Quantum thinking? Sort of.
On Thursday evening I took a lovely walk guided by the brilliant Very Clear Ideas man Charles Davies and the inimitable creative inspiration Floris Koot. These two men are able to make a simple walk in nature a moment of peak insight.
While on this walk I had a moment of thought triggered by something Anne Burnistoun was saying, I forget what it was that Anne said (apologies Anne), but it made me think about the paths we take towards our goals. When setting goals or objectives the common practice seems to be to map one path. But, if this path does not lead us to the desired goal the tendency seems to be to give up. This is then referred to as failure, which in a sense it is as giving up is failure.
Last year I was in London for a brilliant day with people from the Netherlands, Turkey, Spain and the UK, all taking part in a Socratic Design workshop. That day allowed me, among other rewarding things that happened during the workshop, to meet Yuri Van Geest from the Singularity University. Yuri is a futurist with an excellent grasp on the exponential advances we are making through technological and scientific advances and the effects these may have on the organisations we have created. Yuri explained to me the differences between binary digital computing (what we use now) and the possibilities of Quantum computing and the superstates that they allow. The analogy used was to imagine oneself in the centre of a maze with 20 paths to take, how would one find the correct route out? I answered that I would have to attempt each route, one at a time until I found the correct one. Yuri told me that a quantum computer would be able to take all the paths at the same time and therefore answer the question of which was the correct route in a fraction of the time it would take me.
When pondering, the idea of our single path to a goal I thought of Yuri’s explanation and although we are not able to be quantum thinkers ourselves, perhaps we can borrow from the analogy. We could map a number of possible routes to our goal, as many as we can imagine.
This way we would be able to jump from one path to another when we found one failing to reach the desired goal. This would mean at any time we are, potentially, one step away from being on the right path to our goal. The key is to not see the current path being the wrong one as the whole enterprise failing.
