An Attitude of Progress and Embrace of the Unsettling

One of the many mini-obsessions I have among the larger obsession of how we make progress is this question of how we deal with the fact that given that progress so often looks and feels like disruption and threat, we resist the very forces that might move us forward.

Some delightful quotes on this theme are to be found in this piece by Maria Popova.

“Cut short of the floundering and you’ve cut short the possible creative outcomes”
- Denise Shekerjian

And from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

"The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment."

Find the post here.

Monarchs (Butterflies, that is) and Millennials

I went on a business trip with my wife Friday. She calls them field trips. She teaches 2nd grade and Wednesday her 7 and 8 year olds reached the end of their unit on butterflies by releasing some they had watched transform from caterpillars into butterflies. Friday they went to the IMAX to watch a movie about monarchs.

It's cliche to express wonder at the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly but the wonder is deserved. If you saw the two creatures without any knowledge that they were related, you likely wouldn't even put them in the same category, much less realize they were two stages of the same life. There's more, though.

Every fourth generation is a super butterfly. For three generations the butterfly's life expectancy is about two to six weeks. This fourth generation, though, lives for six to eight moths. It's also bigger and able to fly from Canada into the heart of Mexico, thousands of miles. The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is genetic code triggered each generation; the transformation from regular to super butterfly is genetic code only triggered every fourth generation.

Which made me wonder whether something similar is going on in our community.

If we define a generation as 25 years, four generations back takes us to those born about 1900. These people fought in World War 1 and then were the leaders during World War 2. Their inventions, speculations, investments and desires fueled the roaring 20s, tipped into the Great Depression, and then a hot war with fascists and then a cold war with communists. When they were born in 1900, the two most common jobs were farmer and household servants (families with fewer than 3 servants were considered lower-middle class); by the time they died in the 1960s through 1990s, men had walked on the moon, the internet was linking people across the world, and the discovery of DNA had evolved into genetic engineering.

The kids at Parkland so impressed me. Millennials and younger are aware, conscientious, and the best educated generation in history. They are informed by thousands of stories and have access to millions of lives through a media that includes TV, radio, podcasts, video, social media and every other permutation of the internet.

It is, of course, a whimsical idea, but what if those kids born about 2000 - who are 4 generations removed from the generation born about 1900 - are a super generation who will carry us farther than the generations before?

Europe's Great Un-Learning

There are only two states of mind that precede learning, and neither is particularly pleasant. Before you learn something, you are either ignorant or confused; or, put differently, before you get answers you have to question what you know. There were two huge events in the first two centuries of the first economy that created mass confusion and revealed great ignorance, two events that made Europeans question what they knew and opened them up to the Renaissance.

The Black Death, which began in 1348, and the discovery of America created tragedy, hope and cognitive dissonance. Try for a moment to imagine the incessant, near apocalyptic coverage today’s media would give to the discovery of a “new world” populated with people with many of the same social structures as us and yet very different rituals and behaviors, much less a pandemic that killed nearly a third of the population. Imagine what absurd speculation we’d hear on talk shows, the banter between “experts” whose expertise in no way prepared them for this, and the callers who began to question everything. These two events were like gales of destructive creation, destroying so much of what Europeans believed and opening them up to the new.

Saul Alinsky writes that someone pushing for social change will rarely have a majority on his side. Change is too uncertain and people are busy with their own lives. The best one can do is to get the majority feeling like the status quo is so bad that they won’t work to defend it. When that happens, you can make changes. In a sense, the Black Death did at least that, probably not just making Europeans feel ambivalent about the status quo but actually making them ready to actively change it.

Brain Wired by Culture

Some parts of a woman's brain change up to 25% through the course of a month. "When I started taking a woman's hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages of life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality," writes Dr. Louann Brizendine in The Female Brain.

I mention this because I want to make a bold claim. One that I think will be proven in the next decade or two but is not - to the best of my knowledge - yet proven or even claimed by any serious professionals.

It is not just that people in different cultures and points of developmental history have different opinions and beliefs: their brains are wired differently.

To take a simple example, in schools were children don't feel as safe and violence and bullying is common, test scores are lower to reflect, I believe, more time spent in the fight or flight portion of their brain and less time in the frontal lobes.

The brain of a villager living in a rural area of Afghanistan who suffers from hunger, is regularly coerced by threats of violence, and feels as though he has little control over his life will be bathed in a very different set of hormones and chemicals than the brain of a Greenwich villager living in New York who worries about overeating, is regularly persuaded by advertising, and feels like he has no purpose in his life. It is not just that these two people have different beliefs about the world. I would argue that these two have very different brains.

My personal opinion is that a sense of control is the biggest determinant of how the brain is wired and world view formed.

And this matters for policy. Imagine going into Mississippi to "help" the locals to give up on their curious religious beliefs and odd superstitions in order to become more developed and prosperous. It probably would not be long before they had taken up arms to chase you and your BMW-driving friends out of town. It is not as though you can simply offer some new information to change how they think. You would likely have to change the way their brain is wired, the way they make sense of the world. You cannot simply bring new policies into old brains, put new wine into old bottles.

It might just be that the answer is to change conditions for the next generation as much as possible. Alleviating hunger. Adding control and order to the point that people feel less intimidated in their daily lives. Offering choices to the young. These actions might plant the seeds for then introducing policies that will be welcomed rather than repulsed.

I love the idea of psychology, cognitive science, and therapy. I think that happiness and peace of mind is more important than we allow. But as I get older, I am more inclined to believe that social systems do as much to define psychology and cognition as anything we could do with an individual in a particular social milieu. To change the individual, you have to change the social system. Change the world he lives in and you change the individual. I predict that we'll even find that if you change the world he lives in, you change the very composition of his brain.

Lute's Law for Changing the Status Quo

Reading In Search of Bill Clinton: a psychological biography, there is an account of how he helped facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland. One of his aids gave him some really fascinating advice.

Clinton is debating whether to give Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, a visa for entry to the US. Every president before him has denied it. Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, is considered a terrorist organization and not only would the British and the Republicans be outraged at this, so would members of his own cabinet. Yet Clinton's’ advisers in Northern Ireland thought it was key to moving forward in the peace negotiations. (The Prime Minister of Ireland essentially reached the same conclusion months earlier. The Irish PM ditched his bodyguards to meet with the paramilitary groups on both sides. Everyone said that he should not meet with them because they were terrorist groups but he said they were the ones with the power and if he wanted to make anything happen, he needed to meet with them.) When Clinton asked one adviser why she thought he should grant Adams a visa, she had a really provocative answer.

“Because no one expects you to,” Jane Holl Lute told Clinton. “Not even Adams. Everyone expects you to say no. So there’s a card you have to play. And if you say yes, everyone will have to recalculate, including Adams.”
To change the status quo Lute believes that you have to do the unexpected. “People make plans based on expectations. If you fulfill their expectations, their plans don’t change. But when you do the unexpected, you force everyone to alter their plans, including yourself, by the way. And that’s OK.” The other person who agreed with this analysis was Adams, who said of his visa: “It was a change that now everyone had to react to. It shook up the status quo.”

Lots of other factors came into play, but today, in Northern Ireland, Clinton is widely lauded for his role in ending “the troubles.” Many analysts think that without this one move, the process might have de-railed.

How would I state Lute's Law? The status quo is supported by expectations. To change it, do the unexpected.

Our Constantly Changing Political Orientation

I have an idea for a research grant. Send researchers off to find the one person who changed their political position as the result of an argument of any kind. You know, the conservative who suddenly said, "Oh. I get it. You are right. You can't just assume that government is always ineffective." Or the liberal who said, "You mean you can trust businesses? I guess you're right."

We don't stay away from the topics of politics and religion in conversation because they are unrevealing or because they are not fascinating. We stay away from these topics because no one ever changes their mind on these topics. Their opinions have been formed about 4 years before the discussion starts. I don't think that I've ever witnessed a person changing his opinion about a political topic during the course of an argument or discussion. And I've been in and witnessed plenty such conversations.

If the researchers can't find that person, perhaps we could just divert all the money spent on news analysis into video game development.

Just an idea.

Technology - the Opposite of Romance

From Yahoo:

A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.

According to comScore, Twitter had 20.1 million unique visitors in the United States in June, some 34 times the 593,000 a year earlier.

For Twitter users, the outage meant no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.

"I had to Google search Twitter to find out what was going on, when normally my Twitter feed gives me all the breaking news I need," said Alison Koski, a New York public-relations manager. She added she felt "completely lost" without Twitter.

Now that is a rapid move from obscurity to "can't live without it." Technology adoption patterns may be moving in an opposite direction of romance over the course of a life: we are moving from long-term commitments to fleeting, intense relationships with our technology. Of course technology is not left heartbroken when we leave it behind - only the investors in it.

The Limits of Education

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers, is great. He's done it again, putting together a string of great stories that make fairly profound points. I heard him say in an interview that this book is a reaction to the last 8 years of emphasis on individual success. He focuses instead on the ecology of success. I recommend the book.

But one chapter of his really irked me. Gladwell basically accepts that education needs to be more demanding. The example he uses is of Marita, who wakes up each morning at 5:45 and goes to bed at 11 PM. This is not a graduate student. Marita is only twelve.

Gladwell writes that this kind of rigor and time spent will give Marita opportunities that she would never have otherwise. He assures us that this is reasonable. I remain unconvinced.

I’m sure that the data supports Gladwell’s contention that Marita will have more academic success at this rate. I am not so sure that the data supports the notion that Marita will have more life success with this approach.

To digress for one moment, I once heard a claim that even engineers apply less than 20% of what they learn. We spend a great deal of energy getting students prepared but very little time getting feedback on what did or did not work. What, of all that they learned, they really needed. We seem to spend even less time trying to prepare students to become creative, entrepreneurial people who know how to translate raw knowledge into value.

If education is the speed of the engine and life is the speed of the car, we have educational engines revving loudly and, given slips in transmission, drive shaft, and universal joints, wheels on the cars crawling along. Or perhaps a simpler analogy is that we keep pushing harder on the accelerator but don’t ever shift out of first gear. Learning a great deal that we don't know how to - or don't bother to - translate into changes in quality of life seems beside the point.

To focus more on education to the point of putting the kids through a rigorous program that essentially leads to sleep deprivation before puberty is, I guess, one approach. But this seems to me an approach akin to putting more horse power into the engine when the car is still in first gear rather than simply shifting. What if we got better at learning how to apply what we know rather than just learning more?

Regular readers know that I do believe education ought to be transformed – along with the corporation. If we made organizations more entrepreneurial – finding ways to provoke and translate the ingenuity of employees into new products and markets – we’d probably find communities demanding a different kind of education and preparation for life. It is not obvious, though, that the communities would simply demand greater quantities of the education they are already getting.

It might be time to stop finding new ways to push the engine to higher RPMs and instead find someway to shift gears. If today's gains can come only from working kids from 5:45 to 11, where will tomorrow's gains come from? It must just be time to realize that we're reaching the limits of an educational system that was largely defined in the late 19th century.

Just Try to Change the World and See if it Doesn't Change You

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
[excerpt from a David Foster Wallace speech]

I used to think that social progress and individual development were somehow unrelated. I now think that social progress is the surest form of individual development and would go so far as to suspect that individual development is - at best - unsustainable without social progress.

If you live in amongst a horde of Mongolian warriors, you're not likely to have many career options outside of organized homicide or be much rewarded for advocating peace. Until there is some kind of social progress, your "development" simply won't have a place to unfold.

And yet our social reality is to us almost what the water is to Foster Wallace's young fish. The differences between two 15 year old girls in medieval Europe are almost negligible compared with the differences between a 15 year girl in medieval Europe and a 15 year old girl in modern Australia, yet we tend to focus on differences of individuals within cultures and social constructs rather than focus on changing those cultures and social constructs.

And maybe the real punch line to this is that nothing changes an individual quite like undertaking the task of changing the world. Attempting to change the individual without changing society is a dicey proposition. Attempting to change society without changing the individual is impossible.

Inciting Revolution - Or, Why We Cannot Teach Creativity in Schools

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

Like all institutions, education helps to ... preserve the status quo. It is necessarily conservative.

A basic requirement of moving into a new age is creative thinking. But schools stifle creativity, particularly in children, by insisting that they conform to standards of behavior and belief, and by teaching them to respond to questions with answers that are expected of them. Answers that are expected cannot be creative, precisely because they are expected. Creative answers are necessarily surprising, unexpected. The current American educational system can be characterized as having students memorize known (expected) answers to predetermined questions. ….

Students are also taught that certain questions must not be asked; for example, Jules Henry, a cultural anthropologist who argued that a human’s foremost evolutionary task is to learn how to learn, wondered what would happen “if all through school the young were provoked to question the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of patriotism, the profit motive, the two-party system, monogamy, …. and so on. … such questioning would produce more creativity than a change-resisting society could handle.

All quoted from Russell Ackoff and Sheldin Rovin's Redesigning Society, pp. 83-4.

Picture from Sandi's 2nd grade class last Valentine.

------
Other blogs:
ceyo "our students are showing up tomorrow"

Change, Change, CLANG - Change for Fools

It seems like the key to managing large, complex systems is to make sure that no individual can change or impact them. This does, however, have its drawbacks.

It is important that complex systems not be overly fragile or subject to damage by the acts of one rogue or incompetent, So, they are typically made fairly robust against any disruption. This is a good thing. Or can be, if not for the fact that most any change initially shows up as disruptive.

For the same reason that these big corporations or financial systems or airplane designs or governments or computers are fairly secure against disruption, they are also hard to change. This would be significantly better news if the world did not change and they did not have to adapt and evolve.

Because it seems that for whatever goals a system has - it is only a matter of time before the goal to which all other goals is subordinated is the goal of self-preservation, or resisting change.

Where Change Comes From - Insights from Peter Block's New Book

I watched and listened to and read transcripts of various speeches from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. It occurred to me that political speeches and social progress have about as much to do with each other as drug use and songwriting; the two often happen in the same place, but it is not obvious that there is any causation between them or that it is positive.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that it is a lie to say that Reagan's denouncement of communism had anything to do with its collapse or even that Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon had anything to do with it happening. Deep structures and organic processes cause outcomes. God said "Let there be light" and there was light. By contrast, man speaks and God laughs.

It would be hard to imagine a worse approach to building social consensus and resultant change than bringing folks of the same ideology together into one room to cheer each other. The technical term might be ideological bubble.

Which brings me to a beautiful book I recently read. I have worked as a consultant for about 15 years. I have worked inside of organizations like the CIA, GM, Intel, and Lilly. I have formed strong opinions about work and management. This new book by Peter Block seems to me to get it right - to suggest a model for change that actually works.

I once heard Peter Block say, "Leadership is a collusion between control freaks and people who don't want to accept responsibility." His new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, continues in that vein. He suggest something wonderfully different from what we see inside of most organizations and in our political process. To me, it defines essential elements behind sustainable change. I highly recommend the book and doubt that you could have much success with change without having somehow gained at least some of the insights he articulates.

To give you some sense of its message, here are some excerpts that I thought worth sharing.

-------

... freedom being the choice to be a creator of our own experience and accept the unbearable responsibility that goes with that. Out of this insight grows the idea that perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom.


They know that learning best occurs when we structure meetings in a way that puts people in contact with each other where they experience in a conference the same dilemmas they face in life.


The most organizing conversation starter is "What do we want to create together?"


Bornstein concluded that well-funded efforts, with clear outcomes, that spell out the steps to get there do not work. Changes that begin on a large scale, are initiated or imposed from the top, and are driven to produce quick wins inevitably produce few lasting results. This may be a clue to why our wars such as those on drugs and poverty have been consistently disappointing and sometimes have even produced more of what they sought to eliminate
If you reflect on the stories of the successful leaders who Bornstein documents, you realize that these entrepreneurs were committed enough and patient enough to give their projects time to evolve and find their own way of operating. There were years spent simply learning what structures, agreements, leadership, and types of people were required to be successful.
It was after the model had evolved and succeeded on its own terms that it began to grow, gain attention, and achieve a level of scale that touched large numbers of people.
This means that sustainable change in community occur locally on a small scale, happen slowly, and are initiated at a grassroots level.


Allan Cohen claims the ability to herd cats, which many have said is impossible. He does this by tilting the floor, which changes the conditions under which the cats are operating. Emergent strategies focus on conditions more than on behaviors or predictable goals.


The media's power is the power to name the public debate. Or, in other words, the power to name "reality."


The essential aspect of restoration of community is a context in which each citizen chooses to be accountable rather than entitled.


Every gathering, in its composition and in its structure, has to be an example of the future we want to create.


The small group is the unit of transformation.


Questions that have the power to make a difference are ones that engage people in an intimate way, confront them with their freedom, and invite them to cocreate a future possibility.

----

Postive change will happen in your lifetime. It just might not come from where you expect.

Have a great weekend.

Association for Cognitive Dissociation

Michael Kaufman and I used to be on the board of the local Deming User Group. I've always liked the way he thinks. In his latest post, he comments about how attempts to change schools so often fail. He writes,

"I would contend the reason schools and schooling is the way it is - is because of the initial conditions that were present when the idea of free public schooling was conceived. In other words, the patterns established at the early stages of the development of the schooling system are the very same patterns that make it difficult, if not impossible, for schools and schooling to do the things on the list above [suggested changes and improvements]."

I wonder to what extent the problem is one of labeling. When we say schools, we all know what we mean - and we mean what we already have. By contrast, it would be fascinating to define a learning institution with a completely different name, like "Preparatory Institute for Great Happiness and Empowerment," or "Organization for Mind Altering Perceptions," or "A Place of Self Actualization and Occasional Humiliation."

If, by contrast, traditional schools were re-labeled as what they actually are, it might inspire everyone to gravitate away from them. For instance, "Room of Continual Tedium," or "The Institute for the Management of Mediocrity," might more accurately describe some traditional schools.

So, faithful readers (you two know who you are), what labels would encourage schools to transform? Ideas?

Whole System Change

“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction out of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
- Martin Luther King

The only effective way to change a piece of a system is to change the whole system it is part of.

Imagine you've been asked to "change" the missing piece of the puzzle in this picture. You have complete freedom to change this piece but you need to know two things about this change effort. One, no matter what you do, you still have to fit in with the pieces around you. Two, those pieces are not changing.

We live in a world of inter-locking pieces. What you can do with your second grade class (Sandi) is severely constrained by what is done in first and third grade. Further, all that is limited by what your society thinks is important, what they expect of education.

What you can do with your engineering design group is limited by marketing and manufacturing. What they do is, in turn, limited by what senior management thinks - or even what your customers think - is important, what they expect of your product and your company.

Given that we live in a world of inter-locking systems, change is evasive. It is nearly impossible. Once pieces are in place, they tend to prop one another up. Our education system creates a particular way of thinking and a particular kind of graduate who goes out into the world to work in companies that, among other things, have a particular kind of expectation about who to hire out of the education system. Government is shaped by business and education and religion - all these pieces shape and mold each other. And all of these pieces have to fit together. In any coherent and functioning society, that is.

If you want to make sweeping changes in design, you'll involve manufacturing and marketing. Any real change is, by definition, inclusive. And it does not begin with efficiency or improvement. Rather, it begins with a vision of what could be. And this vision doesn't know functional pigeonholes or fit neatly within a particular expertise. Rather, it gives all that a new context.

Of all the candidates, Barack Obama has become most closely associated with change. Given the approach and instincts (I cannot bring myself to call it a philosophy) of the current administration, one can only applaud a call for change. But if he is serious, it suggests a larger vision than an idea about how to change the presidency.

A real change to the presidency will involve far more than just the presidency. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt were the last two presidents to transform the presidency. They did not initiate change, really, so much as display a genius for exploiting times of great upheaval. The changes they made to the presidency and government were almost incidental to the change they made to how Americans saw the world and America's role in it.

If Barack Obama can offer a compelling vision of the world and America's role in it, he can deliver the change he promises. If he shrinks from that - if he limits himself to defining the presidency and government only - he'll fail to change the very piece on which he focuses.

Whole system change always sweeps up the pieces with it. Piece-meal change always gets overwhelmed by un-moving, un-responsive, and larger systems. To effect change, you have to speak over the head of the what you want to change. A change in vision means a change in context. When the context changes, the pieces of the system respond. Given that systems reject pieces that don't support its functioning, the only real way to change a piece is to change the system. We need a conversation about the society we want to create.

[And thanks to Jordan for the conversation that provoked this today.]

Bob Dylan on Change and Facts

Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone recently interviewed Bob Dylan for the magazine's 40th anniversary. Here are excerpts:

Jann Wenner: ... you've changed from outrage to acceptance.

Bob Dylan: I think as we get older, we all come to that feeling, one way or another. We've seen enough happening to know that things are a certain way, and even if they're changed, they're still going to be that certain way.

--------------------
Asked about his tendency to perform songs so differently from how he recorded them, or even from how he's performed them previously.

Jann Wenner: Do you think your performance of it in this way gives it [It's All Over Now Baby Blue] a different meaning? Originally it was lost and sad; now it's assertive.

Bob Dylan: Yeah. Astrologically, you're dealing with a different day every day of the week. Every day is a different color, a different planet rules it. You could say the same thing, you could feel the same way, you could write the same thing, but if it's on a Tuesday, it's going to be different than if it comes out on Friday. That's just a fact. You can ask any astrologer.