When I was young, I lived with my family in Papua New Guinea. We had a small, circular, outdoor pool that my father had built from a pool kit. Once a year we would go on a week's holiday, and when we returned one of the first jobs assigned to me, my brother and sister was to clean out the pool of the dead leaves. This wasn't a fun job, as the dead leaves sat at the bottom of the pool and would disintegrate in our hands as we tried to collect them. No matter how we tried to pick them up, they would break into even more pieces. It was a task that seemed to take forever. That was, until the summer in 1976, when I turned eight years old. That summer, we found a better way.
For some reason, that summer there were more leaves in the pool than normal. Our hearts sank when we saw the job ahead of us. As the three of us jumped into the pool, I said out loud that there had to be a better way. We began to play a game to see if we could collect the leaves by keeping our heads above water, and then we began to play a game to see if we could collect the leaves without even touching them. We began to chase each other around the pool. As we chased each other in the water, the water began to chase itself.
As the water began to chase itself we picked up speed, and went round and round and round, like that Dusty Springfield song…
“Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, Never ending or beginning, on an ever–spinning reel, Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon, Like a carousel that's turning, running rings around the moon, Like a clock whose hands a sweeping, past the minutes on its face, And the world is like an apple, spinning silently in space, Like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind.”
- Dusty Springfield
One of my role models, Buckminster Fuller, was well known for his ‘precession' theory of wealth. ‘precession' is different to ‘Procession'. A processional activity is one based on linear action, where the outcome is the result of an intention. A precessional effect is a side–effect that is often unexpected and usually operates at right–angles to the ‘Processional' effects (in the way that when a pebble drops into a pond, the resulting ripples on the surface propagate out at right–angles to the direction of the pebble's travel). He showed how precessional side–effects occurred throughout nature, and were often more important than the processional activities that caused them. For example, a bee collecting honey was a processional effect (The bee needs honey, so flies from flower to flower, collecting honey in an intentional and straight–forward cause & effect process). However, the precessional side–effect of this process was that the flowers were pollinated as a result. Similarly, Bucky saw wealth as a precessional effect. It propagated as a side–effect of pursuing a worthy cause, rather than as a processional effect (where it appears like honey when we chase it). If you try and pursue wealth as a processional activity (expecting it to be an intentional and straight–forward cause & effect process) it will almost always eluded you.
As we chased each other around the swimming pool, a magical, precessional effect began to take place. While we were having fun in the whirlpool of flow we were creating, the leaves began to move at right–angles into the centre of the pool. As they met the vortex of water in the centre of the pool, they began to rise in a spiral. From there, they were easy for us to scoop up when we were ready to scoop them. Creating flow had not just taken us into momentum and away from the drudgery of the leaves, but had resulted in the leaves solving themselves.
John C Maxwell says “Managers solve problems. Leaders create momentum”. When we slow down to solve a problem, more often than not when we solve it, we notice other problems appear (inevitably smaller and more numerous). When we create momentum, the problems solve themselves. Choose for yourself whether, in 2007, you will focus at solving problems, or creating momentum.
As we delighted ourselves in our solution, the three of us continued to spin around and around, until the flow of water pushed us along with effortless ease. The flow became bigger than the leaves, and then it became bigger than us. That was when we experienced the magic of the circle we had created. It had turned from a spin into a spiral that not only lifted the leaves. It ended up lifting our own little bodies. Our flow ended up sweeping us off our own feet....
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