The beauty of contradictions

Last week, I was in a session discussing about TRIZ (For those who do not know, TRIZ is an inventiveproblem solving methodology which has 40 principles. This is an easy way to solve a problem using these principles : phrase your problem in to a contradiction (there is a parameter that’s improving and there is another one that is suffering) and then using a matrix, you can identify the correct principles to be applied)

That left me thinking a bit about contradictions. Have you wondered what happens in the mind when there is a contradiction? Why is contradiction an important aspect in problem solving?

I think this is because holding two contradictory thoughts in the mind simultaneously, makes the mind bit confused, and there is a moment of uncertainly and stillness. This stillness is where mind is receptive to new ideas, looking beyond the patterns.

Now when I think of it, all the religions used this brilliantly to convey their teachings. The “Bhagawat Geetha“, one of the most popular books in Hinduism begins with illustrating a contradiction. It starts with Krishna telling Arjuna : You are mourning for those not worthy of sorrow; yet speaking like one knowledgeable. The learnt neither laments for the dead or the living. (Chapter 2, verse 11 – This is where the great Shankara starts his interpretation of Geetha). Geetha is conveyed in to the stillness created by this contradiction.

Incidentally Geetha also ends with a contradiction. Towards the end, after the message is conveyed, Krishna contradicts whatever he said in the verse : Relinquishing all the ideas of righteousness, surrender un to Me exclusively, I will deliver you from all sinful reactions, do not despair.(Chapter 18, Verse 66)

Many sayings of Jesus has this contradiction in them. This is a good example: “Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

This is what happens here: there is an immediate compulsive tendency for the mind to respond and this is based on patterns or conditioning. But when there is a contradiction, mind waits for a moment, not sure which pattern to execute. And this is a moment of awareness where you are open to newer possibilities.

I think for the contradictions to really become effective and bring about a new dimension to problems, it needs to be felt by the heart and not the head.

How the mind associates thoughts….

Post my experience described in the previous post (A thought formed..), I successfully did ‘catch’ some of my thought trains and traced them back to the origin. I was basically curious to find out how a thought originates and  forms the first association (or connection) with the next one; which is the beginning of the thought train.

This wasn’t easy. I could do this only on handful of occasions. I wasn’t aware most of the other time and even when I was, it was not possible to trace the thought back to the origin.

But I found something interesting from the experience, on analyzing the first association. When an association is made between a new thought with one already in the memory (a past incident), the comparison is done rather ‘textually’ (like a string matching, sentence matching etc..) and not “visually”. But when the connection is done with something in the future (an imagination that is stored in the memory) it is ‘visual’.

                Another way to state this is to say that most of our past experiences are stored in the memory in ‘text’ form (when I say, text, don’t get carried away by text as we use in day to day world. I couldn’t find another appropriate word for it) and our imagination (anything that has not yet happened) is stored ‘visually’ (pictures static or moving).

                 You must have seen people who can associate two or more seemingly non-related things. (Btw, you must have also have done this yourself some times). Typically people who are found of story telling, have this ability. Given any incident, they will tell you a story, that is connected to the incident in a strange but uniquely strong way. I have been trying to find out how some people are able to do this, while others not. I think the answer lies here in what I described above. These are the people who can do a ‘visual’ association.               

                I think this is what is happening. When you have an experience (visual, auditory, emotion, conversation ….), the mind (the logical mind) has a compulsive need to interpret it and store in the form of language. This actually connects the ‘experience’ with you (the self or the ego or the identity whatever you call it). As you go along, you forget (or lose) the real experience and retain just the ‘interpretation’. Next time a similar experience occurs, it is first ‘interpreted’ and the interpretation is then compared with already stored interpretations in the memory to form the connection.

                Here is an example to understand this: You see a beautiful flower. The experience is “the beauty”, but say the interpretation is “Oh! I don’t have this in my garden”. Some days later, you see a good painting. The experience actually is the same: “the beauty”, but you are probably not able to relate this experience to seeing the flower because the connection is not happening at the level of experience. Now assume you see another beautiful flower, and the interpretation immediately is “Another one I want to have in my garden” and may be you connect the experience to the previous one.

                Since most of the events in life (perhaps with the exception of the time we were children) are interpreted and stored in the memory and this makes the associations to the past events slow and memory dependent. On the other hand, the future events (our imagination) has not yet been interpreted and they are stored in visual form.

                So if we need to form the right associations (with the past events of our life, what we have seen, heard, read, did…) we need to rather store the experience and not the interpretation. Then I think we will be able to do visual associations.When a new experience comes, immediately the association is made and this is effortless and fast.

                 This I believe is the crux of Mindfulness or awareness. When we are aware , what gets stored to memory first is the experience; then the mind kicks in, to do the interpretating job and also stores the interpretation to the memory. When a new experience comes and you are aware, the experience is compared to prior experiences first and only if there is no association found, the interpretations are compared.

                You can experience this yourself, when you are intensely aware in a situation, you form many associations to your child hood events (probably the only time, we didn’t much interpret things, but rather experienced them).

                The two problems that cause this are the ‘language’ and ‘thinking’. We have a compulsive need to interpret, analyze, judge, categorize and label everything around us and connect them to ‘us’ to form our sense of identity.

We communicate by our presence

Yesterday, we were discussing about recruiting few more people in to the team. The role is to do with change management and we were listing down the attributes we need to look for in the prospects. The first came communication skills. No one seems to have a question about it; everyone agreed that we need people with good communication skills. Someone said – only people with good communication skills can create change in the organization.

Communication skills here means to be able to convey something effectively, respond spontaneously, defend ones’ viewpoint, talk fluently without hesitation, talk loud and clear, convince someone, win an argument etc etc.

As I sat there, something in me said –something is wrong? A story of Lord Buddha, one of the greatest change agents the world has seen, came to my mind. Buddha was supposed to address a large gathering once. As thousands waited to hear the great sage speak, Buddha walked in with a lotus flower in his hand and sat just glancing at it. No words. He just sat there silently. People waited impatiently for him to break the silence. He simply sat there in deep silence glancing at the flower. After a while, his disciple, Maha Kashyapa burst in to laughter. Buddha called him and gave him the flower; he was the one who understood the essence of Buddha’s teaching.

So, I think this is again yet another conditioned belief we have not been questioning. If you look at the people around us who are good orators, like salesmen, marketing people, politicians, do we really believe any of them? Someone with common sense can easily see malicious intentions concealed carefully beyond those carefully crafted sentences. But yet we are sure, everyone need to have good communication skills as an essential quality! You might argue that there are great orators who changed the course of humanity, but I think there are also several people who were not great communicators, at least in the sense we understand.

We really communicate by our presence. That is the reason we feel so light and comfortable in the presence of small children. The younger the children, better is the feeling. Imagine a child giving you a lecture on love; you will run away. Look at the people who have influenced you in your life, in whose company you felt peace and comfort, they all communicate by their presence. You just need to be in their presence and it makes no further difference if they talk or not.

This is not the case of a salesman trying to convince you in to buying their product. He might be communicating well, but his presence is really conveying the hidden selfish motives, which you can feel. That’s what makes you feel uncomfortable in the presence of such people.

And when can we communicate effectively with our presence? When we are at peace, mind is centered and content. Then you don’t need to talk anything, people will have no option but to be at peace in your presence. Just a smile from you can communicate what hours of speaking cannot.

When do we start recruiting people for their ‘presence’? I think even now we do that, but just that we don’t quiet understand it or our rational minds don’t accept it.

Our vision for the future is a negated past

We had a couple of ‘visioning’ exercises today in the office, where teams had to create a vision for themselves. The session was split in to three slots. The first was where teams where told how to create a vision (this included a video on visioning). Then they broke in to teams to do brainstorming to come up with a vision and a roadmap to achieve the same. Then everyone assembled back and presented the vision and the road map to everyone.

            I was in the audience during the presentations. Teams took turn to present the thought process (which was bay and large some issues that existed in the system), the vision and the roadmap to achieve the same.

            There were two very interesting observations from the exercise. The first was that most of the teams came up with very long, detailed (sometimes complex) vision statements. There were a few that came up with one liners. The audience liked the latter more.

As I was watching this, it occurred to me that when we make a ‘vision statement’ in one sentence, the space around it contains enormous possibilities that really should characterize a vision. When the vision statement is something logical with long set of statements the space around that is missing. This reduces the vision to a simple act in the future. I think the same is true in most cases. When you can present a problem in the most concise manner, the possibility space for solutions is larger; this is the space for innovation. Many times we are unable to come up with innovative solutions to the problems is that we define the problem so much in detail that we drastically reduce the opportunity space around it.

The second was more interesting. Most of the vision statements (and the roadmap) typically consisted of things that weren’t happening as desired. This is in fact the negation of the past or even the denial of it. That means when we look ahead in to the future, actually what we see is a negative image of the past. For e.g when a team puts “Delivering Quality solutions” as a vision, what they really mean is that we have not been able to do that in the past. And in the future we want to change this.

The same thing happens if we set a vision for ourselves. The influence of the past on our psyche is so much that it restricts or confines your view of the future. For e.g you put a vision for you that you will be perfectly healthy in another one year, you are actually saying that you are not healthy now, and you do not approve that and it needs to change.

This is as if the vision is in the past, and not in the future!

What is the problem with creating such a vision? It not only reinforces the undesirable past, but also reinforces the sense of denial. If you have failed to set this right in the past, it also creates fear and doubt about the vision itself. These two are sufficient to make sure that you can never achieve the vision.

So what needs to happen when you create a vision, either for your own or a team or the organization? You need to put aside the past completely, keep the ‘opportunity space’ as open as possible and create a vision. Be aware of doubt , uncertainty or fear. Any trace of it, the vision is most likely a denial of the undesired past and the mind will do what ever it can to make sure that you don’t make it.

Also visioning is not the act of logical mind; but that of the creative mind. When your vision looks logiocally right and practically achievable, chances are that it’s not a vision, but just an act in the future.

The ‘void’ for creativity in Organizations

Creativity is a buzzword these days and there are all these tools, frame works and thinking techniques to make people and organizations more and more creative (and innovative of course..). But how successful are they? How many organizations really are creative? How many dumb people have been transformed in to creative geniuses by these techniques?

Every organization is doing some thing or the other, which they believe will make them creative. You know what I really think ? Like most of such hypes, the organizations will pursue this for some time and at when they see that it doesn’t deliver what it promised, they will change the definition of ‘creativity’ to suit the concept in their mind (we have done that to Quality already..)

I think the fundamental problem is that most of the creativity advocates are not really sure how exactly this creativity works. When someone sees it happening in a particular setting / situation a few times, they think that’s what will make people creative. Brainstorming may be what an organization finds working for them. But do we go beyond to see how that technique makes people creative?

I think here is the secret. Creativity manifests in a state of void (no thoughts or in the present moment) spontaneously, even without the help of the logical mind. (Here is a typical example people tell you: Think of the time, you were trying to solve a problem and you eventually give up (or drop). And some time later the solution comes totally unexpected. May be after a sleep) How does it happen? When there is the void in you, this is the space or gap where you get to access the infinite creativity of the universe. And in that void the feverishness for the results also disappears.

If you take any techniques for creativity, they lead to this void. Take brainstorming as an example. What happens when you brainstorm? When you continuously flush your mind out, the mind comes to a state of void. This is typically where people become silent and then comes the real ‘out of the box’ ideas. 

There are some other techniques, which don’t take you to this space, because they deal with your logical mind. (Sometimes it is funny, you use your logical mind to overcome the logical barrier in the mind and it all looks perfectly logical) As a matter of fact, they do give results, but not really what’s called the ‘creative ones’. But many times organizations are happy with them, because they are safe.

So in essence to make someone creative, we need to create that void. But it is impossible to stop the mind to created that space. But the sages of India solved this problem rather easily. How? They discovered that mind, breath and body are closely interrelated and each could influence the other. They went on to create techniques (for e.g the breathing technique like Pranayama) which could create the void in the mind, without confronting it directly.

All this is to set the context for a concept of “Void for Creativity in Organizations” that I want to present to you. Extending the same concept to Organizations, I think the simple reason why Organizations are not really creative is because they don’t experience the ‘void’. The noise (or thinking) in organizations create so much of clutter that prevents them from getting to the void or the silence, which is the abode of creativity.

I think organizations, like individuals have a mind, and along with that comes other faculties that contribute to the constant chattering. Here are few important ones that occurs to me:

1. Every organization develops a strong logical mind, which is based on data, past incidents, inputs from market, strategies. The logical mind is so adamant about being right every time.
2. The organization’s mind is always in the past or the future (tracking and planning) and the space for creativity happens neither in the past or the future. The void is always in the present or the time stops in that void.
3. Ego – Every organization works hard to build identities (internally and externally) and after sometime, this feeds in to the organization’s ego. Preserving this ego becomes a strong need and this needs effort. 
4. Lack of a collective mind, which is caused by people conflicts, competing divisions etc.
5. Too much of feverishness about the results or the outcomes.
6. Attributes like Fear, Responding to triggers, Uncertainty (doubt) etc which become dominant at times.

As the organizations grow (old as well as in size) the noise increases, forms rigid patterns and becomes the way of functioning (It is not a wonder that smaller organizations and start ups are more creative many times). Even if organizations become aware of this issue (lack of creativity), typically we blame it on things like processes, bad management, bad marketing, lack of technical competence, market, competition etc. But I think the fundamental problem is that Organizations do not understand the need for the ‘Void’ for creativity.

Let me give you an example. The void comes sometimes when there is a real danger, say to the existence of the organization itself. That’s when people come together, let go of the past and don’t’ have big things to hope for the future – and this brings all the attention to what best can be done right now, which is the void for creativity. It is here where the organizations change its course drastically, attempts things it had always hesitated to do, decides to explore things that never made sense etc.

The moment when this void is there, creativity occurs spontaneously.

It might seem impossible to stop the clutter in the organizations and create a void. It will not come through structural changes or putting more processes, or introducing more techniques. But like the mind-breath relation, there are subtle indirect ways to create this void in the organizations. I will reserve the thoughts on that for another post. Right now, I want to leave this concept for you to think and comment on.

Self-help mantras leave you unhappier than before

Many newspapers today carried this study of self help mantras (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197430/Revealed-Self-help-mantras-leave-unhappier-before.html) The study by some psychologists found that those with low self-esteem who repeated self-affirming statements (like I can win) actually ended up feeling worse about themselves. They suggests that unreasonably positive ’self-statements’, such as ‘I accept myself completely’, simply remind individuals with low self-esteem how much they believe the opposite to be true.

I think this is not surprising, if you have read some of those best selling self help books. Each of them claim that you need to look no further to become the next Bill Gates or Barack Obama. You read them and spend the next few days ‘transfoming your life’, soon to find you back at sqare one. This ideal goal really widens the difference between what you are and what you should be. This process leaves you with a bad self-esteem and you are now more convinced that you cannot change.

I am not blindly accusing, could be there are books that are really valuable. But in general, I find some issues:

1. Some of these books create those false definitions of success for you. In reality you are searching for happiness and freedom. And they tell you about success, and there is the assumption that success leads to happiness. It might seem appealing to our mind, but soon the self (sub concious or whatever you call it) realises that you are on a false trail.
2. Many such books are written by people who do not have first hand experience. How many of them have been miserable, depressed and failed in life before they understand the truth? I think very rare. Instead they lay out those ideal life for for you, missing some very important points such as fear, ego etc.
3. Most them talk to your concious mind. And any change you need to do in life with your concious mind needs lot of discipline. Anyone who is not accumsted to discipline can never sustain such a change. I think the real change need to happen deep within and it can only be the result of a true search.
4. As a practice, we look for precriptive solutions. But every one is unique; your mind, thinking, attitude, response to a problem – everything is unique and personal. Very few prescriptive stuff will work for you, unless you are going to be disciplined. The change doesn’t happen at the mind level. But the mind makes us believe that it is supporting us in the change. (That’s why when we begin to practice Mindfulness, we end up giving a self commentory of what we do – I am now walking, I should not get angry now…)

These days, there is a huge market for self help books (OK, atleast they are successful), because everyone wants to change. We are 100% certain that we need to change in order to be happy and successful i n life. Let’s start with questioning that belief.

I liked a quote from Father De Mello “You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free”.

How many self help gurus teach us the art of dropping?

Related Posts: Being true to yourself

Why is that I do not enjoy something fully?

My daughter loves story books. Everyday I read her a story book before she goes to bed. She has a huge pile of children’s magazines that we subscribe and she picks one at random and I have to read it cover to cover – that’s the procedure.

Few days back I was reading a book for her. There was a poem which I read out. The poem was so meaningless and when I finished, I couldn’t make head or tale of it. What was he trying to convey? It was really that stupid.

So I ask my daughter-‘ Did you like it?’

‘Great’ she says

‘What did you understand?’

She just gave me a grin and said ‘next one’

In a flash, I understood what was happening. For her a poem meant the pictures, colors, rhythm, rhyming and the fact that I was reading it to her. Whether it made sense or not, whether it conveyed something or not – all that was secondary. For her the whole experience is what mattered. And she never even felt the need to explain it. 

And here was I, the stupid logical brainer, caught up with the meaning of the poem…And I just missed the whole thing.

As I went to bed with a disturbed mind, I was thinking of the time when I was a kid and my father used to read story books for me. I would have enjoyed it the way my daughter does now. And what has it taken for me to get this stage where I am stuck with judging and conceptualizing everything around.