URSABLOG: Observing Change

A few years ago – it was before the pandemic so I can’t remember exactly when – I was invited to a summer Sunday afternoon party, to swim in the pool, to eat and drink, and to catch up with old friends, and meet new ones. The company was agreeable and fun, and as usual when there are lots of different people from different backgrounds – I think only the hosts and myself were in shipping – the conversation was very interesting. Two of the guests were the nephew of my hosts and his fiancé: they were young, beautiful and intelligent, and full of hope and promise for the future, and added a touch of glamour and romance to the occasion.

They were both working in high level finance in London, and were full of blockchain and passionate, enthusiastic and persuasive evangelists for it. They had a little difficulty explaining it to us, but once they had done this, the discussion was lively: how it worked, and the potential uses for it, and how it could apply to different industries. The primary focus was of course cryptocurrencies, and as I listened, sceptically I must say, I tried my best to be enthusiastic – they were young, beautiful and full of hope and promise after all – but I couldn’t quite get beyond my reluctance to move beyond currencies that were not embedded in an institution of one sort or other, or how ordinary people would manage to move in this brave new world. I was probably also reluctant to consider a world where commissions were paid in Bitcoin, if the truth be told.

In order to show some positivity, I suggested that one way this technology could work in shipping would be with electronic documentation, bills of lading especially, but it would need the full buy-in of all parties – a hard task in a fully global industry, where technology advances at different speeds in different places – so probably the place to start would be container shipping. This decidedly unglamourous application wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, and the conversation shifted back to cryptocurrencies. Needless to say I was not one of those that invested in Bitcoin that evening.

This party has been on my mind in the last couple of weeks as I read news of the collapse of the FTX trading platform and the disappearance into thin air of San Bankman-Fried’s $32 billion worth of cryptocurrency empire. Elsewhere, and not as dominant in the news, it was reported that Maersk and IBM will discontinue their work on their TradeLens blockchain platform, under development since 2018.

“TradeLens was founded on the bold vision to make a leap in global supply chain digitisation as an open and neutral industry platform. Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business,” commented Rotem Hershko, Maersk’s head of business platforms.

You can almost feel the Mr Hershko’s bitterness as he blames the failure of a brilliant idea on those that didn’t share TradeLens’ vision. This new venture has foundered on an inability of lines to co-operate. But really, would you, if you were MSC for example, back – let alone use – technology developed by one of your major competitors? And in liner shipping, where continually increasing market share seems to be the?raison d’etre?of the business itself, protecting that share, and a refusal to share market sensitive data, is surely part of the reason that this venture failed, especially in the booming market of the last couple of years.?As George Economou has famously commented in the past “Shipping is not a team game.” Technological innovation has foundered on the hard rocks of market reality. Again.

But I don’t think this is a bad thing necessarily, and neither should these ventures be discouraged. There are always lessons to be learnt, and no doubt some of the technology developed will pop up elsewhere. Internal systems for Maersk Line perhaps, or a better understanding of supply chain mechanisms for IBM. It was not a waste of time and effort by any means, driven by a desire for change, to use new and inspiring ideas to make things. It just didn’t work out as envisaged.

We all want change, and we all want to change, for the better. ?And we like life changing moments that will shake us out of our morbid present into a bright new future. And a lot of the time we expect those changes to come from elsewhere, outside of us, in the form of inspiration, inspirational people, and yes new technology. We look for what Adam Phillips calls conversion experiences, to change us from one thing to another.

These experiences may come from religious or spiritual experiences. I am sure that you have, like me, had moments when looking at a beautiful landscape, or after watching a brilliant film, play or opera, attending a concert, or reading a book, where you smell the promise of something better, and are inspired to change to keep that feeling and develop it. You may have attended a party where the vibe was so cool, so appealing that you wanted to change yourself so you can feel that vibe again, and again. You may have done a piece of – lucky – business that showed you a different life and way of doing things, and you look for the reasons why the deal happened and try and replicate them. You may have fallen in love and been changed so much by the experience that you want to live forever with the person that caused that change, because that person made you feel that way. And then the harsh reality of life intervenes, and the moment is gone, however hard you try to recapture it.

In mourning the loss of that conversion experience, or having been changed by it into something new that is disorienting, we forget that the only reason the change happened was because we were an agent of that change. It happened to us because of who we are – or were – and things can never be the same again. It is hard to acknowledge that we have been expelled from paradise, and the cause of that loss, and being in paradise to start with, was us, however a small part we had to play in it.

Before I digress further into psychology, I do not discount science or technology in helping us understand the world. However until quite recently I tended to understand the physical world – if I understood it at all – in terms of ‘for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction’ and stuff like that I learned at school. This explained quite a lot, but didn’t help much when trying to think about human behaviour, particularly in the shipping markets. Numbers, supply and demand and how to measure them, and the idea that if you have a big enough system, or company, or computer that can churn through the data and match all the different sources of supply and demand together you can really make it big all goes out of the window when a small dash of human behaviour is thrown in. It’s easy for me to say now that TradeLens’s ultimate demise lay in human behaviour – even if I thought that would be the case many years ago – but this unsatisfactory idea that science and human beings are always working in opposition, or that stupid emotional human beings will always frustrate rationality has until recently created an unhelpful dissonance, to say the least. Especially when I am one of those stupid emotional human beings. How to explain it?

I had a book sitting around in my ‘to read’ pile for some time, and a couple of weeks ago I finally got round to reading it: Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli. If I tell you that it is an introduction, ?explanation, and pean to quantum physics, you may wonder why I found it not only so inspiring and informative but also profoundly moving. To explain, we would have to meet and discuss it over food and wine. Over a few days. But without trying to explain the concepts and theories, if I tell you that quantum physics explains the world not in terms of forces acting and reacting against each other, but in terms of matter (whether cats, or electrons) in relation to each other, and to the observer too, you may understand why it appeals so much to me. I keep saying shipping is all about relationships after all.

I find it strangely comforting that in this universe, all matter – including human beings – exists not in constant collision, being knocked and buffeted about, but in relation to each other, and further that our existence is defined by not only where we are, but what we observe, and who observes us. This is a grossly simplified – and probably incorrect – interpretation, but it works for me.

But in writing this I am conscious that I am perhaps succumbing to my own desire for a conversion experience, something that explains the world in a way that will make my inherent desire for positive change to be finally realised. The temptation to now live my life through the diverging prism of my interpretation of quantum physics is tempting, but also a mistake. I have to remind myself that there is no silver bullet, no magic key, no vision on the road to Damascus, no eureka moment, no Hélo?se and Abelard.

Seen one way, life can seem bleak. The nephew and his fiancé did not get married in the end, and TradeLens did not change the world of liner shipping documentation. Things sometimes do not work out. But all is not lost. There are summer parties to come, books to be read, new ideas to be thought of and discussed, new business ventures to be formed, new markets to be created and penetrated, new people to meet, and new stories to be told.

The inspiration I got from reading about quantum physics is purely subjective, but that is part of its joy. Not only does every action have a reaction, but our observation of these actions make us part of the action itself. In a seemingly fractious and disturbing world, with dysfunctional markets and a malfunctioning environment, I often feel myself disconnected, without any control over what is happening from a personal to a global level. But I find it comforting that not only will change happen, it has to, and can only happen because of us, not just to us.

What change will actually happen cannot always be predicted, but if I can learn to observe the world from a slightly different perspective, then that observation in itself may bring change. If this is in mind-bendingly incomprehensible to you I apologise, so let me try and put it another way. It turns out after all that everything happens for a reason, and sometimes change happens not only because everything is defined only by its relationship to everything else, but because we took the effort to observe. This gives me an immense feeling of empowerment and humility at the same time, and makes my place in the world – as a sale and purchase broker and as a man – more comprehensible. Will this lead to positive change? Wait and see.

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.gr