The fights we have to have!

The fights we have to have!

Torrey Orton

November 25, 2009

Three posts ago, I was worrying about facts we cannot easily have – independent, neutrally sourced and, therefore, compellingly convincing ones. In our times, the drives for such differentiating substance in our preferred arguments become more profound with each passing day. In tandem, the counter-pressures multiply – spin, playing the man, falsifying, lying. This is summed neatly in the present dilemma of climate change – a 'proven' event whose proof is constantly under duress, especially about its provability.

While the simple answer to doubters / deniers / sceptics is that the accepted risk of inaction is better than 50% and so action is unarguably demanded, this even does not suffice to quiet their multiplying fears of taking action. We are, I expect, on the edge of a plunge into increasingly violent disputation of the competing claims in this area among others.

The evidence for this is increasing rates and types of fragmentation of public organisations and institutions. In Australia this appears daily in two political activities: those of the governments and those of their oppositions. In the states, the oppositions are almost non-existent, and in many cases are riven with internal disputes. These are played out on the national stage most dramatically in the Coalition's floundering about climate change. Characteristic of the decline of the normal institutions of policy debate and delivery is the rise of fringe - right or left side – players, both personal and organisational.

The "death panels" debacle in the US healthcare struggle is examined in detail as a case of the fake news getting irretrievably out of the hands of the real news dealers – the media. It and struggles about the causes and responses to the GFC are two other highly disputed domains of public discourse. Throw in the war on terror and we have a plethora of too slippery to touch dilemmas. All that's left is the clatter of competing beliefs, and troops lining up to get into a fight (e.g. the Tea Party players in the same healthcare debate).
A similar tone exists across waters in the UK - "The debate over climate change is becoming more vitriolic by the week." Financial Times Editorial 24/11/09.

How can we learn when we think wrongly ?

"....when two experts are offering diametrically opposed views about the same subject, at least one of them has to be wrong." Michael Coulter in The AGE Nov. 1,'09. This is a model of digital, black & white thinking. For the major issues of our times multi-dimensional, continuous variable thinking is a minimum starting place. However, the above pressures and drives promote the opposite. They encourage us to make one of them be wrong to sustain our beleaguered simplicities.

An additional problem is that most of those charged with assuring our future(s) are only capable of thinking about our world through from paradigms and perspectives they learned (if at all) more than twenty years ago. These paradigms were themselves the products of the mid-thirties to mid-sixties, and can only be wielded as one edged swords in combats for which flails would be more appropriate weapons. In turn, the stress of life and the idea marketplace force those ideas to be simplified to variations of either/or when to varying degrees both/and is more suitable.

These two factors – need for simplification and shortage of conceptual complexity – yield the economic 'debates' in Australia (and US, UK, and …) which centre around a couple of concepts from Adam Smith (choice and market) and some monetarist adjustments of the last 50 years.

Here, by contrast, Robert Skidelsky tries to make sense of the struggle for dominance in explanations of the GFC.

.... "In my view, Keynes' major contribution to economic theory was to emphasize the "extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made". The fact of their ignorance forces investors to fall back on conventions, the most important being that the present will continue into the future, that existing share prices sum up future prospects, and that if most people believe something, they must be right.

This makes for stability in markets as long as the conventions hold, but they can be overturned in the face of bad news, because "there is no firm basis of conviction to hold them steady".

Tipping or chaos?

In essence, this is what happened last year, and is where we are in our various struggles now. What we can predict from that is hard to know. We are in the region of tipping points (Gladwell, 2000) or chaos points (Ervin Laszlo, 2006) which I want to characterize as long term trends punctuated by short-term excitements of their environments. These, in retrospect, look like the expected tipping / chaos points of the theories.

This is also the region to which our accrued knowledge of life threats – the deep schemas and behaviour patterns (read habits) for defending ourselves from potentially terminal events – is oriented. The most important of these for humans are not the ones poppsychs endlessly berate as the old brain, and evolutionary outmodes which block better relating, communicating, decision-making…on and on.

What we are blocked by are real fears based on long term of threats to our viability. These, appropriately, push us towards powerful actions and fights we have to have. I fear we are daily closer as the world we know is irretrievably splintered by uncrossable gulfs of mutual ignorance.

What to do? I can only hope that seeing is a step towards doing. I believe that this can often be the case, but big numbers make it likely to be a bumpy passage. This gulf can be as big as realising that a published writer on challenges for our times includes only one item I have on my list of challenges! And he's at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. If we do not agree on the problems we'll surely have trouble with the facts.

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Torrey Orton

November 19, 2009

So the Oz coal industry is not spending its governmental freebies for "clean coal" development research and commercialisation. Almost no-one with industry awareness, except the industry mouthpiece Australian Coal Association, thinks they are even trying. How can this be so? There's a host of factors, one of which I want to enlarge a bit. It is the natural entropic forces in organisations, specifically the multiple creature comforts of present arrangements, especially for large and deeply embedded organisations, of which coal is one. Ties that bind.

Try the American automobile industry for another – with decades of encouragement to build useful and energy efficient cars, they've done little, even in the face of dramatic innovativeness from their close worst enemy, Toyota. Their leaders rode to a Congressional hearing on their futures in private planes at the edge of the great downturn. Didn't they know? Obviously never thought about it. Ties that bind.

A micro lesson on resistance

A lesson I learned a while back in executive coaching is that a key development moment for a major shift in coachee approach occurs when he/she doesn't know what to do in a critical workplace relationship. Typically, this is when a personally 'tried and true' approach fails repeatedly with one person or group. The exec is stymied by their own inability to work in a different way. Even high levels of notional motivators like failure to meet objectives, KPI's and similar Taylorist contrivances do not provide the energy and discipline required to change their behaviour. That executives are systemically impervious to disincentives (except in placing their own remuneration pleas) is increasingly acknowledged. Ties that bind.

To do differently – to become effective in the area of agreed ineffectiveness - they would have to learn a new approach. That involves a period of personal vulnerability. This period has two main steps: acknowledgment of the specific incompetence and learning the new one. Resistance flowers in the uncertainty (and implicit loss of face) that accompanies the acknowledgment of incompetence and then flourishes in the anxiety of learning new behaviour. Ties that bind.

Acknowledge the stymie

The pathway to a solution is simple: acknowledge the stymie. But this usually includes acknowledging a weakness – namely not knowing what to do. Around that dilemma many exec's get stuck in their habitual range of communication competences. Many relationship breakdowns can be tentatively sourced to this failure. I'm not the first person to discover this, so it must be hard to learn. I can only guess that it's too hard to be included in leadership trainings or is on the very hard end of the learning spectrum for such events and so few are pushed to extend themselves into this territory of personal vulnerability. They probably would not get a bonus for trying and might get a career limiting file note for embarrassing the leadership. Ties that bind.

Among many factors, this may be a difficult learn because workplace social system(s) are resistant to change, like families, cultures and major human institutions. The resistance arises from the very functionality that is suspect – traditional ways of doing things. Its source is the tension between the ease of present need fulfilment arrangements and the threats of new ones. Few people go into any form of perceived dark night willingly (and those who do personally – the suiciders / euthanasiers - are vilified for weakness, self-indulgence and disrespect of the god(s)).

An outstanding bind – whistle blowing

We are increasingly in a bind about a number of things. The typical diversity of the responses is on with issues like climate change, health reform, and economic system constraints. Not a few ring appropriate alarm bells on each of these – each a whistle-blower of a sort. Trouble is, we have become inured to the whistle and demonise the blowers, unless they shrill for our ties that bind.

It seems that governance can never catch up with work arounds. Wholly normal and wholly necessary…just who we have to work with. If we can notice our own bindings we may do better speaking to others of theirs.

These are the ties that bind.

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Rectifications (18) – Tragedy is….

Torrey Orton– November 18, 2009

Tragedy is the stuff of everyday life now. It, and its associated feeling grabbers - the "loving family", the "caring" father, mother, family who have been beset be trouble(s) of various types, are our daily companions in the print and virtual press. This irritates me for the usual reason: yet another important word demeaned by overuse.

So, what am I squawking about again! Perhaps I'm lacking a good replacement for it - another term for fully fledged tragic events. I feel that 'tragedy' has lost its power through indiscriminate application. A bit like 'fantastic', 'awesome' and the other denatured exclamations. That's why they have to be reinvented about half generationally I suppose.

To shortcut my rising argument, let's go to an idea of what tragedy may be. It's a bit academic but can be made everyday usable.

"In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":

• The conclusion is catastrophic.
  
• The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable.
  
• It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist.
  
• The protagonist suffers terribly.
  
• The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability.
  
• Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human capacities for learning.
  
• The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral responsibility"
  

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/trag_vsn.html

One typical opportunity for an access of public tragic sentiment is road accidents, especially multi-party, multi-death ones. These are so predictably young men in drug and/or drink assisted excesses with uplifted senses of immortality. Supply your own recent example here. Note that the stereotype is beginning to be breached by the spread of similar behaviour among women of the same age. Binge babes and boys.

Now, such incidents qualify as tragic because they are (1) catastrophic, their outcomes (2) seem inevitable, (3) they definitely are beyond the limits of the participants, (4) the participants suffer terribly for more or less time and (5) the suffering seems disproportionate to the drivers' mistakes.

However, they fail to qualify as tragic on the remaining two criteria. (6) The suffering seldom seems redemptive; no one seems to learn from it. The young continue to prove themselves vulnerable to terminal velocities. And, (7) finally, the drivers are often not around to take responsibility for their mistake – so redemption is short-changed once again.

I'm all little inclined to withdraw criterion 5 from the qualification list since the judgment of disproportionate damage to the drivers seems arguable. Anyway, perhaps what we have in the more personal events like driver risks (drink, showing off, and fatigue allatonce) raised to the level of near inevitability are instances of the banalities of youth.

As you see, a modestly close look at what characterises 'tragedy' seems to come out around more than 70% on the side of the present liberal usage. In its worst employ, 'tragedy' is anytime where anything gets hurt in anyway. Many of the everyday "tragedies" meet the better part of the minimal criteria for a tragedy.

We certainly cannot say that someone who falls in the line of a freely undertaken duty died tragically because they were in the line of duty. Police, soldiers, and fire fighters come to mind. Are all large scale death events tragedies? How can tsunami victims and terror victims be equated? If the natural events become signal national historical events like Gallipoli or 9/11 do they automatically qualify without regard to the provenance of the event?

So, where we can we find the real thing? What is a tragic event which fulfils the criteria, especially being an event from which we can learn something? Are we in some now, as a race (the human one I mean!)? GFC, Climate Change, fluid and food declines, for instance? Were historical tragedies recognised in their times?

 

 

 

A Harvard state of mind??

A Harvard state of mind??

Torrey Orton

November 17, 2009

When Harvard surfaces back to back in HIGHER EDUCATION (The Australian Nov. 11, 2009 pg. 28-29) I take notice because I worry about any transfer of American 'solutions' to our very different context. Two academics extol the thinking of current Harvard President Dr. Faust as a model for Australian universities (Macquarie and Melbourne).

fantasyWhat they did not do was present the rest of what she said, nor show any awareness of former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul – How a great university forgot education (2006). He says, "In this book I explain how Harvard and our other great universities lost sight of the essential purpose of undergraduate education." I commend it to your readers along with that of former Dean of Yale Law School Professor Anthony Kronman's Education's End – Why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life (2007).

Between the two they give backgrounds to President Faust's call for renewed vision. They are stories of wounded institutions whose hearts have been victims of the great modern mendacities – the equation of education with technique at the service of present powers. Looking at them (Harvard and its peers) as lights on a hill is a fantasy. They are fighting a similar fight to Schwartz and Armstrong, coming off notionally stronger foundations, though perhaps more corrupted.

The fantasy of the fact

The fantasy of the fact – the evidence is always partly what we need it to be; the other part is theirs!

Torrey Orton

November 9, 2009

The evidence is often partly what we need it to be, unless we are arguing against ourselves. Even then there is a self-fulfilling bias towards our perceived self-interest. So, the facts cannot be determined without a determination of accountabilities. That is, only on very special occasions, or concerning very neutral matters, can the facts by untainted with the interests of the argument. Even academic facts are often disputed in much the same way as ones of public interest. The accountabilities here are the purposes and powers of the contestants, plus their personal needs. So, for example, it is surprising to see a very smart and thoughtful thinker pretend that there are neutral facts in the euthanasia debate. Christopher Pearson would have churches or pro-life groups commission new surveys with "non-emotive language" to ascertain public mood on matters self-terminating. Who could judge "non-emotive" non-emotively?

Thus, much political discourse these days is concerned to shift the accountabilities. Watching our parliamentary process is like watching a collection of fighters with no memory for the sides of issues they have been on and hence no shame about the sides they take over time. The present confected boat people threat is an instance. There is increasingly no other side at all and, hence, decreasingly decisions which are accountable – they are too short term to be effective (see Brian Caldwell in the AGE 021109 on the Federal Government's "education revolution" and time).

We know that ideas come positioned by our natural inclination to prejudge an argument on the back of our perception of its provenance. This may be condensed into useful economic mantra like: "When buying beef in Paris, read the provenance label before judging the visuals before you". This natural inclination is expressed by the pointing out the facts which the other side(s) have avoided, misread, misrepresented or just failed to acquire from the point of view of one's own facts. Such a move, which appears to be neutral, scientific, and balanced, can be just another tactic in the struggle the facts are meant to clarify, expand or conclude.

This is a serious problem for evidence-based, evidence supported or similar practices of various descriptions. It is most obviously a problem in political discourses because they are positioned to defeat the other and at once avoid accountability – the artefacts of a spun world. For other discourses – professional, family, religious – where personal interests are also at stake and accountability cannot be obscured, what constitutes the evidence is disputable for other reasons, too. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them, the picture which gives them meaning by placing them in a worldview. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two other key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. A tipping point can be assumed to occur eventually, like the farmer's rain, but the second, minute and hour of which day in what place and by whose agency cannot.

It seems I am arguing a relativist line. I would, but not as the only line. My concern is that in large scale, complex public policy and action domains, the possibility of shared understanding and commitment is declining with the rising failure of the scientific to convince us. The more science we have the less we can understand. This leaves us in the hands of our leaders and they are tainted in matters of public trusts.

For me at this time my wonder is how we can find or create appropriate common grounds in some of our major life domains – health, education, and the key challenges facing us across them in climate, fuels, foods, finances...