6 views of death – some measures of life

6 Views of death – some measures of life

Torrey Orton
May 31, 2009

“You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. . no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you.”

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death’s nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death. I have a stake. I’m old enough (66) to know that I’m nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I’ve outlived my father and his father by 2 years. I’m pretty clear I want to die when I want to if I can and have taken steps to encourage its probability.

I share this view and intent with my wife. We’ve signed the necessary papers to ensure (there’s a wondrous claim these days) that the ‘life support’ technologies are turned off, or left off, if we’re incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of my confidence, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. These stem from their meanings of life. Some of them are catastrophically confronting for people like me. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too? This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films.

This series of views is undertaken with intellectual wonderment at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertain fulfilment of my preference to choose my own death time as much as that’s possible. Some of the pathways to the views may traverse the following terrains.

Some initial takes on life-death

For instance, there is the common notion of a ‘good death’. Dying on one’s own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one’s time had a limit and making ways for others was both necessary and honourable. A next-best ‘good death’ may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way.

Then we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned comprehensively for).

The handmaiden of this feeling, this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life, is the philosophy of ‘nice’. It has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face of pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).

So, we are not to see death or damage in public (my ex-countrymen took this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country). Nor even should we speak them. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but ‘dead’, ‘body’ or similar explicits. Rather we are given ‘the deceased’ who ‘passed on’ (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly ‘passed away’ (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just ‘passed’ (like a train in the night?). Yet all are “tragedies” (with the exception of registered crims and malefactors by acclamation) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.

Politics of life-death

The politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight to the death to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. They get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair.

The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train. So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. One of these facts is that we cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – life is death and death is life; we are living-dying beings; we live for a while, and, however long it never amounts to how long we have not existed.

In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere And, as the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I’d have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.

A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. This would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine supposedly stands as one for all life-death matters.

So here’s a contents page for some views of life-death to come at this site in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The rest are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I’ll be learning as a I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view.

1) Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – for example:

Cathy O’Dowd’s Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May ’09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. “The general public don’t get this: they think, ‘As long as she’s alive, you can’t leave’. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can’t do that on Everest.” The same story was reported in 2007 with a more extended treatment, and the same ending.

High risk sports – not tennis, basketball, net ball, bowls - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping (?), base jumping, peak bagging, have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers. These are the actions of people whose meaning is tenuous enough to require excitement-enhanced expression.

In Australia we have our own (but don’t others, too?) sport - binge drinking: specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfillments every weekend. These are called “tragedies” when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness. Some don’t even apologise for the damage to others it occasions – both male and female (e.g. -Maria Makridakis, 26; THEAGE May 23, ‘09).

2) Beginning of life and ...rights to life.
Why is IVF a government sponsored medical alternative whose clients believe it is their right – namely the right to have a child even when it’s not naturally happening for them?

3) ‘Normal’ end of life and...death is for embracing or defeating?
What is normal in life-death matters? What’s a good life-death in various cultures? Well-beings on offer.

4) Martyrs and those who serve and...
People join armies and police forces and fire brigades around the world with a heightened prospect of having to pay with their lives for the safety of their fellows (and, in the case of armies and police, by intentionally taking the lives of Others). How can this be integrated into the meanings of life-death.

5) Suicide attempts, successes and failures...
A story of coming to life by attempting to die...
The reporting of suicide ( if at all) as an individual problem while the social settings are seldom mentioned, as factors; and never mentioned as pre-conditions.

6) Near deaths and...insights from those who passed over and back again.
How it feels to have a stroke - Jill Bolt Taylor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Right to die / right to live and...so, what’s it all mean to me?

Rectifications (9) – Client, patient, customer, consumer…a psychologist’s work dilemma

Rectifications (9) – Client, patient, customer, consumer…a psychologist’s work dilemma.

Torrey Orton – May 26, 2009

My rectification fire is deeply stoked by our current confusion of life roles. This appears in the tendency to turn all life roles into variations on consumption – as if we’re eating our way through life. No wonder we’ve got an “obesity epidemic”. This seems a particularly appropriate expression for a time when overconsumption abounds in a spiritually anorexic culture.

One deep source of confusion is the ever thinner boundaries for our life roles and activities. For example, not-for-profit organisations increasingly mimic in structure and self-description the modes and moods of commercial ones. They ‘manage’ things, including themselves, while claiming to engage in helping the dispossessed, dissociated, etc. This has been forced on them over the last 20+ years, with the effect of turning their activities often into agencies of the existing powers and systems which produce the dysfunctions they are addressing. I do not say this with blame or disdain for their efforts. It is endemic in our social and workplace cultures.

What follows explores some aspects of this situation, with emphasis on health and backup from education. Starting at home, for me as therapist the question of what to call those who I treat (itself a wonder word) is increasingly fraught. ‘Client’ is the preferred term among psychs, but from the viewpoint of the agency which pays half their bills – Medicare – they are patients. And my professional association, the APS, is busily propelling itself into the medical arena on the foundation of “evidence-based” care. Now a mantra, evidence-based care is a professional aspiration turned into a quality compliance mechanism linked directly to funding. It has been growing among medicos for 20-30 years, depending on your reading of its history .

A Medical Deviation

From patient perspectives, there is questionable reduction in cost or increase in effectiveness of health care delivery from that history. This is partly because, in some domains of practice, the patients don’t care what evidence says, they just want a pill (e.g. - antibiotics for viral events; anti-depressants for life-constraining social or physical events, and so on). This is a public consciousness residual, sustained to this day by the big pharmas, of the early revolutionary successes of the antibiotics (penicillin and co’y.) and antipsychotics (lithium to Prozac). If you catch it, you can pill it.

And, in other respects, health is a political matter, not merely a scientific one. So evidence-based practice can’t control consumption rates and types – e.g. there are over-priced and over-consumed treatments which have marginal rates of return in wellness. It’s increasingly argued that shifting medical focus to prevention is the only serious hope for increased wellness. Seriously doing this would uproot the health economy as we know it – which, like other parts of the economy, are geared to growth through innovation and profitability, and tend to resist change. In particular they tend to resist investments in public goods which cannot be individualised (and then amortized).

The medical model of services provides the accounting underpinnings of hospital and medical practice funding – the item numbers we psychologists use on our Medicare referred invoice. Item based funding and service payment to professionals tends to encourage focus only on the diagnosed and diagnosable problems which fit the remuneration system. This also encourages speedy throughputs.

Part of this movement towards consumerist language and constructs has occurred in tandem with the greater economic culture’s focus on service effectiveness for customers (mainly understood as consumers) and service efficiency for corporate stakeholders (narrowly construed as shareholders). This is a combination which can provide a rationale for almost any ‘management’ undertaking you can imagine. If everyone is a customer (or, more basically, a consumer) then there is no question except what “value-for-money” can be achieved in the eyes of the customers. the behavioural / emotional markers of which are determined by focus groups (establishing the mind of the consumer) and comparative dollars establishing the measure of service ‘outcomes’. Some struggle against this current occurs at global (corporate social responsibility, sustainability protocols) and local levels (neighbourhood climate groups, social enterprises, etc.).

Back to therapy

If psychology clients are really patients, it cannot be long before the design and delivery of therapeutic action is wholly medicalised, more like treatment for a cut or break than a long-term sadness, anger or anxiety. Such feelings are the underlying evidences and sources of most normal psychological problems which appear almost always in long-term human relationships. That is, they are developed in, and sustained by, relationship systems like families, work groups and affinity groups.

The increasing specialisation in psychology spreads hand in hand with service dis-integration. That is, each piece of a treatment process is analysed into measureable segments that also fit within normal therapeutic requirements. Service specialisation (which also derives from knowledge specialisation in the endless pursuit of ‘solutions’ to main morbidity effects, medical or psychological) in turn drives licensing specialisation and the concomitant professional training silos.

So what?

So, what am I arguing here? Just what I said at the start – the boundaries between life roles are too thin and the weight of incentives is in the direction of collapsing their differences into unified sameness – in this case, consumption. This way of arguing is unlikely to be very persuasive to anyone. I can only hope that I get better at grounding the argument as I inevitably will be singing this plaint elsewhere in my mad man travels. If you know interesting examples, please share.

Some channels to reconnect these key role terms with the world of experience and need might be:
1- Establish the appropriateness of a role term by applying the backward fit test; so, if your clients can also be patients, try out whether the patients can also be clients; similarly, if your patients can be customers, can all customers be patients in all their life activities; and, thirdly, can anyone consume everything in their life that they need? Can all those needs be handled with instruments (forks, knives, spoons, etc.)?
2- Notice the emergence of new role names into public space. ‘Carer’ comes to mind. This is a role with a history of millennia, extending into the non-human genera and acknowledged as such by our use of the term for cat, dog, roo, spider, fish behaviour, but not plants or rocks. Caring has been transformed from a normal role in the household economy to an accountable role in the consumer economy, driven by the latter’s penetration of every cranny of life.
3- Engage others with you in the small scale drawing of important boundaries around our professional domains and relationships. For example, honour the role meanings of client or patient, or student or citizen…and what is expected of them and what they should expect of us in the caring, teaching, helping roles.

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours

Appreciations (4) …my “sick sinus syndrome” saviours
Torrey Orton
May 21, 2009

Here I revisit a “heart event” I had six years ago. Much of the following text was written four weeks after that event and I present it as written with a few editorial deletions and insertions. Some additional setting description and commentary (like this) is added in italics.

I was walking down Clarendon Street in Sth Melbourne on my way from one meeting to another about 9:15 am. I’d been walking 30 minutes at my normal quick but not breathless pace, feeling fine, when I suddenly felt faint, fuzzy, weak and thought, ‘where can I sit down?’ – which was the last conscious thought I had until I woke up on my back looking up at Jane and some medicos around 11:30am the same day in The Alfred Hospital trauma unit. Lesson number one: if you feel faint just sit down regardless of the dignity protocols that may be compromised in the act. I figure it was 1-2 seconds between the first conscious sensations of losing my senses and fully doing so. I’ll try to remember that – though I shouldn’t have to again if the pacemaker works. ….

And I haven’t had to remember for safety’s sake, but the story is a powerful one for showing the difference between the speed of thought and unconscious processes. As for my dignity, it’s still likely to be a cause of concern.
…
It appears that I had hit the curb from my full height (191cm, which the trauma people told Jane was twice the minimum level considered a dangerous descent) with a significant proportion of my full weight (107kg, at the time), fracturing slightly “a small bone” a bit above the right ear, leading to internal bleeding in the brain which prompted a seizure that went on for some minutes – thrashing around enough in the public pathway to chew a tear in my tongue, bounce my head on the hard parts a few more times, swallow a reasonable amount of blood into my stomach, inhale a portion into my lungs and attract the attention of someone who did two smart things (at least): call the ambulance service and take my handkerchief (I almost never use the things these days but have always carried one in the same place for 35 years of more) from my right rear pants pocket and stuff it into my gnashing mouth. …

..and on the way did not take anything out of the other pockets – keyset, wallet, watch: all present in the hospital bedside cabinet, including the blooded handkerchief..
…
The role of chance / luck in all this – One example: if this moment had occurred at the same time a day earlier I would have fallen out the door of a Bridge Road tram under one of two cars that were illegally passing the tram after it had stopped (I was leaning out to check if any yobbos were passing the stopped tram, which they do so often here that not looking before getting off a stopped tram is an invitation to an earlier death). Another example: if this moment had occurred while driving us around the Falls Creek neighbourhood a week earlier we could still be unfound down a ravine, which was subsequently incinerated a week later by the bushfires we could see ringing the high country we were driving through. And so on. A newly acquired respect for fate, luck, chance, etc, …
…
Finally, there’s the status of me as meat* – which is the only intellectual position from which I can summon the images of my unconscious states, especially in the first hour of the events. It’s a peculiar result of seeing myself as an object / subject of fate – as an entity whose intentionality is wholly in the hands of a series of others (some of whom I never saw – the critical care ambulance guys and who ever called them!). These others collectively by their actions affirmed what I could not: that I was more than meat and thereby made it true.

My experience of being saved by the system is what I want to recognise and celebrate. I am very aware from living in other places – notably China – that this kind of health system is not widely available across the world. Second, where it exists, it may not be well run, especially at the level of service provision. The para-medics service (Ambulance Victoria) has been an object of political contention and governance doubt for some time, but whatever the sources their service was excellent. Third, it is stunning that a matter so life and deathly should be handled with such precision and care both by the stipulated role holders and the passing public. My thanks, again.


*See here http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml for a wonderful take on ‘meat’ which illuminates various pretensions of the meat class of conscious beings.

Appreciations (3) … Bushfire’s woolly green recovery

Appreciations (3) … Bushfire’s woolly green recovery

Torrey Orton
May 18, 2009

Eucalyptus, burned but living, sprout fast into a coat of woolly greenery that transforms them from scarred skeletons to fuzzy entanglements in a few months. The effect looks like this:


(Photo by Auscape_JLR08503)

Australia is a terrifyingly regenerative place. Its nature is perhaps the only continental one adapted to repeated, but intermittent ravages of flood, fire and drought. Fire is on my mind, though drought is more persistently (daily) with me as we sink into our 8th year of declining rainfall in Melbourne. So far we’re down by another half from last year and water storage is at 27% of capacity (down 4 percentage points from this time last year).

The fire on my mind - the Victorian Black Saturday fires of February 7th, ’09 - moved us to revisit sites we have walked and skied over two decades till the day. We went to see what was left, carrying a map (see below) which showed everything we knew closely and well had been scorched, including 173 people in various towns in its path. We went to see and to support surviving local business which was under-used almost to the point of going under, though alive.

There was nothing we had not seen before in other bushfire sites (e.g. -Victorian Alps 2003) but this was 50-80kms from our front door. One thing about fires is how wilful they are. Along the same stretch of road, say a couple of kilometres, in wooded hills there were patches where the trees were black from bottom to top, not a leaf in sight. These we knew would be standing there as bleached skeletons for decades. No regrowth from them. A model for the imagery of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Then there were patches, separated by a slight decrease in blackening, of closely burned trees with scorched leaves on the tops already sprouting first shoots low down the trunk or from the roots at the base depending on the degree of intensity of the burn. Some of these will regrow from top to bottom; others part way up; others not at all.

Then a third burn almost touched little but the ground level stubble and leaf droppings.
The sick/sad impact on us of the complete burns was not moderated by the regrowth areas until a day later. But even on the first trip through there were those signs of comeback. A wondrous thing.

Here’s what happened broad scale (see KilmoreEast-Murrindindi map) on Saturday Feb. 7th, ‘09. These fires burned about 100,000 hectares on the day. A month later the picture looked like this: “The total area burnt from the four fires so far is 302,875 hectares” (Melbourne HeraldSun March 1,’09). For comparison 8700 acres burned at Santa Barbara CA recently (May 9-12, ’09). The air temperature on the day here was 46C (116 F) with a northerly wind gusting to 80+ kms/hr. The effect in Melbourne was to burn the exposed leaves of plants in our yards. Within two months many of them were having a surge of new growth as if it were spring. Others died. That was just sunstroke.

My first sight of woolly green recovery – above Lorne, Victoria in October ’83 after the Ash Wednesday fires - was an experience slightly HP Lovecraftian in look. I was ten years in the country already but had never seen a mid-growth forest regeneration. Or, maybe like many arrivals in new places, I hadn’t noticed. Lovecraft was an American gothic writer of the early 20th century, prone to alieninvasion fantasies, some of which he placed in Australia. You may see how the first photo above is weird.

These forests are treed with species that must burn to live in the long term and come to life after burning. The closest deciduous equivalents I’ve seen are northern forests coming into green in a few weeks in spring, sprouting all over it seems, though still mainly on the outer growing branches. Another, more similar, event is the sprouting of new leaf bearing twigs all over elms which have been so drought struck they are nearly leafless mid-summer. First rains of fall or late summer bring a sudden rush in an otherwise wholly unnatural way for such species. Apart from that, no green woolly similars.

From my first step in Oz I loved the land because of its difference from my home in Massachusetts. Gums along the Geelong Road in ’71 were something special highlighted by the flatness and light. I commend them to those with a landscape orientation, especially to the delicacies of visual difference which characterise all of Australia. Woolly green rehabilitations are one of them.

Below are two steps in a series of regeneration pictures taken in another Australian location six years ago. Nick Gleitzman did the work, the only sequence of its sort I found (though having found his I didn’t try hard!).They are done at the same time of day over about 10 time chunks in the year after the fires. The first image below is 5 days after the fires.

And then, with a watering and passage of time (98 days in this instance) we get this where we can see the wondrous mix of survival regrowth and never-to-be-seen again dead remnants of bushes and trees.

Gleitzman’s originals in three different settings from the same 2002 fires can be found at http://www.omnivision.com.au/fire/regen_b.htm. This last photo also shows a field of woolly green regeneration, but in a drier part of the country so there’s much space between each tree.

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery

Appreciations (2) …Learning aikido by submitting to mastery
Torrey Orton
May 14, 2009

This is less an appreciation than an appreciating – a developmental, making process rather than a summary or aesthetically contemplative one. For I have certainly not mastered aikido or even a small part of it, though I have passed my first grading 6+ months ago. And I continue after two years to find little, and sometimes big, refinements or completions of the practices which have required an unconscious transition to a different mental space to even notice that they were possible.

Submission and learning:

One of the key learning steps is being willing to learn. This means, in part, submitting myself to someone else’s expertise, superiority, good intentions. Recently I was telling people I met at a lunch about my aikido commitment and volunteered that one aspect of interest to me after 9 months practice was consciously submitting myself to another’s leadership. One of the listeners blurted: “I couldn’t do that”. Therein probably lies a story of self-entrapment in the folds of self-protection, but...

Repeatedly, I remind myself to just do what Sensei is doing each day and everything will come together. Of special concern is remembering the order of practices which partly controls access to the inner contents of each one. It has become apparent that consciously struggling for the order – making notes, or similar – does not work for me. Or, rather, that just going along brings everything around again and again, so struggle for control is unnecessary. The video of Sensei’s Sensei demonstrating the 21 jo suburi practices helps. I don’t often use it now, though it’s on my laptop desktop and easily playable anytime I’m home (or away).

At the end of the morning meditation routine (which is the entry to the jo work each day), Sensei bows to the aikido school’s founder whose picture is hung on a wall with ceremonial incense burning on a table to one side. This ritual, too, I am not yet committed to after 8 months of participating in the meditation (which was not a part of my initial training, though I had experience with it intensively 30 years ago). I’m aware of resisting this last (?) submission (is it really the last one?) , while realising as I write that submission is a means of honouring the authority, expertise, etc. of the Sensei and his submission to the authority, expertise of his Sensei, and so on. ... a way of respecting the price in submission to the discipline of the school that they paid to become good enough for us to learn from them.

I am also aware that displaying this submission before other students, including my wife, is embarrassing in some way I don’t yet grasp. I undertook one morning when only I and Sensei were training to try getting on my knees at the close of the mediation ritual acknowledgment of the dojo’s founders in Japan, but couldn’t kneel the hardwood floor...so back to my chair.

Submission as offer and undertaking

It seems that submission goes in two different but mutually dependent directions: it’s two common meanings are (a) offer or propose, as in submit a report or an application or a rendition of the jo suburi under the eye of the Sensei (or, precisely, for the eye of the Sensei); this I did to pass my first grading. And, the second is (b) undertaking for another, as in submit to their command, direction, etc.(which I do in every training whether in group or alone).

So, when I take up aikido I both undertake the command of the Sensei and offer myself to him, or put myself in his hands. This is probably the source of the authority which allows me to follow his lead even when it is ‘wrong’ – that is, when he departs from routines, styles, orders of activity which previously had been the behavioural foundation of the discipline. And which made it learnable to a large extent in the initial phases where the performance models were not enough in mind to be accessed quickly and fluently.

Inhibitions to submission

Finally, for the moment, what inhibits submission? What makes “I couldn’t do that” a likely response from some people which also expresses part of me in resistance, like them!? In myself I find that resistance to a fully compliant submission I mentioned earlier – to honouring the elders who are the origin of the aikido I study. At the aesthetic level, it involves moves I’d feel somewhat silly to be seen doing. At another, ethnic perhaps, the manner of honouring is very non-Anglo.

In any event, I can say that part of me is under-developed (or over-developed looked at from another perspective). Perhaps it’s that I would feel shrunken in some respect by participating?? That’s what just came to mind and I’ve learned to follow the tracks of things which come to mind since that’s the only access to the subconscious I carry with me all day every day. But, on noticing that, I also notice that what I may be resisting is the submission to an imperfect god, for the practices continue to change in their home place as much as in the variations of my Sensei here – as they must.

So, what am I submitting to exactly – a discipline which is definite but changeable, which is demanding but relaxed, which is paradoxical to some extent? An effort for perfect form which realises that it can never be achieved...there is only the trying. A parallel universe to everyday life.

At various times each of these three has been my Sensei, but these Sensei’s Sensei is the man in the middle. They are, from l to r: Sean Seibold, Simon Harris, John Rigopoulos in Japan in late 2008.

Rectifications (8) – ‘Cutting edge…’ ….‘World class…’

Rectifications (8) – ‘Cutting edge…’ ….‘World class…’

Torrey Orton
May 12, 2009

Following the suggestion of Confucius, I continue some rectification of names for our times. Elsewhere I offer some ‘solutions’ to some problems of linguistic degradation. Relevant observations appear towards the end of my Dances with Difference (4) post.

‘Cutting edge…’ is what we say when we mean that whatever we’re doing is just far enough behind the leading edge to actually do something reliably enough to be marketed to early adopters. Those in the know know that the failure rate of pure research is 98% , of applied technical research like drugs, invented materials (plastics, etc.) and so on, a good chunk fail and of start-ups around the survivors of the previous culling even smaller but startling amounts fail with appropriate variations between activity domains.

The earlier you are in the innovation cycle the more likely it is that your product /service will not last the course. Early adopters are the consumer side of this process. We often end up with memorials to failed beginnings - Betamax video, Atari’s, Commodores, Mac Lisas, Visicalcs (don’t remember this one? – Quicken, MYOB and siblings’ grandfather). How many internet start-ups came and went in 5 years of the bubble at what aggregate loss?

On these figures we may be wise to stay away from leading edges and doubt the likelihood that the cutting edge could slice a spud. I prefer takeoffs like The Bleeding Edge by Charles Wright, weekly in THEAGE Green Guide . He hopes to straighten us out about fallacious, falsified and fraudulent offerings in the ITC arena (a domain of notoriously cutting edges). His rendition of a Telstra customer service event is a classic example of modernised customer services where we are scored by the cutting edge of their leading edge business practices, for our good they’d say.

In a world where any can opener and financial product and face cream, not to say health “solution” and car is cutting edge, just how much junk are we being sold and how compelling is the argument for our purchasing NOW? The compulsion these days, I guess, arises from the great emptiness of repetitive acquisition syndrome. I find it surfacing in my therapy practice among the 35-50’s as a surrounding aura which soundlessly and sightlessly sucks meaning out of people with no replacement or alternative on offer. They are barely aware apart from a slight sense, as one said, of a low level anxiety underlying everyday life.

As for ‘world class’, it may be possible that there are world class performances in all domains of human activity (and those of nature for that matter). How we could say with much assurance that they are world class is a matter of interest. But that doesn’t prevent people pretending almost daily to have or be doing or making world class things themselves as a core come-on in a sales or marketing strategy. They usually cite some evidence base for the claim, but most (all?) are subject to doubt from a big enough perspective, if not for the accuracy of the framework and processes they have used.

This has never stopped any one from making such claims. Freedom of expression plus necessity of competition ensure the economic viability of discretionary misrepresentation. So they are able to proceed to the next step unimpeded, if not without guilt. This step is the implicit or explicit proposition that everyone should be attempting to become world class themselves, preferably by buying whatever the claimants have on offer. More evidence is given for the transferability of the class in point, with lots of numbers, a few instruments or tools, and a large existing client base as influencers for the prospective sales. Celebrity endorsement by using does all the preceding at half the expense, apart from the aesthetic expense to the rest of us of acquisitive presence syndrome.

This practice is systematised in, for example quality systems (which succeed at less than 50% of implementations), leadership development ( a new one each 6-12 months) and training programs (which themselves hang off the apparatus of quality and leadership). About this time in the product development life cycle the relevant driver of sales is identity polishing for prospective purchasers through membership of the group who buys / uses world class products. Advanced product /services can amplify the drivers by, again implicit or explicit, compliance mechanisms guarding the entry way to markets, right to advertise services, etc.

However, it has been discovered over the last ten years that many of this type of products / services cannot be transferred from one context to another with any assurance. Yet, they sale on in the marvellously self-sealing cycle which characterises, e.g., weight-loss programs, though perhaps with better performance ratios. The weight-loss mob manage an approximately 95% failure rate, which doesn’t stop anyone from signing up for more. Probably all you need to do to be ‘successful’ in weight works is change your product name occasionally to meet the needs for fashion statements in health care. I imagine they follow the latest research on contributing factors. Maybe weight loss is really about how you look – trying to lose is the look for oneself for many of us?

So what is the role of leading edge world class products? They are fashions to some extent. Also they express our inclination to improve and the importance of a vision or standard of excellence as a motivator for many. Whether they are any good or not, they are ‘cutting it’ by stretching or slicing the fabric of current practice(s) - a necessary stage in change of any sort.

Thanks to Brassie and Hamid’s complaints about my lack of channels for anger, and Brassie’s personal support for my making a difference suggestions a few weeks back, I’m going to provide some channels for cutting edges and world class actions to sustain them:
1- Remember cutting edges are mostly local now.
2- Leading at your own scale and pace will provide plenty of edge at a controllable level (see anger).
3- Engage others with you in these small scale high personal return edgeworks.
4- Discourage yourself and others from consuming the blandishments of large scale cutting edges of the sort that amass easily into large group obsessions; any fundamentalist engagement has this kind of potential at its core.
5- Ask others to sharpen the cutting edge you are walking.

That’s for starters. You may notice that this is a recommendation for little insurrections, non-violent of course. You’ll discover how leading your edge is by others’ efforts to dull it. By the time I get finished with this linguistic cleansing I may have the foundations for a movement…of something(s) for someone(s) to somewhere(s).

Finally, some cutting edges which led to world class losers: Edsels, New Orleans flood controls, CDO’s built from sub-primes plus 0% down-payment loans = GFC, non-renewable energy sources plus unlimited consumption plus excess uses = climate change; the extreme management practices of Enron and World Comm; the unsurpassable returns of Storm Financials, the bonuses of financial wizards. What are your favourites?

Appreciations (1) …why appreciate?

Appreciations (1) …why appreciate?
Torrey Orton
May 6, 2009

While this is a new theme for me, it is not new for humanity. Various people have recommended gratitude to us. While approving, I’m not moved by gratitude because of its links to quasi-religious formulas like ‘blessings’. I discovered that there are wonderful things to acknowledge, celebrate, reward by remarking…things which I notice but leave in the innards of my awareness. Often, reporting them makes others feel new interest, insight, desire, awareness, and sustains mine along the way. Building the latter resources is my primary aim here. If I try to write what I appreciate I am forced to get it together in some affecting way which meets my own experience and has a hope of offering that to others. For me, the process is always illuminating in unexpectable ways.

I also undertake this venture because my sceptical side is tuned to the problematic, the doubtful,…which leaves me tending to underestimate the certain, the sure, the light and light-hearted. Conscious countering of this tendency is possible, but I never get much better at automatically reaching for a star rather than the scar. Hopefully, like wearing seatbelts because it’s the law, I’ll get naturalised into appreciation with never a thought of deviating from it as normal.

In another frame, I am a late life convert to story as a way of making and finding meaning. I find myself telling stories to therapy and coaching clients, and using them to structure activities for leadership events. These are usually real stories, not ones I’ve picked up somewhere in the training ether. I don’t do storytelling well unless it arises spontaneously in the work with clients.

I have friends who are really good at this – the kind of good you can get by trying a lot and watching others who’ve been doing something longer and better than oneself. So, this is an emulating initiative for me, too. I’m slow to allow the possibility that someone else has thought of something useful to do and developed it before me (though I know perfectly well that they do so).

Further, this is not an anger driven event (not to preclude the possibility that I’ll also find myself appreciating some matters arising from angers). It came to me in a moment of appreciation, from the perspective of which I noticed I had been appreciating more over recent years. At the moment I can’t remember the original appreciation. Maybe it was a search of Appreciative Inquiry which I was trying to appreciate against the grain of an original exposure some years ago where AI became a cover for being ‘nice’ and not looking at hard things except appreciatively (or so it seemed at the time). Hard things can be appreciated, but they have to be acknowledged first. There goes that problem seeker again.

A recent example of something I appreciated was revisiting sites we have walked and skied for decades after the Victorian Black Saturday fires of early February ‘09. This was a reality shifting event. There’s nothing like seeing the remnants of natural and human landscapes soon after a fire. We’ve done it before at various stages of recovery, but never so close to home and so much of those landscapes ones which we treasured by repeated visits. See next Appreciations for my impressions.

Common Ground and Royal Commission Outcomes Compromised

Common Ground and Royal Commission Outcomes Compromised

Torrey Orton, with assistance from Peter Campbell http://petercampbell.blogspot.com

May 4, 2009

Our times are ones for conviction. They encourage us to be clear, often at the cost of real complexity. We are so loaded with information, and claims on our attention, that it is highly unlikely we will make personal choices rationally. Rather, we will be increasingly likely to rely on our habitual assessment and solution systems. They are what we have easily to hand.

The Victorian Government announcement today that they will commit $200 million to fire prevention, including increased fuel burn-offs, exemplifies this irrationality. It is, in fact, an explicit commitment to irrationality in public processes. The budget is the excuse but pandering to electorate slivers is the reason. These slivers contain pre-digested Commission outcomes, announced in the public campaigns to indict others (Greens in particular) for fuel reduction failures. The science on fuel contribution to fire intensity and speed is at worst conflicted.

All this somewhat knackers my enterprise here. The Government is already implicitly accepting an interested argument over the deliberations of a cast of thousands. It proves the prescience of some of what follows (written before the $200 million deluge) and does not disprove the truth of the attached propositions; just renders them prematurely enfeebled. So it is with the non-political. I should have listened to Doug Cameron’s (then a union official on the rise) warning 20 years ago at an IR event I lectured in: “Everything is political” or words to that effect. I continue because this natural characteristic of human systems is long-term dysfunctional for our times.

Thinking habits

The forces which sustain this system apply most clearly to choices about life and death matters like personal safety from bushfires. We all come to any adult experience with a wealth of existing judgments and supporting evidence(s) for them. These make up our foundational intellectual infrastructure contents. They have the character of change-resistant physical habits. They constitute a predisposed blame architecture. They also have some truth status, usually sustained by like-minded believers. In this they are a predisposed solution system (though not always to the problems of the present).

Stress and simple-mindedness

The flexibility and adaptability of our intellectual infrastructures (at personal and group levels) are severely strained by the ‘reach’ they are forced to make to grasp the world(s) we are addressing or engaging. The greater our distance from tangible and testable facts the more simplistic our grasp of reality. This is by brain system default not by personal defect of aspiration or engagement technique.

Distance makes the mind grow fainter which, under stress, strengthens it slight grasp with intensity – that is a move towards the fundamentalist attitude in a deep sense. This is not a religious matter but it produces socio-psychological climates for religious-like thinking and behaviour across all domains of human activity.

I say this not to disparage or discourage but to acknowledge the realities of the influence challenges which confront the Commission. And, similar will continue to confront us whatever they manage to salvage from their betrayal by the Government. Damage to the credibility of public discourse / debate is the greatest loss, not personal affront.

Change resistance

Another force cutting against development of common ground(s) may be the deep commitment of existing power holders of all sorts to any opening which could facilitate others getting a piece of their action. Cultures have disappeared behind the smoke of such conflagrations. When common ground is lost conflagration or freezing is the result; fire or ice, both are nice for endings.

We know that judgment depends on fundamental values and perspectives (theories) which are very change resistant. We can see the struggle among competing ‘theories’ occurring daily between, climate changers and deniers (sceptics are a related bunch which I belong to temperamentally), between free marketers and state interventionists (neolibs and Keynesians?), between one culture and another. These struggles are conducted by adversarial means whose aim is winning, not the truth. ‘Facts’ become the ammunition of argument. The objective is a consummate union of souls around shared god(s). Therefore, finding common facts is doubtful.

Yet, this is a time when some truth, some reliability of perception and judgment, is necessary.
So, it is a critical task for the Commission to find or create common ground in facts and constructs and values from which may arise shared beliefs and opinions out of which may emerge shareable judgments.

Common ground

There are some compelling examples of common ground shared on some of the topics under consideration by the Royal Commissions.

One example is the protection of native forests in our reserve system – especially old growth forests and water catchments. Broadly, there is consensus across the logging industry, government, and conservation organisations on the general principle of protecting biodiversity, our natural heritage and the aesthetic appeal / value of such forests. However, there are significant differences about the quantity and locations of forests that require protection. The logging and woodchip industries argue that enough forest is already protected in reserves; the Victorian Government is still in the progress of adding some small areas to the reserve system; and conservation groups are asking for several more forests to be protected. There are also some significant differences on the appropriate management regimes for native forests.

Another example of common ground is the necessity and desirability of volunteer contributions to bushfire prevention and response measures. Tensions between professional and volunteer service provision do not stand on disregard for the latter but discussable boundaries of competence and capability distributed across the broad face of fire prone Victoria.

The Commission, and others doing similar work, could benefit from identifying the expected, or more powerfully, the achieved common grounds when reporting their work outcomes. It would give them credibility and us hope.