The Campbell Academy Blog

So for the fourth time, on the 3rd May, we saw Ed Sheeran. This time we had to travel to the O2 in London because we couldn’t get tickets for the two Nottingham gigs the week before, which by all accounts were extraordinary. But unfortunately the gig in London didn’t seem that way at all. I’ve been in the O2 a couple of times before, once to watch basketball in the Olympics and once to see Robbie Williams with Alison. But I’m not entirely convinced about it as a venue. The interesting thing about this though is every time I’ve seen Ed Sheeran before, as soon as he comes out onto the stage and starts to play the guitar everybody stands up and in London, on Wednesday, they didn’t.

In Simon Sinek’s ground breaking book on leadership, “Leaders Eat Last”, which I have previously spoken about, he explores a concept that I have never properly understood before which he calls abstraction. To explain this concept Sinek returns to the 1980’s in the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the dispute with the air traffic controllers which he contends paved the way for multi national companies to make huge amounts of people redundant based on balance sheets. A trend which continues to this day. Sinek describes the political situation well, which reminded me of a not too similar situation with Margaret Thatcher and the minors. During the situation in America with Reagan and the air traffic controllers the president decided to sack every air traffic controller in the USA for breaking the law and striking for better conditions. After stroke he confind thousands of people to poverty and unemployment as a view of authority. The concept of abstraction (as described by Sinek) is the ability to detach ones self from human individuals and therefore treat them as non human. Its very easy for a SEO for a multi national company to write off 10,000 jobs for people that he has never met, much harder for him to sack his PA that he has worked with for five years. Its very easy for dental corporates owned by American investment banks to make large decisions about there organisations which will affect the quality of care of patients, understanding that there patients will never be treated by such dentists who affected. Its very easy for government ministers to make cuts in health care affecting individual patients as they will never meet the individual patient and will always hide behind the phrase “we never comment on individual cases”.

Last year we ran a failure conference based on the principles of “Black Box Thinking”, a wonderful book by Matthew Syed, which changed the way The Campbell Clinic thinks.