How - Dov Seidman [34]
The first thing that struck me was the friendship Noland forms with a half-inflated soccer ball rescued from the crash, which he names “Wilson,” after the ball’s manufacturer. Broyles told me that to research the film, he spent time alone on a beach by the Sea of Cortez. During his solitude, he found a volleyball washed up on the shore. “So much are we a social animal,” Broyles wrote me, “so much do we need the spiritual connection to another human being, that I was endowing a volleyball with human characteristics, just because it was so hard to be alone.”2 You have no need for morals or values when you are stranded on an island (unless you believe you have duties or obligations to palm trees and bananas, a legitimate concern, but off the point). You have no one but yourself to answer to, so how you survive is entirely up to you. By creating this imaginary friend, Broyles acknowledged that there is something in man that calls him to be greater than just himself, to have a purpose to others beyond himself.
The second event that jumped out at me came at the very end of the film, when, four years after he was stranded, Noland completes the delivery of one package that survived the crash, and includes a note that says, This package saved my life. “It was a crucial part of who he’d been,” Broyles said. “Noland had been someone who ‘connected’ the world, who made it work, who kept the simple promise of delivering a package from one human being to another. This man of connections, who’d been so long disconnected, reestablished himself as part of the world by fulfilling this commitment.” To survive his ordeal, Noland needed purpose. He realized he was not just a person who moved packages; he was a person who kept promises. Cast Away, in my view, is a film about keeping promises to others, about our inherent need as humans to be connected with and to do for one another, and to fulfill what seems to me to be a biological imperative to be more than ourselves alone. I began to wonder, is this something that we have learned as a species, or is there some sort of biological underpinning that makes us this way? Are we, in fact, hardwired to connect to others?
When we talk about the interpersonal synapses between people in a stadium or our horizontal collaborations across global supply chains, we are in a sense talking about biological networks. The brain—that spongy mass between our ears—processes a tremendous amount of information throughout the average day, both consciously and unconsciously. It is responsible for everything from our intake of breath to the kiss we place on a loved one’s cheek at night. The unconscious aspects of the brain’s ability to absorb subtle clues from our environment and to process them through what both nature and nurture provide gives us our ways of acting in and reacting to the world. It is the most complex biological network we know. Academics and scientists, it turns out, have begun to marry advances in their ability to see the brain at work with behavioral research in economics, politics, and other sociological activities, to reveal an inherent, biological human predilection for certain behaviors that increase our ability to be effective and prosperous.3 The networked brain and the networked world of business have more in common than we ever thought possible.
First, we’ll examine some of this groundbreaking research, and then try to draw some conclusions. Though it may seem at first counterintuitive to launch into a deeper discussion of HOW in an internetworked world by discussing neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology, the workings of the brain can provide us with some keystone understandings about how we think and act. Since most people concede that you get better results from energy invested in improving on what you already do well as opposed to energy spent improving