Human Limits and Bubblewrap
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
What are we capable of? What am I capable of at 62, that I would never have believed? I have just been reading of the exploits of Kilian Jornet Burgada, who runs up big mountains and is planning his weekend run up Everest and back. And also of a couple who let their big Sussex farm go back to the wild, letting the longhorn cattle fend for themselves over the winter.
This is as far from a human exceptionalist blog as you are likely to get. The things that we as humans do that our culture celebrates as unique and special are largely flawed and broken. And in celebrating them we subtly lose sight of our ability to run up mountains without needing food on the way. Our culture seems to subvert our abilities just at the point where they become wild and free.
I still have those impostor syndrome nightmares, where I have to take an exam or account for myself and I haven’t a clue. And it is true that for my finals I borrowed some of my female colleagues’ notes at the last minute to see what went on in the lectures I slept through. (Once I woke up to an empty lecture theatre!) But this is the point which we won’t grasp, that we refuse to grasp, that the hurdles we set up as a culture are trivial if we let them be trivial. The biggest, literally the biggest, lesson of my degree course was taught me during a viva when the external examiner asked what was wrong with the course and I couldn’t answer though I had loads to say.[1]
As a family pattern, my eldest son Duncan spent most of his sixth form time practising music rather than attending lessons. To good effect — he is a conductor now. Approaching his IB exams he simply addressed himself to the syllabus description on the morning of each exam and got his elder sister to coach him on what he was unsure of. That is, the IB exams are hard if you let them be hard. We, all of us, in practice frighten people into a respect for these hurdles that is completely destructive and non-sensical. Why do we do this? [2]
I have a book somewhere about setting higher academic standards. The case study is an exam in Victorian poetry. Really. And the question is: if you are a real expert and lover of Victorian poetry, can you pass this exam? Or to pass the exam do you have to reflect the views of the lecturer who taught the course? Just ask yourself which you think is culturally desirable or fair: that good students on the course will pass the exam set or that the exam will examine(!) understanding and even the lecturer might not do well?
When I say, as I do to anyone prepared to listen, that education as we know it makes you stupid, I am saying that it makes you into someone who knows you can’t run up Everest and back in a weekend, and who knows that you can’t get a 7 in IB maths by revising for a morning. What we teach as a meta-message is that these things are hard, and of course they are if you let the culture persuade you that they are hard. But why do we do that?
And this is not about positive thinking, or EFT,[3] or setting goals, or working on your self-esteem. It is about the culture and our increasing reliance on bubblewrap.
The bubblewrap generation
My elderly mother was asking me about the time I was “made redundant”. I was not made redundant, I was arbitrarily sacked after some internal politics while I was out of the country. I happened to live next door to a lady barrister who explained that as a neighbour she would go and sort out the company in question, because that is what barrister neighbours do. The company had no sense at all of due process and she got enough money out of them to allow me to readjust. Of course, with this much hindsight I can see that working for a company that was corrupt (literally, criminally) and inept was not what I needed, but for while it gave freedom to do the research I wanted to do.
No-one, I think, would recommend being sacked as an item on your bucket list. No-one would recommend failing a big exam, or not being selected at a long succession of selection centres. Kilian Jornet Burgada was rescued from Mont Blanc with a mate and they were berated by the mountain rescuers because they were in running trainers and didn’t have supplies. These things erect a nexus of very forceful emotions that have a long-lasting effect no matter how you deal with them or not.
My son Duncan has a mate who teaches in a public school, expensive but not top notch academically. (The school, that is.) The parents cough up their £30K to get their precious offspring through their exams and to get a university place. However, the bubblewrap trend is firmly in place and in practice the kids get a lot of help with their work. The teacher’s statement to me was that many of the kids are functionally illiterate: they cannot sit down with a book and extract the information they need. They may get their university place at a good university but they arrive completely unable to deal with what they are expected to do there.[4]
And I have had reports that the demand for bubblewrap now permeates higher education. My current next door neighbour lectures in economics, and she is required to have full written notes and a video recording of her lectures up on the net before she gives the lecture. What price seizing on a learning moment? How do parents get pulled into a system that will make their children stupid? Or is our culture so blinded by formal qualifications and entitlement that we do not notice?
Actually, the last time I did any university lecturing there was a request from on high, from the bureaucrats who know nothing, for the set of learning outcomes from what we were teaching. Well OK, but when we ask for the outcomes of the courses that fed into ours, we got a very brusque refusal. Don’t be silly.
There is obviously a practical problem with bubblewrap. It is counterproductive. But I am asking you to focus on the way our culture creates hurdles and convinces all that they are hard to clear. That drives the very requirement for bubblewrap. But the hurdles are not real. Weird, but we are getting used to weird in this blog. If we ask about the POSIWID of this system of hurdle-making, it seems to be there to convince most people that they are stupid, and some people that they are capable when they are not. Why would society invest in that?
A fisherman’s tale. As a kid of eight we were holidaying on the west coast of Scotland and I was playing with the local kids, fishing on this occasion. I yanked at my line and a fine sea trout flopped out onto the bank. The local kids said, no that is not how you do it, you have to play the fish until it is tired and then you can land it. For the sake of it the fish went back in the water to be played and of course pulled itself off the hook…
Let me do one industrial example. A global insurance company and a new system that I have written about before, for insuring motorcycles. The new system turned out not to be a problem, it was integrating it with everything else that turned into a quagmire. All the corporately mandated project management standards and this standard and that standard, turned out to give very misleading information. So great was the shock to the whole IT development area that for 200 people and 2 years, nothing could be delivered. And the way back to sanity was via some developments that “didn’t matter” and to which the rules could arguably not be relevant![5]
We do this to ourselves. Repeatedly. We use invented hurdles to convince ourselves that doing something is really hard. What is the problem with JFDI? Really?
Bullshit jobs
Many people have seen David Graeber’s magazine article about bullshit jobs. There is now a book that I must read of the same title. The resonance of the idea is very clear: most people can relate to the idea that many jobs, according to the job holder, achieve precisely nothing of any value to anyone. The bigger political question chimes with our blog here: why does our economic system generate so many utterly pointless jobs? Why?
And just to ram this home: if you want to make sure that there are hurdles to jump and that people think they are hard, then create some jobs to specify the hurdles and to make sure that people jump them properly and that the tests are fair. Voilà, bullshit jobs that make people feel bad about themselves. That is a process without limits. And there is always a plausible rationale, almost by definition.
I am in danger of succumbing to this tendency. I called the blog “human limits” thinking of how ephemeral they are, but I know some people will read the phrase restrictively.[6] I write of the smothering and mollycoddling of bubblewrap instead of writing about what happens when you break free. Close to a bullshit blog.
So we have a global industry that creates hurdles for people to convince them that they cannot achieve whatever it is they set out to. (The word ‘achieve’ makes me queasy). The spirit of Kilian Jornet Burgada, the only reason he gets to feature here, is that the hurdles don’t get a look in. My sense is that all the very cogent reasons why you can’t run up Everest just give him a place to play. I have a strong sense that all the reasons that we can’t provide a health service that works for people just gives someone, (me?) a place to help people get well. The hurdles sort of cluster together and annul each other. The bullshit becomes so gross that it collapses under its own weight. Like kids going to a school that doesn’t teach and ending up smarter than the ones who get taught. Or like the Sussex couple jettisoning farming best practice, well just about farming practice lock, stock and barrel, and finding out they are better off without it.
What do you call someone who guides others into understanding how to put hurdles in their place? How to pass exams in a day? How to cook by instinct? How to lean into natural ecosystems?
Bullshit at scale
One of the diseases of public sector management is that things must scale up. You get evidence at a small scale and you “roll things out”. Nora Bateson thinks that a concern for scale is diagnostic that something is a bureaucratic fantasy rather than something grounded and real.
QOF is a UK framework where GPs get paid to prescribe certain drugs that are thought to have preventative power. QOF apparently cost £30Bn over fifteen years: scale. Its effect: zero or less. The publicity for this masterpiece of public sector management: zero or less. Any apology to the population that were experimented on without their consent: no chance in a million years. Are we mending our ways: no. Just think of how many bullshit jobs those billions created and co-opted.
What does it take to simply shake off all that bureaucracy and say with confidence: “that is never going to improve the health of individuals or the nation”? Maybe we just need to get used to doing it. You could easily dedicate several lifetimes to trying to disprove premises and overturn conclusions and get people to take responsibility, but hey. How about a simple, confident “that’s bullshit” and move on to doing something useful, leaving the hurdles just nowhere? I did have that reaction when I first heard about QOF, but I am still gaining the Kilian Jornet Burgada spirit.
So where does bubblewrap come into the story? Well people who have been bubblewrapped are completely inexperienced at finding their own loud voice in highly charged situations. That is precisely what they cannot do, what they have been protected from.
Cardinal sins, establishment sins
Your doctor really wants to blame you for your illness, especially long term conditions. Your teacher wants to blame you for not paying attention to her pearls of wisdom. Your council wants to blame you for not knowing what can be recycled this week. And of course if you should be so derelict as not to be working, the JobCentre wants to blame you for the state of the economy and the world.
For reference, and I had to cheat, the seven cardinal sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Pride and lust are a bit out of fashion but the rest are pretty much how they always were. So in a POSIWID sort of a way, the answer to some of our rhetorical questions about why all those hurdles that make peoples’ lives such a misery and waste of time must be that they position people to be blamed for the cardinal sins.
Just unpick this a bit. The desired establishment result is that you think that your gluttony has made you fat. The science says that isn’t true, the whole of the west has become obese by eating what the food industry sells us and following the government guideline to eat mainly starchy foods. So anyone with an ounce of psychoanalytic insight would say, hang on, that must be projection then. The establishment is bloated so we must be gluttons. That sounds about right.
Let’s do one more. The desired result is that we should be rather passive wage slaves, a trouble free source of labour. Bullshit jobs of course. The science says that doesn’t work, in the information economy we have to be engaged and motivated by our own values. But those jobs largely don’t exist, which means the economy cannot flourish which means there are only crappy jobs. The establishment are mere rent-seeking leeches so we must be slothful and have dreadful productivity. That sounds about right too.
Cases
One of the situations in which hurdles get ignored, and the colonial controlling psychology of the establishment becomes irrelevant, is during a dire emergency. Do or die.
There is an excellent book, Sources of Power by Gary Klein, that gives detailed descriptions of some of these emergencies and the extraordinary responses. One chapter is about a sitting duck US battleship in the Gulf during the first Gulf War. The Iraq Silkworm missile sites were being overrun and there was a high alert given the likelihood that the missiles would be fired rather than surrendered. In the event, a missile (and happily not a commercial airline flight) was shot down before it appeared on the radar.
And in another book with similar interests, Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins, there is another extended case study of people doing impossible things under duress.
From our perspective here, while these are amazing stories of skilful coping beyond what seems possible, they simply demonstrate the Kilian Jornet Burgada principle that hurdles are there to be ignored or played with, not for any useful or serious purpose. Bubblewrap is only helpful during transport, and sometimes not even then.
[1] Which reminds us of Dave Snowden’s knowledge management adage that we know more that we can say, and can say more than we can write down.
[2] Mountains and molehills, perhaps.
[3] Emotional Freedom Technique (tapping)
[4] Speaking of being functionally illiterate in a different context, a professor at my local drama school bemoaned that the new intake had had no voice training whatsoever, ill-equipped to begin their higher level training
[5] Companies that split their project management processes into heavy and light according to the proposed budget suddenly find a good number of projects come in just below the threshold. Not a terrible thing, really, given that small things are often simpler and might get delivered. (Though of course, without ever quite knowing the side-effects in advance…)
[6] Just think of all the scientific justification that might have been posited for why no one would ever run a mile in less than four minutes, that it was a limit imposed by the universe, etc., right up until the day that Roger Bannister did it in public, and now it’s the slowest acceptable pace for a male middle distance runner…
