Category Archives: Philosophy and culture

A question of trust

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The Carnival of the Lions and Christians, also known as the Festival of Stupidities, also known as Australian politics, is back on stage after the summer break, and the players have taken up where they left off.

All that time! Four weeks in mid-fatuity! How galling!

Thankfully, normal stream-of-fatuity has resumed. And first up we have the same old, same old: the issue of trust. Namely, that all Australians will be outraged if Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, does not deliver on her promise to introduce poker machine reform, and once more, breaches the trust of a nation.

Over and over again, the media exhorts us to equate delivering on promises with trust, and not delivering on promises, with moral turpitude.

Yet say if it weren’t true?

Say if we actually had very little idea about what generates trust?

Say if it were the non-delivery of promises that provided the greatest opportunity to generate trust?

Que?

When a person or organisation handles the non-delivery of their promises in a certain way they generate trust, and the trust they generate is deeper and more lasting than the trust that may have accrued if they had delivered on their promise.

What is that certain way?

If the person or organisation: (1) acknowledges the non-delivery and its impact; (2) makes amends for the impact (this might include apologising, making financial or other reparations, arranging replacements, etc), and (3) re-promises.

These actions are the path to generating trust. To take them requires courage and risk.

While ever courage and risk remain inimical to politics, questions of trust will be used to sabotage leaders and gull the public.

***

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Personal archaeology

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Remember I wrote a letter from six months in the future? It was addressed to Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, and of course, myself.

In the letter I described a version of myself I’m inventing during these six months: self as a conduit for expression and creativity to pour through, just as the famous cellist, Jacqueline Du Pre, with whom Ben played Schubert, was a conduit for music.

He tells this story of her.

When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to perform!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!”

“Even at six,” Ben notes, “Jackie was a conduit for music to pour through.”

***

A week or so after I wrote the letter I came across an old photo of myself. That’s it above. I think I must be about three years old.

Looking at it, I’m struck by my freedom and delight. I have the same joy Ben describes in Jackie at age six, and it’s the exact expression of self I was groping towards in my letter.

So I see this new self I’m inventing is a revealing or reclamation of a previous self.

***

When I found this photo I looked more closely at other photos that were lying around from when I was about ten years old.

These are a whole other matter.

In photo after photo, the freedom and delight has been replaced by something else, something cautious and watchful.

I’ve previously mentioned the fact of the ruthless conditioning girls receive. It was the subject of the “Beyond Wanting to be Wanted” series. It’s a conditioning that suppresses and seeks to obliterate what a girl feels, what a girl thinks, what she looks like, her very being. It colonises her soul.

Now this is not a matter of blame. I’m not blaming my parents or my society or my culture. My parents loved me dearly and always wanted the best for me.

It’s just the way it was, the way it probably still is.

And by acknowledging that I also had a choice in the matter – the choice of not submitting, of rejecting the conditioning, of keeping my soul alight – I’m not blaming myself either. I was a child, dependent on my parents and my society, and I didn’t even see the possibility anyway.

No, I’m not interested in blame. I’m interested in reclaiming that earlier free and delighted self, that unabashed, untrammelled young girl and letting her roam.

It’s her time again.

Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.*

***

* Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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Leader of the gang

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The game of politics as it is played in Australia is every bit as “nasty, brutish and short” as anything Hobbes envisaged. Politicians visiting from other countries go home restored by the thought that maybe they don’t have it so bad after all.

Worse, the game of politics is the predominant conversation in Australian public life. It’s always before us, this ugly, unredeeming spectacle, setting the bar for what’s possible and what’s not possible when it comes to the idea of Australia.

The very last thing we need in this situation is yet another description of the situation. Unfortunately, that’s what Glyn Davis has just produced.

Continue reading →

Dignity and grace

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Dominique Schwartz is the ABC’s correspondent in New Zealand. It is 30 years, she said in a recent radio report,

since I walked through the doors of the ABC in Melbourne as a 17-year-old cadet, fresh from high school.

Along the way, she said, she had worked in many countries and met many people including royals and world leaders, but those who had had the biggest impact were people such as the couple she met in a village in West Africa. She proceeded to tell the story of Mary Nakamwagi and her husband Mahmoud, and it made me weep at the dignity and grace within human being.

***

Continue reading →

What has relationships work: A proposition

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Consider that we have a fundamental misunderstanding about relationships, and what has them work or not work.

We have it that relationships are 50% them, 50% us. To expand, we have it that they are 50% responsible for having the relationship work, and we are 50% responsible.

Here’s a radical proposition.

The 50/50 paradigm is the source of all unworkability in relationships.

Why? Because in the 50/50 paradigm there is no responsibility. If each person in the relationship is responsible for half the relationship, effectively no-one is responsible for the relationship. And thus, unworkability ensues.

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The Rise of Followership

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Leadership is going through a bad patch. You can tell, Frank Furedi* says, if only by the increasing volume of thoughts, books and courses on the topic, the “veritable industry devoted to its cultivation.”

In Australia, if we talk about leadership it’s always its absence we’re citing.

But what if the malaise lies in our understanding of what leadership is? Say if leadership were being misrecognised because of the rise of a phenomenon with which it is correlated, namely, followership?

Continue reading →

The Truth about Truth: Final

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The story so far:

The truth about truth is that human beings are incredibly lousy at apprehending the truth. Most of the disappointments and frustrations at work – indeed, any place – are due to such misapprehensions. There are at least three common types of misapprehensions. The first is mistaking inference for the truth, the second, your common garden-variety misunderstanding.

This post is about the third.

Misapprehension 3: Justification

Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, discusses in a New York Times article another kind of misapprehension, one that involves a very common justification.

When he was a boy, Gilbert’s family would drive to New York on their annual holiday. At some point in the trip, his brother and he would get bored with reading comics and they’d start fighting. One would punch the other on the arm, the other would punch him back, and so on. His mother would chastise them, and he and his brother “would start to plead our cases.”

“But he hit me first,” one of us would say …

In pleading this way, Gilbert says, he and his brother were following a very common pattern. In most human societies,

being hit first provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden.

A punch thrown second is viewed as legally and morally different from a punch thrown first. Hence, “participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts … offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.”

Yet there’s a problem, Gilbert says, because “people count differently”.

People think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before [and] … other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

He cites research from the University of Texas illustrating the effect. In a mock conversation, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. Volunteer A was to make an opening statement, B was to respond to A, A to respond to B, and so on. At the end the volunteers were shown various statements and asked to “recall what had been said just before and just after.”

The results showed an “intriguing asymmetry.” Volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements. Gilbert says, while it seems a “grossly self-serving pattern of remembering”, it’s actually

the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others …[thus] our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves, but the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and punches …

So is born the escalation of mutual harm, another example of the misapprehension of truth. What is the truth here? It’s the situation shorn of the “illusion” that others are responsible for my actions and the “belief” my actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

The truth is A and B punched.

***

Being lousy at apprehending the truth doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In the three examples, the truth might have been under a mound of baggage, a little stifled and crumpled to be sure, but it was always discoverable.

And there’s something else to consider. Even if the truth is too plain to be discovered at a particular time, the mere fact of recognising our failure to apprehend it would make a difference. For if we got how poor we are at apprehending the truth, our lives would be easier.

We might begin perceiving our bosses not as monstrous, but human-sized; as human beings trying, and often failing, like the rest of us.

We might give up the insistence we are right, and entertain the possibility we actually don’t know.

As Daniel Gilbert says, we might learn to trust.

Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others – and to start trusting others themselves – there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the [back of the car].

***

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The Truth about Truth: Part 2

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The story so far:

The truth about truth is that human beings are incredibly lousy at apprehending the truth. Most of the disappointments and frustrations at work – indeed, any place – are due to such misapprehensions. There are at least three common types of misapprehensions. The first, covered yesterday, is mistaking inference for the truth.

This post is about the second.

***

Misapprehension 2: Not enough information

The second common failure to apprehend the truth is your garden-variety misunderstanding.

A guest on a recent radio program gave a great example, great because it’s so banal, so typical of what happens in workplaces all round the countryside.

An employee who we’ll call P receives an email from her manager. The email expresses some dissatisfaction with something P had done and requests she do it differently next time.

P then notices the email has been copied to a senior executive. She goes into shock. She says, recounting it later,

I felt sick. Every time I thought about the email my stomach turned. I was so upset with my manager, I couldn’t understand why she had done that.

P’s upset and bitter rage with her manager persists for weeks. She can barely function at work. At last, after two months, she decides to speak to her manager.

Her manager tells her she copied in the senior executive because it was the senior executive who had requested the matter be addressed. The truth then? The manager was doing what she had been requested to do by the senior executive, and she was letting the executive know she had done it.

Maybe the manager could have handled it better by keeping the two communications separate, but she wasn’t doing any of the sabotaging things P had envisaged she was doing.

As the radio guest, a dispute resolution practitioner, noted

If P had had a conversation with her manager at the outset, she could have avoided it all.

Instead, she’d suffered in bitter rage for two months, which sounds horribly protracted except most of us have scores of incidents under our belt where we’ve hung out for far longer.

The wonder of it really is that P got it resolved after only two months. Having straight conversations, the risky kind – those which Susan Scott calls “fierce conversations“ – in the workplace is not your average, everyday occurrence.

And yet these type of misunderstandings, our second common failure to apprehend the truth, are rampant.

To be continued …

***

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Image: Poster by Raymond Savignac, 1986, courtesy of Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

The Truth about Truth: Part 1

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The truth about truth is that human beings are incredibly lousy at apprehending the truth. Most of the disappointments and frustrations at work – any place – are due to such misapprehensions.

Here are three common misapprehensions, and a different possible reading for each: the first, a reading from existential philosophy; the second, a reading from dispute resolution practice; the third, a reading from psychology.

***

Misapprehension 1: Truth vs Inference

It was a few months ago. I was sitting on my regular bus going to work. A phone rang and the woman across the aisle answered. The woman began telling the caller about an incident at work.

The woman had been at dinner with her workmates. Her boss had asked the woman, in front of the table, to tell the story of how she met her boyfriend because

it’s so amazing.

The woman told the caller the question had made her livid. “How dare she do that?” she asked. As she recalled the boss asking her the question the woman became livid all over again, spewing out a stream of hurt and rage about her boss.

For the rest of the 15-minute ride the woman’s distress continued. She didn’t explain to the caller why the boss’s question upset her, or offer any other details. She was wholly fixated on the boss asking her the question and her rage at the boss’s gall.

***

What actually happened here? Going by what the woman herself reported, the boss asked her to recount how she met her boyfriend. That’s it! End of story. Truth.

Only the woman couldn’t apprehend it. What she apprehended instead was some inference she was drawing from the truth without even seeing the truth on the way through. Possibly the inference she was drawing was something like, “My boss always tries to catch me out”, “My boss always tries to embarrass me”, “My boss doesn’t show me any respect.” Everyone on the bus that day could hear an inference similar to this behind her white hot indignation.

Now, the source of our inferences is the past. We use our past experiences to draw conclusions about the present, and we do this so automatically and blindly we literally don’t see the people and situations in our present for who or what they are.

The present comes wrapped, smothered, in the past.

And given the huge gap between the incident the woman described and the distress of her reaction, it seemed clear that the drama into which she’d been plunged by her boss’s question had nothing whatsoever to do with her boss.

From the point of view of existential philosophy, we could speculate that the woman was unconsciously reacting to the memory of an incident with a similar structure: an authority figure, an audience of peers, a question that caught her offguard. Possibly, it had occurred when she was very young, maybe at school, and it had been an incident in which she’d suffered something she perceived as a failure or humiliation in front of others.

The truth of the incident is that the woman’s boss asked her a question. But the woman didn’t come close to seeing the truth. She was completely locked in the world of inference and meaning and drama, a world which exists in the past.

We all do this, and we do it pretty much all the time. And that’s what our bosses and our colleagues are up against every day. Skyscrapers full of people wandering around dwelling in the twilight zone of their distant and mythical pasts, not even seeing or hearing what’s in front of them.

The truth? Good luck.

Coda.

About a month after that day, I was on the bus again and I heard a familiar voice. It was the woman. And, yes, she was on the phone, telling the same story again.

To be continued …

***

Image: Poster by Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1989, courtesy of Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

The King of Pith: Book review of Linchpin by Seth Godin

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The world of work has changed radically from what it’s been for decades. It doesn’t cut it any longer for employees to be merely compliant, merely obedient. Once it did; no question.

Now, the ability to outsource and the internet are driving down the cost of any task that can be commoditised, and being obedient can only lead to redundancy.

This applies to both employees and their organisations. Employees will, sooner or later, be replaced with cheaper workers; organisations will, sooner or later, go out of business. Compliance, following the rules, doing no more or less than what the boss tells you to do, is not what’s required to survive in the evolving business world.

Emotional labour

What’s required, Godin says, is to start viewing work as the opportunity to become a “linchpin”. And being a linchpin, in Godin’s world, is to be indispensable. If a person is a linchpin, he will have the inside running in surviving and thriving in the new world of business. It’s not a guarantee of success, but it’s a big head-start.

The linchpin is not defined by what they do. The linchpin is defined by what they give; as Godin conceives it, they give care, joy, surplus, “emotional labour”.

The chance to do art

Godin spends significant time on the role of the gift and his book is strongest at this point. He refers to the French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, who pioneered thinking on the gift, though he diverges from Mauss on the issue of reciprocity. For Godin the gift lies precisely in the absence of reciprocity or its expectation.

A person who creates gifts to give away – gifts of knowledge or care or attention – is also the definition of an artist. The new workers, the linchpins then, are reconceived as artists, and work becomes a “chance to do art.”

Got joy?

Godin gets a little sidetracked in the book, and profitably so, by my lights.

When he starts out it’s about becoming indispensable. By midway, he’s mostly left behind indispensability and the word “linchpin” as the huge intrinsic rewards of reconceiving work hove into view. Rewards such as joy, aliveness, contribution, and, if you still need it, indispensability.

The logical and happy conclusion of Godin’s thinking is that if work is reconceived as the opportunity to do art then pretty much any job, including the job one already has, becomes a great job.

The lizard

The only thing standing in the way of employees creating these great jobs is the “lizard brain” or amygdala, the ancient reptilian remnant that sits atop our brainstem with its tongue on the flight-or-fight switch. It sets out, he says,

to sabotage anything that feels threatening, risky, or generous.

Until we recognise and deal with this factor, which, drawing on Stephen Pressfield’s book The War of Art, he also calls “resistance”, we will stay frustrated in our jobs.

Superpowers

I enjoy Godin’s style, here in the book, and in his blog. It’s all pith.

At one point in the book he talks about reading superhero comics as a kid; Batman, Superman and the “lesser” heroes who had to “speak up and describe their superpowers.” He extrapolates that each of us probably has one or two superpowers, and becoming a linchpin requires us to name and own, without coyness, our superpower. Crucially, he says,

The ‘super’ part and the ‘power’ part come not from something you’re born with but from something you choose to do and, more important, from something you choose to give. [my italics]

If I were naming one of Godin’s superpowers, I’d say he’s the king of pith.

And this really works in the blog. In a book, I felt a few longueurs. There are some good insights, and I think he could write a big beautiful book on the power of gift. I would look forward to reading it. For now, Linchpin is not quite greater than the sum of its parts.

On the subject of superpowers …

If I tell you one of my superpowers, will you tell me one of yours? Yes? Here goes … one of my superpowers is guessing! Yes, I’m a master guesser. I can guess all kinds of things, and I don’t really know how it happens. No accident I’ve worked as a management consultant, what?

Now, before you run away …

***