The Earth is Flat!

I'm a fan of Fast Thinking; a magazine that regularly focuses on innovation and change.  In the latest issue, there is a thought provoking article titled "Ignorance is bliss and it's back" which posits that society is seeing a gradual decline in scientific rationalism and intellectual vigour and an increase in unverifiable beliefs and rejection of often proven scientific fact.  As the article succinctly puts it:

IN AN ERA where just about anything can be Googled and quality information is more freely accessible than ever before, when scams are easily uncovered and millions of peer-reviewed scientific papers are laid wide open to public scrutiny, how can we explain the rise of conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism, astrology, folk cures, homeopathy, and even dodgy email scams? Are we abandoning rationalism, and is ignorance on the rise?

Reasons discussed in the article cite a number of factors for this change; rise in social networking which means that there is more of tendency to believe what we are told by our friends, distrust of science, the fact that science has advanced so significantly over the last 10 years, let alone the last 30 years, that most people are unable to comprehend how everyday objects work - mobile phone, anyone?  This phenomenon shows itself in the strangest of ways.  An example given being the Flat Earth Society.

As the new president of the society, Daniel Shenton, says in an article in The Guardian:

"There is no unified flat Earth model," Shenton suggests, "but the most commonly accepted one is that it's more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the water. The height and substance of that, no one is absolutely sure, but most people think it's mountains with snow and ice."

The Earth is flat, he argues, because it appears flat. The sun and moon are spherical, but much smaller than mainstream science says, and they rotate around a plane of the Earth, because they appear to do so.

The question you may be asking is how can a rational person in the 21st Century believe that the earth is flat when all evidence points to the contrary?  Well, Shenton himself says that "...the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is ­incumbent on others to prove ­decisively that it isn't."  In my mind, there are plenty of facts that point to the world being spherical; spherical trigonometry and astronomical ­observations that date right back to Aristotle in 330BC, satellite imagery, the view from an aircraft, the list goes on.  I tend to be a fan of the scientific method but accept that there are, as Hamlet said, "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".  Maybe that's fence sitting but it suits me.  I choose to check the facts and make my own decisions.  Daniel Shenton professes to have done that and arrived at his own conclusions, which differ from mine.  fair enough.

What does this mean for HR?  One thing I tell everybody that I teach on Change Management is that they have a duty to challenge the status quo.  You should never simply accept a reason provided for implementing a change without checking the facts.  Personal ownership is critical to personal success when passing through change and the first step is to gain all the facts and, if they don't add up, to challenge the assumptions that prompetd the change to be mooted in the first place.

To do otherwise is to accept that the earth is flat simply because a friend on Facebook said that everybody else said that it was true.

By the way, the Fast Thinking article states that "even today, 70,000 people are members of the Flat Earth Society".  Do you want to know something interesting? I googled left, right and centre and the largest number I could find for membership was 571 members of the Flat Earth Facebook group.  I'm not saying that the 70,000 number is wrong, just that I can't find their basis for it...

All the best

Jim