Category: Irregular ideas

Meetings distracts our attention, making it hard to achieve purposeful work. Advertising grabs our attention, convincing us to buy things. Economists and information management theorists pontificate on attention, attempting to understand how we use this limited resource.

A World Economic Forum study says that every day we send 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, and 65 billion WhatsApp messages. “By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally – that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day!” There is too much data, too much content, for anyone to even make sense of, much less make use of. What should we pay attention to?

Trite advice tells us to ‘focus on the present’ or ‘pay attention to what matters’, but in the constant stream of things coming our way that do in fact need our attention, the trick is not to give it over to one thing but to be able to make conscious, informed choices to shift it to where it is needed for that moment.

But what if our attention isn’t really ours. What if attention is only the result of having something to pay attention to. What if, without things to distract us from our work and convince us to buy things we have no attention. So perhaps the most important skill we can learn, then, is that of where and how to place that attention in response to all those things and move on as the next new thing asks for attention without becoming overwhelmed.

There are three types of dog owners; the pickers, the flickers and the leavers. The pickers pick up after their dog, and the leavers do nothing about what their dog left behind. But in the minority are the flickers. If you see them at all, you’ll spot them walking their dog in the woods with long twig in hand ready to flick into the under-growth what their dog deposits on the path.

Of course, we’re not really talking about dog owners, we’re talking about how we accept or not our responsibilities when in a shared space. A picker accepts the responsibility expected of them. A leaver does not. And a flicker is somewhere in the middle. They do what they think is the right thing to do by others, but with as little cost to themselves as they can.

Consider these behaviours at scale, across all the responsibilities we all have across our entire society. Sometimes our behaviours take on responsibility towards others and the cost to ourselves, sometimes we don’t take responsibility and put the cost onto others, and sometimes, in some circumstances, take some responsibility whilst minimising the cost to ourselves and others. Impossible, perhaps, to always behave in only one way, and unrealistic, perhaps, to expect others to also. So, in fact, we are all pickers, flickers and leavers.

That’s just how responsibility works.

Optimism is “an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable”. Optimists expect the best in any given situation. They accept that problems are inevitable, but solutions can always be found with sufficient knowledge and application. Pessimists don’t. They tend to focus on the negatives of life. Their starting assumption is often that things are more likely to be bad, go wrong, and fail.

Although it’s easy to think of them as polar opposites, actually we aren’t just one or the other, optimist or pessimist. We inherit both dispositions as independent traits, with our general well-being and environment influencing which emerges at any given time. But we benefit more from being an optimist than a pessimist. An optimistic outlook helps us deal with stress and strengthens our immune system. Optimists live longer too.

So, if we want to make life better for ourselves we should be optimists. But it’s the pessimists that work to make life better for everyone else. Optimists are optimisers. They take things as they are and maybe make gradually improvements. Pessimists don’t accept the status quo. They are unaccepting of things as they are or of making things better slowly. They demand bigger changes.

It’s the pessimists who creates revolutions.

When asked to come up an idea our brains tend to go to what we already know and use it as the basis for generating that new idea. This limits our thinking and means the first idea we have is usually the most obvious rather than the best.

The neurologist David Eagleman says that there’s a scientific reason for this. It’s called the Einstellung effect and it occurs where our pre-existing knowledge impedes our ability to reach an optimal solution. We become unable to consider other solutions when we think we already have a one, even though it may not be the best solution possible.

The process of generating lots of ideas has other benefits too. It helps us to reject quick fixes and consider broader connections that may lead to ideas for things we weren’t even looking for. And it can reduce the likelihood of us falling foul of the perfect solution fallacy where we assume that a perfect solution even exists. Coming up with lots of ideas can help us come up with good ideas and so reach the best idea.

In the wide expanse of the universe, life is an unlikely accident. It is the result of coincidental circumstances colliding with coincidental circumstances.

On the timeline of the whole of existence, life is just the briefest of flashes. The universe existed long before life came about, and it will exist long after the flash has burned out.

In the data set of the existence of matter, life is an outlying data point in the wrong place. Wrong planet, wrong time.

Among the trillion species that have ever lived on earth, homo sapiens are just one.

Of all the things all the humans have ever said or done, your contribution is infinitesimal.

Life isn’t the big deal we make it out to be. Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Switches are a human invention. They don’t exist in nature. A switch is either on or off, and nature doesn’t work that way. In nature things are always in a state of changing, whereas the switch only has two states; on or off. Mutually exclusive and with no in-between state.

The idea of opposite states; of yes or no, on or off, good or evil, can be traced back into the long history of human thought. Indian philosophies regarded existence as dualistic in nature, either mind-matter, awareness-nature or God-world. Taoism and Confucianism in ancient China expressed this duality with the yin yang symbol. The Pythagorean table of opposites is made up of ten pairs of opposing principles. Anaximander suggested the idea that every element had an opposite. Plato wrote of the mind and body as separate from each other. And to Descartes, mind and matter were two fundamentally different components. Humans have a long tradition of regarding the world as made up of opposites. But fundamental to all of these beliefs is the fixed nature of the opposing states. Mind is always mind, it cannot become matter. Light is always light, it cannot become dark. Switching between the opposites is a more modern concept.

The switch, as a mechanical device that can connect and disconnect an electric circuit and so allow the instantaneous shift from one state to another, was invented in 1884 by John Henry Holmes. This simple, practical, now innocuous, device embodies thousands of years of thought and it set humanity on it’s path into the future.

A computer is a system of electronic switches that function as logic gates. Without the switch providing a means to open and close logic gates, turn zeros into ones, add and remove electrons, the modern computer could not exist. Without computers, the modern age, with all it’s technological advances, would not exist. Without the modern age, the technological future, with all the possibilities it brings, could never come to pass.

Whatever the future holds, good or bad, the switch is humanity’s best and worst invention.

A paradigm is a fundamental, unquestioned set of assumptions that determine our worldview. It’s the typical or usual model or pattern that we frame our understanding with. It’s such a part of how we understand things that we hardly even think about it. Until it changes.

The term “paradigm shift” was introduced into our language in 1962 by the scientist Thomas Kuhn. Before Kuhn, scientific discovery was thought to progress continuously, building on what went before over time. Kuhn said that sometimes there is discontinuous change; a massive upheaval in what we thought we knew, and a leap to a new paradigm. After the fact, it’s almost impossible to deny the shift. Nowadays, the majority of us are pretty certain that the earth goes around the sun, but that wasn’t always the case. It took the Copernican revolution, a paradigm shift in how we thought about the cosmos, to force that change.

But still, some people don’t see the change even when it’s happening. They suffer from “paradigm blindness”, where they are unwilling or unable to accept any challenge to their core ways of making sense of the world. When we have entrenched views, we can become very good at filtering out information that does not support our views and assumptions and only allow in information that does. So, how might we prevent paradigm blindness and prepare for discontinuous change?

Futurists think about the future not in terms of certainties but as probabilities. If we think about change in our lives, businesses, and entire world more as probabilities and likelihoods rather than simple will or won’t happen, then we can remove some of those perceptual filters and open ourselves up to seeing change happen.

Another Copernican revolution could start tomorrow. Why wouldn’t it? What’s to stop it? Certainly not our outdated beliefs about the continuous nature of change.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” is a phrase pulled out in meetings to justify proceeding with a sufficient solution sooner rather than waiting for a better solution later. The phrase was originally written by Voltaire as “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”, which is literally translated as, “The better is the enemy of the good”. In our quest to find solutions to problems we often fail to apply problem solving thinking to how we think about solving problems.

The perfect solution to any problem doesn’t exist. But the ideal of a possible perfect solution is sometimes used to justify not accepting an imperfect solution. A solution that doesn’t solve the entire problem is considered a failure, even if it could solve part of a problem. Knowing about this ‘perfect solution fallacy’ allows us to not get caught by it. And so, we can consider that solving different types of problems, or even the same problem at different times, doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be better than it was.

Different problem solving techniques should be applied to different problems. New and unknown problems with uncertainty about the solution benefit from a design approach. The way towards a solution is discovered step-by-step as situations are explored, ideas tested and possibilities uncovered. This approach can arrive at novel solutions, but often parts of the problem persist. As the problem becomes more well known and stable the approach to finding solutions should change. An engineering approach to tackling problems focuses on proven and repeatable solutions that are adopted to solve at scale. Well-established, existing solutions can be optimised. This is business thinking applied to a problem. The solution is delivered more efficiently or at lower cost in order to maximise the effectiveness of the solution. Neither of these different approaches solves the problem completely or forever, or does so without other external impacts. That’s not the nature of solving problems.

Every solution that solves a problem, creates another problem.

Pretty much every company over a certain size has its ‘values’. They are considered a cornerstone of defining company culture. They may be used in hiring people who already have a predilection for the same kinds of values and to assess the ongoing behaviour of employees to ensure they remain aligned. Deviating from the company values can result in corrective measures being applied to the rebellious employee. The question here isn’t whether companies choose admirable values, the question here is how morally acceptable it is for them to enforce their values on their employees.

The term ‘Fascism’ is used in many different ways; historically, socially, politically and as a pejorative. It lacks a single agreed definition and although there are many thinkers who have put forward the means to recognise it, this isn’t an easy thing. For the purposes of this discussion we can say fascism is the enforcing of an ideology of conformity and elitism, where some people are considered more valuable than others. There are two parts to that definition. Fascism is an ideology of conformity. Everyone must agree and accept. There is no room for alternative views, no deviation allowed. And fascism enforces it’s ideology. It believes in taking violent action to further the adoption of it’s beliefs, and that action can be in the worst of ways but also in using propaganda to do harm to the psyche of those it attempts to convert.

Where the historian Stanley Payne talks of what he terms ‘Fascist goals’ he includes “the regulating and transforming of social relations within a culture”, and Robert O. Paxton, the American political scientist, states that fascism “reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the collectivity so that, at it’s most extreme, the individual has no rights outside those that benefit community interest”. In the words of both of these thinkers we can see how fascism uses the power of authority and the collective to control the individual. If an individual cannot choose their own values then they suffer fascist rule.

Company values seem, at first glance, to be a positive thing; a means of setting agreed cultural expectations and achieving behavioural harmony. Where an organisation draws the line between the promotion of its chosen values and the indoctrination of those values in ways that prevent challenge and discussion or the adoption of other values, is the line between seeking equality and enabling fascism. But it’s not a line that is easy for all to see. If we’re serious about taking action to be anti-fascist then we are honour-bound to examine fascism wherever it might be and however subtly it might manifest.

Wealth inequality is a terrible thing but any attempts to distribute wealth equally across society will always fail. Any kind of creative production and trading activity always results in a Pareto distribution of goods and wealth. The rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game of Monopoly or a global economy, the Pareto distribution universally applies.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attempt to tackle inequality and poverty, but it absolutely does mean that we need better economic models to understand the complexity of distribution and how to effectively intersect into those systems. Inequality might be inevitable but that doesn’t make it unavoidable. And although the answer isn’t as simple as the redistribution of wealth, that shouldn’t stop us from looking for the answer that works, in fact it points us in the right direction.