The source(s) of effective action — Part 1
The Coronavirus pandemic has put into sharp contrast the difference between effective action and screwing things up badly. (On the subject of which, more about Dominic Cummings later.)
Nations like the UK, the USA and Sweden have so far done tragically much worse in responding to the pandemic than nations like New Zealand and Singapore. See:
Many of the better performing nations, such as Germany (@ 20th June — 110 deaths per million), might seem at first sight to have in most significant respects a very similar set of circumstances to respond to as the badly performing nations like the UK (@ 20th June — 636 deaths per million).
It is said that hindsight is 20:20, and obviously with hindsight people who study the pandemic will be able to tell us why Germany did so much better. But that is not actually what I’m interested in investigating here.
I am not wanting to find out what actions turned out to be effective for Germany after the fact, and which actions turned out to be ineffective for the UK, after the fact and with the benefit of hindsight. Instead what I want to investigate is the question of what practices give rise to effective action at the time before the outcome is settled.
Analogously (and just for example), in the GIF above, what actions or processes or operating practices ahead-of-time, might give rise to the fork-lift driver not attempting to squeeze through a tight gap next to a precarious shelving stack. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is already specifically prohibited in company training programs, and yet it still happened.In other words way back before any action plan or effective action strategy is determined, what are the practices or conditions that are in place which bring about effective action or ineffective action.
That is to say … What is the source, or what are the sources, of effective action?
What are the sources of effective action?
Perhaps if we were to investigate less superficially we would discover some less obvious but fundamentally important circumstantial differences between Germany and the UK, differences that while not obvious to a casual observer make a significant difference in terms of the outcome.
But again, let me say, while all of that is important and should definitely be investigated, it is not my concern here.
Instead what I want to consider is a step further back up the waterfall of effective action. Not the effective (or ineffective) action itself, but rather what practices give rise to the arising of effective action or ineffective action.
What gives rise to effective action? What are the practices before the effective action which brings the effective action into being in the first place? Where does effective action come from?
We tend to call it effective action when the ball hits the back of the net, but anyone who knows anything about football can tell you that the final strike is only a small part of what is needed to score a goal or win a match.
Where does effective action come from?
Hypothesis 1
Effective action is a consequence of (1) alignment between team members and (2) thorough planning based on (3) as full an understanding of the reality of the situation as it is possible to establish, and(4) practicing your skills.Hypothesis 2
Effective action is a consequence of skill acquisition.In respect of Hypothesis 2, please read the following 2 articles:
Hypothesis 3
Effective action is a consequence of transformation. Something is needed (1) prior to team alignment, (2) prior to planning, (3) prior to fully grasping the nature of reality, and (4) prior to practising your skills. Let's call this “something” … TRANSFORMATION.What is Transformation?
Transformation is the re-constitution of a person (ie. a “self”) which occurs as a consequence of a transformational experience. The non-philosopher, Martin Heidegger, believed that thinking could of its own accord bring about transformation, if it was done right.
Transformation is sometimes contrasted from change, in the respect that change happens when something turns directly into something else. When transformation occurs, something is essentially eliminated entirely — ie. turned into “nothing” — and then from that nothing, arises the re-constituted self. So transformation is what all the stories about phoenixes rising from the ashes are about. Transformational experiences typically test you and test your resolve to its very limits. In the process you lose some big part of yourself, which it turns out afterwards you didn’t need anyway — and in fact you benefit from losing it.
Why is transformation needed prior to everything else in order to give rise to effective action? … Let’s find out !
Effectiveness —perhaps it’s not personal
If you google “personal effectiveness” you can find a wikipedia article that (un)reliably informs us that:
Personal effectiveness is a branch of the self-help movement dealing with success, goals, and related concepts.However if you google “effective action” per se, ie. effective action separated from the epithet of “personal”, google does not seem to have any idea what you’re looking for. You get a load of results about physics and maths where “effective” and “action” are used as physics terms bearing no relationship with their meanings in everyday language. No one seems to have considered the possibility that effective action might not have to be personal.
Ok, I thought, so I’ll try ‘“effective action” management theory’ … where worryingly the number 2 link is a PDF blog post from Dominic Cummings. Yes, “that” Dominic Cummings; the idiot scoundrel who, allegedly helped by the Russian mafia, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, conned huge swathes of the British public into thinking they would have better lives outside the EU, and allegedly went on to put B. “Shyster” Johnson into Downing Street, in December of 2019. Which, as it turned out, was just in time for the idiot and his idiotic colleagues to lead the UK to the top of the leader board in getting wrong just about everything they possibly could get wrong in dealing with the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic that anyone has so far come up with. (See the Statista link at the top.)
How ironic it is that this man who in blog posts like this 31 page PDF and these ones can write thousands of words about the theory of effective coordinated action, but when he is actually called upon to provide effective leadership, appears to have been incompetent in just about every way it can be measured.
Hell ! he allegedly couldn’t even come up with a believable lie for why he and his family considered themselves to be exempt from the lockdown rules that he himself came up with and required the rest of the country to follow.
(But I digress !)
Effectiveness … then again, perhaps it is personal afterall
Even though effective action may not be “personal” exactly, my personal access to effective action may be very personal.
For example, this is how you can use Thortspace to solve intractable problems:
Thortspace delivers #Transformational_insights in response to #Intractable_problems.Step1: I have an intractable problem.Step2: Unbeknownst to myself, I am being the kind of personal person that is arbitrarily put together in such a way that I cannot possibly ever fix that problem.Step3: I offload all my conflicting thoughts about the problem into Thortspace.Step4: I organise those thoughts (which are now also thorts) in various ways — essentially I “play” with the structuring of my conceptual framework within which all my thinking is flowing around.Step5: In the process of doing so, I am gifted with a transformational insight — transformational in the sense that I don’t simply have a new thing to think, but instead of that or as well as that, I as the thinker am now re-constituted in an altered way — all of the thinking I was previously doing is now held within a different context which I am now being instead of the original context which I was being.Step6: I now am able to deliver, and I in fact do deliver, an outcome which was previously impossible for me, given who I used to be being. This impossible outcome that I nevertheless deliver, is a result of the re-constituted self that I am now being.
In Step5, I say “gifted” because phenomenologically, the transformational insight comes to me in the form of a gift.
It comes by “letting it come”, ie. by grace, rather than by “making it come” ie. by will. And it comes, as if of its own accord. Even though I did all the work in preparing myself to let it come, by going through the process with Thortspace.
In theory, practice makes more difference than theory, but in practice, theory and practice are inextricably interwoven and cannot be separated, one from the other.
change the GAME, change the FRAME
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-stop-negative-thinking/answer/Andrew-Bindon-1
I remember I was once (a long time ago) hitch-hiking from London to Munich and I had gotten as far as about Belgium or so (no idea really where I was), and it was 3am in the morning, and the ride I had been travelling with was leaving the direction I wanted to go and so I was dropped off at the side of a motorway junction in the middle of nowhere.
It was raining and cold, and I stood trying to thumb my next lift for half an hour while meantime becoming increasingly more desperate as the sparse but nevertheless steady stream of middle of the night traffic, trucks and cars, passed me by with what I presumed was either suspicion or indifference. I had a deadline that I was trying to get to Munich by 9am the next morning to where I was supposed to be meeting up with some friends.
In my desperation it occurred to me to invent a different game, and so I changed the game I was playing from “Try to get a ride” to a new game that I called “Thumb 10 trucks”. I consciously stopped trying to get a ride and instead I simply changed the game to give the best thumbs up I could imagine to the next 10 trucks. (Trucks are pretty good bets when you’re hitching.)
Because you see I had become miserable loosing at the game I was playing, so I changed the game to something I could win at. The game was no longer to try to get a ride. Instead the game was thumbing trucks… I couldn’t help but win at that! All I had to do to win was give them my best thumb, and that was a point to me!
Although possibly it is entirely coincidental, shortly after that a curious thing happened. I had just thumbed my 4th or 5th truck when an eastern european ganster (I found out later) pulled up in spanking new Mercedes sports car and offered me a ride. I hadn’t even tried to thumb him. He must have just seen me thumbing the previous truck, or else he just saw me there at the side of the junction and it was obvious what I wanted. He drove at terrifying speeds and I thought I was going to die, but it was in any case good to be out of the rain.
Why am I telling you this story?
The point is that changing the game I was playing changed my frame of reference, and changing my frame of reference led to an alteration in how I was behaving at the side of the road.
Of course I have no idea whether it was the alteration in my demeanour that led to my being picked up… perhaps that was just luck, but one thing that I can tell you for certain is that although I was still standing there at 3 o’clock in the morning, in the rain, by myself, in the middle of nowhere, feeling scared both of the police (hitching is not encouraged in much of Europe, or wasn’t back then — this was years ago!) and the potential of being picked up by someone up to no good… although the sky was still raining in my face, the rain in my mind had stopped.
I was no longer playing a losing hand. I had started playing a game that knew I could win at. Every time I thumbed a truck, and the truck went on past, I was one point out of ten closer to my target of thumbing 10 trucks. I new I was going to be able to do it! Everything was going according to plan!
Now I know that might sound like I was living in cloud cuckoo land. In terms of “physical reality”, thumbing ten trucks and watching them go by wasn’t getting me to Munich any faster than standing by the side of the road feeling hopeless was getting me there. And whilst in one sense that is absolutely true, in another way it is completely plausible in my mind that the sight of a hitcher having more of the manner of entertainment about him might have helped encourage someone who was considering whether they should help me to actually do so (even if it had not been my eastern European saviour).
And in addition, like I said above, even if I wasn’t finding my ride any faster, I was having a lot better time in terms of how I was feeling while I was waiting for someone kind to pass by. I had changed the game, and so I had changed the frame of reference: changed the frame of reference inside of which I was holding the whole set of circumstances which I was dealing with.
In a similar vein, when I was young and living in London, and I used to go out to night clubs, looking as it were for “new friends”, me and my flatmate pal (I won’t name and shame him) were probably as equally hopeless as each other in terms of our charm and sophistication.
He was (is) better looking than me, and slightly more charming too, but he also really didn’t have much of a clue at that stage in his life how to “pull”. Almost invariably the two of us would come home together the same way that we set off out for the evening… without any female company. I can’t say it didn’t feel kind of depressing.
So we used to make up a whole series of games we would play that in my case got me over my shyness, and in his case got him over his incompetence. We had games like the number of girls who gave us their phone number (usually a low score with me), the length of time that either of us could keep a girl in conversation, the number of times either of us made a girl laugh, etcetera etcetera. We had quite a lot of fun just coming up with the games, let alone playing them. I know what you’re thinking… all very sad. Well yes it was. But the games did in fact make us feel less sad. They were fun to play, and when you’re hopeless at something like that, and it seems really important that you should not be hopeless at it (which at the time it did seem), having some fun around it really does help. To this day I am still as much of a clutz as I ever was, however my friend went on to become one of the masters of the art.
In any case I am not claiming that changing the game and hence changing the frame is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I am only saying that changing the game and hence changing the frame provides an access to behaving and producing results (and also in the meantime an access to controlling how you are feeling) that is a useful tool in the tool bag of anyone who ever finds themselves in a situation where the “default game” (the game that you find yourself playing if you don’t invent your own one) is not giving you the experience or the results that you want.
In part 2 of this article series
We will continue to investigate the source of effective action.
