Solving Problems

For quite some time, we've been involved with a network of people, active citizens, who have formed a platform to contribute to changing the way our society and political system works. The platform calls itself De Publieke Zaak.

Political systems are set up to provide stability and are adverse to change, as by logical extension are the decision makers inside these systems. They derive their power from the investment they have made in using the system to become successful. So much so, that the system provides the basis for their power and legitimizes it. Change is therefore not to be expected from inside incumbent political systems. The facts prove this seemingly universal truth time and time again.

Recently I was invited to join a think tank within De Publieke Zaak. This think tank is to contribute to a report on how to change and improve the functioning of the Dutch government. Part of our discussion was in a number of small groups, which was interesting and fun. There was a connection and the sense of a shared goal. Another part was a kind of idea selection process, dictated by a software system that claims to effectively manage and evaluate large amounts of creative input. We were put in cubicles and each of us had to respond to given questions with ideas. This, to me, was a huge disappointment, suddenly the whole interactive and dare I say collaborative spirit was out the window. Like a group of assembly line workers all my fellow Publieke Zaak enthousiasts were busily typing away behind their screens in the confines of their assigned cubicles. It filled me with horror!

The software system dictating my decision process had a paralyzing effect on me, which lasted for a minute or two, after which I got into a reflective mode. I abandoned my given assignment and started doing something else which I found much more useful; increasing my knowledge of post-modern philosophy. The results confirmed my suspicion on the effectiveness of the chosen software supported selection process. One of the facilitators proclaimed proudly that we had generated over 2000 ideas in the session. 2000 different ideas is no solution to any problem. It is in itself a problem, because which idea do you choose, and for what reason? Disappointment filled me from top to toe.

Then things got worse. After the software stuff a debate about the issues was started with three panel members (including former Minister Pieter Winsemius), with little interaction with the audience. The goal of the debate was to find a road to consensus. On 2000 ideas??? This shocked me. It is impossible to think that this can produce anything good, for the simple reason that a debate produces a winner and a loser. In a debate, by definition, someone always loses. One opinion is victorious over another, like a joust or a boxing match. This is the complete and utter opposite of consensus. In consensus you get everybody, no matter how different opinions may be, to share the same view. How can you dismiss the viewpoint of the one who loses the debate, and at the same time try to reach a consensus which includes that viewpoint? It cannot be done. By definition!

My second misgiving is about the desire towards consensus. One of the panel members mentioned how important it is to reach consensus on certain important values. Reach consensus on certain values? Mmmmm. Again, I don't think this can be done. What makes people unique is the differences in their value systems. Different people, even within the same culture, company or family, have different underlying values. And we at Crossing Signals believe that this is a good thing. These differences are exactly what makes great teams so effective at innovation; they are able to understand their fundamental differences, and use that to gain more insight into the problem at hand, this produces integral and by definition better solutions. When you start generating ideas and in trying to select the right ones, you don't want consensus, you want diversity. There is also the obvious argument that in a complex environment interests and agendas are so diverse that consensus even on simple issues is simply never reached.

In a discussion with one of the facilitators at the end of the session, he asked me what I would suggest if debate and consensus are so problematic. That was an easy question. It is all about creating dialogue and generating solutions where everybody wins. “Debate” should be substituted with ”dialogue”, where the goal is understanding each other’s differences rather than establishing the illusion of one victorious truth. In a dialogue the differences between people add to the solution instead of subtract from the solution space. Consensus can play a part in getting others to commit to solutions, never in creating solutions. Solutions created on consensus have the benefit of providing the illusion of stability, but they rarely if ever rise above a compromise. And what is the definition of a compromise? A solution that everybody can live with on the short term, but nobody is happy with in the long term.

Sports and Innovation

Last Tuesday we went to a meeting sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ in short) and hosted by The Netherlands Office of Science and Technology. The meeting was on Innovation in Sports Technology and from the moment we entered the meeting we knew there was something different going on here than what we generally experience.

On stage was Erika Terpstra, former Olympic Athlete, former member of Dutch Parliament and current member of the Netherlands Olympic Committee. I hope I am not insulting her when I say that she doesn't show how smart she is. Actually, on stage, she doesn't take herself very serious at all. She jokes about her own short comings with abandon, but there is no lack of ambition and passion when it comes to what she has come here to say. She takes her message seriously: Sports unite people!

The atmosphere during the breaks and in the afternoon break-out sessions is relaxed, informal and enthusiastic. Everybody is passionate about sports and it shows. People are open and willing to communicate with each other, there seem to be no, or far less hidden agenda's. A breath of fresh air compared to the frantic, 'In your face' atmosphere of a business context. On most business seminars people are openly hunting and for most there is a lack of passion for what they do. Most attendants keep their cards close to their chest; so unlike the sports context which is clearly about more than the bottom line! However vague the goal essentially is, everybody wants to improve the enjoyment of sports. Sports is about being active and doing something that acknowledges your body and thereby yourself and your team mates.That experience unites the room.

We talked with two American Professors (MIT and Virginia Tech), and two Europeans, one from Austria and one from Germany. The funny thing was that the American professors who have to work in a competitive environment were very open about what they did and we should call them anytime to discuss and share ideas. The professors from Austria and Germany, who are used to working in a collaborative and government supported environment were cautious and had both had bad experiences where people stole their ideas and left them in the cold. If ever there was a contradiction. Funny thing is, the American Professors are jealous of the European way of doing government sponsored research, in stead of their 80% business sponsored research model that is more and more characterized by fighting over IPR's instead of doing valuable research. Apparently they hadn't talked to their European colleagues yet.

Coincidence? I am afraid not. In the US model you need to constantly prove that your research can improve the bottom line of the funding companies. A nice statistic is that US universities make much more money on 'selling' research than they do on IPR's, 80% to be exact. Even including Stanford and Google. In Europe mixing business and research is a taboo, and therefore can never be about improving the bottom line but has to be research that stimulates the European Knowledge economy. This is pretty vague, so who decides whether it does? Civil servants off course! Based on Government and EU policy. That makes getting funded about two things. Knowing how the system works and knowing what the politicians and by extension their civil servants find interesting. A good idea that is not politically favourable doesn't stand a chance. Suddenly it is about doing research that helps a politician gain or retain power. Call me a cynic, but if you are a person with a good idea, in Europe, you will always see the big companies get the big subsidies. Hundred and fifty million (yes, 150.000.000€) from a Dutch innovation fund to a marketing campaign for the Philips Senseo tea springs to mind.

Europe shouldn't copy the US system, it is far from perfect. At the moment, Universities are more and more fighting over IPR's with research funding companies. All with the hope of owning the IPR's for the next Google. This is highly illogical in face of the earlier mentioned statistic. For Europe, I am of a mind to compromise between the two systems.

First, whomever funds the research gets the IPR! Let us copy the open sports mentality. Off course the individual athlete doesn't like his improved shoe, skate or training methods known to other athletes before he has won some medals, come to think of it, he probably won't like it until he has won them all. But, he also knows that if it improves the whole of his sport, there will be more spectators, more opportunities for sponsoring and more money to be made in his relatively short professional life. Some even want a level playing field in order to really show they are the best. In the end isn't it about the record books? We all still remember Bob Beamon! So, let's offer the athlete who contributes to successful research a sponsorship to last him the rest of his short career. He'll love it, takes his mind off of sponsors, management and on to the task at hand, improving and winning. I see some nice parallels with universities here. They are good at research so let's keep them focused on doing their job instead of managing IPR's.

Second to this openness, let us also copy the approach of sports towards innovation. It is about teamwork and involving as many disciplines as possible. An athlete in the current environment can not win alone. Not even Roger Federer can do without a trainer and a coach during the Grand Slams. Roger is a team effort. The team can not be copied! Don't go for point solutions, go for integrated ones that are much harder to copy and by extension have a much longer life cycle.

Third, and this is something I think is also already happening in Sports, combine the power of governments to improve the infrastructure for education and research (providing the people with places to do sports), with the power of business to select ideas with potential and fund them on an individual basis (sponsor the talent they believe in and fits their image). Ideally that would mean 50/50 funding between government and business so government facilitates and business helps to choose, both supporting development in their own way.

But I am probably just pissing everybody off for inviting the Devil to dinner. The US universities for having to share power with the ever untrustworthy government (didn't George W. Bush singlehandedly prohibit stem cell research?) and European Universities for reducing their independence from the ever untrustworthy business. Still I have some hopes, because all professors I have spoken to this year are jealous of the other continent's success. Funny thing, human nature.

Same emperor, new clothes

It’s a grey gloomy Tuesday morning in October, and we are on our way to the Dutch bible belt. We are again invited to Cordys’s annual Cordial meeting at Kasteel Vanenburg in Putten; a day full of networking and lots of tech talk on the frontier where technology meets business. Location and catering are again impeccable, and though we can’t escape the feeling that there are less people each year, a good crowd has shown up for this year’s meeting. Last year was all about Service Oriented Architecture, this year the emphasis is on Business Process Management. A different take on essentially the same solution.

Cordys is a Dutch producer of Business Process Management software based on a Service Oriented Architecture. It’s headed by Jan Baan, former CEO of Baan, the ERP software producer that notoriously went bust in the late nineties. He is one of the keynote speakers this morning, and presents us with a history lesson. Baan is eager to show that history has some tough lessons to teach. His vision on business process management software, he confesses, was “naïve” (he uses the word four times) and has taught him lessons that have off course been incorporated in the Cordys solution. Monolithic systems are a thing of the past (take that, Oracle and SAP!), it is about flexibility and has to be human-centric. I will return to the human-centric demand! He seems remarkably open as he speaks of the mistakes of yesterday and the pain of today, he even mentions his time in prison.

It is interesting to see how content driven this guy is. He really sees, understands, and cares about the complexities of his models. Here is a salesman with a passion for the product he’s selling. It’s a rather unique combination, and it’s convincing. The Cordys Suite (an all in one SOA and BPM solution) wraps all of your existing data and applications. It is a solution to a stubborn and expensive problem; legacy software. The solution is flexible, modular, and can be used to design any uniquely structured process without having to give up on existing investments. It really puts the user in charge. Or does it?

After a number of other speakers and plenty of complex diagrams I am struck by a fairly obvious absence of the knowledge worker in all of this. The term ‘human-centric’ is used, but it is being used to refer to tasks that can be set before the user and managed using the system. Tasks are not people! That is what you get with a process oriented approach; a focus on tasks and activities, not on people. The only one addressing the fact that people are event driven and not process driven is Hans van Grieken of Capgemini. I am afraid though that nobody in the room got the difference. We are not driven by having a mobile communication service, we are driven by the phone ringing.

We share Cordys’ vision on the importance of reality driving the software design process, and not the other way around. ICT is a means to an end, and in the end business considerations are what counts. Flexibility is a crucial aspect of the applications of the future. The days when knowledge workers are forced to adapt their preferred way of doing things to the design limitations of their software tools are behind us (and we’re all much better off because of it). Technology should serve not dictate the work process.

Information and communication technology should be and in the future will be as flexible as the whims and desires of the knowledge worker. Our children, the next generation of knowledge workers, are growing up with the internet and mobile technology everywhere. They will have completely different and much higher expectations of the software tools they work with. These technologies will need to provide them with instant information on what they are working on, and instant access to friends, family and other knowledge workers (even those not working for your company). Their social lives will inevitably blend with their business activities. Get used to the idea! There is nothing you can do to stop it! Whether you block Skype, Facebook or MSN, or are open about it will become a reason not to work for you in the future. These new communication tools are how young people gain information and exchange experiences and they expect its myriad possibilities from their future workplace.

These kids will not only be your new workforce, but your customers as well. Most of the process and client knowledge resides in the heads of your current knowledge workers. In our view it is not necessary to make a great effort extracting this knowledge from the knowledge worker in order to feed it into some kind of system. The best thing to do is to facilitate and support the knowledge worker herself, empower her to be flexible about what the software can do so that she is in control of the customer experience and not the system. The system is not as flexible as a human being and will not be so in our lifetime. Help your employees by providing better insight in customer behaviour and the best products they can offer a specific customer, but let them decide based on their experience and customer contact. You are better off training your workforce to trust their instinct then to put them in process driven straight jackets that will make them lose interest, become indifferent to your customer’s needs and burn them out. You may win a couple of thousand euros a year on efficiency, but will loose millions in missed opportunities and reintegration costs for burned out employees.

The Cordys pitch very explicitly addresses issues of control, the main concerns of management, not the knowledge worker. In the end the main motivation behind using the Cordys suite is realizing a steady flow of real-time, up-to-date, reliable information, so that management can control and optimize processes. If you have had SAP experts over at your company, this must sound terribly familiar. Efficiency and management information are still the main selling points. The software primarily addresses and solves problems important to management. Even though the Cordys software has the potential to empower the individual knowledge worker, making them more effective in addition to being efficient, these needs are not addressed. It is a one dimensional approach and shows a top-down, efficiency driven, old school, industrialized perspective on organizations and processes. The globalised world can not be conquered with a one-dimensional approach. The best you can do is prolong your suffering while slowly dying out like the dinosaur you are.

We see the market catching on to a number of important work related trends. ICT systems need to be designed around existing realities and processes, and need to be based on a client focus. Flexibility is key, which is what mass customization means. But it is still wrapped in old-school values. Your knowledge workers need much more control over what the systems can do for them, not just for you as a manager. They are closest to your clients, they have the most valuable knowledge, and ICT solutions should really be planned around their needs. This requires a bottom-up approach next to the top-down approach Cordys promotes. Both are needed and management needs to bring focus to enabling and facilitating next to monitoring and controlling. We see the need for a fundamental change in how organizations are structured, how and where decisions are made, and what it means to be a global knowledge based service provider. Network organization 2.0 anyone?

The Cordys technology responds to some of these needs, yet it is also clear that the Cordys proposition is based on the old paradigm. Power and control in the top and little attention to the needs of people and how to get the most value out of them. There is a lot of work for us to do still…

To affinity and beyond; Paradoxical Leadership

Peter Drucker said: “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” Doing things right is easily measured. All you need to do is define criteria for efficiency, cost reduction, etc. and put a reward structure in place for meeting these criteria. Doing the right things is another matter entirely. There are no easily measurable criteria that I know of; the bottom line seems to be the only one in use. The quintessential question for leadership few managers ask themselves is: “What are the right things to do and am I doing them?” Answering this question and actually doing the right things is what sets leaders apart. The knack of knowing what things to do and acting upon this knowledge is not given to everybody.

There also is this other part to leadership. The decisions about what to do cannot be delegated; someone has to make them, on his/her own. If they are the right decisions: you are revered as a champion, if they are not, you are likely to fall hard. Either way you are in a very lonely position. There are plenty of choices about what to do in today’s world, and the risks involved in actually choosing and acting upon the choices made are continuously increasing. That is why we have so very few leaders, not many men or women would take the burden of today’s complex choices and increasing risks and bear them alone.

Let us go back to management. There is an old saying: “If all you have is a hammer, all your problems become nails.” Let me add: “If you are in a hole, stop digging!” Most managers today seem to combine the two and are only using shovels, so all their problems are converted to needing bigger holes. They are getting rewarded because they meet all criteria of good management, but they’re not being judged on doing the right things. For the sake of space I will not go into examples. You know what I mean, and if you don’t, just open any business oriented newspaper or magazine and look at the amount of money that is being rewarded for shoddy work. (Enron, Parmalat, Ahold come to mind). At some point in time digging is not the best thing to be doing, filling the hole might have been a better idea.

We recently got a request for helping a department of a big consumer electronics firm to adapt its management style to what its employees expect, thereby empowering them and making optimal use of their unique talents and abilities. Different cultures were also part of the equation, but for the sake of convenience I will leave that part out of this picture. Most people associate management style with finding your affinity as a manager, bringing out the ‘you’ in your behaviour as it were. They believe that congruent behaviour (authentic and predictable) will help you develop a style that is effective and suits both you and your employees. If style where such a simple thing as being friendly, being tough or being thoughtful, or any other one dimensional trait, there would be a point to all this albeit a very limited one. But consider this: all your employees want you to be friendly to them. They also want you to be tough on people who step out of line. Come to think of it all your employees want you to think things through, for them.

Unfortunately life is not this simple, being everything at the same time to everybody is impossible. In our world the context changes continuously and so should the accompanying management style. Every context requires a different approach and so does every employee you have. The question is not whether your management style fits you, but whether it fits your context. Management style is not about you it is about how you respond to what is happening around you. Context is superior in the relation you have with it, reality drives all events, so don’t let your ego get in the way.

Now we come to the central point of this piece. To us Management style is context dependent and is about your ability to show the right style given the context you are in. Every individual has certain affinities, preferences for dealing with situations. Some managers like to control a situation whereas other managers would rather provide the freedom to act. These managers do see when a context is better dealt with through control or freedom, but under pressure they will act according to their affinities and go with what they feel instead of what they know they should be doing. The point is, that your natural affinities will make you effective in one situation, thereby successful, but those very same affinities might prove disastrous in another situation. If the context requires control and the person’s first inclination is to give people freedom . . . . . Well you can paint the picture yourself. The wisdom in leadership is in understanding these two things: is your natural affinity (‘style’) effective for this context, and if not, can you produce the appropriate style or do you need someone else? Someone that is preferably already a member of your team!

This is where Paradoxical leadership comes in, recognizing how to act given your context and who to put in charge given this context. As the manager of a team of people, you should always keep an eye out for people’s egos taking on contexts that should be dealt with by those better equipped to deal with this context. That is why you need to know the affinities of the team of people you are leading and let them deal with contexts they have affinities for. Not only does this solve the “It’s lonely at the top” aspect of leadership - you are delegating your leadership according to who is best suited to deal with the situation - it also solves the earlier mentioned department’s empowerment issue and the use of its team’s unique talents and abilities. Three flies in one stroke!

Paradoxical leadership is about reflection on what is happening around you and acting accordingly, even if your actions seem to contradict earlier actions. This reflection is much easier if done with a diverse group of people, as is the subsequent delegation process of leadership. There are very few leaders who do the right thing in any context, because the individual that sees any context for what it is, is a very unique individual indeed. Under pressure we all revert to our natural affinity, which means that most people will use their hammer even when their problem is a hole. The solution in this case is very simple; build a team of people with different affinities that has the ability to choose and adapt as a whole!

Let us take a start-up as an example. First you need the freedom to generate ideas, structure them into concepts, package them into products that you can sell, sell them and make money. Second, you need to put rational goals in place to grow your business. Third you need to set up internal processes to improve efficiency, control the flow of money and manage the risks. Fourth, if you grow big enough, you need to support your employees with career opportunities, training, et cetera. The first is about freedom and focus on the market, the second is about control and focus on the market, the third is about control and internal focus and the fourth is about freedom and internal focus. The challenge is, that though these are phases, certainly by the time you reach the fourth they all happen at the same time. Paradoxical leadership is not only phase dependent, that would make it easy, it is about adapting to the challenges you meet when confronting them all at the same time.
Back to the manager stuck in a hole. Why not help him gather teams around him with the ability to look at the same situation from different viewpoints, with different tools to adapt and in the process give him an opportunity to continuously adapt his leadership to the given context? In other words make a paradoxical leader out of him!

Behoudziekte

De verbureaucratiseerde mens
in de pluralistische
egalitaire
vergadercultuur
produceert slechts woorden.
Argumenten zonder kracht
die slechts leiden to afleiding
vullen het vacuüm
met leegte.

De sprekers komen tot
beslissingen
die niet leiden
tot actie
niet voortkomen
uit toewijding
noch verbinden
noch inspireren.

Het platgeslagen
van inhoud ontdane
compromis
regeert,
alsof de eeuwige
behoudzucht
ons bestaan
met zin
vervult.

De toekomst wacht
en luistert
en hoort
van ons
slechts onmacht,
vervreemding.
De verdwaalde massa
produceert
een onthand
en roerloos
zwijgen.

Loosing a running battle

Why is it so hard to make long term decisions? Why is it so hard to break out of conventional thinking when the facts tell you you should? There is a recurring theme here; why is it so hard to change when we know we really need to? I have been pondering these questions for many years. Last night I was watching a program on the battle against cancer showing that we are essentially loosing it. Not that the research into cures is without results, but the number of people getting cancer is growing faster than we can come up with cures. The holy grail of genetics is proving to be harder to find than we had hoped and can only be applied to very specific cases at high costs and at the moment you need to take the drugs for the rest of your live.

In the fight against cancer more and more treatments are found to alleviate suffering, halt tumor growth and postpone death. We are growing towards a situation where cancer will become a chronic disease like diabetes or asthma, with the lifelong dependency on the taking of drugs as a result. In this it is very much like the way our society deals with some of its most persistent problems such as multi cultural integration, social security and the ever growing pressure of economic growth on our environment. We create stop gap solutions that keep everybody happy on the short term without solving the issues on the long term. Hello asbestos, oil dependency and the hole in the ozone layer. Not to mention global warming.

When fighting a war, it is good to know who does most of the propaganda. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole has a vested interest in cancer as a chronic disease. Ninety-five percent of the annual budget for cancer research goes into finding new treatments; the meager rest goes into prevention. There is no drive to change the distribution of funds towards prevention, even though the scientific majority states that how we deal with our environment in preventing cancer will very probably deliver far better results than finding cures. This absence of willingness to change is completely in line with the political clout and deep pockets the pharmaceuticals have when it comes to deciding the agenda for cancer research. If we look at the part of the budget that goes to research into the mechanism of metastasis, the factor that causes ninety percent of all cancer related deaths, it is only ten percent. Metastasis is apparently too complex a mechanism to research and takes too long to provide a return on investment. Don’t get me wrong; from the standpoint of the industry this is a very valid reason not to pursue research. Why then are our governments not stepping in to fill the gap through sponsoring the scientific community in performing research into prevention and metastasis and provide legislation to prescribe the distribution of funds?

They do not know any better, pharmaceutical lobbyists have a vested interest and the power to get an appointment. The oncology professors with the knowledge to make a change lack the time to do a running battle with pharmaceutical lobbyists who not only have the time to plan their attack, but also have the time to translate their message into easily understood one-liners. Let’s face it, we did not choose our representatives for their superior knowledge of cancer, so we can hardly blame them for choosing to go the route of easily understandable sound bytes instead of the thorough route of understanding all the complex mechanisms involved in fighting cancer. If we can not cope with cause of death number one and prevent people from getting cancer in the first place, what does that tell you about the society we live in?

It is not the fact that our representatives do not make an effort. They do and do so with our best interests at hart. The problem is the way in which they do it. They are not making a collaborative effort together with industry, science and patient organizations even though they think they do. They go to big conferences, speak to all parties separately and then draft a proposal with their civil servants, a proposal that is then sent to the involved parties for their OK. The result is a compromise with all pieces of the puzzle and no holistic view of the whole. Talking to all parties involved and giving them a voice may be politically correct, but is by no means the same as collaborating with them to get win-win policies.

To ensure you have all the relevant pieces and a holistic view to combine them in the proper order, you need to work together closely with all parties involved. Not sequentially, but at the same time and with proper interaction between them all. The only way to make informed long term decisions is with all parties with a vested interest. For this you need a process to synchronize their value systems, provide a common goal and meet all individual goals at the same time. This takes hard work and strong direction, but certainly less time than the current approach, so why not give up the running battle for funds and start the battle against cancer?

Collaborative building blocks

When talking to customers, partners or just interested people, the topic of collaboration is always an interesting one and a pretty contentious one at that. They are interesting discussions because everybody wants to improve their collaborative efforts and they are contentious because everybody has their own idea on how to approach improving these efforts.

What all seem to agree on is to look for complementary skills in the other party. Be it an individual or a company. E.g. one has an interesting product and the other the means to enter an interested segment of the market. Another subject most can agree on is to look for efficiency opportunities in working together. E.g. outsourcing of administrative or IT tasks. As a consequence of the previous two most agree on the fact that these kinds of collaborative efforts are transaction based; tit for tat. This is a very successful strategy, but also one that is very easy to copy.

I like to look at things from a different perspective. All of the above see the building blocks of collaboration in portions of individuals or companies. In other words, the individual or company is an indivisible building block, not a configuration of micro building blocks itself. This creates the premise for the aforementioned transaction based and sequentially structured value chain for collaboration. A way around this is for two or more companies to start a new one, with all the growing pains that are involved. I on the other hand want to look at the micro building blocks of the individual or company and use these not only to create value in their own chain, but add to this the option of integrating, combining and recombining parts of the individual’s and company’s micro building blocks into something new; the possibility to enter new value chains and create opportunities that neither can do alone or together as they are now. This approach also results in a new block to build with in the original value chain without having to go through setting up a completely new entity. Two flies in one stroke!

It is more than an interesting train of thought because our global village is forcing us to adapt to ever changing circumstances and alliances faster and faster. Companies and individuals can not get away with defining themselves as fixed macro building blocks, this is just not flexible enough anymore for our times. Even in partnerships, efficiency gains are not enough to compete against the far lower wages in the East. Their technology ‘disadvantage’ is slinking fast, so in five to ten years only wage will matter and they will still not be anywhere near western wages. We in the West will only be able to compete by changing the playing field. What better way to do so, then by integrating the context dependent best micro building blocks for a situation when they are needed. The Chinese, Koreans and Indians are building on such a large scale, that this will be a very hard act to follow! To change the playing field, we need to look beyond the exterior ‘brand’ of individuals and companies and create new collaborative efforts and ‘brands’ based on integrating the best building blocks suited to a new or changing context.

There is no such thing as coincidence. The pieces of the puzzle are finally starting to fit on more than a scientific level. Not only do we have the means to measure the strengths of minor building blocks and create insight, but we also have the means to aggregate this insight on a macro level and create new building blocks ready to tackle change and direct innovation.

Who Am I?

There is a new trend that is becoming increasingly noticeable. The business of change management is taking inspiration, and even incorporating, ideas and concepts from traditions that can properly be designated as spiritual. New Age seems to have matured and is moving into the business arena. Spirituality is an important subject, an aspect of being that deserves attention and cultivation, even though there are quite a lot of diverging opinions on what the latter may imply.

We are not really philosophers at Crossing Signals, although we certainly share philosophy’s love for abstract thought and affection for truth. So, while investigations into the nature of spirituality are not part of our activities, spirituality is part of the reality we live and work in. It is profoundly human and expresses itself in behaviour, communication, symbolism and even attitudes to change.

Spiritual traditions are occupied with an investigation into the nature of the ‘self’ (or the nature of our ‘consciousness’, or the nature of our ‘awareness’) and specifically investigate how the nature of our awareness is related to the universe itself. Not just the mind as a cognitive subject, but the ‘self’ at a ‘deeper’ level. The philosophy of consciousness is an extremely elusive and tenacious subject. It is very easy to produce little more than mystification on the subject, vagueness and obscurity after all are very good places to hide. Since our western society constantly reminds us to be afraid of globalisation, terrorism, global warming, losing our job, et cetera, the possibility of salvation and our own distinct role in this salvation may explain the current popularity of all things spiritual. It is easy to create illusions that appear to be profound, but are not.

Theories of spirituality are theories of the ‘self’; spirituality is about what we really are. It seems to me that this will always be the most profound question: “Who am I?” In coming up with answers to this question we, in the west, have a cultural bias about the self that was expressed strongest by Rene Descartes. “I think therefore I am” means that I am fundamentally a cognitive agent, and as such (and because of it) I am separated from the world around me. Two considerations are crucial here, because this view of the self implies:
• I am the thoughts inside my head and,
• I am separated from the world around me.
One might call this a basic Cartesian dualism. Even in ego-bashing models of transcendence or enlightenment espoused by organizations such as Enlightenext, (see previous post) the idea of an inner self seems crucial. It is called the authentic self and is contrasted with an image of an evil, greedy, arrogant “ego”. Higher consciousness in this model is still MY higher consciousness, and as such these hierarchically structured concepts serve the discriminating tendencies of this school of thought.

Perhaps it was sheer serendipity that exactly in the same week we went to a Club of Amsterdam meeting on the Future of Consciousness I came across the work of cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who has a controversial albeit scientifically corroborated theory. Lipton argues that the regulating mechanism of cells, the mind of a cell, is its skin: the membrane around the cell. To him this is a logical consequence of the fact that cells constantly interact with their environment. Through chemistry, exchanging molecules, through electromagnetism et cetera. All of a cell’s behaviour is directly related to this interaction. Since we are in essence communities of cells, this has implications for us as human beings as well. Relative to cells we are super organisms arising out of the integration and collaboration of the billions of individual cells that form our body, much in the same way as cultures are super organisms produced by the complex interactions and histories of individual humans.

Our cerebral cortex grows out of what is still skin tissue in the early embryo. Lipton’s model suggests that not our brain, but our entire nervous system - distributed as it is throughout our body - and our sensory organs is the basis of our consciousness. This means that there is no centre of awareness; it arises out of millions of sensory and other interactions that go on all the time. Our whole being is controlled by a dynamic balance of constant interactions with our environment. The idea that there is a central director of these experiences and perceptions - an ‘ego’, a seat of consciousness - is just that: an idea, and therefore just as much a part of the constant chaotic dynamic stream of consciousness that is the nature of mind. The idea that each of us has more than one, and sometimes many personalities in his head can be traced back to the work of Sigmund Freud. Our active personality, which is the dominant voice we think of as ‘self’, is subconsciously selected based on its suitability to the given context we are in. Our (re)actions are triggered by the situation around us in ways invisible to us. Psychotics and schizophrenics hear ‘voices’ in their head, and are as such not very different from all of us who are sane. Sanity is just a matter of holding on to the assumption that all the different voices in our head, produced by conflicting wishes, desires and/or frustrations, are one person.

“The mind”, “our consciousness”, “the ego”, all are constructs to attempt to understand ourselves as wholes, as one being, as an individual, as a single personality. But we’re not. We are a set of gates and portals that constantly interact with our environment. We are not IN our context, we ARE our context.

This idea has important implications. I recently read an article by Professor Ganzevoort of the University of Amsterdam’s Business School. He argues that change is impossible on a fundamental level because we have an unchanging essence of self, a ‘soul’. You can change your look and adapt your behaviour, but you can not change the soul, it is your unchanging essence, it is “I”. If we consider the previous paragraph and its conclusion, this ‘unchanging essence’ cannot be real. We need some kind of internal stability in our awareness, and we call it ego, but it’s just a construct. This may be a very scary thought to most of us, but the good news is that if true, change is always possible because it is constantly happening. There is no fundamental obstacle to change. We are creatures of habit who react mechanically in many situations, and thus change seems so difficult to achieve. But real change is possible in every single moment. Change IS the only constant! Fundamental change can happen in seconds. Really excellent teachers, doctors and therapists know this and use this fact to be as effective as they possibly can and thus produce the ‘magic’ they produce. Bandler and Grinder’s original publication on Neuro Linguistic Programming was called “The Structure of Magic”.

This is a powerful insight and one that strengthens our conviction that what you need to understand about change and innovation is the interaction between people and their (social) context. That is exactly what we map with our Collaboration Scorecard, and is the foundation of our understanding of change potential, leadership potential and collaboration potential. This is why we believe it is so important to change the context to enable a group to change, and that is what we do in our workshops. Context is a powerful way to use as leverage as it speaks to us on so many different levels, our perception, our emotion, our intuition, our communication, our sense of connectedness, all of these are powerful aspects of our effort to create and change. This connectivity together with the idea of interaction on multiple levels is the essence of our vision of collaboration.

Quantum spirituality?

Isn’t it just time for a new piece. We’ve been busy doing so much constructive stuff, that there has hardly been any time to write about what touches us. Be it negative or positive. But, and here goes, the last couple of weeks we have had many an interaction with spiritual individuals and groups and something struck me hard enough to not be able not to write about it.

One meeting was about spiritual activism and the other on the future of consciousness. The first was about the contradictions between spirituality and activism, the second about how we can reach a higher consciousness as a species. Essentially they have the same goal; make the world a better place. They also share the borrowing of concepts from quantum mechanics.

Let’s take the spiritual activism first. I have no idea why the two should be mutually exclusive to begin with, but that is for another time. The meeting heavily leant on the “Zero Point Field” theory from quantum mechanics. Zero point energy is the amount of energy associated with the vacuum of empty space (I believe Einstein was one of the first to state this). It is the lowest point energy a system can have and can not be removed from the system. The Zero point field is roughly the electro magnetic energy field that is still there even at absolute zero (-256 C or 0 K). Now, I am not an expert, and certainly make no claim at understanding this or other QM concepts to any serious level, but when you start translating this concept into it being the field that connects us all and that we can all tap into, and that it has finally been proven scientifically, I start to wonder about your sanity. When you start telling me that it can be used to keep me young, sadly, all wonder is gone.

The message was: “Don’t think do!” Use the ZPF and we will change the world for the better! All kinds of unverifiable examples were given as examples of this happening already. The only verifiable one was an experiment in1956 were a group of seventy year olds was transported into the world of their childhood (language, dress code, housing, activities, etc.). All began showing symptoms of becoming more youthful, both mentally and physiologically. This off course was all due to these old folks being able to tap into the ZPF and reach back to the body and energy of their youth. People were lapping it up and I felt pretty alone. The fact that other people have looked at the results of this experiment, interpreted them differently, came up with other explanations, and that putting seventy year olds on a light fitness regime produces even better results, makes never no mind to the attentive audience. Skepticism is reserved for outsiders.

The second meeting was on the evolution of consciousness. Here ego was the big enemy, and for convenience sake not defined as a prerequisite for sanity, but as a monster that constantly threatens to gobble us up and keeps our consciousness from evolving into a higher state. When it came to consciousness, the uncertainty principle was brought to bear. Since the outcome of what will happen is uncertain, we as observers can influence this outcome through our higher consciousness. Look at us humans having been granted a consciousness that animals have to do without. I smell the beginnings of a hierarchy and a minority complex shielded by trying to prove our superiority. Any actual real world examples of the so-called higher consciousness couldn’t be given and those who tried were righteously smitten down for being wrong by definition. Mystification and vagueness are good places to hide! In the following discussion, the attendees trying to come up with what could be examples of higher consciousness are, according to the guide, proving they have no higher consciousness by the mere act of trying to prove it and can therefore be treated condescendingly. The latter off course is done fervently since the poor soul does not understand and needs to be forced, whoops guided towards a higher consciousness. Am I the only one who thinks pity is petty?

What was being referred to as scientific proof for a higher conscience was the uncertainty principle. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (Heisenberg) is a mathematical limit on the accuracy with which it is possible to measure everything there is to know about a physical system and predict its future state(s). On a micro level, the more we know about a particle’s position, the less accurately we can say anything about its momentum and vice versa. So, what the esteemed spiritual guide was actually talking about was not the uncertainty principle, but the observer effect. Not only condescending, but wrong as well! The uncertainty principle is a result of wave-particle duality. Will what we measure act like a wave or a particle? We won’t know until after the observation. If the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of superposition, which means it is still in all possible states at once. The most famous example is Schrödinger's cat, in which the cat is neither dead nor alive until observed. The effects of both these principles on the macroscopic world are negligible. I so hope I am not insulting real physicists by putting it this simple, I freely admit to not knowing any better.

Back to the meeting, it was stated that a higher consciousness can and will influence the outcome of the aforementioned superposition of the possible states of our society in a positive manner – as in the previous meeting there is this need for something better then a willingness to deal with what is. The easy way out, while pretending it is even harder then just dealing with what is. If you can’t impress them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. What is consciousness? No consensus could be reached other then on “being aware”. If that is consciousness, what is a higher consciousness? Surprise, surprise, it was off course the ability to use our awareness to influence the outcome of events in our favor. The fun I would have if that were possible. A statement proven through the argumentum ad ignorantiam, since it is impossible to prove wrong, the fact that it can not be proven right makes never no mind, again. Where had I seen that before? It left me thinking though: “What if our Ego is such a smart monster, that it is capable of fooling us into aspiring to a fictitious higher consciousness and thereby getting its narcissist way?”

What struck me both times is that in searching for ‘deeper meaning’ in our lives, the complex and deeply philosophical QM theorems and concepts are flattened, simplified and translated to the point of loosing not only their context, but also their meaning. In looking for ‘deeper meaning’ the spiritual people I met are opportunists who use whatever is convenient and chuck out whatever they can not use, understand or explain. Yes, it is most probably out of fear and pain and is a completely, dare I say it, subconscious act, but that is no excuse to reduce these concepts to platitudes. I really do not understand QM to the level I would like to, for me all the more reason not to appropriate its concepts in the name of higher consciousness and spirituality. But hey, I am not enlightened anyway and am therefore to be pitied and looked down upon. Their consciousness is higher than mine! Funny isn’t it that all this talk about higher consciousness in the end comes down to feeling superior over others. History always repeats itself and god put fossils in the ground to fool Darwin.