I’m not a big consumer of news, especially not on the weekend so I’ve only just found out that Peter Roebuck, my favourite cricket correspondent has died. Death gets to you. Or in the words of Steve Jobs, ‘death is life’s change agent’.

25 years ago I had a malignant melanoma cut out of my right thigh. Although in my head I knew I had dodged a bullet, my youthful heart didn’t really think too deeply about it. A couple of weeks ago I had another one cut out of my left thigh. It’s a bit like having a baby … every one says that until you’ve had one you have no idea how it changes your perspective on what matters in life. Having cancer in your body is a bit the same I reckon.

Maria is away so rather than hang out with her, which is typical weekend stuff for us, I’ve spent a few sessions in one of our hammocks. Don’t you love the gentle rocking? Thinking. Snoozing. Now I’m at the kitchen bench (Sunday afternoon). I’m loving the sound of Bob Dylan wafting through the late afternoon. The smell of my red wine in a plain glass lubricates the harmonica. I’ve loved watching movies til late with Rachel. I’ve loved taking Johanna for a swim and watching her do butterfly better than I can. I’ve loved having the cover off the barbeque and making simple but really good food. I’ve loved eating the raspberry and white chocolate muffins that Heidi made yesterday. I even loved ironing Johanna’s school uniform for tomorrow.

(Dylan is singing about the great reversals – perhaps with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as inspiration he croons; ‘the slow one now will later be fast, the first one now will later be last’)

Among all the recent obituaries for Steve Jobs we were reminded he said he was most proud of his family. Sad though that he said his motivation for having his biography written was so that his family understood why he wasn’t here for them as much as he wished. I choose a different path.

There is so much that seems like it matters. What do you look like? What stuff have you got? Who recognises you? How many twitter followers do you have? What’s your frequent flyer level?

Let’s change the world. Let’s advocate, serve, create, facilitate. Let’s be agents of change. Let’s lose sleep in creative worry about how to make society better. But let’s remember today, not on our death beds, that in the scheme of things, ironing that school uniform really matters.

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While staying in London’s Earls Court recently we stopped in a few times at the local Marks and Spencer Food to pick up supplies. Apart from how cold it was inside, we appreciated the way the food was presented …  and it made we wonder about our supermarkets in Australia.

My hunch that we are being cheated was confirmed when I read this months Monocle issue on food. A myriad of exemplary food retailers from all corners of the globe are featured, including some types that don’t typically feature in a discussion on the future of healthy food such as a Japanese burger chain and middle eastern supermarkets. Australia didn’t rate a mention except for the following:

“It’s not all good news. On our frequent visits to Australia we have often wondered how a nation that has one of the best restaurant cultures in the world has some of the most boring supermarkets: Coles is like a 1970s throughback.” A column then slams the impact of the Coles / Woolworths duopoly.

For an amateur foody like me, it’s an embarrassment. Sure there are alternatives, in fact Monocle uses a stat. indicating that 30% of us (in Australia) never go into supermarkets. We get meat, fish and some fruit and veg from the Vic markets once a week and we pick up supplies at our local strip regularly, especially on the weekend. We are lucky to have a local bakery, fruit and veg, Indian supermarket and an IGA. But with essentially six adults to feed it’s hard to avoid the big supermarkets.

But apart from the pricing dimension, most of don’t realise we are being robbed of best practice food retailing, that includes transparency in the supply chain as well as the way it is presented to us. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Food is one of those big issues, around which there will need to be change on a global scale. Colin Tudge spoke about some of the issues recently at the Do Lectures. You can listen to his talk here. Sometimes, it seems we are happy just sticking our heads in the sand and pretending everything is OK.

In Melbourne, our news diet of late has featured the Occupy Melbourne protests, spawned by the Walls Street occupation. Similar gatherings are now in 900 cities around the world. Beyond the predictable media that loves to capture the antics of dreadlocked hooligans, those I’ve spoken to talk about intense and serious discussions about aspects of our society that are broken. They speak of a hunch that ‘things are not quite right’ and believe that the only way in which we can begin to develop systemic solutions is to talk, with different players around the [figurative] table. Isn’t that what a city square is supposed to be for Mr Doyle?

If, in our immediate lives and spheres of influence we are tracking along just-dandy-thank-you-very-much, then talk of ‘things being not quite right’ sounds a bit alien. But if all of us were to lift our eyes and ask questions about the long term impact of our choices and engage in genuine curiosity about what life is like for all sectors in our communities, then I suspect we would be less inclined to wish these agitators would go away. Improving the way food is produced and sold to us in Australia is just one issue for which there appears little political appetite.

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Many years ago someone told me that the reason they supported the NFP organisation I worked with was that they had had a bad experience with us. I do a double take, did I hear that correctly??? He went on to explain that he had come to base his life on the reality of paradoxes: you get more satisfaction from giving than getting; to truly own something you have to let it go; seeking acceptance from people actually drives them away, etc etc. He therefore found it liberating to be generous towards an organisation that hadn’t treated him well. Hmmmmm.

Paradox has been deeply informative for my own view of the world. In particular, I accept that apparently contradictory ideas, when held together, can offer insight and wisdom that are denied us when we hold dogmatically to a particular perspective, irrespective of its apparent right-ness.

One of the things I appreciate about the way David, Andy and the team designed the Do Lectures (www.dolectures.com) in Wales this year was the bringing together of things that rarely end up in the same space.

• An international gathering of acclaimed achievers, sharing their stories while being accommodated in tents (not hotels). Eliminates the pretention that typically accompanies such events when you are bunking down in sleeping bags and lining up for simple but exception food with enamel plates.
• CEOs, activists, film-makers, inventors, adventurers, entrepreneurs … Do-ers of all kinds sharing the microphone.
• An event that unashamedly showcases a smart little country (Wales), while being genuinely international.
• High tech threads (via speaker selection and social media savvy) and earthy, high touch culture.
• … and the list could go on.

To illustrate this, in one session we heard from Zach Smith (co-founder of Makerbot industries http://www.makerbot.com/ – a 3D printing device likely to be part of the manufacturing revolution) and designer and photographer Nick Hand who rode his push bike around the coast of the UK seeking out and interviewing artisans along the way (http://www.dolectures.com/lectures/why-we-need-to-celebrate-craftsman/ ). The question about which approach, high-tech localised manufacturing or the super skilled handcrafts of the artisans is ‘better’ misses the opportunity to retain the best of the past and embrace the future by holding both stories together in tension.

Our world is in constant flux. Wise people remind us that the thinking required to solve today’s challenges cannot be the same thinking that created the challenges in the first place. When I caught up with fellow Do-participants Ross (@RossHill), Sam (@sambe11) and Derek (@dwinter) last week we talked about the difference in approach when the motivation is not so much to ‘save the world’ but to get on with creating a world with the attributes we understand as good. The Do Lectures, like many other gatherings these days, is part of a groundswell that is not just imagining what a healthy 21^st world is like, but is already living it. This is not happening by reacting against the dominant systems, but by just getting on and doing, believing that the intuitive innovation and resilience of the human spirit will create pockets of life and energy that grow organically.

Haven’t been as inspired by a group of people collectively and individually for a long time.

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Ok, so let me ground the philosophical musings of last week …

AFL is a better code than NRL, Macs are better than PCs, and Spooks is the best spy drama on TV.

Pronouncements like these litter our conversation. We get passionate about our beliefs and can even get into arguments. This happens because we make leaps in logic …

We go from: “I really enjoy AFL” to “NRL is a rubbish game”. What we don’t necessarily acknowledge is: “AFL is all I’ve known and it has provided me with extraordinary satisfaction and a sense of community. As for NRL, I’ve only ever seen it on TV and I’ve actually got no idea what it feels like to play rugby league or support an NRL team.”

In one sense, all we’ve got is our point of view. There’s nothing wrong with not having grown up with NRL, but why do we insist on limiting our appreciation of life by wanting to look at everything through our own blinkered experience? Why do we leap from, “I’ve experienced this to be true,” to “my experience is universally true for everyone”, and it’s corollary, “your experience of truth is invalid.”

Despite the passion involved, the relative merits of football codes don’t matter in the scheme of things. Other things matter more. Justice for people in society who get marginalised or are victims of indiscriminate power or carelessness matters more. Asylum seekers and people with disabilities are just two groups that come to mind. We should be very wary about forming views about people until we have experienced their plight first hand. Until then, listen intently.

The point is simply this: if we want to grow and develop, immersion in a situation that challenges our preconceived ideas about what is good and right is the way to go. Feeding ourselves with content and people that affirm what we already think puts our roots down deeper, but doesn’t help us figure out if we’re in the right spot in the first place.

… but Collingwood supporters really are morons.

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The London based RSA, founded in a Covent Garden coffee shop in 1754, is dedicated to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Last week I read an RSA essay by Matthew Taylor exploring 21^st century enlightenment. Included in the essay is an evidence based exploration of behaviour change. Here are a couple of paragraphs;

“Most of our behaviour, including social interaction, is the result of our brain responding automatically to the world around us rather than the outcome of conscious decision-making. In this sense it is more realistic to see ourselves as a node integrally connected to the world rather than a separate, wholly autonomous, entity. For example, recent work on the impact of social networks shows how they subtly but powerfully influence our lifestyles. After studying public health patterns for two decades Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler conclude:

‘Social influence does not end with the people we know. If we affect our friends and they affect their friends then our actions can potentially affect people we have never met. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.’

Practically, it turns out that changing our context is a more powerful way of shaping our behaviour than trying to change our minds. If you want to become a better person, don’t buy a book of sermons, choose more virtuous friends.”

I first started to think deeply about behaviour change about 15 years ago after reading Professor Rodney Stark’s 1996 book The Rise of Christianity. The book unpacks the sociological context and factors behind the extraordinary growth of the movement in the first three centuries AD. At the time, the disruption in my thinking was related to the power of community to affect people’s lifestyle choices. In short, rather than people choosing a particular behaviour (for example, helping poor or sick people) because of a belief, studies of a variety of groups suggest it is more substantially driven by a desire to belong to a community who also practices these behaviours.

What we are exposed to, our experience of life, is the dominant shaper of our beliefs and behaviour, rather than our articulated belief system or worldview. So what? Here are two important implications:

1. Until we have experienced the alternative, we should be cautious about how dogmatically we argue our case as superior.

This should not paralyse us in putting forward a viewpoint. Indeed, whether it is a trivial argument about the merits of Sydney or Melbourne or a more substantial discussion about an ideology, we should make our point with robust evidence. But the point is that until we have walked in another person’s shoes our argument is simply a point of view. In a less ethereal context, a commitment to immersing ourselves in the other’s perspective is a powerful path forward in everyday family or household tensions.

It is often said that until one has a child, we have no idea what its like. Until we have grieved we have an impoverished view of life. Until we are unemployed, we have no idea what it is it actually like. I recall Ched Myers, from whom I have learned much, saying that the reason he chose to live where he did in LA was to “intentionally see the world through the eyes of the marginalised”.

2. Personal and professional development is still mired in the myth that it is mainly about content. Content, without context is hollow though. The stuff that catapults us forward is our intentional or unintentional exposure to a situation that challenges our existing capabilities or prejudices. Our lives follow predictable paths because we stay within our communities; we feed our minds with content with which we already basically agree, we hang out with people like us. There is nothing wrong with this except if our long term goal includes development and wisdom. My hypothesis is that the broader our thoughtful first hand exposure to different perspectives, the wiser our grasp of that domain.

Happy exploring.

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