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Monthly Archives: August 2014

Invisible Telecoms, the looking glass & the Hidden Art of IT Qi

14 Thursday Aug 2014

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competitive advantage, create and capture value, customer centricity, Digital, hyper speed, Invisible Telecoms, IT, Martial Art, operational innovation, opportunities, Qi, qualitative growth, resilience, Social, Solutions provision, systemic excellence, Tech, tech reflex, telecoms, Zen

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I have become an adherent to the new martial art of business. I can now see the entrepreneurial wood for the IT trees.

And in true zen stylie, what I see is all about what is unseen.

A statement of the bleeding obvious perhaps BUT in the realm of your tech and IT systems and solutions partner who enabled them, out of sight is truly out of mind.

We should not only embrace the invisible Matrix nature of IT and tech deployment. We should grow to love it. And for good reason.

The Now you see it Now you don’t approach to best in class tech and IT – apparent only by its absence denotes a win for the business.

Invisibility is success.

Because Visibility usually means you’ve a little way to go yet.

Like the word Digital. Or the word Social. IT and tech, while still top of the conversational pile and being touted as the next best C Suite thang, are patently still under-performing.

While we still say them out loud, put them on presentations, flag them, budget for them, mention them loudly in lifts it simply means they are not yet embedded properly. They are not optimally integrated. If they were we would not need to point at them.

In certain areas of business the idea of anything becoming invisible is a measure of its success. Sustainability is a very good example also of this phenomena. While there is still a CSO, and Sustainability has not migrated up into the Marketing or Operational functions, Sustainability cannot be said to be truly integrated into the nature and fabric of the business.

Much like Sustainability, Tech and IT should, in its explicit and visible form, seek to become invisible – working towards a strategy of divine obsolescence.    

Moving from an explicit visible tangible to becoming internalized, implicit, invisible: transforming into a discrete reflex or innate ability within the business: when something becomes second nature, it means that the fluid, synchronised nature of it is seamlessly connecting and connected with the ‘flow’.

IT & Tech, much like HR, is no longer a support activity as it was in the old model of Value Chains, an administrative prop to paperwork systems and communications in an analogue world. Through intra and extra nets, digital and social service improvements and propositions, operational innovations and the new world order of hyper speed intelligence and data as a primary driver of most businesses competitive advantage, IT & tech is now woven through every dimension of a business. 

So to set out to deliver Invisible Telecoms – to make the measure of success the degree of visibility of IT & tech dimensions of the business is compelling.

If you are a solutions provider in the area and your goal is to work with clients to embed IT and telecoms to such a degree that they become invisible – transforming into the company’s systemic operational reflex, the synaptic system controlling the optimal operational ‘flow’, then your goal has exceptional commercial value.

The ambition to take it to the nth degree until it becomes the company’s ‘second nature’ if you will presets a business for greater flexibility agility and focus.

Invisibility also becomes a very clear metric of customer centricity.

If you’re in the business of selling IT and tech, in the real world of value, you need to move from pushing buttons boxes and fibre to selling the space to think and act on building a more resilient business through tech.

You need to be in the business of selling Mind-width not bandwidth: free your mind and your ass will follow as Funkadelic sang. Unlocking the entrepreneurial reflex in the business by liberating the customers mind of Tech & IT distractions – leaving them free to concentrate on creating exceptional ‘flow’.

To a customer Invisibility is about the goal of making IT & Tech less and less present in my eye-line: less of a priority: less visible in my inbox everyday, dropping away to being something that just ‘is’. The concept of turning IT & tech into a truly ethereal concept for a business is brave and powerful.

Creating the Qi model for smart businesses, changing the whole way we thing about IT, moving it from rational and engineered to being truly systemic, flow orientated and about cultural and social vitality and wellbeing – wellbeing from the inside out.

Qualitative growth is hard to see or imagine let alone define and capture through a complex maze of surface connectivity, functionality and capability. The ability to mine qualitative growth opportunity needs to be a reflex in the business facilitated by invisible technology and hyper speed connectivity. The systemic fabric and infrastructure needs to be able to act at the speed of the human mind and work well in advance of it.

Time to remove the IT bandages and unsee what is beneath. The degree of how much is left unseen will be down to the mastery of the CTO and their digital partners in crime. 

This truly is the looking glass and the wormhole rolled into one. A world of infinite possibility only recognisable in each successful step towards a wholly more resilient and differentiated business – one focused on unleashing minds to do what they should be doing. Walking the talk is not an app that you buy; its a disposition that you live.

White rabbit anyone? 

crimes of fashion, loose suits, bad shoes & the dark art of sartorial premonition

14 Thursday Aug 2014

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So a thought crossed my mind, of well-dressed men with violent hearts.

Strangely, it happened as I wandered through Regents Park. Perhaps it was the glance to the right through the trees to the security personnel standing outside one of the park’s beautiful regency residences – a member of ‘staff’ with a distinctly eastern bloc special-forces tilt to their gait, posture and physical presence.

Even weirder, the trigger was not the mallet-like, box-thumb hands that could squeeze the life out of me in a heartbeat (a stalled one that is); or his potential tightly-wound, to unleash unholy and highly trained hell armed or otherwise on any kind or number of assailants.

It was not even a sudden turbulent curiosity cloaked in too many spie films about special ops backstories; or on what continent or continents his personal attritional signature might have been developed.

It was actually the cut of his suit.

Yes, amidst the wealth of possibilities for curiosity to be pricked, it was the sartorial that leapt to the top of the pile for me.

The reason it did so was held in the fact that there was the shadow of something terrible about him. But it was not held in his potential for murderous activity or at the very least, its highly painful and vaguely psychopathic cousin, maiming.

I realised that the most disturbing thing about him was the shadow of death that was cast across him – and not that of anyone else’s. It was the shadow of his own.

The suit was the signature of his own demise. His whole sartorial self, was stained with a destiny more aligned with the dusty bottom of a builder’s skip behind some grand hotel In Budapest, than it was the baize surface of a blackjack table in the Sporting Club in Mote Carlo.

Now, to be clear, the look I am describing is not to be mistaken for just plain bad, really cheap or misguidedly chosen clothing and everyday wear.

This also should not be seen to stumble into the wardrobe of the ill-fitting porter’s uniform, the one size too big overcoat of the hotel doorman (with give away chasm between the back of the coat collar and shirt collar). And this absolutely should not under any circumstance be mistaken for the shambling borrowed suit look, quite popular at weddings and court appearances (thought the latter might come the closest). 

The suit was dark blue – almost black. But the vents were a little too over stated; the lapels a little too obvious. It was slightly ill fitting. His shoes were exceptionally well polished.

There was nothing of the stealth-wealth class enshrined in the uber-discretion of Commander Bond’s suit, personally cut by Gieves, an open stitched silk shirt, shod in a well turned pair of Lobbs, a understated pochette off-setting the breast pocket.

The benefit of the minutiae of class correctness and breeding and having been around money and its vestiges all one’s life, means that invariably smart clothes are worn comfortably, a cloth skin which the wearer is happy in, regardless of whether they are loose or tight, cheaply accessorised or expensively purchased.

(Though to be frank some might think otherwise having spent an afternoon in the company of the finer, older end of the British aristocracy: where one could be forgiven for thinking that the ladies from the tills at Sainsbury’s had popped on a frock and picked up the male vagrants from the local AA meeting on the way round to the Manor House.)

Having spied this man, and as my mind wandered through a picture album of gangsterdom and thuggery I realised that it was the same reoccurring theme.

Everyone looks like they’re dressed in their funeral suit.

To be fair these types of men are built for attrition. Built to haul, bludgeon, rip, cut, break and prevail – whether that is with a sharp plough across a barren field, with a sledgehammer about the head of fence post, with a weighted crane wire on a Rig, with the brittle fingered winching of a north sea haul, or with a hand, knife, gun, grenade or club across another human’s being.

But unlike their forebears, whose best suit only came out for a wedding and a funeral, these men wear the wrapping of wedding and funeral as their work clothes.

Perhaps it is because their lives are marked on a potentially much shorter trajectory than everyone else’s that they need to live (and wear) all of their lives at once.

But there suddenly was the striking truth of it for me.

Theirs is a look of the open-coffin funeral. They have the look of a dead man walking.

The Security personnel had that way of letting their arms drop in a V in front of them, crossing at the wrists, with one hand placed across the other at hip height.

It takes little for those same wrist-crossed ‘hand-over-hand’ arms to move upwards towards the middle of their chest to a point of eternal peace and repose – like some stone hewn sculpting of the great knight at their final rest atop the crypt.  

So, the open coffin look; that of a corpse in slightly ill fitting suit they rarely or ever wore, shoes over shined, plasticky and new. The body deflating before one’s eyes, collapsing back into the folds of the suit as the last sub atomic vestiges of their living self leave the cadaver.

And now that I think back to everything from pictures of the Rat Pack and their ‘Italo-American’ Minders, to Russian secret policemen around the Kremlin, to bouncers in any city, to the petite gangsters of any over cologne cocktail bar, the look is the universal look of the Funeral.

I realized that these men seem to have raided the dressing up box of the funeral home, and perhaps there is something bleakly fitting in that they are dressed for a funeral that might given their job come to them, far quicker than you or I.

At a more rarified level, the relationship between men of violence (be they Kings, Tribal Warlords or Gangsters – there is little difference to be fair in their differing shades of socio-psychopathy) and the sartorial plumage of success is long established.

It seems that preening either pre or post violent Armageddon seems to fulfill a number of roles.

CIVILIZATION – To cloak the generator of said violence is some form of cloth grandeur and reward – like an animal skin post the brutal hunt – wrapping oneself in the prize of your violence is quite a primal past time.

ACQUISTION Equally, plunder in the shape of Cloths of gold and silk embroidered with gemstones were the first thing the status-thirsty barbarian would plump for post massacre of the innocence or après a little light butchering of the fat pigs of mercantile avarice.

UTILITY It is worth also remembering that filching a rather natty pair of strides, boots or a well made greatcoat has been the historic stock in trade of most everyone from gunslingers in the wild and rather badly dressed West to soldiers traipsing through thirty below along the Eastern Front – both the Napoleonic and WWII versions.

So the idea of clothing in some shape or form as trophies of violent conquest or subjugation has ‘form’ one might say. 

But most particularly, it is in the suits shirts shoes and accessories – the lizard skin belts, Gucci shoes, encrusted Rolex watches – of the modern day gangster that we see the preening version most vividly adorned – a modern take on the look passed down through the folklore and photographic record of the Italo-American mobster and those that aped their fashionable aspirations – of the poor kid done good; taking their place besides the senators, sages and celebrities of their age.

(Note I have not included the Afro- American and Anglo-Jamaican street gangs in this note as their sartorial aspirations broadly lie in the polar opposite direction – drawing from the dime store sports clothing rip offs and cheap synthetic shirts of their poor streets and the ghetto penitentiary look of the slung trouser inmate of the US Penal system.)

The UK mobsters of the late 40s 50s and 60s were little different to their American cousins and their middle european counterparts. London gangs sported a similar uniform of gaudy suits, over stated silk shirts, razor sharp ties and shoes – over styled and over cut.

Sartorially obsessing men with violent hearts.

To make such an observation may seem flippant in such times, when the news is filled with so much unholy (or for many and to their eternal shame) holy murderous brutality being unleashed on so may innocents by dreadful mobsters, warlords, politicians, tyrants, sovereign states and laughably-lauded Royal Houses.

But maybe in doing this I am searching for a way of easily identifying all of those who have this easy brutality in them.

My reasoning being that if one was able to pinpoint them that easily, and on a global scale, perhaps, and just perhaps someone’s god or gods somewhere, or some form of omnipotent being, or even a calamitous act of science (think Big Bang but on a smaller more human scale, with laser like targeting, really nasty Kevlar piercing particles and an eye for badly dressed violent men) would wipe their faculty and kind from the face of the earth.

But the first problem with this fantasy is that there are also a whole heap of sartorially challenged men out there who might get offed along with them which would constitute a bit of a whoops ( and a rather immediate resource issue for most financial services sales departments out there)

The other problem is that in promoting that scale of vengeful murderous ugliness, I would become just like the men in bad suits with violent hearts: which is a nightmare.

Next thing I know, it’ll be Officers Club, Oxford street. Dark blue wool suit. Over sized vents. Bad lapels. No real button holes. Synthetic yoke and quarter lined. ‘Invisible’ rayon stitching. footballer fat long knot silk tie.

Stage two: a light criminal conviction for mild affray – followed closely by escalating madness with power tools.  

Final destination: a box which, as Ted Moult put so beautifully for so many years, is fully air tight with hard wood surround.

Here’s to well dressed gentle people.

Trust Me Im a Sustainability Practitioner: storytelling, storytellers & the emollient art of not seeming ‘slippery’

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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I watched a film today. A discrete film. An understated film. A short film.

No popcorn. No slash cut dash glut editing. No highly confected verite cutaways. No corporate schlock horror probe. No desperately arch atavistic activist paddling in their own propaganda.

The film, by the Copenhagen Film Company, focused all of its attention on one man; a gentleman of about 60 years of age. The camera is unwavering. A set up shot. A few discernible cuts. Otherwise, clean clinical but mostly respectful.

Sitting in a sparse elevated office, we see incidentally that life relentlessly trammels on below and behind the speaker regardless of us and our elevated conversations; cars on streets going about their business.

The man, Mads Ovlisen, a Senior Advisor at the United Nations Global Compact. speaks of running sustainable businesses. He speaks of the UNGC committed to setting the agenda and aligning policy around sustainability issues – Energy, Water, Agriculture, Renewables, Food, Transportation, Building and Pharmaceuticals: most every pillar and issue one might ever imagine turning up on a sustainability strategy slide.

He speaks of a discrete yet powerful stakeholder group who collectively make astonishing impacts in the world through their brands and businesses.

He speaks of how much fortitude it takes to merge civil and corporate interests

The man speaks of things far from the ears or the offices of the average Brand Jonny or Jane; and probably far from their frame of reference or, to be blunt, self interest.

Though, to be fair, they would I hope understand the emotion that the film evoked in me.

Maya Angelou’s exposition on emotion versus reason: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” is a powerful philosophical sound bite for an ad man or woman looking to do more creative and insightful creative storytelling.

It is one I respect as I do spend most of my time seeking to make very complex things simple through creative story telling.

But the storytelling here was not some confected theme or hashtag slogan mantra being played out. The storytelling here was in the nature of the Storyteller.

It was not the dry content of his words that compelled me: though there was one axial moment in his discourse that fixed in my memory.

He (unsurprisingly in an axial moment) made what was for me an axiomatic statement – one which sticks in my memory.

His axiom was thus: “this is about how a company makes its money, not about how it spends it”

I found this statement scintillatingly simple. Its power for me derived from the way in which it frames the resilience strategy of a company with such philosophical clarity.

If a company finds that its focus resides in the first part of the axiomatic phrase – the pursuit of a more sustainable business is infused with a rich seam – of purpose beyond profit, ethical perspectives and corporate morality – and it gives a clear measure of the humanity enshrined within that company.

If the focus is on the second, then the company is about rational efficiencies and economies and smart procurement – a far less compelling and more importantly far less desirable mantra in attracting the right people towards that company. 

The reason why the subtle difference is or should be so important to companies is rooted in the part of their resilience strategy that demands best possible future talent be attracted in to the business.

The leadership and purpose at play in the first shading is vastly more attractive to Millennials than the second, which suddenly feels quite ’90s Business School in comparison.

Its not about which one is right or wrong. It is about which one is more powerful and compelling: and fit for the purpose.

And though the ability to sustain itself financially is paramount and primary to any business’s success, its ability to relentlessly and profitably attract best in class new and enlightened talent has to be the only strategy for future growth and stability.

As I have said, for me, though powerful, it is not the axiom in his treatise that I found so compelling.

He was the story. The storyteller as the living embodiment of the story he tells. It was not what he was saying so much as how he said it: his demeanour in the telling.

Simply put, his easy intelligence held lightly, the fixedness and the quiet purpose of his delivery were what drew me in.

His eyes and his voice where in some ways hypnotic. A ruse perhaps the cynics might say. Or is he just another modulated technocrat? Maybe.

But the simple fact for me is that his demeanour, delivery and his intention created license for me to both find his arguments authentic and trustworthy.

I would go and listen to him speak again. I WANT to find out more of what’s in his head and heart.

And therein lies the emotional killer insight.

Having spent an inordinate amount of time around the professional cabal of the sustainability world and the consultancies that advise them, I realize now that I find them often no different to the sociopaths and psychopaths of the financial and advertising worlds they so often deride.

The messianic fervor of righteousness is never far away. One need only scratch a little to find it.

I said once that I was stunned by the amount of self interest I found in what is supposedly vaunted as a shared interest space. In the 3 years between that observation and today that feeling has only strengthened.

This is where the kettle pots and blackening may well begin.

So to be clear, that is not to say that the self interest or self advancement, a certain over confidence, or arrogance and a particularly singular and thick skinned trajectory have not been wielded by self interested individuals to make brilliant and collectively beneficial things happen.

The application of one’s personal mettle in the room to achieve an objective is a precarious process at the best of times – and self PR in a good cause is a dangerous tight rope to walk at the best of times. One shouldn’t be pilloried for faltering or getting it wrong sometimes.

Furthermore, doing so while traversing the particular social minefield of a leading edge cause that requires a deft combination of rare scientific and analytical rigour and messy irrational populist behaviour change is verging on Mission Impossible status.

I have been known to hop about a stage wrapped in my own personal theatre espousing methodologies that are of personal interest to me first and foremost.

So I am the last one to talk. I could never say that the cult of personality is a satanic pall over us all.

BUT the sudden clarity the film gave me around those simple levers and pulleys: a voice and eyes that I trust.

And the sudden realization that imparting a world view where the smile barely penetrates past the retina, or simply fixes like a grimace slung under cold eyes is not going to move this forwards.

Playing ones intellect and credentials before you into a very carefully prepared rooms like a buttered juggernaut to ensure the room is won takes us nowhere – other than to the next room.

Does that mean I think we should all grin like an idiot and play the fool? Or not deploy fierce intellects when they are needed?  

Not at all.

I would be the first to say intellect wielded well, whether in arch seriousness or as playful banter is more a matter of style, circumstance and empathy than integrity. I am the first to admit that my own flippancy and ‘lightness of touch’ means that I regularly misrepresent my deeper values and beliefs in this space amongst people who do not see these as even faintly redeeming character traits. I am certain it annoys the crap out of some of the more esteemed minds of the sector, especially if they feel people like me trivialize their cause. A Shiny brand jonny. A Catch phrase Charlie. And an interloper to boot.

But I am on a populist agenda: I want us to find the language, the demeanour and the presence that makes more people turn towards us, listen and find what we impart desirable and accommodating of the real life they lead.

So for me there needs to be creative storytelling based upon what people care about to illuminate sustainability truths. And there needs to be humanity. But mostly there needs to be trust. Trust that is human in its evocation not one demanded through an attrition of rationality.

It’s a simple human mechanism: Do I trust the person imparting the ‘wisdom’ to me.

Do they make me feel bad and stupid? Or good and smart? Great. Thanks. Two of those please.

Who knows. Perhaps I a far too one dimensional for all of this and I miss the complexities and subtleties inherent in the thrust and parry.  Shallow Is the new Deep.

Al I know is that the average man or woman trying to get to the end of the month and have a nice life without bankrupting themselves need some Trust in there to even begin to listen and change tack.

And degrees, credentialing, linked in profiles or executive steering committee positions just don’t cut it with them. That’s your dinner party conversation. Not their life.

So I return to the man who speaks discretely. Sets out his stall. His beliefs and the benefits of what he does.

And at the end of it he gets my vote. I’d put him in a pub with a load of people I was trying to bring round to the cause. He might not be their cup of tea. They might even find him boring.

But I think they’d trust him.

The film can be found at http://thisistouch.com/this-is/the-news/

  

 

Celebrating our human existence & the Big Beautiful Boomerang of Science and faith

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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Just for fun – I endeavoured to make a small childlike scribble of the trajectory and meeting place between science and faith just beyond our sphere of consciousness.

Mainly because I was just wondering what happens when we cast our faith and knowledge into the void? And what comes back.

The sub-atomic particular and turbulent cosmic fizz from which all things known and unknown to us are formed – and from which all things reveal themselves – sits just beyond our consciousness.

It represents the great battle-ground on which the fundamentalists of faith and science seek to prevail.

To one group – the faithful – the fizz is an immeasurable fixed expansive and spiritual state with infinite potency and multiplicity rooted in one spiritual universal truth.

To the others – the rational – the fizz is a measurable volatile dynamic and expanding state with infinite faculty and possibility rooted in one mathematical universal truth.

SCIENCE the systematic enterprise that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe is an amazing thing and it reveals new and wondrous things to us everyday. But there is still so much unknown to us in science – and the more we discover the less we know. We now know that quantum physics and the maths that science roots itself in have been found to be common in material terms and in the more obvious nuclear physical world. But they have no idea how they overlap or how to close the chasm between them. And for all the sharp cornered reason based truths of it, even the most rigorous scientific fact or data is open to misinterpretation and manipulation for much the same reason as its theological counterpart. It exists in a rare society dislocated from the populous, hidden and closed. Its arcane nature renders it as arcane as theology. Equally, the moment the human hand or mind touches some absolute scientific truth, it is sullied: subject to human flaw and spoiling

FAITH There is much to be said for faith and its emollient and redeeming features in the hands and hearts of good people. Its ability to elevate and inspire the masses to elevate our human existence and civilise our societies can be very powerful. But this confidence or trust in a person thing, deity or view is wonderful. But we need to draw a very clear line between Faith with a big prescribed religious F and the little f of that belonging to people who just believe in something greater than us and beyond our comprehension and control

The doctrines or teachings of a religion can become a tyranny, as a belief not based on proof is far more vulnerable to manipulation than one that is rooted in measurable fact. Theology becomes the intellectual plaything of a rare society closed to the people and open to politicising and empire building, much the same as science.

The application of either kind of faith in absentia of any proof demands a leap of it, which in turn can lead to a model of sightless following. Blind faith especially in the prescribed religions suffocates honest open discourse. In this the framework lacks resilience – an adaptive reflex nature – and this is rooted in an often demonstrated inability to listen and react to things they don’t agree with in fundamental terms – unsurprisingly there is no evolutionary nature to their dogmas that can respond fluidly to the flux and flow of knowledge – which is the crux of their issue.

The big beautiful Boomerang

But perhaps for the rest of us just trying to find out how best to get to the end of the month without losing our dignity, destroying our planet or bombing our neighbour in some geopolitical fit of pique, it is the arc or trajectory that should hold the greatest reassurance. Because perhaps it allows us to understand the relative nature of these polarities of our existence in a way that is palatable and slightly more understandable.

We know that if we throw our faith out there into the atmosphere and beyond the personifications and forms our various faith-based religions apply to the infinite unknown – it eventually meets an expansive indecipherable omnipotent state beyond our comprehension. And returns to us as a fact of science

We know that if we throw our current scientific knowing out there into outer and inner space far beyond the reach of the hubble scope and microscope and out of human sight it eventually meets the inexplicable chaos of scientific truths still far beyond our human comprehension. And returns to us as an act of faith.

Out of Sight Out of Kind

Perhaps in the particular throng just beyond our comprehension we spy the missing link in the story telling of our human existence in relative terms both spiritual and material.

And by that I don’t mean who owns the story – though the human condition predicts both parties will try.

The subsequent bun-fight that would ensue if the Hadron Collider did reveal that the Higgs Bosun Particle does in fact play a role in turning mass into matter – and whether that was therefore just a further demonstration of the awesome nature of god’s great mystery espoused by the men of Faith or whether it simply removes the God head from the cosmos as many scientists would like to do once and for all.    

That both sets of fundamentalists – accent on the mentalists part – might ever manage not only to appreciate but also accept that in that subatomic fizz that reaches from a sub cellular to an inter stellar dimension, there is a particular truth of such scale and magnitude that it renders both of their emphatic natures and their insistence on continually throwing stones seem simply wilful and precocious.

That either could even for a moment imagine that they control the conversation and define the absolutes in this realm is simply arrogant and ridiculous.

So I say boomerang our beautiful existence in either direction and be happy if when thrown out there, your faith returns as small spark of science and your science as a small act of faith. Both are illuminating and enriching when kept out of the hands of the lunatics who would have either dictate the shape and form of our human happiness and sense of self-determination.

G’day.

Sustainable Human Existence, The D Word & Treading carefully

02 Saturday Aug 2014

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Brian Cox, cary Grant, China Dream, D Ream, Dream catchers, Dream In A Box, Freud, gramsci, Identity, John Stuart Mill, Loveboat, Mad magazine, Martin Luther King Jnr, Morpheus, Peggy Liu, Philosophy, Science, Sustainability, The Ancients, The Civil Rights Movement, Transforming Desire, Walt Disney, Yeats

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Funny things dreams. Profound to some – sophistry to others.
So please mind your language!

I used the word Dream in a presentation once in the UK. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry any time soon: certainly not without a lot of qualification.
Let’s just say I had not realised how ‘spooked’ grown ups can get by a word.

Equally, it served to remind me that my own slap dash use of language and bumbling naivety could do with some heavy spanner work and a healthy dose of tuning fork.

To be fair the D word popped up in very particular circumstance – a discussion about a methodology called Dream In A Box.

The methodology endeavours to reuse and recycle old wisdoms, contemporary cultural signposting, local idioms and vernaculars to write a new narrative – to re-imagine prosperity, reframe sustainability and transform desire – the consuming kind particularly – to a more enduring and sustainable model; all this in pursuit of a more sustainable human existence.

The D word was chosen for its particular resonance with and reference to ‘the American Dream’ and the staining nature of its most recent variant on our beleaguered planet. Not that it was always thus.

The American Dream was one under which all men (and, sure, yup, women, and ok, eventually, if you’re going to push it, with a civil rights movement for example, Afro-Americans) were equal.

In the heady industry-rebuilding, economy-expanding (where waists would surely follow) post-war rush to create the perfect American thriving, surviving white-picket society, that dream took a few toxic turns, until finally, it eventually settled on the perfectly trimmed lawn of the idyllic all-consuming sub Urban lifestyle that we know and love.

Cue Cary Grant movies. Loveboat. Doris Day. And the chirpy satire of Mad Magazine.

It was a dream promising the consumer citizen infinite growth, financially, spiritually, socially and collectively; all merrily based upon an apparently infinite, fecund and plentiful pool of glorious ‘Godly’ resources; material human and physical.

The patently obvious and accelerating realisation of how wrong that immaculate assumption actually was aside, the feeling in the Dream In A Box camp was that the Dream bit of the phrase was reasonably off set by the In A Box bit.

The In A Box part of it made the following particular point: unless you can find a way of containing the otherwise intangible, lofty, unreachable and mildly frustrating dimensions of a Dream and make them real in ways that are meaningful and valuable to everyday people in the everyday thread of life, you are merely peddling opiates.

Even so, for some it smacked of an over simplified homogenous hideous social chimera. A one size fits all piece of social bullying or bluff that was fundamentally anti–social in its anti-individualist bent.

But this vehemence is not a feeling reserved exclusively for the more square cornered sustainable analysts, scientists, engineers underwriting the operational truths of supply and value chains everywhere.

Dreams generally enjoy a dynamic polarity in many people’s minds.

Dreams seem to inhabit a similar place to things like religious fervor, faith and Walt Disney for many of the reason and rationality junkies out there.
To the nay-sayers and doubters, the idea of having a dream (a phrase preferably spat out or sneered through) verges on criminal self delusion and puffery.

The intangible what if nature of them seems to fill them with some form of existential dread.

There is no place for dreams in a reasonable world, especially a scientific one and certainly no place for reason in dreams  – so what if Brian ‘Mine’s Hadron Collider’ Cox’s band was called D.Ream. Doesn’t mean he ascribes to them.

The reoccurring theme seems to be that Dreams, like faith, are dangerous things – dark instruments. Dreams obfuscate the real raw nature of our human existence and all of its incumbent challenges, puzzles and conundrums.

The realm of Morpheus is a confection that far from enlightening us is seen as one that diminishes us.

Its almost as if Dreams are flawed in some evolutionary way: rendering us incapable of basic human survival; stupefied by our hazy, twinkle-filled and fantastical view of the world.
A small rummage around the point counter point arguments of, on the one hand, the evolutionary benefits set out in Anttii Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation theory, and Flannagan’s concept of Evolutionary epiphenomena (dreams as a state that lacks any form of adaptive function) on the other clearly inform us that the evolutionary jury’s out on this one.

And the case for Dreams as a scientifically proven improver of our human condition is never helped in the eyes of the scientist by the presence of Dream Catchers and other juvenile voodoo bric a brac in the windows’ of student houses and hippy retreats.

Perhaps the most virulent critics spent one long night too many at college or university pretending to give a crap as the fragile teen sitting opposite them bleated their dream stories in some desperate effort to seem windswept, deep and interesting.

Equally the phrase ‘to follow one’s dreams’ doesn’t help, in that it implies a sheep-like loyalty: a subservience in service of something intangible beyond your control. And we know how rationalists like a smidgen of control. 

Whatever it is that causes the anger and disdain; it is a powerful and quite corrosive emotion.

But, for the Dream believers, Dreams are a way of allowing people to transcend the bleak sharp cornered truths of what is and embrace the brighter potential of what could be. Dreams allow us to rise above the deterministic absolutes of any given situation and envision something better.

Martin Luther King had a dream that succeeded in helping to shift millions of black Americans from a position of sub human species needing to know its place to a powerful ethnic constituency in search of a spiritual homeland and tangible human rights and respect.
I doubt even the fiercest doubters could ridicule or set aside the power of that dream to change lives and human existence for the better in some shape or form.
There is a sense that, in the USA of the 1960s, the political power elites, intellectual tribes, state collectives, regional advocates and community activists all jostling for position on either side of the colour divide would never have convened their mighty voices into that one immutable, immoveable and deafening roar without the focus of that Dream, voiced so eloquently and publicly.

But equally, John Stuart Mill found the idea of galvanising and socialising a nation through a singular collective idyll – an idea or dream of better – was at best childish and naïve and at worst an aggressive act of hubris and societal hegemony – a social tyranny.
He believed in the axiom that ‘man should judge everything in life based upon its ability to promote the greatest individual happiness’.
“the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression …leav[ing] fewer means of escape … and penetrat[ing] more deeply into the details of life. ”The “tendency of society to impose … its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation of individuality, not in harmony with its ways”

There is a sense in this view that an individual Dream is fine while it is held safe and unsullied in the heart and the mind of an individual. It is a beautiful and highly personal wonder, broadly uncorrupted though perhaps a little influenced by the dreams of others.

(It is worth reminding ourselves that Martin Luther King Jnr. said ‘I have a dream…’; not ‘We have a Dream’. It was his; it just had the potential to move many others within it.)

It seems that while in its unadulterated individual state, that which is most emotionally proximal to its originator, a dream is widely lauded as the profound generator of poetry, music, art and literature.

Yeat’s Cloths of Gold directs the listener to ‘tread gently for you tread on my dreams’. They are presented as the purest, most precious things he has to offer the world.
Mamma Cass’s ‘California Dreaming’ protested a desire for a sunnier brighter life far removed from the cold emotionally bleak east of Fall and Atlantic swells. It is her dream and hers alone: just one that happened to be shared by a generation.

The problem it seems is that when mobilised, industrialised and socialised at scale, a dream becomes The Dream – the Mother of Suppression of the Individual in hot pursuit of the collective good. The Dream quickly becomes the destroyer of intelligent dissent and the brutal editor of different orthodoxies and philosophies that did not quite ‘fit’ ‘The Dream’. It becomes all that John Stuart Mill berated and warned of in his view of one dimensional models of collective happiness as some conjuring trick played on the masses.

Dreams also have an ill-judged and reoccurring tendency of turning up at the very heart of large orgiastic excursions into nationalistic and hubristic megalomania.
Dreams of Empire whether by Georgian and Victorian Britain, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy or the German Third Reich always seem to bear out the truth of Mr Mill’s perception.

To use a singular Dream in this way is to squash the very diversity and healthy human tension the enables us to evolve as a species. Dreams are a recidivist and controlling mechanism that are worthy of deep suspicion.

The pollutant seems (as so often is the case) to be somewhat rooted in what man has done in the name of dreams; not in the condition of dreaming which in itself is a pretty confounding experience. They are after all an axial mechanism of our deepest mind.

Dreams at their most basic level are the powerhouse of our emotional computing.
They are the synaptic equivalent of taking the big data from every facet and corner of our existence and atomically mixing it up with the narrative skills of Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Spielberg and Plato.

Dreams are the super processor of individual human potential.

They are the transcendence mechanism in us – they are the ‘reach’ mechanism that compels us to perhaps stretch beyond what seems immediately possible or probable to test the edges of what could or might be.

Science clearly sets out the power of our sleeping computations in regards to cognitive ability and capacity.

But given their sleep hosted ‘madness’, flaky associations, the abstracted corollaries that exist within them and Freud’s rather particular take on them, it is easy to set Dreams aside as garish hyperemotional gibberish – or reinvent them as some twist of needy or proving self-identification and elevation.

Most people find the sharing of what one dreams an immature act of identity assertion; usually by those who feel there is little social or intellectual mystery or magic about them. Given that it is a habit that one usually hopes dies out with the arrival of slightly greater intellectual and spiritual surety, perhaps the mere sight of the word makes them run for the hills screaming.

There is a theory that dreams exist in the sleep-scapes of REM Rapid Eye Movement and NREM Non Rapid Eye Movement and do so with a very clear function.

It is believed that the process of sleep to encode and transfer data from the temporary memory store in the conscious mind accesses and activated in NREM sleep to the long term memory store in the subconscious mind accessed and activated in REM sleep – and the continual activation of this flow is what stimulates dreams. So in that way they are a robust and meaningful process of our body science and an enricher of our more adaptive cognition.

It is not just the science of the brain that frames the arguments and beliefs around dreams and their role.

Human history and the texts of the ancients are riddled with expansive philosophical treatise and frameworks. From the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, Upanishads, and Babylonians, to the Egyptians Greeks and Romans, the powerful nature of dreams have always held a deep and profound place in our collective social memory.

In some ways perhaps the truth of Dreams lies as with many things somewhere between the two; at the point at which these two distinct perspectives overlap and stitch together; neither being the predominant force but both represented as balanced and weighted in a perfect symmetry with each other. This duality might offer us a more productive way forwards.

Gramsci invites us to apply Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will in all things. Perhaps this is the filter through which we should view Dreams and everything to do with them in regards to the ambition of transforming the more toxic desires of the average consumer.

Certainly in regards to the Dream word being used as a way to frame the spiritual social and material vision of a more sustainable form of consumption, Gramsci’s invitation would help balance the two dimensions.
The pessimistic Intellect – the science – interrogating the truths of how we engineer and support these more sustainable lifestyles while the optimistic Spirit – the philosophical – compels a more transcendent human nature be applied at every opportunity – a higher human purpose that might take everyday humanity beyond the impenetrable science and just doing enough to scrape through.
This would liberate the word and the language around it to be both rooted in the deep science that will be required to reinvent our standard forms of consumption and yet elevated by the optimism of a collective human endeavour lived in real time in the real world.

And perhaps if we liberated the word – set it free from the shackles of an Either/Or model of determinative application we might find something richer and more human again in Dreams.

If perhaps we also recognised that in regards to visionary models of human consumption, Dreams can be nuanced, shaded and culturally meaningful even at a meta level.

In the Dream In A Box initiatives undertaken so far we already have 5 Shades of Dream – Emerging; Latent; Resurgent; Extant; Evolving – starting to reveal themselves in regards to formulating desirable and enduring lifestyles of consumption.

I am certain that more will present themselves before we are finished.

So here’s to those turbulent, intangible, flaky, studenty, inspirational, nation-shaping, scientist irritating things called Dreams.

If for nothing else they should be considered eminently remarkable purely on the basis that they can elicit so much passionate debate and discourse purely by their mention.

As long as each Dream is considered on its merit – not on some preconceived concept of what it does not fulfil, or on some etymological witch hunt dressed up as rigour and realism we’ll perhaps be fine. Until then…

As Stephen Tyler sang: ‘Dream On’

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