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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly |
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Keynote Speech EOQ 50th Anniversary Conference Theme: Exploring New Roads to Transformation. The Art of Questioning. Steve Unwin. Presented at the opening ceremony in the Carolus Borromeus Church Antwerp, Belgium. May 28th, 2006
This is a special time for me, as I am also 50 years old, so I have a special interest in this celebration. As both the EOQ and I look back on fifty years, there is no doubt that it has been a time of tremendous change for both of us. Looking forwards we might agree that the pace of change will get ever faster and we can expect a world of even greater change. Indeed if I were to pick up a newspaper from any of the forty-four countries represented in this room today, there is a very good chance that I would find news in one form or another of one of the biggest stories of change, change that is likely to affect every one of our lives, the story of global warming. Here we have change on a truly grand scale, perhaps already heralding transformation that may dwarf some of those we have experienced during the last 50 years. We might therefore with justification call ours a world of change. However I’d like to suggest that we might just as easily and perhaps more appropriately call it a world of connections and interconnections. Indeed global warming provides a perfect example of these connections.
We can see that this is an illustration of change and connections. A world where change leads to connections, and connections in turn lead to change. So we might usefully describe our world as a connected and interconnected place where the speed of change reflects the speed with which connections are made. We might use our meeting at this conference to further illustrate this link between connections and change. Changes to the transportation system in the past fifty years have created the availability of world-wide travel in ways that were simply impossible fifty years ago. This conference is an example of how that change creates connections, the connections between us taking place now in this room. These connections will lead to further changes, that’s the purpose of being here, which will lead to further connections when we return from the conference, and then yet more changes in a growing chain. However when we try and look to the future, for example of global warming, the picture of connections is much less clear. You can choose your scientist, and choose your prediction. Will we meet with disaster in five years, ten, or twenty five? They each have different views. Nield Bohr describes this challenge perfectly, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” We are not so good at seeing connections into the future. In fact in truth we are not so good at seeing them in the past. The nice neat sequence I described, the neat chain of connections between burning fossil fuels and rising sea levels, though perhaps obvious now, at least to a majority, has only been accepted in the past few years, and there are still many who would choose not to support it.
Yet the connections have been there all along. Not just since the 1970’s when green activists began talking about pollution and sustainability, but for over 200 years. When James Watt and Thomas Newcomen refined the steam engine they were helping create the industrial revolution, a journey, or road to use the language of the conference, that would lead us here, to global warming. But that’s not how we like to think. It’s not how we like to see the world. We don’t like to think in terms of connections. Instead we prefer to think in terms of starts and ends, beginnings and finishes. We like to have full stops that separate one thing from another, to keep things apart. Read the biography of James Watt, or any biography for that matter and the first thing you’ll read; Born 1736 Died 1819. We describe when their lives began and when they came to an end. And we think of their work in the same way, with a neat start and a finish. But that’s not how the real world works. James Watt didn’t start anything, nor did he finish anything. He built on all who had gone before him, to create the materials, for example from which he would be able to build his engines. Beyond this he built on the work of the educators, the social reformers, a whole multitude of actions, all of which created the world within which he would live and his work could take place. And his work as we’ve seen wasn’t finished, the actions he helped set in motion are still acting to change our world 200 years after his death. James Watt, just like all of us, just like everyone, wasn’t a start or an end, he was another connection, a middle, a link in a chain that stretched back into history before him and will stretch into a future that you and I won’t see, and maybe won’t even be seen by the human race. We want to see the world as beginnings and endings, when the reality is the world is all connections. Robert Frost the poet captures this beautifully. “You’re searching Joe, for things that don’t exist, I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings, there’s no such thing. They are all middles.” We choose to divide things to separate them, to package them so that we can define them with boundaries, and make them manageable. And this desire runs very deep. For example, my eldest children are currently choosing their options at school. Which subjects should they take? Should they take science or the arts? A division that is totally our invention, our created start and end.
Nowhere – there is no such division. Pick up a pine cone and you see the most exquisite beauty, and the most beautiful mathematics. The pine cone is designed to be the most efficient store of seeds and uses Fibonacci numbers to do it. There is no natural division between science and art. So why do we divide the world? Well this is beautifully captured by Carl Sagan, the writer and astronomer. “If you want to make an Apple Pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
If we allow ourselves to think connections, then even to make an apple pie, we are connected to the big bang and the origins of everything we know. But this is the real world. It is the world we all live in, the world in which we are all trying to ‘Explore new roads to transformation.’ It is not a world of disconnections, but highly connected in time and space. It is a world that won’t stand still whilst we prepare our change plans and organise our resources or implement our changes. It is a world that won’t leave things intact in one place whilst we make changes in another. It is a wildly connected place. Not a place of beginnings and ends, cause and effect, problem and solution. It is a world of connections. A place of questions, not answers. I love this quote from Chief Seattle, who was chief of the Suquamish tribe of American Indians around 150 years ago. “All things are bound together So you may ask, 'how do we deal with such a world, a world of wild interconnections?' I can think of no better guide than Leonardo Da Vinci. “To develop a complete mind – study the art of science, the science of art. Learn how to see, realise that everything is connected to everything else.” Recognise that everything we do connects to everything else. We are part of what Chief Seattle calls the web. Each of you in this room is connected to all that has been, and all that will be. So don’t find yourself sitting wondering how what you have learned here connects to your work life, or how you take what you’ve learned and apply it. You aren’t a beginning or an end, you are a connection. How does this feel. Well, take a minute to look around you. What do you see? If all you see is a church, then you are in a world of answers a world of disconnections. If when you return your partner asks ‘Where was the opening ceremony held?’ – Answer - in a church – full stop. Instead see the art in science and the science in art. Don’t look for answers, look for questions. When you do, you will hear this building shouting at you, its history and its future, its connections.
Every piece of carving, every picture will be shouting to tell you of its past and its future, if only you are prepared to listen. If you do, you will find that there are more questions in a single leg of the chair you are sitting on, than you can fit in your notebook, and each question leads to more as you explore the web. Goethe the German playwright has some words that will help us understand this exploration. “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” Allow yourself to be open to what is around you, allow yourself to be here. The organisers, the speakers, guides and their teams have completed their preparations. There are activities full of questions waiting to be explored, if you will just explore them. Leave behind your world of disconnections, of beginnings and endings, and become connected. How will you know that it has begun to experience the art of questioning? You will leave here, not with pockets full of answers, but full of questions, where each will lead to more questions. I wish you the most exciting and stimulating conference, and look forward to meeting you again when we share some of what we have learned on Wednesday. Thank you. Click here to return to the EOQ Conference description.
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We are here to celebrate at a very special conference. The 50th anniversary of the European Organisation for Quality.
Our burning of fossil fuels creates carbon emissions which damage the ozone layer, the reduced ozone layer traps more energy from the sun and leads to higher temperatures, higher temperatures lead to melting of the ice caps and the rising of the sea levels, which in turn impact on weather systems and further change the climate.
It’s only as we’ve begun to see the growing evidence of melting ice caps and the water begins to lap around our ankles, that we’ve begun to accept the evidence.
Where in the real world does science end and art begin?
If you want to make an apple pie, then of course you will need apples, which of course come from an apple tree. The tree, well that comes from an apple seed, which in turn comes from an apple. If we follow the connections a little further we see the apple seed comes from the evolution of the apple tree, which is connected to the evolution of plant life on Earth. This is connected to the evolution of life on Earth, and to the evolution of the planet itself. One last connection takes us to the evolution of the universe.
Every brick will be screaming its story of the people who created it, their hopes and aims, their fears. concerns, challenges and accomplishments.