Progress, process and possibility: 3 words and their new meanings

Self-investigation is a process that involves testing some of the long held beliefs. If some of the beliefs are seen to be false then that results into old words acquiring new meanings. In this article, I would like to present three such words: progress, process and possibility – which have acquired new meanings for me through the process of self-investigation.

Progress: Right from school days the word progress carried significance. Initially, it meant gaining height and weight and getting good marks in exams. Later on it meant getting into a good college, getting a good job, getting married, owning stuff like a house, a car etc. Somewhere along the way, I came across books by two spiritual teachers – J. Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi. JK said – root cause of human suffering is the process of becoming. And Ramana said – there is no separate entity there to progress. I don’t know why but I took them seriously – at least treated these as serious hypothesis to be tested. This was twenty years ago. And I haven’t found any evidence to disprove them so far. As a result, the word progress has acquired a new meaning – progress, to me, is a cognitive illusion – a thought created gap between perception and reality. To get a glimpse of how this could possibly be the case, it would help to look at the new meaning of the second word – process.

Process: Be it history or science, it was about understanding the interaction and relationship between various entities. Physics involved large bodies like planets and small particles like atoms and electrons and the forces among them. History involved kingdoms, nations, their leaders and the wars. In either case, objects were primary and their interaction was secondary. How does the earth attract the moon? Did Gandhi help India win freedom from British? In short, objects were primary and the process was secondary. Somewhere along the way, came a doubt: what if the process is primary and everything else secondary? This investigation takes a new turn when you question whether I am primary or the process of perception and meaning making is primary. Here is how I see this currently: All there is – is the Unknown which is a process of meaning getting expressed into matter, thoughts and actions and simultaneously getting compressed back into the Unknown. Every moment there is a perception and meaning making. If perception is with clarity, then the meaning is harmonious and gets expressed accordingly. If there is misperception then the meaning is conflict-ridden and gets expressed accordingly. Every object is only a relatively stable structure in this process flow – similar to a vortex in a river – never separate from it. Desire for progress comes out of misperception when the relatively stable structures (such as this body or the nations) are taken to be independent entities. And the meaning making process tries to make the entity (e.g. this body) more secure making progress (e.g. by getting a better job). How does a conflict-ridden meaning begin to change?

Possibility: Every conflict has a notion of impossibility inherent in it. Every anxiety involves imagining a future – a what-if scenario – say of losing a job or a breaking of a relationship – and also carrying a rigid belief that the imagined scenario should be impossible (must not happen). However, sometimes perception undergoes a shift and clarity emerges in the process. This is called an insight. And through insight there is a perception of the futility of the process of becoming. Then the rigidities which lead to impossibilities dissolve and turn into possibilities. Then every opinion, every meaning is seen as a possibility and nothing as impossible. In the worst case scenario of someone telling, “You are stupid!” may also involve a possibility of learning something new about oneself. Perhaps there is an opportunity to say “Sorry” if one has inadvertently hurt someone. This is when the meaning making process becomes creative. This understanding results in a living where every moment comes with several possibilities and enriches life.

In short, I see currently that progress is a cognitive illusion which results when meaning making process misperceives reality and begins to treat relatively stable structures as independent entities. Sometimes, through insights, the meanings undergo a shift and that melts its rigidities. Then every moment brings several possibilities and makes life a continuous learning process. Who knows? The meanings might change tomorrow.

References:

1.      J. Krishnamurti’s reference to process of becoming as the root cause of suffering is in “Ending of time” Chapter 1.

2.      Ramana Maharshi highlighting that there is no separate entity to make progress can be found in multiple discussions in the book – “Talks with Ramana Maharshi”. E.g. talk 380.

3.      Seeing every object as a relatively stable structure like a vortex in a river is a metaphor I came across in David Bohm’s writing and interviews. E.g. “Wholeness and implicate order” Chapter 1.

3 ways a metaphor helps in challenge framing

Around forty years ago, Dr. Venkataswamy asked a question – “Why can’t eye care service be offered with efficiency similar to McDonalds?” People found it an odd analogy. How can you compare a cataract surgery with a hamburger? But the metaphor did help create one of the most efficient eye hospitals in the world, Aravind Eye Care System. Framing the challenge is arguably the most important step in innovation and metaphors play a key role in that process. Here are 3 ways in which metaphors help in challenge framing.

Makes it more concrete: Dr. V could have said, “Let’s build world’s most efficient eye hospital.” Perhaps it might have worked. However, words like efficient and others like innovative, world’s best are abstract. They mean different things to different people. When you say – as efficient as a McDonalds – suddenly it makes the concept more concrete. There is a common image for all the people who are involved in the venture.

Brings out uniqueness: While Aravind took inspiration from McDonalds in building process efficiency, it was significantly different from McDonalds in its business model. Aravind is a not-for-profit organization in which paying customers cross-subsidize the poor patients. This was a case when Aravind was eleven bed hospital and it is the case when the size is several thousand beds. Metaphor can also help in bringing out the uniqueness of the idea. You could say it is different from McDonalds in its business model in the following way.

Generates new questions: Anybody who has been to McDonalds especially in the US would know that it has drive-through. So, one  could ask, “How do we provide a drive-through for Aravind?” Of course, the question may or may not be relevant. However, it may take you in a direction not thought before. In fact, Aravind did end up creating a service where they prepare an prescription eye-glass in thirty minutes. This idea may or may not have been inspired by drive-through. But the point is, metaphors can be generative. i.e. They can help you raise questions not thought before. McDonalds customizes the taste of its products and services to local taste. You could ask, “How do we customize eye care to local culture?” This might lead to new ideas.

While Aravind was partly inspired by McDonald, now Aravind is inspiring other hospitals in India and abroad. I won’t be surprised if Narayan Hrudayalaya was partly inspired by Aravind. It is does to heart-surgery what Aravind is doing for eye care.

In short, metaphors make the challenge concrete, bring out uniqueness of the challenge and generate new questions. Thus metaphors help enrich the challenge.

Adopting Design Thinking in organizations, one step at a time

One question that I often get is, “How do we integrate Design Thinking in our existing processes?” Many organizations have well established processes like Agile, Six Sigma, Business Excellence framework etc. It is both impractical and unwise to establish design thinking as yet another parallel process. Instead, what works better is to take a step or two of design thinking and pilot it within the existing processes. Let’s look at a few options.

There are multiple ways to view DT. One view, as advocated by the Stanford D-school, looks at DT as an iterative process consisting of five steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Let’s see what it might mean to adopt only one of the five steps in an organization at a time.

1.      Empathy: If you were to emphasize empathy in your existing processes, here are a few options.

·        Journey map: This is a tool where customer’s experience is mapped through various stages of the journey. For example, one journey map could be about “Employee’s day-1 experience”. This would map out experiences of various new joinees as to how their day-1 experience was through the stages of – arrival, induction session, lunch, afternoon, exit etc. This might lead to a challenge statement such as, “How do we get a new joinee an employee badge by the end of day-1?”

·        Humble inquiry: Popularize humble inquiry in meetings and discussions. This is a form of inquiry where one requests the other person to elaborate the point. E.g. Please tell me more or please give me an example. Contrast this with the prescriptive enquiry where one asks questions like, “But, why don’t you try like this…?” or “Boss, this kind of stuff will not work in our organization?”

·        Bright spots: We are easy in finding what’s going wrong – the dark spots. However, in any situation, there is something working right in some corner. These are the bright spots. For example, in every situation where an organization faces high attrition, there are some people who have stayed long within the same organization. So exit interviews would give some information about the dark spots, staying interviews would tell more about the bright spots. Researching about bright spots naturally evokes empathy because you are trying to understand why certain things are working well in that context.

2.      Define: You may choose to focus only on define step – which means you will try to establish more clarity on which are the challenges a team is focused on addressing at various levels in the organization. You could check following:

·        Quality of challenges:  Many times organizational challenges are framed in an abstract manner – “We want to become an innovative organization”. Or They are concrete but don’t have hooks for imagination – “We want to be no 1 in our market.” This is a concrete goal but doesn’t contain any direction for exploration. Alternately, we could ask, “How do we organize knowledge in our project so that it can create Quora like experience?”

·        Internal bright spot-based challenges: You could encourage framing of challenges which are based on internal bright spots. For example, you may pick an innovation from last year – say a chat-bot integration into a customer service platform (BotServ) – and ask “How do we develop more innovations like BotServ which can excite customers and leadership alike?”

3.      Ideation: In all likelihood, your organization may not be new to ideation. However, you may want to ask how you can have more ideation sessions with cross-functional teams. Or you may want to check if you can organize co-innovation workshops with customers where you generate ideas together.

4.      Prototyping: In case you would like to build a prototyping culture, here are a few options:

·        Story-boarding: This is one of the least expensive ways of getting people to bring ideas alive. You can encourage people to create before-and-after storyboards and paste them in the corridors / brainstorming rooms. This can invite comments and may inspire other ideas.

·        Wireframes:  In the world of software this typically means drawing screens – either for PC or for a mobile phone. In the world of physical objects, it means drawing a floorplan or making a 3-D model like how an architect does for a house etc.

·        Hackathons: Conduct a full-day or two-day event focused on building rapid prototypes for a given challenge.

5.      Test: In case you would like to emphasize getting ideas tested, here are a few options:

·        Test Fridays: Allocate an hour on one Friday every month in getting prototypes reviewed by senior leaders. 

·        Customer testing: Pass on prototypes with customer facing people – sales, product managers etc. and get feedback.

Someone may argue that emphasizing a step like ideation without empathy or experimentation may be missing the main point of design thinking. And, I feel any step is better than no step. Hope you get to try out something.

Mindfulness on the go: mini-podcast #1 and #2

Thanks to the suggestion from my wife, Gauri, we decided to chat together on mindfulness and experiment with podcast. So far we have created two mini-podcasts – each roughly of 10 minutes duration. The process has been fun for us and that is encouraging. One of the aspects I am exploring is how we can learn mindfulness through metaphors from movies. So expect mini-podcasts in future where we take up a movie and see what kind of mindfulness tips it presents us. If you have any suggestions, please write a comment on this blog.

Podcast #1: What is mindfulness? (10:35)

Introduction by Gauri (0:00)
Vinay's background (0:35)
What is mindfulness? (3:55)

Podcast #2: What is “on the go” and Why mindfulness? (10:44)

Introduction by Gauri (0:00)
What is "on the go"? (0:25)
If I practice mindfulness, will I become stress-free or peaceful? (3:30)
Is this connected with any God, religion or a guru? (7:00)
Why should we learn mindfulness? (9:07)

Five tips on mindfulness from “A beautiful mind” film

“A beautiful mind” is a movie loosely based on the life of the Nobel Laureate John Nash. In an earlier article I have written about how it depicts the journey of a human mind through the three stages of creativity, madness and awakening. In this article, I would like to bring five tips on mindfulness that we can learn from this movie.

1.      You can’t reason your way out of suffering

Nash is arguing with his psychiatrist and asking, "Why can't I reason my out of this (schizophrenia)?" Psychiatrist is quick to point out the paradox, "Because your mind is where the problem is in the first place." Thought is distorting our perception. Hence, we can’t use thought as a tool to investigate the distortion. It is like dressing up the thief as a police in order to investigate the theft. Mindfulness suggests that we use attention or awareness as the tool to investigate what’s going on.

2.      You’ve got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive

Martin, Nash's friend, asks him if the hallucinations are gone. Nash says that they are not gone but he has stopped feeding them and as a result they have given up on him. Mindfulness is about watching how you are feeding your dreams and nightmares for them to stay alive. If the feeding stops, the dreams and nightmares lose their power.

3.      Being suspicious of your perception

Nash is approached by a person outside his class whom he has never met. Nash is suspicious of new people. So he double-checks with one of his students if she is able to see this new person as well. Only when she confirms does Nash proceed to have a chat with the visitor. Mindfulness involves being aware that the current perception may be a distortion of the reality especially in surprising situations. And it remains open for alternate views and opinions.

4.      Are you crazy? Yes, it’s possible!

Nash is sitting with a visitor, Thomas King, who has come to meet him on behalf of Nobel committee. Nash is being considered for the Nobel Prize and King is there to check if Nash is crazy. After all, the reputation of Nobel Prize is at stake. Nash says “It’s possible (that he is crazy.)” He further clarifies that he is still on medication for schizophrenia. Being mindful is about carrying a huge bias for “possible” as against “impossible”. Every belief or idea is tentative and open for validation even if the idea is “I am crazy.”

5.      Like the diet of the mind, choose not to indulge in certain appetite

Nash clarifies the situation to Thomas King. He still sees things that are not there but he chooses not to acknowledge them. Mindfulness is a process where one is alert and attentive all the time. This is similar to what Nash calls – a diet of the mind. If you are on a diet, you are alert all the time as to what you are eating. Similarly, here there is alertness to check if the thought or voice in the head is worth "indulging in". 

My 3 takeaways from the Krishnamurti Gathering in Murren, Switzerland

I got an opportunity to attend a week-long gathering of people interested in the teaching of Jiddu Krishnamurti last month. It was held in a picturesque little town of Murren located in Bernese Alps in Switzerland. My father, who has been a student of Krishnamurti’s teachings for a few decades, wished to attend this gathering and we went as a family – my parents, my wife and I. We attended the first week of the two week gathering. 

Like other Krishnamurti gatherings we saw videos of Krishnamurti’s talks, had panel discussions, small group dialogues and also had a space for people to share their personal experiences and insights. We also had guided hikes in the mountains. The gathering organizer, Gisele, a lovely lady, looked after each participant with great care. People came from a dozen countries mostly in Europe but also from the US and Australia. Many participants knew each other and had been part of this annual event earlier known as the Saanen Gathering since 70s and 80s.

A gathering like this creates a space for deep reflection and impacts each participant in a unique way. Here I am jotting down the three things I took away from this event.

1.      Role of silence in a dialogue: Our small group dialogues used to begin with moments of silence. The idea was that the dialogue remains anchored in silence. I knew this and yet there were moments when I was driven by the urge to speak. Our facilitator and other members were very helpful in pointing out to me and others that there is a need to slow down and let the dialogue flow through the silence. In fact, later I found it useful to imagine that each word was entering the pool of silence at the centre and new words were emerging from that pool. It was beautiful to experience it when that happened. Perhaps this is relevant to any conversation and I continue to experiment with this.

2.      What is my primary responsibility? This question was discussed over two days in our small group dialogues. One the one hand, it was observed that the world is in a mess and I am deeply connected with the world. In fact, there is one famous Krishnamurti quote which says – You are the world. Then I must share the responsibility for the mess.  And hence, my primary responsibility is to bring order to this mess. On the other hand, it was observed that it is not easy perhaps impossible to genuinely help anyone because the thought process that leads to conflict – anger, worry, frustration, is almost mechanical and reactive. In all likelihood, I am contributing to the conflict by being reactive too. Hence, my primary responsibility is my inner silence, non-reactivity or non-resistance. Perhaps my inner silence is the best help I can offer to the world.

3.      Nature as a teacher: Murren offered breath-taking beauty in myriad forms. We could see the majesty of the snow peaked mountains like the Jungfrau, a roaring waterfall like the Trummelbach falls, gentle streams, peaceful cows, bright flowers all in the same day. It is as if the nature is teasing our judgmental mind and saying, “You like to judge every situation, judge this scene” and it is humbling. One particular scene was insightful. I was watching the snow patches on the mountain and after a while I suddenly saw that a small patch of snow was not snow after all. It was a stream and it got misperceived as snow. It was a beautiful metaphor for how thought constructs solid objects in place of flowing things. Perhaps the solidity of “Vinay” is similar and it is a stream of thoughts getting misperceived as a solid “I”. Who knows?

Overall, the gathering provided a wonderful opportunity for self-reflection and created new possibilities to experiment in the self-discovery journey. It was made joyous by the serene surroundings and the warmth of the people around us.

How is innovation related to mindfulness?

I work in two areas – innovation and mindfulness. I mention this while introducing myself. A natural question that I get after this is – are these two areas related? I see them as closely related. However, I could be biased. Hence, I thought of jotting my thoughts down and see if I get any inputs. This is an attempt in that direction.

Before exploring the relationship between innovation and mindfulness, it might be easier to see the relationship between innovation and mindlessness. Let’s take an extreme example – 9/11 attack masterminded by Osama Bin Laden’s organization. 9/11 attack has all the elements of a radical innovation – A novel idea creating a huge impact when executed. The impact was positive when seen from Laden’s organization. They were trying to make the world a better place – from their perspective. It so turned out – their perspective was quite contradictory to the perspective of many others. In fact, rest of the world labelled this act as mindless. Thus an innovation may be the result of mindless thinking and may result into mindless action – at least as seen from a section of society.  

Innovation is a creative response to the perceived challenge. And mindfulness is about perceptual clarity – seeing what is. If what you perceive is distorted or muddled up, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many geniuses you put together, the response will be muddled up. If you don’t have the ability to see if you are solving the right problem, then you may be hurting humanity even if you have the best of intentions.

Let’s take the case of Uber – a company that is known for its innovations and a company whose taxi service is running in 600+ cities across the world. I am a beneficiary of its service and perhaps you are too. Uber has had a rapid growth in a short span. However, things become murky when you ask the question – growth at what cost? It apparently fostered a culture where “back stabbing” of co-workers was encouraged and mistreatment of female employees was ignored. An investigation into sexual harassment issues led to the termination of 20 employees and eventually resulted in the resignation of the company CEO.

Uber is a case where the intent of treating all stakeholders fairly got into conflict with the intent of growing the business at a certain speed. And the intent to grow overpowered everything else. Perhaps Uber is not unique and that every organization that is chasing a quarter-on-quarter revenue-profit targets is undergoing similar pressure. To make sound decisions under such circumstances needs intense awareness of not only what is going on outside – in the meeting room, in the company, in the market but also inside one’s own mind – the anxiety of falling short of the growth target, the damage to self-image for not meeting the investor expectations etc. This awareness is mindfulness.

In short, innovation and mindfulness are connected deeply at the problem definition. Unless one is mindful of the distortions created by one’s own anxieties and aspirations one ends up solving the wrong problem. And nurturing a wrong problem is similar to nourishing a monster. You never know what shape it may take in future.

Image source: wikipedia.org