The Fisher Paradigm © ™
Organizational Development1
Intellectual Capital & Power of People
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Noun. Grammar. Any of a class of words naming or denoting a person, place, thing, action or quality.
Intuition. The direct knowing or learning of something without conscious use of reasoning; immediate understanding.
Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2001)
Abstract
The Fisher Paradigm © ™ is a diagnostic tool. What is different is that it is of a primarily intuitive rather than cognitive design. There are no algorithms or mathematical models of verification, yet it is the most authentic tool of a discipline that has suffered from the beginning with an identity crisis. OD grew out of a need to bring some order and comprehension to the complex organization, which grows more incomprehensible with the passing of time. Managers and management attempt to give it direction and purpose while becoming increasingly atavistic and anachronistic. OD is currently being underused if not misused as a subset of human resources management. The function of HR is instrumental (productivity) while that of OD is terminal (continuous growth & development). HR is dedicated to the management of things (hiring, placement, training & development, firing of people), while OD is an assessment tool of the integrity of leadership. HR is an insider discipline with its client senior management. OD is an outsider discipline with its client the integrity of the organizational leadership. HR reflects the values of senior management. OD represents the conscience of organization. HR is primarily cognitive; OD is primarily intuitive. HR reflects the moral authority, while OD reflects the ethical authority of organization. Being moral is a required operational good. Being ethical is an optional good. HR revolves around expedient relations in which obligations depend on nothing more than the shared experiences of the moment. Expedient relations are instrumental, mechanized, means-to-ends, fitting, good, timely and useful – in other words, a resource. OD revolves around enduring relations in which workers are dependent on a special relationship with others and the past – in other words, with history. Expedient relations represent a morality of demand. Enduring relations represent the ethics ask of relationships. The main task of OD is to demonstrate mnemonic obligations through intuitive leadership, the obligation to remember people and events from the past that gave integrity and purpose to the organization. That said, corporate memory is at the heart of corporate identity, and OD is all about corporate identity. Still, the metaphor of memory is just that, a metaphor. Corporations have no minds of the past. The corporate memory consists of stories from the past, kept alive in the present to draw on as a basis for the willingness of workers to work a life in corporate togetherness. OD as the conscience of the organization is at once possessor of the rich legacy of memories, while maintainer of the history that provides continuity with the future. This depends on the value and not the fact of community, on the actual vitality of organization and not on the propaganda of its existence. As such, a new dimension of enterprise is called for that represents the irony of being less instrumental but more relevant. It is the organization’s total reliance on vertical thinking and cognitive reasoning that has placed it at risk. This is evident in the tedium of crisis management, circular argument, and critical thinking being stubbornly employed at the expense of the complement of lateral thinking, intuition and creative thinking. OD exercises the unconscious reservoir of possibilities, while still utilizing its cognitive arsenal. The Fisher Paradigm © ™ postulates that the unconscious has an enormous teleological sense and essence that moves it towards ethical goals, that it has a real sense of what is happening beyond rational explanatory limits.
Introduction to the Idea
We are in a 2,000 year old cognitive groping of reality, and it is extremely doubtful that the empirical evidence upon which the Fisher Paradigm is based, leastwise in the short term will prove convincing to those obsessively cognitive. Given that anticipated objection, I would suggest that most leaders of science, government, education, the religious, as well as of business and industry are using the Fisher Paradigm, but are unaware of it. The efforts of this brief is to encourage its use and build confidence in its exercise by providing the framework and context of its design. It is a diagnostic tool available to lay people as well as professionals.
The Fisher Paradigm proposes that virtually everything revolves around learned experience. Formal education can either enhance or present a roadblock to learned experience, as can cultural programming. Learned experience has two components:
· Immanence – something “inside the individual.”
· Transcendence – something “outside the individual.”
I further argue that the content of consciousness contains more than what it actually contains. There is something invisible in everything that is visible, an absence at the heart of all presence. Yet, because of cultural programming, there is the tendency to view rich tangible experience exclusively in logical, cognitive, intellectual and scientific terms because that is how answers are found.
We are far better at describing something than anticipating its happening, far better at developing explanatory models than determining causation, far better at generating data than pursuing ideas, far more deductive than inductive, far more inclined to critical than creative thinking, far more disposed to protect sacred biases than to move beyond them, far more apt to search for rather than to create solutions, far more given to ape the organizations (personalities) of others than to uncover our own indigenous essence. And I say for reason.
We are in a world of constant change and the desire is for stability and permanence both of which have an instrumental focus. Our senses are constantly bombarded with feelings that expose the arbitrariness of this mind set. Why is that?
Without having to think at all, we perceive certain structures that in the truest sense are not given to our awareness. They are assumed because we are taught such assumptions. What we sense, what pounds at our subconscious to breakthrough is expressed in this litany: “Did I really see what I believe I saw, might I be fooling myself?” What we usually do when faced with this dilemma is to reject our intuition, our insight into the moment, rather than integrate the disparate information into a conceptual framework of some palpable significance and of use to us. We fall back on what is accepted and expected in order to be consistent with what everyone says what is “is.”
This is a pardonable sin for most everyone, but not for OD practitioners. If OD embraces its doubt, if it ignores the intuitive sense boiling in it for attention, the experience OD believes it has had will not be really its, since without being aware of it OD will have been literally “outside itself,” or “beside itself,” but not in possession of the insight crying for attention. OD would have been in a state of transcendence but either unable or unwilling to grasp its significance because “it was just too, too weird.” Consider the cube as illustration of this phenomenon.
A cube has six sides but we can never actually see more than three sides of the cube. Our immanence or “something inside” tells us there are three faces, not a cube itself. But if we embrace our transcendence or “something outside” in clear subjective reporting, we know we are looking at a cube. We don’t say, “I am looking at three faces and deduce I’m looking at a cube.” So, it is not false to say that our perceptions contain more than they contain.
Immanent transcendence contains within itself the ultimate significance of learned experience if we can demonstrate sufficient courage to embrace it. That is why OD practitioners with diverse backgrounds in such dissimilar fields as psychology and engineering, banking and literature, personnel and manufacturing have a rich inventory of immanent transcendence with which to work. But alas, what prevents this so often from happening is the barrier of cultural programming. The individual grows from the “outside-in” rather than the “inside-out.” Several significant others from parents to teachers to preachers and on define the individual before learned experience kicks in. To become oneself, and discover one’s essence, rebellion is often displayed as Einstein demonstrated in opposing the 300-year reign of Newtonian physics, and more recently by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman whose playful vision reinvented quantum mechanics and grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him.2 Both these accomplished scientists relied more on their internal dialogue than the constraints of their cultural programming to define themselves and orchestrate their minds to new scientific truths.
The Fisher Paradigm acknowledges this barrier and proposes a model meant to engage insight, promote intuition, and integrate this into conceptual understanding. Such understanding is only possible when transcendence is realized. The Fisher Paradigm promotes this understanding by postulating that learned experience centers around three discrete spheres of influence: personality, geographic and demographic. These are offered as profiles recognizing that these spheres are constantly bombarding our senses with understanding beyond the visible three surfaces of the cube.
Case in Point
Few would argue the discovery of the “DNA fingerprint” has been one of the most remarkable in recent times. James Watson and James Crick were co-discoverers of the DNA molecule. That enormous breakthrough was managed through conventional painstaking laboratory research. This is well documented in Watson’s best selling book The Double Helix (1969), or with methodology representative of the prototype of what we expect from scientists. Not so for Kary B. Mullis, Nobel laureate for Chemistry, 1993.
Mullis departs from the furrowed brow stabbing in the dark of this mystifying lot to be more like everyman. Yet all he did was invent the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which redefines the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science. Mullis is a surfer, a bar hopper, strip club patron, veteran of Berkeley in the 1960s, and perhaps the only Nobel laureate to describe a possible encounter with aliens. A scientist of boundless curiosity, he refuses to fit the mold of “scientist,” or to accept any proposition based on secondhand or hearsay evidence, yet embraces the chiaroscuro of life in all its shades and patterns, not from a distance but as part of him.
In his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (2000) he challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma and every other kind of authority as he reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind. His words fit comfortably in the Fisher Paradigm © ™:
Suddenly, I knew how to do it. ”Holy shit!” I hissed and let off the accelerator. The car coasted into a downhill turn. I pulled off. A giant buckeye stuck out from the hill. It rubbed against the window where Jennifer, my girlfriend was asleep. I found an envelope and a pencil in the glove compartment. Jennifer wanted to get moving. I told her something incredible had just occurred to me. She yawned and leaned against the window to go back to sleep.
We were at mile marker 46.58 on Highway 128 (Malibu, California), and we were at the very edge of the dawn of the age of PCR. I could feel it. I wrote hastily and broke the lead. Then I found a pen. I confirmed (my intuition). I must have smiled. I could still smell the buckeyes, but they were drifting a long way off. I pulled back onto the highway, and Jennifer made a sound of approval . . . About a mile down the canyon, I pulled off again. The thing had just exploded again. Not only could I make a zillion copies, but they would always be the same size. I had just solved the two major problems in DNA chemistry. Abundance and distinction. And I had done it in one stroke. I stopped the car at a nice comfortable turnout and took my time working my way through the consequence. Everybody on Earth who cared about DNA would want to use it. It would spread into every biology lab in the world. I would be famous. I would get the Nobel Prize.3
The Fisher Paradigm is common yet rare, common because the innate capacity is there for everyone, rare because it goes against societal cultural programming and expectations. If anything, society kills the intuitive drive, as the process of unabashed intuition is too incomprehensible to contemplate. This is displayed in the Washington Post’s crass assessment of Dancing Naked in the Mind Field on the books back cover:
“Kary Mullis, perhaps the weirdest human ever to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has written a chatty, rambling, funny, iconoclastic tour through the wonderland that is his mind.”
Dancing naked in the mind field, indeed. Mullis was considered by his scientific colleagues to be a flake, if not incompetent, for the ways he behaved against how he was expected to behave as a scientist. Thus he was not only able to think outside the box but beyond the limits of what the Scots like to call the meinie or the multitude. He was a free man in an age of conformity, which ironically was even more perverse in the scientific community.
The Fisher Paradigm © ™
Stated simply, the Fisher Paradigm incorporates the organization whole, its
personality, geography and demographics, assimilates this wholeness subconsciously, and comes to understand its insights intuitively.4 From insights gleaned, the inclination is to move quickly to a more rationalistic mode, but this is resisted as absorbing the situation whole is fundamental to the process. Once intuition of the Fisher Paradigm registers empirically on the reader’s mind, the temptation is to say, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” Many have said that of the Mullis discovery. This doesn’t make it any less cogent.
There are three basic spheres of influence in every group dynamic: between the person, the place and the thing. These spheres may be derived from the organization’s:
· Personality (person) profile: personal eccentricities, culture, circumstances…
· Geographic (place) profile: situational dynamics, time, circumstances…
· Demographic (thing) profile: population, age, gender, education, status, circumstances…
Each of these spheres of influence is constantly in a state of motion interacting with the other two, where they intercept is the domain of intuition, which alerts the observer to what is actually happening if the observer allows empathetic understanding to surface in the form of insight. For this to occur the observer becomes the observed, inseparable from the dynamic. Like a heat sensor, the observer is drawn through the distracting camouflage always present to the target, and becomes one with the target in an eruption of understanding. Take the familiar story of Archimedes and his principle as reported by Plutarch:
Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a way to compute the proportion of gold in King Heiron’s crown by observing how much water flowed over the bathing stool. He leapt up as one possessed, crying heureka! (I’ve found it”). After repeating this several times, he went his way.5
The Sicilian mathematician (ca. 287 – 212 B.C.) was the classic absentminded professor, a brilliant thinker often oblivious to the real world and its expectations. He died while tracing a geometric diagram in the dust, as Rome was conquering Syracuse. So absorbed was he in his speculation that he didn’t hear the command of a Roman soldier to rise; the soldier, infuriated, ran him through.
Rationale for the Fisher Paradigm©™
Most briefly, the Fisher Paradigm is art rather than science, impressionistic rather than cognitive. Reality is complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of play as plan. Given this, the Fisher Paradigm doesn’t separate cause from effect, subject from object, thinking from feeling. It is consistent with Thought and Extension as proposed by Spinioza.6
Spinoza infers natural order must be undivided to be comprehended. Archimedes, tracing the geometric diagram in the dust, was one with
the diagram and not separate from it, outside the box and the limits of the world around him, yet very much a part of it. The fundamental features of that order, as we perceive them, emerge from within that order, not separate from it. The observer isn’t considering the subject observed from a distance but is integral to it.
The Fisher Paradigm abandons the bucket theory of the mind, as in the philosophy of Descartes and other empiricists, according to which, in perception, ideas arrive through the senses into a receptacle, or bucket, where they are processed. This is the wrong picture.
The Fisher Paradigm encompasses Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking,7 which insists that linear logic and cause and effect analysis reinforce the box, and offer no
opportunity to think outside it. The emphasis, de Bono claims, is to lionize critical thinking, which is limited to the box or what is already known, whereas lateral thinking introduces the possibility of creative thinking, which doesn’t search for answers but creates them out of experience and what lies beyond. While the Fisher Paradigm shows evidence of following the prospects of creativity, it does so by thinking with the whole body, not simply the mind.
That said, there is no perception without activity and thought. All perception is in an interaction with an eternal reality, a reality more often intuitively sensed than cognitively understood, especially as it relates to persons, places and things. I use the plural here because that defines organization, which indeed has a personality, geography and encompasses demographics. It is a mistake to see organization as different than what it is, a most human entity.
This separates intuitive OD from all other disciplines. OD’s power is self-conscious in being aware of itself as the subject initiating movement and observing the environment. OD’s knowledge of its own movement is not primarily to be found in observation, but in its sense of its own purpose and intension, which is thought, and which follows the laws of thought but intuitively so.
This subjective knowledge is continuously available to OD, whenever OD is conscious of the wholeness embodied in people, places and things. Trying to understand OD as a straightforward, naturalistic description of action is bound to disappoint and paint the wrong picture. What people are doing is not what OD must see, but the metaphysical connection of how this picture fits together to perceive what is actually taking place beyond appearances. This means OD must accustom itself to the fact that mind-body-soul are intertwined in Thought and Extension as two universal features in the common order of Nature. This relationship is an active, involved interaction and not a dispassionate observer disconnected from the subject at play.
Presentation of OD in Everyday Life
Recently I accompanied my wife to a large discount department store. As she was trying on clothes, I watched a man, woman and child shop. The man was six-foot, athletic looking, dressed in shorts, tee shirt and sneakers. He had a trim physique and prominent calves that suggested a jogger. His salt and pepper beard gauged his age at about 46. The woman was tan, trim and athletic looking in a blouse, shorts and sneakers, age about mid-twenties. The boy was dumpy, about thirteen, a little on the heavy side dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and sneakers. The man kept bringing clothes for the boy to try on until the cart was overflowing. The woman didn’t participate, but maintained a bored expression with folded arms across her chest, constantly looking at her watch, forcing a smile whenever the man looked at her. When my wife acquired her purchase, I said, “Wait! Look at that couple and the boy. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a family shopping. Why?”
“Look again,” I insisted. “Study them a minute. Now tell me what you see.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said, “I could stalk them if that’s what you want and it wouldn’t change anything. So, tell me! What do you see?”
“I see a father and his son, and a woman not the mother. The boy is from up north, visiting his father and his trophy wife, and she would like to be elsewhere.”
“Okay, smart guy,” she said, then walked over and started a conversation with the woman, who was even younger looking up close.
“Handsome boy!” my wife opened. “What is he 12, 13? You don’t look old enough to be his mother.”
“I’m not,” she answered tartly and then recovered quickly. “Donny is my husband’s son visiting us from Chicago.” Then to put a lid on the conversation added, “We have no children.” With that, my wife politely withdrew.
“How did you do that?” she asked shaking her head.
“You already know,” I answered. “You were just too busy shopping.”
It involved marrying the mind to the moment to become one with what was being observed in terms of the three spheres of influence to understand what they implied together. It is the clash of these spheres that produces the chain reaction of intuition.
· Personality profile of the three was discrete – father enthusiastically interacting with his son, the woman isolated calculating how much all this would cost;
· Geographic profile – father and son in one space shopping with a vengeance, woman in another with folded arms looking at her watch, wanting to be somewhere else;
· Demographic profile – father clearly of an age to have a teenage son, not the woman, man and woman in comparable physical health, not the boy. But it was the boy’s pallid complexion, which spelled separation.
The Fisher Paradigm is designed to advance intuition. It provides an intuitive framework for gauging and interpreting problems in impressionistic terms that OD practitioners, executives and change agents can understand and aptly apply without confusion. A more in depth discussion is provided in the Fisher trilogy:
· Personality Profile – The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (The Delta Group Florida, 1999). The Taboo deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural and psychological conditioning, which program people, and by extension organizations into the belief that you search for excellence when excellence can only be created out of its own reality.
· Geographic Profile – Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (St. Lucie Press, 1998). Six Silent Killers deals with the social termites burrowing silently into the infrastructure of organizations weakening them to the point of being too late for damage control. The culprit? The geography of fear generated in precipitous decision-making that spawns the venom of virtuous hate that can poison the collective will of a company and lead to its sudden demise even if 100-years-old.
· Demographic Profile – Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Worker (1stBooks Library, 2000). The Industrial Revolution is more than 150 years old, and yet most workers are still treated as well paid serfs. Something is wrong when society is blessed with the most able work force in the history of man, yet managers act as if leadership is their exclusive domain in the dispensing of orders with the expectation of obsequious compliance without complaint. This denies the fundamental change in the balance of power. It has led to corporate sin where both workers and managers share in the guilt.
The Fisher Paradigm is not theoretical but empirical. I have been practicing this paradigm for more than forty years. The chronology of my OD experiences with it that follows is representative of what led to this epiphany.
Thayer Maxwell & How Intuitive OD First Surfaced
Three weeks into my new job with Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, and a comparable time away from the security of the research laboratory with Standard Brands, Inc., I am told by my district manager, “I don’t think you’re cut out for this type of work.” Only the previous week when asked by my area manager to critique his calls, I told him they were mainly social calls; he didn’t ask for the order; didn’t give reasons to change suppliers; gave a canned speech, and made Nalco out to be a big deal as if that had anything to do with anything. This was the first time my young family of a wife and two small children had been out of Iowa. She hated Indiana, was homesick and complained, rightly so, that I was making less money than in the lab. My boss’s words stung like a slap in the face. “We’ll give you some accounts to service,” he said. “You’re solid technically, but you should find something else within the month.” From somewhere in my reeling mind I asked if I could call on competitor accounts. “If you like,” he answered with annoyance as if my departure were already a fait accompli.
One of the first competitor accounts I call on is Philco in Connersville, Indiana. The plant is seven acres under a single roof and manufactures refrigerators. Betz Laboratories, Nalco’s chief competitor, has serviced this account challenge free for decades. The secretary tells me someone will take me to Thayer Maxwell, the plant superintendent. I am escorted to a glassed in bullpen in the center of this huge factory. Mr. Maxwell is not there. I sit for nearly two hours with a cadre of folks coming and going, always looking for the superintendent, and always leaving frustrated. The desk, chairs, cabinets and tables are overflowing with cigarette butts in dented steel ashtrays, coffee stains are everywhere, on papers scattered across the desk, on broken floor tiles and even on the glass walls of the bull pen. Corroded pipes, plugged condenser traps, boiler sludge samples, severely damaged heat exchangers glaring with red rust are haphazardly wedged against the door, on chairs, tables, and on top of papers on the desk. It makes me think of the morgue of the machine -- a picture of chaos.
The extent of my knowledge of Nalco is a three-week intensive course on water treatment technology. I know little of Nalco’s products and nothing about selling. Finally, Mr. Maxwell comes in, lights a cigarette, props one leg over the desk, smiles, and says, “Okay, sport, you’ve got five minutes. What you got for me?”
I say without flinching, “I’m going to save your job.”
Mr. Maxwell throws his head back and laughs heartedly, “So you’re the answer to my prayers? Well, I’ve got to hand it to you. You’ve got spunk.”
Relief registers as his voice tells me he’s not angry, but amused. I back around his desk, and he follows. I take out a piece of paper, and start drawing a flow diagram of the facsimile of a steam generated power supply system from memory of my Nalco technical training. A red marker is used to indicate areas where he’s having trouble as revealed by the samples across his office. This is a systems approach, not a product approach. I don’t show any flashy literature but explain the how and why of his troubles, and talk chemistry as if he understands. I give him the A, B, C’s of trouble free applications as I am confident Nalco can provide them. When I finish, he thanks me, lights another cigarette and heads for the door.
“Mr. Maxwell,” I say, the timber of my voice rising, “your operation’s in trouble now.” I look around the room. “Now! I’ve been sitting here for a long time and heard of breakdowns across the plant.” I pick up a blocked piece of pipe. “This is packed with suspended solids, carryover from the boilers. Not normal. Shouldn’t happen. Give me a three-month trial and I’ll prove it.” My mind is not thinking of what’s in it for me, but solving problems, problems I believe are correctible. Perhaps my naked intensity is disarming.
“You never meet a stranger do you sport?” I ignore his comment.
“I know I can fix this.” I look about the bullpen at the metallic cadavers.
“Blanket order for three-months, em? What we talking about in money?” I have no idea. I have never made a survey, never calculated an actual chemical dosage.
“A lot less than it’s costing you now in breakdowns, lost production, and missed schedules, but we’ll have to survey the plant first. Will take a full day.” The “we” is I’ll need the help of my area manager.
“Okay, do your survey. Have my girl give you a purchase order number. Now let me get back to work.”
* * * * *
· Personality Profile – neglect is apparent, confusion, putting out fires and not having the time or inclination to deal with causes suggest panic.
· Geographic Profile – the office and traffic define chaos.
· Demographic Profile – focus of plant engineering is on crisis maintenance, not preventive maintenance. Ten names on the “in-out” board on the bullpen wall complement 1,200 plant employees. From failed samples the impression is unmistakable – power plant operations are a foreign concern to this crew.
The trigger to this initial intuition
It came from my lab experience in combination with Nalco’s technical training program. I could see science working here and got excited about the problem solving. Everything I saw and felt (re: persons, places, things) told me the superintendent was overwhelmed, possibly incompetent. Meeting him I sensed his need and exploited it. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Perhaps I thought I had nothing to lose, given my boss’s ultimatum. When I called to inform my boss of the sale, he checked with Philco’s purchasing to confirm the order. Skepticism was not limited to him.
The area manager surveyed the plant with me the next day, shaking his head in disbelief as he calculated the astronomical daily chemical dosages required. The situation was made even more incredulous when asked by the superintendent to survey Philco’s other two plants in the city and include them in the billing. It was the biggest order in the district’s history by someone within the company for less than two months. Compounding the irony, Nalco didn’t expect its salesmen to be productive until completing a three-year apprenticeship of gradually increasing technical complexity and sales responsibility. Nalco’s philosophy at the time was that you wowed the customer with technology, and then delivered with sophisticated knowledge of Nalco’s many product lines. I had neither. Intuitive OD, which I was using and would continue to use with consistent success made me out to be lucky rather than skilled, which also seems apparent in the following episode.
Thomas Crown Affair
It is two years later and a stifling hot summer in Terre Haute, Indiana with several days at or near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Indiana State University’s campus is situated in the heart of the business district of this 75,000 community. The summer session is in full swing, but classroom and dorm windows are open, furniture is spewed out on lawns. I see several chemical trucks rigged with acidizing equipment which mean air conditioning condensers have “frozen up” with calcium carbonate scaling and units are down. Acidizing will put these units back in service but only temporarily. Confident in my chemical water treatment technology, I drive to the office of the physical plant.
Mr. Thomas Crown, Superintendent, Plant Engineering is stenciled on the frosted glass door. I knock and he says, “Come in.” The office is a workplace with a drafting board with white-lined blue pages of architectural drawings, and on the wall framed B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. There is also a picture of several children of various ethnicities smiling down from the wall, and on his desk is a framed picture of an attractive woman and three boys, age’s three to six. Tacked to the wall directly behind the desk is a child’s stick figure drawing that says, “Hi daddy! This is me! This is you!” An American flag is on a stanchion to the left of the desk and another kind of flag I don’t recognize is to the right near the corner.
I’m able to take all this in because Mr. Crown busies himself cutting his nails and doesn’t look up for nearly a minute. When he does, I explain my business noting the activity on campus, and saying this is the perfect time to establish a sound chemical treatment program, which not only would be cost effective but also could eliminate such inconveniences in the future. He listens attentively, and then gives me permission to survey his facilities across the campus and to come back with a recommendation. Six hours later I return proposing a chemical treatment program including a $10,000 consulting agreement for monthly service calls.
“No way Jose! Board will scream to high heaven with such a proposal. We don’t pay consulting fees.”
I ask for an hour to refigure another option. He agrees. Once the new proposal is in his hands, he says, “Be here at 8 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll see if we can do business.”
The next morning I arrive with high expectations. As soon as I enter his office, he hits me instead with his thunder, “Get your ass out of here before I break every bone in your body.” I hesitate, more out of panic than anything. He is a big man, but so am I. “I mean it, God damn it,” he bellows, “this new proposal costs as much as the original only you buried the costs in the chemicals.”
* * * * *
I wasn’t thinking of the Fisher Paradigm or of the three spheres of influence. Yet I was processing information subconsciously. I know because I stood there. I didn’t leave. Mr. Crown ranted until his throat was so dry he couldn’t speak anymore. I looked at his tired eyes, deep dark circles etched around them in half moons. I wondered if he’d been to bed and decided he hadn’t. He slumped forward in his chair, stretching his massive arms over his head, and then through his thick black hair. Suddenly he noticed me standing, waved me silently to sit, and then collapsed forward on his desk. A lapel pin on his jacket became prominent as it bunched up around his bull neck. It was a Lions International Club pin.
“You a Lion?” I asked. The lids of his eyes lifted, a minute sparkle in them. I make the connection of the pin, the unknown flag and the picture of the children of diversity on the wall. “Lions do a lot for kids,” I continued fatuously remembering something about sponsoring children’s hospitals.
For the longest time he studied me, but said nothing. I stared back silently, uncomfortably, my nervous energy crying to fill the vacuum with words but resisted. Nearly an eternity of two minutes transpired.
“You know ‘bout Lions International?” he asked finally sotto voce, fingering his pin, his voice little more than a whisper.
I shrugged. “Not much. Know of its eye bank. Have a daughter with eye problems.” I felt my answer disappointing. I was wrong.
Instead he broke into a big grin, an upturn smile line across his face. “Giving city a new ambulance tonight.”
“Wow!” I heard myself say.
Then he launched into a spirited history of Lions International, his face flushed with pride. The exercise was cathartic for us both. I jumped when he banged his fist on the desk. “Tell you what! How ‘bout being my guest at the Terre Haute Club tonight?”
I cowered. “Sure.” But actually I wasn’t. What’s going on here? The guy has gone from rage to rapture just like that! I’d never studied psychology. Something told me, however, to stay cool and quiet during his rage. It helped coming from a home where my da often lost it. I was audience to his fury, one with it, not separate from it. I didn’t become defensive. I couldn’t explain why. I’m not a meek guy. Perhaps I attributed his rage to a lack of sleep, constant system failures, mounting complaints of students and faculty, and perhaps, as well, to a little guilt for deceiving him. But I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time.
At the dinner, he introduced me to everyone from the Lions Club president to Terre Haute’s mayor as his friend. As we were leaving, he whispered in my ear, “I sent in a blanket order for that stuff you recommended. They’re to rush it over night. Your boss will be calling you.” He chuckled. “Don’t expect to see your family for a few days.” Then he added in a friendly voice, “Believe me I know the feeling.”
· Personality Profile: A man is at his wits end with a problem I am trained to handle. His office defines him, efficient, pragmatic, and functional -- his comfort zone. Deciphering this proves the key.
· Geographic Profile: High summer heat, acidizing trucks across the campus, furniture on lawns, open doors and windows indicate major air conditioning system failures.
· Demographic Profile: A student-faculty population of 10,000 unable to function in classrooms or dorms because of these failures spells a crisis situation.
Role of Intuition in Thomas Crown Affair
Initial greeting was warm, open. Candor about the consulting agreement reinforced this. Survey indicated a serious lapse in water treatment application and control. Major revamping translated into a costly and time-consuming chemical program. Nalco’s 400-series matched these demands however deceptively presented. Discussion was expected, but not rage. Intuition told me to weather the rage although I had no such training. Spheres of influence separately were clueless. It was all of them clashing like thunder that submerged me into the problem, not only technically but also emotionally.
Culture + Test Kit = Intuitive Symbology
My success in Nalco’s Industrial Division brings me to the attention of senior management. No one can put a finger on my hard to believe success given my unconventional approach. I don’t sell benefits, don’t deflect objections or use “penalty of delay” tactics to close sales. I merge myself with the customer and become one with him. The vice president of Nalco’s International Division is so intrigued with my success that he one day travels with me. At the conclusion of the day, he says, “I’m not sure what you’re doing, but we can use it. How’d you like to work for us in South Africa?”
Knowing nothing about South Africa, I ask if I can think about it. I do and am mesmerized with the country’s history. My job there is to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company composed of our American subsidiary, Great Britain’s I.C.I., Ltd. affiliate, Alfloc, and South African Explosives, Ltd.’s water treatment division.
South Africa has no anti-trust laws to prevent this new company from dominating the huge industrial water treatment business. Water is a precious commodity and water clarification in the gold and diamond mines is critical to profitable business. Nalco has cutting edge technology in this field and is anxious to leverage this product line to full advantage here.
Two brothers inherited the Nalco subsidiary from their father, the Alexander Martin Company. They have no college training in either chemistry or business, but have the colonial manners and elocution of the British business class. Likewise, the Alfloc people are mainly British and derive their business acumen primarily from experience. The only extensively college trained people are Afrikaners, mainly associates of South African Explosives. Afrikaners are descendents of the 17th century Dutch settlers, who fought two Boer Wars with the British.
It is 1968 and Afrikaners now have control of the South African government while the British still control business and industry. The Afrikaner government has created a policy of apartheid, or “separation of the races,” which is rigorously enforced. Nearly a million Bantu workers come into Johannesburg every working day from their homes in the South African Township of “Soweto.”
This is the climate in which the three technical directors from the merging companies are now acting temporarily as a technical management team. They ask me, “What test kit are we to use in the field?” I study them and feel their defiance – what is this kid doing here telling us what to do?
“Here is my suggestion,” I offer. “Go back, consider the needs of the field, build your test kit, and come back in two weeks with a recommendation.”
Three days later they present a Rube Goldberg concoction. It is mainly a South African test kit, the most inappropriate of the three. “Fine, package it and send it to the field.” They look at me stunned. “Anything else? If not, good luck!”
It isn’t a month later that radical modifications are made to this basic test kit, and Nalco’s sedimentation test kit is being used without modification. When Nalco’s chairman of the board comes to Johannesburg and asks me to explain my behavior, I have no vocabulary.
· Personality Profile. A clash of cultures is felt from the moment customs confiscates Allen Drury’s critical book on South Africa, A Very Strange Society (1968) to the conflicting pull of colonialism with British descendents who look to England as their homeland to the passionate nationalism of Dutch descendents who consider South Africa home. Afrikaners in this new company tend to be better educated, yet English speakers occupy most leadership positions. A subterranean superior-inferior relationship is going on between the two peoples with the Bantu majority of the country treated as non-citizens.
· Geographic Profile: Apartheid divides the country into nine native tribe homelands. These homelands have little wealth, commerce or industry, forcing African men to leave their families to live and work in the industrial centers of Johannesburg, Durban, East London and Cape Town. Apartheid of a different sort is palpable between British and Afrikaner South Africans.
· Demographic Profile: South Africa is a country with a population of 20 million – 12 million Bantu, 6 million white (4 million Afrikaner, 2 million British), and 2 million colored including Indians, descendents of indentured workers from India. This newly formed company is slightly more Afrikaner than British.
The voice of intuition speaks to the outsider
Before taking on this assignment, I read all I could about South Africa and found the country’s history surpassingly similar to ours. Also, being from Iowa, I could identify with Afrikaners or Boers. Still, my intuition told me I was an intruder. I looked much younger than my years and knew I was not likely to be taken seriously. Therefore, my intuition told me to put the risk of failure on the technical team not realizing I was symbolically telling all employees this was “their company,” not Nalco’s. The action elevated the three diverse companies above their petty differences into a common culture, and what could have been a colossal failure, became a budding success.
Fisher Paradigm © saved my life!
In 1974 I was contracted by the American Management Association (AMA) to investigate a riot, which occurred in Fairfax County Virginia. A white police officer killed an unarmed 27-year-old black man in a convenient store in Herndon, which led to a riot.8
My job was to interview senior officers, detectives and command personnel. During this nine-month intervention, I also conducted executive seminars for AMA across the country. In the course of this seminar work, the deputy Secretary of State of Iowa participated in a Kansas City seminar. Later, he looked me up when he came to Washington, D.C. and we went to dinner and took in a play.
D.C. is about twelve miles from Fairfax City. A Fairfax County police officer drove me to D.C., and said he would pick me up when I called. It was after midnight when my new friend and I parted. The police officer, however, couldn’t pick me up until 1:30 a.m. I said that was okay, as I was a walker.
I walk briskly along Pennsylvania Avenue, a November chill in the air, dressed in an unbuttoned dark blue Hickey Freeman cashmere topcoat, a pinstriped gray three-piece Hickey Freeman suit, wearing black leather gloves. I notice three African American youths across the street that are jiving and walking parallel to me. I pay them little mind as there are eight lanes of traffic separating us, that is, until they race ahead, cross the street, and start hanging out at the corner under the light.
Some time ago, an elderly United States senator from Mississippi was accosted, knifed and nearly died after being robbed in this area. When I was about one hundred yards from the boys, that crossed my mind. Without breaking my stride, I processed this information:
· Personality Profile – three young people up to no good and I am one.
· Geographic Profile – no place for young boys to be out at this hour.
· Demographic Profile – they are teenagers; I am in my late thirties. They are black, slender, one about six feet, the other two about five-six, athletic looking. I am white, six-four, two-ten, and in good shape.
I feel the rush of their excitement (Personality). How do they see me? I sense danger but imagine they sense opportunity. Somehow (Geographic), my feet continue their aggressive stride. More incongruous still, I have a sense of calm. Why? I know I can’t
take the three of them (Demographic) if they have a knife or gun, I have no weapon. No weapon? My senses explode. That’s it!
Intuition and the phantom gun
I remember that during intense one-on-one interviews with plain-clothes detectives, they would invariably adjust their shoulder holsters when I asked sensitive questions. I am now thirty yards from the boys, still walking with authority. When I am ten yards from them, I make an elaborate move to adjust my phantom shoulder holster through my open topcoat. Not a boy misses this. They open a path for me to pass. Without looking back, I hear them giggle, “There goes the fuzzzz!”
Not leaving it at that, I hear myself say, “Going to be a little hard to get up for school in the morning.” They laugh hysterically, “Yeah, man, sssccchoool is what we’re about! Dig it!” They retreat in the opposite direction.
When I explained this episode to my ride, the police officer says, “You just might have saved your behind.” No might about it as far as I was concerned.
Mutiny Minded Police Officers
In 1975 the Public Safety Institute was contracted to investigate and dismantle the unauthorized labor union of Raleigh Police Officers and to defuse its threat of striking the city of Raleigh, North Carolina. Statisticians, psychometricians, experts on police organization and public safety policy were brought in. I was retained as a “people’s person” with a reputation for OD detective work.
· Personality Profile: A clear dichotomy existed between police command and patrol line operations. Police officers were spiteful of the police chief when interviewed and spoke angrily of his incompetence, but were surprisingly civil to me – a disconnect. They demanded the chief be fired or they would strike even though public employees in North Carolina have no such right.
· Geographic Profile: Raleigh is the state capital, centrally located, and the hub of politics, industry, commerce and education. It has the bizarre feel of an antebellum community, producing a certain time-lapse ambivalence.
· Demographic Profile: Raleigh is a community of more than 200,000 with several colleges and universities within and around the city, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Only 5 percent of the 350 sworn officers are college trained, the rest are high school graduates or have GED equivalences; 80 percent are between the ages of 25 and 35 with an average of five years on the police force, while 60 percent live outside Raleigh city limits. None of the command officers, including the chief, are college trained.
While the situation worsened, the headlines of The Raleigh Times blared a daily menu of police officer dissonance, and the demand for new leadership, while television news programs nightly echoed the same sentiments. Meanwhile, I continued to ride with angry patrol officers on three shifts, interviewed command staff, wandered around city hall, and sent out a questionnaire with the water bill. This was not a scientific study, yet the response was more than 30 percent, indicating citizens wanted resolution of this stalemate.
Intuition as serendipity
We were several weeks into the intervention, and getting nowhere. I had spent scores of hours with police, but only marginal time in city hall. Something told me the problem started here. My previous interviews with the city manager, members of the city council and the chief of police were not insightful. I thought I must dig deeper. So I wandered the halls some more. That is how I came to see a distinguished looking man with a white mane sitting in an office devoid of trappings reading The Wall Street Journal. I asked if I might talk to him. “Sure, make yourself at home,” he said with the fastidious gestures and diffident manner of antebellum civility. For the next two hours I listened to an intriguing story that made everything fall into place.
He informed me he was the prior city manager. His best friend was the previous chief of police. “First college graduate ever to be a Raleigh police chief,” he said proudly. But there was a problem. His friend had an incurable heart condition and could tolerate no stress. To make certain his friend acquired full police chief pension benefits, he made him a sinecure while he rotated the three majors every four months to run the police department, creating three islands of authority, three different and competing police departments, and three distinct power cells. After three years in this configuration, the city manager’s friend died. He then appointed the senior major of the three as permanent chief, convinced the city council to hire his deputy, and resigned.
The new chief, to solidify his power, promoted his favorite sergeant to major over patrol, the most powerful wing of police operations, placed one major in administration and the other in community service – both non-power positions. He then placed his most despised adversary, a captain, on permanent nights running patrol. That proved a fatal error. This meant that the captain had access to all patrol officers, some 300 strong. As they rotated shifts, and came under his wing, he painted the chief a clown, incompetent if not a crook, and a perfect foil to all that grieved them.
When this scenario was disclosed in a report to the Public Safety Institute, it took the air out of the siege. Officers could see how they had been used. Order was restored. The union became a social club, and the chief ended his career with dignity.
Technical Obsolescence & Intuition
It is 1980. I am now a Ph.D. in organizational/industrial psychology with ten years of consulting experience. OD consulting fails to be fulfilling – no sense of fruition – so I am delighted when an opportunity comes to join Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an OD psychologist, only to have my new boss say almost immediately, “If you don’t find your role here in six weeks, you’re history.” It is a directness with which I have had some familiarity. So I go to work to create a role.
· Personality Profile: Engineers here are the elite, treated with deference, which is manifested in a cavalier attitude toward everyone – cowboys can do no wrong.
· Geographic Profile: The facility is mainly a government contractor with work centered on large defense contracts in space and strategic operations. Program managers are engineers and dictate the tempo of work. All accede to their needs. The ten-acre campus is graced with seven attractive white sun baked buildings including a recreation center on manicured lawns, and complemented by an artificial lake, picnic areas and several parking lots in this the heart of the leisure-like south and tourist industry.
· Demographic Profile: The working population of 4,000 includes 1,000 engineers, 2,400 support technicians and administrative personnel, and 600 production workers. More than 3,000 workers are college trained with 400 with advanced degrees among whom more than 30 have Ph.D.’s.
After three weeks in the company, I experience the wall between Human Resources and engineering. Engineers requisition courses, seminars, and professional meetings but take umbrage when asked to explain the benefits. Their elitist attitude says, would you know if I told you? A pervasive duplication of courses is noted unnecessarily multiplying costs. I ask compensation to generate a demographic profile of the engineering population. Most striking with this profile is that pay continues to increase for engineers as job complexity decreases; 75 percent of these engineers are working on technology developed long after they left engineering college; and many engineers receive engineering pay and do no engineering work, suggesting technical obsolescence, a problem correctible with training.
A memo is prepared that goes out to all chief engineers announcing the formation of a task force to address this problem. No response. A second memo follows to forty engineers representative of the range of engineering disciplines and programs. One response. He is an engineer near retirement, who long ago recognized his declining skills, and claims to be sold on the idea of continuing engineering education. We meet every week as if we are a full-fledged task force.
Intuition and the power of the pen
Trained as a chemist, I can relate to technical arrogance. Knowing this, and being a writer by inclination, I embellish our weekly sessions with statistics, graphs and studies and copy everyone on the original listings. One day a chief engineer joins us. Mention is made of his attendance in the next memo, not realizing his celebrity. Thirty engineers show up for the following session overflowing our cramped quarters. The chief engineer takes over the meeting outlining how technical education might work. Each gathering thereafter finds greater and more diverse attendance from the engineering community. A holistic view is developing. In time, the chief engineer becomes director of engineering, and then general manager of the facility with technical education key to his administration. Today technical education at Honeywell Avionics is a highly developed program. Technicians in conjunction with the engineering college of the University of South Florida are able to pursue engineering degrees on the Honeywell campus, while all engineers may continue to upgrade their skills. No engineer need be left behind.9
A Bridge Seemingly Too Far
The management team of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is visiting Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater and asked to see me. They have read an article of mine, “Quality Control Circles: Motivation through Participative Management,”10 and indicate an interest in my coming to Cambridge to work with their people in team building. CSDL designs the ring laser gyros that are manufactured in Clearwater. The concern is that a breakdown exists between design and production of this $50 million U.S. Navy program.
· Personality Profile: The nation’s top engineers, physicists and chemists work at CSDL. These scientists are perfectionists.
· Geographic Profile: There is a 1,000-mile separation between the design and production team. My first discovery in “the bridge too far” is the design of the twin CSDL circular towers joined by a bridge well above the street. This houses the CSDL laboratories and offices on the MIT campus. The design was apparently meant to provide privacy but it also promotes separation and isolation.
· Demographics: There is a distinct pecking order. Physicists are of the first rank, engineers and mathematicians follow with electrical engineers rated above other engineers, and chemists and biologists, whatever the discipline, complete the ranks. Many are Ph.D.’s and so academic credentials cause less friction than does seniority and status. The mean age of the group is late thirties but the mindset is closer to that of the spoiled child.
Intuition as anticipation
I anticipated that I would be perceived as a touchy-feely shrink trained in second-rate schools (state universities), so I put together beforehand a loose leaf book titled “Teaming: Productivity through Cooperation,”11 composed of articles I had previously written on team building, transactional analysis in the workplace, leadership style, effective communications, stress management and how to conduct meetings. Armed with 40 books produced by Honeywell’s technical services, I journeyed to CSDL. Once there, I outlined how to use the book, divided people into groups of ten with the balance acting as audience, and then sent them off to plan their respective meetings on topics of burning concern. They took to the assignment like excited children. Each team tried to outdo the previous session, and in the process, ventilated pressing concerns common to all. The following week, again in teams conducting meetings, they developed corrective strategies. Pleased with their solutions, they decided I could now go home.
“Aren’t we forgetting something?” I asked. “I don’t see Clearwater in the picture.” Busy arriving at consensus on how to work better together they overlooked the breakdown between the design and production teams. That was partially my fault for I left Clearwater out of the discussion wanting CSDL people first to talk to each other and to be thinking of shared aims before embracing the larger issue.
“Why don’t we have a CSDL team go to Clearwater and observe production and have a Clearwater team come to Cambridge?” somebody offered. And that is what happened. The CSDL team learned that their precise design was not reproducible in the factory, and the production team found they could propose suggestions to the lab to make its design more production friendly. One thousand miles was not a bridge too far.
Workings of the Fisher Paradigm ©™
These illustrations are not abstractions. Nor should it be a concern that the Fisher Paradigm originated in a sales discipline.12 It was in sales I learned the fallacy of the mechanistic A, B, C linear approach to persons, places and things, and that a company has a personality, geography and demographic profile unique to it. These spheres of influence are charged with intuitive insight if we only erase the line between cause and effect, thinking and feeling, observer and the observed to witness what is happening without bias and allow the small voice of reality to resonate with its need.
The Fisher Paradigm is conceptual, self-conscious and self-organizing. Instead of forcing the world it observes to fit into the imposed order of vertical thinking (linear logic) or boxes, it lets information organize itself into lateral thinking or understanding. By doing so, persons, places and things find themselves on the same page, fall into their own unique pattern and find their own way forward to move off the dime together. The quick response is that “the Fisher Paradigm is just common sense,” but common sense is so rare. Even more rare is to see a situation whole and integral rather than separate from itself and to see beyond the cultural blinders that would judge, label and describe it, not as it is but as it should or is expected to be. The workings of the Fisher Paradigm are as much in evidence in the small as in the large as I close with this episode.
Bottling Plant Fiasco
A major bottling company of soft drinks replaced its bottling handling conveyor with a top of the line electronic conveyor system during a Christmas vacation while 200 employees were on holiday. The new design was meant to cut operating costs in half and reduce employees by a third. The exact opposite happened. A productive work force with virtually no labor problems (Personality Profile), situated in a low-tech community (Geographic Profile) with most employees otherwise unskilled (Demographic Profile) registered shock, then anger, when reporting back to work. Management expected employees to be pleased. They weren’t but kept this to themselves, displaying their anger in work slowdown that practically killed the company. Operations did not again become productive until an OD intervention convinced management to level with employees, admit its mistake, form a management-employee team to ensure it would not happen again, along with the promise of skills training and worker involvement in future cost cutting schemes. Management mistakenly read the slow down as employee apathy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Employees felt deceived and betrayed.
Intuition was staring management in the face but was ignored. Intuitive OD gave management the eyes to see, but the mind and will to understand is likely to remain its constant challenge.
