Perspectives in Public Health: Untouchables revisited

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Untouchables revisited

Columnist Tom Friedman, in today's New York Times, in a context when another 100 people are being laid off at the Times newsroom, assesses the qualities of "the untouchables" -- those who will keep their jobs when the others are long gone.

I think he misses the point that the sea of others is going to drown the few in that mental model of how a solution might work. I suggest a better way, one that will sound familiar to my regular readers.

Maybe, we can help each other out, and get by with a lot of help from our friends.
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Ann Arbor, MI

October 21st, 2009

4:14 am

Indeed, "Man must wait on corner long time for roast duck to fly into mouth."

We are, sadly, more crippled by our educational system than we are helped by it, as gurus such as W. Edwards Deming have noted. The reason is not that we don't teach enough stuff, but that we teach "the wrong stuff."

We teach math and science and sometimes English and social studies, but all in a context of intense individual competition, as if we are waiting for very bright individual humans to save us. That "roast duck" isn't coming back. No individual is bright enough to grasp our social problems any more, and even if they could grasp their own and succeed, it has lately been at the expense of all of the rest of us, not as our leader and savior. Wealth isn't what's trickling down.

There is a solution, and it is realizing that people, like computers, are a thousand times more powerful in cooperative networks than as isolated "mainframes" or even "super-computers." All the new research on social intelligence and high-performance teams shows that we are at our best, and a best a thousand times better than our worst, when we are in a high-functioning team.

But that is exactly what "do your own work" trains us out of. We need courses in how to make friends, how to ask for help and get it, how to be a team member, how to be a good or great leader and / or follower, how to build relationships, and WHY we need cohesion and synergy far more than bright Rambo-style individuals.

Done correctly this does not dampen or quench the brightest of us -- it lifts and empowers and supercharges the brightest of us. Teams of people working this way are shown repeatedly to have extraordinarily high performance, quality, and productivity.

That's the corner we need to turn, the new model we need to understand, and respond to. Otherwise, we will turn on each other and collapse, like a shattering glass.

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(PS - yes it IS possible to have a work place where, when you get a good idea, other people enthusiastically support you instead of thinking, "Damn, there goes my own raise and job." In fact, that type of socially uplifting context is the only place where really good ideas can be nurtured and evolve and where truly creative problem comprehension and solving occurs.)