WALK ON BY

Dionne Warwick sung this in 1964. Bill Baccharat and Hal David wrote it.

“Foolish pride…that's all that I have left….” Those lyrics floated round my head as I walked and walked and walked last week.

Walking isn’t anything new.  We used to walk vast distances across continents.

Dickens walked 25 miles through the night from London to Rochester creating plots and giving birth to characters. Bill Sykes was conceived on the A2. Wordsworth who trudged over fell and dale in the Lake District was reckoned by his substance-abusing friend Thomas de Quincey to have walked 180,000 miles during his lifetime. Oxford Dons used to walk alongside the River Cherwell talking, thinking and debating.

Ferris Jabr wrote a piece in the New Yorker in 2014 entitled “Why walking helps us think” in which he said:

“Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight.”

We live trapped in front of PC screens in air conditioned offices thinking in an air conditioned way. Recycled ideas collide in our dulled, aching minds.

Last week a client-friend and I walked through London. We didn’t walk that far, just six miles give or take, but for a sedentary chap like me that seemed a long way. A long way in retrospect because at the time it seemed like a gentle stroll being constantly stimulated; an agenda-less conversation with intellectual diversions as they occurred. We even walked into a couple of churches - the Brompton Oratory and a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens. On our journey we needed peace which we found in both, as well as inspiration.

We wandered through Hyde, Green and St James’ Park. We admired Nile Geese in the latter, the Ove Arup exhibition in the V&A - “the Philosophy of Total Design”.  How wonderful to find an eccentric genius who made a fortune and made people laugh. His lyrics and doodles are funny and insightful.

So we discovered walking? No we rediscovered the joy of discovery. Here’s Jabr again:
“When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps.”

We made a series of mental footsteps in puzzling over a series of issues and stumbling over a set of possible resolutions. We wrote nothing down, although I was able afterwards to produce a pretty well word perfect version of the discussion just by recalling a place - Harrods - or a situation - the Black Swan or an incredible, buzzy, joy overflowing early supper in the Wolseley.

It felt like a particularly happy time.

Walking liberates thinking, creativity and peace - try it.

CIVILISATION IS THE REAL ISSUE

This will be read when I am in Europe. Yes, I’m depressed by the Referendum-Shambles and even the prospect of a Euro-Divorce (are we insane?) so I’ve fled to Venice and left my proxy vote at home in safe hands.

As I walked through Brighton yesterday a tough looking, crop haired, wiry girl (probably an off duty copper I thought) said to her friend:  “So we want less interference from bloody Brussels right? No one tells us what to do. Correction - no-one tells me what to do.”

It was the rolling plod of her walk and the “you are nicked” tone of her talk that suggested she was a copper - life is full of such first impressions.

And what has struck me throughout this gruesome debate is the oil and water mix of an argument about money and an argument about sovereignty. Add to this a bubbling “we don’t like Johnny Foreigner” ingredient and you have a complete Eton Mess.

 
Politics is ill served by its main protagonists right now. Most of the people I most dislike are politicians - shifty, cocky and furtively looking as though they are “up to no good.”   But I am in Venice chewing my finger nails and wondering why all the Europeans I’ve recently met seem nicer and more sensible than many of my neighbours and the Brexits.

Yet this isn’t a simple either/or decision. It’s more nuanced than that. What it really involves is defining the sort of world we want to live in. I love the idea of living in this the biggest-economy-united-states of the world which has an asset I prize and the world as a whole prizes above all others.

Civilisation…

We have in this vast “kingdom” the greatest art, music, creativity and sense of humour (yes even Germany - watch Klaus Myers) but most of all we have the best food, drink and civilised conversation. If Jesus returned he’d come to Continental Europe (sorry not the Green and pleasant land of Britain).

My cleverest soothsayers tell me not to worry that the result of “remain” by a wide margin is a foregone conclusion. Drink Prosecco. Relax. Celebrate.

Relax?

The problem is discovering 50% of the UK comprises people that I don’t want to live with anymore.
‘Once you’ve decided to start an argument you have to be prepared to finish it’…I’m sure someone said that once but I wish they hadn’t because it’s completely wrong. The survival of the human race (no less) depends on not finishing arguments.

In recent years the derided (by some), undemocratic EU has been brilliant at nudging us towards compromises and liberal consensus. We have abandoned the idea of fighting as our default mode and when we revert, as we did in Iraq, the results are not great. As with the Arab Spring violent disruption tends to be a bad thing.

I’m in Venice looking at great paintings and talking to gentle Venetians.

Please vote for civilisation.

   

CREATIVITY GETS VERY EASILY BLOCKED. BEWARE!

When it comes to creative thinking most of us get blocked by inner voices asking “what if?” or posing the question “just suppose x happens...” The fear of rejection looms larger than the anticipation of success and so long as it does we are driving our creativity with the handbrake on.

And here’s the hardest question of all that I once saw – “if whatever you decide to do next could not fail what would that be?”  The terrifying thing is you have things like “create world peace” and “end of all disease” to beat and then you wonder whether either of those might have an explosive impact on  population growth so terrible that the expression “be careful what you wish for” would come home to roost rather smugly. Creativity needs a bit of grit in the oyster to achieve really great results. Human beings handle perfection uneasily.

In fact most people are lacking in confidence when it comes to creative thinking. They think they are reasonably intelligent but weak at creativity. In self-assessment tests respondents scored themselves at 7/10 for intelligence but only at 4.5/10 for creativity. In removing the most obvious blocks we have to realise that our brain has a habit of lying to us. Yes inside our heads is a congenital fibber.

In research tests where people are asked to solve a problem involving moving a weight from position A to position B and the answer is to swing the weight on a rope pendulum (an obvious solution once seen) they will deny having had any help to get there despite the questioner brushing the rope and giving strong hints.

Yes, I’m sorry to say the creative muscle in our head tells great whoppers. It’s also a brilliant film editor cutting and editing our memory so our “honest” recollection of history is (how shall I put it?) especially favourable to us. We are heroes in our own memories. We are tolerant, kind and liberal. By the way if you want to find out what you really are deep down try the “Implicit Association Test” (implicit.harvard.edu/‎). You may be a little surprised.

Creativity is massively impeded if we meet a cynic. There are a variety of terrible expressions cynics have mastered which act like a right hook on our ability to think lucidly, imaginatively and come up with ideas:

 “Well, anyway…”, “in the meantime…”, “mind you…”, “let me think about it”… (that means “no” in plain English), “suppose for the sake of argument…”, “with the greatest respect”…, “that’s all very well but…”

Assumptions stifle creativity; assumptions that our ideas won’t meet approval, that the audience won’t laugh or assumptions that the worst will happen.  This also happens in institutionalised bureaucracies where the assumption exists that creativity is a bit flippant and “not for us.”

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson