Haxted Thinking / Newsletter No. 11: December 2023
1Haxted Thinking is a newsletter for anyone interested in how buildings and spaces are designed, made and used.
Edition No. 11: December 2023
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
Niels Bohr
2023 Year of Paradox
1So, as we approach the end of another year, today is the winter solstice for those of us up here in the Northern hemisphere. It’s the shortest day, with the noonday sun sitting lower in the sky than at any other time. For anyone who happens to be at the North Pole today that’ll mean a full 24 hours of complete darkness!
It's always struck me as somewhat paradoxical that tomorrow the days will start to get progressively longer, and yet today is officially the first day of winter. From where I’m sitting today marks the real end of the year and the point at which winter starts to slowly slip away. It’s today when I start to look forward to the lighter days to come. This liminal time around Christmas always feels like a time of rebirth to me, and while many like to go for new year resolutions I prefer to reflect on what's died away during the year passed, and what’s ready for new growth as the days lengthen.
In the early part of 2023 I read John Fowles The Magus for the first time. Wow what a novel that is. Whilst written from the perspective of a young man in his early 20’s recently graduated, and not a wizened, old has-been like me, two passages really jumped out:
“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…..The truth is I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated but I hadn’t found where I love and so I pretended there was nowhere to love.”
Oof. That was piping hot food for thought as the year played out. And the second:
“And my feelings at the end of that wretched term were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”
Powerful, powerful writing. It’s such a richly textured, nuanced, clever and beguiling novel. You really must give it a go if you haven’t already, and another go if you have. I believe Netflix are making it into a mini-series now, so even more reason to read it asap so the fertile imagination that is fired up all the way through isn’t spoiled by seeing it all on the silver screen first.
On reflection 2023 has been, in many ways, just like any other year – full of change. The potent, if not rather obvious insight that has characterised my year, is just this - the unequivocal truth that everything changes and will always change. Whether we look to Western economics or Eastern philosophical traditions we find the paradox that accepting and embracing change is the best way to ensure we maintain strong foundations. Joseph Shumpeter’s 1942 exhortation to businesses that those that resist change are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet,”1 is every bit as true today as it was back then. This notion isn’t so different to the first Buddha’s teaching that “whatever has the nature to arise will also pass away.” This can help when considering that however deep a despair or challenge may seem to be, there is always this deep truth to fall back on. “Keep buggering on” as Churchill so plainly put it, and eventually new shoots will appear. This isn’t for one moment to diminish or underplay the desperately difficult mental or emotional or spiritual challenges that many of us will have had during 2023, but rather to acknowledge that even someone like WSC who suffered acutely from depression, was able to acknowledge that things will always get better, even when he was all but single-handedly providing a publicly confident bulwark against Nazism after the rapid fall of France, and for the years that followed, before active US support in early 1942.
The VUCA environment beloved of military strategists is now arguably just as significant to corporate strategists, entrepreneurs, actually all of us whatever we’re up to. Everywhere we look there is volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It’s somewhat trite to say we need to embrace the VUCA categories2 and learn to love them even if that is all we seem to hear from the LinkedIn strategy brigade or the automaton management consultancies. But there is a truth to the idea that ignoring the battlefield nature of so much that presents itself now in a business context, can only lead to increased stress and negative impact. We need eyes in the back of our heads as my Mum used to say, even if we always did. Whether it’s the unquantifiable macro risk of holding stranded assets at higher interest burn rates, not knowing how or when supply chains can better be secured, or anticipating micro-market dynamic changes, disorder and turbulence are everywhere. But paradox again – they are also the precursors to entrepreneurial advantage. So we do need to embrace them somehow. Heading into 2024 we’ll need a funky kind of mixology – think house DJ meets cocktail shaker extraordinaire meets Leonardo da Vinci breadth polymath mindset3 all fused up together. Even a tiny bit of that blend will help to make any kind of sense of what’s next, or just to keep the blood pressure within a normal range.
All this narrow, specialist, ‘niche’ nonsense I don’t think cuts it anymore. 2024 is all about a T shaped approach – the horizonal bit of the T representing curiosity and breadth – learning from everywhere and everything, not just adjacent disciplines - and the vertical bit representing deep expertise whether that be in a market, a sector, a particular specialist area or otherwise. The two combined mean that expertise doesn’t spill over into hubris and that we stay rooted in humility. The curiosity will always keep us open minded and remind us how little we know. If we then add to that the spice that we all possess already – our ‘original mind’ - we’ve got a potent mix and the chance to explore and capitalise on many possibilities. What Suzuki Roshi implored us to remember in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is yet more paradox:
“Our ‘original mind’ includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself. You should not lose your self-sufficient state of mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” 4
So I’ll be hoping that any residual hubris about the wider world we now operate in, and more specifically the markets we serve, will die off altogether in the months to come. My ever - increasing belief in the absolute necessity for curiosity and the power of creativity will continue to grow. At Haxted we’ll keep turning up, working hard to hone our craft, and looking both wide and deep (macro lens and 24mm wide-angled) for inspiration. I like what Sting said recently in a great interview with Rick Beato5
“My theory of creativity is like fishing. You go to the river, you throw a line in and you don’t catch anything. Next day the same. Next day the same. Maybe by Thursday you catch a fish. But I know this – unless you go to the river with a line you aren’t going to catch a fish. So turn up.”
(By the way Dominic Miller never gets enough credit for the work done on the best of Sting’s output over the last 31 years – check out the whole interview if you want to see the two riff beautifully together. While you’re at it you should probably watch this as well – what a guitar hook that is in Shape of My Heart). 6
Which brings me back to paradox again. Like all great performers do (and Sting and Miller talk about this with Rick Beato) we need to be able to hold conflicting ideas at the same time in order to do our best work. I’m sure that’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald was getting at in his brilliant 1936 essay, The Crack Up, when he said:
“Let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”7
I think it's really important that we are confident and maintain doubt at the same time. I’m increasingly clear that holding uncertainty is not a weakness but a strength, and from that standpoint we are primed for agility and adaptability. I wrote about the great (and I do mean truly, unarguably great) Iain McGilchrist in newsletter 9. Here’s his most excellent exposition of why we see paradox as error rather than the teacher:
“There is a paradox entailed in paradox. What we call paradox is seen by the purely analytical mind as a sign of an error somewhere - an error which it may be hard to identify, but which nonetheless exists, and must be flushed out and exposed, no doubt by further analysis. Meanwhile to the imaginative mind it may be a sign of quite the opposite: that we are at last approaching, in one of two possible senses, a deeper level, not of error, but of truth.”8
There is a lovely bit of Cherokee wisdom that says that if you sit still, you’ll see something but if you’re very quiet you’ll hear something. The elders passed on wisdom to their kin through this kind of paradox – the kids learned patience, but they weren’t taught patience, they were taught awareness and observation. It’s something I’m going to consider more as the year turns.
Finally, to one of the very best teachers - Pema Chodron. During this year her writing provided me with reassurance, comfort and insight on a scale hard to measure. Given the often furiously combative nature of property development, these words of hers changed everything in my approach to conflict:
“The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes us smaller. Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right or wrong in ourselves, there’s a middle way, a very powerful middle way. We could see it as sitting on the razors edge, not falling off the right or the left. This middle way involves not hanging on to our version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground serenity. Equally when we make things right, we are still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and who’s wrong? Cultivating a mind that doesn’t grasp at right and wrong, you will find a fresh state of being. The ultimate cessation of suffering comes from that.” 9
With that go find your paradoxes and embrace them. I wish you all a very peaceful and compassionate Christmas.
Carlo Navato
Shumpeter: https://www.scirp.org/reference/referencespapers?referenceid=1858797
VUCA: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2389563
Leonardo: https://archive.org/details/leonardo0000leon (note: if anyone would like a copy of a brilliant one day to-do list from Leonardo’s journal please email with Leonardo List)
Suzuki: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Roughcut/dp/1590308492
Rick Beato: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efRQh2vspVc&themeRefresh=1
Shape of My Heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dhh5txgyA
F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/
McGilchrist: https://channelmcgilchrist.com/buy-now-the-matter-with-things/
Pema Chodron: https://pemachodronfoundation.org/product/when-things-fall-apart-book
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