Let the Game Changers Loose. Now!

Human stupidity. That's our black swan. Look what it is doing for us.

A century ago, almost to the day at the end of the first world war, the H1N1 virus was released with the power of a plague. It infected 500 million people, a third of the global population. It killed an estimated 50 million people.

Extrapolating this to today, Covid 19 could infect 2,5 billion people across the planet and kill 250 million.

Without our black swan, our shadow, this did not have to happen.

THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY

Carlo M. Cipolla wrote a short but powerful book on The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. (If you haven't read it yet, read it.)

Throughout history, human stupidity has hindered the growth of mankind's welfare and happiness. More powerful than the Mafia or the military, it forms an unorganised group, which has no chief, no board, and no by-laws and yet it manages to operate in perfect unison and to devastating effect.

Cipolla suggests that human stupidity, our black swan, may even be built into our DNA as a fixed percentage regardless of age, intelligence, wealth, gender, religion or politics. I suggest we could even name this our 'black swan gene' as it can affect anyone.

Here are some examples of our black swan at work.

1. Covid19, we knew it was coming. We have had a century to plan for this. It need not have happened. (Watch Bill Gates 2015 TED Talk to see what we should have done.) It's not the first and it's certainly not the last of its kind. We know its cousin is just around the corner.
2. Our almost total inability to manage a complex planetary system. Every day we are destroying oceans, forests and life itself as if the earth is flat with unlimited resources. This is the ultimate stupidity. After all, would you destroy your own house?
3. The total stagnation of our political systems and structures, best suited for a bygone age of myth and magic.
4. Allowing the population to balloon from 1,5 to 7,5 billion in one hundred years.
5. The millenia-old struggle between science and truth on the one hand and collective nonsense on the other.
6. Growing inequality. The pitchforks are not far behind.

THE SOLUTION. GAME CHANGERS NEEDED URGENTLY!

History shows us that our cultural evolution over the past five thousand years has been guided by a powerful but balanced triad of priests, warriors and wealth creators who together have successfully created an imaginary world of gods, nations and organisations, divorced from the real world of rivers, trees and lions, as so poignantly painted by Harari in Sapiens.

This has been the cunning work of our black swan. Implanting the stupidity gene into our brains, allowing us to think that we are masters of the universe, friends and lovers of the ancient gods, sitting high on our throne of narcissistic splendour. Lording our dominion over the earth and all its creatures.

Effectively we have set ourselves up as the all powerful subject with all things around us (Michel Serres calls this Biogea) our obedient object, to be plundered at will. Covid19 is a stark reminder that this subject - object relationship is yet another manmade illusion. In the real world the earth is our master, the subject, with us the not-yet-obedient object.

THE PALE BLUE DOT - THE GAME CHANGER'S CHALLENGE

Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to turn its Voyager camera towards earth in the nineties as the craft left the solar system. He described the very first photo 'selfie' as a pale blue dot, 'a mote of dust in a sunbeam.' A four and a half billion year old rock sitting alone in a dark alley of an average galaxy. Here homo sapiens has evolved its imaginary world with all its gods, religions, political systems, societies, rich and poor, presidents and philosophers, warmongers, and psychopaths. And we are here alone. No aliens and no gods in chariots dropping by to guide us.

We are last in the line of hominins, struggling with our black swan.

We need a new paradigm. We need game changers.

BIOGEA NEEDS THE GAME CHANGERS

For argument's sake let's assume that our planet is real. Apart from rivers, trees and lions, it is a complex laboratory comprised of chemical compounds, physical processes, energy and evolutionary software. To survive it certainly does not need us. But we need it.

GAME CHANGERS NEED THE RIGHT STRUCTURE TO BRING THEIR MAGIC

Here lies the catch 22. Game changers are the mavericks, the magicians, the independent warriors, the ones who have the gift of looking around corners and seeing the new world that others cannot see. In bureaucratic systems they are the rebels and misfits, the ones who say the world is round and not flat, that the planetary system is heliocentric and not earth-centric. They challenge the myths and imaginary truths and often end up burned at the stake.

But here is the paradox. If it were not for the game changers we would all still be swinging from the trees. From Socrates and Aristotle to Galileo and Einstein we can thank our lucky stars that the black swan passed them by.

If we are to manage both the planet and homo sapiens in a sustainable and successful way, we will have to change the political structures based on nation states. We may even need to go to war on this issue. Currently we have 196 nations each led nominally by people high on street wisdom and pleasing the crowds but remarkably low on knowledge and experience in science and technology. Let's be generous and say that 5% of current leaders have the intelligence and game changing skills and courage needed to both think and act differently in a Covid and post Covid19 world. This means that about 186 nation state leaders are the wrong people to manage the crisis. (Based on prima facie evidence this is an observable daily truth.)

The possible solution to the political structure issue may be based on the growing power of game changing activists, challenging and electing game changing representatives. A subject for deeper analysis.

GAME CHANGERS AND ORGANISATIONS

Organisations worldwide are facing perhaps the most serious crisis of this century and possibly specie threatening event. Our very survival may depend on how we think and act in the weeks and months ahead.

The challenge is this. The power and decision making processes in traditional organisational hierarchies, after an initial burst of creativity, often devolve into a zombie-fied cloning of past experience where the artery of game changing and life giving fresh blood is turned off permanently. Generally the grim reaper is not far behind. (For evidence watch share prices, retrenchment exercises, grand 'transformation' projects, closing stores, cost cutting - all undertaken by teams of non game changers.)

In organisations we need to remember that our universe has coped quite well with two key ingredients. Energy and the evolutionary software package which after 14 billion years has never needed an upgrade. The lesson is simple. Organisations must move away from linear best practice ways of thinking and fully embrace both the energy and evolutionary capability embodied in the game changer.

To survive this pandemic, to survive the harsh vicissitudes that Sorres' Biogea is about to throw in our path, and to survive the black swan sitting in every organisation, we have to identify and release the game changers.

Today.