How can a man fail to finish a fortnight of blogging without a comment on the worlds’ number one golfer? Obviously I cannot. But it is not really the golf thing on which I want to comment. How can people think about what Tiger has accomplished in sport and his life in a balanced way?
It seems that a gender argument is a must. It seems that blame focussed on Tiger is a must. It seems like, the very attractive young women were somehow seduced into a relationship with this married family man through no real activity on their part, well no, we know that can’t really be true. His sponsors, horrified by the assault on family values and the consequent threat to their brand image and thus sales.
So, what is all the hoo haa about, really, I mean he has not assaulted any young women or even engaged with them in any way against their will. It is not like every one of the young women did not know he was married to another attractive young woman with whom he had children of whom he was very fond. Hmmm… so what reeeaaally is this about. Apart from his wife who we might all assume has a legitimate cause to be angry and upset, and his children, what is it about him and his behaviour that at its core gets us all going?
What about it got you going?
Phill Boas
And au revoir
How could I finish this fortnight as a guest blogger without tackling the two juiciest issues of the week. So for the first:
The world engaging in a climate change binge. Why am I being so cynical? Well what are we 6 climbing to 7 or 8 billion people, well even to me that’s a big number. We are totally committed to money and growth and that means every business and every government with growing hunger for more money in the public purse and more profit in the business sphere and an insatiable urge for the new and different and better, both smaller and bigger and faster and …
So, is it really our hope that even though we want more and more and better and better for everyone everywhere, we will be able to do this without polluting our atmosphere? That is, assuming that it is us tiny billions of polluting creatures and not the sun and thus cosmic realities beyond our control that are heating our atmosphere i.e. assuming that it is actually heating. It would seem to a naive observer like myself that we are still engaged, globally, with attempting to deal with what would seem to be a real issue, purely by indulging in discussions about the symptoms. I mean, what really do we need to be talking about. Really?
Phill Boas
I wondered today if I was alone in a futile search for the opportunity to make up my own mind about where to park my car. I was in a part of town where there were less than half a dozen cars in the street but the signs said No Standing.
I happen to know the area well and the street was likely to be uncluttered for at least the next few hours. But, last time I used my initiative it cost me a fine. So, I followed the signs because I feared the fine even though common sense told me that obeying the signs was actually both unnecessary with regard to the purpose they had been put there and irrational, though legal!
I did not feel proud of myself and I did not feel virtuous, but really somewhat cowardly and frustrated. Then I wondered why I was wasting emotional energy on the most trivial of bureaucratic control processes and realised that it was really because this was the thinnest edge of an iceberg of much greater proportions.
I actually begun to wonder where it was in our society today that we were supposed to develop our own moral compass and our own sense of appropriate social responsibility.
I also realise I could have used much more potent examples bus somehow the trivial seemed to suit my energy at the time.
Phill Boas
I was assailed at the airport the other day with a diabolically difficult choice, Dunkin Doughnuts, Crispy Creams, the ones that sit in the coffee shop casements looking a bit dry and unloved or those strange little dry ones that someone is making for you whist you wait and that they dip in very tantalising cinnamon sugar. It became very stressful, the choice I mean. Well there were the calories to consider, the size, the minimum number you had to purchase, whether to have coffee or hot chocolate with, whether to buy some to take home for later when you are absolutely certain you will only throw them out.
So, I looked around for something that might stimulate my taste but more than the doughnuts, MacDonald’s and Hungry Jacks somehow failed to move me, noodles was not what I needed, the confectionary bars looked only vaguely tempting.
I made one last sortie past the ‘these are the most expensive chocolates you will ever get the opportunity to but here at the airport with no one watching what obscene range of near flawless sweet and fattening things you could wish for.
In the end I walked up and down the causeway about 10 times before my flight was called and felt a surge of virtue at my self-control, specially as I had walked past Crispy Crème’s at least 5 times.
About once a day I make the fundamental error of either turning on the radio and hearing a news broadcast or watching the news on TV. Big mistake.
I usually feel, either I have tuned in to an advert for something, by someone who has something to flog, but no necessary brand name, or I am being introduced to a message about the faith I should have in the brand ‘science’.
Since when did something become right because someone, calling themselves a scientist, and quite possibly not only being one but being a really smart one, claims to have proven something. I was always taught that science was not a way to prove anything, what happened to the null hypothesis?
I mistakenly believe, apparently, that tiny incremental bit by tiny incremental bit we weed out what is not actually correct about the way the world works, and so finally one day we will sort of understand a bit about ourselves and our world. So, how come I keep being told that today scientists have proven something, either that every adult with half a brain has known for the last millennium or that some study that covers a microcosm of existence has at last proven the truth of something?
Whether it is about climate change, where the truths of various kinds are vehemently told by variously funded ‘scientists’ or about how some new insight from the field of say Biology has now at last answered some fundamental question. Why are we supposed to be given nothing to think about, nothing to debate, nothing to wonder about? What makes the sound bite, the tiny fragment of information, so valuable and acceptable to us today?
Phill Boas
For years I have seriously and semi systematically read the right books, the ones everyone recommends, the ones with really great messages, or good concepts or models I could use. Not the ones from the book clubs or the reading groups, not the ones with the glossy covers on the bookstands or at the front of the bookshops. I also managed to avoid ones about really important topics, like the latest research on the environment sponsored by ‘save our endangered species’ or the ‘green forever’ groups. Cynic I hear you cry.
Well, deciding what to read is not a simple matter, I try the sci fi and every now and then one of them really grabs my attention. I read the detective stories, and some of them, like the majority of PD James and Frost and Morse they please me. Then I tried the mortuary set; they died, but you can hardly believe the exciting data in the gruesome and no longer living tissue. Decided that there was something excessively morbid and whilst loaded with seemingly stimulating science problem solving; not really my thing.
If I am about to get a flight, should I find myself sitting next to that enormously important executive who has this swathe of figures to peruse and commit to memory, or use to make some mind bogglingly difficult decision about whether to buy some unfortunate business to merge its capabilities and books his, with of course the usual round of redundancies. Or, should I give up and just enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s latest clever collection of reassembled data go grasp an especially titillating concept to share with my colleagues.
Oh hell, I brought my computer, time to enjoy my 230th run through of M.A.S.H.
For my sins ‘ what a perfectly stupid phrase’ I am an involved in executive education. Once we ran workshops that lasted for 3 months residential, then we ran 1 month residential, now we run 3, 5 days or sometimes, rarely one or two weeks, but mostly 3 or 5 days.
On a nostalgic day I consider what we are able to teach and offer as learning in these absurdly short time periods compared to what we could be offering and I look at the news broadcasts, clearly intended for individuals with the attention span of a gnat. And, I wonder, what is it about doing very rapid things in very short periods of time that is so attractive to the human mind. What is it that makes these teensy weensy sound bites, Twitter-like pieces, seem so worthwhile?
Are we perhaps managing to avoid any seriously deep development, any periods of serious discomfort, any intensities that might disturb us? Have we perhaps reached a place where thinking too hard or feeling too much is not seen as a page in the learning lexicon?
In an economically rational world where too few people are being asked to do too much for too little in too short a time, where is the time to reflect and consider possibly more intelligent options? We are removed by this manipulative process from the need to consider the sanity of our actions, either toward money, growth or learning.
So nice to have a rave from day to day with no-one too concerned about how sane it is.
Sometimes I find myself climbing on board a aircraft and looking at the seating, I can see and then feel the excruciating discomfort of being treated like a relatively insignificant product, my comfort of no real concern for the airline, my quality of travel experience a figment of their marketing department spin.
I cannot help wondering to what level of insignificance do we put ourselves when, like sheep we sit and take it in these cattle pens that transport us in our hundreds across the country.
I wonder why we agree to be so uncomfortable for the profit of their system, why we don’t simply refuse to accept the diabolical conditions of economy and cheap flight. The I sink back into my somnambulistic trance and wait to get there.
Am I really alone?
As your guest blogger I am indulging my various prejudices and idiosyncratic concerns. Today its problem solving incompetence! Seems to me that there is a lot of this sort of incompetence around and maybe someone should sound off about it to reduce his level of generic angst.
When The City of Melbourne issues permits to an extraordinary number of all night drinking establishments (oh I mean clubs) in one street with obscene numbers of people allowed in each, and when said patrons, in an inebriated and aggressive state totter out onto the streets, it is really not too surprising that nightly people get seriously injured and occasionally killed or maimed for life.
My difficulty is, that we always seem to think that the only solution is to either put more policed on the streets or set up sobriety shelters or at least do some utterly absurd ‘finger in the dyke ‘ act, deal with the symptom.
Well, why would we not try and explore the extensive range of people and groups and systems and in fact the entire linked causal chain, the multiple causality that lies at the heart of every such difficulty.
We could start by being curious about the entire collection of stakeholders who have a part in this problem. Parents! Oh of course, they had something to do with it, teachers, and schools, The government who tax cigarettes to the limit to ???why is it,, um to get money for…, from tobacco …., anyway you know and who don’t tax alcohol at anything like that level because…. Well you know,,, and then there’s the Police, they of course are supposed to be able to fix all this, like in some special miraculous way? And then there are the Councils and the Club Owners and there are probably another dozen or more stakeholder groups but — hands up all those who believe that these groups contain people with the intelligence and the social skills and the relationship skills and the social concerns to actually engage with this issue, “Oh and is that hand in the corner –you – ‘tooth fairy’”
Phill Boas
Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.
© COPYRIGHT 2025