ARE YOU STUCK?

ARE YOU STUCK?

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

© August 2007

"If I could change my circumstance, I would have preferred different parents, a different religion and a different wife."

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Are you stuck?

That's kind of a threatening question, isn't it?

We are not supposed to be stuck. Yet I claim in my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD that we are stuck and have been stuck for a long time. In fact, I build a case that between 1972, when I first wrote this essay and now, a period of 35 years, little has changed only the names have changed.

We're again in an unpopular war. We have a president that hunkers down. We have a congress that missed the changes, stayed the same, and left the future up for grabs.

Businesses are disappearing from the American continent faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson."

The other day an engineer making a six-figure income called me and said his workplace was sick and he was unhappy.

How so, I asked.

I think I suffer from malicious obedience, he replied.

Immediately, I knew he had read one of my books. Malicious obedience is withholding information critical to the success of an operation, hiding information required by colleagues to do their job, doing what you're told even if you know it's wrong, or circulating misinformation or disinformation to vent your hostility without anyone being the wiser.

If it is so bad, I asked, why don't you leave?

He answered. Well, let me put it this way. If I left right now, there would be such a huge hole in the bucket that it couldn't hold water.

I let that pass, clearly he sees himself as indispensable. He doesn't recognize that he's stuck. But he is stuck. He wants from his company what it cannot give him, leadership. He wants it to do the right thing when it doesn't know how. It is locked stepped in the past, obsessed with the future, and frozen in the present.

It is a phenomenon experienced across the board but nobody wants to admit it. We are overwhelmed with the complexity of the times. So, we play the lotto or lose ourselves in the casino.

You see, you're stuck if you are in a job you hate, in a relationship you hate, in a profession you hate, in a community you hate, in a religion you hate, in a school you hate, and so on. Hate is a failure to accept things as they are.

As soon as we fail to accept things as they are, we have come to own the problem.

If you hate the way I look, the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I act, the way I live, the way I am, I don't have a problem. You have a problem.

I'm perfectly content with what and who and where I am. You're not, and therefore, by definition, you have a problem. You are stuck with me as I am because you want me to change. You want me to be like you want me to be.

But that is impossible because you are not me and I am not you. We have different wills, different constructions, different experiences, and we are different persons.

So, if there is some behavior of another person that drives you up the wall, you are stuck. If you cannot accept what you encounter, you're stuck. It can extend to a person, place or thing beyond your control.

I'll go beyond that.

Let's say you have a problem with yourself. You've been programmed to be a perfectionist, and you know you're not. You've been programmed to always have answers for everything and of course you don't. You've been programmed to wax secure when you're not, and so you're not self-accepting. You're stuck in denial and loathe yourself for being stuck.

See my point.

We have drifted away from our foundation. Forgotten is how we came to be Americans. We originally left Europe in the 17th century to escape religious tyranny. In America we felt free to believe and behave as we willed. We entered a harsh environment and had to embrace its risks and endure its pain, as it was unforgiving. We had to cope with disease, hardship, hunger, and yes, even starvation.

But our will was huge against these forces of nature. We grew resilient, resolute, and strong embracing, not denying our weakness.

That is our legacy. It would come to pass one day for that constitution to find us the strongest nation in the world.

Now, how did that happen?

That happened because the focus was on the process not the outcome. There was no comfort zone, no home in the suburbs. We were all on the same page pushing off the same dime. We were united in hardship not so much because we loved each other so dearly, but because we needed each other so desperately to survive.

We had no time for petty complaints, for saying Harry has advantages Joe doesn't. We worked from sun up to sunset and collapsed in a cold bed with the sleeping sedative of exhaustion.

We had no time to be stuck.

We had no choice but to use our creative intelligence, which deals with what is not known but can be discovered instead of critical intelligence, the intelligence of being stuck, which deals with what is already known.

Critical intelligence solves problems with the same thinking that caused the problems in the first place. We are very familiar with that.

We go round and round in circular logic with cause effect analysis solving problems by identifying and treating symptoms, wondering why they are never resolved. We look for the magic bullet that will cure our lifestyle excesses: eating, drinking, and smoking too much, doing drugs and sexual dalliance. Stuck.

We've come to call it the paralysis of analysis feeling more inclined to describe a problem ad infinitum than to take action.

We are stuck in Socratic hierarchical vertical thinking when the complement of lateral thinking is required. Moreover, we fail to realize problems are never solved, but only controlled.

We're stuck everywhere. We're stuck in a war. We're stuck in a congress that blames the president for the war, and a president that blames the congress for its lack of patriotism and being supportive of our troops in harms way.

In my work, I've often dealt with professionals: engineers, scientists, and specialists. These people go to school a long time, come into industry and commerce only to find they have to work for somebody that doesn't have their knowledge base, but who exerts position power over them.

What do you think they do?

Do they attempt to bridge the gap and bring their bosses up to speed?

They become frustrated, anxious, angry, and yes, retreat into such behaviors as malicious obedience. They don't use their intelligence to school their superiors into seeing the wisdom of doing things differently.

Why?

They are stuck with protocol and programming.

Leadership is supposed to come from the top, down, not the bottom, up. They have been programmed to be passive, reactive and submissive as if nothing has changed. Stuck.

In 1950, 80 percent of workers were blue-collar and 20 percent were white-collar. Today nearly 90 percent are white collar and 10 percent are blue collar. Yet we are stuck managing, motivating and mobilizing workers as if the color of their collar has not changed.

We are stuck with position power while knowledge power dangles in the wind.

If I'm going to change the system, I've got to change me. And if I change me and I'm unhappy, I've got to leave.

Those of you who have read my ten questions will see I've done many things. I've done those many things because I believe in the formula:

RISK + PAIN = GROWTH

On the other hand, the failure to embrace risk and endure pain equals atrophy.

Nothing stays the same; you either grow or waste away.

If you are wasting away, it suggests it is because you are unhappy. You are not getting what you want; you're not going where you prefer. You are stuck.

Now, an individual can be stuck. A corporation can be stuck. A country can be stuck. A society can be stuck. Such things have often happened.

We don't have time to go into the history but I am sure your filter processing what I am saying would immediately block the penetration of the information because we are all stuck on certain things.

We continue to believe what we've been programmed to believe, and don't want new information that challenges such beliefs. Everyone here has core beliefs, beliefs that may be so rooted as if a tree.

Yet, everything is moving. There has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300. We have an exponential acceleration of change that is making it very difficult for us to be on the same page and getting off on the same dime.

The problem can be reduced to three words: what and who and why.

We like simple answers to complex problems.

We are still stuck in the terrible tragedy of 9/11 attempting to determine what caused it, and who was responsible. We are forever stuck on the what and the who, but never seem to get around to the question of why.

Why has been ignored. It would challenge our core beliefs. It would force us to see the terrorists not as demons and murderers, both of which they are deemed to be, but as people believing they have nothing more to lose and, rightly or wrongly, have been disrespected, their culture and religion slandered.

Terrorism is not new and is always a matter of perspective. Desperate people take desperate measures to right imagined or real wrongs. The Minute Men of our American Revolution picked off the British Red Coats marching proudly in a row. George Washington had his greatest victory crossing the Delaware completely surprising the British who expected a secession of hostilities during the holiday season. Menachem Begin had the reputation of a terrorist in the 1940s against British authority in Palestine, only to rise to a celebrated prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize winner with Anwar Sadat in 1978.

Tecumseh Sherman torched the earth and left the South barren and burning in his march to the sea demoralizing and breaking the will of the Confederate Army.

Terrorism is a dehumanizing strategy. And as shown throughout history, it is effective.

Just think, in this little bit of time, I have managed to offend Christians and Jews and patriots, and indeed, western civilization. Minds close when so threatened and become stuck.

We will remain stuck and never progress off the dime or find ourselves on the same page if we continue as we are. The mega force of change has made us one people in a "rainbow coalition."

The United States of America increasingly resembles Europe with multi cultures and languages spoken and costumes on display in virtually all points of the nation. It is not time to resist this trend but to embrace it.

The need to have a token understanding of these languages and acceptance of these differences is no longer a luxury but increasingly a fundamental need to get along.

Why say all these things and stir up the dust?

We once possessed a moral compass of tolerance. We have misplaced it. We have lost our way. To find our way we cannot turn to an authority figure or leader to find it for us. Leaders are as lost and stuck as we are. President John F. Kennedy once said he was born with the wrong parents in the wrong religion and to the wrong wife. It would be hard to improve on a better definition of being stuck.

We are all leaders or none of us are.

We cannot afford to be stuck in this modern world looking for someone else to lead us to safety. Our history indicates that many want to wrest that power from us, and we've paid dearly for the attention.

The answers are not in the media, although the media loves that sense of power; the answers are not in our institutions that programmed us for another time; nor are the answers in our leaders as leadership is no longer top down, but bottom up.

We are stuck asking top down leaders to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. You see, leadership has changed but no one wants to admit it, and so we have dissolved to leaderless leadership and crisis management, stuck.

It is time we take charge, grow up, and embrace our resistance to the present. The future will take care of itself.

Thank you very much.
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This is another possible talk composed during my peripatetic walk today for inclusion during my book tour in Clinton, Iowa next month.