Chore Pay More: Bruce Lee, Sonu Nigam's Harkat, Harvard's Ellen Langer, Swami Sukhobodanana, John Vervaeke, Innovation Teacher Clayton Christensen

Image: Instagram @1947PartTwo

It was 1991. 

And our school had a silver jubilee celebration. 

Many students had prepared their performances for this mega day.

And many more students had prepared their performances...

...ahmmm! in their imagination! 

(side note: as children and perhaps as humans, in our imaginary world, we create lots of fiction

...where we outperform or do something heroic and get lots of applause, or a photo-frame-notice by the one we want to impress). 

I was quite prolific in these imaginations. 

Anyways,I distinctly remember one of the leading student figures (a senior). 

He was to dance with his group. 

He was wearing a super-pristine white shirt, black pant, and a bouncy hair-do 

(hmm! he had bouncy hair anyways, but he had done something to augment it that evening). 

And he was carrying a very attractive thing in his shirt pocket. 

Woah!!! It was a pocket disco light. 

You can imagine....a pocket disco light in 1991???!!!...that was super-sonic-woah!!!!

That !!!

...that was the attraction of the evening. 

Everyone kept noticing and talking about it. 

And this sort of  "noticing or detecting something unique",

or what neuroscience calls "salience detection network in brain", was so so so hyperactive that day.

And i could list several instances of so many of fellow students,

who would bring stuff in school over the years,

and we would get raptly frozen thinking about it for days.

Well! It turns out that this salience detection network plays out in various ways in later life....and even to this day. 

One of the jobs of this salience detection network is to scan,

for various kinds of threats in the environment.

A story for another day,

as to how this then goes on a hyper drive/detecting threats where there are none (what science calls as false positives).

Or connecting too many dots and overfitting them for being a threat. And sometimes this is over done.

We experience concern-fatigue or crisis-fatigue (((like many persons are facing in the current pandemic))).

And then we sort of have various coping strategies.

One of the coping strategies is called "deflect".

Deflecting it to all sorts of consumption or activities...binge eating, or content binging or simply blabbering to self or others,

or what Psychologist Freud called immersing oneself into forms of expression or art. 

(((side note: these immersions when goes under the reflection knife, won't remain deflections...; also the fact that human life has so so so many different incompleted or unmet needs of self and others,

it could become overwhelming for an unpracticing and unreflection human being))). 

But it seems that,

when there is adequate scanning for immediate threats done to a certain degree, 

this network then turns on in some weird ways. 

It could be easy to understand the following.

The salience detection would scan for sensory inputs and qualify whether something is familiar or not.

Once it is familiar (1/2/3/4), it would have a certain pre-defined reactions or response (habits/bias driven or paved).

Once it is unfamiliar (5/6/7/8), it would get into a quick risk detection mode.

Once the risk is negligible to manageable (avoidable for time being), 

it would scan for "interesting" elements in them or go back to forms of "deflections".

(((side note: there are further nuance to this but for another day)))

Oh No!!!

We have come too far.

This chain of thought leads to some interesting places.

But that for another day.

For now, let's go back to connecting it to the salience detection network.

So, we saw in the earlier chain, that there is this way which we handle the "familiar".

Our daily life involves various interactions with people, things, situations and experiences.

The weird or wicked about "familiar" is that sometimes there is indeed the coming across of the "familiar".

But sometimes we self-deceive.

We overfit the unfamiliar or misfit the unfamiliar as "familiar".

Or because we are too exhausted or lazy or uncreative or helpless or hopeless,

we deal with the "unfamiliar" with the strategies of dealing with the "familiar".

This has the potential to land us in exponentially high challenges in the future.

And this is even more inflammable in current times...

...with the pace and scale of changes,

and the potential for a lot of existential threats looming over humanity in the next decade.

So, what can one do?

What can one do to strike a balance between the "familiar" and "unfamiliar"?

What can one learn from in order to understand the "familiar" a bit better?

There are different ways.

Let's look at some of them.

I remember watching a Bruce Lee movie in 2002.

A bunch of newbies had joined to get trained from a master.

Newbies being newbies, they erred!!!

And the punishment???!!!

Well...cleaning the entire campus!!!

But that's not all.

Cleaning it with a toothbrush!!!!

The central idea was to use "chore".

Use the rabbit-hole of a daily chore to deeply know and align one's deeper self (thinking, feeling, saying, doing).

Another short incidence!

I guess this was 1997.

I was watching Indian Musical Reality Show "Sa Re Ga Ma".

In Indian Classical music, there is a particular render called "harkat" in music.

When the singer riffs on the original song in a slightly different manner.

I was listening to Sonu Nigam sing a famous song, but with a harkat this time.

And I noticed him doing this many times over the years. 

And other singers too later on. 

This was perhaps my first introduction to "improvisation". 

This is what Harvard Psychology Prof Ellen Langer calls "actively noticing the new" or "active micro-tweakiing". 

Pick up anything you do throughout the day.

Especially the ones that come out of your habit or bias. 

(((side note: biases are to mind what habits are to behavior))).

Combing hair, buttoning the shirt, reaching out for coffee, or walking....anything !!!

Absolutely anything!!!!

And just try to do them slightly differently. 

You can simply switch between slow-fast way of doing it.

Or moving in a different direction or ways.

If you are able to develop this as a practice over time,  

doing this would strengthen the muscles of "awareness", "focus", 

"re-relating to the chore" and if you are lucky then you would emerge with lots and lots of insights over time. 

This is what Swami Sukhobodananda calls the "adbhuta rasa" (the art of awe or wonderment).

To be able to hold what we have known for long or doing for long.

And seeing the unobvious within the obvious. 

Many many many sages and scientists have followed these simple techniques but with rigor and sincerity. 

Not only that,

over time one develops a better relationship with their "doing" or "action", and better self-created strategies for engagement at work and interactions. 

We are seeing the dark sides of not doing these.

Being played out in the intense "polarization" or "fights" across the world. 

This is what Canadian Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke calls the inability to draw a distinction between "salience detection" and "relevance realization".

Unfortunately we have "over-flexed" and "over-strengthened" our muscle for detecting and reacting to "hyper-normal stimuli"...and that's why we find ourselves being sucked into "unending scrolling down on social media feeds", or "content binging" or "getting fooled or awayed by sensational journalism or activism", or "repetitive bad forms of argumentations" and more.

His point being that unless we go down the path of self-awareness based inquiry into our thinking and speech and action, 

we would fall for these hyper-normal stimuli coming from all directions.

And would not be able to map them for "relevance" (deeper purpose or meaning).

Finally, this is what we believe the most revered innovation teacher, Clayton Christensen, meant.

When he was referring to getting caught in the organizational "bureaucracy".

Where individuals and teams lose sight of their daily SOP or chores or assumptions.

And do not question or inquire deeply about them

And soon we find, a start-up comes along.

Who have questioned these assumptions.

And have built something on it. 

Our habits and biases have become an overused, sort of "un-maintenanced or unassessed car" of our existence. 

They are taking us places. 

But, not the ones where we want to be mostly 

(hmmm!!! sometimes they do, but we do not realize the deeper significance until later or late)

Chores (driven by habits and biases) are a great laboratory.

Chores require archaeology like approach. 

Chores pay more.

Sometimes being "gold mines" or better still sometimes being "enlightenment mines".

amygdala hijack and jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of utopian-vaccine

Image Credit: Instagram @1947PartTwo

we can do somethings
we cannot do somethings

we have to do somethings
we don't have to do somethings

we want to do somethings
we don't want to do somethings

the whole life then, is a constant negotiations and treading of of the can-have-want triad

for most part, one is trying to or wants to get rid of "have to do" + increasing opportunities for or expanding the horizons of "can do" and "want to do"

and because of the swelling pressures of competitive work environment, personal life and social changes (now heightened by technology disruptions) and intermittent catastrophes, one's bandwidth of awareness and reflectiveness and what Aristotle calls "an examined life" gets choked. 

meaning that one operates from the "essential services" of "reflexiveness".



many people have been asking as to what will happen to us post covid-19    

honestly, the answer is that it would depend on what happens to structures and skills and ethics during and post covid-19


structures are aspects of rules, norms, values, new conversation architectures, organization structures, reimagining power and revising their governance, distinction of "essential-cum-universal" and how they are taken care of in innovative ways, emergency response preparedness at systemic level and what Yuval Noah Harari calls global problems and global co-ordination, interdisciplinary approaches to framing of challenges and solutions as mentioned by many thinker like Physicist and Systems Theorist Fritjoff Capra, adaptive pluralism, adaptive community having evolving cohesion and diversity, advancing fairness not just through legal system but through daily inner and inter-personal interaction courts we hold each day, provision for developing skills(as described below), structures that enable more gratitude-forgiveness-apology, 


skills are aspects of attention training, meta-cognition, reflections on biases-heuristics-hubris, meta-emotionality, social intelligence, creativity-imagination, adaptive empathy...


In words of American anthropologist & Historian, Joseph Tainter, 

our current capabilities of minds (a combination of genetic and developmental and socially structured) have very narrow windows of assessing for things over time and space. 

And with growing complexity, there are very fewer and fewer people who are able to even begin to make sense of what is happening. This leaves a large population at the mercy of "oversimplification" or "unreflected maladaptive tribal tendencies or echo chambers" simply fending for their "self-preservation or ego-chamber". 

If one looks at history of where we were thousands of years back and where we are now, there are certainly great great strides we have made. 

And in some sense, we sit at The Great Paradox ...

...On one side built on the six killer apps as described by Niall Ferguson (Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University): competition, science, right to property, medicine, consumption and work.


...on the other side these very apps turning into forms of maladaptations of some sort


So, the way we are able to transform our structures and skill around the killer apps, is what is going to determine the outcome. And how these structure and skills enable us to reimagine and renourish our can-have-want tendencies.  

I would tend to partly side with Existential Risk Researcher, Dr Luke Kemp, that the current covid-19 shock is not so much of a Goldilock shock. But some of us could use it to create momentum in the direction of a more anti-fragile systems and society. 


Finally, i want to light the candles and not sit and curse the darkness. I am personally elated by the number of people working in the direction of a positive change. Of course, those people and efforts do not look coherent and sometimes also maybe canceling each other. 

I believe that as more and more people keep going deeper in awareness and reflection, and rising from them, we shall keep having regenerative (and not depleting) creativity, performance excellence and humaneness (ala ex-IIM Director Dr Pradip Khandwalla). This would mean that we are able to integrate these practices into our moment to moment intra-action and interactions.


Finally, it would mean that amygdala hijack and jill do do go up the hill, but not to fetch a pail of utopian-vaccine, albeit a practice of perseverence and advancing our civilization. 

Behind the Scenes thinking for a Manifesto

This is a work in progress unedited draft document.

A 210,000-year-old partial skull found in southern Greece about four decades ago has been identified as the earliest example of anatomically modern Homo sapiens discovered outside the African continent. The discovery, described in a paper in the journal Nature, pushes back the known date of our species in Europe by more than 150,000 years.

So, we have been around for a long long time. 

And if we were to assess where we stand as humanity, 
we have some pretty solid stories...

...of research and development and innovations
...of progress ala Steven Pinker (Author Enlightenment Now)
...of challenges ala UN Sustainable Development Goals 
...of horrifying human acts ala Breaking News
... and more...

We live in what Futurist Benjamin J Butler calls "The Great Paradox". We have made a lot of progress and at the same time lots of challenges stare at us. 


So, where are we going from here?
Or, a better question is, where can we go from here?

Our world is made up of behaviors.
Result of billions of behaviors we collectively perform everyday. 

Our behaviors primarily negotiate two key things.
Things Inside the person.
Things Outside the person. 

Things inside have elements of our thinking and feeling.
Things outside have elements of politics-economics-social of the day...the rules-norms-incentives of the day. 

And then we have people whom we call successful and those who are not successful.

Is there possibility to reimagine the political-economic-social system? Such that there are no underdogs. 

What kind of system would ensure that

... people can feel that they gave their best shot
...that in the process they have grown
...that they have been realizing their potential
...and they need not be part of large organizations to be able to feel this
...that they feel that there is fair competition and the bar of fairness is being pushed up and up
...that they feel they are part of larger community and purpose
...where failure is celebrated and seen as an experiment done by some on behalf of entire humanity
...where people who want to keep at it...keep receiving rightful frameworks and support to have a go at it...
...where matter of understanding human nature is a constant inquiry
...where duty is as important as entitlements
...where many more people and enterprises have a winning chance at a dignified life


So, what are the challenges we face in order to move in this direction?

Issues pertaining to skills and structures.
Skills has more to do with the individuals.
And structures to do with explicit/implicit rules-norms-incentives, etc. 

In terms of structures, we believe that:

...inability to comprehend the nature of complexity of our global and national systems
...there is more focus on bits and atoms and less on cells, human nature and social complexity
...there is more focus on GDP and less focus on holistic development
...polarization
...anti-pluralism
...conversational violence
...slow uptake of interdisciplinary framing


In terms of skills, we believe that the following need to be looked at:

...quality of awareness and presence
...meta-cognition
...emotional intelligence
...body intelligence
...social intelligence


So, how does Dhanvarsha come in?

...we realize that in the interdependent world, collaboration is the proverbial bandwidth
...whoever has the best and widest bandwidth, will have a better chance at realizing life's potential and also building social capital


...and as humans we can collaborate with hand-head-heart


We believe in building on the sweat and blood of billions who walked before us. 

We pay homage to what we have been handed down in terms of what we avail and what we detest. 

That which we detest are opportunities for us all to collectively frame and solve. 

We believe that every human has to right to realize one's own potential. 

We believe that we all have potential beyond that which comes out currently.

We believe that one's potential is stifled owing to challenges at levels of skills or structure. 

We believe in constantly creating and refining platforms for lending hand-head-heart. 

We believe that current skills and structures disproportionately skew the definition of success and also the chances of success in favor of the few.

We believe in challenging this status in a constructive and meaningful manner.

We believe that performance excellence and creativity without humaneness is not a holistic development of our civilization.

We believe in reimagining our political-economic-social systems along with our ecosystem of MSME, employee colleagues and alliance partners. 

We believe not in blind radical overthrowing of things, albeit we respect what has been done as experiments for us to learn from.

We believe that progress is not a binary between reform or revolution...but can be a new world order that combines the two.

We believe that world has already seen myriad battlegrounds of state vs market and socialism vs capitalism...we believe time has come for the social capital. 

We believe that we should take the features of all of the above and reimagine new systems. 

Welcome to Dhanvarsha...where we are committed to reimagine things as social capital.

  

HD Camera. HD TV. But what about HD Experience?

18th Century by any imagination of today, could not qualify as a fast life. And yet you have one of the most quoted poet Meer talking about the unattendedness. So much so that the entire life passes in a fleeting moment, and one is unable to savor the myriad worlds hidden in so many moments throughout life. 

How is it connected to corporate life or life in general?
Let us explore.


Of Seeking and Avoiding

As humans, we experience.
We have so many experiences.
Through the days, the weeks, the months and the life.

There are some experiences we seek.
Then there are some we avoid. 
And this seeking and avoiding continues.

As time passes, one keeps bumping into the confusion.

On one hand of the eluding grasp, of the experiences sought and achieved but yet we feel we could not experience them well.

And on the other the unending of the avoided experiences...they keep chasing us.

Somehow we are made to believe or we believe it ourselves or a combination of both, that more possessions or more validations from others would help us in having a better life experience. 

But the truth is that we all have had something in our lives that we strongly desired once and we may have it now, and the question is, "how has the experience changed from chasing that to winning it and now after having it?". 

And we also have experiences of intensely avoiding some experiences. And then some of those avoided experiences faded away. Some of them still continue. And the question is, "Even after succeeding at avoiding some experiences, and having tons of many more to avoid, where do we stand today?". 


Sale! Sale! Sale!
Bring your OLD ANALOG EXPERIENCE! and Take Home HD EXPERIENCE!

Well! 
We don't have any shop that can give you that!
Sorry !!!

We will need to cultivate it.
Let us cover a part of it here.

Our experiences have features. 

Feature of lasting...some last fleetingly, some for more moments, some for lifetime.

Feature of affecting at mental level, some at emotions, some at body level, some at level of short term to long term goals. 

And there are many more features...such as expectation leading to experience leading to expectation leading to experience chain... but them for some other day and blogpost...

So, the question is, "what determines the features of every experience?"

Among many other things, it turns out that we experience things depending on how we savor them. 

And because we are constantly on a never-ending and ever-speeding treadmill of to-do and to-become, we tend to under-attend to our various experiences. 

Thus accumulating heavy desires of seeking more and avoiding more. 


So, what happens when we shift our awareness to our experiences and start savoring them?

We shift our experiences and our expectations. 
Hence from "seeking" we shift to "Less is More". 
And from "avoiding" we shift to "Difficult is Portal".

Let me explain "Less is more".

Take the example of food we eat.
When we are having our food and we really attend to its various aspects...

• how many people contributed to bringing this food from farm to fork, 
• how the nature toils together to make this, 
• how we are blessed than many more on the planet to have this, 
• how the texture of the various food material feel in the hands, in the mouth, in the olfactory, in the gulping region

...it turns out that if we have a mindfulness meal, we may eat less quantity, but our experience becomes high-definition (HD). We feel what in Hindi is called "tripti"...contented and fulfilled.  

Similarly, when we are able to shift our awareness-es in a focused manner to many other things like... the conversation at hand, or the task at hand, we tend to savor them more. 

• We will be able to speak less to communicate more and deeply
• We will be able to deeply listen to understand the other better
• We will be able to attend to the various aspects of the task at hand in a high-definition manner, and thus understand things in nuance and tinker with it in deeper manner rather than pushing papers around.

 

• We will be able to what Dr Barbara Oakley (Prof Engineering @ Oakland University and Curator of 'Learning How to Learn" course) calls "connecting the dots"...because one is able to on-demand move one's awareness in various direction and span and stability.

 
• We will be able to tap better in imagination...what Director Of Mindsight Institute & Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Dr Dan Siegel calls the ability to create space between thoughts such that it gives room for insight to emerge. 

• We are able to speak with each other in a manner of Conversational Intelligence (Judith Glaser, Anthropologist). Where conversations are not about YELL-TELL-SELL but about Transforming one another ((((Judith and I had written an article 4 years back .. how conversations influence neurochemistry influences conversations influence neurochemistry ... Changing The Fabric Of Humanity (((https://drive.google.com/file/d/19LLhfvKEz54LUz-7buMkRA5y0vKcdN5W/view )))

I guess you would have realized by now that it could also help in ensuring that what we avoid as experiences would turn into "Difficult is a Portal". 

Through use techniques of awareness, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, body intelligence, social intelligence, we are able to see beyond the superficial label of "difficult". 

We then see "difficult" in a nuanced manner, peep into its intricacies, see them as "wow! moments" (in order to apply our abilities...because if everything in the world was already right, what would you and i do? Difficult is necessity of mankind...to grow...to flex the muscle of creativity, collaboration). 

Loaded with HD Experience, one feels more engaged at work and in life in general. One feels the "naturalness" of difficulties, one feels the urge to solve, one feels the acceptances of failure and to learn from them, one feels the gratitude of opportunity to be at a job and to perform, one feels to need to use resources mindfully, one pursues aspects of fairnesses or unfairness in the organization/community in a more constructive manner, one feels that organization is a community and if it doesn't manifest as community yet, then one works towards making it one ; one can see the merit that the organization needs to accumulate resources but for the community and not for any individual ...

Those who are unable to have HD Experiences eventually end up getting mired in politics, cribbing, complaining, and not oriented towards solving and seeing the humane part of corporate journey and life. 

All of the above doesn't mean that the organization becomes complacent. No! The Organization still exists in an environment, in society, in markets. And it needs to play by some of the rules of the game. But it can develop its own culture and its own ecosystem of internal colleagues, customer base, shareholders, debt-holders and external alliances...such that it creates structures and skills for HD Experiences.

Finally, there are adaptive HD experiences and maladaptive HD experiences. Sometimes when people develop these, they use it with a certain ethics which are self-serving, sometimes the HD experiences can overwhelm a person and shift their intentions and goals in life. Due care and community around could ensure that one's HD experiences are channelized for realizing one's potential and also being part of a humane yet prospering community.

Disclosure: Concepts are embedded in concepts. Hence some of the concepts could be covered only briefly here.

Meer Taqi Meer-Image Credit: 
https://www.facebook.com/RekhtaOfficial/photos/a.2447182795304366/2551449271544384/?type=3&theater