In the past few years, there’s been a more public interest in quantum mechanics and quantum physics. Much of it was brought about in the non-scientific community by the movie, “What the Bleep do We Know?” In the movie, quantum physics and consciousness were merged in a philosophical treatise that had human implications such as ‘observer created reality’ wherein what we seek to measure we affect and therefore objectivity is not truly possible.
This means on a more simplistic level that as leaders, what we look for we find.
This isn’t news to most people, however, it’s interesting that quantum physics is backing up on a scientific level what we’ve often encountered in the world.
“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Abraham Maslow (although also attributed to Mark Twain in slightly different verbiage.)
There were other properties of the quantum world, such as Superposition** and the MultiVerse** theory. And there was the principle of ‘entanglement’ which states that even though separated by great distance, an action taken on one electron affects the other one. This is the quantum version of the phenomenon seen in the chaos theory ‘Butterfly Effect’ and previewed in the nursery rhyme, “for want of a nail the shoe was lost…etc.”
There are even questions such as “Does quantum physics tell us that consciousness of reality is required to actualize that reality?”
Q Leadership is interested in the questions quantum physics can raise for us about all these things, but even more importantly is the advent of quantum physics in the first place. What its presence in the world signals is the quest for the quintessential understanding about what our universe is about. It has come about by scientists challenging ‘the known.’ It signals that just because we had classical physics to explain things for a very long time, with lots of evidence it doesn’t mean that it is the answer for ALL time.
At Q leadership we are constantly seeking what really makes leadership timeless, practical and an ever occurring match for the emerging future.
In “What the Bleep..” one scientist even poses the radical idea that the physics of the past and the physics of the future are identical so why can’t things just go backwards? It also raises the question “since we can remember the past, why can’t we ‘remember’ the future?”…if all time exists simultaneously according to some physicists.
So…what does this all have to do with you as a leader?
Well, on the simplest level it points to not relying on the mental models of the past as you move forward and not rely on the historical physical models either. In the U.S. the pony express was a great way to move mail at the time…what worked before isn’t the best for now and especially not the future.
What it also means is according to the quantum physics model, we’re ALL connected.
Our actions have impact on others and others on us. There’s a whole raft of connectivity that generates results that we have typically claimed as our own. We’ll address this in upcoming blogs the Q Leader Magazine in more detail in future.
What is finally means is to engage with ideas, concepts and principles that may challenge our current perception of reality and the ways in which we engage with it.
The ability to ‘respond spontaneously to the needs of the moment’ (Tom Stone, Power of How) is a crucial ability to possess in order to effectively encounter the future we haven’t yet met. Being entrenched in what we know will only kill in the long run because as we all know there is one prime constant in the universe…and that is change.
So whether the change you’re engaged with is one you’ve started or one started on you by someone/thing else, mastery of the ability to be with change (read uncertainty) would appear to be a fundamentally timeless attribute to a leader. After all, currently, even Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle from Quantum mechanics even points to it all being ultimately ‘unknowable’ and simply living in a field of probability.