A lunch, a miracle and hope for the future of humanity

My friend and I found ourselves the center of a seemingly inexplicable series of extraordinary coincidences, all associated with a lunch conversation. And I must say that I am a little spooked by it.

Being spooked is always a trigger for curiosity, so the question was where to go to find evidence-based insight. An obvious direction is the field of probability – by definition, thinking that something is an extra-ordinary co-incidence is assigning it an extremely low probability.

And so, a minor coincidence to get started. I am more familiar with the field of probability than most people. That does not put me very high on the knowledge scale. Most people are dreadful at probability – we are too easily misled by our intuition (6 Heads in a row, Tails is due!). The reason for my familiarity is that I direct executive education programs for leaders of major projects. Probabilities are really important if you are in the business of understanding cost and schedule risk on major projects. This requires that I understand some concepts but more importantly that I am very clear where my competence ends and I need someone who is actually competent. Luckily I have access to people who are truly experts. In my case my colleague at Oxford Saïd Business School, Alexander Budzier is one of the best in the world. I could have asked him for advice but I didn’t have to - here comes the first (minor) coincidence.

To stay current, I was reading  a book at the time called The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter; certainly one of the best books for understanding coincidences. Not only that but I was up to the chapter on extraordinary coincidences (you must google “Ron Biederman’s trousers”!). So I was reading the exact chapter of the exact book required at my exact time of need. What are the chances!!?

Warning: the phrase “what are the chances !!?” will occur a number of times in this article.

Spiegelhalter tells us that a predominant explanation for “what are the chances!!?” situations is the Law of Truly Large Numbers (Diaconis and Mosteller) and so it is here. There are millions of people across the world currently experiencing coincidences. There are also tens of thousands of people across the world reading about coincidences. When we look from a global perspective and observe over a long time, we actually expect this coincidence to occur. So while it is remarkable for me, it is unremarkable to the global observer. The global observer can’t predict where or when it will happen, but she can statistically predict that it will happen at a certain frequency.

The other factor which you will already have thought of is that I am highly susceptible to observer bias in this situation. The fact that I am interested in, and actively researching coincidences makes it much more likely that I will interpret my observations in the world as coincidences.

The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a good perspective on the next coincidence which happened at our lunch. My lunch buddy Callum and I had a conversation about our children. I told a story about the moment a decade ago that I realized my then teenage son was destined to be a talented musician on the electric guitar. How surprised was Callum later that day, when without prompting, his teenage daughter suddenly started talking about how much she loved electric guitars! What are the chances!!?

While Callum and I are shaking our heads in amazement, our global observer is unimpressed. It’s just the Law of Truly Large Numbers. Lots of teenagers fall in love with the idea of electric guitar at some point in time and blurt it out to their parents. Independently, lots of parents have guitar-playing children and talk about it to other people (I am a little embarrassed now that I reflect about just how often I mention it when discussing my children). With billions upon billions of conversations happening every day, you will statistically predict a number of electric guitar coincidences. Seems less remarkable now that I say that.

The next coincidence however, ups the ante.

Callum is a graduate of one of the leadership programs that I led in the past; that is how we met. So with this common ground it is only a matter of time before we are discussing how Callum is going in his senior leadership role, putting some of the ideas from the program into action. Imagine my surprise then when Callum messaged me about what was waiting for him on his desk when he returned to the office the next day. It was a note from one of his team. It was the type of note that most senior leaders can only dream about; a heartfelt thankyou for the way that Callum had transformed the organization; for his encouragement and continuous support; about how inspiring it was to work for someone who leads with such clarity, care and purpose.

The content of the note did not surprise me. It completely confirmed my view of Callum as a leader. But in my experience, for a leader to get a note like that when they in full flight on driving major change through an organization is truly extraordinary. But then for the person to be writing that note at the same time that Callum and I are discussing his leadership is …. well …. I mean …. What are the chances!!?

I could potentially buy a Law of Truly Large Numbers argument were it not for the final coincidence. But now, hmmm.

Having gone back to work on my computer after Callum’s message about the note, I noticed a LinkedIn post. It was from a person who worked a couple of levels down in my team years ago. I’m guessing that I hadn’t spoken to her in at least 15 years. Her post was about leadership and in particular an interaction with a senior leader when she was at her lowest point. The conversation with the leader completely reframed the situation for her and completely changed her view on leadership. The leader she was talking about was me. What a surprise that she would be suddenly be prompted to write about an incident that happened two decades ago. Then I saw the timestamp on the post …..

The thing about probabilities is that they multiply. The probability of getting a six when you roll a fair dice is one in six. Roll a second dice and the probability of a six is, again; one in six. But the probability of them both being sixes on first throws is much, much lower; one in thirty six. The maths works like this 1/6 X 1/6 =1/36.  The probability of straight sixes on three dice is one in 216 i.e. – 1/6 X 1/6 X 1/6 =1/216  

This multiplication means that while The Law of Truly Large Numbers explains the occurrence of highly improbable events, it doesn’t explain the simultaneous occurrence of a number of highly improbable events. The LinkedIn post had been posted at the same time that Callum’s team-member was writing her note at the same time that Callum and I were discussing Leadership.

Let’s put the whole chain together. I have no idea what the actually probabilities are but one of my professors when I did my undergraduate degree in Engineering had a philosophy. He said that plugging your estimates, no matter how dodgy, into a robust equation is far better than an outright guess. So I followed his advice and came up with….

Distant connection recalls a leadership incident from the distant past involving Graeme and posts about it at the same time as Callum and Graeme are discussing leadership	One in 1,000,000
Callum’s team-member is writing her heartfelt note about Callum’s leadership at the very same time as Callum and Graeme are having that leadership conversation	One in 10,000
At the time, Graeme is reading the correct chapter of one of the best books in the world on coincidences.	One in 10,000
The electric guitar coincidence	One in 1,000

So, what are the chances!!? - One in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

To put that in perspective; 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 is one estimate of the number of grains of rice in the world.

That’s a truly small probability, but the Law of Truly Large numbers demands that we work out how many opportunities there are. So, how many conversations are there in the world? They need to be of sufficient depth, so let’s not include transactional or trivial conversations. There are approximately 3.5billion working adults with an average of 3 people per conversation, 4 times per day = 4.7 billion per day. In other circumstances this would indeed be a truly large number. But here it is a tiny number compared to the massive improbability of the coincidence.

What are the chances? Assuming the number of working adults stayed constant, you would expect this confluence of coincidences once every 580 thousand years.  Given that HomoSapiens have only had capacity to have conversations of this sophistication for 50 thousand years, this is a long time. ^1.

It’s a miracle !

Probability theory doesn’t accept miracles of course. It says that as long as the events are truly random and the probability is non-zero, then it can happen at any time. An event with a one in 580 thousand year probability can occur in the next hour.

There’s a lot of maybes here

·         maybe my estimated probabilities might be way out

·         maybe it’s only one in 5,800 years

·         maybe it’s more – like one in 58 million years

·         maybe there’s a hidden link that I’m unaware of

·         maybe the Global Consciousness Project² is right

·         maybe God made it happen

and the biggest maybe of all

·         maybe nobody gives a _**** !!!!

This whole line of enquiry has led to nothing. After all this work, I am still exactly where I started – that Callum and I were at a confluence of extraordinary coincidences. My pursuit of a technical explanation has delivered zero additional insight. I have been looking for answers to a question that no-one is asking. It’s time to look for new questions.

Time to Reframe this inquiry!

Whenever I teach leadership and are unconstrained by curriculum design, the first concept I teach is reframing. Reframing lets us escape from the trap formed by our expertise and mental models and inquire in a completely different way. Of course, as a leadership development professional it is always my job and that of my colleagues to reframe leadership for the students. So reframing is always in the background of what we do. But I like to bring it into the foreground.  I do so because I believe that reframing itself is a powerful leadership skill,

Reframing always prompts the question, what new frame will we use? Almost any word or phrase can be a new frame, but some are more productive than others. So it is worth spending some time considering, but not too much as the point is to get into the inquiry. I have a hack for my students – when you are stuck for a frame, philosophy always works.

In addition to Speigelhalter’s book on uncertainty I am also currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary” (secret shared – I always have multiple books on the go and, shock, horror, rarely finish a book cover to cover). McGilchrist is indeed a Philosopher but one that refuses to be categorised to a single academic field; thus immediately endearing himself to me. The book starts as a Neuroscience book but then tracks through Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology and above all, Philosophy.

McGilchrist starts by examining the real differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. And we are talking the real differences, not the left brain=science, right brain=art nonsense simplifications. He goes much further by asking that most powerful of questions – “Why?”. To quote McGilchrist from one of his speeches –

“Consider these facts - The brain, an organ the power of which consists solely in making connections, is massively divided down the middle.

Why?

Moreover, it is asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured at many levels in both its structure and function.

Why?

Not only that, but the band of fibres that connects the hemisphere at their base, the corpus callosum, is getting proportionally smaller, not larger over evolution, and is in any case to a large extent, inhibitory in function.

Again, why could it be that two aspects of brain function are being kept apart? ………

In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved for classical Darwinian reasons to pay a different kind of attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not immediately dawn on me, because I'd been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention as simply another cognitive function.

But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance. It creates and moulds the only world we can know. Indeed, it is a matter of a disposing of our consciousness towards the world in a particular way.

The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow beam attention, focused on the detail that we already know and desire, and our intent on grabbing and getting, whether it be something to eat or to use in some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation.

The right hemisphere, meanwhile, is on the lookout for everything else that's going on ... Its attention is broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant, and uncommitted as to what it may find the exact opposite of that of the left hemisphere.

In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual whole, which is nothing less than the world, and context changes everything.” 

These last two pararagraphs are an ‘ah-ha’ moment for me. I now understand that what I am teaching is not so much reframing as right-brainedness. I am asking people to stop zooming in on the problem, zoom out to broaden your view, put aside your expertise and judgement, put the thing in its context, think systemically, suspend judgement, look for the patterns, understand the context. Tick, tick, tick on McGilchrist’s list of right-hemisphere traits.

But why is developing right-brainedness important? McGilchrist does not hold back, putting the future of humanity and the planet on the line. He argues that the rightful roles are that the right hemisphere is the Master and the left hemisphere its Emissary. However the Emissary has usurped its master and set up its own kingdom.

“We have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant … the left hemisphere is unaware of what it is missing. It doesn't know why the right hemisphere is important. It cannot see the gestalt, the ultimately indivisible whole. Therefore, it thinks it can go it alone. A culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere's world attracts to itself in positions of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar, especially in the areas of science, technology and administration which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary life… This has resulted in what has been called the meta crisis. Not just the odd crisis here and there, but the despoliation of the natural world. The decline of species on a colossal scale. The destabilisation of the climate. The destruction of the way of life of indigenous people. The fragmentation and polarisation of a once civilised society with escalating, not diminishing resentments on all sides and escalating, not diminishing gap between rich and poor. A surge in mental illness, not the promised increase in happiness. A proliferation of laws and a rise in crime. The abandonment of civil discourse. A betrayal of standards in our major institutions."

Amidst my horror of this full picture of the meta-crisis coming together, I had a moment of smugness. “I knew that teaching reframing was important, but wow, look at just how important it is. I’m so good at this!”  Then the moment of realization – “what a hypocrite I am”.

I am a hypocrite because while I have been extolling the virtues of right-brainedness, my own professional practice is in an inexorable slide to the left hemisphere. I have become enslaved by the machine that should be my servant.

It all seemed so honorable, so aligned with purpose. My purpose is not complicated. I simply believe that good leadership has a multiplying effect on goodness in the world. I work to improve the leadership of the people I interact with in the fundamental belief that even a minute change in them improves the outcomes for he many and ultimately in better outcomes for the world. The trace back to my work dissipates almost immediately but the impact lingers in some almost inconsequential way, and when combined with the work of thousands of others out there, we are making a difference. This is the right-hemisphere Master at work. But without the Emissary, nothing would move beyond intention.

The mechanism for fulfilling on the purpose is through the programs I direct and teach on. Doing this well requires the left hemisphere to go into overdrive; so much organizing, so many tasks, so much detail, so much organization, logistics. And overwhelmingly at the moment, targets and tasks for recruitment. To manage all this, meetings and more meetings with agendas and action items. It has been such a busy and intense time mapping this all out and then following the map. But as McGilcrist says“there is nothing wrong with a map as long as you don’t mistake it for the world”.

Reframing. Such a powerful concept. But when you are trapped in the map, it is so hard to remember that there is a world.

Reframing lunch coincidences has led me here. My narrow-beam focus has been at the expense of understanding the contextual whole. It has been at the expense of my own learning (writing is an essential part of my learning and this is the first writing that I have done in over a year). I find myself in the paradox that most of the leaders I work with find themselves. The harder they push at the target, the more lost they become and the less likely they are to fulfil on their purpose. They find themselves in perilous danger of hitting the target but missing the point. For me this is now so clear. If I am not learning, then my teaching degrades. It becomes process-driven and impersonal, highly rehearsed but dead inside.

Reframing lunch has been transformational for me, arresting a decline that was invisible to me, and giving me a visceral experience to bring to my teaching. The key question then is, what was so special about this conversation that had it become the catalyst? To answer that question we first have to understand the leadership capability of creating a special kind of conversation - spacious mode conversations.

Callum and I were in spacious mode at our lunch conversation and it was the catalyst for my transformation in the days following. That’s impressive, but spacious mode conversations offer so much more. They offer no less than to be a significant contributor to solving the meta-crisis, a way forward to save humanity from itself. How? Please read on. I intend to justify that statement by the end of the article. And if I can do that, surely you will agree that it is a miracle, or at least far closer to a miracle than a bunch of coincidences.

“Spaciousness”, as a leadership capability, is the work of my Oxford colleague Megan Reitz and her co-authors. It was Megan who introduced me to McGilchrist’s work. In her HBR Article How to Give Yourself More Space to Think, she defines ‘spacious mode’;  

In spacious mode, the shoulds and musts of doing mode are put on the backburner. This allows us to widen our view, engage with curiosity, encounter what is not readily measurable or predictable, and notice and enjoy interdependencies and relationships. New insights become possible and we are able to better engage with the complexity of our wicked challenges — and life and work regain their colour. 

I find this deceptively simple paragraph quite profound.  I believe it a substantial part of the solution to overcoming the meta-crisis. From McGilchrist we understand that the meta-crisis is a direct outcome of our left-hemisphere Emissary’s grab for power in the delusion that we no longer needs our right-hemisphere Master. From Megan we are given access to re-engaging our right hemisphere “in service of understanding the contextual whole which is nothing less than the world.”

Callum and I did not specifically have the meta-crisis on the agenda for lunch. Importantly, we had no agenda for our conversation. I often meet with graduates from our programs but almost always there is an agenda of coaching, either explicit or unspoken. This time however, Callum and I had agreed that this was not the case. My sense is that this is important.

Does that mean that every conversation without an agenda is a spacious one – emphatically NO! During the same period I met for lunch with some mates from my undergraduate university days. Much conversation ensued over many hours but I can assure you that we were not in spacious mode.

If the lack of agenda is important but not sufficient, what are the other components? I think there were two other ingredients present which seem important to me.

If the first ingredient is lack of agenda, then I think the second is the presence of shared purpose. Callum and my professional objectives overlap, but only in a minor way. But at a higher level we are both passionate about the place of universities in contributing to the health of society. While not the purpose of our meeting over lunch, this shared purpose is always in the background when we talk.

Ingredients one and two are my intuitions. Ingredient three I can be more certain about because of Megan’s work. But to explain it we need to introduce another philosopher, Martin Buber.

When Megan and I work together we connect our teaching through the common thread of Buber. It is through his work that we come to understand the essential third ingredient for a leader trying to create spacious mode for themselves and for others. To start we need to examine his most remarkable observation. Buber observed that there are two fundamental and incompatible ways of being in the world. He named them “Ich-Es." and “Ich-Du” in his native German language. We will use a rough translation of I-IT and I-YOU.

I-IT  - “The world when it is planned, processed, organized, analyzed, mapped, dissected”.

I-YOU  - “The world as experienced immediately together, not distanced and detached, but mutual, emotional, shared, connected”.

I think the best place to observe the distinction is at a coffee shop in your CBD, preferably one near the finance hub at 7:45am rush hour. Sit yourself in a place where you can see and hear the interactions between customers and the staff. At some point Mr/Ms Captain of Finance Industry will announce themselves into the shop and be immediately annoyed at having to line up behind lesser mortals. Watch their interaction with the service staff. You will be left in no doubt that the moment robots can match Barista-quality coffee, Mr/Ms Captain of Finance Industry will be the first customers. The fact that the service staff and Barista are human is really annoying. This is the I-IT relationship. The “other” exists only as instruments or obstacles.

Now see the contrast when the staff from the shop next door drop in as they do every morning. Witness the warmth and humanity of the exchange. This is the I-YOU relationship, where human connection trumps even the quality of the coffee. But here is the real insight – wait for the complete stranger to come into the shop for the first time and immediately establish an I-YOU relationship. It can be overt, but is often remarkably subtle. It can even be done with body-language alone. But you will identify in the first few seconds of the exchange that you are witnessing the I-YOU relationship rather than the I-IT relationship.

We make our choice as to which world we will inhabit in the first words we say and it sets the path of the subsequent discussion. As Buber said, “when a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.”

If you are still unclear on the I-IT distinction, I suggest you watch the Trump-Zelenski White House meeting on YouTube. It is a stark example of a human interaction that is I-IT in nature. As you watch Trump in action you might also reflect on another Buber quite; “Without IT, a human cannot live. But an individual who lives with IT alone is not a human”.  

The left hemisphere has Trumpian conviction that it is right to the point of literally being dillusional (evidenced by right hemisphere brain damage patients – ‘that’s not my paralysed left hand doctor, its yours’). How much safer this space than the flightiness of I-YOU. Buber says;

“Measure and comparison have fled. It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you. The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable. It comes, comes to fetch you and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes.”

Unreliable it might be, but oh how incredible. Think about a turning point in your professional career, or a moment of significance in your development. Based on my experience of asking that question often, 90% of you will describe an I-YOU moment.

Spacious mode can only reach its full potential if experienced with others.  It is a product of relationship. Not just any relationship, always I-YOU relationships. As Megan says, referencing Buber, spacious mode requires that people “turn themselves fully to the other”, a profound shift away from IT and towards YOU.

How do you as a leader create spacious mode? Surely it couldn’t be a simple as making space to bring people who share a higher purpose together in I-YOU conversation? I think it is as simple as this. Maybe the solution to reversing the mega-crisis is in the ordinary, not the extraordinary. To quote another Oxford colleague, Marc Stears, “ordinary people going about their ordinary lives possess all the insight, virtue and determination required to build the society of which they dream and need no direction by others”. Maybe the solution to reversing the meta-crisis is in the ordinary, not the extraordinary. Maybe it is as simple as this.

If you had walked in at sat down at the lunch table with us, you would have thought Callum and I quite ordinary. Certainly, an I_YOU conversation but no great highlights. Graeme being a little bit too excited about his son’s ability on the electric guitar, and agreement that the Barramundi was overcooked. But if you listened carefully, you might also have heard the shared commitment to purpose. Maybe it is as simple as this.

Callum and I inadvertently tried spacious mode, and something remarkable happened for me as a result. At the time it felt ordinary, yet it produced the extraordinary. But really, is there anything as extraordinary as the relationship space in an I_YOU - “the seemingly empty space: that true place of realization is community, and true community is that relationship in which the Divine comes to its realization between I and thou.”

As an atheist, I use a quote with the word “Divine” deliberately, choosing the valid definition of “God-like” rather than “of God”. Because surely the last thing that science will fully explain is an I-YOU relationship, so that makes it Divine. It is beyond current explanation, it is God-like. And some might say, it’s a miracle. A miracle of the ordinary.  

So there is our lunch, our miracle, so where our hope for future of humanity? Surely, I am not proposing that that we can start to attend to the meta-crisis simply by making space to bring people who share a higher purpose together in I-YOU conversation? Surely, but surely, it is not as simple as this?

I will leave you with the words of singer-songwriter Jake Bugg.

I've been in search of stones

Making up the pavement of less-travelled roads

Mining for treasure deep in my bones

That I never found

Travelled to each ocean's end

Saw all seven wonders, trying to make some sense

Memorised the mantra Confucius said

But it only let me down

Tried absolution of the mind and soul

It only led me where I should not go

Oh, and the answer well how could I miss

Something as simple as this

Something as simple as this

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reitz, M., & Higgins, J. (2025). Create mental space to be a wiser leader. MIT Sloan Management Review.

McGilchrist, I. (2025, July 10) Retrieved https://darwincollege.cam.ac.uk/podcast/transcript .

Buber, M. (1996). I and thou Touchstone. (Original work published 1923)

Stears, M. (2021). Ordinary: On living a meaningful life. Harvard University Press

Spiegelhalter, D. (2023). The art of uncertainty: How to navigate the unknown. Basic Books

Diaconis, P., & Mosteller, F. (1989). Methods for studying coincidences. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 84(408), 853-861

Bugg, J. (2012). Simple as this [Song]. On Jake Bugg. Mercury Records

.........................................................................................................................................................

Footnotes:

1.      For the avoidance of doubt, the whole section on applying probability theory to the coincidences is a story. It is a story to illustrate how the left-hemisphere drive to break down and analyse takes over and subjugates the right-hemisphere ability to marvel at the beauty of an interconnected world.

If someone actually challenged me to work out the probability of the simultaneous coincidences, I would refuse and not just because I am not that competent at statistics. I would refuse because probability theory is based on the system being stochastic. A stochastic system is one in which outcomes are truly random.  True randomness is rare, effectively only existing in natural systems e.g. the timing of radioactive decay, the movement of a gas molecule. Other systems may exhibit high levels of randomness because they are highly complex such as economic systems. Here we can use stochastic probability because it approximates the system, but the system is not truly random. Our lunch coincidences are neither of these. While the system is complex, it is incredibly inter-related. A single relationship between Callum’s network and my network that we are unaware of could have influenced outcomes massively. Sorry left-hemisphere, you’ll have to try another approach.

2.      In this situation, the allure of pseudo-science is strong. Maybe the depth of connection between Callum and me in our conversation created ripples in the global pool of consciousness. As the ripples travelled outwards from our conversation and intersected with the consciousness of others, they were then triggered into the physical action of writing and posting. I feel the horrified reaction of my audience to this idea!

The Global Consciousness Project out of Princeton hypothesizes that global consciousness interacts with physical systems, most notably that the network of random number generators experienced massive anomalies around the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Their argument was strong enough to make it through peer review in a reputable science journal. Unsurprisingly, their methodology has come under heavy challenge since.

It is easy as a rational person to dismiss all pseudo-science as most of it is dribble. But we also need to put the context of all the things which science is yet to explain. My favourite example is mirror neurons. Could anything have sounded more pseudo-science before their actual discovery! Pseudo-science sometimes turns into Science. Of course this should not encourage us to legitimize any pseudo-science that offers a convenient explanation. For the one pseudo-science legitimized by the discovery of mirror neurons, there were hundreds disproved.

But if we are working in the territory of important things which science is yet to explain, then consciousness is surely at the top of the list. It may not be the Global Consciousness Project that leads the way, but my intuition is that consciousness does interact with the physical world in some way that we will discover one day. And if I were leading the research project, my focus would be on one particular dimension; what happens when two people share a relationship.