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Solving the global leadership vacuum

Leadership
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Is superlinear genius the key to evolving new, more intelligent global leadership?

Despite the improbability of our existence, our greatest and only task as a conscious specie must be first and foremost to preserve our planet. To do this we must evolve a new and better way of managing our environment if we wish to avoid the evolutionary dustbin.


The purpose of this article is to highlight the total vacuum of leadership at a global level. We are attempting to manage a highly complex planet with a centuries old nation state mentality which is dangerously inadequate. The article suggests that we need to turn to the maverick geniuses that have hitherto driven our successful evolution to solve the urgent need for effective planetary leadership.

Synopsis 


Sapiens is attempting to manage the planet with a nation state mentality and the ancient rules and beliefs that are not just outdated, but downright dangerous. Clearly as a specie we have not yet shown the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planet which has been here for 4,6 billion years. For all we know we may be the only specie in our galaxy and perhaps the entire known universe that can think, speak, read and write.


 Despite the improbability of our existence, our greatest and only task as a conscious specie must be first and foremost to preserve our planet. To do this we must evolve a new and better way of managing our environment if we wish to avoid the evolutionary dustbin.

We have 196 nation states where the majority of so-called leaders lack the knowledge, experience, intelligence, scientific literacy, and above all character and integrity to manage the complexity of a planetary system. Of this group we should be afraid. Very afraid. Europe appears leadership, China is now a virtual dictatorship, America is fast becoming a soap opera, and Russia is struggling to enter the twenty-first century. And if these four don't learn to work together very soon, they will almost certainly take us the way of the dodo bird.

We need to wake up and smell the roses. Our current and hopelessly outdated nation state leadership methodology which, by hook or by crook, got us to where we are, no longer works. And importantly the structure of 196 nation state leaders cannot do the job.

Synopsis 

Sapiens is attempting to manage the planet with a nation state mentality and the ancient rules and beliefs that are not just outdated, but downright dangerous. Clearly as a specie we have not yet shown the evolutionary intelligence to manage a planet which has been here for 4,6 billion years. For all we know we may be the only specie in our galaxy and perhaps the entire known universe that can think, speak, read and write.

There is a solution. The history of sapiens' evolution has always been a series of punctuated steps generated not by priests and politicians, but the few maverick geniuses that have taken us from swinging in the trees to the moon and beyond.

The challenge for every thinking person is to become a maverick thinker and action taker within his or her sphere of influence. Read, think, discuss, challenge, debate issues of planetary importance.

Freedom of speech is the underlying foundation for the maverick genius. This article quotes an example of one warrior maverick that helped to rid a country of a corrupt web of politicians, providing a population with new hope and a brighter future.

I define this process of maverick genius as superlinearity, a special kind of evolutionary intelligence that can successfully take us to a new place of planetary survival and prosperity.

  End of synopsis

  Entropy - The destroyer of energy and intelligence


Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientific geniuses of our time, once said that entropy is like gravity – we experience its effect every minute of every day – but we don't know much about it.

In the 1850's scientists such as Rudolf Clausius and Ludwig Boltzmann were working on the problem of energy loss (heat loss) in chemical reactions. Clausius coined the word entropy as a measure of the loss of energy over time. Over decades the concept has slowly moved into other fields such as informatics and now, somewhat belatedly, into the fields of organisational and social systems.

  Entropy examples in our daily lives

Here are some simple examples of entropy in our daily lives.

  • You boil a kettle to make tea. When you switch off the kettle the water cools down over time to room temperature, the point of maximum entropy.

  • Relationships. When you meet a new partner it's all chocolates, wine and red roses. Ten years later you wake up and say, "what's this lying in my bed!"

  • An organisation that starts with an innovative 'bang', becomes bureaucratic, hierarchical and slowly slides down the entropy black hole. The first public sign of pervasive entropy is usually a falling share price. (Watch as the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica drama unfolds possibly into the Mueller investigation, and then into the Brexit debacle. Was Facebook data used by Cambridge Analytica to generate fake anti EU propaganda to influence the Brexit vote? We are in a whole new entropy minefield here.)

  • Your favourite sports team wins the league competition. The following year it struggles to avoid relegation. If anyone really understands entropy it is sports team coaches whose half-life must be measured in months.

  Entropy is like gravity - there is no escape

The point I wish to make is that entropy, like gravity, impacts every moment of our lives 24/7. There is no escape. Entropy is not just important. It is the only thing that matters. The rest is just obiter dicta. If we cannot manage entropy successfully, maximum entropy or death is the only alternative. There is no escape.

 Into the helicopter

Entropy, or loss of energy, will always occur in closed systems. If it is not closed then new energy can be injected into the system not just to overcome the loss of energy due to entropy but to actually increase the system energy to a higher level of intelligence, complexity and competitive capability.

Again at a personal level, if you lead a healthy life, exercise regularly, eat carefully and pursue something you are truly passionate about – making money, playing a cello, bungee jumping, reading books or saving the polar bear – you can spend a lifetime increasing your overall energy level. This principle of injecting new energy is the basis of superlinearity.

  The global crisis - The vacuum of leadership

My concern however is at a global level. Do we have the requisite intelligence and courage to design and implement a superlinear strategy capable of combating the current global entropy malaise? We need to learn to think and act more intelligently.

Note. I define superlinearity as the ability to generate higher levels of energy, thus overcoming the natural loss of energy caused by entropy. Think of superlinearity as the 'dark energy' of our minds.

  Homo sapiens strategic framework

Clearly we have evolved as a specie from the bottom up. From small wandering bands, survival of the self and group would have been the priority. Over the past ten thousand years, against all odds such as ice ages, wild animals and superstitious madness (as recently as the eighteenth century King James as a powerful, educated and erudite man, wrote the manual – Daemonologie - on identifying and burning witches), we have reversed the entropy process by evolving a super linear capability. 

We have achieved this largely through technology, science and a powerful intellectual and engineering evolutionary process that in the past two centuries has given us radio, flight, education, health care, energy, the Higgs boson, flights to Mars and beyond, the internet, smartphones.  

As Peter Thiel added somewhat humorously, the millennial have given us 140 characters.

 Imagined reality - driver of our evolution

As we have evolved from nomadic hunter gatherers – the original free thinking, maverick entrepreneurs – to sedentary farmers, city dwellers and nation states, at each step up the ladder we have had to sacrifice levels of individual freedom to defend the group. Yuval Harari in his superb treatise Sapiens, suggests that the key to our success over Neanderthal (remember Neanderthal was taller, more muscular and with a bigger brain than us) was our cognitive ability to create an imagined reality that could bind much larger and more dispersed groups than the traditional wandering bands of 100 to 150 people.

"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations." Sapiens, p32.

Over a few centuries we have moved on from feudalism (the serfs didn't much like that) to various 'isms' sometimes linked to major religions, sometimes not, most of which have left the serfs and their descendants largely dissatisfied.

But now we have a problem. Over the past few centuries with European expansion, science and technology has started to make the age-old concept of nation-state, nation-culture, nation-religion, nation 'ism' (Communism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, Capitalism etc., pick your brand) somewhat obsolete, and potentially downright dangerous.

In the good old days companies paid their taxes in the country where they manufactured their goods. Now the Googles, Facebooks, Amazons and Apples have upset the apple cart (pardon the pun) where they generate revenues across national boundaries and declare profits in some obscure island or country, which offers the best deal.

Today the EU has woken up and plans to take action. It wants the internet behemoths to pay taxes on the source point of the revenues, not on the caravan headquarters on the dodgy island. Good luck with that one EU.

(Further suggested reading. Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall, and Connectography, Mapping the Global Network Revolution, by Parag Khanna.)

If you had been living one hundred and fifty years ago you probably would not have travelled more than twenty-five miles from your village in your whole (somewhat shorter) lifetime. A blink of an eye later you can now sit on your computer and travel to every corner of the geographic and intellectual world. You can watch global events unfold in real time (and the fake events too of course) and you can post a picture of your cat which millions of people will watch in the next 24 hours.

In reality you live in a parallel world. One foot in pre-history and the other in post-history. But we have one gigantic, potentially apocalyptic, sixth extinction generating problem. We are attempting to manage the next higher level of strategic challenge with pre-history tools and thinking.

Before you cry foul, let's be direct and practical. No-one in their right mind would use their living room as a rubbish dump and their kitchen as a lavatory. This would represent maximum personal entropy, and if we all did it there would be no human race. However as we move up the hierarchy of complexity we simply become detached from taking personal accountability, and do precisely these things. Our planet, our home, the-only-one-we-have-you-can-forget-about-Mars-you-ain't-goin'-there-anytime-soon, we are treating like a dumping ground and lavatory. And here lies our extinction threat.

We haven't the first, foggiest notion on how to manage a living, life-supporting, complex, dynamic, 4,5 billion year old planetary system. We cope by putting our collective heads in the sand and busy ourselves with things we do understand like bombing the living daylights out of our cradle of humankind or completely destroying a major source of protein, the oceans.

We probably crossed an evolutionary line in 1945 with the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Up until that time, war was always a threat but never species threatening. Now we have ten nations with over sixteen thousand known nuclear warheads between them, with so-called 'world leaders' – in my book not one has shown the intelligence and courage to make this transition to planetary and strategic competence – each with their grubby little finger perched on buttons of various sizes.

Let's look at the next one hundred years. In your mind's eye construct a Baysian analysis tree with a range of probabilities such as how many nations will have nuclear capability, how many nuclear warheads will there be, how many madmen will have their fingers on the button, and what is the probability of one of them starting a nuclear holocaust? Then take a leaf from Taleb's Skin in the Game regarding cumulative risk and you may arrive at the same conclusion as Stephen Hawking. If we don't get off this planet in the next hundred years we are unlikely to survive as a specie.

Brexit. Asking your dentist to design an atomic submarine would be less complicated than asking a fisherman or a banker to vote on something as complicated as leaving the European Union. Tribal madness. Entropy orgasm.

Trump. Watching the whole US election debacle was embarrassing. The level of general debate on issues of global importance was virtually non-existent. Clearly, and fully supported by the TV channels, people wanted entertainment and if the price was maximum intellectual entropy, so be it. So don't blame Trump.

China. Dictatorships generally end badly. After a dramatic economic rise over a few decades, China has now decided that they want a leader for life, a concept straight from the pages of pre-history. For millennia we have had to endure kings and dictators who claim divine rights and life-time employment. Watch this space. It probably won't end well.

Religions. The world's major religions have a powerful grip and influence over billions of people, but what do they have to say about managing and preserving a complex, possibly one-in-a-billion, unique planet? Nothing at all. Zero responsibility. Maximum entropy. Equivalent to criminal negligence.

In addition we know that our current use of natural resources is unsustainable and leading us quickly to a precipice where there may be no return. Things about which there is no debate include:

· Pumping eight million tons of plastic waste into the oceans every year. This breaks down into micro and nano particles, which are now entering the food chain. Research announced this week shows that your favourite bottled water from makers such as Evian, Pelligrino and Coca Cola already carry up to 350 plastic particles per bottle.

· Deforestation.

· Acidification of the oceans and the potential destruction of all ocean based life.

· Destruction of major fishing habitats and the destruction of fish species.

· Dumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – contributing to the acidification above.

· Global warming. We know this is happening. Instead of managing the issue we stand around and argue whether we are causing it or not. Who cares? Are we really that stupid? Just get on and manage the crisis. Further concrete evidence of the global leadership vacuum.

· Obesity. The global obesity average is now 35% of the population. In Qatar it is a specie threatening 70%. Clearly this is a far greater threat to our specie survival than all wars, cars, guns and terrorism combined. Again we remain globally impotent.

· Saving the Rhino. This is a perfect symbol of our global lack of intelligence. The rhino as a specie is millions of years old and is an important link in a complex evolutionary chain with which we are all ill-equipped to interfere.

The magnificent animal weighs nearly two tons, can be seen and tracked from space, but is now under threat of extinction simply because Asian men think the rhino horn – made of keratin, the same type of protein that constitutes your hair and fingernails – will help them generate a better erection. This is nothing short of criminal stupidity from the dark ages and from the same book of burning witches. If we cannot deal with this crisis, how on earth will we manage anything else?

Externalities, organisational structures, quarterly reports, derivatives and the shareholder. In the 1980's Milton Friedman and the Chicago School did much to influence Reaganomics and the concepts of externalities, the free market, and minimum government interference – all sound principles, in theory. Of course in practice when the organisation has the legal persona of a psychopath, its only goal being to satisfy the equally psychopathic needs of the shareholder, with zero consideration being given to externalities (plastic being dumped into the ocean for example), we have the makings of a perfect storm of severe harm to both homo sapiens and our environment.

Further clear examples of sub linear activity (entropy) are abundant on our news channels every day for one simple reason.

Short-term sub linear news is always more salacious, shock-worthy and entertaining than longer-term superlinear news, which may require a modicum of neuronal activity. That is, entropy-driving news makes more money.

Look at the daily news right now in April 2018. The Brexit Circus. The Trump Circus – Stormy Daniels the porn star's alleged affair with Trump takes centre stage, while Trump fires people left right and centre, denies environmental issues, adds tariffs on a seemingly random basis, and fires up the coal industry.

Global leadership requires a minimum one thousand year planning horizon. Our current leaders, supported by the news channels, are more likely to be rewarded by a twenty-four hour planning horizon.

And on the so-called global stage we have Russia poisoning people on British soil resulting in an escalating tit-for-tat, we have Facebook completely out of control where a Cambridge professor, seemingly in cahoots with Russia, extracted fifty million US profiles, without permission, which were then passed on to Cambridge Analytica, who then, perhaps worked with the Trump organisation to attempt to influence voters in the 2016 US election.

If all this nonsense, including trying to negotiate with North Korea, the la-la-land from another century, were not potentially really serious, it would be laughable indeed. However the real tragedy of everything that is unfolding is that the world has really changed and we are trying to manage an incredibly complex and dynamic planet with the thinking and tools learned on the playground.

We have 196 official nation states represented at the now largely toothless United Nations. Each state has some sort of leader, elected, imposed or appointed for life guided largely by corruption, dishonesty, sheer inefficiency and a mindset from earlier centuries (Crimea, Ukraine). If you are interested google Transparency International and you will see that the dominant human trait is to operate with deliberate immoral and criminal intent. Lying, cheating, bribing and stealing are de rigueur in most countries. If you were an alien investor in new planets, surely you would have one look, shudder, and move on elsewhere in the galaxy?

The current Unilever CEO was recently quoted as saying that in all his years with the company, not one shareholder had ever asked him about the impact his company may be having on the environment.

Ask yourself a few simple questions. List half a dozen to a dozen so-called global leaders. Use a one to ten scale and rate each one on the following.

  • General intelligence

  • Wisdom

  • Scientific literacy. (How can you contribute to managing the planet if your knowledge of physics, science, statistics, economics, finance and the environment etc is for all practical purposes, zero?)

  • Clear long term policies on environmental management, including plastic, fishing, forests, global warming etc.

  • In speeches and political rallies, talks mainly about the 'big picture' global issues.

  • Courageous. Capable of building strong and intelligent teams/cabinets (in the US Trump's choice of Education Secretary, Betsy De Vos is a frightening reminder of the potential damage that can be done by appointing your maximum entropy pals) that have the capacity to think and act at a planetary level.

Appoints people who have real intelligence, qualifications, knowledge and a proven track record in their portfolio. There is nothing more likely to accelerate national economic entropy than clogging the arteries with incompetent officials.

Let me be clear. I am neither a Luddite nor a head in the sand socialist. I certainly believe in a free entrepreneurial market and the remarkable creative and free spirit of the human being. I just think its time to do this on a planet that survives our creativity. It has nothing to do with old school left wing or right wing thinking. It is about evolving a new way of thinking that evolves beyond the nation state mentality.

I live in a country where communists still lurk in the shadows, calling each other comrade this and comrade that. There is an ever present danger that the current government will ignore a century of appalling suffering caused by communism and misguided socialism, and attempt to re-invent Marx and Engels. To be on the safe side a few weeks ago I bought and read the Communist Manifesto, an angry tirade at capitalists, ownership, the middle class, intelligence, innovation and excellence in every shape and form.

Simply put it is a blueprint for maximum human entropy and general human misery. It contains not one word, not one sentence about intelligent environmental management. Anyone who mumbles principles from this patently idiotic document should be locked up for their own safety!


Here is our challenge. Our science and technology has evolved way past our global ability to manage it.


Carl Sagan famously once said that we live in a world of science and technology where virtually no-one fully understands science and technology.

Communism is patently flawed and should remain in the cupboard of really bad ideas from the nineteenth century. Capitalism has shown itself to be the winning formula for generating compound growth through science and technology and a foundation for our evolution. However it currently has a potentially fatal flaw in attaching no value and no control over externalities.

And the world religions, which have such a massive hold and influence over vast swathes of the population, instead of remaining steadfastly in the world of magic and prehistory need to have the courage to adopt a new and relevant super linear strategy for our current times. Ignoring this imperative would be a gross miscarriage of responsibility.

IS THERE A GLOBAL SUPER LINEAR SOLUTION?

Homo Sapiens is at a strategic crossroad. We can keep our heads buried deeply in the sand, sit back and enjoy the ride or we can actually do something constructive.

Here are my suggestions. They are neither complete nor perfect. My wish is that these ideas may stimulate new thinking and new action.

My reason for optimism is that human evolution is always started by individual mavericks and geniuses in their own fields.

Here is a real-life example.

For the past decade the government in my country, South Africa, has been ruled by an utterly corrupt president and cabal that has successfully captured the state and almost destroyed the economy. Instead of growing at seven to eight percent we have struggled to achieve one percent. The cost of this dishonesty and corruption has been enormous both in the past and its possible impact in the future.

However we now have a new president and some cautious optimism. And there is just one thing that has allowed this to happen. Free speech. We have a free press and a lively and open arena for debate. If this were Turkey, Russia, or China for example we could never have had this revolution. We don't shoot or kidnap people who don't agree with us (most of the time). We don't shoot opposition leaders. We don't trump up charges and lock dissenting voices before an election. And we don't blow up our journalists.

This is no small matter. And the key to this transformation is not the political elite but always a small band of dedicated activists and their organisations. A wonderful example is Wayne Duvenage who gave up a CEO position to start an activist group called Outa. Almost single-handedly this band of fearless warriors took on the might of the state over a corrupt E-Toll scheme designed to fleece the motorist – and won. Most people would just have accepted further government inefficiency and moved on with their lives. (As did many of the banks and corporates in SA. Just like the current Aussie cricketers these organisations have been happy to play the game with 'sandpaper' in their pockets.)

Wayne and his Outa team then focussed on corrupt government officials, and together with honest journalists and similar activist organisations have turned the tide of an entire country of 54 million people. Largely due to their bravery and commitment South Africa now has new hope for a brighter future once envisioned by Nelson Mandela. Under the new President, corrupt officials have been fired and the dominos will continue to fall, hopefully involving many years of free accommodation for those involved with corruption at the pleasure of the state.

The key lesson here is important. Entropy in private and public corporations is driven by corruption, criminal greed, dishonesty, malpractice, laziness and incompetence. It is insidious and grows like a cancer. And the only antidote is hard and continuous exposure, led by strong and brave individuals. It is a sad reality that 99% of the population will simply blow with the wind in bovine acquiescence.

  Action steps

The only reason we are not still swinging from the trees on the African savannah, is that by some remarkable good fortune we evolved speech and conscious thought. (It is of interest that all the evolutionary biologists, linguists etc including Pinker, Chomsky et al, although they have written copious books on the subject, still don't know how this happened. Language and consciousness remain, frustratingly, an evolutionary black box.)

Ponder this a moment. Our universe is close to 14 billion years old, our planet 4,6 billion, our modern civilisation a mere ten thousand years. Not even a flea on the backside of a horse. To the best of our knowledge we are the only sentient being in our galactic neighbourhood, possibly the only one in our galaxy, and who knows, possibly the only one in our universe. And we have the remarkable power to think and speak. I don't believe in miracles but this is as close as it gets.

This means that Sapiens may have a once in a lifetime-of-a-universe chance to manage a planet that can sustain sentient life. This possibility mathematically is so remote that for all practical purposes it is zero. It is impossible that we are here. But – here we are. Screwing the place up with gay and ignorant abandon.

We are at the crossroad. It is a simple choice. Survive or go extinct like 98% of all other species that have graced this special rock.

It's time for action
 

It is too easy to simply put our collective heads in the sand and say, not my problem, nothing I can do about it. Remember that human evolution has always been driven by smart mavericks who have had the courage to speak up against political flatulence. It has never been driven by security seeking mobs who simply wish to retain the status quo.

It starts with you using the simple principle of Superlinearity

Remember that entropy is the loss of energy over time where I define energy in organisations as the ability to think intelligently and act intelligently. And the only way to overcome this is to continuously inject new energy in the form of more intelligent thinking and action. I call this superlinearity and it is the key to our survival.

Use your circle of influence. Speak up. Debate. Ask questions. Demand answers. Raise the level of intelligence around you.

Traditional nation-state thinking and action will destroy us sooner or later. We need a structure that manages the planet with at least a one thousand year strategy.

Demand that our leaders debate the big issues. Don't let them get away with their playground nonsense.

If we want planetary leadership we first need to push our leaders to debate the big issues.

For example, get the US, Russia, China, and European leaders to debate publicly on planetary issues, agree on action and hold them to account. What is their combined policy for example to rid the oceans of plastic? Save the Rhino? Stop deforestation? Eliminate endless and pointless wars?

No more hiding behind daily nonsense. We need real leaders, real warriors that have the brains and character to solve real problems rather than create them.

This approach has certain key advantages.

  • It will unite rather than divide nation states. 

  • It will add real power to the Paris Accord. (Currently there is no skin in the game for nations who don't deliver on their commitments.)

  • It will go a long way to rid the infantile playground behaviour of our current crop of nation state leaders.

  • It will generate and bring to the fore a new breed of more intelligent, more competent, more talented, more courageous, better-educated, non-criminal, non-corrupt leaders who understand and know how to design and build a planetary strategy that actually works.

Encourage and reward the mavericks. Without them there would be no civilisation.

  Use the simple principle of Superlinearity every day

Remember that entropy is the loss of energy over time, which affects every aspect of our lives. Superlinearity is the positive evolutionary force which reverses entropy. And the key to superlinearity is thinking smarter and acting smarter every day. I invite you to become a superlinear maverick from today. Our future depends on it.

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About the author

John Raddall

John Raddall

 

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