Socrates in the Never Normal

iQuestion

“The unexamined life is not worth living”, said the philosopher Socrates, at the trial for his impiety and corrupting influence on society. He chose death over exile.

Socrates was impertinent and insouciant with his constant questioning. He spilled into the key moral concepts of Athens in 400 B.C: piety, wisdom, courage, and justice. People avoided Socrates even as he actively pursued them and asked uncomfortable questions, bringing out inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs.

Arriving at answers demands time, an open mind, and a willingness to endure the difficult and awkward. Now, I don’t know if the availability of time was really a problem in 400 BC, but certainly, Socrates was trying to think for himself and tried to enlist his fellow Athenians around him in dialogue duels. And they did not have the patience to endure the awkward questions. So, Socrates died.

Cut to 2020.

In the 24 century that passed, I doubt if our society has any more time for Socratic Dialogues. A Socratic Dialogue would question the very assumptions one makes, responding to a question with a further question, seeking to understand the ultimate foundation of what is believed. Socrates would treat all thoughts as in need of development and simulate connections to further thoughts. (And, generally, be an annoyance. But one cannot be a philosopher unless one annoys!)

Now, the ‘new normal’ or the ‘never normal’, is something that many businesses and leaders are working on. In this situation, a Socratic line of questioning would be something like this:

· What is ‘normal’?

· Who are ‘normal’ people? What do they do?

· What is the past?

· Why should normal people continue doing what they have always done?

· What is ‘new’? Future?

· How do you ‘know’?

· How do we know what the future holds?

· Why do we need to know what the future holds?

· What do you mean success?

· What would normal people do in the future?

· What is a change?

· Would you be a normal person if you don’t change?

· How do we know what is right and wrong?

These are just indicative questions which could change based on responses, but you get the drift.

iPause

Questions gives us pause. Deep questions require more than a pause, demanding reflections into the future. Constrained as one is by the safety of precedents, we need to summon intentional energies to question assumptions that don’t support the future.

At a very basic level, the pause is to consider ‘Precedent-ial’ thinking versus ‘Futuristic’ thinking. At its best, such thinking brings out the wonder of possibilities. Unless there were courageous forays into the possibilities of the future, no change would have ever been made in history.

To change, it is necessary to pause and empty the cache of our acquired knowledge of how things worked. It also requires a presence of mind and personality to persist, not just of our leaders but also of teams.

The work for leaders is cut out to take their teams through immersive questioning and reflecting.

iChange

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is”, said Yogi Berra.

Change is easier in theory than in practice. An intellectual understanding of ‘why’ change is not sufficient unless the ‘how’ of it is deeply understood. Processing change demands time, an open mind, and a willingness to endure the difficult and awkward.

When we are willing to change our mind, our perspective changes, i.e., ‘what’ we see also changes. We see the possibilities of the future. A train journey changed the life of a lawyer, MK Gandhi, in South Africa, and thereafter the vector of India’s independence movement.

A pandemic changed the world around us. What would Socrates say now? Characteristically, something like “I know nothing”.

A modernistic twist from me to that saying would probably be “i know nothing”, the i being intentionally lower case to express the willingness to lower the I (ego) and access the good place to start questioning, reflecting, and changing.