Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear

Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear
Torrey Orton
Oct. 31, 2011


A reader wondered how I could "threaten to threaten"* someone – in that case, threaten a protestor that I might seriously threaten him and his accomplices for their harassment of patients. That is, that I would take aggressive action to injure them in some way (not physically). The actual objective would be to shame them in the theatre of their choice for shaming others. A brief discussion about the situation with a verbally facile buddy delivered a string of punch lines, advertising hording material and such in 3 minutes, so I know it's doable.


"Threaten to threaten" goes like this:

• Decide, preferably with the other, what our mutual expectations are for a specific activity.
• Establish to myself that potentially serious shortfalls in their performance seem to be happening
• Formulate appropriate step(s) I might take to sanction them for breaking our agreement(s)
• Invite them to discuss how we are doing with our mutual undertakings
• Have this discussion in private; if necessary, out of sight and hearing of others with an interest but not a stake in your relationship
• Make clear that what I am about to say is a threat to threaten more seriously at a later time if things do not change in the specific matters of concern to me.
• Conditionally offer an actual threat I might use ( if you / then I type of formulation)
• Note their non-verbal reaction to the threat – are they shocked, etc.
• Check it is clear to the them
• Check their perception of the appropriateness, intensity, focus, etc. of the threat.
• Invite them to consider changing their performance….Consider changing my threat.
  
   

The next step would be an announcement that the threat is about to be executed, if they fail to respond appropriately. Then, do it.

 People often wonder why others don't take them seriously in everyday life interchanges, especially in pursuit or defence of their own interests. All too often this, on examination, is because they have not been clear about their expectations / needs with those others. Being clear is not easy, especially under pressure. Both sender and receiver, to use an old, simplistic but resiliently tenacious image, are likely to have their communication machinery befuddled.


There are at least four virtues of the "threaten to threaten" tactic:

One, the ethical part of this is not dropping a surprise punishment on someone which they might have escaped if they knew one was coming for certain behaviour(s). This virtue is the private version of the management principal that leaders are morally obliged to warn their staff of dangers arising for them from contextual factors they could not know or guess by themselves – an impending buyout, default, bankruptcy, catastrophic technology or market developments, etc.

 

Two, the threatened threat may elicit the other's perception of our needs, our shared circumstances, or their needs, which may change the understanding of the total context. In other words a challenging event may increase our understanding of the realities we are in, if we engage it in a challenging way, out of the heart of our needs.

 

Three, threatening to threaten shows that we can act with effective restraint in strong ways without blowing things up irreparably, that we can act with strength and focus in appropriately modulated ways. Perceived self-control may increase the potential for negotiating difficult matters. Threatening to threaten demonstrates such control, as do other tactics like self-disclosure, and self-rebuke.

 

Four, the first three above may deepen and humanise the relationship in question.

*I learned this tactic 20 years ago on the negotiation training ground of Effective Negotiation Services. The basic influencing idea is do not threaten if you do not mean it. A fake threat is worse than no threat, especially when it establishes your bottom line or walk away position so the other party knows that an end game is approaching and can better gauge their need to win at all costs. If your 'Don't tread on me' point turns out to be posturing, expect to be counter-postured into even greater losses.

Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled

Appreciations (10) – Just walk on by…motives (un)fulfilled.

Torrey Orton

August 26, 2009

I went out this morning at 7:15 to pull some weeds in the lawn. They are egregiously big things which shade the resilient grasses into nothingness after a month's growth. It's not like I just noticed them today. I've noticed them for a month, having decimated their tribe a few months ago with a heavy session of pulling, root and branch. The act is a wonderfully refreshing test of hand /wrist strength and a certain tenacity in the face of roots natural resistance to eradication. The branches fail easily which actually defends the roots from my efforts. Mostly I win.

For the effort, I got not only death to the weeds but also this boy's delight of dirty hands and nails needing themselves a serious brushing to return to sociability. If only I remembered this collateral effect I love I might more often grab the offenders early in their life-cycle and so eradicate rather than just interrupt their progress. There are a bunch of similar activities which I almost always like doing and enjoy the after-feel of. Among them are: aikido technique practice, cutting the grass by hand, skiing (cross country and downhill), and bushwalking with a stiff climb in it. Daily stuff like dishwashing holds a similar place in my life.

From motivation to motion

This brings me to the point of this appreciation: what a fine turn of awareness into intent it often is that brings something from the edge of possibility to the range of probability and then into an undertaken and completed task. The possibility-probability transition seems to be the longest for many highly discretionary tasks.

For instance: I can let a weed go for months, reminded more or less daily when I look out the door; the box(s) of empty wine bottles on the way to neighbour Etty for recycling move a bit more briskly. Ironing is somewhere in between the weeds and the recycled. If there's too little or too much time, I avoid with reluctant energy. Mostly, I do this by forgetting, which is irritating when I remember that I had an hour here of there over the week languishing for a utility to be fulfilled. I 'used' it on snoozes or another modest editorial foray from the world's presses.

A case of aikido interrupted

This is all a bit to do with subtleties of my motivation. For example, I decided last night I would practice my aikido technique this morning. I only do this early, before eating. I did not get there today. Here are the checkpoints along the way to the trip I did not take (this failed intention occurs about once a week, with one or two successes, too). I've counted 11 potential disconnect points along the road – always there for every trip, hence perfectly envisageable when I don't take it.

1. The alarm
   
2. Getting up
   
3. Go to bathroom
   
4. Dressing
   
5. Picking up jo and sweatband
   
6. Going out
   
7. Walking to park (3 mins)
   
8. Warm-up 90 seconds
   
9. 21 kata each repeated 5 times (25 mins)
   
10. 31 kata sequence repeated 1-3 times (3-5 mins)
    
11. Walking home (5 mins)

A feature of these potential disconnect points is that they require transitions of time, space and mind to accomplish them. Every transition contains at least the moments William Bridges (and Kurt Lewin before him with unfreeze / change / refreeze) popularised three decades ago:
Endings, Neutral Zone, New Beginnings. Each of the 11 change points in my aikido practice is a transition. Therefore, there's a big opportunity for distraction or spontaneous variation (home of insight, creation and their friends).

…building blocks of life

One of the points of aikido practice is to make excellent moves routine. This requires constant attention to perfect form, followed by the assumption that perfect form cannot be achieved; it can only be maintained with vigilance (hear an obsession coming on?). My interest here is not myself, but the exploration of the delicacies of distraction, interruption, and creation which surround the engagement with established or establishing routines – the building blocks of life.

Self in the way of action

In general, there are a number of struggle themes / patterns around these distraction opportunity points. These include the struggle with my disengaged, distant relationship style (dismissive avoidant?), my strong inclination to large picture concepts and abstraction (INTP), my do-nothing reflective/contemplative self, and my worrier approach to work performance. Recently, I've been very interruptable by ideas for writing. I often get stuck in writing an article and then I suddenly see my way into and through it at odd times. These are notably ones when I'm doing something active, but measured – bushwalking, aikido, weed pulling, etc. Gross muscle activities seem good for thinking without intending to.

All of this applies to my vocational cores as well – the various helping/thinking/creating things that are me without my choice. But, some of the maintenance tasks (keeping case notes, organising data files) around them are more discretionary than driven. Therein is one of my motivational outs. Back to walking by things like weeds. Walking by seems more likely to occur the more transitions there are in our lives. Transitions often offer a promise of change, difference, and may provide instead breakage and fragmentation of our continuities.

The virtue of trying

And herewith is one of the implications, so far, of this walk into domesticity. For me, to keep trying is critical in doing new things. Aikido and writing are the most recent additions to my daily life. Not that I do them daily, but they are in my mind, I am working them to varying degrees. So, while I often fail to get up, or to get going once up, I almost never fail to catch an idea, and will even put Aikido second for that. It's the trying that counts, as long as I am trying about something that matters.

It seems to me the common perception that goals and objectives are the way to change / improvement is largely hollow. The hollow part is where the fundamental motivation – the motivation by vocation or value(s) – is missing. It cannot be replaced by short-term goals and performances, unless these are understood as practice for the real thing.

Getting good at trying is one thing I need to learn to teach others, while keeping in my own view the vision and practice of adequate trying myself. Much of the self-focussed reverie above begins specification of the internal and external contexts which need to be identified and engaged to increase motivated change – the direction for our trying.

Rectifications (7) – ‘Make a difference…’ ….‘Give back…’

Rectifications (7) – ‘Make a difference…’ ….‘Give back…’

Torrey Orton
April 22, 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.

‘Make a difference…’ is what we say when we mean that whatever we’ve been doing until the moment of speaking has not been making a difference; that we’ve been contributing negatively to the human condition? Is this what all the job adverts mean if they don’t involve ’making a difference..’, if they don’t promise that you can ‘make a difference..’ by working with us, our clients / customers??

I got about 75, 000,000 Google hits for the expression, with involvements in every domain of human life and specialties like the Make a Difference movie. I just can’t help thinking about all the lives which, presumably, are not making a difference. They’re just getting on with living in various forms, which makes humanity continue. I guess they are not making progress or making things better or something. Being one who has always struggled to find what difference was worth making, I find it hard to join this parade. And I can’t also help thinking of the gratuitous exclusion from virtue of those who have no access to such opportunities!!

In fact, I’m inclined to sneer a bit about making a difference. This inclination is strengthened when I remember that ‘Make a difference..’ reminds me of its cousin ‘Give back…’ (146 million hits, amongst which some organisations I support like Environment Victoria with Gifts that Give Back). From its viewpoint I’ve been robbing you quietly all these years. Am I now going to make amends for damages which you never noticed I was doing, either directly or indirectly, by being associated with destructive products, process and payments???

Does the return of unprincipled and unearned bonuses constitute an example of giving back? How would we know when a claimed example of giving back actually amounted to enough of whatever it is that was withheld or stolen in the first place to recompense the victims? For example, Bill Gates is lionised for giving back immensely – his whole fortune, more or less – by doing which he gets to play god with the lives of masses he chooses to help on topics he decides are most important. And have the consumers gotten back the outsized results of his de facto monopoly?

Similarly, but from the product side of the make a difference equation, there are products which make or sustain their appeals to buyers on the back of making differences of highly ambiguous sorts. The alcohols which support sports events / organisations come to mind. I suspect there’s a pile of cultural studies books on variations of this theme among certain clothing manufacturers and styles, cars, and on and on. Probably someone’s done the work. Let me know if you know who and where.

These may be also more or less making a difference by giving back?? Two-faced contributors to NGO’s now come to mind. ,,, and how about the energy companies spruiking new energy orientations while sustaining old energy profits (an unavoidable conflict of interest for an existing industry seeking to respond to market or other changes??).

I think all this (my anger / irritation) has to do with the stripping of the moral fibre of late capitalism to its thinnest. What’s left are pretensions to it – a moral fibre – which keep us aware of our awareness that there’s little left to aspire to in our world but things. Other reminders include CSR, the new one – ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues, pleas for greedless leading, disparaging of excesses and denials that there’s any role for anyone in anyone else’s use of their choices as long as they do no harm to others (harm calculated as something like shooting rather than spiritual dismemberment). I rave on without making a difference.…

Thanks to Brassie and Hamid’s complaints about my lack of channels for anger a few weeks back, I’m going to provide some channels for making a difference here. What you can do to make a difference wherever you are now is:
1- Do your job right and well – whatever you have to do to live
2- Do the right job well – something you care about and make a living
3- See to it your organisation does its job well and right
4- Discourage yourself and others from consuming the results of wrong and badly done jobs – scams, frauds, discretionary misrepresentations ( the most widely spread chicanery in human worlds) in ‘normal’ commercial endeavours – that is, omission of important consumer information which is not required by law. Complain where you find these hidden, preferably by naming and shaming.
5- Encourage others to join the difference you are making.

That’s for starters. You may notice that this is merely a recommendation to bring basic virtues back into the everyday.