Change is difficult - even if data proves its necessity

Humans are storytellers. Stories are going on in our heads all the time.

If we rated stories by how many people believe in them, the most highly rated story would be the story of mathematics. I am a mathematician and obviously fascinated by this. As a very young child being introduced to mathematics, you might have stated boldly that 5 plus 7 is 16 or “5 million hundred billions,” but this kind of boldness wanes quickly once you understand the truth behind the concept of natural numbers. People stop believing in religions during their lifetime. People question empirical concepts such as a round earth. But only very few people question the truth behind the mathematical concepts that they have learned.

How comforting to know that there is something that we all can believe in. And yet, it took and still takes work to write, tell, and re-write the story of mathematics in a way such that it is and stays believable.

The legend of Hippasus

One of my favorite stories in this regard is the legend of Hippasus, a follower of Pythagoras, who sometimes gets credited with the discovery that there is no such fraction of two natural numbers that equates to 2, because the number is in fact irrational. The legend says that Pythagoras’ followers tried to drown Hippasus angrily. And if they did, they did so without any proof that he was wrong.

It is a legend. We do not know what actually happened, but it is easy to believe that it was difficult for Pythagoras and his followers to accept the existence of irrational numbers, especially for such a relatively simple thing as the square root of 2, the length of a diagonal in a square with length 1. But why was it so difficult for them to accept this truth?

Just for the kicks, I told my two older kids this story this morning, and explained to them the irrationality of the square root of two. I guided them through a proof which is not very difficult to follow, once you know it. And they seemed to have accepted it without much complaint.

I do not think it was my authority that got them there. I have plenty of evidence, some of which even showed during the homeschooling session this morning, that they have plenty of healthy protest energy against my authority, always questioning my “truth.”

So, are my children geniuses? Smarter than Pythagoras and his followers? Probably not.

But Pythagoras had something that my children did not have: a deep attachment to the idea that every number is rational, a fraction of two natural numbers. It is a beautiful concept and works for so many calculations. The idea lit something up in Pythagoras’ heart. I could even see it in my oldest daughter when we were trying to approximate the square root by a fraction. We got to 17/12, and she wanted to go on and try to get closer, hoping that we might find an answer.

The morale of the story

Why am I telling you this? Well, it is not hard to guess. In business, in life, this happens all the time: we fall in love with an idea, we get attached to the way things are going, and suddenly data does not align with these beliefs.

If you are a leader in a software company, and you have good judgment, you have probably built a bunch of metrics and at some point the numbers tell you: “Something is not right. It is time for a change.”

Accepting this data can be hard work. Feelings can come up: anger, fear, disappointment. And people, maybe you yourself, might want to hide the truth, question the metrics, or try to find an outside event that explains the data but keeps your beloved beliefs intact.

I have seen this happen in companies where a product was working for a long time, and suddenly something had to shift. Sales would not work anymore. Panic comes up.

Heart-led leaders and change

This newsletter is about heart-led leadership. In this newsletter, I am arguing that emotions are what make you valuable in this world. Emotions connect us to each other, which is what business is about. Emotions connect us to hidden truth about how the world works. Emotions evolved over millennia, keeping our race alive in ever-changing environments. This is where the million-dollar ideas are hidden.

And AI does not have it. It just repeats what we have written in the past, adding nothing new. But now, the legend of Hippasus teaches us that emotions can misguide us, and even prevent us from changing where change is necessary.

So should we just rely on data, on AI, on the treaded path of thinking and reason? Well, look at the story again.

Why was I able to tell my children that the square root of 2 is irrational today?

Because more than two millennia ago, some people got so obsessed with the idea that every number should be rational that they tried over and over again to find this fraction. And it took them a lot of frustration until one of them finally had an idea to introduce a new concept: irrational numbers.

If they had not been so in love with the concept of rational numbers, nobody might have cared about what else is out there. They laid the groundwork for advancing the story of mathematics by taking a stand for a hypothesis and failing. It is such a beautiful allegory for almost every business.

It requires a heart-inspired hypothesis to initiate movement, and it requires heart-led leadership to react to the feedback. You do not want to throw the person with the solution into the ocean.

Reflections for the day

• Can you think of an example when it was difficult for you to accept change?
• Can you think of an example when you were hesitating to commit to a hypothesis because you feared being wrong?
• Are any of these two events happening right now?

With care,

Martin