How do we get anywhere?

Dances with Penguins - 2
Originally uploaded by Fotomom

Isn't there some tool that we could use so that our meetings always get us a little closer to where we want to go?

If we're going to get anywhere, we need to learn how to talk to each other. That's a conclusion I keep coming back to. With all these people, why can't we solve our own problems?

So, I come back to the side-point Professor Gary Olson made in class one day. He said that white-boards were proven to be very useful for making meetings get somewhere, but he hardly ever saw faculty or administrators use one when they met.

This is on top of arriving without a clear agenda, and working without minutes being taken of what was said.

Well, that's curious. Why is that? I mean, white-boards are really useful in removing ambiguity and bringing issues to the front where they can be seen by everyone. They help you leave the meeting with a common understanding of what was agreed to and a clear picture of what steps who is taking next.

So, I have to suppose that faculty and administrators prefer to keep issues hidden, prefer to avoid revealing conflict, and are happy to let everyone go off with their own misconceptions of what was decided and who is doing what next. And, I guess, it's OK in their minds that people who weren't at the meeting are now missing part of the picture and walking around misinformed.

So, let's start the "Five Whys" process and see if we can figure out what it would take to overcome this apparent social dysfunction.

So far we have:

• We have major social problems that aren't being dealt with, locally, at a department or corporate level, regionally, statewide, and nationally, or being dealt with way too late to be effective
  
• which is partly because: people don't get anywhere when they meet
• which is partly because: they don't use obvious tools like agendas, white-boards, and minutes
• which is partly because: those tools remove ambiguity which clarifies areas of conflict which is disruptive and unpleasant
• which is partly because: people aren't good at dealing with conflict so they avoid it.
• which is partly because: what?

I think part of the reason people have trouble dealing with conflict is that they don't think of it as "apparent conflict" and assume that it is "real conflict."

Because they think it's "real" conflict, they also think that the only way to survive is to "win", which means that everyone else must "lose", so they hardly want to be open and honest about their motivations. Most people also assume that everyone else is just like them, so they assume the same reasoning and motivations are behind what everyone else is doing as well.

We get some guidance from the superb book "Getting To Yes", which is about techniques that let the Soviet Union and the US negotiate during the cold war, when they hated and mistrusted each other.

The authors use the example of an orange that two kids are fighting over. Each wants the orange and "needs it" and "must have it."

On investigation of what they would do with it if they got it, one wanted to squeeze it and get the juice to drink, and the other needed the outside rind for some class project.

So, it turns out the "it" they were fighting over wasn't ever made clear enough to reveal that there were two "its" and one orange could satisfy both needs.

So, one problem the authors found is that people tend to jump to conclusions about what they think is the "only way" to do something that could "possibly" work. The conclusions are wrong, but are based on unstated or even unrealized assumptions or different life experience.

When the people can back off of their "positions" ( "I must have that orange!") and go back upstream a step to their "interests" ("I need orange juice!") new solutions suddenly appear to what was an "unsolvable problem."

If you keep on tracking back upwards one step after another, you end up coming back to basic needs, that people need to survive, to eat, to have clothing and shelter, etc. I think any negotiation has to start with the assumption that the goal in life is not the annihilation of the other party (which would be a position), but to figure out how to proceed so that the other party doesn't pose an on-going threat of annihilating me (an understandable and predictable interest.)

Many international conflicts are generated by the belief that the only way the other party will stop being a threat is if it is annihilated entirely, and that there are no other possible solutions to reducing the threat.

I'll look at other properties of rational ways to deal with conflict in other posts. Where I wanted to get in this one was to follow the chain of causality upstream far enough to see hope along one axis. So far, we've found that many of the reasons to avoid discussing conflict and actually resolving it are based in misunderstanding, unspoken assumptions, leaps of judgment about the "only way" something can happen, and perhaps hidden assumptions that the "only way" to reduce a threat to myself is to sabotage or eliminate someone else.

The humility required is being willing to accept that it is possible that somewhere you have leaped to some conclusion and leaped right past another solution you didn't see.

The belief required is being willing to accept that your own survival does not automatically require the elimination of someone else.

In other circles, maybe the realization is that your own wealth, empowerment, and happiness does not automatically demand dis-empowering everyone else. There may be other ways to survive and thrive and be legitimately happy and wealthy.

In fact, as I'll discuss in other posts, both health and wealth are bio-social constructs and if everyone else died, the wealth would be worth nothing and physiological and mental health would be impossible. And, just like our body doesn't have a "super-cell" that all the other cells bow down to and "obey", the planet doesn't need a "super-man" that all other men bow down to and obey. The whole concept of domination is fatally flawed, and has no biological or natural analog. Ecosystems can't make themselves subservient to one component, and the emergent power is so much larger than any component's individual power that subservience would make no sense. There is no "best" part of a mutually-dependent ecosystem.

(credits - photo Dances with Penguins, by Fotomom,
click on it to go to that site on Flickr., "dinner time" penguin photo by
Uploaded by c-basser on Flickr)

Review of Beyond Reason - by Fisher and Shapiro

Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and co-authors of the best-selling book Getting to Yes, have come out with a new and important book - Beyond Reason - Using Emotions as you Negotiate.

A review of the book by "Negotiator" magazine is here, which concludes:

This is one of those unusual works that is so carefully constructed and written that you may find yourself praising its common sense and nodding easily in concurrence. It may even seem that you knew it all as you read along. Perhaps, of course, you did. And yet, more likely, you will decide as this reviewer came to do that you have just read a new and valuable contribution to the literature of negotiation. It is a book to reflect upon and that belongs on every negotiator's reference shelf.

The book includes an extensive and well-chosen bibliography, a glossary and a full index which will please both practitioners and scholars.

Highly Recommended.

John Baker, Ph.D.
Editor

This book is relevant here, because the authors have enormous experience with what it takes to make successful negotiations, particularly on a global scale. So, let me move on from the review and author's words to my own discussion of how this subject is relevant

And one of the most important realizations is that humans are not machines. We are not little cognitive processors that just happen to be superimposed on top of animal bodies. Humans have a rich depth that is sloppily called "emotional", and too often treated with disdain by Science -- as if it's left over baggage from our grandparents that we wish we didn't have.

Human emotions are a "feature" not a "bug".

It seems that these "emotions" have a lot to do with social relationships, and with the establishing and maintenance of "social capital" and the fabric that underlays the rest of our lives, commerce, etc. The emotions have a lot to do with preventing (or causing) the kind of ripping apart that was described in the prior post.

Like "Religion", "Emotions" are often slammed for their visible downside, while failing to take into account their upside. Remember that the core problem I'm discussing now has to do with a very subtle, relatively distant breakdown in global coherence, but one that turns out to result in a series of "unavoidable" system errors that just keep on happening.

And, as Commerce has been increasingly noticing, if you want a productive labor force, it really helps if they are a happy labor force, and truly enjoy working together. Positive Psychology makes a tremendous impact on the bottom line, not just on "safety" or reliability or error reduction or mission completion. It also turns out to make a tremendous difference in the physiological health and mental health of the workforce. So, it cannot be left out in the hopes of having a "more efficient" company. The maximally efficient sustainable operating point for a group of people includes joyous interactions. Stripping out the emotions and the side conversations makes the output substantially worse in quality and quantity.

People are capable of working together side by side, they can enjoy doing it, and they need to be encouraged continually to do so, or the "silo" effect will dominate.

Very briefly, let's review Fisher and Shapiro's summary of "human needs" of negotiators (who we assume are already well up on Maslow's Hierarchy, breathing, healthy, fed, etc.)

The often overlooked human needs they focus on are these:

• Express Appreciation
• Build Affiliation
• Respect Autonomy
• Acknowledge Status
• Choose a Fulfilling Role

They end with an account of using these ideas in the real world, by Jamil Mahuad, the Former President of Ecuador.

I'll end my quotes from the book with one from the very start of the book:

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate - and in ourselves.

Again, I'll emphasize that the world we live in is multi-level, and the operational laws of levels outside our own are often very hard to see, but are every bit as important as the laws of the level we inhabit and can see so clearly. Just because something is distant from us does not make it "small". Mount Everest and the Sun are distant from us - but they are huge.

Emotional couplings can go dramatically wrong, but they can also go dramatically right. There is, in the words of Professor Kim Cameron - "Positive Deviance." We desperately need the "going right" part, because simple cognitive processes (thinking, symbol string processing) just doesn't have the oomph and motivational power to get actual hard work done in a sustainable way. Dispassionate thoughts can help us analyze situations, but are powerless to generate actual sustainable uphill driving action. For that we need emotional power and passion. Again, these are not "bugs" but "features" of the way humans and our society are designed.

The fact that emotions don't fit neatly into the cold, mechanical, "Scientific" model is an indictment of the limits of the model, not an indictment of emotions. Like Religion, Emotions deal with wavelengths and frequencies that are outside the historical Scientific linear model of "things-that-can-be neatly isolated from context and continue to operate".

Not only can they not be separated from context - they are the very stuff and substance of context.

Note that this is true on two different levels. I came to the topic on the social level, on what makes us tick, on what makes an organization capable of highly accurate, highly productive activity, day after day.

But it's true on a personal physiological level. Our brain, and neurons, are literally swimming and bathed in a different dimensional context of chemicals that form the context for our neural activity and "thinking." This context should not be seen as something that only has two states, namely working (or neutral, not interfering with thought) and broken (interacting with thought.)

Our brain is exquisitely wired for certain kinds of computations, such as "vision". Similarly, our bodies and emotions are exquisitely hard-wired for other kinds of computations involved in keeping our society functioning. Similarly, our own gut has its own neural system and pretty well runs itself, being visible only when something goes wrong - but that doesn't make it any less important to our well-being.

IN the book Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the role of "mirror neurons", and a whole shadow array of processes that take place outside our awareness whenever two people meet or interact. (An TV interview by Nova with Goleman can be viewed here.) Here again we have a whole set of important systems that are almost invisible to our consciousness, except that they aren't invisible and are just critical to successful interactions. I'll quote from the cover of the book:

Our reactions to others and theirs on us have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins- and bad relationships like poisons. We can "catch" other people's emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequence of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening.

So, again, these are not factors that "interfere with" the management and operation of groups of people. These factors are the empowering forces that need to be orchestrated and "managed" in the best sense of that word. And, as with growing crops or healing bodies -

the natural processes do the hard stuff and the heavy lifting here, and mostly we need to just get obstacles out of the way of those natural processes.

It is like the concept that Alex Baldwin comes up with in the movie Red October, basically, "Hey. We don't need to solve this problem. We just need to realize how Captain Ramius has already solved this problem and go along with that." We don't need to create the concept of massive parallel computational power and add some "plug-in" to humans to make it work, although wireless connectivity and cell phones certainly should help -- we just need to open the floodgates and let it happen.

Actually, there is one step we could take to massively increase that effect, nationally. We could subsidize phone conversations and make them totally free. We could remove the last financial barrier to people talking to other people. Years ago, Japan basically did this, and made the cost of any phone call something like 5 cents. Of all the places where we do not want to slow things down, interpersonal communication is tops. There are billions of other places to make money, but charging people to talk to each other is the most economically damaging one I can think of. This models seriously suggests subsidizing those conversations, and not trying to profit from free Internet conversations.

Or, in our workplace design, we could be sure to include employee lounges with whiteboards, where people can mix and run into each other. One study I heard reported that something like 2/3 of the barrier-cracking solutions to problems arose "spontaneously" when people just happened to come by when others were talking about something. This was way more powerful than formal "project meetings" for solving hard problems. Removing the kitchens and lounges is not a step to improved efficiency or effectiveness, and if it appears to be so, we need to re-validate our metrics.

We have no way to predict which two people need to meet and exchange views to hold together the fabric that I showed in my last post being ripped apart. We know that we will need many such interactions, and that we need to facilitate interactions that cross gaps, cross silos, and cross social classes and not let everyone spend all day just inter-breeding mentally and psychologically. Too much inbreeding causes birth defects and production defects.

It is necessary to "stir the pot" and not let the natural forces that cause separation and clumping to "win" the day. We need to actively celebrate diversity, not "tolerate it" one day a year.

In a complete system, every part resonates to every other part. We are not sure how to "cause" that to occur, but we know a lot about ways to be sure it does not occur. One way to be sure it won't occur is to break the world into segments and not let them talk to each other socially, especially if the segments break along racial, caste, or social-status lines.

Central planning the details of human interactions won't work. Central planning and environment that will nurture human relations is critical.

Maybe, breaking the workspace up into cubicles, and putting one person per cubicle and not letting them see each other or talk to each other is not the best way to accomplish that. The human interactions being squelched are the ones that the company needs to operate. There's even death-spiral possible here, where, the more in trouble the company is, the more "management" prevents people from "wasting time" talking to each other -- which, in turn, reduces morale and efficiency even more, which makes the company more in trouble, etc.

People are an asset, but the most important part of people is not N-people taken as "individuals" but a dynamic emergent "us" that can and will show up if people with a common purpose are allowed to interact and encouraged to support each other and find corporate support for such on-going "social" interactions.

The classic concept of checking your guns and your emotions and, basically, your life at the door because we should be "professional" because this is a "work place" produces not neutrality, but a workplace that is dismally depressing and just sucks the life-force out of the employees who try to work there. Phrases like "I'm going home so I can get some work done" start sounding familiar. What those classical techniques produce, time after time, are "anti-work places" where the work cannot possibly get done and cannot possibly get done well in a sustainable fashion.

The old model, the "Theory X" model of employees, doesn't actually work in practice. We need to be looking at "Theory Y" instead, that seems to fit reality and be much more productive in both human and commercial senses. Ben-Sharar teaches Harvard's most popular course, Positive Psychology, and teaches that this is productive for everything from health care to the Israeli Army. Theory Y actually works and works way better than Theory X. That's the take home message.

We are not machines. That's the better model.