Eight to Late

Despite our carefully laid plans, the lives of our projects and the projects of our lives often hinge on events we have little control over. Robert Chia stresses this point in his wonderful book, Strategy without Design:

“Ambitious strategic plans, the ‘big picture’ approach that seeks a lasting solution or competitive advantage through large-scale transformations, often end up undermining their own potential effectiveness because they overlook the fine details of everyday happenings at ‘ground zero’ level.”

At one level we know this, yet we act out our personal and work lives as if it were not so.

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In business (and life!) we are exhorted to think before doing. My boss tells me I need to think about my team’s workplan for next year; my wife tells me I need to think about the future. Thinking is at the centre of our strategies, blueprints, plans etc.  – the things that supposedly propel our lives into a imagined, better future. 

The exhortation to make detailed plans of what we are going to do is a call to think before acting.  As Descartes famously wrote, cogito ergo sum:  thinking establishes our being.

But is that really so?

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In his posthumously published book, Angels Fear, Gregory Bateson noted that:

“There is a discrepancy of logical type between “think” and “be”. Descartes is trying to jump from the frying pan of thought, ideas, images, opinions, arguments etc., into the fire of existence and action. But that jump itself is unmapped. Between two such contrasting universes there can be no “ergo” – no totally self-evident link. There is no looking before leaping from “cogito” to “sum”

The gap between our plans and reality is analogous to the gap between thought and action. There is ample advice on how to think, but very little on how to act in difficult situations. This gap is, I think, at the heart of the problem that Chia articulates in his writings on emergent approaches to strategy.  

Understanding this at the intellectual level is one thing. Grasping it experientially is quite another. For, as they say, there is no better way to learn than through experience. 

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A few weeks ago, I attended a 10-day Vipassana course at the Dhamma Bhumi centre in Blackheath. Late April is a beautiful time in the Blue Mountains, with glorious sunshine and autumn colours just starting to turn. A perfect setting to reflect and meditate.

Vipassana, which means insight in Pali, is a meditation technique that revolves around observing the often-transient sensations one encounters across one’s body without reacting to them  (for example, that itch at the back of your head right now).

The objective is to develop a sense of equanimity in the face of an ever-changing world. Strangely, it seems to work: the simple act of observing sensations without reacting to them, if done in the right away and for long enough, has a subtle influence on how one perceives and responds to events in the world.

Now, I would not go so far as to say the experience was life changing, but it has certainly made me more aware of the many little incidents and encounters of everyday life and,  more importantly, better mediate my reactions to them.  That said, it is still very much work in progress.

Buddhist metaphysics suggests that the practice of Vipassana helps one (gradually) understand that it is futile to force change or attempt to bend the world to one’s will. Such acts invariably end in disappointment and frustration; any planned change aimed at achieving a well-defined, stable end-state will miss the mark because the world is Heraclitean: ever-changing and impermanent. 

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Heraclitus famously asserted that everything is in motion all the time or all things in the world are constantly changing. Hidden in that statement is a paradox: if everything is changing all the time, then it is nigh impossible to pinpoint what exactly is changing. Why? Because nothing in the universe is stable – see Bateson’s article, Orders of Change, for more on this.

Lewis Carroll describes this paradox in a conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar in Chapter 5 of Alice in Wonderland:

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

If the world is ever-changing then so is one’s own identity, not to mention the identities of everything else around us. This brings up a raft of interesting philosophical questions that I neither have the time nor expertise to confront. 

However, I can write about my lived experiences.

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Anapana is a breathing technique taught as a prelude to learning Vipassana. The technique involves focusing on the sensations caused by breathing – for example, the coolness felt above the upper lip on an incoming breath and the corresponding warmth on exhalation.

After a day or two of intense practice I became reasonable at it. So much so that at times deep in a Anapana session, it felt like the observer and the observed were distinct entities: the “I” who was watching me breathe was no longer the me who was being watched.

This was disconcerting. I asked the teacher what was going on.

His terse reply: “don’t worry about it, just do what you are doing.”

At the time his response felt deeply unsatisfying. It was only later I understood: as Wittgenstein famously noted in the final line of the Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Some things are best experienced and learnt through experience than spoken (or written about) or taught explicitly.

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An organisation is a complex system in which much of the complexity arises from the multiple pathways of interaction between the people who comprise it. The objective of an organisational strategy (of any kind) is to get all those people working purposefully towards a well-defined set of goals. Such a strategy is invariably accompanied by a roadmap that describes what needs to be done to achieve those objectives.  Very often the actions are tightly scripted and controlled by those in charge.

But those who wish to control change are no different from those who believe in a chimerical stability: they are today’s Parmenideans. Many years ago, the cybernetician and organisational theorist, Stafford Beer, wrote:

“The most famous of the believers in change was Heraclitus, working in Ephesus, best known for teaching that everything is in constant flux. It was he who wrote that you cannot step into the same river twice. But just down the road the philosophers of Elea were contending that change is impossible. Parmenides, for example, taught that all change is inconceivable – its appearance an illusion. All this in 500 BC. The argument rages on. Today’s management scone is typified in my experience by people fervidly preaching change to people who fervently embrace change – on condition that nothing alters.”

A little later in the same piece, he notes, “Society is Heraclitian; but Parmenides is in charge“

One could say the same for organisations.

But then, the question is:  if tightly scripted and controlled approaches to strategy don’t work, what does?

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The technique of Vipassana is simple, straightforward and can be summarised in a few lines:

The basic procedure is to scan (turn one’s attention to) all parts of the body in sequence, objectively observing the sensations one feels on each part. A sensation is anything that comes to your attention. It could be temperature, humidity, itchiness, pressure, strain, pain etc. Although one is immediately aware of relatively intense sensations itches and pains, one is typically not attuned to the subtle, ephemeral sensations experienced across one’s entire body all the time. The technique forces one to focus on the latter in an equanimous manner – i.e., without reacting to them. Instead, one uses these sensations to guide the pace at which one does the scan. See this reddit post for more.

The simplicity is deceptive.

It was sometime in the latter half of the course – may be day 6 or 7 – I realised that a key aspect of the technique is its indirectness. The sense of balance and equanimity I was practising during meditation was, almost imperceptibly, spilling over into other aspects of my life. I found myself being more relaxed about small things I would normally get upset about. Not always, of course, but more often than I used to.

Habits of a lifetime take a while to change, and the trick to changing them seems to centre around taking an oblique or indirect route.

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In a paper published in 2014, Robert Chia noted that:

“Managing change then is more about small, timely and quiet insertions made to release the immanent forces of change always already present in every organizational situation. Change then appears unexceptionally as a naturally occurring phenomenon; it does not attract undue attention and does not generate unnecessary anxieties. Obliqueness of engagement is key to managing sustainable change in a world that is itself ever-changing.”

From personal experience – and more about that in a moment – I can attest that such an indirect approach to change, which leverages latent possibilities within the organisation, really does work. Akin to natural evolution, it is about repurposing or exapting what is at hand to move in a direction that takes one to a better place.

As Chia wrote,

“The Emergent perspective emphasizes a ‘bottoms up’ approach to change and views outcomes as the result of the cumulative and oftentimes ‘piecemeal’ adaptive actions taken in situ by organizational members in learning to cope with the exigencies of organizational situations.”

So, back to the question I hinted at earlier: how does one act in such a manner?

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Strangely, few if any proponents of the Emergent perspective have offered any advice on how to develop and implement strategy in an indirect manner. As Bateson once noted,

“What is lacking is a theory of action within large complex systems, where the active agent is himself a part and a product of the system.”

A couple of sentences later, Bateson offers a route to a possible solution:

“It seems also that great teachers and therapists avoid all direct attempts to influence the action of others and, instead, try to provide the settings or contexts in which some (usually imperfectly specified) change may occur.”

An indirect approach to change must focus on creating a context in which change can happen of its own accord.

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Participants in a Vipassana course are required to abide by a code of discipline for the entire period of the course At first I thought some of the restrictions were over the top – for example, complete silence, no reading or writing. Now I know that is not so:  the rules are necessary for creating a context in which an individual can initiate serious changes in his or her outlook and way of life.

By day three I no longer missed having my phone, journals or reading materials at hand. When the weather permitted, I spent the time between meditation sessions walking on the tracks within the centre compound. On rainy days I would just sit and reflect on the things going on in my head.

Practising the technique seems to evoke all kinds of thoughts, memories and emotions.  As we were informed in one of the evening discourses these are all expected  natural reactions caused by the process of learning Vipassana in the right context. The serene physical environment and the code of discipline provided that context.

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To be clear, creating a context for good things to happen does not guarantee a specific outcomes, let alone positive ones. The Vipassana experience is highly personal: no two people doing it will have the same experience. Yet, the context is the key because creates conditions in which beneficial outcomes are more likely to occur than harmful ones. This is reflected in the overwhelming number of people who speak positively about the experience.

As I have discussed in an earlier piece , there are many actions from which one might reasonably expect positive changes without knowing upfront, in detail, what exactly those changes are. This is exactly what Bateson was getting at when he wrote about good teachers (or change agents) who are somehow able to create “settings or contexts in which some (usually imperfectly specified) change may occur.”

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In the late 1990s, a group from MIT Media worked on a multi- year project to introduce students in rural Thailand to new learning approaches based on computing technologies. In the early stages of the project, it became evident that standard pedagogical approaches would not work for these students, not because of a lack of ability or intelligence but due a lack of relevance. To address this, the group created a context that would motivate the students to learn. They did this by demonstrating how the technology could help address problems the villagers faced – such as building a dam to store water.

The change in approach made all the difference: once students could relate the new technology to issues that they could relate to, learning came for free.  They called this approach Emergent Design.

When I came across the MIT work about a dozen years ago, I  realised it could be applied to problems of organisational change (indeed, David Cavallo – one of the MIT team – mentions that specifically in his PhD thesis). Since then, I have applied variations of Emergent Design in distinct organisational settings, ranging from multinationals to not for profits and government agencies. Although the broad approach I took was inspired by the MIT work, it gradually took on a life and identity of its own.

I have described my take on Emergent Design in brief in this article and in detail in this book.  However, if I were asked to summarise the key to Emergent Design, I would echo Bateson in saying that it is largely about creating a context in which good stuff can happen.  Doing this successfully requires the change agent to develop a deep understanding of the organisation and the way it works, and then initiating small changes that enable it to evolve in a positive direction.

Evolution is a slow process, but far more likely to succeed than revolution (see this article for an elaboration of this point).

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In a lecture on Intelligence, Experience and Evolution, delivered at the Naropa Institute in 1975, Bateson started with the remark, “what goes on inside is what goes on outside.”  He was referring to the deep analogy between human learning and natural evolution (see Chapter 6 of his book, Mind and Nature, for an elaboration of the analogy). In essence, learning and evolution are processes of change which are context dependent.  Both processes are essentially based on gradual improvement through trial and error, and context plays a key role by constraining  successive iterations of trial and error to move in productive directions.

Bateson’s analogy between what goes on in our heads and on the outside assumes an even greater significance for me when I view my experiences over ten years doing organisational change via Emergent Design through the lens of the ten days I spent learning Vipassana in Blackheath. The key lesson it brought home to me is that true, lasting change – whether at the societal, organisational or personal level – is best achieved through a gradual, evolutionary process which mirrors what goes on both on the inside and the outside.

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