"The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter"

The Russian author and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known by his pen name  Sholem Aleichem (the musical Fiddler on the Roof was based on several of his short stories) reportedly once said, "The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter."  I don't know about you, but I happen to like radishes.  However, I also know that not everyone agrees with me!  As a matter of fact, radishes were used specifically for their poor taste (in this case relative to chocolate chip cookies) in a set of now classic experiments(see my post "What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes") on ego depletion by the psychologist Roy Baumeister.

Baumeister's study was originally published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998.  Basically, college students were told to fast for at least 3 hours before coming to Baumeister's psychology laboratory.  Upon entering the laboratory, the students immediately detected the aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.  Each student was told to sit at a table on which was placed two plates - a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a plate of radishes.  The laboratory team explained that the study was designed to test subjects' taste perception.  Each student was assigned to either the "cookie group" or the "radish group."  Students in the "cookie group" were told to eat at least 2-3 cookies but no radishes, while students in the "radish group" were told to eat at least 2-3 radishes but no cookies.  The laboratory staff then left the room and observed what happened through a one-way mirror.  After about 5 minutes, the laboratory staff re-entered the room and asked the student to complete a nearly impossible puzzle.  Students in the "cookie group" spent, on average, a total of 19 minutes on the puzzle before quitting.  Students in the "radish group", on the other hand, spent only 8 minutes on the puzzle before quitting.

Baumeister used these results in support of a concept he called ego depletion.  He believed that we all have a finite amount of self-control or willpower that we can rely upon in any situation.  Once we use up that self-control, we are more susceptible to a loss of control or willpower in a later situation.  Here, subjects that were told to eat the radishes and refrain from eating the cookies were using their willpower to follow the laboratory staff's admonition NOT to eat the cookie (they could have easily done so - no one was stopping them, right?).  Most of the students did, in fact, refrain from eating the cookies.  However, the mere act of refraining from eating the cookie used up all of their willpower.  So when they were faced with a more difficult cognitive task, they simply gave up.  It really doesn't take a lot of willpower to refrain from eating radishes, especially when you are told to eat the cookies.  Therefore, the students in the "cookie  group" still had enough willpower to persist for a longer period of time on the impossible puzzle.

Why am I talking about ego depletion and radishes?  As it turns out, a team of investigators from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina applied this concept to hand hygiene (handwashing) in the hospital setting.  Their study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2015, collecting hand hygiene compliance data from 4,157 clinical staff (physicians, nurses, allied health professionals) working in 56 different inpatient units at 35 hospitals for a total of 13,772,922 unique hand hygiene opportunities.  Compliance was measured using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology on both entry and exit to and from a patient's room.  Overall hand hygiene compliance was poor (38%), consistent with other studies.  However, hand hygiene compliance dropped from 42.6% in the first hour to 34.8% during the last hour of a typical 12-hour shift.  The drop was even worse on higher intensity units (i.e., units with either more patients or sicker patients, where the workload was higher).  Longer breaks between shifts mitigated at least some of this decrease.  In other words, if clinicians were better rested at the start of their shifts, they were more likely to continue to maintain the same level of hand hygiene compliance from the start to the end of their shift.

What does all of this have to do with radishes?  As the investigators suggest in their paper, "Just as the repeated exercise of muscle leads to physical fatigue, repeated use of executive resources (cognitive resources that allow people to control their behaviors, desires, and emotions) produce a decline in an individual's self-regulatory capacity."  Similar to the concept of ego depletion, we all have a finite amount of capacity to follow standards, policies, and best practices.  If we are fatigued (say, towards the end of a busy shift with a lot of sick patients), we are less likely to be compliant with these standards and policies.  Given the importance of hand hygiene compliance in minimizing the spread of infections, these findings are of great interest to those of us in health care.  It would be interesting to see if compliance with other standards and policies similarly deteriorated over the course of a single shift in the hospital.  More importantly, it would be interesting to see if longer or more frequent breaks during a shift had any effect on maintaining compliance.  

Better, stronger, faster, and flatter?

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a company-wide email in March 2023 in which he claimed, "It's well understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making."  While that makes some intuitive sense, is there data to back-up Zuckerberg's statement?  Eric Anicich, Michael Lee, and Juan Pablo Sánchez Celi attempt to answer that question in their article published this past March in Harvard Business Review ("The Challenges of Becoming a Less Hierarchical Company").  Importantly, they highlight the results of a meta-analysis of 54 published studies involving over 13,000 teams that showed that hierarchical structures negatively impact team effectiveness, which only gets worse when there is the inevitable intra-group conflict.

An article ("Fitter, flatter, faster: How unstructuring your organization can unlock massive value") by Sarah Kleinman, Patrick Simon, and Kirsten Weerda for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company suggested that leaders can take five actions to position an organization for success in the future:

1. Radically flatten the structure to minimize layers and increase speed: 

Particularly in today's digital work environment, the old rules about the most effective ratio for spans and layers no longer apply.  Rigid hierarchies with multiple layers create inefficiency and delays.  Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda suggest that even the largest organizations shouldn't have more than six layers, and the organizations that are most agile typically only have three!

2. Build a flexible, dynamic network of teams to tackle rapidly evolving problems:

In today's VUCAT environment, agility and flexibility are essential to organizational success.  If you haven't read General Stanley McChrystal's fabulous book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, you should!  He discusses the network of teams structure that he developed for the U.S. military's special forces during the Iraq War.  

3. Provide a stable home base for employees to ensure long-term career development:

Here, Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda reference McKinsey's helical model, which is in essence, a hybrid of a matrixed organization built around a network of teams concept.  Here, the typical management structure is split into two arms, a capability line organized based upon skill-sets where managers are responsible for the professional growth and development of employees and a value creation line, where the managers work with employees on day-to-day operations.  

4. Empower the "edges" to ensure leaders have access to the best information and rapid innovation:

While not explicitly mentioned by Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda, the concept of psychological safety is an important one here.  Individuals who are closest to the action (whether the action involves a product, a customer, or something else) should be free to speak up and take action (see the next point below).

5. Delegate clear decision rights to lowest possible levels:

Here is yet another great recommendation to incorporate the High Reliability Organization principle of "Deference to Expertise" into an organization.  Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda state, "The flattened structure can accelerate decision making by minimizing unnecessary management layers; ensuring people are clear about their roles, responsibilities, and decision rights; and empowering the front lines to make decisions with guardrails (Where have I heard that before?).

Importantly, there are some additional points that need to be made regarding some of the challenges to a flatter hierarchy.  I'll save that discussion for a future post.  

"The evolution of working from home"

Working from home ("remote work") has been around for much longer than perhaps we all realize.  If you follow the trends since the early 1990's, the number of remote workers doubled approximately every 15 years, as technology began to catch up and provide more options to facilitate working from home (remember, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and cloud file-sharing applications like Dropbox didn't even exist until relatively recently).   Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, and remote work increased five-fold from 2019 to 2023 (equivalent to about 35 years of pre-pandemic growth), with 40% of employees in the U.S. working remotely at least one day a week. 

Many of the aforementioned statistics came from a working paper by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis "The evolution of working from home" (now published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives under the same title).  There are a number of key findings reported in this paper.  First, there are three distinct groups of employees in most organizations (and more generally, in the U.S. workforce) based upon their current working arrangements.  Fully on-site employees represent the largest group (60% of all employees in the U.S.) and are, on average, the lowest paid employees due to the types of jobs that require fully on-site work (e.g. front-line retail, food service, cleaning, security, etc).  Even during the pandemic, the vast majority of these employees still worked on-site (during the 2020 lockdown, they may not have worked at all).  "Hybrid working from home" employees typically work from home 2 or 3 days per week and comprise about 30% of the U.S. workforce.  These employees are, on average, the highest paid and include professional jobs, including middle and senior management.  Of note, the most common pattern of hybrid work is to work from the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and remotely from home on Mondays and Fridays.  The last group of employees are "fully remote" and comprise about 10% of the U.S. workforce.  These typically include IT-support, call-center, payroll, or HR jobs that require limited on-site work.  

I was somewhat surprised to see that remote work is highly concentrated in cities and suburbs with high population densities.  Given the fact that industries that typically have higher percentages of remote work (e.g. information and computer technology, business) are located in cities and suburbs, this shouldn't be all that surprising.  However, the cost of living in these areas is also higher, and I would have expected to see more of these remote workers living in rural and suburban areas with lower costs of living.  

The highest percentage of remote workers were college-educated employees in their 30's who have young children.  As a matter of fact, education was the single best predictor of whether someone worked remote or not.  Employees with a high school education spent less than 18% of their days working from home, while those with a college degree spent 37% of their days working remotely.  Some studies have suggested that college graduates greatly value the ability to work remotely, with the ability to work from home 2 to 3 days a week valued equivalently to an 8% increase in pay.  While the percentage of female employees who worked from home was significantly higher than the percentage of males, the difference was small (31.3% versus 29.6%).  Previous studies do suggest that female employees have a greater preference to work remotely than males.  Finally, workers in their early 20's and their 50's-60's spend fewer days working at home compared to employees in their 30's-40's.  Importantly, employees in their 30's-40's are more likely to have young children at home, which was also a factor in whether employees worked remotely.

As I've discussed in previous posts (see "Everyone's working for the weekend?", "The WFH Question" and "Remote work, again..."), there have been a number of studies that have tried to determine whether remote working arrangements improves or worsens productivity.  Of interest, Barrero, Bloom, and Davis surveyed both employees and their managers on what they thought - employees generally feel that working from home makes them more productive, while managers feel the converse is true.  Most of the studies strongly suggest that the impact on productivity depends upon whether employees are fully remote or hybrid.  Fully remote working appears to lower productivity by around 10% to 20%.  There are several reasons why this may be the case, though we can only speculate at this point.  One commonly cited reason is that fully remote workers are not as closely supervised and may "slack off" as a result.  Whether this is a legitimate concern or not requires further study, though it has led to the increased use of technology by supervisors to monitor productivity in real time (which is the subject of my next post).  Conversely, hybrid working arrangements, in which employees work remotely 2 to 3 days per week, is likely to have either no impact or a slightly positive one on productivity.'

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis end their paper with a prediction that the amount of working from home will continue to grow, primarily as a result of changing norms and continued technological improvements.  To this end, they cited another study that noted that new U.S. patent applications mentioning "working from home", "telework", "remote work", or similar language tripled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.   They write, "In 10 to 20 years we could see 30% to 40% of working days being done from home, continuing the long run trend of growing levels of working from home...we expect the rate of technological change in remote work friendly innovations to fuel a new phase of work from home adoption in the coming decades."

Clean your room!

My office at work used to be an absolute mess.  For the longest time, I had stacks and stacks of papers literally everywhere (as I've said in the past - see "Today's word is Tsundoku" - I am addicted to printing out articles and saving them to read later, except most of the time it takes a very long time to actually read them).  A few months ago, I actually spent a few hours cleaning up my stacks.  Of course I found that in some cases, I had multiple copies of the same article!  I still have stacks of articles, but now they are at least hidden out of sight.  The question is whether I will forget about them now that they are hidden, but that's a question for another day.  I have to confess that I felt very good about finally having a clean desk.

Apparently, our brains are wired to like order.  As Libby Sander wrote in an online article for Harvard Business Review (see "The Case for Finally Cleaning Your Desk"), "When our space is a mess, so are we."  It's easy to understand how much time we can spend searching for a lost document on a cluttered desk.  As it turns out, the same is true if we've gone completely digital - one international survey (see Melissa Webster's white paper from 2012, "Bridging the information worker productivity gap: New challenges and opportunities for IT") found that workers lose up to 2 hours per week searching for lost digital documents!  But it goes much deeper than that.  What was news to me is that clutter can adversely effect our behavior and emotions.  Clutter has negative effects on stress and anxiety levels, our ability to focus, our eating choices, and our sleep!  It's no wonder that Marie Kondo is so popular these days!

Clutter is bad!  But as I learned from my own personal experience, de-cluttering your workspace is not only possible, it's refreshing and reinvigorating!  So, what are you waiting for?  Go clean your room!

"Come on! You can do it!"

A few years ago, my wife and I were running together on a trail at a park near our house.  I was struggling some, and she was trying her best to help me.  She kept telling me, "Come on! You can do it!"  For a lot of people, these words of encouragement would motivate us to push harder, but for me it just made we want to quit.  I told her that she wasn't helping me, so she stopped encouraging me.  I started to wonder why her words of encouragement seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect.  I think I finally learned why only now, several years later.

I recently came across a "Defend Your Research" interview ("If you want to motivate someone, shut up already") in Harvard Business Review by Brandon Irwin, a faculty member in the Department of Kinesiology at Kansas State University.  Irwin actually studies what is known as the Köhler effect in psychology, named after the German psychologist Otto Köhler, who first studied motivation in groups in the 1920's.  Köhler asked several members of an amateur rowing club to do standing arm curls with a heavy barbell until they were so exhausted that they could not lift it anymore.  They performed the task alone or in two- and three-person groups.  When working in groups, all of the members held a single barbell that was twice as heavy for two-person groups and three times as heavy for three-person groups. In other words, if one person quit, the rest of the group would struggle to continue after a short time ("A chain is only as strong as the weakest link!").  Köhler found that the groups persisted longer than their weakest members had persisted as individuals.  The effect of being in a group on motivation was the largest when the members of the group were moderately different in ability. If the difference in ability was very small, or it if was very big, the effect of group participation on motivation was not as significant.

The Köhler effect suggests then that a person works harder when he or she is a member of a group or team compared to when working alone.  That makes intuitive sense, but we still don't know why I wasn't motivated by my wife's encouragement.  Irwin conducted a study in which college students performed a series of plank exercises, in which they were told to hold the plank for as long as possible.  The study participants performed the first series of plank exercises alone, and then they repeated the same exercise with an online partner (the online partner was always a fitness instructor who was able to hold the plank for longer than the study participants).  Half of the time, the partner remained quiet and just performed the plank.  However, the other half of the time, the partner would provide words of encouragement, such as "Come on", "You got this", or "You can do it".  

Consistent with the Köhler effect, study participants consistently performed better when they had partners compared to when they were alone.  Surprisingly however, participants were able to hold the plank position for longer when their partners were silent!  Those with silent partners performed 33% longer than when they were alone, while those with the active partner shouting words of encouragement only performed 22% longer than when they were alone.  

Based on questionnaires and interviews performed after the tests, Irwin speculated that study participants believed that they were just as good as their partners (despite evidence to the contrary).  In order to avoid being the "weakest link", they performed better when part of a team (consistent again with the Köhler effect).  However, when the partner was shouting words of encouragement, study participants thought that they were trying to motivate themselves, which made them believe that the partners were less capable (the partner was the "weakest link"), which decreased their motivation to push harder (i.e., the Köhler effect no longer applied).

Let me be clear.  When my wife and I were running, I didn't think that I was the superior runner and I knew she was trying to encourage me, not herself!  Regardless, I still find the results of this study to be of significant interest, even if they don't necessarily answer my original question.  Irwin mentioned a follow-up study in the "Defend Your Research" article (see "Aerobic exercise is promoted when individual performance affects the group").  The set-up in this study was similar to the plank study, except in this case participants rode a stationary bike over five sessions with and without a virtual partner.  Here, all of the virtual partners remained silent.  Half of the participants were told that they were on a team and contributing to the total team score, while the other half rode alone.  Again, participants performed better when they were with a partner.  However, participants who were on a team tripled their time on the stationary bikes!  These results are again highly consistent with the Köhler effect.

Okay, what's the take-home message here?  First (and perhaps most importantly), as leaders we should leverage the powerful motivational aspects of participating on a team (i.e., the Köhler effect).  If you want someone to perform better, put them in a group!  Second, if you want to motivate, encourage, and inspire someone to work harder, direct your words of encouragement to them specifically by using their first name (e.g., "Come on, Derek! You can do it!" instead of "Come on! You can do it!").  

Fire and Ice

I haven't always enjoyed poetry, but I have always admired the American poet Robert Frost.  I always felt that I could read and enjoy his poems without necessarily looking for a deeper, hidden meaning, even though the deeper meaning was always there.  One of Frost's most famous poems is one called "Fire and Ice".  It's a short poem (only 9 lines in length) that was first published in Harper's Magazine in December 1920.  Here it is:  

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

It's important to remember that the poem was written in the aftermath of World War I, one of the most tumultuous periods of time in history.  Chaos and revolution were the topics of the day and were frequent themes in a number of literary publications.  For example, the poet W.B. Yeats had written his poem "The Second Coming" just two years earlier with it famous line, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."  Just five years after Frost wrote "Fire and Ice", the poet T.S. Eliot (see my post here) wrote his own apocalyptic poem "The Hollow Men" which declared, "This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper."

Frost's poem also discusses the end of the world, using two of the four classical or Aristotelian elements (earth, air, fire, water) as symbols for the two emotions of desire (fire) and hate (ice).  Just think about how often we use "fire" to denote the emotion of desire ("burning with desire").  Similarly, when we say someone is "ice cold", we generally are referring to the emotion of hate (at least on some level).  Frost then is telling us that the world will either end because we all hate and kill each other or our passionate and insatiable desire (for power, money, etc) will eventually lead to our destruction.  

Frost was reportedly inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are frozen in the ninth and lowest circle: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass...right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice."   The astronomer Harlow Shapley claimed that Frost had once asked him how the world would end, to which Shapley replied that either the Sun would explode and burn up the Earth or the Sun would burn up and the Earth would freeze, along with all of civilization as we know it.

If the phrase "Fire and Ice" sounds familiar, it's because it is frequently used in a similar context.  For example, the writer George R.R. Martin used the phrase in the title of one of the books in his "Game of Thrones" series ("A Song of Ice and Fire").  I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the great rock-n-roll tune by the artist Pat Benatar ("Fire and Ice").

In my opinion, "Fire and Ice" is one of Frost's great poems.  

Money, love, and happiness

I've posted about the relationship between wealth and happiness at least once in the past (see my post, "Money can't buy me love, but can it buy me happiness?").  The current research suggests that there is indeed a positive association between subjective wellbeing (i.e. happiness) and income, though that relationship peaks at a certain level of income, around $75,000-$95,000, depending on the particular study.  In other words, above that income threshold, more money isn't going to make you significantly happier.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a recent article on CNN.com by Allison Morrow, entitled "We've been wrong about a key contributor to human happiness".  Morrow discusses a recent study (not yet published) by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who found that the so-called "happiness plateau" is actually much higher than previously noted in other studies.  In his latest study (see "Money and Happiness" Extended Evidence Against Satiation"), Killingsworth analyzed a large U.S. database with over 33,000 individuals and found that (1) high net-income individuals were significantly happier than people earning $500,000 per year and (2) the difference in happiness between wealthy and middle-income participants was nearly three times larger than the difference between middle- and lower-income participants.  Killingsworth concluded that the positive association between wealth and happiness continues far above the previously documented income threshold.

There are a couple of really important caveats here.  First, the study has not been published, so it hasn't been subject to peer review (review by other experts in the field to determine if the results of the study are suitable for publication).  While I recognize that the peer review process isn't perfect, I hesitate to make any definitive statements in its absence.  Notably, Killingsworth published similar findings suggesting that happiness continues to rise above the previously identified income thresholds in 2021 ("Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year").  Second, this is only one study among several others that have previously identified an income threshold.  Again, I would expect that Killingsworth would discuss his findings in the context of other research findings in the Discussion section of a published manuscript.  Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, Killingsworth finds that there is a correlation between wealth and happiness, and establishing correlation between two observations isn't the same (it's actually far from it) as finding that one observation caused the other.  Killingsworth admits that there are other things that likely impact happiness, and when asked whether money can buy happiness, he responds, "There isn't one silver bullet - this one secret trick that the doctor is going to tell you is key."  

The next step, not the 200th one...

My wife and I recently took advantage of an opportunity to listen to a talk by the author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was touring in support of the release of her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960's.  It was actually the second time we've attended one of her lectures, and we weren't disappointed.  As I stated in a recent post, she is "A National Treasure".  I've read a number of her books, including The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  In that book, she makes a statement that I thought was so profound, that I wrote it down.  She said, "After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step." Of course, I later researched it and found the original source for the quote by Roosevelt.

The original quote goes like this: "I dream of men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.  It comes from a letter Roosevelt sent to the journalist Lincoln Steffens on June 5, 1908.  The letter is fascinating from a historical perspective.  Imagine the President of the United States writing a journalist directly today to argue about one of his or her political viewpoints.  He even ends the letter with an offer of an in-person meeting:

If you will come down to see me I will go over all this more at length with you, and for once, instead of passing by or brushing aside what you say about me or about anyone else with which I disagree, I will tell you just what I do disagree with. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.

The context of the letter is important, in order to fully appreciate the quote.  Apparently, Steffens had accused both President Roosevelt and Secretary of War William Howard Taft of merely "fighting evil" as opposed to the Republican Senator (and Roosevelt's and Taft's main political rival) Robert M. La Folette, who attacked evil at its root cause.  Roosevelt goes on to provide specific examples of how he and Taft also attack evil at its root cause.

There is no question that Roosevelt was a man of action.  I refer you to my previous post on his famous "Man in the Arena" speech ("Why your critics aren't the ones who count..." and "In the Arena").  In his letter to Lincoln Steffens, Roosevelt also explains the importance of taking the necessary first step, which is also the most difficult.  I am reminded of the old adage, "a journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step" reportedly first said by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.  

I would be remiss if I didn't also remind you of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's admonition that "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".  I'm not saying that the proverbial 200th step isn't important, but you have to remember two important points.  First, trying to come up with the perfect plan for every single contingency is, as Eisenhower suggests, likely to be a useless exercise.  There's no way to come up with a perfect plan, and sooner or later, you just have to get started.  Second, you have to have an end in mind - that 200th step, if you will.  If you don't know where you are going, it's difficult to get started.  As Yogi Berra famously once quipped, "If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else."

As always, I am reminded that there is a lot to learn from leaders of our collective past.  There's no question that Theodore Roosevelt was one of our greatest Presidents - he consistently ranks in the top five of surveys of historians.  And he is becoming one of my personal favorites (though Lincoln is still my favorite).  To paraphrase him once again, I am more impressed with the individual who takes the first step than the one who theorizes about the 200th step. 

The Invention of the Can Opener

If you grew up during the 1970's, you may remember Saturday morning cartoons and in particular the animated musical educational program called Schoolhouse Rock!  These short videos aired in between cartoons during commercial breaks, and they were only slightly longer in duration than the commercials themselves.  Topics covered included history, civics, grammar, science, and mathematics.  While I had several favorites, today I am thinking of the episode called "Mother Necessity", which made the claim that all of history's great inventions were thought up by men and women who were trying to solve a problem or satisfy a specific need.

So, while I won't necessarily argue with the creators of Schoolhouse Rock!, I would like to point out that the metal tin cans used for the preservation of food were used in the Netherlands as early as 1772 (the first patent for the invention of the tin can was awarded in 1810 to Peter Durand), though can openers weren't invented until 1855 in England and 1858 in the United States.  Early tin cans were opened using a hammer and chisel or the sharp end of an axe.  I understand the need to preserve food created a "necessity" for inventing the tin can.  But why didn't the use of a tin can lead to the "necessity" of inventing a tool to open that same tin can?  I can't imagine that a hammer and chisel or axe was so much better that no one thought to create a special tool for opening the tin cans.  As a matter of record, opening a tin can with a hammer and chisel was actually dangerous, at least back in the day.  Remember that antibiotics were still not yet invented either, so any small cut or laceration (which commonly occurred) could lead to a significant and potentially life-threatening infection!  

The problem (i.e. the necessity) was clearly there, yet it too over 80 years before someone thought of designing a tool that made it easier to open a tin can.  Unfortunately, the early can openers weren't easy to use, and to be honest, even the can openers that we use today aren't all that good (I'm not alone in that opinion).  Maybe there's more to innovation and invention than just filling a need?

The editorial staff at Harvard Business Review wrote an introduction to a classic article by the management guru Peter Drucker called "The Discipline of Innovation" in which he listed not one, but seven sources of innovation.  The introduction begins, "How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? If it's mainly the former, then management's role is limited: Hire the right people, and get out of the way.  If it's largely the latter, management must play a more vigorous role: Establish the right roles and processes, set clear goals and relevant measures, and review progress at every step.  Peter Drucker, with the masterly subtlety that is his trademark, comes down somewhere in the middle."

Drucker defines innovation as the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise's economic or social potential.  He suggests that innovations occasionally "spring from a flash of genius," but the overwhelming evidence suggest that these so-called "Eureka moments" are quite rare (see also my post "Where Good Ideas Come From" and the book of the same name by the author Steven Johnson).  Indeed, Drucker once compared (see "Principles of Successful Innovation") "Eureka moments" to "miracle cures" in medicine: 

"All experienced physicians have seen 'miracle cures.'  Patients suffering from terminal illnesses recover suddenly - sometimes spontaneously, sometimes by going to faith healers, by switching to some absurd diet, or by sleeping during the day and being up and about all night.  Yet no physician is going to put miracle cures into a textbook or into a course to be taught to medical students.  They cannot be replicated, cannot be taught, cannot be learned.  They are extremely rare; the overwhelming majority of terminal cases do die, after all."  

The same is true for "Eureka moments" or what Drucker himself called "flashes of genius".  He next mentions perhaps the greatest innovator of all time, Leonardo da Vinci, one of those rare individuals who seems to have been "kissed by the Muses".  Drucker explains that da Vinci's notebooks provided several examples of incredibly innovative concepts and ideas for inventions that were way ahead of their time, including drawings for a submarine, helicopter, and flying machine.  However, none of these inventions could have been built at the time with the technology and materials available during da Vinci's lifetime.  Nor would there have been anyone receptive to them, as they wasn't a clear need for them (okay, maybe there is something to necessity after all).

Drucker lists seven sources of innovation:

1.  Unexpected occurrences

Unexpected successes and failures frequently lead to opportunities for innovation and are often the easiest and simplest.  These unexpected, unforeseen disruptions to the status quo compel individuals and organizations to adapt, explore, and even try unconventional solutions.  Examples include Post-It Notes by 3M, the accidental discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming, and the widespread adoption of Zoom video conferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2.  Incongruities

Incongruities between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be (or ought to be) is another common source of innovation.  Examples include Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft (using private homes or automobiles to meet the needs of travelers and commuters) and smartphones (recognizing that a handheld phone can be so much more than just a phone).

3.  Process needs 

Innovations frequently occur when someone recognizes that a process can be optimized or streamlined.  An example here is Amazon's innovations in supply chain management (which continue to this day with the potential to deliver products using drone technology).

4.  Industry and market changes

Changes in regulatory requirements, consumer preferences, or shifting demographics frequently lead to innovation.  Examples include the shift to plant-based and/or laboratory-grown meat products, electric vehicles, and telemedicine.

5.  Demographic changes

Demographic changes include changes in age, size, and composition, which can lead to innovation.  An example here includes the massive open online course (MOOC) such as Coursera, Khan Academy, and edX.  

6.  Changes in perception

Shifts in cultural norms, attitudes, and values pave the way for innovative products and services too.  For example, as consumers have become environmentally conscious, new eco-friendly products have become more common.

7.  New knowledge

The so-called "Eureka moments" or "flashes of genius" tend to fall into this category of sources of innovation.  An example here is the CRISPR gene editing technology developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

The first four sources in the list are internal to the organization, industry, or service sector, while the last three sources are external and involve changes outside the organization or industry.  Importantly, Drucker admitted that there isn't a clear distinction between each source, and there is likely some overlap between sources.

Drucker had a few final comments that I think are important to highlight.  First, he strongly felt that "purposeful innovation" - the kind responsible for more than 90% in his estimate of all innovations - only occurs through hard work.  He wrote, "In innovation as in any other work there is talent, there is ingenuity, there is predisposition.  But when all is said and done, innovation becomes hard, focused, purposeful work making very great demands on diligence, on persistence, and on commitment.  If these are lacking, no amount of talent, ingenuity, or knowledge will avail."  Second and lastly, Drucker suggested that innovation takes time.  He claimed that the lead time, particularly for innovation that stemmed from "new knowledge" takes around 50 years.  Perhaps that is why the can opener took so long to be invented?

All Things Must Pass II

This past January, two without a doubt future Hall of Fame football coaches retired -  University of Alabama Head Football Coach Nick Saban  and New England Patriots Head Football Coach Bill Belichik.  I posted about their anticipated retirements in a post entitled "All Things Must Pass".  Well, I learned over the weekend that another Hall of Fame coach is retiring.  University of North Carolina Women's Soccer Head Coach Anson Dorrance announced his retirement after 45 seasons.  Apparently Dorrance was UNC's first and so far (until now, of course) only women's soccer head coach, and he led the team to an overall 934-88-53 record over 45 seasons (1979-2023).  Dorrance was also the men's soccer coach from 1977 to 1988, winning 172 games and guiding UNC to an ACC title and NCAA Final Four berth in 1987.  During his tenure, the UNC women won an unprecedented 22 national championships and were the runners up six other times.  The 934 wins, 21 NCAA titles and 147 NCAA tournament wins are all the most in women's soccer history. The Tar Heels enter the 2024 season having been ranked 513 consecutive weeks.  As UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts said, "It is no exaggeration to say Anson Dorrance is one of the greatest collegiate coaches of all time, in any sport.  He has trained many of the best players in the history of U.S. women's soccer and has led our program through decades of unparalleled success."

I've posted about Dorrance in the past (see "How 'bout those Heels?").  I stated at the time that there  are a number of reasons that explain why the UNC team has been so successful under Coach Dorrance.  Without a doubt, he can identify and recruit talent for starters, but he also knows the technical aspects of soccer very well.  However, former players and coaches that have worked with Coach Dorrance consistently cite the team's winning culture.  The elements of their winning culture boil down to Twelve Core Values.  Every year, Coach Dorrance meets with the rising seniors in the spring to discuss how the team can continue to live the core values, both in their personal lives as well as on the soccer field.  Here they are:

1.  We don't whine.  

2. The truly extraordinary do something every day.  

3. And we want these four years of college to be rich, valuable and deep.  

4.  We work hard.

5.  We don't freak out over ridiculous issues or live in fragile states of emotional catharsis or create crises where none should exist.

6.  We choose to be positive.

7.  We treat everyone with respect.

8.  We care about each other as teammates and as human beings.

9.  When we don't play as much as we would like we are noble and still support the team and its mission.

10. We play for each other.

11. We are well led.

12. We want our lives (and not just in soccer) to be never ending ascension, but for that to happen properly, our fundamental attribute about life and our appreciation for it is critical.

There's a lot to say about organizational culture, and I think these Twelve Core Values are a great place to start!  Congratulations to the UNC Women's Soccer Team on a great run and good luck in the future!  More importantly, congratulations to Coach Dorrance on a job very well done!

Wandering Minds

The comedian Steve Wright (see his first appearance on "The Tonight Show" here) once quipped, "I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering."  As it turns out, our minds often wander.  We humans spend a lot of time thinking about what's not going on around us, what happened in the past, what may happen in the future, or even what will never happen at all.  Some scientists believe that a wandering mind is our brain's default mode.  The self-help experts would tell us that we should "live in the moment" and "focus on the present", but is that the right answer?  Well, as it turns out, the self-help experts are right.

Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a study a few years ago in Science magazine that sought to answer this exact question (see "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind").  They created an iPhone app that allowed them to create a large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions by people in their everyday lives.  They analyzed 2,250 randomly selected adults who had answered three questions: (1) How are you feeling right now? (2) What are you doing right now? and (3) Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?

What they found was very interesting, at least to me.  First, as expected, people's minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing.  Close to half of the individuals were daydreaming at the time that they answered the survey, even if they were participating in an activity that they enjoyed.  Second, and this was surprising to me, people were less happy when their minds were wandering, again regardless of activity.  Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of happiness than what they were actually doing.  Killingsworth and Gilbert concluded, "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

Killingsworth gave a TED talk ("Want to be happier? Stay in the moment!"), in which he claims that society spends literally billions of dollars every year looking for happiness, when the secret to happiness is right there in our grasp.  Do you want to be happy?  Don't let your mind wander.  Stay in the moment.  Focus on the present.  Jason Castro, writing for Scientific American, suggests, "The happy upshot of this study is that it suggests a wonderfully simple prescription for greater happiness: think about what you’re doing."  Castro also cautions us that this might be easier said than done - remember, our brain's default mode is to wander!  Castro adds, "On the plus side, a mind can be trained to wander less. With regular and dedicated meditation practice, you can certainly become much more present, mindful, and content. However, he offers one last caveat - and it's an important one, "But you’d better be ready to work. The most dramatic benefits only really accrue for individuals, often monks, who have clocked many thousands of hours practicing the necessary skills (it’s not called the default state for nothing)."

Debility

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the word debility is defined as the quality or state of being weak, feeble, or infirm (but especially, physical weakness).  The term was frequently used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe the various afflictions that sailors and explorers suffered at the time.  Most of the time, the term referred to the more specific medical diagnosis of scurvy or consumption (tuberculosis), which were very prevalent amongst 18th and 19th century sailors.  As a matter of fact, most naval physicians during that period of time would easily make the diagnosis of scurvy or consumption based solely upon the presence of debility.  That is exactly what happened during the infamous Lost Franklin Expedition, as detailed in a great book by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition.

It's been called the greatest disaster in the history of polar exploration.  The Lost Franklin Expedition was a failed polar (in this case, arctic) expedition led by the British naval captain,  Sir John Franklin, who departed England in 1845 with 129 officers and sailors aboard two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror.  The expedition's goal was to locate and traverse the last unnavigated sections of the famed Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  The exact details are sketchy, but the two ships became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island.  After being trapped in the ice for more than a year, the two crews abandoned their ships in April, 1848 in an attempt to find their way to safety on foot.  By that point, two dozen men had already died, including Sir John Franklin, had died, presumably from scurvy and consumption.  The remaining survivors were led by Franklin's second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus's captain, James Fitzjames, who all disappeared and presumably perished.  During the decades that followed, what had happened to the Lost Franklin Expedition was one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries.

Pressed by Franklin's wife, Jane, and others, the British Admiralty launched a search for the missing expedition in 1848. During multiple searches in the ensuing decades, several artefacts from the expedition were discovered, including the marked gravesites of three sailors who had died relatively early after the two ships were trapped in the ice.  The book, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition details the how the exhumation and subsequent autopsies performed 138 years later on these three sailors revealed that the probable cause of death was neither scurvy nor consumption, but lead poisoning.  The British Navy had started to use canned meats and vegetables as a better source of nutrition for sailors (notably, the tin can was first patented in England in 1811 and was immediately put to use by the British Navy), but unfortunately the tin cans were soldered shut with lead, which apparently leached into the food (for two relevant scientific publications, see here and here).  Acute lead poisoning can produce a range of clinical signs and symptoms, including loss of appetite, fatigue (debility), weakness, and colic, many of which mimic scurvy; it can also cause neurologic effects, such as confusion, erratic behavior, and paralysis of the limbs. The expedition's medical team at the time was unable to diagnose lead poisoning, and they instead diagnosed all the sailors with debility with scurvy.  The treatment for scurvy was more canned meats and vegetables, which only worsened the acute lead poisoning.

As Beattie and Geiger conclude, "It is sadly ironic that Franklin's expedition, certainly one of the greatest seafaring expeditions ever launched, carrying all the tools that early industry and innovation could offer, should have been mortally wounded by one of them...When Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845, an entire nation believed that the honor of conquering the Northwest Passage was within his grasp.  None could have known that inside the tins stored in the ship's hold there ticked a time bomb that helped not only to deny Franklin his triumph but to steal away 129 brave lives."  They go on to write, "There is often a terrible price to pay in human exploration reliant upon new technology.  That fact was vividly demonstrated again in recent years by the failure of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003."

The British artist, W. Thomas Smith commemorated the Franklin expedition with his haunting painting, "They forged the last links with their lives": Sir John Franklin's Men Dying by Their Boat During the North-West Passage Expedition.

Apparently, the original title of the painting, under which it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895 was  "They forged the last link with their lives: HMS Erebus and Terror, 1849-50".  The dates were the artist's best guess, and the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were the two ships in the lost Franklin Expedition.  The "last links" in the title refers to the claim that Franklin and his men had actually completed the discovery of a formerly uncharted Northwest Passage route through the Arctic archipelago, before Robert McClure did so in 1850 during his expedition to determine the fate of the Franklin expedition from the Pacific side.  Smith's painting is based on McClintock's find of a lifeboat in Erebus Bay containing human remains. Earlier during that same expedition, he had also found documentary evidence that Franklin had actually died in 1847, before Franklin's men had abandoned their ships. 

As an interesting historical aside, several ships were sent to search for the Franklin's lost expedition, including the HMS Resolute.  As happened so frequently in those days, the HMS Resolute became trapped in ice and was abandoned, only later to be recovered by an American whaler George Henry in 1855 and sent back to Queen Victoria.  Timbers from the ship were used to construct three desks, one of which was sent by Queen Victoria as a gift to then President Rutherford B. Hayes.  You will recognize this desk as the famous Resolute Desk, which is a central feature in the White House Oval Office as the President's desk.

Beattie and Geiger finished their book by writing, "The story of how the Royal Navy failed to achieve the Northwest Passage is really that of how the world's greatest navy battled, and was ultimately humbled by, a simple yet gruesome disease - scurvy, allied to a menace of which they could not begin to conceive: lead poisoning.  The source of their defeat was not the ice-choked seas, the deep cold, the winters of absolute night, the labyrinthine geography or soul-destroying isolation.  It was found in their food supply, most notably in their heavy reliance on tinned foods."

Does your academic pedigree matter?

I've been following the various colleges and universities that are boycotting the U.S. News and World Report rankings with great interest.  By report, the USNWR has ranked the nation's top colleges, universities, and graduate schools (the magazine has ranked hospitals too, but I want to focus on the education rankings today) for at least the past 40 years.  These rankings are used by the organizations as marketing tools, and by prospective students to help select where to apply.  One of the most frequently asked questions is whether these rankings have anything to do with the quality of the education.  More importantly, does graduating from a top-ranked institution predict long-term performance in the workplace?

It is with this exact question in mind that I read the study ("The predictive power of university pedigree on the graduate's performance in global virtual teams") by Vas Taras and colleagues with great interest.  These investigators used the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities and studied undergraduate and graduate students who were participating in the X-Culture project, a global business competition in which about 4,000 students from over 140 universities in 40 countries participate every year.  Students are randomly assigned to teams, and they are asked to solve real-world problems submitted by usually 10-12 corporations, who then also serve as judges.  The winning teams receive travel stipends to present their projects at an annual meeting, and the students who show the best performance may receive internships or offers of employment.

The investigators collected and analyzed data from the 2013-2016 academic year competitions, resulting in a sample of 28,339 students from 294 universities in 79 countries.  University rank was the independent variable, while performance, based upon both subjective assessment by the judges and by peers, was the dependent variable.  In general, students from higher-ranked universities performed only slightly better than their peers, at least on some measures.  However, a more prestigious university pedigree was also associated with a greater level of arrogance, excessive focus on the task at the expense of relationships, and envy, all of which could negatively impact the ability of these graduates to work well in teams.  

It's an interesting study, but I am not sure that we can say that the question of whether graduating from a top-ranked institution predicts better performance in the workplace has been answered.  Notably, most of the studies that have tried to answer this question have equated job performance and success with factors such as employability or pay.  Given that the current study is one of the few that has tried to link academic pedigree with actual performance, the results are certainly compelling.  I will look forward to seeing more studies like this one in the future - perhaps a future study will finally answer the question, "Does your academic pedigree matter?"

"Give a darn" outcomes

A few years ago, I asked whether hospitals should be run like hotels.  I mentioned a study by Dana Goldman and John Romley at the RAND corporation that was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in 2008 entitled "Hospitals as Hotels: The Role of Patient Amenities in Hospital Demand".  The two investigators also later published an editorial piece about their study in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The study involved almost 9,000 Medicare patients (so that hospital price was not a factor in the choice of hospital) who presented to one of 117 hospitals in the Los Angeles, California market for treatment of pneumonia.  Hospitals were assessed and ranked from both a quality of care perspective (using mortality in patients with community-acquired pneumonia) and a patient experience perspective (based on "good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings").  Patients under 65 years of age were excluded.  When the patient experience ranking improved by one standard deviation, the demand for that hospital increased by close to 40%.  Conversely, when the quality of care ranking improved by one standard deviation, hospital demand increased by only by 12%.  I also mentioned a systematic review published in the Journal of Healthcare Management which found that patients were more likely to return to the same hospital or ambulatory clinic if they had a positive experience.

It is with that post in mind that I read a recent commentary published in NEJM Catalyst ("Outcomes or experiences - what do patients value more in evaluating medical teams?").  The investigators in this study surveyed 998 patients from four European countries (France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) with diagnoses of breast cancer, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, depression, or arthritis and asked them to rate the importance of so-called patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) versus patient-reported experience measures (PREMs).  PROMs generally measure the quality of care based upon what outcomes are most important to patients, e.g. the patient's self-determined health-related quality of life.  Although patients considered both outcomes important, on average 83% of patients considered PROMs to be more important than PREMs for choosing a medical team.  

Importantly, organizations are starting to catch on that the outcomes that matter most to patients and clinicians may differ from what may be important to regulatory agencies.  As one recent example, Newsweek magazine and Statista have started to use PROMs in their annual review of the World's Best Hospitals and World's Best Children's Hospitals.  At my own organization, we are starting to focus on "Outcomes That Matter" - those outcomes that are of most importance to our patients and families.  Similarly, Providence St. Joseph Health focuses on "give a darn" measures.  All outcome measures are required to pass the "give a darn" test.  As Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer told Dr. Thomas Lee in an interview for NEJM Catalyst (see "The “Give a Darn” Method for Outcomes Measurement"), "We use something called the ‘give a darn’ test. What are the outcomes that your colleagues would care about if they were better than their neighbor? And what are the outcomes that your patients would care about if you were better than your neighbor? If a measure is in both those sets, then that’s an outcome that matters."

Krakatoa

The historian and philosopher Will Durant, author of the massive 11-volume The Story of Civilization, once wrote, "Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."  That is indeed the theme (and conclusion) of three books that I recently finished.  The first book was Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester.  I've now read three of Winchester's books (including The Atlantic and The Pacific), and I've thoroughly enjoyed each one.  Here, Winchester writes about the eruption of the volcano known as Krakatoa, an archipelago located in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra.  Krakatoa erupted from May 20-October 21, 1883, with peak activity on August 27, 1883.  Nearly 70% of the island and surrounding archipelago were destroyed and collapsed into a caldera.  It was one of the deadliest and most destructive eruptions in recorded history, and Winchester describes in great detail the eruption's global and historical impact.

Krakatoa's eruption was heard almost 3,000 miles by scientists on the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.  The accompanying pressure (blast) wave circled the world at least 7 times.  Massive tsunamis that occurred in the aftermath caused most of the 36,000 deaths.  There were multiple reports of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of pumice stone hundreds of miles away from the eruption, some of which washed up on the shores of the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption.  

The eruption itself caused a volcanic winter as temperatures dropped by an average of 0.4 °C in the northern hemisphere.  Global weather patterns changed, with some areas reporting record rainfalls and widespread flooding, while other areas experienced severe drought.  The ash darkened the skies and changed the character of the setting sun as far away as the United States.  British artist William Ascroft apparently made thousands of colored sketches of the brilliant sunsets, and the artist Edvard Munch is said to have been inspired to paint his famous The Scream as a result:

The second book, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William and Nicholas Klingaman, tells the story of the now famous "Year Without a Summer", predominantly due to a volcanic winter event following the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.  Based upon the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) (a measure of intensity of explosiveness of volcanic eruptions, similar to the Richter Scale for earthquakes), the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 (VEI 7) was more powerful than even the Krakatoa eruption (VEI 6) above.  Similar to Krakatoa, the Mount Tambora eruption significantly disrupted normal weather patterns on a global basis, resulting in extreme weather and harvest failures around the world.  In their book, the Klingamans suggest that the Mount Tambora eruption and the subsequent "Year Without a Summer" served as inspiration for paintings by J.M.W. Turner, as well as the classic novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.  Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori, Lord Byron, and friends were spending the summer near Lake Geneva, Switzerland in June 1816.  Due to the constant rain, the group of friends spent most of their time indoors, and as the story goes, inspired by a collection of German ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed a contest to see who could write the scariest story.  Mary Shelly apparently won that contest, though Lord Byron wrote a vampire story that Polidori later used as inspiration for his story, The Vampyre, which served as an early precursor for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

The last book was Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by the journalist David Keys (also discussed in the first two episodes of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead).  I thought Keys overreached here, but he tries to link several major sociopolitical events with a cataclysmic event that occurred around A.D. 535, possibly due to a volcanic winter caused by earlier eruption at Krakatoa.  The dramatic change in weather patterns led to harvest failures and extreme weather (flooding in some areas of the world, drought in others), which when accompanied by the Plague, resulted in fall of some ancient civilizations and the rise of others (particularly the rise of Islam).  He concludes, "Climate has the potential to change history - not just on a short-term basis but in the long term as well."  It's an interesting theory, if not exactly backed up by solid evidence.

By far the best book of the three was Winchester's.  Regardless, I learned a lot from all three books.  As I reflected on these three books, I think that the lessons for us today are fairly clear.  First, as I've talked about a lot in several posts this past year, we are all tied closely together.  Events that happen in one part of the world can and frequently do have an impact on the opposite end of the world (I am reminded once again of the "butterfly effect").  Second, it's hard to reliably predict the downstream consequences of an event that occurs in the VUCA world of today.  Lastly, I go back to the original quote from Will Durant at the beginning of this post (I will paraphrase slightly).  Civilization does exist by geologic consent, and we would do well to remember that, particularly as we deal with the change in climate today.

Ravens and Monkeys

Several months ago, I posted about the legend of the ravens living at the Tower of London (see "The Day the Ravens Left the Tower").  There are currently nine ravens that live at the Tower of London.  They are cared for by members of the Yeoman Warders (the legendary Beefeaters).  Legend has it that "if the Tower of London ravens are lost or fly away, the Crown will fall and Britain with it" (the legend is the subject of an awesome song from the 1980's "The Day The Ravens Left The Tower" by The Alarm).  As you can imagine, the ravens are very well-cared for!  Apparently they've been around since at least the late 1800's, as the earliest known reference to the Tower ravens is an illustration from 1883.

I learned of a similar legend involving a species of monkey called the Barbary macaques of Gibraltar.  The island of Gibraltar is a British territory that sits near the exit of the Mediterranean Sea at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula (which includes Spain and Portugal).  The local population of Barbary macaques is apparently the only wild monkey population in all of Europe.  As of 2020, there were approximately 300 macaques living in five different troops.  These monkeys were under the care of the British military until 1991, and the "Keeper of the Apes" was even a royal appointment!  Since 1991, the monkeys have been under the protection of the local government.  There is a local legend that as long as there are monkeys on the island of Gibraltar, it will remain under British rule.  In 1942, the population dwindled to seven, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that several wild macaques be brought in from Morocco and Algeria.  

Both of these legends are interesting, if not a little peculiar.  I am reminded a little of the idiom "when hell freezes over" to mean that something will likely never happen (see also, "snowball's chance in hell" or "one chance in a million" or "ghost of a chance").  However, the British legends seem more tangible, as I suppose there is at least some chance of the ravens leaving the Tower of London or the Barbary macaques population dying out on the island of Gibraltar.  But I suppose there is a small chance that either of these events would be associated with the collapse of the British monarchy.  They are interesting legends nonetheless.