Tuesday 26 March 2024

The Future of Flanders in Space


This is the text I wrote for the Flanders Technology and Innovation Closing Festival. It served as final scene of a Space Exhibition in Antwerp. Here is the full text.

We explore space because we are curious about what we will find. Travelling in space sometimes demands the utmost of what we can do: the lightest and strongest materials, the most powerful engines, the most sensitive instruments and, above all, the greatest imagination of the best minds.

Every journey changes a perspective. The space we travel to is also the space from which we emerged. With so many challenges we meet ourselves a little, but we also learn to love our Earth a little more. For example, the first trip to the moon brought the beauty of our Earth into focus. Countless satellites now image this beauty every day.

It is now time for the next step. Perhaps around the middle of this century, people will see the Earth disappear like a speck in the sky, only to land on another planet. The challenges will be enormous, not only for the crew. Thousands of people will work on it, also from here in Flanders. But we will get to know ourselves better again.

I refer to my blog: "Space Trends in 2022" and to my Dutch blog "Zie ons doen".

Picture: FTI Slotfestival March 2024©Wim Lahaye

Tuesday 6 February 2024

Temperance Saves the World


Temperance is a virtue which doesn’t have a prominent place in economic textbooks. Yet the word economy refers to thrift and frugality. Economy allows you to be self-reliant and to survive with little means.

Our popular culture and our company culture seems to go the opposite direction, the direction of ‘never enough’, or is it simply greed? It is much easier convincing people to do something than convincing them not to do something. The reason is the imagined group loyalty. Pleading against something may be seen as a rebellious act, a result of laziness or complacency. Pleading in favour of something big is seen as positivity, energy, and good willingness. As a result, companies do too much and have a total lack of focus. Hyperactivity and Beschleunigung have become a plague.

Temperance is exactly what companies need now. Instead of asking what they should do, it may be worth asking what they should no longer do. The question is equally important in times of scarcity of resources. Leadership is also shown through temperance.

I refer to my blog: “Economic Justification in a Culture of Scarcity”.

Picture by Curtis Yancey via Pixabay

Tuesday 2 January 2024

A New Year’s Resolution: Cultivate the Art of Being There


Most New Year’s Resolutions emphasise action or abstinence. We should do more or less of something. We should do more sports, more language learning and more hobbies. We should smoke less, work less and drive our cars less.

Instead of our actions, we could also consider our presence in this world. Are we really there for our loved ones? Do we spend time with them and how do we spend our time with them? How is our attentiveness towards our loved ones? Do we really listen and talk with full attention? We do not always need to speak, but are we receptive to the expressed and non-expressed needs of our fellow human beings?

In many cases, we can’t solve all problems and it is not good to overact. The essence is to be there. This sounds like a tautology. We need to be present when our loved ones need us. Let us get rid of our full agendas and live in the here and now.

Tuesday 19 December 2023

The Power of Vulnerability


In these dark days, the struggle for existence, on the last days leading up to Christmas, can be tough. Now that in itself is not a problem if we could freely share that feeling with each other, among colleagues. Rather than telling success stories to each other, we could tell what went wrong, how we made ourselves immortally ridiculous with the customer and, above all, how miserable we felt about it.

Our organisational culture is however still based on a model of competition. Showing weakness and vulnerability is not done, because our assessment and our salary depend on it. We bottle up our emotions until they reach heights we didn't know existed. Is it because our organisations are mainly run by men? It looks like a competitive macho culture plays a role everywhere. Moreover, our society is still permeated by a certain stoicism.

The problem is that the competition model has reached its limits. One of the symptoms of this is the burning of employees – the so-called burnout. In a knowledge-based society, competition is neither effective nor efficient, because it prevents the sharing of knowledge. Collaboration is much more effective than competition. Our evaluation systems are based on individual performance and not on willingness to cooperate. And to evaluate the latter, you should not ask the boss, but the peers.

In an atmosphere of cooperation, it is easier to show vulnerability. The advantage is that you don't need to hide your weaknesses so much and that you can therefore call on colleagues in time to compensate for them. This reduces the burnout rate and increases customer satisfaction. Don't get me wrong. We don't do this just for the numbers. We improve the quality of our lives and we make the world a little more friendly.

I refer to my blog resilience.

Picture: Michelangelo, Madonna with Child, Church of Our Lady, Bruges, ©Wim Lahaye

Tuesday 14 November 2023

Leadership and Subjectivity


When Moses arrived on the top of Mount Nebo in Jordan, how did he know this was the land he had announced to his people, the Promised Land? The objective truth is: he didn’t know. Perhaps the view is magnificent as we can see on the picture, but there were other people and other armies down there. It is reasonable to assume Moses got tired roaming through the desert for forty years. Otherwise, there was no objective fact indicating this was the end destination for his people.

The book of Exodus, which tells the story of Israel’s people leaving Egypt under Moses and his brother Aaron’s leadership, is a splendid manual on leadership. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t read the scriptures because they are useful. I read them because I love them. I love them because they are beautiful and because I feel like they could make me a better person. But for those of you who don’t love the scriptures, beware the book of Exodus contains all you need to know about leadership.

The Bible says Moses knew from God. But how does God speak to man? It never happens through objective reasoning. Moses didn’t have any useful objective data that would have allowed him to make a reasonably good decision. Moses knew almost nothing about the land in front of him and the strength of its armies. He needed to rely on his inner voice, through intuition, prayer, belly feeling, dreaming, sense of responsibility and love for his people, in short through his own subjectivity.

If good leadership in difficult circumstances requires subjectivity, it has a serious implication for the leader. The people need to believe him. They need to give him the authority to rely on his personal subjective feelings. They will only do this if they believe he is good, wise and integer. And this belief is usually based on some common experience in extremely bad conditions, such as the experience in the Sinai desert. If the people’s belief gets lost through some negative experience, the leader becomes extremely vulnerable. The leadership crisis we observe today, is due to a lack of common experience in the desert and a lack of willingness to grant authority to someone else, usually because of our own narcissism. The conclusion of this blog is that in leadership, subjectivity is objectively required.

I also refer to my Dutch blogs Leadership and Love and Dreamers Who Do.

Picture: Mount Nebo, Jordan, 2023 Courtesy of Patricia Deneffe

Tuesday 17 October 2023

The Engineer’s Social Role


There is a history of the technical marvel IMEC in presentation form. In it, Professor Hugo De Man characterized his closest colleague the late Professor Roger Van Overstraeten as a ‘visionary Fleming’. According to Professor De Man, it had always been the intention "to put Flanders on the map of the industry of the future by training a generation of engineers who, in addition to a solid scientific basis, also have an eye for the social and economic progress of the people."

We did indeed have some professors at our University of Leuven who gave a little more than the sober lessons. On the one hand they tried to teach us a kind of entrepreneurship and on the other hand they reminded us of our social role and our social responsibility. Entrepreneurship was not an end, but rather a means to improve the socio-economic fabric of society and the common good. This may all sound rather obvious, but it never was, on the contrary. Not all colleagues showed the same interest in social themes. Deep specialisation threatened to suck many fellow engineers into the deep oblivion pit of the professional nerds. It didn’t end up that bad, however. The problems to be solved became so complicated that only good teamwork proved to have a chance of success. Furthermore, new developments are now being evaluated very thoroughly in terms of their social relevance. After my studies, at the engineering association and at the European Young Engineers,  I met many like-minded people.

The profession of engineer is indeed a wonderful profession, although it sometimes takes courage. It certainly deserves promotion among the various groups that are still underrepresented in this profession. But the beauty of it all is that I became more and more aware that I did not have a profession but a vocation. In "Science as a vocation" we already saw that this vocation can be described as a kind of apostolate in the industrial landscape.

I also refer to my blogs: "The Why of Technology” and to “The Trap of Technology".

Picture: Brussels Airport Runway, courtesy Jan Straus

Tuesday 19 September 2023

The transformative power of berserker rage


The theme of anger or rage has only been discussed once in my blog. However, rage can be constructive and life-saving, because in certain cases it generates the necessary combativeness. In our country, the police were only properly reformed after the population was first inflamed in rage. We are talking about the white marches of 1996.

The Normans called that life-saving rage berserker rage. They discovered that in the heat of battle, especially when the situation was completely hopeless, they could fall into a 'level two' fighting spirit, a kind of trance in which they threw all remaining energy into the battle and in which they felt neither fear nor pain.

In fact, berserker rage is a survival instinct. A Viking warrior then turned into berserker, literally bearskin warrior (implicitly also 'without-armor' warrior) and was deemed invincible, which earned him Odin's mercy and eternal fame. In English, the expression 'to go berserk' still exists. The film Erik the Viking made use of it with the inimitable Tim McInnerny as Svein the Viking. The Normans discovered that they could also put themselves in a trance before battle with all kinds of rituals and hallucinogenic substances. But why is this berserker rage so interesting? Because it has a transformative power. It pushes boundaries. It moves the thin grey line between the feasible and the unfeasible.

Those who find themselves in a hopeless situation (e.g. of exploitation, injustice, misery, depression,..) can therefore do well to cultivate that berserker anger in order to transcend the situation and put an end to the misery and injustice. This is especially useful where the hopelessness has to do with one's own fears and one's own complacency. But beware: berserker rage is a dangerous weapon. You can only use it once and then you have to win.

Shouldn't our society also cultivate some berserker anger to get out of the negative spiral of some lingering problems? I refer to my blogs Day of Wrath and Failed State. This blog should be used with caution.

Image by Mattias Styrman from Pixabay