I entered the seventh grade a successful student. In grade school, I had lived among the top tier of students, participating in an array of extracurricular activities. I played a decent (though never distinguished) second chair clarinet, squaredanced, Cub Scouted, and ran my own paper route. I’d written and produced a play in my fifth grade class for scholastic achievers, and even conquered the dreaded long division. I left grade school college bound. By the end of my first term in junior high school, I was certain that college would be beyond my reach.
What happened? French happened. Try as I might, I could not make French behave. My ability to manipulate the English language gave me no leverage with La Francaise. The language labs left me sweaty, the homework left me despondent, and the classroom interaction left me feeling like the deaf mute in the choir. It would not figure out!
The teacher, watching my struggles, took a special interest in me, and offered to spend extra time helping me overcome this difficulty. I had never needed special tutoring, and felt uncomfortable taking him up on his offer.
A delicate balance was disrupted. My IQ plummeted in my other classes, too. This experience was sending me into an intellectual stone age. I was becoming a Neanderthal!
My stomach began giving me fits. Gurgling and aching, particularly when I would don my imaginary beret to begin my homework. Usually a confident intuitive, I began painstakingly transcribing each phrase ten and twenty times, sub-vocalizing each as I scribbled. My handwriting went to hell along with the rest of my faculties.
My doctor prescribed a healthy dose of failure. “Drop the class,” he advised. Reassured by my parents that there was, indeed, life after French, I dropped the class. I was assigned to shop class instead. Shop class was overseen by an unimaginative bull of a bullet-headed man who taught me one enduring life lesson. When my intuitive design for a shelf baffled him, he advised me to, “Just copy something from the back of the book.” I had gone in less than one semester from near the head of the class to crouching in the back of a wood shop, looking for something to copy out of the back of the book.
I was twenty five before I figured out a way to get into university without mastering a foreign language, and I did well there. Very well. How curious that I still tend to cope with the impossibles in my life by carefully transcribing, then sub-vocalizing them.
The other side considers differences of opinion to be departure points and refuses to get married to (or even go steady with) either the either or the or. This 'side' believes that domination eventually (often quickly) falls apart and compromise is just stupid (we'll be smarter by deciding to each be a bit dumber...). This side believes there is always a third way, one which integrates values and interests to invent a more satisfying resolution than either pole of the difference can anticipate. Let's call this the Insight (or 'In') side.
Okay, In-side proposes a resolution and invites DC to engage in an inquiry intended to develop a deeper understanding of the issue and stumble upon some insights that might serve as a really different resolution than the one he proposes. (It doesn't matter where he starts with his proposal, since that's just the medium for starting the conversation.) But DC mistakes this as a negotiating ploy intended to either threaten dominion or encourage compromise, and responds in kind, with threats or counter-compromises, never engaging in anything like a dialogue.
No matter how vehemently In-side insists that he's not cleverly pursuing dominion or compromise, DC just can't grok that there's other space possible. When In-side calls for bi-partisanship, he is not trying to weaken DC, but strengthen them. But DC interprets this as just another round of partisan gamesmanship, and responds in kind.
Any dispassionate consideration of this dilemma would conclude that if there was a way to integrate values and interests to create a resolution that would serve everyone better, this would be a great thing to pursue. But the game becomes one between an adult and an eight year old. The subtle potential imbedded in the invitation slips by unseen, and raw emotion at what's not there dominates play, when what's not there (yet) is the whole purpose of playing in the first place. The eight year old does not yet understand how to create in this world.
In the past, these sorts of conflicts have resulted in civil wars (a curious label for anything so uncivil), or, wait for it, even greater domination or compromise (Wilson in France negotiating the 'peace to end all peace' comes to mind, when the French and English swiped everything that wasn't nailed down in a desperate last gasp for dominion.) We're hopeful a third way might yet emerge from the debating society stuck in DC.
What they're finding out there today is really no different than what their great grandfathers found: employers capable of insisting upon unconscionable irony. People struggling to hum along to tunes they do not really believe in.
This land grab for eternal exponential growth, the petty insistence on applying industrial-scale regulation strategies to operations too large to manage or too small to warrant such bureaucracy. Value creation displaced with slight-of-hand balance sheets and indictable (but usually not quite convict-able) income statements. A shell game played by touts to soak the gullible, of which they presume an infinite supply when there are actually ever fewer.
It's not a credit crunch, it's a credibility crunch. It's not a downturn in the markets, but evidence of markets designed to perform in ways ever fewer are even interested participating in. It's a dream turned nightmare. Sure, it would be great if, by cleverly accumulating ever more debt within an ever-expanding economy, we'd all outrun the unsustainable premise while trickling down prosperity on even the least of us. It actually doesn't work that way. Never has. (Evidence: the number of organizations gobbled up just to bolster 'temporary' sales shortfalls with a larger—albeit deeply indebted—pie, and the really, really successful ones who evaporated when their deliberately-constructed bubble burst. --- kinda sounds like the sub-prime mortgage debacle, where individuals were convinced they could manage their personal finances just like The Big Boys manage their corporate ones.)
This curious form of economy has migrated into government, non-profits, even social systems. We plan, track, then intend to control—we really do—even when, especially when, conditions shift into the uncontrollable. (We hold more firmly to our joysticks then.)
Here's the buried lead: most work is not industrial, yet we routinely employ industrial-scaled techniques to much of our work.
We lost the ability to relate. It's simple to undermine this natural human ability. Plan your future, then treat the plan as the arbiter of reality. Judge people by behaviors, not intentions, and make scant effort to understand intentions. Reward by performance to expectations, rather than by performance to conditions on the ground. Refuse to relate in any way except arm's-length, metrics-bound formality. Build your fiefdom and defend its boundaries.
Ninety years ago, Henry Lawrence Gantt declared that industry had lost its guiding compass, replacing it with profit. He claimed that if a company produces value, profits would follow, but if a company satisfied itself with merely pursuing profits, society would (and should) clamor in and take the reins away. This turns out to have been a prescient prediction of where our health care 'industry' has turned out to be today: The relational transformed into the industrial. How's that working for you, for us?
I've grown out of even being interested in working with such Big Dumb Companies.
The way it is never was the way it was ordained to be. The industrialists are engaging in yet another desperate attempt to maintain a moot status quo. They could succeed. There are plenty of organizations flying under that radar, those who accept that they are not industrial, and gain no benefit from industrial aspirations.
I am watching a massive project spend years developing their master program plan, which never informs those actually doing the work. This is vanity, the vanity of systems thinking twisted into mechanical decomposition. Their lunch is already cooked, and will be eaten by others. They will be surprised. Again. You and I won't be.
Perhaps we are hard-wired with a blind spot when we look at what's so obviously there. It's always mere illusion, transformed into absolute delusion when certainty stares inside.
We dare not carry the weight of endless uncertainty, nor the vacuous lightness of absolute certainty. We live somewhere in between, double-clutching and grinding gears even when we remember the transmission and the gear shift there. The problem with the certainty problem has always been that it limits our potential, our choices. It works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't work, we're more likely to spin our wheels in an ever-deepening mud hole, still certain of our goal, confident of our path, seemingly consecrated by our certainty.
Damned if we do and also conveniently damned if we don't, we can confidently choose between them then. Or bust this damnable dilemma by choosing what no certainty could support. Roll the dice. Spin the wheel. Randomize the search routine. For if there is one unsolvable problem in this world, it is certainly the Certainty Problem.
(See the other nine covenants in this series by clicking on the covenant link above.)
