Writing to his friend, the Cambridge political scientist Goldie Lowes Dickinson, in 1913, Bertrand Russell confessed to a feeling that a great many of what we now call knowledge workers must often feel:
We here in Cambridge all keep each other going by the unquestioned assumption that what we do is important, but I often wonder if it really is. What is important, I wonder? Scott and his companions dying in the blizzard seem to me impervious to doubt – and his record of it has a really great simplicity. But intellect, except at white heat, is very apt to be trivial.
That one of the leading intellectuals of his time should long to be ‘impervious to doubt’, at least as regards the importance of what he was doing, is food for thought. That he should have admired the heroic exploits of explorers, on the other hand, seems completely understandable.
This evening I would like to argue that the greatest intellectual work is precisely that which is pervious to doubt, which challenges itself again and again. The worst kind of intellectual work is that which is impervious to doubt. But I will explore this idea and its implications for leadership and innovation against the background of mountaineering and, in particular, the heroic and unsuccessful efforts by Russell’s contemporaries, in the early 1920s, to scale Mount Everest for the first time.
Let me explain at once what I mean when I say that the greatest intellectual work is precisely that which is ‘pervious to doubt’. We speak rather often of the need for people to have the courage of their convictions, but serious thinking actually requires the opposite. It demands that we be capable of critically cross-examining our convictions and those of others to probe for flaws, illusions, biases and errors. The greater the stakes and the more entrenched a conventional belief or common assumption is, the more courage this requires.
We should not be reduced to hopeless confusion by chronic doubt. That is not at all what I am saying. Rather, we are first rate thinkers just to the extent that we can see in a complex and important field the grounds for our existing beliefs; or those of some major strategic commitment on behalf of our company, our client, our government, or public opinion and then see our way through to pinpointing errors and pointing the way to a new framing of the problem and a better grounded assessment of the reality.
It is curious, in a way, that Bertrand Russell, of all people, should have envied Scott or other explorers exposed to mortal hazards. After all, in the course of a long life, he sought to challenge many orthodoxies and to use his acute reasoning powers to point to what he regarded as better approaches to government, education, religion, arms control and so forth. Did he not regard these forays as being important? Did he not believe that sound approaches to reasoning in public policy were actually more important than hazardous expeditions to remote places?
He once remarked that many people would rather die than change their minds and in fact they do. Yet he declared himself in awe of those impervious to doubt about their commitments even in the face of death in a blizzard. I think we would do well to reframe his way of looking at this matter. I want to suggest that the reason we may well admire explorers of the natural world, right up to astronauts walking on the Moon, is not that they are (if they are) impervious to doubt, but precisely because they embody the tenacious will to overcome challenges in the face of doubt and to deepen our collective understanding of both what is so and what is possible.
What is required in terms of thinking, instrumentation and the revision of opinion or perception here is, I think, beautifully captured in an anecdote some of you may have heard before. It concerns the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the old pre-Copernican notion that the Sun circled around the Earth. The story goes that one day a student remarked to Wittgenstein, ‘You know, it isn’t really surprising, is it, that people used to think that the Sun circles around the Earth; because it looks like that’s what happens.’ To which the philosopher responded, ‘Really? So, what would it look like if, actually, the Earth revolved around the Sun while rotating on its axis?’
The answer, of course, is that it would – and does – look exactly the same. It’s just that unless you inquire closely and calculate carefully and have the intellectual training to conduct the necessary calculations, you will never see behind what looks like the truth to what is actually the truth. To do such things, in any field, whether in geophysical exploration or intellectual inquiry, requires being pervious to doubt and having the courage of one’s doubts, one’s questions, one’s willingness to entertain radical new possibilities, to experiment, to think hard and to be prepared to both fail and admit to failure.
This is where the matter of mountaineering becomes interesting as a metaphor and where we can learn a little by, as it were, unpacking the instinctive respect we tend to have for those who actually do climb serious mountains. I have never climbed a mountain of any consequence, much less put life or limb at risk in doing so. Two years ago, however, I read an extraordinary book by the explorer and prolific author Wade Davis. It was called Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. If you have neither heard of it nor read it, or have heard of it but not read it, I urge you to get yourself a copy and read it slowly, digesting its endless richness.
This evening, of course, I will only be touching on a little of what is in the book and from a particular angle. My own point of entry for reading the book had nothing to do with mountaineering, everything to do with the scaling of Everest as a metaphor for striving to reach the summit of one’s aspirations. I have had melanoma in me for a decade and in 2012 had two substantial operations – the fifteenth and sixteenth in eight years – to remove clusters of tumours from my right leg. I was on crutches for weeks and unable to exercise properly for months. But I had a highly ambitious book I wanted to finish – or die trying.
Your own context, at least as the KWS Law team, is different, whatever your personal situations. You are a new and still small law firm. The world of legal practice is evolving rapidly on the global stage and you are, collectively taking on challenges and seeking to mould yourselves into a highly effective, international team that can scale new heights. That, I take it, is the place from which you might listen to talk about mountaineering and, in particular, about one of the most famous as well as, let it be said, ill-fated, mountaineering teams of all: the British teams around George Mallory who attempted in 1921, 1922 and again in 1924 to climb Mount Everest for the first time. They failed each time, while getting a little closer to the summit on each occasion. On the final attempt, Mallory lost his life, leaving behind a beloved wife and three young children.
In elite sport these days, athletes often undertake training or adventure routines designed to test their endurance. Those who attempted to climb Everest with Mallory had already been through endurance tests of the most extraordinary nature. In particular, they had endured the First World War. Of the twenty-six climbers who participated in one or more of the three expeditions, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three, as army surgeons, dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers killed in action. All had endured the unprecedented mass killing, the extraordinary artillery barrages, the mounds of shattered bodies in the mud, the bones and the decaying faces of the dead.
But there was more to them than this. One after another, in the early pages of his book, which is to say the first couple of hundred pages, Davis introduces them as individuals. They were, the war quite apart, a group of men who had extended themselves in many ways and exhibited a remarkable range of skills, a rare depth of character. The names Arthur Wakefield, Howard Somervell, Francis Younghusband, Charles Bruce, Alexander Kellas, John Noel, Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury, George Ingle Finch, F. M. Bailey, Henry Morsehead, Charles Bell, and Alexander Wollaston are in all probability unknown to you. But in the pages of Wade Davis they come alive like heroes from the Homeric epics, not because he overdraws their exploits, but precisely because their exploits and characters, soberly described, were so impressive.
Let me give you a little sense of this by sketching a few of their profiles for you. Take Arthur Wakefield, for example. A devout Anglican and churchgoer – before the Great War – he was, as described by Davis, ‘ferociously strong, a champion boxer and rower at university, with brilliant blue eyes and a penchant for adventure that led him, in 1900, to suspend his medical studies and sign up as a cavalry trooper and sharpshooter’ in the Boer War. After the war he completed his medical training in Edinburgh and Heidelberg, then went to work as a missionary doctor in Newfoundland and Labrador from 1908. For the following six years, he ‘lived a life of considerable hardship: intense cold in winter, clouds of mosquitoes in summer, a diet of little but flour and grease, molasses, tea, caribou meat and salted fish.’
‘Dedicated to God and King, impervious to physical suffering, possessed of medical skills that seemed wizardly to the scores of people he saved’, Wakefield, when the balloon went up, in August 1914, raised the first five hundred of the Newfoundland Regiment. He knew them all as if they had been his foster sons and swelled with pride as they clutched their rifles, fixed with bayonets, marched to their ship with cheering crowds and broke into a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Two years later, by happenstance, he was manning the casualty clearing station at the very sector of the front on the Somme where the regiment was stationed on the eve of Haig’s gigantic offensive. Yet it was weeks after the notorious opening day of the Somme before he learned their fate. They had been slaughtered by German machine guns on the parapet of their own trenches. Of 810 who went over the top, only sixty eight survived the day unscathed.
Then there was Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury: a brilliant writer, a fine photographer (when it was still a challenging art), a keen and accomplished naturalist, fluent in 27 Asian and European languages, a man who travelled widely in Siberia, Central Asia, China, India and Tibet at his own initiative, heir to a vast estate in Ireland whose main house had originally been built as a hunting lodge in 1740. When the war broke out, in August 1914, he immediately took a commission in the army. He became one of the most decorated officers in the war, winning every citation for valour except the Victoria Cross. He fought throughout the war and that he survived was statistically a miracle, given the massive attrition rate of the unit he led fearlessly and constantly. He was to become the team leader of the first assault on Everest, in 1921.
A third was Henry Morsehead, of whom Davies writes: ‘he was a man of action and deed, a true explorer, decisive and contained in temperament, ferociously strong and fit, at five foot nine a pocket Hercules, as one friend described him, hard as nails, utterly indifferent to personal comfort, blessed with an impregnable digestive tract, fully capable of eating anything or nothing, of going without food or even water for days. Trained as a military engineer, with a specialty in topography, mapping and the design and construction of fortifications, he’d joined the Survey of India in 1906. Thereafter, he’d embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions, none more dramatic than a number of thrusts up the Brahmaputra from the southern side of the Himalayas to the jungles of northeast Assam and, ultimately, into the heart of the Tsangpo Gorge.’
One of my favourites is Fredrick Marshman Bailey. Bailey was a British intelligence officer and one of the last protagonists of the Great Game - the legendary struggle for supremacy between the Russians and the British Empire in Central Asia and along the Himalayas. Bailey is described by Davis as having been a master of disguises, travelling at different times as a Buddhist priest, an Austrian soldier and an Armenian prisoner of war. He became such a headache in places like Tashkent and Samarkand to the nascent Bolshevik regime in 1918-19 that he lived with a Soviet bounty on his head for the rest of his days – and he lived until 1967.
Bailey was also a gifted naturalist and his clandestine work as a spy gave him many opportunities to pursue his hobbies of photography, butterfly collecting, ornithology and trophy hunting in lands most of us even now would regard as both harsh and exotic. His personal bird collection is now held in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. His papers and extensive photograph collections are held in the British Library, London. He also wrote books about his experiences and married into a wealthy family. Now there is a remarkable life. As Tom Lehrer once quipped about Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel, ‘It’s people like this who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished!’ He famously added, of course, ‘It is a sobering thought, for example, that Mozart, when he was my age, had been dead for two years!’
Now, let’s take stock of these remarkable individuals. You see, the salient thing here is that all the impressive accomplishments I have listed had been completed before any of these men attempted to climb Mount Everest. From almost any reasonable point of view, none of them had anything to prove. They certainly did not need to risk their lives more than they had already done or demonstrate that they had exceptional powers of endurance or commitment. Yet this, in 1921, again in 1922 and yet again in 1924, is what they did. They did it, as Davis makes clear, for many of the same reasons that test pilots in the 1960s became astronauts in the race to put a man in space and then on the Moon. They did it because the British Empire, or visionary people at the pinnacle of it, like John F. Kennedy in 1961, had issued a challenge.
Davis describes, as he puts it, the literal measurement of India, in the Survey of India, begun in 1806 and still proceeding in the first decade of the 20th century, as ‘the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century.’ It was the work of the surveyors of India that discovered Mount Everest to be the highest mountain in the world. The Himalayas as a mountain range fired the imaginations of the British surveyors: more than a thousand mountains each soaring above 20,000 feet, rising out of the heat and dust of the north Indian plain and the jungles of Burma. It was only in 1846, however, that the exploration of them pinpointed to ‘a rugged knot of mountains some 140 miles west of Kanchenjunga, then considered the highest point on Earth.’
Here I pick up Davis’s account. As you listen to it, bear in mind everything I began by saying about being pervious to doubt and about thinking, instrumentation and revision of opinion:
Compared with the stunningly beautiful massif of Kangchenjunga, which dominates the sky beyond Darjeeling, these distant summits were unassuming, mere fragments of white on a dark horizon. [The leader of the 1846 party, John] Armstrong designated the highest simply Peak B. During subsequent seasons it remained hidden in cloud and it was not until November 1849 that another officer of the survey, James Nicolson, was able to make a series of observations from six different stations, the closest being some 108 miles from the mountain, by then known as Peak XV. Only in 1854, at the headquarters of the Survey of India in Dehra Dun and in Calcutta, did work begin on Nicolson’s computations.
Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, assigned the task to a brilliant Indian, Radanath Sikhdar. Given the distance of the sightings and the problem of atmospheric refraction, the challenge was enormous. It took two years for Sikhdar to determine that this unknown summit was, at 29,002 feet, fully a thousand feet higher than any other known mountain on Earth. It was a most impressive feat of computation. The actual elevation of the mountain, measured today by satellite technology, is 29,035 feet. But the mountain itself has been rising at the rate of a centimetre a year for the last several centuries. In the nineteenth century, when Sikhdar did his calculations, the summit of the mountain, in all likelihood, would have been some five feet lower. Thus, with pencil, paper and mathematical wizardry, Sikhdar was off by only twenty eight feet.
Once this was established, that sharp spire of a white peak, fully a thousand feet higher than any other mountain in the world, became an object of aspiration and, for years before the Great War wrought catastrophic havoc on the world of European empires, the geographers, explorers and imperial propagandists of the British Empire found themselves yearning to mount an expedition to scale it.
If my objective this evening was to acquaint you with how that was done, I would be well into it by now. But of course my intention is rather different. It is to tantalize you with the very idea of that expedition or what became several expeditions; with the idea of the diverse and accomplished people who came together to form the team that made those attempts on the summit. I cannot, as I remarked early on, too highly recommend the book, but especially as a wonderful source of metaphors that you might individually and collectively draw upon in the next few years as you mount your own expeditions and build your own team.
Lest that seem a little grandiose, it may be worth recalling that, in 2005, when he first took over as senior coach at Hawthorn, Alastair Clarkson specifically evoked John F. Kennedy’s famous speech about putting a man on the moon and declared that Hawthorn should set itself the target, metaphorically speaking, of putting a man on the moon within five years, by which he meant winning a premiership. He won his first within three years and has now won three, with the last two coming back to back last year and this year. He and they have fulfilled and over fulfilled their goals.
Late last year, after Hawthorn had won the second of these three premierships, I was approached by the club and asked to help them raise the bar in terms of decision-making processes within the coaching panel. My company worked with them this season and we were impressed by their honesty and openness to innovation. We are now represented on their newly created Innovation Committee and I must say, although I grew up and have been throughout my adult life a Collingwood supporter, I found it very sweet to be associated with Hawthorn’s exceptional performance this season, capped off by a stunning performance and record breaking victory in the Grand Final.
But I mention all that chiefly to emphasize the matter of metaphors of aspiration. The one I have advanced this evening has been climbing Mount Everest. Doing so, is still a serious challenge to this day and people still die or lose body parts in the effort. But doing it the first time, back in the early 1920s, that was crazy brave. You are, I suggest, at that point in your endeavours. So the question is:
What is your Peak B, or Peak XV?
In other words, what is the shimmering peak off in the distance, far from your tea plantations in Darjeeling, that might lure you onto greater heights, quite literally? What observations have you made of it? From how many points? How have you set about computing its height relative to where you are? Who is your Radanath Sikhdar, who with pencil and paper will get the measurements right for you? What will it take to first measure, then reconnoitre and then scale that peak?
Perhaps, more important than all these questions, is the spiritual one: what spirit, what approach to life itself will you bring, as individuals and as a team, to this endeavour? At the end of his marvellous book, having taken us in fascinating detail through the terrain and human drama of the three expeditions, climaxing in the deaths of George Mallory and his sole climbing companion at 28,000 feet, Sandy Irvine, Wade Davis concludes with the following reflection:
Mallory and Irvine may not have reached the summit of Mount Everest, but they did, on that fateful day, climb higher than any human being before them, reaching heights that would not be attained again for nearly thirty years.
Mallory held nothing back, he writes:
Because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but a frail barrier that men crossed smiling and gallant, every day. They had seen so much of death that life mattered less than the moments of being alive.
I do not, of course, suggest that you work yourselves to death in building your company. I simply pose the existential question: for you as individuals and as a team what ultimately matters? The answers you find to that question will shape how you work together, what goals you set for yourselves and how you go about achieving them. And as I understand it, you have gathered here this evening largely to begin reflecting on those things.
I mentioned earlier that the context in which I myself read Into the Silence was the sense, in 2012, that the relentless assault on my right leg of a melanoma that kept recurring no matter how many tumours were cut out of my leg, portended a metastasis and a mortal battle in the near future. Last year, the metastasis began. My doctors at once urged that I begin a course of oncogene inhibitor tablets, though they were likely to have significant side effects, might not work and, even if they worked, would only be effective for a median period of nine months.
I demurred, while I thought through what ultimately mattered to me existentially. It quickly became clear that mere survival, if increasingly depleted and without final hope of remission, meant very little to me. What did matter was the completion, if at all possible, of at least one and preferably several of the creative writing projects I already had on my drawing board. The moments of working on them, it was crystal clear to me; the prospect of finishing them and seeing them into print and of being able to leave them with family and friends, meant far more to me than merely hanging around.
The chief such project is a wildly ambitious work of literary art called Darkness over Love: A Complete Fiction. As I read Wade Davis’s book, I came to think of my own endeavour on the model of Mallory’s famous attempt on Everest. Does that mean I expect to fail and to die without attaining my goal? Given the scope of the project, as well as my health problems over the past decade, those possibilities can hardly be denied. Indeed, they are surely, on the balance of probabilities, more likely than the chance that I will succeed. Yet, as Davis concluded, we admire Mallory for what he attempted and for how close he got to his goal.
Eighteen months since I learned of the metastases and with my body still proving resilient, I feel more inclined than at any point since my project began to try to press on to the summit. Three months ago, knowing that the summit was still some considerable distance away and that time might be against me, I arranged for the publication of a 421 page book titled Darkness over Love: A Writer’s Workbook. It was conceived as soon as the metastases were discovered last year. It will be in print within a fortnight. I think of it as my high altitude base camp for the next stage in the climb, to be undertaken in 2015, health permitting.
This is my existential project and I am increasingly arranging my life around it. The questions I would leave you with are simply these five:
What is your project?
Where is your base camp right now?
Who are the people in your team?
Why are you in the team?
How will your team reach the summit?
Let me suggest that in answering each and every one of these questions, you need to remain in all humility pervious to doubt. That is where exploration occurs. That is where you find your true answers and the sources of your inspiration.