Driving out ghosts and bugbears
Will you pick up a candle to help illuminate the path to a future-fit culture?
“From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”— Richard Feynman 1
For a country that still only boasts a population of five and a half million people, Scotland has produced more than its fair share of innovators.
Here are just five household names who made significant contributions to creating the world we live in today:
James Watt (1736-1819) for improvements to steam engine design
Joseph Lister (1827-1912) for pioneering antiseptic surgery
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) for development of the telephone
Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) for the discovery of penicillin
John Logie Baird (1888-1946) for the invention of television
But one less well-known name arguably had more impact than all of the above — someone central to my undergraduate studies in electrical and electronic engineering.
And even though it’s now 45 years ago, I can still recall the challenge of trying to wrap my head around Maxwell's Equations.2
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was a gifted mathematician and physicist who developed the kinetic theory of gases and described mathematically the dynamic stability of Saturn's rings.
But his main contribution was devising a set of mathematical equations linking electricity and magnetism that ultimately became the four formulae that bear his name.
In “A Dynamic Theory of the Electro-Magnetic Field”, presented to the Royal Society in 1864, Maxwell said:
“We have strong reason to conclude that light itself — including radiant heat and other radiation, if any — is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electro-magnetic field according to electro-magnetic laws.” 3
In combining the previously presumed-to-be separate phenomena of light, magnetism and electricity Maxwell moved the world of physics on from two centuries of reality conceived as fundamentally mechanistic — the orthodoxy established when Newton published his Principia Mathematica in 1627. 4
Maxwell's breakthrough was to conceive physical reality in terms of fields as opposed to mechanisms.
A glimpse into the mindset that enabled him to do this came in an 1850's speech he gave as a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society:
“Let nothing be wilfully left unexamined.
Nothing is to be holy ground consecrated to stationary faith, whether positive or negative...
I assert the right of trespass on any plot of holy ground which any man has set apart...
A candle is coming to drive out all ghosts and bugbears. Let us follow the light.” 5
Einstein described Maxwell's breakthrough as “the most profound and fruitful change in the conception of reality that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”.6
When he visited Cambridge in 1922, Einstein was introduced as having “stood on the shoulders of Newton”.
He immediately objected — “No I don’t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell”. 7
In developing relativity theory, Einstein repeated what Maxwell had done half a century earlier — lit a candle that drove out ghosts and bugbears of the long established orthodoxy that was Newtonian mechanics.
Creating future-fit cultures
Unleashing more of the collective human capacity to continuously generate new value by creating cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness similarly requires a Maxwellian attitude to past orthodoxies.
Specifically, it means trespassing on various aspects of holy ground consecrated to stationary articles of faith, including:
“Leadership” is done by top management. 8
“Senior executive” is synonymous with “decision maker”. 9
“Culture” is an organisation’s “shared values”. 10
The best way to transform an organisation is to hire a finders, minders, grinders management consulting firm. 11
Are you ready to pick up a candle to help drive out the ghosts and bugbears?
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. The quote about Maxwell is from The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol II; lecture 1, "Electromagnetism"; section 1-6, “Electromagnetism in science and technology”; p. 1-11
Maxwell’s equations are a set of coupled partial differential equations that form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, optics, and electric circuits.
Cited in this Britannica.com article
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published by Isaac Newton in 1687.
Cited in Ian T Hutchinson’s MIT lecture on the Faith of Great Scientists.
Ibid Royal Signals Museum article.
As my former Society for Organisational Learning colleague Dr Peter Senge pointed out: “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. See “Leadership, not leaders”.
The role of senior executive is creating conditions, not making decisions. See “Senior executives must give up their decision rights”.
For more than 40 years, this myth — which was literally plucked out of thin air by McKinsey — has plagued organisational attempts to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness: “The toxic myth of culture as shared values”.
Creating a culture is like building muscles. The heavy lifting must be done by people within the organisations — not by an army of junior consulting grinders shipped in by the busload from a consulting firm.