Unpredictable Patterns #48: Now - navigating the three times
Co-constructing the present, negotiating the past and understanding political futures
Dear reader,
The winter weather in Stockholm is glorious today, with a bit of sun. Yesterday, I baked some traditional saffron buns and thought about a subject that has come up in a few conversations lately - the question of how we understand the concept of “now” and what we can learn from it. I benefitted greatly from discussing this with AK and RY - thank you both.
Time is weird
All in all, time is weird. Even Aristotle seems to have found it weird. Look at what he writes about ”now” in the Physics:
”For what is ’now’ is not a part: a part is a measure of the whole, which must be made up of parts. Time, on the other hand, is not held to be made up of ’nows’.
Again, the ’now’ which seems to bound the past and the future-does it always remain one and the same or is it always other and other? It is hard to say. ”
You know you are in trouble if Aristotle grumbles that it is ”hard to say”. But there is something in his sketch here that is worth digging into, and that is that time is not made up of nows. There is something that happens to the now as it transforms into past, and Aristotle sees clearly that the past is not just a bunch of nows and the future is not just a bunch of thens.
Our now is not seconds and minutes, it is not linear - but what does that mean?
Aristotle was not alone to be worried about the now. According to philosopher Rudolf Carnap Einstein also worried about what now could mean to modern physics. Carnap writes:
”He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. So he concluded “that there is something essential about the Now which is just outside of the realm of science.”
So, if both Aristotle and Einstein found the question of now hard, you could argue that we should back away from it carefully - right? Yet, we do understand it and there is so much in the concept that we can use even without understanding exactly what it is - it would be a missed opportunity not to explore it further and see where it can lead us.
We can start with Shintoism.
Naka-ima
Shinto lacks concepts that are clearly analogous to heaven and hell. The closest they come, some writers suggest, is the concept of naka-ima. Loosely translated this means in the middle of now. The present, here, is dissected as a place where there is a middle, and one simple interpretation would be something like this: paradise is here, in the present, and available to us if we just stop and see it. But, then, if we stop we will not see it - so this is not quite right - but the general idea is found in many different religions and spiritual practices.
From zen to the modern writer Eckart Tolle the idea of presence is lifted as the key to a better existence. The popular idea of mindfulness is based on this belief as well. Even outside of spiritual traditions the sense of now and presence is identified as a key to happiness. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed that ”flow” - the feeling of being completely immersed in the present (and hence not feeling the flow of time, paradoxically) is a key to happiness, or at least the sense of fulfillment that many of us seek. Good work is work that lifts us out of time into the present without observing it.
It places us in the middle of now. Naka-ima.
Now is a place
Now necessarily is a place. The Shinto intuition here is not just metaphorical - we have to be at some place in order to experience the now, and that is why we now think that there is no great absolute universal now - but several different nows in different places. The starry skies that stare down at us do so with a gaze that is millions of years old, and we really cannot see what is happening in some kind of now around them. It takes time for light to travel, and so the now we can experience is not just situated in space but limited by it.
One important consequence of this is that our now is always a then.
It is simplest to realize this if we think about the human body. In order to experience the present the brain needs to construct it out of all the impressions, nerve signals and sensory data that it receives. It collects a subset of all off these signals and synthesizes them into a now that you experience as a string of moments.
Now has a rhythm. The pulse with which the body does this is the flow of time for you, and so that is why you have no sense of now when you dream or sleep. Time passes differently just means that your flow of nows is being produced at a different pace.
Our now is late by about 100 milliseconds.
We can explore this by looking at different visual illusions ( a great article and list here), but we intuitively understand that it has to be true. The mind cannot take all of that data and build a now instantaneously - it will need time, and the time it takes is about 100 milliseconds.
That means that if you tend to engage in lines of business where you are likely to be shot in the head you do not need to worry about experiencing that. You will never experience the feeling of the shot, because the brain will not have time to construct it.
This realization also provides us with a possible explanation for why the aliens have not contacted us - the famous Fermi paradox. What if our aliens were enormous distributed networks of galactic size? If they were their pace of now would be calculated in millennia, and not milliseconds, and maybe our civilization will rise and fall between two of their nows!
Organizational nows
Our now is place, and it is constructed - but does this matter? In the vast number of normal cases it does not. But it provides us with a powerful mental model to think in. It is not just individuals that have a now that is both a place and a then - a constructed present - organizations do too.
Every organization has a now.
A small local company has a now that is being produced almost at the pace of the individuals in it, or near enough, but a large multinational organization has a now that is much slower.
A typical CEO in a multinational company is not living 100 milliseconds behind the present, but days, perhaps even a week later.
Think about the old Roman Empire - and the emperor. As he led the empire he would have to get data and information from around the empire, and that would arrive by horse and courier. The time it took for that ”sensory data” to reach him and for him to construct a now could easily be so long as to ensure that he had lost battles before he knew that they were being fought.
That is why highly centralized organizations tend to fail - their capability to produce a strategically effective now is simply lacking.
But there are ways in which this can be dealt with. Skilled leaders know that they need to allow for and build local nows, local presents that can solve problems that would otherwise not solvable. And here we find some interesting insights into how a leader should think about delegating power.
The minimum delegation of power is the delegation that allows for an effective distribution of nows that match the problems the organization is facing.
This, in turn, means that if you know that your customers expect you to get back in hours, and you live 8 hours away in another time zone, well, then you had better delegate that decision to the local leadership and allow them to manage their now for the best of the organization.
The trick is then to combine this delegation of nows with the creation of an organizational now that is useful and meaningful, that allows the leadership centrally to understand what is happening and how it is happening. To produce a global now from the many local ones.
Strategy depends on the logistics of the now.
Technology and the emergence of the global moment
Technology can help with this, of course. Our ability to communicate immediately with all of the world has created the experience of a single now. Global mass media and news, as well as the Internet, have together enabled us to share a single now in some sense.
This is no small change, and it is quite recent, less than a 100 years ago we had no such global now to share.
It became most obvious, I think, following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Those events played out in real time before all of our eyes, and we shared that moment as a civilization - and our generations were among the first to share the present in that way.
Is it a coincident that it was such an atrocious act of terrorism that created the shared now? Probably not - the sense of now we have must have evolved for survival, which means that we build our individual, and collective, nows on the basis of the threats that we face - and as the threats change the need for new nows and a new logistic of the now also emerges.
But it is important not to overstate the impact technology has brought. The social and political now is not the same as the sensory now - it is a now that is interpreted and debated, it is constructed at the pace of public discourse. It is faster with technology, but it is not immediate. And we do not naturally seek a global political now - but a local one.
A hypothesis here is that we seek a now that also allows us to build our identities together, that the will to a now is embedded in our will to belong to a tribe of some kind. So instead of worrying about filter bubbles, we should worry about the emergence of tribal nows.
Conspiracy theories are dangerous because they splinter our shared time, and create fragments of now that do not clock together at all.
If we look closely at how the now is constructed in the mind we see that it is based on two different processes - the collection of sensory data and the collation of that sensory data into a coherent picture. That later process is not helped by technology as much as the first one is, but it is easy to fall under the illusion that just because we have access to information faster we now share the now that seems to be implied by that information.
So, if part of leadership is the careful construction of an architecture of nows, the other part is the establishment of a shared process of construction - a sense of what we do when we build a larger shared now.
This process is key - if our brain did not filter out a lot of the sensory data we would have no now, we would be lost in timeless, eternal noise.
The personal now
Our personal nows vary. We have the moment, of course, but there is also a sense of trailing present in the week or month that we are in. We even have a sense of the year as the present time. We are at some stage in our life, in our own story.
We live in narrative nows - a number of them - and they are built on our history. Our future is charted by these narrative nows and limited by them; we cannot become something that are not becoming in the present - there has to be some narrative bridge form where we are to where we go.
Those bridges are built in the narrative now.
We have noted this before - but this is why journaling is so powerful. What you do when you journal - professionally or personally - is that you are constructing your own now. If you share it with your team you can build a collective now together as others help you interpret what you see.
The ability not just to delegate, but build shared nows, is key to building teams.
It may sound outlandish, but think about it - the sense of community and shared endeavor is dependent on the sense of a now, a sense of the present.
In fact, if we look at the three times - past, present, future - they all are managed from the present. The way we interpret the past and the way we envision the future is negotiated in the now. None of these three times is set in stone, they are all reflected through the lens of the present time.
This is true politically as well. The general trend to reappraise political leaders is clear evidence of this. A leader that was generally dismissed when they left or the source of extreme polarization when they were in power will, over time, be renegotiated into the past as something different. Raegan in the US and Gorbachev in Russia are examples of pasts that are being renegotiated in the now.
The future is also a political fact in the present. The future envisioned by a party or politicians in the now is what gives them power. The populist who paints a bleak picture of a future where one group will be worse off is arguing that now is the time to intervene and change that and builds their power on the image of that future as it is negotiated in the present.
There is another aspect of this that is interesting for us, and that is the close relation between the now and the new. Something can be new only now, and it can be new only once.
The new is politically powerful - as threat or opportunity - and in every negotiation of the now we organize around the old and the new. The old belongs to the past, the new to the future. The new implies movement and the old a return or stasis. The German word for now - jetzt - is related to the English yet and comes with nuance of further, once more and something prevailing in the face of obstacles. The new pushes forward.
The fate of the new in politics seems to follow cycles - sometimes it is embraced and cheered, in other times it is denounced and reviled. The new is unexplored but can be dangerous, it is fresh but can lack in experience, it represents a break with tradition and a loss of the memories we should cherish.
The political now plays out in between the new and old, and how we perceive them. For technology policy this is a key condition: technology will be judged as new in most cases and the political reaction dependent on if we seek the new or preserve the old.
An organization will do well to have a stance on new and old in society, and an answer to the question of how it balances both in the now. Past and future only exist here and now.
So what?
Ok, down to business. Why does this matter?
First, the obvious answer is that we should pay close attention how our organizations and communities produce a now, or several nows. Even if it is a fanciful idea, it probably is helpful to sketch out an audit of nows in an organization to understand how it makes decisions. This will also help you classify different decisions as best belonging in different nows.
Second, finding the mechanisms that construct the political now is key to anyone interested in government affairs. Is it the press cycle? Is it some other process? And how is the past and future produced through that now? Having an operating hypothesis here is a good way to understand where interventions need to happen and when they are most effective. The now of the legislative process is different than the now of the press cycle, but they inform and affect each-other.
Third, exploring our personal now and how far it stretches is an interesting exercise. Where do you feel that your now is bounded by the past and future? Is it a day? A week? This present year? Why?
Fourth, remembering that the now has no satisfactory explanation is a great way to remember that we still face great mysteries in life.
As always, thank you for reading, and do let others know if you think they will find the newsletter interesting!
Nicklas