Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

We human beings think largely in a deterministic manner. We try to understand the present by looking back to the past, believing that everything that is happening to us now was caused by things that happened in the past. In a similar way, we believe that what happens to us now, in the present, will form our future. We often tend to view life like a deterministic mathematical model, with sets of differential equations measuring the rate of change over time, all happening over an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. Of course, deep down inside of us, we know life is not at all like this, imagine how dull it would be, but often we think and act as if it were so.

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While there are many deterministic aspects about our lives, e.g. we know that what we do now often has an effect on what we will become, there is still a great deal of randomness in our lives, which leads to elements of absence of order, purpose or cause and a great deal of unpredictability. Managing one’s life in a deterministic world is easy, as is managing a business: you can pretty well know what’s going to happen next, but managing in a world where there is a high level of unpredictability is another thing entirely.
An important starting point is to confront reality; to recognise the world as it is, not as you wish or imagine it to be. You also need to have the courage to do what must be done, not what you’d like to do. Facing reality has never been easy and there are many psychological reasons why most people shrink from it. The price, however, of unrealistic business or personal thinking is heading upwards as we are sailing into unchartered territory in many aspects of our business and personal lives. Globalisation and the Internet, in particular, are linking the world into a real-time network where information flows at the speed of light and instant decision-making, based on rapid changes, becomes the norm. The differential equation approach is unable to cope with these circumstances.

In our world, things do go wrong, nothing is ever perfect or as we wish it to be. When things do go wrong, however, we need to invoke a deterministic attitude and try to identify and understand the cause, in as much detail as we can. Over simplifying possible reasons will lead to an over-simplified interpretation and we will not learn much from this. Even a simple lapse is important as it tells us that something is wrong and, knowing possible causes could help us control a bigger and more serious consequence that may still happen. Coping with things that go wrong does have a very positive side; it helps us to become more resilient to enable us to bounce back from inevitable errors. One does require to be resilient in changing disordered times.

A feature of a disordered world is that nobody seems to be in control and everything seems to be out of control. Everyone also seems to be an expert and we believe all or most of what we hear from whatever source-there are theories about almost everything. Critical thinking, although not very prevalent anymore, is an essential tool to handle randomness. Just being able to recognise those elements of randomness in our lives and learning how to live with them are important benefits of critical thinking. We need to be able to reflect on things as they happen so as to give us a personal and common-sense explanation of why things are as are.

Ultimately, everything around us is related to a system or a system of systems. Everything is connected to everything else. Stuff happens on account of how the elements of systems respond to one another, or how systems interact with each other, given a perturbation or two, not how the individual elements react on their own.
Living is indeed a challenge, but it is also an art. The challenge is living with uncertainty and the art is knowing that things can go wrong.