Violence and violations – making sense of extremes

Violence and violations – making sense of extremes
Torrey Orton
August 5, 2009

What seems consistently missing from every outburst about our violent days and ways – in and at the footy, around the fastfood parlour, on the roads, down the laneways of our nights – is any integrated understanding of what breeds it and feeds it. Just how much violences of various kinds are with us I assayed by a quick count of today’s TheAGE: I totalled 43 mentions of items people might find violent, or encouraging them to do so by choice of header language. I didn’t bother with the BusinessDay. I guessed it would be around 50% violences. 43 items out of a possible 73 (total of non-advertising contents) in the front is enough.

For lack of perspective, we look to numbers of incidents of perilously violent events (street bashings, glassings…) to help adjust our fear responses. These divide roughly into two camps: the directly dangerous and the distantly dangerous. This is a continuum of course! Then there’s the collection of almost invisible and imperceptible violences which make the rest.

Domains of violence
I will try to sketch here the variety and coverage of the actions which compose the domain of violence in everyday life. It cannot be exhaustive. It cannot itemize the damages which different violations deliver for calculating the comparative villainy of perps near (thugs, etc.) and far (terrorists, plane accidents…). But, it can suggest a range of types which casts different light on the most feared violations – the personal assaults, distant or direct.

My intent is not to diminish the latter but to portray something of the encouragements to violence which abound in our culture. Without such a picture, we are left to interpret the most violent as acts of the deranged, the drunken and/or the criminal – personal failings to be stamped out. We have some inkling of the broader social support for violence in the repeated incidence of footy flair-ups and the prominence of alcohol in local incidents or gang-like forays.

Our violent times
So, perspective one: these are seriously violent times for many of us (just how many are not touched at all or very little by the fears and pressures which drive our angers?). The angers arising are expressed in a variety of recognised ways: the road, shopping, telemarketing and similar rages, rising violence to persons – numbers and intensities, public fractiousness (rudeness)…. The bio-psycho-social context is well covered. What’s not so clear is why the extremes seem to be growing, even allowing for the inflation of our perceptions of what’s happening by news media beatups (the daily front page assault above).

Here’s a take on why. Try the cumulative effects over 15-20 years of increased time ‘at work’ in a 24/7 kind of way. Try a world in peril on more dimensions than most of humanity, or any computer, can hold in mind at once. Try a world where all achievement is measured in capacity to consume, or amassing excessive consumptive capacity. And all of this is happening faster and faster…deeper and deeper, ever more extremely it seems.

Invisible stressors and the epidemic of mental illness
This is a world of high grade, largely invisible stressors. They appear in the form of media light ups, many of which are falsely inflated issues for present power scrabbling purposes by equally incompetent politicians; that they all speak with the same wedging tongues and spun language makes this outrageously clear! (Notice that nearly every public query under pressure is responded to with this spinning intro: “Look, I just want to say…”; pollies or priests do this, CEOs or cabbies do it, too.) The symptoms of long term stress can be found in AFR’s BOSS (July 09 issue, pg. 32 ff).

The one they leave out is anger, probably because their audience is commercial and that’s a world in which only the most powerful can be openly angry. Stressed workers do well to contain that part of the stress overwhelm experience, which adds to the stress of course. In the BOSS article Professor J. Toohey of RMIT is reported to say: “…we commonly medicalise issues around work stress and anxiety…psychological injury often has much more to do with the way work is organised and the way people are managed than it has to do with illness.”

Society of fear
Some have noticed that we live in a fear society – dominated by pre-emptive defences against unseen and unsubstantiated threats expressed in defensive behaviours like door-to-door school transport. Locally, Shaun Carney started from this point on the way to his interpretation of public violence phenomena. He ends up with the view that increased violence results in part from increased opportunity arising from increased public service hours and activities (“the 24/7 lifestyle”).

..and society of shame
Then there’s the approach of Dr. James Gilligan, cited in Simon Castles’ TheAGE article excoriating the Victorian Government for the advertising-led effort to restrain boffo and biffo. Having soundly trounced the media fools, fed by governing fools anyway, Castles quoted Gilligan saying: “..the purpose of violence is to diminish the intensity of shame and replace it as far as possible with its opposite, pride.” Castles summarised further: “The major causes of shame were relative poverty, downward social mobility and unemployment..” and concludes that more egalitarian policies are more likely to be useful than adverts.

While for significant numbers and segments of our most wealthy human societies ever life is good materially, an apparently irreversible divide grows between those with repeatedly too little and those with undoubtedly and unaccountably too much. There’s a middling to long argument to sustain this point, but I’ll take it as made for the moment.

A similar insight came from Guy Rundle’s second Crikey piece on local violence in late July:

"The “respect” culture, the exhausting aggressiveness is an assertion of atomised individualism, a getting the first punch in against an indifferent world. The same thing underlies opportunistic violence in the West. What’s noticeable about the kids hanging round these stations is that they’re not in gangs, so much as small packs of individuals, whose personal style — bad gangsta rapper gestures, the hoodie all the way over — is not an expression of confidence, but a perpetually threatened and hostile resentment, a desperate desire for impact."


Hard wired for fighting?
For an evolutionary take, of the sand box battlers variety, TheAGE’s Michael Coulter (Sunday AGE July 19, 2009; pg. 15) reviewed the “human animal” research showing violence for good (by goodies) is seen to be better than violence for bad (by baddies). And he concluded that“..violence still provokes an extreme emotional reaction that a lot of people experience as pleasure.” This is OK in his view if it’s addressed to or roused by make-believe (films, etc.). Unfortunately he closes, many folks, men in particular, cannot tell the difference.

Necessary violence with disregard for accountability
Here’s another brand of violence, from the top as it were. A few weeks back Lihir Gold’s Ballarat mine was consumed in a debt collapse leaving 200 jobs on the way through. TheAGE’s Matthew Murphy reported:
"Despite leading the $400 million acquisition of the project from Ballarat Goldfields in 2006, Lihir chief executive Arthur Hood chose not to tell the workers about the job cuts in person, instead leaving it to site general manager Craig Thomas.
Peter Smith, Lihir's executive general manager for Australia and Africa, said delivering the news was not a priority for Mr Hood, who yesterday was flying back from the company's more successful operations in Papua New Guinea.
"Arthur's had other priorities right now but the mine management team has taken great ownership of the people at site and I think they actually felt a responsibility to do it themselves," he said. "

This is classic accountability violence, which disrespects both the people in charge (“the management team”) and the workers. The executive general manager Australia and Africa above attributes to the management team a responsibility which wasn’t theirs by way of excusing the accountable and responsible person – Arthur Hood. This is multi-level commercial violence not often on show so clearly. For once the workers don’t get smirched with the others.

This violence was necessary in the sense that the business went under (maybe financially disputable, but within understandable limits for such things). The gratuitous violence, the unnecessary part, lies in the ethical gutlessness of the senior accountable – in this case, “Arthur”.

And this kind of violence is not thought of in the morning paper’s treatment of assault. It’s reported as fateful acts befalling the powerless with an implicit suggestion it’s their fault for being powerless. Only in the last 12 months have we seen so clearly that the powerful fail with feather landing fields and get up to play and earn as if they had never strayed from the fold of commercial productivity. Executive bonuses anyone? How many billion US$’s in New York or Sterling in London last month based on public guarantees and subventions?

Precursor spin – the Meno message?
I remember my surprise 35 years ago at discovering that Socrates was leading Meno by subtle questioning to mathematical insights which he was pretending were to be found in Meno’s natural capabilities. By chance (reading the translation with a Greek interlinear), I found that the words used to name the objects being explored were shaping the progress of the dialogue to imply / suggest the insights which were being sought. It was as if the master midwife to thinking had been caught with virtual hands in the pie.

There in the heart of the origin of dialogue was a slippery practice hidden in the authority and competence of the master. Elsewhere, we have Socrates as master of violating the pretences of public figures of his time. In both guises we have dominance of others, in both instances for their best interests (and those of society, Socrates would have us think).

The violence of Socrates demolition of various public figures is clear. He paid violently for it, hemlocked by his own hand. What of his instruction of the boy Meno? This is our task. To understand, distinguish and deploy judiciously violations of existing habits which impede growth at the personal, group and organisation levels. Growth here is change allowing better adaptation to environmental changes than would be the case if no growth occurred. This task is that of helpers of many persuasions and leaders of all organisations.

Violence - a flower of many colours
You may be wondering at some of my inclusions in the violence bestiary above. Most providers of support services to victims of family abuses recognise that the larger part of abuses and their instances are not physically violent – harassment, belittling, demeaning, withholding of resources and social connections, threats, etc. On a slightly closer look these behaviours can be found in discriminatory organisational processes, bullying in all settings and similar occurrences on the borders of reportable offenses.

The degree of actual reporting may be proportional to the power of the offenders, especially in organisational settings. This is why whistle-blowing is never met with organisational approval (when was the last time you saw it celebrated by those within the organisation whose hides were being exposed to public scrutiny by the whistler’s tune?).

So I take the position that there are many violences in our worlds, some of which are unavoidable and many of which seem endemic, even among ‘nice’ people, or our leaders, both personally and institutionally. To understand the unveiled or unavoidably visible ones we must understand the veiled and collusive ones. That’s the starting place for a deeper grip.

Again, what to do?
So what to do in thinking and talking about violences? This is really hard because so much reporting and discussing of violences occurs in seriously sub-optimal perceptual conditions. That is, we are assaulted by the assault (direct or indirect) in an assaulting (language inflation) way while reeling from an undercurrent of little violences which keep us often in a clinically stressed state. Hence, the leap in responses to the black and white; the fundamentalist reaction is automatic and intensely propelled by fear rising as anger and rage.

At least that’s what happens to me and a few other old farts I know. Judging from the personal commentariat in the virtual and hard copy letters pages, I / we are not alone in this volatility. So, again, what to do to understand And act on violence better, something that doesn’t take a book (I found 4 on my shelves with ‘fear’ in the title, none of them a work of fiction)? I propose this: That we…

• …assume it is a whole of society problem, whatever it is;
• …assume it’s a local systems problem, at whatever level of scale and diversity is appropriate to good coverage of the influencing (original sources) sustaining (currently continuing enablers, enhancers) and ameliorating (motivation reducing) factors bearing on the violence in question;
• …assume that it is multi-generational;
• …assume that the violence is multi-modal and multi-dimensional;
• …assume that it is meeting some real needs of some of the participants some of the time.
• …assume that we, too, do violences to others, and the previous assumptions apply to us.
• …and???

Over to you…

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood?

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood? Accountability, responsibility, blame and victims
Torrey Orton July 28, 2009

Accountability*: giving an account for personal responsibilities or for those undertaken by others on our delegation.

This is a terrible field to step into. Much travelled and trammelled. Who am I to add another step…even to be presumptuous enough to try? This is one I have to try because my confusions are so great. Others seem equally confused. I have been here before while exploring the Royal Commission on the Black Saturday bushfires. Here I will focus on this quartet as it applies in psychotherapy. I do not think that’s the same thing as the great worlds of politics and world changing surrounding our everyday lives. But my patient clients feel this greater world in their own distresses and are touched by their place(s) in it.

The problem for us all as adults is that there’s a part of our life we are not responsible for. Sometimes we need to be able to give an account of it!! One such time is if we are in psychotherapy. Most therapies acknowledge that our family of origin experiences shape our potential for family making (and many other group) experiences as adults. Our gender roles are learned there and the nature and variety of attachment is developed and embedded. Some cultures think of themselves as families and construct all social roles in family terms.

… our parents’ children

So, in important respects, we are always our parents’ children. This is recognised in everyday observations to that effect about children. And, we all honour the part(s) of our shared heritage we delight in. The undelightful is usually omitted. Sometimes it is systematically excluded from family conversation by explicit punishment of anyone who strays into the guarded territory. Therapeutically, I would say the most important breakthrough for many of my traumatised clients is to speak to the power of the family’s denial by actually opening previously closed doors with parents or sibs, or both, or virtually doing so in imaginary role-play of such openings.

Similar dynamics of denial and speaking to it can be seen in our societies at large – e.g. child abuse by trusted figures like priests, carers, etc. Acknowledgment of these abuses is resisted by the responsible organisations (seeking deferral of their accountability) like churches (Catholic most prominently, but certainly not solely) and social service agencies like the Salvos recently. The only thing worse than a bad family experience is no family at all.

Again therapeutically, family of origin appears as a source, a cause, of both the foundations and the distortions of our everyday relationship functionality. Some distortion is unavoidable. Parents can be no more perfect than the rest of us. Imperfection has its prices, though, and this acknowledgment meets a barrier in the same everyday world of this type: ‘thou shalt not blame, nor a victim be’. Probably this is because someone would have to be uncomfortable in the process and so it would be aggressive and selfish and therefore undesirable. About this time we can forget justice, forgiveness or many other everyday attributes of a ‘normal’ life.

Blame and intent to injure

Blame has to do with perceived intent to injure. Human intent is the only true cause of anything, and then often of not much or not what was intended! Without intent we have no actions, goals, progress… a view for which I might make a case in another argument! If I am injured in fact, I am a victim of the injuring force. Its actual blameworthiness is a matter for discussion or negotiation. The discussion process may reveal that I have not been victimised, though I am pained – that is, what happened arose from my wandering into the path of another’s intentions.

Or, it may reveal that the actions expressing that intention were inappropriately designed, executed, etc. The other is still ‘to blame’ but not condemnable. This is recognised in law, but recently is being deformed by the assumption that any injury I incur is someone else’s fault and worthy of compensation by them, especially if they are a legal person. Whence warnings in national parks like “Limbs may fall” or on the roads to them like ”Overhanging trees” to defend the relevant authority from suits for supposed maintenance malpractice.

Who’s to blame?

Not a few of my clients wonder at some point if talking about family history suggests their parents are “to blame” for whatever presenting issues they have. And, consequently, are they “victims”? It seems to me that both of these are their rightful usage if the hurt is great enough. Now there’s the lynch pin. Establishing for me that something hurts enough is easy. I decide for myself. But establishing the hurt is big enough to warrant an acknowledging apology is another thing. It requires some kind of negotiation, or intermediation, when the level of hurt reaches which mandates notification by public authorities like teachers, police, health workers of all sorts, etc.

In our cultures we have defined levels and types of evidence of hurt which require intervening action by others and condemnation for failure to act (which is a virtual collusion) by relevant others like the above authorities and parents, siblings, etc. These levels and types vary significantly from culture to culture, so much so that some feel proud to stand on a notional high ground declaiming the sins of others. This ground is often built in turn on their own relatively recent development from the close neighbours of the attitudes and behaviours they are decrying. That these are extremely difficult matters to adjudicate is affirmed almost daily with stories here of children abandoned to incompetent parents’ rages at their own social and personal non-entity. The authorities trying to handle child protection services are caught between saving lives and the social commitment to saving families. As close to pure lose/lose as I can find, at least for the kids and the workers!

Anxieties sustained by long-term childhood abuse, and often continuing family denial, are almost always experienced by the patient as their own fault, even while they are aware that they were (and, often, still are) being abused! This is the deep meaning of ‘victim’ - the meaning which holds people over the long term in sub-functional experiences from which moving on is not a choice unless the relationship system members choose together to change. Not easy to do if they are already under-powered. Taking the pathway of no blame and no victim begs the question of right for the sake of avoiding a dispute of power. Not disputing power may be a smart move, but to assume it away is to leave the victim stuck with their self-perception: ‘It must have been my fault.’

The multi-generation, multi-family challenge

To complicate matters a bit – part of the exploration of long term trauma usually reveals that it is multi-family and multi-generational, extending back 2 or more generations in the conscious memory of living descendants. Alcoholism, and other addictions, personal violence, distant relationships with no intimacy or affirmations – all have family histories sometimes anchored in major socio-political cataclysms like wars, social breakdown (depressions), natural disasters. This means the apparently to blame are themselves more or less victims with their own blaming to do! Have a look at “Who do you think you are?’ for some trails followed back hundreds of years.

With this complexity in mind, plus the need to allocate responsibility across time to meet the current calls for accountability, we can ask what criteria should we use for giving accounts and/or for demanding accounts be made by others of public damaging events? Here’s a go. Accounts of events should:
…treat all adult participants in the events being judged as partially blameworthy (a recognisably Asian perspective), and so as victims, too.
…make clear what actions were intentional, or predictably likely as consequences from intended actions.
…make clear who and what were truly collateral / accidental damages and who and what were ‘targetted’ damages
… specify that the time frame for accountability extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods – something like 30-50 years for many public services like education, health, and water systems.
…establish who among the affected put themselves knowingly in harm’s way, thereby mitigating their inclusion as victims and ensuring some membership in the collateral damages category.

These are just a start. Your thoughts???

*The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; accountableness; responsible for; answerable for; The obligation imposed by law or lawful order or regulation on an officer or other person for keeping accurate record of property, documents, or funds. ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accountability
The pretentious nature of my undertaking any discussion in this area is highlighted by a few webfacts: rates of occurrence of accountability related searches (Oz websites only!): “accountability and responsibility difference in government” - 5,490,000 webhits; 165,000 for ‘accountability transparency’; 43,300 web hits for ‘ethical accountability’.

Emerging needs…and wants.

Emerging needs…and wants.
Torrey Orton – July 27, 2009


I’m partial to the view that life is for fulfilling human needs, if we know what they are. Ah, if we know! We know that they change over time, that some are not available to direct inspection, that they emerge often under a veil or obscured in the stream of other needs which dominate daily life… we know, thus, that we cannot know them until we have them at a certain level of intensity, salience, etc. And we are expected, and expect, to pursue our needs politely, temperately, considerately, as well as focussedly, commitedley, all to pass through flowingly...to happinesses again.

We are in a world of intemperate processes and outrageous wants, often disconnected from substantive needs, whose momentum generates unnecessary activity that reinforces itself. Talk about moral degeneration…For in this world our needs are distorted, reconfigured, powered and bustled by waves of energy we often cannot even feel until their infectious power grips us. We discover needs by the emergence of new behaviours…sometimes discussed as trends or megatrends, the fashionable material of second rate sociology sustaining consumption-driven marketing to create new ‘needs’ like this:


Commercial self-indoctrination?

Rashid’s commercial self-indoctrination story – told to me one day at lunch.

He and Safiya went to the optometrist’s to get her new eye test done. After she went through, the staffer asked R. if he wanted to have an eye test, too.

He said no, no problems reading or anything else, thanks.

She said it’s free on Medicare, just have a try…maybe…

OK, he said, and so he did have them tried. There was a slight shortfall in tasks like reading.

So, R. accepted that he needed glasses. Why? Because the test said so, though he did not feel any need of them until he heard the test results. If the test said so, there must be something. He found it a day or two later (before getting his first glasses) when noticing that some things seemed a little blurred while reading…Voila, commercial self-indoctrination.

A few days later he added by email, speaking of the above rendition of our chat:

“It’s nice and accurate T. However; after wearing my new glasses few days now, I do feel that I really needed them!! Power of commercial self-indoctrination getting stronger by the day :)”

I love vindication. However, R replied to my reply to the above:

“Somehow I don’t want you to post the story, and when I inquire into the nature of my resistance I hear two things. One seems to do with resisting public self-disclosure on the net and leaving digital crumbs and the other is to do with knowing now that actually the glasses are medically useful to me. While I could read even relatively small prints but wearing glasses now I notice that I was subjecting my eyes to quite a bit of stress! It also has an undercurrent of denying that “commercial self-indoctrination” could happen to me. “

So, it’s a very delicate business, this emerging needs / wants one. Now I understand what a marketing friend has often tried to get me to see – what a serious business it is, too, fooling as it does with the boundaries between acknowledged needs with hairextension-like retro-fitting of them to the latest thing, fashion, trend, innovation – all the materials of consumptionous wellbeing.


Expressive need

Here’s a quite other kind of need – an emerging need for ‘negative’ self-expression which I wrote in a post entitled Popular anger denied makes way for populists a few months ago.

A small example of displaced anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few questions as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).

This need is for expression of experience. People need to do this. Just when and how much is a personal and social question. Unvented anger is an internal stressor; lots of little ones may make a big explosion – a rage. We all know that withheld anger or irritation builds, often to be inappropriately expressed on the wrong person(s) (often at greater distance and of less power than ourselves); or, expressed to the appropriate person(s) but well over the top of the immediate cue that sets it off. Inappropriate after all. This comes from the arena of perceived injustice or unfairness, a capacity which it seems all humans have (for personal detection of injustice, that is). Accessing emerging perceptions of injustice is a core skill for a competent person and a competent social system. Prevention of inappropriate blow-ups is one reason for getting better at it. Another is to rectify emerging injustices.

Getting a grip on emergences, separating the real from the false, the liberating from the enslaving, is one of the major challenges of our turbulent times where standards and process of all kinds are up for grabs. The challenge is personal, familial, social, political…multilevel, multi-sectoral…all happening at once.

A sense of need, but what need?

A third potential example of the emerging, and a difficult one to even present, is this: I have a sense that there is a new level of intellectual / spiritual activity, a kind of desperate expressiveness coming from every type of existing socio-political paradigm across all domains of human activity (all those which are disordered, distressed, displaced by turbulence) as if they are gearing up for a fight and want to get on the field of influence or battle early. Perhaps it is just a flowering of new expression liberated by the turbulence – change is good for innovation, encourages it, demands it. My sense is that we are entering a new phase of activity.

So, join me in discovering and disclosing emergences of all kinds…we certainly can’t tell now which ones matter for the future. Refining our detection capabilities will count for the future, since some of the emerging needs / wants will be thematic in the future.

Rectifications (13) – Empower…*

Rectifications (13) – Empower…*
Torrey Orton – July 22, 2009

“… Since people of all political persuasions have a need for a word that makes their constituents feel that they are or are about to become more in control of their destinies, empower has been adopted by conservatives as well as social reformers....”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/empower

Three itches

Of the gratuitous deceptions contemporary management PCness visit upon us, empowerment is among my most despised. The concept inhabits all manner of organisational communications – for profit and not, alike – often in company with that other favourite ‘make a difference’ and its fellows like ‘add value’. Three itches rise for a scratch from the claim to be empowering anyone else. First, personal power cannot be given, only taken. Role power can be given and taken away, usually not by the weaker role holder except by strenuous and secret exercise of personal power (i.e. going over the head of direct reports).

Second, pretending personal power can be achieved through empowering by others is sure to muddy the usually opaque waters of a work group’s responsibilities and performance. For example, as a work group member, where does my role power stop and my colleagues and our boss’s start again? If I am unclear about that, the limits to my personal power are hard to establish and difficult to defend from allegations I am over-powering the management’s role accountabilities (credit for achievements they see as theirs by role) or under-fulfilling their expectations (my responsibilities expressed in KPI’s, tasks and such).

And I may be doing so without intent either way. To say we are in a power partnership invites interactions of greater volatility than before the days of transparent empowerment. In those days we knew we often weren’t on shared ground. Who can reprimand who? Who can fire who? Who can hire who? These are role powers whose use by management are the first thing workers look to in assessing organisational fairness and management competence.

Third, as in many other public, social situations, to name the outcome you want as the objective has the effect of obscuring the pathway with assumptions that are unchallengeable. For example, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be empowered as you are suggesting. Can we negotiate this?’ Now we have an apparent conflict of espoused values, a much more difficult negotiation than who is responsible for handing on a piece of work from one step to another.

Power and learning

It is a simple matter to note that we can acquire personal power only by becoming good at something. Note also that the power of persons and their roles are often not the same. A common management failure is that of a low power person in a high position not using the position power they have. All workers know how to detect this weakness and some know how to exploit it. It spreads like the rings of an oil slick on a calm surface plinked by the first drop of a storm. Knowing how these things work in specific workplace contexts constitutes a major part of the ‘local knowledge’ which allows real organisations to function. This is in part due to the power dilemma which underlies all delegations….that we are all in each other’s hands, but those with position power are more able to fence out unwanted responsibilities and rope desired ones in (by selectively claiming the achievements as their own via delegation return).

This confusion clangs against the side of the accountability – delegation disorder which I will post on soon. For lack of two-way clarity about delegations of responsibility, the powers of the respective role-holders are confused. It is not for lack of trying that performance management – the process of ensuring that delegated responsibilities have been carried out - is among the more disappointing activities in organisational life. Notice that this is not merely a small scale occasional activity; it also can be seen failing at highest levels. Try executive remuneration and organisational performance in the GFC!

The idea of empowerment also tangles with well-understood mastery learning theory and research. Basically, you can only get to competence by passing various hurdles; the higher and more intense the competence, the greater the effort and recovery from stumbles along the way. The competence in organisational life must be more than knowing about the subject. An old engineering rule of thumb is that graduates are 25% of the way to practitioners on graduation. Most of what they need to know about doing engineering is learned at work.

What to do about 'empowerment'?

Combat the sliming of real developmental relationships – teaching, mentoring, coaching, etc. – by the oil of empowerment. Delete ‘empower’ wherever you see it and replace with help, enable, instruct, demonstrate (learning words) in sentences which specify the relevant outcome of the development as a skill, competence, capability, practice. If such verbs cannot be used you can suspect its only empowerment on offer and get your disappointment deflection armoury ready.

*13 million webhits 170709

Optimysticals (2) – Liberating laughter*

Optimysticals (2) – Liberating laughter*
Torrey Orton
July 12 , 2009

I noticed about 25 years ago in the midst of a therapy session (I was the patient client) that I broke out laughing at a critical turning point in the process. It was one where I suddenly saw my absurdity, silliness, conflictedness…just which word it is is a subject of this reverie. It was a shock of self-recognition. Increasingly, in the last five years I do the same (or similar, because it is not yet clear what it is) at moments of irresolvable conflict of needs or perspectives in my work as therapist for others. Sometimes it comes into play in group activities, too.

This laugh comes unstoppably, in a rush, energetically, forcefully. I am beginning to be able to catch it before it springs out on an unexpecting patient client (because thoroughly in tune with the rhythm of their own musings?). Usually I cannot remember the exact cue(s) which unleashed it. Only occasionally does anyone query it.

A lifting laugh
The moment always seems one needing a shift of level to advance and my laughing outbreak is met almost exactly with a responding laugh, or at least smile(s) broadly flashed. On querying I offer a badly worded explanation like that I’ve subjected us to above (it is badly worded for me, too; this is the best I can do yet; I’m hopeful this process will yield improved understanding through expression for both you and me).

The nature of the laugh is this: it comes sharply, irrepressibly and in short burst of two or three whoops and then stops, unless reciprocated by the other(s). It happens also in non-therapeutic settings where serious matters are being engaged – serious defined as presently pressing and discouragingly unresolvable; these are matters of the state of our world(s), our places in them, our responsibilities to others….meaning of life if we could make it / find it kind of stuff. An infectious laugh I guess, though it may be an imposing laugh or a domineering one (in effect) for others because of its spontaneity and volume, and my general volume on many dimensions, too.

A visceral vision?
So it is a laugh which both expresses a seeing, an insight, and generates insight, vision, itself! It is visceral vision? And when it ‘works’ in therapy, it does because I am already in synch with patient client states; we are mirroring well; empathy is complementary.

It also works among therapists at moments of stuckness in their group process. I was in one of these a few days ago as we struggled with making a new shared treatment process work between us…very complicated for an apparently simple thing. We were talking over and around each other trying to make sense of our relationships. The ‘agenda’ kept slipping from one matter to another as the connections and complexities overwhelmed our still emerging shared understanding of our work. After a while of well-intentioned but frustrating thrashing around and trying to include all the therapeutic examples we have in train now, I noticed and said that we were in a parallel process with those of our patient clients (who one insightful colleague shortened to “platients”). On the second go, everyone burst out laughing together… a transcending and lightening energy.

So, the laugh accompanies many states / stages of incomplete activities, with elements of stuckness, helplessness and consequential frustration. These are usually associated with actually uncompleted tasks like being an adult, a human being, a learned person, a worthy person… all the end game judgments and daily engagements of life which much of modernity expects as to complete before the end of life – itself a dilemma which no amount of obsessive youthfulness will avoid.

I guess this all makes me an optimyst. I’ve long struggled with the tension between my sceptical and my believer selves. The former provides constant direction (traditional optimist style) and the latter throws up insights which undermine the direction(s) by disclosing a passel of others for consideration (my pessimist style). The above excursion reveals another level which is mystical, mythical – something spiritual but not religious? Touching on the archetypal outputs of consciousness? Someone will tell me hopefully. Followers, please act up.

* 'laughter' got 423,00 web hits in Australia alone; it’s hard to imagine this kind of laughter being made a trained competence for therapists but have a look at Google yourself; perhaps this is just another example of the fact that there’s nothing which cannot be turned into a marketable techno-rational commodity; see happiness, life skills, virtues….

PS.
You may have a favourite optimystical. I’d like to post them. We’d probably have to negotiate a bit to develop a shared standard for them. Once negotiated, you can become an authorised poster on this site in the optimystical stream. Howzat?


* an optimystical is a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view
Torrey Orton
July 8, 2009

I wanted to write this when I had the thought of it a week ago. Then my desire collapsed in the face of my incompetence to produce the effect that I intuited. Now, some wordmongering later, I like its intent if not its achievement. On to the cat….

Poppy’s the fifth in a line of cats who’ve befriended us over 35 years. He’s not the oldest. Moon (black female longhair; ‘good’ farm family; real lap cat) was at 20 earth years when she decided to take up a position under an unplanted azalea 15 years ago. He’s only 16 and in the best shape of them all.

I will discover why I am writing about him by writing. I’ve become a cat person by marital exposure though not, be clear, with any resistance to the opportunity from the first glimpse of our own first cat - the above mentioned Moon - on the farm of her birth in 1974. We don’t do dogs because we travel too much and they pine. Cats do not, and our neighbour feeds them if were off for a real visit elsewhere. Our yard is their playpen, but for occasional visits of cat neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that Poppy, like the others, displays serious intent about a range of important matters – bed, breakfast, dinner, stalking bugs and aspiring to birds. In these he is focussed to a point I seldom achieve doing this blog; he’s a model of timely preparation and persistence (the prep often failing to conclude the hunt successfully – its best test).

Here I’m giving him the blackbox treatment – attributing intentions – because he makes things happen and does it repeatedly. Pretty much what we do. So, who’s to say he doesn’t know he’s doing what I attribute? He certainly resists energetically any blockages on the way to the various ends of his days and accompanies the performances with verbalisations of relatively consistent types, too. Is this consciousness? Enough so to warrant consideration. Mine is often not easy to distinguish from his.

Cat causality

Poppy knows how to make things happen. Around dinner time, ours that is, already beyond his, he makes for the door, if he’s in, to get out to get ready to get back in. It took a while – months, years? – to see this move for what it is: a part of his system of making new food appear. He’s really on the stick about this, distinguishing between opportunity types with precision.

Top of the line are bony things like chicken and duck; second, steak with bone attached – rib-eye, or t-bone; third, lamb with chop attached. Fish doesn’t rate other than a short presentation to announce he knows its dinner time and a show must go on. When he gets back in he devotes greater or lesser attention to encouraging the inevitable, depending on the offerings available.

But his system of making it happen is consistent over all the sub-classes of his actions. He perseveres in the face of failure…like Mallee farmers who know it will rain, sometime. And unlike them, he knows his intention that food should happen is effective… though he doesn’t know it will stop being so when he stops, which is why he is a cat.

Cat naps

He’s really good at body heat adjustment, running through two to five locations a night over an 8 hour span. He warms up for sleep with the food act, morning and night. After our dinner, if the external temperature is below 10C degrees, he uses my lap as a post from which to oversee the empty plates and slip into a snooze looking across the table at Jane.

About 15 minutes of this is enough. He’s off to the bedroom for a first go at the bed, or maybe Jane’s office for a bit of her reading chair. An hour later he sets up shop on my dining room chair which, when pushed into the table, leaves a lying cat’s height of space between him and the underside. There he practices snoozes for an hour or so.

If it’s cold, he shapes up for the bed, either towards the bottom if moderately cold or between us at shoulder height if threateningly so. His step up is always in the lower corner of my side, as is the step down. On warmer cold nights he pushes off back to the chair, to return around sunrise for a first headbutt push towards breakfast. This is administered from a standing position on my back with lots of verbal encouragement that has started from ten feet away before getting up again.

Cat connection

Cats are great head-butters, in a friendly, beseeching manner. See Christian the lion for a good example of this writ large. Poppy’s a member of headbuttersanonymous, like most catty beings. It’s a cleaner assault than doggy slurping, though a lion headbutt is probably testing in other ways. He also has the slideby which is an internal segment of the bone seeking act. This is more a leaning walk against some lower extremity, which he occasionally confuses with chair legs, door jams and similar appendages. A slideby sequence can go on for 5 minutes, halted for a scratch pause, then restarted for a few more minutes just to see if there’s anyone with forgotten bones.

Cat memory

A mother substitute always goes a long way to calm a disturbed cat, or one trying to settle for a bit of napping. A nice hairy blanket or a feather duster often do well in this role. I know it’s on because Poppy kneads the blanket with a kitten’s intensity and satisfaction, even if for a milkless trip. All his predecessors in our life have done the same.

Catoptimystical??

I’m wondering if Poppy qualifies for an optimystical ranking. I’m trying to understand this new category by the ‘see if it fits’ method of inclusion. If I say he does he does, but some bright lights out there will detect that I’m being willful again, not insightful, and probably complain, I hope. I could cite Wittgenstein on families of meaning as an authority for my inclusion of the cat but other bright lights would rubbish my lack of conviction.

I think, after this digression that I will so consider him. In the first Optimystical I characterised an optimystical as a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Since for me consciousness is an emerging competence, allowing myself to appreciate its possibility in forms and beings my education did not prepare me for is an important development step in my own consciousness. Poppy - a small step for human kind, too?

Rectifications (12) – The Usual Suspects…

Rectifications (12) – The Usual Suspects…

Torrey Orton – July 1, 2009

… is the name of a film (1994) which a patient client was telling me about in the middle of searching his own script a few days ago. I jumped for my notepad because I’d been looking for the next needed Rectification. I know one when I see one because my favourites abound, but only a few are chosen. This is one. Not the film of course, which I gather from reviews and his recollection is a must for those among the unchosen.

Apart from the film, ‘the usual suspects’ enjoys an ubiquity among the commentariats and letterati which is saddening. So quickly, in a turn of the phrase, the writers relieve themselves of any need to think about their argument. It is no longer argument since it addresses part of the prospective audiences as noteworthy only by their dismissal. Pathetic. But this fault is not only to be found here or on just one side of socio-political discourses.

Its underpinning is a failure of intellectual competence, or better, of intellectual and moral development beyond that of the black and white universe of early adulthood. The Harvard Business School provides a nice example of this. In “How Frank or Deceptive Should Leaders Be?” the argument flows back and forth between the two with nary a thought given to the probability that both are required in many circumstances – quite likely in all human ones. Such digital thinking, either/or thinking leads to simplicities which cannot sustain complexity. The roles of frankness and deception in everyday life (to say nothing of their roles in high speed, high stakes decision-making) are open to encyclopaedic dispute. Accepting that they both have a role is the starting place for a more radical discussion.

If the digital is the level of thought of world class (?) CEO’s and aspirant-CEO’s in the US (and therefore, since at HBS, the world) it is not surprising they get caught in conceptual and procedural pits, inflexible in the face of normal complexity. What’s the training they offer for this gap? I think an education may be required, but most universities don’t offer that anymore. It probably can’t be trained anyway, though a multitude of leadership specialists will offer it in a week or two’s workshops and projects and someone is buying their wares so…maybe it can!

Finally, talking to Brassie today, I realised that ‘the usual suspects’ is a kind of profiling which, if it were conducted by our various social services, would be grounds for a discrimination complaint or more. Since it is only intellectual profiling of figureheads in our fantasy demonologies let it be.
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As a last gasp, if you feel a ‘usual suspects’ coming on, take a breath, wonder why you are preparing to attach this label to the people in question, and ask yourself what your thought or action gains by so labelling them. I bet it’s some kind of ethical free pass for you from the pain of thinking through a complexity. It usually is for me.