I was reading an article over at dimbulb. Yes, this is the name of the blog by Jonathan Salem Baskin. It’s a marketing blog, and always seems to have an interesting perspective. Well today’s entry was a little out there in left field and discussed an area of science called entanglement. You’ll have to read the blog entry to appreciate how he ties it back to marketing. It states:
Researchers have recently proven that a quality of the unseen quantum world called entanglement can happen also at the microscopic level (i.e. the size of stuff in the regular world).
Entanglement is really strange. What happens is that two particles can get mated (how that happens is a bit of a mystery), and then communicate with one another not just faster than the speed if light, but instantaneously. This is a really, really big mystery, because it violates a few cardinal laws of physics: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, at which point an object’s mass should become infinite. And since light itself has a speed, being instantaneous is something that just doesn’t happen in Einstein’s relative universe.
Personally, I find some of this stuff I don’t understand, much less comprehend really fascinating. But then dimbulb turned my head with a bright light. Baskin notes;
It turns out that everything there doesn’t really exist at all, per se, but rather hovers in a state on indeterminacy, only collapsing into something observable when somebody observes it.
Wow… As I’ve discussed in my book and on this blog numerous times, this is exactly how certain types of Silent Problems exist inside organizations, a.k.a. they hover in a state of indeterminacy, only collapsing into something observable when somebody observes it (except I likely didn’t state it that poetically). And thats why silent problems are problematic and opportunistic. I’ve experienced it many times, the silent problem is right under our nose. And unless we become obervationally focused, it too often escapes our sight. And when this occurs, the problem turns toxic and eventually emerges as a Without Warning Event.
For instance, take a look at the headlines in the WSJ or business section for a newspaper. In fact Jim Collins talks about it in his new book which I reported here . Bottom line: Silent Problems are the most challenging type of problem and oftentimes can only be identified when one begins to conciously begin to observe them.
