Do you have the prescience to get out of your own way?

How do you train yourself to see what you don’t want to see? How can you get out of your own way?

That’s what I’ve been reflecting on of late and it spurned me to go back to a key point in history – the period post WW1, leading up to WW2. I bypassed Winston Churchill and went one step further back – Neville Chamberlain.

I suspect that we’ve forgotten much about Neville Chamberlain. He’s become a discard of history, that silly buffoon who claimed ‘Peace in our time’ with Hitler. But for a long time he was well respected and very popular. He told the people what they wanted to hear and believe, none of them wished to revisit the slaughter that had been the then last war.

And, in case we think we’re better than that. You may wish to recall that only a couple of years ago a respected US President said that he knew Putin as he also had two daughters, another time he ventured that he looked into Putins’ eyes and could see his soul! Even US Presidents, with all their advisers, aren’t immune to seeing what they want to see.

So let’s refresh and ask ourselves if there’s more we can learn from Neville Chamberlain? Might we be making the same error? How did Chamberlain and, realistically, nearly everyone miss the intent behind the rise of Adolf Hitler? Let’s look a bit wider at that time:

• They had all lived through, and still lived with, the loss of a generation of young men. Family, friends, relatives, work colleagues. Everywhere they went, they were still assaulted with the consequences. Even at work there was a long-held view that business in Britain suffered for over a decade as the new managers and technicians had to be promoted too early as they were all that remained. They’d been too young to go to war, but now they didn’t have the training nor experience for their roles. That doesn’t even begin to account for the mental health of those who returned, as well as the terrible physical injuries. The cost of that war was everywhere in every day of their lives, they desperately didn’t want another.
• Britain was crippled by its war debts to the USA. The debt would have been manageable if only the debtors, particularly France, had been more forthcoming (and able) in paying.
• With the Spanish Flu, Britain faced the most lethal pandemic since the Black Death.
• The Great Depression and its scars were with them still. Picture Britain, by geography and history, a trading nation. Its trade fell by half between 1929 and 1933. In parts of the country the unemployment rate was 70%.
• There was also a great distraction which I believe has been lost in history and that is that it was a time of losing the Empire. Now it may not seem like much of a point, but picture that time, the British Empire remains still the largest empire, by size, ever known in the world. It covered over 25% of the worlds landscape. And Britain was losing its empire, it was losing its self-view, its feeling of power and grandeur. Hence, the Government of India Act of 1935 was critical to their efforts to try and keep power through limiting what they gave up in the face of the demands by the Indians.

Now imagine that’s you, living in that time, how readily do you think you would have been to see the threat of another war? It’s perhaps with this reflection that we can see why ‘silly old Neville Chamberlain’ was perhaps like most of us. And don’t forget the man talking in the wind at that time, Winston Churchill, had disgraced himself over Gallipoli, was known as a braggard, he’d changed parties to join the Liberals, and then changed back again to re-join the Conservatives – he hardly presented the picture of considered thought! Neville Chamberlains’ view was the considered, respected view of the leaders of that time.

And Neville Chamberlain personally? Could he extract himself from that time and try and challenge himself? With the backdrop of such powerful distractions above, he was also the Chancellor of the Exchequer in two stints during these years. It was his job to get Britain out of its economic malaise! The massive debt, the unemployment, the industrial decline, fallen exports and trading partners/allies who had problems enough of their own. They were ‘distractions’ simply put.

Perhaps in that context it’s easier to see why they didn’t want to see the coming war, another slaughter. But it’s also easier to see how they became distracted by the ‘big issues’ of the time, as they would have been living through that period.

So what’s our lesson? What have we learned over say the past decade? Very quickly lets cover perhaps the more obvious ‘big issues’ - The cyber opportunities and threats (I’ve previously noted that I believe we’ve been at war since approximately 2011); climate threat, which again I believe we’re significantly underplaying (and, from that, consequential losses such as the loss of biodiversity); the growing societal divide (I’ve previously noted that I think we’re living in the 1930s; and with that comes socioeconomic threats, demographic changes); as I’ve noted the divide between USA & Friends and China & Friends + Russia (witness the ramifications that will have in tech alone), the increasing transfer from globalisation to regionalisation (and with that, and the divide noted, the change in economic capability required of countries with Australia as a prime example, hence also lesser global leadership both geopolitically, supra-national (eg UN) and financial leadership in particular), which spurns increasing reluctance to ‘go to war’ much like 1930s (hence changes in geopolitics risks), and the change from one industrial revolution to the next (from the industrial age to the information age, with innovation, sustainability, tech, etc) and with that usually comes 20 years of very significant disruption, hence again socioeconomic divide, retraining people, failed states (including possibly significant states and regions) etc; the rise of individual actors (Sovereign Wealth Funds, Individual corporates) v’s state actors, and we best not forget the threat of pandemics. And, I should note, very few of us have lived through hard economic times. And that’s just the quick tour!

So what are we missing? What might be our Neville Chamberlain mistake? Perhaps it’s the obvious, our ability to discuss and pace ourselves through more difficult times. Perhaps that's the issue we're avoiding. Just witness the havoc caused by our inability to adjudge social media and use it maturely, the impact on people of this time. Perhaps that’s the ‘obvious’ that people in future decades will think us the silly buffoons to have missed?

So how do you have the prescience to get out of your own way? Do you actively seek too? Do you spend the time? How do you have the discussions? And with whom can you have those discussions and make the decisions as to how you'll address them?