenneth Stanley’s research into open-ended algorithms asks the same questions. Just as evolution has no goal in mind, Stanley’s attempts to develop AI that leads to human-level intelligence “travels the road with no destination in mind”. His work has shown that the strange stepping stones we stand on along the way don’t look like they lead to the outcome we want to achieve, that potential solutions may be deceiving and take us in the wrong direction, and that preventing divergent thinking slows down our ability to recognise novel and interesting things. He says that, “to achieve your goals you have to be willing to abandon them”.

If we want to truly solve puzzling puzzles, the problems where the pieces of the solution don’t neatly fit together and we don’t have a picture on the box to follow, then we need to approach problems like Stanley. We need to experiment. Try things that spark our curiosity. Don’t predict the outcome, and let the path be unknown. Take stepping stones that lead to new ideas. Explore ideas that don’t resemble the final end state. Don’t converge on single solutions, but let multiple solutions emerge.

To solve our problems we have to willing to abandon them.