LESSONS LEARNED -- THE GENESIS OF FINDING AN AUDIENCE

LESSONS LEARNED – THE GENESIS OF FINDING AN AUDIENCE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 30, 2010

* * *

“There are three classes of people in the world. The first learn from their own experience, these are wise. The second learn from the experience of others, these are the happy. The third neither learn from their own experience nor the experience of others, these are fools.”

Lord Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), English courtier, orator and wit.

* * *

REFERENCE:

DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), written by William L. Livingston IV, has been an epiphany for me. I have known the author for twenty years. We became friends when we exchanged books we had written those many years ago.

Livingston has devoted 2010 to testing D4P to find its audience. A test completed has been with his peers (professional engineers. It has been a disappointment, but not a surprise.

A mismatch has surfaced between content, context and process and systemic programming. "The compass of competency covered in this manual must of necessity encircle both technological (content) and sociological (context) realms," he states simply in an effort to focus on ends rather than to be obsessed with means in the process.

Cultural programming is powerful stuff.

The "Pied Pipers" of convention, or business as usual find us metaphorically marching blindly off the cliff. This is literally mirrored as crude oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico with little abeyance.

Natural Law has no conscience.

We defy Nature at our peril. Livingston reminds us of this dramatic fact. Nature rarely walks in a straight line yet we often address her as if she does.

We get caught up in our semantics of truth. Validity does not equal credibility. Nature pounds this at our senses. Truth does not shrine of its own light. It involves understanding and, yes, accepting the undercurrent subtleties of Nature. She has given us a brain with two lobes, a bicameral mind, but we choose to use only one, confining us in the prison of our thoughts.

Everything we are is an invention, science, religion, art, while Nature has no need to invent anything. Nature is.

Livingston attempts to bring us out of our darkness by bringing us back into compliance with Nature. DESIGN TO PREVENT complements Nature’s forces. We have gotten off Nature’s track, he is telling us, and the force of that friction accelerates entropy, which is destroying us.

These things I am thinking as I walk today.

* * *

AUTHORS, TITLES AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Perhaps Livingston's intended audience is wide of the mark.

This was true of the Irish clergyman Jonathan Swift some three hundred years ago.

The original title of Swift's GULLIVER’S TRAVELS (1726) was “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships.”

Swift was an angry man. He was alleged to have hated Man, but loved individual men. Hatred is masked in GULLIVER, which was meant as a caustic, polemical political and social satire novel directed at the English people, whom he parodied as representing mankind in general, and the Whig political party in particular.

With disarming simplicity of style and language, but careful attention to detail, he cut through British pomposity and injustice to strip its society naked.

GULLIVER, which has never been out of print, was aimed at society but has survived as a children’s classic.

Many writers over the centuries have copied his content and context, but never with the impact of the original process.

Swift was not a brave man. He feared social ostracism and even criminal prosecution so published his classic novel anonymously using a nom de plume, even disguising his handwriting.

Today is another time but an equally fragmented society. Authors, now as then, who take risks are seldom applauded. We jump on the bandwagon when authors reconfirm what we already know and already think, while we choose to ignore those who would suggest otherwise.

* * *

LIVINGSTON AS PHILOSOPHER ENGINEER

I’ve given a copy of this book to a young man who is not an engineer but has a passionate interest in science. He is just starting to read the book. I am thinking of our conversation as I walk today.

* * *

“It’s more a less a manual, isn’t it?” he offers.

“It could be seen as such I suppose, certainly a manual for engineers in prevention strategy, but I see it as much more.”

“But there’s not a lot of engineering in it," he insists.

“By engineering, you mean mathematical algorithms and such. No. That is understood and, therefore, not the book's premise. The book is meant to get inside the engineer's head to understand the content, context and process of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION. To design to prevent it is necessary to know what obstructs that possibility.”

“Oh, I’ve missed that but I haven’t read but 50 pages. I do find the charts and schematics quite interesting.”

“You haven’t missed anything. Read it and let it speak to you where you are and how you are and then let us discuss the book."

"But I'm not an engineer like you."

"My background and life’s work has been largely in human engineering. While this book is designed for professional engineers who deal with control theory and systemic design in mechanistic systems, Livingston is something of a philosopher engineer.”

“How so?”

“He looks at institutional society as a philosopher would only from an engineering perspective. We live in an engineered society, a society that owes as much to the engineer in the last two centuries that Western society previously owed the church, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment period.

"Engineers were, of course, a force from Roman times on, but engineers over the last two centuries have defined the modern world. Unfortunately, they have also allowed it to drift on secular enlightenment without the benefit of a moral compass.

"The structure, order and control emblematic of engineering with its reverence for natural law have failed to penetrate institutional society.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Bear with me.

"Livingston in an effort to engage the professional engineer in the rationale of design for prevention exposes the maladies of institutional society.

"He demonstrates how this is so with its passionate defense of the status quo, and the practice of business as usual in the face of its collision with first principles and natural law. This has led to societal dysfunction.

"Livingston argues that its stance of infallibility, hierarchical rigidity and closed approach to the problem solving has accelerated entropy and therefore signaled collapse.”

“I've not read far enough to integrate them as you have expressed it here, but I have noticed he repeats the same ideas again and again.”

“Mind you, I am sharing with you my interpretation, not his, not yours. I bring my life experience to this book. It resonates with me especially the statement: the purpose of an organization is what it does.

“I have often found the stated purpose of the organization in absolute conflict with what it actually accomplished. Personalities, politics, hidden agendas, cognitive biases, and the cardinal sins of institutional infallibility, defense of the status quo and business as usual invariably got in the way.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Yes, of course. I spent nine months in Fairfax, Virginia after a riot broke out in the county at a place called Herndon. A white police officer unloaded his service revolver on a young African American in a Seven-Eleven store, after the man grabbed the officer’s nightstick when he was pushed violently into a beverage cooler

“The officer had followed him to the convenient store when he saw the young man driving a car knowing his license had been revoked. The young man denied he had been driving, and everyone in the store supported the lie. This infuriated the officer who had a running feud with the young man, shooting him six times and wounding him fatally.

“A riot followed in the shopping center with angered blacks throwing Molotov cocktails at police. It was a standoff until a discredited junior officer stepped into the fray and negotiated a settlement.

"American Management Association brought me in after the fact to make sense of what had transpired and why.

“Several factors were apparent, which complicated the function of the Fairfax County Police Department’s ability to serve and protect.

"For one, the department had grown from 84 to 840 sworn officers in ten years, but continued to operate with the pastoral consistency of its earlier size. Senior officers micromanaged, and complaints were hand counted at headquarters while computers remained idle."

"When was this?"

"1975."

"Why?"

"It was a matter of policy. All recruits were expected to spend five years in patrol before being given permanent assignments. Two recruits in the field actually had graduate degrees in computer science but had years left on patrol duty before being reassigned.

“Add to this the fact that 1,000 African Americans were relocated from Washington, DC to Fairfax County with little planning. Unemployment among black youths was over fifty percent, and the only recreational opportunity for them was to hang out at the shopping center, where they drove their cars around and around, or congregated in the parking lot listening to the music blaring from amplifiers on the roofs of businesses.

“The Herndon city council reacting to complaints from whites imposed a curfew on the complex, requiring the lowering of the music volume, and when this didn't work, disallowing music in the shopping center altogether. The angst of this black community festered, and then exploded that hot summer day in 1975, as the shopping center was torched and the businesses looted.

“A comedy of errors followed. Officers didn’t have protective flack vests and firemen were afraid to enter the fray for fear of being hit with fire missiles.

"The African Americans burned down their only comfort center in contempt for their collective deprivation, while a demoted officer came forward to save the day, and restore some sanity.

“The white police officer had come into disrepute previously for stealing a hunting knife out of the evidence locker. His connection with the African American community, however, was good. He was known and respected for his attention to their complaints, and the fact that he made it his business to serve and protect them as best he could.

"While ostracized from the police community -- he was never invited to police functions -- he was trusted by this otherwise ostracized community.

“The rioters would negotiate with only him, and so for a time he became the acting chief of police, chief negotiator and the face of Fairfax County authority. Once calm had been restored and the rioters returned to their homes, his original exclusion was reinstated.”

“That is some story.”

“I wish it was. It is life when the purpose of the organization is clouded and no one knows what has gone wrong or why.”

“Until an outsider comes along?”

“I’m afraid that isn’t even true. Every OD crisis I’ve been invited to work has had the incendiaries of which Livingston writes, but what of those that no one intervenes?

"Incompetence is seldom noted because institutions are no better than individuals in knowing they are incompetent.

"Livingston is not saying institutions are bad. He is not sullying institutional purpose but the reason for its faulty function. He is saying to the engineer, and to the outsider that knowledge and expertise is imperfect, that everyone's tool kit needs retooling, and that it should start with an appreciation of natural law.

"He is not advocating pressing because pressing in any case doesn’t work. When you get into the book, you’ll see what I mean. He is emphatic when he has to be. Take the chart 'Routinely Encountered Pursuits of the Impossible.’ Really study it in terms of my example.”

“Okay. I sense that it dovetails with your books.”

“You might say I've covered similar territory, but never this well.”

“I disagree. You attack dysfunction just as vigorously if you ask me.”

“Attacking dysfunction, and getting inside it are worlds apart.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Livingston shows why institutions are failing. It is the stance of infallibility that cripples them. Moreover, their hierarchical structure of presumed infallibility puts a burden on them they cannot fulfill. It becomes pure folly to defend the status quo and conduct business as usual.

“I call it the American disease of corpocracy. Livingston gets inside the disease to reveal its fatal symptoms. He has entered unchartered territory with the confidence of having Natural Law on his side.”

“I think I see. Contempt for natural law with infallibility is the same as contempt for the environment with pollution.”

“If you like.”

“Quite frankly, he is not the first to make this comparison. How is he different?”

I chuckle. “In every way. Just as he sees institutional society clearly, he also recognizes an inherent problem is the way we think.”

“You mean yin-yang and hindsight and foresight, all that stuff. He repeats that mantra a lot. Why is that?”

I chuckle again. “I’ve been accused of that as well. It is why you pound on the door when nobody answers knowing somebody is in there.”

“What if they never answer?”

“Livingston isn’t the first to encounter that nor will he be the last. Ideas eventually get through. But you take me away from the thrust of what he is saying about thinking.”

“Which is?”

“We are a vertical thinking society, top down, linear logic, rational, concrete and palpable. It is deductive reasoning, analytical, the exercise of pure reason, from cause to effect, objective, from a general law to a particular instance.

"This is the scientific method devised by Kant and perfected by Wittgenstein and Russell in the modern era. It is a priori thinking, or left-brain thinking, the so-called masculine brain.

"Kant claimed if it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist. It is a hindsight orientation with the focus on what is known or knowable. It is the thought pattern of the Western mind.”

“Livingston has a problem with that?”

“No, that is not his concern. It is rather that it is not enough. Vertical thinking has led to the haughty infallibility upon which institutional society is constructed.

"I call it forward inertia, having the foot on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere while looking through the rearview mirror unaware of being stuck or courting disaster.”

“Hindsight thinking?”

“Exactly! We see it personified in crisis management and the paralysis of analysis.

"Livingston is focusing on DESIGN FOR PREVENTION for professional engineers but I view his work through the broader lens of human engineering.”

“How is that?”

“Bear with me again.

"This is my take on vertical thinking. It is how we are programmed to think. It has served us well, but now we need to complement this thinking with horizontal or lateral thinking.

"Lateral thinking is inductive thinking, which is not scientific, not cognitive, but intuitive, conceptual and holistic. It is analogic, from effect to cause, subjective, experiential, and from a particular instance to a general theory. It is a posteriori thinking.

"This is right brain thinking, which is sometimes called the feminine mind. It is the thought pattern of the Eastern mind.”

“Wait a minute. This is a lot to absorb. As far as I’ve read, Livingston isn’t exactly saying this.”

“No, not exactly. As I said, this is my take on his wonderful book. He has a particular focus while I have a more general one. His clarity has cut through some barriers in my programming, and yes, my cognitive biases. It has allowed me to make these connections.

"For example, I would interpret what he is saying regarding institutional command and control infallibility as representative of a broken society because of a broken brain.”

“Broken brain?”

“Broken because we go off half cocked all the time perceiving the world from a left brain perspective while essentially ignoring the right brain.

"The world is exploding around us because the right and left-brain are not connected, not working as one.

"Science is important (left brain) but so is religion (right brain). We live in a material world that we can explain away, but also a spiritual world, which we cannot.

"The left brain is verbally dependent while the right brain is metaphorically so. Both worlds exist in our brains.

"We are moving beyond the analytical and analytical philosophy because it is not enough. Existence is now a merry dance of myths and mechanisms in a computational age, which requires the creative mind, and the creative mind can only function when both right and left brains are speaking to each other.”

“And they are not?”

“They are not.”

“And Livingston is correcting this?”

“No, Livingston is simply asking the right questions, looking at a fundamentals.”

“Which is?”

“I think I’ve already told you. In any case, when you’ve read the book, you’ll be able to tell me. Good reading!”

* * *