The word “episode” is a familiar and everyday term for a part of a television series, or for part of a long story. It’s a simple idea, but it turns out to be very powerful and useful tool for managing the future – your future, your organisation’s future and society’s future. Why? Because the idea of an episode has everything to do with time. Understanding what an episode is and how they are joined up is an insight key to getting a grip on change, on chaos and on the future.
To understand a bit more, think about a photograph. It’s a record of the state of things as they were at the moment it was taken. Contrast that with a video, which shows you things changing between the time the video was started and the time it ended. A photograph is a snapshot in time. A video is an episode in time. Anything that has a time-dimension, a beginning, a middle and an end is an episode.
Anything?
What have the following in common: stories; plays; projects; programmes; procedures; tasks; actions? They all have a time-dimension. They all have a beginning, a middle and an end. They are all episodic. They are all episodes. But we can go further. What have all events, causes-and-effects, happenings, changes, the Universe and even “stuff” itself got in common? They, too, are all episodic. They are all episodes.
We can go further. Even our memories and our language is episodic. The difference between memory of facts and time-dimensioned memories was observed in surgical operations carried out in the 1950s by surgeon Wilder Penfield. In the course of open-brain surgery on conscious patients (remember, the brain itself does not feel pain, although your scalp and skull does!) Penfield found that when he touched certain parts of the brain with his surgical instruments, patients said things such as “I can smell burnt toast; “I hear a melody!”; “Oh gosh! My mother is telling my brother he has got his coat on backwards. I can just hear them”. Penfield’s experiences showed that we can recall not just facts, which are snapshots of the state of things, but time-dimensioned video-like episodes.
In 1963 a psychologist called Endel Tulving made the distinction between ‘semantic’ memory – memory of facts, like “The Nile is the longest river in the world” – and ‘episodic’ memory, like “I remember my teacher telling us one hot summer afternoon in class that the Nile is the longest river in the world”. Our episodic memories and our imaginations are distinguished by a having a time dimension.
Given that our brains function in an episodic way, it’s not a surprise to find that language – all natural languages – also have an episodic structure. Consider “The cat sat on the mat”. At the beginning of the sentence, the cat is not sitting on the mat. At the end of the sentence, it is sitting on the mat. During the episode, a change has taken place to the state of the cat (noun; subject) and the state of the mat (noun; object). The change is signified by the verb in the sentence: “sat”. A sentence describes a beginning, a middle and an end. It describes an episode.
Around you and across the world as you read this, episodes are happening in their tens, thousands, millions, trillions, decillions, and so forth. If you start to think down to the sub-atomic level, they are happening all at the same time in their googleplexes! How can we possibly manage the interactions between all of these things happening simultaneously? All the “can’t-untils” and “can’t because-s”? The answer is in that simple sentence: “The cat sat on the mat”.
It turns out that episodes are connected together in three simple ways. They share:-
1. Things (objects), which are nouns in sentences. “Cat” and “mat” occur in countless other sentences, memories and other sorts of episodes.
2. Changes (transformations) which are verbs in sentences. “Sat” occurs in countless other sentences, memories and other sorts of episodes.
3. Outcomes (states of objects), which are nouns with adjectives in sentences. “The cat is sat upon the mat”; “The mat is sat upon”. Many other episodes are a consequence of, caused by, dependent upon, the changed states of the cat and the mat. Simple as they are, these connections form a vast network of causes-and-effects.
Fortunately, parts of this network are “small-world”, which means that every point in the network is surprisingly closely connected with every other part. You may have heard of “six degrees of separation”. If you (1) have forty friends and each of those (2) have forty friends, of whom each of those (3) has forty friends and each of them (4) has forty friends and each of them (5) has forty friends, each of whom (6) has forty friends, then you are connected within six steps with 4 billion people, half of all those alive in the world today (which is 8.3bn).
To start to get a handle on change, therefore, all we have to do is to replace a “can’t because” approach with “can because” and a “can’t until” approach with “can when”. That makes us to focus on opportunity in place of obstruction. Instead of struggling to find solutions to problems, it reframes our attention around problem removal. It capitalises on language, the simplicity of the underlying connection of episodes, the ‘small-world-ness’ of the network, to tweak it to achieve much more with much less much sooner. To enable that we do something called “backcasting”, another simple idea, which I will explain in another post.
I have just touched on the power of insight into the nature of episodes. I hope you will re-read and think about the significance of what I have said here and look out for an upcoming post on backcasting.
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