From radar to trim tab
Ghosts from the future and why I’m taking a break from writing fiction
Note to readers: This essay will take about a quarter hour to read. It describes how my work had me relating to possible futures; and what happened when I started writing fiction. It might interest you if:
semiotics or future studies is your bag
you work in/do innovation and you like conceptualisation
you’re an artist…or a certain kind of civic activist
Landscape scanning: a strange capability
Before I started writing fiction in 2017 as part of a grief process I’d designed in the wake of three significant family deaths in 18 months, I was hard at work building a business innovating innovation processes in complex companies.
At the heart of our business was a culture scanning process which Indy Neogy ran (and runs still). Indy is a dot-connector and futurist. I, a semiotician by training, learned the craft from him. Gregg Fraley was our seasoned problem-solver, steeped in the creative practices developed over decades at the Creative Problem Solving Institute Conference in Buffalo, New York. Gregg is also a storyteller, and his business novel Jack’s Notebook is a wonderful way to gain or make more conscious creative problem solving skills. Gregg helped me see the connection between my workplace and business storytelling and fiction.
Together, we three created a 3-dimensional magazine called “IdeaKeg”. Every six weeks, an “edition” packed inside a FedEx 10-kg carton would be dispatched to our company subscribers. At the start of the subscription, we provided a 125-page illustrated manual for a conversation process we’d dubbed FuseTrail. Inside the box, users would unpack seven wrapped objects. If using FuseTrail, groups would self-direct in a ritual opening and exploration of the objects, through sensation, lateral association and forced connections with trends in culture, material science, geopolitics. The purpose: to frame bolder, braver questions and generate wilder ideas with the benefit of whole-brain thinking and a scaffolded process that protected divergent thinking. Underpinning it all was scanning we called TrendTrail, which Indy led.
At first, we thought: we’ve sold a beta product, we’re launching in a recession; if we can make a go of this now, we’re set when the economy turns. We knew we were ahead of our time, and we put in the hard work to build a name for IdeaKeg, and validate it works better than conventional brainstorming.
Along the way, Indy and I married. My thinking expanded, I started developing (both from Indy and some of our clients) an engineering mindset. I grew more confident in my domain-specific skills in design. More and more, I came to see what he meant when he’d said:
I know to look where the ball will be.
Beyond our work together on IdeaKeg, I was asked as a consultant to help an advisor to a utility company to articulate the behaviours and attitudes associated with anticipation. Using what I knew of cognitive psychology, human behaviour and trendwatching, this project was a joy.
In the midst of all this, starting to write commercial and later literary fiction seemed like a big gear shift. Writing would be me and my imagination. No client brief. No emergent, hard-to-articulate requirement that need coaxing and coaching from an innovation manager’s early-stage thinking. No need to be anyone’s fairy godmother: helping them blast through a commercial target and launch a career move or career change.
StoryFORMing: using story to instantiate possible futures
I should have been more circumspect of what I was leaving behind and what I was taking with me. For part of the FuseTrail process was the idea we hatched of Future-Tense Stories. Help an innovation team win buy-in for a novel concept by showing teams how to construct a story, set in the future, when the innovation exists.
Our Future-Tense Storytelling worksheet inside our ideation system percolated. On my own, I went on to create storyFORMing: a visual thinking framework for helping people articulate what they offer and why anyone would care. One way of thinking of storyFORMing is as Business Model Canvas with a heart. From Creative Problem Solving, I adopted the use of questions and applied them to fact-finding. storyFORMing is thus both an imaginative space — to conjure an concept that does not yet exist into reality where it can win acceptance and buy-in — and a place/way to collect evidence.
From 2012 when I created it, until today, I use storyFORMing to make sense of the world and what I’m offering to improve it; and I coach and teach it to others. Given this continuity, I expected it to exercise influence.
What I didn’t anticipate was how scanning and future-tense story would operate implicitly as I wrote fiction.
Fiction
I started writing without a theory about fiction. I grew up in an artistic family, my one surviving family member, my brother, is an award-winning documentary maker. We were all readers.
I didn’t worry “where” fiction came from, and never encountered writer’s block. My early drafts were rough technically, and often uncontrolled. But nothing about the process of writing itself felt hard. I had trained as an actor for about five years in my twenties. I loved improv and, thanks to my late father, felt entitled to use my personal experience in my art. It’s a way of making shitty things have purpose. My performance capability and some learning when I started training as a psychotherapist gave me good access to trance states. The writing itself could be gritty and reaslistic, whilst I its writer was in deep flow.
I came to fiction after some experiments in grief writing. Trance made it safer to remember. What came out were shards of memoirs. Some of those crafted memories led early readers (including me) to feel anxiety. My stories weren’t, after all, mine alone. First and foremost, I am a parent and even now my daughter is only a mid teen. The shift from personal terrain to a fictional world liberated me from the hesitations and obfuscations that writing-whilst-parenting evoked. I felt free.
In my first sabbatical, I produced 96,000 words in 4 months. A stranger with skills and credentials rated it: enjoyable upmarket commerical women’s fiction. I continued with that manuscript, looking at structure more keenly, and at the characters’ backgrounds more deeply. I tried to get a feel for what the category meant, and what demands would a manuscript need to meet to be literary, rather than commercial, fiction. Eleven or so months later, with teaching, politics and everyday life making steady demands, I had a new back story that had taken on a life of its own. The big discovery was: what I had intended as a better set-up story was in fact two novels.
I had to work to earn for six months; and found it hard to progress the novel because of political turbulence and an a toxic workplace. So in June of this year, I gave myself the second sabbatical, this time in the USA. I had four weeks in two libraries in two east coast states. I solved problems relating to narrators; and relished the depth of characterisation I was starting to create. The second library was the John D Rockefeller Library at Brown University, where I’d last been exactly 30 years before, as an undergraduate. As an alumna, I had free access to the full range of resources, including borrowing privileges. I was in heaven.
Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing how to start
When I got back into the swing in London, including welcoming my first corporate project in several years, I divided what I saw as my writing work into four segments. Only two of those related to writing itself. I held the boundary I had set when I spoke with prospective client, explaining that my own project would have my attention until 2pm each working day.
So why didn’t I stick with that plan?
After all, if I had the first novel would be done and in the hands of my literary agent, who I hoped and still hope will sell it.
What happened was the collision of two events, or rather one event and one pattern. It’s the growing presence of the pattern that tempts me to use the word “eerie” in the headline.
Trance isn’t all good
First, I discovered that too much time in trance writing is not healthy. What it does is make it easy in group settings for my mind to wander. As a creativity catalyst, mind-wandering is usually something I welcome. But I welcome it the way an artist does: as a tool or a mechanism inside the creative process. The phase where it helps is divergence. It also aids when seeking patterns. But to do convergent thinking well — the selection, the editing — takes a clear not a wandering mind.
Think of your eyes: soft focus or a wide gaze is wonderful if you’re staring at sunset or into the horizon. It won’t help you read the directions on your smartphone or the ingredients on a food label.
I started finding that the predominance of trance was getting in the way of some of my pursuits, not helping them.
Being a pattern seeker who is steeped in the human sciences, I began looking into the brain-body systems active in trance. I determined three things:
First, I should reduce my use of steroid inhalers to manage my asthma. To do so safely means reducing my asthma risk. We had already put high-powered air filters in our home’s two main rooms. Long ago I stopped running outdoors and two years ago I stopped cycling; to limit how deeply I breathe in the car pollution. The thing I hadn’t tried was food restrictions. Maybe my childhood lactose was still affecting me; now in my respiratory system rather than my digestive one?
Second, I should limit any foods that will quickly turn to sugar in my bloodstream. This might limit how much dopamine my body produces as part of its normal metabolism. After a single visit to a nutritionist recommended by a body therapist I trust deeply; I’d eliminated all milk products, all processed foods and fast carbs, reduced fruit, stopped alcohol and stopped coffee. That was one heckuva Sober October.
Turns out, dopamine is not the pleasure chemical, but rather the exploration-and-imagination neurochemical. It participates in a number of processing systems detectable within the brain. I’ve come to see the dopamine system as our brain’s way of holding out a carrot. Experiments suggest that motivated action is supported by the dopamine pathways that coordinate the “anticipation of reward and activation of representations in the PFC needed to achieve it.” (Miller and Cohen 2001). It sounds like dopamine is one of the brain chemicals that helps us imagine a future state.
Third, I should limit any sensory experiences that create non-normal visual sensations or intense auditory ones. It turns out our brain and our eyes make dopamine. Dopamine receptors in our eyes change our colour sensitivity. I added auditory stimulus because in my brain I’m not enitrely convinced the two sense systems function autonomously. Both systems felt under assault in the recent concert at the Barbican Centre by Portico Quartet; I walked out after four songs and for about 18 hours felt the effects of the lights synchronised to the beat.
At first, I thought would affect just my social media use, and some of the live performance or cinema I would see. But it was here that I started realising what I’m doing when I’m writing. I’m screening movies I’ve unknowingly already made in my mind, and using words to describe what I see, hear, feel or notice in the imaginary scene.
Just today, the 27-inch iMac to replace the 7-year-old machine on its last legs has arrived from Apple. During the summer sabbatical I was frequently in bright North America summer sunshine, and writing in sunlight filled rooms on a small, old MacAir. I know its screen is not crisp, and I think there’s a bit of a flicker. So when I start again, it will be in a visual environment that’s more spacious, cleaner, less taxing on my eyes and mental processing.
So, you’re starting again once the new computer is set up?
Err, no.
The three areas I’ve made big changes in relate to my embodied mind and what I know about how it works. What I need to tell you now, is not about how I am but about what I’ve made.
This is where things get eerie.
People have, over the years, brought shamanism into my line of sight and first-hand experience. It was something *they* had which I might, if I chose, experience. Their skill or aptitude might be my episode. I appreciate them but don’t possess them.
That said…
The first draft of novel 1, written in autumn 2017, mentions the downing of MH17. At first, it was a headline in a newspaper that was a prop, unread. Later in 2018, I developed the action around a character consuming news. This brought the air crash closer into the story world. In summer 2019, I began researching why Russia and NATO are so invested in Ukraine, and hold such competing views of its future.
Today, Reuters reported on the investigations by the joint investigation team led by the Dutch which reveal how close the evidence trail comes to President Putin.
So what? If you’re setting a story in July 2014, the MH17 crash might get a mention. Why not?
Well, for one thing, Ukraine had already the story in the form of a character who is pivotal. She lives in London, is Ukrainian and becomes increasingly fearful and helpless as 2012 rolls into 2013, the year of the EuroMaidan protests that toppled Yanukovitch, the corrupt president who fled to Russia. It was to understand her that I was learning more about the geopolitics of the region. So no coincidence. None at all.
Where it starts feeling eerie is that the grounds for impeachment of the 45th President of the United States now underway concerns his actions with regard to Ukraine taking at the very time I was deep in my research. The fine palace of hope and optimism I’ve constructed for myself (and through me, which animates at least in some measure my immediate family) is based on a successful impeachment and ensuing criminal judgements. In other words, it’s the first piece in the Rube Goldberg machine by which Brexit stops, the pollution of the digital space by gangsters and of the sea with unnecessary plastics ceases. It’s the first step in the restoration of fair-play democracy but this time with fewer deficits, exclusions and ongoing excuses for perpetuating exploitation and structural oppression. That’s what I striving for: restoration+: to reach somewhere better, more equal.
So my wish collides with geopolitics. Again, so what? Well, yes, of course. Only… one of three senior democrats who was finally tipped to back impeachment now as a result of the bribery is close in my circle. We didn’t speak about this matter. But it felt to me like I was keying in, and amplifying something.
Part of this sense that my thinking is a ghost from the future comes from my knack to find specific people and places.
So far, in my resistance work I’ve found I could find pretty much everyone I set out to find, without much effort. One of the Three Knights graciously read some of the lobbying framework I co-wrote in February 2017 and blessed it. The framework was written as if unilateral revocation would be possible a year + ahead of the judicial decision that confirmed this. Keeping this since of “ahead of the curve” I helped an independent MP candidate run on a halt-Article 50 platform in June 2017. Now the third party has adopted this as policy.
I found where Chrissy Ford lived in high school, and then a pal found the house we think was the location of the assault. Reading Siri Huvstedt, I found a better explanation for the psychology of memory and its errors than Dr Ford herself gave.
I wasn’t looking for Richard Branson’s money in that first year after the referendum but I found it. I wasn’t looking for the 2020 campaign planning, but this autumn it found me. So I’m a good seeker on information and insight. I play with timelines in my professional and artistic practices.
So, at times, it can feel to me like the future haunts me.
The rest is all coincidence, merely that. But what it brought into relief is that:
who I am, in this time of crisis and possible collapse, and how best I serve is something I need to choose.
Maybe my eyes no longer need to be focused on the past, surfacing in the name of fiction, civic wounds. Maybe now: I can stand in the presence and look ahead, with furious hope.
I’m still not quite in step with time. Immediately ahead of the 45th President saying publicly that *everything* will be on the table and Dispatches confronting gormless health ministers with evidence that USA pharmaceutical company lobbists have already had half a dozen meetings with Johnson’s officials…I spoke out publicly about the threat of the UK becoming the 51st state, of Big Pharma prevailing in overturning the National Institute of Clinical Excellence pricing guidelines that keep our medicines market for 68 million people reasonably priced and focused on generic rather than brand name medicines. NICE guidelines is why diabetics don’t die here for lack of insulin. Why even with asthma rates rising because of intolerable air pollution, deaths due to asthma are still relatively rare. These attainments will, I fear, decline if USA pricing is introduced.
I told some of this (and even more coincidences, whereby aspects inside the novel echoed in political life) to a professional friend in the States, who I haven’t seen since autumn 2015. He told me my life sounds like a movie M. Night Shyamala would make. And with all its London locations, he assures me it would be a surefire hit in the USA.
My laugh grows hollow. If only Windrush victims weren’t dying, unvindicated and without the apology of a government both pitiless and pitiful. If only those thirty-nine fellow humans who had travelled by lorry from Vietnam had not suffocated. Elements of the novel keep rebounding in real time: worse and scarier than their seeds appeared in my fictional 2004, 2012, 2013. Real people suffering and dying frightening deaths.
Someone else, hearing of the overlaps and echoes, said: “You’ve seen The Truman Show, right?” I haven’t. Yet. I’m not sure I feel sturdy enough to watch it right now.
What matters most
Stopping writing and seeing the coincidences mount has given me a moment to ask myself: what matters most?
If a building was burning, and I had to choose my literary manuscripts or the letter notifiying the European Union that Britain withdraws its 2017 Notification of Intent to Withdraw letter, which would I choose?
If now, it’s another building burning, and I face the same choice of my manuscripts or the judgement that puts a former President in prison with a sentence fitting the gangster he is; which would I choose?
I love my writing life. I’m proud of what I’ve made and I think readers will relish the experience of reading my books. I believe I can earn the respect of critics and my peers. I’ve written with screen adaptation in mind. My writing could, if I’m lucky, secure my future retirement and also provide for my daughter’s university education. With deeper luck, I could help all those close to me I would wish to help: to complete interrupted educations, to travel, to be cared for with dignity in their disability. All this seems worth imagining. Not, in other words, impossible.
I love my life whilst writing. Feeling connected so deeply to my creativity gives me a sense of wonder and rightness that I’ve never felt in such an intense and sustained way. Writing fulfils my self. It means I no longer have to question who I am or what I am for. More than merely satisfying, it fulfils me. I have arrived at who I always meant to be: an artist. As an artist, I love myself.
And yet…
I’d let the manuscripts burn or rot if that’s what change takes.
I’d stop fiction-writing if, in some weird thought experiment, that’s what’s required.
I love Rule of Law and the ever-improving spiral of democracy more that what I’ve found in fiction writing. So, if asked of me, I’d make the hardest, most heart-breaking choice: to stop just as I found I’d really started on my true path.
Of course…
No one’s asking me to change course.
But I hope, now, after this sideways story, I can share an image for a safe future:
Becoming a trim tab
UNEP Champion of the Earth, designer and sociologist Leyla Acaroglu explains why Buckminster Fuller said “Call me Trim Tab”:
Even the biggest ship changes direction thanks to one of its smallest parts. Way in the back of a boat, down inside the rudder, is a small part called a trim tab. This mechanism moves one way, and the ship turns in a new direction. Bucky reminded us that we are all trim tabs, tiny parts of a big systems, all working to move the ship in different directions. He had served in the US Navy during WWI, hence his naval knowledge and metaphor.
So being a trim tab is about being the size you are and still commiting to shift the status quo. Not letting the scale difference between the world and you be the reason you stop, or let fear keep you from starting. If I’m not a shaman or a radar, maybe I can happily be a trim tab. It’s a big shift for me: from radar dish to trim tab.
Would you like to join me? Perhaps you already have and it is I joining you. And as a trim tab…in making positive change…where are you starting? Do you know? Can I join you?
Everyday people are actively working to challenge the status quo, and when we look at these people, they are the quiet superhumans shifting the larger systems at play; they are the trim tabs of the this beautiful round ship in space, Earth. Leyla Acaroglu says.
What shift can you imagine?
And should I stay to help you, or head back to my stories?
My name is Kate Hammer PhD FRSA and I am a semiotician and commercial storyteller. Also a fiction writer, university teacher (FHEA), accredited work/life coach (ICF ACC) and trainee psychotherapist in the Existential Analysis method first formulated by Viktor Frankl. Based in London, UK, I work internationally with people and teams who innovate. An advocate of science and evangelist for applied creativity, I see a clear link between making believe and making beliefs. I am pitching a short proposal for a new non-fiction book for general readers called Honest Innovation. If you’re a commissioning editor and the title strikes a chord, please get in touch.
You can find me here on LinkedIn. I live on Twitter.
For more about story, please explore my SemioStories publication here on Medium. For more on stopping Brexit, visit #NoDust.
References:
Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience. 24, 167–202. doi/10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.167
Lacoursière-Roussel, Anaïs. (2013). Testing propagule pressure theory : maritime transport and invasion by fouling species.
