Smart Thinking in Crazy Times?

Most problems and issues that we face are complex and multi-faceted. Simple, straightforward solutions are seldom sufficient. And when we get into conflict answers are seldom easy and mostly muddled! Is there a way of thinking about local, national and global craziness that is clearer and smarter than most of our standard approaches? I think there is.

Ian Mitroff is a professor at the University of Southern California where he heads up the Centre for Crisis Management. He suggests that all problems display four perspectives. And all four must be considered if we are to arrive at satisfactory solutions to the complex problems that beset us in these crazy times. The four perspectives are: 1) Technical/Scientific 2) Personal/Social 3) Context/System and 4) Ethical/Spiritual. They will become clearer with the example below.

Instead of choosing the current craziness of no-fly zones in Libya and who is in charge of what, (UN, NATO or the Coalition) to illustrate Mitroff’s method, let’s have something closer to home: a typical suburban issue, a relatively simple dispute between neighbours. And let’s say that the dispute is about the noise level of the classical music played by one of the neighbours, which he loves to play really LOUD to accompany cooking his Sunday lunch. This drives his next-door neighbours crazy. Their preference is to have a quiet Sunday morning listening to the church service on the radio and then reading the Sunday papers before going out to one of the restaurants for lunch. Clearly a “classical” conflict!

Now hopefully the quiet neighbours will discuss their problem with the musical maestro and the parties involved will amicably resolve the conflict. But what if one of them decides to treat the entire matter in a technical, scientific, right/wrong manner and “go the legal route?”

All disputes have a technical/scientific perspective. Some or other regulation will usually apply to an aspect of the dispute.  So, whatever the final outcome, the parties will need to take cognisance of a technical/scientific aspect to their problem. Sadly, most people too, too often only think of the technical or scientific perspective! However, there are always three other perspectives to consider, and if no attention is paid to them a purely technical, scientific solution is likely to make matters worse than before.

So instead of just calling in the police to measure the decibels at which the offending classical CD’s are being played, the neighbours also need to consider the personal/social perspective to the problem. When the police arrive with their decibel measuring equipment it is highly likely that personal relationships between next-door neighbours will deteriorate into acrimonious accusation and counter-accusation. In such circumstances the ability to hear the other side usually flies out the window. And when other friends and neighbours of both parties take sides, the wider social ramifications of the conflict click in and could poison the entire neighbourhood vibe. But that’s not all, there’s more!

Every problem, conflict or crisis is always part of a larger context or system. So, the noisy neighbour problem is a sub-set of many broader issues such as noise pollution, cultural clashes and diversity, local and national values and norms, constitutional rights and duties and eventually even broad human rights. Each of these wider contexts deserves some discussion and clarification prior to any precipitous actions on the part of the battling neighbours. And yes, there’s still more to be taken into account!  

There is an ethical/spiritual perspective to every problem. Even though your neighbour is driving you bonkers, have you considered whether anything that you may have done or may be doing is adding fuel to the fire? In the light of this conflict what is the right thing to do? What is right for the longer-term well being of your irritating neighbour, yourself, the immediate neighbourhood, your suburb, your city and all its people?

Perhaps we can learn something from practical academics like Mitroff. Can we think smart in the crazy conflicts that beset us? I certainly think that I can certainly improve my approach to problems, issues, conflicts and crises by trying to consider all four perspectives that Mitroff suggests. And I suspect that this approach might help all of us avoid some of the horrendous mistakes we are apt to make in the heat of crazy conflict moments.

Randall Falkenberg

Black Swans and the Perils of Prediction

This week’s world-class thinker is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “NNT”, as he calls himself, was born and raised by a highly political Greek Orthodox family in Lebanon, but studied in the USA and Europe. He now lives in the USA and is visiting professor at various universities and Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at Massachusetts University. NNT is an incredibly interesting human being. Fortune selected his second book Fooled by Randomness as one of the “smartest books of all time”. He has a formidable brain, thankfully tempered by a fine sense of humour: for example “My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves and the quality of their knowledge too seriously and those who don’t have the guts to sometimes say ‘I don’t know...”

He writes that before the discovery of Australia, Europeans thought that all swans were white, and it would have been considered completely unreasonable to imagine swans of any other colour. The first sighting of a black swan in Australia, where they are quite common, shattered that notion. This leads to his first, big insight!

First insight: “Black Swans” are highly improbable events that have a huge positive or negative impact on our lives. (while it is almost impossible to predict them, we can be alert to recognize positive or negative Black Swans once they have occurred). Taleb is fascinated by rare, unpredictable yet pivotal events that shape our world far more than the myriad of mediocre happenings that occur regularly. And a troublesome characteristic of these enormously important Black Swan events is that they are virtually unpredictable.

Examples of Black Swans are: the rise of the internet and its impact within a relatively short slice of time; the invention of Google and how it has changed the lives of everyone who uses it; the revolutionary upheavals of recent times in North Africa; the Japanese Tsunami. We are still (hopefully) recovering from the recent crash in world markets. And although the next crash of world markets will surely come, who knows precisely what combination of events will precipitate the disaster – it’s an unpredictable Black Swan. (Here his advice is always to be conservative with 85% of your assets and to speculate wildly with 15%, looking for the massive returns that a positive Black Swan can bring).

What would constitute a South African Black Swan? The technically correct answer would be “who knows?” Looking back, the negotiated settlement between the ruling Nationalist Government and the once banned and exiled ANC was clearly a positive Black Swan. What would constitute an American Black Swan? The assassination of Barack Obama by the crazies in the Republican right wing with Sarah Palin sweeping into office? Clearly a bad Black Swan. Perhaps a possible global Black Swan that would severely impact our lives is if the oil price hit and stayed at something like $150 to $200 a barrel! Improbable but not impossible, a typical Black Swan!

Second insight: Inventions and discoveries usually owe more to luck and randomness than to carefully planned research. Many of the discoveries that have had a huge impact on our culture were accidents discovered while people were looking for something else. For example, Penicillin was just some mold inhibiting the growth of another lab culture; despite massive expenditure on cancer research, chemotherapy was discovered as a side-effect of mustard gas in warfare (people who were exposed to it had very low white blood cell counts). And look at one of today’s big pharmaceutical money spinners, Viagra – it was devised to treat heart disease and hypertension before it rose to other heights.

Luck and randomness also play a huge part in the success of the stars in all spheres. Bill Gates is not a business genius; he was tinkering around with creating some operating software for IBM’s Personal Computers and was lucky enough to negotiate a deal at the right time with the ailing giant that resulted in him being rewarded out of all proportion to his effort. But this brings us to the third insight.

Third insight: random tinkering is the true path to success! We need more uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering! What Taleb is arguing for is this: most economists are too bathed in enlightenment-style cause-and-effect to realize the effects of wild randomness. Tightly planned and narrowly lived lives and businesses and organisations are highly unlikely to reach the dizzy heights of success that can be achieved by those who constantly try new things, slightly different things, those who tinker with what is to produce what might be. Taleb chides us to make our own luck: we can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie just outside the path of our imagination.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an eye-opening thinker, one who teases our intelligence. He awakens us to the Black Swans, more prevalent than we suspect, that lie hidden at the edges of the tiny and tranquil ponds of our daily lives.

Randall Falkenberg

Good and Bad Reasons for Believing Things

Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s famous scientists. He is a world class thinker who “kicked the hornets’ nest” with his 2004 book The God Delusion. But Dawkins is not only an anti-theist. He is also one of the leading exponents of evolution and his recent 2009 book The Greatest Show on Earth is the clearest and most comprehensive presentation available of the overwhelming evidence supporting Darwin’s great theory. I shall in future weeks be writing a few pieces on Dawkins and Evolution. But first I want to refer to a letter he wrote to his daughter Juliet when she turned ten. In it he explained his thinking on good and bad reasons for believing anything.

It’s a brilliant letter in which he offers Juliet a simple but powerful way of dealing with the many things that she will be told by all sorts of people throughout her life. As a grandfather of four precious granddaughters, it’s a message that I would like to pass on to my fabulous four as well as to readers of this blog.

Dawkins’ good reason for discovering and believing what is true about the planet and the universe is to look for evidence to support what is being asserted. The best evidence is what we learn by direct observation. But often, like detectives, we have to gather evidence from a number of sources to see where it all points. The bottom line is that evidence provides the best reason for believing something to be true. So he advises young Juliet: “next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: What kind of evidence is there for that? And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say”

He also warns Juliet about three bad reasons for believing anything. They are ‘tradition’, ‘authority’ and ‘revelation’.

Tradition means beliefs handed down through generations from grandparents to parents to children. Tradition can stretch back over hundreds of years. For example, Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, didn’t die but was lifted bodily into heaven. Other groups, Christian and Secular, disagree, claiming that Mary died like everyone else. This belief about Mary being bodily lifted into heaven (called “The Assumption”) appears to have originated about 600 years after Jesus’ time and was made official Catholic belief only in 1950 by Pope Pius XII. Dawkins encourages everyone, including the Catholics, to ask for the evidence that supports such a belief – and not to accept it or any other tradition simply because it’s a tradition that has been taken seriously over a long period.

Authority is the second bad reason for believing something to be true. Because the headmaster says so doesn’t make it so! Because Muammar Gaddafi or even Nelson Mandela says something is the case, their authority does not make it true. It needs to be tested, backed by evidence and sound, logically reasoning. So, we should not accept anything as the truth, just because it is spoken by an important person. In addition, because the Bible (or the Koran or whatever other text) says something is true does not make it true. Truth always needs evidence and solid arguments to back it up rather than conferred or claimed authority. In short, Dawkins is advising his daughter not to accept what is claimed as the truth either on the authority of the person making the claim or on the authority of a written claim to truth. Such people and such writings may indeed contain the truth about our world, but that truth always needs rational and evidential support.

What Dawkins and most of the great scientists and philosophers seem to be saying is: “do not rely on any authority to back your stance; instead, search for evidence to support your position and follow the path of reason before energising your proposals with the passion needed to make them happen!”

Revelation  is the third bad reason for believing anything. “Revelation” is the claim that some or other divinity, spirit or ancestor has communicated a truth to you. In South African history the Xhosa prophetess, Nongqawuse believed that the spirits of three ancestors revealed to her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle, both being their source of food and wealth. In return, she had been promised that the spirits would sweep the British settlers into the sea; replenish the granaries and fill the kraals with more beautiful and healthier cattle. Sadly, Paramount Chief Sarhili believed her and ordered the cattle killing frenzy that destroyed between 300 000 and 400 000 and led to a serious famine. What evidence was there that the truth revealed to her was indeed true? What is the evidence to support the so-called revelations of the three main monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Asking for evidence and sound logic is essential in any discussions about the truth of the many religions of humankind! It is also essential in weighing up the truth of the myriad superstitions and bizarre beliefs that abound in modern society.

I reckon that the insights that Richard Dawkins shares with his daughter Juliet in his letter to her some years back are really inspiring and they can be summarised, more or less in his own words, like this: the universe and our life in it is so wonderful and awe-inspiring, our discovery of its treasures so exciting and ongoing that a readiness to believe without enquiry everything that is presented to us by tradition, authority or revelation is a sad and ultimately dangerous disengagement from reality.    

Randall Falkenberg

How Ecologically Intelligent are we?

This week’s reflection is based on the insights of a few thinkers, rather than just one. Some while back I read a book by a remarkable South African Ian McCallum. His book, Ecological Intelligence, inspired this article. Ian was the fullback of the Springbok rugby team in ’68 & 69; he is also a medical doctor, a Jungian psychiatrist, a naturalist and a published poet. He lives in Cape Town.

McCallum argues that we can only understand ourselves as a species if we understand our evolutionary past and how we remain intimately connected with the whole evolving web of life on the planet. We are an integral part of the phenomenon of life, and as conscious beings we are inescapably responsible for caring for our environment and our fellow creatures. We are the gardeners, the zoo keepers. He quotes poet Antonio Machado to make the point. Read this poem aloud, and then read it again.

The wind, one brilliant day, called

to my soul with an odour of jasmine.

“In return for the odour of my jasmine,

I’d like the odour of your roses”

“I have no roses; all the flowers

in my garden are dead.”

“Well then, I’ll take the withered petals

and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain.”

The wind left. And I wept. And my soul said to me:

“What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”

There are obviously many people researching and writing about ecology and climate change and I could have also drawn on their insights. For example, I can recommend George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. And James Lovelock’s passionate scientific missives like The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning. But for this short piece I have chosen to stick with just two main thinkers whose message is clear and crisp: Ian McCallum and Ervin Laszlo.

Ervin Laszlo was formerly a Professor of Philosophy, Systems Science and Future Studies. He now, like many of us, lives in a small country village – his is in Tuscany, lucky blighter. He is founder and President of The Club of Budapest, an international think tank. In his latest book, The Chaos Point – the world at the crossroads, he sees the current ecological, social and economic trends that frame life on earth as essentially unsustainable. Our profligate consumer lifestyles, cavalier disregard for our physical and biological environment, and our addiction to violence and war are all reaching a tipping point beyond which there may be no turning back.

But, according to Laszlo we do still have a choice: trends are not destiny, they can be changed. There is still time for concerned groups of people to pull together and form associations and networks that pursue the objectives of peace, simplicity of lifestyles and the sustainability of the environment. To help birth such a new society Laszlo and McCallum both say we need a blend of science and soul. We need science to enable us to understand our past and present reality and we need a new spirituality that inspires us to do whatever it takes to be co-creators of a viable new world.

Laszlo says there are four things we can all do today: shed obsolete beliefs; adopt a new morality; envision the world as we would like to see it; and evolve our consciousness. Here is a brief elucidation of these insightful gems:

• Obsolete beliefs: Stop believing that nature is inexhaustible; that everything is reversible; that technology can solve all our problems. Shed these obsolete conceptions!
• A new morality: Gandhi’s “Live more simply, so others can simply live” offers an alternative to the rampant consumerism of the “developed” world
• Dream a new world: he says start with your town, village or neighbourhood. Ask yourself and your community: what is preventing your space from being one
• That is safe for everyone
• Where nobody is marginalised, hungry, unemployed and with no voice
• Where local officials are honest, informed and represent the best interests of all the community
• Evolve your consciousness: Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt the power of a small group of people to change the world. Nothing else ever has!” And Gandhi (again) insisted that we should “be the change you want to see in the world”. We need to become hyper-aware and conscious of our potential and our responsibility.

Given these challenging insights we can all be extremely grateful for those committed citizens who breathe spirit and science into our conservation oriented organisations and institutions. Eco-activists, investigative journalists and ad hoc issue-based ecological formations often need our full support and participation. Is it not crucial that we take immediate action to ramp up our ecological intelligence. And shouldn’t we be continually challenging our thinking and our lifestyles in these globally unsettled times? As commander Piers Sellers of a recent Space Shuttle mission told ABC News: “I think that we all are mindful, while we’re flying around and around this one little Earth, that this is all we have. This is humanity’s home…”

Randall Falkenberg