I've been framed!

There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."

We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.

It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!

My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

This cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.

This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.

This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.

That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.

We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."

Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.

It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?

Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.

It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.

Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.

It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.

Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."

At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.

There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.

Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.

Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.

Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".

The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.

The insights are that

• content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
  
• you cannot change one without affecting the other;
• if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.

In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.

This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.

Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.

Implications
==========

Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.

It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.

In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.

Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).

Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.

This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.

Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.

If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.

(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)

Communication and control - the LAPD and Moslems

A hornet's nest was stirred up by a recent announcement by the Los Angeles Police Department that it was collecting data on Muslim communities.

"LAPD to build data on Muslim areas; Anti-terrorism unit wants to identify sites 'at risk' for extremism.", Los Angeles Times, Nov 9, 2007, also titled "LAPD defends Muslim mapping effort". Those aren't available for free, but a brief restatement is on the LAPD weblog at http://www.lapdblog.org/

What went wrong, and how could this work better next time? One hint is that the LA Times story had over 250 comments posted, and the LAPD weblog story had two.

The core problem, as I see it:
=============

I think it is almost impossible to communicate to someone, you can only communicate with them. Otherwise, you are really only talking at them -- most of it is bouncing off unheard.

This is like the teacher who said "I taught that material - the students just didn't learn it." That's not teaching, it's spouting. A DVD can spout. It takes a human being to teach.

When the FAA wants to read a flight clearance to a pilot, where it matters if the message is received, it waits until the pilot says "ready to copy." There's no point in running the faucet if the glass isn't under it.

What our K-12 or college systems seldom teach, however, is a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but overlooked all the time in planning:

People are not machines.

I've gone on at length in prior posts about what this means, but the most important take home message here today is this:

Human communication paths are not copper wires

that are either "attached" or "not" -- they are dynamic paths that you have to grow from both sides and continually nurture and weed. The are, in most senses of the word, living things.


And, like the way you talk with your wife, one harsh word or insult, even if unintended, can shut the whole thing down in an instant. To do this right requires heavy lifting over a long period of time. It doesn't just "happen." It's worth it, but it doesn't come easily.

It's as if you each have very low power walkie-talkies with invisible antennas, but your antenna is at right angles to hers, and essentially no signal gets through. You have to jockey around for a while on each end to get them more closely aligned before you can carry on a conversation.

You can't make up for this with volume. If the person is misunderstanding what you mean by a word, shouting doesn't improve the communication. What helps is noticing that their face registered a blank, or anger, when you used the word, which you didn't intend as your message, and stopping right there to ask what they just heard instead of what you meant.

Except that, you have to do that several hundred times, and they have to do it several hundred times, with both sides making a good faith effort to avoid jumping to conclusions, for it to work. There is no way to avoid this step. People are not machines. There is no magic wire, no Mr. Spock kind of Vulcan Mind-Meld that will let you communicate directly.

And, as my other posts go into at length, we live in silos in very different worlds, where words are attached to very different meanings, and it is misleading that we might all speak English, say. Then we think what I mean by a word is what you mean by it, and that's not true at all. Actually, it's amazing we manage to ever communicate at all with other people.

"What you heard is not what I meant" is the norm.

Anyway, at the end of this give and take dance of adjusting our internal antennas to get more aligned, there is, in fact a sweet spot at which a new thing takes over. In signal theory this is called "phase lock". Suddenly, briefly, you are 100% aligned. For a moment, the air is crystal clear, not filled with smoke and debris. But, people are not machines and this doesn't last very long, per event. But it can happen. Then you have to repair the channel again.

Sometimes you see this in sports teams that "get their act together", for a few seconds they play as if mind-reading, like a single person, totally synchronized and coordinated. There's a joy in watching this few seconds that makes the rest of the miserable weather worth while.

LAPD and Muslims
==============

Anyway, what triggered this post was the announcement (above) this week by the Los Angeles Police Department that they were going to start ... and I should stop there, because at the next word, communication already broke down.

The LAPD, after some false starts and use of the term "mapping Muslim communities" changed to the phrase "engaging". Too late! The community heard "mapping, followed implicitly by forcing to wear stars, surrounding with barbed wire, and shipping off to concentration camps, or worse. "

Again the basic rule of communication had shown its face:

What you say is not what they'll hear.

So, which side is "right"? I have no idea what is "really" going on, in terms of engagement between the LAPD and Muslim communities, aside from noting the obvious dysfunctional communication that set things back quite a bit.

Is the conclusion "Oh, I give up. There's no way to talk to her?" No. But there's no way to talk "TO" anyone, as I described above, unless you actually plan to take a lot of time listening as well, hearing surprising things that you weren't originally aware were issues.

In other terms, your antennas or mental models of each other have to both shift around somewhat and play this dance that we used to hear computer modems playing, alternating various beeps and squawks at each other, searching for a communication protocol that both sides understood before trying to start the actual conversation.

That step cannot be skipped, or your faucet is over here and their glass is over there, and there ain't any water making it across the gap.


The LA Fire Department
==============
By a remarkable coincidence, this month's issue of the magazine "Government Health IT" had a story about the LA Fire Department's use of Web 2.0 technology, including Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to build communication paths with the public.

The LA Fire Department weblog is here.

The whole point of "Web 2" or "Web 2.0" is that the communication goes both ways. In "Web 1" systems, the company posts a "website" and the viewers, as on TV, well, "view it". It goes one way, period. Sometimes a letter to the editor might get a tiny bit of feedback loop going, but not really -- it's to little, and too late. Delay time matters, to humans. Remembering your wife's birthday ON her birthday is way better than remembering it the next day.

All of the "Web 2" tools are different, and not different inside the box -- they are different outside the box. They are used differently. They are social-networking tools that allow communications to go BOTH directions.

So, like a weblog, not only does the blog owner get to post an item, but everyone and his brother gets to post a response. That's one cycle. Then, people start posting responses to other people's comments, and it takes off. It is, in some sense, much less controllable.

The trade off that makes it valuable, despite this lessened sense of control, is that it lets the customers stop being "viewers" and start being "participants." It goes from the world of "selling" to resistant "customers" to actually hearing what people are saying and asking for and changing the product line to fit those actual needs. This is the key of the whole Toyota Way, known to Toyota as "customer pull", and Toyota could not operate without it.

Toyota knows how to LISTEN.

It turns out, it is not trivial to listen. It is not even easy to listen. Being in the room with the TV on is not listening, it's being near something spouting. TV trains us to be "subjected to" messages, which is like standing under a cold shower. People "tune out."

You want people to "tune in", you need to go interactive, where both sides talk, AND, both sides listen. AND, both sides adjust their frequency and antenna position slightly to improve the channel bandwidth, and go through that mutual learning cycle over and over again, each time getting a little better at hearing.

It's a loop, like the clothes line pictured above. It either goes both ways, or it doesn't go at all. If there's no loop, you're simply trying to "push with a rope."

If you want them to hear you, you have to spend a lot of energy listening to and hearing what they are really trying to tell you. The "density" is a property of the CHANNEL, not either side. If your listener seems "dense", it's because the whole communication LOOP isn't flowing adequately, full cycle.

Anyway, what's the LAFD doing?

Brian Humphrey and Ron Myers are described as having 80 different Web 2.0 efforts in the works, at the LA Fire Department's public information office.

I quote the Government Health IT article (Nov 2007, pages 42-43, Crisis Communications 2.0")

Humphrey and Myers see the new tools as opening more channels of communication between the department and the public. "Some might make the mistake of thinking these web 2.0 tools will allow us to get our message out louder and to more people," Humphrey said. "I think that is is wrong. What they enhance is the ability to listen."

He said some emergency agencies seek to control the public. "Instead, we want to empower them," he added. "And that lends itself to Web 2.0"

Well, I mostly agree. I am afraid that their phrasing could be heard as saying that it is not important to get OUT the message, and that it is not important to have public control and order."

In point of fact, as a friendly amendment, the reason for listening better is that you have to listen better IN ORDER TO get your communication channel built, IN ORDER TO be able to get your message not only broadcast and spouted, but actually heard and understood correctly.

The listening part is not just "for nice". The honest listening part is part of the requirement humans have to build a channel.

And, providing a spot for comments that are ignored is not "listening".

True story - once at Cornell the Building and Grounds department decided they were going to undertake some ill-advised project, which I think involved demolishing part of the beloved "Arts Quad" to put in something ugly. There was a huge outcry over the fact that this had not been discussed in public and there had been no chance for public input. As a result, the B&G department scheduled a huge public hearing. I went. They started off the meeting with, as near as I can recall, these words. "Thank you for coming tonight. We welcome your input. After the discussion, on your way out, please pick up your copy, from the boxes in the back,
of the booklets that describe the construction we will be doing next week. "

Communication only has value if it contains surprises. This is a basic law of signal theory. If the communication has no news in it, it's pretty useless. We already know that.

Which means, if you want to communicate, and build this loop, you need to accept the astounding fact that the party you're talking with knows something that you don't.

And the point of the conversation is to mutually surprise each other with facts that the other side didn't realize. This only works if both sides are willing to be surprised with information as good as, or better than, the information they had been working with and assumed was true.

The notion of "fairness" is very strong in human communication, unlike computers. People really resent being talked down to, and shut down the link. On the other hand, people sit up and take notice when their comments are heard and responded to, and come sit closer and start listening themselves. But it takes time. And humility. And listening. And hearing. And responding to what is heard by updating your mental model of what is going on.

The other point I have to disagree with, or tweak, in the statement above by the LAFD, is the implication that this communication process could lose "control".

As I've discussed before, no company or hospital or armed force is going to abandon the level of control they worked so hard to get, to be able to deliver their mission. BUT, they can, and must, adjust their internal mental model of what they thin they're doing, based on real information from the real world, not on some old, outdated concept of reality. Or, there's no point in "control" - you get that level of "control" by welding the steering wheel in place as the car drives off a cliff. You see that level of control in GM as they refuse to hear the message that people want cars with better mileage.

So, even the US Army, with a very strong hierarchy and a very strong need for control, has embraced the idea that they also need how to listen. (See the US Army Leadership Field Manual, FM22-100.)

The core "cybernetic" loop requires two things -- that the body respond to the brain's control commands, and that the brain stay current on what's going on in the body. Then it's a win-win.

Brains issuing controls based on how the world was last week or last year or "when I was in school" are like driving a car with the windshield blocked with a full-size photograph of the road taken last month.

Two kinds of authority
==================

As I've discussed elsewhere, the two meanings of "authority" have to be disentangled. Authority, in the sense of being able to issue lawful orders has to be retained, and enhanced.

Authority, in the sense of being right and being up to date an an authority on a subject, has to be obtained, and can only be obtained, by listening to real-time updates from the field, and being prepared to be surprised with what you hear.

The two together is a terrific combo. Control without actual paying attention is very short-lived, and expires at the next bend in the road one wasn't expecting or that wasn't on the Mapquest or Google Map of our planned route -- it is pointless.

The communication and response loops are key. One, vertically, has to let the guys at the top listen to, and actually hear, what they guys at the bottom are saying. One, horizontally, has to let everyone hear what the customers are actually saying. Then, you have a recipe for a very agile and adaptive powerhouse. Otherwise, you have a blind monster at large.

Wade

Related posts:

Unity in diversity and the two feedback loops (horizontal and vertical):

Nature of Feedback

(photo of man and woman , "Worn out" by by Avid Maxfan)