See Things as They Are—Then Change Them
Don’t read this post while eating.
In college I spent part of a summer at John Denver’s Windstar program in Colorado. We ate macrobiotic food, slept in teepees, practiced Aikido, and were treated to lectures by Buckminster Fuller — inside the teepees. Windstar had a pithy water-conservation saying for the toilets: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down.” Which is certainly one way of handling it.
I was recently in Amsterdam, and the Dutch have a more ingenious way of handling “it.” Instead of one flush lever, there are two — one large and one small — for two different volumes of water, depending on what the job calls for. When I figured out why there were two levers, I had one of those confusingly satisfying “Why didn’t someone think of that before?” moments.
A few of my other favorites:
Countdown clocks on pedestrian “walk” signs. How stupid was it for us all to bet our lives on when the sign was going to change?
The 60-mile long Breast Cancer 3-Day walks. Why were charity walkathons always 10 kilometers long? Who made up that rule? Why not create a really long walk and ask for larger donations?
The escalators in London that only turn on only when they detect someone entering, instead of running constantly, even when empty. Genius!
Kiva. Why not ask people to loan money instead of donate it? Who says that the donation has to be the only financial instrument for the expression of compassion?
Wheels on suitcases. For decades we struggled through airports, sweating and exhausted, lugging our luggage around (that’s why it’s called luggage) before it dawned on anyone that we could put wheels on the suitcases.
What each of these innovations has in common is that none of them required a new technology. Just add a second valve to the toilet, a sensor to the escalator, some numbers to the digital pedestrian display that’s already there, a some distance to a walkathon. Add the oldest tool in the universe to the suitcases.
This is the power of asking why. Why does this thing work this way? Why not turn it upside down? Why not put it in water?
It’s not as easy as it sounds. To ask “why” is to ponder the is-ness of something, and to do that one has to be fully present in the moment. But human beings are addicted to living in the past or in the future or in our anxiety — anywhere other than the here and now. Business leaders are the worst offenders. Rarely are we truly present, seeing things for what they are and what they are not.
We don’t notice the escalator running nonstop because we’re too busy worrying about whether we’ll make our flight. We don’t realize we’re betting out lives in the crosswalk because we’re mentally rehashing the meeting we just came from. More often than not we see life through a barely translucent movie screen in our minds that is running nine shows at once. These inputs deafen and blind us to reality. It is a testament to our capacity for unconsciousness that we hefted luggage around airports for decades before anyone thought to put wheels on the suitcases. We literally couldn’t see that they didn’t have them.
You have to ponder the reality of a thing before you can ponder a new vision for that thing. Before it can occur to you that there could be two different flush volumes for a toilet it has to occur to you that there is presently only one. That requires zen-master presence.
It is the power of now, to borrow Eckhart Tolle’s phrase, that gives us access to the power of why. No presence in the moment, no innovation. No now, no new. This is not taught in B-school. In fact, the B-school culture encourages the opposite of it. The hectic pace of our information overload existence makes us think that there’s no time to be present. The truth is, our time is too valuable not to be present. The opportunity cost of worry, anxiety, stress, and incessant activity in terms of unmanifested innovation alone is inestimable.
Presence is a muscle that has to be developed. The more we develop it, the more we will see its rewards, and the more we will be incentivized to exercise it.
If we take the time to be quiet, be still, and be present, we may start to see things we haven’t seen before — things that have been right in front of our eyes. And those are the things that change the world.
