I read a post by Alison yesterday, received a few comments about the last post I did on emergent strategy and have an email conversation or two and got to thinking about the concept of the future. What an odd concept. The future? I define it as a place beyond our present where another form of existence… exists! In my previous post on emergent strategy I assume the existence of a path let me clarify.
For a path to exist it means that one was already created by thinking about it. By virtue of the selection of the variables we use to define the future what we expect can become what we get. So to say “path” is to imply that it was there before I thought about it. Chances are it wasn’t. So when you think about the future think about this, for it to exist it needs people to think it exists. If it were to involve anything outside of what you think, then it would probably come from nature. An external unplanned seismic event can change your planned future. Then again, it may not. I am sure I am watching far too much summer viewing ala Eli Stone.
So I can add to my last post a singular yet profound thought about the emergent nature of strategy: a path is the outcome of a thought process, yet in reality when we think it out, it never plays out the same as it did in our heads. Now, our heads are our enemy. They tell us of things that are true and false. The falseness of a path or the trueness of it, may change when we change our assessment of it’s viability. So if I decide to change my mind, my future changes until I change it again. The path keeps changing or it is many moving paths that exist as thoughts of action to be taken… not actual actions. I can be like Tim Ferris and set goals or make companies or be like my dog and sit around and do nothing. The outcome of what I do still goes back to what I think and what I think determines the course of actions I am likely or not likely to take as the future I have evidently created unfolds in real time.
That said, I have met the odd person who has a deeper sense of destiny that I do. You believe that these people are precisely where they are meant to be and they have a deep underlying confidence that their life is what they knew it would be. These kinds of people are there, and this shoots a massive hole in the idea of emergent strategy. They have the grand narrative, the underlying concept, why don’t I or others? Perhaps this small percentage of people (less than 1%? yeah I looked it up, made it up, rolled a dice, shouted, pulled a rabbit number out of hat) are more tuned in that the rest of us and have an inward comprehension of destiny that scopes beyond my interpretation of it. See when you pull a truism you run the risk of falling into the either/or trap. If one is true, then the other is not. What if both are not true? Or they are different versions of different narratives we have created because inwardly we like the ideas we find because of our self.
Therefore, everytime you think of something or frame a new future, you frame new actions and interpret this as a mini-destiny if you will. These of course must be open to change and revision as you need to change them. You can’t set them in stone and expect to find “the answer”. Does life follow a grand narrative? Derrida would say no, but I say it does. It just may be a non-linear iterative one that is totally created by us, written as a reflection of the things we externally magnetise to, and the social context we live in. It might be a fragment, that is not connected to anything else. Is the search for meaning futile… no because we can’t stop even if we tried. Meaning is what we look for in all that we do. Even if we say there is no meaning, we have found meaning in the meaningless.
To finish up this obscure holiday post I think that perhaps one should not write a blog whilst reflecting on the future. It is such an abstract concept that it leads to thinking as redundant, bizarre and formally lateral as shown above. At the same time, it makes you think: how much of my life is the result of my thinking or what I am unconsciously harbouring around in my head? All of it?
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Luke,
How are you doing? Are you relaxing and enjoying yourself or are you being haunted by the scaring future that does not look that bright any more? Your last post on “Re framing yourself…” could be perceived as your personal revenge to all the nonsense that you were forced to read in order to lay your own personal jewel in the field dominated by dummies. You had be an the floor, everything seemed so crooked that you simply could not produce a straight line! At this stage of my paradoxical development, when I hear somebody talking to God, I conclude that he is simply praying, but when I hear God, talking to anyone, I feel that it is time to visit my “Psychiatrist!” Anyway no matter how stupid I felt,I completely failed to figure out what exactly you wanted to say!?
There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into Literature.
I also enjoyed the movie- “Shortcut to Happiness” that has some very fine points to its credit. If you have read Plato, in one dialog “Giorgi”, Giorgi is convincing Socrates in the value of his
Art of Manipulation and Persuasion. Socrates asks Giorgi one single question: apart from teaching his students the ability to convince other people what is really good for them
and how they should act in a concrete situation, does he also educate them in the skill, where they can Themselves judge what is good and right?- This question is a killer for all
manipulators from ancient to recent times. Since all know what something costs at the moment, but none know what is it real value, that will never pass into nothingness! This
is elegantly generalized by Oscar Wild – “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” On this basis Sir Anthony Hopkins asks the
Devil(Played by a lady) the killer question- “Now that you claim this man’s soul on the basis that you offered him “Success” as a writer, What could he possibly write without his
Soul? What at all can he say that is truly significant? And how many from the “Successful”, whose novels and thoughts are on sale, really have something to say?
The same unfortunately is with arts, that with the development of the internet took a standstill. Everything, everywhere begins to look and sound the same. Oscar Wild in “The Portrait of
Dorian Gray”, according to the best of my memory, was saying that even a second rated artist could paint a more impressive “Sunset”, than nature. He went even further than that,
stating that “Art exists to show Nature, where her real place is in eternity.”
Tell me Luke, what is the answer to this ALL?
I venture to suggest that one is the successive reframing of oneself. And the future, insofar as it comes into existence under human influence, is the largely unconscious consequence of the projection by the many of these successive reframings.
Ok, so perhaps I’ve been thinking rather more about Alison’s blog than yours (see my comments there). And I don’t actually believe the idea in my head that maybe the future is what we learn when exposed to the lessons of life (mediated by the technology we call the present). But, as always, the value of the idea is not how true it is but how useful. Does believing in certain “learning outcomes” for the future, where the present is all that we have to move us from our current state of knowledge (the past) to the post-learning state (the future), does this believing, I ask, lead us to less sub-optimal outcomes?
@ Michael … very articulate. Perhaps the bottom line here is that I don’t know what I have to say. Perhaps that’s the issue. Maybe this post is my revenge on the future, but I can say that hope dissipates as soon as it arrives when reality sets in! I will think about what you have written
@ Alan … I can’t answer that with any degree of formal intelligence. However, I think you have nailed what I was trying to say by (or so I think) saying: “Does believing in certain “learning outcomes” for the future, where the present is all that we have to move us from our current state of knowledge (the past) to the post-learning state (the future), does this believing, I ask, lead us to less sub-optimal outcomes?” My answer is this: as soon as we frame the future we make the goals and take the steps. We frame it, develop it and map it out in our heads. I shouldn’t generalise either… I DO THIS!!!