The real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new landscapes but having new eyes. Marcel Proust.
Red Queen Effect
MG leads a large delivery team of over 1500 people in a global IT services organisation; she is on top of things at work and yet uneasy.
It’s a feeling of being stalled, the more of being unable to move as fast as I want to, in fact, the harder I work, the more I seem to be in the same place.
Sounds familiar? What should MG do?
She needs to manage her Red Queen in the near term.
The Red Queen is a concept drawn from evolutionary biology that all progress is relative. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you, and the less you make progress; and time cancels out all comparative advantages. Seals in the Arctic grew big and fat for a time matching wits with brown polar bears until a white polar bear was born. Polar bears invisible in the snow nullified the seal’s advantage.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen explains to Alice that her world works differently:
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
The Red Queen Effect applies to all of us, whether we are startup founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, middle managers or independent contributors. We are like Alice living in Wonderland, dealing with our Red Queens as our landscape keeps moving with us, however fast we run.
Do you know your Red Queen?
As for us all, MG knew she couldn’t be complacent, or she’d fall behind. MG’s great love was technology, and she was very proud of her ability to solve problems, so much so that it became her identity. She always found time to help people solve problems and never refused anyone.
Her identity was her Red Queen and her most significant obstacle to moving to the next level.
The faster she solved problems, the more requests she received, and the more people sought her, and that left her with no time to think about the future, strategise, to expand her network. Like Alice, she was running very hard but going nowhere.
MG decided to chart a new course. She stopped running the same race and crafted a new identity for herself that did not involve problem-solving. She slowed down yet moved faster and began contributing to new initiatives of strategic importance to the organisation.
To break free of the spell of one’s Red Queen requires one to think differently and be comfortable charting a new course if necessary. As Morgan Housel said, ‘‘The future is always endlessly unpredictable. What changes isn’t the level of uncertainty, but the level of people’s complacency.’
There are ways to break free from your Red Queen’s spell.
Reimagine your Future
To create the momentum for us to move out of that comfortable groove that keeps getting deeper as we run the same race, we need to reimagine the future and be inspired and filled with awe.
Travelling to new places and experiencing natural ‘wonders’ or marvels of human ingenuity can help break the ‘sameness’ of our lives.
Ranakpur Temple
When the pandemic eased towards the end of last year, I started to travel again and visited the magnificent Jain Temple at Ranakpur, tucked away in an isolated valley on the western side of the Aravalli Range, 90 km from Udaipur.
It was built in the 15th century by Seth Dharna Sah with the support of the ruler of Mewar, Rana Kumbha. He had a vision of a Nalinigulm Vimana (heavenly aircraft), and apparently, Seth Dharna took years to find the right architect, Depa, who could translate his vision. The temple is a vast edifice of marble, with 29 halls, 80 domes and 1444 pillars exquisitely carved, and no two pillars are alike in their design and structure.
I was struck by how Depa, inspired by Seth Dharna Sah’s vision, reimagined the idea of a temple to the likeness of the celestial vehicle and created a wonder in marble which is one of the five holiest Jain shrines in India.
Hoodoos of Bryce Canyon
Utah has some of the most majestic national parks in the US, the Zion National park and the Grand Canyon National Park. Still, the most spectacular is the Bryce Canyon, National Park.
Bryce is the smallest of the Utah National Parks, more remote and elevated at over 9000 ft, and it was quite a drive from Zion National Park up to the plateau.
In Bryce, it was as if Nature decided to reimagine a new world, a canyon very different from any other that she had created. A world of vermillion, orange, and tangerine towers known as Hoodoos. Over centuries, these are formed as headward erosion excavates extensive amphitheatre-shaped features in the Cenozoic-aged rocks of the high plateaus. Hoodoos are up to 200 feet tall, and no hoodoo is alike.
The canyon is deeply spiritual for the Paiute people who have inhabited the area for centuries. They believe Hoodoos are an ancient people turned into stone for displeasing a powerful spirit.
As I trekked in the canyon at sunrise, thousands of Hoodoos burning bright in various hues of yellow filled me with hope. My challenges seemed trivial when it seemed that the Hoodoos were marching with me, keeping me company at a distance.
It took 65 years to carve the exquisite marble pillars of Ranakpur Temple; it took centuries for the forces of water, ice and gravity to craft the mystical shapes of Hoodoo pillars made up of Limestone, siltstone, and dolomite. Reimagining one’s future and making it happen is similar, though on a different time scale. It still takes patience and persistence, and the results can be equally wondrous.
MG spent time reimagining her future, persisted in learning new skills and did the hard work of letting go of her earlier identity.
She is free of her Red Queen for now.