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.