Relativities (1)…following a path you can’t see

Torrey Orton

December 5, 2013

When looking where you are going is misleading

Telling direction by sun reckoning

We were out bushwalking a known path which became more and more uncertain as we ambled along uphill within decreasing earshot of the lightly gurgling rapids of Olinda Falls. The path had been much clearer two years ago when we walked into an ant colony territorial scouting party thereabouts in spring. I was sure we were on the right one (mapped in the walk book we were carrying), but Jane was not. And I understood her doubt. Many parts of our passage were unrecognisably the passage of before.

What grounded my certainty this time was direction. I knew from the previous walks, and the map, that we had to be heading north-westerly and we were. The sun told me we were actually doing so. It was assisted by the fading stream gurgles to our right and down 50 meters or so, which positioned the map in the place we actually were walking.

The sun has noticeably more consistency in its shifting daily passages than the flora on a bush trail year to year. This consistency does a reasonable job of being the truth for that setting. That is we can safely proceed with life as if it were true, and behaviourally we treat it as really true – that is, we act on it. For this practical purpose it is and was certainly true. Sure that certainty is only as good as this walk, though generally within our life spans the broad contours of maps do not change too much, climate catastrophes so far notwithstanding.  The sun is even more likely to endure for our reconnoitring purposes.

Plato’s cave

Plato probably knew about this level of certainty, but demanded, as philosophers do, something a little more reliable, more certain, more definite and picked up on the idea that an idea has a longer life than any particular sunray…though not than the sun, perhaps.

Those who have only lived in either the northern or southern hemisphere believe that the sun always runs in the same part of the sky characteristic of northern and southern exposures. They have to be told vigorously to check their natural directional guessing when changing hemisphere…somewhat as right side drivers have to be told vigorously to check their natural look to the left before crossing a road, and vice-versa for left siders. Of course, the sun is running in the same place, it’s only our perspective that makes it not look so.

 

Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.

Learning to act right (4)… a dilemma of ethics.
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010


"The hole in the system's heart", Malcolm Maiden says, is the unaddressed ethical issue in the analysis of the GFC. It cannot be addressed simply by "reregulation" he notes, quoting UNSW law professor Justin O'Brien. On the same day in the Financial Review (pg 62), Peter Wilson, President of AHRI, reviews the latest moves in CorporateSocialResponsibility – the re-engineering of the old MV&V (mission vision and values) and TBL (triple bottom line) "mantras" into separate business results objectives and "core internal values"...as if being "core" and "internal" makes the values any more resistant to the corrosive effects of mis- or unmanaged conflicts which occur naturally.


Wilson hopes this will revitalise ethics in the workplace and markets. I doubt the same was said about MV&V two decades ago when its consultant-pushed run began, following on decades earlier tools like MBO (managing by objectives). The research on strategy is clear that having one doesn't mean acting strategically. How can "core values" be anything without sound underlying ethical principles and practices??? Similar plaints dot the comment pages of major papers and websites across the Anglosphere.


Virtues always entail vices


I suspect that what condemns us to endless returns to these concerns, that we do not get much better at the issues except over generational lead times, is that many virtues underpinning organisational effectiveness are a bit suss for registration among the ten commandments and other sources of our ethical wherewithal. These virtues include decisiveness and action taking, driven by focus with obsessiveness.


A noticeable characteristic of these virtues is that only one side of them is lauded, while the collaterals are left unspoken. Simply, action means doing something and not another thing. In this movement people, places and purposes are often damaged – a cost we must endure to live, entailing a responsibility we fear to take. See Up in the air for a bone grating evocation of this split personality which is our late modern culture.


A story that might have been…


Here should be a story which a colleague in another hemisphere told me. I cannot present it because it gives a glimpse inside complexities of trying to act right, where making the effort may be damaging to those we're trying to do right by!! Telling the story of this itself offers a likely fall into the same danger, taking with us others who might be tainted by implication while themselves caught in the same systemic dysfunctions as the exemplary story portrays.


This is a practical dilemma of ethics learning: to learn we need real practice, and much real practice is itself in domains so touchy and entangling that their public discussion in real cases is marginally to maximally unethical. To do so, to discuss publicly could embroil participants in recriminations or revenges, moderated by claims of unfairly, untruthfully, in fact scurrilously, disclosing their compliance or collusion with bad actors and systems!!


This is more than a theoretical observation, much as I'm inclined to the latter. I pre-posted this now archived article to him as the last step before blogging it. A quick response refused permission to post with no exceptions because of the turmoil, systemic and personal, which could ensue. Worst among the possible results would be the unveiling of others caught in their own version of our dilemma while still under the institutional care and guidance of their peers and structural betters! Some are still there. The whistleblowers' dilemma!


Doing the right thing may unavoidably produce conflicting results – collateral damage as the military expresses it. While others may seldom die from our well placed shots at ethical complications, for those of us of thinly guarded sensibilities, an implicit disparagement feels like a death sentence socially. This appreciation lowers the likelihood of taking the risk of exposure in the first place…and the field for ethical innovation is enclosed a little more.

Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Torrey Orton – June 29, 2009

“It’s about trying to find out what it’s all about – life that is – without sounding like a generation-X navel gazer. Is this possible?” This is Sarah Wilson, THE AGE Sunday Life‘s new A Better Life columnist, (June 28, 2009 pg. 6) blurb for her new column. I suspect that she may succeed in finding something life is about but not what it is. Her initial steps in the first column provide a skate around a variety of ‘about’ sources - pop-cultural with handles of deep culture (Asian religious terms, get-a-life coaching mantras and such). That’s her method for finding out I guess.

There’s a market for everything, and everything relentlessly is found by a marketer and transformed into product. I’m sounding bitchy to myself and I want to be clear it doesn’t derive so much from this example. It’s just the one which punched the following button. In the discourse of our public figures “it’s all about…’ is among the commonest sound bites to be had. In those cases, particularly the political speakers, the territory covered by ‘about’ is exactly what saying ‘it’s all about…’ cannot cover.

For example, our Premier, John Brumby, on the latest effort to deflect accountability for public transport by changing the guard without changing the task: it’s about serving the public, the community, which is just not what we the public think they are doing. We do not think so because the government traipses these platitudes (see organisational values below) around with decreasing public accountability, responsiveness or effectiveness in the performance the platitude addresses – transport in this case. Try planning for another.

What is it?
By linguistic nature, what something is about is not what it is. If it really is about something, then what that is is the matter of interest. The ‘about’ part is speculative, aspirational, at best, hopeful. It’s nice to know that the speaker has an aspiration, a hope, but not to know that that’s all they have.

In common usage, for example, we are asked ‘what was the film about?’ We answer it’s about crime, or love, or destinies… And our questioner, if interested in the leading line will ask something about what happens, the story. That’s what it is.

For pollies and CEO’s to ‘about’ things is to attempt a dog-whistle appropriate to their intended listeners – the public or shareholders or bankers. The result of effective aiming is the listeners don’t ask for more because they know what the story is supposed to be. They are playing a historical tune in peoples’ minds.

About values
Our leaders, for instance, say of their organisational values ‘we are about inclusion, transparency’, etc. (they all use a selection from a list of 10 or 12 I guess, for which they’ve originally paid Mckinsey and would-be’s $5K/day for top level consulting inputs, and now everyone can borrow them at the price reduction which comes from market penetration and copycat consulting). This can be found across the full organisational spectrum now.

To the extent such terms are proposed as a leader’s aspiration, they are already twice debased. Once by being potted priorities, and twice by being repeatedly proven (within the science accepted by such leaders – business effectiveness) to be unimplementable, or badly implemented, faultily understood, non-transerable and so on.

Take action
So, what to do? Try this: suppress your next use of ‘it’s all about’. Do it in normal conversation where the habit lies entrenched in standard usage. When you’ve done that 4 or 5 times you may discover that you have developed a capacity for saying what things are or are not. Often the missing material can be supplied be telling someone what struck you, what effect the performance, discussion, activity had on you. This will be the beginning of a short story which others can join through their stories of similar things. It’s for making the world closer to us and us to each other as a result. What it’s about is relationship.

Rectifications (5) – ‘The research shows…’

Rectifications (5) – ‘The research shows…’
Torrey Orton
March 30, 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.

“The research shows...” appears in the everyday press and television (especially in the late night spruiking of face cleansers and miracle waters by the material and spiritual religionistas) as if it were an intellectual celebrity guarantee of the sanctity of the product offer. Its partner, research’s that is, is ‘evidence-based’ in the scientistic communities of health, education…in fact, in every domain of the everyday. I can hardly speak without citing, or referring to the possibility of citing, some evidence for whatever proposition I’m offering.

The research shows that evidence-based nutritional regimes have changed regularly (5 year cycle?) over the last half century, probably circling back around themselves a few times. Consider the virtues of wine or meats, red and white, or vegies white or coloured…. Or, how can I be sure that the end of various things is coming or not - peak oil, peak ice, peak GFC, trough food, jobs…?? Uncertainty is certainly the tune of our days (except for those in denial or, even more exceptionally, those in disengagement).

So where do they all (including my professional association and many others) get off with their claims to showing things with research? If I’m right in the preceding para’s (for which a booklength argument would be required, but…) research has become a marketing event. We do know this and discount it except where it matters as with the Big 5 (fluids, finance, food, climate…). Most of us are technically ignorant about these sorts of things, except as consumers, and we do know this, too. Hence the growing public doubt about claims by anyone about anything’s veracity, certainty, likelihood.

All of which contributes to a currently destructive dilemma: truth is a social construct out of shared experience. The possibility (and hope) of truth underlies the sharing of experience. But our experience is increasingly unshared and unshareable, except the burgeoning of virtual shares from which so much is hoped. Our memberships and identities, which underpin shared experience, are collapsing under the weight of tumultuous global disorders.

This collapse is aggravated by the fact that we cannot even grasp, not to say arrange, the ‘facts’ of our experiences. So, we are left to scrabble among the claims and claimants to our hopeless expectations to understand our world(s). It is not surprising that someone’s researches show that the fastest growing social entities are also often fundamentalist ones. This is an effect of excessive and unremediated doubt – the loss of our cultural potential to learn when we need it most.

So, in the small world of my work I use ‘objective’ to describe aspects of therapy clients’ worlds which they count on to some extent. Many find it a reassuring concept because their worlds are tumultuously disordered by the very factors which research is supposed to reassure us about but no longer can. The ‘objective’ contents, the facts, are things we agree on together (the clients and I). The process of agreeing is captured in the expressing of a perception about the outer world, including that one between us, grounded in facts which we can discussably accept as such. Much of the return of balance in ones disturbed world can be achieved simply by co-definition of its attributes, characteristics, etc. This is not a problem of diseased minds.

Confidence amid calamity

Confidence amid calamity
Torrey Orton
170109

Confidence is a creature of capability and competence. Reading John Hewson (AFR 160109 – “Blind leading the blind”) and a plethora of other economic commentators, we could believe the reverse is the case: that confidence is the creator of competence. If only we could print it like money, then we could recover from our economic calamities. It is the dark energy in most commentators’, observers’ and bloggers’ understanding of our times.

Hewson finishes excoriating the economics crowd by asserting that “Economists are not really good at saying exactly what will make that happen.” - the confidence that is (while implicitly counting himself among them by not counting himself out). There’s a good reason for his judgment: because you can’t get there from here soon enough. Confidence is not a product nor is it an outcome. It’s a platform or a precursor to outcomes, which can be increased by success (especially against odds and difficulties). Confidence is, in brief, a mix of material predictability (the capacity to make ‘things’ happen) and intentional community (the desire to do it together).

The false confidence based on material predictability alone we’ve seen a lot in modern times. And some would argue that the dominant tendency to seek outcomes for self over others in the last few decades has eroded the will to community (and distorted the relationships though which the will could be expressed). If we seek confidence about and from the economy alone, as economists tend to, we cannot get the whole thing.

Self-esteem, happiness and other emotional assessments like confidence cannot be created by direct instruction. We cannot achieve them by trying to be them. We can only achieve them by living. Put another way, confidence and self-esteem and happiness, etc.) can only be had by successful learning and doing. These emotions tell us how we are doing along the way; they are not the doing itself. When we are doing OK, the feelings support our next steps into new learnings (unknown settings, new tasks, etc.).

Back to our calamitous times. In the short term (1-5 years, say), what can we do to re-create confidence? A starting place is to tell the truth of our declining confidence. First, it is increasingly unlikely we can have, or hope for, predictability in material matters. The world of material certainties is fading around us as a (perfect) storm of personally uncontrollable forces assail us. Not merely is it the economy stupid. It’s also the climate and the fluids (fuels and waters), the food and the pervasive speed of movement of them all., plus a gathering of insights and innovations which mark the growing edges of the sciences.

Second, we are engaging these forces from a weakened position in our fragmented relationships. And these weaknesses will be enhanced by the times which are the reasons for our worries in the first place. Making the effort for the longer term will be even more important as each day of its decline passes.

This, telling the truth, is something our leaders (especially, but not only, political) seem uniformly unable to do. One commentator (see Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday Jan. 11, ‘09 ) suggests that even those leaders who display occasional truth-telling tendencies (often appearing in unguarded ‘mis-spokes’ quickly reversed in appalling tangled circumlocutions prefaced with first name addressing of the interviewer and .. “Look,…”) are caught in a situational Catch 22: if they said they did not know what to do at this time, they would be turfed out and maybe the people would feel bad and hopeless. But the research on credibility shows the masses don’t believe them anyway, so I’m not sure who would be surprised. The exception is the credibility of perceived intentions or character of leaders for religious believers – even in the face of evidently incompetent pursuit of those intentions with flawed character. That is a kind of confidence.
I look forward to the first public utterance of these two truths by any government or corporate leader (commentators and not-for-profit leaders already do).