The Day From Hell: Why Does Anyone Care?

05 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

anarchy, Business, collaboration, competition, cooperation, Democracy, pattern language, politics, Rule of Law, sports, teamwork

The Day From Hell: Why Does Anyone Care?

apple applications apps cell phone

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I oversleep. The alarm did not go off and it feels late. I glance at my watch and sure enough, I’m late. I grab my iPhone to see whether I forgot to set it. Nothing works. I cannot even turn it on or reboot it. I’ll have to deal with it later. I will be late for my tennis match or have to skip breakfast. I decide to compromise and just grab a protein shake out of the fridge. Something’s wrong. It’s not cold. In fact, the refrigerator is not cold at all. Nor did the light go on when I opened the door. I try the kitchen lights. Nothing. Power is off throughout the house. I’m sure the bill was paid on time. I’ll deal after tennis.

assorted trophies

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I arrive at the court for my doubles match. The other three are already there. John says, “You’re late. We’ve decided we’re playing you.”

“What? Very funny. Yeah, I’m good but not that good.”

“No, it’s not a joke. We’re tired of losing. The three of us will stand you.” John’s face is deadpan. I look at the others and there is no sign of japery anywhere.

“Well…that makes no sense whatever. Sorry I’m late. My phone alarm isn’t working. In fact, my phone isn’t working at all. But I’m sure this isn’t April First. How about if Tom and I take you two on?”

“No. We’ve decided we’ll take you on.”

I think that sounds crazy but whatever. I’ll call their bluff. At least I’ll get a lot of exercise! “Fine,” I say, “let’s just warm up for a few minutes.”

“No. No warm-up. We’re already warmed up,” explains Tom.

“OK, fine. Just go ahead and serve.”

“No, you have first serve,” says Larry.

I quickly unsheathe my racquet and walk to the baseline, one ball in each pocket and one in my left hand. I position myself near the middle. It looks really weird to look across the net and see all three of them positioned there. “First in?” I query.

“No,” they sing out in unison. “Serve it in.”

“What is this joke, guys?”

“No joke. Just serve.”

“Fine.” I think to myself, I will play along till the joke gets old. Since I’m not warmed up, I just hit an easy serve into the middle of the box to start the point.

“OUT!” shouts Tom, who generally makes fair calls.

“WHAT?! That was in the middle of the box! It wasn’t even close to the line! Enough’s enough.”

“Our call,” says Larry.

“Yeah, it’s your call, but come on. You all know that was well in.”

Our debate, if you can call it that, is interrupted by screaming tires and a loud crash coming from the nearby street. “What the hell was that?”

No-one reacts or answers my question. Larry says, “Second serve.”

I shake my head. “Guys. We should go up there and see if anyone needs to call 911. I mean, it would have to be one of you. My phone doesn’t work.”

Don, still with a bland, blank look on his face says, “None of the phones work. That was just a car crash. Probably intentional. Let’s just play.”

I know I am not dreaming. But what is going on? “You seriously think someone crashed their car on purpose? What is with you guys this morning?”

“Yeah,” says Larry. “It’s been going on all morning. Let’s just play. Second serve. Wait. Tom! Come over here. I want to play deuce court.”

“No way,” says Tom. “I’m already here.”

Larry wields his racquet above his head and charges at Tom. In seconds, they are both bleeding profusely and keep swinging at each other. Don joins in the fray. They are completely oblivious to my shouts so I pick up my stuff and head for the clubhouse to call for help. Maybe someone put some kind of drug in the water? Just then, another screech of breaks, squeal of tires and a loud crash. Another car crash?

red and yellow hatchback axa crash tests

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By now, I am jogging through the parking lot toward the front desk at the tennis club. Something is terribly wrong. It all looks wrong. Then, I notice that virtually none of the cars are parked inside the white lines meant to indicate parking spaces. Some appear to have been left in the drive. Several are on the grass and one is in the flower bed near the gym. Many of the cars have smashed windshields.

Collaboration? Cooperation? Teamwork? Who cares?

I am very grateful for readers and commenters on my blog. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been cataloging “best practices” in collaboration and teamwork in the form of Patterns. I think it may be time to “take stock” and make it clear why I am doing this, in case it isn’t obvious.

I don’t “own” these Patterns. I don’t get any money from people using them. Why should I care whether people do a good job or a horrible job at collaborating? And, isn’t life all about competition anyway?

There was a time, not so long ago, that I really didn’t think it would be necessary to “explain” why it was important to cooperate. There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought most people knew that life was not all about competition. But lately, so-called “civil society” has been so rife with uncivil words and actions, at least in the “United” States, that I think it’s time to re-iterate why cooperation is vital. I also want to point out that, while there is certainly competition in life, there is also cooperation.

Why all of life is not competition.

In the natural life of animals and plants, there are, for some species, some specific times and places for competition. That is true. And, some of those competitions can be pretty fierce; e.g., antler-smashing bucks competing for mates. And, you could say that the rabbit eats a plant and that the coyote eats the rabbit. But there are far more ways that plants and animals cooperate.

adult and cub tiger on snowfield near bare trees

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First, plants and animals participate in the recycling of material. Generally, plants gain energy from sunlight, and put some of that energy into compounds that are high energy and fit for consumption by some animals. In the process, plants also take carbon dioxide out of the air and replace it with oxygen. Animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Animals eliminate “wastes” from their food and that “waste” replenishes nitrogen and minerals into the soil. Plants use the nitrogen and minerals. And, when animals and plants die, their bodies further enrich the soil for plants.

Cooperation within the great tree of life doesn’t stop there, however. Flowering plants often cooperate with each other and with bees to flower so that there is a more or less a constant supply of pollen. Sucker fish take parasites off large fish. Butterflies collaborate with flowering plants. Rabbits collaborate with berry bushes. When there is danger, many animals and birds cry in such a way as to warn others.

Let’s move on to consider what cooperation means for human beings. A single human being, however smart, will die soon after birth without the aid of more adult human beings. Apart from providing physical needs for the infant such as food and water, older humans immediately begin teaching the infant and then the child much of what he or she needs to know in order to survive. People have typically hunted, gathered, and prepared food in cooperative groups. People build shelters together. Cooperation among human beings has become more wide-spread and more complex over time. Most of the people in the so-called civilized world now rely on complex supply chains for food, water, clothing, electricity, security and learning. Dancing, playing music, playing sports, business, government — all of these activities depend on cooperation.

photography of people stacking hands together

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Cooperation and competition in sports.

Right now, the French Open tennis tournament is going on in Paris. The competitive spirit of the players is amazing! In some of the matches, shot after shot looks like a sure winner – only to be returned with another difficult-to-return shot. The players push themselves mentally and physically to the very limit and sometimes beyond. They are indeed fierce competitors.

But guess what? They follow the rules. And they show sportsmanship. No-one arranges to secretly injure another player or sabotage their racquet. The players cooperate to compete. After many of the most savage hard fought contests, the contestants often fall in each other’s arms.

In life, there is both competition and cooperation. In a world of 7 billion people, cooperation is more important than ever. In a world that relies on international supply chains and agreements and laws, cooperation is more important than ever before. In a world with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, cooperation trumps competition. The natural world has never been a zero-sum game; it has never been a fixed pie. Look around! Life has covered the planet largely through cooperation. To solve problems such as global climate change and the plastification of our oceans, we need widespread and effective cooperation more than ever. Of course, there is a role for competition as well. But competition is only fruitful within the bounds of cooperative frameworks. If we try to run this world under a non-cooperative and purely competitive framework, we will guarantee our own extinction. I had thought that was obvious to everyone, but apparently it isn’t.

That’s why I’m trying to catalog best practices in collaboration and teamwork.

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Examples of cooperation:

http://nectunt.bifi.es/to-learn-more-overview/cooperation-in-animals-ants-case/

https://listverse.com/2015/02/23/10-amazing-cooperations-between-different-animal-species/

http://vetsci.co.uk/2011/05/16/cooperation-between-species/#

https://epdf.tips/making-democracy-work-civic-traditions-in-modern-italy.html

Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-0304-6.

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Author Page on Amazon.

Find and Cultivate Allies

14 Monday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

allies, Business, collaboration, cooperation, HCI, IBM, organizational change, pattern language, politics, teamwork, usability

Find and Cultivate Allies

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern comes from personal experience although I am sure there must be many other writers who make a similar point.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas in May, 2018.

Abstract:

Human beings are highly social beings by nature. We work more effectively in groups (for many tasks) and it’s also more pleasurable. In a group of any size and complexity, people will have a large variety of goals and values. To achieve a goal, including but not limited to change within the group itself, it is useful to make common cause with others within the larger group. Whenever it becomes useful to promote social change of any kind, it is important to seek out and then cultivate allies. You will achieve greater success, enjoy the process, and learn much.

Context:

Complex problems and large problems can often only be solved by groups. Within a large group, there will be many sub-groups and individuals whose motivations, expertise, and values are partially different from those in other sub-groups or from those of other individuals. In order to achieve any kind of goal including but not limited to changes within the group itself, a great deal of knowledge must be brought to bear and a large number of actions will be required. Generally, an individual or a small group will not have the knowledge, power, or resources to take all of these actions.

The variety of goals, values, experiences, and scope of power of various individuals and subgroups within a larger group can be viewed as a resource. The interactions among such individuals be a source of creativity. In addition, in order to accomplish some goal, you may seek and find among these individuals and groups those whose goals are compatible with yours and whose power and resources allows them to do things you cannot do yourself.

Individuals are subject to a variety of perceptual and cognitive illusions and these may be exaggerated by being in a large group. Changing a group, team, organization, corporation, NGO may be even more difficult than changing an individual even if the change would benefit the group, team, organization, corporation or NGO. Within any organization, there come to be entrenched interests that are orthogonal to, or even antithetical to, the espoused purposes of the group.

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Problem:

Over time, organizations eventually begin to behave in ways that are ineffective, inefficient, or even antithetical to their purpose. Whatever the cause, an individual who recognizes these infelicities in the organization will typically not, by acting alone, have the power to change them. Force of habit, custom, the culture, and the entrenched power of others will tend to make change by an individual extremely difficult or impossible despite their pointing out that the current way of doing things is counter-productive.

Forces:

People who wield local power in an organization are often afraid that any change will weaken their power.

Changing one part of the organization generally means that other parts must also change, at least slightly.

What works best for an organization must necessarily change over time because of changes in personnel, society, technology, competition, the environment, and so on.

Organizations typically codify the way they currently work by documenting procedures, providing training, incorporating current processes into software systems, floor layouts, and so on.

Each person in an organization is typically rewarded according to the performance of a small area of the organization that centers on or near them.

* People within an organization of any size will exhibit large variations in knowledge, skill, values, goals, and the resources available to them.

* In many organizations, a valid reason for continuing to do X is simply to say, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

* It is not considered a valid reason for change from doing X to doing Y to simply say, “We’ve never done it this way before.”

* Organizations are therefore prone to continuing along a path long after it is a fruitful, ethical, or lawful path.

Solution:

If a person wishes to change how a large organization does things, they need to find and cultivate potential allies within the organization. Allies may be people who can be convinced that the change is best for something that is best for that individual, their department, the organization as a whole, for society or for life on earth. These allies will have crucial information, power, friends, or resources to help make the change possible.

Example:

For two years, in the early 1980’s, I worked in the IBM Office of the Chief Scientist. My main mission was to get IBM as a whole to pay more attention to the usability of its products. No-one worked for me. I had no budget. I did, however, have the backing of the Chief Scientist, Lewis Branscomb. Among his powers, at the time, was the ability to “Non-Concur” with the proposed plans of other parts of IBM. This meant that if other IBM divisions did not have usability labs or adequate staff, the Chief Scientist could block the approval of those plans. Lewis himself was a great ally because he had a lot of personal credibility due to his brilliance. Having the power to block the plans of other divisions was also critical.

IBM at this time already had some Human Factors Labs who had done excellent work for years. However, there were large areas such as software that were mainly untested. In addition, most of IBM’s users were technical people and many of the usability tests had been done on other technical people. This had been appropriate but with the extension of computing into other areas of life, many of IBM’s “end users” were now people with little technical computer background. This included administrative assistants and clerks; even chemists, physicists, MD’s, lawyers and other people with advanced education found IBM products hard to use. None of these fairly new groups of users had typically used computers much or had been taught their use in their schooling.

I needed to find allies because the changes that were necessary to IBM were widespread. One important ally was already provided: Tom Wheeler had a similar position to mine within another corporate staff organization called “Engineering, Products, and Technology.” Tom could also get his boss to non-concur with the plans of divisions who were unwilling to “get on board” with the changes. But I needed more allies.

One obvious source of allies were the existing Human Factors Groups. Where they existed, they were typically staffed and managed by excellent people; however, they were often understaffed and often brought in near the end of the development cycle. In many cases, only their advice on “surface features” or documentation could be incorporated into the product. This was frustrating to them. They knew they could be more effective if they were brought in earlier. Often, this did happen, but typically because they had developed personal reputations and friendships (allies) within their organization. It was not mandated by the development process.

Who else would benefit from more usable IBM products? There’s a long list! A lot of “power” within IBM came from Sales and Marketing. The founder, Thomas J. Watson was himself primarily a sales and marketer. Most of the CEO’s had been from this function of the organization. Many in Sales and Marketing were beginning to see for themselves that IBM products were frustrating customers. Finding people within such organizations who were willing to stand up and “be counted” was critical. It was especially useful to find some allies in Europe who were on board with suggested changes. In many countries in Europe, there were various social and legal constraints that gave even more weight to having products that did not cause mental stress, repetitive motion injuries, eyestrain, hearing loss and so on.

In many parts of IBM, there were also “Product Assurance” organizations that required products to be tested before final release. In this case, two simple but crucial and fundamental changes needed to be made. Again, people who worked in Product Assurance wanted these changes to be made. First, we needed to convince development to work with Product Assurance earlier rather than later so that any problems would not be the cause of product announcement slippages (or ignored). Second, we needed to convince Product Assurance to test the procedures and documentation with people outside the development teams. Current practice was often for the Product Assurance people to watch people on the development team “follow” the documented process to ensure that it actually worked. The problem with this process is that language is ambiguous. The people on the development team already knew how to make the product work, so they would interpret every ambiguity in instructions in the “proper” way. IBM customers and users, however, would have no way of knowing how to resolve these ambiguities. Instead of making sure that the documentation was consistent with a successful set-up, the process was changed to see whether documentation actually resulted in a successful set-up when attempted by someone technically appropriate but outside the development team.

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People within IBM product divisions did care about budgets. Adding human factors professionals to existing labs or, in some cases, actually setting up new labs, would obviously cost money. We needed to show that they would save money, net. Some of the human factors labs had collected convincing data indicating that many service calls done at IBM’s expense were not due to anything actually being wrong with the product but instead were because the usability of the product was so bad that customers assumed it must not be working correctly. In most cases, fixing the usability of products would save far more money than the additional cost of improving the products.

In some cases, developing allies was a fairly simple business. For example, IBM had a process for awarding faculty grants for academic research relevant to its technologies and products. These were awarded in various categories. Adding a category to deal with human-computer interaction required a single conversation with the person in charge of that program. Similarly, IBM awarded fellowships to promising graduate students in various categories of research. Again, adding the category of human-computer interaction resulted from a single conversation. It should be noted that the ease of doing that resulted much more from the fact that it was known throughout the company that usability was now deemed important and the fact that I worked for the well-respected Chief Scientist than from any particular cleverness on my part.

In at least one case, an ally “fell in my lap.” Part of how I operated was to visit IBM locations around the world and give a talk about the importance of usability for IBM’s success. Generally, these talks were well-received although that did not guarantee any success in getting people to change their behavior. When I gave the talk to the part of IBM that made displays, however, I got a completely hostile reaction. It was clear that the head of the division had somehow made up his mind before I started that it was complete nonsense. I had no success whatever. Only a few months later, the head of this division got an IBM display of his own. He couldn’t get it to work! He did a complete 180 and became an important supporter, through no fault of my own. (Of course, there may have been additional arm-twisting beyond my ken).

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There were also two important, instructive, and inter-related failures in lining up my allies. First, it was very difficult to line up development managers. An IBM developer’s career depended on getting their product “out the door.” Not every product development effort that began resulted in a product being shipped. Once the product was shipped, the development manager was promoted and often went to another division. So, from the development manager’s perspective, the important thing was to get their product shipped. If it “bombed” after shipment, it wasn’t their problem. In order for the product to be shipped, it had to be forecast to make significant net revenue for IBM. No big surprise there! However, these predictions did not take into account actual sales, or the actual cost of sales, or the actual service costs, or even the actual production costs. The only thing that was really known were the development costs. So, for every additional dollar the development manager spent during development, there was one dollar added to the development costs, but also an additional dollar added to predicted service costs and predicted manufacturing costs. Moreover, there were an additional five dollars added to the predicted sales and marketing costs. If they spent an extra dollar doing usability tests, for example, it added not just one but eight dollars to estimated overall costs. Moreover, since IBM was in business to make a profit, an increase of 8 dollars in costs, meant an increase of nearly 20 dollars in projected price. This meant fewer predicted products sold.

In actuality, spending an additional dollar to improve usability of products should reduce service costs and sales and marketing costs. But that is not the formula that was used. The logic of the formula, corroborated by correlational data, was that bigger, more complex products had higher development costs and also had higher service, manufacturing and sales costs. When one compared a mainframe and a PC, this formula made sense. But when used as a decision tool by the development manager, it did not make sense. (By analogy, there is a strong correlation between the size of various species of mammals and their longevity. This, however, does not mean that you will live twice as long if you double your own body weight!).

Recall however, that the development manager’s career did not much depend on how successful the product was after release; it mainly depended on showing that they could get their product shipped. Development managers proved to be difficult to get “on board.” In some cases, despite the organizational pressures, some development managers did care about how the product did; were interested in making their products usable; did spent additional money to improve their product. Making such allies, however, relied on appealing to their personal pride of ownership or convincing them it was best for the company.

Some development managers suggested that perhaps I could get the Forecasters to change their formula so that they would be given credit for higher sales to balance the projected increase in price (and attendant reduction in sales volume forecasts). It would have been an excellent leverage point to have gotten the Forecasting function as an ally. I was not, however, sufficiently wise to accomplish this.

The organizational payoff matrix for the forecaster was quite skewed toward being conservative. If they used the existing formula and ended up thereby “killing” a product by reducing the sales forecast because of the money spent improving usability, no-one would ever find out that the forecaster might have erred. On the other hand, if I had convinced them by giving them evidence (which would necessarily be quite indirect) that the product, by virtue of its being more usable, would therefore sell many more units, there were at least two logical possibilities. First, I might be right and the product would be a success. The forecaster would have done the right thing and would keep their job (but not be likely to receive any special recognition, promotion, or raise). Second, I might be wrong (for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with usability such as unexpected competition or unexpected costs) and the product might tank. In that case, the company would lose a lot of money and the forecaster might well lose their job. While I occasionally found development managers I could convince to be allies because I could get them to value making the most excellent product over their own career, I never was able to gain any allies in the Forecasting function. In retrospect, I think I didn’t take sufficient time to discover the common ground that it would have taken to get them on board.

Resulting Context:

Finding allies will often enable the organization to change in ways that will benefit the organization as a whole and most of the individuals and sub-groups within it. If done with the best interests of the organization in mind, it should also increase internal mutual trust.

There is a related Anti-Pattern which is finding allies, not to change the organization in a positive way, but to subvert the organization. If, instead of trying to make IBM be more effective by making its products more usable, I had tried to ruin it by finding allies who, in the process of ruining IBM would also profit personally, that would have been highly unethical. Such a process, even if it ultimately failed, would decrease internal mutual trust and decrease the effectiveness of the organization. Of course, one could imagine that some competitor of IBM (or of a government or team) might try to destroy it from the inside out by favoring the promotion of those who would put their own interests ahead of the company or its customers. Finding allies is likely to be ethical when it is for the best interests of the overall organization and all its stakeholders and if is a known initiative (as was the case for improving the usability of IBM products).

References:

https://gps.ucsd.edu/faculty-directory/lewis-branscomb.html

Branscomb, L. and Thomas, J. (1984). Ease of use: A system design challenge. IBM Systems Journal, 23 (3), pp. 224-235.

Thomas, J. (1984) Organizing for human factors. In Y. Vassilou (Ed.) Human factors and interactive computing systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Thomas, J.C. (1985). Human factors in IBM. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 29th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society. 611-615.

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

Speak Truth to Power

10 Thursday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, collaboration, cooperation, ethics, learning, organizational learning, pattern language, politics

Speak Truth to Power

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

This is a well-known phrase and also served as the subtitle to an on-line course I took recently on political consulting. I thought it would be useful as a follow-up to the last blog post which comprised the Anti-Pattern: Power Trumps Good. It is all well and good to say that one should speak truth to power. But how exactly does one go about that? Most people realize that exercise is good for them and eating lots of refined sugar is not; but knowing that is not enough to make those lifestyle changes happen. It is easy to forgo exercise; it is easy to get hooked on sugar; it is easy to “go along” with whoever is in power and accept or acquiesce in whatever they say. Hopefully, the pattern Speak Truth to Power can help motivate people but also provide some guidance in how to go about it. The result will be organizations that are more effective and efficient as well as being more life-promoting to interact with or belong to. That said, if you are like most people, it will be uncomfortable initially to speak truth to power just as it will be uncomfortable to start an exercise program or stop your sugar addiction. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

A committed individual can accomplish a lot. In many cases, however, an organization can accomplish a lot more. Most organizations have some kind of power structure. In order to collaborate and cooperate most effectively, it is important to understand, not only how to be an outstanding individual contributor to the goals of that organization; it is also important to know how to help the organization as a whole meet its goals. The next few Patterns should help with being effective in your work for and with organizations: Speak Truth to Power; Find Allies; Seek Forgiveness, not Permission; Servant Leadership; Prioritize; Seek to Work Down, not Up the Chain of Command.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas in May, 2018

Synonyms:

Be Yourself. Be Honest.

Abstract:

Human beings often need to form large groups in order to accomplish great things. In order to coordinate the actions of a large group, the most commonly used mechanism is to form a hierarchy of power and control. In the best of circumstances, information flows up such a chain of command only so far as it needs to; decisions are made; these decisions are carried out through the chain of command. Such “command and control” structures can be efficient, but they are subject to the difficulty that people in positions of power may use their power, not to achieve the goals of the organization but instead use the organization only for their own ends. People in power may concoct a rationalization or story or outright lie that makes it seem as though they are doing things for the common good when they are only doing things to consolidate their own power or to make themselves comfortable. People in power may discourage subordinates from giving them honest feedback about the effects of their decisions. As an antidote, it is important for everyone in the organization to speak truth to power. That is, you must find a way to insure that important information, including “bad news,” is made available to the organization.

Context:

Complex problems and large problems can often only be solved by groups. In many cases, these groups have considerable structure including, importantly, a hierarchical control structure which gives some people the power to make decisions. Often, these decisions are not just about the appropriate course of action for the group as a whole; they also include decisions about the other people in the group; e.g., who to promote, give a raise to, fire, okay a transfer, write a recommendation and so on. Hopefully, the person “in charge” of a group or team within a larger organization knows or makes sure to learn a good deal about the domain as well as the people he or she works with. Ideally, people use their power to gather information, facilitate fruitful discussion, and make decisions that people within the group understand even if they don’t always agree. However, as point out in the Anti-Pattern: Power Trumps Good, it is also possible that the person “in charge” uses power primarily for their own benefit; in extreme cases, they will use it for sexual exploitation, to blame others for their bad decisions, to take credit for things they didn’t do and so on. Such bosses often only want to hear about the good that comes from their decisions. They only want to hear data and arguments that support their positions.

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Problem:

Groups function better if decisions are based on facts. Yet, sometimes the person in charge does not want to hear facts that argue for a different course of action from the one they want or if the facts show that a previous decision turned out to be a bad one. People who work for such a boss may well know these “uncomfortable facts” but the boss has the power to promote them, fire them, give them a raise, and so on. This puts pressure on those who work for such a boss to tell the boss what he or she wants to hear so as to stay in their good graces. If a bad decision is made it is generally bad for the overall organization, the team, and at least some of the individuals on the team.

Forces:

Having power tempts many people to abuse that power.

A person in power can bestow positive and negative sanctions based on obedience and compliance rather than competence.

People in an organization know they are supposed to be working for the best interests of the organization as a whole.

If a person in power signals (implicitly or explicitly) that they will use that power to put everyone under them in compliance with their wishes rather than what is best for the organization, it is tempting to be compliant.

When faced with an ethical dilemma, if people do what is expedient rather than what is right, they can generally find a way to “rationalize” their unethical decision.

An organization that runs on personal power as the driver for decision making will make inept decisions that are often at cross-purposes.

An organization that runs on personal power will tend to attract and keep the kind of person who will fail ethical tests.

If some people in an organization are willing to forgo the facts in order to please the boss, it will tend to encourage others to do the same.

If some people in an organization are willing to speak truth to power, it will encourage others to do the same.

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Solution:

Speak truth to power. There are many ways to do this. Depending on circumstances and the character (or lack of character) of the person in power, it may help to be bombastic, quiet, rational, emotional, respectful, or find a way to demonstrate that taking facts into account is in their interests as well. In many traditional and highly hierarchical Japanese companies, the workers always defer during working hours and publicly. After hours, a junior person may “unfortunately” get drunk and “accidentally” let the truth out to his superiors. Later, after sobering up, they apologize. In the Middle Ages, the Court Jester might tell the King truth. However you do it, speak truth to power. And, if you are in power, encourage everyone to speak the truth to you.

Examples:

To understand this example, it takes a while to set the stage. You need that background in order to understand how necessary it was to speak truth to power. For a time, I was the Executive Director for an AI lab. The company that I worked for was having a problem with their credibility. Fewer than 15% of the union people trusted top management. The figure for people in management like me, was even lower. The CEO called in a top consultant who told them about what Sam Walton did (who, at that time, enjoyed high trust among his employees). Every week, he had an hour long conference call. Each of his 700 store managers were on the call. Each manager had a chance to describe in one minute, a problem that he or she had encountered and how they had solved it. Part of the reason this process worked for Sam Walton was that he already had a lot of credibility. He would spend fully half his time traveling the country in jeans and a pick-up truck with two dogs in the back. He knew each of his store managers personally. Beyond that, while clearly some problems are local, any given store manager might very well have a solution to a problem that the other 699 could use.

By contrast, in the company I worked for, at this time, there were 70,000 “managers” in the company. The range of jobs among these 70,000 was tremendous. Some, like me, were in R&D. Others were telecom engineers or personnel counselors or accountants or software engineers. Our CEO at that time was definitely not someone wear jeans nor to ride around in a pickup truck with dogs in the back. He definitely was someone who “stood on ceremony” and expected others to do the same.

Management realized that 70,000 was far too many for everyone to speak about problems and solutions, but they still thought it important to make this weekly experience interactive. So, they decided that each week, the CEO would talk at the 70,000 managers for an hour about something important such as that they had a clear understanding of their precise role and duties. After the talk, each of the 70,000 managers would be asked to react with the touch-tone keypad. In this example, they were supposed to indicate on a 10-point scale how much they had a clear understanding of their precise role and duties. The basic structure of this had been decided. They came to me, because I was an “expert” in human-computer interaction. They wanted to know whether the “0” key should be used to indicate a “ten” or whether it was better to use “9” as the top of the scale and “0” as the bottom of the scale.

cuts

Wow.

I made it very clear that this plan was a disaster waiting to happen and would do nothing to improve trust between people in the company and top management. After explaining this as clearly, yet politely as I could, the person from Corporate who presented the plan said, in essence:

“Well, when my boss asks me what the best way to do something is, it isn’t my job to tell him that it’s a bad idea. It’s my job to figure out the best way to do it.”

I said, in essence:

“Well, if my boss asks me what sort of chain saw he should use to trim his hair, I think it is definitely my job to tell him that trimming his hair with a chain saw is a really bad idea.”

The guy from Corporate was not pleased. Eventually, however, before implementing this plan, they did run some focus groups and I am happy to report that this plan was never implemented.

Of course, it’s uncomfortable to be a nay-sayer, particularly when the CEO of the company has already been involved in choosing (what I saw as) a disastrous course of action. But the alternative would have been to dishonest. The alternative would ultimately done a disservice to myself, my work colleagues, the stockholders of the company and, indeed, to the CEO himself.

In my opinion, you should always be mentally prepared to lose your job even before you accept the job offer. You should be prepared to be fired for insubordination, laid off for no reason, or suffer at the hands of someone in power who is not really doing what is best for the organization. Then, when you are surprised by someone making an absurd request, you already know where you stand.

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2. In the 1990’s, I became intrigued with the idea of a “Learning Organization.” The idea is simple in essence but non-trivial to implement. Just as individual animals (including humans) learn, so too can an organization be set up so that lessons learned by a few can be shared by the many. (Some of the Story Patterns just posted are meant to encourage just that). Working with consultants, my colleague Bart Burns and I made the outline of a plan to help turn our company into one that was a “Learning Organization.” In order to modify this plan appropriately and ensure its acceptance, it would be necessary to get the CEO’s backing. (FYI, this was a different CEO than in example 1). I decided that I wanted to present this to our CEO directly. This is, of course, not how things are typically done. Good manners would be to convince my boss. If I convinced him it was a good idea, I would still have to convince him to try to convince his boss. And, not only would I have to convince my boss to convince his boss; I would have to convince him to convince his boss to convince his boss. And so on. I knew the company. I knew it would never happen. The further up the management chain you went, the more conservative the people were about “shaking the boat.”

Instead, I set up an appointment with the CEO directly, went to the meeting, made the pitch. I immediately told my boss what I had done and why. It was a gamble, but my boss was a smart man. He realized I was right that it would never go up the hierarchy to the CEO. Furthermore, even if I had convinced my boss, he might still appear foolish to his boss, or his boss’s boss. Basically, by not telling my boss, I had actually saved him some potential embarrassment and hassle. This is not a method I would try many times in a career and you’d better be ready for consequences. In this case, I felt that the transformation that it might have made to the organization was worth the risk. The “truth” here was not something that could be proven with the kind of certainty we have about, say, global climate change. I could not “prove” that being a Learning Organizations was a good idea. So, it was speaking my truth to power, not an objectively provable truth.

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3. In The Shawshank Redemption, a crucial turning point in the movie occurs when the main character, Andy, overhears one of the prison guards talking about some tax problems. He asks the guard whether he trusts his wife. The guard is ready to kill him, but Andy persists. If the guard can really trust his wife, Andy can show him how to avoid the taxes by putting everything in the name of the guard’s wife. This allows Andy to begin working for all he guards and indeed making lots of money for the prison officials. He eventually uses the information to his great benefit. In this plot, Andy was taking a chance. It would have been easier just to keep his head down and say nothing.

Resulting Context:

Speaking truth to power tends to help an organization be effective. It tends to prevent people in power from trying to dictate truth to suit their private agenda. In addition, when people speak the truth, it makes for a more creative, more peaceful workplace. People can concentrate on finding out what’s what and doing what’s correct, not dwell on what the likes and dislikes of the next person in the hierarchy are or how to curry favor with them. “The truth shall make you free.”

Related Patterns:

Reality Check.

References:

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

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

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

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https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Fostering Community Learning via Transformed Narratives

01 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in family, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cooperation, innovation, learning, organizational learning, pattern language, politics, religion, stories, Storytelling

Fostering Community Learning via Transformed Narratives

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern emerged from work done around 2000 with colleagues at IBM Research (including Cynthia Kurtz, Carl Tait, Frank Elio, Debbie Lawrence, Neil Keller, Andrew Gordon), Lotus (including Dan Gruen, Paul Moody, Michael Muller), and at the IBM Knowledge Institute(including Dave Snowden, Larry Prusak, Sharon Darwent & Fiona Incledon) on the business uses of stories and storytelling. However, the essence of the idea is not that new. The British Navy uses a cartoon of a silly Admiral doing something to be avoided. Apparently, there was a process to collect anonymous stories of “mistakes” that people had made. Rather than being ascribed to the actual person, they were “ascribed” in the cartoon to the fictional Admiral. The point was to help insure that others would not make the same mistake. Mullah Nasreddin stories predate that practice by centuries. This fictional character often was reputed to have done silly things but in a way that made a point for others to learn from.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas April, 2018.

Abstract:

Stories are memorable and motivating. One popular type of story is the “Cautionary Tale” which describes what happens when a person makes a significant kind of error. Stories of this type can be valuable ways for a community as a whole to learn from the errors of one person thus preventing others in the community from making the same mistake. However, many communities also punish people for making errors. One solution is to alter the story of what actually happened slightly so that the community learns from the mistakes of individuals without the individual suffering from an unrecoverable loss of status.

Context:

Groups across many contemporary cultures and throughout history have tended to tell, learn, and repeat stories as a way of codifying what is desirable and acceptable behavior, understanding the world, and communicating important lessons learned across generations. One such type of story is the “Cautionary Tale.” Many of Aesop’s Fables, for example, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Dog and its Reflection fall into this category. Such stories are potentially excellent ways to teach a lesson in a memorable way. For example, The Dog and its Reflection cautions that one may be so obsessed with greed that they will lose even what they already have in the attempt to grasp for more.

While Aesop’s Fables and other folk stories make very general points about values and “right action,” stories also serve an important way for a very local community to learn from the mistakes of individuals so that these same mistakes are not made over and over.

David's DreamDeeply

Problem.

In communities, families, and organizations there are often negative sanctions applied to members who make mistakes. This sets up a dilemma. For the group as a whole to learn optimally, it is best to be able to learn from the experiences of every other member. On the other hand, the member who freely shares stories of his or her mistakes may find themselves punished and the “cautionary tale” repeated in the community then becomes a lesson about how not to admit mistakes, or not to be discovered, or how to shift blame to someone else. Rather than learning as a community and having such learning experiences increase social capital, such a practice instead reinforces self-serving denials and lies. The process is unpleasant and the group loses opportunities to learn from each other. While giving appropriately structured feedback can help, it is not a complete solution. Indeed, a culture that celebrates self-serving lies may quickly devolve into a “race to the bottom” with everyone mistrusting everyone else. The group as a whole is incapable of improving actual performance and so are its members.

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Forces:

Life is too complex, changing, and chaotic to describe completely in empirically falsifiable scientific statements.

Learning from the stories of others who have made mistakes can prevent everyone else from making the same mistake.

Humans are social creatures who tend to reward those who do well and punish those who do not do well.

Since people avoid punishment, if the punishment for admitting and relating mistakes is more severe than the reward for knowledge sharing, people will tend not to admit mistakes.

Once it becomes known in a culture that admitting mistakes leads to punishment, then it becomes even less likely for people to admit their mistakes.

The details of a story that are most important for the group to learn are often different from the details needed to mete out punishment.

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Solution:

When someone in the community makes a mistake that might teach a valuable lesson but could also result in loss of face, there are alternatives in the presentation of the story that allow for the community to learn the lesson but also protect the person involved from social ostracism. This may be done by “projecting” the story onto a fictional character such as Mullah Nasreddin. Another method is to slightly alter the story flow. For instance, instead of a story that says, “I did X and this terrible thing occurred” once could alter the story to: “I almost did X and if I had, this terrible thing would have occurred.” Or, one might say, “I did X and this really bad thing happened. Good thing we noticed right away because otherwise, this much worse thing, X! would have happened.” Another alternative: “Our team did X. This put us in a terrible position vis a vis our crucial customer Y. Luckily, we had a contingency plan in place and were able to immediately repair our relation with customer Y. Of course, next time, we will know not to do X in the first place.”

PicturesfromiPhoneChinaParisPrinceton 035

Examples:

At once point, IBM was trying to save money and suggested that employees only use sardine class airline tickets. I overheard an IBM executive relate the following story. “I was high enough in the hierarchy that IBM made an exception for me. I could have gotten the first class ticket but I decided to take the sardine class ticket anyway. As I boarded that plane, I could see a dozen people in my own organization sitting in steerage. I was really glad to be able to sit down in my teeny seat along with everyone else.” This may have actually been true. On the other hand, it’s also possible that he only wished he had done this and altered what really happened to avoid opprobrium but still get the message across.

Resulting Context:

The altered story allows the team, family, culture or other group to learn from the mistake while protecting the person who made the mistake. As a result, people are more willing to admit to mistakes.

Needless to say, these kinds of alterations are not ethically done so as to avoid punishment for criminal behavior. Even apart from criminal behavior, there are certainly cases where the public has the right to know about actions that reveal a person’s character and this may outweigh concerns for ensuring that the community focuses on learning.

References:

Pan, Y., Roedl, D., Blevis, E., & Thomas, J. (2015). Fashion Thinking: Fashion Practices and Sustainable Interaction Design. International Journal of Design, 9(1), 53-66.

Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.

Darwent, S., Incledon, F., Keller, N., Kurtz, C., Snowden, D., Thomas, J.(2002) YOR920000749US2 Story-based organizational assessment and effect system (granted).

Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. (2001) The Knowledge Management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), 863-884.

Thomas, J. C. (1999) Narrative technology and the new millennium. Knowledge Management Journal, 2(9), 14-17.

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

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Author Page on Amazon

Fostering Group Cohesion through Common Narratives

28 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by petersironwood in family, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

collaboration, cooperation, learning, life, marketing, pattern language, politics, religion, teamwork

Fostering Group Cohesion through Common Narratives

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern emerged from work done around 2000 with colleagues at IBM Research (including Cynthia Kurtz, Carl Tait, Frank Elio, Debbie Lawrence, Neil Keller, Andrew Gordon), Lotus (including Dan Gruen, Paul Moody, Michael Muller), and at the IBM Knowledge Institute(including Dave Snowden, Larry Prusak, Sharon Darwent & Fiona Incledon) on the business uses of stories and storytelling. Of course, stories have long been used by leaders to motivate groups and to help foster group cohesion.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas April, 2018.

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Abstract:

Stories that we tell ourselves help define who we are and frame our experience, both individually and collectively. In relatively stable cultures, a number of common stories are usually shared by everyone. What makes storytelling challenging in modern life is that group boundaries are continually shifting and changing. It often happens that groups which used to be separate must learn to work together; e.g., because of a peace treaty, corporate merger or acquisition, or even a marriage involving extended families. In these cases, it helps to find within the stories of these groups, common values among the previously disparate groups and then make compelling versions of stories that express these values and tell them back to the entire newly formed team, family, group, company, or nation.

Context:

Groups across many contemporary cultures and throughout history have tended to tell, learn, and repeat stories as a way of codifying what is desirable and acceptable behavior, understanding the world, and communicating important lessons learned across generations. Such stories often include “creation myths” but also include stories about the “hero’s journey.”

In most cultures, these stories are transmitted orally regardless of whether such “cultures” are based on geography, company, religions, or even families. It’s true that some important stories have been put into written form. For example, many company founders have their own stories of founding the company put into written form. Religions often have sacred texts. However, both corporate cultures and religious sects and even congregations transmit the “proper interpretation” of these written documents orally. The written texts are modified very slowly while the oral interpretations can possibly change much more quickly. Nonetheless, the stories often persistently encode modes of behavior over centuries and even millennia.

When groups are stable over a long period of time and have minimal interaction, the fact that diverse groups have quite different stories seldom causes difficulties. As these diverse groups began to interact more frequently, it often happened that one group (typically the one with superior weapons) used violence to impose their stories on the other group. More recently, the world has become highly interconnected through inventions and developments in communications such as telegraphy, telephony, and the internet. Physical travel is also faster via rail, cars, and airplanes. People with different stories now come in contact of one sort or another very frequently indeed. Many of the most pressing problems that the world now faces including overpopulation, pandemics, and the destruction of the ecosystem require global cooperation.

Problem:

The very different stories of different groups are not simply just a matter of preference or taste. They are much more crucial and central than that. The stories portray how people should act; they specify good and bad values. When cultures collide, the fact that their very different stories encapsulate very different preferred modes of behavior often fosters suspicion, fear, hatred and disgust. People do not simply observe that others behave differently in terms of speech, dress, food, rituals, and so on. They perceive that the others are doing things, not just differently, but wrongly. The stories of the “in-group” can be used to rationalize exploitation, enslavement, or even genocide.

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Forces:

Life is too complex, changing, and chaotic to describe completely in empirically falsifiable scientific statements.

Learning from others who have relevant experience can shorten learning time.

Humans are social creatures who can feel empathy for others.

Cultures use stories as memorable and succinct ways to encapsulate lessons learned and inculcate the proper values in the young.

Because stories encapsulate much of a culture’s knowledge, members of the culture habitually do what is prescribed by stories and avoid what the stories proscribe. In this way, they can focus decision making among a much smaller set of possibilities and not be perpetually at a loss as to what to do.

Because stories are valuable guides for the individual, they are reluctant to change those stories. If learned early, contradictory evidence is then particularly ineffective at altering or discarding stories.

When people in the “in-group” perceive those in the “out-group” as behaving “badly” (not doing what the stories say they should), trust is ruined and cooperative action is nearly impossible.

Solution:

Whenever two or more groups with different stories must work cooperatively for mutual benefit, create and promulgate new stories that stress the commonalities among the groups rather than stressing differences. In more detail, one way to do this is to collect important, value-laden stories from each group; find the common values expressed; generate stories that stress these common values; and then re-introduce these common values in the form of compelling, memorable common stories.

Examples:

Two people from very different cultures fall in love. Individually, they find that their love supersedes any feelings of disrespect for the way the other eats, dresses, speaks, etc. In fact, the difference may even be part of the attraction. However, the two families each experience discomfort when confronted with someone who is so different from what they are used to. In some cases, the couple may simply convince their families to accept their choice of mate. In other cases, as in Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story, love ends in tragedy. In other cases, they would work together by each learning more of the stories of their partner’s culture and find, among those stories, common values. They may find or create stories that stress these common values and relate those back to their families. A nice illustration of this is in the movie, The Hundred-Foot Journey in which two families from very different cultures come together over their skills and love of fine cooking.

2. In a corporate reorganization, both the Marketing and the R&D Departments are put under one executive whose job is to speed to market a stream of innovative new products. Among the factors that make this a difficult task is the fact that Marketing and R&D have different values, culture, and success stories. Of course, it will help if they are rewarded only for mutual success. But even this may not be enough. It will help to find and promulgate common stories that stress common, rather than different, values. Marketing people may typically dress more sharply than R&D people and put more emphasis on flash and dazzle. But stressing that will hardly encourage better cooperation. Instead, it will work better to stress, for example, persistence, originality and being willing to change based on feedback. These are values that are important for success in R&D and for success in Marketing. The story of Thomas Edison (light bulb; lead storage battery) and Ray Kroc (McDonald’s franchise) for instance, both show that success comes with persistence in the face of repeated failure.

3. Two companies merge. Let’s say one (a sports-focused media company) has a corporate culture that stresses work hard/play hard while the other (a sports-focused engineering company) culture stresses work hard/family time. If it’s really important for the two cultures to merge and then work together, promoting stories about the outrageous parties and wild orgies that the first company participates in will not be helpful. Instead, it will be good to find stories from both companies that stress the “work hard” part. Since both companies are concerned with sports, the settings and characters from stories can both utilize sports. But the values that are stressed should relate to working hard and the resultant rewards.

4. Many nations in an entire region of the world; e.g., Europe, are sick of centuries of war and counter-productive bickering and the inefficiency that comes of contradictory rules and regulations on transportation, environmental protections and so on. Despite different cuisines, traditional dress, and languages, they wish to be able to cooperate more effectively. In furtherance of that goal, they form a “European Union” which promotes the freer interchange of products, ideas, and people. Together, they constitute a formidable trading block and military force. It is important in such an effort to find stories that stress commonalities and then make sure these are prominently communicated among all the members. By contrast, an agent who wants to weaken or divide such a union would promulgate stories, even false stories, that stress differences.

Resulting Context:

Once a newly merged group shares a common story or set of stories stressing common values, they are much more likely to experience a higher degree of trust. This will make interactions more pleasant in terms of the on-going experiences but will also result in more effective action in meeting common or overlapping goals.

Related Patterns:

Build from Common Ground.

References:

Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.

Darwent, S., Incledon, F., Keller, N., Kurtz, C., Snowden, D., Thomas, J.(2002) YOR920000749US2 Story-based organizational assessment and effect system (granted).

Thomas, J. C., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. (2001) The Knowledge Management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4), 863-884.

Thomas, J. C. (2001). An HCI Agenda for the Next Millennium: Emergent Global Intelligence. In R. Earnshaw, R. Guedj, A. van Dam, and J. Vince (Eds.), Frontiers of human-centered computing, online communities, and virtual environments. London: Springer-Verlag.

Thomas, J. C. (1999) Narrative technology and the new millennium. Knowledge Management Journal, 2(9), 14-17.

Author Page on Amazon:

Narrative Insight Method

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, collaboration, cooperation, coordination, innovation, learning, pattern language, story, Storytelling

Narrative Insight Method

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Prolog/Acknowledgement:

Since my dad worked mainly as an electrical engineer and my mother as an English/Drama teacher, I’ve always felt pulled in two directions: toward science, mathematics, systemization, practical solutions, and formalism and simultaneously toward the arts, particularly various types of storytelling. I finally had a chance to synthesize these two areas while managing a project for several years at IBM Research on the business uses of stories and storytelling. Though this project provided value in various ways to many within IBM, there was no single part of IBM whose main business was stories. For this reason, finding funding was a continual challenge. Our closest allies, apart from my senior manager, Colin Harrison, were The IBM Knowledge Management Institute, researchers at LOTUS, and a part of IBM internal education located in Atlanta. My group at IBM Research included Carl Tait, Andrew Gordon, Cynthia Kurtz, Debbie Lawrence, and Frank Elio. Larry Prusak and David Snowden from the IBM Knowledge Management Institute were particularly interested in stories as were Michael Muller, Dan Gruen, and Larry Moody at LOTUS. The method described here was mainly developed by Cynthia Kurtz, Dave Snowden, and Neal Keller of IBM Research Education though writing the method as a “Pattern” is my own responsibility.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created originally by John C. Thomas in January of 2002, and revised substantially during April, 2018.

MikeandStatue

Synonyms:

Story Circles.

Abstract:

Experts learn valuable lessons from their experiences. Such lessons can guide less experienced people. In small trusted groups, a natural, effective, and traditional way for experts to share their knowledge is to trade stories (See, e.g., Orr, 1990, Talking about Machines). A challenge for large organizations is to extend this process to larger groups and non-co-located personnel. Writing stories is a possibility; however, in many cases experts are too busy to write stories and find the process of writing stories difficult and unnatural as compared with telling stories. The method describes here minimizes the time of the expert, allows them to tell stories in a natural setting and organizes the knowledge in a useful manner.

Basically, about 12-24 people who are all interested in a topic but have various levels of experience are brought together for an hour. After a short introduction, the large group is subdivided into smaller groups of 3-5 people each, making sure that each group includes at least one experienced person and at least one less expert. For about 35 minutes, the group tells stories about their experiences and these are recorded for later transcription and analysis. The small group decides which story would be best to share with the larger group. The “best” story from each subgroup is shared with the larger group and this is followed by a short discussion. This plenary session is also recorded. People are thanked for their participation and given some sort of very nominal gift or memento.

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Context:

Within societies and organizations, people generally differentiate into specialties. Many of these specialties require years of training and experience before people reach maximum effectiveness. In most societies, mechanisms have been set up so that those with more experience can help those with less experience learn more effectively and efficiently than if every generation had to learn completely on their own. People tell stories for many reasons, but one major use of stories is to help create and share knowledge across levels of expertise and across generations.

Less expert people in a large organization or community of practice typically want to learn from more experienced people. This is beneficial for the individuals as well as for the larger organization or community of practice. In modern societies, many of the people who have relevant knowledge are physically distant from the people who need the knowledge. In many cases, much of the most valuable knowledge of experts is tacit knowledge.

An organization typically has people available who may not be expert in the subject matter but have relatively more expertise in writing stories and organizing educational materials. The experts in a given subject matter are typically very busy and in most cases, may lack both the skills and the time to produce good written stories.

Problem:

Experts have valuable knowledge based on their experience. However, experts in organizations are typically very busy people. They are willing to share stories informally and orally but do not necessarily have the skill or patience to write stories. Moreover, it can be difficult to find stories relevant to a specific situation. In addition, stories often reveal lessons learned through the sharing of mistakes that were made by the experts. In fact, experienced people have generally made many mistakes through the course of their careers. They do not typically want to have all of these mistakes made public inside and outside of an organization.

If one is telling a story face to face, there are many cues about how the story is being received. The teller can sense whether the audience is understanding, interested, bored, or shocked for example. The teller can then adjust the story to suit the audience and the situation as they continue to tell the story. The writer of a story lacks this type of information to mold the story while it is being created.

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Forces:

· The time of experts is valuable.

· Subject matter experts are typically not experts in producing educational materials.

· People expert in producing education materials need to gain access to high quality content.

· In many fields, much of the most important knowledge that experts gain through their experience is in the form of tacit knowledge.

· Tacit knowledge is not well communicated by formal methods but can often be well communicated by stories*.

· Experts telling stories of their relevant experiences orally to small groups that contain other experts as well as some novices comprises a natural way for experts to share experience.

· Storytelling occurs only when the social situation is right.

· Telling a story about one’s experiences increases the probability that someone else in a group will also share a story about their experiences.

· Producing written stories requires special skills.

· Experts who have experience relevant to novices may be remotely located from them.

· Different learners learn best at different rates, by different media, and in different styles.

· Since stories often reveal errors on the part of the storyteller, it can be important in competitive organizations to hide the identity of the storyteller while retaining the lessons learned.

Solution:

Provide an informal setting conducive to storytelling; this is encouraged by several factors. 1. Provide non-standard seating arrangements with easily movable chairs. 2. Conduct in a room with an informal atmosphere. 3. The structure and content of the invitation should be friendly but make clear the importance of the activity. 4. Gather a commitment to participate, making sure people know their time commitment is for one hour only. 5. Provide friendly but clear reminders near the time of the session with an additional check on the commitment to participate. 6. Provide refreshments at the beginning of the meeting. 7. Limit participation to a group of 8 to 20. 8. Groups should include experts as well as people knowledgeable in the topic but less expert. 9. Set expectations both prior to and during the session that people will be sharing stories, (E.g., “We find that when a group of experts get together like this, they generally end up telling stories about their experiences.”). 10. Make the recording clear but not obtrusive, and modeling storytelling at the outset.

During the session itself: 1. Greet people warmly and thank them for coming. 2. Break people into 3-4 smaller groups. 3. Each group should include a facilitator/recorder. 4. Digitally record the sessions with separate high quality tape recorders for each subgroup. 5. Tell the subgroups that they will be sharing stories based on their experiences and that then the group will choose one story from each subgroup to share with the larger group. 6. Implement this plan. 7. Facilitate to gently guide people back to telling stories of concrete instances (as opposed, for instance, to making general statements or pronouncements). 8. After each subgroup shares its story with the whole group, allow discussion to continue, encouraging but not insisting on storytelling.

Examples:

We used this methodology to provide learning materials in the form of stories for NOTES 5. Such stories were not focused on how to invoke specific functions but rather on how to use NOTES to enhance your work practices or enhance team coordination and communication.
We used this methodology to develop stories about “boundary spanning skills.” This was used for R&D personnel from a number of diverse organizations interested in organizational learning.
Finally, we also used this method to develop learning materials for the IBM Patent Process based on multiple sessions.

Resulting Context:

After such sessions, it is necessary for the tapes to be transcribed and for analysts to find the lessons learned. The stories leading to the lessons learned were also included in shortened and anonymized format. In the case of the learning materials for the IBM Patent Process, the learning materials were in the form of Guided Exploration Cards. This form of documentation was originally developed by John Carroll and colleagues for product documentation. (See The Nurnberg Funnel, John Carroll, in references). In other situations, stories and their lessons could be arranged in other ways.

While the intended “product” of using this method with respect to materials for “how to” produce patents were the Guided Exploration Cards, it also happened that master inventors and more novice inventors who were initially brought together for this exercise subsequently began additional fruitful collaborations and consultations. Indeed, sharing stories may typically have the effect of increasing group cohesion in the longer term as well as providing lessons learned.

References:

Carroll, J. M. (1990), The Nurnberg Funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Orr, J. (1996), Talking about machines: an ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. (Available on Amazon).

https://www.amazon.com/Talking-about-Machines-Ethnography-Collection/dp/0801483905

*Thomas, J., Kellogg, W., & Erickson, T. (2001), The Knowledge Management Puzzle: Human and Social Factors in Knowledge Management. IBM Systems Journal, 40(4):863 – 884.

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Author Page on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Music

12 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Pattern Language., cooperation, coordination, family, feelings, life, media, music, politics, teamwork

Music

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

This “Pattern” most likely can be decomposed into various sub-patterns. It seems so obvious that music has historically played a huge role in fostering social cohesion across centuries and cultures that it is tempting not to bother arguing the case or bother to put it as a Pattern. However, music does not always seem to be a positive force for social cohesion. Parents arguing with their kids about music for example; bands famously “breaking up” despite spending hours of time playing music together and listening to low quality Muzak while on hold seem to indicate that the mere presence of music is not enough; some kind of analysis of the effects of music on teamwork, cooperation and coordination seems appropriate.

Societies have traditionally engaged in drumming, singing, dancing and making music both “for fun” and as accompaniment to rites and rituals. In my own cultural upbringing in the Midwestern United States, music has been part of every church service, wedding, and funeral. Songs were sung in every camp where I worked. Singing, dancing, and the staging of musicals was a large part of the high school experience. For example, most of the high school yearbook pictures of activities involve either sports or music. Music has been such an integral part of my cultural tradition that I cannot point to specific origins of its use. Indeed, rhythm, tune and dance are not even limited to humanity but also play vital roles in social coordination among numerous species of insects and birds.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas April 11-12, 2018

Abstract:

People typically enjoy listening to music and making music. Music can influence mood. If people listen to the same music, it can influence mood similarly across individuals as shown by the background music in cinema. There is ample evidence that music can be therapeutic in numerous ways across the lifespan (see references). Use appropriate music to help increase social cohesion. This can take the form of people listening to music or participating in its creation. In order for group music to “work,” whether classical symphony, jazz improvisation, a work song, military band, or caroling, it is necessary to pay attention to the larger group. Most cultures have developed music to help group coordination and cooperation. Most likely music has both an immediate, “in the moment” effect as well as a longer term positive effect on social capital.

Context:

Every person has their own concerns. We have our own individual bodies; our own friends and family; our own possessions; our own preferences; our unique education and personal experiences. Yet, people are happiest and most productive when they work together. In a highly complex and highly differentiated society in which people have very different roles and expertise, common experiences in the “workplace” have become less common. Hunting, gathering and agriculture often require people to work together on very similar tasks in the same place at the same time. In an “information economy” a person’s actual work may often be mainly solitary. Only the “results” need be communicated to someone else. In such circumstances, using music for the whole group is probably more important than ever.

Not everyone has precisely the same “tastes” in music. Some people prefer to do intellectual work without music while others find it useful. For this reason, it is not uncommon to see people at their individual work listening to their music privately via headphones. Similarly, on a family car trip, people may find it less argumentative to have everyone listen to “their own” favorite music rather than communicate, play a game or listen to or create common music. We may be missing opportunities for social cohesion though when music becomes only a vehicle for private enjoyment rather than a shared experience.

Problem:

Because humanity lives in a highly inter-connected world, in many cases in close proximity to many others, we need to agree on how to allocate scarce shared resources and otherwise communicate and coordinate. Often, the interconnections of people in complex social and work situations are too complex and varied to “specify” in detail. It is vital to have a high degree of mutual trust and to collaborate and coordinate, not just through well-defined and precise set of rules and regulations, but through a sense of being part of a larger group.

In addition, people often have different professions, roles, backgrounds, experiences, educations, etc. This makes both communication and trust more challenging. Many of today’s communications are done remotely and in many cases, communication is limited to writing and reading text or the exchange of other purely instrumental communications; e.g., through forms, data, formulae, or signals. While such communication can be “efficient,” it is only effective when the situation being communicated about has been well-anticipated. In novel situations, it might not work at all and that is when people need to rely on each other in informal ways. In addition, while storytelling and conversing may seem “inefficient,” they are intrinsically more engaging and richer experiences for most people as compared with filling out forms.

Communication that is purely instrumental does little to encourage cooperation and build trust. Yet, because of the wide disparity in people’s backgrounds and experiences, as alluded to above, we need that cooperation and trust more than ever.

Forces:

Groups of groups must sometimes work together to achieve common goals.

Subgroups may disagree with each other about the best use of resources to achieve those common goals.

In a drive to improve “efficiency,” rather than simply letting people talk, many business transactions are formalized and leave no room for expressive communication.

When the actual problem at hand requires people to work outside of the formalized transactions for a solution, it helps to have mutual trust.

Music that is shared, whether listened to, danced to, or created together, provides an opportunity to be expressive and build mutual trust.
Higher levels of mutual trust lead to better outcomes and provide more pleasant experiences for all.

Solution:

When possible encourage groups to engage in listening to or creating music together as a means to increase trust.

Examples:

1. Early in the days of IBM, at the beginning of the day, employees sang company songs in unison.

2. Many high schools, colleges, and nations have songs that everyone in the group sings together. Many couples also agree on one song that is “theirs.”

3. In basic training, the military uses cadenced marching “songs” to help keep the group literally “in step” and encourage esprit de corp.

4. When multiple people row a boat, it is more efficient when the oars all hit the water at the same time. Most cultures that use rowers, also use songs to help coordinate the effort. Song is also used when a group of people has to pull or push something heavy.

Resulting Context:

When people sing together, play music together or dance together; even when people listen to the same music, they are literally more “in synch.” Each person is individually in a better mood. The group as a whole identifies more with the whole group. Trust in increased.

A community, team, or group that regularly shares music together also experiences a longer term effect of increased mutual trust. Robert Putnam and his collaborators, Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Nanetti, in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy found that the best predictor of both how people felt about various communities in Italy and how effective they were economically was best predicted by how many chorale societies they had.

Related Patterns:

Small Successes Early, Build from Common Ground.

Metaphors:

In the vertebrate body, there is a heartbeat. The pulsing heart serves as a coordination event for the rhythm of the body. In the brain, there are various frequencies of “waves” and although the exact evolutionary advantage is not known, we may speculate that these help coordinate the overall response.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20175359

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1744388114000516

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4021113/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-017-8920-2_3

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5105.html

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Author Page on Amazon –

https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

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Piano

Strike! the keys then smoothly skim along.
Strike! piano then sing your song.
Strike! down harder as the music flies.
Strike! once more as the music dies.

Murmur so softly to the moonbeams of blue;
Whisper quiet to the desert night.
Rolling, caroling, dancing, whirling,
Murmur down to nothingness and silence long.

Triumphantly, the snow falls now,
Majestically were love’s enow.
Chord full rich. Chord weird whines.
Empty fifths flow futilely along.

The rhythm picks up in a waltzing gate
And all the dancers can hardly wait.
The melody’s thinking, “All is great!”
This orgy of music will satiate.

Mellow and sadly, slowly going,
Seeds of sorrow steadily sowing,
From painful pathos fire growing,
Mood and madness never slowing.

Strike! the keys both loud and strong.
Strike! piano then live your song.
Strike! down harder as the music flies
Strike! once more as the music dies.

Positive Deviance

07 Saturday Apr 2018

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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.

fullsizeoutput_11a7

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.

tennisinstruction

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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Author Page on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Give a Sympathetic Reading

29 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cooperation, family, innovation, interpretation, learning, pattern language, teamwork

Give a Sympathetic Read

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

As a high school debater, I instinctively knew that it was my job to find the holes in the arguments of the other side and then try to find arguments, examples, facts, figures, metaphors, and so on to try to show how those holes, however small, were fatal flaws. In my English literature and interpretation class at Case-Western University, however, I was first introduced to the notion of a “sympathetic reading.” Since English (and other natural languages) are extremely ambiguous and vague, if we want to understand what the author is getting at, it is vital to take a “sympathetic reading.” In other words, try to find one or more interpretations that do make sense rather than finding ones that do not make sense.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas March 28-30, 2018

Abstract:

In highly competitive societies, it is easy to fall into the habit of finding holes in the arguments of others and one easy way to do this is to exploit the ambiguity and vagueness of anything said in natural language. Instead, if there is an interest in teamwork and cooperation, it is important to first find a way to interpret the other person’s statements in a way that does make sense rather than a way that does not make sense. Instead, presume that the other person is trying to make a contribution and try to build on it. This imparts three advantages. First, it moves the problem solving forward. Second, it moves the problem solving process forward. Third, it makes the entire process more pleasant for everyone during the problem solving process.

Context:

Complex problems can often only be solved by groups. In many cases, problem solving and design moves forward at least partly through the presentation of oral or written argumentation in natural language. In some cases, this is supplemented by models, sketches, or prototypes. Though generally less ambiguous than words, such artifacts still allow some ambiguity.

Naturally, there are some contexts for which using only a sympathetic reading is not appropriate. For example, if you are presenting a mathematical proof, you want your colleagues to find and point out any errors or ambiguities. Similarly, if you are aiding in a code walk-through, you want to point out cases where the proposed code will fail. The same holds for a usability walk-through. You want to find the cases where users will be confused or likely choose the wrong option.

There are many other contexts, however, where it is much more appropriate to find a sympathetic reading. These are contexts in which the team or group needs to work together to solve a problem, design a system, or reach a goal even though there may be disagreements along the way of how best to achieve a solution, system, or goal. This includes civic debate and disagreement on contentious issues. If you make the “worst possible” interpretation of someone else’s comments, instead of making any progress on the overall goal, you will instead end up in arguments about how to interpret things, what was meant, and the rules of grammar rather than the difficult issues that do need to be worked through.

fullsizeoutput_1351

Problem:

Especially in competitive societies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing every statement that has an absurd interpretation as an opportunity to “score points” against the “other side.” The ridiculous interpretation only serves as “proof” of how stupid or ill-informed the other side is (and, by comparison, how right and righteous your own side is). If every ambiguity and vagueness in an argument is treated in this way, very little if any progress will ever be made. It is the nature of natural language that such ambiguities abound. In fact, every attempt to “clarify” or “specify” what was meant will typically be another set of natural language statements that will only further proliferate into set of arguments about what was meant.

Examples:

You are working as a part of a large software development team of 500 people. Your generally reasonable project manager sends an email that says: “Remember: everyone is responsible for everyone writing bug free code.” A sympathetic and reasonable interpretation of this is that the entire software team will be rewarded on the basis of the success of the team as a whole and that therefore, the team needs to use a process in which all the code is double checked and that there is adequate time in the development schedule for testing the code. In all likelihood this is at least close to what was meant. Another interpretation, arguably closer to the precise words, is that all 499 people on the project are responsible for checking your code and that you are personally responsible for checking the code of each of the other 499 people. If your project manager is at all reasonable, this is not what they meant. What would be gained by pointing out that it’s not feasible to have everyone check everyone’s else’s code in detail?

In another case, you get instructions for a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Included is the statement, “Make sure you have a good pair of hiking boots that you fit into.” This may not be the best possible way to put this, but don’t show up in size 12 hiking boots just because your size 7 feet indeed “fit into” the size 12 hiking boots. Even more absurd would be to show up with a house-sized shoe like the mythical shoe of “Old Mother Hubbard” from the Mother Goose Nursery rhyme, because, after all, you need a shoe that big for you to fit into it (rather than just your feet).

fullsizeoutput_11a7

This procedure becomes even more important (and more difficult) when interpreting other people’s statements about a contentious political issue. For example, someone might say, “We should license gun use the way we regulate automobiles.” This is admittedly a vague statement, but it does nothing toward problem solving if the retort is, “There’s nothing in the Constitution about driving automobiles!” or “So, you think a gun owner should be forced to take a driving test?” What is recommended instead is to assume a reasonable rather than an unreasonable interpretation and then discuss more precisely what kind of licensing, training testing make sense for guns. Or, someone says, “I want to have a gun to protect my family.” You could say, “How is that going to protect them from an atomic bomb or a plague or the heat death of the universe?” Again, the original statement is vague. It doesn’t really specify how a gun is going to help protect a family against which kinds of threats. If instead, the parties tried to specify various scenarios and see how likely the various scenarios are statistically, at the end, the parties might still disagree but at least they would be disagreeing based on differences they actually have about what they actually believe rather than a made up fantasy about what is believed, a fantasy constructed from rather intentionally misunderstanding or misinterpreting what is said to make it absurd, ridiculous, unethical, etc.

Forces:

Groups of groups must sometimes work together to achieve common goals.

Often the only practical way to communicate about complex situations is in natural languages.

Natural language is vague and ambiguous.

If one person seizes on the vagueness and ambiguity in natural language to set up a “straw man” argument, it fails to move problem solving forward.

If one person seizes on a ridiculous interpretation of another person’s statement, it makes the first person feel disrespected.

* When people feel disrespected, they are less likely to be cooperative.

When people feel respected, they are more likely to be cooperative.

Solution:

Therefore, when people are working together to try to solve a problem, design a system, or address an issue, it behooves everyone to take a sympathetic reading of the other person’s statements.

Resulting Context:

Once people participate in debate, discussions, or dialogue in which everyone is attempting to find interpretations of each other’s statements that make sense, it increases trust and social capital. People stop wasting time trying to attack and defend positions that don’t even exist. Progress toward solutions is more likely for the particular issue at hand. Perhaps even more important, people are more likely to work together cooperatively in the future.

PicturesfromiPhone 238

Related Patterns:

Reality Check, Iroquois Rule of Six, Build from Common Ground.

References:

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Column/David-Weinberger/Perspective-on-knowledge-Sympathetic-Knowledge-105751.aspx

http://www.goingtoseminary.com/2009/09/08/an-ethic-of-reading/

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https://www.amazon.com/author/truthtable

Negotiate from Needs, not Positions

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

competition, cooperation, innovation, negotiation, pattern language, politics, problem solving, teamwork

fullsizeoutput_17f9

Negotiate from Needs, not Positions

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

So long as I can recall, I’ve seen negotiation as an arena for creativity, but most people don’t like to play that way so I was very happy to learn about the Harvard Negotiation Project. When I was Executive Director of the NYNEX AI lab, Beth Adelson developed a short course in negotiation based on the Harvard Negotiation Project. (That project later evolved into the Project on Negotiation).

I have been struggling with a recurrent issue in writing these Patterns. The issue nearly every time is separating the “Problem” from the “Context.” In the format that I’ve been trying to use consistently, the “Problem” comes first and then the context. But in attempting to tell a compelling story, I typically find myself needing to say at least something about the context early on in order for the reader (or at least my mental representation of the reader) to make sense of why the problem arises. I had thought that Christopher Alexander might finesse the issue because people are typically already familiar with towns, cities, buildings etc. and because he uses an evocative image to remind people of the context. It generally seems much more difficult to point unambiguously to a social situation with a picture. I returned to A Pattern Language in order to find out how CA and his team handled this issue. Well, it turns out, A Pattern Language does not make anything like these separate categories! Patterns typically begin with a lead-in which contextualizes the problem. I think the format I was trying to use might work for the Object-Oriented Programming Language community because, in a sense, programming solutions are typically themselves decontextualized. Having separate and well-defined sections also helps someone using a Pattern Language navigate to a specific point. However, it may damage the logical and compelling presentation of the idea to begin with. This provides something of a puzzle, but for now, I am going to try to follow the spirit of CA’s original Pattern Languages for a time and thought I will attempt to keep separate sections, I will put Context before Problem.

The following Pattern is especially relevant today because as of this writing, there seem to be an increasing number of “leaders” in the world who are presuming that negotiating by positions is the only way to go and every negotiation leads to winners and losers.

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

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas March 15-24, 2018

Abstract:

Especially in highly competitive societies, it is common to view negotiation in terms of a zero sum game. In this view, a “good negotiator” is someone who gets more of what they want at the expense of the other person. Instead of assuming that everyone else is just like us in every way and therefore wants the same exact things as we do, one might explore a more open problem solving space by finding out what the other person actually wants and discovering what you really want. Put another way, each negotiator might put on the table what their actual needs are rather than simply their position about one or a few things. Often both (or all) sides can work together to creatively construct a solution that satisfies the needs of all parties. If parties to a negotiation view each issue as unidimensional, monotonic, and independent, it tends to induce a competitive frame of mind. If parties to a negotiation instead view issues together in multiple dimensions, it is often possible to induce a problem solving frame of mind and all parties end up better off in terms of meeting their real needs. In addition, negotiating in this way tends to increase mutual trust and cooperation over time.

Context:

Complex problems can often only be solved by groups. Typically, really large scale groups are not homogeneous but have subgroups within them. This works at many levels of scale. For example, the world as a whole needs to solve the problems of climate change and pollution. Yet, it seems it would be efficient to implement some solutions on a country by country basis. But the countries will then tend to argue about how much is “their share” of the solution. Or, a nation needs to improve its solar energy research program. But some states will fight over where research money is invested. Others will argue all that money should go to oil and coal. There may be negotiation between son and father about how long to walk the dog. In every case of negotiation, there is both some sort of common goal and some difference of opinion about how to get there. In the case of Labor and Management, for instance, both want to avoid a strike. In the case of the countries, all the countries presumably want to have a livable planet for their descendants.

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There is another habit of work common at least in my cultural context (American business) that plays into typical negotiations. When people of many industries organize meetings, a key part of that organization is the agenda – the linear list of topics to be addressed. When applied to negotiations, this is translated into a list of individual issues that need to be addressed. The implication is that they are to be addressed one by one. An important underlying assumption is if the best solution is found on every issue, then we will also find the best solution overall. This is not necessarily so, but it is a common default way of addressing issues: one by one.

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My own cultural experience of contemporary America is that it is insanely competitive. Competition has its place. Personally, I love competition in sports and games. My first book is titled, The Winning Weekend Warrior. It deals with strategy, tactics, and the mental game as applied to all sports. It also points out that this competition only “works” because people agree on a framework of competition and stick to that framework. Sportsmanship is fundamental to good competition. But I call out my current society as insanely competitive because we now apply it to nearly every human activity. You can turn on TV and not only find competitions in basketball, soccer, and tennis (which make sense) but also for activities which have historically been cooperative, enjoyable fun such as singing, dancing, cooking, and even dating! It has come to apply particularly to politics. There is almost no cooperative attempt to identify and solve important national issues. It is all a question of ratings, polls, press coverage, donation dollars and votes. This competitive mindset is then reinforced when people negotiate according to positions. Not only are such negotiations unlikely to yield any creative solutions, they encourage viewing the “other” in the negotiations as “the enemy” or even something sub-human. While competitive athletics at least works within an agreement about rules and procedures, in politics, there seems no longer to be any agreement about what is appropriate.

Problem:

Especially in competitive societies, it’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing every negotiation as a contest with winners and losers. Labor, e.g., says they must have at least 20$/hour to prevent a strike and management says they can’t possibly afford more than 10$/hour to avoid bankruptcy. Of course, these are not necessarily true statements. Privately, labor may know that their membership would settle for 15$/hour. Privately, management might know that they could pay 30$/hour and not go bankrupt – but that would require cutting executive bonuses and dividends. So, here, in a nutshell is the situation. Two parties are both being dishonest and yet, they are relying on the other to solve a problem that requires trust.

Not only are the parties unlikely to end up even close to the “best” solution. Hard feelings and mistrust are likely to spill over into the work itself or any implementation of the solution. If either side feels “betrayed” they will be even more “hard-nosed” in the next negotiation. In some cases, the parties will no longer work together for their common good. Instead, there will be at various levels such effects as war between nations, secession and civil war, riots among citizens who feel unfairly disadvantages, or divorce between two people who fight to win – about what should be honest, mutual problem solving.

Forces:

Groups of groups must sometimes work together to achieve common goals.

Subgroups may disagree with each other about the best use of resources to achieve those common goals.

Honesty on every side and mutual trust is most effective and efficient in solving problems and implementing solutions.

When negotiating on the basis of positions, negotiation becomes viewed as a zero sum game.

In a zero sum game, it can work to your advantage to be dishonest.

* Negotiations that always treat every issue independently cannot always converge on the best solutions.

Zero sum games induce a highly competitive mindset.

Negotiating from real needs tends to induce a cooperative mindset.

Negotiating from real needs tends to increase trust.

* Higher levels of mutual trust lead to better outcomes and more pleasant experiences for all stakeholders.

Solution:

When it is necessary to negotiation among two or more sub-groups within a larger group, negotiate from actual needs not positions. Work together to discover the best solutions for the larger groups while minimizing undue pain for any one subgroup.

Examples:

1. A quintessential example used in the Harvard Negotiation Project is the story of the two sisters. They spied a lemon in the kitchen and both went for it at the same time. Each said they wanted the lemon. Eventually, the grudgingly cut the lemon in two. In this way, it would seem that they had reached a “fair” solution in that each one had met the other half-way. It turned out, however, that one of the sisters actually wanted the lemon peel for a cake recipe while her sister wanted to drink the juice of the lemon. It turned out they could have each had 100% of what they wanted. Perhaps they could have even planted a lemon tree from the seeds as well.

2. Two countries are each trying to achieve more economic prosperity for its citizens. Some countries have relative advantages in the production of some goods and services over others; e.g., because of differences in natural resources, availability of necessary labor and expertise, cultural resonance with the required activity, or existing infrastructure. It makes much more sense for some countries to specialize in some rather than all goods and services. Over time, these differential advantages change. At one time, for instance, India and China, among others, had a huge advantage in terms of cheap labor but relatively less advantage in science and engineering expertise compared with, say, the United States. Labor costs in India and China are now higher (though still much less than in the US) while expertise in science and technology has skyrocketed. In any case, the US government has now decided to embark on a “trade war” with one of our most productive trading partners. In this case, the results will probably be bad for everyone except for a few very wealthy American executives who might make more money in the short term.

Instead, negotiators from China and the United States could get together and identify a number of issues that could be better solved by having the United States and China work together. As one example, as China becomes more proficient in science and engineering, they may find it increasingly in their interest to promote a more universal and more enforceable way to deal with intellectual property. As automation, robotics, and AI become more capable of replacing more jobs in both countries, they could work together on how to avoid massive unemployment. They could work together to define specific areas of scientific and engineering cooperation; e.g., how to provide clean water, how to slow and reverse climate change, how to ameliorate its effects, how to develop and share best practices in managing emergencies such as earthquakes or large fires. It’s infantile to imagine that there are a finite number of jobs available which must be apportioned between the US and China so that every job is either “given” to one party of the other.

3. Joe and Suzi are New Yorkers who are already sick of the hot, hazy, humid weather in early July and they decide it’s time for planning a vacation for late August. Joe wants to take a vacation to Orlando while his wife Suzi wants to go to Aspen. These are their initial positions. If each “insists” on getting their way, there are several options that seem “fair.” They could flip a coin. They could agree to alternate vacations between the two places and flip a coin to decide which one “wins” first. They could find a place half-way between. In this case, that might be Little Rock, Arkansas. They could arm wrestle over it. Of course, they might want their own vacation site so much that they agree to take separate vacations. There are options available but they are limited. Joe has no idea why Suzi wants to go to Aspen and he may not even be fully aware of why he wants to go to Orlando. He just remembers having a good time there as a Columbia college student on winter break. Suzi, for her part, has no idea why Joe wants to go to Orlando and may not even be fully aware of why she wants to go to Aspen. She remembers going to a design conference there about 15 years ago and she had a really good time and loving seeing the mountains in the background.

If Joe and Suzi are willing to trust each other and jointly figure out what they both want from a vacation, the space of possibilities for meeting their needs expands tremendously. As it turns out, Joe loves to bake in the sun. He likes to swim in the ocean. He likes to look for pretty rocks and shells. He likes to run along the beach. He likes to watch women in bikinis walk by. In college, he got uproariously drunk, but he has no such desire now. Suzi, for her part, enjoyed the design conference, more than Aspen. It was fun to meet new people doing interesting design projects. She did enjoy a bit of some cross-country skiing and the way it got her heart racing. She also recalls that the town itself had pretty flowers and buildings.

Once both parties become aware of their needs and wants rather than their positions, several things become clear to them as a team. First of all, when Joe went to Orlando as college student in the winter, he was getting away from the cold and lying on the beach in the sun seemed great. Now, it’s late August and hot. Orlando will only be hotter. Suzi will not be doing any cross-country skiing in Aspen in late August. More importantly, the Aspen Design conference is in the Spring. With more mutual planning and problem solving, they discover that San Diego has a design conference during their vacation time frame. They can drive into the mountains in an hour and there are plenty of beaches for Joe. Running along the beach, renting bikes, playing beach volleyball, or playing tennis could be pleasurable exercise. San Diego has plenty of flowers and nice looking houses. The climate is much more temperate than that of New York City. San Diego provides a much better “solution” to their needs than does Little Rock (which would be even more hot and humid than New York City in August and actually provide almost none of the desires for either Joe or Suzi). In their research about San Diego, they may discover things that they both want to do that they had not even thought about when their thinking was limited to trying to recreate something from their past. For instance, they may both want to visit the San Diego Zoo.

It might seem contrived to the reader that two adults might stick stubbornly to a preconceived “position” rather than attempt a mutual problem solving activity. In my experience, it isn’t the least bit contrived. As I mentioned earlier, this is precisely the kind of stance the American government seems determined to take toward negotiations.

4. To return to the Labor and Management example, this may seem to be one case where “positional” negotiation makes sense. After all, every penny management pays to workers means less pay for executives and stockholders. Even here, it is extremely likely that this is not really the case. A large company, for instance, will have much more leverage in providing affordable health care than will the individual workers. So, a dollar less in salary might mean $.50 goes to management and stockholders but another $.50 goes to health care that will actually save the employees $1.50 in healthcare costs. While the employees say they want higher wages, what they really want might be worried about is paying their mortgage and sending their kids to college. Money is one way to help make that happen. But there could be other ways to help that might be much cheaper for the company. A large company, for instance, could put its considerable political pull behind cheaper government college loans, debt forgiveness or universal, government-sponsored 2 year degrees for everyone. Perhaps under certain conditions, they would co-sponsor housing loans. Another part of why workers might want more money is that, in our society, a person’s “worth” is erroneously equated with their financial worth. Workers might be willing to trade some dollars of salary for earned respect. In far too many companies, management may have very little or very limited perspective on how the work is actually done, instead relying on abstract and greatly over-simplified flow charts. Management issues orders to workers and workers are expected to follow those orders, however stupid they are in practice. Instead, workers and management together could identify and solve problems, agree on metrics of improvement, measure those improvements, engage in general profit-sharing and provide bonuses to workers who help identify and implement improvements.

Many studies also indicate that workers often produce more net in a 30 hour week than in a 60 hour week because the 60 hour week causes fatigue, burn-out, costly errors and accidents, work stoppages, and turnover. For some businesses and workers, four ten-hour days might improve the quality of life for workers at the same time that it reduced costs for the employers. The general point is this: No matter how “obvious” the unidimensional nature of a negotiation is, that obviousness is almost invariably an illusion.

Resulting Context:

Once people participate in joint problem solving to identify and agree upon ways to satisfy people’s needs rather than compromise on initial positions, they will be more likely to trust each other in future negotiations as well. Furthermore, they will behave more cooperatively and civilly to each other between negotiations as well.

Related Patterns:

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

Metaphors:

In nature, competition certainly exists. But so does cooperation. Even when competition is “life and death” it is almost never treated as monotonic. A hungry fox will eat a rabbit. That’s nice for the fox but not so nice for the rabbit. Or, the rabbit gets away which is not so great for the fox. But the foxes do not “decide” that their hunger is due to rabbits and they are now going to set out to destroy every last one of them so they’ll never be hungry again. Clearly, if the foxes “succeeded” they would be full for a while — and then they would all starve to death. Foxes seem smart enough to intuit this. With humans, the jury is still out.

References:

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

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

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

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

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