Category Archives: Business

Who moved my cheese?

Books, Business, Climate Change, Fiction, Psychology

I was rather amused recently to pick up the little fable ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’, which my daughter had picked up on her travels. Published in 1998 and written by Spencer Johnson, this was apparently a massive bestseller, interpreted for some reason as being about business – although it’s about business no more and no less than any other area of human life. It deals with basic questions about human motivation and responses to change. Its core message is, interestingly enough, about the Middle Way in some respects, though it also seems to slightly miss the point in some others.

What enables this fable to get straight to the point is the way it strips down the complexity of human experience, by setting the story in an apparent endless (almost Borgesian) maze and reducing the focus of all human desires and values to ‘cheese’. We don’t know where ‘cheese’ comes from, or what rules, if any, determine its appearance in the maze (we don’t need to know). All we know is that it appears in the maze from time to time and is the only goal for the characters in the fable. I imagine that Johnson must have started his fable as being about mice in a maze in a psychological experiment, but then decided that mice did not reflect the complexity of human nature closely enough. So instead we have four characters – two mice and two ‘Littlepeople’ (humans that are the same size as mice, and in the same situation).

The mice, Sniff and Scurry, are mainly just a contrast with the Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, said to behave in more straightforward ways due to their smaller brains. This was one area that I found unconvincing, because it seems likely that mice could also get into the same kinds of problems that the Littlepeople do. The problem that frames the story is that all four characters have been accustomed to finding cheese in one place, ‘Cheese Station C’, but then it dwindles and disappears. The mice quickly adapt and scurry off to sniff out cheese elsewhere, but the humans are cognitively attached to only getting  cheese in that one place, so they continually rationalise their belief that the cheese will start coming there again. Of the two LIttlepeople, Hem is so stuck that he never leaves Cheese Station C, and gets thinner and thinner, but eventually, with many struggles, Haw overcomes his fear of change and goes off to look for cheese elsewhere. Eventually, of course, he finds it.

So what does this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, the Middle Way is the avoidance of absolutisation, which means getting stuck in particular beliefs that one takes to be the whole story. This is exactly what Hem does, as he absolutises his belief that cheese will return to Cheese Station C and keeps going back there day after day. Haw, on the other hand, illustrates the positive process of the practice of the Middle Way, as he gradually starts to think more provisionally and consider other possibilities. The contrast between them illustrates the adaptivity of the Middle Way – namely, the way in which avoiding absolutisation allows us to face up to changed conditions. To take an overwhelming parallel from the present, Hem could be seen as a climate change denier, stuck in old patterns of thinking, whilst Haw is someone who gradually faces up to the high probability that the ‘cheese’ of a habitable range of planetary temperatures is dwindling and may be about to disappear entirely.

However, there are also aspects of the Middle Way that I think the fable misses. The chief one of these is the tendency for absolutisation to come in opposed pairs of opposites, the attractiveness of which is so strong that the rejection of one absolute is almost bound to result at least temporarily in the adoption of the opposite extreme. This would result in Haw not just reluctantly starting to look for new cheese, but suddenly being struck, as by a revelation, of the falsehood of his previous belief of the Second Coming of cheese to Cheese Station C. He then might become slightly manic in his search for cheese elsewhere, or indeed might fixate on one other alternative cheese station where he believes it’s bound to be. Giving up on absolutes is not just a binary switch from one view to another, but involves a process of navigation between extremes, with constant adjustment and re-adjustment. There is no sign in the fable that Johnson gets this aspect of psychology, constantly illustrated as it is by human behaviour.

Johnson’s attribution of the ‘stuck’ state to one of the Littlepeople rather than to the mice also seems questionable to me, because it assumes that mice don’t get stuck – i.e. that it’s a uniquely human trait arising from our large brains. However, all other mammals and birds have the same bilateral brain structure that we do, which presumably means that the goal-oriented left hemisphere in other animals can become over-dominant just as it can for us. You don’t necessarily have to have a representation in language, as humans do, to be implicitly convinced that your image of the world is absolutely correct. The monkey trap, in which monkeys who put their hand in a jar to get food are trapped by the narrow aperture of the jar as long as they won’t let go of the food, would be an example of another species getting ‘stuck’ in the same way. So I’m not sure that Spencer could not have written a more straightforward fable that was just about mice, rather than inventing ‘Littlepeople’ who are in the position of mice.

In the Wikipedia article on ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’ (which you could read for an alternative summary of the story), one of the criticisms that have been made of it is mentioned. Managers have apparently given the book out to their employees to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to re-structuring or redundancy – a procedure that obviously involves interpreting the story far too narrowly. The employees could just as reasonably give the book to their managers to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to a demand for better pay and conditions! The conditions we need to adapt to are not those created by those who have assumed authority, because those people could also do some adapting in solidarity with others, rather than adopting the demand for provisionality as a tool of power. The people who give and take away the cheese are not the managers but rather the conditions that really are beyond our control, and perhaps even our explanation. The use or abuse of the story in business seems to have contributed to a lack of understanding of its universality.

So, I wouldn’t make excessive claims for this little book. You’re unlikely to get very much more from reading it than you will from my summary or that on Wikipedia. It offers some insights, but also lacks a few more. Nevertheless, it is interesting that it has apparently struck such a chord with its readers and been so accessible. It may be worth picking up if, as it did for me, it crosses your path.

 

 

The ‘3.5% rule’, stubborn minorities and tipping points

Activism, Books, Business, Climate Change, Middle Way Philosophy, Politics, Systems Theory, ,

The recent protests in the UK by Extinction Rebellion have stimulated discussion of the so called ‘3.5% rule’, that 3.5% of population need to join a protest movement for it to succeed. This is based on research by Erica Chernoweth, which is discussed in this BBC article. Chernoweth looked at a variety of protest movements, and found they tended to succeed if they reached that threshold, as we see for instance in the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960’s and quite recently in the overthrow of  Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

How can a whole society be changed by such a relatively small proportion of people? It all depends how determined they are – but if they have taken to the streets, even willing to face arrest or potential violence, they are obviously resolved. This research seems to offer an example of a much wider property of systems, whereby it only takes a relatively small but unyielding element of a system to force a modification in the way the whole system operates. I have come across this same point discussed from different standpoints in two other places: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Skin in the Game (2018) and Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000).

Taleb talks about the power of stubborn minorities, giving the example of orthodox Jews who want food labelled kosher obliging US food manufacturers to include it on their label. The proportion of orthodox Jews in the US is, according to Taleb, only 0.3%, but nevertheless, because this 0.3% were very definite and uncompromising about what they wanted, and because it did not require any great sacrifice on a food manufacturer’s part to label kosher food as such, they did so. So you may not need anything like as much as 3.5% if not too much is demanded of everyone else.

Taleb’s other example is the gradual replacement of Muslims for Coptic Christians in the population of Egypt. The Copts are now a minority of about 10% of the Egyptian population, but after the Muslim takeover in the eighth century they were the great majority. The Muslims were tolerant and did not force anyone to convert. What made the difference, however, is that Muslims refused to contract marriage with anyone who did not convert to Islam. All it took was that degree of unyieldingness, over many centuries of just a trickle of mixed marriages, for the Coptic majority to become a minority.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point approaches the same phenomenon from the standpoint, not of minority resistance, but of minority enthusiasm. He offers story after story of new products or ideas that suddenly ‘took off’: hush puppies, Blue’s Clues, The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The apparent causes of them doing so are not consistent, but in every case a kind of group epidemic occurred: the product suddenly ‘went viral’ after passing a ‘tipping point’. The sales chart started rising, not arithmetically, but exponentially. It’s clear that there are lots of reinforcing (or closed) feedback loops going on that are leading more and more people to adopt the product, because it has become a mark of acceptance by the group to do so.

What does all this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, it seems likely to me that what is often, though not always, going on, when people reach a tipping point of this kind, is absolutisation. People get into feedback loops in which the desire for the new thing (or rejection of the old thing) is driven by obsessive desire for social acceptance (or fear of losing it), and such feedback loops have the effect of producing sudden exponential change. That change is easy for even a very small group to achieve when the sacrifices demanded are small and the resistance is low (as in labelling kosher food), and require the magic 3.5% when there is some resistance, but the majority resistors are still much less strongly motivated than the minority.

But do minorities always only get what they want through absolutisation? I suggested that absolutisation may often be the source of the unyieldingness, but not always. Instead, it must be possible to be unyielding for far more justifiable and considered reasons – that one is confident of one’s cause, that it is supported by good evidence, and that it is far better justified than any alternative view. This, I hope, is what we are seeing with the campaigns of Extinction Rebellion. All the evidence I have seen so far suggests that they are very careful to try to combine a sense of urgency with calm. We need to ‘panic’ in the sense of acting urgently in response to the climate emergency, but not to ‘panic’ in the sense of locking ourselves into closed feedback loops of obsession or anxiety. This suggests that a tipping point can be reached, on a genuinely important issue, by following the Middle Way rather than any absolutized belief.

However, we also need to beware of the same phenomenon being utilised by absolutists, whether it is to advertise a product, spread a conspiracy theory through social media, or get people to accept a simple idea (like Brexit) that is grasped at as a false solution to complex problems. It takes a lot of effort and difficulty to reach a tipping point without absolutisation – but to do it with absolutisation seems so much easier! Fast thinking and easy solutions are always appealing, but there is no alternative to the harder road to the tipping point if you want to make the world a better place.

 

Picture by Michal Parzuchowski (Unsplash)

The MWS Podcast 135: Anthony McCann on the Garaiocht Manifesto

Business, Culture, Podcast,

We’re joined this week by the creative and versatile polymath Anthony McCann. As a keynote speaker, after-dinner speaker, consultant, coach, trainer, and facilitator, he inspires people to reimagine and redesign their relationships, working environments, and communities through a better understanding of proximity, power, and possibility in their lives.
His work is based on 20 years of original research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences, and also of practitioner experience in leadership, community development, and performing arts. He’s here to talk to us today about ‘The Garaiocht Manifesto’ . More an invitation than a message. When it comes to professional life, trust your humanity. The Manifesto offers a human-scale and humane set of principles for sustaining the heart of being human in the art of being human in professional life.


Click here to view other podcasts