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.

 

 

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.

__________

(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

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Why Do We Lose the Desire to Follow the Quest-ion?

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“The important thing is not to stop questioning… Never lose a holy curiosity.” – Albert Einstein

Probably the two things we associate most with curiosity are children and questioning.  We remember childhood as a time of openness and inquisitiveness, we observe children approaching even the most mundane things with a sense of awe and wonder, and as parents we weather the barrages of questions that follow.  They have a fervent and intrinsic desire to know and learn. Renowned child psychologist Jean Piaget wrote that curiosity is “the urge to explain the unexpected” and for infants almost everything is unexpected.

But what happens to us?  Once upon a time we were all children, with that wonder in the world around us, that intrinsic desire to learn and know, and that willingness to follow any question about anything that stirred our fascination. Is the main thing that separates children from adults joy in discovery, in the desire to know, in curiosity?

Numerous studies have demonstrated the precipitous decline in ‘questioning’ between the ages of 4 when children will ask as many as 300 questions in a day (1), and their entry into middle school when they’ve almost stopped asking questions at all. Part of the answer lies in natural neural development. From infancy to early childhood there is a cosmic explosion of billions of neural pathways and networks wiring themselves together in hyper-complex adaptive systems; it’s all growth growth growth.  But then this process slows down and enters into a new era of trimming back, called ‘synaptic pruning’. However, ‘synaptic pruning’ does not adequately explain what Warren Berger, the author of ‘A More Beautiful Question’, described as the drop of questioning off a cliff.

So, what else happens at that age?
First off, as comedian Louis CK demonstrates in this brilliant scene from ‘Lucky Louie’, answering the barrage of ‘why’s’ that can come at any moment from a curious 4 or 5 year old can get pretty sublime. It’s also pretty exhausting, and overly busy parents, struggling to conform to their own productivity driven milieus, just can’t ‘go there’.

But beyond weary parents, a great many researchers have demonstrated that this decline is due in very large part to the systems that children enter into when they are old enough to attend school.  The education system is not designed to cultivate curiosity. If anything, in fact, it’s designed to discourage questioning.  Children are rewarded for knowing answers, not for asking questions, and the goal of education is not to learn to explore and learn, but to ‘get the right answer’ (2).   As Developmental Psychologist and Curiosity researcher Susan Engel puts it, “Curiosity that is ubiquitous in toddlers is hard to find at all in elementary school”.

Current education systems, worldwide, grew out of the industrial revolution and are designed to produce human resources that will efficiently and successfully find work and ‘be productive’ in an industrialised environment. “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity.” says Sir Ken Robinson, in his renowned TED talk ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’.  That ‘commodity’ would be a relatively docile, malleable and compliant person, highly literate in abstract mathematics and written English.  That is, a manageable person well adapted to the work force of an industrial culture where managers want answers to bottom-line problems – fast.  But let’s face it, curiosity, by nature, isn’t docile, malleable or compliant so it’s no surprise that curiosity has it’s wings clipped in school.  As Einstein put it so very succinctly, “It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” I propose that for many, it doesn’t.

Children born today will be leaving high school in the mid-2030s.  Who dares to predict the nature of the culture into which these children will be emerging from school? Few today dare to predict what the world will look like in five years, let alone twenty. What we may be able to say with some certainty is that they won’t be emerging into an industrial culture anything like the one for which the formal education system was designed (3). We are faced with a shocking degree of uncertainty and unpredictability; a great unknown.

And what is the most intelligent attitude towards the unknown?  The very aptitude that is determinedly clipped in the process currently called education and ‘literacy’: curiosity.  Curiosity, the intrinsic desire to know, is *the* most essential character impulse in the face of the unknown. Intelligence itself follows curiosity which, like an impetuous scout, dares into the dark to cast light and map paths and possibilities. Success based on the necessity to ‘have all the right answers’ is antithetical to the ‘quest’ of curiosity. How can you possibly have the right answers when you’re entering the unknown? It’s an absurd notion.

The ‘questing’ heroes of the chivalric romances – Gawain, Lancelot, Galahad – were called ‘knights-errant’.  To ‘err’ meant ‘to be wandering in search of something’.  The linguistic migration of the word ‘errant’ from ‘a noble quest’ to the ‘incorrectness’, ‘deviation’ and just plain ‘wrongness’ of ‘error’ is a powerful indicator of the cultural stigma against ‘quest-ioning’ and curiosity.

Curiosity is following a quest-ion.
Curiosity is a dynamic of ongoing inquiry.
Curiosity is a virtuous cycle of recurring, adaptive questioning.
Curiosity is also the evolutionary strategy by which humanity became the dominant species on the planet earth.  Given the the extraordinarily disruptive uncertainty of our global future, curiosity may be the aptitude that enables humans to continue to evolve (4). Surely this is a compelling reason to integrate the cultivation of curiosity into educational curriculums and workplace cultures everywhere.

 

(1) According to Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author, research shows that a child asks about 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five.
(2) “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question.” – Richard Saul Wurman, founder of TEDTalks.
(3) The World Economic Forum claims that we are in a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. I would argue that it’s not an ‘industrial’ revolution at all; maybe it’s a biological revolution, or a digital revolution, or a virtual revolution. But ‘industry’, as the great economic engine which upholds nations, is in it’s final throes…
(4) Hopefully to evolve beyond ‘dominance’ towards symbiosis and sustainability.

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”.

 

______

 

(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.

 

Curiosity and Vulnerability

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Curiosity is a dynamic of ongoing inquiry requiring that you reveal that you don’t know something.  Your seeking to know something reveals the limits of what you know: that’s what real questioning is.

openheartopenmindCuriosity may also require that you reveal that others don’t know something, and we all know folks who are pretty attached to having all the answers.  They may not like the feeling they get when they don’t have the answers; they may feel challenged, and they may react in an unpleasant way.

Curiosity does more than just expose someone’s ignorance about something; it can threaten to expose something that is being hidden.  If this is the case one can expect to encounter resistance, obfuscation, evasion and even aggression.  This ‘something that’s being hidden’ may be something dangerous, something corrupt, around which there’s a wall of shame[1]. Or it may be an injury, a deep wound, an old painful trauma that’s never healed (shame is, itself, a wound). But, it can also be something beautiful: an extraordinary talent, a passion, a deep love, which is too frightening to expose.  There are many reasons that things become hidden.

So curiosity is a state of unknowing, and requires the admission of unknowing: to be curious we need to be humble and vulnerable.  Because it can expose ignorance, corruption and injury curiosity can be perceived of as dangerous, and this makes curiosity vulnerable to reaction and repercussion[2].  But curiosity also creates vulnerability: its nature is to expose, and it creates vulnerability in those whom it disrupts with its questions.  This may not be their choice; they are put in an uncomfortable situation which may feel ungrounded and out of control.

Because curiosity requires and creates vulnerability, it requires bravery and courage[3].  Bravery and courage are the attributes of warriors.  So, to remain steadfastly curious, you need to be a warrior.[4]

[1] “I ran into this thing that absolutely unravelled connection in a way that I didn’t understand and had never seen…it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection?” Brene Brown ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ TED Talk

[2] Maybe the most archetypal of stories of the perils of inquiry is the Paradise story which opens the Old Testament. It’s not hard to interpret the terrible price Adam & Eve pay for succumbing to the temptation to eat of the Tree of Knowledge as the price paid for ‘wanting to know’.  In this light ‘curiosity’ is depicted as the Original Sin precipitating The Fall, leading to the banishment of the first humans from the Garden of Eden. – Genesis 3

[3] “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.” – Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Letters to a Young Poet’

[4] For Chogyam Trungpa ‘warriorship’ was nothing more than demonstrating the persistent courage to leave the safety one’s own perceptual ‘cocoon’. “The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon…perpetuate habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.” – Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa

Curiosity & Vulnerability Pt 2: When is it safe to be vulnerable?

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We held our first Curiosity Lab on ‘Curiosity & Vulnerability’, viewing Brene Brown’s ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, and then launching into a fascinating discussion, with some marvelous attendees.

Brene Brown’s talk, which is truly worth a watch is, at heart, about the life affirming and revivifying benefits of living vulnerably.  She clarifies that this takes courage, and reminds us that the roots of the word ‘courage’ come from the French ‘couer’, meaning ‘heart’.  For her the definition of courage is “to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.”  Which is also what it is to live vulnerably.

What keeps us from living this way is, according to Brown, uncertainty with regard to our own self-worth.  People who have intrinsic self-worth believe that what makes them vulnerable makes them beautiful.  People who lack this sense of self-worth find vulnerability excruciating.  For them vulnerability risks exposure to criticism, bullying, ridicule, loss of status, ostracisation … simply stated, fear and pain. They don’t experience vulnerability as liberation, but as a potential avenue to disconnection and isolation which, as Brown drives home, are the foundations of shame.  Shame is the gatekeeper of our personal prison cells and bunkers. It chokes out our vulnerabilty.  Brene Brown is a bold advocate of vulnerability.

Miriam, one of our bold participants in the Lab, persisted in posing the question,
“When is it safe to be vulnerable?”.
I’ve been following this question for a few months, and don’t anticipate this particular expedition to end anytime soon.  You could say easily enough that ‘it’s never safe to be vulnerable’ because the very nature of vulnerability is uncertainty and risk.  But the results of someone telling the story of who they are will be very different depending on what their story is, and who they’re telling it to.

 

What does the bullying lion in The Wizard of Oz lack?
Courage.  
“Why, you’re nothing but a great big coward”,  says Dorothy
on seeing how terrified he is after she gives him a slap for bullying Toto.
“I haven’t any courage at all”, says the Lion, “I even scare myself.”  
But why is, after all, Lion so afraid. [1]

Cowardly Lion

There are good reasons for getting anxious about vulnerability.  There a cost for telling “the story of who you are with your whole heart.”  Your story may challenge cultural norms, shatter parental expectations, fray peer relationships, or alienate your employer. It may isolate you or, depending on the story, leave you in danger.  Loss of status, loss of work, criticism, ridicule, bullying, ostracisation, alienation, intimidation, violence … these aren’t fictions. These are real, and most of us have seen them or experienced them, and it can teach us to keep our mouths shut, our true natures ‘in the cupboard’, and our souls enclosed.

 Unlike Scarecrow,
Lion does have a brain,
and maybe he’s using it the way that life’s taught him.  

 

I don’t want to be naiive about vulnerability.
We live in a broken world where people are hurt, and hurt people hurt others, and traumatised cultures are traumatising.  The expression ‘pecking order’ – a reference to group hierarchy – comes from how chickens determine who rules: by pecking the weaker ones to bits.  The corporate and political worlds are said to be ‘full of sharks’.  From schoolyards to monasteries, from house league teams to corporate boardrooms, from cop shops to prison cells, from anonymous strangers on public transit to the person with whom you share your bed: we all have hurts, and we all have the capacity to be hurtful and to take advantage of another’s vulnerability for our own gain.  There are some people who are so emotionally and socially damaged that this is almost the only way they are able to be in relationship: by finding and exploiting vulnerability.

So when is it safe to be vulnerable?

 

 More importantly,
Lion is willing to challenge his fears to pursue what he most needs.

 

I heard an amazing episode on Radio Lab the other day.  The story of Stu Rasmussen, a transgender person from a tiny town in conservative evangelical USA who became…. the mayor.

How did that happen?

Stu, who had lived in the town all his life and ran movies and took tickets at the only theatre in town, started by painting his nails blue. Not pink, or red, but blue.  Then, some weeks later, he painted them pink.  Then, piece by piece, he donned articles of women’s clothing.  Each carefully staged gesture of transformation produced a new burst of gossip and the potential for ostracisation.  But Stu was tactical, and new the town extremely well, and furthermore, everyone knew Stu as a trustworthy, helpful, kind person.

 

So the Cowardly Lion, in search of what he most needs
– courage –
and through many trials and tribulations,
makes it to the ruler of his Kingdom, the Wizard of OZ,
where he fully expects to receive what he wishes for.  

We normally think of curiosity as risk-taking, and this is why we’ve associated it with vulnerability.  But it’s worth considering here that Stu Rasmussen must have had a generous measure of curiosity to so successfully strategise his ‘coming out’[2] in a town so culturally antagonistic to his gender choice.

 

 There Lion discovers that the wizard-tyrant ruling over his Kingdom
is a frightened little man with a lot of smoke and mirrors
who has absolutely nothing to give him.

 

 

Stu understood the culture he lived in. He had it well gauged. That level of understanding takes focussed curiosity: an absorbent watchfulness, an openness to information and new understanding, a concerned interest in and care for the people of the community. That curiosity led him to the careful and deliberately patient strategy that would allow him to – eventually, and not without very great trials and real danger – “to tell the story of who he is with his whole heart.”

 

Almost nothing.
The wizard-tyrant has a medallion for bravery,
for setting out with a cast of misfits to find his courage.
And he has the insight and humility
– aka wisdom –
to bring Lion to see that he always had what he sought for.
His search for courage took courage.  

 

 

Curiosity is the opposite of blind faith:
it’s reconnaissant, observant, watchful, interested.
It’s gathering information through careful observation.
Care-full.
It’s questioning the situation you’re in with an open and non-judgemental mind.
Why is curiosity like this? Because, believe it or not, curiosity is rooted in care.
Seriously.
The word curious come from ‘cure’, and from ‘care’.
Curiosity is about caring.

Gabor Mate, in lecturing on addiction, regularly reiterates that the word ‘vulnerability’ comes from the Latin, ‘vulnerare’, meaning ‘to wound’.  For Mate, “To be a human being is to be profoundly vulnerable. And there’s nothing that you can do to make yourself invulnerable.” I agree, you can’t ever be invulnerable. But, by engaging your curiosity, you can be less or more vulnerable in situations that may be perilous, in keeping with your own limitations.
That is, while caring for yourself.

 

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2itQkiQUOE

[2] Stu has persisted in identifying as a heterosexual male.
https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/tag/stu-rasmussen/

Exploring a Curiosity in Mindfulness

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I’ve seen a lot of chatter about mindfulness recently. It seems to be “in fashion” right now. I have seen it referenced recently for change activity, I’ve also seen it as part of wellness packages and employee assistance programs. It’s definitely something that is permeating to the surface in many ways. My first confession here […]

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When Vulnerability Is Aggressive

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Another theme in Nik’s post on Curiosity and Vulnerability, is being curious about what lays hidden beneath, causing “resistance, obfuscation, evasion and even aggression.”

vulnerability-aggressionIn an idle moment, my daughter Googled ‘Millennials are…’ The top adjectives linked to her search were: idiots, lazy, spoiled, entitled, useless.

It is belittlement on an industrial scale reflecting unchecked vulnerability. The narrative runs counter to a more hopeful truth. A White House report: 15 Economic Facts About Millennials, found Millennials “are a technologically connected, diverse, and tolerant generation. The[ir] priority on creativity and innovation augurs well for future economic growth, while their unprecedented enthusiasm for technology has the potential to bring change to traditional economic institutions as well as the labor market.”

Without curiosity, it is hard to stop the pungency of negative judgements seeping into our worldview and behaviour. The duty of the curious is to peek behind the sentiments to discover the sources of vulnerability that lay beneath.

Armed with understanding, it becomes possible to ask the producers and the normalizers of derision: “What is it that you really want and, when you get it, then what?” It takes us to the nub of conversations that must be had if new possibilities are to be made likely.

In the case of Millennials, it begs the question: what is the cost of subjugating their  “creativity and innovation [which] augurs well for future economic growth”? Will today’s squelchers regret their sentiments when, in their dotage, they come to rely on this maligned generation? Millennials are but one example. Anti- sentiments lock out people and possibility; also it bolts the rest into a delusion of security amidst a sea of disruption.

Left unchecked, industrial scale aggressive vulnerability is pernicious, detrimental and shortsighted. The value of curiosity is that it has the power to peel off the blinkers of certainty; that necessarily produces a new kind of vulnerability until we adjust enough to make use of the opportunity. Finding ourselves “in a dark maze” (Bayo Akomolafe), we mustn’t miss seeing the importance of these intersections of vulnerabilities.

Add your thoughts and questions in the comments and click  to find out about the next Curiosity Lab potluck!