Sport, Players and Teams

As part of Continuing Professional Development (CPD), I used to go to the Actuarial Conferences in South Africa each year. It was a quick way to get all the required annual CPD points. More than that, it felt like I was connected to something bigger than my company. My second role in the Corporate world was as a Marketing Actuary. That involved Competitor Comparison. It could get quite nasty listing the pros and cons of the competitors (who were all trying to provide for clients). It becomes a little like sport. Gradually you see players transfer. Senior members moving to other companies. Companies treating employees badly. A little like patriotism. I leaned deep into Rainbow Nation South African patriotism till the 2008 Xenophobic attacks. You don’t owe your company any loyalty. “They” won’t show it to you. Your team will change. You will develop loyalty with certain individuals and beef with others. Take the countries and companies we are a part of with a pinch of salt. There is something bigger we are all a part of. Institutions serve us, not the other way around.

Players Move

Where the Culture Lives.

When an organisation is small, you don't need to worry about things like precedent. If everyone knows each other, and they know how other people know each other, decisions can take into account things that are difficult to communicate. Difficult to put in words. Impossible to put in numbers. The culture of the group can develop so there are unstated rules and expectations. Knowing each other provides both constraints and support. It isn't that things aren't messy, there is just more ability to deal with mess.

Mess at scale is tough because you lose the bonds that connect. You can work at a company for years without getting to know the boss. Different people in the company can be working on very different projects. The fact that they are in the same company may just be co-incidental. Executives will try and get round this by building up a culture. This is often cited as the one thing that keeps them up at night. Building a culture around a myth that has grown about what the company stood for when it was small. A myth that grows out of trying to put the difficult and impossible into words and numbers. 

One way that culture can be maintained in big companies is through story telling. Stories of how the founding members dealt with situations. Ideally stories that carry enough ambiguity that they can carry a bit of that founding member's soul to those that follow. That can allow them to face the problems that arise like that person would have done it. What would the founder do?

What dampens the story is that big organisations by their nature tend to move into Silos. Working in parallel next to each other. The projects that the bigger group are working on are too big for everyone to wrap their head around. So we focus. We don't know people outside our bubble. We don't know how other's know each other. We lose the subtlety. The stories lose relevance and we start comparing people by summary bits of information like years service, qualifications, hours worked, grades, gender, job title, age.

Focusing on Silos

(finepixtrix)

Skill is only a fraction of what makes people succeed. A huge driver is the web of relationships within the group. Relationships are where the culture lives.

Safe in Your Tribe (by Neville Scott)

Guest Post: Neville Scott

I met Neville in my first job after university. He headed the glamorously named 'Modelling Team'. It was their job to work with the Actuaries in Product Development to take whatever ideas we had and clarify them. If ideas could be clearly articulated, they could be built into models that could do what they were meant to. Neville also arranged weekly learning sessions where we would focus on a different concept that would help in our quest to think better. One of the most lasting lessons I got from those Monday mornings was the idea of describing something (and yourself) by what it is rather than what it isn't. I wrote about this idea in 'Aporcupine Apineapple'. Neville is always curious and has lots of interesting ideas. I hope this is the first of many guest posts.

Safe in Your Tribe
by Neville Scott

Many years ago I saw an experiment on a TV program. They set up a huge pyramid of coke tins in a supermarket. With a touch sensor and a device to collapse the pyramid when touched. Successive people looked at it, touched it, and then witnessed the calamitous collapse of tins clattering noisily over them and all over the shop. Lawyers, doctors, housewives, ministers, children all touched it and triggered the collapse, and every single one declared loudly "I never touched it!"

They all lied.

The experimenters put forward an interesting hypothesis. People are herding animals who don't individually have all of the tricks needed for their own survival and need to stick together. Herding creatures know that expulsion from the herd means death. And apparently collapsing a monster pyramid of coke cans in a supermarket generates a significant herd-rejection fear.

On the science level, we've got at least two completely independent brains: the survival brain (amygdala) and logic brain (frontal lobe). Simplistically our amygdala maintains lists of life threatening stuff. It got high speed hard-wiring to sensors (sight, hearing, ...) and hard-wiring to the central nervous system to trigger action. If it senses something on its list, it fires survival actions. And it doesn't consult the far slower-acting logic brain. It doesn't concern itself with morality or logic. Its sole job is to keep you alive. It manages its list:

• Every time it learns of a new risk it adds it to the list. Cars. Rocks. Pointy things. Big Johnny.
• If it is repeatedly exposed to a listed item with no ill effect it may shift down the list. Even off the list. Fear of heights can be overcome.

If you abuse it for too long it gets confused and can malfunction and start firing false alarms. Anxiety attacks, panic disorder, PTSD, shell shock - these are the survival brain misfiring. Apparently most people are born with spiders & snakes pre-coded on the list. And mice are born with cats in their list - a newborn mouse panics when exposed to cat hair.

The frontal lobe does the thinking and moralising and logic stuff. But it doesn't have the same hard-wire privileges of the amygdala. It gets information far later and takes longer to respond. Throw a ball at a person. They will invariably duck immediately, then say "what was that?". The survival brain saw the danger immediately and generated the ducking survival action. The frontal lobe eventually woke up and got vaguely fascinated about what they hell just happened. It seems we are hard-wired to survive; and be logical later.

The Amygdala (left red) and the Frontal Lobe (right blue)

So we've got these brains operating independently. When we're scared the survival brain is dominant and triggering defensive responses. When we're safe the logical brain is dominant and making moral and sensible decision. Simon Sinek tells us why good managers make you feel safe.

Let me stretch the hypothesis and suggest that herding creatures feel safest when they are in the company of others that "feel" like the same herd: Genes, Qualifications, Profession, Race, Religion, School, Politics,... The 911 attacks triggered enormous herding polarisation. Winning the rugby world cup defined the "South African" herd and aligned those within it against an external common enemy. My takeout is that environments of perceived safety allow morality, tolerance and peaceful co-existence. Perceived danger awakens defensive responses and cause polarization into herds and survival responses. "I never touched it!"

The moments when the brightest, most trusted people look you straight in the eye and blatantly lie. They're scared. Something has awakened their fear of herd expulsion. For managers and governments: if you want teamwork and a sense of national identity - make people feel safe.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com 

Include and Transcend (by Patrick Madden)

Guest Post: Patrick Madden

Three important points about levels

In the first post of this series I talked a bit about how morality can be thought of as a line of intelligence that develops over time by gradually increasing the range of entities we see as morally valuable. We start with egocentric morality (only I matter) and grow via ethnocentric morality (we matter) through a still broader morality (all of us matter) and so onwards.

Thinking with levels of development in this way is useful because it’s clear and methodical and can inform policy. It can also be very problematic if we don’t understand it properly. So here are three points about levels that are important to understand.

Higher is not better, just more inclusive

Firstly, levels can be usefully thought of as efficacious adaptations to the environment. An egocentric morality is good for a two-year-old child, whose development relies on looking out for herself above all, while ethnocentric moralities better serve young adults for whose development collaboration is crucial. The upshot here is that the ‘higher’ levels are not better than the lower levels, they’re just more inclusive. This is crucial point for thinking and talking about moral development: it means value judgements are optional rather than given with the data. We don’t have to judge our own or others’ moralities relative to each other: we can simply see it as it is and stop there, short of condemnation. That usually helps!

(We can of course choose to judge moralities relative to one another. And – according to some but not all moralities – we ought to.)

Include and transcend

The second important point is the principle of “include and transcend”. Ethnocentric morality does not deny or exclude egocentric morality. Obviously, a morality that values my clan does not exclude me because I am a member of my clan; it just includes others as well as me. A morality that values all beings does not exclude my clan; it just includes other clans also. The principle of development in every line of intelligence, not just the moral line, is inclusion and transcendence: in growing, we include the view of the former level and we go beyond it.

Transcending the Swart Donkey's clan

Many ladders, many rungs

The third important point is that there are many ways of grading levels. The one I’ve used here (with three levels up to and including humanistic morality: egocentric, ethnocentric, humanistic) just happens to serve because it’s simple. Others speak about preconventional, conventional and postconventional (then post-postconventional) morality. The important point here is that the data doesn’t, from its own side, give us objectively discrete or discontinuous stages. Rather, we deliberately choose a particular, convenient framework for categorising the data into stages so we can talk about them. If we choose a framework of three stages, we could equally choose one of six or eight. Many ladders, many rungs.

Why does this matter?

If we don’t understand that higher is not better, just more inclusive, then we have to judge others’ morality. Firstly, that’s terrible for conversation. And secondly, it also keeps us limited to a particular stage of development – our kneejerk move into judgement limits the range of information we can consider objectively.

If we don’t understand the principle of include and transcend, we might fear that moving beyond a particular stage means sacrificing our own interests altogether. It usually does mean sacrificing some of our own interests, but it’s more a case of subsuming them within a schema that includes them and other things, to create something that’s even more valuable.

If we don’t understand that the number and characteristics of developmental levels are contingent on our chosen theory and not given to us by reality from its own side, we might be far too confident that our view is The Correct View. That’s almost always a terrible mistake because it precludes curiosity.

The next post in this series will discuss how different levels look to one another. What is it like for someone at ‘level 3’, for example, to hear about ‘level 4’ – and vice versa?

Related Posts:

1. Levels of Moral Development (PM) - increasing moral intelligence by increasing my range
2. Empathy Armoury - We don't only have to be aware of our path
3. Chipping Away - at our ignorance in a world that is impossible to understand
4. Pause & Engage - getting past moral log jams
5. The Bigger Tribe - Patriotism gets ugly when it makes enemies of those outside

About the Guest:

Patrick works with The Potential Project and you can find out more about what he does through his website and blog.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com 

A Conversation

Group tags don't carry a lot of information now that that we can talk, read, write and are empowered. We still want to be part of groups, but they are living organisms that evolve with the times. A little like the way Steven Pinker describes the evolution of English in 'The Sense of Style'. There is no central committee that controls English. Those who put together dictionaries do it as an aid to writers. They survey the very best to see how they are writing and how things are changing. 'Silly went from "blessed" to "pious" to "innocent" to "pitiable" to "feeble" to today's "foolish".' What is more important than how the word should be understood is how the word is understood. If the writers aim is to communicate clearly, pedantically sticking to rules that don't represent usage is not helpful. The writers may be the ones surveyed, but the readers are very much a part of the evolution of the language.

It is for that reason that I am getting more and more careful in ever answering a question about who I am with a tag. As soon as you do, it can shut off the conversation. A hot topic question often avoided in polite company would be 'Do you believe in God?'. I am happy to have a conversation about this, but I would start by delving into what you mean by the question. I am almost 100% certain that our use of the word will be different. What I would hope is that the evolving story that makes sense to me would be useful to you and yours to me. It is the closing off of discussion and the use of divisive language that bothers me. To emphasise their point, some groups will use emotive terms to emphasise just how against something they are. They may even explicitly identify themselves as anti-[enter horrible nasty other group]. When I hear this, I just assume they are talking to themselves. I have no examples of occasions where attack has been a useful strategy in changing someone's mind. Stirring anger is very useful to rally the troops, but only when that anger is directed elsewhere.

How is this connected to talking/reading/writing/empowerment? Well, before the printing press someone had to tell us what we believed. Groups were clearly defined by the handful of the literate. Slowly we realised that the world is more fuzzy. Our stories are more fuzzy. They evolve. The handful of people who cling to a previously defined static story forget that words don't mean anything without the context provided by the listener. Words are a stab at the truth. Imperfect without the other arts. They make no sense without seeing how people interact, dance, paint, sing, love and laugh.

Democratising Thought: Early Wooden Printing Press

Social media is taking it to the next level. Not only are we literate but 'broadcast' is dying. No longer does a small group craft a message which becomes what everyone hears. Wikipedia long ago replaced the World Book as the primary starting point when looking up facts because things are always changing. I get very excited by all this stuff. We don't need groups labels as anything other than a starting point for a conversation.

Fat, Salt, Sugar & Anger

There is something appealing about being in a persecuted group and having a cause to get angry together about. Getting angry alone doesn't seem to be any fun, but sharing that anger and finding agreement makes you feel bigger than you are. With an ally to get angry with, the emotion is no longer destructive (to you). The bigger the angry group gets, the easier it is to completely lose yourself in the group. Losing yourself means prioritising the worries of the group over your own, which seems to be a big driver of happiness.

I haven't actually had much first hand experience of this. Apartheid ended during my teen years. Besides refusing to sing Die Stem (the old South African anthem) and trying to introduce my all white classmates to Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika in 1992 - my activism as a 12 year old was fairly limited. I was actually a little 'disappointed', if that is the word, when I arrived at Moscow on the Hill (as my university, UCT, was nicknamed due to sustained opposition to apartheid) to find the student body rather apathetic. Most just wanted to play sports, drink, learn (a bit) and explore the mysteries of the opposite (mostly) sex.

I also had a glance in the mirror. I was - White, Male, Middle-Class, English Speaking, Educated... and as my degree progressed, I became a Capitalist. I wasn't persecuted. The closest thing I get to being persecuted is that South Africans receive the Green Mamba - our passport is basically an extension of the Apartheid legacy. The world only partially 'accepted' the new South Africa, and we aren't trusted enough to travel as freely as Europeans and Americans. If you have such a passport, please treat it with the love and affection it deserves and kiss it before you go to bed every night. Even then, my other privileges mean I just need to do the paperwork and I can be accepted. So - boo hoo. 

I don't get to belong to any clubs where we all sit and get angry together. The closest I come to that is when there are complaints about reverse-racism with jobs being restricted for 'people of colour' with fist-thumping calls for meritocracy. Suffice to say, I don't participate in those conversations either and look for the best opportunity to slither away.

Perhaps all of this is why I am most motivated to say that forming angry groups may be awesome, but we can do better.  I want to play too. Anger is like fat, salt, and sugar. It just tastes so good that it is hard to put aside. I like the idea of finding ways to include everyone. I am not saying we all need to hold hands, sing kumbaya around the fireplace and pretend everything is alright. I just think we need to shift to the harder work of creating bigger groups.

To be clear - I am not saying we should defend the status-quo, or accept the way things are. I just think that things are improving. Check out 'Our World in Data'. I have found that malicious people are the exception and not linked to any characteristics that form useful groups. In general, I think the world is a better place than it has ever been. That doesn't mean we can't do better.

Onwards and upwards.

Bankers and Poets

I have always disliked being boxed or categorised. Perhaps it is why I have an aversion to star signs - 'ah, you are a Capricorn. Now it all makes sense.' More seriously than that though, I think a big part of what causes us to be happy or unhappy is our continual search for an identity. What we do or don't like defines us. What we do or don't agree with defines us. We then end up looking for the feathers to flock together.

Once in a flock, we get cut off from those who disagree. It feels good to be part of a group. The self-less focus on problems of the group rather than your own really does make you feel good. I am becoming more and more suspicious of being part of any group though where the opposition is classed as evil. I still allow myself some leeway when it comes to sport. The animal instincts which are present need to be channeled somewhere, and as long as you can shake hands afterwards a little banter is good fun. Off the playing field it gets more dangerous. I wrote about a problem we have with the current form of capitalism being that because of real world friction, sometimes we end up doing work for the sake of work rather than because it adds value. The same can be said of groups that have an interest in being seen as different. Take political parties for example. In a country with two parties, each needs to define themselves around opposing sides of a few issues. They can't by definition agree on everything or they wouldn't be able to campaign to be voted in. Like the work for works sake problem, professional politicians have a vested interest in sticking to their same group and finding things to disagree with the enemy. Ideally they keep the same support base. This appears to be the case in the US and the UK. Both are liberal democracies that are slowly chipping away at remaining barriers to liberty and equality. Both are wealthy countries. Many big ticket items took massive battles to win but we are largely cleaning up the 'last mile' towards true freedom. Where is the incentive to start breaking down barriers between Republicans and Democrats, or Labour and Torries? It is not difficult to shift your gaze to other countries around the world with significant poverty issues and legalised discrimination against minorities. We are, or should all be, on the same side eventually.

This doesn't mean we have to agree on everything, but some attempt to understand the opposing views seems to be very hard to find sometimes. An example is when people self-define as being extreme capitalists or anti-capitalist. The recent Global Financial Crisis gave plenty of fodder to people who wanted to create groups around the issue. Robert Shiller recognising this danger made an attempt to write a book explaining the various roles in the finance world to avoid people thinking that because there were some bad apples or some problems in the system, all of Finance was evil. It is far too easy shorthand to say something like 'Bankers are evil'. I have even seen supposedly mainstream tweeters who would not self-define as trolls  making comments like 'Putting a "banker" in charge of an economy is like putting a pedophile in charge of schools'. I know rule number one of participating in social media is not to feed the trolls, but the problem is there are too many people who don't consider themselves trolls who make comments like this.

In the simplest definition, a banker is simply someone who is licensed to receive deposits. They hold peoples cash. Instead of letting it be inactive they lend it out to other businesses or people to keep the economy going. I am busy reading Stephen Fry's very funny 'More Fool Me' autobiography. In it he speaks of friends trying to get him to invest his money in something other than cash. He says that he didn't understand why after making money, he had to try make money on that money. Were it not for banks, Mr Fry's pile of cash would sit under his bed. He would literally be a Scrooge McDuck. Instead of wealthy people being hoarders, bankers help keep 'money working'. Gates and Buffett don't have pools of money. Instead the money is invested in real businesses making or doing real things for real people. That is a good thing. A good banker gets to know and understand her clients. She understands the risks of businesses and can be a good sounding board. Various advances in legal approaches etc. and bigger banks have allowed more standardised contracts and greater risk control which make it easier for new businesses who aren't well known to get access to capital. I am not excusing the examples that can be made of poor risk control and of clearly dodgy incentivisation. I agree that a bonus culture focussed on short term results is problematic and some of the compensation ends up being incredibly excessive. What I don't think is helpful is not realising the benefit we get from certain professions and labelling them aggressively without a full understanding.

Source: sploid.gizmodo.com

While well intentioned, I am not sure Shiller's book will be well read by those who troll in this way. The problem is that this vitriol becomes part of someones definition. If you want to be categorised as someone who isn't driven by making money but has a nobler cause you are going to want to use certain words to advertise this. Capitalism allows some people to contribute to society 'by making money'. This doesn't make them evil. I wonder if a group of artists put on an exhibition where they took Shiller's book and tried to illustrate each of the roles he mentions in a creative way if there would be more reach?

It swings both ways obviously. There are those who go to the extreme of saying that anything that doesn't make money is a waste of time and are derisive of people who pursue lives of meditation, poetry or anything that doesn't have a tangible product. 

My point is simply that while I accept that in any big enough category there are likely to be a small group of genuinely nasty characters, and while we can always improve given good-willed criticism, I am not convinced that we should too easily label groups as evil. It is my view that expanding your group as wide as possible is a key to happiness. Expanding your definition of yourself to include others... and that includes Bankers and Poets.

Them and us

Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene look from different perspectives at the challenge of getting people with fundamentally different views to live well together. As countries become more cosmopolitan and social media and multi-national companies start meaning we cease to be so defined by narrow groups, I wonder if the role of the Sovereign State is due for a shake up. There are 206 states which have evolved, dissolved, revolved and ended up with what we have today. What I am hopeful of is that we can combine Haidt's approach of people trying to understand emotional disagreement rather than arguing over rational issues, and Greene's revival of utilitarianism through deep pragmatism to create a bunch of states defined not by cultural identity but by an established core rule book or constitution. In my Utopian world, there would be freedom of movement for people to go to whichever set of rules suited them best. I doubt though that the most successful societies will have a rule book that suits people perfectly. If movement of people is truly free, then no society will be as homogeneous as the sovereign states of old. People will have to accept diversity.

I like that multi-national companies are effectively creating borderless states. Culture then becomes defined by the core values of the people you choose to spend your work days with. Perhaps once we have progressed even further to the point where our leisure time starts increasing more, we will spend a less dominant part of our time working and there will be other multi-national groups we belong to. Even more ideally, we will each belong to a few of these groups and life becomes one big choose your own adventure.

The art is maintaining the warm fuzzy feeling of feeling part of us without the angsty often violence inducing feeling of being against them.

Other than sport of course. Then anyone who doesn't support the Sharks, the Springboks, the Proteas, and Roger Federer is more mortal enemy.