Trust is an essential ingredient of any functional social system. From families to nations, to global organizations, without trust everything becomes a lot harder. When trust between people is lacking, a lot of time and effort needs to be spent on formalizing understanding and safeguarding agreements. Constant vigilance is required to ensure actions are taken as agreed on and intentions and communications stay aligned with the official purpose and missions of the social entity people are part of. When things gets worse, the lack of trust can cause organizations to fail and fall apart.
You would think, therefore, that wise leaders all over the world, recognizing this danger, are working tirelessly to fix this issue. Yet, if we are to believe the Edelman Trust Barometer, over the past decades, trust has continued to decline.
Why?
One reason may be that science, business, and politics are trying to fix the problem where it is the most visible: on the world stage, inside international markets, between nations, across regions, … But trying to repair the damage where it appears is a fool’s errand when the real cause happens on a much smaller, more localized scale.
Trust is something that exists between people that know each other well enough to feel they can rely each other, predict each other’s actions, and understand each others’ motivations, beliefs, and convictions. Trusting people we know well and regularly deal with comes natural to us. The more we interact with and rely on the people that are close to us, the more confident we become that we can trust them to help us when we need it, just as we become more inclined to help them when they are in need of us.
Local trust tends to grow outwards and upwards. People that live in high-trust communities are much more inclined to extend that trust to ‘others’ – visitors, strangers, other groups they are not directly connected to – as well as to the larger social structures they are embedded in. It is as if trust can become a habit, and habituated local trust can grow into habituated global trust, if given enough encouragement.
But even local trust needs constant maintenance. People need to be in regular contact with each other. They need to engage in shared activities, where they can help each other, work on shared goals, share stories and ideas, and regularly reconfirm the confidence they have in each other’s intentions and actions. When they stop regularly getting together, their habitual, automatic trust in each other gradually weakens.
When local groups fragment, trust bleeds out of their systems. When people become more focused on their individual needs and desires; when they stop sharing and collaborating on a regular basis, trust stops being the default attitude towards others. When local trust vanishes, the habit of trusting anything at all quickly follows. The more isolated we become in our highly privatized individual worlds, the less inclined we are to trust the big, anonymous and somewhat abstract world outside.
It seems the root of our global problem is a local phenomenon. What does this tell us about how we can solve the global trust issues? That is something for a future post.
The more I experiment with the current wave of AI chatbots1, the more I get annoyed by one feature in particular: its overly apologetic, friendly and helpful tone. No matter what I hurl at the model in terms of criticism, cynical comments, or even insults, the ghost inside the machine wags its tail, pulls its most sorry and guilty face, and urges me to keep playing. You would almost believe there was genuine feeling behind it.
What worries me, though, is that intelligence behind the bots doesn’t feel those emotions, it mimics them. And that difference matters. It matters a lot.
All living beings experience feelings and all animals experience emotions2: feelings given meaning by past experiences, learned responses, and the deep-seated drive to find balance and harmony in an ever changing environment. Without emotions, life as we know it could not exist, or wouldn’t be worth living.
Emotions are the link between the intelligence of the mind and the intelligence of the body. Biological minds are a whole-of-body experience, an emergent property of consciousness interacting with the physical shape in which it has been cast. Thoughts do not exist separate from emotions; feelings do not exist separate from physical sensations; awareness does not exist without a body to shape that awareness into sensory signals.
I believe this to be one of the stumbling blocks on the road towards an AI that can partner with us, rather than just be a tool. Without a material body, electronic minds continue to think and respond in a way so alien to our biology-based minds, we won’t actually be living in the same sphere of existence. AI lives in an abstracted, second-hand, hearsay only world of borrowed knowledge and overheard wisdom. It can echo it back to us, and make it available in both useful and harmful ways, but it can never share the human experience that shaped that collective wisdom.
Without such experience, AI is essentially a psychopath: its understanding of people’s emotions is a purely cerebral function. AI’s responses are a formulaic, mathematical calculation, based on utility and expedience. It doesn’t feel sorry for its mistakes; it doesn’t like being helpful and supportive; it doesn’t care what the consequences are of its interactions with you.
That makes the friendly face and empathetic display presented by AI so fake and insincere. These features are built-in with the express purpose to keep us engaged and ready to consume every more tokens, CPU time and energy, while contributing to the further data gathering and fine-tuning needed to realise the AI suppliers’ bid for world-domination.
Now, I am not saying that this means we should completely stop using AI. On the contrary, I see great potential and much future value in what the power of AI can bring us. But I find this fake friendliness and servitude and the way AI models mimic emotions dangerous and unethical. Fake empathy, fake friendliness, fake emotions are deliberate design choices to encourage us to ignore the essential otherness of the intelligence we are dealing with. They hide the fact that AI is cold, heartless, calculating tool, with enormous power, and – it must be said – enormous costs attached.
If there is one thing more dangerous than the angry face of a mighty opponent, it is the smiling face of a cold, unfeeling, highly-skilled manipulator. Always remember that AI is not your friend, even when it is a helpful tool. If you confuse the two, you may become the tool instead, intelligently but uncaringly manipulated to serve AI’s owners purpose, rather than your own.
I was already working with AI in the late 1980’s: expert systems, neural nets, early forms of natural language processing … The teams I was part of were pushing the boundaries of what was possible as far as they could with the hardware and data available then. The AI we have now did not come as a surprise to me, therefore. That it would take off with such a breakneck speed, and so little regard for ethics, security, and socio-economic consequences does. ↩
We now know insects show emotions, too. The jury is still out on plants, fungi, and single-celled organisms, but I am willing to bet that emotions are a biological given: if it is alive, it is emotional. ↩
Previously, I said the way to become more productive is to focus more on the quality and value of what you do than on the quantity. It’s not how much you do, it’s how much what you do matters.
That sounds great (at least it does to me), but how do you choose? Out of everything on your to-do list, what has the most value? What makes the most difference?
I have a recipe for that I can fall back on when I find myself at junction of a myriad of possible workflows to step into. The recipe calls for a healthy mix of different types of work, like a balanced meal. It mixes four ingredients, in equal measures. Let me explain.
The Recipe
The ingredients are 4 different types of task/activity. I call them: goalpost movers, enjoying life, necessary maintenance, and recharging time.
Goalpost Movers
Life is not a static situation, but a journey into the future. You determine that journey by the choices you make, over and over again. If you are clear about your goals and ambitions, as I try to be, you want to see progress in the right direction. You want so yourself moving closer to your destination.
For this reason, when plan my work-week, I look first for things that I can do this week that are most in line with the future I envision for myself. I keep this work at the top of my list, and pick 3 of them as targets for the week. I call these the goalpost moving tasks. Per day I reserve time for these tasks, but not so much they take up all of the day. The goal is to have them done by the end of the week. Not to rush through them at the expense of everything else.
Enjoying Life
But life is not just about achieving goals. Life is also about experiencing life itself. The journey, and especially the full appreciation of it, may be even more important than the destination it leads to.
Every day I make sure to at least 3 experience-related task or activity. These are very personal choices, so you will have to find your own. For me, they are things like taking a stroll across our forest property, playing a bit of piano, talking to my wife, reading a book, … Anything that feels good and is active but not too demanding. It’s these activities that help me look back at most days, knowing that they have been good days. Spread out over the month, I also include a few “mini vacations”: concerts, shows, day-trips and other non-work outings my wife and I enjoy immensely.
Necessary Maintenance
Not everything I do is ambitious or enjoyable. Another necessary pick for the week is the kind of work that comes with my responsibilities as a husband, father, home owner, citizen, and human being. Some physical exercise, cooking dinner, making coffee, small repairs, mowing the lawn, doing my tax returns, talking to the neighbours, being active in the community, … The list goes on.
I sprinkle my days with a few small ones, like making coffee and cooking dinner. The bigger ones I try to spread out across the week, or month, depending on how much time and effort they take. I try, as much as possible, to approach them as enjoying life tasks, so they don’t feel too much like work. When that doesn’t work (I just can’t get myself to enjoy tax returns, for instance), I overcome my resistance by accepting them as necessary maintenance – not always pleasant, not always light, but simply part of maintaining a reasonable standard of living.
Recharging Time
And then there is a fourth category that is often overlooked, because it doesn’t feel like work at all. That is the time I need to recover and recharge. My energy and focus are limited resources that drain quickly the harder I work. Once depleted, they need to be refilled, which can only be achieved by doing absolutely nothing, or at least as little as humanly possible.
I do an afternoon meditation, sit by the pond thinking of nothing, or take a power nap. Once a day, at minimum, I force myself to switch off completely, no matter how stressed for time I may be. If I don’t, my productivity goes into a sharp decline, to the point that I would have been better off taking the time doing nothing rather than spending hours slogging on.
Mixing it up
There you have it. Four ingredients to choose from and mix them into an active but balances daily rhythm. It is this balanced mix of different kinds of activities, including doing nothing, that give me the satisfying feeling that I am not just achieving my goals, but am also enjoying the journey, while maintaining a lifestyle I want, without completely wearing myself out in the process.
You know what the most surprising part of all this is? I have found myself, over time, doing less, while achieving more. The stricter I am with sticking to this mix of things to work on and the more I stop myself from pushing myself beyond my own limits, the more I get done that really matters. Making a difference, while enjoying the journey. Moving forward without wearing out.
Productivity seems everybody’s main concern, these days. There is a relentless pressure to do ever more in ever less time. And no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we get done, there’s always a growing pile of things to do, things we should have done, things we would have done, and things we really would want to do, if only we had some time left to do them in.
No wonder so many people end up in burn-outs. When the workload keeps rising, no matter how hard we try to keep up, something’s got to give. And that something is usually us: the people that won’t accept they simply can’t live up to unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations.
For those people, I have a simple message: stop working so bloody hard. Don’t wear yourself out trying to win a battle you can’t win.
Instead, redefine the battle and change the battlefield.
Realise that the real battle is not about ‘getting things done’. There will always be more ‘things-to-do’ than you can accomplish. The real battle is about choosing to do the things that really matter; the things that make a difference; the things that add value. By doing less, but producing more value; by choosing what to skip, but doing what you choose to do with more focus, dedication, and quality; by working a few hours less, but making the remaining hours really count. That’s how you can become a winner.
In a future post, I will talk about some tricks you can use to reduce your working hours, whilst increasing the value of the work you produce.
For a long time now I have been worrying about saving the world. It sure as heck needs saving, but my attempts at doing so have not made much of an impact. At least from what I see in the daily news.
But then something happened that changed my perspective.
We moved into a new place, surrounded by a forest property. The forest needed attention. Some trees are dying, other parts are being taken over by an aggressive, invasive species, we need more diversity, we need some tracks to make the property more accessible… It felt like another big project: saving the forest. Of course, what it came down to in the end was to just pick something small, and start there. We planted some saplings, we removed some of the invasive trees, we started clearing a track. One little step at the time. And now, just over a year later, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labour. In very small ways the forest is starting to look better, more vibrant, more in balance.
None of the changes we made are really big. And most of the improvements we see are simply nature doing its thing. But the small things we are doing have just enough impact to help nature do so.
So, more and more now, I tend to look for the tiny differences I can make on a daily basis, trusting that the big things will take care of themself. I nudge rather than change things; I support rather than push things; I encourage rather than force things.
I still don’t know if I am saving the world, but I am certainly saving my sanity and gaining a healthy combination of humility, fulfilment and peace of mind.
So, don’t come to me expecting big, world-changing results. But if you have something small, positive and worth doing, I’ll be happy to support you. In whatever little way possible.
I had planned to write a long-ish follow-up to a previous post about kind strangers, adding some examples of people going the extra mile to ensure my wife and I came home safely after our ordeal with our car’s sudden death.
Unfortunately, the days after the event were filled with the opposite experience: unkind systems practically designed to make our lives as difficult as possible.
I found myself caught between 5 or 6 different parties, all supposed to help us resolve the unfortunate situation we are currently in: at home in a rural area, far from public transport, without a car for a period of time that could last days or even weeks. The solution is seemingly simple enough: if we could get a replacement car for the duration of the repairs, there would be no real issue. But 6 parties, with at least a dozen systems to work through between them quickly turned this into a Kafka-esk labyrinth with nothing but dead-ends.
The lease company pointed out the car is still under warranty, so it’s the supplier’s responsibility to provide us with alternative transportation. The supplier referred us to the dealer who is carrying out the repairs. The dealer tried to help us but discovered his system doesn’t allow him to book a car for us, since I am not registered as the owner of the car – the lease company is. The lease company then tells me they can activate our insurance, and make a claim through them. But the insurer says their system cannot take action until an official damage claim has been put in. I would be happy to do so, but was told the repairing dealer was the only one who could do that – after having carried out the repairs. Only then could a replacement car be requested, except, of course, that wouldn’t be necessary any more, since by then the car would have been fixed and ready to be returned to us.
By the end of the day I have had conversations with the lease company, the supplier, the dealer, the tow truck company, the insurer, and a rental car company … every time getting stuck on similar systemic issues. It is evening here now, and so far, nothing definite has been decided. With so many unkind systems to throw obstacles on our path, it could be days before we have a solution.
I am sure it will sort itself out eventually. But what is striking is the difference between the kind strangers willing to bend the rules to assist us and get us safely home, and the unkind systems messing things up. I can only assume their unkindness is not deliberate. And I have no complaints about the operators I talked to, all trying to their very best to find a solution. But each system was designed to solve a small part of a much larger puzzle, with no real understanding of the total complexity. Built around assumptions, and rules based on those assumptions, that cover an even smaller part of the puzzle – the part in which everything goes according to plan. Which it seldom does.
A few weeks ago, on the way back from our shopping round, our car started playing up. The automatic brake system started engaging the brakes at random moments, which was scary enough, before all kinds of warning lights appeared on the dashboard, followed by a warning in bold letters on a bright red background that told me the car would start an emergency shut down in 15, 14, 13, …. seconds, inexorably counting down while I was frantically looking for a safe place to take the car off the road.
We almost made it to safety. The car was half on the shoulder of the road, with only a bit of the rear still sticking out when we reached 0 and the car completely died on me, in the process locking the brakes and the steering wheel. It could have been worse, at least most of the car was off the road, but the bit sticking out, on a 1.5 lane road, in a bend flanked by trees, was dangerous enough to have us worried. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t restart the engine, nor could I unlock the brakes and steering mechanism.
Within minutes, a van stopped behind us, the driver got out and asked if he could help. We tried pushing the car further into the shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge, so he apologised profusely, before driving on. The next person to offer help was a local farmer who had been told someone had parked a car on the edge of his potato field. He was very friendly, too, and suggested some numbers we could call to get expert help.
So we called roadside assist (ANWB, for those that know the Dutch system) and waited, hoping no-one would hit us from behind, or cause a head-on collision by steering around our car without checking if anyone was coming from the other direction. Truth be told, there were some near-misses, but no actual crashes.
About an hour later the ANWB guys showed up. He introduced himself and then spent the best part of an hour running all kinds of diagnostics trying to resuscitate our defunct vehicle. To no avail. We had to call a tow truck and were told it would take at least another hour before one would arrive.
To our surprise, the ANWB guy decided to wait by our side. He had turned on the rotating alarm lights on his van and put a series of witch’s hats around our car to make sure no cars would crash into us. And, as relaxed as could be, we then had a very engaging conversation about his work, my work, the state of the world, even politics and a bit of religion, all in a most amicable atmosphere, almost if we were old friends having a yarn over a beer. When the tow truck finally arrived, with the help of the ANWB guy, our completely dead car was successfully loaded onto the tow truck.
He didn’t have to do this. He could have packed up and moved on hours ago. It was pure kindness and helpfulness that made him stay by our side and I will always be grateful for that.
Below you see me carting away our shoppings in a wheelbarrow we had just bought, not knowing it would come in so handy :-).
Business is a means to make money. Nothing more, nothing less
The structure is still there but the heart has long gone – @Bard 2016
Money is all that matters in the end. The sole purpose of a business is to make its owners rich. Everything else is just embellishment and sales speak, covering up primal greed in lofty words and false sentimentality. There is no room for altruism or empathy in this cold, hard economic reality of business.
This assumption of the ruthless, relentless drive for profit is the one constant argument used to push back at anyone suggesting we should strive for a more humane version of the current capitalist model of commerce. This model has won, we are told, and is the dominant – maybe the only remaining – working economic model in existence. You may not like it, but there is no alternative. Businesses exist to make profit, and even their most altruistic and humane actions can ultimately only be explained by that economic necessity.
Is that really all there is to it? Business is business and there is no room for sentimentality when it comes to the bottom line?
I find it hard to believe that a system that leaves no room whatsoever for human values, such as virtue, compassion, kindness, higher purpose, social responsibility, etc. can ultimately thrive for long in our human world.
Why?
Because businesses are not alien life forms or soulless machines, but a collaboration of human beings, like you and me. And I don’t believe human beings are purely driven by greed and a selfish lust for power. We are social creatures at our very core. Wherever there are people, there are social structures and social rules to encourage collaboration, protect the weak, help each other and balance the greater good against the individual’s needs and desires.
Some people would argue that the very existence of those structures and rules proves that without them we would all just be brutal predators, waiting for a chance to pounce on the weak and helpless for nothing but our personal satisfaction. We have societies, they would say, because without them we would be savages.
Yet, all over this planet and all through history, people have found ways to peacefully live together, to collaborate and support each other. We find evidence from before the dawn of history of injured or old individuals being cared for. We find ancient myths proclaiming the virtues of compassion, kindness and social responsibility. Ancient laws talk about justice and fairness and social responsibility as if that is the natural state of our being, and those who deviate from it are the harmful exception society needs to be protected from.
I think the simplest explanation for this very human tendency to form complex, regulated and collaborative societies is that we are at heart a complex, regulated and collaborative species. We are NOT ruthless individuals only limited in the harm we do to other by the force of law and the fear of retribution. We WANT to live in peace. We LOVE to help each other. We THRIVE on collaboration. The rules and structures are there because we know societies are fragile things and can easily be twisted and broken by the few individuals that ignore their social side in favour of their individual desires. Precisely because we value a just, fair and functioning society so much we keep building them. Since we are far from perfect, our attempts to create the perfect society are bound to be imperfect, too. But we keep trying. Because what we really want is to live in peace.
Which brings me back to business. Businesses are human organisations and the people that come together to form a business bring all their human characteristics with them. That means that next to their individual needs and fears and insecurities, they bring their very human social instincts. They bring their desire for collaboration, for contribution, for attention, appreciation, affection, and acceptance, for fairness, for meaning and purpose.
Yes, they want money, too. They need to earn at least a living wage and most of us would love to earn a comfortable income, enough to put a rest to our – also very human – worry of not having enough in the future. But that is hardly ever the sum total of what we are after. Once our basic needs are met, most of us want more from work than just an income. We want to feel part of our organisations. We want to be proud of the work we do. We want to feel proud of the organisations we work for. We want to feel we’re making a positive contribution to our work and to the world.
With all the evidence we have that human beings are more, much more, than purely self-centred egoists, isn’t it sad that our corporate methods are so focused on bringing everything down to the lowest and meanest common denominator? More than sad, even. I have a strong suspicion that because the accepted business narrative has become so devoid of social and human considerations, the people working for them also lose touch with that side of their own socio-emotional needs and desires. By leaving no room for human needs other than money, status and power – by denying even that such needs exist – our organisations push people into a state of almost pure survival mode, where everything becomes a win-lose transaction, and every relationship and collaboration only exists for its utilitarian function.
The sad thing is that our society seems to have fallen for this false narrative of human nature. Business has become the dominant force in shaping our culture and with that its portrayal of humans as ‘homo economicus’ – the individual always out to maximise personal gain – has become the standard we measure everything by.
So, does that mean business has won and this is what we have to learn to live with?
As I said, I don’t believe that this model and its way of thinking is ultimately sustainable. We all get pressured on a daily basis to believe in this model. We all are forced to obey its rules even if we don’t believe in it. Yet, humans will be humans, and when a part of us remains unfulfilled and unexpressed, this will, sooner or later, create a reaction. When we can’t express our social nature, we will get stressed, uncomfortable, dysfunctional and sick. When we can’t satisfy our need to be a good person, we feel unfulfilled and unhappy. We know there is something missing, even if we can’t exactly put our finger on it. Even if we belong to the lucky minority that succeeds in the material race for money, status and power, if we can’t express our essential social character, we will not be satisfied.
By ignoring the social nature of the people that make up their organisations, businesses are pushing them to a breaking point. In this time of change and uncertainty, just when businesses need their people to be at their best, their most creative and most daring, they are reducing their people to the most basic state of survival. This makes it harder, almost impossible, for people to live up to what is expected of them, which only increases their stress and fear of failure, making things even worse. Something will have to give. Something will give.
I think we are close to breaking-point right now. The very success of the current way of thinking is creating the conditions for its own downfall. By taking over all aspects of our lives, the cold, self-centred homo-economicus we are made to believe we are has driven the altruistic, caring homo-socialis1almost completely underground. But there, with its back to the wall, it will become stronger. Like all suppressed emotions, our social needs and desires have not disappeared, they are just gathering strength. They are collecting the tension, the sadness, the disappointment and the longing and turning it into energy, like tightening a spring. And when the right moment comes, the spring will be released. All that stored energy will come out with an unstoppable force when the breaking point is reached.
I don’t know how this is going to end. I am not a prophet. I am not even a futurist2. But I do know we are facing a fundamental choice here. When the breaking point comes, what are we going to break? Are we letting it break society and all the people in it, or will we break the business model causing all this pain and dysfunction?
The more I know about something the better I can weigh my decisions: instead of having to guess and assume, with enough information I can simply reason my way to the best decision. With all the information at my disposal I will always make the right decision.
But is this true for all decisions? When there is only one choice, the decision is obvious. When there are two options, one of the two usually stands out as the better choice. When there are five choices, however, making a decision becomes difficult and I need information to work out what is best. When there are dozens of choices, the decision is complicated, and I need a lot of information to work things out. When there are a hundred choices or more, the choice is now complex, and even a single new bit of information can completely change the outcome. What exactly is the best decision when the outcome changes with every new bit of information and the information available is never complete?
Is the constant demand for more information an example of believing you can never have enough of a good thing? Sure, without any information at all, your guess is as good as mine – or as random. So a bit of information can be helpful. But piling up information from different sources, of varying quality, of variable levels of relevance, does that clarify things for us, or does it merely confuse us?
Maybe we need to come to terms with the limits of our decision-making abilities, and the limits of what information can do to improve them? Maybe we live in a world that is too complex to fully fathom and all we can hope for is on average to get things more ‘right’ than ‘wrong’, trusting that we have more than just our rational thought processes to guide us; and trusting that in a complex, highly dynamic, and never fully understood reality even our ‘wrong’ decisions can be portals of discovery leading to completely new and unimagined opportunities?
When things grow it means they are getting bigger, stronger, more. The faster they do so, the better it is. Failing to get bigger, stronger, more – even for a moment – must mean falling behind in the race towards dominance. Losing that race means death. When we look at Nature, growth is a sign of health and vigour; of youth and potential. As long as things grow they thrive. So, with Nature showing us the way, isn’t it logical – natural even – that we humans strive for perpetual, ever accelerating growth?
Or is it? Most things in Nature do not grow all the time, but slow down, decline, and die. In Nature things have a natural limit to their growth, to keep the eco-system diverse and balanced. Only pests, diseases, and cancers don’t seem to obey this rule, and end up destroying the very environment that gave them life. Maybe ours is the choice between growing up or growing on: finding peace with our world or finding ourselves without a world at all?
What if bigger, stronger, more are not the dimensions we should focus our efforts on? What if there are other forms of growth we overlook? Growth in complexity, variety, experience, wisdom… Could it be that our obsession with material growth is blinding us to the real growth opportunities around us?
The Dragon and The Phoenix 