I suppose that Tom Peters must take place as one of the great management gurus of our time.  This week I have chosen a short video clip of Peters talking about diversity with a small “d”.  There is a great phrase within the video lecture: “Random groups of human beings dragged off the street will do a better job of solving problems than a group of experts.”  Here is the clip:

When I looked at the comments below, I found a lot of anti-Diversity emotions (some stronger than others) – many of whom did not understand the subtlety of Peters’ distinction between BIG D and small d.  However, there was a comment referring to my old Alma Mater which resonated with me:

“Henley Management College did a similar study.  Industry experts and top personalities spent most time arguing between themselves – they were used to being in charge not in a team. Egos blocked progress. Sales people did best because they were used to time targets, finishing, and compromising. Expert groups itellectulised and ran out of time trying to get the perfect answer. Tom’s on the money here and there are studies to support his proposition.”

So, if you really want to solve a problem, business or personal, then go out into the street and collect a few strangers- preferably some with sales skills.  It might save you a bundle on lawyers fees and it could turn out to be quite fun too!

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After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year, French scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 200 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 150 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the French: in the weeks that followed, American archaeologists dug to a depth of 20 feet before finding traces of copper wire. Shortly afterwards, they published an article in the New York Times saying : “American archaeologists, having found traces of 250-year-old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network 50 years earlier than the French.”

A few weeks later, ‘The British Archaeological Society of Northern England’ reported the following: “After digging down to a depth of 33 feet in the Skipton area of North Yorkshire in 2011, Charlie Hardcastle, a self-taught amateur archaeologist, reported that he had found absolutely sod all. Charlie has therefore concluded that 250 years ago Britain had already gone wireless.”

Just makes you bloody proud to be British, don’t it?

(Thanks, Richard, for sending me this on an email.  I thought I would put it on the blog to share it more widely!)

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I pulled off a book from my bookshelf the other night with the title of this post. The book is a collection of writings, including nine chapters never before published in book form by Alan Watts. Watts was a British pilosopher, lecturer and author who interpreted Eastern thought for Westerners. He was born close to where I live in Chiselhurst, Kent in 1915 and died in California in 1973. Other more famous titles of his include “The Way of Zen” and “The Book”.

I have copied the article below – which has the same title as the book – which gives a good insight into Watts’ writing – as well as a piece to ponder on this Thursday:

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Become What You Are

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It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.”  Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor hasten the departure of things unpleasant.  To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. 

In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal Now.  For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart  from this Now; by themsleves they are illusions.  Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal.  For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever.  This movement and change has been called Tao by the Chinese, yet in fact there is no movement, for the moment is the only reality and there is nothing beside it in relation to which it can be said to move.  Thus it can be called at once the eternally moving and eternally resting.

How can we bring ourselves into accord with this Tao?  A sage has said that if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it.  But he was not altogether right.  For the curious thing is that you cannot get out of accord with it even if you want to.  Though your thoughts may run into the past or future, then cannot escape the present moment.  However far back or forward they try to escape, they can never be separated from the moment.  For those thoughts are themselves of the moment; just as much as anything else they partake of and indeed, are the movement of life which is Tao.

You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now – otherwise you would not be here.  Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.  So become what you are.

Source: Become What You Are – pp10-11 from the book with the same title by Alan Watts – (c) Shambhala Press 2003

More on Alan Watts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

Podcasts at: http://www.alanwatts.org/

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In my research on swarms, I came across this extraordinary video of a swarm of  tiny flying machines called “nano quadrotors”.  You have to watch it to believe it.  The mind boggles when you think of some of the applications!  Once you have watched the short video, please leave any comments on what you think!

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At the recent evidence for the House of Lords Communications subcommittee, I drew attention to a great piece of thinking which was written-up in a book by Everett M Rogers in 1962 called “The Diffusion of Innovations”.  It has since sold more than 30,000 copies, is now in its fifth edition and has become a classic on how ideas spread.

Often, when we think about innovation, we think of words like “new”, “creative”, “first-mover” etc.  Diffusion is not really a word that instantly springs to mind.  Yet Everett’s research has proved to be a robust model which has stood the test of time across many innovation cycles.  Here is a great cartoon which outlines Everett’s five constituencies that need to be convinced about a new idea, product or service:

I particularly like the cartoon because it includes “THE CHASM” as the first gap across which all innovations much leap if they are to be successful and grow beyond the first 15-20% of any given market.  How many ideas or innovations fail at this hurdle!

What is even more interesting to note are the different dynamics as you move from up the curve after the chasm has been crossed.  To capture the “early majority”, then a “word of mouth” or “refer a friend” strategy is the main mechanism for growth.  There are many examples on the internet where this has been institutionalised.

Once the early majority has been convinced, the late majority tends to be more convinced by the opinion of a number of  individuals or other social groupings.  Once again, the internet has helped to accelerate this in recent years with social media platforms and other types of discussion fora – further driven by well-designed applications that allow people to group themselves together in areas of common interest like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

As the Internet has accelerated the diffusion of ideas around the world, distance has become less important than it was in the 1960s.  The fifth edition was updated in 2003 to address the spread of the Internet, and how it has transformed the way human beings communicate and adopt new ideas.  How much has changed, even since then!

I have found this a very useful model for all those struggling with marketing ideas, products and services in the age of the internet.  It is always worth remembering that the tactics used for getting over the chasm are probably not going to be much use when you have to convince the Laggards.  Perhaps the UK needs to understand the model better when looking at how we increase our usage for the internet as a whole – and particularly encourage the laggards to get online.  Hence my use of the model when talking to the Peers last month.

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Whilst away at Easter I started to read Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s book “Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang” which was published last year.  It is the latest accumulation of Griffin and Tyrell’s ideas on the Human Givens, and the importance of the REM state in sleep and the Universal Relaton Field.  Yet to list out the other many ideas in the book is impossible.

What is impressive about the work is that it attempts to bring a set of organising ideas to some of the BIG questions that mankind has asked since the beginning of history such as: “What is consciousness?” and “How was time created?”.  It gives some very interesting frameworks for understanding the universe by relating concepts like the big bang theory to the development of the human mind.

By drawing on their previous ideas of caetextia (or context blindness), the authors link the development of the human brain to the two very separate ways that we think: left-brained thinking and right-brained thinking.  This is very similar to the System 1 and System 2 in Kahneman’s “Thinking, fast and slow” which I reviewed a few Thursdays ago.

However, Griffin and Tyrell (being psychoanalysts) bring out some very interesting new theories on how the human mind developed to become more conscious – both to become more objective (or left-brained) as well as subjective (right-brained).  Each half of the brain (in balance) creates a rounded self-consciousness which connects both sides of the brain for human living.  However, too much focus on the path towards objectivity (which they also call the arc of descent) creates a tendency towards scientific genius and autism.   Too much focus on subjectivity (or the arc of ascent) creates art and a tendency for certain folk to become schizophrenic.  They also suggest that mood swings, depression and bipolar disorder are, perhaps a mixture of both without the ability to create balance between the halves – and yet have also produced many of our most creative geniuses such as Robert Schumann, John Keates, William Blake, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Peter Gabriel and Spike Milligan…..and their list goes on much longer (p.96)!

However, the book is far more than a set of ideas on the development of the physical brain and mental health.  In the second and third parts of the book, the authors bring together a set of very powerful organising ideas on how human consciousness connects with the “one-ness” of the Universe through an invisible field of “relatons”.  Since only 4% of the Universe is made up of matter that is visible (detectable by radiation), the authors believe that the field of relatons (or subjective matter) is contained somewhere within the remaining 96%.  These relatons have some very interesting properties.  They are undetectable (like all dark matter).  They are also capable of relationships with solitons (objective matter) and are always generating consciousness (or information).  And when two solitons are joined as matter, relatons are released!

The struggle that the mind has in balancing between objectivity and subjectivity (and the ability of such thinking to drive us mad in the process) was well narrated in the timeless classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”over 30 years ago – which had a major influence on my thinking at the time.  The authors suggest that this balance-of-two-halves-in-time (between the two sides of the mind) appears to echo the same dance that plays out from the largest to the smallest objects in the Universe and that somehow time breathes in and out between objective and subjective states through states of probability.

The book is not just analytical and mind-stretchingly interesting.  It intersperses spiritual stories and poems – and one of my favourites is here:

“How often do you sense that there is a profound meaning in a poem but, without an organising idea to consolidate it, you can’t hold on to it and it slips away from consciousness?  T.S.Eliot knew this, as we see from other lines of his great “Burnt Norton”, where he reveals his intuitive grasp of the nature of truth but also that he is aware of the failure of words to hold on to what he has grasped:

Words, after speech reach

Into the silence.  Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.  Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

Overall, the book presents a fascinating set of ideas and theories which draw on thinking from our latest understanding of the physical brain, quantum mechanics, spirituality, creativity and the development of mental illnesses – and much more besides.  Big ideas which the book far better articulates on over 450 pages than I can in this short article.

I remain fascinated on how we can apply some of the ideas to the areas of Information Management and Organisational Design.  My previous article on Organisational Caetextia started to explore some of these themes.  Expect more to follow – particularly with colonies of bees interwoven in the stories!

I hope that it makes some of you interested enough to buy what I think is one of the best books I have read in the past year.

Picture: (c) iStockphoto not to be reproduced without licence.

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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.

Image of Rug from: Spongobongo

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I gave evidence at the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications on Tuesday – all about the future of UK Internet Access.

There is  a video of it here:

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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:

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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

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