Our whole lives we have been made to feel that we don’t have enough, that we are not good enough, that we don’t do enough. This dissatisfaction engine has been seen as essential to keep the wheels of modern society turning.

But it just fell off the tracks and as result we are currently recalibrating “enough”.

When we realise that we have enough, do enough and are enough we have more.

We have more time.
We have more patience.
More of us are focusing on those we love.
More of us are helping those around us.

The more we remember this the more chance we have of a better future.

The Do Lectures are a very special event that happens in a remote glamping site in West Wales and I was lucky enough to be asked to speak – a rather frightening ten years ago now!

As ever the joy of these events is the people that you get to meet. This started on the way there for me as I gave the fascinating Craig Mod and inspiring Maggie Doyne a lift from Woking station to the event. Great conversations before we even got there.

The other unexpected highlight was to sit round a campfire, late into the evening, sorting the world out with Sir Tim Berners Lee and David Allen (of GTD fame), pinching myself to convince myself that it was happening.

The guys at Do are in the process of making the recordings of the talks available as a podcast and you can hear my own efforts here.

Normal was making us miserable and killing the planet.
Normal was already falling apart.
Beware the vested interests of those who want to rush back to normal.

Coronavirus is giving us the opportunity to reset.
It is forcing us to ask some really big questions and removing the option of complacency.

We have the time and opportunity to consider what matters as individuals, families, communities and beyond. Why not make the most of that opportunity?

It has been interesting having to make do with less.

Less money coming in, less money going out.

Less going places, more being wherever I am.

Less people, more time for conversations.

Less aspiration, more contentment.

I could get used to less…

It’s amazing watching Alby watching his world as we sit side by side in the sunshine looking out onto our back garden.

To me I just see “garden”. Pretty undifferentiated. I know some of the names of the plants, I can see the various sections. But I just see garden.

He on the other hand sees opportunity! Opportunity for carnage and destruction. He can be sitting apparently at peace on the patio and then with blistering speed, and laser like precision, run the length of the garden and grab some small animal.

It struck me that life and work can be the same. Some are content to see the big picture, take in what is happening, and unless something needs tending leave it be.

Others on the other hand are looking for trouble, opportunities to have impact, and aren’t always aware of the destruction they leave behind…

The thing I miss most is the very start of the day. The feeling of pulling myself up the several steps into the cab of a new truck for the very first time. Even this was risky. One driver I know didn’t maintain three points of contact, slipped, and fell backwards off the truck damaging his back!

Once in the cab the first thing I’d do would be push the digital tachograph card into its slot and run through the menu options to start recording my time. It is important that you do this before you do anything else as you are legally required to spend 15 minutes on a rigid and 30 minutes on an artic doing your vehicle checks.

If the weather was cold and the window frosted I would start up the engine to clear the glass but otherwise I’d leave it off as most trucks automatically cut out after a while if you are not moving to reduce pollution.

I would then run through my vehicle checks. All trucks have a vehicle check form on board that you are required to complete, even if you drove the same truck the day before. This ensures that you have checked things like wheels, tyres, side protection, lights, brakes, etc. All trucks have safety checks every six weeks at a garage but it is still your responsibility if something fails and you had not done your pre-drive checks.

Most jobs I had to do my own loading, but even if the truck had been loaded by a forklift I would be responsible for securing the load. This usually involved large ratchet straps and some loads took a bit of skill to ensure that the straps did their job and didn’t slacken while on the move.

I would then pick up my manifest, the list of drops for the day, and put them into my sat nav app on my phone. Some drivers put their next location in one at a time but my iPhone app, CoPilot GPS, allowed me to plan the whole route. This gave me an overall view of how much driving I had to do and where it would make most sense to take my driving breaks.

Last thing, I’d adjust my driving position. The seats tend to have lots of adjustments, and they also differ slightly in design from truck to truck so some days it would take a bit of fiddling to get it right. I’d also, more often than not, be driving a truck that was unfamiliar to me, so adjusting the mirrors, and working out what I could and couldn’t see in them, was really important.

And that was it, checks done, I’d fire up the engine, slip into gear, release the powerful parking brake, and ease away.

There was such a thrill in that first feeling of the power and the bulk. It’s that that I miss the most.

Maybe one day I’ll do it again.

In my recent post I mentioned what a pernicious word “normal” was. Right up there with it is the word “should”.

Should is primarily used to encourage socially acceptable behaviours backed up with the threat of guilt. “Children should be seen and not heard”, “You should respect those in authority”, “You should wash behind your ears”

Once we have been exposed enough to shoulds from those around us as we are growing up we start to own them and apply to our ourselves. “I should be trying harder”, “I should be more successful”, etc.

In our current enforced lockdown the power of these shoulds increases tenfold and the attendant guilt increases likewise. “I should be making better use of my time”, “I should be helping more people”, “I should be exercising”, “I should be eating more healthily”. When the shoulds are coming at you thick and fast from “experts” on the internet the situation becomes untenable.

But like the word normal, there is no such thing as “should”. It’s up to you to work out what matters. It’s up to you to decide what action to take. It’s up to you to decide when to be content with “enough” – or not.

Normal is such a pernicious idea.

How many people have been ostracised for not being normal? How many times have you worried that your thoughts are not normal? How many ideas never see the light of day because they would call on people to do things that are not normal?

And yet people worry that after COVID-19 things will never get back to normal.

I hope they don’t. In fact they can’t. Normal doesn’t exist!

I am currently taking part in a Facebook meme sharing the cover of a book each day for seven days. The idea was to share seven books that I have enjoyed, but enjoyed is perhaps the wrong word. All of the books have had an impact on me, changed the way I thought. Some have been harrowing to read but I love them nonetheless.

I have avoided adding any explanation to my choices or making any attempt to explain their meaning or relevance to me. I have read so many books. Hundreds and hundreds. Some I have read many times. Their meaning changes each time and in some ways their relevance depends on the books I was reading before and after them.

My Kindle apps on iPhone and iPad are by far my most used apps. I read constantly and wherever I am. Second only to walking in nature, books are one of my greatest pleasures.

I hope the covers that I post trigger memories or introduce you to new books and help share the long threading paths of ideas that have led my thinking to where it is today.

We desperately want things to mean something. We label constantly in an attempt to confer meaning. We label nature – tree, grass, sky, birds – and ever after give these things a quick glance, apply the label, and move on to the next thing. In the process we stop seeing. We experience concepts, not reality.

We label things good or bad, we label people good or bad, we label circumstances good or bad. We label certain days holidays and expect those days to be different from other days. We are then disappointed when they are not.

We even label ourselves. We identify ourselves with our labels. I label myself a man, a husband, a speaker, British, etc. These days we use the phrase “Identifying as…” and then slap on a label which separates us off from those around us. But I am none of these labels, I am more than them.

Even the thing that I label “me” isn’t real, it can’t be found, it is a convenient label. But that label comes at a cost. It separates me from all the other things that I have labelled. It makes me subject to the moods and threats that I have labelled. It makes me less than I really am.

We are very lucky to live in beautiful countryside and to have a short 30 min walk circuit through fields and past farms and cottages that we do each day. I am very aware that not everyone has such an opportunity and indeed I heard yesterday about the plight of families stuck in one of the towers next to Grenfell Tower and can only imagine how stressful that is at the moment.

I’m also aware that there have been a lot of articles about how much the planet is benefiting form our inactivity and I too have enjoyed the resulting piss take photos of the greening of Hendon High Street or Dinosaurs reclaiming Paris.

But…

Each day on the walk we see more wildlife as it gets more confident as our impact on their world diminishes. I have written before about the uncannily loud sound of the bees as we walk past a patch of woodland. The air is most definitely clearer and sweeter smelling. It really does feel as if the planet is breathing a sigh of relief.

Wouldn’t it be great if we came out of this crisis with less of an inclination to rush around desperately making more money to buy more stuff? What if we all slowed down just a little. Spent just a little more time staring out of the window at the world around us? Just a little more time pausing to just be?

While I am still convinced of the benefits to the system of multi day fasts, including boosting your immune system, a couple of people have pointed me to research that indicates that there might be an early dip in immunity. Given current risks I have decided to curtail my fast.

Still, 45 hours in and it feels pretty good.

Interesting watching the Queen being trotted out at exactly the same time as it is announced that Boris Johnson has been taken into hospital. I’ve watched The Crown. I can imagine the Whitehall and Palace conversations that took place to get that to happen.

These are interesting times in terms of how we view the state and their role in protecting us and helping us pull together in a crisis. Clearly there are risks that it could all fall apart.

But would it? And what is “it”?

I always felt that the “real” BBC was the organic networks of individuals who turned up in the same place at the same time to achieve something challenging and complex – and not the often deluded group of individuals in the centre and “at the top” who thought they were running things. In fact on many occasions the interventions of that group of individuals damaged the organism.

The “real” United Kingdom is the complex organic networks of people who inhabit these islands, and the glue that holds us together is the day to day conversations that we have with each other. The increased tolerance, generosity, and bravery we are seeing is not happening because anyone told us to behave that way. It is because we know it is the right thing to do.

As ever we have way more power than we have been led to believe. We exercise that power in the day to day conversations that we have with our families, our friends and our networks – online or off.

If we are thoughtful about those conversations we will be all right.

I have practiced intermittent fasting for a while now and really benefit from, and actually enjoy the effect it has on my body. I have read a lot about longer term fasts and always wanted to try one. Anything up to ten days and beyond of nothing but water have been well documented and are increasingly well understood medically.

Being in lockdown seems like the ideal opportunity to experience a longer fast. I am unlikely to have so much control over my time, and demands on my energy, again in the foreseeable future. I have also spent the first couple of weeks of lockdown eating way too much and have as a result put on a couple of stone!

So, like I said, wish me luck, and watch this hopefully increasingly small space…

It’s interesting watching the range of responses to coronavirus and various states’ attempts to control their citizens activities. From the libertarians in Idaho to the Singaporeans ability to get stuff done, we have the whole range with the UK muddling along somewhere in the middle. The balance between centralised control, collective will, and individual freedom has never been more critical or fascinating.

As ever I end up feeling that we ideally want the best of all worlds. Control when we need it, but not when we don’t. Individual freedom when our actions don’t impact others, collective responsibility when they do. This is mirrored in our business models and our technologies. We need control and freedom in the right proportion and in the right places at the right times.

It is fascinating to watch people coping with the current restrictions and the enforced inactivity it is imposing.

Most of us find it really hard to do nothing. We feel bored. We feel guilty. We are brought up to expect to be distracted by things or activity. We are brought up to see doing nothing as being lazy.

But isn’t this the source of so many of our problems?

We are so busy trying to achieve, making money to buy more and more things, constantly travelling to be more places, that in the process we are exhausting ourselves and the planet.

Isn’t it nice to stop, even if just a while? Could we get used to it?

In my previous post I talked of a more decentralised future that may emerge from our current situation. Such a future will call for new ways of looking at the world, new ways of working together, and new tools to do so.

Some of you will know my friend Dave Snowden and his work on understanding and managing complexity. Over the twenty years that we have known each other we have had some wonderful conversations, usually on Welsh mountains, about helping people adapt to more complex world and the impact this would have on individuals and society. I have also watched as he developed the Cynefin framework and his powerful tool SenseMaker.

This was all before the world was thrown even more up in the air by the current COVID-19 crisis. Dave’s ideas and methodologies have always felt right – they now feel critical.

He and his team have pulled together an impressive set of resources that could help us deal with our challenges and increase our learning from them. They may well help an organisation near you…

It’s ‘ interesting to watch centralised, structured power struggling to cope with decentralised, unstructured challenges. We have been brought up to expect “the state” to protect us from threats. We expect them to protect us against coronavirus.

But what if decentralised problems are too much for them? What if centralised solutions can’t cope? What if they collapse under the strain?

We are beginning to see alternatives. As more of us get better at using the distributed, decentralised, networks of the internet, we increase the likelihood that the information we get through these networks becomes faster and more reliable than the alternatives. We are also being thrust into using online networks to do our work, our shopping, our learning, and to maintain our sense of community.

Although there is noise in the system (there is in any system) this is not about “fake news” nor is it an argument against expertise. The experts are also benefiting from increasing use of online networks to share and work together without going through centralised authorities, cutting out middle men in efforts to speed things up. We are also able to watch them doing so and benefit more directly from their learning.

The provision of resources to help us deal with the effects of this virus are currently centralised – hospitals, food, financial support – and as such they risk becoming single points of failure. But what if they weren’t?

What if out of all of this we learned to rely less on the centre and the “top”? What if we learned to help each other, to do so more locally, and through flexible, complex adaptive systems rather than hierarchical, centralised brittle ones?

This question has always fascinated me and there have always been a number of different possible answers. Some see it as represented by the hierarchical org chart. For others it is a network of networks. In reality it is a combination of the two. But for most of us our organisations have been closely associated with their buildings. You “go” to work.

That is until now!

Given that very few of us are “going to work”, including the senior management, what is the organisation now? Where does it exist? Is it just in our heads? Was it always?

It’s nothing new, we do it all the time. We do it to ourselves. We do it in our own heads.

All it takes is some casual comment, something we read, something we’ve seen, and all of a sudden an anxiety or fear will be triggered and we lock onto that thought.

Terrier like, we refuse to let it go. We niggle with it, run it round and round, we will do anything but put it down and let it go.

While we’re doing this the rest of the world ceases to exist. Locked into thought like this we can’t even see what’s right in front of us – even with our eyes wide open. We are stuck in our own head. Isolated in our mind’s vice like grip.

But as soon as you notice this, the lock releases. Noticing that you have been caught in this vice like grip dissolves it immediately.

Being locked in is a habit. The habit can be broken. All it takes is to notice it.

We spend so much of our lives striving. Striving to get somewhere better. Striving to be someone better. Striving to get away from where we are.

But now we are stuck. We can’t get anywhere. And we get bored. We get bored because we can’t bear to be where we are.

But we don’t know where we are going. We don’t know what’s next.

We just know that we are here now, and what is happening is what is happening. And it’s ok.

There’s peace in that thought.

There always was.

Watching an unprecedented flourishing of creativity, collaborative energy, and mutual online respect brought about by our current challenging circumstances. We won’t forget this, and we can’t go back to “business as usual”.

This will change how we perceive businesses, governments, nations, how we build cities, how we relate to each other, what our aspirations for the future are… everything.

My elder daughter Mollie has been travelling through Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos for the past nearly 2 months. She and her boyfriend Theo set off when the coronavirus was in its very early stages. We knew it was around, but they had planned and paid for this trip ages ago and decided to go ahead.

Paradoxically they were probably safer where they have been than here in the UK. Regular testing, and mostly in remote less busy parts of the various countries, ideal.

But with things escalating we decided to get their return flights shifted to a week earlier than planned. Etihad were superb. Calm, efficient and helpful. It took more than ninety minutes of call centre hell to get through to them but they were great.

I picked Mollie up from Heathrow Airport yesterday and to say that I was relieved when I saw she and Theo coming through the arrivals gate is a HUGE understatement.

If you are in a similar position, unsure whether travel restrictions will prevent your family from getting together, I most sincerely wish you luck and hope that your travel challenges are resolved soon.

Usually doing the dishes is a bone of considerable contention in our house. I end up getting grumpy because I feel that no one else does them as often as I do, and if they do do them they certainly don’t do them the right way like I do. I end up muttering away to myself as I put stuff in the dishwasher, feeling self righteous and hard done by. Poor me. Inconsiderate them.

We are brought up to see ourselves as a separate self, cut off from the world around us, needing to protect ourselves or curry favour in order to avoid pain or hold onto pleasure.

Our economies and modern society are based on this narrative.

But in reality we are part of life. Our boundaries are imagined (if Covid 19 teaches us anything it is surely this). Our sense of separation is fuelled by made up narratives based on a made up past. We desperately try to protect the little me that sits on our shoulders yelling shit in our ears all day long, and in doing so simply make it stronger.

But when things fall apart there is just this, and we deal with it.

I am currently getting a great deal of pleasure out of doing the dishes and doing so uncomplainingly…

People are talking about a big reset being brought about by the corona virus. But it’s not just that. Some of us have been saying for a while that we are in a transition from an old way of looking at the world to a new. Whether political, social, scientific, or spiritual, clearly change is happening.

But any “big reset” is only ever a result of lots of little ones. It is not being done to us, it is done by us.

How are you going to see things differently today? What are you going to do differently today?

Some of you have said that my stories about truck driving have been useful. It occurred to me that this story might be of some little help in our current challenging situation.

What follows is a description of one of my most testing days as a lorry driver.

Firstly I was on my own, heading in to London, totally responsible for a 32 tonne mortar mix tanker. This isn’t ready made concrete but a mixture of sand and cement that gets blasted under pressure into large silos that are located on building sites.

The second thing is that not only do I have the responsibility for a large vehicle heading in to one of the busiest cities in the world, but I also have a knot in my stomach because I know that at the end of my drive I have a risky and stressful delivery process to carry out when I get there. Coupling up large pipes between the truck and the silo, firing up the noisy compressor, and trying not to blow the whole lot up was testing!

Lastly I am aware that the expectation is that I will do at least two, ideally three, such drops in the day, each time returning to the plant west of the city and repeating the whole process, so I feel under time pressure too.

The truck is fantastic. Relatively new and state of the art in terms of monitoring and cameras etc. But because of its weighty load, and the muddy locations I am delivering to, it has a manual gearbox to give more precise control over traction. Not only that but it has a split range gear box, with a high and a low range, that I have to switch between using an extra lever on the gearstick. Not a big problem except that the change from the upper range to the lower coincides with the speed change as you go into a roundabout. Add to this the fact that the truck really doesn’t like going down into third gear and you can imagine desperately trying to push the bloody thing down through the box without inadvertently ploughing straight over the roundabout!

Stressful!

But it gets worse. I hadn’t been to the site that I was delivering to before, it was on a bit of land which had confusing postcodes, and was on a road on which there are currently about half a dozen major building sites. It was far from clear which of these was the one I was aiming for. Add to this the fact that the road I was on didn’t have anywhere to turn except for a roundabout at the far end and then the one-way system at the other end forced me to go back onto the A40 and a couple of miles back up to the road to the notoriously difficult Hanger Lane Roundabout.

Each time I turned up at the wrong site I had to navigate my way out of the traffic, get close enough to the traffic marshall to speak to him, extricate myself from the entrance once I had realised it was the wrong site, and then head back up yet again to Hanger Lane.

By the time I was on my third attempt I was knackered and I was scared. I was close to packing it in and was fantasising about calling my agency, saying the keys are in the ignition, and walking away.

But then I started to slow things down. Applying what I have learned about meditation and mindfulness, noticing my breath, noticing the feel of the gear stick and the steering wheel in my hands. Enjoying each smooth gear change and precise turn. I slowly began to return to the moment. The feeling of being a failure brought on by what had recently happened began to diminish. The terror of getting it wrong again also began to reduce. I began to really enjoy the immediacy of my current actions, what was happening around me, sights, sensations, feelings as the whirling in my mind began to slow down.

This was obviously an unusual circumstance, and one that most of you won’t ever experience (except for the drivers who I know might be reading this and have to do it every day). But these practices apply generally in life.

What we think of as our past, even our very recent past, is a made up story, it’s not real, its filtered recollection of already filtered perceptions. My “story” was that I was a complete failure and utterly useless. When I got back to the yard I discovered that other drivers had also found the site difficult to find and faced similar challenges navigating their various attempts. My story was made up.

Again, in normal life, the future is most definitely a made up story. As current events are showing us our ability to reliably predict our futures are much more shaky than we like to think they are. In reality we have no idea what is going to happen in the next moment. In one respect that can feel terrifying, but in another sense, if we can hold onto this idea, it means that the future is nothing to worry about. It doesn’t exist yet. It is nothing.

All of this may sound like mumbo-jumbo but from experience it has helped me to keep the lid on when I felt like it was about to blow off. You still make decisions, often better decisions as you are calmer and more aware of what is happening around you, and you don’t disappear into a hippy daze either!

Hopefully this story might help some of you a little as you face your own challenges in the coming days.

Our lives are biologically determined by dopamine rush which is steered by culture built up over millennia. Our chattering monkey brain then tries to convince us that a fictitious “we” are in control and the resulting tension between this fiction and reality drives us mad. Literally.

P.S I will bear in mind that any of you who choose to comment on this post telling me that I’m mad had no choice but to do so.

P.P.S Who would have guessed what a large can of worms I opened when I failed to observe myself deciding to get out of the bath.

When the shit hits the fan you want your inside information flow to be at least as fast as what is happening outside. In most organisations this is not the case.

Conventional hierarchical communications systems are too rigid and there are too many obstacles to information flow.

Internal social networks are noisy and messy but so is life. If you have a big enough, mature enough, fast enough set of internal conversations taking place then you will be better able to work out what is happening and what to do about it.

Yes it may be too late for this current set of challenges, and it is still counterintuitive for many in positions of authority, but we can all do better than resorting to WhatsApp the next time the shit hits the fan.

Collaboration is more about willingness than about process or technology.

The curiosity to notice what others are doing around you, and the inclination to share what you know or offer your effort, count for more than all the “how to articles” you can read or fancy “collaboration” software you can buy.

If people in your organisation appear unwilling to collaborate start having some honest conversations about why.

I am finding it exciting to watch the challenge of coronavirus accelerating our collective learning.

Yes, there is nonsense about panic buying loo roll, but there is also sharing of expertise, reality checking the utterances of politicians, push back against scare mongering in the media, shared and reinforced common sense, and a lot of collective compassion.

Once we have learned these things we won’t forget.

A couple of weeks ago I trapped a nerve in my back. These two weeks have given me the opportunity to think hard about my work driving large trucks with the result that I have come to the decision to stop.

Why? I have been doing it for more than a year but I still get a knot in my stomach the night before I do a job. I have never been happy with the amount of loading and unloading that I had to do, especially with the associated risks. Add to this the fact that the pay is very poor and the arguments to keep going just didn’t stack up.

There are elements of the job that I will miss. The feeling of competence operating the vehicle, the feeling of being so much higher and bigger than anything else on the road, the responsibility of exercising a skill. But then the flip side of those are also all of the negatives, not knowing what I am doing, worried it is all my fault, and terrified at the size and power of what I am dealing with.

I have no regrets at all. I learned a lot about myself, about trucks, and about people. I got to see a side of the world that most people never get near. I got to see the cleverness of the haulage industry, logistics, and construction.

I have nothing but praise and admiration for the other drivers who helped me and were kind and gentle with me. From the two saints who put up with me during my original training to all of the others who took the time and had the patience to show me the ropes. They never made me feel small or stupid.

I will miss pulling on my safety boots and my high viz jacket. I will miss making sure that my kit bag has all of the right stuff in it. I will miss the feeling of pushing my driver card into the digital tachograph. I will miss the sound of a massive 13 litre engine moving up through its automatic gearbox. I will miss really powerful power steering. I will even miss clambering around on frosty steel piping at 5am!

It’s been a hell of an adventure – but it’s time to move on.

We are all getting tired of being sold to. We can’t make a move online without someone trying to sell us something.

You can’t have online conversations any more without some bot shouting at you about things that you don’t want.

At the same time in “old media” we’re not impressed by shiny, over produced ads, and talking heads in front of green screen backgrounds are a joke.

So why do we still feel the need to import all of the above into the workplace?

Chatting to Stephen Waddington today I enthused about the power of blethering. Conversational ways of understanding things and sharing what we know.

Whether the to and fro of a network of smart people blogging about what they do and why, or long form podcast conversations between people grappling with change and how to deal with it, we could do so much better to help people adapt and move forward than shouting at them.

 

It is going to be interesting to see how people cope with working from home due to the coronavirus. In particular it will be interesting to see how managers cope with not being able to see their staff in the office.

I know things have shifted a bit over the last few years but for many people, perhaps most, doing office work still means working in offices. You only need to see the numbers of people commuting on the train into London every day to realise that this is still the case.

Some of them, especially those higher up the organisation, still don’t really know how to use remote working tools, let alone use them to best effect. I can imagine that there are going to be a few anxious moments over the next days and weeks.

If you know anyone who is struggling to adjust, and could do with some advice, you know where to find me.

As more people work from home in response to the coronavirus it will be interesting to see if it encourages them to make doing so more part of their normal working lives. If enough people make this change it could have a major impact on all sorts of things.

Apparently cities around the world are already recording drops in pollution as a result of less people commuting, and longer term it could begin to affect how we design our cities and how we live in our local communities.

But it is not for everyone. Some people find it easier to work alone with reduced interaction with others. Some go quietly mad!

At the very least this may make us think harder about why we work the way we do, use the tools we do, and interact the way we do. In the long term this would be a good thing.

More than twenty years ago when I connected up my US Robotics 1400 baud modem to the internet life changed.

Encountering Pierre De Chardin’s noosphere (the thought, prompted by the advent of radio, that there was a geological layer like the stratosphere in which all thought connected in a global brain) was an early glimpse of the path that I was on.

Spending as much of the past few decades online as I have has meant that the internet feels like an extension of my neural networks, with some of my synapses firing outside my skull and some inside.

Following those connections and thoughts led me to Jon Kabat-Zin‘s and Buddhist philosophy, through Sydney Banks‘s Three Principles and Douglas Harding‘s headless experiments, to non-duality, the principle that separation is just an idea and ultimately the cause of unease.

Nancy Neithercuts poetry, Dr. Amy Johnson‘s podcasts, and Clare Dimond’s latest book Sane are currently nudging me to the brink of not taking “myself” so seriously.

“I” still struggle with this.

But then “I” only exist in the struggle.

Without the struggle I’m not real.

And neither are you.

Not only is most of our knowledge partial in the sense of being incomplete, it is also partial in the sense of being the opposite of impartial. We filter the vast majority of the information available to our senses in terms of raw data and we then further filter it on the basis of cultural conditioning or previous experience in the form of memories.

These memories are themselves only partial recollections , in both senses of the word, of previously experienced partial understanding.

Given this it is perhaps just as well that our decisions are made by our subconscious and only later do we retrofit agency and forethought with our conscious minds.

One of the reasons that I stopped posting my blog posts directly into Facebook was that I had grown tired of some of the comments. Those that missed the point, twisted my meaning into their interpretation and then argued with it, were sneering or dismissive, etc. I am fortunate that I get less of those sort of comments than most, I am careful who I call friends, but it can still get wearying.

On the other hand it is also why I write online in the first place. If I didn’t want reactions I could just keep my writing to my journal. The point of sticking it out there on the internet is to see what reaction I get, and then choose how I react to that reaction.

And this is what I have realised that I am missing. The valuable learning opportunity of someone pressing my buttons. Why those buttons? Why are they so sensitive? What do they say about me and how I see the world?

So, in the interests of furthering my own learning I am going to start copying my blog posts into Facebook again.

Any comments on this post will be seen as a valuable learning opportunity!

The title of my book started out as a tweet. It was a response to my frustration at corporate accounts and brands starting to appear in Twitter and wanting to be my friend. How could I be a friend with a corporation?

But it works in both directions. Now that social media is saturated with brands it is easy to forget that there are real people bring their Twitter accounts. When we feel like hurling abuse at an organization that we feel have let us down or behaved badly we should remember that there is an individual behind that account, often not very well paid, and often young.

I can still feel frustrated at the impersonal pollution that brands have inflicted on my online conversations but both sides can do better.

As Ella Minty points out in this LinkedIn article “if they are not there to enter a real dialogue with their consumers (the shouting and all that included), why are they there?”

Real conversations with real people about stuff that really matters is what the internet was for. These conversations can include brands and corporations – and we can help them achieve this lofty ambition.

Many moons ago I wrote “Social media adoption happens one conversation at a time, and for their reasons not yours.”
This is true for all change where you require other people to behave differently. They need to have understood what is proposed at a personal/conversational level and seen what is in it for them.

Neither corporation wide hard sell, nor being told they “have to” work. Both of those, even if in the short term they appear to have brought about the desired changes in behaviour, invariably provoke a reaction and can even in some cases can shift things into reverse.

If you want to really bring about change you have to take the time and effort to treat people with respect and give them good reasons why it makes sense for them to do what you are asking of them.

Not many people charged with bringing about change have the necessary patience.

The collections of microbes, molecules, and mostly space that inhabit this infinitesimally small part of the universe that I have grown accustomed to think of as me cause my finger to touch the screen of my phone, which triggers electrical impulses which generate Unicode, translated into fonts, then back into zeros and ones on a packet switched network that itself is nothing but molecules and impulses such that your collection of microbes, molecules and mostly space that inhabit the infinitesimally small part of the universe that you have grown accustomed to think of as you believes it has understood.

We overlay all of this with our different stories and feel closer or further apart as a result.

Neither of us are in control of the process and none of it means anything.

It’s nothing to get bent out of shape about.

“It [the internet] is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don’t like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.” – Vint Cerf

I continually forget this even though I was there when he said it and I quote it all the time.

The internet just is.

Facebook just is.

Life just is.

My experience of life is a result of all of the cultural, genetic, and personal history baggage that I carry around with me.

It is a made up story.

Remembering this is important.

Almost every day someone in my immediate network will struggle with their technology. Whether this is while using their phones, accessing their emails, or responding to error messages from the system, it is often very basic things that they struggle with.

But it is clearly widespread. If I extrapolate what I see in my own network to the entire population then the overhead must be enormous. I know in the predominantly Windows workplace people spend inordinate amounts of time fighting their technology. One of the reasons I have always preferred Apple stuff is because they make their best efforts to reduce this level of frustration but even they are far from perfect.

This is a hard problem to solve. Technologists make their best efforts to improve interfaces and simplify processes and yet at the same time the possibilities increase and our expectations are raised. Equally people still seem to have a quite passive attitude towards technology and, in my biased view, don’t make enough effort to overcome some of the more basic difficulties.

Most of the time I try to be patient when I am asked to help but it can be frustrating. I remember a quote from an old IT guy at work: “If you want to sort out your corporate computing make UNIX the standard platform and if the buggers can’t work out how to use it they shouldn’t have a computer.” and on a bad day I feel like agreeing.

Just a couple of links this time but both current and fascinating.

An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away.
I know I go on an about “the ideology of algorithms” but this article gives a good idea of why it matters. Algorithms already deciding all sorts of things to do with people’s lives. Who gets to decide their priorities and how will we feel when we realise that they are already being applied to us?

when trust is lost.
Fascinating take on the Chinese response to the corona virus from my friend Harold Jarche.

 

Our brains are pattern seeking mechanisms. Evolution has given us an ability to see patterns of threat or opportunity. We do this all the time, and can’t stop ourselves. We string together a succession of these patterns and identify with the narrative that they create. They become what we think of as our self, our identity, what we think of as “me”.

Most of these patterns are based on things we have heard from others around us – family, society, peer groups, the media. Once we have taken in these patterns, established this narrative, and identified with it as “me”, we will do anything to hold onto it. Anything that shakes this narrative is seen as an existential threat. And it is.

If our sense of self weakens it feels like facing death. We will struggle to maintain it in the face of evidence to the contrary from the world around us. We will make ourselves miserable if that world doesn’t conform to the way we think it should be. We will fight other people who don’t agree with our narratives. We will attempt to bend the world around us to try and force it to conform to our narratives and in so doing we are causing untold damage to the planet.

We should take our stories with a pinch of salt. We should remember it’s all made up.

It is fascinating to watch people getting bent out of shape by the Conservatives excluding certain journalist from their press conference. I find it hard to care.

I watched a journalist pursuing Dominic Cummings down the road the other day and he was having none of the journalist’s attempts to grab hold of him and interview him. I’m afraid I would be the same. In the unlikely event that I am ever involved in anything “newsworthy” I wouldn’t let journalists near me.

It’s a long time since any journalist wanted to speak to me but the last few times I swore never again. Each time they were more interested in getting across their predetermined story than they were in listening to me or telling anything remotely like the truth.

Newspapers and broadcast newsrooms are bureaucracies. They are hierarchies. Journalists will toe the editorial line in order to keep their boss happy and keep their jobs. Many of them are just churning out copy to satisfy a desire for existing memes and prejudices. Many of them are not that bright.

The relationship between the press and politicians has become a cosy dance. The embarrassing Whitehall Farce that is The Today Programme has been unlistenable for years. For a while I subscribed to the Guardian, given that my views are generally left-leaning, but I gave up because the writing was just too biased to add any real understanding.

Journalists I know will bang on about the truth and overplay their role in uncovering it. Truth is slippery. Truth is malleable. Truth is overrated. Even science only purports to state currently working hypotheses. In fact the strength of science is that they don’t take any of their truths too seriously.

Perhaps journalists would do well to learn from them.

One of the companies that I drive for provide steel piping and fittings for the building trade. Very often this is to companies who do fire safety installations in large office buildings. Even existing office buildings replace this infrastructure as their ownership and use changes, so a lot of my deliveries have been to Canary Wharf, the massive business centre, in the east of London.

As I drive towards this imposing island of glass and steel I don’t stay on the surface but end up driving down the service roads into the bowels of the earth beneath these shiny buildings. It’s like wandering around in the intestines of some massive powerful beast.

Today, I will stay on the surface having a coffee with the CIO of one of the businesses whose headquarters are in Canary Wharf.

In some ways the contrast couldn’t be more stark, in other ways it’s all just life. London life, in all its varied glory.

Some of you may remember my bath time experiment of trying to observe myself deciding to get out of the bath – and the fact that I found it impossible to do so. In fact, once I began to notice this, it became apparent that I am unable to observe myself making any decision, or for that matter deciding to have any particular thought. They emerge and I become aware of them.

Decisions and thoughts bubble up from my unconscious and only become apparent to my conscious mind after they have happened. Modern neuroscience is able to observe this process and confirms that the parts of our brain in which conscious thought takes place react to stimuli after the subconscious areas.

I am not in control of my mind any more than I am any other organ in my body. My heart beats without me having to think about it, my lungs breathe without any intervention on my part, and thoughts arise whether I think I am choosing to have them or not.

The decisions we appear to make are a result of our biology, our genetic inheritance, our culture, and our previous experience. We can’t help the thoughts that we have. Our apparent decisions to act are likewise out of our control. We often do things and wonder afterwards what on earth we were thinking. We weren’t!

The same it true for everyone else. They can’t help what they do or say. They are not in control. We can remove ourselves from their influence, we can protect ourselves from them, and in extremis we can incarcerate them, but we should always remember that they didn’t have a choice – any more than we do.

I have rarely needed a manager to decide things for me. Give me lots of context – yes. Give me support when I decide to take action – yes. But make decisions for me – not so much.

It fascinates me how many managers still feel burdened with the responsibility of making decisions for people. This is clearly due to legacy baggage of what is expected of a manager.

But this feeling of responsibility invariably increases their stress and either cultivates passivity in their staff or causes frustration when the decisions are inappropriate or ill timed.

With enough information people know what to do. Telling them what to do rarely works. Maybe it’s time to lay down that burden of responsibility.

As with all media stories, and social media memes, it is easy to become dulled to the impact of what is being said. Seeing all the posting and commentary about the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz passing by on TV screens and in social media news feeds it is all too easy for it to join the list of things that we “consume” – and then move on to the next snack.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz. The place has an impact way beyond words or images. It seeps into your bones. It doesn’t go away.

If you get the chance – go.

I recently watched a Louis Theroux documentary on the Hillsboro Baptist Church. It was the second one where he goes back to visit the community after the father, who founded the church, had died. One of his daughters summoned up the courage to leave the group and ended up being a very articulate critic of its ideas and the behaviour of its members.

When explaining to Louis how she had become aware of how wrong headed their views were, and how she had realised that she had to leave, she placed great importance on the connections she had made on Twitter. These connections were her first experience of a world outside the church and the ongoing conversations there had helped her realise that there was another way of looking at the world.

In the early days of the web, and my interest in explaining its potential, I used to use the example that in the past if you were the only bloke growing up gay on a remote island in the West of Scotland you had no way of know that that was OK. With the internet you were suddenly able to connect with people beyond your limited community and explore other ways of viewing society and your place in it.

With all the current headlines about the downsides of social media, and the problems it is seen as causing, it is easy to get disillusioned with the web. It is also fashionable to denigrate the original excitement that we all had in the early days as being naive optimism.

But what I loved about the Hillsboro story is that it shows that the potential is still there. That ability to cross boundaries, expand our view of the world, and foster new connections is still available to all of us. We just have to choose to use it.