rEvolution E-Book

Bill Lucas

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

We have reached a turning point in our development as a species. In the coming decades we face significant global challenges in terms of climate change, biodiversity, food and water resources and violent extremism. At the local level, these seem like crazy times, with the speed of change accelerating faster than ever. In rEvolution, best-selling author Bill Lucas suggests some of the ways we can all succeed in today's complex world. 150 years after Charles Darwin invented the concept of natural selection, Bill argues that the rules of evolution are changing. To thrive in our current crazy world we need a new kind of "mind-ware". Specifically we need to develop our adaptive intelligence. Drawing on new and emerging sciences and using approaches previously applied in other domains, this book describes some of the practical steps you can take at home, at school, in the workplace and in the wider community to ensure that you can constantly adapt to new circumstances. Bill's analysis, optimism and suggestions for practical learning make this an essential addition to the book shelf of all thoughtful questioning members of the species!

Leseprobe

Praise for rEvolution: How to Thrive in Crazy Times

“Not just a book, but a generous compendium of practical ideas; so generous in fact that you’ll surely thrive on just a fraction of the suggestions Bill Lucas offers up in this compelling book.”

Dr Peter Honey, author and expert on learning

“rEvolution: How to Thrive in Crazy Times is a practical survival guide to the volatile and discontinuous change which is a characteristic of the modern world. It’s an accumulation of wisdom that explores how humans can flourish in accelerating change, distilled into an engaging and easy to use book.”

Simon Walker, co-founder, talentsmoothie

“For my money the focus of this book on adaptive intelligence – and the need for managers and leaders to let go – is crucial to surviving this recession. I commend Bill Lucas for another thought-provoking book. A must have for anyone who is rethinking their approach to business.”

Ruth Spellman, Chief Executive, Chartered Management Institute

“There are few people that I would trust to hold up an umbrella and lead people to their varying destinations but Bill Lucas can do this, even for people, perhaps especially for people, who don’t know where they’re headed and where they might end up. But armed with an insatiable curiosity about people, life and learning, Bill gives us new clues, provides us with helpful constructs and tells us some charming stories, all of which become our aids and friends as we battle to make sense of the crazy world around us and build our own futures.”

Jeffrey Defries, Chief Executive CRAC, The Career Development Organisation and creator of icould

“This new book from Bill Lucas is a treasury of invaluable ideas and advice on living and learning more effectively with the reality of change in the 21st century. Its variety, energy and expansiveness is a delight. I thoroughly recommend it.”

Lynne Sedgmore, Executive Director, 157 Group

“Bill Lucas presents a deeply compelling argument for a mind-ware revolution which has the potential to equip individuals, organisations and institutions with vital capabilities for navigating and adapting to the uncharted waters into which we’re all sailing.”

Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith, School of Management, University of Surrey

rEvolution

Bill Lucas

rEvolution

How to thrive in crazy times

Bill Lucas

Crown House Publishing Limited

www.crownhouse.co.uk

www.crownhousepublishing.com

First published by

Crown House Publishing Ltd Crown Buildings, Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales, SA33 5ND, UKwww.crownhouse.co.uk

and

Crown House Publishing Company LLC 6 Trowbridge Drive, Suite 5, Bethel, CT 06801-2858, USAwww.crownhousepublishing.com

© Bill Lucas 2009

The right of Bill Lucas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The right of Les Evans to be identified as the illustrator of the work on pages 23, 31, 33, 56, 66, 174 and 212 has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Image credits: pages 118 and 143 © AJ/Fotolia; page 148 © Owen/Fotolia; page 166 © The Granger Collection/TopFoto; page 195 © EcoView/Fotolia

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be addressed to Crown House Publishing Limited.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-184590129-5eBook ISBN 978-184590359-6

LCCN 2008936753

Printed and bound in the UK by The Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to:

My friend and colleague Professor Guy Claxton, who gave me invaluable advice on an earlier draft.

Colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire who encouraged me to put some of the theories I have described into practice as part of their change programme, UH Evolution.

Jeffrey Defries, Dr Peter Honey, Lynne Sedgmore, Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith, Ruth Spellman, Professor Bob Fryer and Simon Walker, who kindly reviewed the book.

And to the many people mentioned in the book whose ideas have greatly stimulated my own.

Contents

Introduction

Rule 1 – Change is changing Crazy times

Rule 2 – Real change is internal not external It’s all about us

Rule 3 – Slow down Life in the fast lane

Rule 4 – We can all change the way we see the world Pioneers and stay-at-homes

Rule 5 – We can all learn how to change more effectively Adaptive intelligence

Rule 6 – No one can make you change It’s a free world

Rule 7 – Sometimes it’s smart to resist The algebra of change

Rule 8 – Use the brainpower of those around you Six degrees and a flat world

Rule 9 – Make up your own rules End piece

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent but the ones most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin

We have reached a turning point in our development as a species.

Our past is catching up with us with respect to climate change. We continue to reduce our stock of biodiversity in ways that we do not understand. The population of the planet is expanding so fast that we may not have enough food or water to go round. Whether through religious extremism or shortage of resources the chance of violence and even war is increasing. So serious is the challenge facing Homo sapiens that eminent Professor Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society in the UK, considers that we have only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving this century.

At the same time we continue to get smarter. In the last decade alone just three inventions illustrate our creativity. We have discovered the three billion DNA letters of our own human code – the human genome, invented a hybrid car that runs on petrol and electricity and, in YouTube, found an almost instant means of sharing moving images across the globe. Technological advances involving the Internet, computers and affordable air travel proceed at an astonishing pace so that pretty much wherever we are on the planet, we can be in touch with each other. We are consequently no longer subject to the old rules of time and place. And as the World Wide Web grows exponentially, we are surrounded by so much data that even an educated person could only ever presume to know a tiny fraction of what there is to know.

A century and a half ago Charles Darwin published his brilliant account of the process of evolution, On the Origin ofSpecies. His theory of natural selection focused on the way modifications (changes) in species take place over long periods of time. Although he speculated about human beings and their development, his main interest was in the evolution of non-sentient organisms and on the ways in which improvements are passed down the generations so that the species which are most responsive thrive.

Fast forward to today. Evolution is taking place at such a speed that where natural selection took place over millions of years, it is conceivable that human beings may evolve into something else in a matter of a few centuries or less. The essence of Darwin’s theory – his emphasis on adaptability as the best strategy for success – holds good. But it does not go far enough in explaining what we might actually do to stay sane and thrive in a period of accelerated evolution.

Homo sapiens has upset the old order by his capacity to turn ideas into actions so rapidly. For precisely because we can think and use language, our evolution is likely to be charted through the quality of our mindware or, as I will refer to it from time to time, our “adaptive intelligence”.

In this book I want to explore what this means for the way we learn in the real world. Our ancestors developed physical tools – axes, fire, wheels, buildings, printing presses and so on. We need to develop a correspondingly helpful set of mental tools or mindware to ensure that we cope with the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. Faced with virtually no time to process new challenges and new ways of doing things, how best should we react? To thrive in the first part of the twenty-first century requires some new rules (as well as a fresh look at some old ones).

We are, I will argue, in the middle of a revolution with a small “r”. A rEvolution if you like. Some of the traditional ways of approaching things still work well, while others need to be turned on their head. And in some cases we simply need fresh ways of looking at what is happening around us.

Adaptive intelligence

Developing adaptive expertise involves some fundamental rethinking about intelligence. This will express itself in two ways; in the habits of mind1 we cultivate in our daily lives and in the patterns of social interaction we choose with other human beings.

Where once smart people knew a lot of stuff and were confident that their way of doing things was the most enlightened, we may need to get better at unlearning things and at managing short-term relationships.

If it was a safe bet to do more of the same or simply try harder, it may be more helpful to understand the processes of habit and change the ways in which we can harness the energy of those around us to help us stick to any new resolve.

Where in the past we spent our time in forensic analysis and problem-solving we may prefer to shift our attention to appreciative inquiry and to the formation of richly rewarding reciprocal relationships with other like-minded people.

And, while the lessons of history will continue to be valuable, we may become more suspicious of traditional “experience” as we go into uncharted waters and look as well for the capacity to imagine futures, to reframe situations and to conduct, with others, a series of ongoing experiments into the way we live our lives.

Whether ideas like these seem like revolution or evolution will probably depend on your state of mind and personal knowledge and experience. rEvolution: How to Thrivein Crazy Times is not a traditional self-help guide. Rather it is aimed at anyone who is curious enough to pull it down from the bookshelf hoping for a more eclectic and wider-ranging selection of ideas than is traditional in many of these kinds of books. Some of the suggestions will be familiar to readers. But in the blending of the known and the unknown I hope you will find useful prompts to action or at least be stirred to find out more about something that has reawakened your interest. If you are working in organisations you may find yourself part of a “change programme” and be grateful for the orientation a book like this can give you. And in your role as citizen of a changing world I hope that something I have written may gently nudge you into further reading, contemplation or action.

A brief history of change

Let me go back in time for a moment to put Darwin and other evolutionary thinking in context.

For a few billion years there were just single-celled organisms on earth. Then our immediate ape-like ancestors emerged from the swamp. And, somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million years ago, Homo sapiens “arrived”. These are the slow and fascinating processes of natural selection described by Charles Darwin.

Then, as an intelligent species, we invented tools, fire, language, farming and civilised living. A few centuries ago we started to get clever with machines, harnessing the power of water, steam, gas, oil and electricity. We learned how to communicate in print, how to travel around the globe at speed and, only decades ago, we invented the computer and the World Wide Web. Most of these changes took a long time, many centuries or at least decades.

But the latest kinds of computer-driven evolution use a much tighter timescale. They operate in years, months or days. For just as we have automated production in much of our living, so with new computer science there is a sense in which we are beginning to automate evolution. Avoiding the debate as to whether computers will render us redundant (personally I do not believe that they will) they will undoubtedly be able to do things that we cannot. They can already recognise patterns, relatively quickly, which we cannot discern. (We can see this, for example, in the recent advances in our understanding of both climate change and of the human genome.) They can learn behaviour, continuously reprogramming themselves to do things more effectively. They can bring massive amounts of data to bear on complex problems in ways in which the human mind cannot. And in case you think I am only interested in “Homo technians”, I am not. Almost every aspect of human inventiveness is being challenged today.

Once evolution was in nature’s random, slow and playful hands. Now it is in our own. It is increasingly fast with the possibility that new evolutions can almost immediately be spread through the World Wide Web. In this book I will explore not the moral or other purposes to which human beings may direct the evolution of our species but the ways in which we may like to adapt our minds to whatever happens.

Different kinds of change

Of course change arrives in many forms:

Good and bad.

There’s change which is good such as a new cure for an old disease. Or a similar technology may be turned into a biological weapon.

Significant or minor.

We alter a deeply engrained pattern of behaviour or we move the furniture around in our living room or buy a new mobile phone.

Personal or social.

A new child is born or the well-being and lives of thousands of people are affected by a natural disaster.

Desired or not.

There’s change that we want such as a new partner, a new job or a new belief. Or there are the changes that are forced upon us which we may not desire at all: separation, death, redundancy and loss of faith are the flip side of the coin.

And within these categories there are at least three degrees of impact.

First there are all the hundreds of minor reorderings we undergo on a daily basis – a new look or hairstyle, a new gadget or a different route to work.

Then there are more significant developments, the real-world adaptations that we undertake either consciously or not. We finally give up a smoking habit, we stop taking shorthaul flights and travel by train, we start playing a musical instrument or join a gym.

And finally the third level – the most difficult to navigate – a major reprogramming, either sought, achieved or experienced accidentally, such as a fundamental reappraisal of your working life, moving from employed to self-employed status or the loss of a lifelong and much loved spouse.

The poetry and philosophy of change

Perhaps, not surprisingly, when life moves along more slowly it tends to be poets and philosophers who spend time thinking about change, often by speculating about what is permanent and what is changeable in life. Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It is, perhaps, the purest example of this:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the canon’s mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lined, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Where poets remark on the passage of the seasons and the ageing process, philosophers speculate on the essence of change, wondering about the notion of fixity and permanence. Greek thinkers famously waxed lyrical on the subject some two and a half thousand years ago. Heraclitus, with startling prescience, argued that the only constant was change itself. As a consequence we can never drink from the same river twice because, although it may look similar, it is in fact different.

By contrast, Empedocles saw the world as made of the elements of fire, air, water and earth, only changing as the consequence of one of two forces: “love/harmony” or “hatred/strife”. In his world view the four elements are the fixed components while their impact on us changes according to the positive or negative forces of love or hatred.

Both Heraclitus and Empedocles, in trying to account for change, end up by defining it in terms of the permanent elements which they favour. The exception to this is arguably Parmenides who seems to argue that there is no such thing as change. While things may appear to change, their underlying reality remains constant and indestructible.

In an echo of Empedocles, the great Chinese philosophers sought to define the workings of the world in the Bookof Changes. They called this the Tao or “workings of the universe”. From this they derived yin and yang, the two opposing forces which, as with Empedocles’ love and hatred, shape the world, often in cyclical fashion.

Yin and yang are used to account for all change. And all change can be explained by yin, yang and five agents – earth, fire, metal, wood and water. At their simplest levels, yin is associated with femaleness, the moon, completion, cold, darkness, wetness and passivity, while yang is maleness, the sun, creation, heat, light, Heaven, dryness and dominance.

Yin and yang help to ensure an endless cycle of change, with neither dominating. Each depends on the other; each, in a sense, causes the other. And, in this world view, any condition – sickness or health, happiness or misery, good or bad government – is explicable by reference to yin or yang. The action of yin and yang on the matter that makes up our world accounts for and explains everything in the world that changes.

Precisely because we cannot see what goes on within ourselves or beneath the surface of the world about us, exactly what underpins the changes we all experience has been a source of much speculation for many centuries. Not surprisingly we have sought to account for change by imposing our own theoretical frameworks on it. A good example of this is the Hippocratic idea of the four humours – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Each of these had associations with different elements and suggested certain temperamental tendencies:

Blood, associated with

air

, became synonymous with sanguine (from the Latin

sanguineus

).

Phlegm, linked to

water

and calm, becomes phlegmatic.

Black bile, connected to the element

earth

, gave rise to melancholia and being melancholic via the Greek for “black” (μελας) and “cholic” (χολη).

Yellow bile, like

fire

, indicates energy and passion and is summed up by the word choleric.

As with the four elements of Empedocles, the four humours provide a way of explaining change and exploring the idea of what it is to be living a life which is in balance. If you have an excess of yellow bile, you may blaze away and be exhausting to be with; if too much black bile, then you may be prone to depressive reactions to the cruelty and unfairness of life. And so on.

These ideas found rich roots in medieval medicine and science so that they emerge almost unscathed at the end of the nineteenth century as the first great psychologists were using more scientific methods to account for the way we all grow and change. Carl Jung’s theory of personality, later adapted into what is now known as the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) by the Myers-Briggs sisters, still betrays our hunger for dynamic frameworks, by which I mean for ways of seeing ourselves as in the middle of opposing forces.

The MBTI mines this idea by applying it to four key human activities which, taken together, go to make up personality:

Source of energy – the degree to which you look externally or socially for your energy as opposed to preferring a more inward and reflective attitude.

Information-gathering – how concrete (noticed by your five senses) or intuitive (abstract, intuitive) you tend to be.

Decision-making – the tension between rational and emotional thought.

Lifestyle orientation – perhaps the element accounting for the greatest source of tension within people, the degree to which you favour an ordered and predictable world or one more flexible, open-ended and fluid.

Later on we will explore the degree to which some people may find it easier to change, for example if they are temperamentally more likely to be open to new and unplanned experiences.

The stirrings of science

It was not only philosophers and psychologists who were keen to account for change. Astronomers and astrologists have also exerted much influence. Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, turned to the heavens to find patterns and to track celestial movement. But at the same time as the astronomical eye looked to the sky the human mind made connections with earthly events – fire, pestilence, the birth of a great saviour. It also marvelled at the grandeur and power of what it saw with the naked eye or through the telescope and assumed some kind of divine role.

The earth’s movement around the sun (albeit initially thought to be the other way round) gave us the basis for the measure of all change, the yearly calendar. But then the astrologers got their hands on things. A science became a pseudoscience. While Nostradamus may be a name we know, the reliability of his predictions was extremely limited. The astrologer’s tendency to cede human free will to the movement of the stars, combined with the deep instinctive love for shamans that seems to exist in many of us, created an industry that still thrives today. Newspapers and websites have found horoscopes to be powerfully enticing, giving millions of people daily plausible enough predictions of the changing circumstances of their lives. In fact, it never ceases to amaze me that otherwise intelligent and sane members of the human race still seem to want to see what fate allegedly has in store for them!

But, as I have already suggested, it is the scientist, Charles Darwin, who, some one hundred and fifty years ago, arguably gave us the most potent theory of change. His theory of natural selection accounts for the gradual improvement of the various species which inhabit a crowded planet. At its heart is a simple but powerful idea that it is not the strongest or most intelligent of the species that survive but those that are the most adaptable to change.

In other words, things change not because of a dynamic tension between elements (as with earlier Greek or Chinese views) but because of a complex and, in most cases, rather slow series of modifications and developments which play out over time. As a consequence certain species thrive where others do not. And within species, modifications occur which more effectively suit the external environment and so get passed down the generations.

Darwin, especially with the benefit of recent advances in our understanding of the human genome, helps us to understand why human beings have so much in common with other species. But he does not account for why we, as a species, are actually so different from other species, and why, as I am arguing in rEvolution, our minds are running away with us so fast that change which was once so gradual is now so rapid.

In recent years there have been two powerful attempts to account for human evolution. The first, by Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, looks to the genes themselves for the explanation. Genes, he argues, are selfish. They have to be. For their job is survival by any means. However this does not mean that in the way we behave we necessarily need to be cold and cunning to thrive. In fact, in a chapter called “Nice guys finish first” Dawkins demonstrates, through game theory and symbiotic examples from the natural world, how the smart response is often to act collectively not competitively.

In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore goes one stage further. Rather than focusing on genes, she explores the “meme”, a concept first coined by Richard Dawkins. A meme is the cultural equivalent to a gene. So memes are ideas, new words, new fashions, new inventions, new ways of doing the high-jump or different ways of doing the complex mathematics and science of, say, climate change, which transmit themselves from one mind to another. The successful memes are the ones that last.

Blackmore elegantly explores the ways in which memes account for those aspects of human evolution on which Darwin has least to say, all the things to do with language, ideas and culture. The central thesis is that a unique element of our makeup is our ability to imitate. Blackmore extends this to show how the evolutionary journey human beings are engaged upon is a different kind of selection, not so much natural as cultural. In this new evolutionary soup it is ideas which compete for space in our minds.

And Blackmore goes one step further, making a case for a genuinely different approach to the way humans change by invoking the possibility that even our non-conscious self (or indeed consciousness itself) are illusions created by our memes. In this she is drawing in part on the fascinating notion of adaptive self-deception first advanced by Robert Trivers.

Think about it like this. If any particular human being is really to be ultimately successful then there will be times when he or she will not want to betray feelings to an enemy, for by detecting fear the enemy might sense an advantage. So what more cunning way of ensuring survival could there be than for an individual to be genuinely unaware of things which might otherwise be transmitted to their opponent!

Darwin’s concept of evolution and his subsequent elaborators changed our view of the world dramatically, just as Nicholas Copernicus did when he placed the sun at the centre of our universe or as Christopher Columbus and other notable round-the-world sailors achieved with their safe return home with regard to the idea of a flat earth.

These moments are what Thomas Kuhn, in The Structureof Scientific Revolutions, called “paradigm shifts”, moments when there is a significant change in our basic assumptions about the way the world works.

Personal and social change

So far we have touched on just a few of the big philosophical and scientific approaches to change in a loosely historical sort of a way. Of course, no one strand of thinking is discrete as we found when moving from Greek philosophy to contemporary psychology via medieval medicine. In this section I want to look briefly at some more socio-cultural lines of thinking.

One trend is very clear. Where once thinkers, from whatever discipline, tended to look for single causes today we are looking at the world as a complex adaptive system with no simple control levers. Good examples of complex adaptive systems are the international banking system (as revealed in the sub-prime mortgage shocks which rippled their way around the globe in 2007–8), the world’s weather, a flock of birds on the wing, a jazz band in full music-making mode, human beings and, of course, the human mind.

If this seems complex and as yet impractical, then that’s probably because it is! As Douglas Adams put it in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Personal power

Empedocles. Copernicus. Darwin. Kuhn. This litany of names reminds us of how much changing world views are associated with individual thinkers. But there is another view, well expressed by Willis Harman: “Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in society have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds – sometimes only a little bit.” I will return both to the significant roles we as individuals can all play in times of change and to the idea of changing minds.

It is worth remembering that, for some while, we thought that human beings were largely victims of the circumstances of their environment. Pavlov’s dogs salivated when bells were rung because they were always fed when the bell was rung. Skinner’s rats responded to cues in their environment. Unsurprisingly they modified their activity according to rewards and sanctions. And such changes somehow persuaded us that environment was a more powerful influence on our behaviours than our own determined intentions. Thus behaviourism was born and its ideas held sway for many decades.

Until that is, in the 1980s, when significant new thinking about the power of mindset began to challenge more deterministic views of human behaviour. At least two fruitful lines of enquiry emerged. One, often referred to as positive psychology, is closely associated with the work of Martin Seligman. For Seligman, especially with his idea of “learned optimism”, reminds us that change is not an absolute concept. It is perfectly possible for different people to view the same event through very different lenses. For one individual life seems good while for another everything is going wrong.

The second line of thought also qualifies events through the lens of an individual’s personal perception. Change happens, but, as Carol Dweck has shown, its impact on us varies according to our mindset. If we believe that we have the potential to grow and develop, then change is to be welcomed. We will rise to the challenge. Whereas if we have a fixed sense of our own talents, then change becomes much more threatening for we may not have what it takes to deal with it. “People’s ideas about risk and effort grow out of their basic mindset,” Dweck reminds us. If we believe that we can, through our own efforts, rise to new heights, then change is a challenge and we are happy to take risks. Whereas, if we have a fixed mindset then change is an unwelcome test of our ability, one which we may not wish to explore for fear of failure or of not coming up to the mark.

One of the most influential metaphors for imagining change was created by physicist turned social scientist Kurt Lewin in the first part of the twentieth century. His three stage model involves unfreezing, changing, then refreezing. Unfreezing is the process by which existing ideas, beliefs, habits or ways of doing things are dismantled. Then there is an uncertain time – the crazy times – suggested by the subtitle of this book. This most difficult period is followed by the third stage during which new patterns are established and embedded.

Changing behaviour is here being compared to the way in which you might refashion a square block of ice into a new shape, say a doughnut. It would be impossible to chip away at the cube and reform it into a pristine tyre shape. The only means of achieving this would be to turn the ice into water, pour it into a new mould and refreeze it. The metaphor has resonance at many levels – personal, social and societal. Most importantly it reminds us that there is essentially a transition between two fixed states. For many people today, with so much change in the air, it is difficult to imagine what fixed new state to aim for. Not surprisingly, life is stressful, crazy, even. There are, however, many ways of getting better at dealing with change, as we shall discover, at home and at work.

Most recently it has begun to occur to many people that, with the increasing power of computers and computerdriven technology, we may be on the verge of a new kind of evolution. James Martin puts this most compellingly when he talks of three eras of evolution. The first was the slow process of natural selection, so brilliantly described by Darwin, which culminated in the arrival of Homo sapiens. The second phase, about which Darwin had little or nothing to say specifically, was the period during which Homo sapiens used his intelligence to develop ideas, inventions, machines, tools and so on. This is where we are today and the difference between the first two phases is that where once evolution was in nature’s hands, now it is in ours.