IATROGENIC -- AN EXCHANGE! "QUIT COMPLAINING, DR. FISHER, GET ON THE SOLUTION BANDWAGON!"

IATROGENIC – AN EXCHANGE!

“QUIT COMPLAINING, DR. FISHER, GET ON THE SOLUTION BANDWAGON!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 22, 2009

“We commonly select practices according to what is known about the solution when we should choose practices according to what is known about the problem. The popular notion is that the ‘problem domain’ is an incoherent riddle, while the ‘solution domain’ is coherent and tidy. Actually, the opposite is true.”

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), p. 53.

REFERENCE TO THE EXCHANGE

One of the advantages to being relatively unknown is that the labels people are inclined to prescribe to you do not exist. You are like a free-floating entity invisible to the naked conscience. Once gone, however, all sorts of appendages can be attached to your persona including non grata. But of course you could care less because by then you are fertilizing daisies.

That said many of us are so afraid of offending that we don’t have time for comprehending. We are so busy feeding off the minds of others that we never have time to actually wonder what is going on in our own. It has been my mission to push against that hot air, encouraging other common souls such as myself to do the same. When push comes to shove, no one has the answers for any of us but ourselves within the limits of our own experiences, comprehension and determination. We are all philosophers.

We happen to live in the Age of Optimism, against all evidence to the contrary with a palpable fear of pessimism, as if it were the “New Plague,” which perhaps it is. Yet, we read George Orwell’s “I984” with the omen Big Brother is watching us, and say, “Oh yeah! That’s true enough!” We read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which people are chemically produced and the word “love” or physical intimacy is banned, and we chuckle, “Oh yeah! Here about that woman who had octuplets, didn’t she lift that right out of the book? She already had six kids at home without a man, insanity!”

But it’s not shocking because the shocking has become the norm. It gives the ludicrous Dr. Phil a role in life to fulfill. It is easy to throw stones at Jerry Springer, but he admits to working in a farcical zoo, while the good doctor fails to see the absurdity of his role. Millions are loyal fans to these two panderers to pessimism.

In an Age of Optimism, noise is music; splashing paint on a canvas is art. Mayhem and murder on high rated CSI-type TV dramas compete with bizarre sexual innuendo comedies for prime time audiences. Literature and films cannot have two sentences of dialogue without the “F” word, while education and religion struggle to be “with it” in a catch up fashion, when it was their mission to set the standards.

People find the disgusting entertaining failing to realize they are carrying the banner of pessimism right into their living rooms. Orwell, Huxley, et al, documented the dystopia of our culture and now we are living it.

My story about the “Man in the Cage,” which I shared with readers earlier, is pure dystopia. Some readers nailed its message. They had had corporate experiences similar if not the same as the protagonist.

That is the intention of the story – identity, or there go I but for the grace of God. In other words, it was not just the man who found the cage so enticing that he entered it voluntarily never to escape, but the story was intended to address us all.

That’s what writers of dsytopia do. The story is suggesting that we all create a cage to which very few of us ever escape. The cage is our cultural programming. The message implies society is moving in that direction; that we have become afraid to be individuals in a society predicated on that principle. We have become a groupie culture flaunting our tattoos. But again, like Orwell and Huxley, it is but a story, and as stories go, it can ring true or false to the reader, who has that option always.

Serious novelists are philosophers describing the world in the light of the darkness they observe. They speculate on what the future portends to be. Viewed simply as novels, little learning takes place. But viewed in the wider sense of everyday life in society it can have another meaning.

My writing suggests we are a knowing society not a learning society. There is nothing more dangerous, in my view, because when you know all the answers you are not open to the problems you face. You hide in their complexities choosing to see them beyond the pale of comprehension, and therefore deciding to solve the problems you can, which in an absurd way was illustrated by Samuel Beckett in “Waiting for Godot,” another dytopia work.

* * *

One of the benefits of these exchanges is not only a better insight into the ideas exchanged, but the reader cannot read such an exchange without having a conversation with him or herself.

The reason it might appear that the writer and I are talking past each other here is because he is in the “prescriptive truth business,” the business of solutions, and his focus is on those who will provide him with solutions:

(1) Prescriptive truth is practical and applicable to the problems at hand and is “solution intensive.”
(2) Prescriptive truth conforms to what ought to be desired or what is right in that context.

Optimism is an “opt to be,” or preferred to be position to pessimism because it is right for our health and well-being. It is a choice or preference, which may or may not be consistent with reality. Optimistically speaking, everyone should have health insurance. Realistically, is it possible or even desirable? What pressures would it place on other institutions? Would it lead to inferior quality for all?

I am in the “descriptive truth business,” the business of defining problems, as clearly as possible in light of data and situations, fully realizing the competing influences of my own “self-demands” and my “ideal self,” or how I ought to be. “The Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution” was created to illustrate this.

Descriptive truth has no right or wrong, or ought’s or should be’s but only “what is” and “what is not.” Descriptive truth is the only truth we can know or deny knowing because it is the reality of our actual experience. It is “problem-intensive” and not solution driven.

Prescriptions are solutions to deal with problems, and descriptions are problems defined as carefully as the writer is talented to define them in the belief that a well-defined problem is already more than half solved.

So, you can see prescriptive truth and descriptive truth are not the same. Educators are in the prescriptive truth business for the most part because they are imparting as educators solutions that have survived the test of time. Educators who write books are providing solution-driven formulae to that end.

Philosophers are almost exclusively in the “descriptive truth business,” as they are looking for trends and patterns that identify problems, not only of their time, but are indigenous to man as they see him.

Philosophers cannot divorce themselves from the fact that their vision is flawed because their reality, too, is governed by “what is” and “what is not” true about them. Schopenhauer, for instance, who wrote about love, will and ideas, held intense hatred for George Hegel, a fellow academic and philosopher, and quit teaching because of him. Should we discount Schopenhauer for this, him being one of the first philosophers who took the subject of “love” seriously as a philosophical subject? I think not.

To him reality was one thing, “WILL.” Kant said we could never know the true nature of reality, or the “thing in itself.” Schopenhauer disagreed. He was a German idealist. He saw “WILL” as a random, irrational and often destructive force. Our age confirms his thesis. He saw us as an animal governed by the survival instinct. He saw life as pain, WILL as inspiring desire, and desire constantly reminding us of the things we lack, which leads to mounting frustration, anxiety and pain.

When we do things, self-destructive things, things that baffle us after the fact, such as Bernard Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, it is the WILL, Schopenhauer says, following its own singular path. He anticipated the “Age of Knowledge," claiming the more we know the more it hurts because we can never know enough. Not very comforting, but more importantly, does his description resonate with the reader today? That is the reader’s option to determine.

Descriptive truth is so vast that philosophers only tear off a piece of it: Aristotle – ethics; Erasmus – religion of the heart (no need for a church hierarchy); Heidegger – on being or awareness of mortality; James – on pragmatism; Jung – on the unconscious; Kant – on reason; Keynes – on the efficacy of government intervention; Kierkegaard – on contempt for individual man; Locke – on the perceiving mind; Marx – on a classless society; More – on utopia; Newton – on the laws of gravity & motion; Nietzsche – on the will to power; Plato – on ethics and Socratic truth; Pythagoras – on the ultimate reality, numbers; Freud – on the talking cures, and so on.

I am in the “descriptive truth business,” which is the business of defining problems I have experienced in the line of my work. I am not in the solution business, nor do any of my books or articles purport to being prescriptions for a better life, a more prosperous livelihood or a happier existence.

(1) They instead identify, for example, the six passive behaviors I have observed killing worker performance along with worker spirit and contributing to the entropy of corporations.
(2) They identify the changing nature of work, workers, the workplace and the impact of culture.
(3) They characterize how we have become stuck in time with the illusion of reality founded on progress and unhinged with nostalgia.
(4) They document leaderless leadership and the causes of dissidents among workers, and so on.
(5) Even this current missive is descriptive truth with no intention or interest in providing prescriptive formulae.

By describing the situation, and defining it in terms relative to my experience, it allows the reader to do the same in terms of his own, as I have no answers for him because I am not he, and make no claim to being capable of solving his problem. The problem belongs to him, alone. He owns it. I do not.

If he chooses to deny it, retreat from it, or project it to others, my descriptions will give him little comfort. I am not in the comfort making business anymore than I am in the business of hiding the pessimism with a word brush of optimism.

Pessimism is “what is,” and it will be “what is not” when it no longer suits the mind of the time. We are in an age of superficiality and artificiality, claiming intimacy because we exchange text messages with each other. We are afraid to grow old and therefore grow up, spending billions to be eternally young, while burning the candle at both ends. Everything must be grand, contrived, formalized, ritualized to give it moment. There is no joy in celebration when there is no room for spontaneity, sincerity, and unbridled candor. When we live in the surreal, the real has no purchase for us.

This is description, not prescription. What is the antidote? It would be a first step to get inside the emotional character of our pessimism, which would be defining the problem. We cannot will it away, hope it away, or deny its existence with optimism. It serves our needs and therefore “it is” “what is.”

* * *

MY PROFESSOR FRIEND WRITES:

Jim,

Yes to what you just wrote but are there anyone left in this country that fails to see the problems? We all hear about these every moment of every day do we not?

How about moving the conversation both towards solutions and actions? This is not a time for our great nation to simply complain and diagnose every problem to the finest level of detail and each of us promote our own agenda as if we alone can figure this out. It is so tiresome to hear most of our talking heads and pundits telling us they have figured
out what is wrong.

Hurrah for them and on their tombstone it should read that they really knew more than anybody else. Now some if not most of us have to get engaged in creating a new economic system.

We need to promote our solutions and then do the really hard work and make the serious effort to work with others to create some small steps towards the actions needed to move us towards what we can create that is far better.

This crisis in particular is one that represents an incredible opportunity to create a far better world than what we inherited. Or more accurately lets try to leave something for our children and grandchildren that helps restore their and our own faith and trust, and
here is our real call to take action.

We now have the chance to work together and by using the miracles of a wired world it takes only a few keystrokes to find any number of places that are begging for help in creating actionable solutions. We have a surplus of complainers but apparently only a few who have the skill and desire to move to action.

Here is one example of a person who can complain with the best of them but who is also organizing an effort to make a real difference. In the past I worked with Dave Korten and brought some of my thoughts and experiences to two of his books. He and many others working with him have taken initial steps in organizing a new economic agenda and have
set up a place that people can join with each other to effect change and not just talk about it.

David's new book "Agenda for a New Economy" has just been released and his publisher, Berrett/Kohler has a president, Steve Piersanti who is also a person I highly respect. This is a firm I have encouraged you to send some of your work to. You can examine very carefully how this publisher and its leader do practice what they and their authors
preach. Steve and David are both men of principle who have the skill and energy to move beyond just words to actions.

Another person I also know and have confidence in is Carolyn Lukensmeyer and she too has the talent to help us move well beyond the complaining stage to action. This site below can give you more info on the work that her and thousands of others have been doing in helping create a democratic process and not just talking about it.

Carolyn also has a Wiki page dedicated to her and she is one of the few OD trained colleagues who has worked inside the centers of political power and devoted more time to changing the world than just complaining about it. I admire that greatly. One final note for anyone who wants to move to or support action is an incredible story captured on video as told by Paul Hawkens. His theme is to identify the greatest social movement ever.

These are the careers of the future. We all have a chance, more than in any prior generation, to move our thoughts and ideas towards collaborative action. Action that can really make a difference.

What a world and what an opportunity! Now what was it you were saying, Jim, about what is wrong today? Lets work together to move and make more efforts to really CHANGE the world. We have all shown quite convincingly that we can make words, publish books and critique the times we live in but can we bring our skills and experiences out into the world of action?

These are exciting times and not since that original forming of our country, back over nearly a quarter of a millennium ago have we been provided such an opportunity.

Thanks

Ken

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ken,

You are one of the men I admire for your dedication and hard work to make a difference in the lives that you touch academically and throughout the world in your OD consulting work. That said we might be yin and yang, the positive and negative, or the optimist and pessimist to each other.

We both come out of the tradition of organizational development (OD), but your world has been more cognitive to my intuitive experience. Put otherwise, it has not been what I have done that has made the difference. It has been what I have found out, and shared with others, which has moved them to do that has been the differentiator.

In all cases, many of which are discussed in my two new books, “Creative Selling,” and “Confident Thinking,” now struggling to find a publisher, I describe problems; I do not prescribe solutions. The answers are there, but they are not my answers, but the readers.

My experience has taught me that problems are never solved, only controlled, and to control them sufficiently, one must know the chronic perturbations that confound the systems that purport to be working smoothly. I also know that a great idea will fail if the people don’t believe in it, and a poor idea will succeed if they do.

Now to some of the ideas in your response:

(I): "The conversation should be about solutions, and actions."

I think that is the problem.

We are a solution driven society with an incredible level of energy for action for actions sake. You say we have conversations about problems. Yes, but conversation is not the problem. The problem is we are not a society with any patience for the defining of the problem. The sheer panic of the Bush and then the Obama administration with regard to the economic meltdown is evidence enough to rest my case. They both have acted half cocked with $billions of taxpayer dollars being filtered into European banks and brokerage and insurance houses, while, paradoxically, these American firms are attempting to pay down some of their debt to their European connections. It is so convoluted that no one can get a bead on it, but that, of course, was the point of it all in the first place.

William L. Livingston III, who wrote three penetrating and poignant books about defining the problem, gave up, and quit publishing in disgust. I keep publishing in the problem-defining genre and run into the same wall he has vacated.

You are prescription driven, and I can see why because you are in the business of applying prescriptions to real OD problems. Livingston was in the descriptive business, identifying problems for which society had no patience or stomach for dealing with much less identifying.

(2) “We are preoccupied with complaining.”

That, too, is not the case. Talking heads aside, who are in the business of exploiting people’s hot buttons, are not in the descriptive business, per se. It may seem, and quite legitimately so, that I keep hammering away at the same excesses, but always in terms of describing the problem, hopefully, more poignantly to bring attention to it. If anything, there is not enough qualified descriptive criticism that would reveal the true nature of the problem. Writers want to be published and so attempt to narrow their pitch to a specific audience. I attempt only to narrow mine to my descriptive experience in the hopes it has some value to the reader. I am not in the solution business.

(3) "We must create a new economic system."

We have had Adam Smith, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, and Karl Marx with Nobel Laureates feeding off their economic crumbs, while each of these distinguished minds were in the descriptive truth business of their respective times, allowing others to wrangle over pragmatic solutions. We cannot create a new economic or any other system until we understand why the old system failed.

In my descriptive parlance, one reason it fails is because we are all programmed for it to fail in the light of the new challenges. We keep failing, and will continue to fail because we are structured and programmed to fail.

We keep promoting "critical thinking," or cognitive thinking exclusively in the problem solving without the complement of “creative thinking,” or intuitive thinking in the process except cosmetically. No less than Einstein said that problem solving so handicapped is an impossibility.

We would still be doing Newtonian physics if he had not come along. We need “creative thinking,” or thinking beyond the dimensions of the problem embracing the unknown prudently, cautiously and patiently, as Einstein did, which is not in our character. We panic and then create a plethora of solutions desperately looking for problems. It is why Carl Sagan once said, “An Einstein comes around about every 300 years.” Since there has been more change in the last 30 years than the previous 300, we need an Einstein in economics now.

(4) “This crisis represents an opportunity.”

Sorry, but that statement has the ring of a cliché and a cover up for the painful business of a society unglued. It isn’t pessimism that is killing us; it is unbridled optimism that keeps generating these crises calling them new opportunities.

It is time that we start crawling through the underworld muck we have created and get inside our crises instead of dressing them up as opportunities.

We are in the crisis generating business. That is our main business. We create crises, then solve them, learn little or nothing from them, congratulate ourselves for our solutions, and then repeat them over and over again.

That is what I describe in such books as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007). I don’t prescribe for it. I show where we are stuck, page, chapter and book. I tell why we are stuck. Why?

“Progress is our most important product.”

Progress is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates economic miracles in the US, then Germany, then Japan, now India and China, and for it we cannot see our face across the street.

Tell me one advanced society or one emerging society that questions the dictum: progress is our most important product? None, zero, zilch!

It is progress that is killing us, and we are in the manufacturing business of creating crises of progress so we can solve them, and then congratulate ourselves for the limited success that we experience, because with an ephemeral tick of the clock another crisis in progress is happening somewhere on this small planet earth.

(5) “We have the miracle of the wired world.”

It is a miracle no doubt. It is the future. No doubt about that either, but where it is taking us? That is in doubt.

If it is used for good, people in the most remote sections of the world can be contacted with the potential of them sharing their cultural riches with us and us with them. At present, it is more a toy than a tool, more a curiosity than cooperative device. It has not lessened the great divide between the haves and have-nots. It has not reduced hunger or reduced genocide. In fact, an argument could be made that it has increased man’s greed and malevolence. Where are philosophers when you need them?

(6) “We have a surplus of complainers.”

If I take your meaning correctly, and I believe I do, you place me in that category. If so, you have not understood what I am saying or why.

There is no gain to my pain. Writing these missives takes away from my novel, and I’m not getting any younger. If there is anything that I am saying that is worthwhile, it is that:

(1) We cannot depend on bromides, pretty words, reassuring writers,
(2) We cannot depend on people who can write tantalizing prose with algorithms and paradigms that capture the reader’s mind and ease his discomfiture with solutions.
(3) We love solutions, and then we don’t have to think for ourselves.
(4) We are past the time of experts, past the time of dependency on specialists, past the time of obeisance to authority, past the time of the nation-state, past the time of one dominant race, past the time hegemony and empire,
(5) We as people, however, crave the words of spellbinders who would relieve us of the need to think for ourselves. So, they will always be there waiting to mesmerize us with their easy answers to health, wealth and happiness.

Notice these scholars and writers, journalists and educators don’t cause the reader any pain, and as a bonus, they give the reader a new boat of solutions to launch into the water.

I cause pain. I cause unease. I cause people to think about the unthinkable. I cause people to wonder about what they take for granted. Yes, I introduce them to themselves as thinking persons because they have not been trained to think. A college degree doesn’t train you to think, nor does a Ph.D. Education is an industry producing a product and that product is a specialist of some sort to be plugged into the system, no thinking required.

You can’t be serious, Jim, you might say? I’m dead serious. We can launch a satellite to the moon, we can do open heart surgery, but that is not thinking; that is programmed learning to do those things. Thinking is beyond the doing to enjoin all the complexities of life, which originate with and end with us, alone.

The two best selling books in the world require no thinking; they are all about behavioral change: they are the Holy Bible and diet books.

We have astrophysicists and brain surgeons that know a lot about knowing, but can prove behaviorally to know very little about being. That’s the problem; that’s where ethics is involved; that’s where people cannot be duped; that’s where people can see beyond the end of their nose. I dare say astrophysicists and brain surgeons are not any less likely than high school drop outs to be prisoners to their own appetites, as Schopenhauer might say.

Specialists have been trained to regurgitate and do, to behave within the confines of their professions, but not necessarily outside of them, to be optimistic, to hope for the best, to believe in their leaders. You have seen me write, “Everyone is a leader or no one is.” I don’t say that lightly.

There is never much written about that premise, which to my mind is the unit of leadership, everything else is only incidental to it. A President of the United States is part of a tradition started 10,000 years ago with witch doctors. I remind readers of that fact.

(7)“My friend Dave Korten has a new economic agenda.”

I’m sure it resonates with you, and I’m equally sure it will resonate with many others because they are looking for something new. I am not interested in a new economic agenda because as powerful and well thought out as it might be it pales by comparison with what I am saying here.

You cannot superimpose the most striking edifice on a crumbling foundation. It will ultimately collapse.

You travel the world and do a lot of good. I travel through the labyrinth of my thoughts and they take me to far off places beyond topography and geography. I am a philosopher with a problem solving background. I am not the first scientifically trained man to be smitten with philosophy. I’ve just not taken the time to create a system. Perhaps I’ll do it in my novels.

Bill Livingston, as mentioned earlier, has been one of my best teachers and I’m sure you’ve never read his books: “The New Plague”(1985), “Have Fun at Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). I have read them many times and their wear and tear shows.

He saw my “Work Without Managers” (1990) at a Book Fair in New York City, and we exchanged books. We have been friends ever since. Virtually everything he defined in those books, and I defined in mine, came unhappily true.

Were we complaining? We thought we were defining the problem, something that solution driven books are trying to solve without knowing what it is. Livingston became weary of publishing, but I persist even though I am misread and misunderstood. When the two of us are long gone, others will read our books because they will be safely free of our torch and torque.

(8) “Action is what we need.”

There is no argument there. You are not only a proponent of such action but a dedicated practitioner, and for that I commend you. You are a collaborator and that also is needed. You care and make a difference. The world is a better place for your being out there doing your thing. It would please me even more if a lot of the things I’m saying here were more responsive to and in support of your doing.

(9) “Let’s change the world.”

I don’t want to change the world. I want to understand and accept it as it is, and as it isn’t. I think that is our problem. We look at things from opposite ends of the telescope.

So many well-intentioned people are attempting to change the world without knowing whether the world wants or needs changing. Not everyone needs digital TV to be happy. Nor does everyone have to live in an electronically automated and controlled mausoleum. You know this, Ken, you’ve traveled as I have traveled, and have seen indigenous people happy living close to the earth and God, and each other with very little. They don’t envy us; they just want us to leave them alone.

* * *

I must share a conversation I had with BB. She read my last missive to you, and said, “Well, you’ve done it again, haven’t you?”

“Done what?” I replied innocently.

“Lost another friend, someone you actually esteem.”

“He knows that.”

“Of course, he does, after you slam everything he says.”

“I’m just expressing myself.”

“Do you have to do it with a sledgehammer.”

“A sledgehammer? Now that’s a little harsh.”

“You think that’s harsh?”

“You know it is.”

“No I don’t. I planned on saying a bulldozers, but I thought better.”

“He’ll write me back.”

“You think so. Why?”

“Because he’s a smarter and nicer person than I am.”

“He is nice, but you like being contrary, as to him being smart, do you ever tell him that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He knows.”

“How does he know?”

“I’ve spent three days composing this. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t esteem and respect and value him as a friend, and worthy of my honest ideas.”

She shakes her head. “I’m going to make dinner.”

And always be well,

Jim