In this episode of the Profound Podcast, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ariane David, PhD, an insightful thinker and academic who delves into the principles of non-positional thinking and its profound impact on personal and organizational learning. We explore how W. Edwards Deming's theories on quality and continuous improvement intersect with modern challenges in digital transformation, particularly within IT, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.
Dr. David's introduces the four principles of non-positional thinking, beginning with the 'uncertainty principle,' which emphasizes intellectual humility and the acceptance that our perceptions and conclusions might be flawed. This acknowledgment opens the door to 'curiosity,' the second principle, fostering a desire to explore and understand rather than to confirm biases. The discussion progresses to the 'principle of discernment,' where information is analyzed critically to separate useful insights from noise. Lastly, Ariane discusses 'courage,' which is essential for challenging our own assumptions and committing to a path of genuine understanding and improvement .
Throughout the conversation, Dr. David highlights the dangers of 'adaptive learning' in organizations—learning driven by fear and survival instincts—which often prevents genuine insight and improvement. She contrasts this with 'generative learning,' which encourages a blame-free environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth and learning, thereby fostering a culture that supports continuous improvement and aligns closely with Deming's philosophy.
You can find Dr. Ariane David's LinkedIn below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arianedavid/
In this episode of the Profound Podcast, I have the pleasure of speaking with Ariane David, PhD, an insightful thinker and academic who delves into the principles of non-positional thinking and its profound impact on personal and organizational learning. We explore how W. Edwards Deming's theories on quality and continuous improvement intersect with modern challenges in digital transformation, particularly within IT, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.
Dr. David's introduces the four principles of non-positional thinking, beginning with the 'uncertainty principle,' which emphasizes intellectual humility and the acceptance that our perceptions and conclusions might be flawed. This acknowledgment opens the door to 'curiosity,' the second principle, fostering a desire to explore and understand rather than to confirm biases. The discussion progresses to the 'principle of discernment,' where information is analyzed critically to separate useful insights from noise. Lastly, Ariane discusses 'courage,' which is essential for challenging our own assumptions and committing to a path of genuine understanding and improvement .
Throughout the conversation, Dr. David highlights the dangers of 'adaptive learning' in organizations—learning driven by fear and survival instincts—which often prevents genuine insight and improvement. She contrasts this with 'generative learning,' which encourages a blame-free environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth and learning, thereby fostering a culture that supports continuous improvement and aligns closely with Deming's philosophy.
You can find Dr. Ariane David's LinkedIn below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arianedavid/
John Willis: [00:00:00] Hey, great. This is John again, another podcast for a profound and you know, a couple of you now You've met Bill Bellows Dave Nave, and a bunch of great people that I met at a meetup. It was a reunion for Deming, a Deming group reunion, Into InThinking. We talked about that. So I've got another great guest that she gave a presentation and I just sort of like, really, it's like, man, I have to get her on a podcast.
And Ariane, you want to introduce yourself?
Ariane David: Yeah. My name is Ariane David.
John Willis: There you go. There you go. And who are you?
Ariane David: Well, I'm, I'm the owner of the dog that's barking in the background. There you go.
John Willis: That's okay.
Ariane David: I want faculty at the California State University in Northridge. I teach in the Masters of Public Administration program but the core of everything that I do is has always been thinking.
So no matter what course I teach or what book [00:01:00] I'm writing, it's always about thinking. And when I first discovered, and I know this wasn't the question, but when I first met Bill Bellows that's what attracted me was that, it was all about thinking as opposed to problem solving or symptoms or things like that.
So
John Willis: that's who
Ariane David: I am.
John Willis: That's great. No. And you know, I remember, you know, like you gave a presentation and I think a lot of people, I think we all hover around the same ideas, you know, like I was telling you before the call, I've you know, I've struggled to read the fifth discipline. It's like one of those things that one of those books says, like, incredibly hard to read for Normal humans, but, you know, the mental model stuff, you know, I like and systems thinking and all that.
It's really sort of powerful stuff. And and I remember you're giving your presentation and you mentioned non positional thinking. And I think a bunch of people like, Whoa, again, I think I love what you did there because you literally sort of caused us to think [00:02:00] about what we think we know. Right? And and you, you've ex and, and I noticed you had to explain it a couple of times because it was sort of like that, that's the beauty of like, you know, like I, and I want you to go much deeper than I am right now, but, so what is non-positional thinking and why is that important to you?
Ariane David: One of my great interests over the years has been critical thinking, and at one point I realized that critical thinking was a good base, but it wasn't enough. And the reason it wasn't enough is that critical thinking gives us the way of examining arguments to sort of to pick out what the facts are from the opinions and etc.
But what it didn't do is that it didn't show us how to examine our own knowledge and our own beliefs. So I realized that, that really at the core [00:03:00] of critical thinking or any, any kind of thinking has to be our understanding of the biases through which we see everything, because I don't care if it's systems thinking, which I love system thinking.
That's one of my, that's to's. But whether it's systems thinking or critical thinking or the, you know, fifth discipline, which by the way I loved. You know, all of that, if it's not based in an understanding of your own biases and your own thinking processes, then, then everything is going to be, then everything is going to be blurred and everything is going to be biased.
So that's really where I begin. And that's what non positional thinking is about. It's about understanding our own thinking processes, understanding that, that how we view the world is a, is a function of what goes on in our head, of what's already there. [00:04:00] So and that it colors, and I call these organizing patterns Frederick Bartlett called them schema's when he sort of created that term in the thirties.
But what these are. Are preset patterns in the brain into which all new knowledge must be put. And in cases where we, there's not an, an appropriate organizing pattern, you know, we sort of squeeze it in there. So I like to tell the story of a Colin Turnbull was an anthropologist and he worked with the people in the Congo, the Umbuti tribe in particular.
And these were people who lived in the forest their whole lives. And they never came out of the forest and at most, you know, they would go into a clearing that was maybe a hundred feet in diameter, but that was really the limit of sort of their spatial experience in the environment. And so Turnbull went up there and he worked with them and studied them.
And one day [00:05:00] he, Realized that he had to sort of leave the forest, go down the, go down the mountain and get some supplies. So he asked one of the young men from the village to go with him and the young man, of course, was delighted and jumped into the truck and they drove through the forest. And then at some point they got out of the forest and were on their, on, on the road going down the mountain.
And all of a sudden the young man says, what are these insects? I've never seen them before. And the young And Turnbull looked and there were no insects, but what there were, were water buffalo grazing in the distance about a half a mile away.
John Willis: And
Ariane David: because the young man had never had the experience of seeing anything that was a half a mile away, for him, if it was this big and it was black, it was a bug.
John Willis: Wow. And of
Ariane David: course it took his, it took his brain only seconds to adjust itself to the fact that this was something in the distance. But that's because he had never developed [00:06:00] the organizing patterns for seeing a half a mile away or for seeing in, in, in the distance. So it's that kind of understanding about how we think that, that, that.
Will allow us to start questioning how we think and then that leads to the, you know, the four principles of non positional thinking.
John Willis: Yeah, I want to dive into it, but, you know, it's interesting about that, right? Is this I don't know if uber is the right word for it, but like, you know, as like, I could see myself falling into the trap of like, of course, that would happen to somebody who is encapsulated in a jungle, but that would never happen to me.
Yeah, I have to say, like, it's the circles of what we see and what we don't see. Right. That's pretty cool. So you, you had mentioned the four the four principles of non positional thinking. What are those and, you know, how did those sort of relate?
Ariane David: Well, the first is the principle of what I call the uncertainty principle, not Heisenberg's
John Willis: uncertainty principle,
Ariane David: David's [00:07:00] uncertainty principle, and that has to do with intellectual humility.
And that's the, you know, that's really the very first step. And that's the realization that I can't be certain about my thoughts. about the, the, the factualness of my thought thinking. I can't be certain about what I perceive. I can't be certain about my conclusion. So uncertainty is the first principle and uncertainty allows us then to move to the second principle, which is Curiosity or, or wanting, you know, once I've, once I've realized, made that realization that I can't, I can't depend upon my thinking to be 100 percent correct, even though it feels 100 percent correct,
John Willis: then the
Ariane David: next natural step is, Okay, I may not know exactly what's going on, but I really want to find out and so that leads us to curiosity [00:08:00] and that's another word for curiosity is intellectual openness.
John Willis: So,
Ariane David: I don't, I know that I, I don't know exactly what's going on. I can't be certain. And now I'm curious and that leads me to, to kind of a, an objective. Okay. analysis or an objective look, not analysis, but objective look at all the things that I know. So I gather information from the standpoint of understanding something or learning something new rather than from the standpoint of proving that I'm right, which is the way we, of course, usually gather information.
And then the third principle is what I call the principle of discernment. And that means at that point, you know, you've gathered this information and this information can be on an organizational level. It can be looking at all of the data that you have regarding a particular situation. It could be on an interpersonal level, you know, me [00:09:00] and my partner, me and my, and my child, me and my best friend.
So it can, it can be that granular. But at that point, when I've, When I genuinely and honestly gathered my information, found out what is it that you're trying to say to me. Now I look at that information with discernment and I say, okay, what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. And then the final principle, which is really the envelope in which the other three principles are wrapped in, is the principle of courage.
This takes tremendous amount of courage questioning your own, your own perceptions, your own conclusions, your own judgments, takes a huge amount of courage. And once we gain that courage, then we can, we can go to the, to the sort of second half of courage, which is [00:10:00] commitment. Have the courage then to commit to, to.
Understanding, to be honest, you know, one statement that I, one statement that I love that I made up, but I still love it.
John Willis: That's fair.
Ariane David: Is you know, in a situation in literally any situation, but definitely in a situation that feels conflicted in the question is what is it that I'm not seeing, which if I could see would change everything.
Well, because, because in every situation in every conflict. There is something that you're not seeing. So you're having a, you're, you're having, you know, a terrible argument with the number one person in your life, you know, and, and we know how those go. We know how we feel victimized by then because, because they don't understand us and they don't hear us and etc.
And of course they feel equally victimized by us. But in [00:11:00] those situations, if we can just stop and say, what is it? about what he or she is saying that I don't hear, that I don't get, which if I could get it, would literally change everything. And I'll tell you in every situation, there is at least one of those things.
And if you can, if you can hear that thing, if you can get it, if you can get beyond your biases and what you think, you know, and the judgments you've made and the hurts that you have, if you can get past that, what you'll have. Is an immediate shift
John Willis: in the relationship. Boy, there's so many things, like I started making a list and I stopped, but There's so much I was thinking about.
I guess the, The one thing, I, I, a couple of things I wanted to sort of, like, Dissect based on all that and that was great One is, I, I, you know, I, I, I, I try to think of myself as a meat and potatoes [00:12:00] person, right? Like I try to make the simplest way to describe things so I can get to the next level of conversation or something.
And you know, I, I fall back on the scientific method, right? Like why, well, you know, there was a good, an author that I'm good friends with who wrote a book. He, he, he was the one who did the original, Sort of he wrote his thesis was on sort of decoding Toyota production DNA, right? And he wrote this HBR article that one of the most downloaded or reviewed Harvard Business Review reports And something about the Toyota production DNA and decoding it or something like that One of the things he says in there he says Toyota was a scientist, a community of scientists continually experimenting.
And I always thought that was a good way that they were, like, that, like, even in sort of some of the modern IT companies, you think, well, they think about the experimentation. Do I really know what I know? You know, the first question, like, do I, do I operate in a world where I think I know everything and I tell everybody [00:13:00] what to do?
And like, you know, why did that fail? How come? Or do I operate in a mode where I'm constantly questioning what, like, everything I know? And, and so I, I sort of fall back to, like, isn't that scientific method? And then you said something there about, like, we could fall into, it sounds like a trap that we can fall into that.
Of this sort of predictiveness that was it. Right. And, and sometimes I do get pushed back on maybe the scientific method isn't the greatest way to explain. You know, in your case, sort of non-positional thinking or the curiosity or the intellectual openness is, is there something there or am I what, what is the question exactly?
Ah, okay. Sorry about that . Well, I'm wondering if is, is there sort of pure overlap with the scientific method or scientific think mix method? In terms of, you know, or even more to make it even simpler, Plan Do Study Act from Deming. Or, you know,
Ariane David: well, you know, even with the scientific method and I and I'm a, you know, I'm a scientist.
I have a B. S. in [00:14:00] physics. So I love science and I love the typic method, but even with the scientific method, you see, we have to engage in non positional thinking. We have to at every point say, what is it that I'm not seeing, you know, we have to and we have to examine our own biases. So, you know, we see this.
We see biases come up so often, you know, in, in absolutely everything where there seems to be scientific proof of something, but we don't, we can't get past our own beliefs about the subject, you know, so once again, non positional thinking really undergirds everything because, because we are, our brains are the primary mechanism by which any information is processed.
You see, so before we can go on to the scientific method, that information goes through our brains before we can go on to.
John Willis: Yeah, this makes sense. Yeah, because I think in some ways, and this is probably not the right way to say it, but in [00:15:00] some ways, I guess the trap, you, you, you got to the answer that I want, and I just wasn't explaining the question very well was in some ways the scientific method is a linear approach, whereas what you're saying is I have to dissect it at a multi level at every level to always ask the question, what am I not seeing?
And I think that's brilliant. Right. The second thing I was going to ask you is you're familiar with like the ladder of inference. And Chris Rogers. If not, we can just skip. No,
Ariane David: no, no, no, no, no, I, Chris Ardress was one of my Yeah,
John Willis: I, I, I, I didn't think I was risking the question, but yeah, so, but it sounds like there's a lot there, there, like that whole ladder of inference, and like forcing yourself to get out of those reinforcing loops, does that sort of map well to what
Ariane David: Yeah.
You know, Chris Ardress is funny because I, when I first saw his little book and I can't remember the name of it, but it was just a little book and I thought, Oh, you know, and there were books that I could choose. I was still in school [00:16:00] and there were books that I could choose to read and I was being lazy.
So I took Chris Ardress's book. Well, let me tell you something. This little tiny book was the densest book I had ever read. Literally every. Word every letter had to be gone over three and four times to understand what he was trying to say But in the end I got it and I'll I'll tell you that was very early on in my career as a as a consultant that That really shifted everything for me
John Willis: Yeah, because I mean it sounds a similar he's forcing you to sort of try to recognize where you create reinforcement loops And to sort of try to force yourself to break out.
I guess the last piece I was going to say is the a friend of mine, once we were talking about Deming, and we will definitely get into a little bit of Deming here, but she said whenever she feels this real deep cognitive dissonance to her, it turns out she's taught [00:17:00] herself to make that a flag.
to try to question why does she feel that strongly against what somebody just told us. And I thought that was like, that's been helpful for me to sort of think about that. Like, you know,
Ariane David: I agree.
John Willis: Yeah. Yeah. So you also, so you, you were talking about Bartlett a little bit and I honestly didn't know who he was until I saw your presentation, but I think you've covered a list, but he talked about schemas and, but I like the war of ghosts.
That's sort of an interesting concept that you want to explain
Ariane David: that. Yeah, this was one of Bartlett's early experiments. And once again, I think it was like 1932. So he was pretty, pretty early on in terms of the memory and that kind of research, but he decided to see just exactly. If he could, if he could pinpoint this thing that goes on in our brains where he observed that that what we see or what we perceive or what we remember [00:18:00] somehow seem to be affected by what we already thought or knew.
So he created this experiment. And he was teaching at, it was either Yale or Oxford, I don't remember at the time. But, so his students were all, you know, upper class young gentlemen. And he gave them a story to read, and the story was called The War of the Ghosts. And the story was, it was an indigenous, a story from the indigenous population in, you know, the First Nations in the northern part of North America.
And you know, it was a story that incorporated, incorporated the, the sort of life of fantasy, the life of spirituality, along with the physical life and, and all intertwined. And you know, young men get into a canoe to go, to go seal hunting and they meet, they meet other men in a canoe who are really ghosts and they're going, you know, so, so it's [00:19:00] just an inter, intermix of.
All these kind of dimensions and then so they read the story and then after a week, he had them write down what they remembered and he had every week. He did this. And as he did this, the stories would get shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And then. The story started getting longer and longer and longer and longer.
And when he analyzed it, he, he saw that as the stories were getting shorter, they were leaving out the elements with which they weren't familiar. So, so if it was, you know, had something to do with a ghost or had something to do with a spirit, that was dropped out. And then they started adding back details from their life.
So young men going down in a canoe to hunt seal turned into some young men going fishing in a rowboat, etc. And so he saw that, that in [00:20:00] the end, what they remembered the story to be had more to do with what they already believed. And very little to do with what was actually in the story.
John Willis: Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, you know, it's funny too, though, because in some ways we encourage storytelling as a way to communicate, right? Because it is a very effective, but then therein lies the danger, right? And that the fact that. You'll say you explain a very complex subject to me or something that's really interested. I have to try to understand it so I can understand it myself.
I was like, as a, as a teacher, there's like, like knowledge, things that I learned is that I can understand it, but I can't explain it. And as I can understand it now, I can explain it. Right. And you explain it through that very mechanism, right? Which then becomes the distort valve. But, but you got to have, you have to have both.
Right?
Ariane David: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I [00:21:00] just want to just want to add one thing about about stories. And then this actually pertains to science, etc. And that is that when we read a story, we have to read it with the eyes of a person who wrote that story. So we have a tendency here in the West, you know, we read a story.
And. If it's not a Western story, if it's not a story that incorporates elements of our world, and only our world as we see it, our material world, we don't understand it. And we lose a lot. We lose a lot. We lose a lot in science when we disregard Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous stories, Indigenous ideas. And I think over the years we've, we've lost hugely and we see that a lot in anthropology where an anthropologist will go into I want to tell you this story, but I can't remember the, the names involved, but [00:22:00] basically it had to do with some anthropologists who went, you know, over different times to study baboon populations.
And. They studied only male baboons, which was interesting. And of course that was, you know, they said, well, we studied male baboons because they're, they're the ones who are doing things. You know, the females just sort of are there at the disposal of the male baboons. And one day a couple of anthropologists decided to, primatologists decided to go study the baboons, but.
Not study them from the standpoint of, of when something happens, because then that necessarily is always the, always the guys, but just, you know, pick a baboon and follow that baboon around. And what they discovered that was what anthropologists had previously believed to be very sort of dull, submissive, compliant females.
Not worth studying when they followed the females around. They found that the females had [00:23:00] really quite an interesting life. They didn't, you know, engage in the violence that the males engaged in or the turbulence. But you know, they often found that a female who was. Who had mated with an alpha male or one of the higher ranked males would sneak off when he was busy and have sex with a beta male, have sex with a lower ranking male and, you know, and they just discovered this very rich life of the female, of the female did I say baboon?
I meant chimpanzee. Of the female, of the female chimpanzee. And that was an example of how scientists. not get past their own biases in order to see what was really going on.
John Willis: We don't have to go into like AI and stuff, but the biases in these sort of large models now are very dangerous, you know, like the very dangerous image recognition medical [00:24:00] healthcare, you know, like like most of the things about like heart attacks and all that, we're all sort of like heavy bias to Males and white males in terms of images.
Yeah, so that that just exists everywhere, right? And that's always the danger. I think that brings it to you. You talk about the sort of the tyranny of knowledge, the tyranny of empathy, tyranny of logic, and like that is that's sort of like where we get into the danger zone. The tyranny of knowledge is the bias.
Ariane David: Yes. Yes, and I really want to change that word knowledge. I used to say tyranny of knowledge, but then I realized it was really the tyranny of knowing because knowledge has no tyranny. Knowledge just is, but the tyranny of knowing. So that's when we know something and the idea that we know it sort of overshadows everything.
John Willis: Yeah, and I, I watched, I loved you had this sort of timeline of like, if the, where you talk about like, you know, we go all the way [00:25:00] back where there was, there really wasn't anything written, sort of Aristotle was the first know it all. I love that. And then, you know, you sort of, that, that sort of drives through that, that, that, that knowing, if you will, gets pushed forward, but.
He didn't know as much as we, you know, everybody thought he was until you get to like, well, and then you got Thomas Aquinas, which I think that's sort of fascinating. But then people like Rene Descartes, who literally sort of changed it. I'd love to hear your sort of thread on, on that, that narrative that you've given publicly.
Ariane David: Well, you know, I, I laugh because Aristotle, first of all, we like to say that, that our civilization was founded on, you know, on sort of Greek classicism and really it wasn't, you know, we completely forgot about the, the classicists until the, until the, the first crusade when, when the crusaders going over to the, to Jerusalem, you know, discovered this [00:26:00] whole new science and mathematics and philosophy.
That the Arabs had so and brought it back and that suddenly became the new thing, but the thing about Aristotle was that he really didn't know anything, but he had opinions about everything. And so he wrote, I think it was, it was, he wrote books. He wrote like 20 books or more about everything. You know, I mean, he was, he knew absolutely everything.
How conception and childbirth took place, you know, the man inserted his seed in the woman. The woman had nothing to contribute other than being the vessel for this sperm that became this child. And that was just one of many things that he wrote. And the funny thing is that in the funny kind of, I don't know if it's funny, but it's funny.
Peculiar was that, that the knowledge that the knowledge that Aristotle supposedly had was introduced to, you know, medieval Europe, and that was taken as the fact. And so in medieval Europe, people were [00:27:00] certain that women were nothing but a vessel for the man's sperm. That would eventually develop into the baby.
And so the baby really belonged entirely to the man, the progeny developed with belonged entirely to the man and not at all to the woman because all she did was carry it.
John Willis: That's crazy. And then, yeah, so yeah. And then, but I think you're like, I'm a. I love Rene Descartes, right? Like, to me, again, the simplest, like, you know, I think therefore I am, like, which to me is such a strong, like, you know, but, but, and I love how you sort of described, like, it wasn't until people like Galileo Copernicus, or like, were these, like, outliers that literally started creating these questions and did it in such a clever way, like you talked about how they sort of got away with it in a time where they could have gotten, like, you know, burned at the stake, right?
Or what they were.
Ariane David: Well, you know, with, with Rene Descartes, he was totally a member in good [00:28:00] standing of the church. And at the time, you know, you really couldn't discuss what we now call science. Because it was all, you know, you didn't have the right to discuss that because it was just the mystery of God doing what God did, and that's all the understanding that we needed of it, but that was not good enough for Descartes.
And so he did a very clever thing. He said, yes, it's absolutely true that everything is within God, that God created everything and all of that is true. And within God's world, we can look at how things work. Knowing that they work because God wants them to work that way, and that's how he was able to get away with it.
When Galileo, for instance, wasn't, wasn't able to get away with it.
John Willis: Well, it seems like there's some organizational magic there in modern day, you know, changing like, that's the way Bob wants it. So right. [00:29:00] Exactly. With that stuff that the current model the, I think it was oh, I know another thing that sort of sparked me too, which is, you know, sort of the, at first glance I'm like, wait a minute, do I agree with that?
Because I a lot, I think, You know, you get, you know, if you think you're sort of a modern thinker, a critical thing, and we already talked about this between critical thinking and non positional thinking, but like, I, I normally think of the idea of adaptive learning as a positive thing, and I'll, and people who are more often people I follow.
Who aren't sort of classic, you know, very deterministic, it works like this, it's a, it's, you know, it's a command and control structure, do what you're told, or you get in trouble, and so a lot of times you'll hear people talk about adaptive learning or adaptive you know, understanding adaptive complexity, and then you, you kind of had this thing where you talked about, like, there's a big difference between adaptive complexity.
and generative. And I thought that was sort of an interesting, like, [00:30:00] it's, you know, it sort of takes something and makes you think a little bit different about what you're thinking. For me, you know, it is just by telling people that you should be adaptive and adaptive learning is a great thing. And your point, I think, was maybe not, if I'm not.
Ariane David: Well, you know, we cannot not engage in adaptive learning because Because of our sense of our need for survival, but in an organization, this can be this can be very damaging now for an organization as a whole to adapt to the changing environment in which it operates is very valuable, but within an organization.
If, if all you have amongst the people who work there is adaptive learning, what you'll never have is is true learning is true organizational learning. And this was, you know, one of our addresses. Great points is that organizations don't learn. And he, you [00:31:00] know, organizations don't learn and fear is the primary motivator.
So fear is the primary motivator of adaptive learning. You know, I learned that if I go into those woods, you know, I learned that someone was eaten by a tiger when they went into those words, I'm going to adapt. I'm not going to go there. Or as a child, you know, I learned that I get spanked if I do this.
I'm not going to do that. At least I'm not going to get caught. And so we, we adapt constantly. And in organizations, the danger is that people learn to adapt to, for instance, blame. You know, if your organization is run on blame and, and most organizations are, you know, when something goes wrong, the first question is, well, who did it, who's responsible, you know, and you know that that question means who's going to get called out and get punished for
John Willis: it.
Ariane David: So, so adaptive learning. Has its value, but in an organization, what we need is generative learning. And that's the learning that [00:32:00] are just talked about, which is when we, when we look at what happened and rather than saying, whose fault is it? We say, Oh, look what happened. Let's see, let's examine what happened and see if we can figure it out.
And that brings everybody in. To look at the problem, there is no blame, and from there we can get good information. When there's only adaptive learning, if we say, who did it? It's like, I'm not saying anything. Then you can't get, you can't get the proper information that you need because people aren't telling you they're not coming up with it because they're afraid that they're going to be blamed.
So in a generative learning situation or in a learning organization, where there is no blame, people then feel free to say, Wow, I did this, maybe that contributed, you know, I did this, and that didn't work. And then from there, you, you learn as an organization, And not only do we learn about the, whatever the problem is, but people learn [00:33:00] that it's okay to speak up and to tell the truth.
And that's essential for solving problems. And so when you have generative learning, then what it leads to is an organization that continues to learn. And when it hits a snag, it's looked at in the same way. No one's to blame. What can we do about it? How can we solve this problem? Et cetera.
John Willis: But that's, that gets into the whole change thing, right?
So you and I have both been doing this for many years, you know, working with organizations, trying to figure out, like, how do we get organizations to adapt to change? And then, you know, like, there's so many reasons why people are more adaptive than generative. But, you know, one of the sort of, one is the sort of command and control structures, right?
Which, you know, like, but, but probably the one most is high consequence. Situation site, you know, and healthcare, you know like something really bad happened. And like the nurse probably knows exactly what happened, [00:34:00] but is unlikely to explain what happened in fear of being blamed for it. Because maybe something catastrophic happened or in, in aviation, very similar, right?
There's those type of situations. Did you see, and then like banking, even like, you know, you know, in some of the banks, there, there are things that if you misinterpret a policy, sorry, you're fired. You know, I mean, it's the policy you signed a contract when you signed up for this job, like, how do you, and I'm not asking for the one on one like the magic button, but.
That's therein lies this really hard problem of creating blameless environments and generative learning where people feel free. And we see examples of it, but I see it's the ones where that are really hard to do. And, you know, what has been your experience of sort of tipping If there is an ability to,
Ariane David: oh, gosh, I'll tell you that has been a bone in my throat ever since I started.
Yeah,
John Willis: when everybody,
Ariane David: you know, [00:35:00] a CEO would ask us to ask the Veritas group to come in and do some work. And it was kind of like, well, fix my people. It's like your people ain't broken, dude. Let's look at what you can do. So, you know, the, in the, in the, in the, in the working, in the, in the working world, you know, there is no grassroots environment.
There's no such thing as a grassroots movement. Yeah. You have unions, you can, but you know what, in general, 99 percent of the time, there are no grassroots movements. The direction of the company, the direction of the of the culture comes from the top. And that's where you have to start. You can't start at the bottom, although if you're the manager of a small group, you can set the culture for that small group, but you can't, you know, my students used to say to me, yeah, but how do you get, you know, [00:36:00] yes, we have to listen, but how do you get your boss to listen?
And my answer was, you don't, you can't. You can't. You can't manage upwards. You can, but you really can't. Transformation does not happen from me to the person above me. So it starts at the top.
John Willis: Yeah, I mean, that's like, you know, like in every movement I've been involved with. Like, how can I do this? You know, like, you know, for most people listening, I'm, you know, I'm very deeply involved in what's called the DevOps movement.
So people come like, John, how do I get DevOps? Like, well, you know, you can do a bunch of things. You know, like you can, you know, like, and for me, a lot of times it was like, you know, do all these things and keep your fingers crossed that they replaced the CIO and who's doing DevOps. Oh, that guy over there, you know, that's been doing it for like two years, but we didn't know if it was anything good or not.
Right. That kind of situation. But yeah, you have to get, you know, I mean, it, you know, I guess the other thing I, you know, like, I wanted to ask I actually want to get in, you know, I was going to ask about, [00:37:00] like, what do you think about the mappings to Deming's ideas and system of profound knowledge and how they map to all this, but I think what would be more interesting in case we run out of time is, I loved your, you kind of talked about a little of this with sort of Aristotle and he set the stage that it was, it was a man's world, if you steal a line from a song but you really went into like, like how, like, There were civilizations, and there was knowledge, and there's examples where, like, I mean, I'm trying to squeeze my memory, I'm hoping you can just take the torch here, but like, Cleopatra, and there were things that seemed to have gotten dropped somewhere, you know, in a Western culture.
That that are, I think, about how we think about women and leadership and all those things. Am I on the right track here?
Ariane David: Well, okay. So I'm going to just pop in and see if I can maybe do some good here. Were you referring to what I spoke about? The
John Willis: presentation you gave when we were all together. All right.
Ariane David: So the latest work that I'm [00:38:00] doing, the work that I'm doing the book that I'm researching and writing right now has to do with sort of understanding how we became a world that is incapable of creating sustainable peace, how we became a world with really unjust resource distribution, social injustice, gender inequality, you know, how did we get this way?
And if we look back prior to 10, 000 years, the agricultural revolution began about 11, 500 years ago. It took thousands of years, and this wasn't done in a generation. It took thousands of years. So about 10, 000 years ago is when we start seeing evidence of real warfare. Prior to that, there are archaeologists have found absolutely no evidence of, of warfare.
So, but then 10, 000 years ago, we see our first probably [00:39:00] indisputable example of warfare. And then, and then, you know, we start seeing it more and more and more often. And by 6, 000 years ago, the the, the, I'm sorry. the metal revolution, you know, the, the, the age of metals, the Bronze Age, Iron Age we start seeing war as being really the focus of almost every civilization.
Well, what happened in those 10, 000, in those 4, 000 years, in those 5, 000 years? How did it change? And so that's been, that's really been the focus of my, of my study. And what we see is that, you know, one of the big things that changed was that we went from being a subsistence society to a society that had At times in the larger cities, really great resources in terms of surpluses and we see wealth beginning and we see wealth [00:40:00] disparity beginning.
And one of the things that we see is that where women had been equal to men. I mean, if we can, if we can make that statement, I don't know what equality actually is, but what we see from the pre agricultural revolution and the early agricultural revolution is that women, there was no difference in the way women were treated in burial.
There was no difference in nutrition. We can see what they were eating from their, from an analysis of their bones. In terms of grave goods, they were, pretty much identical. So we see no evidence at all that women were treated any differently from men. Fast forward now, 4, 000 years, there's a big difference.
Difference in grave goods, difference in nutrition. And so we, and, and we now not, not only see no difference between men and women, but we now start seeing difference in Different people in the society and in Jericho, for instance, how are, how did the, [00:41:00] you know, an ancient Jericho, you know, the, the poor were had a much poorer diet than, than the rich.
And so this, this separation between the genders and between rich and poor really happened at that time. And one of the things. that I believe was very, was very important in allowing chronic war and chronic wealth disparity to take place, was that women who had had a very high status in the pre agricultural days, because, because in hunter gatherer societies, even today, women are responsible, women bring in about 70 percent of the calories on average, you know, hunting is not, is not a science.
And so women are very important in modern hunter gatherer societies and in early hunter gatherer societies because they brought in the food dependably. Meat was wonderful when it came in, but what you lived on day to day was what women brought in. With the [00:42:00] agricultural revolution, women no longer were responsible single handedly for feeding the, the band, and they, they really lost in status.
very much. The thing about women, why this is so important, is that and we have really good reports from the United Nations showing that when women have power, for instance, if they make up 35 percent or more of the national legislature, when there are women heads of state, that the incidence that the, the forecast of war, internal or external, goes down almost to zero.
I mean, that's almost unbelievable. You would say, well, that just doesn't make any sense. But it does. When women have power, war is is less, less chronic resource insufficiency is less chronic, you know, so women with power [00:43:00] actually put a damper on war and put a damper on wealth. One of the it's a great organization called Inclusive Security, And they study, you know, the relationship that women have to politics all over the world, and that to poverty, to education, etc.
And one of the things that they said was that after, you know, that Rwanda had a terrible, terrible, terrible civil war, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, so many men were killed that the women had to take over the and and Rwanda had been a notoriously corrupt kind of country until the civil war, the women took over after, after 20 years, poverty was way down corruption was way down.
So not only was war way down because they had, you know, Rwanda has not had a civil war since then, but also corruption and poverty went way down [00:44:00] once the women took over.
John Willis: There's so much here, right? Like, you know, like, so, I mean, I think. I think I kept thinking about the guns, germs, and steel, you know, as a simplest way to explain that sort of point in time that things might have changed, right?
The agriculture paradigm, right? But, but and I love the sort of explanation that, like, if prior to sort of that, whatever he calls that sort of area where there was just all the conditions to create, you know, an agricultural society, so turn into villages and all that. That the, but prior to that, based on sort of your knowledge and, and not, you're not knowledge, that is knowledge, that, that women were a big part of maybe 60, 70 percent of the nutrition and the calorie of, now all of a sudden that changes.
And that explains that. But what explains the, what do you think explains why so, and that's sort of a social evolution, if you want, I think, right? Maybe, but [00:45:00] what explains this sort of, is there some type of research or science mission that explains what, like, why there was less war, no war? Why is there scenarios where like Rwanda, where, like, what, what's the science, where's the science in that?
Because, I mean, I get it, right? Like, I think, right? I think men are jerks. I'm one of them, you know, you know,
Ariane David: men are not
John Willis: jerks. Okay.
Ariane David: Okay. Men are not jerks. We, you know, we've been, we've been homo sapiens for probably anywhere from 250 to 300, 000 years. Okay, we would not have gotten to this place if men were jerks.
John Willis: All right, fair enough, fair enough, yeah. Okay,
Ariane David: what happened was that, that for the first 250, 000 years of our being homo sapiens, males and females just did it together. There was no gender, there was sex, but there was no concept of, well you're a woman so you shouldn't do this or you're a man so you should.
It wasn't like that. Everybody [00:46:00] did what they could. Women sometimes hunted, they tended not to hunt because it was dangerous and they were more important for the children. You know, women definitely have a somewhat greater Propensity towards social social stability. That's obvious. It's clear. It's not huge.
However, it's important men have a, you know, a somewhat greater propensity for risk taking for aggression. Not huge. It's not. It's not as great as we've made it. You know, men are not Rambo, you know, that's not, that's not men's nature, you know, so, so but, but a wedge was driven between the genders during the agricultural revolution during that, that time, where suddenly, you know, men without women are jerks and women without men are jerks.
You know, so what we have to strive for is to get back to the [00:47:00] partnership that we had before. Right. Neither, you know, you know, as I say in my book too much, too much risk taking and too much aggression. Race would have literally wiped itself out in the first years of our existence. Too little risk taking, too little aggression, and the human race would have stagnated and probably gone into a dead end, you know?
So, we, we became humans in partnership. In partnership, men and women, males and females together in partnership, when that partnership was broken apart and and the power went all to the men, you see, then there was not that there was not the female propensity for social justice for social stability, then to balance out.
The propensity for risk taking, for aggression, for domination, etc.
John Willis: That's fantastic. So tell us about your [00:48:00] book. What can you tell us about it?
Ariane David: So, I approach the book the same way that I approach non positional thinking, which is, what is the thinking that has kept the human race in this sort of Hobbesian, You know, conflict mode for the last 6, 000 years, and so I, I looked at it and I saw that there were, there were concepts that have embedded themselves into the culture, which I call super myths.
And there's not a lot of them. And they're, you know, mostly based for instance, there's what I call the masculine super myth. Which enables the super myth of war that I mean, how many times have you heard that war is in our blood? It's in our DNA. We make war because we can't not make war. Well, that's a bunch of bull.
We've only made war like this in a kind of addictive manner. For 6, 000 years, 250, 000 years, we didn't do [00:49:00] it. So obviously it's not in our DNA. So what is it that that now makes it chronic? And what makes it chronic are super myths. And these were, these were ways of thinking, cultural ways of thinking that developed during the agricultural revolution.
And really they were developed to The facilitate the growth of wealth and the growth of power and the growth of hierarchy, we see big God religions being introduced at this time. Hammurabi, who's sort of famous for his first written law said that the law was given to him by God. And so, so just stop and think what that means.
That means that one, the king is the, either the representative of God or in many, you know, some somewhat divine himself, the divine right of kings, but also that what the king says is the word of God. So if the king [00:50:00] says you are a slave, you remain a slave, you remain in that position, it is the word of God.
You see, so big, big God religions really separated the people from God up until that time, you know, a hunter gatherers have an animistic kind of religion where God is everywhere. God is everything and everybody can access that. But now suddenly God could not be accessed except through the King, the ruler and the priests.
And so now, you know, now we keep the people in place You see, through, through these, through the religion, but then you get to a point where, you know, the myths change, the stories change, the details of the religion changes, but now these concepts are so deeply embedded in the culture that the story, It doesn't matter what the story is, doesn't [00:51:00] matter at all, because now we have these beliefs that are embedded, the belief that men are violent, that they're jerks, that they're you know, that they're better leaders, that they're, you know, better thinkers, blah, blah, blah, fill in the blanks, and that women are by nature submissive, are by nature, you know, during the Victorian era, was sort of the pinnacle of, you know, women really aren't that smart.
And all that other conversation, they're the angels of the home. They're too good. They're too pure to be, to vote, to be involved in politics. So, so now we have these embedded super myths about how males are, how females are. The quickest road to manhood. is through violence, through war, and we see that throughout 6, 000 years of history from the from the time of the Bronze Age, where this [00:52:00] vision of masculinity that, you know, I know very few men who can live up to that.
And I've seen men who look like they live up to that. You know, they're gorgeous, they're buff, they've got money. And they'll tell you that they've been fighting this feeling of inferiority all their lives because no man can live up to it.
John Willis: Yeah. Now it's the super man, I guess. So this, I thought this was, I knew this was going to be fun.
And I, I just knew because I knew that sort of the tidbits we got to interact at that meetup and your presentation, but I've I've, I've got, I've gotten chills a bunch of times. I, I think your book is going to be incredible. I think this audience is going to like this. You got to be careful here because people, Bill said, Bill Benson said the other day, I've done four podcasts with him and he's like, yeah, I got a lot of people in your community calling me.
So beware, you might be making a whole lot of new friends. Friends. But yeah, [00:53:00] I, I, I just thought this was incredible. I, I, I enjoyed it so much. How, how do people, I'll put links and all, but if people wanted to reach out to you and learn more about what you're doing, and I, I suspect there's gonna be a lot of people in my community were inspired by this conversation.
How would they find you? Well, they
Ariane David: can go to, or they can go to the website in my nonprofit, it's called Pax Veritas, P-A-X-V-E-R-I-T-A-S, peace and Truth. And I'll, I'll get it if there's a contact sheet there, and I'll be happy to talk with anybody.
John Willis: Brilliant. Oh, this is great. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, because it was pretty awesome.
I do.
Ariane David: Well, you know, I always enjoy talking about this.
John Willis: Yeah, totally.
Ariane David: Give me 10 hours and I'll just get started. Ah, there you
John Willis: go. All right. Well, I may get you back. We'll see, like, if you want to do this something again, we can sort of expand on some things. But I, like I said, I, I, I really enjoyed the heck out of this.
So thank you so much.
Ariane David: Well, thank you.