Fuzzy Signals

Bricolage

Editorial note: I'm continuing with the theme of reviewing a review of a book. To be honest, I'm a little ambivalent about this rather Talmudic approach – a commentary on a commentary, a full three degrees of separation from the original content – but we are living in a postmodern, multi-textual universe so I guess I have permission to use whatever I want in the name of intellectual bricolage. Bricolage, by the way, is a nifty concept worth resurfacing, first developed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. It means the mixing and matching of old and new ideas in unexpected or unusual ways. In current-speak, think of it as recombinant intellectual DNA.

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I'm not a frequent reader of The Financial Times, but the weekend edition often has some gems. I like surprises like this. I was particularly intrigued with a book essay by Mark Archer, "The Sum of Triangles and Squares" (October 11/12). [You have to subscribe to FT online to get access to this article, I'm afraid.] The essay was based on John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman by Robert Skidelsky. Not exactly a title that makes your heart pump with anticipation and excitement, but there were some sexy (quite literally) aspects to good-old Keynes, which I will get to shortly. For the keen Keyno-philes, this book is the latest volume, in a multi-volume biography, of this greatly accomplished man. I haven't read any of them, so I can't vouch for them.

[A dashing version of his earlier self]

So, now that I got all of the relevant sourcing and disclaiming out of the way, let me get down to business. A number of things struck me as I read the essay. First, I had no idea just how multifaceted Keynes was, especially his connection to the Bloomsbury crowd, nor did I know about his the trials and trysts as a late Victorian homosexual. (The title of the article is an allusion to a Bloomsbury saying – "they all loved in triangles but lived in squares" which is a deliciously perverse, pithy, and revelatory statement of how this group lived.)

Like many great thinkers and innovators, Keynes genius sprang from his exposure and connection to a wide variety of perspectives and people. In particular, he traveled in three diverse but important worlds: the Bloomsbury world (avant-garde), Cambridge (academics), and Whitehall (politics), which must have been fertile ground indeed for generating his ideas and putting them into action. Recent research into how social networks work confirm the power of "distant ties" and random linkages in spurring serendipitous discoveries, and engendering the conditions for practical implementation of ideas. Gladwell's book The Tippping Point makes this case well.

Speaking of what he did, Keynes succeeded in two very different activities. On the one hand, he revolutionized economic theory with his seminal work. But Keynes was also a statesman, and the chief architect of our present financial system and geo-economic arrangement (the prototype of the IMF and World Bank, GDP/GNP metrics, etc.) during the famous Bretton Woods conferences. Both of these achievements have a direct connection to the present, and some of the most pressing dilemmas we face. First of all, there has been much talk and fervent activity to develop another "Bretton Woods", that is, another sea-changing set of conferences designed to update our 60 year old financial system in a way that better reflects the needs and power structures of today. While the system has changed considerably (its digitization is one obvious example), its core assumptions around the central role of nation state haven't shifted much. So as these conversations evolve amongst today's avant-garde, it would be interesting to reflect on the first Bretton Woods and mine that experience for relevant learning and insight.

Secondly, key aspects of Keynes conceptual work still matter because he tried to replace some of the faulty assumptions of certainty embedded in classical economics with more realistic ideas that the world is full of uncertainties. No duh!!!!! Yet fifty years later we are still living with some of these outdated ideas in our financial and social systems. Despite plenty evidence to the contrary, many forecasting tools still cling to a desperate hope that the future follows neat predictable straight lines.

I am always fascinated and awed by people like Keynes who were successful in both the world of ideas and the world of practice. The ancient Greeks were probably the first to talk about the inherent tension between these two modes of being – a tension that is particularly taut today in our go-go world, where all of professional metrics and incentives encourage haste (and with lackluster results if the 90s are anything to go by.) It's clearly hard to have intellectual and creative breakthroughs if one is totally engaged in the hurly burly of daily life, whether it be working on a ministerial portfolio or running an operational unit of a large corporation. "Garbage in, garbage out" goes an old research saying. It's also the number one complaint I hear in business class lounges these days: no time to reflect, no time to make sense of things around them. But as an executive at a large engineering company told me, in his macho corporate culture, people are rewarded for (what Richard Normann calls) "hysterical hyperactivity." As long as he was on an airplane, going somewhere, or being perceived to be "putting out fires"... all was well with head-quarters. The unfortunate reality is that distinctively new ideas and enduring insights (beyond the faddish present) often take time to incubate; they require whites-space, long stretches of quiet contemplation, far removed from routine and responsibilities. For instance, the highly social Picasso gave birth to his famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the revolutionary first cubist painting, after he barricaded himself in his Montmatyr room, seeing hardly anyone from his rowdy Bande de Picasso (another group of philosophical laughers), for almost a full year. This is something to keep in mind when someone asks you to "think out of the box" by next quarter.

Getting back to the Greeks... because they were onto something as usual... Aristotle debated which mode of being – the intellectual (sophia) or practical (phronesus) – was the most worthy. The life of the mind, I think, was where he landed, but this is a little unclear because he also greatly admired the "doers" of the world, especially political leaders, like Alexander the Great, who "changed the world with his hands." In today's world, I think we have an unhealthy emphasis on just the practical side of things, as evidenced in the statement: "Teachers teach because they can't do." That's only partly true. Being able to think abstractly is just as important, especially when most of the value-creation is now coming from intangibles like ideas; and better futures depend on our ability to imagine alternative models or structures. As Aristotle put, the art of living is in the balance between contemplation and doing. Deep happiness, which the Greeks defined much more profoundly as a "flourishing in the mind, body and soul", could be achieved by a sequential to and fro, or dialectical flow, between the life of the mind and the life of action, one mode of activity informing and enriching the other in a virtuous circle.

I was wondering why this sounded so familiar. And then, I remembered the heaps of research in the management literature on "double loop learning" or "action learning", and the work on creativity and innovation. Business scholars like Chris Argyis (who, like Aristotle, is worth reading regardless of sector) and Peter Senge have made their careers describing the "Fifth Discipline". They and others, like Kolb, describe a learning loop which cycles, iteratively, through phases of personal reflection, observation of experiences, conceptualization/theorizing, and testing/experimenting. So this balancing act turns out to be quite an old idea – that bricolage phenomena in action yet again – and something that Keynes obviously did with acumen and talent.

Posted by nicole at October 14, 2003 05:40 PM