How to suppress the truth
How to suppress the truth
Implied in what follows is that truth is something shared between persons, and that externalised truth is a degraded species.
Following a morning’s discussion with the excellent Bob Marshall, I wrote some notes and sent them to him. A fortnight later I had another discussion with him, to discover that my notes had not successfully conveyed what I had intended them to. You may well say “I am not surprised he couldn’t follow you” but I want to look at some alternative descriptions of the phenomenon.
A culturally normal description on this phenomenon would focus on my writing and whether I was clear or not and on Bob’s ability to hear what I was saying and to understand my intentions in writing. But I want to assert a different description: Bob and I are conversing, whether or not we are in the same room — the context is a relating in which communicating happens. This is an active, self-correcting process in which Bob and I are necessarily both involved. And that active, self-correcting process itself has a context in which the situation and subject matter of the communicating are prominent factors.
So, instead of asking whether Aidan can express himself clearly and whether Bob is able to comprehend adequately, a construct which focuses on implied qualities in Bob and Aidan, we can ask whether the communicating between these two people is able to support discussion of this subject in this situation.[1] Think perhaps of families torn apart by political arguments: clearly, they have been able to communicate with each other on many topics, but there is a situation and a subject which they are not able to communicate about successfully.
Why might this alternative description be important? One of the fundamental insights into systems is that you cannot improve the performance of the system by improving the performance of the parts. If you think you can get a group of people to communicate with each other better by training them separately in good communication practises, you will be disappointed. Which doesn’t stop people doing exactly that, again and again. If we ask instead what people can successfully communicate about in what circumstances[2] we may be led instead to ask how they might communicate about more challenging subjects or communicate about them in more difficult circumstances.[3]
The mostly likely scenario in may experience when faced with difficulty communicating is that my interlocutor has a practical and substantive reason for not understanding what I am saying.[4] I once shared a long train journey with the director of a major transport project I was consulting to. I was trying to distinguish, carefully, between the planning of the overall project, a process of decades, and the planning of a year’s effective work within the strange political budgeting arrangements. It was like talking to a wall.
Difficult contexts
Perhaps we should look at contexts that readily cause conflict and poor communication, like the family torn apart above. These contexts seem to put a strain and stress on the ability to communicate: but why? Remember Jane Jacobs’ book Systems of Survival. In it she describes two major systems of human organising for survival, modes that are mutually exclusive to a considerable degree. One revolves around loyalty as the primary virtue and the other around being true to your word. What the book makes clear is that in a difficult situation, where you are coming from trumps what it is you need to say.
When I was a software engineer writing big geophysical processing systems I had a problem with +1 and -1. Direction, I suppose. In The Matrix, when Neo under considerable pressure is told to go left, it is followed immediately by the classic line “No, the other left”. And I am tickled by south-west winds coming from the south-west, not going to the south-west. In meteorology we emphasise origins not purposes. Yet in human affairs we make purpose almost everything. If our purposes are aligned we don’t have a problem, right? Wrong, it depends where we are coming from.
A colleague facilitated a workshop for midwives who were facing budget cuts. In the room were managers who were clear about what they needed to do to save money and midwives who were clear about how to protect the integrity of their work. And there was a woman who was a part time manager and part time midwife who could not even have a successful conversation with herself! So much for clarity.
The situation I find most refractory personally is the current (lack of) debate about vegetarianism. There are people who think that we all need to become vegetarians in order to save the planet. If I voice any of the evidence that this is a self-contradictory position, then I simply become part of the section of humanity that hasn’t understood yet that we all need to become vegetarian in order to save the planet. And actually, after we have established that I am not swayed by your arguments nor you by mine, there is a general inability to have serious discussion on any topic.
The situation that is completely legendary is the “debate” about abortion where it seems that people will kill each other over the issue of protecting life. Labelling someone as a murderer is not conducive to conversation with them.[5] But remember what we are after here is just the sense that what is being discussed and the situation in which that discussion takes place are often much more significant that the supposed communication skills of the people concerned.
Education
We often turn to education to see how things play. I have reported before on Madeley nursery school which uses a Reggio Emilia system. In the original Reggio Emilia school in the town of that name, the parents built a school for their kids and then went out to find pedagogues who would facilitate the education of the children.
In almost all schools there is constant assessment, also-known-as judgment. Indeed it is a formal requirement of teachers in state schools in the UK that they continually assess the children in their “care” on many, many dimensions. Actually, if anyone bothered to notice, this really pisses off the children, but of course it is for their own good. Now, being assessed and judged and ranked is just the sort of situation that radically alters the ability of children to communicate. Why would it not?
In the Madeley school, the two and three year olds I observed for a day were gently and sensitively drawing each other out. They explored topics they found in the world of the school, largely from their own resources and observations, with the occasional stimulating question thrown in by a pedagogue. Because this is a fully peer-to-peer process, the question of being judged recedes because it is not central. What is valued is the ability of children to have stimulating discussions and to pursue their mutual curiosity about the world.
There is something shockingly bad about our society that it can call something profoundly anti-educational education. I spoke with a friend who was an education administrator for a few years and he spoke of trips he took to Austria and Germany to observe schools and lessons there. Those schools got better “results” then and get better “results” now and nothing has changed as a result of all the observations and recommendations in between.[6]
The contrast in the Madeley school and the standard issue allows us to see that the situation, the context of constant judgment and exhortation to do better is precisely what inhibits the development of mutual intelligence and articulate thought. The real competence we seek in education is sacrificed to a pale imitation of competence that is individual and siloed.
Fake news
Fake news is not simply misinformation. That is not how it works. It is a siren call into dismissing the views of others as being hopelessly biased and blind to what matters. Because it establishes, whether we want it to or not, an abortion-like climate of fear and hate it disrupts our ability to communicate. That is its purpose and it can be every effective in achieving its purpose. So the only questions worth asking about most of the news in our mainstream media are who is trying to destroy our ability to communicate and what do they not want us to communicate with each other about. Which, of course, entirely sidesteps the question of what the fake news purports to be about.
If you are concerned about fake news, do you ask about people’s competence in speaking or listening? Do you think that if people could communicate better with each other, then fake news would not be able to take hold? Probably not, although it is an interesting possibility. But in a corporate situation where there are often many equivalents of fake news in the stances taken by senior managers, when you do a survey you find that people feel that communication is the issue. I has to be the espoused issue because people cannot say how frightened and pissed off they are at the stances of senior management, but I just want to emphasise the inconsistency here. People’s ability to communicate is not a set of individualised skills, it is largely determined by the situation and the subject matter.
And just as the people paid by billionaires and politicians in maverick states to create fake news will simply improve their creative art to overcome any resistance they find to their campaigns, so senior managers, while preaching openness and transparency will create the necessary (to them) climate of fear. And it is not an accident that the public think that Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook are the saviours of the economy.
Systemic structure
Whether we are thinking epistemology and the thought embedded in language, or whether we are thinking about systemic structure and how things work in practice we come to the same conclusion. The effectiveness of communication about contentious issues in difficult or threatening situations depends on the connecting and the factors influencing that connecting, rather than on the supposed properties of the people doing the communicating.
In fact the reason why HR departments witter on about communication skills is because they are never prepared to tackle the substantive issues. It is not the brief of HR or an Organisational Development (OD) programme to tackle the climate within which their work takes place and where the issues they claim to tackle are generated.[7] It is not surprising that systemic structure itself can be seen as politically charged.
However. However. If we think about individual psychotherapy, it is targeted at structures of belief and practice that have outlived their validity or usefulness. It supports, at least in its own estimation, an individual in coming to terms with highly energetic psychological material that the individual has become unable or unwilling to deal with on their own.
I was once working with a bunch of software developers and business analysts in a corporate setting. It felt like a benign setting to me. In the course of a planning meeting that was raising issues about management, several people claimed that the manager was unwilling to countenance certain important things. The manager concerned was sitting behind a closed glass door a few paces away. I suggested that rather than speculate on his views we should invite him into the meeting for a few minutes. After a few minutes the manager went back to his office. I pointed out that the people in the meeting had not asked him about his views on the issues.
So the difficulty of subject matter and the threat in the context may or may not be real. It can be entirely fantasised and still have its effect on the ability to communicate. The system structure is a system of beliefs about what other people think and what they might do. Although no one part of a system or person in a system can control the system, that doesn’t stop other parts from believing it is so. And it is necessarily the actual communication of important messages within and across the system that will determine system behaviour. What are we going to do then to allow information to flow in the presence of fake news? In the presence of the implied violence of managerial stances? Given that communication training is just wimping out? Is it any wonder most people rate their jobs as bullshit?
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[1] As always, it’s the connections not the (apparent) things. We often cite that there’s no such thing as a child, not by itself, but that there is a mother-child relation. Talking about these things is necessarily convoluted, because our language is so rooted in things and parts of things.
[2] You’ve experienced this yourself. E.g. confidently ordering food in a local restaurant, but stumbling over the same task when abroad. Competently presenting your case in a team meeting, but umming and aahing your way through when the big boss is in the room.
[3] Not just for communicating of course, context matters. On the trapeze, there’s a moment when you can competently and reliably execute a trick, so now we’re going to try to catch you from that trick. Most people screw up the trick, so we have to progressively introduce both the catcher and the catching into the context of that particular trick. Being caught from one trick doesn’t transfer to being caught from another. Doing something in lines doesn’t transfer to doing it out of lines. Yes there’s a relation and you can get better/faster at reorienting/adapting, but it’s always new.
[4] Must quote Upton Sinclair here: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
[5] Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post, Too Important to Have a Fight About: “The opportunity is to recast your outcome in terms of the other person’s worldview, not insist that they change what they want or what they think they know.”
[6] I have a colleague who moved from Germany to Denmark. Overnight, his daughter went from being a star student to failing, and his son the reverse, respectively wilting and blossoming in the more collaborative, less test-oriented Danish system.
[7] Also, it’s easier. In IT, this is known as bike-shedding. Everyone has a view on what to do with the bicycle shed, its design, location, colour, etc. Meetings and resources are consumed in debates about the trivial, with no capacity to spare for tackling the hard stuff.
