Use Diversity as a Resource

31 Thursday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, Uncategorized

Tags

collaboration, competition, Design, diversity, innovation, learning, pattern language, politics, problem solving, Representation

Use Diversity as a Resource

Prolog/Acknowledgement/History:

On the one hand, I’ve always been fascinated with biology. If you learn or recall even a little about biology, you’ll know that diversity is a fundamental aspect of life. Life repeats patterns. But it balances that repetition with variation and diversity.

At the same time, I’ve found it much more interesting in nearly every aspect of life to seek some substantial level of variety rather than constancy. That includes everything from flowers to fields of study to people to interact with. My “favorite color” is blue. But the last thing I want is to see only my favorite shade of blue. That is, after all, equivalent to being blind. While I love eating cashews, it would be hell to have only them for every meal.

My first job after grad school was managing a project on the “Psychology of Aging” at Harvard Med School. We focused on such tasks as reaction time and memory but I also looked into adjacent fields; for example, it was clear that “ageism,” as well as sexism and racism, was alive and kicking. True enough, there are general trends of age-related slowing and memory issues, but there are several caveats. First of all, there is huge variability within an age group. In our studies of generally healthy veterans from their 20’s to 70’s, the differences within an age group were about 2.5 x as large (roughly speaking) as the overall age-related changes that we saw. The fastest individual in the whole study of several hundred people was not in their 20’s nor in their 30’s. In fact, it was a 55-year old school superintendent who raced motorcycles cross-country on the weekend. The effect of the way various tasks were constructed was far more important than individual differences. In over-simple but basically accurate terms, age is a weak variable when it comes to “mental performance,” individual differences are a moderate variable and the conditions of the tasks are strong variables. In my experience, having individuals with a diversity of ages produces better results. (Relevant studies of aging, not empirical proof of the immediately previous statement: 9, 10, 22, 28, 31, 37 in references below).

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When I started the Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX, I learned something of the history of the phone company including the fact that the telephone was invented to try to help people with special needs (in this case, hearing loss). There are many other cases where inventions that are of great use to huge numbers of people were first inspired by trying to aid those with special needs. Already aware of the possible enrichment of the field of human-computer interaction by making it more accessible to people outside of Western Europe and North America, I helped organize and run workshops on “cross-cultural issues in HCI” and as I met people from different cultures, I became even more convinced that diversity offered a resource for innovation and excellence. (Reports on a few of these activities: 2, 8, 32, 33, 36).

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Working with people in other cultures or people with special needs, in my experience, provides a much greater wealth of possibilities than sticking with only one. (Some studies of relevance that I have been personally involved with: 11, 15, 16, 27, 30, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41).

Excellent arguments have been made by many as to why supporting diversity is the ethical thing to do and I quite agree with those arguments. Here, however, I am not making an argument on the basis of what is right; I am merely claiming that it is in everyone’s interest to support diversity and use it as a resource for creativity and innovation.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas in May, 2018

Related Patterns:

Who Speaks for Wolf?, Build from Common Ground.

Abstract:

Human societies have widely different customs about what is appropriate behavior. As people grow up in a culture, they generally learn one (or, more rarely two) ways to dress, eat, speak, walk, and so on. Diverse groups of people, regardless of how that diversity arises, will have a wider range of skills, experiences, perspectives, and attitudes to apply to solving a problem. This diversity is a resource that can help throughout problem solving to improve the chances of solving a problem, generating a good design, or resolving an issue. Therefore, when faced with a problematic situation, improve your chances of success by bringing to bear diversity on the problem.

Context:

Cultures developed separately in many places around the world. Partly to adapt to specific conditions and partly by accident, these cultures developed different cultural practices. In addition, humans, like every other living species, exhibits diversity on thousands of dimensions even at birth. Beyond that, people are further influenced to develop differently based on their families of origin and their peer groups. These differences are critical in having allowed us to develop a complex, highly interconnected society of many specialists. People can become incredibly skilled at tennis or playing the piano or writing poetry or programming in LISP or fixing plumbing problems or planting trees or hunting or cooking, to name a few of the thousands of specialities that now exist. Everyone doesn’t have to do every single task for themselves. If we did, we would all be moderately good at the same relatively small set of skills. Instead, we can mainly rely on others who are extremely good at doing what they do and trade the fruits of our labors at what we are expert at for the fruits of their labors.

All these differences mean that it often takes slightly longer to find and work from common ground; to understand each other, than it might if everyone were born and raised identically.

Many of us live in societies that push for the fastest possible answer, solution, design, or resolution. There is an absurd push toward speed at the expense of quality. This tends to make people impatient to “just get on with it” by which they actually mean, “just get on with it the way I want to do it.”

Problem:

When people push to the fastest possible solution, it tends to compromise quality in every way. One of the most important ways it compromises quality is that it pushes people not to consider a large variety of ideas but instead to pick the first one or two that come to mind. Generally, the first few ideas that come to mind are not original in any significant way. The ideas will be largely deployed or implicit in the dominant culture already. There will be very few real innovations.

There is another problem with such an approach. Whatever the “answer” is, it will typically not appeal to everyone or even be in everyone’s interest. As a result, a design will fail to gain the widest possible audience and may instigate a backlash among those whose needs are not being met or whose needs are actually being subverted.

In a fairly homogeneous group, it is very likely that some vital aspects of the problem or situation will be overlooked. A solution will be derived based on limited data and then marketed based on limited appeal. This failure will be surprising to the homogeneous group because they are only looking at it from one perspective; viz., their own.

Forces:

Diversity of background leads to diversity of experiences.

The expectations of any one person are primarily based on their own past experiences.

The behavior of any other person is largely based on that person’s past experiences.

People in fairly homogeneous groups tend to focus on their similarities rather than their differences; in some cases, they may even denigrate or make fun of other groups.

Fairly homogeneous groups who focus on their similarities will further reduce the space of possible ideas to ones that are shared by the entire group. In other words, the group will work within the constraints of the intersection of their experiences rather than the union of their experiences.

Ideas and approaches that appeal to those in a fairly homogeneous group will engender a false sense of universality of the appeal. It is easy to believe that the idea will be liked by everyone as much as it is by this particular group.

The same unconscious close-mindedness that prevents the fairly homogenous group from generating very innovative ideas will also make it very difficult to accurately diagnose the real source of the failure.

People in a diverse group will provide that group with an initial set of ideas that is far larger than the set of ideas generated by a homogeneous group.

Moreover, people in a diverse group, if they see diversity as a resource, will tend to more often work from the union of their ideas than limiting themselves only to the intersection of their ideas and experiences.

Ideas can play off against each other and produce still other new ideas. Thus, the diverse group who views their diversity as a strength will start off with a larger pool of ideas; will produce still more “recombinant” new ideas; and will more likely allow a look at the large space formed by the union of ideas rather than being limited by the intersection.

Moreover, people in a diverse group will not only be more likely to produce an innovative service, product, or solution; they will also be more able to see how to market the idea, or specialize it, or localize it to any population represented within the group.

Solution:

When facing any particularly challenging situation, try to construct a highly diverse group of people to face that challenge. Respect and learn from each other’s differences. Focus on your diversity as a resource to be capitalized on rather than a handicap to be overcome.

Examples:

Artists as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright, Vincent Van Gogh, and The Beatles intentionally allowed themselves to be exposed to Asian versions of their art in order to enhance and extend their own styles.

2. High level chefs who specialize in a particular type of cuisine may also become conversant in other types of cuisine to expand the palette of tastes from which to select.

3. In problem solving, it often happens that the representation a person uses can have a huge impact on how easy a problem is to solve. Similarly, different things are often better said in different languages. Even when it comes to advances in an entire field, they often follow new ways of representing things. For example, understanding human speech began making much more progress once the sonogram (which shows time on the X-axis, frequency on the Y-axis and amplitude as darkness) came into use as a representation (rather than the earlier representation of a speech waveform with time on the X-axis and amplitude on the Y-axis). Modern medicine today relies on many kinds of “scans” – not just X-rays, though X-rays certainly allowed a big advance over guesswork. (Studies indicating the importance of representation: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26).

Resulting Context:

Generally speaking, when diverse groups work together and view their diversity as a resource, the result is a better product, service, solution, or resolution. In addition, it typically happens as a kind of side-effect, that the roads to marketing in diverse markets are also opened up. Finally, everyone within the group learns from the others in the group. Inclusion and diversity have another very powerful positive impact. Everyone sees that what one does is the basis for reward rather than what one is or who they know. (Studies on the impact of diversity on team performance: 7, 12, 17, 42).

This is a huge win for teams, groups, companies, and nations. If people feel that they will be rewarded based on what they do, then people are incentivized to do the best they can. If people feel that they are rewarded based on their age, race, sex, national origin etc. — that is, things over which they have no control, then no-one is motivated to do their best. Those in the out-group feel it is fairly pointless and those in the in-group feel it is unnecessary.

Of course, there are many other factors besides diversity that impact creativity and innovation. The latter depend on leadership, organizational context, process, support, incentives, etc. In the short term, if people are under time pressure, some may perceive that they haven’t been as productive even if they have if there more ideas and more varied ideas are discussed. Arranging the context so that people are motivated to do well rather than do quickly will be critical to success.

References:

[1] Bellamy, R., Erickson, T., Fuller,B., Kellogg, W., Rosenbaum, R., Thomas, J. and Vetting Wolf, T (2007) Seeing is believing: Design visualization for managing risk and compliance. IBM Systems Journal 46:2, 207-218.

[2] Best, M., Deardon, A., Dray, S., Light, A., Thomas, J.C., Buckhalter, C., Greenblatt, D., Krishnan, S., Sambasivan, N. (2007). Sharing perspectives on community centered design and international development. Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007. New York: Springer.

[3] Carroll, J. and Thomas, J.C. (1982). Metaphor and the cognitive representation of computer systems. IEEE Transactions on Man, Systems, and Cybernetics., SMC-12 (2), pp. 107-116.

[4] Carroll, J. Thomas, J. Miller, L. & Friedman, H. (1980). Aspects of solution structure in design problem solving. American Journal of Psychology, 93 (2), 269-284.

[5] Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1980). Presentation and representation in design problem solving. British Journal of Psychology/,71 (1), pp. 143-155.

[6] Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1979). A clinical-experimental analysis of design problem solving. Design Studies, 1 (2), pp. 84-92.

[7]Chow, I. (2018) “Cognitive diversity and creativity in teams: the mediating roles of team learning and inclusion”, Chinese Management Studies, 12 (2), 369-383, https://doi.org/10.1108/CMS-09-2017-0262

[8] Dearden, A., Dunckley, L, Best, M., Dray, S., Light, A. & Thomas, J.C. (2007). Socially responsible design in the context of international development. Panel presented at INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janiero, BZ,

[9] Fozard, J. L., Thomas, J. C., and Waugh, N. C. (1976). Effects of age and frequency of stimulus repetitions on two-choice reaction time. Journal of Gerontology, 31, (5), pp. 556-563.

[10] Fozard, J. and Thomas, J. (1975). Psychology of aging: Basic findings and some psychiatric implications. In J. Howells (Ed). Modern Perspectives in the psychiatry of old age. NY: Brunner/Mazel.

[11] Friedman, B., Brok, E., Roth. S. K., Thomas, J. C. (1996). Minimizing bias in computer systems. SIGCHI Bulletin, 28(1), pp. 48-51.

[12] Kurtzberg, T. (2005). Feeling creative, being creative: An empirical study of diversity and creativity in teams. Creativity Research Journal, 17(1), 51-65.

[13] Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C., Carroll, J. & Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 20 , 119-140.

[14] Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C. and Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, pp. 119-140.

[15] Srivastava, S., Dhanesh, K., Basson, S., Rajput, N., Thomas, J., Srivastava, K. (2012). Voice user interface and growth markets. India HCI conference.

[16] Srivastava, S., Rajput, N, Dhanesha, K., Basson, S., and Thomas, J. (2013). Community-oriented spoken web browser for low literate users. CSCW, San Antonio, TX, 2013.

[17] Stahl, G., Maznevski, M., Voigt, A., and Jonsen, K. (2009). Unraveling the effects of cultural diversity in teams: A meta-analysis of research on multi-cultural work groups. Journal of International Business Studies, 1-20.

[18] Thomas, J.C. (1991). The human factors of voice interfaces. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 80 (3), 138-151.

[19] Thomas, J.C. and Schneider, M. (1982). A rose by any other alphanumeric designator would smell as sweet. Behavior and Information Technology, 1 (4), 323-325.

[20] Thomas, J.C. (1978). A design-interpretation analysis of natural English. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 10, pp. 651-668.

[21] Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11.

[22] Thomas, J. C., Fozard, J. L. and Waugh, N. C. (1977). Age-related differences in naming latency. American Journal of Psychology, 90(3), pp. 499-509.

[23] Thomas, J.C. (1974). An analysis of behavior in the hobbits-orcs problem. Cognitive Psychology 6 , pp. 257-269.

[24] Thomas, J. (2015). Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D. Invited keynote @ASEAN Symposium, Seoul, South Korea, April 19, 2015.

[25] Thomas, J. (2014). Mobile Systems for Computational Social Science: A Perfect Storm. Invited keynote address at UbiComp workshop, Sept. 13, 2014, Seattle, WA.

[26] Thomas, J., Diament,J., Martino, J. and Bellamy, R., (2012). Using “Physics” of Notations to Analyze a Visual Representation of Business Decision Modeling. Presented at VL/HCC 2012 conference in Salzburg, Austria.

[27] Thomas, J. C. , Basson, Sara H., and Gardner-Bonneau, D. (2008 & 1999) Universal access and assistive technology. In D. Gardner-Bonneau (Ed.), Human factors and voice interactive systems. Norwell, MA: Kluwer.

[28] Thomas, J.C. (2003), Social aspects of gerontechnology. In Impact of technology on successful aging N. Charness & K. Warner Schaie (Eds.). New York: Springer.

[29] 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.

[30] Thomas, J.C. (1997). Steps toward universal access in a telecommunications company. In B. Friedman (Ed.), Human values and the design of computer technology. Stanford, CA: CSLI.

[31] Thomas, J. C. (2017). Old People and New Technology: What’s the Story? Presented at Northwestern University Symposium on the Future of On-Line Interactions, Evanston, Ill, 4/22/2017.

[32] Thomas, J.C. (2007). Panelist, Meta-design and social creativity: Making all voices heard. INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, BZ, Nov., 2007.

[33] Thomas, J.C. (2007). E-learning: An opportunity to meld modern technology and ancient wisdom? Panelist, E-learning. INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, BZ, Nov. 2007.

[34] Thomas, J.C. (2005). Patterns to promote individual and collective creativity. Presented at the Human Computer Interaction International, Las Vegas, NV, July 27, 2005.

[35] Thomas, J.C. (1996). Invited panel presenter at the National Research Council’s workshop: Toward an every-citizen interface to the national information infrastructure, Washington, DC., August 23, 1996.

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

[37] Trewin, S., Richards, J., Hanson, V., Sloan, D., John, B., Swart, C., Thomas, J. (2012). Understanding the role of age and fluid intelligence in information search. Presented at the ASSETS Conference, Boulder CO.

[38] Trewin, S., Bellamy, R., Thomas, J., Brezin, J., Richards, J., Swart, C., and John, B.E., (2010). Designing for Auditory Web Access: Accessibility and Cellphone Users. The 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, W4A.

[39] Trewin, S, Richards, J.,Bellamy, R, John, B.E.,Thomas, J.C., Swart, C.Brezin, J. (2010). Toward Modeling Auditory Information Seeking Strategies on the Web. CHI Work In Progress.

[40] Trewin, S., Bellamy, R., Thomas, J., Brezin, J., Richards, J., Swart, C., and John, B.E., (2010). Designing for Auditory Web Access: Accessibility and Cellphone Users. The 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, W4A.

[41] Trewin, S, Richards,J.,Bellamy, R, John, B.E.,Thomas, J.C., Swart, C.,Brezin,J. (2010). Toward Modeling Auditory Information Seeking Strategies on the Web. CHI Work In Progress.

[42] Yap, C., Chai, K. & Lemaire, P. (2005). An empirical study on functional diversity and innovation in SMEs. Creativity and Innovation Management, 14 (2), 176-190.

Support Both Flow & Breakdown

21 Monday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

collaboration, contextual design, Design, environment, error messages, HCI, human factors, learning, pattern language, pliant systems, politics, usability

Support Both Flow & Breakdown

Prolog/Acknowledgement/History:

Only a few days after moving into our San Diego home (with a beautiful drip-irrigated garden), I glanced outside to see a geyser sprouting about ten feet into the air. San Diego can only survive long term if people conserve water! Yet, here we were — wasting water. I rushed outside to turn off the sprinkler system. As I ran to the controller, I noted in passing that the nearby yard lay soaked with pools of water. I turned off the sprinklers — except for the geyser which continued its impersonation of “Old Faithful.” I tried turning the valve on that particular sprinkler and did manage in that way to completely soak myself but the water waste continued unabated. We called the gardener who knew and explained the location of the shutoff valve for the entire house and garden. Later, he came and replaced the valve with a newer type. The old type, which had failed, failed by being stuck in the fully ON position!

Often in the course of my life, I have been frustrated by interacting with systems — whether human or computer — that were clearly designed with a different set of circumstances than the one I found myself in at the time. In a sense, the Pattern here is a specific instance of a broader design Pattern: Design for Broad Range of Contexts. The specific example that I want to focus on in this Pattern is that design should support the “normal” flow of things when they are working well, but also be designed to support likely modes of breakdown.

During the late 1970’s, I worked with Ashok Malhotra and John Carroll at IBM Research on a project we called “The Psychology of Design.” We used a variety of methods, but one was observing and talking with a variety of designers in various domains. One of the things we discovered about good designers was a common process that at first seemed puzzling. Roughly speaking, designers would abstract from a concrete situation, a set of requirements. They would then create a design that logically met all the requirements. Since we were only studying design and not the entire development process (which might include design, implementation, debugging, etc.) it might seem that the design process would end at that point. After all, the designer had just come up with a design that fulfilled the requirements.

What good designers actually did however, at least on many occasions, was to take their abstract design and imagine it operating back in the original concrete situation. When they imagined their design working in this concrete reality they often “discovered” additional requirements or interactions among design elements or requirements that were overlooked in the initial design. While unanticipated effects can occur in purely physical systems, (e.g., bridges flying apart from the bridge surface acting like a wing; O-rings cracking at sufficiently cold temperatures), it seems that human social systems are particularly prone to disastrous designs that “fulfill” the requirements as given.

woman in white wedding gown near orange car

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The Pattern here specifically focuses on one very common oversight. Systems are often designed under the assumption that everything in the environment of the system is working as it “should” or as intended. This particular type of breakdown was featured in an important theoretical paper authored by Harris and Henderson and presented at CHI 99. That paper claimed systems should be “pliant” rather than rigid. A common example most readers have had with a non-pliant system is to call an organization and be put into an automated call-answering system that does not have the appropriate category anywhere for the current situation but still does not have a way to get through to a human operator.

A telling example from their CHI Proceedings article is that of a paper-based form that was replaced with a computerized system with fixed fields. So, for example, there were only so many characters for various address fields. When someone needed to make an exception to the address syntax with a paper form, it was easy. They could write: “When it’s time to ship the package, please call this number to find out which port the Captain will be in next and ship it there: 606-555-1212.” In the computerized form, this was impossible. In fact, there were so many such glitches that the workers who actually needed to get their work done used the “required” “productivity-enhancing” computer system and also duplicated everything in the old paper system so that they could actually accomplish their tasks.

As part of the effort (described in the last blog post) to get IBM to pay more attention to the usability of its products, we pushed to make sure every development lab had a usability lab that was adequately equipped and staffed. This was certainly a vital component. However, usability in the lab did not necessarily ensure usability in the field. There are many reasons for that and I collaborated with Wendy Kellogg in the late 1980’s to catalog some of those. This effort was partly inspired by a conversation with John Whiteside, who headed the usability lab for Digital Equipment Corporation. They brought people who used a word processor into their usability lab and made numerous improvements in the interface. One day he took some of the usability group out to observe people using the text editor in situ in a manuscript center. They discovered that the typists spent 7 hours every day typing and 1 hour every day counting up, by hand, the number of lines that they had typed that day (which determined their pay). Of course, it was now immediately obvious how to improve productivity by 14%. The work of this group seems to have been inspirational for Beyer & Holtzblatt’s Contextual Design as well as the Carroll & Kellogg (1989) paper on “Artifact as Theory Nexus.”

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Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas in May, 2018

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Related Patterns:

Reality Check, Who Speaks for Wolf?

Abstract:

When designing a new system, it is easy to imagine a context in which all the existing systems that might interact with the new system will operate “normally” or “properly.” In order to avoid catastrophe, it is important to understand what reasonably likely failure modes might be and to design for those as well.

Context:

For people to design systems, it is necessary to make some assumptions that separate the context of the design from what is being designed. There is a delicate balance. If you define the problem too broadly, you run the risk of addressing a problem that is too intractable, intellectually, logistically or financially. On the other hand, if you define the problem too narrowly, you run the risk of solving a problem that is too special, temporary, or fragile to do anyone much good.

In the honest pursuit of trying to separate out the problem from the context, it happens that one particular form of simplification is particularly popular. People assume that all the systems that will touch the one they are designing will not fail. That often includes human beings who will interact with the system. Such a design process may also presume that electrical power will never be interrupted or that internet access will be continuous.

Systems so designed may have a secondary and more insidious effect. By virtue of having been designed with no consideration to breakdowns, the system will tend to subtly influence the people and organizations that it touches not to prepare for such breakdowns either.

Problem:

When the systems that touch a given system do fail, which can always happen, if no consideration has been given to failure modes, the impact can be disastrous. Most typically, when the system has not been designed to deal with breakdowns, the personnel selection, training, and documentation also fail to deal with breakdowns. As a result, not only are the mechanisms of the systems unsuited to breakdowns; the human organization surrounding the breakdown is also unprepared. Not only is there a possibility of immediate catastrophe; the organization is unprepared to learn. As a result, mutual trust within and of the organizations around the system are also severely damaged.

architecture building fire exit ladders ladder

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Forces:

Design is a difficult and complex activity and the more contingencies and factors that are taken into account, the more difficult and complex the design activity becomes.

Not every single possibility can be designed for.

People working on a design have a natural tendency to “look on the bright side” and think about the upside benefits of the system.

People who try to “sell” a new system stress its benefits and tend to avoid talking about its possible failures.

It is uncomfortable to think about possible breakdowns.

When anticipated breakdowns occur, the people in relevant organizations tend to think about how to fix the situation and reduce the probability or impact of breakdowns for the future.

When unanticipated breakdowns occur, the people in relevant organizations tend to try to find the individual or individuals responsible and blame them. This action leaves the probability and impact of future breakdowns unimproved.

When people within an organization are blamed for unanticipated system failure, it decreases trust of the entire organization as well as mutual trust within the organization.

* Even when consideration of support for breakdown modes is planned for, it is often planned for late in an ambitious schedule. The slightest slippage will often result in breakdowns being ignored.

Solution:

When designing a system, make sure the design process deals adequately with breakdown conditions as well as the “normal” flows of events. The organizations and systems that depend on a system also need to be designed to deal with breakdowns. For example, people should be trained to recognize and deal with breakdowns. Organizations should have a process in place (such as the After Action Review) to learn from breakdowns. Having a highly diverse design team may well improve the chances of designing for likely breakdowns.

Resulting Context:

Generally speaking, a system designed with attention to supporting both the “normal” flow of events and likely breakdown modes will result in a more robust and resilient system. Because the system design takes these possibilities into account, it also makes it likely that documentation and training will also help people prepare for breakdowns. Furthermore, if breakdowns are anticipated, it also makes it easier for the organization to learn about how to help prevent breakdowns and to learn, over time, to improve responses to breakdowns. There is a further benefit; viz., that mutual trust and cooperation will be less damaged in a breakdown. The premise that breakdowns will happen, puts everyone more in the frame of mind to learn and improve rather than simply blame and point fingers.

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Examples:

1. Social Networking sites were originally designed to support friends sharing news, information, pictures, and so on. “Flow” is when this is what is actually going on. Unfortunately, as we now know, social media sites can also not work as intended, not because there are “errors” in the code or UX of the social media systems but because the social and political systems that form the context for these systems have broken down. The intentional misappropriation of an application or system is just one of many types of breakdowns that can occur.

2. When I ran the AI lab at NYNEX in the 1990’s, one of the manufacturers of telephone equipment developed a system for telephone operators that was based on much more modern displays and keyboards. In order to optimize performance of the system, the manufacturer brought in representative users; in this case, telephone operators. They redesigned the workflow to reduce the number of keystrokes required to perform various common tasks. At that time, operators were measured in terms of their “Average Work Time” to handle calls.

In this particular case, the manufacturer had separated the domain into what they were designing for (namely, the human-machine interface between the telephone operator and their terminal) from the context (which included what the customer did). While this seemed seemed like a reasonable approach, it turned out when the HCI group at NYNEX studied the problem with the help of Bonnie John, the customer’s behavior was actually a primary determiner of the overall efficiency of the call. While it was true that the new process required fewer keystrokes on the part of the telephone operator, these “saved” keystrokes occurred when the customer, not the telephone operator, was on the critical path. In other words, the operator had to wait for the customer any way, so one or two fewer keystrokes did not impact the overall average work time. However, the suggested workflow involved an extra keystroke that occurred when the operator’s behavior was on the critical path. As it turned out, the “system” that needed to be redesigned was not actually the machine-user system but the machine-user-customer system. In fact, the biggest improvement in average work time came from changing the operator’s greeting from “New York Telephone. How can I help you?” to “What City Please?” The latter greeting tended to produce much more focused conversation on the part of the customer.

Just to be clear, this is an example of the broader point that some of the most crucial design decisions are not about your solution to the problem you are trying to solve but your decision about what the problem is versus what part of the situation you decide is off-limits; something to ignore rather than plan for. A very common oversight is to ignore breakdowns, but it’s not the only one.

black rotary telephone beside beige manekin

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3. In a retrospective analysis of the Three-Mile Island Nuclear Meltdown, many issues in bad human factors came to light. Many of them had to do with an insufficient preparation for dealing with breakdowns. I recall three instances. First, the proper functioning of many components was shown by a red indicator light being on. When one of the components failed, it was indicated by one of a whole bank of indicator lights not being on. This is not the most salient of signals! To me, it clearly indicates a design mentality steering away from thinking seriously about failure modes. This is not surprising because of the fear and controversy surrounding nuclear power. Those who operate and run such plants do not want the public, at least, to think about failure modes.

Second, there was some conceptual training for the operators about how the overall system worked. But that training was not sufficient for real time problem solving about what to do. In addition, there were manuals describing what to do. But the manuals were also not sufficiently detailed to describe precisely what to do.

Third, at one critical juncture, one of the plant operators closed a valve and “knew” that he had closed it because of the indicator light next to the valve closure switch. He then based further actions on the knowledge that the valve had been closed. Guess what? The indicator light showing “value closure” was not based on feedback from a sensor at the site of the valve. No. The indicator light next to the switch was lit by a collateral current from the switch itself. All it really showed was that the operator had changed the switch position! Under “normal” circumstances, there is a perfect correlation between the position of the switch and the position of the valve. However, under failure mode, this was no longer true.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

4. The US Constitution is a flexible document that takes into account a variety of failure modes. It specifies what to do, e.g., if the President dies in office and has been amended to specify what to do if the President is incapacitated. (This contingency was not really specified in the original document). The Constitution presumes a balance of power and specifies that a President may be impeached by Congress for treasonous activity. It seems the US Constitution, at least as amended, has anticipated various breakdowns and what to do about them.

There is one kind of breakdown, however, that the U.S. Constitution does not seem to have anticipated. What if society becomes so divided, and the majority of members in Congress so beholden to special interests, that they refuse to impeach a clearly treasonous President or a President clearly incapacitated or even under the obvious influence of one or more foreign powers? Unethical behavior on the part of individuals in power is a breakdown mode clearly anticipated in the Constitution. But it was not anticipated that a large number of individuals would simultaneously be unethical enough to put party over the general welfare of the nation. Whether this is a recoverable oversight remains to be seen. If democracy survives the current crisis, the Constitution might be further amended to deal with this new breakdown mode.

5. In IT systems, the error messages that are shown to end users are most often messages that were originally designed to help developers debug the system. Despite the development of guidelines about error messages that were developed over a half century ago, these guidelines are typically not followed. From the user’s perspective, it appears as though the developers know that something “nasty” has just happened and they want to run away from it as quickly as possible before anyone can get blamed. They remind me of a puppy who just chewed up their master’s slippers and knows damned well they are in trouble. Instead of “owning up” to their misbehavior, they hide under the couch.

Despite the many decades of pointing out how useless it is to get an error message such as “Tweet not sent” or “Invalid Syntax” or “IOPS44” such messages still abound in today’s applications. Fifty years ago, when most computers had extremely limited storage, there may have been an excuse to print out succinct error messages that could be looked up in a paper manual. But today? Error messages should minimally make it clear that there is an error and how to recover from it. In most cases, something should be said as well as to why the error state occurred. For instance, instead of “Tweet not sent” a message might indicate, “Tweet not sent because an included image is no longer linkable; retry with new image or link” or “Tweet not sent because it contains a potentially dangerous link; change to allow preview” or “Tweet not sent because the system timed out; try again. If the problem persists, see FAQs on tweet time-out failures.” I haven’t tested these so I am not claiming they are the “right” messages, but they have some information.

Today’s approach to error messages also has an unintended side-effect. Most computer system providers now presume that most errors will be debugged and explained on the web by someone else. This saves money for the vendor, of course. It also gives a huge advantage to very large companies. You are likely to find what an error message means and how to fix the underlying issue on the web, but only if it is a system that already has a huge number of users. Leaving error message clarification to the general public advantages the very companies who have the resources to provide good error messages themselves and keeps entrenched vendors entrenched.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

References:

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobsen, M., Fiksdahl-King, I. and Angel, S. (1977), A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Beyer, Hugh and Holtzblatt, Karen (1998): Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco: Elsevier.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1980). Presentation and representation in design problem solving. British Journal of Psychology/,71 (1), pp. 143-155.

Carroll, J., Thomas, J.C. and Malhotra, A. (1979). A clinical-experimental analysis of design problem solving. Design Studies, 1 (2), pp. 84-92.

Carroll, J. and Kellogg, W. (1989), Artifact as Theory-Nexus: Hermeneutics Meets System Design. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, 1989.

Casey, S.M. (1998), Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error. Santa Barbara, CA: Aegean Publishing.

Gray, W. D., John, B. E., & Atwood, M. E. (1993). Project Ernestine: Validating GOMS for predicting and explaining real-world task performance. Human Computer Interaction, 8(3), 237-309.

Harris, J. & Henderson, A. (1999), A Better Mythology for System Design. Proceedings of ACM’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM.

Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C. and Miller, L. (1980). Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, pp. 119-140.

Thomas, J. (2016). Turing’s Nightmares: Scenarios and Speculations about “The Singularity.” CreateSpace/Amazon.

Thomas, J.C. (1978). A design-interpretation analysis of natural English. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 10, pp. 651-668.

Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11.

Thomas, J.C. and Kellogg, W.A. (1989). Minimizing ecological gaps in interface design, IEEE Software, January 1989.

Thomas, J. (2015). Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D. Invited keynote @ASEAN Symposium, Seoul, South Korea, April 19, 2015.

Author Page on Amazon

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

Anti-Pattern: Power Trumps Good

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anti-Pattern, Balance of Powers, Corruption, Democracy, Impeachment, learning, pattern language, politics

Anti-Pattern: Power Trumps Good

Drawing courtesy of Pierce Morgan

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

Sometimes, learning works quite well when it’s based on negative examples. We learn what not to do. Negative examples, however, may also prove problematic for at least two reasons.

First, when one has to make decisions quickly, as in sports, having an image or rule about what not to do can actually make it more likely that you do the exact thing you are trying to avoid! My least favorite thing to hear on the golf tee is someone familiar with the course pointing out the rather large obvious lake lying before us – a lake that the tee shot must carry. “Well, you can see that there’s a giant lake right in front of you. Be sure not to hit it in the lake. No. You don’t want to go into that lake. Believe me, I’ve hit the lake a hundred times. Don’t go in the lake.” Of course, as pointed out in The Winning Weekend Warrior, before even beginning your pre-shot routine, you need to turn this into a positive image. Pick a very specific spot on the green where you will be landing the ball.

Some readers may remember the ancient vector graphics video game, Asteroids, in which the user controls the image of a tiny rocket ship which must shoot the asteroids to break them up while at the same time avoiding being hit by one of the asteroids. I discovered that it was much more effective for me to find paths and steer my ship through the paths than it was to “look out for the asteroids.” That latter method got me staring at the asteroid as it smashed into my wavering, wobbling ship.

Second, and aside from the psychological effect of putting a negative in your head, the other problem with negative examples is that it may not be obvious what to do even if you are able to understand and avoid what not to do. You may hear, at various points, a thousand different things not to do while trying to hit a golf ball; e.g., don’t look up so soon; don’t let your foot slip; don’t swing so hard; don’t be so tense; etc. Put them all together — and there are still a thousand wrong ways to swing the golf club!

Despite these potential cautions, I decided to try blogging about an Anti-Pattern: something to be avoided while trying to foster teamwork and collaboration. My aim, in the course of the discussion, is to clarify what one should do instead as well as point out the many and varied problems that can arise from letting Power Trumps Good. Of course, hopefully, the Patterns already suggested comprise a large set of positive best practices to foster effective teamwork and collaboration. By the way, in addition to avoiding Power Trumps Good, the Anti-Patterns mentioned in the link below, in my opinion, are to be avoided, not only for software development but any time you are trying to be productive in a collaborative way.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas May, 2018.

Abstract:

For various reasons, cultures throughout history have found it practical to award and assign specific powers to particular people. When this is done, it sometimes happens that people in power, instead of fulfilling their duty to do what is best for all within their purview, they simply do what is best for themselves or a small group. This is considered an Anti-Pattern in that it is bad for that individual, for the institution they have a duty to, and for the society as a whole. In order to prevent such corruption, specific preventative and curative counter-measures must be undertaken such as “Balance of Powers” or “Removal from Office.”

Context:

Groups across many contemporary cultures and throughout history have found it useful to have some people in specific roles and these roles sometimes include the power to make decisions. This is not the only possible method. One can insist on consensus for every decision. However, consensus-based decision making can become quite inefficient, slow, and contentious. In much of Medieval Europe, a widespread mythology held that royalty was beyond question and reproach; that their powers came from God. The monarch sometimes bestowed lesser rights, powers, and responsibilities on others. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence set forth quite a different view:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

In this view (influenced by European intellectuals but also quite likely by the practices and philosophy of the Iroquois Nation – see Forgotten Founders) rights do not come from government. They are considered natural rights. The power of the government does not come from God. The power of the government comes from the people governed. This is a crucial change. Power is not, in the fundamental view of America, absolute and it certainly does not come from above; it comes from the people governed. People in governmental positions of power, whether elected or selected, are not above the law. Indeed, they swear to uphold the law. Their power is limited and temporary. Later in this Anti-Pattern, we will see why this is crucial.

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Power can trump good in other spheres besides government. In our capitalistic society, we have often chosen to put property rights above human rights. In order to accomplish many sorts of complex work that takes place over long periods of time, several fundamental elements must be brought together: a place to do the work; competent labor to do the work; tools to allow the work to be done more efficiently; money or capital to pay for the place, the workers’ labors, and the tools. Most typically, the capital is required before any actual goods or services are provided. It is possible to imagine many ways to organize such work and many ways have been effectively tried. But most commonly, in the United States, the people who provide the capital choose various leaders who have power to decide many things about the work practices, the work process, the workers, and the workplace. This is not logically necessary, but it is common. (For example, in a frontier town, people spontaneously organized themselves into a “bucket brigade” to transport water from a source and use it to try to douse a fire).

Whenever a person finds themselves in a position of power, whether it is because of a capitalistic endeavor, a government office, a volunteer, effort, or even by virtue of being a parent, babysitter, or older sibling, it is sometimes tempting to use that power to make decisions that are good for one’s self as opposed to what is good for the organizational role that one has been entrusted with. For example, a boss may push for an inefficient process that will require them to hire many more people thus giving them more power (even though it will lose money for the organization whose interests they are supposed to be looking out for). A US government official might make “deals” with foreign dignitaries, not because it is good for the country, but because it is good for them. A volunteer in charge of decorations for a party might pay twice the going rate for balloons to his brother-in-law in order to get a good deal later on wedding decorations. A babysitter might find it conducive to studying homework by putting the kids to bed earlier than the parents requested and before the kids wanted to go to bed.

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In the worst-case scenarios, people use their positions of power to hurt someone out of vengeance, or to sexually or physically abuse someone just because they can. A person in power always has some sort of duty, often even a solemnly sworn duty, to do what’s best for some other entity. Whether it be a mayor, a councilman, a US Senator, a CEO, a supervisor, a teacher, a movie producer — there is always some entity on whose behalf that person is supposed to be working. They are not meant to use their power on their own behalf and particularly not when their interests are counter to the interests of the body for whom they are supposedly using their power. Lord Acton famously said that “…power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Problem:

A person in power who abuses that power will inevitably (and by definition) do things that are ineffective, inefficient, and unethical with respect to the goals that it is his or her duty to work toward reaching. This weakens the organization and corrupts anyone who goes along with the charade of doing good while doing bad. People tend to lose faith in the corrupted organizations, not just in the corrupting individuals.

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Forces:

For purely practical reasons, it is often efficient to invest one person or a small group of people with special powers.

People who have the power to make a class of decisions may often be chosen because they have particular experiences or skills in making that class of decisions.

Most human beings take their responsibilities seriously most of the time.

It is tempting to use power to do what’s best for one’s self, one’s family, or one’s political faction as opposed to doing what’s best for the organization for which one has sworn to make decisions.

When people find out that someone has abused their power, they are necessarily upset and will try to prevent further abuses.

When someone knows that they have abused their power, they will try to use their power to cover up that abuse.

Among secondary abuses of power, lying about what is done and the reasons for what is done will be foremost.

When people in power “get away with” abusing their power, they will tend to do it again in a more and more outrageous fashion.

When people in an organization come to know that the person in charge makes decisions on the basis of what they perceive to be best for them, they either leave the organization or “go along” in which case, they will no longer try to do or argue for what is best for the organization as a whole, but only what will be approved by the authority figure.

When a power abuser ends up surrounded by sycophants who only them them what they want to hear, they may come to believe the lies they tell. In any case, a power abuser almost always ends up “disconnected” from reality. No-one whom the abuser puts stock in will speak “truth to power.”

Solution:

Institutions must fight against the tendency of people in power to misuse that power. There are a number of specific methods. For example, in the United States, people in the Federal Government who abuse their power can be impeached; that is, they can be removed from office. In many cases, there are limits to the length of time someone can hold an office or at least until they are again chosen.

Most companies move their executives around to different positions. Partly this is to reduce their ability to abuse power. Many companies have alternative channels of communication to help stem power corruption; e.g., IBM has an “Open Door” policy which basically means that an employee may go outside their normal hierarchy of control if they believe someone above them is doing something illegal, unethical, or clearly counter-productive. Many organizations, both governmental and non-governmental have policies to protect “whistle blowers.” The United States Constitution was written to ensure a “balance of power.” The three main branches of government: Executive, Congressional, and Judicial have separate powers and the ability to check each other’s power. In addition, in truly democratic countries, there is a “Free Press” which acts as a kind of limit on potential abuses of power by finding out and reporting on such abuses.

Examples:

At one point in IBM’s history, the executives in charge of any one branch of the company had a lot of power over that particular branch. This made it tempting for the executive in charge to maximize profits for their part of the company rather than for the company as a whole. For example, the person in charge of very large computers might wish to extend their product line to medium and even to very small computers in order to enhance their overall revenue. This might increase revenue for that part of the company (as well as that executive’s power, prestige, and bonus) but lower overall revenue and particularly lower it for those parts of the company who were supposed to make medium-sized or small computers. IBM therefore had a “non-concurrence” process. All executives were required to share their plans with other executives. If the plan seemed problematic for some other part of IBM, that other part of IBM could “non-concur” with the proposed plan and the Central Management Committee would have final say on each of the plans. This is another example of “checks and balances” on absolute power.

2. Within the Federal Government, there is an Office of Government Ethics. The purpose is to have an agency not under the power of those in charge to be able to make independent determinations of the ethics of various situations. However, the Director of that office, Walter Shaub, resigned in July of 2017 because the White House refused to follow the same rules that other White Houses have followed for the past four decades. https://www.npr.org/2017/07/06/535781749/ethics-office-director-walter-shaub-resigns-saying-rules-need-to-be-tougher

3. Ultimately, when people feel that power has been misused for personal gain or to benefit a small group at the expense of a much larger group, some kind of chaotic change seems inevitable. For example, The Magna Carta was designed to balance power between King John and some rebellious Barons. It seemed to work for awhile, but soon Kings came to repudiate it and various wars and bloodshed resulted. It would seem that anyone in power (at least anyone with even a passing knowledge of history) would realize that misusing power is ultimately a bad idea, even for the power abuser. But apparently, the process of surrounding oneself only with those who are afraid to speak truth to power eventually makes the person or coterie “in charge” too divorced from reality to make good decisions.

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

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Resulting Context:

If the abuse of power goes unchecked, the entire purpose and structure of an organization becomes corrupted much as untreated cancer can over-run an entire human body and end up killing it. Power abuse, as described above, has a negative effect on the one doing the abuse. It tends to make them disconnected from reality. As their decisions become worse and worse and more and more blatantly self-serving, people will tend to leave positions around the power-monger whether actually resigning from positions or mentally “giving up.” Those who stay will tend to be the least capable and most cowardly. This in turn, means that qualities such as being ethical, knowledgeable, effective, efficient, reflective, and generous will not be rewarded while qualities such as being sycophantic, duplicitous, and weak-willed will be rewarded. As a result, those with ethical standards or even simple competence to do a good job will tend to avoid working near the center of corruption.

In the Anti-Pattern Power Trumps Good, the word “Good” has many meanings. Those in power will tend to make decisions that are not for the common good, but only for personal gain or the gain of a small group. In this sense, “power trumps good.” But other “good” things even without much ethical content such as being effective and efficient tend to suffer as well. Orders are carried out without much question even if those orders are contradictory, plainly stupid, and when they are not actually producing anything “good” even for those in power. Not only is the system that arises from power abuse ineffective and inefficient in getting things done; it is also mean-spirited. It fosters cruelty, exploitation, dishonestly, and ignorance. People in such a system often feel trapped and feel bad about themselves. They are often subject to abuse from above and they then transmit this abuse to those below them in the hierarchy. Those people, in turn, promulgate more cruelty to others below them in the hierarchy as well as to their family members and pets. Such people seldom take it upon themselves to learn more or to improve their skills. They are typically too worried about keeping their position to “waste time” in any intellectual pursuits.

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Related Patterns:

Reality Check.

References:

Johansen, B. (1982), Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Commons Press.

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

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton

Thomas, J. C. (2015). The Winning Weekend Warrior: How to Succeed at golf, tennis, baseball, football, basketball, hockey, volleyball, business, life, etc. CreateSpace. http://tinyurl.com/ng2heq3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

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Note to readers and followers: I am planning to end the current project of best practices in collaboration and teamwork around the end of June. If anyone would like to suggest a Pattern to be added, now would be a good time! Even if you don’t have a specific Pattern, any comments or suggestions are welcome. You might also enjoy some of my books which are all available on Amazon.

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.

halloween2006007

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.

PicturesfromiPhoneChinaParisPrinceton 131

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:

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:

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

Author Page on Amazon:

Author Page

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

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/

———————————

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

Use Thoughtful Group Feedback Structures and Processes

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by petersironwood in management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Business, competition, Feedback, innovation, learning, military, pattern language, Peer Learning, RET, sports

caution

Use Thoughtful Group Feedback Structures & Processes

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern comes mainly from my experience as a Fellow at the Institute for Rational Living. In my two-year Fellowship in Rational-Emotive Therapy (a variant of cognitive, emotive, & behavioral therapy developed by Albert Ellis), I saw about 6-8 individual clients a week as well as running a weekly group therapy session. I participated in a two hour group supervision session with a more experienced senior therapist each week and received very useful feedback. In addition, I participated in several “Pattern Workshops” at various SIGCHI conferences where a similar though slightly different structure of feedback was used. I also have had experiences teaching, tutoring, and providing feedback on scientific papers and grant proposals. These all overwhelmingly positive experiences on the whole. Like most of us, however, I’ve also been subject to a variety of diatribes, harangues, and reviews which were useless as learning experiences.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas March 6-8, 2018

Synonyms:

Hamburger feedback. Writer’s Workshop.

Abstract:

Life is complicated! The human brain is finite. We all make mistakes. Mistakes provide excellent opportunities to learn. Sometimes, we can learn all on our own, but in complex situations, even when we know we have failed, we often cannot tell why or how to improve. More experienced people can provide feedback to help us learn more effectively and efficiently. However, there are many different ways to point out errors and suggest improvements. Some of these ways provide much better learning experiences than others. Therefore, in providing feedback, choose a feedback structure and process designed to maximize the opportunity for learning and minimize negative emotions that can interfere with learning.

Problem:

When it comes to complex behavior in nearly every human domain (e.g., playing tennis or golf, writing a grant proposal or scientific paper, writing a short story, acting in a play, or providing therapy, cooking an omelet, drawing a portrait) there are many ways to go wrong. Generally speaking, people who are just learning a field know when they fail but often they cannot tell what they did wrong or how to improve. To the expert, the error is sometimes obvious. Since the expert teacher has seen the same mistakes made by over and over, it is easy to become impatient. The teacher may forget that even though they have pointed out this same error a thousand times in their career, it may only be the first time it has been pointed out to this particular learner. Even if it’s the tenth or twentieth time, it’s human nature for the learner to “revert” to a bad habit.

Furthermore, as Tversky and Kahnemann pointed out, coaches and teachers may find themselves “drifting” over time toward more and more emphasis on negative criticism rather than praise for a job well done. The reason posited by Tversky and Kahnemann is “regression to the mean.” Basically, performance in anything varies somewhat randomly over time. This random variation can be fairly large even as performance on the whole is improving. If a coach or teacher says something positive after an unusually good performance, chances are that the next performance will be somewhat worse. On the other hand, if a coach or teacher says something negative after a particularly bad performance, regression to the mean says that the next performance will usually be somewhat better. Over time, coaches and teachers tend to be punished for praising good performance and rewarded for criticizing bad performances. (I expanded on this idea to our self-criticism in “Why do I Self-Down? Because I’m an Idiot?”). Both praise and criticism can provide informative feedback. However, they are quite different in terms of the emotional impact that they make. Except for the very least self-motivated students, criticism will tend to provide too much stress for optimal learning. The newer or less intuitive the thing being learned is, the lower is the optimal level of stress.

In addition to the emotional impact, there is another problem with criticism. It often tends to fixate the attention of the person on the wrong things making further errors even more likely. If a golf coach, for example, says, “I’ve told you a hundred times! Don’t life your head up while you putt! You keep missing left because you keep lifting your head up, lifting your head up, lifting your head up!” Well! Even apart from making the student more nervous (which will make it harder to learn), by focusing on the student’s error, the coach has put it firmly in their student’s thought pattern: “Putt coming up. Don’t LIFT UP YOUR HEAD.”

Even without the social and emotive element, providing feedback that is really useful can be difficult. In the case of putting, for instance, you may miss a putt left for many reasons: you might have misread the slope; you might have misread the grain; you might have been aiming the putter blade left; you may have hit the ball of the center of the putting blade; you might have hit the grass behind the ball; you might have swung the putter on a curved path (and, indeed, one cause of that could be lifting up your head too early); there are imperceptible imperfections in the green; you might not have noticed the extremely brisk wind. Even a marvelously skilled instructor is going to have difficulty knowing which of these many reasons is in fact the case.

Context:

Complex skills require long training. Generally speaking, people will get much further in any field of human endeavor if they have formal or informal training and teaching in that field. The more complex the field, the more training is required. The better the coaching, training, teaching, or mentoring the student has along the way, the better will be their ultimate level of skill, other things being equal. Teaching is often done in classroom settings with only one teacher and many students. If the teacher does criticize a student, it is generally done in front of the whole class. The teacher seldom has the resources to find out why a student made an error. Feedback in the form of public ridicule can be worse than no feedback at all.

While formal teaching and training form one set of contexts for which it is useful to provide structured group feedback, there are many others. For instance, ten people submit a paper to a conference but only one gets in; ten people with a realistic chance try to win a gold medal in ice skating but only one does; ten people vie for one job with a job interview. None of these are primarily meant to be teaching experiences, but there is no reason that they cannot be. In fact, it is not just contests that provide opportunities for structured feedback from others; any time people face a challenge and meet it, is an opportunity for learning.

Forces:

Our brains are not infinite but finite. We all make mistakes.

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

Humans are social creatures. We feel good when we get praise from others and feel worse when we get criticism.

Even a good teacher cannot see all the circumstances of a complex situation as well as a student’s peers might.
Because teachers are way beyond the learning phase of elementary skills, a students peers, who are closer to the learning phase, can sometimes offer better feedback.

We tend to believe informative feedback about our behavior more as more people give that same feedback.

Due to regression to the mean, over time, some instructors and teachers come to rely much more on punishment than praise.

* Instructors often see and correct the same wrong behavior thousands of times. They may tend to be impatient, forgetting that it isn’t this student who has made all those errors.

Each person only knows a small proportion of another person’s situation and individuality. Feedback from a group of peers may all convey the same information but someone may say exactly the “right thing” for this person in this situation.

Solution:

Whenever a group is attempting to solve problems and address issues of any kind and wishes to improve its abilities over time, then it pays to provide feedback to those attempting to learn from peers as well as superiors in thoughtfully structured ways. The method should provide the optimal information but also the right emotional tone to optimize experience as well as learning outcomes.

Examples:

At the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy, all the Fellows, including me, tape-recorded all our sessions (with the client’s knowledge). Each week, a small group of us (3 or 4) met with a Supervisor (a much more experienced therapist). We would typically play a segment of one of our sessions that we had found particularly troublesome in some way. After that, the Supervisor would fist ask the therapist who had played the tape what they were trying to accomplish and what they felt they had done very well at. Then, the Supervisor would ask that therapist what they saw that they could have improved upon and how.

The Supervisor then asked the peers for additional feedback, beginning each time with some additional positive thing. This was followed by suggestions for improvement. It would not be helpful, for instance, to say, “Be more empathic.” If someone did say that, the Supervisor might say something like, “Can you offer some specific suggestions; e.g., what has worked for you in becoming more empathic?”

At last, the Supervisor would give additional feedback and again beginning with additional positive aspects of the interaction and ending with additional suggestions for improvements or a summary of what everyone else had said. Although this sounds very formal, it typically felt quite natural. As psychologists, we all knew why this feedback was being provided in this manner and appreciated it.

2. At Patterns Workshops, those who write a proposed Pattern present it to the group for feedback. These feedback sessions are structured in a very particular way which seems to work quite well. In broad outline, the writer supplies a written version of their Pattern. The are then asked to briefly summarize the pattern and read aloud a small part of it. Then they are asked to sit outside the rest of the group who are in a circle. Now, they are to be silent and listen (to be a “fly on the wall”). The rest of the presentation of the Pattern and the feedback will be hosted by someone else. The author is not to talking except for a brief clarification question. Everyone in the group is invited to give feedback on both Structure/Content. They are always asked for positive comments first and then suggestions for improvement. If someone has essentially the same comment as someone else, they can simply say, “Ditto.” When all the relevant feedback has been collected or time runs out, the author is thanked, invited back into the circle, and someone tells an irrelevant story or joke.

From my personal experience, not being allowed to talk during feedback and hearing the same thing from ten people is a truly amazing experience. By not being allowed to prepare your rebuttal — because there is no rebuttal — you instead listen to what is being said and are able to process what is said at a much deeper level. You think about what it means to your Pattern. What is outlined above are what I consider to be the main features that are most relevant to this Pattern. However, if you are interested in a succinct yet detailed suggested structure, see Jim Coplien’s Pattern for Patterns Workshops linked below.

https://sites.google.com/a/gertrudandcope.com/info/Publications/Patterns/WritersWorkshop

3. Readers will see similarities among the first two examples. In other contexts and in other cultures, different types of feedback sessions will be seen as effective. Ideally, the structure will have been developed through experience so as to maximize group learning, as opposed say, to feeding the ego of the most experienced member of the group. Another example of a structure process is in Code Reviews.

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

4. Toastmasters is an organization designed to teach people how to give better presentations and provide peer feedback. Here is a link to a nice feedback guide by one of their members.

http://blog.toastspot.com/22-tips-for-giving-effective-feedback

5. After Action Reviews. The US military conducts After Action Reviews (AARs) as a standard part of learning from training exercises and field experience. Some of the same suggestions appear again: the spirit of the investigation is key; preparation is key; the purpose is not to point fingers but to learn how to do better.

Claude

Click to access tc25-20.pdf

Resulting Context:

Once a group experiences useful feedback delivered in a clear and constructive fashion, it maximizes the chances that learning will take place, and that the process itself is a positive one. Over time, a group may become even more effective over time as mutual trust is gained and people begin to gain proficiency in the process.

fullsizeoutput_1fcd

Rationale:

People learn from feedback more effectively if feedback includes positive statements; is specific and actionable; if they have a chance to suggest their own improvements first.

Related Patterns:

Reality Check,

Metaphors:

Make love not war. In all seriousness, feedback can feel more like the exercise of power — a kind of intellectual bullying — than it does like a learning experience. Poor feedback or even accurate feedback ineptly delivered feels like a sales person trying to guilt trip you into buying something. You feel manipulated and slightly dirty. It’s also a lot like a neighbor playing their rock music at full blast. It mostly feels obnoxious and not suited to your current situation or needs.

References:

Thomas, J. (1978). Why do I self-down? Because I’m an idiot? In Rational Living.

Bohm Dialogue

21 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by petersironwood in America, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

A Pattern Language., Bohm Dialogue, Business, competition, dialogue, innovation, learning, politics

Bohm Dialogue

Prolog/Acknowledgement:

The idea for this Pattern comes from the work of David Bohm. Bohm was a quantum physicist who, later in life, became interested in human communication. He would not say he “invented” dialogue; rather, he felt it was common in so-called “primitive” societies. Indeed, it seems to have been a common occurrence in the recounting of Paula Underwood in The Walking People. I learned more about Dialogue from Peter Senge and Bill Isaacs while working in “Knowledge Management” at NYNEX and IBM.

Author, reviewer and revision dates:

Created by John C. Thomas on February 21, 2018

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Synonyms:

Campfire Reflections. Quaker meeting.

Abstract:

In a hyper-competitive society, conversations that might be related to actions that affect more than one person are framed as contests with winners and losers, much like a sporting event or a court case. Sometimes, this might be appropriate, but it is not generally a good method. An alternative method to debate and discussion is Dialogue. In discussion and debate, as soon as one person begins saying something in favor of X, others decide whether they are for or against X. Then, based on a superficial hearing of what the person is saying, they determine how to best add weight to X or detract from it. They typically want to be able to “jump in” as soon as there is the slightest gap in the conversation. As a result, they are typically rehearsing their own upcoming argument and not even listening to the other person beyond the first few words. By contrast, in Bohm Dialogue, one person says something and everyone else listens to them respectfully. After listening, everyone reflects on what has been said. Then, they might or might not make a comment. This comment does not have to be an argument pro or con. It can be an analogy, a story, a reflection, a question, an example, or an observation. Rather than dividing into “camps” or “teams” and trying to “win” an argument about whether X or ~X is better, everyone works collaboratively and cooperatively to understand the space of possibilities and consequences. In such cases, the group might end up doing X, ~X, or .5X. Or, they may decide to gather more data; they may invent Y; they might decide to experiment in a small way with X. It is a joint construction process.

Problem:

Groups consists of individuals who never have precisely the same interests or the same experiences. In some cases, people simply make their own choices. It isn’t necessary for everyone to eat the same food or read the same books. But in some cases, appropriate action requires that people agree. Do we drive on the left side of the road or the right side? Do we penalize companies for polluting the environment or not? Do we have daylight savings time or not?

In a competitive society, it is easy to fall into the trap of framing problems in terms of who will benefit and who will lose. Everyone on the “losing side” will tend to find arguments to support their position even before understanding the other side. Such a process rarely results in innovation or breakthrough thinking. In a rush to win, people tend to ignore subtleties and interactions so even the framing of the problem becomes over-simplified. If people become angry or fearful, their ability to process information deteriorates and they most often stick with something they already know. In extreme cases, people will literally “freeze” with fear and be unable to perform even a simple yet critical action such as pulling the ripcord on their parachute.

In addition, if group action is decided through a process that is framed in terms of winning and losing, those on the losing side may not fully cooperate with the group decision. Consciously or unconsciously, they may even act to thwart the implementation of the group decision.

In the rush to “win,” those on the winning side may not even listen to important concerns from the other “side” and even if the “correct” decision “wins out,” important implementational details are overlooked. In this way, the implementation of the group decision will be flawed even if everyone tries to cooperate.

By framing the group decision process in terms of “winners” and “losers,” group cohesion and mutual trust can often be lost. This is particularly true if the group process is so contentious that people use propaganda or outright lies to try to “win” the debate. This not only makes this particular problem solving exercise less than optimal; it also means that future interactions will be less cordial, less civil, and less likely to result in what is best for the group as a whole.

Context:

Complex problems and large problems can often only be solved by groups. In addition, sometimes, decisions must necessarily impact the entire group. Groups may be as small as a couple deciding where to go on vacation or tennis doubles team deciding on an effective approach to their next match or as large as all of humanity deciding on how to deal with population growth and pollution.

Groups must not only decide on a collective course of action; generally, they must also implement that decision.

Forces:

Everyone wants to protect their “own interests.”

People may think of their “own interests” at varying levels; e.g., their own body, their own belief system, their own family, their own tribe, their own party, their own nation, all of humanity, or even all of life.

The expectations of any one person are primarily based on their own experiences.

The behavior of any other person is largely based on that person’s experiences.

If one person acts uncivilly or hyper-competitively, it tends to increase the chances that others will do the same.

In some societies, competition has become the default way to interact.

Competition tends to induce high stress levels in people.

High stress levels tend to make people less willing to listen, change, or think creatively.

* Everyone is an expert when it comes to their own experience.

Solution:

Instead of having a group debate or discuss two or a few alternatives to determine which one is the winner, instead use Bohm Dialogue to cooperatively, cooly, and calmly have the group examine a situation using everyone’s experience together. Have people listen respectfully to everyone’s contribution. Have everyone reflect on what they say. It helps if people frame their contribution in terms of their own experience rather than abstract and sweeping generalities and pronouncements. Let the group cooperatively build a joint understanding of the problem. This often results in an emergent solution. Even when it does not and, in the end, a vote on X or ~X must be taken, everyone feels respected by everyone else and people are much more likely to help implement the solution.

Example:

Imagine a tribe of people sitting around a fire at the end of the day. They reflect on their experiences. One says, “I gathered acorns today. There were very few though. This is not like the other years.” Everyone listens. They reflect.

Another says, “It would be nice if we could eat the acorns as the squirrels do, without having to wait.”

Another says, “Yes, though even they do not eat them all right away.”

Another: “Are there fewer oak trees? Or, is each tree making fewer acorns?”

The first says, “I am not sure. Let me think back. Each tree has fewer than in years past.”

Another says, “Speaking of fewer, I only caught two fish today in my favorite fishing spot. And the water was shallower.”

Another adds: “This spring I gathered fiddlehead ferns. There were only a few. Odd.”

Another: “There were so many nice sunny days this spring and summer. I guess there was a lot less rain.”

Another: “It would be nice if we could make it rain more.”

An older woman adds, “It has been raining less as I’ve grown older. Less and less each year.”

Another: “How can we make it rain more?”

Another: “I don’t know how we can make it rain more. But we could save the water when it does rain.”

Another: “I like water. Sometimes the small raindrops join together to make larger ones.”

Another: “Indeed, it is the nature of water to like the company of others.” Laughter.

Another, “Perhaps we can encourage water from the big river to visit us. We can dig a trench. If we encourage some water to go into that trench, other drops may follow into our stream.”

Another: “More water in our stream would encourage fish as well as fiddleheads and oaks to visit us more often.”

To the typical “modern person,” this dialogue seems needlessly random and inefficient. But is it really?

Sure, the typical business meeting has an agenda and it seems as though it’s efficient. The meeting below is pure fiction — but it is precisely in line with my typical experiences from a lifetime of meetings in “efficient corporate America.”

10:10- 10:30 Discuss ways to get more acorns.

Chairperson: “We need more acorns. How can we get them?”

Person 1: “I need help. They are hard to find.”

Person 2: “Well, I can’t do it. I’m having enough trouble getting fish. That takes all my time.”

Person 3: “You think you’ve got troubles? I can’t find enough fiddleheads either, so I can’t help.”

Person 4 – speaking directly to Person 1: “You sure you’re really hunting acorns and not just ogling the women? Just kidding.”

Person 1: “You come gather the acorns then. You’ll see.”

Person 4: “I said I was just kidding.”

Person 2: “When can we talk about getting more help fishing? Can we put that on the agenda for next week?”

Chairperson: “It’s next on the agenda.”

Person 5: “The real solution is incentives. I hate to say it, but I just don’t think everyone is really pulling their own weight around here.”

Person 6: “The key is better metrics. Words like ‘fewer’ are very fuzzy. We need an accounting of all the acorns. And fish. And fiddleheads. Then, we will be able to quantify the extent of the problem.”

Person 1: “Who is going to count the acorns? You? I know I got fewer and it isn’t from not trying.”

Chairperson: “Hey, we’re almost out of time. Let’s table this discussion for now and put it on the agenda for next week. It seems to me, in the meantime, Person 1, you’re going to have to get up a little earlier in the morning and gather more acorns that way. Let’s vote. All in favor of Person 1 getting up earlier to gather more acorns, raise your hands.”

[Everyone raises their hands except Person 1].

Chairperson: “OK, motion carried. Person 1, give us a report next week on exactly how many acorns you got every day.”

Person 1: “Look, the acorns are largely gone now. Getting up earlier isn’t going to help.”

Chairperson: “Sorry, Person 1. Do the best you can. We need to move to the next item on the agenda which concerns fishing.”

Person 1: “I always do the best I can. But I’m telling you that there will still be fewer acorns next week.”

Chairperson: “OK, we need to take this off-line and talk about fishing. If you can’t gather acorns, we’ll find someone who can. Enough.”

What are the likely outcomes from this “efficient” meeting? First, it is quite likely that Person 1 is pretty pissed off. Second, the group is unlikely to ever realize that there is a problem with the acorn supply rather than the extent or manner in which Person 1 is gathering them. Third, the group is way far away from realizing the systemic nature of the problem and the fact that the “real problem” is a diminishing source of water, let alone making any progress toward solving that actual problem.

Resulting Context:

Generally speaking, using dialogue will be more not less efficient for finding and implementing solutions to root problems than will competitive debates or discussions. The solutions arising from Dialogue will be “owned” by the entire group and it is more likely that everyone will be working together to make sure the solution actually works. In addition, the long term effect on the group is to increase mutual trust and cooperation.

Rationale:

Actions are always better based on reality than on fantasy. Yet, humans often latch onto a particular interpretation of events very quickly and with insufficient data. As a consequence, people often work within the constraints of their own limited thought patterns. Treating what is essentially and quintessentially group problem solving as a competition between people for which of two or three solutions most often results in solving the wrong problem or at best only solving a sub-problem. In addition, “solutions” arrived at in this competitive way often result in decreased effectiveness of a group over time because of growing envy, resentment and mistrust.

By contrast, Bohm Dialogue encourages people to work together with respect and to understand a problematic situation from many angles. In this way, the real or more basic problem is understood as well as how it impacts everyone present.

As Bohm points out, many people mistakenly believe the word “Dialogue” comes from the Greek word logos for truth and the Latin root di for two implying that a dialogue is a two-sided debate. Instead, “Dialogue” comes from the Greek logos and the Greek root dia which does not mean two but through. It is coming to the truth through interaction.

Related Patterns:

“Who Speaks for Wolf.” Reality Check.

Known Uses: (See the Incarnations section of the Wikipedia article on 2014)David Bohm referenced below). I have also had personal success running Dialogue sessions as Executive Director of the NYNEX AI lab and in SIGCHI meetings. If you explain the “rules of the game” people can fairly easily learn to Dialogue.

Quaker meetings are often run in this same fashion and the group does not “vote” to choose among a couple possible actions but instead reflects as a group until a consensus is reached.

Metaphors:

Bohm, as I mentioned, was a quantum physicists and he likened what happens in dialogue to having people be in a “super-cooled” and therefore “super-conductive” state. When people are “agitated” to “win,” they are bouncing around like hot molecules and conducting information among them is difficult. The more you heat up a wire, the less well it conducts current or information. Near absolute zero, the wire instead becomes “superconductive.” When people relax and do not have an “axe to grind” and are not ego-invested in a predetermined outcome, they behave quite intelligently in discovering truths.

References:

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

Bohm, D. (1996). On dialogue. New York: Routledge.

Holman, P & Devane,T. (1999). The change handbook: Group methods for shaping the future. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.

Krishnamurti, J. and Bohm, D. (2014). The ending of time: Where philosophy and physics meet. New York: Harper/Collins.

Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.

Shaw, P. (2002). Changing Conversations in Organizations. A complexity approach to change. London: Routledge.

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petersironwood

~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

Tag Archives: learning

Use Diversity as a Resource

Support Both Flow & Breakdown

Speak Truth to Power

Anti-Pattern: Power Trumps Good

Fostering Community Learning via Transformed Narratives

Fostering Group Cohesion through Common Narratives

Narrative Insight Method

Give a Sympathetic Reading

Use Thoughtful Group Feedback Structures and Processes

Bohm Dialogue