I wish that…

The other night I took my fiancé out for dessert and as I sat happily eating tiramisu, she looked up from her chocolate mud cake and said ‘I wish that..’

At that moment, a few quick sparks shot through my mind and a thought formed.

We all make wishes. We wish for a better job, more money, a bigger house, a flatter stomach, better weather, health, a beautiful partner, safety, world peace, equality, an end to suffering and the list goes on and on and on. A wish is wanting a shift from the current position to another; struggle to wealth, sickness to health, sad to happy. How many wishes have we made up until this point? How many birthday candles extinguished, falling stars dreamed upon and eyelashes gently blown off fingertips?

Have we really thought this process through?

Perhaps our wishes are being granted, but the process is random and limited. Rather than asking which we would prefer, the genie picks a wish out of a hat and the chance of any one wish being selected is relative to the number of wishes it contains. If we have 1000 wishes in there, what are the chances of a worthy selection? Is the hat full of high quality wishes we really desire or is it diluted by frivolous, meaningless wishes that were made in a moment of weakness. Maybe at a time when circumstances existed that were not to our liking or didn’t meet our expectations. Like a cold and rainy day on a beach holiday – ‘I wish it was warmer’. There may be an opportunity cost component to wishing that we have been neglecting, as each wish may lower the chances of an alternative being granted.

Imagine someone that you consider successful. What wishes have got them there? I wish I had this skill, I wish to meet this person, I wish this deal goes through, I wish for a bit of luck, I wish for… Imagine that their actual success was determined by a focused wishing practice where each wish aimed them down a particular path. This meant that all of the wishes in the hat were consciously invested so that any one wish chosen for granting was definitely one that furthered their journey. Sounds ludicrous right?

Everyone realises that for the most part, success in anything does not depend on wishing. It depends on ideas, development and action. It takes patience, control, direction, knowledge, movement, training, practice, failure, learning, discomfort and numerous other skills. It takes work.

Most of our wishes are directed at things that either we cannot change, such as the weather – or another person. Things we are impatient to get or for which we are unwilling to invest energy, such as our fitness level or financial security, also claim a number of wishes. If we prioritise our wishlist by sorting it into categories and doing a little research on each we may better understand what is going on.

Perhaps headings like: what we can affect, what is valueless to our big picture, and what we feel we have no power over would be suitable sub-categories. Once listed. the things we can affect, we attempt to do. The useless we drop. And, the things we can’t affect, we accept and then possibly find value in them as they are.

I will assume that most, if not all wishes, are inherently selfish by nature. We wish for power, prestige, respect, attractiveness, material items and social status. We wish that others will move so that we don’t have to. We wish for our side to win and our position improved. We wish to succeed in all we do. We wish for the world to be different, less volatile, less risky and more peaceful.

In uncertain economic times, the desire for stability increases. Wishing for company success, government saviours, changes in culture or institution is probably not an effective use of our time. Neither is denial, distraction or ignorance to these areas. To move from one position to another with a certain amount of accuracy, intention is required. ‘I intend to…’. But as we know ‘the smallest deed is better than the greatest intention’. The smallest deed meaning: action. Not just any action though, action with a conscious intention to move in a specific direction. It doesn’t mean that we are forever tied to this path and without it we have failed, just that it is a directed movement away from a starting point. Once moving, options increase and as knowledge deepens and widens, the course can be adjusted. If we are looking for cultural, country or global movement, it takes the concerted effort of many hands working together with each hand knowing it has a certain responsibility to uphold as an individual.

This is obviously a little tongue in cheek but consider two things:

1) When we make a wish for the sun, growth also requires the rain.
2) Be careful what you wish for, as you might just get what you ordered.

My current wishlist? I wish for the strength to accept the responsibility of my experience, the power to help those I can, the ability to challenge my understanding and the courage to know and be myself. And just in case none of my wishes ever get granted, I will work hard to improve myself each day so that I may continually bring some value to this world.

Oh, and my fiancé wished that she could always be this happy. Good mud cake can do that to a person.

What do you wish for and what will you do about it?

Taraz Kanti-Paul

Riding the Exponential Tail

Do you remember much of high school maths?
Do you remember doing anything with Standard deviations?

So, what is it?

A normal distribution curve describes the amount of variation within a set of data values from the mean (average). The further away a point lies from the middle, the more unusual it is in terms of frequency. When I was at school and university, I never really paid much attention in maths or statistics and spent even less time trying to understand how these concepts applied to the real world. I knew they did, but I always thought that it was never going to be my area and had little relevance to what I would end up doing. These days, I still don’t know much about maths, but I do see many areas of application and will invest a little time to understand a touch more.

However a few basics are required as a reminder:

If you look at the bell curve above, each section contains a certain amount of the data set within it, with the middle point being the average (0). So, in standard deviation 1 there is about 68% of all occurrences and the further away from 0, the less likely an event will happen.

To imagine this, think of the likelihood of a daily event occurring.

Standard deviation 1: likelihood about twice a week – Perhaps something like watching a movie on TV
Standard deviation 2: likelihood about every three weeks – perhaps something like going out to a restaurant with friends
Standard deviation 3: about once a year – The staff Christmas party

Pretty easy to understand so far. What about standard deviation 4 for the possibility for a daily even to happen?

Standard deviation 4: about once every 43 years (about twice in an average lifetime) Perhaps breaking a bone
Standard deviation 5: about once every 4700 years. (the chance of it happening within our lifetime is less than 2 percent)

Frequency matters

Now, as you realise, this depends on the source of the data set. For the average population, breaking a bone is quite unlikely as the normal person does not open themselves up regularly to high-risk, bone-breaking situations. However, if the set comes from let’s say, motocross competitors, where each day their profession exposes them to the opportunity, the likelihood of a particular person experiencing the event increases. So with frequency, the instances of a possible event goes up. applied across an entire population, the average is skewed (pushed one way or another) because of these high-incidence outliers.

Let’s innovate

Take this into the workplace and apply it to change ideas. Let’s work under the assumption that all ideas are for the better (a big assumption). An idea that lays in the 1st deviation is one that slightly improves upon the current state, it doesn’t move far from today’s position. The 2nd deviation has a larger affect but nothing significantly ground-breaking, and in the 3rd, an idea is quite different from the current position and has a significant impact on the business. How many ideas do you need to achieve one of each?

If we put a team together tasked with developing innovation within an organisation and they begin throwing ideas around. Still assuming no negative ideas, of course.

1st: 3 ideas produce 2
2nd: 22 ideas produce 1
3rd: 370 ideas produce 1

What about the 4th: only one in almost 16,000 ideas lay here. And what could this idea achieve (still acting under the assumption it is for the better)? Major disruption and organisational impact that may create a complete strategy shift.

And if it is in the 5th?: one in 1.7 million ideas produces an entire industry changer that would have global repercussions and knock on to unrelated industry.

Sounds easy enough to disrupt global industry as all the team needs to do is have 1.7 million ideas. Well, yes and no – as always. For a start, if the team is together for 40 years and works continuously they will need to have 116 ideas per day. Secondly, the hardest part for the team isn’t creating any one idea, but selling the idea to decision makers, getting resources and implementing it into the organisation effectively so that it can have a chance to make an impact.

Feeling resistant

Most people understand that implementation of organisational change can be difficult for even the most minor of movements and the more stable (comfortable) the culture or environment, the less likely people want to move. The further away from the average an idea deviates, the more uncomfortable it is for those required to enact it. Essentially, more resistance is met. If we then plot the normal distribution of 100 people’s willingness to change from one work process to another. With 0 being unwillingness. 68 people are slightly open to change, 27 are somewhat open to change, 4 are very open and 1 (actually 1/3 of a person) is exceptionally open to change.

The chart below represents that the further the thought deviation from the mean, the greater the resistance to change (willingness to accept an alternative position)

Get thinking

Going back to our team though, they need not work alone on their ideas. Their ideas are being driven and directed by experience and affected by external ideas that are invading their thoughts. Plus, as their ideas are introduced to the organisation, they meet with varied minds and as more heads take the responsibility to think deeper, the more new ideas get formed. As people add their own adjustments and flavours, these unintentional collaborations inadvertently lower resistance, as more people feel part ownership rights to the developing ideas. The more these ideas meet, collide and interact, the stronger they develop and the closer we come to not only discovering world-changing ideas but the more likely it is that any given idea will fall upon the ears of those with the resources, influence, skills or intelligence to realise its full potential. And the more this process happens, the more tolerant we become for future change cycles. Small changes, introduced a bit at a time, really can change the world as they lead on to the large.

Getting change requires supporting change

Each day we hear how movement is necessary, how innovation and growth must take place, how companies, organisations and governments must develop in order to be efficient, effective and relevant in an ever changing world. Leaders are tasked with developing and attempting to implement ideas into organisations where 2/3rds of the people have quite strong resistance to the prospect of moving from the status quo. Even an average-impact idea that lies in the 2nd deviation has little chance of gaining momentum in most environments let alone an extreme outlying thought that could change a company, country or start a global movement. (Side note: This may indicate towards a critical flaw in majority rule if the majority wish to remain comfortable and standing still)

What I am attempting to demonstrate is that as diversity of thinking increases so does resistance to it. But, if people train to widen their tolerances, think deeply, talk openly, question and push thoughts both together and apart, we can develop and support some amazing movements. We could turn the representation of extremist thinking from a media negative into one of global advantage that aims to bring maximum benefits to all by creating new normals where acceptance, resilience, creativity, passion, forgiveness, responsibility, compassion and trust become the average.

Looking backwards, moving forwards

Those that live beyond the 3rd deviation need to be nurtured not starved. Supported, not ostracised. Seneca, Plato, Da Vinci, Galileo, Curie, Einstein, Gandhi, Turing, Mother Theresa, Hawking and many, many more are extremists of the mind. They pushed the boundaries of their thinking into areas far from the average thoughts of their times and added enormous value to our world for doing so. Going forward, economic stability, social prejudices, world hunger, disease, environmental issues and war won’t be solved by thinking like yesterday, they will be cured by outliers and freaks of thought that get supported by the other 99.7 percent.

Taraz Kanti-Paul

Scaling what we think we know

Where are our preferences and impressions formed, are our feelings ours, can we truly take another’s perspective, is there an alternative? What we really know and why to take the journey for answers.

Get on the scale

As we travel along our journey, our experiences, training, parents, friends, media, governments and thoughts come together to create a scale rating system. Most times, this scale is created passively as our mental systems manage and compile information in the background into a rulebook that then dictates our impressions of the world around us.

To evaluate something we compare it against our personal reference scale to tell us what sounds, looks, feels, smells and tastes and weigh it as good, bad and everything in between. But, these scales are built to appraise more than just our physical senses. We develop these for psychological and emotional experiences too. Interpersonal relationships, beliefs, values, likes and dislikes, actions made personally and by others, and a vast amount of other aspects that we place judgement upon. Essentially, these scales create our position on all matters that concern us (and many areas that don’t).

Getting emotional

A conflict is created when something challenges our current position. If someone acts out of accordance with our social rules, we feel uncomfortable. If our ideas are questioned or criticised we feel attacked and get angry. And, if we act in a way that breaks our own values, we feel guilty. But, when the situation aligns with the rulebook we are satisfied and if we act to surpass our personal levels, we feel happy and proud. All of our emotions skip and slide based on these judgement scales as they deliver our expectations for the way things ought to be, shouldn’t be, what is best or the worst. We become emotional slaves to an invisible list that we have been programmed to follow.

Another’s shoes

Once a position is held, it is very difficult to move to an unfamiliar one and this in part is why it is challenging to shift to another person’s perspective. It is uncomfortable and sometimes terrible to change perspective but even when a move is made, it is impossible to truly see through their eyes. Having only our experience, our scales, our held positions, we can never fully imagine those of somebody else. We can never completely understand, we can only guess. And because our seemingly objective guesses (born from limited information and a position calibrated from personal experience) match with what we already know, we feel that we have done well and drawn an accurate and relevant picture. Empathy is a skill that is used as an attempt to close the gaps in interpersonal positioning but due to varying experience and the resulting reference points, it is an imperfect tool that can never completely achieve parity between positions. There is always an error.

Closing the gap further?

Understanding. Not an understanding of their position, an understanding of ours. The acknowledgement that no matter how strongly we feel, our gut reactions, our personal experience, our norms and beliefs – have made us biased. Our own shoes affect our thinking on all things. We are attached to what we know much more strongly than to the unfamiliar and are obviously completely blind to what we do not know. To obtain understanding, we have to accept that we are imperfect in our judgement due to our priming and preferences and allow room for errors. In so doing, we leave space for growth because we have a deeper understanding of where we may be, where they could be and where other things possibly lay; and know that we may be wrong. We can build a more relevant map and understand that the blurred lines between locations are a known unknown, but do exist.

From an emotional standpoint, the understanding that our thoughts, actions and reactions cause feelings that may not be entirely accurate (and at times are significantly inaccurate), we are better able to disconnect, observe our position and interject a little active rationality to better understand the situation. Our decision making ability can improve not by the increase in information, but by the increase in awareness of potential judgement errors and therefore the risks involved.

Sail off the edge of the world

The sight of uncertainty raises questions of what is hiding in the fog and like an explorer looking to discover what lays beyond the horizon, we can journey into these areas and begin to clear the air. With a curious mind, and an open heart, challenges are met firstly by acceptance, secondly by questions and hopefully, as the right questions are asked, understanding. When it comes to communication between people, what is often hiding in the murk is a lot more similarity than difference but our positions and the trust in the accuracy of them, work to make unknown waters no-go zones. This lowers the chance of conversation, narrows dialogue between borders and therefore any real, honest and truthful understanding.

Grow together

The fog insulates us from having our position challenged and can help us feel a sense of security but, it isolates us from each other and can make us cold, inflexible and ignorant. When two parties both work to blow the fog from the distance between, they grow outwardly together, and inwardly deeper. An internal repositioning of narrow-minded knowing to open-eyed unknowing, sharing experience and challenging the reference scales opens the possibility for acceptance, understanding and change; and greatly increases its probability.

It takes one

If a question comes from a root to understand, accept and be open, a reply is more likely. The response or lack of one hints at a position which aids understanding and points to roads through barriers so that the conversation can continue. If the reply comes from a curious, like-mind, the conversation is one of effectiveness, development, adaptability and mutual growth. The benefits are large, the implications are huge.

Taraz Kanti-Paul

One voice to start a conversation, two to continue, many for peace. Fear dies with understanding.