Quickthink

A great story from Ben Johnson at Edutopia

A humble farmer was out working in his field and uncovered a large, perfectly formed pearl (no, this is not the Steinbeck version). He rejoiced in his discovery and was in awe about the transcendent beauty he saw in that pearl. He concluded that since the pearl was so beautiful the whole world should be able to look on it and rejoice in its radiance and that he would be terribly selfish to keep this wonder to himself.

As a result, he sold all that he had in preparation to put this pearl on display for everyone. It occurred to him that the pearl deserved a box worthy to demonstrate its beauty. He made a box out of fine hardwood, engraved it with many beautiful designs, encrusted it with gold, silver, and jewels and placed a beautiful blue velvet cloth on the inside. The man then placed the pearl in this box and put it on display for everyone to see. Thousands came from all the neighboring cities and viewed the display.

After three days of hearing the same thing from every visitor, the former farmer was so disillusioned that he decided to stop displaying the pearl and never display it again. For three days, without fail, each visitor after seeing the display would comment on the beauty of the wood, and the fine carving and filigree, or comment on the ingenious design of diamonds and rubies decorating the outside of the box, or even commented on the beautiful velvet within. The old man overheard long conversations about the origin of the wood, or who the artist was, and was even questioned about where similar beautiful velvet could be obtained. But never once did any visitor comment on the beauty of the pearl.

Indeed, we can only see one thing at a time. And we see what we choose to see. So too in learning. What is the pearl and what is the box? Ben thinks the pearl is in the participation rather than the event. The pearl is the sharing experience.

 A nice Sunday morning rant

Sir Kenneth Clark pointed out that the cultural value of “mercy” (kindness or humanitarianism) in Europe is a 19th century Victorian cultural innovation.  Before the Victorians adopted this, one might do good for others for many reasons (for example, in the name of justice or even chivalry) but not out of compassion for others.

Indeed, allowing passion for others to rule one’s heart was considered to be dangerous. Check out Shakespeare’s Mark Antony or poor Romeo and Juliet to get a sense of the perceived dangers of love and passion. And in the 18th century, no one batted an eye at public floggings and even executions of pickpockets or other bad actors. Indeed, the extent of the 19th century romantic convulsion evidences how painful it was to adopt values with emotional content over cold calculation and trust in God’s will.

Above all others, Dickens presented the lack of compassion as a problem — a vacuum of the spirit. And that vacuum was filled — at least on the surface. And at least we thought so, until two great twentieth century wars showed how dispassionately western man could kill and destroy. But those wars are long over, and as the years have rolled by, we have worked hard to repair the damage that they wrought. More than a half century of relative prosperity has eased the burden of adopting a compassionate political center, especially in Europe.

So here we are. These days — for reasons that are quite understandable and in my view, entirely political — western man would prefer to speak of these values as timeless. As embodied in “rights” rather than as cultural artifacts. And so we have some difficulty understanding the behavior of other cultures where mercy and compassion are not so well loved. We tend to see an absence of mercy as evidence of a character flaw, rather than a cultural norm that not too long ago, we were quite comfortable with.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that western advocacy and even military intervention in Afghanistan has done little to shift Afghan cultural values.  In that cultural mix, compassion is a foreign import that is not necessarily suited to local conditions. Indeed, it could be dangerous and therefore something to be resisted.  This sad story about playing basketball in Afghanistan makes the point rather well.

What does this tell us about global trends? Sadly, I think that we should accept at last that we cannot export compassion. It would be wiser to see more clearly where compassion is viewed as weakness and adopt other strategies to resolve conlfict. Tom Friedman asks, for example,

If you appreciate that Israel lives in a neighborhood where there is no mercy for the weak, how should we expect Israel to act?

Even if one blames this lack of mercy on Israeli cruelty, it remains as a cultural artifact. Something that being more kindly is not likely to erase. This does not mean abandoning compassion as a value. To the contrary, we too easily forget how we set compassion aside at home and how things can fall apart as a result. It does mean thinking more clearly about the limits of compassion as the basis for strategy in working across cultures.

Well, this is all rather abstract for most of us. We neither kiss our neighbors nor hide kalashnikovs in the basement anticipating an impending assault. But we do have a more widespread problem that is directly related. It is our limited capacity to work in teams. To form and re-form groups based around shared values. This is a corporate issue and a political one. And the good news is that it is an area where skills development can help.

Skills? I refer to soft skills where a new language is emerging that brings out how to take next steps in energizing the networks around us. And perhaps most important, re-thinking the leader/follower paradigm.

Any stories that can give us more background on this history? Here is one — that is not discussed much these days, but still resonates for me. Graham Greene complained bitterly that Americans were blind to the complexities of conflict in other cultures. His book, The Quiet American, tells this rather sad story

Greene portrays the American problem as arrogance, pure and simple. Well, he has a point. But he misses out on another bit of cultural baggage from the US. The American obsession for building compassion into relationships. This came out rather well, for example, in Robin Williams’ starring role in Good Morning Vietnam. This obsession gives Americans an advantage in one respect. They value compassionate engagement (and I think are the world leaders in understanding engagement as a value). But this is an engagement within the American cultural scene. In other settings, we will see other ways of developing engagement without making such strong demands for personal connection. For lack of a better word, we may call this “empowerment”.

Quickthink is following the great adventure that young Siisi Saietalu is leading in Kampala, Uganda. She is leading the charge to start up a cafe that would be run by physically challenged Ugandans. Here is a link back to our start up coverage. Here is the second installment.

The latest - Siisi is close to finding a location for her “Pop Up” cafe. Here is her latest video

And here is a link to her blog - where we find out that she may be close to getting a signed lease on the property. Wow!

Frank Bruni offers a nice piece about President Obama today. It is not so much a political piece (thank the Lord), but more a comment on the man. The premise is that the president rose to his position via rigorous self-crafting. He is a control freak about his image. The problem is that presidential self-images are easily shattered by powerful outside forces, of which there are many.

I think that Frank nails it pretty well. And I would go further. His point about Obama can easily apply to all of us. Finding the good life is not about crafting a fixed image of the self in a vacuum. It is about interacting, and more precisely anticipating and structuring interactions. These days, we are who we are connected with.

Which brings me to a teensy weensy problem. Media drenched culture pushes us in a different direction. Via media, we get the impression that the good life is about being a celebrity. Well, it is and it isn’t. Getting adulation is nice. But craving recognition means losing connection. We see “me” instead of “we”. It is the dark side of Hollywood.

The siren call? For the young it may be found in Cyril Connolly’s famous line from”Enemies of Promise” (1949)

Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.

For Connolly, it was the gateway to self-absorption and startling laziness.

Buddhapesto is a food product. Well, it is more than that. It is one of those things that inspires people. They treasure it. Crave it. And it can only be made a little at a time by Maria Gandara, who created the recipe. Only Maria knows how to do it just right. NYT has the story.

So what? Well, imagine if we all could do or make one thing as well as Maria Gandara makes pesto. We would suddenly have an amazing community.

That is the message from Sarah Laskow writing for Good Magazine.

After two years of research, UCS found that the most important strategies for reducing a person’s carbon footprint are to change “what and how you drive, the energy you use at home, and what you eat.”

Those are answers we already knew. The vast majority of the green advice you’ll read? It’s irrelevant. There are four primary activities that dump carbon into the atmosphere: traveling from place to place, keeping buildings at pleasant temperatures, creating electricity, and raising animals for meat.

The hard part is making the life style changes.

And who wouldn’t? Especially these days, the idea that local communities can develop better strategies to promote job creation and economic activity is very sexy. But where to start?

At FC, Billy Warden and Greg Behr offer their vision. They argue that there are three keys to making this happen (1) embracing risk taking culture, (2) unlocking value in local institutions and (3) building more networking platforms.  BTW, this is conventional wisdom by now. But again, where to start?

I think the basic problem is that building the above capacities is not the job of any one institution. Instead, it gets dispersed among various actors in the community. It boils down to a leadership question. So we need a new type of institution that has the job of developing these capacities (1) keeping the vision alive - evangelism, (2) connecting people - outreach, (3) supporting projects - energizing.

Hmm … what type of institution does that?

A Year End Rant

This is not a post about fantasy (as in a far away land). Nor is it about the past (as in a long time ago). Yet both past and fantasy influence me. Why? When stories are about things that happen elsewhere and/or from another time, they do not threaten us in the here and now. They evoke a feeling of being safe, which is why we often place important stories in these contexts.

That feeling of safety is critical. It gives us sufficient peace of mind that in turn allows us to open our minds to the new. Without it, we live perpetually in the wilderness, ever alert, and never transcending our fears. Perhaps peace of mind is the reward we expect for being human and civilized. A gift and a pre-condition for embracing new stories and for learning. For we learn nothing if we do not have an open mind.

So on this last day of 2011, I venture the question “how safe do we feel in our current “here and now”? BTW, if you have not guessed it, the corollary question is “how open are we to new stories and learning”? One measure of our sense of security is how much we obsess over the here and now. The more confident we feel, the more we allow our attention to roam. The less confident, the more we talk about and fret over what is immediately before us. The more we are imprisoned rather than free.

Having been around for some years, I am in a position to compare where we are with where we have been. My “seat of the pants” estimate is that our current obsession level is above normal. Why? I offer two observations which form the main subject of this post.

In part it is because we are waking up as a species to how little we understand of reality. In the bad old days, we believed mightily in who we were, and in turn, each moment connected us to eternity. It mattered not that the eternity was largely a construction of our imaginations. Our belief in it was sufficient to give us confidence. We see less now but more clearly. What has changed? Why do we see less of eternity? The gift of science allows us to deconstruct our presumptions. And with some exceptions, we live now as a scientific rather than mythic construct. It is a pleasure to see things more clearly and painful to give up what we now know to have been a dream. This reveals a great irony of our times. We want both the clarity and the certainty. And ooops, we cannot have both in the measure that we would like. So we fret.

There is another reason for us to fret. We accept that innovation is changing our world ever faster. Yet our institutional framework (as always) is founded on what we value from the past. Can we still afford those values? Will we do what we must in order to protect them? In other words, is our institutional framework sufficiently robust to support the communities that we need in order to thrive? Sadly, I think that the popular answer of the day is “no”. This unequivocal answer is reason to give us pause. We sense that something must change. But what? We cannot know until we agree on what to share. That implies, agreement on what we give up as well as what we take. And without that agreement, we are frozen in patterns that we fear cannot be sustained. We work harder but with less trust that we will be adequately compensated for giving up so much. And we fret.

But these are current and fleeting concerns, not universal ones. There are many stories around us even now that enchant. That free us from our obsessions. For example, Tara Clancy offers us a glimpse of life within a community of friends. These types of stories are the best gifts to share in these times. They offer peace of mind when peace of mind is sorely needed.

Enjoy! And all the best from Tartu for the new year!

FOLLOW -  When I asserted that  “(t)he more confident we feel, the more we allow our attention to roam”, I was thinking about the types of societies that produced great explorations and adventures. Like the race to the South Pole. or like Jules Verne’s fantastic character, Phileas Fogg.  Poor old T.S. Eliot bemoaned a traumatic loss of confidence in his epic poem, The Wasteland. But have we really lost it? Well, perhaps that is the wrong question. Perhaps the more relevant question is, “what builds it in the first place”?

2d FOLLOW - BTW, Sir Kenneth Clark talks about living in perpetual wilderness (life in the 7th century Europe) as a most melancholy existence because there was no escape from it. I would like to think that the value of escape is twofold - in real terms (finding a better place) and in figurative terms (needing an exit even if we are secure at home)

The other day, I linked to a TED video by Kathryn Schultz about how we avoid thinking about the possibility that we are wrong. Here is a link to Kathryn’s video. The same idea underlies Bruce Schneier’s TED talk about the differences between real and perceived security. Here is a link to Bruce’s video.  They got me thinking about certain risks that we face in building and using shared spaces.

Think about it. Steve Williams, Matt Ridley et al tell us that we come up with more and better ideas when we share our ideas in groups.  Right. The era of the heroic genius saving the world while he tinkers away alone in his basement is over.  Hurray! Instead, all we need to do is to get into groups and start talking. Right? Wrong. According to Kathryn and Bruce, things may be just a bit more complicated than that.

Why? Because introducing the variable into the shared space model of people being certain but wrong makes it … well …. weird. Consider this. With this wild card in play, there are at least two very different types of sharing that can take place.  The first type is easy, quite common and problematic. The second type sounds better, but may not be so easy.

In the first type, we go into the group looking for confirmation that we are right about something. That may be ok — if we actually are right. And even then, there are certain problems with the approach. But as Kathryn and Bruce point out, being wrong feels just like being right. Oops. So while sharing opinions may make us feel better about them, it doesn’t necessarily help the group test whether the opinions are right. Disastrously, the conversation may get the group to converge in a frenzy of passion on a wrong opinion. Sieg Heil! Moreover, when we look for confirmation in a group, we tend to do it by making assertions. Another Oops. When we do that, we risk getting into conflict with people in our group who enthusiastically hold the opposite opinion or just get grumpy about the way things are going. These are not great results from using shared space. But I  see them happen a lot in bars and cafes … errr …. and in meetings, conferences and classrooms. Hmmm … perhaps that is why Steve Johnson was so enthusiastic about the introduction of the coffee house as an alternative to pubs that took place a long time a go.

Of course, we should go into the shared space instead to talk about testing out new ideas (a second type of shared space use) rather than just to assert opinions. We might think of this shared space as a “laboratory” space. This seems to offer us more possibilities for the simple reason that we do not presume that our thoughts are correct when we share them. We may still feel certain and be wrong, but at least we say we open for testing. Ok. From Kathryn and Bruce’s perspectives, this is essential to get us off to a good start. But there are certain other presumptions about this setting that could pose problems, even if we promise to be good boys and girls and cooperate rather than vent, argue and pout.

First, it presumes we have ideas to share. We can only get started in our lab work when someone has an idea worth testing — not just a set of opinions. As Kathryn points out, the more we value being correct, the less likely that we will generate testable ideas at all. Or as Seth Godin points out

As soon as you say, “failure is not an option,” you’ve just said, “innovation is not an option.”

Here is that link. So we have a learning issue — we need to re-learn the value of failure (being wrong) before we can generate new propositions worth testing. Ok, let’s be honest. Do we really value failure? And how often do we generate new propositions for testing? Where do they come from? Very good questions, I think. And they are questions that are not so easy to answer. At least not for me.

Second, it presumes that the sharing will be stimulating. We need to get energized before we can get results from shared space. Dan Pink calls this getting “engaged”. But what does getting engaged look like? In the old paradigm, the heroic genius tended to work alone in the basement with that weird gleam in his eyes because his excitement made him less successful in groups. Like Dr. Frankenstein. Well, surprise, surprise, we need Frankenstein’s engagement but without the weirdness. Ooops. It is very easy to get engaged in argument about opinions (especially after a few beers). But in laboratory shared space, we need to get engaged in shared testing. Hmmm …. just how do we generate excitement in the lab? Good question. It can be done, but it doesn’t happen automatically. And as champions of better use of shared space, we need to learn how to do it on a regular basis.

So there are at least two major, major learning challenges for making shared space productive. (1) To generate propositions worth testing and conversations about them, and (2) To generate engagement in testing rather than argument for argument sake. Hmmm … where do I sign up for courses on those things? Perhaps the Harvard Innovation Center? Or are these more mentoring issues?

As I thought about this, I was reminded of Orson Wells’s movie The Third Man. In the movie, cowboy romance writer Holly Martins gets into endless difficulties trying to figure out how his friend died. The problem is that his friend wasn’t dead at all. Worse still, he turned out not really to be a friend at all. But blinded by his romantic attitude, poor Holly stubbornly refuses to see any of this until he gets hit over the head by the facts. BTW, Joseph Cotton plays the role of Holly Martins brilliantly. Hmmm … we can think of Holly Martins as a metaphor for our own shared space problem. He is loaded with opinions but makes an absolute hash of every shared space he enters.

Wells liked playing these kinds of tricks on his characters. One minute they are 100% sure of something. Then they find out they were wrong. Not just a little wrong. Disastrously wrong. The moment of discovery, or epiphany makes the story interesting, even if it is sad. The recognition also makes possible a new sort of shared space. Hey! Perhaps Wells was onto something!

FOLLOW -  More on story telling (BTW, a tool that helps make shared spaces work). One might compare the story generation strategies of Wells and Hitchcock. Both were fascinated by enormous errors as the foundation of the story line. In Wells’s stories the mistakes usually come from an attitude problem (consider, for example, John Foster Kane or Holly Martins). Hitchcock’s characters are usually more “normal” (like the family group in The Birds). Their mistake is in feeling safe (Bruce Schneier has some thoughts on that). From Kurt Vonnegut’s perspective, Hitchcock’s strategy in generating sympathy  for characters may be more a more effective way to draw the audience into the shared space of the story. But the characters’ plight in being wrong about what is going on makes the story work.

2d FOLLOW -  We might compare the above story telling strategies with how we value the life stories of “great” historical figures. Generally, we celebrate how these people got something right. For example, how Churchill was right about fascism. Or how Roosevelt was right about how to cope with the depression. Or how Gandhi was right about Indian independence. Or how Lincoln was right about slavery. And so on. I do not mean to devalue the contributions of the great and mighty here. But I would ask a question. Does our love of these stories reflect also our limited capacity to understand how to generate new story lines and share space by reducing our sympathy for failure?

3rd FOLLOW -  In light of the above, consider the words of Oscar Wilde’s character Sir Robert Chiltern in his climactic speech to the House of Commons in the play “An Ideal Husband” that was retrofitted into a very good movie by director Oliver Parker

… As we stand at the end of this most eventful century,  it seems that we do after all, have a genuine opportunity. One honest chance to shed our sometimes imperfect past. To start again. To step unshackled into the next century. And to look our future squarely and proudly in the face.

Chiltern makes the speech to condemn a corrupt scheme, believing (wrongly) that his speech will lead to his own exposure for long ago revealing state secrets for personal profit.  “Shedding our sometimes imperfect past” is a rather gentle but firm condemnation of self-righteousness which BTW is the mistake that is at the core of the story line. But I like the idea of stories starting over again. In this case, with a gift of courage in the face of a perceived pending failure (errr …. even though the perception was wrong).

4rth FOLLOW -  In his TED talk, Bruce Schneier makes a number of interesting points about the “trade offs” we make when we decide whether to try to enhance our security. We make good choices when our feelings of security match the reality of the risk. But in our modern world these often diverge and we often make poor trade offs. This is why we need models that enhance our ability to decide about risks. And he makes the good point that institutions have strong interests in manipulating our thinking about models. This vocabulary is useful for understanding challenges in making shared space more productive. We should recognize that our decisions on whether to share space also are part of a trade off. We give up independence to get value added from sharing our thoughts (we might call that value higher cognitive capacity). But our feelings about that higher cognitive capacity may not match the reality and so we need models to help us judge the value added. My chit chat about the value of gifting and story telling is about building the model. Great! — so how well do we understand modeling? Hmmm … sounds like another learning challenge to me.

I have been talking a lot recently about “shared spaces”. These are the spaces that we share with others. They can be real shared spaces (like in a cafe) or virtual shared spaces (like this blog) or a metaphor for shared space (like a network or a corporation). The question I am interested in is how much value do we create in these spaces … and my sense is that we could do better.

But what would “doing better” look like? Well, before I get into that,  consider what the opposite looks like. There are lots of examples of poor uses of shared space. One of the more mundane is that dreadful artifact of modern institutions, the “meeting”.  It is said that meetings waste quite a lot of time.  The deeper problem is that wasting time devours engagement. It takes us down the wrong path by sapping our energy. That is the opposite of what we want from shared space.

So do we have models for highly productive shared spaces? Consider this story. Huang Gongwang was a great artist in China many hundreds of years ago. Towards the end of his life, when his skills were at their peak, he gave a gift of a drawing to a colleague who would appreciate the work. Over the centuries, the drawing became part of many incredible stories not the least of which is how it was torn into two pieces. But the pieces have come to us intact and now will be reunited as a gesture of friendship from China to Taiwan. And the work itself? “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” is considered to be one of China’s greatest works of art. A masterpiece. History Blog gives more detail.  Here is the link.

I don’t know very much about the shared space between Huang Gongwang and his friend. But it is enough for me that it inspired the creation of a masterpiece. And it is likely that the gift of the masterpiece was appreciated at the time. Equally interesting is how their relatively small shared space has grown through history out of the gift that Huang Gongwang created. Its story (which is also an artifact of shared spaces) has captured the attention of whole nations. And the story touches us as well. A satisfactory result from a simple gesture of friendship and respect.

Can we use this story? Why not? We just need to ask a few questions. What skills do we possess? Who shares our appreciation of those skills? What gifts have we shared with them?

Interesting.