Ciamos

Bob Janes

Reading John Varney’s note about the pervasive flood of the mainstream and the need to swim against it in search of the source I was curious about what led to the development of the mainstream. To mix my metaphors ~ where do the band get onto the bandwagon?

In the beginning there is just an idea floating in the ether that seeds itself in a mind. We are witnessing the birth of a meme (Richard Dawkins neologism for a self-replicating idea). Suddenly, in a moment of inspiration there is a concept that is sufficiently well-formed, curious, entertaining, whatever to be worth expressing to someone else. Now we have created information ~ actually the flow of information from one person to another, a communication. Here we have the two building blocks of culture memes and communication. Neither can flourish without the other. To be sure there are plenty of ideas that are not self-replicating and wither in an early mind, and there is plenty of communications that contains no memes (usually we say it goes in one ear and out of the other).

So lets look a little more clearly at these two ideas. First memes. Dawkins places his bet on the one fundamental principle of life being the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. For most of evolutionary time this has been through the mechanism of genes, the design rules for creating living creatures (or actually the physical manifestations which are the vehicles by which the genes replicate). However, since the emergence of human-kind there is a new form of self-replicating entity, the concept or meme ~ a unit of cultural transmission or imitation. “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”

Memes then are what are flowing in John’s stream. And from that initial spark and the first communication there is now a flow, a flood of memes washing through the culture. This is not new, what has changed in the last few years (in evolutionary time, a very few moments) is the speed of and the profligacy of propagation. When the wheel was invented (another meme) it took several centuries to successfully propagate around the world. In the sixteenth century the East India Company traders might take nine months or more to get replies to their letters back to London. In the Napoleonic war Rothschilds bank made money by using their own couriers to get news back from the front a few days before the official version arrived. In this decade CNN showed the attack on Iraq in real time. Today, the Internet is becoming the chosen medium of communication for new ideas and they can reach around the world in milliseconds.

And so it is within the community in which we work. There is now massive communication within the business community (though how much is of value is a question for another time). There is intense competition to perform ~ often driven by motivation to survive coming from the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy and rooted in deep human needs. Unfortunately it seems that Maslow’s hierarchy is relative not absolute so the CEO with a million in the bank may still see any threat to his (and it usually is ‘his’) continued employment as being directly aimed at his need for food, shelter and security. This competition to perform leads many people to an eternal search for the magic potion ~ the charm that will solve all of their problems. This externalisation of reality is perhaps a form of denial but it is certainly pervasive.

One last piece in the equation is the human propensity to learn through imitation, to copy what other, ‘better informed’ people do. This is how we learn to walk and talk, it is how we are taught in our ‘teacher knows best ‘ education system and it is a deeply rooted pattern for most teenagers. It is not surprising that adults behave the same way. Though sometimes it is called keeping up with the Jones’, sometimes it is covered with an intellectual and possibly cynical veneer. The truly self-actualised individual is rare.

So we have a business community in which success and survival are synonymous; there is a common wish for a ‘magic potion’; people are predisposed to emulate success and there is a rich and rapid communication system. This is a rich and fertile land for any meme to light in. It is hardly surprising that it is possible for a trickle to become a flood in a very short time.

And then what happens, if this idea is so good and the ground so fertile surely every business will now be successful. Sadly we have omitted the power of memetic evolution. Rarely are memes passed on unchanged. In the same way as each gene undergoes a radically reshuffling through sexual reproduction and a random battering from its environment, so memes enter into fresh mind and interact with it in their own form of sexual reproduction. This ‘mexual’, reproduction will modify the meme, sometimes for the ‘better’ sometimes for the ‘worse’ ~ though these terms are all relative to the context.

For instance, the old verbal meme “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” becomes mexually transmuted into “send three-and-fourpence we’re going to a dance” (and that would not happen today because ‘three-and-fourpence’ is no longer a current meme). The theme from the latest song gets shifted in key, embellished, simplified but remains recognisable. Business Reengineering is taken on board and modified by each new consultancy to fit their skill set and their perception of their clients needs and, within a year or two, there are so many different versions out there that the sparkling stream has become the turgid and slow flowing Mississippi.

The problem of course is that if you try to swim back upstream in the Mississippi you cannot tell where each piece of the river came from. Was it from that tributary, or that? Was it rain from the sky? Or thrown over-board from a passing paddle-steamer? The only way out is up, to get out of the flood and look in the hills where there are still sparkling streams and new springs. But which of them will form the new river? And it is really useful to know?

References

Dawkins, Richard (1989 2nd edition) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 0–19–286092–5.

Maslow, Abraham H (1968 2nd edition) Towards a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0–442–03805–4

©1998 Bob Janes. Originally written for the newsletter of the Center for Management Creativity.