Welcoming Disturbance

We're not educated to welcome disturbance. We prefer things to be smooth, regular, and predictable. The thing is though that it is a disturbance that provides us with insight and spreads the seeds of new ideas that help us evolve.

Not the sort of easy disturbance - such as the market volatility that allows a few to make a fortune from sophisticated derivatives that do nothing to change things for the better. What we need is the disturbance that shakes world views, questions convention and shakes foundations. In other words, the sort we have now. We need to welcome it. We are creative, cognitive, imaginative creatures. It is what we were born for.

There is a well-known association in psychology - the "stimulus/response gap". It is an assessment of how conditioned we are to a situation and how quickly we find, automatically, a ready answer to a problem. When things are smooth and regular, conditioning of this kind has advantages. Standard Operating Procedures. Risk Analysis. State Educati…