I have spent the past twelve days in the Alps on a spring retreat doing a bit of skiing. Yesterday we had a enormous thunderstorm and the most beautiful rainbow – like the one above. Somehow, it got me reflecting on a conversation I had with John Varney, a reader of this blog, a few months ago. He told me that he often intersperses his organisational change work with Sufi Teaching Stories. So I went on the hunt for a good one and found the one below. I am interested to know what readers think of using this approach to unlock new meaning to our work in the reductionist world we live in.
The Story of the Locksmith by Idries Shah
Once there lived a metalworker, a locksmith, who was unjustly accused of crimes and was sentenced to a deep, dark prison. After he had been there awhile, his wife who loved him very much went to the King and beseeched him that she might at least give him a prayer rug so he could observe his five prostrations every day.
The King considered that a lawful request, so he let the woman bring her husband a prayer rug. The prisoner was thankful to get the rug from his wife, and every day he faithfully did his prostrations on the rug. Much later, the man escaped from prison, and when people asked him how he got out, he explained that after years of doing his prostrations and praying for deliverance from the prison, he began to see what was right in front of his nose.
One day he suddenly saw that his wife had woven into the prayer rug the pattern of the lock that imprisoned him. Once he realized this and understood that all the information he needed to escape was already in his possession, he began to make friends with his guards. He also persuaded the guards that they all would have a better life if they cooperated and escaped the prison together.
They agreed since, although they were guards, they realized that they were in prison, too. They also wished to escape, but they had no means to do so. So the locksmith and his guards decided on the following plan: they would bring him pieces of metal, and he would fashion useful items from them to sell in the marketplace. Together they would amass resources for their escape, and from the strongest piece of metal they could acquire, the locksmith would fashion a key.
One night, when everything had been prepared, the locksmith and his guards unlocked the prison and walked out into the cool night where his beloved wife was waiting for him. He left the prayer rug behind so that any other prisoner who was clever enough to read the pattern of the rug could also make his escape. Thus, the locksmith was reunited with his loving wife, his former guards became his friends, and everyone lived in harmony.
On a similar theme of last week’s Global Awareness Campaign, I came across the developing idea of a “Global Earth Hour”. Surely it is a good idea to spend one hour a year thinking about the Earth?
Started in Australia in 2004, this BIG SWITCH OFF is now held annually on the last Saturday of March every year – so you have two days to prepare yourself!
Worth taking time out to think about how dependent we are on electricity – and it does not take much effort to join in. Just switch off all your electrical appliances from 20.30 to 21.30 this Saturday – and think about the Earth – or whatever else comes to mind!
The video below is so cute, I had to reproduce it. Might also convince you to vote for some of the pledges on the site:
I have subscribed for several years now to a great site called ChangeThis – where anyone can publish a manifesto to change something that they think is important. So it was today that I was browsing the site and found out that it is World Water Day. Designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993, World Water Day is held annually on March 22. It’s a day to focus attention on the importance of freshwater and sustainable management of water resources that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. With over half of the world’s population now living in cities, this year’s focus is understandably on water and urbanization, under the slogan “Water for cities: responding to the urban challenge.”
There are quite a few statistics and factoids listed (mostly U.S. centric) that come from a new book called the Big Thirst, being released on April 12 by Free Press. However, they still make you think:
Water is the oldest substance you’ll ever come in contact with. The water coming from your kitchen tap is about 4.3 billion years old.
A typical American uses 99 gallons of actual water a day–for cooking, washing, and the #1 personal use in the U.S., toilet flushing. But a typical American uses electricity at home that requires 250 gallons of water each day. And an American eating a diet of 1,700 calories a day is eating food that requires 450 gallons to produce–each day.
The average cost of water at home in the U.S.–for always-on, purified drinking water–is $1.12 per day, less than the cost of a single half liter of Evian at a convenience store.
Water and energy are intimately linked. Electric power plants in the U.S. consume 49 percent of the water used in the country. And water utilities are the single largest users of electricity in the U.S.–in California, 20 percent of all the electricity generated is used to move or treat water.
Water and food are also intimately linked. Worldwide, farmers use 70 percent of water. And agriculture is also one of the least efficient users of water. Half the water farmers use is wasted.
Americans spend almost as much each year on bottled water ($21 billion) as they do maintaining the nation’s entire water infrastructure ($29 billion).
Las Vegas has grown by 50 percent in population in the last 10 years–without using any more water now than it did back in 1999.
In the U.S., we use less water today than we did in 1980. As a nation, we’ve doubled the size of our economy while reducing total water use. We have literally increased our “water productivity” as a nation by more than 100 percent in the last 30 years.
Microchip factories require water that is so clean it is considered dangerous to drink.
The difference in price between home tap water and a half-liter bottle of water at the convenience store is a factor of 3,000–you could take the bottle of Poland Spring that you buy for $1.29 at the local 7-Eleven and refill it every day for 8 years before the cost of the tap water would equal that original price, $1.29.
We often hear that “only” 2 percent of the water on Earth is fresh and available for human use, outside of the polar ice caps. The “only” 2 percent comes to 1.5 billion liters of fresh water for each person on the planet. It’s 400 million gallons for every person alive. That’s a cube of fresh water for each us as long as a football field and as tall as a 30 story building.
The U.S. uses more water in a single day than it uses oil in a year. The U.S. uses more water in four days than the world uses oil in a year.
Enough water leaks from aging water pipes in the U.S. each day to supply all the residents of any of 30 states.
The city of London loses 25 percent of the water it pumps.
Seventy-one percent of earth is covered with water, but water is small compared to earth. If Earth were the size of a minivan, all the water on Earth would fit in a half-liter bottle in a single cup holder.
Not one of the 35 largest cities in India has 24-hour-a-day water service. Even the global brand-name cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai offer water service only an hour or two a day.
Treating diarrhea consumes 2 percent of the GDP of India. The nation spends $20 billion a year on diarrhea–$400 million a week–more than the total economies of half the nations in the world.
A common statistic is the 1 billion people in the world–one in six–don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. But a less well-known statistic is equally stunning: 1.6 billion people in the world–one in four–have to walk at least 1 km each day to get water and carry it home, or depend on someone who does the water walk. Just the basic water needs of a family of four–50 gallons total–means carrying (on your head) 400 pounds of water, walking 1 km or more, for as many trips as required, each day.
Between 1900 and 1936, clean water in U.S. cities cut the rate of child deaths in half.
Water required to manufacture 1 ton of steel: 300 tons Water required to produce 2 liters of Coca-Cola: 5 liters
Cooling water a typical U.S. nuclear power plan requires: 30 million gallons per hour
Water that New York City requires: 46 million gallons per hour
Water required to maintain a typical Las Vegas golf course: 2,507 gallons for every 18-hole round of golf Each hole of golf, for each golfer, requires 139 gallons of irrigation water.
Average time a molecule of water spends in the atmosphere, after evaporating, before returning to Earth as rain or snow: 9 days
Amount of water that falls on a single acre of ground when it receives 1 inch of rain: 27,154 gallons
I was chatting to Oscar the other night and he pointed me to a really interesting site:
If the frame above does not work for you, then you can link to the site HERE. It makes you think how extraordinarily small in the Universe we are. And how big we are too! If you did not see my previous entry, the great 1977 video from IBM: “The Powers of Ten”, then have a look at that too.
The day before, I had come across another rather more abstract view that sets a new world record for representing a Mandelbrot Set – which gives a bit more of a zany trip towards infinity.
Oscar liked it – and called it “trippy”!
I hope these two views stretch your mind to think a bit more about our place in the Universe, touching both your left and right brains.
Susie, my wife, booked us to go and see a film on Sunday evening – “The best exotic Marigold Hotel”. A very funny film and well worth watching! You can’t leave the film and not remember the line that one of the leading characters, Sonny, keeps saying throughout the film:
“Everything will be all right in the end; if it’s not alright then it’s not the end.”
Apparently this is a quote of the Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino: “No fim tudo dá certo, e se não deu certo é porque ainda não chegou ao fim” – but I am not sure if he really was the originator or not. Doesn’t matter. It is a great quote. Actually, Susie has often quoted the first bit at me and it is strange, but somehow, everything always does work out in the end….
Anyway, it got me thinking back to the Thursday Thoughts theme two weeks ago about optimism – and the Optimist’s Creed.
And so it was that last night I got to Chapter 24 in Daniel Kahneman’s Book “Thinking, fast and slow” (which I started to review last week) only to find that this chapter – entitled “The Engine of Capitalism” is all about optimism too! Or perhaps, more accurately, over-optimism. Coincidence or what?
Kahneman summarises in a section entitled “COMPETITION NEGLECT“:
“It is tempting to explain entrepreneurial optimism by wishful thinking, but emotion is only part of the story. Cognitive biases play an important role, notably the System 1 WYSIATI (What you see is all there is):
We focus on our goal, anchor on our plan, and neglect relevant base rates, exposing ourselves to the planning fallacy.
We focus on what we want to do and can do, neglecting the plans and skills of others
Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. we are therefore prone to an illusion of control.
We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.
What was more extraordinary is that as I was reading this, a good friend and follower of this stream, David Brunnen wrote to me and sent me this link: http://www.innovationpolicy.org/my-new-book-title-eh-the-future-will-be-okay with the comment: “Worth a read I think – partly because of his realistic assessment of US R&D funding and partly because Rob gets close to the tendency that has long-plagued the ICT world – eternal optimism and hype.”
Even more coincidence. Anyone else thinking about optimism, over-optimism and the way we think about the future? Please join in the flow by commenting below!
I was browsing the bookshelves in a provincial airport lounge last month. I really like browsing business books in these sorts of places (as opposed to ordering books from Amazon). You find things you would not normally find and you can pick them up and read the gist of what the book is about in a very tactile way. Something Kindle struggles with, I think.
Anyway, I came across a what looked like interesting title “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. Being one always on the look-out for new Thursday Thoughts, I bought it and have started to read it…
The book is written by Daniel Kahneman who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his pioneering work, developed with Amos Tversky, on decision-making and uncertainty.
Interestingly, there is a quote on the front cover by Steven Pinker which says “(Kahneman is) certainly the most important psychologist alive today”. I thought the blend of economics and psychology would be interesting – and I have not been disappointed!
To begin with, Kahneman’s says that we all have two “systems” of thought. He adopts terms originally proposed by the psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West referring to two systems in the mind: System 1 and System 2. Thee labels of System 1 and System 2 are, apparently, widely used in psychology. For those of you, like me, who are mere lay-folk in the art of psycho-babble, this was news!
Here is an extract from the introduction which outlines the two systems:
“When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”
Kahneman describes System 1 as: “effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2”.
In rough order of complexity, he describes some examples of the automatic activities that are attributed to System 1:
Detect that one object is more distant than another
Orient to the source of a sudden sound
Complete the phrase “bread and…..”
Make a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture
Detect hostility in a voice
Answer to 2 + 2 = ?
Read words on large billboards
Drive a car on an empty road
Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master)
Understand simple sentences
Recognise that a “meek and tidy soul with a passion for detail” resembles and occupational stereotype
The highly diverse operations of System 2 have one feature in common: the require attention and are disrupted when attention is drawn way. Here are some examples:
Brace for the starter-gun in a race
Focus attention on the clowns in the circus
Focus on the voice of a particular person in a crowded and noisy room
Look for a woman with white hair
Search memory to identify a surprising sound
Maintain a faster walking speed than is natural for you
Monitor the appropriateness of your behaviour in a social situation
Count the occurrences of the letter a in a page of text
Tell someone your phone number
Park in a narrow space (for oct people except garage attendants)
Campare two washing machines for overall value
Fill out a tax form
Check the validity of a complex logical argument
The interesting thing that I have learnt so far is that we use System 1 and System 2 interchangeably throughout the day – and each system performs very important and different functions. Kahneman’s main thesis is that the intuitive (System 1) often arrives at a conclusion or judgement without the detailed logical evidence for that decision being through by System 2. There are many examples he gives where this is so – and here is one of them from page 43 of the book:
“A disturbing demonstration of depletion effects in judgement was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The unwitting participants in the study were eight parole judges in Israel. They spend entire days reviewing applications for parole. The cases are presented in random order, and the judges spend little time on each one, an average of 6 minutes. (The default decision is denial of parole; only 35% of requests are approved. The exact time of each decision is recorded, and the times of the judges’ three food breaks – morning break, lunch and afternoon break – during the day are recorded as well.)
The authors of the study plotted the proportion of approved requests against the time since the last food break. The proportion spikes after each meal, when about 65% of requests are granted. During the two hours or so until the next feeding, the approval rate drops steadily, to about zero just before the meal. As you might expect, this is an unwelcome result and the authors carefully checked many alternative explanations. The best possible account of the data provides bad news: tired and hungry judges tend to fall back on the easier default position of denying requests for parole. Both fatigue and hunger probably play a role.”
The book is certainly worth a read and I hope that even these small excerpts have make you think – even if only to understand we all have two systems of thinking that dance to the daily cycles of our more basic animal behaviours – and that, for all important decisions, gut-feel or intuition is not enough and that it is important to engage System 2. An aspect of thinking I sometimes struggle with! And it appears I am not alone – since the book highlights this as one of the main causes of human suffering in the world today.
As an eternal optimist, I came across this rather splendid creed which was originally published in 1912 by Christian D. Larson in a book called “Your Forces and How to Use Them”.
I hope it gives you a lift and makes you more optimistic!
THE OPTIMSIT’S CREED
Promise Yourself:
To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that thesis something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticise others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words, but in great deeds.
To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you.
—
One hundred years on, and every word rings true. How timeless the messages are. In these times of so much pessimism, it makes you think how important it is to be an optimist! Oh – and May the Force be with You!
So are you foolish or wise – and if so, does that make you wise or foolish? Makes you think. It also makes you take yourself a little less seriously – which is never a bad thing!
