My first career breakthrough came when Jim Crompton, then Chairman of the Defence Research Laboratories in Adelaide invited me to work with him. To be his first-ever, executive assistant. Crikey. I wasn’t a scientist, or a technologist. I thought of myself more as a managerial ‘jack of all trades.’
When I stood outside his office, there in my late 20s, my nervousness must have been obvious. Jim’s secretary Phyllis said, “Richard, he’s only a man. And, he’s good at answering questions. So, don’t assume anything, just ask.”
Great advice from Phyllis. It wasn’t too long before Jim said to me, “Richard, you always ask the hard questions. And, if you want an answer you’ll have to go to Canberra.”
After 30 years of asking hard questions, I was working in Canberra as part of a 3-year reform program. You might have noticed how, as reform takes shape, details accumulate until the accumulated detail takes over. Each segment of reform builds a life of its own. People become their organisation and one story becomes many stories. Well, that’s where we were.
The questioner in me dared to ask, “What’s the narrative here? How do these things fit together now? And, why can’t the leaders answer me?” This time, the questions were thrown right back at me.
Do we live with perennial hope of technology saving the planet from the pollution of the industrial revolution? That somehow the fourth industrial revolution will save us.
On 23 September, the 2019 Climate Summit meets in New York to “showcase a leap in collective national political ambition and it will demonstrate massive movements in the real economy in support of the agenda. Together, these developments will send strong market and political signals… ” It’s highly ambitious, and perhaps it needs to be so.
At the last Climate Summit in Paris, Australia’s message pinned hope that “environmentally friendly technology and innovation will be the force to arrest climate change.”
Reductionist thinking is killing us and much of life on the planet as we know it. And while we know we need to change the way we’re thinking , I was reminded today that “we cannot take the salt out of the broth ” – reductionist thinking is here to stay. So, how do we add to it to reduce the “salinity” of how we’re acting and thinking?
The Hawking Challenge : disprove Professor Stephen Hawking’s hypothesis that humanity has 100 years in which to leave Earth and colonize another planet in our galaxy.
In Article 2019-001, I explored why he might be challenging us to disprove his hypothesis.
Do you ever wonder why pre-school kids always ask why, and do it irrepressibly so? Yet, somewhere along the way we forget the value of that most fundamental question, and we stop asking it.
At the outset, let me be clear. This is not another post about “finding your why”. As fashionable as that is right now, “my why” is as contextual to me as yours is to you, and unless and until we share the same context, it’s likely not to be helpful to you. I believe there's more value in exploring the practice of asking why, and why 'asking why' seems to be sliding off the scale. And, ask what we can do about it.
As a parent of two wonderful daughters and grandparent of four (ages 12-19), I reckon I’ve seen a sliding scale of development that goes something like this.
We all live two lives. The second one begins when we realise we have only one life.
