By Bill Caswell
Special to Ottawa Construction News
Not only in this day and age do new ideas get quickly shunned by most people, but this type of action has belonged to humans as far back as recorded history. Good or great ideas get shunned, even though they logically serve people’s needs.
With time, some useful ideas do get accepted, at which point everyone joins the parade and believes that this action or trait had been obvious all along.
One of the greatest difficulties of accepting fact occurred in 1819, with the discovery of dinosaur bones in strong Anglican Britain. More and more bones and skeletons were unveiled between 1823 and 1875. Since the clergy/intellect/political leaders of the day had ascertained that the world was created 4,000 years prior, and had humans as the centerpiece of God’s masterful work, what were these other creatures? What was their age? And where were the corresponding human bones of that time? Even worse, the Bible, the factual book of the day, said that Noah had collected every animal in the world on his ark and these fossilized creatures were not on the ark.
The debate was about understanding the role of God – or what was the explanation for this historical, but contradictory, evidence? People could not accept that creatures mutated into other forms because that would suggest that God had made a mistake at the beginning AND THAT WAS IMPOSSIBLE.
Verbal wars broke out and had intellectuals such as the esteemed George Cuvier, a lead scientist in France, attacking Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who postulated in 1809 that animals varied in their nature because they inherited certain characteristics that were determined by their environment. Cuvier stated that Lamarck was “less severe in scrutinizing the evidence” than he should have been, “mingled fanciful conceptions with real discoveries and had constructed his results on imaginary foundations resembling enchanted palaces.”1
In England, Gideon Mantell published in 1831 that “there was a period when the earth was populated by quadrupeds of a most appalling magnitude, at a time before the creation of the human race”. He was condemned by the leading scientist of the day, Richard Owens, and this condemnation lasted even until and during Mantell’s burial.
At Oxford University, the cleric Frederick Nolan railed at the impiety of geological research. Many set forth to outlaw such studies.
It was a huge battle for Britain to abolish colonial slavery (laws for which occurred in 1829) because leading parliamentarians (and plantation owners) held sway. They stated bluntly that the evidence showed that the slaves enjoyed this kind of life.
The simple fact was that those who suggested an alternative to the Biblical history were viewed as radicals in the most important corners of British society: parliament, clubs, universities, church. These outcasts were denied good jobs. Some even were imprisoned, such as George Holyoake, a journalist, who, while incarcerated, suffered his daughter’s dying of malnutrition.
In 1832, Charles Darwin, a somewhat aimless youth, departed on the Beagle to travel to the south Atlantic and then around the world, as an intellectual companion to Captain Robert Fitzroy (since it was a naval rule that the captain could not converse with the crew). To keep busy, Darwin collected samples of flora, fauna, and rocks during the almost five-year odyssey.
This hysteria against promoters of new ideas was the reason that Charles Darwin had not yet committed to paper ideas that had flowed out of his experience during the voyage of the Beagle that docked back in England in 1836. With time, Darwin was aware that other intellectuals had arrived at similar conclusions that animals evolved, adapting to their ambience. These others could publish before him if he continued his wait (to avoid public condemnation), so he put his ideas to print with On the Origin of Species in 1859.
Today, Authors Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape), Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), and Dr. Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) have made a clear case for our brain’s logic processor still being a slave to the ancient part of our brain; and as a result of this well-established fact of the brain’s internal conflict, we have humans fighting humans in war, business, and everywhere else. That is, humans fail to cooperate when they would benefit by doing so. The authors’ messages were well received, turning their publications into best-selling books. Yet, a few million convinced readers are but a drop in the bucket to the Earth’s eight billion inhabitants.
CCCC runs into the same prejudice of business not paying attention to the fight between old (limbic) and logic (prefrontal cortex) parts of the brain. Even though Bill Caswell has demonstrated dozens of times, the performance escalation of companies that understand and work around these cerebral conflicts, there is a reluctance of most companies to adapt to this new idea.
What are you waiting for? Jump in. The water’s more than fine, it is liberating. Win by generating more co-operation within your own company. How? Start by making everyone in your firm less unequal.
1 Michael Taylor, Impossible Monsters (New York, N.Y.: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024).
Bill Caswell leads the Caswell Corporate Coaching Company (CCCC) in Ottawa, www.caswellccc.comor email
bi**@ca********.com
.