squareONE explorations
resources, discoveries, insights, perplexities

I’m a political junky. Over the years I’ve tried to keep politics out of the explorations here, but the personal is the political. I’ve thought about a political blog too, although the world probably doesn’t need another lefty blog. Far lefty in my case for I am a fabian, a digger, a radical humanist, and, perhaps worst of all, I can count. Think of me as a pointed headed auto-didact 52yo slacker. If I did have a blog I would orient it around the common cognitive dissonances which riddle political discourse. For example, when I hear the T-baller speak of the “desire for freedom in every human’s heart” while his administration ouskebombs and shoots up neighborhoods in Iraq, I recognize the U.S. is attempting today to destroy the village to save it. And, this means this universal urge for freedom is actively and concretely being extinguished in the heart of every innocent person ‘accidentally’ killed or grievously injured as the U.S. collateralizes the damage issued in its insane imperial dream.

The campaign button expresses my somewhat inchoate sentiment. As J.K. Galbraith told it, one expects the Republican Party royalists to serve their minute corporate artistocratic constituency wholeheartedly. Tom Franks is wrong to suspect great swaths of rural and suburban peeps don’t vote their interests. The cognitive problem in a nutshell is that they, obviously, do. The Democratic Party hasn’t with any rigor at all figured this out, yet it’s a good sign the insurgent Democrat today, (like John Tester, Scott Kleeb, Paul Hackett,) does speak truth to power, does recapture and co-opt mainstream values, and, does seem to have a sense of humor.

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The Lakewood Public Library has returned to the top ranking (pdf) of American libraries in its class. And, it scored #2 among all libraries in Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings for 2006.

It is my favorite library.

I like what the publisher of The Lakewood Observer wrote on the LO forum after hearing the news.

What has become more amazing to me is how each member of your staff also that his rare ability to reach out, make contact and touch people lives. Kids, adults, teens, young, old, rich poor, you and your staff have created one of the finest public institutions, I have ever witnessed.

When I first met you I loved your talk about how a library must be the home of public knowledge. That it is your mission to not just answer questions with answers you like, but to give them background on all sides so that they can make the decision that is best for them. Again, your staff does this nearly as well as you do.

There’s a lot I could say about the feel of this library, but I will echo Jim’s highlighting the human touch in the staff/patron interface. There’s no library like it.

Karl Weick is one of my main guys. The Social Psychology of Organizing and Sensemaking In Organizations are deservedly classics but each of his books are terrific. Anyway…in the aftermath of the earlier MAZE THE COURSE post, the following excerpts from an interview Dr. Weick gave in 2003 are timely. Incidentally, he’s speaking here of what he calls the HRO, the High Reliability Organization.

The key difference between HROs and other organizations is the sensitivity or mindfulness with which people in most HROs react to even very weak signs that some kind of change or danger is approaching. In contrast to HROs, most companies today are hugely unprepared for the unpredictable. Managers are under the illusion that they know more or less what’s going to happen next or how other people are likely to act. That’s both arrogant and dangerous. Not only do those managers ignore the possibility that something unexpected will happen but they also forget that the decisions they do make can have unintended consequences.

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Can organizations learn to be more mindful?
They can, by adopting some of the practices that high-reliability organizations use. For instance, besides being fixated on failure, HROs are also fiercely committed to resilience and sensitive to operations. Managers at these organizations keep their attention focused on the front line, where the work really gets done. For example, among wildland firefighters, the most successful incident commanders are those who listen best to the people out there actually fighting the fires. HROs also defer to expertise, and they refuse to simplify reality. This last point is particularly important because it has profound implications for executives. As I have often written, leaders must complicate themselves in order to keep their organizations in touch with the realities of the business world

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he problem with defining and refining your hypotheses without testing them is that the world keeps changing, and your analyses get further and further behind. So you’ve got to constantly update your thinking while you’re sitting there and reflecting. And that’s why I’m such a proponent of what I call “sensemaking.” There are many definitions of sensemaking; for me it is the transformation of raw experience into intelligible world views. It’s a bit like what mapmakers do when they try to make sense of an unfamiliar place by capturing it on paper. But the crucial point in cartography is that there is no one best map of a particular terrain. Similarly, sensemaking lends itself to multiple, conflicting interpretations, all of which are plausible. If an organization finds itself unsure of where it’s going, or even where it’s been, then it ought to be wide open to a lot of different interpretations, all of which can lead to possible action. The action and its consequence then begin to edit the list of interpretations down to a more manageable size.

And this is the point I wish to underscore: Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes. Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it’s the action itself that gets you moving again. That’s why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or to leap while looking. There’s a beautiful example of this: Several years ago, a platoon of Hungarian soldiers got lost in the Alps. One of the soldiers found a map in his pocket, and the troops used it to get out safely. Subsequently, however, the soldiers discovered that the map they had used was, in fact, a drawing of another mountain range, the Pyrenees. I just love that story, because it illustrates that when you’re confused, almost any old strategic plan can help you discover what’s going on and what should be done next. In crises especially, leaders have to act in order to think – and not the other way around.

From a tale of the Mulla Nasruddin, I visualize the real political problem.

it is quite possible for commonsense to join with an iconoclastic mission. My friend Alan Kuper, the father of a junior high classmate of forty years ago, and a retired professor of electrical engineering, is on such a mission. At the same time, his approach is commonsensical: he has devised a system of scoring U.S. Congress persons based in evaluating their voting records on environmental matters.

This would be the broad brush. What Dr. Kuper notes is that the United States is home to the biggest population problem on earth. Why? Because our resource hungry, wasteful, and polluting consumption grows as our population grows. As is well known, the U.S. is the world’s leading resource mongerer, consumer and polluter. And, as Illich pointed out, the earth itself cannot support a global consumer society on the U.S. model. There aren’t enough raw materials in the earth, nor reserve of fresh atmosphere, (etc.,) to fund a global consumer utopia.

Somebody has to take a stand; a lot of somebodies; and from a small home office in his home, Dr. Kuper has taken a stand. It provides for a good human interest story too. Alan Kuper is wholly devoted to the cause of connecting the dots between the big picture of consumption la-la lunacy and democratic policy making. In his eighties, he hasn’t shuffled off to the wings of oblivious retirement. Since I’ve known him for so long, but no better than I have only recently, I am pleased to state he is a delightful curmudgeon of the old school, speaking truth to power and to the people for that matter.

The point is to leverage the data he’s put together. …because we might all better evaluate the voting implication of those congress people who purport to be acting in the citizenry’s self-interest. Dr. Kuper’s mission is completely grassroots, hardscrabble, and, at the same time, relentless in its evaluation of congressional commitments.

He generates a scorecard of each congress and this scorecard is packed full of valuable, surprising, and, often, shocking data. Consider a donation too–you’ll receive CUSP’s booklet and a hardcopy scorecard.

CUSP: USCongress-Enviroscore

From a perspective of what language can and cannot accomplish, and especially from the perspective concerned with the dynamics of cognitive relation to persuasive language over time, the effort of the Cheney Inc. to push “stay the course” back in the box is fascinating.

Maureen Dowd is pithy:

The Bushes don’t connect words with action. Action is something that’s secretly plotted with the inner circle behind closed doors. The public should stay out of it. The Bushes just connect words with salesmanship. (NYT Oct.25:2006)

Message management can only serve proscribed purposes. Conceptual simplification, reduction to spin, and repetition across delivery domains, lands rightly with some and lands not at all with others. There’s a ‘matching’ goal and, presumably, it reinforces acquisiton of consonance with both the message and the conceptual structure implicit underneath the message. The idea is people want to feel okay about the sense they make about something. For example, all the Bush callers who phone Washington Journal (on c-SPAN) and state their “100% approval” likely fund this consonant sense using rationales which smooth over divergence and dissonance. For some, there’s no devil and no details; it’s all good. One never hears a caller say they are “85% supporters”.

Having at hand a language of convergence, and of absolute sympathy and alignment, obviously helps the make the sale. One might, were one a marketer in this mode, measure the effective matching with the return report “Doh, we should stay the course!”. We buy what makes us feel good. It’s a hunch. Sure, who wouldn’t want to bring a victory home?

What happens when the matching becomes more difficult? Surely dissonance starts to ripple into the placid sympathy, unwelcome thoughts intrude, reality begins to feel different than it did previously, anxiety increases. The sturdy sense begins to become fragile. That stay the course refers to an actual course is besides the point for the most part. The point of matching to a sense of resolve, to confidence in the proxy, (ie. the executive and its military fighting on our behalf,) and, implicitly, to an optimal outcome, “Victory,” loses its grip when any of those vectors begin to be displaced or deposed. When several or all of them begin to unravel together, it’s possible to speak of, perhaps, a multiplier effect.

Keep in mind the phrase was often deployed-over and over again-defensively. The defensive maneuver was implemented in light of trying to smooth over the rough and disturbing spiral downward of the news coming from the battlefield of Iraq. In effect, stay the course glides over its own middle since the full posit is: stay the course to victory; stay to victory. Tis a hard deployment to cut and run from. Clearly the administration wants to stay the ’something or other’. Even now the idea is to stay in Iraq until the course, whatever it is, is completed. But it is impossible to persuasively reimplement stay at the same time the recipient of the pitch is searching for a way to get away from the sudden, prominant feeling of severe dissonance. Nobody volunteers for a cognitive game of chicken.

There’s a point of irony, doubled, in noting this. This point is: reality is always dynamic and always requires adaptation. This week it was laughable for me, someone who isn’t likely to be ever persuaded by surface language, to hear Tony Snow state what I already knew had to be the case anyway and always. Yes, the facts on the ground are dynamic and our forces are always flexing and adapting to the changes. Twas ever thus.

(Oct.23:2006) Q Is there a change in the administration “stay the course” policy? Bartlett this morning said that wasn’t ever the policy.

MR. SNOW: No, the policy — because the idea of “stay the course” is you’ve done one thing, you kick back and wait for it. And this has always been a dynamic policy that is aimed at moving forward at all times on a number of fronts. And that would include the international diplomatic front. After all, the Iraq compact is something we worked out with the Iraqis before visiting the Prime Minister in Baghdad earlier this year.

So what you have is not “stay the course,” but, in fact, a study in constant motion by the administration and by the Iraqi government, and, frankly, also by the enemy, because there are constant shifts, and you constantly have to adjust to what the other side is doing.

I already knew “stay the course” was implemented to cover or even bury the dynamic situation on the ground. Failed adaptation was not to see the light. Consider it is the dynamics of shifting cognitive apprehension of rhetoric which eventually exhaust the ameliorative power of the spin and the catch-phrase and the reductive move to a satisfying ’selleable’ trope.

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I had reason to recently provide a colleague with a primer on Social Constructionism. Diving into a stack of papers and rooting through the web, it brought back memories. Good ones too: I’m not a doctrinaire anything let alone a social constructionist, yet it is, viewed philosophically, a very respectable meta-methodology in my book, and, besides, its thinkers often display an ingratiating amount of chutzpah. The gloss categorization of social constructionism is well-known: it’s the distinctively American chapter of post-modernism.

For me, the image of a hovercraft springs up. Social constructionists zip around held above the surface by a column of downrushing air.

I’m of two minds when I try to locate social constructionism somewhere in my own personal catalogue of prejudices. From one cherished perspective, I favor the interplay of process, the phenomenographic, eros/logos, and intersubjectivity, which any mediation of knowledge requires. yes, it’s a mash-up for me!

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Over on the excellent creative music blog destinationout, saxophonist Noah Howard is featured. He was part of the first avant-garde wave in the sixties, recording for ESP, and has been making a comeback over the last fifteen or so years. destinationout provides a rich recap, mp3 examples, and the link to Noah Howard’s fine web site, discography, and even more examples of organic and melodic adventurism.

I’m very curious about the process through which people really get to know each other. And, just as fascinated by the processes through which people fool themselves into believing they are getting to really know one other. There is overlap between the former and the latter kinds of processes. Some people are very good at both, but, a person who is good at getting to know another person is likely to well understand what the differences are between really knowing and surface knowing.

It’s tempting to insert here that it is a two-way street too, but, my experience is that there can be a significant differential between two approaches and how effective each, in actuality, is.

When engaged with other persons my common mode is research and participant/deep observer, so, at a minimum, I’m often sitting there being greatly amused by processes of interpersonal knowledge building. For example, it is often for me a case of observing how much interference there is in people’s attempts to be present, listen, respond, and, overall, apprehend what is going on. This goes for me too: reflecting on my own interference.

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