The Washington Post is paying a tribute “to our little teenager” saying that had they known this birthday was coming up they would have baked a cake … (after Googling the recipe). They’ve posted a clip with a collection of Google Doodles celebrating past birthdays. ”Today, Google is one of the most influential companies worldwide” and it’s just a teenager. Google got the Príncipe de Asturias some years ago for their contribution to the development of global information and communication.  Now it seems they are also trying to change the way we humans deal with wallets and money expressed in paper notes, credit cards, tokens and coins.

Notice all the things that have changed and converged with the emergence of the internet: cinema, photography, journalism, telecommunications, TV, video, news and show business, games and entertainment, to name a few closely related to the information and communication that we now call technologies. We have moved from pencil to print to digital and we have moved from coins and paper notes to paper checks and credit cards in the days of plastic.

Information that was previously framed in paintings, print and images became known as audiovisual during the last century and was soon renamed as multimedia with the evolution of computers and peripherals converging with broadband and telecommunications.  It only took a decade or so to see external drives evolve to support data aggregation from bytes to terabytes and at the same time we went from tape to CDs and from pen drives to just “the cloud“.

During the last decade or so we’ve also learned how to use VOIP (voice over IP as in skype, google talk or other), WebTV and have learned to expect Live Web TV streaming from different sources of news and events. A lot of this has become common practice nowadays if you just have access to the broadband technology that is increasingly going main stream for anything related to information and communication. Why would money and the way we handle payments in cash be any different? Are they not information?

The tokens we use for parking, transportation and access to many devices might be a thing of the past pretty soon,  just like phone booths became a collectors’ piece in a little over a decade. How long do you think it might take Google and others this time to bring the Google wallet (and similar artifacts using NFC or other) onmain stream? But let’s remember that new media”experts” had also informed in the ’90s that Microsoft‘s software empire was going to take over much of the information and communication arena including the daily news. (Negroponte dixit) And yet, plenty of newspapers and other media and advertising industries were able to re-mediate their business model fast enough to get their necks above the water, ride the waves and keep going.

Bajo la luz de un farol se hallaba un hombre que había bebido un poco de más buscando y buscando algo en el piso. Un oficial de policía se le acercó y le preguntó qué estaba buscando.  El hombre respondió: “mis llaves”. Siguieron buscando juntos.  Luego de un rato el policía tuvo una ocurrencia y preguntó al hombre si estaba seguro de haber perdido las llaves allí mismo. El hombre respondió que no, que en realidad las había perdido más allá, pero en aquel otro sitio más allá estaba muy oscuro para poder buscarlas.

Este cuento del libro “La situación es desesperada pero no es seria” de Paul Watzlawick ilustra como jugamos juegos con el presente cuando buscamos resolver problemas “haciendo más de lo mismo” de algo que funcionó en otro momento y en otro lugar.  Nos esmeramos en aplicar soluciones que funcionaron con éxito en el pasado, pues creemos recordar que funcionaron o tal vez fueron entonces las únicas posibles.

Se entiende que no se puede estar cambiando nuestra forma de hacer las cosas todo el tiempo y que para adaptarnos a nuestro entorno de forma satisfactoria desarrollamos patrones de conducta y pautas de relación que en su momento resultan útiles. El problema surge cuando mantenemos adaptaciones puntuales que pasan a ser consideradas como válidas para siempre manteniendo presupuestos de forma tal, que no nos deja ver que en más de una ocasión dichos patrones se vuelven anacrónicos para poder evolucionar naturalmente.

Luego si enfocamos en un tipo de solución a un problema designado como tal en el pasado, omitimos posibilidades que podrían estar al alcance de la mano.  Decía Watzlawick que este tipo de “doble ceguera” conlleva un doble efecto: i) la solución elegida se vuelve más y más inútil haciendo que la situación en general se vuelva más y más desesperanzadora y ii) aumenta  nuestro grado de insatisfacción con una situación particular y esto combinado con nuestra creencia de que la solución intentada es la única posible y necesaria, confirma la conclusión de que hay que hacer más de lo mismo. Consecuentemente al hacer más de lo mismo aumenta nuestro grado de insatisfacción y así sigue una forma de actuar que podríamos denominar: trampa cognitiva.

Dicho mecanismo, continúa Watzlawick, ha dado de comer a generaciones de expertos en diferentes temas desde tiempos inmemorables. Solo que no lo llaman “hacer más de lo mismo” sino que eligen términos que suenen más científicos.  El nombre no interesa, lo que importa es el efecto y sus dos reglas simples:

1. Existe solo una solución posible, permitida, razonable y lógica. Si dicha solución intentada una y otra vez no ha producido aún el efecto deseado hay que aplicarla con más esmero y más fuerza.
2. Bajo ninguna circunstancia hay que dudar del presupuesto de que existe solo una solución al problema; solo su aplicación puede ser cuestionada y refinada para hacerla más efectiva.

“Manteniendo alejados a los elefantes”

Si la historia anterior enfoca en cómo hacer para mantener un problema, la siguiente enfoca en como podemos también perpetuar problemas cuando los evadimos.

Una persona caminando por ahí se encuentra con otra que no para de aplaudir un par de veces cada tantos minutos.  Cuando se le pregunta por el motivo de tal “extraña” acción reponde: “para mantener alejados a los elefantes”.  ¿Elefantes? Pero si no hay ninguno por aquí dice sorprendida la persona que venía caminando.  A lo cual quien aplaude cada tanto con certeza ahora confirmada responde: “Justamente”.

Nuestras historias personales reproducidas a través de filtros de nuestro lenguaje, así como nuestras experiencias en relación con sus respectivos contextos son eventos que plasmamos en una narrativa que no refleja una realidad objetiva sino que formula aquellos encuentros y desencuentros que “aprendimos” a destacar. En el mejor de los casos las historias de una región son un combinado de muchas perspectivas, algunas de las cuales se mantienen incuestionables de generación en generación.

Cómo definir los problemas que importan y qué hacer con ellos requiere reformulaciones si no constantes al menos periódicas, donde cierta tensión entre las distintas versiones puede ser mucho mas informativa que los grandes acuerdos mantenidos sobre esto y lo otro. Si deseamos que algo cambie y que algo nuevo florezca tal vez debamos aprender a buscar novedades en los lugares más insospechados y lograr pequeños cambios sin hacer mucho ruido… para no quedar atrapados en las mismas viejas (muy viejas…) conversaciones históricas.

Link to the clip in YouTube. It’s a long clip but it’s also easy to follow for Harford is an excellent storyteller.

The author of several books and a financial reporter of the Financial Times, Tim Harford interviewed experts in many fields, (including domino contests) to try to understand how tightly coupled complex systems work, especially when something goes wrong. As systems thinkers tend to do, he observes that certain problems require a different set of thinking tools to those you would use if you were just trying to describe or solve a simple problem.  Rather than looking for an immediate solution,  you might want to focus on the series of relative actions that circumvent the problem. This form of inquiry  often times facilitates a re-definition of the problem, which doesn’t call for a redesign in so much as it may need the development of productive actions and evolutionary strategies.  This type of thinking is what Francisco Varela proposed in 1988 with his essay that responded to Royal Dutch Shell Corporation’s request for cognitive tools to “better understand a complex system that is also a learning system“.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson would also argue that redesigning programs per se won’t be having much of an impact on underlying realities and embodied practice. Having better devices, study manuals and control systems as are for instance, more costly evaluation systems in education, a new ministry of gender issues or a new and costly building to deal with technology and innovation, mean nothing more than a costly expenditure if  we don’t follow through by meaningfully engaging with actual failures and learnings. As a cultural trait we tend to focus on given models and representations of things, and a lot of it is useful, but we forget that many of the “things” we are dealing with are “not things, but activities”, evolving (or not) human activities. Lakoff and Johnson who studied and wrote extensively about “the metaphors we live by”, namely about discourse, linguistics and mind, challenge many of our given thinking mechanisms and concepts.

The new book by Tim Harford “Adapt. Why success always starts with failure.” seems to be arguing in favor of adaptive learning activities and experimentation:

“The world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex… we must adapt -improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather great leaps forward“. (Tim Harford – Adapt web site)

When I was a kid I trained long hours every day to be the tennis pro that I was never going to be.  My school had two tennis courts but they were usually empty as the double program implied 8-9 hrs doing class work and the school administration favored hockey during the gym hours. But my family was a “tennis” informed one, so my days ended around 9PM at night after a couple of hours training with sparring partners in different tennis clubs. That was much more fun than the dreaded weekends when we’d drive to 3 or 4 different clubs to participate in tournaments with the national ranking as a goal. By the age of 17 I was done with tennis competition, to the dismay of my parents.  It was time for them to mind their own business and so they did. And I went back to full time study for the O Levels and a lot of catching up with socializing with the other school kids.

I let go of tennis for a while until a couple years later I visited the Esalen Institute in California and by chance I noticed a “zen tennis” workshop led by a former pro. It blew my mind:  he was instructing players to “keep the ball in play” and to  ”learn to go with the changing flow…” precisely the part of playing tennis that I had liked so much!  Take a look at this site I just found, on How to Practice Zen Tennis. It’s got good hints.

In learning a language as in developing a meaningful conversation with others a co-operating attitude is required as a basis of exchange and building on common factors to start with. In tennis, just like with any sport,  you can learn the rules and find more about techniques, concepts and different perspectives all over the place,  but eventually you’ll have to put in many hours of actual practice with a pro who can help you do some scaffolding to start enjoying the game.   In tennis á la zen, players need to pay attention and stay focused on the ball, but they also need to flow and follow the movement of the other players,  adapt to the style or match it in a way to collaborate and keep the ball in play.

Gregory Bateson used to say, that knowledge as such will be a function of the thresholds of our own perception, in terms of resources and structures. (Mind and Nature; Gregory Bateson, 1979).

If you are asking yourself what the heck has this got to do with language and communication … that would involve a conversation and you are invited to contact me in mentalsys in Facebook or in Twitter.

Regarding the practice of Tennis, if you’re interested visit: Tennis en Asturias in Facebook and/or follow Tennis en Asturias in Twitter.