In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.
1950-tih godina u Oksfordu, bila je jedna fantastična doktorka, veoma neobična, zvala se Alis Stjuart. Alis je bila neobična i delom zbog toga što je, naravno, bila žena, što je bilo poprilično retko tada 1950-tih. A bila je genijalna, bila je jedna od, u to vreme najmlađih saradnika izabranih za Kraljevski koledž lekara. Bila je neobična i zbog toga što je nastavila da radi i posle udaje i kada je dobila decu, pa čak i onda kada se razvela i postala samohrani roditelj, nastavila je svoj medicinski rad.
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?
A bila je neobična i zbog toga što se zaista zanimala za novu nauku, novu oblast u epidemiologiji, studiju obrazaca (ponavljanja) kod bolesti. Ali kao i svaki naučnik, znala je da, da bi ostavila trag, ono što je trebalo da uradi je da pronađe težak zadatak i reši ga. Taj teški zadatak koji je Alis odabrala bio je povećana pojava kancera kod dece. Većina bolesti je povezana sa siromaštvom, ali u slučaju kancera kod dece, deca koja su umirala činilo se da uglavnom dolaze iz imućnih porodica. Dakle, ono što je ona htela znati je može li objasniti ovo odstupanje?
Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for. This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? What time of life had they started school?
Alis je imala problem da nađe sredstva za istraživanje. Na kraju, dobila je samo 1.000 funti od nagrade Lejdi Tata Memorijal. I to je značio da ima samo jedan pokušaj u prikupljanju podataka. Ali sada ona nije imala predstavu za čim da traga. Ta potraga je bila kao za iglom u plastu sena, pa je tako pitala sve čega se mogla setiti. Da li su deca jela kuvane slatkiše? Da li su pila obojena pića? Da li su jela pomfrit i prženu ribu? Da li imaju unutrašnje ili spoljne instalacije? Sa koliko godina su krenula u školu?
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.
Ali kada se njen indigom kopirani upitnik počeo vraćati, jedna jedina stvar je počela da se izdvaja sa statističkom pouzdanošću o kakvoj većina naučnika može samo da sanja. Po stopi dva prema jedan, deca koja su umirala bila su od majki koje su tokom trudnoće snimane rendgenom. To otkriće je sada udarilo na opšte-prihvaćenu mudrost. Prema kojoj je sve smatrano bezbednim do izvesne mere. Suprotstavilo se opšte-prihvaćenom shvatanju, koje se odnosilo na prevelika očekivanja od nove kul tehnologije toga doba - rendgen mašine. A suprotstavilo se i mišljenju koje su o sebi imali doktori, a to je da kao ljudi koji pomažu pacijentima, nikako im ne mogu naškoditi.
Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried. It was fully 25 years before the British and medical -- British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women. The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change.
Pa ipak, Alis Stjuart je požurila da objavi svoja preliminarna zapažanja u "The Lancet"-u 1956. Ljudi su sa uzbuđenjem to dočekali, bilo je čak i pomena o Nobelovoj nagradi, a Alis je zaista bila u velikoj žurbi da prouči sve slučajeve kancera kod dece koje je mogla naći pre nego što oni iščeznu. Zapravo, ona nije ni morala žuriti. Trebalo je čitavih 25 godina da prođe pre nego što su britanske i američke lekarske ustanove obustavile upotrebu rendgenskog zračenja trudnih žena. Činjenice su bile tu, bile su javne i dostupne, ali niko za to nije mario. Jedno dete nedeljno je umiralo, ali se ništa nije menjalo. Otvorenost sama po sebi ne vodi u promene.
So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong." He actively sought disconfirmation. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.
Dakle, Alis Stjuart je 25 godina vodila veoma veliku borbu. Kako je znala da je to što radi ispravno? Pa, imala je fantastičan uzor za razmišljanje. Radila je sa statističarem zvanim Džordž Nil, a Džordž je bio uglavnom sve što Alis nije. Dakle, Alis je bila veoma otvorena i društvena, a Džordž je bio usamljenik. Alis je bila veoma topla, osećajna i strpljiva sa svojim pacijentima. Džordža su više zanimale brojke od samih ljudi. Ali on je rekao fatastičnu činjenicu o njihovom poslovnom odnosu. Rekao je: "Moj posao je da dokažem grešku dr Stjuart." Bio je istrajan u protivljenju. Drugačiji načini sagledavanja njenih obrazaca, njenih statistika, drugačiji načini baratanja činjenicama, a sve u cilju da je ospori. Svoj posao je zamislio kao suprotstavljanje njenim teorijama. Samo neuspevanjem da dokaže da je ona grešila, Džordž je pružio samopouzdanje koje je trebalo Alis da zna da je bila u pravu.
It's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.
To je fantastičan model saradnje - kolege koje nisu istog mišljenja. Pitam se koliko nas ima ili se usuđuje da ima, takve saradnike. Alis i Džordž su bili veoma dobri u sukobima. Gledali su na njih kao na razmišljanje.
So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
Šta dakle zahteva takva vrsta konstruktivnog sukoba? Pa, pre svega, zahteva da pronađemo ljude koji su mnogo drugačiji od nas samih. To znači da treba da se odupremo instiktivnom nagonu, po kome biramo ljude slične nama i da treba da tragamo za ljudima drugačijeg nasleđa, drugačijih interesovanja, drugačijeg miišljenja i drugačijeg iskustva, i nađemo načina da se povežemo sa njima. To zahteva puno strpljenja i energije.
And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care. And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. "My mother," she said, "My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them."
I što sam više razmišljala o ovome, sve sam ubeđenija da je to vrsta ljubavi. Zato što jednostavno nećeš žrtvovati toliku energiju i vreme ako ti zaista nije do toga stalo. A to takođe znači da treba da budemo spremni da promenimo svoje mišljenje. Alisina ćerka mi je rekla da svaki put kada bi se Alis našla prsa u prsa sa nekim od kolega naučnika, to bi je podstaklo da ponovo razmišlja i razmišlja i razmišlja. "Moja majka", rekla je, "nije volela da se prepire, ali je bila zaista dobra u tome."
So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship. But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives. So how do organizations think? Well, for the most part, they don't. And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't. And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.
Mada, jedna je stvar raditi to u odnosu jedan na jedan. Ali plaši me da najveći problemi sa kojima se suočavamo, mnoge od najvećih nesreća koje smo doživeli, uglavnom nisu od strane pojedinaca, već od organizacija, ponekad većih i od država, mnoge su u prilici da utiču na stotine, hiljade, čak i milione života. Kako dakle te organizacije rasuđuju? Pa, u većini slučajeva i ne čine to. A to nije iz razloga što ne žele, već će pre biti da to ne mogu. A ne mogu zato što se ljudi unutar tih organizacija previše plaše sukoba.
In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise. Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose. Eighty-five percent is a really big number. It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did. They can't think together. And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.
U anketiranju evropskih i američkih rukovodilaca, čak 85 procenata njih potvrdilo je da su imali problema i nedoumica na poslu koje su se plašili da rešavaju. Plašili se da to može izazvati sukob, da će upasti u raspravu u kojoj se ne bi snašli i u kojoj bi bili osuđeni da izgube. Osamdeset pet procenata je zaista veliki broj. To znači da organizacije uglavnom ne mogu ono što su Džordž i Alis pobedonosno postigli. One ne mogu skladno misliti. A to znači da ljudi kao i većina nas, koji smo pokretali organizacije, i trudili se što bolje možemo da pronađemo najbolje ljude, padamo na tome što iz njih ne izvučemo ono najbolje.
So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too. If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company. And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help. But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. So, he didn't really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn't. Maybe he'd look stupid. But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.
Dakle kako da razvijemo te osobine koje su nam potrebne? Zato što to zahteva i umeće i vežbanje, takođe. Ako ne želimo da se plašimo sukobljavanja, treba ga doživeti kao razmatranje i trebalo bi da postanemo zaista dobri u tome. Tako sam, nedavno, radila sa jednim direktorom po imenu Džo, a Džo je radio za kompaniju mediciskih aparata. Džo je bio veoma zabrinut oko aparata na kome je radio. Smatrao je da je bio previše komplikovan i da je njegova složenost ta koja je pravila slučajne greške koje bi zaista mogle da naškode ljudima. Plašio se da tako možda šteti pacijentima kojima je pokušavao da pomogne. Ali kada je sagledao svoju organizaciju, izgledalo je da niko drugi nije bio ni najmanje zabrinut. Tako da je ipak odustao od toga da bilo šta kaže. Pomislio je da su možda oni znali nešto što on nije. Pa bi možda ispao budala. Ali je nastavio da o tome razmišlja i toliko se zabrinuo da je na kraju došao do tačke da je mislio da jedina stvar koju može da uradi jeste da napusti posao koji je voleo.
In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns. And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. So now Joe had allies. They could think together. And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.
Na kraju smo Džo i ja pronašli način kako da se oslobodi svojih sumnji. I ono što se tada dogodilo je nešto što se skoro uvek događa u takvoj situaciji. Ispostavilo se da su baš sve mučila ista pitanja i sumnje. Tako da je Džo sada imao saveznike. Mogli su skupa da razmišljaju. I naravno, bilo je dosta i sukoba i rasprava i svađa ali je to omogućilo svakome za stolom da bude kreativan, da bi se rešio problem i promenio aparat.
Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn't a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence. And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader.
Džo je bio ono što bi mnogi ljudi nazvali tužibabom, jedino što za razliku od nje on ni najmanje nije bio prevrtljiv, on je bio strastveno posvećen organizaciji i visokim ciljevima koje je ona imala. On se toliko plašio suprotstavljanja, dok na kraju nije postao mnogo više uplašen ćutanja. A kada se usudio da progovori, otkrio je mnogo više o sebi samom i doprineo sistemu mnogo više nego što je ikada mogao zamisliti. A njegove kolege ne vide u njemu prevrtljivca. Oni ga smatraju liderom.
So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend. It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority. I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.
Kako da onda takve razgovore vodimo lakše i češće? Pa, Univerzitet u Delftu zahteva od svojih studenata na doktorskim studijama da prilože pet izjava koje su spremni da odbrane. Zapravo nije ni važno šta one tvrde, ali ono što je svakako bitno je da su kandidati voljni i u stanju da se usprotive autoritetu. Ja smatram da je to fantastičan sistem, ali mislim i da, ostane li se samo na doktorantima, biće to suviše mali broj ljudi i suviše kasno u životu. Ja smatram da treba učiti ovim veštinama decu i odrasle u svim dobima njihovog razvoja, ako želimo da imamo intelektualne organizacije i kritičko društvo.
The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.
Činjenica je da većina najvećih katastrofa kojih smo svedoci retko proizlazi iz informacija koje su sakrivene ili tajne. Zapravo dolaze iz informacija koje su javne i dostupne, ali koje svesno ignorišemo, zato što ne možemo ili ne želimo da se izborimo sa sukobom koje one donose. Ali kada se usudimo da razbijemo tišinu, ili sakupimo hrabrost da progledamo i usprotivimo se, na taj način podstičemo i sebe i ljude oko nas da na najbolji način sagledamo stvari.
Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.
Slobodne informacije su fantastične, otvorene veze su od suštinskog značaja. Ali istina nas neće osloboditi sve dok ne razvijemo veštine i naviku i sposobnost i moralnu čvrstinu da ih upotrebimo. Otvorenost nije kraj. Zapravo je početak.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)