The boundary…

The boundary…

Picture a three dimensional box. The six sides separate the inside from the outside. Everything inside of that box is the content of our knowledge and our lives. Everything outside the box is the temporarily unknown and not part of our knowledge or lives, yet.

Things need to pass through those sides to go from the outside to the inside. In our cell walls this is called “passive diffusion.” Two amazing parts of this process are, 1) that no energy is required from the cell to allow this process. 2) that molecules follow concentration gradient where they move from a more concentrated area to a less concentrated area.

I say that what’s outside the box is the more concentrated area. Just look at the knowledge base we have inside the box now in the 21st century and how much it’s grown over thousands of years! All the knowledge was outside the box before it came inside. Just think of how much more is out there to be discovered!

I call the passive diffusion of thought, context. This outside area is full of lots of temporarily unknown knowledge and as it passes through the sides into the box, these sides are made of context. This context determines how the knowledge will be seen inside the box.

Imagine the contextual sides of the box as a pair of sunglasses. Whichever tint you have on those glasses determines how you will see things. Well what if you’re born into a life with a figurative pair of sunglasses and you don’t even know you have them on. It would be like asking a fish, “How’s the water?“ And the fish replying, “What water?”

One of the gifts of being a human being is we have the ability to create contexts. This is like putting on different tinted sunglasses and seeing the world with “new eyes” each time.

Again creating is a way of being not a way of doing. You have to create creating, from nothing. The content inside the box will shift every time you change the context of the sides of the box.

Years ago I was consulting an aerospace composite’s start up company in Albuquerque, NM. I was initially hired by an older brother to help protect his sister’s investment. Overtime I became the CEO of the company and lead the team to develop a composite honeycomb walled air cargo container.

We had a strong engineering team and they met regularly and these meetings lasted for hours. In my observation, engineers seem to discuss things to the smallest minutia and not get a lot accomplished.

I decided to sit in on these meetings and be a facilitator, to keep things moving. First, I asked if they could all easily agree that I was the dumbest person in the room. They easily agreed. Second, therefore as the dumbest person, once I understood what someone was saying we could move onto the next point. This cut the meeting times down dramatically. This was not because I had any engineering training, but I had confidence that I could listen well and learn new things. Also without any formal training I wasn’t constrained by the existing knowledge base.

When it came time for FAA certification, it was going to be a 16 to 18 month process, just due to the staffing issues at the FAA. Fortunately at the time Eclipse Aviation was starting up in Albuquerque too. Because Eclipse had hundreds of millions of dollars the FAA suddenly had someone there every week for inspections and approvals.

I approached the FAA representative and said, “Given you are in town each week could you stop by our small company and help us keep things moving along and I’ll buy you dinner each night.” The fellow agreed and our certification was complete in 2 months, probably a FAA record.

Just prior to the FAA certification, Fed Ex wanted to flight test the containers. I explained we can’t flight test them until we get certified. Then I thought, could I shift the context of how it’s always been and find another way? Soon thereafter I was at Fed Ex headquarters in Memphis, TN. I observed personnel loading a pallet with large packages and then throwing a sort of rope spiderweb that goes over all the packages and then is attached to the pallet with metal connectors.

I could now see that I could detach our composite top from the pallet base, put the rope spiderweb over it and make my top a package rather than a product that needed certification. This allowed FedEx to flight test the containers prior to it being FAA certified and it was legal and completely safe.

When we applied for our patents the engineers told me they had put my name on the patents too. That without my input the project would not have been accomplished.

Remember a context is your point of view, how you perceive. If you have a fixed point of view, that one context has you and you are unaware of its filtering effect. Yet if you can have a floating point of view, you have created a new context where you can create multiple contexts, which represents a huge paradigm shift. Each new context you create allows you to see in new ways and in turn allows finding new solutions.

Or as John Lennon sang in “Watching The Wheels”…

People asking me questions lost in confusion

Well I tell them there’s no problem

Only solutions

Well they shake their heads and they look at me

as if I’ve lost my mind

I tell them there’s no hurry…

I’m just sitting here doing time