In 2016, I was at The School to give a talk at the annual teachers’ conference of the Krishnamurti schools. My talk was scheduled after the morning tea break. When I arrived, it was tea time. I caught up with many people whom I had not seen in some time. The feelings were warm and affectionate. The conversation lively, cheerful and energetic. On that morning, I felt very much at home and in some ways the eighteen years that had elapsed since I left the school had not happened at all!
A chance remark made me realize with a small jolt that I was something of an oddity in that group. “You have been a bit of a rolling stone, haven’t you?” I was in the midst of people who have spent a lifetime in the world of K institutions. And in my work life since leaving The School, I had indeed rolled through a few different organizations and subjects. I remember responding with something along the lines of, “I sure have gathered plenty of mass”, which indeed I have in the journey into middle age!
This is how the India Development Review, an online journal that I have contributed a few articles to, chooses to describe me:
G. Ananthapadmanabhan (Ananth) works with purpose driven leaders and social sector organizations that aspire to make a difference to the significant issues of our times. He’s the former CEO of Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives (APPI). Prior to that, Ananth was the CEO of Amnesty International in India and the International Programme Director at Greenpeace. He started his work life as a teacher in The School, Krishnamurti Foundation India. Ananth graduated in 1988 from IIT Madras with a BTech in electrical engineering.
I must say, it is a description that I like. It is bland and makes no attempt to connect it all into a sort of narrative. However, my own sense of myself is that of someone who has persisted and stuck to things. I realize that my own experience of persistence and continuity comes down to looking to Krishnamurti for insights into situations. And every work context I have been part of has been the ground in which to explore the teachings.
K once asked a group of teachers, “Sir, what can you do alone?” This simple question has over the decades kept me away from fantasies of ‘withdrawing’, including from the messy world of large organizations. It gave me the energy to throw myself wholeheartedly into the organizational context that I was part of at that moment. And building organizations became the ‘problem’ that I spent my energies on. Organizations seem to, very often, be spaces that distil our individual stupidity into collective dysfunction. And their very architecture—with its hierarchies, competitive cultures, mechanistic processes—often seems to bring out the worst in the people in it.
In spite of this, or perhaps even because of this, organizations are excellent grounds to observe the nature of thought, a subject that K has been spectacularly insightful about. K, at least to a casual student of his teachings, suggests that there is something wrong with thought. I completely accepted the limits and limitations of thought. I accepted wholeheartedly that thought would always get me into trouble and cause fragmentation and misery. And of course, it did and continues to do so every single day!
My first lesson was seeing that thought (in spite of its propensity to cause fragmentation and misery) deserves a lot of compassion! It has an impossible task. It is tasked with producing a complete, coherent account of the world of experience. And yet it is conditioned to divide all of experience into a ‘self,’ an ‘I,’ and create a narrative that explains the rest of the field of experience from the point of view of this ‘self ’. Whenever it tries to do this, it quickly comes to ‘problems’, things that don’t fit the narrative. Then it throws everything at the problem—redefines the ‘self ’, tries a different story, makes tremendous efforts to change the experience to fit the story. Quiet heroic, if you think about it. Never gives up. Day and night.
The second lesson that comes from a slightly more careful look at the teachings suggests that ‘thought has its place’. K often implied that thought has its own place and even suggested that meditation is, “giving thought its right place” (Public Discussion 3, Saanen, Switzerland, 27 July 1979). It is useful for practical matters but in the area of ‘relationship’ thought has no place whatsoever.
I saw my professional life as a ‘practical matter’ where thought was applicable. And if used well, it might even be the appropriate instrument. I began to apply what K pointed out about thought to the ‘problems’ of organization building, development and leadership. And by careful thinking guided by the insights of K on the nature of thought, I realized that I could get better at the practical application of thought—I could and did learn to think ‘better’.
This led to an acceptance of the word ‘better’ as the best that thought could achieve. Thought could never produce that which was ‘true’, ‘whole’ or ‘complete’. Rather than wasting energy using thought to find ‘the right answer’, could I and my colleagues use thought to produce ‘options’ for action? I began to encourage myself and my colleagues to explain our thought processes, lay out its steps as it were, and try to be explicit about why we thought our conclusions were valid. Further, to include in that movement, descriptions of how your feelings had guided your thought.
The third lesson was about feelings and their relationship to thought. If not thought, then is it feeling that will lead to the ‘true’, the ‘whole’ and the ‘complete’? K’s use of the word ‘love’ cues the mind in that direction.
In 1990, I heard David Bohm at Brockwood Park (where I was visiting as a teacher from The School) use the phrase ‘thoughts and felts’. He was pointing to the nature of feelings as being rooted in the past in exactly the same way as thoughts more obviously are. Organizations are particularly inept when dealing with feelings. Feelings are simultaneously seen as a disorderly intrusion into the ‘rationality of thought’ and greatly cherished (especially in organizations like Greenpeace and Amnesty, where a passion for the cause is the raison d’être). Rather than getting caught in a ‘thought vs feeling’ debate, K helped me accept the equally limited nature of both. This helped me create spaces where both feelings and thought had a place.
I have come to understand and articulate to my colleagues (thereby creating common ground) that it is our feelings that direct our attention to something and give us a sense of what is worth thinking about. It is from the subjective experience of strong feelings that, say, ‘justice’ evokes in us, that we find the energy to make efforts to secure it for ourselves and others. But to secure it, we need to act in ways that are strategic and smart. And in pursuit of effective action, it is necessary to think and think well. Feelings are likely not the best guides in designing action, but without them we would be hard pressed to figure out what to have thoughts about!
The fourth lesson is that thought is a material, mechanical process and that there is nothing new in thought. This is hard to get for a modern organization, given the exhortation to ‘be creative’! I have seen that thought is the right instrument to achieve a purpose, to chart a ‘path’ to a ‘goal’. While we understand that becoming free is not a meaningful purpose and ‘truth is a pathless land’, as any such effort requires us to develop a mental image of freedom, we can equally understand that thought is indeed the right instrument when one is solving a problem where the end point is well defined.
In an organizational context, this clarity around ‘when thought is the right instrument’ is often very valuable. No amount of thinking can help organizations find their purpose. This has to come from feeling, a sense that something matters and is worth accomplishing. But once there is a purpose then thought is the right instrument to bring into play.
The fifth lesson is that thinking is a skill and therefore can be cultivated. K made it clear that one cannot become a better human being. But one could become a better potter—one could cultivate skills and through effort become better at it. Similarly, with thinking. And in the context of organizations it is a very powerful and valuable skill when it comes to achieving the purpose of the organization.
By and large (and that is not a surprise at all!) it would be accurate to say that my colleagues didn’t quite see ‘thought’ in this way, even at the level of intellectual understanding. For many years, my engagement with the nature of thought remained a private matter. In the last nine years or so, it began to dawn on me that if K was right about thought, the insights would apply to all thought and all thinkers, irrespective of whether they had any inklings about the ‘real nature of thought’! To create a (perhaps simplistic) metaphor—a complete belief in a ‘flat earth’ does not change the shape of the ‘globe’.
This interest in the nature of thought and its applications to the organizational context became something of a public project within the organizations that I was privileged to lead. I began to explore the possibilities of creating training programs for my colleagues and myself to learn to think better. K has an intriguing suggestion to make here. In a conversation with Bohm he suggests that thought would be ‘perfect’ if it can ‘vibrate to the emptiness within’—like a ‘drum that vibrates to the space within’. The confusion created by thought is itself a result of thought; we are conditioned to imagine that there is a ‘thinker who thinks’ rather than see thought as a conditioned process with the ‘thinker’ herself being one of the products of thought.
I began, in 2011 or so, to develop a traditional training program whose premise and explicit purpose was to help the participants think better. Since I was imagining this in the context of social sector organizations whose ultimate purpose was societal change, and the self-image of many of us in the sector was that of being ‘changemakers’, my early articulation of what I was trying to do was to say that I was creating a ‘Cognitive Tool-kit for Social Change Makers’.
I was clear that I wanted to create a tool-kit, a set of tools, organized neatly into a box, each tool with a defined purpose and a master craftsman, the social change maker, the human being, who was adept at its use. I was floundering till I came across an extraordinary speech given by Charlie Munger1, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and lifelong friend of Warren Buffet. (I am well aware of the irony of finding wisdom in the world’s richest men, especially those who got rich by being investors in the stock market!).
I suddenly had the ‘tool’. It turns out to be something called a ‘mental model’. Here is a quote from the talk that lays out what this is about:
What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.
You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.
What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.
It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So, you’ve got to have multiple models.
And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So, you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.
You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because eighty or ninety important models will carry about ninety per cent of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.
As a student of K, I read several things into this that might not have occurred to someone without that exposure.
1. To me, the reference to multiple models spoke directly to what has been called the second lesson above. All models (products of thought) are limited. There is no perfect model of the world. Thought cannot create it. Rather than expend energy on trying to find the perfect model, learn the art of seeing them as useful tools, and invest in the even more challenging art of learning the contexts and conditions in which the model is appropriate. Learn about both the tool and the context—the hammer and the nail! The art of thinking better is to improve the range of tools at one’s disposal and the skills to use them for the appropriate problems.
2. It is the nature of thought that it will torture reality so that it fits its models. This seems to reveal the other side of the point made above about thought deserving compassion. It is relentless in its power to create narratives and to fit everything into that narrative—emphasize the parts that fit and obscure facts that don’t.
3. Thought is in the end fairly limited, there is nothing really new in it—it is really endless construction and remixing! All it takes is eighty–ninety mental models! When encountering a new area of thought, a new subject, one can come to it with a ‘beginner’s mind’, a mind that is well schooled in the ways of thought and has at its disposal a modest range of highly effective tools. It is quite likely that the new subject is an extension of something you already know, a modification of one of your tools. Occasionally one will encounter a new tool but even then, one will know its place in the tool-kit!
4. The same beginner’s mind can also help active listening—the tool-kit of mental models is not yours; they are sort of applicable to all thinking, including those of others. This creates the space of ‘understanding’—I can understand anybody’s thought. I may not agree with them at all. But I can see that it is merely a matter of them and I using different tools or models to think. And it is quite likely that I know and understand their model.
5. While Munger’s list of mental models presents itself as objective, I know, thanks to K, that the ‘self ’ is not ‘outside’ the world and it cannot ‘operate upon the world’. Therefore, the mental models that you cultivate should include insights or models about the self not just the world, i.e., the tool kit must give the craftsman tools to imagine themselves in ways that are closer to reality. The lesson about the relationship between thought and feeling is to my mind one such model.
At around this time, thanks to a friend from the K community, Venu Narayan2, I met Rajesh Kasturirangan. Rajesh is a philosopher, mathematician and cognitive scientist. He actually has two PhDs! And he says about himself, “I think, write, meditate, agitate”! Over the last eight years or so, Rajesh and I have developed this line of thought further.
And at the end of 2018, when I was thinking about what next for myself (“You have been a bit of a rolling stone, haven’t you?”), I reached out to Rajesh and broached the idea of co-founding a new initiative dedicated to this exploration and its application to the problems of the contemporary world. This initiative now has an immodest name, SOCRATUS—the academy for collective wisdom!
The real world is messy and wicked problems3 are rife with stakeholders who have competing interests. Wicked problems combine moral and material complexity in equal amounts. They consist of coupled challenges where interventions in one domain lead to changes in another. In complex systems, the good news and the bad news are often due to the same source—fossil fuel energy is at the root of modern prosperity as well as pollution and climate change.
The cornerstone of SOCRATUS is the belief that complex, ‘wicked’ problems can only be solved by minds as wicked as the problems they seek to solve. Unfortunately, the complexity of our mental models and their interconnections hasn’t kept pace with the complexity of the world. We believe that’s the major source of systemic failure. We aspire to be a modern take on Socrates’ claim that, while he himself was incapable of wisdom, his method was the midwife of wisdom. In keeping with the growing complexity of the world we aspire to be the midwives of collective wisdom; hence SOCRATUS (rather than Socrates)—using modern tools (of data, design and visceral experiences) in combination with the traditional tools of individual wisdom (contemplation, public reason, universal compassion).
While there are many organizations devoted to systems thinking and systems change, few have identified the lack of wisdom as a stumbling block. We believe that’s a blind spot. Having said that, we are grounded in a partnership architecture where we don’t invent anything that we can acquire through collaboration. SOCRATUS is creating a distributed academy for training ‘wicked minds’ through deep engagement with problems such as the agrarian crisis and climate change.
It is 2022, I am again invited to the annual teachers’ conference at The School. When I arrive, it’s tea time. I catch up with many people that I have not seen in some time. I feel very much at home. And I talk with a kind of wholehearted animation about SOCRATUS—as if it was the only thing I had done in my life!
Endnotes
1 You can access this speech at: https://fs.blog/a-lesson-on-worldly-wisdom/
2 Venu Narayan was a teacher at The Valley School, KFI, and is one of the founders of another Krishnamurti-inspired school, Centre For Learning. He is currently Director of the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem)