Bright spot diary: A source of ideas during challenging times

“Just surviving!” That’s the typical response I got from friends and family during the current ongoing Covid lockdown. Where does one find a source of creativity during such a gloomy period? In this article, I would like to present one such source which I find useful – bright spot diary. I have been maintaining this diary – more like a list in my diary – for over two years now. Let’s see how it helps me.

What’s a bright spot? It is anything that has (a) worked for me recently, and (b) was unexpected. Let’s look at 2 entries I made in this diary during the Covid period:

1.      Mindfulness webinar – 29 participants – 12-April

2.      Reading small chunks – Laplace approximation – 3-May

Entry no. 1 on 12^th April is about the number of people who participated in an open webinar on mindfulness on that day. I didn’t expect so many people would turn up. Entry no. 2 is about a change I made while planning my day. For a while, I was writing in my todo list that I would finish a chapter from a book every day. And every day I would get stuck somewhere and fall short of the target. So one day I decided to allocate only one concept - more like a section – per day. And it worked much better. So I continued that way.

As you may have guessed, bright spots are well suited for asking scaling questions, “Can I do more of it?” Sometimes the answer is “yes”, sometimes “no”. But at least it creates options.

What does it mean for something to have “worked recently”? Well, it could be anything where things are not working out. So if days look boring, a bright spot would mean fun moments *in* the otherwise boring day. If exercise is not happening regularly, then a bright spot would be that situation where you went for a jog or did yoga. In fact, bright spot philosophy says that there is nothing universally dark. In every dark situation, there are bright spots lurking in the darkness.

I first encountered bright spots approach in the book “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. In fact, I wrote my first blog on the topic after reading Switch exactly ten years ago (May 2010). Then I followed the two sources from which Heath brothers borrowed it. One, psychotherapy called Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) and two, Positive Deviance approach championed by Jerry Sternin. So in a way, I have been sharpening my “bright spot” lens much before I began to write the diary.

What triggered the writing of bright spot diary for me?  Two years ago, in one of the guest lectures, a student asked me, “When everybody around you keeps pointing at your shortcomings, how does one get motivated?” and I suggested she write a bright spot diary. And then I asked myself, “Why not write one myself?” And that’s how it began. By then my bright spot lens – i.e. ability to notice bright spots in challenging situations had been honed for a number of years. And that brings us to an important aspect of bright spots.

Unlike the name suggests, bright spots are not necessarily very bright and shining and easily noticeable. In fact, they are oftentimes dim flickers in an overall dark and gloomy background. Somebody mentioned in my introduction in a panel discussion that I am an innovation and strategy expert. Wow! Strategy expert? Am I? Could I be? I noted it as a bright spot. And later asked me, “Could I develop this area further?”

Personal examples are always limiting. People say my life has been quite smooth. I never had major challenges. And that’s true. However, I feel that bright spots are present no matter how challenging the situation is. Apparently, people at the receiving end of the suicide hotline are trained to say, “Is there a part of you that doesn’t want to commit suicide? I would like to talk to that part of you.” There is usually a part that doesn’t want to commit suicide otherwise the person wouldn’t have called the hotline number anyway.

I hope you get to try it out and see if it works for you. Best wishes.

Improving idea velocity: A webinar May 15, 2020

(Watch the video of the webinar - filesize 54MB)

Improving idea velocity is arguably the most important imperative of the current innovation efforts. In a challenging time like Covid-19, the speed of innovation becomes even more pertinent as we respond to create novel and affordable solutions such as vaccines, ventilators, disinfectants, social distancing interventions, etc. In this webinar, we will step back from covid context and explore ways of improving idea velocity, in general. This webinar is meant for practitioners, educators, students, researchers, and whoever is concerned with the speed of innovation. Familiarity with 8-steps to innovation framework is helpful but not required. To register, please send mail to vinay@catalign.com. 

Mindfulness webinar 12th April 2020

Audio of the webinar (MP3, 31MB)

It was a pleasure to facilitate a webinar on mindfulness last Sunday and interact with participants in this corona lockdown period. The topic was "Recognizing wasteful thinking", i.e. chapter 4 of my book "Mindfulness: connecting with the real you." Here are the topics/questions we explored:

00:00:00 Introduction to the webinar
00:01:10 Questions from participants
00:04:35 Wasteful thinking and 3 examples
00:11:39 The clue: observation can stop a movement
00:15:02 Observing the train of thought
00:18:00 Leave it, change it, accept it
00:19:54 Diet of the mind
00:27:24 How to control my thoughts?
00:37:50 Are there stages of maturity?
00:40:15 Is positive thinking helpful?
00:46:22 Would acceptance lead to inaction?
00:54:00 Does closing eyes help?
00:55:15 Is it similar to Karmayoga of Gita?
00:57:19 Relationship to meditation and samadhi state
01:00:31 Teenage interaction - feels challenging
01:07:53 Fear of missing out in corporate world?
01:18:30 3 quick tips

Hope you enjoy it!

The short film “Being 97”: A humbler version of Katha Upanishad

Katha Upanishad is one of the important Indian scriptures where a boy Nachiketa has a dialogue with death.  The short film “Being 97” also presents a dialogue with death except that the protagonist here is a ninety-seven-year-old former professor of Philosophy, Herbert Fingarette. Unlike Nachiketa, Herbert is not at the doorstep of death such that he can return to life after the dialogue. He is about to step in. Moreover, the dialogue in the short film is humbler in its stance as compared to Katha Upanishad in trying to probe the terrain which lies beyond death. “Being 97” is made by Andrew Hasse, Herbert’s grandson and I am really impressed by the gentleness of his approach in dealing with this delicate subject. Here are my 3 takeaways from the film:

The illusion of understanding: Herbert had been a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara for close to forty years. He had written several books including one on death. I have written a couple of books myself, one as a single author and another as a co-author. I know how effortful the book writing process is. Moreover, you can’t write a book unless you really believe that you understand the topic of your book. Herbert believed that anxiety about death is not rational. And yet, he admits in the film that he was wrong. Whether rational or not he feels anxious about his death. This is not to suggest that Herbert was a poor or phony researcher. On the contrary, it demonstrates how powerful the illusion of understanding is. I look at it as a warning signal to all so-called experts including myself to be a little humble about one’s claims. At ninety-seven, Herbert is able to answer the question, “What’s the point of it all?” with, “I wish I knew”. I really admire his honesty.

Importance of acceptance: One thing the film brings out is the difficulty Herbert faces in doing simple everyday tasks. For example, it shows his inability to wear a shirt himself. There is a caregiver who assists him with his chores. He had been an independent person all his life and it must have been hard to accept that you can’t do these tasks yourself. And yet, that is what Herbert has been learning. To accept the situation as it is, without inner resistance. It is such a powerful lesson. The word “acceptance” is many times misunderstood as akin to doing “silent or passive observation”. I feel the real meaning of acceptance is “inner non-resistance”. It is seeing the futility of the inner voice that says, “This shouldn’t be happening to me. I have been independent all my life. I will fight it out.” This inner voice is typically accompanied by a sustained feeling of frustration and anger. Acceptance is associated with actions in harmony with the situation.

A clue on prototyping death: Problem of death “is not just a theoretical question for me,” says Herbert, “It’s the one thing central to my existence.” If one were to understand death actually, not just theoretically, where would one begin? I feel Herbert gives us a clue, without perhaps being aware of it, when he says, “Half of me is gone and her absence has been a presence.” He is referring to his wife’s death several years earlier and its continued effect. “We were very close. We were married for probably around 70 years,” he says and it feels as though he is half-dead. If it is seen from this perspective, death can be looked upon as dying to things you really consider part of you. These could be – family, friends, possessions – both material and knowledge, status, things you feel you belong to like country, religion, political party, etc.  One’s existence is a continuation of all these things. Sometimes these are collectively referred to as self-image. Now, I can ask simple questions like – Can I die to TV for a day? Or Can I die to my phone for a day? Or can I die to the office for a day? Or can I die to the family by going to a silent retreat alone? These are not theoretical questions. You can actually experiment and test which part of the self-image is really permanent – unshakable. The boundary of the self-image can get pushed when you experiment with something like a religion which one has inherited from generations and carried for several decades. I found these experiments useful and insightful. Perhaps you may find them useful too.

Herbert passed away shortly after the film was made in late 2018. And what a beautiful piece of art the grandfather-grandson duo created! Kudos to Herbert and Andrew!

Source: 

Ajanh Chamras on learnings from monkhood, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Taoism

Ajahn Chamras interview (19 minutes, 10MB, MP3)

Recently, I got an opportunity to meet Ajanh Chamras at Chestnut Hill Eco Resort near Hat Yai, a beautiful place tucked in the hills in Southern Thailand. He had been associated with the former avatar of the resort called Stream Garden Retreat for close to two decades. We could see his love for the place as he volunteered to show us around. Ajanh Chamras taught psychology at Siam Technology College for several years before becoming a forest monk. After six years in the forest, he became an instructor and facilitator at the Stream Garden Retreat which was a study center based on Jiddu Krishnamurti's teachings. He translated over ten of JK's books into the Thai language. Currently, he is writing a book on the "Taoist approach to health". In this audio interview (19 minutes) Ajanh talks about his learnings from monkhood, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Taoism.

Ajahn Chamras interview (19 minutes, 10MB, MP3)

Highlights from the interview:

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:58 What did it mean to be a forest monk? Made friends with nature, listening to melodious song of the stream, birds, mind became captivated b the surroundings
• 03:41 Did you have a teacher during this time? Yes, Laung Phor Tien, an awareness meditation teacher, he used movement and taught walking meditation, get alms from a nearby village,
• 04:30 What could be your key learnings from this period? My senses became awakened - not just at the superficial level but also at a subtle level, felt a sense of cleansing by living in nature especially related to my accumulations in my career, being alone with occasional visitors, sense of the depth of peace
• 05:45 How did you get interested in J. Krishnamurti? Was reading and then started to translate his works
• 06:10 What aspect of the teaching did you find so interesting? His teaching is about self-awareness, Long Phor Tien teaching was limited because he is not educated, He discovered it through his own practice, It was very simple, folks language, Long Phor Tien would say, "Feel the feet touching the ground, feel the wind, don't let your mind wander, be in the moment". 
• 07:35 What did Krishnamurti add to this teaching? Took me on the path of psychological investigation
• 07:44 Can you give an example of it might mean to do a psychological investigation? You question the nature of thought, nature of mind
• 08:58 What aspect of the nature of the mind is crucial to look at? the thought enters into everything in our mind and creates something artificial and imitate real life, 
• 10:25 Where would somebody begin to investigate how thought is fooling us? I would start from Long Phor Tien, To be aware, being watchful to the operation of the mind, A phrase from Long Phor Tien is "don't believe in your thought process." 
• 11:37 How would I find out that it is actually fooling me? Majority of the thought is not coinciding with the actuality, not go along with the actuality, thought affects our health also
• 12:23 Can you give an example? I get stressed, get tension, from the tension I get a headache and it prevents me from going to sleep, I see the negative aspect of thought. mind uses us and we become a slave to it, we don't think there is another dimension of life and we think that is all to life.
• 14:15 How did you get interested in Taoism? Taoism works with nature, let nature work its own way, one aspect of Taoism is health that's why my book is "Taoism: an approach to health".
• 15:01 What's Taoism approach to health? They talk about food, they talk about looking after the energy in our body, practice of movement which accumulates Chi which works its way through the blockage
• 17:17 Currently what do you do? I teach this to visitors, sometimes we have health seminar.

If you have any questions to Ajanh Chamras, you can reach out to him at chamras536@gmail.com. 

Hope you enjoyed the background music of cicadas and especially the rhythmic singing of big frogs. 

Dr. Radhika Herzberger on teaching students to slow down their thinking

I got an opportunity to meet Dr. Radhika Herzberger on the beautiful Rishi Valley School campus last month. Radhika is a writer, educationist, and Indologist. She is a former Director of Rishi Valley Education Centre. She has been teaching culture and history for several years. Radhika is concerned about the anxiety that dominates students’ mind especially due to exam pressure and is currently exploring ways of teaching students to slow down their thinking. In this short conversation, she presents her thoughts on this theme.

You can listen to the interview here (13:30 minutes, MP3 file, 5MB)

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:40 What do you mean by slowing down the thinking process? Awareness of “Mind’s eye”, Attention, veiled by conditioning
• 03:38 Why do you think this is relevant for students?10^th class while facing exam and struggling
• 04:35 Don’t students need a fast mind to solve problems in a shorter time?  The quickness of perception doesn’t have a bearing on the fast mind, In fact, you can see better with a slow mind. That’s why it is called a mind’s eye. Empty drum sounds best.
• 06:00 Where can interested students start this exercise of mind’s eye? Start by writing down their thoughts for 20 minutes without censoring. Raises awareness of your preoccupations – typically self-condemnation or fantasy. Let the pen write, and you discover about yourself through it. I follow this up with a short film by Prof. Robert Sapolsky called “The best and the worst in you”. Self is not a unified whole. Then students write about people they don’t like.
• 11:38 Could this exercise be relevant for anybody? Yes.

If you have any questions on this, please feel free to write to Radhika at radhika@rishivalley.org.

4 attributes of strategic thinking

Strategic thinking has been a side topic for the past decade whenever I taught innovation. However, last year I got an opportunity to study it more during my course at IIM Bangalore on “Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation”. In this article, I would like to present my current view of the 4 attributes of strategic thinking. It’s my way of delayering strategic thinking. To illustrate the attributes I plan to refer to Andrew Grove’s book “Only the paranoid survive”. I found it useful not only because Grove presents many examples where these attributes are exhibited but also because he was vocal about the slippery areas associated with some of these attributes.

The four attributes of strategic thinking I would like to present are challenge clarity, bright spot awareness, metaphoric thinking and hypothesis thinking. Let me try to articulate each one with an example or two.

Challenge clarity: This is arguably the most important attribute of strategic thinking. Here is an example from “Only the paranoid survive” which illustrates what challenge clarity is. By then Intel had been losing money on memories, its core business, for a long time. Andrew Grove writes, “I remember a time in the middle of 1985 when I was in my office with Intel’s chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary. I asked, ‘If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?’ Gordon answered without hesitation, ‘He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, and said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?’”¹

I have been facilitating the exercise of identifying the topmost challenge with many executives for over a decade. And I feel many of them felt uncomfortable or lost during this exercise. We are comfortable articulating a plateful of challenges. But to say one is the most critical needs clarity. And without that clarity strategic decision making is difficult.

Bright spot awareness: By the time Intel management took the decision of exiting its core business of memories, a viable alternative was already present within the company – microprocessors. It was a profitable business and growing but it was not considered of any strategic importance. In this case, “microprocessor business” is referred to as a bright spot – something working in the same context where many other things like memories business are not working.

We have a huge bias for dark spots (things that are not working) and we spend disproportionate energy in removing the dark spots. For example, companies spend a lot of time on exit interviews – to understand why employees are leaving. And in contrast, spend little time doing staying interviews – why employees are staying long years (bright spots). 

In the 1770s Britain lost a jewel in its empire leading to the formation of the United States of America. During this crisis period Britain decided to shift its attention to a bright spot in its empire – a series of victories by a private corporate armed force led by Robert Clive in Bengal, India. It paid handsomely over the next century. Bright spot awareness is counter-intuitive and yet extremely important.

Metaphoric thinking: It is not sufficient to know a challenge and a response. Things need to be sufficiently concrete to give direction to oneself and especially a team. This is where metaphors become important. Andrew Grove tells the story about an executive staff meeting where they were discussing Intel’s new direction as a “microcomputer company”. Their Chairman, Gordon Moore, said, “You know, if we’re really serious about this, half our executive staff had better become software types in five years’ time.” Becoming “software types” was a good metaphor for a company where almost everybody is concerned with hardware.²

Dr. Venkataswamy who founded Aravind Eye Care asked, “How do we deliver eye care with the same efficiency as McDonald's?” And Dr. Kiran Bedi asked, “How do we transform a jail into an Ashram?” Metaphoric thinking plays a crucial role in establishing direction clarity.

Hypothesis thinking: This is perhaps the toughest of the four attributes to master. Andy Grove narrates a story of an exit interview during a podcast discussion. During this exit interview, Steve, a young employee said, “Andy, if I were you, I would take microprocessors seriously. We should learn how to use microprocessors and become an expert.” Andy said, “Sure” and never paid any further attention. In fact, Andy mentions that it was inconceivable to believe Steve. Hypothesis thinking is about treating the input as a hypothesis and not rejecting it outright like Andy. 

In the book “Only the paranoid survive” Andy calls people like Steve Cassandras³. Cassandra was a princess of Troy who foretold the fall of Troy. He mentions that there are Cassandras all around us giving us useful hints about the big changes happening around us. Hypothesis thinking requires a certain quality of listening. It requires being sensitive to receiving inputs contrary to one’s belief. It requires cultivating mindfulness.

Once you begin to treat every suggestion as a hypothesis then the natural next step is experimentation. Andy Grove mentions in the book, “Resolution of strategic dissonance doesn’t come about in the form of figurative light bulb going on. It comes through experimentation.”⁴

In short the four attributes of strategic thinking we looked at are challenge clarity, bright spot awareness, metaphoric thinking and hypothesis thinking.

References from: Andrew Grove, “Only the paranoid survive”, Currency Doubleday, 1999.

1. Page 89 (Dialogue with Gordon Moore)
2. Page 143 (Gordon Moore’s metaphor of ‘software types’)
3. Page 108-109 (Listening to Cassandras)
4. Page 129-131 (Experimentation for resolving strategic dissonance)