Author: Richard

Chris Corrigan found a great quote from the poet, James Richardson, that I just couldn’t resist repeating. It’s so purposive drift.
“The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be”

Digging around on the often intriguing Metacool site, I came across this piece on routine innovation as exemplified by Honda. Well worth a read. Here’s a taster:
“Know by doing:  as the leader of the Ridgeline project, Gary Flint wasn’t isolated from reality by layers of managers.  He lived the details of the project to the point where, as he says in the article, he would even dust the office.  If you’re in there dusting, you’re probably also walking around, hearing and seeing the realities of the project.  And if you know those, you’ll know the critical things to focus on.  Honda has a long culture of knowing by doing, and of putting people in leadership positions who know — really know — the nuts and bolts of the business.”

Prompted by a posting in the excellent 3Quarks I found my way to an article by Robert M. Sapolsky in Foreign Affairs, “A Natural History of Peace”, where he argues:
“Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not ‘killer apes’ destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history.”
Sapolsky is a subtle thinker, whose combination of field work and lab work gives him an interestingly nuanced view of the interaction between genes, environment, social context and physiology. While I have somewhat provocatively titled this post, “What can we learn from baboons?”, it would perhaps have been more accurate to ask “What can we learn from Robert M. Sapolsky?” and my answer would be “a lot”.
These days we are bombarded with advice about how and why we should change our lifestyles if we are to live healthy and productive lives. So we should eat “five a day”, stop smoking, drink moderately, take exercise, maintain the correct bmi and so on. What generally gets left out of all this is the importance of the nature of our social interactions and the very real physiological impact they can have on our health. To put it crudely – inequality kills.
One of the lessons I draw from Sapolsky is the vital importance of a sense of control over our lives for good health. This insight can be useful on an individual basis for formulating strategies to cope with the physiological impact of any sense of insecurity and inability to influence events in our lives.
And here, perhaps there is something we can learn from the baboons. Sapolsky’s account of the baboons that simply opted out of struggle for position in the hierarchy is one of the most optimistic things I have encountered for years:
“A handful of these guys simply walked away from it over the years. Nathaniel was one, and Joshua was another. They had the lowest stress hormone levels you’ve ever seen in male baboons, and outlived their cohorts.”
But the more important lesson is political. The evidence to me seems overwhelming that if we could shift our institutions and organisations so that the individuals within them felt that they had more power over their work and lives and a greater sense of solidarity with those that they work and live with, we would probably have both more effective and healthier institutions and organisations. Such a shift, would of course, mean moving away from the fragmented individualism that has been propagated over the last twenty or so years to a greater recognition that we are social beings and that a true individualism is more likely to thrive in a co-operative and collaborative context than one where individual competition is all.
Anyway, that is my reading of Sapolsky. Take a look at these and see if you agree:
“Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences”
A fascinating video of one of his lectures filled with good stuff one you get past the rather over long introduction.
A BOZO OF A BABOON: A Talk with Robert Sapolsky
My first encounter with Sapolsky at Edge back in 2004 where I warmed to his account of the drop out baboons.
Of Monkeys and Men
Another good interview from The Atlantic.
And finally, do read, “A Natural History of Peace” in Foreign Affairs, which has some of his latest thinking about this stuff.

My friend Michael Renouf is getting close to completing his plan of producing an illustration a day for year on April 7. Over that time he has produced an extraordinary body of work – witty and clever. Go take a look at Non-Stick Plans and see what I mean.

For a creature that lives in time we seem to have a very undeveloped sense of how things unfold over time. A classic example of this is how our financial markets so often reward those who slash and burn their way through a company making the numbers look good in the short term – and the short term here can be some years – before reality bites back and the value that has been destroyed in the process is finally revealed.
Steve Jobs’s remarks, “On managing through the economic downturn” makes a refreshing contrast to these hard-nosed fantasists:
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

I’ve been planning to write something about the curious paradox of our system where financial markets operate in a free market fantasy detached from the world the are supposed to be servicing and our public services have adopted the old Soviet fantasy of centralised targets. In both cases we are beginning to see clear signs of reality biting back and the nonsenses of the past twenty years or so unravelling.
However, once again Simon Caulkin has beaten me to it:
“We live in strange times. In the private sector, market rules are so degraded that it has become the role of companies in the real economy, some built up over decades, to act as chips tossed around by high rollers in the City supercasino. Meanwhile, the public sector is in the grip of a central planning regime of a rigidity and incompetence not seen since Gosplan wrote Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
You think I exaggerate? Well, as Exhibit A, consider the hedge funds that borrow company stock in order to vote for or against a proposal – a merger or takeover, say – not to further the interests of the company, but to make their previous bet on the firm’s share price come true. For Exhibit B, name another government since Leonid Brezhnev’s that prescribes 198 targets for local government, numbers and postings of junior doctors, reading methods for teachers in primary schools, cleaning techniques used in hospitals and how GPs should organise their appointment diaries.
Already individually dysfunctional in their own way, in combination these diametrically opposed management extremes deliver not the fabled ‘third way’, or at least not in any manner intended, but an unholy mess, from which we get the worst of both worlds.”

Johnnie Moore opens a recent post on brainstorming with the caveat, “(Long slightly rambling post ahead)”. And, yes, the post that follows is both quite long and quite rambling and herein lies its strength. Although the focus of the piece is on brainstorming and some of Johnnie’s reservations about the process, the rambling nature of piece opens up spaces to to explore a whole range of crucial issues about how we can work productively and creatively together and the obstacles we place in the way of doing so.
I would urge you to go to this post, read it carefully and then join in the discussion that I hope will follow. There is much to be mined here.
The part I want to focus on here is where he talks about the importance of “noticing”. Paying attention is one of the central tenets of purposive drift. Those who have been following my ramblings will have noticed that a point I keep on returning to is the way that many of the plans and processes we adopt get in the way of us noticing what is actually going on. Or as Johnnie put it in an earlier post, “pay more attention to what is happening and less to your notion of what should be happening”.
In his brainstorming post, Johnnie suggest that, “… instead of having innovation programmes, we might try noticing programmes”. My sense is that the successful adoption of a “noticing programme” could be the biggest step that any one could take to transform an organisation in a positive way. What do you think?

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Other people’s indispositions (to use Johnnie Moore’s delightfully old fashioned term) are boring, unless one is suffering from a similar condition, when they become compelling reading. So I promise this will be the last entry meditating on my current state of health for, I hope, a long, long time.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, one aspect of my Bell’s Palsy has been intense fatigue. While this is better than it was, it is still something I have to take account of when deciding what to do on any one day.
This form of rationing of effort is, I guess, an extreme form of something we all do everyday. But because it is extreme it thrusts itself into the centre of consciousness in a way that doesn’t usually happen. When one’s decision become, “Shall I go shopping for food or can I prepare the evenings meal with what we’ve got?” and it really is a choice between one or the other, it does highlight the kind of decisions about the distribution of effort and attention we make everyday.
Much of the time management stuff I have read over the years seems to focus on the criteria we use for making such decisions and seems to suggest that we should make important things the priority rather than all the other immediate demands on our time. But, what I have discovered is that daily, routine maintenance tasks have a much higher priority than such systems suggest.
Clearing the dishwasher, making the bed, buying the milk and so on all need to be done or one finds one’s life falling into an unproductive chaos. Were I the kind of person who made a to do list, it is quite likely that I wouldn’t include many of these routine activities and those that I did would have a very low priority. I suspect that many of the “unimportant’ routine tasks in organisational life may be the same.
What, perhaps, is concealed here is that the routine maintenance of the fabric of life, including the seemingly trivial acts to maintain our relationships with other people, may be of much greater importance than we usually give them.
The question then arises that if we want to move in new directions how do we avoid being overwhelmed by the routine. One answer may be that given by John Cleese:
“I’m coming up on 60, and I’m wondering where my life will begin to go. I need to take a slightly different direction. I talked to a very wise man, and he said, ‘If you’re trying to find a new direction, don’t plan it, because this [pointing to his head] has been planning your life up to now. You can’t plan something new with the same old apparatus.’ He said, ‘Leave a gap. Leave a space, and just do things on auto for a while. Just see where these whims take you.’
It’s like creativity. You have to follow it without knowing where you’re going. If you try to control where you’re going, you’re back in the same process. It’s like asking a piece of machinery that’s broken to mend itself.”
Or as I might put always try and leave yourself the time and space to do purposive drift.