Continuity and Change

I have mixed feelings about the value of traditions.  Presidential inaugurations, commencements, and even Sunday lunch with the family, events like these are ways to reinforce belonging and connection.  A sense of community defines our place in society, traditions give us an anchor to the past and the reassurance of continuity into the present.  However, traditions can also serve to underline difference and disadvantage: we see the affluent at inaugurations, the privileged on stage at commencements, and we miss family members not invited to lunch.  Past practices can constrain our choices, but so can embedded values and preferences.  Unnoticed, the residues of things learnt when young can affect us later, shaping our lives, attitudes and behaviour.  They can comfort us or act as roadblocks, deflecting us like roadworks diversions; we assume we’re on the right path, not realising we’ve been redirected. Traditions link us to the past, but they need regular review, questioning if they are still relevant or if it’s time for change.

The need for change has become pressing recently, as problems and weaknesses have emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, and in the aftermath of the protests following George Floyd’s death.  Whatever your underlying belief system, Christian, humanist, socialist, surely we can now agree we need significant change.  Some observers are convinced current events will push us to rethink our values and our activities, while others are more tentative.  Which will it be?  Will we create a truly inclusive, community focussed way of life, or we will be just a little more careful in what we do, reverting back to previous lifestyles, attitudes and ways of working?

It’s a familiar issue for business, considering innovations and asking: are we seeking small scale, incremental changes and adjustments or radical ‘game-changing’ new directions?  Can we learn from business?   Studies of organisational innovation reveal entrenched barriers to change are common, and most changes are focusses on improvement.  For business, this is ideal.  Tweak a product, add a little extra functionality, and you can sell an update of last year’s model or service as something ‘new’.  More income for relatively little expense, compared to really new offerings which can be costly, both in themselves, and in their likely financial impact if there’s a decline in sales of existing products.  Some companies even go as far as buying rights to a new idea to ensure it never appears:  when Sarich invented an orbital car engine, major car manufacturers licensed his idea in order not to make this new and more efficient combustion engine!

If incremental improvement is normal for business, radical innovation depends on breaking away from the familiar.  Years ago, ‘wise’ managers would say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  Bert Lance is cited as the source of this advice, but the Wall Street Journal added: “‘If it ain’t broke, let’s don’t fix it,’ says Mr. Davant, quoting an old Swedish saying from his home state of Minnesota.” [i] It’s a rather convoluted way of saying ‘leave well enough alone’. You know no management guru is going to leave that alone!  Tom Peters, the master of the one-liner, modified the nostrum to: “If it ain’t broke, you just haven’t looked hard enough.” Thinking further he added: “Fix it anyway.” [ii]  The process continued, reaching a new high with “If it ain’t broke, break it anyway”. [iii]  What’s next?  ‘If it ain’t broke, break it before someone else does’!  Good advice for a university system that is broke(n) with a massive drop in international students?

Businesses re constantly declaring ‘we are ‘disrupting’, but most claims are simple incremental improvements.  There’s certainly scope to do better.  Many examples spring to mind: how about the keyboard for starters?  Its invention is usually ascribed to Christopher Latham Scholes, a newspaper editor and printer, from Wisconsin.  He developed his keyboard in the early 1860s, and patented his design as part of an ‘early writing machine’ in 1867. [iv]  The QWERTY layout took a little longer, designed to maximise the speed of keyboard use (which some people find hard to believe!).  To still be using keyboards 150 years later is quite bizarre.  Habits die hard, but steps are emerging to allow voice commands and voice to text conversion (like Siri and Naturally Speaking).  One day devices will be voice managed for in input, operations and output.

Some other examples?  While we are on computers, what about the icons on your device?  Back in 1984, Steve Jobs was an exemplary innovator, with the first of the Apple computers, the Macintosh 128, introducing the mouse and the GUI (Graphic User Interface) into a commercial device.  Now we live in a world where smartphones, iPads and notebook computers have dozens of apps, each activated by tapping on the appropriate icon.  It was a great idea 35 years ago, but how much time is wasted locating, activating and using each application?  We are living in the aftermath, of what was once useful, and now is hard work.  We could change this by dispensing with icons, each task enabled by a voice request to start the appropriate software running.

There are so many examples where we live with the continuation of a technology that was developed in the past, but is no longer necessary.  How about cars?  Why do we have steering wheels?  Steering with your feet is natural (from walking to skiing!), and controlling speed and braking with your hands would be very simple (ask a motorcyclist about a manual accelerator).  Or education?  Many years ago, learning past the basic level was through discussion.  It is sad to see we teach an MBA, say, by having one person telling the others what they need to know.  Most teachers know little and invariably from a narrow perspective, but the experience and knowledge shared within a group, with a facilitator not an instructor, leads to much greater and far more valuable learning.  Many years ago, that was what educational practice comprised.

All these are examples of lingering conventions, business traditions.  Innovation means turning them on their heads, shooting some ‘sacred cows’!  You’d think we are as, every month, I read a ‘groundbreaking’ article suggesting we should address ‘zombie orthodoxies’, and ‘think the unthinkable’.  In one example I read, “conformity – defined as adhering to conventional wisdom – that gets leaders to the top too often disqualifies them from grasping the scale and nature of disruption.” [v]  Lots of talk with captivating phrases, but little application.  Sounds familiar?

The dead weight of established ways of doing things concerns much more than practice.  It is about how we see ourselves and the world around us.  Ill-considered use of language implants ideas that then go on to have a reality that is often misleading, and sometimes very dangerous.  A current and very worrying example come from experts and politicians voicing concern over the ‘health of the economy’.  Hang on: the economy is not alive!  The word ‘health’ implies it is essential to act now before it (the economy) dies.  Actually, it’s that less transactions are taking place.  Increasing activity so economic returns flow to more people would be a good.  Rethinking which transaction are most beneficial to people (including their health about which we should be concerned) would be an even better idea.  We might choose to increase economic activity to ensure more income for everyone, and reduce transactions that foster exploitation by a minority.

The other example I grumble about is artificial intelligence.  There are no examples of artificial ‘intelligence’, not do I think it is likely there will be for some time.  This nonsense stems from the popular view that human being are mere ‘information processing systems’.  That is as helpful as suggesting that televisions are electron processing systems.  Certainly, the human body does a vast amount of data processing, at a level of complexity well beyond our current abilities to understand, just as we can’t yet describe each and all of the electron movements in a television. Intelligence is more than data processing; in the simplest possible terms, it’s about sense-making.

Artificial information systems, however sophisticated, don’t do that.  They are programmed to process data according to rules.  We can even write programs that allow a computer system to find more efficient or ‘new’ paths to achieve pre-determined outcomes, but they can’t ‘think’ and they aren’t ‘intelligent’. [vi]  Indeed, their inability to think is a matter of great concern:  a system in a nuclear device can be programmed to identify a hot jet engine, which is good if the weapon is fired at an enemy jet, and bad if the jet avoids it and the weapon continues on to blow up a civil aircraft.  While human beings do perform analytical tasks, they are also living physiological organisms, intelligent, emotional, curious, and so much more.  I found a recent article revealing.  It described a program, Deep-speare, developed to ‘write like William Shakespeare’.  By being fed all Shakespeare’s works and other poetry, it produced lines similar to Shakespeare in metre and rhyme. [vii]  But it wasn’t poetry.  It couldn’t be, because computers lack insight and feeling.

The power of words to constrain our thinking is extraordinary.  What about our ‘rights’, claims that are absolute and cannot be abrogated?  In the US, attempts to limit rights on gun ownership, or freedom of expression or association, are fiercely resisted.  The right to bear arms is simply a nonsense.  However, I do agree the rights to free opinion and to free association are important in a healthy democracy, but they are not absolute.  John Rawls suggested we should all have an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, but he went on to suggest “equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value”.  He saw these liberties, these rights, as a ‘family’, in which no one of them should be given precedence over another.  Balancing rights is a tricky but essential process, as arguments about ‘free speech’ reveal.  It might help to shift the discussion to responsibilities.  What are my obligations, and to whom am I obligated?  To my partner; my family; my neighbours; my community; my city, state or region; humanity; the biosphere?  All of these.  Thinking this way, how different we would be.  We might bring an end to our ‘us and them’ polarised discourse if we lived in a world where everyone was ‘one of us’.  There’s a radical change, one that’s greatly needed right now.

There is a danger in this, in suggesting we should rethink everything, which is not my view.  With that proviso, I would like to explore another level in this theme of routines and accepted ways of acting by turning to the behaviours we acquire over time and which no longer sit on the surface of our character but are the underpinning, the skeleton beneath the skin.  These values and habits come from our upbringing and education, social values and perspectives we often absorb without noticing.  Even deeper, there are  behaviours and ideas we learn from a young age, but which lingers on throughout our lives.  If the Jesuits claimed they could mold a person if they had him or her for the first seven years of life, then families are in the front seat.

Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in gender stereotyping.  J S Mill’s essay, The Subjection of Women, was published 150 years ago, but there are days when it seems the issue is still stuck in values that existed before then. [viii]  Societies around the world continue with different expectations of boys and girls, justified on the physical differences between them.  “Boys are encouraged to explore and dominate their environments. Girls are required to be helpful and pleasing. Different values are thereby instilled in boys and girls, along with a shared belief in the supposedly natural differences between the sexes.”  [ix]  On the days I think those expectations are disappearing, all I need to do it walk through a shopping centre.  The clothes (still pink for a girl, blue for a boy), the toys, even the books on offer set out the distinctions.  As for gender diversity, while some of us feel there have been some social changes made, advocates remain a largely disliked minority.  To mention LGBQTIA is to run up a red flag in many communities.

The trap is this stuff about clothes and values becomes internalised.  Simone de Beauvoir argued the real harm comes from gender stereotypes deeply embedded in a growing child’s mind and outlook.  Often without intending to do so, families, schools, shopping malls, television and videos, even many books, subtly establish deep seated values and expectations.  ‘It is clear that woman’s whole “character” – her convictions, values, wisdom, morality, tastes, and behaviour,’ de Beauvoir concludes, ‘is explained by her situation.’ [x]  Can we ever change?  We need to.

If I am rather cynical about how society will change as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and Black-Lives-Matter, it’s for the same reason I am cynical as to how far most companies are willing to make major innovations  Things are broken in society right now,  Surely, we want radical change to create a better society.  Can we learn from analysing businesses’ abject failure to address harmful products, climate change, glaring income differences, and gender issues?  Research on companies suggests that a failure to change is not so much about resistance, although there is some of that.  Rather it is because of a failure to ‘see’ what is happening, what is needed.  Just as our personal aspirations are shaped by what we have learned as the right way to act from a very young age, so businesses suffer from their embedded perceptions and values.

With society under pressure from the COVID-19 outbreak and militarised police enforcing racial discrimination, we need major changes, but not at the cost of democratic principles and systems.  What’s the saying?  ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’.  Can we make the changes that are needed, while preserving and sustaining what is appropriate and effective?  I hope so.

[i] Oct. 4, 1976.  The Washington Post later quoted Bert Lance saying this on 23 December 1976

[ii] In Thriving in Chaos, Tom Peters, Knopf, 1988, subtitled ‘Handbook for a Management Revolution’

[iii] By Robert J Kriegel and Louis Patler, Business Plus, 1992

[iv] With Carlos Glidden and Samuel W Soulé.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY

[v] Be prepared for disruption: Thinking the new unthinkables, by Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, Strategy and Business, 6 May 2020

[vi] Medical researchers understand this:  see Schwable and Wahl, Lancet, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Global Health, Lancet, vol 395, Issue 10236, pp 1579-86, May 2020: “AI-driven health interventions fit into four categories … : (1) diagnosis, (2) patient morbidity or mortality risk assessment, (3) disease outbreak prediction and surveillance, and (4) health policy and planning. However, much of the AI-driven intervention research in global health does not describe ethical, regulatory, or practical considerations required for widespread use or deployment”

[vii] This AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare, Jey H Lau, Trevor Cohn, Timothy Baldwin & Adam Hammond, IEE Spectrum, 30 April 2020

[viii] Published by Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, and republished in many formats ever since

[ix] Against Type, Jonathon Webber, Aeon, 29 January 2019

[x] Op cit

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