Reflections on progress

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There’s progress – and then there’s the journey. Take your eye off the journey, and you stop making progress.

A convention is like a planet. It has a gravitational pull, that draws things to it, and keeps them in place.

The way people think and behave towards education (what people call ’learning’) for example, is an attractor in conceptual space. Like planets, attractors have a ‘gravitational field’, drawing surrounding objects towards them. A shared world-view, replete with common practices, becomes almost inescapable. 'Learning’ is a convention that draws us to it.

If gravity is a fundamental force in physical space, what is the equivalent in conceptual space? Emotion (affect). We are attracted to those around us - we think, and talk and act as they do. We organise get togethers, we share a vocabulary, we award each other for singing along. There are many advantages of this: a sense of belonging, of self-confidence – and an ease of movement (all is said and done as expected).

It’s really quite difficult to take another trajectory – to achieve ‘escape velocity’. Doing so requires either tremendous impetus, or a curious freedom from influence.

For example, a catastrophic life event, such as the death of a loved one, or war, may set one on a different trajectory - make us feel very differently about things. For someone fighting for change in the wake of a terrible miscarriage of justice, the indifference of people around them may seem staggering. This new trajectory is accompanied by feelings such as ‘awakening’ or ‘alienation’. Stop the clocks. One has departed from the norm.

But that is not the whole story. Thoughts that seek to escape still run the risk of merely orbiting a convention – much as a satellite orbits a planet. The satellite is still, in a very real sense, captive. You feel as though you are in motion (and in a sense you are) but you are held in place - circling perpetually. Conventions also have this curious hold over us: even as we move away from them, we turn our gaze towards them.

In case this sounds very abstract – let’s say I have a different view of corporate 'learning'. Let’s imagine I have – to some degree – escaped the convention. This escape has probably come at no small cost. However, there is still a very real risk that I remain captive: forever disputing the terminology on twitter, regularly turning up at corporate 'learning' events to present a different perspective. I become defined by the ‘no’: ‘no, that is not correct!’ , ‘no, that is not effective!’ and so on.

Though I may feel that I have made progress, I am still captive: like our satellite, I am still pointed towards the convention. The remainder of my life may well be spent trying to correct the views of my colleagues – perpetually oriented towards the conventional view. Indeed this is precisely the trap I have seen many (myself included) fall into.

But what is the alternative? Like our imaginary space rocket, we may succeed in escaping the ‘gravity well’ of accepted wisdom, and set our sights on a distant star. Progress will require a ‘turning away’. We will need to be literally less attached to the convention. Eventually, if we continue to make progress we will find ourselves free of some of these influences, and able to travel unimpeded.

But now a different aspect of progress reveals itself – influence works both ways, after all. We are no longer bound to address specific aspects of the convention, but our messages are increasingly alien and incomprehensible. This post, for example, on the nature of progress – risks sounding odd, disconnected – perhaps you were expecting me to talk about training effectiveness? Progress is not a conventional topic: ‘progress’ is – by which I mean talking about the latest technology developments, or what people think is new and exciting in an area of life – Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Blockchain and the like. These things are attractors in their own right – little gravity wells that give us the sensation of movement, while holding us in place.

Way out there it is terribly silent; no babble to contend with – only the darkness pricked with stars. Eventually, not only is there no conversation, but any news sent back will arrive long after you have expired. This is a journey to the future, after all.

We choose the journey: we pay the price.

*Image: Frans Van Heerden