Covid-19: Disruption & Crisis, Possibility & Peril

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“There’s a love that doesn’t bend,
When everything comes to an end.”
– Ryan Driver in honour of Justin Haynes

All of a sudden everything’s irrevocably changed.
Our normal routines and habits of typical behaviour, the things that were significant to us, our commitments, the relationships we were immediately involved in, the tools we used, the authorities we believed in and responded to, the goals which we worked towards and our expectations of the future, the stories of our lives, the whole worlds we lived in, have suddenly shifted into a new reality.
Everywhere everyone is seeking to find a way to adapt to something completely beyond their control.
But we’re not ready.
How could we be?
And the new reality is a tragic one, a plague which is running amok, invisibly infecting us, making us sick, and even killing those most vulnerable to it.

This is a crisis, and a deep disruption.

‘Disruption’ is a word that has been popularized of late, most frequently used in the world of entrepreneurship, as a description for the impact a technological innovation might have. As it happens I’ve been researching and doing workshops on ‘disruption’ and ‘curiosity’ for a couple years and I’m a bit of a purist on the use of the word. Much of what is currently called ‘disruption’ I would call ‘evolution’.

The word ‘Dis’ originates from the Roman word for ‘the gates to hell’. The gates of Dis are what the three headed dog Cerberus guarded. So, as a prefix in front of every word we use to demonstrate that something is wrong – dysfunction, disability, disorder – it has a powerful place in our lexicon. ‘Dissing’ someone is insulting them. And the word ‘rupture’ means that something is ‘ruptured’. That is, broken beyond repair: a ‘ruptured spleen’, a ‘ruptured pipe’.

When I began to get a grip on the word (if that’s possible) I wrote, in a blog post entitled ‘Disruption is asking the question, ‘Who Are You?’, ’that “Real disruption is a wound to the integrity of an identity.” Real disruption goes to your core, and may hurt deeply, and questions your, our, very identity – who we are.

Band-aids don’t work on ruptures. Recovery from real disruption requires more than ‘repair’ or ‘replacement’. In fact disruption isn’t asking for ‘re-covery’, a return to a previous mode of operation, at all.  Response to real disruption requires radical adaptation, structural transformation, a change in identity.

We’re in a crisis, and ‘crises’ are ‘disruptive’. The etymology of ‘crisis’ is also very telling, coming from the Greek krisis, “the turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death” with further meanings of a trial, judgement, decision or separation. Going farther back is even more interesting as it derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *krei- “to sieve or sift”, with a specific reference to ‘separating the wheat from the chaff”. A crisis was once understood as a disruption which, to survive, required the separation of the wheat from the chaff, what we need from what we don’t need.

So, we’re in a time of ‘disruption’ and ‘crisis’. Four core elements of both ‘disruption’ and ‘crisis’ are volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity; known in worlds of change theory by the acronym ‘VUCA’ (the acronym was devised by military strategists to describe the difficulty of decision-making due to ‘the fog of war’ in combat situations). We don’t know what is going to happen because we hardly know what is happening, the situation is novel and changing rapidly, the number of possible variables is overwhelming, the intentions of influential actors are not aligned, and people affected are reacting in ways that are panic-driven or ill-informed and so lacking in rationality and predictability. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that the paradigm in which ‘the world order’ has been operating – its current form of governance, its financial markets, its political and economic models –  is under extreme duress, responding inadequately to the threat, and becoming, at least temporarily, crippled by its onslaught. The temporary collapse of that model, it’s inadequacy in the face of the disruption, opens the door to radical change.

Naomi Klein, in her very recent video ‘CoronaVirus Capitalism’, daringly opens and closes with a quote from the free market economist Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.” In the realm of such change, Klein states, “seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible”.

But which impossible ideas, which impossible reality, will become possible is a question that doesn’t have an answer in the thick of crisis and disruption. There are a plethora of possibilities and perils that Covid-19 has opened the lid on.

 

COVID-19 AND ITS POSSIBILITIES

I’ve seen a lot of folks expressing, despite the critical nature of the crisis, an optimism about it’s possible outcomes. I’ll call these folks the ‘Kali-ites’.

Kali is the renowned Hindu Goddess of astonishingly fieresome aspect. She has either four or ten arms (handy), is either black or blue in colour, her eyes are red with intoxication and rage, her hair is a mess, sometimes she has small fangs and her tongue is sticking out (like Miley Cyrus a little while back), she wears a skirt made of human arms and an impressive necklace of human heads, and is accompanied by large snakes and a jackal. Not Barbie. She also has one foot on what appears, at first glance, to be a very sorry looking blue dude, but he is not in fact a vanquished foe but her consort, the god Shiva. He’s just chillin’ down there – maybe getting the f**k out of the way –  while she completely annhilates all the baddies (I could use a consort like that!).

In a renowned tale featuring Kali she completely demolishes the demon Raktabija. Various heroic gods – including Durga the Goddess of war (who seems a lot like Athena from Greek mythology) –  had been trying to defeat Raktabija but from every drop of blood that came from his wounds a replica of him would come to life, so soon enough there was an army of Raktabijas overwhelming the good guys. Durga produces Kali from her forehead (Zeus did the same with Athena) and Kali doesn’t mess around. Kali sucks his blood dry so there’s no more clones, and then eats all the clones; she doesn’t just kill them, she eats them. So, to say the least, Kali is seriously badass.

But here’s the thing; Kali is essentially benevolent. She’s revered, primarily, as a divine protector of the good, a destroyer of evil forces, as a Mother Nature, even the Mother of the Universe itself, bestowing liberation, enlightenment. Being a natural force, a wild thing, the force of her capacity for destruction sometimes gets carried away. So, while the devastation and tragic consequences of Covid-19 – a virus, a force of nature – are clear, there are many people who see the momentary collapse of an unjust socio-political paradigm as a great possibility for good.

My dear friend, Dani Guiharo, quarantined in Spain, e-mailed in response to my query of his well-being “I am positive that this is changing the world for good.. Anthropocentrism is dying… positivism is dying.. nation-state is dying.. capitalism is dying.. All of these are obsolete.. none of them are able to respond to what is happening… All the paradigms we live by are not reliable anymore…“.

Here are some of the possible positive benefits arising as a result of this disruption.

The revaluation of (climate) science, data, facts and ‘truth’, and a Green New Deal
The last couple of decades have seen a precipitous decline in huge swaths of the public’s confidence in science, facts, research and expertise. Special interest groups profiting politically or financially from ignorance have fueled conspiracy theories levelled against climate science and well-researched reporting (“fake news”). Covid-19 is proving, again and again (witness Donald ‘It’s-Gonna-Be-a-Miracle’ Trump time and again eventually conceding to Anthony Fauci), that data matters, facts matter, and ‘truthiness’ is fatal. Folks who were blowing off the virus as a democratic or socialist hoax have had their come-uppance, and some have died already. Expertise matters, and those who flout it reap the reward of their ignorance not in decades (as with climate change or tobacco) but in weeks or days.

Simultaneous to a revaluation of science we may see a devaluation of superstition, particularly prevalent in the evangelical right. Prayers, and anointments, and sending cash to a televangelist will do nothing to mitigate the spread of the virus. Listening to and obeying the directives of experts in epidemiology will save your life, and the lives of your loved ones. The fact that the vast majority of Americans are, albeit tragically slowly, coming around to the views of scientists demonstrates a devaluation of superstitious and conspiratorial thinking.

The experience of Covid-19 epidemiologists and community health care experts – to be vilified by wishful thinkers, profiteers and conspiracy theorists for presenting facts – has been precisely what climate change researchers and experts have been experiencing for years. In the case of Covid-19 the immediate price paid for ignoring science has been immediate and devastating. The fundamental efficacy of valuing science, data and facts is being driven home as we speak, and this may bode well for the revaluation of climate change science.

In response to the devastation of the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt crafted ‘The New Deal’, a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations which focused on relief for the unemployed and poor, support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly, recovery of the economy, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. The Green New Deal is a modern revisiting of Roosevelt’s approach, combined with sweeping reforms to combat climate change by supporting renewable energy and resource efficiency. Could the crisis caused by the CoronaVirus be the perfect opportunity for pushing through a Green New Deal?

A decline in polarization
CoranaVirus presents a common, and formidable, enemy that finds as much opportunity in people of the right wing or the left wing. Covid-19 doesn’t care whether you voted for Donald Trump or were a leader in the Occupy Movement, it just wants to find a human host to grow in. Whether you’re a libertarian or an anarchist (I’m cheating here – these actually have quite a lot in common) the symptoms of Covid-19 are the same, and the danger’s the same, and we all have to take the same measures to limit its growth. So there’s a common enemy, and a common goal, that crosses political and party lines. Crises and ‘shocks’ can disrupt enduring patterns of relating, creating openings for change and transformation.

Renewed respect for the role of government and a revolution in health care policy
The governments – federal and regional – of every nation affected by the CoronaVirus have proven to be absolutely essential. From disseminating the information required to educate a populace, to advancing restrictions to limit or delay the spread of the virus, to managing the logistics of a radical re-orientation towards health and safety, to massive injections of money into collapsing economies; big biz, small biz, and everyday workers. It’s not private corporations, it’s not churches, it’s the government that everyone’s relying on. In the United States – where free market capitalists continue to ideologically dominate –  a mind-numbing two trillion dollarS has been injected by the government into an economic system and a health care system ruthlessly exposed to be blatantly unable to manage such a crisis.

The CoronaVirus will reveal that decades of disinvestment in, and the impoverishment of, basic health care is having devastatingly tragic consequences right now, as I write this and as you read this. How many uninsured people in the US, where hospitals are a business, are judging… delaying… because going into hospital costs them more than they can possibly afford. And the consequences of that delay is the spread of the virus into the community. That revelation may lead to massive improvements in Health Care. As Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations, writes, “This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care—a single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from”.

The CoronaVirus also exposes the gruesome failings of a for-profit pharmaceutical industry. “The CoronaVirus has laid bare the failures of our costly, inefficient, market-based system for developing, researching and manufacturing medicines and vaccines” writes Steph Sterling (vice president of advocacy and policy at the Roosevelt Institute). As Noam Chomsky wrote yesterday, “There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe.”

 

COVID-19 AND ITS PERILS

Equal to the number of folks expressing optimism in the face of this crisis, there are those who are highly pessimistic, seeing in the crisis not only the fundamental tragedy of lost lives, but also the predatory behaviours that typically arise around catastrophic and shocking events. I’ll call these folks the Matthew 12:43-ites (I know, super awkward).

Matthew 12:43 is a New Testament parable featuring its usual protoganist, a man called Jesus, and is commonly called ‘The Parable of the Empty House’. It goes like this:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”

The typical interpretation of this parable is that you can drive something very bad out of your ‘house’ (yourself, your community, your financial system, your government) and even clean it up, but if you leave it empty, if you don’t occupy it, what you drove out will return seven-fold and take up residency and everything will be worse than before.

Covid-19, at least temporarily, has the potential of driving a lot of demons out of the house. Market systems which have been benefiting a minute 1% are in free fall, science-deniers and conspiracy slingers are being humiliated by the inexorable invasion of a virulent and undeniable reality, the chronic underfunding of health care systems is being excruciatingly and catastrophically put under a spotlight. People are angry, and they’re going to get a lot more angry, and they’re going to want justice. But they’re also scared, and there is a very long and sordid history of predatory regimes playing on, and profiting from, anger and fear to increase their authority and domination.

Namo Klein outlines this phenomena in capitalist societies in her 2007 book ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’, whose central thesis is the exploitation of crises – during which citizens are under-resourced, disoriented and distressed – to push through projects, plans, and policies which benefit a very few.

Here are some of the possible, and in some cases actual, negative perils arising as a result of this disruption.

Increase in Authoritarianism
Charles Eisenstein writes, “A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify.” and he is supported by American historian Heather Cox Richardson who wrote on March 28, “such profound dislocation presents a perfect opening for an authoritarian power grab.” There is already evidence of a move towards this in the United States as the Justice Department asked Congress last week for the power to indefinitely detain citizens without trial during an emergency (Politico). While such policy changes are typically deemed to be ‘temporary’ Milton Friedman once noted that “there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.”

Another typical casualty of authoritarian instincts in times of crisis is the right to protest. Again, a number of US States have already passed laws prohibiting acts of civil disobedience against fossil fuel projects under the claim that it is ‘critical infrastructure’.

Such crises also tend to support another typical potentially authoritarian trend, an increase in the popularity of ‘the leader’ known as ‘the rally effect’. Citizens, in times of strife, tend to coalesce around whoever is leading, no matter their political stripe. George W. Bush enjoyed an astounding 39% jump in his approval ratings after 9-11. Trump, so far, has enjoyed a very humble 3% increase.

Revoking of civil or environmental protections to benefit special interest groups
Under the smokescreen of a crisis it can become possible for special interest groups – public or private sector or both in collusion – to slip potentially unpopular policy or legislative changes ‘under-the-radar’ of its citizens. The Environmental Protection Agency in the United States has already drastically relaxed its regulations on the fossil fuel industry, allowing them to ‘self-monitor’, citing that the CoronaVirus is creating ‘special’ circumstances.

Profiteering
The Covid-19 crisis has resulted in a precipitous decline in financial markets, and a 2 trillion dollar bailout package, both of which give ample opportunity for predatory profiteering.

Early in March it was discovered that 2 US Senators, briefed on the severity of the upcoming crisis, sold off millions worth of stocks, while simultaneously expressing publicly their complete confidence in the US capacity to handle the virus. The success of their insider trading depended on the ignorance of the public, and they went to length to ensure that ignorance was maintained. Richard Burr, after dumping his stocks, tweeted “The U.S. is in a better position than any other nation to handle a public health emergency”.

500 billion dollars of the bailout will go directly to big business. Congress, attempting to resist the kind of cronyism and malfeance associated with the 2008 bailout strove to put a variety of checks and balances in place so that the funds will be allocated with strict oversight, including provisions requiring that the chief bailout overseer inform Congress “without delay” if executive branch departments “unreasonably” refuse the overseer’s request for information. President Trump, in signing the bill, waived that oversight opening a possible path for the kind of unscrupulous ‘bailout bonanza’ that characterised 2008.

 

THE POSSIBILITIES AND PERILS OF DISRUPTION

Disruption, real disruption, challenges a system in such a way that it must fundamentally change its way of being in order to adapt and survive. Returning to ‘normal’, the old way of doing things, the previous ‘homeostasis’, invites disaster either in the short or long term. As Vijay Prashad said, “We won’t go back to normal, because normal was the problem.”

Will this disruption vanquish, Kali-like, “zombie ideas” (Paul Krugman’s description of “ideas that have been proved wrong by overwhelming evidence and should be dead, but somehow keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”), and give rise to a new paradigm in which science is highly valued, climate science is responded to in the form of a Green New Deal, politicians endeavour to solve problems rather than vilify those across the aisle, and health care isn’t a for-profit endeavour?

Or will the demon return to the house with seven more, all finding in the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the current crisis ample opportunity to centralize control and prohibit protest, tear down environmental protections designed to curb climate change, while further rigging and playing the system to maximize profits for a very few?

Right now this is an unknown.

Naomi Klein in her recent video states “Shocks and crises don’t always go the shock doctrine path… it’s possible for crisis to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap… This no time to lose our nerve. The future will be determined by whoever is willing to fight harder…”.

But what is ‘nerve’? There’s been a bit of a meme going around of late about ‘fear’ being a contagion even worse than the virus. But I think fear can be ok; it’s informative and useful and can result in well directed action. The real danger is ‘panic’, which is paralysing.  As a bar owner in New York said as she was forced to close down, “fear is the alarm clock that wakes us up into action, but if we keep that alarm clock ringing it will just drive us crazy in the end, and we can’t take care of business.” Panic is the autonomic fight/flight/freeze response – a highly useful adrenaline fueled reaction to an immediate emergency –  gone awry. In fight/flight/freeze our executive functioning shuts down, there is no sense of the future, and we make poor, short-sighted and ill-informed decisions.
So… don’t panic.

‘Nerve’, or courage, is the capacity to take action even when we’re afraid, and even towards what’s making us afraid. But courage requires a certain kind of confidence, a faith, in the future. We’re brave because we believe that it’s what is required in the moment to achieve something we’re committed to. Witness the astonishing courage of the health care workers on the front-line. They’re commitment is to something beyond themselves, they’re committed to ‘us’… the collective, the community. To quote Boris Johnson’s epiphany 3 days ago while in quarantine, “there really is such a thing as society” (obviously real change is indeed afoot – way to go Bo-Jo!).

Staving off panic, growing confidence, and building up courage require a resourcing, a building up of resilience. Rick Hansen, one of the foremost authorities on resilience, describes twelve inner strengths that we can develop to grow more resilient: compassion, mindfulness, learning, grit, gratitude, confidence, calm, motivation, intimacy, courage, aspiration, and generosity. A book could be written on every one of those qualities but my point is that to have the nerve, the courage, to ‘fight harder’, and to bring on Kali, we need to focus on our resilience. Growing it so that we cease to react from panic, but respond creatively from courage and confidence and also curiosity. Curiosity grows from the soil of resilience. And curiosity – the dynamo of learning, the ideology slayer – is humanity’s foremost evolutionary strategy and is our most useful aptitude and motivation for creatively navigating disruptive change.

Covid-19 is a virulent disruption and a crisis with already tragic consequences. Disruption and crisis strike to the core of an identity, a paradigm, requiring a structural, systemic, transformative adaptation. In the midst of the crisis the direction of that adaptation is uncertain: there is possibility, and there is peril. To ensure that the possibilities rather than the perils emerge requires courage, resilience and curiosity.

And actually, to bring it all back to the opening quote to this article, first and last, love.

 

 

Values cloud

When Values Meet Addictions

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Why aspirational values differ, sometimes drastically, from behavioural values

The theme of Toronto Change Days 2019 was ‘Living Values’, and through the course of the ‘unconference/celebration’ of change, participants used the HowSpace conference app to enter their top five values four times: before the conference started, and then in increments throughout the weekend. Word Clouds created from the input of all the participants gave a picture of how our values shifted throughout the experience.

The values which showed up in the Word Clouds were, possibly, a little predictable: Integrity, Compassion, Curiosity, Honesty, etc. Noble value aspirations which we aspire to and which we see commonly in organisational value statements. But, as the weekend wore on, I began to feel there was a disconnect.

Values cloud

The Cambridge dictionary gives a single definition of values which is in keeping with the value proclamations at Toronto Change Days: “the principles that help you to decide what is right and wrong, and how to act in various situations”. Dictionary.com has a couple of alternate definitions which complicate the matter: “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”, or “a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.” One definition is that values are what we see as ethically or morally noble or correct, another definition is that values are what is important or useful. These two definitions have an alignment problem.

No organisation anywhere, including every fossil fuel company (1), has ever proclaimed that they value global warming. But the very planet we dwell in is exponentially heating up as a result of greenhouse gases created by human activity imperiling the very existence of future generations. Researchers, governments, and even fossil fuel companies have known this for decades but, despite decades of value proclamations about sustainability, our climate changes precipitously quickly. 

No person anywhere has ever proclaimed that they valued ending up on the street as a result of substance abuse. But every day in my neighborhood in Parkdale, Toronto, I see people who have valued addictive substances above anything else, and as a result are homeless and destitute. 

So, there can be a very significant disconnect between ‘proclaimed’ values, and ‘actual’ or ‘behavioural’ values.

Dutch former ad exec and co-founder of ‘Church of Change’ Stephan Ummelen ran a workshop during the conference entitled “79% of Values are Bullshit”. With a small team of researchers he assessed the value statements of organisations compared to how their staff evaluated how these same organisations lived up to those values. The results of his research were that organisational value statements were precisely 79% bullshit. I believe that the same can be said of our own personal value statements. While we may express that we value Integrity, Compassion, Curiosity, and Honesty, in the messy grist of every day we behave in ways that undermine those value proclamations.
We actually value other things.
Why is that?


socrates-vs-protagorasThe problem of this discrepancy isn’t anything new. The ancient Greeks called it ‘akrasia’; “a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment” and Plato in the dialogue ‘Protagoras’ describes a debate between Socrates and Protagoras which elucidates their opinions on this. 500 or so years later Christianity’s most zealous early evangelist the Apostle Paul proclaimed, in a kind of despair, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:15, NIV).

Why do we ‘not do the good that we want to do’?
Why do we profess and aspire to one set of values and yet in our behaviour, day in and day out, follow another.

samsara

About simultaneous with Socrates, and 500 or so years before St Paul, Siddhartha Gautama, aka ‘The Buddha’, had an alternate answer to the question of ‘akrasia’. Following a lengthy experiment with radical asceticism he arrived at a description of humanbehaviour which, to my mind, still has great relevance today. His ‘Second Noble Truth’ (the First Noble Truth being that ‘All Life is Suffering” – a little harsh but most of us can relate to some degree) is that the reason for suffering is that we’re attached to, or crave, things that don’t last (they’re ‘transient’), and our dependency on those things causes us to suffer. Our attachment to temporal things results in our being caught into a cyclical world which he called ‘Samsara’ (the Buddha described the craving as a ‘flame’ and ‘Nirvana’, the ultimate goal of his philosophy, as the extinguishing of that flame). Samsara, in the traditional sense, is the birth-death-rebirth cycle. If we haven’t resolved our attachment to ‘things’ in this lifetime, we’re born again to try and figure it out again (better luck next life). But Samsara also refers to the ‘cycles’ we engage in everyday: the behavioural loops, the dramas we get hooked into, despite our most noble aspirations, day after day, night after night.

In contemporary-speak that’s called ‘addiction’. Gabor Mate – one of the world’s foremost addiction theorists, a doctor who spent decades working on the front-line of substance abuse on Vancouver’s East Side – defines addiction as “…any behavior that a person craves, finds temporary relief or pleasure in but suffers negative consequences as a result of, and yet has difficulty giving up.” Sounds a lot like the reason for ‘akrasia’. Ann Wilson Schaeff, who wrote ‘When Society Becomes an Addict’ and ‘The Addictive Organisation’, takes it a little further. Schaeff writes that addiction is “any substance or process that begins to have a control over us in such a way that we must be dishonest with ourselves or others about it… If there is something that we are not willing to give up in order to make our lives fuller and more healthy, it probably can be classified as an addiction.” There are substance addictions, which are pretty easy to recognise, but there are also process addictions: “process addictions refer to a series of activities or interactions which ‘hook’ a person, or on which a person becomes dependent.” She includes in these addictions such things as work, money, religion, relationships and even certain types of thinking. According to Schaeff, most societies actively foster addictions.

My proposition is that the span between aspirational values, and behavioural values, is addiction.

I’m an addict…
Fortunately I’m not alone.
I propose that we’re all addicts, and that the organisations we work in, and the cultures we live in, are largely founded on behaviours that encourage and/or reward addiction.

I had a revelation many years ago about how addiction was affecting my values. I was driving into a small town in Nova Scotia with my partner and child and I valued first and foremost my child and my partner, and also learning, and the sense of discovery of this small town, it’s history and the special fascinating places that could be discovered. But I was also addicted to alcohol so, as we drove into the town I was preoccupied with where the beer store was (in my minds eye the orange sign of the Beer Store was lit up in my head like a church steeple) and how I could acquire enough alcohol to get me through the night without anyone really knowing about it (which worked against other professed values; honesty and transparency). My need to satisfy my addiction – my behavioural value – worked against my professed values. Simply stated, as we drove into town I was valuing the location of the beer store, and how I might finesse getting in and out of there without anyone really knowing what I was up to, more than I was valuing finding and exploring cool historical sights, or even making sure my partner and child were well accommodated and genuinely happy. I was Jonesing (slang for the somatic experience of anxiety when you’re not getting your ‘fix’), and that experience of ‘Jonesing’ was compelling my decision making. It was then that I first realised that my addiction, which was determining my behavioural value system, was a tyrant.

In the 2006 State of the Union Address George Bush proclaimed that “America is addicted to oil”. Bush went on to say “The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001 we have spent nearly 10 billion dollars to provide more reliable and more cleaner technology sources. And we are on the threshold of incredible advances. So tonight I announce the Advance Energy Initiative. A 22% increase in clean energy research…” Yes, that was George Bush in 2006, the elected representative of the people of the United States of America, professing the aspirational values of the US government for clean energy, and freedom from the tyranny of oil. Two years later the US was invading Iraq in an illegal war which killed, depending on the report, between 150,000 and 650,000 civilians. Apparently the price of a nation, the most powerful nation on earth at the time, still addicted to oil.

Professed values differ from behavioural values.
Our real actions  – personal, organisational, even national and global – are often driven by attachments which consistently undermine, and even blatantly oppose, our value statements. When our actions, at the end of the day, demonstrate habitual behaviours whose long-term consequences are illness and toxicity, it’s called addiction.
Addiction’s a tyrant.
But… we’re all addicts of one thing or another. It’s part of being human.
And addiction, once recognized and admitted to, can become a teacher.
And tyrants have been, over and over, since the beginning of organised governance, uprooted and overthrown.

 

 

  1. BP’s Value Statement – “We care about the safe management of the environment.”
    https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/who-we-are/our-values-and-code-of-conduct.html
    BP’s actual history – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/14/rise-fall-of-bp

 

Curiosity vs Conformity

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“Curiosity… is insubordination in it’s purest form.” – Vladamir Nabakov

It’s becoming increasingly common for leadership coaches and innovation experts to espouse the benefits, and even necessity, of curiosity. And yet we also know, as I explained in a previous post, that education systems and workplaces typically discourage curiosity.

Why is this? What is it about curiosity that is so repellent?

Curiosity, actually, has a very long history of being seen as dangerous; we all know the aphorism, “Curiosity killed the cat”. The Greek myth of Pandora is the classic tale of curiosity gone awry. Zeus commissions Haephaestus to design ‘Pandora’, the first woman, as a trap for Prometheus in revenge for his stealing fire. Zeus then gives Pandora a gift on her wedding day, a beautiful jar, but forbids her from opening it to see the contents. As we all know, Pandora’s curiosity gets the better of her, releasing all the evils known to humanity. Another even more familiar creation myth is also a tale of the danger of curiosity: the story of Paradise. Eve cannot resist the temptation to eat of the apple of the tree of knowledge, the result of which is humanity being expelled from Paradise by the angry God, to live and work ever after in toil and suffering.

The stories of Pandora and Paradise have quite a few things in common. In both cases curiosity is represented by the feminine, in both cases curiosity is related to contravening a masculine authority, in both cases there is a punishment for stealing a transformational power that only the gods can have (fire and knowledge), and in both cases the punishment is permanent and catastrophic.

Evidently, according to the myths, there can be a very high price to pay for curiosity.

What is the authority that would punish curiosity?

Mario Livio states it plainly in his TedTalk ‘The Case for Curiosity’: “Who is it that doesn’t want you to be curious? Totalitarian regimes. People who have something to hide.” Trump - Media the enemy of the peopleA powerful indictment against those who reject questions! What is that totalitarian regimes do the world over: claim that the Free Press – the questioning corps – is the enemy of the people.

Curiosity – the virtuous cycle of questions – is revelatory: it wants to know… its got to know. And so, where there is much to hide, it is most unwelcome, and so it is that this essay opened with Nabakov’s exclamation that “Curiosity… is insubordination in it’s purest form.” So curiosity, in the context of political oppression, can be a cognitive Molotov cocktail.

Curiosity is typically challenging to an insecure status quo. In classrooms and also boardrooms ‘the way things are done’ can prove to be immutably resistant to change. Curiosity may question ‘the way things are done’, and make those who benefit from the way things are done feel vulnerable. This feeling of vulnerability is rarely welcome. Furthermore we live in a culture in which teachers and managers are expected to have answers. Any really good question is hard to answer… but rather than provoking a thoughtful reflection, or discussion, or avenue of exploration, in an insecure culture it will provoke a fiercely defensive rebuke.

There are, however, much more subtle, and possibly more powerful, ways in which curiosity is suffocated. If – as we learned in a previous essay – anomalies, misfits and deviations heighten curiosity, we can also say that habit and conformity suppress it. And we are indeed creatures of conformity. The renowned and somewhat disturbing series of experiments done by Solomon Asch in 1951 demonstrated with great clarity the fact that a majority of people will literally deny the evidence of what they clearly see with their very own eyes if it risks social alienation, even amongst a group of strangers. Put in a room with a small group of actors who were instructed to all agree on a patently false statement about a chart they were shown test subjects would – despite evident discomfort – almost always agree with ‘the group’. Conformity can be a great silencer of questions than threats of imprisonment.

In Susan Engels’ book ‘The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood’ she discusses a complex and subtle array of cues by which adults – parents and teachers – encourage or discourage curiosity in children. She describes how “different avenues of influence converge and blend to create an overall environment that may be more or less conducive to children’s curiosity”. “Although curiosity leads to knowledge”, Engel writes, “it can stir up trouble, and schools too often have an incentive to squelch it in favor of compliance and discipline.” (1)

Cultures of conformity – whether in homes, classrooms, tribes or workplaces – are just such ‘overall environments’. Culture is made up of webs of significance, nests of commitments, cycles of behaviour and paths of influence which mesh and blend together to create an overall environment. Cultures also have, like any organism, an immune system which a poignant curiosity may provoke, releasing the antibodies of defensiveness, shunning, demotion, degrading, expulsion, aggression, etc.

(1) Excerpt from Susan Engels, ‘The Hungry Mind’ @ Salon.com

The Neurology of Curiosity & What Makes Us Curious

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“How does it feel when you are searching for the possible answer.” – Matthias Gruber

Curiosity: NeuroChemical Learning Overdrive

Probably the most exciting frontier of psychological research today is the field of neurobiology. With an exponentially rapidly evolving panoply of new tools with which to observe the brain in action and analyze its chemistry and network circuitry, we’re making extraordinary discoveries that have great ramifications beyond the field of neurology.

Your brain on curiosity

How does it feel when we are curious? There’s an urge, an excitement, a stimulation; curiosity is energizing! And what’s happening in our brain when we are feeling this way? Curiosity activates the mid-brain and the nucleus acumens which are part of the dopaminergic circuit (1), the brain’s ‘wanting system’. These are the areas of the brain involved when we anticipate rewards like money or food or sex. Essentially curiosity behaves in the brain like a hunger, recruiting the same brain areas whose function is to maintain motivation and drive towards a reward – in this case a cognitive reward (2). As astropohysicist Mario Livio puts it bluntly, “Satisfying our curiosity is like having good sex.”(3)

The activation of curiosity also activates another potent combination in the brain, that of the hippocampus and its communication with the mid-brain. The hippocampus is the area of the brain associated with memory and particularly with forming new memories. When this area of the brain is activated in relationship to the part of the brain associated with motivation you have a very simple and massively important result: learning. “Curiosity energizes us via the brain’s wanting system so that we go out seeking new information and curiosity helps us to make our memories stick.”(4) The obvious import of this? If you want learning to happen, find a way to make folks curious about what you want them to learn.

Curiosity’s Learning Vortex

Black Sheep Excuse Me - outliers anomalies

Outliers & Anomalies

Memory researcher Hans Gruber discovered that curiosity not only dramatically increases the retention of information that a subject is curious about, it also significantly increases the retention of ‘incidental information’ that ‘happened to be present’ while a subject is curious. People who are experiencing a surge in curiosity don’t just remember more about the topics they’re curious about, they remember more about everything happening while they’re in a curiosity surge.

If optimal learning is achieved when curiosity is activated, the obvious question is, “How do we activate curiosity?” Astrophysicist Mario Livio, in his TED talk on ‘The Case for Curiosity’, says that there are two things that activate curiosity: surprise, and what he calls ‘confounded evidence’. When we are surprised we have an expectation, and this expectation is foiled by something else happening. Curiosity naturally surges to comprehend, and fill, the void between the expected and the unexpected: ‘surprise’ is a temporary cognitive void. Extreme outliers, anomalies and non-conformity – anything that breaks an expectation or pattern – are also a form of surprise and activate curiosity.

‘Confounded evidence’ occurs where there are a multitude of possible answers to a problem, or multiple possible futures to a situation. The instigation of uncertainty arouses curiosity (5) and, as research psychologist Susan Engel writes, curiosity “can be understood as the human need to resolve uncertainty.”(6)

Curiosity and the Knowledge Gap

There are two extremes in which people have very little curiosity: people are not curious about something they already know everything about; and people are not curious about something they know nothing about. Curiosity is most active where there is a knowledge gap. The greatest masters of optimising the potency of that knowledge gap are storytellers and game developers. The power of suspense is its leverage over curiosity; we just gots to know! And the power of gaming is the drive to know what’s on the ‘next level’; we just gots to level up! And, let us not forget, perhaps the grand masters of seducing curiosity… BuzzFeed… “Evil or not, Buzzfeed headlines work because they evoke an overwhelming sense of curiosity.”(7) writes digital marketer Ahmad Munawar.

The neurology of curiosity – tied so deeply to dopamine, the brain’s motivation and reward chemical – demonstrates how ancient, intrinsic and important it is to human evolution. It also demonstrates its current significance in how we can face, and excel in, our current immediate challenges, obstacles and disruptions.

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(1) Dopamine has traditionally been associated with ‘pleasure’, and with ‘pleasure seeking’, but it is now being more directly associated with a basic ‘drive’ or ‘motivation’ which includes wanting and desiring, but also seeking and searching.

(2) Hank Pellisier writes in his article ‘Cracking the Code on Curiosity’, “Research suggests that dopamine should now be more associated with our need to discover things, of wanting to know more, than making us feel pleasure. It keeps us motivated. Dopamine drives our goal-directed behavior. It causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search. It may have kept cavemen alive.” http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/cracking-the-code-on-curiosity/

(3) ‘The Case for Curiosity’, Mario Livio. TedXMidAtlantic.

(4) ‘This is Your Brain On Curiosity’, Matthias Gruber, TEDXUC Davis Salon

(5) Curiosity researcher Daniel Berlyne characterized it as “an optimum amount of novelty, surprisingness, complexity, change, or variety.”

(6) Susan Engel in ‘Cracking the Code on Curiosity’

(7) ‘The Buzzfeed Guide to Sending Irresistible Email’, Ahmad Munawar

Why Curiosity?

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“I have no special talents.  I am only passionately curious.”
– Albert Einstein

The World Economic Forum – backed by an outpouring of mildly panic stricken white papers from big name organisational consultancies (1) – hails our era as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We are already riding the rising wave of an increasingly complex fusion of technologies – digital, biological, material, social – which will disrupt, revolutionize and transform almost all spheres of human culture and conduct.  Artificial intelligence, blockchain encryption, genomics, 3D printing, driverless vehicles, ‘the internet of things’, nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing, renewable energy systems; any one of these innovations will have a profound impact on technical, social and organisational structures as we currently know them. The combination of all of them emerging simultaneously is, lightly stated, mind-boggling (2).

We’re entering an era of hyper-complex rapid change which will be experienced by most as serial disruption.
How to cope?
How to manage?
How to navigate intelligent pathways through tumult?

Social researchers and organisational experts from the Harvard Business Review (3) to Brene Brown (4) are proclaiming the value of curiosity to successfully navigate the turbulent cultural vicissitudes of the early 21st century.

But, what is curiosity?

Curiosity is the human trait that has enabled a physically feeble species with an exceedingly lengthy and vulnerable infancy to become completely dominant.  It’s the drive that has led to every important invention and exploration that humans have engaged in, from pre-digesting food by cooking it over a fire, to sending a vehicle (called ‘Curiosity’) to Mars. Curiosity is a dynamic of ongoing inquiry, a virtuous cycle of recurring, adaptive questioning. It’s a proactive journey of questioning, rather than a reactive defensive entrenchment.  Curiosity is a call towards something, rather than a flight from something.  Curiosity is not driven by crisis, but by wonder and awe, and it’s a drive that’s inspired people to take extraordinary risks and endure extraordinary hardships. As James Stephens wrote, “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will, indeed, it has led many people into dangers which mere physical courage would shudder away from…”

I would like to pose that curiosity is the characteristic best adapted to resiliently navigate the kind of emergent complexity and serial disruption that we face as a species existing on an astonishingly unlikely finite living system.  Curiosity is the most useful response to what is known in strategic leadership as VUCA; Volatility/Vulnerability, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.  It’s a key to innovation, productivity, agility, continuous renewal, well-being and fulfillment.  It responds mindfully to crises, it discovers opportunities in obstacles, it enables the release of outmoded habits and patterns and is a core element of basic resilience. But, oddly enough, curiosity is not taught in schools or places of employment, and, in many cases, it’s actively discouraged.

Why would we discourage curiosity, when it’s many benefits are so very obvious?
Is curiosity dangerous?
What, really, is curiosity?
And, if it’s of value, how do we cultivate curiosity?

This post is the first in a series in which I’ll explore these questions.

We’ll go on a journey exploring wonder and respect, conceptual bubbles and perception blinders, disruption and hard transitions, habit creation and dissembly, resistance and innovation, and vulnerability and creativity.  We’ll look at the nature of ‘questioning’, the neurology of curiosity, the relationship of curiosity to ‘mindfulness’, and how habits and preconceptions can suffocate curiosity.  We’ll look at curiosity and learning, and curiosity as a disruptor and a rebel.  We’ll explore vulnerability, experimentation and failure, and curiosity as a navigator.  Finally, we’ll dip our toes into the real question….how do we ourselves, and our organisations, become more curious?

I hope you’ll join me in this curious ongoing investigation and become, in the words of Lewis Carrol’s Alice, “Curiouser and curiouser”.

 

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(1) Age of Disruption. Are Canadian Firms Prepared. Deloitte.

(2) Above and beyond the exponentially increasing speed of technological innovation we are already dealing with the increasing effects of climate change, resultant mass migrations, increasing inequality, and increasing ethnic division demonstrated by the rise of terrorism, nationalism and authoritarianism.

(3) Tomas Chumorro-Premuzic, Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence. Harvard Business Review.

Warren Berger. Why Curious People are Destined for the C-Suite. Harvard Business Review.

Todd B. Kashdan, Companies Value Curiosity but Stfle It Anyway. Harvard business Review.

(4) “The rumble begins with turning up our curiosity level and becoming aware of the story we’re telling ourselves about our hurt, anger, frustration, or pain.” – Brene Brown

“Failure can become nourishment if we are willing to get curious, show up vulnerable and human, and put rising strong into practice.” – Brene Brown

‘Disruption’ is asking the Question, ‘Who Are You’?

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Last month I attended and gave a workshop at ‘Berlin Change Days’ – a conference full of an extraordinary diversity of bright, creative and highly progressive ‘Change Agents’ – whose theme this year was ‘Disruption’.  The conference opened with a mock trial of ‘disruption’, debating whether the word still has credence and traction, or whether it has become a washed-out meaningless buzzword from its overuse in contemporary ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ parlance.  In a deft and creative move the organizers had an artist-provocateur disrupt the trial itself, demonstrating the word in action.

What really is ‘disruption’?
What has to happen for ‘disruption’ to occur?

Disruption painting

Collaborative painting done during workshop at Berlin Change Days.

The word itself opens with the intrinsically negative connotations of the prefix ‘dis’. In Roman mythology ‘Dis’ is the ruler of the underworld, and Dante carried that forward in the Divine Comedy in which the ‘City of Dis’ encompasses the sixth through the ninth circles of Hell. Today, when you ‘dis’ someone, you’re insulting them. ‘Dis’ is followed by the word ‘rupture’ which indicates a ‘break’, ‘burst’ or ‘breach’.  A ruptured spleen is a medical emergency, a ruptured pipe is one that is broken.  ‘Rupture’ is not so much a change word as a word connoting severe damage requiring emergency action.

So, ‘disruption’ is no ordinary change.  Nor is it the change necessarily resulting from an innovation, which is where we see it used so often today in entrepreneurial circles. While a new and innovative idea may have a significant impact, does it actually ‘rupture’ something? If an organisation can adapt to the innovation – by changing tactics, by buying it up, by hiring expertise – it’s not ‘disruptive’.

To break it down, disruption requires two core elements. Firstly there needs to be a functional identity: a clearly defined organism or organisation, an operating system or a set of rules, a score or a choreography of some kind.  Secondly we need an intrusion that challenges the functional identity with sufficient force that it ruptures some aspect of its core process such that it cannot continue functioning without ‘radical’ (emergency) procedures.

Real disruption is a wound to the integrity of an identity.

Band-aids don’t work on ruptures. Recovery from real disruption requires more than ‘repair’ or ‘replacement’. In fact disruption isn’t asking for ‘recovery’, a return to a previous mode of operation, at all.  Response to real disruption requires radical adaptation, structural transformation, a change in identity.

Disruption is asking a question.
The question that disruption is asking is ‘Who are you?’
How you navigate that question determines the path of your evolution.
Will you react or respond?

Will you deflect, dismiss, resist, deny or hide?
Or will you recognise it, meet it, acknowledge it, bear it?
Will you be willing to wrestle with it and, more importantly, with yourself?
Will you seek to understand it and, more importantly, seek to understand yourself?

From a theological perspective ‘disruption’(1) has a strong correlation to the ancient Greek word ‘apocalypse’.  ‘Apo’ translates as ‘out from’, and ‘kaluptein’ is ‘cover’. The word uniquely combines a sense of catastrophic termination with revelation and disclosure. Really answering disruption’s challenging call requires diving into a deeper level (the sixth through ninth level?) to ‘discover’ and ‘uncover’ deeper more intrinsic core strains and veins of meaning from which can emerge (emergent-cy) new vigorous forms and paths forward.

 

(1) Interestingly, Japanese contemporary artist Moriko Mori defines ‘Rupture’, in her Rebirth exhibition, as “the state between death and rebirth”.

In Tibetan Buddhism the ‘state’ between death and rebirth is called ‘Bardo’ and is the subject matter of ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’. Tibetan Buddhist scholar and teacher Chogyam Trungpa reinterpreted Bardo as simply “that which exists between situations” asserting that the spiritual and psychological processes that we go through in periods of extreme disruption are very much akin to those that we go through at death.

 

Spasm, Splinting, and Change Dynamics: Injury, Immobilisation & Aggravation

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Spasm & Splinting

So, I threw my back out…
Again…
I planted somewhere over a million trees in an evidently overlengthy treeplanting career, once upon a time rowed a dory down the coast of BC, and, for a time, took great pleasure in something called ‘Martial Dance’ which involved improvisationally and consensually flinging one another all over the place with great grace, so, my back has done its fair share and periodically lets me know it’s had enough.

fight flightThe cause is pretty much always a combination of heavy object(s), reaching, twisting and stress; in this case an innocent enough maneuvering of an amp into my ‘95 Honda (aka ‘The Blue Flame’).  Not uncommonly, having set one of my lower vertebra adrift, I exacerbate it by doing some other activity; in this case Lebron Jamesing with my ten year old who is on that delicious cusp of finally thoroughly whooping his dad at a game that he’s far more gifted at.  Baddaboom baddabay and I’m calling the game a little short and gentling home to lay my sorry ass flat on its back with a huge sigh of relief.

 ‘Herniated disc’ = one wrong move = shooting nerve pain + persistent exhaustion aching through glutes, hips, all through lower back, not to mention, in my case, a permanent slightly twisted forward tilt.  Like I said, I’ve been here a few times before and I know know that, despite an urgent desire to do something, anything to fix it as soon as possible – massage, twist, do yoga, stretch – the best thing to do at first is almost nothing except, as often as possible, lie down and give it some relief.

 Fact is, the pain is there for a reason.
Human physiology is a marvel.
Pain is a marvel – if an unwelcome one – and has a most compelling story to tell.  Pain’s great and powerful cut through all the crap nervous system megaphone announcement is “STOP”.   Stop doing whatever you’re doing that’s damaging some part of you.  In the case of back trauma it’s a whole lot of ‘STOP MOVING’ because a very high percentage of typical movements mobilise your lower back and/or pelvis.  Mobilising your lower back scrapes your herniated disc across the highway of nerves running just beside your vertebra and, nerves being what they are, you get an electric shock wave of shooting pain jolting you into immobility.

Mobility causes damage and excruciating pain, and excruciating pain is paralysing and debilitating, so the autonomic nervous system pulls a brilliant trick to immobilise the traumatised area.  It puts the muscles directly around the injury into spasm, which makes them as hard and unyielding as a piece of wood. The autonomic nervous system ‘sets’ the injured area in a splint of spasm.[1]  The traumatised area becomes effectively frozen.

Emotional & Organisational Splinting & Freezing

 Physiological ‘splinting’ is a good metaphor for some forms of both emotional and organisational trauma.  Splinting occurs, non-volitionally, around physical, emotional, organisational and social trauma[2] to reduce further damage and pain.

 The American physiologist Walter Cannon, who coined the term ‘homeostasis’ to describe the ‘internal fixity’ he believed necessary for an organism to survive, was the first to describe the ‘fight-or-flight response’; “a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival”.  More recently PTSD specialist Pete Walker elaborated on ‘fight-or-flight’ in describing the 4Fs: fight, flight, freeze or fawn, which are psychological response to perceived harm.  

 Simply stated, the anxiety caused by real or perceived threat to which one feels helpless to respond can result in psychic ‘freezing’ well documented in PTSD sufferers.  The symptoms can be strong involuntary disassociation from situations which trigger memories, emotional ‘numbness’, or feelings of complete powerlessness, despair and futility.  They can also manifest as ideological and ideational rigidity or even fixity, as well as in addictive behaviour. In organisations a traumatic situation – a hostile takeover, deep layoffs[3], market failure – may be ‘fixed’ or ‘splinted’ by temporary authoritarianism, extreme legalisation or bureaucraticisation.

 Aggravation & Enculturation

 In physiological ‘freezing’ the functions of the immobilised muscle groups need to be covered for, so the brain calls up substitute muscle groups which, while not adapted for that role, can temporarily ‘pinch hit’.[4] A localised injury, by calling in temporal support, sets off chains of adaptations resulting in global shifts in the ecology of coordination that characterises healthy movement and posture.  Prolonged reliance on substitutions, however, will result in the brain neuroplastically rewiring itself such that aberrant and substitute posturo-movements becomes normalized and permanent.[5]

 The same can hold true for individuals and organisations: ideological fixations, addictive behaviours, authoritarianism, legalism – all of which may have been a temporary ‘fix’ for a traumatic situation – become normalized and enculturated.  However, because temporary fixes are inadequate long-term solutions they typically engender more instances of conflict and turbulence hence further aggravating an initial trauma. A vicious circle takes hold.

[1] “By ‘splinting’ the area with spasm, the hypercontracted (shortened) muscles, ligaments and fascia effectively reduce painful joint movements. Splinting is a common form of protective guarding clinicians address day-in and day-out… “
– True Grit of Muscle Spasm: Erik Dalton (http://erikdalton.com/media/published-articles/true-grit-of-muscle-spasm/)

[2] Taboo is social splinting. Taboo is a socially strategic immobilisation around an area of conduct in which there has been great pain and damage: sex, money, mental illness, etc.

[3] David Noer, author of Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations, gives a compelling account of ‘layoff survivor sickness’. “Survivors of most organizations are angry, depressed, anxious and fearful. They are not able or willing to take risks or focus on increasing customer service. At the very time organizations need them to be the most creative and energetic; they hunker down in the trenches, absorbed in their own toxic survivor symptoms.” – http://www.cnbc.com/id/32990164

[4] “Regardless of the reason for loss of joint play, when vertebrae are not free to move, muscles assigned the job of moving them (prime movers) cannot carry out their duties and are substituted by synergistic stabilizers, i.e., the brain sends in the subs when a key player is injured.”
– True Grit of Muscle Spasm: Erik Dalton (http://erikdalton.com/media/published-articles/true-grit-of-muscle-spasm/)

[5] “Prolonged joint damage can set the stage for aberrant posturo-movement patterns which, in time, causes the brain, through the process of sensitization, to re-map and re-learn the dysfunctional movement as normal (neuroplasticity).”
– True Grit of Muscle Spasm: Erik Dalton (http://erikdalton.com/media/published-articles/true-grit-of-muscle-spasm/)