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“I’m a firm believer in the power of change. 

But there is one thing I’ve learned, and that’s the hardest part of moving forward is not looking back.”

Felicity

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Progress is difficult <and easy>. Changing is even more difficult <and easy>. Now. I am not sure if it is more difficult if you discuss this as ‘one’ <an individual> or as a ‘whole’ <groups, countries, society>.

Well, to me, the reason why I kept on throwing in easy is because I believe we look at “difficult” incorrectly.

Maybe difficulty is simply difficulty.

Maybe there are no ‘degrees of difficulty’ when it comes to change.

Maybe there is no ‘little or big’ change.

Maybe it is simply, well, change … no size … no degrees … and it is all difficult.

One size – same degree of difficulty.

In fact. Maybe I should be arguing we diminish, or boost the whole concept of difficulty by trying to find levels within it. And maybe a philosophical young student Tv character <Felicity> simplified change and progress and difficulty into the simplest form — not looking back. In other words, change difficulty is all about the past and not looking back. Therein lies the hardest part or the “difficult” as it were with change – looking forward & just doing and not looking back at what you may, or may not be, leaving behind.

That said.

Individuals or societies, the ones or the manys, always seem to want to go back or look back <in some form or fashion>. It’s funny. We do this even if we know it isn’t the right thing or the best thing. We look at the past holding on to what exists with ragged tenacious claws.

Worse? We sometimes <often> delude ourselves into believing we are proceeding in the most rational way by weighing all of the pros and cons of various alternatives which are actually alternatives usually based on looking backwards <with an eye on a future thought>.

Oddly.

Quite often it really isn’t rational thinking because in the end most often the decision ends up no more than “I liked that more than I liked the other alternative.”

Oh. And that is scary. Because our attitude and perception with regard to the past is wacky.

Wacky not only because, all things created equal, we not only view the past differently than it really was <we tend to gloss over things> but also how we think and feel today <please note this is the first time I have mentioned anything to do with the present> influences how we remember yesterday. Yeah. Whatever we are feeling now and about ‘now’ is a filter in which the past has to sift its way thru. That matters because tomorrow’s anticipated gains and losses inspire today’s decisions and actions.

–          Example one:

After being shown an ad talking about the wonders of Disneyland, including shaking hands with Bugs Bunny, people were asked about their own memories of visiting Disneyland. 16 percent vividly remembered shaking hands with Bugs Bunny, even though there’s no Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. (He’s a Warner Brothers character.)

–          Example two <using some research>:

This is about what is called Time perspective. It’s not the actual real events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. It is actually our attitude toward events in the past matter more than the events themselves <ponder that one for a minute or two>.

Our time perspective — whether we tend to get stuck in the past, live only for the moment, or are enslaved by our ambitions for the future – effect our attitudes and behavior and decisions <lets call this ‘progress’>.

Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created this idea of time perspective. After a boatload of research over a lot of time <10 years> he concluded our attitude toward time is just as defining as key personality traits such as optimism or sociability. He concluded time perspective influences many of our judgments, decisions, and actions. Zimbardo identified five key approaches to time perspective.

These are:

• The ‘past-negative’ type. You focus on negative personal experiences that still have the power to upset you. This can lead to feelings of bitterness and regret.
• The ‘past-positive’ type. You take a nostalgic view of the past, and stay in very close contact with your family. You tend to have happy relationships, but the downside is a cautious, “better safe than sorry” approach which may hold you back.
• The ‘present-hedonistic’ type. You are dominated by pleasure-seeking impulses, and are reluctant to postpone feeling good for the sake of greater gain later. You are popular but tend to have a less healthy lifestyle and take more risks.
• The ‘present-fatalistic’ type. You aren’t enjoying the present but feel trapped in it, unable to change the inevitability of the future. This sense of powerlessness can lead to anxiety, depression and risk-taking.
• The ‘future-focused’ type. You are highly ambitious, focused on goals, and big on making ‘to do’ lists. You tend to feel a nagging sense of urgency that can create stress for yourself and those around you. Your investment in the future can come at the cost of close relationships and recreation time.

Anyway. All the research aside … here is an uncomfortable truth. Most of us are either focused on the past or the future. Or even both.

Here is the uncomfortable part.

That means if we are so preoccupied with past and future, well, that inevitably makes the present, well, smaller.

Yeah. The present becomes the smallest part of our attitudes which inevitably drives our behavior.

Unfortunately <or fortunately to any change consultant>  change actually begins and ends with what you actually do in the present. Nothing else really matters when it come to change.

Yikes. That sure explains a lot.

Anyway.

The hardest part of moving forward is not looking back. Heck. Maybe the hardest part of moving forward is not only not looking back .but not looking forward too.

<note: my head hurts after typing that>

Change is, adn will always be, about flipping today to tomorrow. Easy, and as hard, as that.

I imagine that change will always be difficult and the only thing that may matter is to make the present a little bit bigger in how you think in the scheme of things. I say that because when you do flip the present, and what you do in the present, and tomorrow looks bigger & better you will most likely have no desire to look backwards anymore, less likely to hold with ragged claws to anything you used to do, and more likely to just have, well, changed … and it is all said and done.

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originally written October 2013

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“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”

Carl Sandburg

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In a world where we so often talk about time being money I am surprised we don’t see this quote more often.

Oh.

Sorry.

I know why. Because it suggests you control your time and popular wisdom suggests that our time is out of our hands (and that there is not enough of it).

Carl suggests a different perspective.

Time is currency in your wallet and just like that ten dollar bill you have a choice how and where and when to spend it.

I am sure there has been a book written suggesting this, but suffice it to say thinking about time as money in your own wallet that you have to spend (and earn) is actually a useful thought.

It’s bigger than “time management” and closer to “time budgeting.”

Anyway.

A similar thought <which I liked> is time spent is not distance covered. I don’t know who wrote this, or said this, but it seemed appropriate here.

How we use our time is a discussion I am fairly sure we will never tire of.

Well. We may tire of it but we will never stop discussing.

Mostly because we worry whether we are using it wisely, or efficiently or whether we even have any control of our own time at all. In addition many of us assess our time investment by ‘distance covered’ <distance being defined by any variety of something tangible so that we can have some type of ‘measurement’>. In fact, we use measurement in some fairly absurd ways to judge time.

Look. I see many <many> people spending the coins of their life, not flippantly for sure, but I question whether they do so wisely. There is more time spent on … well … time … than almost anything else I can think of. People, websites, apps, far too many other things to list, all telling you how you should spend your time, on what, and how, and for what. So many people being told HOW to invest their time.

But it’s your money. Do you really want others spending it?

Sure.

We all have responsibilities but at some point, I admit this may be a selfish perspective, if I only have ten dollars of time I sure as hell do not want to let someone spend all ten dollars for me.

To be clear, whether I really know what I am talking about what I do know for sure is that Carl makes a valid point.

One which I believe is worth thinking about. Ponder.

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“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at birth.”

Justice Oliver W. Holmes Jr.

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“I have always believed that I should have had no difficulty in causing my rights to be respected.”

Eli Whitney

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The limits of conscientious objection and civil disobedience is, well, the law. Okay. Not really. The limits are actually part of the social fabric of what society accepts. The truth is the machinery of legal order most typically establishes its enforcement when the social contract breaks down. What I just wrote shouldn’t be that controversial, but in today’s world there is always someone shouting “without laws there is chaos.” The problem is laws really shouldn’t be applied in all cases. Yup. I just said that.

Indiscriminate self-righteousness – or individual moral judgements – have limits within a citizenry and when the citizens themselves, the social judgement, cannot agree that is when law steps in.

Which leads me to say violence is not in the purview of those rebelling.

It is not only not within the law it isn’t within the overall social contract. Righteousness does not equal right.  Regardless. Righteousness, in almost all forms, is disciplined by risk. And that is where violence steps into the conversation. There is no such thing as ‘well intended violence.’ We may be empathetic towards the reasons, but never to the means. On the other hand, nonviolent interference into the normal everyday activities of the rest of the world should be expected and should be seen as almost the inevitable actions of civil disobedience of citizens with reasonable reason to showcase disobedience to a system/society. We should actually celebrate these activities, no matter how annoying they may be to our own lives, and maybe even lean in and listen.

We should listen because violence, or let’s call it extreme civil disobedience (which may or may not include actual violence), is usually a reflection of heightened frustration. This is different than rebellion. True rebels have established no allegiance to the legal order (no matter how they may twist their version of legality). The reason most people balk at true rebels and rebellious behavior is because it is incoherent to natural societal coherence. ON a side note, I think Jefferson was a bit misguided in his rebellion thinking but that’s a topic for another day. But this is where things go awry in today’s world. we confuse civil disobedience, rebellious behavior and even violence because we don’t view them with trying to understand but rather by our ideology. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a healthy society should be judging individual behavior against itself, the societal norms, and not ideology.

Which leads me to anyone who purposefully disobeys a law, or purposefully stretches the law’s intent, pits the individual judgement against society’s judgement.

Righteousness of motives is judged by everyone else. And this is where things go awry in today’s world. in the wayback machine everyone else’s judgement wasn’t tainted by ideology, only by what they sensed as right or wrong. In today’s world people seem to have settled into a simplistic binary world – “if we do not follow the law (strictly), we are no longer a country of laws” versus, well, any other view than that. There is a portion of the world that goes to the most simplistic definition because it is easier to make a stand. The problem is the world is driven by nuance. Shit. Even law demands a bit of nuance. And therein lies the issue. Disobedience defies definitions while society assesses definitions and ideology demands definitions. The truth is society makes exceptions all the time and these exceptions are not made by the process of logic; but by the rules of prudence. Its part of what Edmund Burke suggested: “the notion of an established form of social life with the notion of an established set of institutional arrangements.” What I mean by that is ideas flow, even disobedient ones, and that’s why civil disobedience has always influenced culture. And what I mean by that is, well, it is inadmissible even when it may feel admissible and, yet, admissible within strict inadmissible rules. This happens because society is malleable to prudence and judgement. I state that because there are boundaries in identifying the limits of permissible civil disobedience and protest, but we would be naïve to think that “whoever is in power in government will peddle their preferences on what is right and what is wrong and what is within the limits and what is not.” The truth is the ‘law’ is simply a weapon wielded by the ones in power.

In the end.

I would argue that if the citizenry of a society continuously use law to settle their grievances, the law will fail. You cannot expect the legal system to decide what is the right thing to do. The truth is society judges what is right and wrong, legal and illegal, and admissible and inadmissible. Unless maybe if you are a judge, saying “it is just the law” to justify something, is lazy. The law is the last resort to deciding right or wrong because if that is the point we have arrived at, we, society, have failed in our duty to judge well. Ponder.

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In the scenery of spring,

nothing is better, nothing worse;

The flowering branches are

of themselves, some short, some long.

Ryōkan

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1st day of Spring. I have always had this crazy idea that we should celebrate the first day of spring instead of New Year’s Eve.

I say that because I sometimes find it odd we celebrate new year’s day which seems to be associated with regrets and leaving ‘things’ behind and ‘starting anew’ as if you completely throw out the old and start with a clean slate <which sounds good but is not really possible>.

And, yet, Spring is actually all about new from existing, growth from that which is and, well, hope <not regret>.

To me, as nature begins to throw off the cold thoughts of winter and days get longer, it seems natural to think of possibilities. And <returning to my crazy thought on ditching new years’ eve> it seems like it would also be much easier to become the change we seek in ourselves in Spring than when you are in the dead of winter and you have to fight off not only last year’s regrets but the grayness and coldness of winter days.

Spring abounds with, well, a life to come.

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Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

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Spring begins what could be called the narrative of hope.  The narrative can be religious or philosophical or both intertwined. Regardless. The narrative revolves around a speculation of what could be.

This I am today.

That I will be tomorrow.

I say this knowing full well that speculation is not an end in itself.

Speculation must involve some meaningful application.

While you have hope for growth in a belief of freshness and emerging growth from what already exists, you have to water the plant <you get the metaphor>. You have to do some shit in order for all the ‘hope shit’ to happen.

Spring isn’t about putting aside old habits and things it is about using them as stepping stones to grow and move forward.

I would argue that Spring helps us with hope because it suggests possibilities. This is good because far too often hope tends to stunted in pragmatism.

In other words, fulfillment of hope is much much easier in spring then in the dead of winter.

Behaviorally speaking, the pragmatic constructs of life and improvement seem much colder and stricter and harsher and less attainable in the winter.

And, yet, those same pragmatic constructs of life seem more open and warmer to adapting to change in the onset of spring and, most importantly to attitudes & behavior, more attainable.

And, yes, I do believe pragmatism and possibilities have a symbiotic relationship.

Now.

While you actually have to do some shit to make change and growth happen, Hope is a pretty powerful thing. Hope, which actually offers nothing more than mere speculation, actually provides us with the very basis of living.

Seriously.

Think about it.

What is existence without the hope for a better tomorrow or expectation of things to come?

<answer: not much>

We long for meaning which is certainly intertwined with hope — a hope for being as good as we can. A hope for being better today than I was yesterday and better tomorrow than I am today.

All that said.

“Dum spiro spero”

(While I breathe, I hope)

Alexander Pope

As long as we breathe, hope breaths.

Spring is about, well, breathing. Breathing life into hopes & dreams.

I would argue New Year’s Eve is about suffocation and is grounded in the despair of past dreams.

Ponder that a bit.

How often have you stood on the threshold of a new year looking to discard things <to start anew> and felt this?

                   “From where you are you can hear their dreams.

The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams.”

Dylan Thomas

Conceptually, for New Years to exist it means some dreams have died. Yeah. On New Year ’s Eve we put to rest some of our dead dreams … and create new ones.

<please note: I do not believe any dream should die>

On the first day of spring we let the seeds of our dreams burst forth from the ground and grow.

Now that, my friends, is something worth celebrating.

Spring is here.

Hope lives.

Think of the possibilities.

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“All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”
Aristotle

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I am both a complexity person and a “cause & effect” person. I believe all actions have a stimulus in some form or fashion. Yes. All actions. That said, I also know unwinding a usual complex interconnection of things to isolate a specific cause is often a fool’s errand. But the truth is that something always gets the ball rolling and it is often quite useful to spend some time thinking about causes of things. specifically, I rarely think “man, was that a stupid thing to do” when I see someone do something. Instead my first thought is almost always “gosh, I wonder what made them think that was the right thing to do.” To me that is a useful reflection of cause.

So. If I take that type of thinking and put Aristotle’s thought in place every time you see or hear someone say something, and rather than going ballistic or laughing or shaking your head or whatever,you place one of these into your head:

• Chance
• Nature
• Compulsion
• Habit
• Reason
• Passion
• Desire

Maybe, just maybe, you will generate a more reasonable response to the situation than doing or saying something silly.

I will tell you that I wish more managers (or people managing people) in the business world would try this thinking out when managing people.

Too often I have seen ill considered responses to people’s actions in business environments and it becomes more of a “slamdown” rather than a teaching moment. Or are just plain stupid with regard to this topic (although I like to err on the side of “not investing the energy to teach”).

Cause and effect is any easy thing to grasp and I wonder why managers forget it. Maybe it is because we seem to often get caught up in the “blame game” versus “teaching game” (probably because of the alliteration). Or maybe we get caught up in the complexity narrative and begin thinking there is no cause for any of the effects happening. Either of those two beliefs are less than useful if you want to foster an effective business.

Anyway. There is a Law of Cause & Effect which states that Every EFFECT has a specific and predictable CAUSE and every CAUSE or Action has a specific and predictable EFFECT. I do not buy into that ‘law’, but, as a concept it is useful in exploration. It can be useful because it means that everything that we currently have in our lives is an effect that is a result of a specific cause (or groupings of causes). Simplistically, in a business world, these causes are the decisions we make and the actions we take on a daily basis. Whether our decisions seem small and rather insignificant, or whether they are significant and transformational in nature, does not matter. Each and every decision we have made and action we have taken has set events into motion creating some predictable and specific effects, and some unpredictable and specific events, that we are now experiencing in our lives.

Which leads me to Chance.

The Law’s premise is that life (or any personal action) isn’t built upon accidents, chance or luck. It is rather built upon Cause & Effect. While I think that is a bullshit, absurd, less-than-realistic, thought, I will suggest that for business it has some usefulness. In business you have to believe you can shape your future and destiny in some way or let’s say “nudge chance in your favor” or why be in business at all.

Lastly.

While I simplify cause and effect down to a sound bite “stimulus-response” when teaching high school kids, this thought is really overlooked in personal relationships.

It may be that in long term relationships there becomes such a comfort & routine that you stop paying attention to details or maybe better said “cues” as to what is really going on. Let’s call this “the slippery slope of indifference to stimuli.” In other words, ignoring (or simply overlooking or even being simply oblivious to) the cause ‘cues’ to specific actions and effects. And once you begin to overlook things you run the risk of beginning down that infamous slippery slope.

In the end.

While I began with Aristotle I will end with Harry Potter.

“Humans have a knack for choosing precisely the things that are worst for them.”

Albus Dumbledore

We do have a knack for doing what is worst for us.

We should invest at least a bit of energy wondering why because we aren’t stupid.

I believe it is because we don’t invest enough energy asking “why did this happen?” when we do the ‘worst.’

Instead we choose “precisely the things that are worst for them” and shake our heads and move on.

Maybe if we seek to understand the cause for our actions a little better we could make good ole Dumbledore a little less insightful. Because, well, the answers to our actions are everywhere if you look around a bit. Ponder.

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“Life is a test of endurance, strengths, challenges and patience.”

Kim Hoth

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We all have an inner strength that is difficult to assess until you actually have to access it. But we ALL have that inner strength.  A source we would rather never have to tap into, yet, we do — or we will.

It is inevitable in life.

Because Life is nothing if it is not consistent in that it challenges us.

Constantly.

And I also believe most of us are surprised not only by our own capacity when tested, but also certainly when seeing the capacity of the others around us.

I was reminded of this several years ago. The experience reminded me that Life gives each of us different tests and the experience reminded me of perspective — perspective on what is truly a Life challenge versus what we sometimes believe is a ‘challenging life’.

And, once again, in self-reflection, the experience made me wonder “would I be that strong?”

Or maybe more importantly “would I be strong enough?”

In other words, would it pass my limits?

Ok.

Here we go.  Envision this scenario.

(WARNING: this is short … but tough)

Your oldest daughter passes out in the shower at home.

She isn’t breathing.

You, the father, frantically give mouth to mouth while someone calls 911.

She is brain dead on arrival at the hospital.

She is dead the following day.

A blood clot in the brain in a healthy 15 year old young woman.

Dead at 15.

No warning

Your daughter is gone.

And you, the father, couldn’t save her.

—-

(I am taking a break here)

—-

I typed that fast.

I had to.

I type things out of anger.

I type things out of thought.

I type things out of frustration.

I have never had to type anything like that ever before.

And I had to do it fast and not dwell.

The words?

That is what my friend Mike actually experienced several years ago.

Ok. He experienced significantly more, and still is, but from me, someone looking in from the outside that is all I believe I had the right to write.

I cannot envision being in his shoes.

I cannot envision the pain & emptiness.

I cannot envision the depth of helplessness.

I cannot envision the burden.

I am not a godly man.

At least not in the traditional sense.

I say that before I use this quote:

“Life’s a test. I was taught in church that the Lord wouldn’t put more on you than you can handle. But it’s getting heavy.”

Dusty Baker

I used Dusty Baker because Mike & I are not close friends.  We are ‘within work environment’ friends.  And we would seek each other out for our shared love of baseball.

And I imagine that the heaviness he feels today is close to more than he can handle.

“It’s getting heavy” as Dusty suggests. It tests the limits.

I believe we all think life gets heavy on occasion as we face our day to day issues. I know I have faced some things and I know I have felt the heaviness of life. But I have never faced anything like this.

I know, for sure, we shouldn’t measure the heaviness on day to day stuff.

Maybe heavy is this scenario.

And that is the standard. Anything else is just light or a lesser burden.

He and his wife have three more daughters.

Will that lessen the burden?

Shit.

I don’t know.

I don’t know how a father ever leaves the helplessness of not being able to protect, and save, his child.

I am not going to preach here.

I am simply going to remind.

No matter how hard you try to protect someone you love, sometimes you just can’t.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you should value every day you have.

Regardless. Life is going to test your limits. I am unclear we really know what our limit is until you have to face it. All I know is any time your limits are tested it is something serious. And serious things that test limits do not go away. What I mean by that is the situation may, but the consequences lurk forever. Ponder.

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“The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

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This is about measurement in business, specifically, about learning and developing a learning organization.

First. Let me say I am dubious of almost all measurement. Why? Because in today’s world everyone is (a) incentive to make a specific measurement usually at the expense, with no cost, of other things that could be measured, and (b) measurement creates objective blindness.

Suffice it to say, if something is going to be measured people will figure out a way of gaming the system to attain whatever is to be measured. Sound cynical? Not really. Its just reality. If you have a system that rewards attainment of things measured you create a culture, society and civilization believing only what is measured is important.

Second. I believe most of the truly important things in business and in life don’t need to be measured because if they are truly important, they will trigger the intrinsic energy with everyone to go out and make those important things happen. As a follow-up to that, yes, there are unimportant things that need to be done. And, no, they don’t need to be measured to make sure they are done (and done well). if you have a system in which intrinsically people attack important things, they will do the unimportant things simply because they know they need to be done.

Third. As Arie de Gues said: “Institutional learning is much more difficult than individual learning.” The individuals know there must be a better way to do the business of doing business and what ‘growth’ should be and, yet, the institution, collecting all that may be important, i.e., what is foremost to the institution itself, warps its ‘directed learning’ toward its wants, not the individuals, and seeks to shape the individual TO what it wants.

Which leads me to learning cannot be measured.

Judged perhaps, but not measured. But that has never stopped us from measuring learning. We try and try and try and then claim it has been measured. I would suggest we do this as part of some devious command and control ideology. What I mean by that is we use those measurements to dominate others and control their actions and behaviors under the guise of “intelligent leading” when it really is in the pursuit of institutional objectives. Regardless. Measurement, or let’s call it ‘performance management’, cause some real issues:

1. Gaming 81% of the time
2. Information manipulation 74% of the time
3. Selective short-termism 55% of the time
4. Give an illusion of control
5. Negatively affect social relationships 81% of the time

While measuring learning has all the appearances of being critical to the learning processes it more often creates results counter to the objectives of the business, i.e., agility to meet emergent opportunities and adaptability to optimize situational needs. In other words, measurement tends to stratify, not make the business more elastic. That said. I would argue you can only ‘measure’ through direct observation of performance or by examination of a ‘conclusion of activity’ that required use of acquired learning (that’s more individual-activated self-learning rather than some L&D initiative).

To make a distinction. While I tend to believe how we measure learning in schools (mostly below college level) is fucked up, I do believe measuring young people’s learning progress, retaining of knowledge and usefulness, is good.

• Source: Measuring Student learning, Cornell Center for Teaching innovation

Anyway. The truth is business learning and rational thinking demands a bit a setting aside the ego; and measurement almost always triggers ego. Learners be open to include a changing, overlapping knowledge of minds/thinking which can come from anywhere at any time. Since a person cannot collect all relevant information if they are to be competent at identifying relevant actions/possibilities, they must to some extent know where to look for the apparently most useful information as well as be open to connectivity within a community of people who knows things they do not.

Which brings me back to business.

Most businesses fear unmeasured learning not because of wasted time, but more so wasted efficiency. What I mean by that is business fears anything that could create a complicated and time-consuming process that less-than-efficiently stitches together all the necessary knowledge/data to decide or do something. The fear is that reality is vague if there are no numbers to create an outline to see (and business fears vagueness). The fear is that any actionable learning is too late to make the optimal impact on financial performance. Look. Learning shouldn’t be judged on efficiency only effectiveness. Learning has no need for logic other than learning is good and therefore learning has no need for measurements other than “am I consistently providing an environment which encourages people to pursue learning.”  I know that sounds like heresy in a business world religiously attached to measurement.  I think of “intelligence” as less to do with “knowing a bunch of stuff” and more to do with figuring stuff out in new and uncertain situations, but that skill is only developed by actually being in uncertain situations full of unknowns. So maybe measurement should be reflective of ‘effective navigation’ (financial performance is an outcome of this done well consistently).

Which leads me to end with Mary Parker Follett.

Follett offered 3 core concepts and five principles to support what she called the “circular reflective learning arc.”

Concepts:

1. thinking in terms of wholes
2. harnessing the creative power of self-organized integrative thinking
3. enhancing our ability to respond to what she called “the law of the situation”

Principles:

1. engaging our internal sense of intention and purpose
2. engaging and learning from the intentions, values, and purposes of others who are different or who think differently
3. designing change through a process of co-creation informed by those differences
4. enacting and acting on those designs where experiences meets experiences
5. adapting and learning from those experiences, the doing, learning about, and living of life itself.

Basically, at the core everything Follett suggests is connective and as part of a community – I AND We. None of it is solely individualistic except possibly self-awareness. I imagine I end here to point out that learning, driven in direction and interest of the individual, combined with that learning forged against other’s learning, is about the only thing truly measurable – outcomes of various situations navigated. But. You don’t measure learning because, well, who knows what learning will be most important in future situations? You don’t. Ponder.

• postcript: there are a number of highly qualified people in my network of friends and acquaintances who absolutely are wrapping their heads around this measuring issue. in particular, Rachel Happe and community measurement, Hilton Barbour on culture, and Jeppe Haansberg on internal networks. I imagine most of them, if not all, would debate me on this issue. And that’s a good thing.

“I’m not responsible for fixing all the world’s problems. I’m responsible for doing my part.”

Jess Morales Rocketto

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“Life is like a library owned by the author.  In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him.”

Harry Emerson Fosdick

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Many people suggest “knowing yourself” is the key to, well, everything. It suggests that you kind of write your own book and live it, live by it, and add chapters as life goes on. The problem is people do not live their lives in silo-like ways. Our physical and mental self doesn’t exist in the absence of the interaction with other people and society. The brain and the body and the external world all shape one another in fluid dynamic ways. To truly understand ourselves, or people in general I imagine, we must not focus on what’s happening with one of part, but on the interactions between the parts. In fact, I would suggest there is a partnership between the brain and society and it is somewhere within this alliance (or battle) between the body (experience), the mind and society as a mutually informing and codependent entity that society changes as well as the individual. That said. Our brain has limits and existing thought systems can accommodate change up to a point. Of course, overstimulation (overload), causes us to ‘shut down’ if not retreat into our most comfortable beliefs. But more when enough new insights and changes in our thinking accumulate, the resulting strain almost demands our brain to consider a paradigm shift. It is conceptual thinking in action. New assumptions create new expectations and even some new choicemaking rules emerge like a phoenix from the fire. The reality is knowing yourself is kind of like the gradual twisting of a kaleidoscope wherein a large number of small modifications eventually yields a substantially different picture.

Which leads me to how to know better.

I am not sure ‘how to know better’ is really grammatically correct, but let’s get to constructs. We all have a construct for how we do and think about everything. The problem is that construct does not exist in isolation.

In fact, an isolated construct has little meaning on its own. It has meaning only through its conversations and interactions with other constructs. Every person changes in some way depending on an interaction the more people we interact with and the more diverse that they are the more complex our own behavior becomes. The same is true of constructs. A construct becomes more multifaceted the more it interacts with other constructs. Associations among constructs not constructs in isolation drive behavior. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out you can think of constructs as people.

Which leads me to say constructs only get you so far.

Many of our constructs reside in the subconscious. What this means is that the brain does a lot of talking amongst itself. In fact, most of the brain spends its time communicating with itself and only infrequently do we consciously get to take part in these conversations. What I mean by that is that the neurons, and groups of neurons, are having conversations among themselves with regard to what we are seeing, hearing, feeling in our interactions and creating ‘constructs’. Occasionally the results of their conversations bubble up into our consciousness and we become aware of them as ‘constructed thoughts’ which appear as a form of reasoning (making sense of the world). Here is an unfortunate truth. Much of the time what the neurons tell us are constructed stories. What I mean by that is some of those stories, just from a sanity standpoint because we just do not have time to know or experience everything, add things to create it and subtract other things to be able to create the story. What I mean by that is that oftentimes we get an incomplete data input and our brain completes the data and then gives us back the story; constructed.

Which leads me to say knowing yourself better does not always lead to doing better.

“Human nature and human life are wide subjects”

John Stuart Mill

Yeah. Knowing better does not automatically lead to doing better. That’s a tough nut to swallow, isn’t it. By the way, this is true also of knowledge. Knowing more knowledge does not automatically lead us to being wiser in our decision making. The reality is knowledge can create what is called “accepted theory” (I believe this to be true), but the rubber hits the road on ‘applied theory’ (as in what is actually done). To be clear, I am not suggesting ‘applied theory’ is hypocritical because, as I noted in the opening, even accepted theories are contingent to interactions, i.e., reality. Excessively following accepted theory actually lacks rationality in that it ignores context. There is nothing we do that doesn’t exist in the absence of the interaction with other people and society. So you can know better but that knowledge is constantly placed at the intersection of a shitload of things and, yes, sometimes your ‘know better’ just gets run over by reality. But you know what? You get back up, dust yourself off, maybe know a bit better, and try to do better.

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“This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

Joseph Campbell

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“Technology is a great servant, but a terrible master.”

Sherry Turkle

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“It is a matter of understanding that society is both very, very good and simultaneously very, very bad. Reality is rich. It has room for plenty of extremes. It has multitudes of contradictions. We must increasingly learn to live and deal with such paradoxes. You don’t have to choose one side. Both are true.”

Hanzi Freinacht

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For a variety of reasons, I seem to be consistently disappointed in humans these days. I say that and I believe in human kindness, believe most people are smarter than we <the system> lets them be and believe most people try and do the right things. But at the heart of my current disappointment resides technology and how we appear to be thinking technology is gonna fix, well, humans and humanity.

• ** note: if you would like to restore your belief in humans, I highly recommend reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman

We appear to live in a world with a misguided boundless optimism tied to an absurd belief that numbers, or some version of twisted math, can explain anything and there must be a solution for every problem (technology is inextricably tied to numbers). I begin there to suggest that technology has tended to bring out the worst of us as more and more of us adopted it. This is odd because it started as a good thing with flaws and now it has simply become a flawed environment which amplifies our worst flaws. Technology, simultaneously, makes us smarter and dumber.

Which leads me to the fact we often view technology as the future and, yet, paradoxically, want it because we seem to think it has the power to change the past. We keep looking backwards and developing technology to attempt to fix old arguments, conflicts and mistakes. I would add we even use it to attempt to change the present (see beauty filters that reshape our images). It’s a race to fix something unfixable. I would argue it’s a race to fix somethings we shouldn’t even attempt to fix. Sometimes it’s enough to make anyone doubt the human race. We have received a gift, and, yes, technology is a gift, one which we alone of all the species on this world have the ability to use to explore the past, present and future. We could build on our triumphs, learn from mistakes, discover things that were once undiscoverable, and instead of regarding it as a wonderful gift, we time and time again simply use it for nothing more than exploitation in the pursuit of a buck or, maybe even worse, for nothing more productive than some incredibly unhealthy social behavior.

Which leads me to Marx and Engels of all people. They grounded their thinking on a belief the country was an uncivilized place populated by idiots (I don’t agree). I would note that same distinction occurs in today’s thinking – leaders treating employees like idiots as well as city ‘intellectuals’ thinking rural idiots abound and politicians, in general, just being idiotic. This simplistic divide is timeless. But they have a larger point lurking in there. Engels thought cities were “something against which human nature rebels” speaking in terms of intellectual and spiritual/moral aspects. But what he was really suggesting was that capitalist cities were becoming devoid of ‘humanity’, homes to human poverty, where individualism prospered. But it’s not just the cities, its everywhere now. The zero-sum game has crept into every community and for the most part business lacks any sense of solidarity with society encouraging each person to pursue their own self/selfish interests (note: businesses actually believe this is the way to ‘optimize productivity’). I would be remiss if I didn’t point out if you remove collective meaning, or relegate it to a lesser value, than there really is no reason to treat someone WITH humanity <except as window dressing>. Circling back to the topic at hand, I am disappointed people allow this to happen. We have permitted the tragedy of commons to be, well, common.

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“However, even if we accept that citizens are not primarily causally responsible for our poor information environments, it could be argued that they nonetheless have a remedial responsibility to mend them.”

Solmu Anttila

Which leads me to staying involved.

Look. I understand that in a complex uncertain world where it feels like you are constantly under attack (senses being bombarded and cognitive overload), and that everyone else is going to do something and if you do not you will be at a disadvantage, so a seemingly reasonable response is to seek to minimize your ‘attack surface.’ This is where you attempt to reduce your exposure to shit. And this is where technology really is a sonuvabitch. It seems like this would be a common sense, if not sane, tactic just to survive mentally. The problem is the technological weapons in today’s world improve exponentially faster, in effectiveness, when focused on a smaller target. It’s the conundrum of the complex world in which technology increases exponentially against you as you decrease your involvement space. So while I understand why most people retreat, I am disappointed they aren’t attempting to fight. Yeah. Technology has created a fundamental restructuring, and connectivity, of the relationship between an individual and society. And, yeah, technology is using tools to manipulate us on almost a minute-by-minute basis. But retreating isn’t really an option. Here is where I will lose some people. I am all for trying to change the system itself, but I think individuals need to embrace the battle – and the future. I believe to combat the emergence of AI people will have to aggressively augment themselves in terms of intelligence, skills, and expertise. This may sound like science fiction, but within this conversation is the exploration between brain-computer interfaces which could connect our brains directly to any computer to enhance our brains, critical thinking and general awareness (I would also toss in bioscience – embedded chips – but that is another topic for another day). This certainly has risks, but also offers rewards. In combination with the individual augmentation, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out smart cities and infrastructure augmentation. This is structural value creation of which all individuals could and should benefit and combined with my first point it offers a deeper individual connectivity to context/environment to augment our thinking and awareness. In order to get onboard with my thinking many of us would need to shed the concept of some ‘ideal of self.’ Look. Through technology we have reshaped the world, for good and bad, which as a consequence has made us in and of this world. “It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964. We are all direct participants now. In addition, we now better recognize that each human has a multitude of different intrinsic incentives, desires, instincts, and biases. We need to be in and of the environment in order to be involved enough to shape the future let alone even understand the present. The only way I can see to do this is to amplify our senses so that we are capable of sensing what we need to and the only way I can see doing that is augmentation through technology (because technology is the ally and the enemy). None of this is easy, but I am disappointed so many people will not even consider this path.

Which leads me to how rationalizing everything is killing us.

Continuing my last thought, we can rationalize ourselves out of anything – good or bad.

“However society might wish to make scientific progress efficient, the truth about complex systems is that trying to simplify them doesn’t guarantee that they become more effective; it risks making them less effective. They function best when they are robust, throwing off a vast array of insights whose value may be realised over time. That means they can look wasteful, producing more than what is needed. But when you don’t know what’s needed, you’re safer with more.”

Margaret Heffernan

What I just said sounds, well, irrational. We often do not think about irrationality of behavior and its relationship to attitudes and beliefs. Sometimes something seems like the right thing to do, or ‘the thing to do,’ and when asked someone will reconstruct the beliefs and attitudes to “rationalize” it. To the outside world that person will appear irrational (doing something based on emotion), but if you ask them, 99% of the time they will create some fairly rational looking and sounding things to explain it all away. I say that to suggest we should be wary of rational explanation for seemingly irrational behavior (and vice versa). My point here is that we use rationalization as if it is some superpower when in reality it can talk us out of doing a shitload of good things. Mostly I am disappointed that humans always seem to be grasping about for some rational reason to not do something that really have no single answer to do – particularly with technology. In that fumbling around we inevitably grab onto whatever ‘feels’ right if we can convince ourselves it puts our feet on the path to an answer we can live with. That rationalization gives us a faux superpower to uncover what is the ‘right thing to do.’ Needless to say, no one on earth has this superpower.

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”

Viktor Frankl

What’s a little more dangerous is that belief in this superpower almost becomes an ideology. Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that exploits the universal human longing for social validation and fear of being cast out. This ideology is amplified by social and news-media feedback loops that now fill the vacuum left by the loss of shared sustainable values. We are going to have to do some wrong things, and we will as humans do, to finally get it right.

Which leads me to how we can stop being disappointed with humans.

I believe it was Albert Camus who said that he was pessimistic about the human condition and optimistic about humankind. While technology is racing ahead at an exponential speed, I sometimes wonder if we humans have gone as far as we can go. Our general stupidity has curbed our progress to a point where the only things it seems we can do is bludgeon each other in the here and now and pursuing wealth with a self-interest focus. That said. It was John Maynard Keynes who said humans are not economic entities striving for subsistence. They are complex beings who face a new problem: “the permanent problem of the human race — how to use one’s freedom, “how to live wisely, agreeably, and well.”

Maybe if we want to be a little less disappointing, we should stop focusing on economic trends and instead tap into human nature. We are not doomed to the lowest common denominator or what could be called the tragedy of the commons. The truth is humans, left to their own devices and not squeezed by a zero-sum world view, actually work well collectively and for a greater good. There is an abundance of evidence that show humans still cooperate and work well with each other and that the tragedy of commons is not a certain fate.

Maybe if we want to be a little less disappointing we should embrace our inner-Adrian Bejan: “For a finite size system to persist in time, to live, it must evolve with Freedom such that it provides easier and greater access to What flows”. The laws of physics suggests the evolution of any type of flow system is its inclination to liberate its stream and remove any type of obstacle to keep moving and, as a consequence, survive.

Maybe we should see the pathway forward as enabling a flow system to prosper (and survive) and stop continuously building walls and obstacles within this flow system.

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”

Tom Robbins

Maybe we should stop rationalizing all the reasons to not do something and begin doing some things that make us uncomfortable.

We are living in a highly competitive multi-polar trap world in which we will inevitably face a far greater variety of problems than ever before which will demand collective action – or we will be disappointed. That said. We will also have a greater variety of alternatives than ever before. And maybe if we would like to be a little less disappointed in humans, we will embrace some of the alternatives and shape the future we desire. Ponder.

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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

George Bernard Shaw

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“Perception is a dynamic conflict between the attempts of an outer world to impose an actuality on us and our efforts to transform this actuality into a self-centered perspective.

Perception is a confrontation between an inward-directed vector of external reality compelling awareness and an outward-directed vector of physiological, cultural, and psychological transformation.

Where these vectors clash, where they balance each other, is what we perceive.”

Source: Understanding Conflict and War – Volume 1: The Dynamic Psychological Field

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Look. Far too often we speak of truths in absolutes and, even worse, suggest an individual fact represents truth. Both of these things are actually the nemesis of truth.

Truths are dependent upon knowledge and, well, knowledge is not only contextual to situations but is also evolving as new learning occurs.  Truth is often contextual, often situation-specific, and often can take on a slightly different hue when viewed by different people. In other words, truth is emergent.

Let me define how I view facts, knowledge and truth (and their relationship).

• Facts. Facts are everywhere. an individual fact is nice to know but, in isolation, does not represent a full truth.

An absence of a fact is typically the root of any conspiracy theory (or false argument). “There is no proof, it is not” never trumps “there is proof that it is.”

• Knowledge. Facts, combined, create knowledge. Opinions, & conspiracy theories, combine *coincidental* facts, not correlated facts. knowledge are *correlated* facts combined. coincidental is lazy. correlation takes work & thought.
• Truth. Truth is a coherence of knowledge (combinations of facts) into a cohesive unit of facts. This means that truth adapts to changing knowledge (not individual facts).

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“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

André Gide

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“Truth” is rarely are solid black & white. Truth is often contextual, nuanced and often slippery to get a hold of. Now. Let’s not confuse facts with truth. Lots of facts exist. And in a mutually exclusive environment someone can hold up a fact as a single-minded fragile truth. The difficulty is that everything is connected with everything and a single fact does not ever live in a world solo. It rubs elbows within a community of other facts. And as they rub against each other they create, well, truths. Truth is a combination of facts.

That said. The simplest use of facts is, well, to use one fact to make a conclusion. 99.9% of the time one fact is not reflective of a conclusion. Yet. We people are pretty persistent in doing this. the problem with this is, in isolation, that fact can be many things to many people leading to many possible conclusions depending on “where you stand.” If I were particularly harsh I would suggest of you hold only one fact with your conclusion it is an opinion, not a truth.

The next most common use of facts is linear logic. This fact plus this fact equals this truth. Or maybe call it a “if this, and this, then that” logic. This combinatorial usage is pretty relentlessly persistent in the world mostly because it appeals to our ‘common sense’ instinctual logic. To be fair, if you stack this, ‘buildable logic’ it is slightly better. That said. 99.9% of the time you are screwed if you believe this represents ‘accepted truth.’ Why? Revisit the simplest use of facts, but double the potential pain. Each of the individual facts could be viewed a gazillion different ways by an infinite number of people and the “this + this” is no longer additive. The codependency makes this an extremely fragile logic.

The follow-up to linear logic is fact storytelling. This is where you connect a number of facts that logically conclude in a truth. This is an incredibly effective way of communicating a ‘truth’ in a way that not only appears logical, but sounds good. Once again, revisit point one. This sounds good, but is also extremely fragile in that a story begins to fall apart if one thing is disputed. But this is where this one gets a bit crazy. The conspiracy fact storytelling. This is the “go-to” technique on cable TV opinion shows. This is where they pluck any number of random facts, which in isolation may be technically true, and then combine them in a very tenuous connective storyline in order to make the grand conclusion that “if all these things are true, this has to be the conclusion.” This one is wacky, but unfortunately highly effective in creating a perception of a ‘truth.’ I will note this is extremely difficult to destruct effectively because the facts are so often random eliminating one simply leaves a number of others in this mosh pit of non-associated facts for the conspiracy to fall back on. I will also note this is not healthy for society.

Lastly is ‘bounded truth.’ This is what you learn in debate classes or any logic classes. You triangulate, or box, multiple facts so the conclusion resides WITHIN the space of the connected facts. Its “if these four things truly exist, within this space resides the truth.”

Which leads me to the title of this piece: truth can simultaneously be contextual and timeless. Bounded truths reside in a world of facts and other truths. Any, and all, of these things can change, but if the ‘boundary facts’ do not, the context has not ultimately changed the principles of that truth. It becomes timeless … until the boundary facts change (as facts have a tendency to do at some point).

This all means truth is often elusive. In that I mean, if you care about truth, you are always in the pursuit of truth as facts replace facts (as facts tend to do).

Now. I want to be careful. Yes. There is truth in the world. Even if some facts change all they do is change the shape of most truths, not make them ‘untruths.’ I do believe we sometimes forget that. Simply because a fact changes does not make the whole become irrelevant. It can, but most times it does not.

I believe rather than discussing truth, or a truth, as static we should refer to it in, well, progress terms. The pursuit of truth is one of progress. Things may arc toward truth (assuming there is active involvement in the pursuit of), but that arc is not smooth nor does it actually move in one direction. Truth, itself, is uneven in that in its combination of facts those facts can reside in the past, present and future as well as within the truth itself and ‘with-out’ (correlative connectedness). Truth is, well, very often emergent therefore, you can deal with many wrong turns, stops (which look like dead ends but aren’t really), doom loops and a variety of backtracking trips. All in all, though, things continue moving toward a Truth that changes. And Truth changes in some unexpected and unpredictable ways. Being blind, or remaining purposefully ignorant to that, shifting of truths can cost you, well, Truth itself.

But the real point to this is that someone without YOUR knowledge is more likely to teach you something completely new than someone who shares your knowledge.

Anyway.

I would suggest that Truth is a puzzling maze for anyone to navigate — good person or bad person.

• Facts come and go. We have as many of them floating around as stars in the sky.
• Knowledge demands some creativity in combination of facts (think seeing constellations in a night sky), some hard work (to gather the most appropriate facts) and some wisdom (to discard less relevant facts).
• Truth demands active learning and a tightly held, loose grip on individual truths themselves.
• Truth is often fragile. This means it demands some rigor to protect it from opinions.