Negative Space

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

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art, Design, HCI, music, negative space, problem formulation, problem framing, sports, UX

Negative Space

When you look at a scene, it is natural to concentrate on the objects in the scene. So too, when one begins to design, it is natural to concentrate your attention on the things you put in the design whether those are menus, icons, images, banners, buttons and so on. You tend to give little thought to what is not there because, after all, there’s nothing there!

As your expertise grows, you will find it useful to spend some time and resources thinking about what is not there; the “negative space” if you will. In art, the “negative space” refers to the space around and between the objects. Often, paying attention to the “negative space” can result in a much more interesting and aesthetically pleasing composition. It is a concept that has applications far beyond artistic visual composition however.

Consider music for a moment, or better yet, listen to some and you will note that the silence is just as important as are the notes. Increase or decrease the silence in a tune by a factor of two and it becomes a different, and in most cases much worse, tune.

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The same can be said of great acting whether on stage or in a movie. The silence while we wait for the actor’s response to some news — while they are saying nothing and possibly even showing nothing or very little on their face, can often be the most poignant and moving parts of the picture. If the actor reacts “too quickly” with no space, we can tell that the stimulus presented is something that they “trigger” on because they are upset about it or trying to deny it. The leading man, for instance, asks a seemingly innocent question on a first date, such as, “So, do you like French Cuis…” “NO!” she cuts in. The audience’s attention is immediately drawn to see what comes next. The response that is too fast indicates a “sore spot.” Did the leading lady want to become a French chef? Did she just end a love affair with a Frenchman? What is going on here?

On the other hand, imagine the leading man, says, “So, do you like French Cuisine?” One beat, two beats go by. No answer. A long pause. The leading lady’s face shows nothing. Perhaps she tightens her lips ever so slightly or frowns to the slightest possible extent. The pause continues. The leading man tilts his head as though to ask whether she’s okay. Finally, we come to expect a tirade about the French or French Cuisine or French wine or … something. Instead, after this long pause, the leading lady says nothing but punctuates her silence with something that sounds like a cross between a humorless laugh and a karate grunt. There are probably no words she could have said which would have intrigued us more than the non-response. We think, “What the hell is going on with her and French Cuisine?”

Speaking of French Cuisine, when you go to a fine restaurant, your focus is on the food. So too is the focus on the chef and the server. But the space is important as well. It is annoying when you are paying good money to have a nice dining experience and you are shown to your table, given menus and then ignored for the next twenty-five minutes. On the other hand, it is equally annoying when your server comes back every 30 seconds and asks, “Are you ready to order yet or do you need more time?” The optimal time to wait between courses is not always obvious either. Some people need or want much more time between courses. Maybe this nice dinner is all they have planned for the evening. The patrons are having a nice quiet dinner with good conversation. They are in no hurry. Just as one of the diners launches into a complex story or joke, the server comes over and interrupts to tell about the specials. Conversely, another foursome may be planning on attending a play and long pauses between courses may mean missing the first act.

The negative space in dining is not just about the timing of events. It is also about the spatial arrangement of the food, the spacing between textures and colors. Often, the artistic arrangement is as much about the negative space as the objects on the plate.

Sometimes, the food itself has positive and negative elements. In a meal with varied and complex and contrasting tastes, for instance, the rice or the bread can provide a kind of “negative space” between the tastier and more salient constituents. These neutral or negative elements allow more contrast among the salient elements than if the more salient elements were enjoyed right after each other.

Negative space is important in architecture, paining, typography, cinematography, the design of user interfaces, culinary arts, music, and the design of other stimuli. It is also important in activity.

One of the first popular video games was called “Asteroids.” In this black and white vector graphics game, you controlled a small space ship that shut bullets in the direction the space ship was aimed. All you could control was the speed and direction of the space ship and whether it was shooting. The screen also showed a number of large, irregular “asteroids” that you were meant to hit. When you hit one of these large asteroids with a bullet, it split into two moderate asteroids. When you hit a moderately sized asteroid with a bullet, it split into two small asteroids. When you hit a small asteroid with a bullet, it disappeared. If you got hit by an asteroid, you would die. There was also a flying saucer who came to hassle you. Anyway, I found that if I focused on all these floating asteroids and trying to not to get hit by one, it was a difficult game. For me, at least, it was much better to visualize a path among the asteroids and try to follow the path. In a way, concentrating on the negative space, helped.

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The importance of negative space in sports can hardly be over-emphasized. In American football, the back tries to find the holes to run through. In soccer, players seek paths between. In baseball, the hitter wants to “hit it where they ain’t.” In tennis, beginners often play only during half a point. Their attention is focused on the ball and the opposing player(s). They choose a target on the other side of the court and watch to see how well they hit that target. Just as their opponent begins to hit the ball they shift their attention to their opponent and watch where that opponent hits the ball, scurrying there as quickly as possible so as to hit the next shot. What does such a player do between the time they hit the ball and their opponent hits the ball? They watch! They want to see where the next ball goes. If you are young and fast and your opponent is not well skilled, you can often get away with this process. However, what higher level players do is something quite different though it may look similar. The good player has a target in mind but watches the ball while their mind has the target clearly in mind. By watching the ball, they are much less likely to mis-hit the ball. Furthermore, they are not giving away their intended target with their body language. Perhaps most importantly, long before their opponent hits a return shot, the good player thinks about the open spaces on their side of the court and go to cover the most likely of those spaces.

Many otherwise well-skilled athletes only focus on the game during play. For example, many hitters on amateur softball teams, pay little or no attention to the game while their team is batting until they are “on deck” (almost ready for a turn at bat). This is absurd in the majors, but it’s even more absurd in amateur games. You should be taking this time to learn about the opposing pitcher and about the weaknesses in the opponent team’s fielders. Just because you’re not in the batter’s box doesn’t mean you can’t improve your play. Similarly, in tennis, you can use the time between points to think about tactics and strategy, as well as to mentally “reset” yourself if necessary. Some players wave their hands in front of their face after a point as a reminder/trigger to forget about what just happened and focus on the next point. Some will even turn away from the play, seemingly to talk with their “imaginary friend.”

To close, a very short, short story based on true events in my first trip to Japan.

tokyo tower behind black and white dojo building during daytime

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The Touch of One Hand Clasping

Japan, Tokyo, 1977. I walk crowded streets and beautiful gardens where care is taken for spaces as well as things that grow. I struggle — try to speak Japanese language but usually mispronounce “Key-Ray-Ee-Des” (It is beautiful) as “Key-Rah-Ee-Des” (It is dirty). I tip-toe through minefields of culture steeped in subtlety; lose huge chunks of flesh and karma with my thunderous, blunderous New York strides.

Shin-Ju-Ku: lights dim Times Square into grandmother’s fruit cellar. Row on countless row of Japanese stare hypnotized at small vertical pin-ball game called Pah-Chinn-Koe. This bright hustle bustle hassle hides deeper subtlety, deeper calm, inside, beneath, where foreign eyes can peer not.

I enter Tokyo subway. Then — she enters — total stranger, totally beautiful, black hair, endless eyes. I, of course, having learned small little in my many minefield walks, look everywhere but at her. Better, she looks everywhere but at me. We ride, totally not looking at each other. She stands in middle — nowhere to hold on to — unprotected, beautiful, vulnerable.

Suddenly, train lurches. Simultaneously: she shoots hand out to only spot I can possibly reach while I shoot hand out to only spot she can reach. Our hands clasp strongly for instant and I save her from fall.

Slowly, we release.

Next stop, she rushes out. But — just before the doors bang shut, she turns — looks straight into my eyes. “Kohn-bahn-wah” she says (“Good Evening”).

Thus, Japanese beauty touches beyond body into very soul of clumsy Westerner.

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Negative space….

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Regression to the Mean

10 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, sports

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Business, experiment, family, Feedback, HCI, learning, life, politics, science, sports, testing, usability, UX

Regression to the Mean

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While working full-time at IBM Research, I was also a Fellow at the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in Manhattan. I wrote an article in 1978 for their Journal, Rational Living. The title was: “Why Do I Self-Down? Because I’m an Idiot?” Indeed, many people put themselves down and it is not helpful. I hypothesized several different causes for this kind of self-slamming behavior. Most of these causes you could probably figure out on your own. But one in particular is subtle and non-intuitive. It is based on a statistical phenomenon which few people know about despite the fact that it is extremely pervasive. This phenomenon is called “Regression to the Mean.”

I want to define this term by explaining some examples. Imagine that you have a new soft drink which contains a combination of herbs that will purportedly make you smarter; e.g., gingko and bacopa. (There is some evidence these may actually work but let’s assume that they don’t or that your tea has too little to be effective). Here’s what you do to “prove” that it works anyway. You give an IQ test to 10,000 people and choose the 50 who score the lowest on the test and have them drink your tea for the next six months. At the end of that time, you give those 50 people an IQ test again and — Voila! The average (or mean) of the IQ scores has almost certainly gone up. Yay! It works!

Or does it? One of your competitors is not too happy about your study. In fact, they aren’t even happy you put your tea on the market. They decide to prove that your tea is not only ineffective but that it makes people less smart. So what do they do? They give an IQ test to 10,000 people and they pick the 50 who score the highest. They have them drink your tea for six months and at the end of that time, they have them take another IQ test. In this case, the mean (average) score is lower than the first time! Ouch! They say your tea causes brain damage!

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How can the same tea make people smarter and make them dumber? In this case, it does neither. What is going on? Here’s what is going on. When you measure something, there is always some error. Whether you are measuring your weight, your height, your blood pressure, or your IQ, the measurement is never exactly perfect. Your weight may vary slightly because of atmospheric pressure and more so because of water retention. If you take an IQ test, your score will partly reflect how well you do on such tests in general, but it will partly depend on luck. You may have felt particularly good that day, or a few of the questions might have been on topics you just heard about on TV the day before, or you may have made some lucky guesses. Or, you may have been unlucky on a particular day. You might have had a cold or misread one of the questions or forgotten your morning coffee. On any given day, some people will be a little lucky and some people will be a little unlucky. These things tend to balance out in a large group and if you tested all 10,000 people after six months, then assuming the tea has no real effect, no effect will be shown in the data.

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However, if you select the very best scores, you are partly picking smart people, of course, but you are also picking the people who were lucky that day. When you test just those people six months later, they will generally be just as smart but there is no reason to suppose they will be lucky again. Some will be lucky both times, most will not be particularly lucky or unlucky and a few will be unlucky. The average score will be lower. Conversely, if you choose the lowest scoring people, you will partly be choosing people who don’t do well on such tests in general. But you will also be choosing people who were tired, sick, guessed wrong or were otherwise unlucky that day. When you retest, those people will still tend to be people who do poorly on such tests, but they won’t necessarily all be unlucky again. Some will. Some won’t. On average, the scores will be higher than they were the first time.

The phenomenon of “Regression to the Mean” was first noted by Francis Galton in the 1880’s. Tversky and Kahneman, so far as I know, were the first to note that this phenomenon could easily cause managers, coaches, and parents to end up being unnecessarily negative. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are learning to hit tennis serve. Although you will likely improve in general, over time, there will also be a lot of variation in your performance. Sometimes, everything will work well together and you’ll hit an excellent serve, one that is above your average level. At first, the coach’s natural inclination will be to praise this by saying, “Wow! Great serve!” or something like that. Unfortunately, your next serve, due to regression to the mean is very likely not to be quite as good as that one was. Your coach’s praising behavior was thereby punished. On the other hand, if you hit a particularly poor serve for your level, your coach might say, “Oh, come on. You can do better than that!” If they choose to say such things only on your very worst performances, then, due to regression to the mean, your next serve is likely to be somewhat better. In other words, their slamming you will be rewarded by your doing better the next time. The same general tendencies will apply to managers and parents as well.

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The same applies to you! Whatever you are doing, your performance will vary somewhat over time. If you begin by praising yourself internally whenever you hit a particularly great shot, your next shot will most likely be not so great. On the other hand, if you put yourself down when you find your performance particularly bad, “You idiot! How could you miss that!?” Your next shot will tend to be somewhat better. Over time, your positive self-talk will tend to be punished and your negative self-talk will tend to be rewarded.

It’s no wonder then that many managers, coaches, and parents end up saying very negative things about their charges. It’s also no wonder that many people say (or more likely think) many more negative things about themselves than they say positive things.

Is there anything to be done? First, simply be aware of this phenomenon. That is step one. If you are running a study, you need to be careful in selecting. The study about your tea could be fixed by re-testing the entire population; by selecting a random group of 50 rather than the best or worst; or by using a control group who did not drink tea but was retested anyway. When praising or punishing someone’s performance, do not bother with trying to reward or punish outcomes based on one trial. That’s actually a pretty poor way to coach yourself or others in any case. See The Winning Weekend Warrior for more on this. Also watch out for this when you read about various conclusions of other studies. Did the investigators select either the “best” or the “worst” for their study? If they did such a selection, did they talk about the bias this introduces? Did they have a control group?

Meanwhile, treat your mistakes as opportunities to learn, not as opportunities to put yourself down. There’s really no point in self-downing. But if you do find yourself self-downing, remember that it’s common; relax; smile at this human foible; then quit doing it. At least give yourself a break for the holidays.

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Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 1974, 185, 1124-1131.

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Many Paths

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, psychology, sports

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Business, competition, creativity, Design, divergent thinking, family, innovation, learning, life, sports, truth

Many Paths

{Translator’s Note}: Exciting news: more (mythological) archaeological evidence is being unearthed as I write this about the mythical Veritas tribes. My next series of translations will be put on hold however, until we have a chance to arrange and understand this new evidence so that I may use it to help guide the translations. In the meantime, I’ve asked one of my psychologist friends (Dr. John C. Thomas) to take over the blog for awhile and write short posts on such topics as thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Dr. Thomas has been studying these topics for fifty years. He was also trained as a Fellow in Rational Emotive Therapy. He has over 300 publications and presentations on psychology, AI, human-computer interaction, and user experience.

Hi, folks. I imagine many of you, like me, can hardly wait to see what these new findings will be regarding the Veritas tribe. Meanwhile, I’ve been asked to fill in by helping us think about thinking. One of the main characters we’ve been following in the myths of the Veritas is “She-of-Many-Paths.” She personifies the first thinking skill I’d like to discuss.

This skill goes by many names including “Alternatives Thinking,” and “Divergent Thinking.” It is also discussed in the Pattern: “The Iroquois Rule of Six.” The basic idea is simple. When we are confronted with a situation, we often “Jump to Conclusions” or “Spring into Action” before we have all the facts. Even when we have all the facts (which is rare), we also have a tendency to focus on our first interpretation. This often leads to thinking of one (and only one) course of action. And, very occasionally; for instance, in some emergencies, that is the correct thing to do.

backlit breathing apparatus danger dangerous

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Even in emergencies however, our first terrified instinct about what to do can be dead wrong. For example, people see a small fire in their homes and immediately throw water on it. But if it’s a grease fire or an electrical fire, this is not a good course of action. Soon after I first began my dozen years as Executive Director of the NYNEX AI Lab, there was a fire in a nearby Stouffer’s Hotel. The charred bodies of a dozen IBM executives were found huddled in a closet. In the smoke and panic and confusion of the fire, they had apparently grabbed at the first door and gone into a dead end closet and perished there.

In daily life, there are a great many situations where a little extra thinking time would improve the outcome. For example, while working at IBM Research in the 1970’s, I drove about 10 minutes each way to work. At one point, I had a loose fan belt and my battery went dead. In a hurry to attend a meeting, I jump-started my car and drove to the IBM parking lot. Already late to a meeting, I went to turn off the car and just before I did so, I realized that I had not driven far enough to recharge the battery. So, I decided I’d better leave the car engine running for awhile. But as I gathered up my things and began dashing off to the meeting, I realized that it was insane to leave my car unlocked with the engine running! After all, someone could simply open the door and drive off! So, still in a hurry, I locked the car — with the engine running and the keys safely locked inside.

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Most of us have done similar things. In some early experiments on design problem solving done at IBM, I found that when I asked people to come up with as many solutions as possible, they would generate ideas fairly quickly until they came up with one that they thought would really solve the problem. At that point, their idea productivity fell precipitously. It is hard for us to force ourselves to think of more than one good solution.

Why is this important? For one thing, conditions change. Something may happen that makes your first solution no longer apt. For another thing, there may be side-effects of your solution that make it unacceptable. Another class of problems is that someone may object to your first solution for reasons you could not foresee. (See also, “Who Speaks for Wolf” as a way to help minimize that chance). In the context of invention and product development it is extremely unlikely that the first solution you come upon (and indeed even the first few solutions you think of) are novel. They are instead extremely likely to be the intellectual property of someone else. The most obvious solutions have likely already been patented and may already be in products or services that many customers are already using.

I have long been interested in observing people’s strategies and tactics in sporting events (See “The Winning Weekend Warrior”). One tactic that is overwhelmingly popular in tennis, for instance, is that the harder your opponent hits the ball, the harder you try to hit the ball. For example, someone hits a very hard ball while you’re at the net. You take this as an affront and think “I’ll show you!” Trying to hit the volley even harder means you take the racquet back farther. About half the time, the extra time it takes to bring the racquet back means you’ll mis-hit the ball or miss it entirely. On most of the remaining occasions, you’ll hit the volley too hard and it will go long. If someone hits the ball at you hard, what you need to do is simply block it back and guide it to the right spot. Trying to add extra power is unnecessary and too time-consuming. What is remarkable is not that you and I try to hit a hard ball harder. What is remarkable is that we never seem to try a different tactic!

There are many issues with focusing all your energy on the first solution you come up with. But the worst consequence is that you are overly invested in that first “solution” (which may not even be a real solution). This is bad in trying to solve problems in every domain I can think of and having others involved amplifies the badness.

For instance, let’s say that after 3 years without a vacation, you and your spouse finally have time for a nice two-week vacation. You want to visit Cuba for two weeks and they want to visit Vietnam for two weeks. If you each only come up with one idea, you will almost always find yourself pitching for your idea, trying to convince the other person that Cuba is better while they will spend their energy trying to shoot down your choice and explain (patiently at first and less so as time goes on) why Vietnam is a much better idea. After many frustrating arguments that go nowhere, you may decide to compromise; e.g., you could visit an empty stretch of open sea in the Pacific Ocean half-way between the locations; or, you may decide to flip a coin. All this frustration and bad feeling might be avoidable. It could turn out that your second choice and your spouse’s second choice are both San Diego! But you’ll never even discover this because when each of you only thinks of one idea, what should be a collaborative problem solving exercise instead becomes a debate – a contest with precisely one winner and one loser.

man and woman wearing brown leather jackets

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Thinking of many alternatives will save you many headaches – at work, in your love life, in your recreational endeavors. When you force yourself to think of many alternatives, you will also be more open to the ideas of others. Over time, thinking of many alternatives whenever you get a chance will also increase your own creative potential. Who knows? You might even be chosen as the next leader.

For a leader, it is particularly important to consider many possibilities. Insisting that everyone get on board with the first idea that pops into your head will cause resentment and dissension. It will also make you far less willing to change to a different idea when circumstances necessitate it.

You may start a business and decide that you must be personally involved in every decision and with every customer contact. At first, when your company is small, this might work out wonderfully well. No-one knows the customer and the product quite so well as you do. But you are not God. You cannot be everywhere and know everything. If you never learn to delegate; never grow the capacity of your people; never take expert advice — you will drive yourself and everyone around you crazy. The very success of your business will guarantee its ultimate failure. Learn to consider many paths. You will be glad you did.

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Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom.

07 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

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Business, career, HCI, human factors, IBM, life, school, sports, UX

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom.

Madison Keys, for those who don’t know, is an up-and-coming American tennis player. In this Friday’s Wimbledon match, Madison sprinted to an early 4-1 lead. She accomplished this through a combination of ace serves and torrid ground strokes. Then, in an attempt to consolidate, or protect her lead, or play the (in)famous “prevent defense” imported from losing football coaches, she managed to stop hitting through the ball – guiding it carefully instead — into the net or well long or just inches wide.

Please understand that Madison Keys is a wonderful tennis player. And, her “retreat” to being “careful” and playing the “prevent defense” is a common error that many professional and amateur players fall prey to. It should also be pointed out that what appears to be overly conservative play to me, as an outside observer, could easily be due to some other cause such as a slight injury or, even more likely, because her opponent adjusted to Madison’s game. Whether or not she lost because of using the “prevent defense” no-one can say for sure. But I can say with certainty that many people in many sports have lost precisely because they stopped trying to “win” and instead tried to protect their lead by being overly conservative; changing the approach that got them ahead.

Francis Scott Key, of course, wrote the words to the American National Anthem which ends on the phrase, “…the home of the brave.” Of course, every nation has stories of people behaving bravely and the United States of America is no exception. For the American colonies to rebel against the far superior naval and land forces (to say nothing of sheer wealth) of the British Empire certainly qualifies as “brave.”

In my reading of American history, one of our strengths has always been taking risks in doing things in new and different ways. In other words, one of our strengths has been being brave. Until now. Now, we seem in full retreat. We are plunging headlong into the losing “prevent defense” borrowed from American football.

American football can hardly be called a “gentle sport” – the risk of injury is ever present and now we know that even those who manage to escape broken legs and torn ligaments may suffer internal brain damage. But there is still the tendency of many coaches to play the “prevent defense.” In case you’re unfamiliar with American football, here is an illustration of the effect of the “prevent defense” on the score. A team plays a particular way for 3 quarters of the game and is ahead 42-21. If you’re a fan of linear extrapolation, you might expect that the final score might be something like 56-28. But coaches sometimes want to “make sure” they win so they play the “prevent defense” which basically means you let the other team make first down after first down and therefore keep possession of the ball and score, though somewhat slowly. The coach suddenly loses confidence in the method which has worked for 3/4 of the game. It is not at all unusual for the team who employs this “prevent defense” to lose; in this example, perhaps, 42-48. They “let” the other team get one first down after another.

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America has apparently decided, now, to play a “prevent defense.” Rather than being innovative and bold and embrace the challenges of new inventions and international competition, we instead want to “hold on to our lead” and introduce protective tariffs just as we did right before the Great Depression. Rather than accepting immigrants with different foods, customs, dress, languages, and religions — we are now going to “hold on to what we have” and try to prevent any further evolution. In the case of American football, the prevent defense sometimes works. In the case of past civilizations that tried to isolate themselves, it hasn’t and it won’t.

landscape photography of gray rock formation

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This is not to say that America (or any other country) should right now have “open borders” and let everyone in for every purpose. Nor should a tennis player hit every shot with all their might. Nor should a football team try the riskiest possible plays at every turn. All systems need to strike a balance among replication of what works, providing defense of what one has and exploring what is new and different. That is what nature does. Every generation “replicates” aspects of the previous generation but every generation must also explore new directions. Life does this through sexual selection, mutation, and cross over.

This balance plays out in career as well. You need to decide for yourself how much and what kinds of risks to take. When I obtained my doctorate in experimental psychology, for example, it would have been relatively un-risky in many ways to get a tenure-track faculty position. Instead, I chose managing a research project on the psychology of aging at Harvard Med School. To be sure, this is far less than the risk that some people take when; e.g., joining “Doctors without borders” or sinking all their life savings (along with all the life savings of their friends and relatives) into a start-up.

At the time, I was married and had three small children. Under these circumstances, I would not have felt comfortable having no guaranteed income. On the other hand, I was quite confident that I could write a grant proposal to continue to get funded by “soft money.” Indeed, I did write such a proposal along with James Fozard and Nancy Waugh who were at once my colleagues, my bosses, and my mentors. Our grant proposal was not funded or rejected but “deferred” and then it was deferred again. At that point, only one month of funding remained before I would be out of a job. I began to look elsewhere. In retrospect, we all realized it would have been much wiser to have a series of overlapping grants so that all of our “funding eggs” were never in one “funding agency’s basket.”

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I began looking for other jobs and had a variety of offers from colleges, universities, and large companies. I chose IBM Research. As it turned out, by the way, our grant proposal was ultimately funded for three years, but we only found out after I had already committed to go to IBM. During this job search, I was struck by something else. My dissertation had been on problem solving but my “post-doc” was in the psychology of aging. So far as I could tell, this didn’t bother any of the interviewers in industry in the slightest. But it really freaked out some people in academia. It became clear that one was “expected” in academia, at least by many, that you would choose a specialty and stick with it. Perhaps, you need not do that during your entire academic career, but anything less than a decade smacked of dilettantism. At least, that was how it felt to me as an interviewee. By contrast, it didn’t bother the people who interviewed me at Ford or GM that I knew nothing more than the average person about cars and had never really thought about the human factors of automobiles.

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The industrial jobs paid more than the academic jobs and that played some part in my decision. The job at GM sounded particularly interesting. I would be “the” experimental psychologist in a small inter-disciplinary group of about ten people who were essentially tasked with trying to predict the future. The “team” included an economist, a mathematician, a social psychologist, and someone who looked for trends in word frequencies in newspapers. The year was 1973 and US auto companies were shocked and surprised to learn that their customers suddenly cared about gas mileage! These companies didn’t want to be shocked and surprised like that again. The assignment reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s fictional character in the Foundation Trilogy — Harry Seldon — who founded “psychohistory.” We had the chance to do it in “real life.” It sounded pretty exciting!

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On the other hand, cars seemed to me to be fundamentally an “old” technology while computers were the wave of the future. It also occurred to me that a group of ten people from quite different disciplines trying to predict the future might sound very cool to me and apparently to the current head of research at GM, but it might seem far more dispensable to the next head of research. The IBM problem that I was to solve was much more fundamental. IBM saw that the difficulty of using computers could be a limiting factor in their future growth. I had had enough experience with people — and with computers — to see this as a genuine and enduring problem for IBM (and other computer companies); not as a problem that was temporary (such as the “oil crisis” appeared to be in the early 70’s).

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There were a number of additional reasons I chose IBM. IBM Research’s population at the time showed far more diverse than that of the auto companies. None of them were very diverse when it came to male/female ratios. At least IBM Research did have people from many different countries working there and it probably helped their case that an IBM Researcher had just been awarded a Nobel Prize. Furthermore, the car company research buildings bored me; they were the typical rectangular prisms that characterize most of corporate America. In other words, they were nothing special. Aero Saarinen however, had designed the IBM Watson Research Lab. It sat like an alien black spaceship ready to launch humanity into a conceptual future. It was set like an onyx jewel atop the jade hills of Westchester.

I had mistakenly thought that because New York City was such a giant metropolis, everything north of “The City” (as locals call it) would be concrete and steel for a hundred miles. But no! Westchester was full of cut granite, rolling hills, public parks of forests marbled with stone walls and cooled by clear blue lakes. My commute turned out to be a twenty minute, trafficless drive through a magical countryside. By contrast, since Detroit car companies at that time held a lot of political power, there was no public transportation to speak of in the area. Everyone who worked at the car company headquarters spent at least an hour in bumper to bumper traffic going to work and another hour in bumper to bumper traffic heading back home. In terms of natural beauty, Warren Michigan just doesn’t compare with Yorktown Heights, NY. Yorktown Heights even smelled better. I came for my interview just as the leaves began painting their autumn rainbow palette. Westchester roads even seemed more creative. They wandered through the land as though illustrative of Brownian motion, while Detroit area roads were as imaginative as graph paper. Northern Westchester county sports many more houses now than it did when I moved there in late 1973, but you can still see the essential difference from these aerial photos.

YorktownHts-map

Warren-map

The IBM company itself struck me as classy. It wasn’t only the Research Center. Everything about the company stated “first class.” Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a trivial decision. After grad school in Ann Arbor, a job in Warren kept me in the neighborhood I was familiar with. A job at Ford or GM meant I could visit my family and friends in northern Ohio much more easily as well as my colleagues, friends and professors at the U of M. The offer from IBM felt to me like an offer from the New York Yankees. Of course, going to a top-notch team also meant more difficult competition from my peers. I was, in effect, setting myself up to go head to head with extremely well-educated and smart people from around the world.

You also need to understand that in 1973, I would be only the fourth Ph.D. psychologist in a building filled with physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and materials scientists. In other words, nearly all the researchers considered themselves to be “hard scientists” who delved in quantitative realms. This did not particularly bother me. At the time, I wanted very much to help evolve psychology to be more quantitative in its approach. And yet, there were some nagging doubts that perhaps I should have picked a less risky job in a psychology department.

The first week at IBM, my manager, John Gould introduced me yet another guy named “John” — a physicist whose office was near mine on aisle 19. This guy had something like 100 patents. A few days later, I overheard one of John’s younger colleagues in the hallway excitedly describing some new findings. Something like the following transpired:

“John! John! You can’t believe it! I just got these results! We’re at 6.2 x 10 ** 15th!”

His older colleague replied, “Really? Are you sure? 6.2 x 10 ** 15th?”

John’s younger colleague, still bubbling with enthusiasm: “Yes! Yes! That’s right. You know. Within three orders of magnitude one way or the other!”

I thought to myself, “three orders of magnitude one way or the other? I can manage that! Even in psychology!” I no longer suffered from “physics envy.” I felt a bit more confident in the correctness of my decision to jump into these waters which were awash with sharp-witted experts in the ‘hard’ sciences. It might be risky, but not absurdly risky.

person riding bike making trek on thin air

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Of course, your mileage may differ. You might be quite willing to take a much riskier path or a less risky one. Or, maybe the physical location or how much of a commute is of less interest to you than picking the job that most advances your career or pays the most salary. There’s nothing wrong with those choices. But note what you actually feel. Don’t optimize in a sequence of boxes. That is, you might decide that your career is more important than how long your commute is. Fair enough. But there are limits. Imagine two jobs that are extremely similar and one is most likely a little better for your career but you have to commute two hours each way versus 5 minutes for the one that’s not quite so good for your career. Which one would you pick?

In life beyond tennis and beyond football, one also has to realize that your assessment of risk is not necessarily your actual risk. Many people have chosen “sure” careers or “sure” work at an “old, reliable” company only to discover that the “sure thing” actually turned out to be a big risk. I recall, for example, reading an article in INC., magazine that two “sure fire” small businesses were videotape rental stores and video game arcades. Within a few years of that article, they were almost sure-fire losers. Remember Woolworths? Montgomery Ward?

At the time I joined IBM it was a dominant force in the computer industry. But there are no guarantees — not in career choices, not in tennis strategy, not in football strategy, not in playing the “prevent defense” when it comes to America. The irony of trying too hard to “play it safe” is illustrated this short story about my neighbor from Akron:

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Wilbur’s Story

Wilbur’s dead. Died in Nam. And, the question I keep wanting to ask him is: “Did it help you face the real dangers? All those hours together we played soldier?”

Wilbur’s family moved next door from West Virginia when I was eleven. They were stupendously uneducated. Wilbur was my buddy though. We were rock-fighting the oaks of the forest when he tried to heave a huge toaster-oven sized rock over my head. Endless waiting in the Emergency Room. Stitches. My hair still doesn’t grow straight there. “Friendly fire.”

More often, we used wooden swords to slash our way through the blackberry and wild rose jungle of The Enemy; parry the blows of the wildly swinging grapevines; hide out in the hollow tree; launch the sudden ambush.

We matched strategy wits on the RISK board, on the chess board, plastic soldier set-ups. I always won. Still, Wilbur made me think — more than school ever did.

One day, for some stupid reason, he insisted on fighting me. I punched him once (truly lightly) on the nose. He bled. He fled crying home to mama. Wilbur couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

I guess you got your fill of that in Nam, Wilbur.

After two tours of dangerous jungle combat, he was finally to ship home, safe and sound, tour over — thank God!

He slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and smashed the back of his head on the cement floor.

Wilbur finally answers me across the years and miles: “So much for Danger, buddy,” he laughs, “Go for it!”

Thanks, Wilbur.

Thanks.

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And, no, I will not be giving away the keys to the kingdom. Your days of fighting for freedom may be over. Mine have barely begun.

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Anti-Pattern: Cascading Betrayal

23 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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authoritarianism, Business, competition, Democracy, ethics, Facism, life, pattern language, politics, religion, Totalitarianism

Cascading Betrayal

A very interesting little book that I recommend is Jane Jacobs’s Systems of Survival. In it she argues that there are two systems of ethics and morality: an older one, the “Guardian Syndrome” whose values include: Shun trading; exert prowess; be obedient and disciplined; adhering to tradition, respecting hierarchy, being loyal, deceiving for the sake of the task, making rich use of leisure; being ostentatious; and taking vengeance. Most of us might recognize these from history and stories about the Middle Ages in Europe but many other kingdoms and empires of earlier times also valued such things more than most of us do today. On the other hand, a newer system of values has been developing since the Renaissance. In the “Commerce Syndrome,” people tend to value things such as shunning force, competing, being efficient, being open to inventiveness and novelty, being honest, collaborating easily with strangers and aliens, dissenting for the sake of the task, respecting contracts, investing for productive purposes.

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In modern societies worldwide, both systems are at play and they can often be in conflict. For instance, you have friends that you feel loyalty to (Guardian Syndrome) and you work for a corporation which asks you to sign a contract that says you will not steal from the corporation and that you will report anyone who does (Commerce Syndrome). You observe your good friend taking supplies from the company storeroom for personal use. You ask the friend to return the goods but they say, “Oh, come on. The company makes billions. They can afford it. It’s just our little secret.” You can’t dissuade your friend. Now, the conflict in values causes you a conflict. Do you “betray” your friend and honor your contract? Or do you betray your contract and collude with your friend?

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Within American society (the one I happen to be most familiar with), these values are not evenly distributed. For instance, Silicon Valley seems quite centered on the “Commerce Syndrome” while small towns, sports teams, and the Catholic Church, for example, seem more centered on the “Guardian Syndrome.”

People whose values are almost totally aligned with the “Guardian Syndrome” will tend to stay loyal to their boss, leader, team, political party, even when the boss, leader, team or political party does something stupid, cruel, unethical, or illegal. For a time, people in positions of great power can keep their power through, for example, the dispensing of favors, defining agreed upon untruths, or taking vengeance on the disloyal.

abandoned architecture auschwitz auschwitz concentration camp

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Such a system is always somewhat fragile as demonstrated by the constant stream of rebellions, crusades, and wars in the Middle Ages. A state or organization based purely on the “Guardian Syndrome” is even more difficult today. If one tries to keep to a pure “Guardian System” in the midst of a highly interconnected and interdependent world, it will fail sooner and more spectacularly.

One issue is that it is no longer possible for people not to be exposed to the actual truth. Lying to a populace in which only 1% of the population could read and write was fairly easy. Trying to do it in the computerized and recorded world of today is nearly impossible. Some people will remain loyal and refuse to call out the Emperor for having no clothes. But someone will. And, it will be caught on tape. And, the tape will be shown to vast numbers of other people who have no loyalty to the Emperor. They will all see he’s naked and have no compunction about saying so.

As a result, a modern “Emperor” will find it difficult to keep all but the most fanatic fans from dismissing his attempts to control through politics and pageantry. The Medieval mechanisms of dispensing favors and wreaking havoc via vengeance will largely prove ineffective. Once such an Emperor begins to lose power, more and more people will begin to realize that they are much better off to “play by the rules” of the Commerce Syndrome. As a result, people who might have stayed loyal to the death to the Emperor will instead begin to defect. As more and more people defect, this will further weaken the Emperor’s power base and make it more likely for even more people to defect.

Naturally, the Emperor will attempt to use whatever power they have left to prevent defections, but in our modern interdependent and interconnected world, this is increasingly difficult. Most modern countries — and their leaders — realize that material prosperity in the 21st Century depends on many of the values of the Commerce Syndrome. A society that tries to remain “closed” like North Korea, for instance, will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to invention, comfort, prosperity, and the happiness of its citizens. What little resources such a country does have will be increasingly funneled toward weapons of war, security, police, prisons, and the suppression of truth. While these measures may serve to consolidate the power of a modern emperor in the short term, in the long term, too many people will have too little physical comforts to feel much loyalty to the emperor. Support will continue to erode and eventually everyone will see beneath the invisible clothes. An early signal of such a collapse will be a cascade of betrayals.

By contrast, in a modern state, loyalty is earned through such virtues as fairness, competence, innovation, and collaboration. In other words, people dispense loyalty on the basis of what people do, not because of what they promise to do and not on the basis of some bogus claim to royalty based on how and where they were born. Cascading betrayal is typically a symptom of an attempt to revert to an earlier state of human social evolution. It is another descriptive short-hand Anti-Pattern. It can be avoided by allowing feelings of loyalty to grow naturally from watching someone in a role of power make and keep promises over time and by watching them do what is in the best interest of the State; not by watching them take actions which mainly enrich the emperor.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

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Positive Deviance

07 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by petersironwood in health, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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cooperation, family, Feedback, innovation, life, pattern language, Peer Learning, sports

Positive Deviance

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern comes from a book of that title.

I am continuing in the style of trying to write something that explains the Pattern and why it works along the lines of Christopher Alexander’s original book. For this particular suggested Pattern, it seems important to point out some of the caveats and challenges. I may be that this is important for all Patterns but I’m still puzzling over how much these should be a specific part of each Pattern.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas March 23-April 7, 2018

Abstract:

In any complex situation that you might want to “improve” or “fix,” there are some who are in that situation and have already figured out how to succeed. Instead of designing and imposing a solution, you can find out who the success stories are, observe what they are doing, get feedback from the observed and then encourage those involved in the success stories to share what they do with their larger community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_deviance

Context:

Complex problems can often only be solved by groups. In some cases, a problem seems overwhelming, impossible, or insoluble. People from the “Global North” for example, see a situation such as illiteracy or malnutrition and wish to use their resources and knowledge to solve a problem for others who are experiencing the problem. It is certainly worthy to want to help others and to share abundant resources. However, even when one is careful, it is easy to intervene in such a way that the problem is not really solved but only temporarily ameliorated. In other cases, the problem is actually made worse or the problem that is focused on is solved, but other even more severe problems result.

For example, a so-called primitive society may rely on hunting and gathering for its existence. The people are okay under normal circumstances but have no extra resources to “better” their life. Instead, they are taught by well-meaning people in the “Global North” to grow a cash crop that brings in enough money that they can buy a variety of foods as well as more clothing, medical supplies, and housing. This all works fine until the monoculture crop gets a disease. If the “primitive society” is lucky, this happens fairly quickly while the tribe still retains the necessary hunting, fishing, and gathering skills to survive. In worse cases, perhaps the skills or the lands needed no longer exist and the people are much worse off than they were before the intervention by the “Global North.”

Of course, not every such intervention is well-intentioned. In some cases, the real goal of the interveners is to make a lot of money off a crop of tea, coffee, opium, or cocaine. In other cases, the natives become miners for diamonds or precious metals. It might or might not also be an intention to destroy any possibility that the natives in the land can still live off that land in the way that they and their ancestors have done for millennia.

Even in the best of circumstances, there will be unknown and often deleterious side-effects of interventions. For example, perhaps the women of a particular tribe used to spend considerable time together in the village center pounding roots and talking with each other. Because they were doing this in the center of the village, they also easily helped each other watch all the village’s children and to watch for predators. During this time, all sorts of other “work” might also have been done. The women as a group may have solved many budding feuds within the tribe, or done gentle match-making, or experimented with different shaped tools and so on. Because they bonded with each other, they may have also made family break-ups due to infidelity less likely. The point is that an outside look at the culture may only see “inefficiency” in what is actually an effective social and economic system.

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Regardless of how it came to be, the fact of today is that many people in various parts of the world are in dire need of clean water, food, shelter, or medical care. Within the so-called “developed” world or Global North, there are other widespread problems such as the opioid crisis, obesity, vast wealth inequalities, and, in the United States, mass shootings. We tend to think of such large scale problems, regardless of the geography, as being both general and systemic. And we typically look to use analytical tools to diagnose problems and generate solutions to be imposed by the government or NGO. Such imposed solutions will almost always have unintended consequences, some of which will be negative.

Problem:

There are many problems in the world and the most severe have to do with people’s basic needs not being met. If one tries to solve a problem and then impose that solution, there is a good chance that the solution will be wrong. Even if it’s “correct” in solving the given problem, there’s a good chance that it will have negative side-effects that may be worse than the original problem. Moreover, even if the solution is “perfect” and avoids negative side-effects, it may still fail to be adopted because the people necessary for implementing the solution were insufficiently involved initially in finding, formulating, and solving the problem.

When it comes to problems in logic and mathematics, there can be some reasonable notion of the “goodness” of a solution which people will agree on, given enough background and training. However, problems in real world settings are generally too complex to allow of legitimate “proof.” People will have different values, preferences, and experiences so that they will tend not to agree unless everyone involved at least has a chance to feel as though they have been involved throughout the process.

Forces:

Real world problems dealing with basic needs are likely to be complex. (If there were “simple” solutions, they would already have been found).

An outside group may have knowledge or perspective that allows them to see possible solutions that the people experiencing the problem may not know about or see.

Sometimes, people intentionally mislead others; they claim to have a solution to a problem based on superior knowledge or technology but actually, they are just manipulating others.

Even when operating with the best of intentions, outside problem solvers may not understand enough about the context, values, and culture to design solutions that will work.

People generally want to be consulted on decisions that impact their lives.

* Typically, people within a community are more trusted than outsiders.

When feedback loops are slow, delayed, or noisy, people may not know when they have solved a problem or made progress on it.

Most solutions to complex problems require the active cooperation of the people most affected in order to be implemented and maintained.

A proposed solution is more likely to be adopted if the solution comes from community members.

* In complex problems in the real world, there will often be a large variation in how well people are solving these on their own.

Solution:

When facing a complex, real world problematic situation, instead of having an outside group find, formulate and solve a problem and then try to implement that solution, instead, seek to find people within the community who have already solved it or partially solved it. Help to understand the nature of the solution and facilitate the communication so that those who have solved it are aware of how they solved the problem and communicate it to the larger community.

Examples:

1. The idea of “positive deviance” is similar to the progress in “best practices” that is often achieved in sports, arts, and crafts. For instance, in tennis, hitting the ball harder means your opponent has less time to get to the ball and more trouble judging how to hit their own shot. However, if a player hits the ball too hard, it will tend to go out of bounds. Some tennis players have experimented with hitting the ball with a huge amount of topspin. This allows the ball to be hit fast but with a trajectory that allows it to clear the net but still dive down into the court. Because such tennis players have tended to be successful, newer players try to copy these techniques. Similarly, good weavers, painters, and writers try to understand how those who are “best” at the particular craft achieve the results that they do.

2. In the opening example in Positive Deviance, aid workers are concerned about malnutrition among rural children in Viet Nam. Various charities have, in the past, handed out additional foodstuffs to families and the children do better…for a time. Once the charity moves on or runs out of money, however, the nutritional needs stop being met and kids are just as bad off as they were before.

Instead, the authors of Positive Deviance discovered that among a large number of extremely poor rural families in Viet Nam, there were a few who had kids who were not suffering from malnutrition. In order to to find out why, they initially interviewed both these families and the (much larger) group of families whose kids did have malnutrition. These interviews revealed no differences. Of course, there are many possible explanations including luck of getting or not getting diseases or parasites or possibly genetic factors.

When the authors investigated by careful observation, however, they discovered three crucial differences between the numerous underweight kids and the few normal weight kids. First, the families of the normal weight kids included an older relative who fed the kids a noon meal every day. Most of the families fed the kids in the morning before going out to work in the rice fields all day and again upon coming home. The kids could only eat so much during two meals; though hungry, their stomachs were small capacity. The kids ate more total during three meals. Second, the families with healthier kids included in the daily soup, not only rice, but tiny crustaceans and bitter herbs that grew among the rice stalks. Third, the parents of healthier kids were more rigorous about hand-washing. All the kids were supposed to wash their hands before eating, but in the case of the healthier kids, if the family dog came up and the kid petted the dog during a meal, that kid would have to go wash their hands again.

After these discoveries were made, the authors of Positive Deviance did not “explain” to the villagers what the solution was. Instead, the kids were publicly weighed each week. The families of those who were of “normal” weight explained what they were doing. Some families adopted these practices and everyone could see that, over time, these kids began to thrive too. The community became convinced on the basis of what worked for others within the community and as explained by others in the community and they altered their behavior to match those in the community who had a better solution.

3. Of course, in some sense, having the whole species “learn” from the cases of “positive deviance” is more or less how major mechanisms of evolution work. There is always variation along many dimensions among the individuals of a species. In any given environment, there are some variations which will confer a relative advantage compared with others. Those with an “advantage” will tend to prosper and have more offspring that those who do not have this advantage. Over time, most of the members of the species will come to have the advantageous trait.

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Resulting Context:

Once people participate in a community-wide effort to see who and what is being successful and then understand what they need to change in their own behavior. The cohesion and self-efficacy of the community is increased. The solution tends to have fewer “side-effects” and is necessarily respectful of the community culture.

Related Patterns:

Reality Check, Small Successes Early, Build from Common Ground.

Caveats and Limitations:

There were no reported bad side-effects to implementing the nutrition and lifestyle changes suggested by the observations in the study. However, we must realize that there could be. For instance, it might have been the case that when everyone started harvesting the bitter herbs and crustaceans, those species might have been killed off. As a result, it could have turned out that none of the kids would now have that advantage.

In general, a solution that “works” for a small minority might not work if everyone does it. We can easily imagine a situation where a few people in a village of farmers are rich while most people are not. A thorough investigation might reveal that the few who are rich got that way because they cheated when they weighed their produce and stole from the church collection plate. This is obviously not a “solution” that will work when everyone does it!

References:

Pascale, Richards & Sternin, Jerry. (2010). The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press.

http://www.betterevaluation.org/en/plan/approach/positive_deviance

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Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Business, collaboration, competition, cooperation, Indian Wells, life, pattern language, sports, teamwork, Tennis

This blog post is a short break from my attempts to build a “Pattern Language” of best practices for teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and cooperation. I wish to re-iterate why I feel the enterprise is important. I have been attending the Indian Wells tennis tournament and watched some amazing matches. While it’s tempting to write about the matches, I will leave that aside. What struck me about the tournament, aside from the athleticism and grit of the players, was the widespread and effective teamwork, collaboration, coordination, and cooperation that the tournament represents. This is obviously related to the Pattern Language because it gives an example of what can result from excellent teamwork and cooperation. In other words, this tennis tournament is just one illustration of why it matters.

It’s nicer in some ways to sit in your living room and watch sporting events on TV. You don’t have to deal with glaring hot sun at noon or chilly winds in the evening. You can get up to hit the bathroom any time you want and snacks are right there in the kitchen. However, you do not get a feel for just how incredible is the athletic ability of the players nor the velocity and precision of the shots when you watch on TV. More important in the context of cooperation is that when you watch on TV, every time there is a break in the action, you are treated to commercials. When you are at the actual venue, however, there is also ample opportunity for observing a little bit of the incredible collaboration and teamwork that an event like this requires. Even at the venue, all you see is the snow that dusts the surface of that tenth of the iceberg that rises above the ocean. With a little imagination, you can get an inkling of how much more collaboration must be required that you do not see.

The reason I want to dwell on this for just a little is that collaboration and cooperation permeate a healthy society. Indeed, widespread collaboration and cooperation are critical for society’s existence. Yet, it is easy to take cooperation for granted like the air we breathe. People like me, who have lived almost their lives in peaceful and kind circumstances, may easily forget that it need not be so. People have lived in circumstances of war, oppression, and slavery. We should never take cooperation for granted. Even in a very peaceful circumstances, there are many screw-ups in collaboration and while we notice the screw-ups when they affect us directly, we tend not to realize the vast interconnected threads of collaboration and cooperation that we rely on every day.

Let’s return then to the Indian Wells tennis tournament and examine just a few of the many collaborative aspects. First, there are the professional athletes, of course. Let’s return to this later, to understand a little of the massive cooperation required for there to be professional athletes in general and what’s required in cooperation to make any particular athlete operate at their amazing level of skill. What other roles are there? Possibly coaches, trainers, officials, and the ball boys and ball girls come to mind. It’s quite likely that if you watch tennis (or any other sport) on TV, one of the most salient roles is that of the TV announcers. They are a major part of most people’s experience of pro sports. Yet, when you are actually at the venue, they are relatively invisible. If we watch TV, we are cooperating in making the TV announcer a major part of our sports experience.

At the venue itself, there are many other obvious roles. There are police assigned to the area. There are hundreds of volunteers who help people park, answer questions, check bags and check tickets. There are vendors selling various wares as well as offering up a variety of food items. This is all much more obvious when you attend a sports event in person. But the cooperation doesn’t stop there. How do the clothing and food get to the venue? How are we able to eat food that is grown far away and sometimes packaged? Where did the recipes come from? Why do people share recipes? At this point in our cultural evolution, you can attend an event in Southern California and enjoy some excellent Japanese food at Nobu. Japanese speak Japanese. And Japan is more than 5000 miles away. So, somehow, through a giant network of collaborative and cooperative relationships, people in Southern California are able to produce delicious meals that reflect a cuisine developed in a different culture with a different language. Of course, Japanese is not the only cuisine represented at the venue. There are hundreds of options that originated elsewhere.

There is also clothing on offer, much of it designed in one place, manufactured in another place, and shipped via complex supply chains. You can buy it with a credit card. But how does that work? You guessed it. It works because of other giant networks of cooperation and trust. Yes, it’s true that some people steal credit cards and there are elaborate systems to minimize losses but even those elaborate systems work on trust.

The venue comprises parking, stadiums, parks, practice courts, with running water and electricity, working toilets, wheelchair access, and gates for crowd control. Again, the existence of the venue requires widespread cooperation among various levels of government, financial institutions, tennis organizations, volunteer organizations, and fans. But it isn’t even just contemporary cooperation that’s involved. These kinds of large scale venues go back in our history thousands of years. We’ve been collaboratively building best practices in city planning, architecture, crowd control, with many idea exchanges across cultures. We must remember that, by and large, the fans also cooperate. They don’t simply mob the gates to crash in without paying. The vast majority of fans are quiet during actual play, sit in their assigned seats, get up to allow others to pass and so on. This kind of cooperation also depends, in part, on widespread public education in how to be civil.

Let’s return for a moment now to consider that our society has professional athletes. Some people make a career out of playing a sport extremely well. But playing the game extremely well does not, in and of itself, enable professional athletics to exist. There have to be fans both at the venue and watching TV who pay, either with dollars or with taxes or with their attention to commercials. There are organizations who administer the sport. There are, in this example, thousands of coaches and tennis venues to develop the sport and spot prodigies early who then receive additional coaching and training. There are ranking systems and systems to seed players in tournaments. There are manufacturers who make tennis balls and tennis racquets which have evolved over time to allow more elegant play which pushes the game toward more extremes of human performance. This kind of evolution of artifacts does not happen “automatically.” It too requires communication and cooperation.

Indian Wells is just one event in one sport. If you dig beneath the surface just a little, you will see that nearly everything on the planet is the result of thousands of years of mainly cooperative enterprise. Of course, the players compete. They try their hardest to win. But they try to win within an agreed upon set of rules and regulations. If no-one followed the rules, there would be nothing very interesting to watch. If you’ve seen one bar fight, you’ve seen them all. There is no elegance and no beauty in watching thugs slug it out and waste time and resources. I dwell on this because it is critical to keep in mind that having a decent society that helps people thrive depends on having cooperation, teamwork, collaboration, and coordination. The individual human brain may be relatively large compared to an ape’s. But what really sets us apart is not our individual intelligence. Abandon a baby with a perfectly good brain into a forest by themselves and, if they survive at all, they will not behave much differently from an ape or a raccoon. They may scrabble for food and water, but they will not end up building a tennis court or constructing a tennis racquet.

It’s not turtles all the way down. It’s trust. It’s cooperation. That’s what makes us human. If we just grab everything for ourselves and lie about it, it subverts the very foundation of human life. Our human nature is to control our competition to acting within agreed upon boundaries for the good of all. If we forget that, we are not “lowering ourselves” to the level of wild animals. We are way below that. We are like a wild cat who refuses to use its hearing and fast reflexes to hunt. We are like a redwood tree who refuses to use the sun’s rays. We are like a deer in the forest who refuses to forage but instead expects other deer to bring them food. Willfully ignoring that we are a social species; intentionally lying in order to gain advantage to ourselves will never help create a bigger pie. In the short term, it can get you a bigger piece. But the cost is that you despoil what it means to be human. Grabbing all you can for yourself subverts the very essence of what makes humanity such a successful species. This has always been true throughout human history. Now, however, cooperation is more vital than ever both because we are on the brink of destroying the ecosystem we depend on for life itself and because we have even more brutally destructive weapons than ever before. We have cooperated through much of our human history. Now, we need to do it even more intelligently and more consistently — or face extinction. The earth doesn’t need us. But we need the earth. And, each other.

———————————————————

Author Page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Build from Common Ground

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Pattern Language., collaboration, Common Ground, family, innovation, life, music, religion, sports, teamwork

CHI Workshop Activity: Working Together to Create World Map (Florence, 2008)

Build From Common Ground

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern comes from long personal experience trying in many contexts to get to solutions quickly without first bothering to try to find common ground. In addition, I am working on a project to provide a platform to support civil discussion, debate, Dialogue, and deliberations. One of the other founders has a long history with The Interactivity Foundation which also uses various methods to build from common ground.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas on February 20-25, 2018

Synonyms:

Abstract:

Human beings share a large majority of their genes. Life on earth began 4.75 billion years ago. Only around 100,000 years ago people began migrating out of Africa, going to different places and evolving different cultures, religions, and languages. In addition to our long common history, people across the globe want many of the same things: freedom, food, water, safety, love, friendship, a space to be themselves, a life with some pleasure and a sense of meaning or higher purpose.

In the so-called developed world, there is an emphasis on doing things as quickly and efficiently as possible. To accomplish that, many people are extremely specialized in their education and profession in addition to whatever differences they have in culture and family background. Often, in a highly populated, highly interconnected world, people must collaborate and cooperate at a very large scale. Since some of the problems we face (e.g., preventing atomic war; preventing plagues; reducing global climate change) are vital, people are passionate about getting to solutions. They want to do this quickly. There is often a natural tendency to focus immediately on the problem as initially defined, and then to focus on differences and to resolve those differences as quickly and efficiently as possible. This does not generally work. People are invested in their own solutions which depend on their own background and experiences in their various cultures, families, education and training. Focusing from the onset on differences sets up a competitive mindset which then has everyone thinking how to “win” against their competitors. Unlike athletic competitions, people are unlikely even to agree initially on the “rules” for deliberations and debate, and often have pre-existing “positions” to sell to everyone else or force on everyone else.

Therefore, for any group trying to solve a problem collaboratively, it works better to first identify and build on common ground. Later, after some degree of trust is established, people may (or may not) find it useful to examine as well their differences as a source of ideas for how to solve the larger problem. They may choose from a variety of methods to make progress. Starting with common ground can help everyone involved to see that they are all part of one big and quite similar “in-group” with a problem to solve rather than focusing on everyone else as being in an “out-group” that needs to be defended against.

Problem:

Groups function better under a wide variety of circumstances if there is a high degree of internal mutual trust. If people work together over a long period of time, trust will usually develop if warranted. This is what happens in most (but not all) work groups, teams, standing committees, etc. However, it often happens that other problems need to be understood and solved by groups that span pre-existing organizations. For example, a town needs to collectively decide whether to sell a beautiful community park to a mall developer who promises tax revenue and convenient shopping for the town. A state needs to decide whether to legalize marijuana or to ban assault weapons. A nation needs to decide whether or not to work with other nations to reduce air and water pollution. People addressing such issues will often have to address them in combination with others that they do not already know well and may not trust.

Often such decisions as those mentioned above must be made under some time pressure. Some people will have vested interests in a “solution” that is particularly favorable to them regardless of how much it hurts others. When people begin by stating their own position and trying to “sell it” to others, an adversarial atmosphere is created so that “winning” rather than “solving” becomes the dominant tone of subsequent conversations and actions. This almost always results in sub-optimal solutions and, in addition, almost always results in reducing trust and social capital among the people deciding.

Even under the best of circumstances, with everyone committed to finding a “good” solution for all, people will tend to misunderstand each other simply because language is ambiguous and vague. People have different assumptions based on their experiences, culture, and training what process to follow as well as what constitutes acceptable rules and boundaries. If we add to these inherent difficulties the further (and avoidable) difficulty that people are focused on the ways people are different, it will tend to prevent mutual trust and prevent the emergence of new ways to find, formulate and solve the problems at hand.

Context:

Complex problems can often only be solved by groups. Even when the nature of the problem is simple enough for one person to solve, people want to feel that they or their representatives are engaged in the process if the outcome will impact them. For the group to work well together to solve problems, it is useful for them to understand each other’s situations and motivations. When in a hurry or under stress, people often perceive others and their motivations, not on the basis of inquiry into what those are but on group membership and the way that group differentiates itself from other groups.

Our nervous systems (and those of other animals) are constructed to be particularly sensitive to differences and changes. Our education and society teach us to differentiate as much as possible. We celebrate the wine connoisseur who can tell you the year and vineyard and scoff at the person who simply says, “I like all wine.” Sometimes, of course, fine differentiation is critical, particularly for an omnivore. We need, for instance, to be able to differentiate the three leaves of a wild strawberry from the three leaves of poison ivy. In biology class, we get high grades for correctly labeling 100 different parts of the earthworm and get no credit for simply saying, “Look! These are all parts of an earthworm! How cool! I had no idea it was that complex inside or that it has so many of the same parts we do!” In many contexts, being able to further differentiate things is a good thing. Even in group problem solving, there are situations where this is true. However, we typically do not ask ourselves whether this is one of those situations. We tend to dive unthinkingly into exploring differences.

Forces:

Our brains are not infinite but finite. We, along with other animals, generally focus on foreground while ignoring or presuming the background. Our nervous system is especially tuned to differences and changes, not to similarities and constancies.

Our educational systems typically focuses on teaching people to make even finer and further differentiations beyond what our senses immediately show.

Societies typically celebrate finding additional differences rather than finding additional similarities. Experts are typically defined by their ability to detect differences rather than their ability to see similarities.

People are quintessentially social animals. Therefore we tend to join groups. Each group coheres around a group identity which tends to define itself in terms of differences from other groups and seldom mentions similarities.

Each person only knows a small proportion of another person’s situation and individuality. Often, we treat each person according to their differentiating group membership(s) rather than their similarities to ourselves or according to the complexity of their individual selves.

Solution:

When a group begins to address a situation that impacts many people in various ways, and especially if people already have opinions and positions on the situation, begin by stressing, creating, or fostering their common ground before even starting any other problem solving activity.

Sharing a Meal at CHI 2008 Workshop

Examples:

1. At IBM Research, for several years, I managed a research project on the “business uses of stories and storytelling.” I worked with a small team of researchers & consultants to develop tools and techniques. One patent (Story-based organizational assessment and effect system) was originally inspired by trying to help companies involved in mergers and acquisitions deal with cultural differences between companies. The suggested technique essentially involved collecting stories from the two original companies, analyzing them for the underlying values that were expressed in the stories, finding common values in the stories from both original companies, creating new stories using the values and situations from the originals but making sure the new stories were constructed to be memorable and motivating; and finally re-introducing these stories to the people from both companies. The reason for this whole process was to stress common ground so that people from two companies could work better together.

StoryPatent

2. At a workshop at the 1992 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’92), I co-organized and co-led a workshop on “Cross-cultural issues in HCI.” At the beginning of the workshop, the participants entered the assigned workshop room to find that it had been set up in a “classroom style” with one small table and two chairs at the front of the room and all the other chairs and desks set up for the “listeners.” We wanted the room set up as a large circle. Everyone pitched in to re-arrange the room into this large circle. This physical activity provided additional common ground for the team. One outcome of the Pattern “Small Successes Early” is to provide common ground. Having people work together to perform a physical task is one way to establish common ground.

We also played a game called “Barnga.” In my introduction to the game, I explained that it was much like Bridge, Whist, or Euchre. To my surprise, none of the participants attending from Asia had any idea how to play such games or what I meant by “tricks” or “following suit.” That experience illustrates how easy it is (at least for me!) to over-estimate how much common ground exists in a group. (http://www.acadiau.ca/~dreid/games/Game_descriptions/Barnga1.htm)

In a later workshop (2008) on “Human Computer Interaction for International Development,” at the suggestion of Andy Dearden, we began by cooperatively building a map of the world from materials at hand (illustrated above) before delving into the details of the workshop. Starting with this as “common ground” we then explored some of our differences by standing on the representation of where we were from, a favorite place we had visited, a place we wanted to visit, etc.

3. Religions regularly practice rites and rituals. For practitioners of the religion, this provides common ground regardless of a host of differences among the adherents. Of course, it is a double-edged sword because differences among these rites and rituals can also separate people. One of the more brilliant scenes from West Wing cuts among scenes of people attending religions services that are variously Jewish, Muslim, and Christian while the viewer knows that there is an unsuccessful peace effort underway. In this case, the uncommented footage helps to illustrate the common ground among these three religions.

earthfromspace

4. The Family of Man was both an ambitious photography exhibit and a book (definitely worth buying) that portrays people across the world to illustrate precisely that we do have common ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_of_Man

5. In an earlier blog post, I showed with back of the envelope calculations just how “related” humanity is in terms of genetics, experience, ideas, and matter. In fact, all of life on earth is highly inter-related and it has been for its entire 4.75 billion years.

https://petersironwood.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/math-class-who-are-you/

6. In a recent episode of the TV series, Madam Secretary, the Secretary of State is trying to resolve a conflict between two nations A and B. The diplomats from A say they cannot trust B and the diplomats from B say that they cannot trust A. She suggests that they start from their mutual distrust as part of common ground. In other words, rather than treating the mistrust of A and B as two separate issues, she begins by suggesting that A and B both share two things in common: not only a desire for peace but also a difficulty in trusting the other side. Even mutual distrust can be framed as a basis for common ground. This is more than a linguistic trick. It is an important reframing. It may well turn out that a single event such as a soccer game with teams that have members from both nations may help reduce mistrust on both sides at the same time.

7. Holiday celebrations, the preparation and consumption of food, listening to music, or appreciating the beauty of nature may all provide additional ways of beginning with common ground. Of course, there are cultural differences in all of these as well so one must take some care to provide something that actually is common ground and not something that tends to emphasize the differences among people in these activities.

8. One of the plenary speakers at CHI 1989 in Austin Texas was an astronaut who had been in space. I spoke with him after and during our conversation, he claimed that all astronauts, whatever country they were from, shared the same experience of seeing earth from space; viz., that the national boundaries we typically think so much about were only political; most are not physical. He said all the astronauts were struck by how thin and fragile our atmosphere is and that the earth is the only place around that is capable of sustain the breadth and depth of life. Many of them found this realization of “common ground” the most transformative of all their experiences in the space program.

Resulting Context:

Once people experience common ground, they may still disagree, debate, discuss, or hopefully dialogue in order to identify issues and problems. Experiencing common ground makes it harder to “dehumanize” the other side. It decreases the chances that people will engage in counter-productive actions such as “name calling” or using propaganda techniques to “prove” that they are right and their “opponents” are wrong.

Rationale:

Actions are always better based on reality than on fantasy. Reality is that people share much in common. Reality is that there are also many remaining differences. The entire problem solving process (including problem finding, problem formulation all the way through to finding issues with solutions and re-solving, re-negotiating, re-designing, or re-developing a solution) is enhanced when it is based on a balanced view that includes both real similarities and real differences. We already have a culture and an educational system that focuses on differences. Focusing on common ground is a critical factor in balancing our view so that we do not try to solve problems based on the partial truth that we are all different.

Related Patterns:

Reality Check, Check-In, Small Successes Early.

Metaphors:

It is a windy day in San Diego as I write this. We have a set of wind chimes outside the bedroom. Whichever direction the wind blows; however windy it gets (within bounds); and even if the wind is quite chaotic, the sound that emerges is always harmonic and tuneful. This is because of the structure and relationships of the chimes. It would be nice if we could have a platform that encouraged and promoted civility. I think that could work because of the nature of the platform. One of the “chimes” could be Bohm Dialogue; another could be “Building from Common Ground.”

Another musical example is Jazz Improvisation. If a group of musicians who know each other get together, they can improvise some very nice music. If they’ve never met, they will almost certainly agree on a few boundaries before beginning such as style, time signature, key signature. They may well start by having the percussion set up a “beat” that everyone relates to.

Now, imagine instead that seven random people are thrown together from seven different cultures. Each has an instrument that none of the others has ever seen. They have completely different musical experiences and expectations. Does it not make sense that they will take more time to converge on anything good? Doesn’t it seem as though they first need to discover some kind of common ground in terms of scales, rhythms, degree of repetition before achieving a good result? Or, do you think they should argue about which kind of music is best first? Do you think any of the seven will be able to convince the other six that “their” kind of music is superior? Suppose instead of having as one mutual goal making good music, instead, they are in a contest and only one of them will “win” and go on to the next round. Surely, this will only further confound any possible teamwork. Add to this, that they only have two minutes. What kind of performance would you expect now? And, yet, we seem to expect people from very different backgrounds to get on-line and instantly “make good music together.” Whether it’s 140 characters, 280 characters or a whole paragraph, it seems unlikely you will be able to sway anyone to move from “their position” to “your position.”

International sports competitions such as the Olympics provide a setting where people from around the world get together and compete. These are not random people; they are all immensely talented and skilled; however, they are also all highly competitive. Yet, the venue provides a framework for competition that provides a structure for competing within common ground. Despite being from different cultures and using different languages, the athletes push each other to amazing performances with a minimum of rancor. Every athlete realizes as well that every other athlete has also gone through a rigorous selection and training process involving many sacrifices to get where they are — more common ground. The Olympics might be thought of as a particularly interesting example of finding common ground despite people having different backgrounds, language, and goals. Sports may also be thought of as a compelling metaphor. When politics are reported in the media, they are most often treated as a sporting event. But it is a strange kind of sporting event in that such reporting seldom stresses common ground and instead focuses on strategy, polls, winning, losing, and differences. It almost never reports on common ground in politics. In reporting on actual sporting events, however, the reporting focus often does cover the common ground that athletes face; e.g., the training, the dedication, the sacrifices that families must make, the importance of coaching, etc.

References:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197193.The_Family_of_Man

https://www.johngraham.org/coach/17-finding-common-ground-negotiating-and-resolving-conflicts-part-i

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057267.2016.1206351

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1049732306289705

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221517384_Video_Helps_Remote_Work_Speakers_Who_Need_to_Negotiate_Common_Ground_Benefit_from_Seeing_Each_Other

Thomas, J. C. (2017). Building Common Ground in a Wildly Webbed World: A Pattern Language Approach. PPDD Workshop, 5/25/2017, San Diego, CA.

Thomas, J.C. & Kellogg, W. (1993). Cross-cultural perspectives on human-computer interaction: report on the CHI ’92 workshop. SIGCHI Bulletin, 25 (2), 40-45.

Greater Gathering

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Business, collaboration, cooperation, coordination, innovation, pattern language, social capital, sports, teamwork, trust

Greater Gathering.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas on Dec. 11, 2004

Reviewed by <> on <>

Revised by JCT on Feb. 7, 2018.

Prologue and Acknowledgements.

This pattern can be found in many teams, companies, NGO’s, families, and religious organizations. If you are interested in how this happened to strike me as a pattern, feel free to read this section Otherwise, you can skip it. I began to notice this pattern after two events happened to coincide.

While working at IBM Research many years ago, I played in an inter-company tennis league in Westchester County, New York. During those matches, I met many IBMers from outside of IBM Research. One of the people I met worked in the corporate tax department. In those days, long before Google, we used a Key Word In Context system (ITERC?) to scan for potentially useful documents. Every week, I would get a long list of abstracts based on my list of keywords. This system was not nearly so accurate as what many of us have access to today. While there were many “hits” for me, there were also quite a few false positives. For example, I was interested in the psychological process of “induction” – learning a rule based on examples. I often got abstracts, however, about “induction motors.” One day, I got one of those “false positives” about a new tax law that allowed highly profitable companies like IBM to “trade” tax liabilities with companies who were struggling like the tire companies in my home town of Akron. According to the abstract, it was in the financial interests of both companies to use this “trading” mechanism. I had little interest in it, but I liked the guy I had met from corporate and we had traded contact information for tennis purposes. I sent him the abstract. As it turned out, this was precisely applicable to IBM and saved them a lot of money.

At the same time, I was reading about the history of IBM and particularly thought it interesting that they had put so much time and effort into the 100% club meetings. This was a country-wide meeting to bring together sales people from all over the US who had met or exceeded their sales quotas. I was never in sales, but even at Research, we had “annual picnics” in which everyone in IBM Research was invited to come with their families. As I began thinking about it, I realized that these kinds of “larger gatherings” were common across many different cultures, domains, and types of groups. The tax example showed a very specific financial benefit to the IBM company but I realized there were many other potential benefits as well.

Synonyms:

Conference. Congress. Convention. Jamboree. National Holidays.

Abstract:

When moderate to large groups work to solve large, complex problems, it is often necessary for them to subdivide the work into distinct subgroups. This results in the group being more efficient and effective. However, it also means that each group comes to develop their own vocabulary, search for people who are particularly good at certain things, and in various other ways, the people within the subgroup communicate a lot, come to trust each other, and have clear common interests. They are often at conflict with other subgroups for resources. In addition, there is less trust across these organizational boundaries than within such a boundary. Often, the people themselves come to be somewhat different kinds of people. Large effective groups therefore participate at least annually in a “Greater Gathering” which allows people to meet and co-mingle across these organizational boundaries. These meetings are constructed to emphasize “common ground” within the larger group. As a result, new lines of communication are lined up; mutual trust is enhanced; sometimes, real problems are solved.

Problem:

As large, complex problems are broken down into pieces and assigned to different groups, efficiency and effectiveness increase. Not only that, the individuals within each of these various subgroups typically grow more trusting of each other within that sub-group. They learn about each other’s skills and motivations, so over time, the sub-group as a whole grows more effective and efficient.

However, this high intra-group cohesion comes at a price. People in one part of an organization consider themselves the “in-group” and may begin to limit their learning because of a lack of diversity in that one perspective. Furthermore, they may come to work so hard to solve their own sub-problem that they lose sight of the larger problem and make sub-optimizing decisions. In some cases, the ideas of various subgroups about how to handle something will differ and result in conflict. Even worse, sometimes, decisions made in Group A help them a little but make life for Group B much more difficult and make the overall objective of the group, whatever it is, more difficult to achieve and no-one ever realizes it. There may be lack of trust between different sub-groups or even outright mistrust among sub-groups. Often sub-groups that are “at odds” with each other, not only have different management chains and objectives; they may also be geographically apart; they may be from different cultures; they may be of different professions, etc. For these reasons, a suspicion may grow over time while mutual trust diminishes. Information sharing becomes strained. The overall organization is not doing as well as it might nor are the people within that organization doing as well as they might.

Context:

A group of people has been attempting to accomplish some task as effectively and efficiently as possible. In order to do this, one common method is to breakdown a large, complex task into smaller, less complex tasks. Often, those people working on a subtask naturally spend more time with others on that subtask than on other subtasks. It naturally occurs in this context that since people spend a lot of time together, they may develop common interests and also spend leisure time together as well. Sharing common sub-goals, physical contexts, and leisure activities as well as working on the same subtasks may eventually lead to an “in-group” feeling.

Over time, these subgroups develop different methods, procedures, values, customs, terms of art. They become, in a sense, different sub-cultures. But just as cooperation and communication can be trickier when two historical cultures are involved, so too, it can more difficult for, say, someone from each of the legal department, the accounting department and the R&D department to understand each other than, say, three accountants. Sometimes, various departments actually want the same thing. They simply don’t know it because they are speaking different languages.

Some degree of “antagonism” of purpose is often built in to the organization. The R&D department will ask for more money. Finance will say no. But these kinds of one-sided or even two-sided or multi-sided competitions are much healthier both for the organization and its people if they are done with respect and rules. Having completely different sub-cultures can enhance the difficulty of such negotiations.

Forces:

*People are naturally gregarious.

*People working on a common problem often bond as well.

*People working on a common sub-problem often lose sight of the larger problem.

*Social sanctions can lead to a lack of diversity of perspectives.

*All people share certain basic drives.

*Shared special events help build social bonds.

*People enjoy novel experiences and viewpoints, under some circumstances

*An expectation of what happens (based on story and experience) can help mold what does happen.

The possibility of one person harming another and not doing so increases mutual trust.
Shared experiences tend to increase mutual trust.

Solution:

All the sub-groups that need to cooperate in a larger group should get together periodically for a meeting of “Greater Gathering.” This should be periodic and structured. Activities need to be formulated that help everyone visualize and experience common ground. Eating, drinking, dancing, singing, athletic contests, and other physical activities should also be included since these are experiences people will relate to and enjoy regardless of which sub-group they belong to or which sub-problem they are working on.

Examples:

Companies generally used to have many of these events when such companies were run by people who cared about the companies and the people within those companies rather than simply caring about using companies as a tool to enhance the power and wealth of a few. For example, when I first joined IBM, they sponsored many sports leagues within IBM Research including tennis, golf, softball, and soccer. Furthermore, they participated, as in the prologue of this pattern, in sports leagues across nearby IBM locations which included sales, CHQ, Engineering, Programming and Technology, Marketing, and Advanced Ad Tech. Every year, there was an elaborate company picnic. There was a Holliday Party and fairly frequent less formal award ceremonies with refreshments. There were also numerous recognition events which were attended by people outside your sub-group.

Other examples are numerous. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts have national Jamborees. Families have extended family reunions. Sometimes, these can be at a civic level such as Mardi Gras or a local annual parade that most people work on or attend.

I’ve been very active for a long time in a group called “CHI” for “Computer-Human Interaction.” It’s a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery. (ACM). Anyway, the people who do research in this field are scattered across the globe. They work for different university departments or companies or non-profits or governments or as individual consultants. We have full professors and undergraduate students; we have people with original backgrounds in electrical engineering, philosophy, psychology, design, architecture, fine arts, English, human-computer interaction, mathematics, mechanical engineering and many more. Some are doing research whose application is out at least 20 years and others are worried about whether their start-up will survive the quarter. Some work for giant multi-nationals and others are one person companies. Every year, we have a rather challenging conference where all of these folks are invited. The conference centers around the technical program, but there are also many things meant to provide a larger gathering; to foster mutual trust; to have a great time together so that we can better respect each other, communicate more effectively and achieve common goals.

Resulting Context:

The result of the first example above is that people throughout IBM at that time almost universally thought of themselves as IBMers rather than someone from the accounting department. What this meant was that there was a high level of trust for people from other parts of the company. I’m not saying it was perfect but it was much higher with more people honestly trying to do what was best for the company rather than what was best for them or their immediate manager. Now, that’s largely reversed. Of course, it’s hard to know how much is due to the “cutting out of all the fat” like annual picnics and sport’s leagues.

In the second example, Boy Scouts get a chance to see that people of different shades of skin, creeds, geographical locations share a lot in common.

In the third example, the CHI conference continues, I believe, to be an important reason that people in such a wide variety of circumstances can collaborate and communicate so well.

Rationale:

It is easy to imagine that people we rarely or never see are not only different from us superficially, but that they are different in essence. If you meet people from various parts of your organization in a neutral informal situation that stresses your commonality such as a picnic, a sporting even, an ice-cream social, or a walk-a-thon, you will see that you have some common ground, trust, and makes communication easier.

Related Patterns:

Conversational Support at the Boundaries.

Known Uses:

Metaphors:

Many species go to a common place at least annually. We humans attribute this to the benefits of cross-fertilization or more global competitions in survival of the fittest. Is it also possible that they are also exchanging information that is useful for the species as a whole?

Fable:

I think I will defer, at least temporarily, to that excellent fable of Norton Juster’s: The Phantom Tollbooth. In that fable, Rhyme and Reason are banished to separate kingdoms and the results are not good.

References:

Meaningful Initiation

29 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, collaboration, coming of age, cooperation, coordination, Design, initiation, life, pattern language, ritual

Meaningful Initiation

Prolog:

I have mixed feelings about the phenomenon of “initiation.” I’d be very interested to hear about other people’s experiences, intuitions, and studies related to this very common social phenomenon.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas on January 29, 2018

Synonyms:

Appropriate Initiation

Abstract:

Persistent social groups typically require people who want to join the group to pass an initiation ceremony, rite, or test. Some of these “initiations” include meaningful tests of skill, knowledge, or loyalty. Such initiations prevent people who are deemed unworthy or not ready from joining the group. This has several additional effects. People who pass the initiation, especially if it is severe, value the group more. The initiation also tends to prevent people who do not really value the group enough (or even seek to subvert it) from joining. In addition, people who have no interest in joining the group may also value it more highly if they know it is difficult to join. Initiations may be severe by virtue of having the test of skill itself be difficult, or by requiring endurance, pain, or embarrassment on the part of the would-be joiner.

Problem:

Groups function better under a wide variety of circumstances if there is a high degree of internal mutual trust. If people work together over a long period of time, trust will develop if warranted. However, often even a newcomer to a group can cause chaos and mistrust due to lack of experience, competence, or in some cases, intentionally. Groups therefore need some way to ensure that everyone in the group is minimally competent, values the group and works for the group’s benefit, not just their individual benefit. It’s important for the group work that everyone value the group and trust each other.

Context:

Complex problems and large problems can often only be solved by groups. For the group to work well together to solve ill-defined or wicked problems, they need to have a common way of communicating, have knowledge of what each other knows, and have a high degree of trust. At the other extreme, consider slaves chained to their oars, slaves picking cotton, or even volunteers, each of whom scans a very small pre-assigned segment of the night sky. In these cases, someone outside the group is typically “in charge” and the cooperation and coordination required among the members of the group is determined, not by the group, but by an overseer. As the problem space becomes more complex however, it becomes more and more necessary for the group to be able to re-prioritize, re-arrange how they work together, and even for fundamental values and goals to evolve. In these latter contexts, it is very important for the group members to share common experiences and trust each other.

In some cases, the normal progression of education, joining a sports league or becoming a full-fledged member of a profession has an initiation aspect even if its accidental. For instance, becoming a tennis professional will require submitting to the requests of coaches and doing a lot of repetition of the fundamentals. It may also require many hours of working out for flexibility, strength, balance, and cardio fitness. In addition, as the person gains skill, their opponents and the venues will tend to produce more and more stressful situations that must be mastered in order to progress to the next level. Similarly, to become a medical doctor requires hundreds of hours of study as well as practical, hands on experiences which will typically require higher and higher levels of skill and stress. Sometimes there are actual specific ritual initiations in addition, but sometimes the structure of the profession itself serves an initiative function.

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Forces:

If someone works harder, or suffers more pain or embarrassment to be accepted into a group, they will tend to value the group more (though this findings has not always been replicated).

For groups to work well together, they need common ways to communicate.

Common experiences tend to increase mutual trust.

For many groups, it is vital that the members of the group are selected so as to have adequate speed, strength, vision, courage, training, skill, or other characteristics.

Groups which are perceived to be very difficult to join may be viewed as being higher prestige than those which are easy to join.

Groups with higher prestige may enjoy more benefits from the larger society such as special laws, exceptions to general regulations, or a better pool of candidates.

Some people may use the excuse of an initiation in order to satisfy their own need to inflict cruelty on others regardless of the impact of that cruelty on the individual being initiated or on the effectiveness and cohesion of the group.

Solution:

Before someone is allowed to join a group, they have to “prove themselves” by undergoing an initiation. This insures they have some minimal qualifications. It also increases the strength of loyalty, social capital, and trust within the group. It may also increase the “cachet” of the group among others.

Examples:

As Royal Dutch Petroleum was nearing its hundredth year of existence, they commissioned Aries de Gues to find out whether corporations ever existed as long as a century and if so, what were the characteristics. He found that indeed, there were companies that old and they had four common characteristics. One was a high degree of mutual trust. A second was “strong boundaries.” This latter characteristic meant that it was difficult to join such companies and people tended to stay for a long time. Both these characteristics are logically related to having meaningful initiations. (The other two are not strongly related to this Pattern; Tolerance for Exploration at the Edges and Financial Conservatism).

See link for examples of religious initiations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_initiation_rites

Many so-called “primitive” cultures had initiations and rites of passage. Here are a few references.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/09/30/lessons-from-the-sioux-in-how-to-turn-a-boy-into-a-man/

https://mightywrites.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/maori-ta-moko-a-ritual-of-passage-a-study-of-tattoing/

http://www.maasai-association.org/ceremonies.html

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/us-apachegirl-pp

Resulting Context:

Presumably and hopefully, the resulting context is a self-sustaining group over time whose members trust each other, communicate well, and highly value their group membership.

Rationale:

Initiations are supposed to have these benefits: 1) The initiation screens out anyone who is incapable or not sufficiently interested to undergo bad things in order to join the group. 2) The initiation causes members of the group to value the group more highly. 3) The initiation provides a common experience that all group members can share. 4) The initiation may make the group seem more “selective” to people outside.

Related Patterns:

Special Roles; Strong Boundaries; Levels of Trust; Bell, Book, and Candle; Apprenticeships; Official Sanctions of Competency.

Known Uses:

College fraternities and sororities, clubs, sports teams, commercial groups in many settings, military groups, religious groups, and professional societies among others, all require tests and/or initiations before one becomes a full-fledged member. In some cases, such as a Ph.D. dissertation and defense, the “initiation” is mainly a test and an educational experience, but there is often an “endurance” aspect as well. While college fraternity initiations may include tests of knowledge of the participants; e.g., about the fraternity, it’s origins and members; it seems mainly to require the pledge to endure humiliation, discomfort, endurance and sometimes physical danger.

Known Misuses:

(Note: This is not a standard section in the Patterns of a Pattern Language. In this case, I think it’s important. While I do think this overall Pattern can be a useful one, it is particularly prone to misuse as well. I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts and experiences of initiations and what could be done to insure that this is a positive pattern.)

College fraternities in particular are known for so-called “hazing” that sometimes results in deaths. The most common cause of death is from drinking too much alcohol in too short a period of time.

Although part of what internships for medicine do is teaching and testing the ability of doctors to handle pressure, the schedules and attitudes often seem to include an element of cruelty and possibly even danger to the health and well-being of both interns and patients. Many professionals in other fields as well have experienced abuse of one sort or another from superiors during or associated with such tests.

In the movie, A Few Good Men, a commander orders a “Code Red” on a recruit who has repeatedly fallen short in various physical tests. The recruit dies. It turns out that his inability to perform some of the physical requirements of Marine training were because of an undiagnosed heart problem. This is at least arguably an example (albeit fictional) of initiation gone horribly wrong. Even though the fallen soldier was “in” the Marines, he was still in basic training which consists of a combination of skills training, conditioning, and repeated “initiation rituals.”

When I was a Boy Scout, my “initiation” consisted of supposedly being branded by a hot poker. Three of us were to be initiated during a week-end long camp outing. The kids who were already in the troop were in the main common room and we three were told to wait our turn in another, smaller room. The main room had a roaring fire and fireplace tools including a poker. I volunteered to go first. I was blindfolded and led into the main room where I had to lay down on a bench next to the fire. My shirt was pulled up and after a few minutes, when my torso felt hot from the fire, an ice cube was laid on my stomach. As you can easily verify for yourself, if you sense both hot and cold at the same time, it produces a burning sensation. I was instructed to scream bloody murder for the benefit of the guys still in the other room. As best I can recall at the time, I had been fairly well convinced that I was not actually going to be branded. (But either way, I thought it better to go first). For one thing, I had been swimming with all these guys and never noticed any kind of a scar that would be consistent with being branded with a hot poker. The second guy went through a similar procedure and was also told to scream bloody murder. After his “branding” the troop members took a towel and put ketchup on it to simulate blood. They took this in to show the third and last one of tonight’s “initiates.” The two of us who had already been initiated still moaned mournfully as though in pain, as per our instructions. When the boys went to blindfold and bring the last initiate in however, he completely freaked out. He not only refused; he fought as though his life depended on it, punching, kicking, biting, and otherwise wreaking mayhem on the older and larger boys who were trying to subdue him for the initiation. Realizing how extreme was his fear, they tried to intimate that he was not really going to be branded but this last boy was far too wound up to pay attention to what was being “intimated.” The troop eventually gave up on his initiation. That boy was seriously traumatized. I can’t really say whether he ever believed us that no-one really meant him physical damage, but he never looked any of us in the eye again or spoke much during the remainder of the camping trip. He never asked for another go at an initiation and, to the best of my recollection, everyone else in the troop felt very bad. Rather than increase social cohesion in the group, this misadventure backfired completely. Whatever the reason, this particular troop soon disbanded. This example serves as a cautionary tale about “initiations” because none of the people involved foresaw this particular outcome or were operating out of conscious cruelty.

Early in high school, I got a volunteer job as a “Y leader” at the local YMCA. I basically taught and supervised younger kids in basketball and various fitness tests. My manager was a young man probably in college. He said I would have to pass a “test” first which consisted, basically, of doing a chore for him; I was supposed to go to a nearby department store and pick up a shade that he had bought and paid for. I went to the department store but no-one in the drapery department had the least knowledge of this guy and the shade he had supposedly bought. I had to return empty handed and figured I had failed my “test.” He explained, however, that he hadn’t bought window shades but lamp shades. Back to the store I trudged and returned with his lamp shades. It all struck me as weird and irrelevant to my job as a Y-leader. But there was more to come.

In order to be fully admitted into this little “club” of the Y-leaders we had to go through an initiation. We had several weeks to memorize every athletic record of that local Y, as well as their times or weights or distances. There was also additional material about the procedures and the hierarchy of the YMCA and so on. Then, we came to the initiation night. I think there were four of us who were initiates. We initiates took turns and had to answer questions given by this same manager mentioned above. While doing this, we stared into a very bright light. He was behind the light so that I could only see a slight shadow of the outline of his head. He and the rest of the Y leaders called us “worms” during this little ritual. On the other hand, the initiates were supposed to begin and end each of our utterances with “sir.” Well, I hadn’t really cared much about the material and quickly got three wrong. Now, I was given a choice: I could either delay being initiated and try again next month, or I could take 40 whacks with a wooden paddle. I opted for the 40 whacks. I had been paddled before with wooden paddles, but never more than a few times.

As I soon discovered, there was another crucial difference. My other paddling had been by teachers. Although they certainly wanted to make the paddling punishment hurt, they also certainly wanted to avoid a lawsuit. Although back then, lawsuits were not so plentiful as raindrops, there were some. In any case, I don’t think any of them actually wanted to physically injure us. This paddling was done by all the boys who were already Y leaders. This paddling was done by my peers. They were not adults but young teen-aged boys. As they took their turns, a few went easy on me and most hit fairly hard — around “teacher” velocity. Two brothers, however, had some kind of sadistic streak. They took several steps forward during the “wind-up” and swung the paddle with both hands like a baseball bat. Anyway, I “passed” the initiation. My backside was black and blue however, not just on my buttocks, which I would have been capable of hiding, but also on the back of my thighs. Two of my co-initiates also received 40 whacks. The last guy had taken the task very seriously and knew an incredible amount of trivia about a bunch of local athletes. But as he answered question after question, the manager simply made the questions more and more obscure, venturing well outside the scope of what we had been told we needed to learn. I realized that the point of the whole exercise was not to have us learn anything but to get to have us paddled. At last, the last boy got three wrong, but to my surprise, when it came to the question, he said he would study again for next month.

Eventually, my parents found out (because the bruising was visible, not just on my buttocks but all the way down the back of my legs) and complained to the Y about this whole initiation. Again, this “initiation” seems to have backfired in every sense. One has to wonder whether overly powerful initiation rituals are also part of why sexual abuse and child abuse often go unreported when it occurs in certain tightly knit groups. Initiation is a tool that needs to be used appropriately, carefully, and protected from the misuse of those who are really interested in inflicting cruelty to others merely under the ruse of carrying out an “initiation.” Need initiations be “secret”? They often are and this increases the tendency for them to be subject to perversion from being what is potentially good for the group into a private exercise in cruelty.

Metaphor:

A sperm cell, whether human animal or flowering plant, must be healthy enough to traverse some distance before getting to an egg. It then has to penetrate the cell wall of the egg. While we do not expect the sperm to therefore “value” the joining with the egg, this process does perform a kind of screening function.

In some team competitions, there are a series of “rounds” before the final round. One could think of these earlier rounds as a kind of trial that has some aspects of initiation. Only the best teams continue on in further into the tournament. In addition, it probably also has the effect of increasing social capital within the team.

Apprenticeship programs often require new apprentices to perform the most menial tasks. This process of gradually assigning more responsibility as the initiate gains more skill is necessary for safe and productive work, but it also may partly serve an initiation function as well.

References:

Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177-181.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0047195

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hazing_deaths_in_the_United_States

De Gues, Arie. (1997), The Living Company. London: Nicholas Brealy.

Gerard, H. & Matthewson, G. (1966), The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group: a replication, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2(3), 278-287.

Walsh, A. (1990). Becoming an American and liking it as a function of social distance and severity of initiation. Sociological Inquiry, 60(2), 177-189.

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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Category Archives: sports

Negative Space

Regression to the Mean

Many Paths

Madison Keys, Francis Scott Key, the “Prevent Defense” and giving away the Keys to the Kingdom.

Anti-Pattern: Cascading Betrayal

Positive Deviance

Indian Wells Tennis Tournament

Build from Common Ground

Meaningful Initiation