`Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin
with,' the Mock Turtle replied; `and then the different branches of
Arithmetic-- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
In my twenties, I was enrolled in a graduate
program in Applied Behavioral Science at Johns Hopkins. Built on a foundation of
immersive training (like they do at the National
Training Laboratory), the program taught the tools and techniques of "change
agency". I took the head of the program as my mentor for a number of years.
He taught me several valuable lessons. Two come
to mind.
He told me that people always complain.
(Actually, he said "b*tch"). He said they complain and that is something that
you can never change. People will always complain. The job of a leader, he
informed me, was to change the content of the complaints. He believed that you
could move people up
Maslow's
hierarchy.
So, if they were complaining about issues related
to belonging and membership in a group, the prudent thing to do was help them
move up they pyramid to complaints about self esteem. If they were complaining
about self esteem, attention should be given to moving them to issues of self
actualization.
I wanted to be a teacher, writer and management
consultant.
He kindly told me that I would need twenty years
of actually doing something constructive before I was qualified enough to teach,
write or consult. While I am not known for taking the advice of others, this was
a piece I swallowed in its entirety.
By letting go of the desire to educate and
improve others, I was able to immerse myself in the details of my work. I
learned how decisions are made and how organizations behave. I came to
understand the way that organizations adapt and how they repel.
I also learned to make mistakes and profit from
them. No one gets it right much more than 25% of the time. (Insert appropriate
baseball analogy here.) Mistakes are tools that should be used to clarify the
end game.
I wonder how to apply these lessons in a world
where much of the information is outrageously bad. I read stuff that is
clearly written by people who have not had enough experience to actually
understand the domain that they critique (I fall prey to that mistake myself).
Figuring out the best way to communicate the fact that the material is erroneous
is challenging.
I don't typically find that the author of bad
information is interested in my view. That means that phone calls and emails are
unlikely to work. So, I prod. Usually, I stick to the substance of the argument.
Occasionally, I stumble and lose my cool.
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