The Fountain of Bedevilments ... and how to help mitigate some of the issues.

Is meta-conversation technology the answer? It's looking good!

A friend in the U.S. recently posted on social media that Amazon delivered to their home just three and a half hours after an order was placed. Here in the UK the deliveries seem to be arriving ever more quickly, too.

That’s good, huh? Or is it?

The point is, change can result in beneficial or detrimental outcomes and, not infrequently, both the positive and the negative outcomes happen at the same time.

So, if Amazon gets ever more efficient and reliable on its promise of speedy delivery, their service is likely to become ever more the default choice. It’s an outcome of customer ease and satisfaction, two outcomes that are often held up as hallmarks of good marketing.

BUT … might their success put ever more pressure on local businesses, to the point where more of them are unable to compete? I mean, if a product can be delivered in such a short time, why bother going out at all?

Now, okay, the action started moving from a depopulating High Street out onto the global frontiers of the 24/7/365 online world quite some time ago. But it’s not a one-off shift. Rather, it’s ongoing and incremental with, every so often, dramatic surges.

There is a trend, of course, for local businesses themselves to hop on to the Amazon platform. Maybe that’s the answer?

BUT … yet again, if that does happen, it must help make Amazon ever more powerful. And the GAFAM group, which includes Amazon (the initialism stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), already has a combined market value of somewhere around $11 or $12 trillion.

Not sure that’s entirely healthy, is it?

---

The above is simply to make the point that change almost invariably brings both benefit AND detriment. Benefit for one party may create detriment for another. That’s kinda what progress is all about, isn’t it?

My deeper point, however, is that while most changes may be clear to see … others are far less easy to identify. And if something is less easy to identify it surely follows that it is less easy to assess the impact.

And most discombobulating, it seems to me, WHAT IF THERE ARE THINGS THAT, EVEN IF THEY ARE NOTICED, TEND TO BE REGARDED JUST AS UNAVOIDABLE IRRITATIONS?

There are, I think, lessons to be learned about this phenomenon from the issue identified by Jonathan Haidt and others in the book The Anxious Generation¹ and online. Which is to say, the fact that, since 2007 there has been a whopping decline in the mental health of children and young adults.

We’re talking about an entire generation of children deprived of real-world independence and lured irresistibly by the screens and other devices that are now so readily available to them.

You can read about it here:

A Mission for Businesses and Entrepreneurs: Help Bring Back Childhood

What I find particularly interesting is the fact that it took a long time for the childhood-anxiety issue to be properly identified. Yes, suspicions arose over the past few years that children might be suffering from a regime of over-protection that had come to the fore, including the fact that they no longer enjoying the ‘free play’ of earlier generations, however getting to understand any actual mental harm that might be occurring took a long time to clarify.

Ultimately, in 2024, in The Anxious Generation, Jon Haidt was able to figure it out as follows:

I propose that we view the late 1980s as the beginning of the transition from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood”, a transition that was not complete until the mid-2010s, when most adolescents had their own smartphone. I use “phone-based” broadly to include all of the internet-connected personal electronics that came to fill young people’s time, including laptop computers, tablets, internet-connected video game consoles, and, most important, smartphones with millions of apps.

This was all accompanied by what Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in an earlier volume², had labelled ‘safetyism’:

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg and I found that the concept of safety had undergone such extensive concept creep among Gen Z and many of the educators and therapists around them that it had become a pervasive and unquestionable value. We used the term “safetyism” to refer to “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. ‘Safety’ trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger."

So, Jon Haidt and colleagues worked out - and are still working on - the fact that the use of new digital technologies has detrimentally affected the mental state of children and young adults.

But what about the rest of us? What about those of us who had already reached maturity when the digital era arrived?

Are we above all of the trauma? Has our pre-conditioning been sufficient to exempt us from any mental challenges created by the new technologies and conditions?

Seems unlikely, don’t you think?

---

As it happens, very recently, two friends underwent major medical operations and social media has proved a wonderful resource for keeping a large and widely geographically dispersed group of friends and family informed about their progress. Had we had to rely upon pre-digital communications this task would have been far more difficult and almost certainly less effective.

So, in this respect, social media is a boon. But, as we all know, it’s not all sweetness and light.

For example, a besetting challenge of our time is that of ‘disinformation’: “I have access to a vast number of communications. How do I know what’s true and what’s false?”

It’s a massive problem, made worse by those who operate with the bizarre belief that there is no such thing as objective truth, only ‘my truth’.

Which brings me to The Fountain of Bedevilments.

To set the scene, here is my ‘theme tune’, the opening three lines of Burnt Norton, the first of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.

Which permits me to look back in history to see if the past might hold some wisdom that is pertinent to current issues. Well, how about this? It’s from the fourth century BCE, from the Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational texts of Taoism:

Bedevilments arising in the mind are ideas of self and others, ideas of glory and ignominy, ideas of gain and loss, ideas of right and wrong, ideas of profit and honor, ideas of superiority. These are dust on the pedestal of the spirit, preventing freedom.

Jon Haidt references this³ and comments on it as follows:

Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.

This is undoubtedly true … but it is only part of the story. As or more concerning is the fact that social media, and digital technology more generally, actually closes down the contributions of many more people in many more situations.

“Whaddya mean,” you might exclaim, “everyone uses social media.”

Maybe so, but the ‘uses’ are restricted when compared with what happened before the digital revolution. This has to do with the wholesale reordering of Politics, Society and Business.

If your reaction to that last sentence is along the lines of, “The wholesale reordering of Politics, Society and Business?!?! What the …?” you might like to take a peek at an earlier article on this topic but here, for now, I want to focus on the Business component.

---

There was a wonderful, very English writer who shuffled off the mortal coil far too early - author and screenwriter Douglas Adams (1952-2001), best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy⁴. In this wonderful comedy sci-fi series of books and radio & TV programs, the hero, Arthur Dent, is whisked away from Earth by his friend, Ford Prefect, just seconds before the planet is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Well, you get the idea.

In the story Adams introduces us to the planet Golgafrincham which is home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The people of the planet decide to rid themselves of the useless third of their population who actually make nothing and simply provide services to those who do. These hairdressers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers (that’s the old name for HR managers), security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers (yes, these really did exist) and the like are packed off in a spaceship (the B-Ark), believing the lie that others will follow them.

Okay, enough of that. Enough of fictional comedy. Let’s turn our attention to the real thing. Because, in the real world we’d never do anything as daft as outsource all the ancillary services, would we?

No, of course not. Rather, we outsourced loads of the jobs - the primary jobs - that actually made stuff instead. Duh!

And, okay, yeah, as it happens, that did get rid of a lot of the ancillary service providers because many of them served the huge numbers of those who, up until that time, worked in the industrial premises where all the real action took place.

Weird, huh? Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Western world executed what might be termed a perfect Reverse-Golgafrincham Manoeuvre. That is, rather than jettisoning the ancillary services, we kicked out more and more of the actual manufacturing and other core business functions.

The excuse given, in the 1990s and 2000s, for offshoring manufacturing and other functions was cheap labour. The workers of China and India, we were told, were happy to work for far less than their western counterparts.

Common sense suggested that labour rates would level up after a time but that didn’t carry any weight when there were short-term gains to be grabbed. Now, of course, it’s a different story. Tim Cook, ceo at Apple, is on record as saying, in 2017:

There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.⁵

This hints, also, at another issue - innovation. Back when the Reverse Golgafrincham Manoeuvre was in full swing, we were told that the territories from which all of the nasty, messy, dirty manufacturing was being expelled would flourish because they would keep the super-high-value, super-high-paying innovation work.

Well, that proved to be as big a lie as the one told in Douglas Adams’s fictional tale that others would follow the exiled ancillary service workers.

The fact is, as a general rule, innovation goes to where the manufacturing is. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, by the Fall of 2019, the authors of a paper in American Affairs Journal, could write this:

It’s time for some soul-searching with respect to our economic future. Will we restore our ability to produce world-class products here in America? Will we invest in our capacity to lead innovation in the industries of the future?⁶

It wasn’t just manufacturing jobs either. Here’s a UK example, a quote from a gentleman called Michael Allen, who, back in 2002, was managing director at Mitial Research. Here, he’s talking about the outsourcing of call centre operations:

Our studies show that more than 95 per cent of customers are vehemently against this [the migration of call centre jobs out of the UK].⁷

“More than 95 per cent” against! So much for Customer Power.

The outsourcing stampede led us also to consider something far more diffuse and far less thought about, let alone discussed. This is something hard to pin down, hard to quantify. I refer to the societal milieu and its cohesion, or lack thereof.

For so long as Businesses operated as integrated entities with numerous functions in close proximity they were also, in and of themselves, social communities. The members of a firm met and talked across social and hierarchical levels on all manner of topics, including the conduct of the work itself and goals, expectations and opinions about everything. Members of a firm and their families would obviously also meet in schools, churches, shops, sports clubs and any and all other amenities.

Much of the contact was undoubtedly tittle-tattle and gossip but these occasions generally reinforced the human relations and also produced some profound insights regarding functional and cross-functional matters and activities in the workplace.

But now much of this has been lost - which is ironical, really, because it is a loss of the much-lauded diversity that we are continually now told is so important and wonderful.

Now, however, it is far more likely than in the past that functional teams are separated and isolated from one another. Quite frequently, too, team members may work remotely, so that many of the water cooler moments and coincidental corridor, coffee shop and pub meetings that used to happen simply do not occur.

And, anyway, for all of the wonders that it has provided, digitalization has, in many situations, given us a much more rigid, controlled environment: one in which there are prescribed ways of doing things, often labelled as ‘best practices’, just in case you dared for a moment to wonder whether there might be a different or better way to tackle a task.

You may say that this is all compensated for by online connectivity and contact … but it is not the same! Far from it. The loud, shouty voices get heard … but what about the quiet ones?

Indeed, in my opinion, this is a Big Issue that fits the criterion I mentioned earlier where a negative change, even if it is noticed, is regarded just as an unavoidable irritation.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, we have to start from where we now are. The digital world is a reality that isn’t going to go away - rather, it will evolve. So the question is, how might we able to influence and use that evolution to help bring back some of the benefits we have lost of community intelligence and cohesion?

The most promising answer to this puzzle that I know of is meta-conversation technology.

The mover and shaker behind this method of unlocking ‘collective intelligence with meta-conversation technology’ is Dr Olaf Hermans.

Rather than try to describe it all here, might I suggest that you take a quick look at a couple of online resources:

• For an overview of this method to “Unleash the potential of every team member by connecting ideas, fostering collaboration, and driving top performance—all in real-time”, check out R500 Agency.

• For a real behind-the-scenes introduction to the philosophy, listen to the fascinating conversation when global thought leader, trainer, speaker and networker, Dr. Ed Brenegar interviews Dr Olaf Hermans.

I’m hoping soon to bring a chat with Dr Hermans here onto Aargh! so if you have any points or questions you’d like to be covered, do please let me know, either in comments or by direct message.

Getting some control, one way or another, over the Fountain of Bedevilments must surely make life more productive and better for everyone. Come on, let’s blow some dust off the pedestal of the spirit, and get some more freedom and humanity back into our working environments!

Thanks for reading.

Image at top: Shutterstock

1. Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024)

2. Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)

3. Jonathan Haidt (2024) Ibid

4. Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

5. https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-is-number-1-reason-we-make-iphones-in-china-its-not-what-you-think.html

6. Sridhar Kota & Tom Mahoney. Reinventing Competitiveness. American Affairs Journal, Fall 2019, Volume III, Number 3.

7. Call centre fears as Prudential jobs go to India, The Times Business Section, October 01, 2002.