THE MISSING CHINK?

THE MISSING CHINK?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 2006

A READER WROTE:

Someone is using your metaphor Jim. Nothing to worry about - it's a book about something quite different than a self-constructed cage. However, it's interesting they decided to use the same metaphor as you. See below:

Our Schools/Our Selves: Spring 2006

Education's Iron Cage and Its Dismantling In the New Global Order
May 1, 2006 | National Office | Topic(s): Education | Author(s): George Martel | Publication Type: Our Schools Our Selves | Research Desk: Education | ISBN: 0-88627-474-5 | Pages: 220

Over the last three decades, global capitalism has carried out a full-scale assault on public school systems around the world. This collection of essays, edited by George Martell, describes the range and power of this assault and opens up our understanding of the savage privatization agenda in public education The contributors to this collection come from Australia, Canada, England, First Nations Communities, Latin America, Quebec, Western Europe, South Africa, South America, South Korea and the United States. And they bring more than a story of neo-liberal dominance in our schools. The explore the resistance that is building to this dominance, among students and teachers, parents and communities.

THIS WAS SHARED WITH A FRIEND WHO IN TURN WROTE:

Education's cage for our children is a hot button for me. The more obtuse and pseudo-scientific/professional their language gets, the worse education gets.

If you think the nowhere man has problems, they are most visible and exasperating in those crafts that have tried to turn themselves into "professions." Teachers, Police, and Corporate/Government Managers - grin - run a close second as a group to lawyers and doctors as those who can turn ordinary lives into Kafkaesque nightmares!

AND FINALLY, I RESPONDED IN KIND WITH A PIECE I CALL “A MISSING CHINK?” It follows:

I don't differ with you a whole lot in this assessment. Where I do depart is that I think I understand the inevitability of this kind of fumbling as we are in a transitional period, and no transitional period has ever been without disruption, contradiction, and folly.

I just completed my "social conscience" segment in my latest walk -- not yet transcribed however -- in which I take the social parameters from birth to rebirth in old age. I have no idea how it will read once transcribed, but as I told BB it seemed some of the most integrated stuff I've come up with of late. We shall see.

Yes, there is something of the cage metaphor in almost everything around us; and yes, we are very much encapsulated in the routine if not the mindset of NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND.

But unlike Orwell, who had the right medium with the right message for the right time, I seem to be a little out of sync with the mindset of my contemporaries. Not something new, however.

Ken Shelton sent me my article in the February issue of Leadership Excellence -- he had previously sent me the PDF electronic version, but I like a hard copy in my hands.

Ken presents "in" and "out" favorites in leadership, among the "in" were John Kotter and Michael Dell. I have peripheral connection with these two gentlemen.

With Dell, because I've lost a great deal of money on the Dell stock, and Kotter, as I sent my Director of the Management Development Center for Honeywell Europe Ltd. to interview him when I was operating out of Brussels.

Kotter, you may recall, was advocating "cutting edge" technology when the horse was already out of the barn. This was 1987 and Japan and South East Asia were already eating our lunch.

I wanted my man to get a sense of his thinking in the period of the 1970s when a little advanced warning might have helped. Well, my man never got to Kotter although he had an appointment, and had traveled from Brussels to interview him among other "change agents." The bureaucracy at Harvard was thicker than the Kremlin in the hey days of the Soviet Union.

My point is that both men are members of the myth-making machine that still believes in the dominance of the US in business. It is reactionary thinking of Monday morning describing why we didn't win on Saturday night. We call it "Monday morning quarterbacking," or always having answers for why what we expected didn't happen and whose fault it was. We are good at this.

What we are not so good at is anticipating and dealing with problems before they coalesce into a nightmare.

It is the American idea of "if it ain't broke don't fix it," which I think is the most stupid slogan in the American business lexicon. I ran into it at Nalco, and of course at Honeywell as well.

I attempt to point out that we are locked into vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning (explaining everything after the fact) and not complementing it with lateral thinking (anticipating the trouble ahead when things are going splendidly). Stated otherwise, vertical thinking is critical thinking, or dealing with what is known, or in accepted terms with what has been done before, whereas lateral thinking is creative thinking or concerning itself with what is not known or nailed down but can be found out by being speculative, conceptual, contradictory, and illogical.

Obviously, lateral thinking would be unwise without vertical thinking, but vertical thinking would be much more complete complemented by lateral thinking.

There isn't a front in which I don't see the existence of this gap.

Education has always been a leader in "gap thinking" -- when in trouble invent another course or program, don't stop and consider that the curriculum is possibly totally wrong for the times. Where is it written, for example, that a student of fourteen-years-old ready for college should have to spend four boring years in high school? Instead, we have a curriculum of 12-years of schooling that has been written in concrete. Nor where is it written that "C" students in my day should graduate with 3.9 GPA's today?

A professor wrote only yesterday in the op-ed page of The Tampa Tribune (August 25, 2006) that her college students, all with high grade point averages from high school, don't read books. When asked who their favorite authors were, the only author they could think of was Dan Brown of "The De Vinci Code." She laments, if you don't read, you can't write, and it you can't write you can't express yourself, and if you can't express yourself you have no business in college. Hurrah! I hope she doesn't lose her job!

You mention the word "professional." I've written a good deal on this subject. We have been in a 50-year fixation with management, management as a profession, if you want to call it that, which became only of serious moment during and after World War II.

Management has every right to be proud of its accomplishments in that Great War, but it has ridden that status for more than 60-years now. Management is however not the stick that stirs the drink. It hasn't been so since the flood of college trained people have come to dominate the workforce. The least able contingent in the corporation is those that lead it. This is verified every day. You don't have to take my word. Just read the headlines of the business news.

The problem, and it has not yet been resolved, but it will, because in peace as in war necessity is the mother of invention. Otherwise, entropy wins out.

We have made stars of the Dells and Jobs and Gates and Buffets when they simply rode a trend based upon the work of many people now forgotten who created the major technologies a century ago. We are in the imitative and refinement stage. None of these billionaires created the science or technology that they have come to perfect. Indeed, this is currently the least creative period in over a century. They are riding on the back of the inventions of the radio, telephone, television, computer, airplane, automobile, and on and on that were invented in the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

So, I don't think the problem is whether you believe there is such a thing as a professional class or not -- I can see your point -- as people deemed professional don't behave like professionals.

That said professionals are the next iteration in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, their voices are not being heard because the most brilliant of them are silenced and the most affable and symbiotic are promoted and ride the gravy train as long as they can. Sycophantism is not a disease. It is the character of the complex organization today. Professionals are trained to this distinction.

First, professionals have a conforming and conformist education that is reified in MBA programs as if taken from a page of Roman Catholic indoctrination. Second, self-interests and survival win over integrity. And third, they know what happens if you don't toe the mark, ring the bell, salute the chair, and walk quietly on the job -- you get dumped or demoted.

There is an interesting story of Eric Edward "Chink" Dorman-Smith of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers in World War II.

Chink was a tall, well read, witty, sardonic, charming man, and a brilliant strategist.

He, not Montgomery, was responsible for the planning that resulted in turning the Second World War around by the decisive British victory in North Africa against Rommel at Alamein.

Chink was purged into obscurity because he forgot to conceal his brilliance or tolerate the mediocrity around him, including the strutting General Montgomery.

Chink had an astonishing run of quick promotions from captain to brigadier general in ten years. He wore brilliance openly on his sleeve -- a mistake. He was a theoretician (lateral thinker) and a perfectionist; he did not however always understand how to handle the common clay of mankind (he lacked touchy-feely palaver); and he could not and would not compromise his principles in the comfortable British way.

Junior officers while his outspokenness and quick-witted personality created enemies above admired his intellect and imagination.

He had such a flow of ideas combined with a caustic tongue that it was often imagined that he was essentially a staff officer and a theorists rather than a commander. No commander would ever be so direct!

Rommel knew of him and respectfully mentioned him in his memoirs. But his superiors envied him, not least of whom were General Montgomery and Prime Minister Churchill.

They both disliked his failure to show obeisance to them, not to mention his arrogant manner and sharp tongue when asked his assessment of a situation.

Doubts spread about his ability to command troops, not from the troops, but from senior commanders. Skepticism grew about his military theories, confessing they were brilliant but unsound.

But here is where the rubber hit the road -- Montgomery used his strategy to defeat Rommel, going against convention, at the second Battle of Alamein, which turned the war around. Great Britain needed this victory to gain the total support of the United States.

Chink made his bed when he challenged Churchill in an open staff meeting prior to the first battle. He saw the proposed strategy as being wrong for the situation although previously successful elsewhere, arguing it would result in the unnecessary sacrifice of too many men.

As Chink predicted, he was right and the prime minister wrong. His action sealed his professional doom. He was demoted, relieved of his command, removed from central command, and ultimately reduced to the rank of colonel and then captain. It was a long fall from grace.

One of the ironies is that those responsible for the disasters at Tobruk and Gazala, that Chink had predicted, went unpunished and their careers flourished, while the strategy that Chink had proposed and was eventually used at Alamein ended in a super victory.

I share this with you because I know, personally, that the Chinks of the world become scapegoats for those in a position to cover-their-asses, and no one is above doing so, even great men.

Churchill, incidentally, attempted to justify his approach to this situation in his volume "The Hinge of Fate." You may recall he was named by Time magazine "The Man of the Twentieth Century," and received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his Memoirs. Churchill wasn't the first great man to do this nor will he be the last.

Professionals, such as Chink, will not rise to the occasion until the organization develops a capacity to deal with conflict management in positive terms.

We are afraid of brilliance, afraid of arrogance (defined as people not obeisant to the powers at hand), afraid of imaginative ideas, and subject to retreat to a dark mood when someone is skeptical of our leadership and motivation when it is clearly wrong.

There is no phase of the system in which this declension doesn't exist.

One time when I was teaching a graduate seminar in organizational development (OD) to US Air Force officers at MacDill Air Force Base for Golden Gate University, a young man rose to his feet, looked me in the eye, and chastised me for a litany of reasons, finding my teaching method chaotic, confusing, conflicting, and on and on.

All the time he was talking growing redder and redder in the face, I was smiling. He must have talked for at least five minutes. When he was done, I said stretching out my hand to embrace his, "Welcome to OD?"

I had been goading the class on to penetrate its ubiquitous passivity. They acted as if I had all the answers and they none; as if I was giving them something and they were not expected to get anything on their own. I wanted them to be actively engaged not passively responsive. I wanted to create a typical OD climate, and I was willing to wait until someone discovered that they were immersed in it. Risky? Yes. But well worth it!

A few years later, I received a letter from this young man. He was now a pilot, a major in the USAF. He said that moment in that class was a turnaround moment in his life. Funny thing happened, he said, I finally started to trust myself, which lowered my contempt level, and I found I started to become more trusting of others. It has been smooth sailing ever since.

Well, that is a bit grand, but he was ready. All I did was give him permission to recognize his readiness. I don't see many like him, and until we do, this United States of America will sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of NOWHERE LAND playing the role of NOWHERE MAN.

Always be well,
Jim

* * * * * *
An exchange of correspondents on a subject common to us all. NOWHERE MAN in NOWHERE LAND is a book that I have completed but has not yet found a publisher.