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.

The Rectifications…of names and things (4) – ‘Wake up call…’

The Rectifications…of names and things (4) – ‘Wake up call…’
Torrey Orton
March 20, 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 most recent Dances with Difference (4) post.

“Wake up call...” We have them just about everywhere, yet few who are not awake seem to be getting more awake. So, why keep using this useless phrase. It is not influential, but once again, like other expressions I’ve rectified, saying it seems to be doing it (waking others up) for the unrepentant users. I keep thinking they’ll wake up to themselves, but they don’t. That’s a kind of sleepiness on my part, isn’t it.

Wherein lies the story of keeping asleep while appearing awake. The core point here is that most of us go about most of our lives asleep waking – that is, on autopilot much of the day, with occasional spurts of focussed consciousness when autopilot ploughs us into an unseen hill of reality. They needn’t be big but they must be sharp enough to permeate our sleepy hides. See David Brooks' effort to do this here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/opinion/20brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion.


It is no bad thing to be on autopilot, as long as the DEW line of our awareness is sufficiently powered to sense the impending. The older we are the more likely we are to be on autopilot. It is our gathered history of proven effectiveness expressing itself in workable solutions to most of living. The younger we are the more attention we have to pay, so young people must be more energetic than the old, and nature made such. This is because they are ignorant and incompetent in many ways, so much so that they prefer the discovery of that ignorance and its associated joys and pains to benefitting from our experience.

Many of our important habits, those of thought the most so, depend on human history for their foundations, core structures and images. We mostly, young and old, think through the past. Watch current reflections by quite smart people on the GFC, among other wake up calls not well answered. For example, there you will find arguments mostly couched in Adam Smith’s 250 year old theses selectively recalled to fill gaps in understanding with apparent authority. See Amartya Sen’s recent view of Smith for a counterpoint.

Like all habits, their serviceability is confirmed by their resistance to change, especially big changes. They have seen it all before. To be experienced, what’s new has to be very brightly lit and sound-staged to get through the perceptual filters of habits. And in our times more than some, we have had a constant assault on the competence of socially constructed reason – the sciences and technologies founding our world now.
This assault ranges from the struggle to make Darwin god or God darwin, to the rapid changes of ‘the research shows’ about diet, hearts, reading scores, the weather, …nearly ad infinitum. Counter evidence to the goodness of our economy also appears persistently – the fat epidemics, the greed epidemics, the extreme everything compulsions of the young, the increasing speeds of everything and the underlying denial of accountability for all these things by those who are supposed to protect and support us.

The effect of the destruction of scientific credibility for the public is to reduce the range and substance of the experiential ‘hills’ our auto-pilot missteps encounter. So the wake ups get louder, raucous, cacophonous … turning into noise which is uninterpretable. We know this produces its own defense by turning off the reception machinery and demonising the callers.

This is not a dream we can wake up to. It’s time for those in power of all sorts to start truth-telling and stop inviting others to wake up by calling from a distance and sending messages to anyones.