Feynman Day At The Bloomsbury

Last Saturday, I went to ‘A Day Celebrating Richard Feynman’ held at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London.

Feynman is well-known to physicists the world over (he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965) but also much more widely through his books (such as ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman?’) as well as through his role on the Commission into the Challenger disaster. It was the 95th anniversary of his birth.

I was fortunate enough to meet Feynman in person as I co-organised the last conference he went to (held at Wangerooge, an island off the coast of North Germany) so I was very interested to join in the celebration! I went along with a friend, Ron Donaldson, who is a consultant in creativity and innovation (hence the interest in Feynman). The full event spanned the afternoon and evening – we attended just the afternoon session (for travel reasons, we both live outside London).

The Bloomsbury is a small but quite intimate theatre, well suited to this sort of event. The afternoon session was split into two one-hour parts; the first was technical and the second oriented around the videos made about him.

The first talk was by John Butterworth, Professor of Physics at nearby UCL. It focused on what a Feynman Diagram is and how the idea is incredibly useful in figuring out the complicated interactions of fundamental particles, including the recently discovered Higgs particle.

I was familiar with this material as I’d previously worked in this area (when an academic) and it was interesting to see how he went about his explanations (of some quite complicated physics) in the relatively short space of time allowed, something that is always tricky. There was a good selection of questions afterwards so it obviously hit the mark!

The second part centred on some captivating interviews with the producers Christopher Sykes and Christopher Riley.

Christopher Sykes is a TV documentary producer who made three very well-known programs with and about Feynman (he’s done loads of other interesting work as well, including contributing to the fascinating Web of Stories video collection). Christopher Riley produced the latest documentary on Feynman, The Fantastic Mr Feynman, which was aired on BBC2 last Sunday. Robin Ince handled the interviewing well, using a light touch and encouraging some really interesting insights from both speakers.

Talking about his well-known video work with Feynman in the ‘80s, some of the stories that Sykes told that particularly caught my attention were (I’m going on memory here):

1. Feynman and Dyson

The idea for the series of interviews with Feynman came about as a bit of an accident. Freeman Dyson, another celebrated physicist, had written a well-received book ‘Disturbing The Universe’ (well worth a read by the way) and Sykes thought that this might be a good basis for a programme. However in discussions about this, Dyson strongly recommended interviewing Feynman instead! This was along the lines of ‘Feynman is so special, capturing anything about him is incredibly important’. Not a ‘good thing to do’, important! This response obviously tells you quite alot about Dyson himself as well as his high respect and admiration for Feynman. He’s written a perceptive review of a couple of recent books on Feynman here.

2. Talking From The Chair

It says alot about Feynman’s charisma and presence that he can hold your attention whilst just sitting in a chair and talking. No glitz or props at all! Here’s an example in case you’ve not seen any of the videos (produced by Sykes in the ’80s):

This particular video is interesting in it’s own special way as it gives such a brilliant example of a productive and imaginative conversation. It starts from the question of how can you understand the feeling you get when you move two magnets together i.e. the sense of repulsion or attraction.

In the video, there’s some very reasonable confusion at the start, and most non-scientists would identify with the questions that Sykes asks. The key point comes when Sykes says ‘I must say I think that’s a perfectly reasonable question’ and Feynman agrees with him (‘an excellent question’) and then goes off on a fascinating discussion of the role and limitations of the question “Why?”. The main point is that you can only explain something in terms of concepts that the other person understands and is used to. However, talking around this point and elucidating it in different ways and guises is incredibly illuminating. The clip also gives a glimpse of Feynman’s inimitable personality as well as his determination (and ability) to make things exceptionally clear.

3. Buffoon and Genius

Feynman has a great reputation as a showman, and this sometimes leads to criticisms. However Sykes offered the suggestion that this was a method that Feynman used to handle the fact that he was so different from other people but still needed to get on with and communicate with them. A tantalising insight.

4. Feynman’s Problem Solving Algorithm

• Write down the problem.
• Think very hard.
• Write down the answer.

Unfortunately this doesn’t have general applicability, especially to mere mortals!

5. Reputation as a Womaniser

Feynman has a (somewhat vague) reputation as a womaniser, as well as perhaps giving a rather macho view of women. Sykes strongly questioned this viewpoint and was curious where it originated from as he’d never come across any solid facts to support it.

On this theme, when I was a postdoc at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, I’m sure I remember seeing a poster for some talks at Caltech where one of the speakers was jokily mentioned as Fine Dickman!

Anyway, maybe this was all part of the deliberate smoke-and-mirrors act, perpetuated by Feynman as well as others?

6. Death

Feynman died of cancer in February 1988 and Sykes spent time with him during the terminal stages. One of the delicate issues that cropped up was whether they could or should discuss his views on dying and death. In the end he decided to bring it up and after thinking about it, Feynman decided it was best not to talk about it.

This is a rather poignant topic. When I invited Feynman to a specialist workshop I was organising (I’d heard through the grapevine that he’d been working on the subject area), I wasn’t aware of his illness. To our surprise and delight, he accepted and the meeting was held in September 1987. Together with a colleague, we transcribed his talk. Afterwards, via his secretary, Helen Tuck, he complimented us on our write-up. She also told us that he’d reviewed the paper from his hospital bed, which naturally came as quite a shock.

Feynman at the workshop held in Wangerooge, Germany in 1987. He’s in the middle, just to the right.

7. Living Life

It was impressive that Sykes and Riley both had the strong view that Feynman communicated and encouraged an irrepressible enthusiasm for life, as, for example, typified in this quote:

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.” – Richard P. Feynman

Something for us all to think about…

Top picture credit: here.

Success And Peer Conversations

I spotted this quote by Robert Rowland Smith in the Sunday Times magazine last weekend:

You want to succeed, so what’s stopping you?

Some people feel they don’t deserve it; others just don’t think they’re the successful type; a few hold themselves back because they believe that equality should prevail. There’s also a deeper fact. To succeed is to stand apart from others, and that can be lonely.

Coincidentally in the Appointments section of the same newspaper there was an article on how peer groups can give bosses a way to reduce the loneliness of making hard decisions. In these groups, participants (from various industries) speak frankly about their problems and learn from the mistakes and successes of others. Obviously suppliers and competitors are not allowed to attend to ensure a confidential environment.

Senior management is a lonely place…Having a group of people with whom you have built a rapport and who are able to give you a different perspective, or who can just support your thinking…is something you won’t get in your own business, either because people are all in the trenches or aligned with the same problems. Getting a fresh pair of eyes gives you new ideas.

Importantly, the interactions can be quite trenchant – if someone thinks you’re doing the wrong thing, they’re allowed to say so. I would imagine this would be very natural anyway with the type of personalities involved. Another benefit is that:

Giving advice can be as useful as receiving feedback. It helps people to think about an issue broadly and to crystallise their own ideas.

The article says that the usual format is a half-day workshop on a specific topic, followed by a round-table session where members ask for advice on difficult problems.

Various colleagues of mine in startups are members of similar groups but their experience has been variable. It should be a good idea but I guess it all depends on how open you really want to be, how candid others are and how much you trust their advice! It’s interesting to speculate on whether some of the business issues they’ve encountered would have been avoided if the peer groups had jelled a bit better.

So the key factors seem to be getting the right collection of individuals in the first place (although this is partly a matter of luck) and then in wisely facilitating ‘fierce conversations‘ between them so that something different and useful comes out on a regular basis.

Building Communities Around Your Business

From a poll carried out by Zoho.

Actualising Dreams

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney

The Roles Of Ignorance, Uncertainty And Doubt

From the excellent Brain Pickings:

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” – Richard Feynman (physicist)

The creative role of ignorance applies to other fields as well of course.

Gadgets, Cool Stuff And The Knowledge Society

From a recent thought-provoking post by Geoff Mulgan (CEO of Nesta):

We’ve now had fifty years of discussion about the arrival of a knowledge society and a knowledge economy. Much of this discussion is couched in quantitative terms, with successive measures of the proportion of jobs or GDP that’s devoted to knowledge. But what would a true knowledge economy look like?

Presumably it would be one constantly enriched by knowledge in all its forms, in which workers, consumers, and citizens had a deep knowledge of the world they’re in and its opportunities and challenges.

A moment’s reflection shows how far we are from it. We have highly sophisticated systems for producing and circulating information of all kinds.  But little of it counts as knowledge. Much of it is data about our behaviour that is bought and sold without our knowledge. A lot of it is simply inaccurate – lies and half-truths – and the dominant search engines distinguish by popularity not accuracy. Commercial messaging dominates – often with almost zero information content – and a high proportion of the messages we’re bombarded with have no relevance to us.

He ends by suggesting that

We need a new generation of leaders who aren’t just interested in the gadgets and cool stuff – but also have the wisdom to understand what it means.

He points out that it’s key to distinguish between the differing concepts of data, information, knowledge and wisdom (and I don’t mean in an overly academic sense). In many circumstances these words are used as if they were (practically) interchangeable, which is part of the problem. Anyway, I like the use of the word wisdom in the final sentence!

Keep A One Sentence Journal

Until recently I’ve never kept a journal, either for business or personal reasons. I’ve often tried – usually starting with a short burst of energy which then fizzled out fairly soon. However, in an attempt to find out where all my time was going, I’ve kept a daily journal for over a year now (without even a day slipping). It covers all aspects of my life.

I use bullet points rather than sentences and I use Circus Ponies NoteBook (I’m on a Mac) as the outlining feature is very handy for this (there are lots of other products of course).

As I do about 3-5 things a day, this amounts to well over 1,000 items in a year. In hindsight, and skimming through, some were important and others not. However whilst I’ve found the journal indispensable for daily and weekly work, it’s not been so successful when viewed over longer timescales. Dealing with such large numbers of items is cumbersome as well as time-consuming and structure can often evolve in complex inter-connected ways!

To make more progress, and being realistic with my aspirations, I’ve now decided to write one sentence a day on the most important ‘thing’ that happened. This might be a task, an insight (on anything), a feeling (about anything) or a significant meeting/event. The simple point is that it forces me to think through, on a daily basis, whether something of note has happened (physically or emotionally) and then summarise it in a catchy manner (a skill in it’s own right). It’ll be interesting to see what this produces longer term and how it compares to my standard ‘task’ list.

When I worked full-time, in a large and fast-moving company, I always thought I had no time to take daily notes. I had Outlook and I used this to collect (in a rather random way) the usual oddball collection of contacts, tasks and events. When I left I thought it might be useful to take this file with me but I was surprised to discover just how unhelpful it was (information wise). I realised (a little too late) that most things were in my head, coupled with a fuzzy memory of details the further back I went.

It would have been fascinating to have these one-liners to illuminate me on what I’d done and when and how I felt about things at the time. Even the decision on what I wrote on a given day would be enlightening – things at the time and in hindsight are often quite different. I can’t think of any reason why I couldn’t have found the time to think about and then write just one sentence (more is allowed of course, if the opportunity arises). I’m sure I would have got better at it in time as well (as it’s not as easy at it sounds!).

In a way, the one-sentence journal is an attempt to see some simplicity in the complexity that usually surrounds me, even if it is misleading or a little naive at times.

Anyway, I’l let you know how it goes!

Aside:
I got the idea for this from a variety of quite different sources over a period of time. Here are two of them:

Day One

A desktop Mac application that also has a synced iPhone companion, so there’s no excuse not to write! There’s also a handy reminder function. So at 6 pm everyday a little box pops up encouraging me to write my line! I still have to do the thinking/reflection of course.

Notebooks (1970 − 2003) by Murray Bail

I found this book a number of years ago in a small, local ‘reduced price’ bookstore. Murray Bail is an Australian writer. The book is a collection of snippets collected along the way, presumably for use in future books. It’s quite tantalising, and gives an interesting insight into a writer’s mind. Here are some typical entries (most are longer; there are over 2,000 of them)

From London June 1970 – November 1974:

‘Tossing his head, he laughed like a horse and kept on slapping his thigh to keep galloping.’

‘The only exercise he took was shaving.’

He makes an observation and then translates it into a short memorable phrase. Out of context this might seem a little strange but it does work!

The Book Of Dreams

‘Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.’ – Marsha Norman (playwright)

Premortem Your Plans And Projects

Recently I was dipping into ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman; it’s an interesting but full read, coming in at over 500 pages.

Skimming through, I came across the idea of ‘(project) premortems’. I’m very familiar with project postmortems (and their variations), which take place after a project has finished. The hope being that insights and learning may arise that will be helpful in the future. Premortems, on the other hand, take place at the very beginning!

Here’s a summary of the idea by Gary Klein:

A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.

I was especially interested in the idea as it links to, although is different from, the idea of Discovery Driven Planning discussed earlier.

As a fresh way of communicating outputs, there’s an interesting post here that uses sketchnoting (see picture above).

Picture credit: here.

Keeping Mistakes

There’s lots if talk of running your business (and maybe even your life) as a series of ‘experiments’ that you learn from rather trying to implement some grand plan (especially in times of rapid change and uncertainty).

In this general context of ‘trying things and seeing what happens’, I thought this quote was instructive:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams (cartoonist)

I like the idea of keeping some mistakes and throwing others away. Unfortunately, of course, the quality of the choice made (however it’s done) can only really be judged in hindsight, so luck will always play a role. Nevertheless you should be able to influence this as well – see here.