Greetings and happy new year.  For QSource this year I’m going to attempt putting together short articles on topics from our fellow pax around The Fort.  They will be for you to digest and discuss as you go about your week.  So, for the first week, I am volunteering as tribute to guide this effort and open myself (and this approach) up to criticism.  The first topic is disruption, which seems befitting as this is the first step in a new direction.  I’m going to try to convince you that disruption is not only a prerequisite in the process of improving one’s life but a basic necessity of life.

If we explore our existence from the basic levels, we can find some things that are necessary for our own survival which may not be self-evident.  Observing the world around us, we see all objects in the world on an endless timeline of actions/reactions that are both completely random and completely predictable all at the same time (chaos theory).  Then there is life.  With life comes a stored memory of these actions and reactions which will dictate how behavior is changed (adaptation) and how life changes through the generations (evolution).  In the same way, we need proper conditions conducive to life (food, water, shelter), life also needs something to adapt to or it can not be called life at all.  Therefore, the status quo is not only “less desirable” it is a hostile condition that renders life useless and leads to self-destructive behavior.  It may be the reason why “I’m fine” is both true and everything but.

As a Control Systems Engineer, I deal with measurement and control on a fundamental level to the extent that I see it in everything (feedback).  Because we can not learn anything about a process while it is at steady-state (read: status quo), we have to inject a disturbance (read: disruption) in order to see how the system behaves.  Only then will we learn anything, and only then will see if the system is capable of handling the process.  Only with disruption will you ever know of competence, which some psychologists are now seeing as a basic psychological need:  “Competence concerns the experience of effectiveness and mastery. It becomes satisfied as one capably engages in activities and experiences opportunities for using and extending skills and expertise. When frustrated, one experiences a sense of ineffectiveness or even failure and helplessness.”  Link

Let me give you a metaphor.  Let’s say you try to develop the ability to do a handstand.  Your entire muscle chain from your fingers to your hip flexors will develop in the process, because you will use every muscle to help you stabilize.  Your muscles will get stronger, your nervous system will develop, and your balance will improve.  With practice, you will learn how to balance with less and less effort.  This will eliminate the need for muscle recruitment and lead to atrophy… unless you don’t stop at just a handstand.  We can not become intoxicated with the pride of holding a longer handstand when it is at the cost of your overall capability.  The skill is a basic practice that is helping to become more competent at the simple activity of moving and controlling one’s own body.  The disruption that instigated the need to do handstands needs to be replaced with a new disruption.  You must now learn to walk on your hands, then walk up stairs on your hands, etc.

Because we know that disruption is needed for life, we now have to figure out how to use disruption to “influence movement to advantage”.  That’s where you, dear reader, come in to play.  Due to our own shortsightedness or perhaps even willful ignorance, we can often not see our own need for disruption or perhaps the proper disruption that precedes advantage.  Advantage is a “superior circumstance” that is not defined by our own feeble senses or fickle emotions, but by the community as a whole.  Advantage is any condition that promotes the health of all life that is influenced and helps all things thrive.  This unconditional service to all life (of which we are a part) is what is defined as love.  In other words, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (Cor13:7)

As a leader, we must be constantly using disruption to increase competence and seek advantage, but it can not stop.  We must constantly be challenging the status quo and asking others to do the same for the health of our society.  Give them a reason.

Cultivate virtue in yourself,
And it will be true.
Cultivate virtue in the family,
And it will be overflowing.
Cultivate virtue in the town,
And it will be lasting.
Cultivate virtue in the country,
And it will be abundant.
Cultivate virtue in the world,
And it will be universal.

Therefore:
See others as yourself.
See families as your family.
See towns as your town.
See countries as your country.
See worlds as your world.

~Tao Te Ching