Being stupid used to be a shortcoming. It was used as an insult and an excuse to alienate and bully. My bet is that stupid people are more better at adapting to change. Seth Godin agrees:
It doesn't take a lot of time to change … to reinvent … or to redesign. No, it doesn't take time; it takes will. The will to change. The will to take a risk. The will to become incompetent – at least for a while.”
Martin Schwartz at the University of Virginia seems to agree with me as well. In his essay The importance of stupidity in scientific research, Schwartz claims that "we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying." The Economist seems to be on to something similar in last week's issue but where I and Professor Schwartz seem to herald stupidity as an asset, the magazine is of a different view in an article entitled The Spiral of Ignorance: Lack of understanding of the credit crunch is magnifying its damage. Says the magazine: "The tide has gone out and, with a very few exceptions, Britain is swimming naked: almost nobody appears to know what he is talking about. The havoc of the financial crisis has stretched and outstripped even most economists. The British political class is befogged. Ordinary people are overwhelmed. And just as the interaction between banking and economic woes is proving poisonous, so the interplay of public and political ignorance is damaging the country’s prospects."
This debate is interesting and is also the focus of my upcoming book. Stay tuned!
American psychologist Herb Simon once remarked that "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Nowhere is this as apparent than in today's media-saturated world. From Twitter to Pecha Kucha presentations, minimalist media is on the rise. Another interesting example of this landed in my inbox this morning. Conference Bites promises"Big Ideas for Short Attention Spans". The idea is to give you a couple of sample tidbits from conferences around the world. And I thought TED's 18-minute time limit was brief.
If you happen to have an hour to spare in the coming week - and in this era of downsizing, who doesn't? - use it to watch the following excellent lectures. The first is Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus who envisions a world where we'll build "poverty museum" since poverty has been eradicated.
I met a representative for Rektorsakademien in Stockholm today. They are a pro-bono organization who coaches headmasters around Sweden and put them in touch with representatives from the business world for a mutually beneficial exchange. The woman I met - Mrs X, in her early 60's now - was a key figure when private schools started to make their way into Sweden in the early 1990's. Private schools - or "Free schools" as they're referred to here - are still a polarizing political debate with many populists drumming up fears of inadequate learning as well as general xenophobic drivel ("Imagine the horrors for a child in a Muslim school!"). The situation now, however, is nothing compared to what Mrs X had to go through. The schools she opened were vandalized the day before the opening ceremony. She had to put guards outside of them to prevent vandals. One night, a female watchman was brutally beaten and the police strongly urged Mrs X to stay away from work as she was the likely target of the attacks. Let me make myself clear: We're talking about someone opening a new kind of school - not a woman guilty of genocide. While she talked about her experience, I couldn't help to think of something I heard recently: If you're not making enemies, you're not making change. Thanks to people like Mrs X, we have a choice between school systems in Sweden today. That wasn't the case a decade ago.
PS! Taking about making change, yesterday's blog post generated some interesting replies. A friend of mind put it very eloquently: "Politicians are, in fact, elected for the unknowable things they profess to want to achieve. The fact checks we submit them to prior to the election is just the Vision/Delusion litmus test we perform before handing our fates over to them. If they're entirely clueless, we try to weed them out before they appear on the ballot, though in George W. Bush's case that didn't work. As politicians achieve power, the great revealing begins: were they visionary or delusional? The test of a great politician is the ability to which he or she is capable of uniting vision with reality through actions, which will always be factual.”
Risk is defined as the precise probability of specific outcomes. Uncertainty is describing something that is indeterminate, fleeting, unknown. The former is precise. The latter is fleeting. Up until September of last year, we lived in a world where many people thought that controlling risk means controlling the unknown. Now we see that these are two completely different concepts. I was reminded of this when listening to Richard Bronk speak about imagination in economics at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce a few weeks ago. Bronk has written a book about the need to fuse the scientific, mathematical perspective on economics with a more romantic (as in Romanticism), imaginative view. "We half create the world that we see", says Bronk and continues to talk about how certain theories may cloud our minds in such a way as to lead us astray when we, for example, think about the way a market works. Bronk quotes John Keats and urges us to adopt a negative capability - "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Imagine a future ahead of us when politicians are elected not because they seem to know things but because they seem to not know things.
Remember the penguin advising Edward Norton's character to "Slide!" in the movie Fight Club? Perhaps this is what he was referring to.
I often look upon my profession, trendspotter, as being the result of a series of failures: In the world of marketing, advertising, film, novel writing, selling cat litter and lottery tickets, and so on. I refer to this as Darwinian career development - you try something, it either works or it doesn't, in the latter case you move on and try something else.
My friend Stein has written a solemn story about what it was like to work with SAAB and what might ultimately have killed this once quirky and promising brand. Read it here.
In my pet project to meet with headmasters and teachers around Sweden, a recurring theme is the current decline in math skills. Someone has even coined the term "Discalculus", a parallel to dyslexia, to describe the struggle many children encounter when working with numbers. This theme is an echo of the fierce debate in the U.S. where several national initiatives have been set up ensure America's hegemony on the global rankings of mathematical and scientific aptitude. A very interesting viewpoint came up in a recent meeting with a headmaster which is at odds with this stereotypical portrait of a society doomed to oblivion because kids don't learn calculus. The reason schools in Finland, China and Japan are ahead when math and even language skills are ranked is that they don't accept as many refugees as, say, Sweden. I have no idea what it's like to be a refugee but when I ask my wife who came as a refugee to Sweden in 1992, she describes it as a very turbulent ordeal and hardly the kind of conditions that will boost any kind of academic result in the first couple of years as you adapt to and try to settle in to a new society. This broadens the argument. Maybe Sweden should invent their own curves at which to excel. Don't get me wrong, we need to reach a certain level of mathematical literacy, but what about rankings for "Best collaborative landscape in schools"? Or "Best to work across cultures"? Or "Best to work with diversity"? I'm not convinced Sweden would score highly on all these new rankings. But neither would Finland, Japan or China - the current maths and science champions.
When I worked as a brand strategy consultant at Differ and later at Grow, we used to say that a strong brand should polarize people. Some will love it. Some will hate it.
