For 32 years now, I’ve been conducting a decision-making game with my Ripon College students and with various mid-career groups. The game challenges participants to decide on the relative usefulness of fifteen items for survival in the desert after a plane crash. Participants first rank the items on their own and then rank them again in groups of six to eight. They then compare their own lists and their group’s list with the rankings of the military survival experts who concocted the game in the first place.
The game is supposed to demonstrate the advantages of group decision-making over individual decision-making in a situation like this. I have probably facilitated this game with more than 3,000 people since 1980, and every single time I have done it the group scores have been higher than the individual scores somewhere between 65% and 80% of the time. Every time I did it, I told the participants that someday the individuals would do better than the groups, but that never happened. Until last week in my introductory course, Leadership and the Human Spirit.
After trying unsuccessfully to figure out why this happened, I chalked it up to the law of averages and accepted the fact that it was bound to happen sooner or later.
Though the scores were out of kilter this time, the students and I were able to identify the reasons why groups normally do better than individuals on this game and why, in a minority of cases, individuals do better than the group. It helps to start with the observation that the decisions in this game are all about common everyday items and thus do not require complex knowledge of high-tech stuff. Everybody has some idea of what the items on the list can do but most people have never thought about them in a context like this.
At any rate, the explanations are apt for our Leading Together blog, so here goes.
The first reason why groups normally do better than individuals is that two heads are indeed better than one, and six or eight heads are better than two. More viewpoints mean more ideas.
The second reason is that people in isolation are unable to appreciate their own mistakes; but if someone else is present then mistakes become easier to detect. Group decision-making can weed out mistakes as well as contribute more ideas.
The third reason is that the process of communication is creative and tends to transform original ideas into better ideas as people express themselves, reflect on other people’s ideas, and consider new alternatives. Ideas piggyback on other ideas. Communication is not just a process of expressing what we know we know; it is often a process of finding out what we can learn.
And why do groups not always make better decisions than individuals? Well, they all have something to do with the non-rational and social influences on our decisions. When members of a group are unclear about the rational or logical reasons for a decision, they look to other cues.
If, for example, someone in the group speaks up quickly and confidently, as we expect leaders to do, we assume they know what they are talking about – unless, of course, we know they are wrong. In that case, we may be reluctant to follow their lead the next time.
The other two reasons are polar opposites of the same proposition. If we have or would like to have a positive relationship with someone in the group who advocates a particular position, we are likely to side with that person if we are unsure of any better reason. And if we just can’t stand someone in the group, we are likely to seek other options rather than agree with them. It may not matter if those other options make little sense as long as they satisfy our desire to avoid being on the same side of the fence as the person we just don’t like.
This is not to suggest that emotional factors and personal relationships are inherently bad; they are in fact extremely important within any group and they contribute to the commitment of members to try out and stick with the group’s decisions. And in fact, the best decisions are sometimes the ones we feel committed to whether they are rationally and objectively better than other decisions.
The classic example of that is a marriage. There is no way to verify that one’s spouse is literally the best choice in the world, but a strong commitment to the relationship from both partners can make for a happy and durable marriage.
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Training for Collaborative Leadership
The Wisconsin Leadership Institute (WLI) will host a five-day training institute at the Cenacle Retreat and Conference Center in Chicago June 25-29, 2012. The “Leading Together Institute” will be based on the curriculum developed by the WLI and published in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership. It will aim to prepare K-12 teachers; school administrator; experiential facilitators; college students, faculty, and staff involved in collaborative leadership; and others who use experiential education in their professional lives to implement practices and exercises provided in the curriculum.
During the five days, participants will engage in the process, reflect upon their experience, and dialogue with each other to gain meaning and understanding. Completion of the institute will entitle participants to train other educators to use the curriculum to its fullest extent. By the end of the institute, participants will apply their learning by co-facilitating parts of the curriculum, offering feedback to one another, and creating a personal action plan. For an additional fee, graduate credit will also be available to those who complete the institute.
For more information about the Leading Together Institute, please contact Laurie Frank at 608-251-2234 or email her at lsfrank@mac.com.
During the five days, participants will engage in the process, reflect upon their experience, and dialogue with each other to gain meaning and understanding. Completion of the institute will entitle participants to train other educators to use the curriculum to its fullest extent. By the end of the institute, participants will apply their learning by co-facilitating parts of the curriculum, offering feedback to one another, and creating a personal action plan. For an additional fee, graduate credit will also be available to those who complete the institute.
For more information about the Leading Together Institute, please contact Laurie Frank at 608-251-2234 or email her at lsfrank@mac.com.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Next Generation Calls for Collaboration
The Next Generation (NGen) project, funded by American Express and convened by Independent Sector, recently released a report on the major concerns of the 2009-2010 class of NGen Fellows, all aspiring leaders under the age of 40.
In essence, the report concluded that professionals under 40 feel that collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve society’s problems and agree on the most important issues to address, but don't know how to connect with people in other sectors working to solve these problems.
The top issues facing communities, the nation, and the world, they concur, are education, poverty, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, however, NGen Fellows had great difficulty identifying any of their peers who were currently effective at solving those significant social problems. Of the Fellows polled, 1,300 skipped this question altogether, and of the 1,000 who did answer it, the top vote getters were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who received just ten and eight votes respectively.
Finally, the Fellows believe that the nonprofit sector is best positioned to take the lead in engaging other sectors (government and for-profit business) to solve comprehensive social problems. They also believe that they need more leadership development, especially for the challenges of collaborating across the sectors.
The report goes on to recommend expanding the traditional definition of a “leader” and to stress the need for collaboration to reach out, find common ground, and build bridges.
Want to know more? Check out the summary yourself at http://buildingmovement.org/pdf/ngen_fellows_09_report.pdf.
In essence, the report concluded that professionals under 40 feel that collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve society’s problems and agree on the most important issues to address, but don't know how to connect with people in other sectors working to solve these problems.
The top issues facing communities, the nation, and the world, they concur, are education, poverty, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, however, NGen Fellows had great difficulty identifying any of their peers who were currently effective at solving those significant social problems. Of the Fellows polled, 1,300 skipped this question altogether, and of the 1,000 who did answer it, the top vote getters were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who received just ten and eight votes respectively.
Finally, the Fellows believe that the nonprofit sector is best positioned to take the lead in engaging other sectors (government and for-profit business) to solve comprehensive social problems. They also believe that they need more leadership development, especially for the challenges of collaborating across the sectors.
The report goes on to recommend expanding the traditional definition of a “leader” and to stress the need for collaboration to reach out, find common ground, and build bridges.
Want to know more? Check out the summary yourself at http://buildingmovement.org/pdf/ngen_fellows_09_report.pdf.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Zero-Sum Games
As I prepare this blog for publication, the President of the United States and several House and Senate leaders from both parties are trying to hammer out a deal whereby our nation can avoid defaulting on its debts. According to the most reliable economists and historians, an actual default would be catastrophic in several ways; they also tell us that there is no credible reason for us to be in such a precarious position in the first place. But we are.
The underlying causes for the impasse, it seems, are more about the kind of political games that are being played than any rational insights about spending cuts and taxation. The two sides – that is, the two political parties – are playing a zero-sum game, which means that one party will win and the other will lose. Just as in every sporting event ever played in the history of sport, the number of all the wins is exactly the same as the number of all the losses – hence the zero sum.
A non-zero-sum game, by contrast, leads to a positive outcome for both sides, or what we sometimes call a win-win outcome. Win-win outcomes also benefit people who aren't even playing the game but who are influenced by its outcome. People who study human effectiveness know that we can almost always achieve win-win outcomes as long as nobody is driven by non-rational ideologies or dysfunctional emotions like unjustified fear and anger. (Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lists “think win-win” as habit number 4.)
In the budget and deficit tangle now engulfing our national politics, it is becoming more and more evident that the larger good of the whole nation seems less important to some of our leaders than the narrow interests of some portions of the nation and certainly less important than victory over the other political party. Some of the beliefs driving the participants are in fact based on no rational evidence; they are really just ideological creeds. And a creed with no rational evidence behind it is really nothing more than an intellectual addition – what I like to call an ideaddiction. More than 30 years ago, John Gardner, one of the most insightful observers of our national life, called this kind of thing “the war of the parts against the whole.”
Non-zero-sum games are what most of us play most of the time. Education is a non-zero-sum game because everyone benefits from an educated population. Business is as well, since a successful business satisfies the needs of customers and clients and supports suppliers and the general community. Businesses cannot endure if they only satisfy their own desires; the function of any business is to provide goods and services for others. (It’s also true, of course, that businesses compete against each other in zero-sum kinds of ways.)
The fact is that groups, cultures, and nations can only survive, let alone flourish, if they play enough non-zero-sum games to create lots of win-win situations. The kind of extremist competition we are now witnessing in our political culture is ultimately destructive every which way, and if there is no progress from the talks going on in Washington right now, the destructive results will start to show up real soon.
Collaborative leadership, of course, attempts to play exclusively non-zero-sum games that lead only to win-win outcomes. Such leadership downplays or skirts the compulsion to compete and to perceive people with different ideas as dangerous or misguided. Leading together takes patience, empathy, and wisdom. That’s why it usually takes a long time to show results. But when results start to show up, they are virtually always durable and satisfying. When people are all in the same boat, it is always better to work together than to fight each other. And in this global community we now inhabit, we are all in the same boat just about all the time.
The underlying causes for the impasse, it seems, are more about the kind of political games that are being played than any rational insights about spending cuts and taxation. The two sides – that is, the two political parties – are playing a zero-sum game, which means that one party will win and the other will lose. Just as in every sporting event ever played in the history of sport, the number of all the wins is exactly the same as the number of all the losses – hence the zero sum.
A non-zero-sum game, by contrast, leads to a positive outcome for both sides, or what we sometimes call a win-win outcome. Win-win outcomes also benefit people who aren't even playing the game but who are influenced by its outcome. People who study human effectiveness know that we can almost always achieve win-win outcomes as long as nobody is driven by non-rational ideologies or dysfunctional emotions like unjustified fear and anger. (Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lists “think win-win” as habit number 4.)
In the budget and deficit tangle now engulfing our national politics, it is becoming more and more evident that the larger good of the whole nation seems less important to some of our leaders than the narrow interests of some portions of the nation and certainly less important than victory over the other political party. Some of the beliefs driving the participants are in fact based on no rational evidence; they are really just ideological creeds. And a creed with no rational evidence behind it is really nothing more than an intellectual addition – what I like to call an ideaddiction. More than 30 years ago, John Gardner, one of the most insightful observers of our national life, called this kind of thing “the war of the parts against the whole.”
Non-zero-sum games are what most of us play most of the time. Education is a non-zero-sum game because everyone benefits from an educated population. Business is as well, since a successful business satisfies the needs of customers and clients and supports suppliers and the general community. Businesses cannot endure if they only satisfy their own desires; the function of any business is to provide goods and services for others. (It’s also true, of course, that businesses compete against each other in zero-sum kinds of ways.)
The fact is that groups, cultures, and nations can only survive, let alone flourish, if they play enough non-zero-sum games to create lots of win-win situations. The kind of extremist competition we are now witnessing in our political culture is ultimately destructive every which way, and if there is no progress from the talks going on in Washington right now, the destructive results will start to show up real soon.
Collaborative leadership, of course, attempts to play exclusively non-zero-sum games that lead only to win-win outcomes. Such leadership downplays or skirts the compulsion to compete and to perceive people with different ideas as dangerous or misguided. Leading together takes patience, empathy, and wisdom. That’s why it usually takes a long time to show results. But when results start to show up, they are virtually always durable and satisfying. When people are all in the same boat, it is always better to work together than to fight each other. And in this global community we now inhabit, we are all in the same boat just about all the time.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Train-the-Trainer Institute for Collaborative Leadership at Ripon College July 5-9, 2011
This week’s blog is a rather shameless promotion for an event sponsored by the Wisconsin Leadership Institute for teachers and youth leaders who want to learn how to facilitate our curriculum on collaborative leadership at the secondary-school level. It will happen on the Ripon College campus in Ripon, Wisconsin, from July 5 through July 9.
The purpose of this five-day Institute is to help facilitators and youth leaders understand the process for facilitating the Wisconsin Leadership Institute’s youth curriculum, as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership, by Laurie Frank, Carol Carlin, and Jack Christ. The Institute will prepare facilitators to offer workshops and programs to train others to use the curriculum. This Institute will be valuable for teachers, youth workers, camp counselors, and those who train people in youth development work. An understanding of adventure education, group facilitation, presentation, and processing of activities is desired.
Facilitators and youth leaders who participate in the Institute will:
· Develop an understanding of the underlying assumptions and concepts of collaborative leadership as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership.
· Become familiar with the scope and sequence of the curriculum.
· Practice the experiential process as outlined in the curriculum.
· Share information with colleagues about collaborative leadership and facilitation techniques.
· Leave with an ability to provide workshops to those who are interested in developing collaborative leadership skills, values, and habits within youth groups and organizations.
To achieve these goals, participants will engage in the process, reflect upon their experience, and dialogue with each other to gain meaning and understanding. Participants will create their own personal action plan for applying the lessons of the Institute and sharing them with others. Completion of the workshop will entitle facilitators to conduct workshops with those who are interested in using the curriculum to its fullest extent. Graduate credits will be available for completion of the Institute.
Overview of the Agenda
Day 1: Introductions, orientation to the history and structure of the curriculum; foundational beliefs; collaborative leadership tasks.
Day 2: What is leadership?
Day 3: What is collaborative leadership?
Day 4: Participant presentations and feedback.
Day 5: Action planning and closing.
For questions about the Leading Together Institute, please call Laurie Frank
at (608) 251-2234 or email her at LSFrank@mac.com
To register for the Institute, please contact Dr. Jack Christ at Christj@ripon.edu
The $480 program fee includes room, board, and meals for the duration of the event. Three graduate credits are available through Viterbo University for an additional cost.
The purpose of this five-day Institute is to help facilitators and youth leaders understand the process for facilitating the Wisconsin Leadership Institute’s youth curriculum, as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership, by Laurie Frank, Carol Carlin, and Jack Christ. The Institute will prepare facilitators to offer workshops and programs to train others to use the curriculum. This Institute will be valuable for teachers, youth workers, camp counselors, and those who train people in youth development work. An understanding of adventure education, group facilitation, presentation, and processing of activities is desired.
Facilitators and youth leaders who participate in the Institute will:
· Develop an understanding of the underlying assumptions and concepts of collaborative leadership as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership.
· Become familiar with the scope and sequence of the curriculum.
· Practice the experiential process as outlined in the curriculum.
· Share information with colleagues about collaborative leadership and facilitation techniques.
· Leave with an ability to provide workshops to those who are interested in developing collaborative leadership skills, values, and habits within youth groups and organizations.
To achieve these goals, participants will engage in the process, reflect upon their experience, and dialogue with each other to gain meaning and understanding. Participants will create their own personal action plan for applying the lessons of the Institute and sharing them with others. Completion of the workshop will entitle facilitators to conduct workshops with those who are interested in using the curriculum to its fullest extent. Graduate credits will be available for completion of the Institute.
Overview of the Agenda
Day 1: Introductions, orientation to the history and structure of the curriculum; foundational beliefs; collaborative leadership tasks.
Day 2: What is leadership?
Day 3: What is collaborative leadership?
Day 4: Participant presentations and feedback.
Day 5: Action planning and closing.
For questions about the Leading Together Institute, please call Laurie Frank
at (608) 251-2234 or email her at LSFrank@mac.com
To register for the Institute, please contact Dr. Jack Christ at Christj@ripon.edu
The $480 program fee includes room, board, and meals for the duration of the event. Three graduate credits are available through Viterbo University for an additional cost.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Harmony, Not Unity
In the contentious, partisan environment currently swamping our political culture, we hear plaintive calls for calm, compromise, and unity. Unfortunately, we hear at least as many angry calls for total victory by one side over the other.
The current situation here in Wisconsin offers an instructive look at the main outlines of the problem and may hint at solutions. After weeks of bitter dispute over the new governor’s budget and plans to strip bargaining rights from public union members, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a thoughtful and refreshing column written by two prominent Wisconsin citizens on opposite sides of the dispute.
The column, signed by Kevin Conroy and Jim Connelly, a Democrat and a Republican, concluded that “We need to show individual leadership by calling for a decrease in partisan shouting and by getting directly involved in bipartisan business growth initiatives. One thing is very obvious: We can’t do it divided.”
My only quibble with that column is in the headline: “Wisconsin’s Prosperity Requires Unity.” That headline, of course, was probably written by a headline writer and not by the authors of the column itself. Nonetheless, the issue is worth attention. I would suggest that “unity” is a misleading and elusive goal. I would rather we aim for harmony.
Aiming for unity suggests that we should all agree on most if not all strategies and tactics, which of course also assumes that we agree on goals and objectives. To point a metaphor, people unified on political and economic issues is a lot like a choir singing in unison. Everyone sings the same notes at the same time. That assumes that sopranos can sing bass notes and basses can sing soprano notes.
Harmony, however, requires us to sing different notes in a coordinated effort, as long as we agree to sing the same song in the same key at the same tempo. The concept of harmony respects the integrity of each section – bass, tenor, alto, soprano – in the service of richer, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying music.
Aiming for unity asks us to choose one of the following alternatives: ask or force the other side to give up its integrity, surrender integrity for the sake of unity, or concoct a compromise which both sides can support. The more deeply each side is committed to its own principles, the less likely they are to settle for any of these alternatives.
Aiming for harmony starts with the simple act of listening to the other side and choosing to get to know people on the other side in all their complex humanity. Aiming for harmony asks us to quit demonizing the people on the other side and to quit distorting their arguments. It requires some measure of empathy, the driving force of all moral and ethical behavior. It requires us to look for verifiable information and to quit spouting unverifiable ideology. It is worth noting, by the way, that all ideology is unverifiable. That’s what makes it ideology rather than information, knowledge, or wisdom.
Collaborative leadership always starts with relationship building and agreement on basic principles like democratic process and empirical evidence, which can take a long time. It is, however, worth the effort, since it promotes harmony – coordinated action in pursuit of shared goals while maintaining the integrity of the participants. It helps us avoid the toxic and fruitless condition of “us versus them” and it helps us remember that our political adversaries are also our neighbors and fellow citizens.
The current situation here in Wisconsin offers an instructive look at the main outlines of the problem and may hint at solutions. After weeks of bitter dispute over the new governor’s budget and plans to strip bargaining rights from public union members, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a thoughtful and refreshing column written by two prominent Wisconsin citizens on opposite sides of the dispute.
The column, signed by Kevin Conroy and Jim Connelly, a Democrat and a Republican, concluded that “We need to show individual leadership by calling for a decrease in partisan shouting and by getting directly involved in bipartisan business growth initiatives. One thing is very obvious: We can’t do it divided.”
My only quibble with that column is in the headline: “Wisconsin’s Prosperity Requires Unity.” That headline, of course, was probably written by a headline writer and not by the authors of the column itself. Nonetheless, the issue is worth attention. I would suggest that “unity” is a misleading and elusive goal. I would rather we aim for harmony.
Aiming for unity suggests that we should all agree on most if not all strategies and tactics, which of course also assumes that we agree on goals and objectives. To point a metaphor, people unified on political and economic issues is a lot like a choir singing in unison. Everyone sings the same notes at the same time. That assumes that sopranos can sing bass notes and basses can sing soprano notes.
Harmony, however, requires us to sing different notes in a coordinated effort, as long as we agree to sing the same song in the same key at the same tempo. The concept of harmony respects the integrity of each section – bass, tenor, alto, soprano – in the service of richer, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying music.
Aiming for unity asks us to choose one of the following alternatives: ask or force the other side to give up its integrity, surrender integrity for the sake of unity, or concoct a compromise which both sides can support. The more deeply each side is committed to its own principles, the less likely they are to settle for any of these alternatives.
Aiming for harmony starts with the simple act of listening to the other side and choosing to get to know people on the other side in all their complex humanity. Aiming for harmony asks us to quit demonizing the people on the other side and to quit distorting their arguments. It requires some measure of empathy, the driving force of all moral and ethical behavior. It requires us to look for verifiable information and to quit spouting unverifiable ideology. It is worth noting, by the way, that all ideology is unverifiable. That’s what makes it ideology rather than information, knowledge, or wisdom.
Collaborative leadership always starts with relationship building and agreement on basic principles like democratic process and empirical evidence, which can take a long time. It is, however, worth the effort, since it promotes harmony – coordinated action in pursuit of shared goals while maintaining the integrity of the participants. It helps us avoid the toxic and fruitless condition of “us versus them” and it helps us remember that our political adversaries are also our neighbors and fellow citizens.
Friday, January 14, 2011
The Courage to Learn
This week’s biggest news story happened at a Tucson shopping mall, where a disturbed young man went on a rampage with an automatic weapon that left six dead and fourteen injured. His primary target was Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who seems to be recovering miraculously from a bullet hole in her brain. Among the dead is nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was attending the event to learn about how the democratic process works.
As a community, we have witnessed so many of these violent episodes that the range of responses has become predictable. The resulting public conversation, in fact, has focused largely on who is supposedly to blame for this catastrophe and others like it. Among political partisans and some quarters of mass media, the talk has often been polarized, defensive, and accusatory.
Part of the problem, I think, is that too many people, especially those with a political or religious ideology to defend and promote, assume that cause and effect in human affairs can be reduced to simple one-cause-fits-all solutions. We are told that the horror in Tucson could have been prevented by more civility in our political discourse, by stricter limits on guns that are only good for killing lots of people in a few seconds, by reducing the amount of violence in mass media and entertainment, or by better monitoring of people with mental-health problems.
Some even argue that the best solution is to make sure that even more people have guns at the ready for self-defense. That argument may seem useful and personally satisfying after the fact, but it is not a prescription for prevention.
The fact is that people never do anything significant for just one reason. Causation in human affairs is always a matter of multiple causes. In cases like this, communities are a lot like gardens. Just as a garden’s growth requires healthy seeds, receptive soil, ample sunshine and water, perhaps some appropriate fertilizer, and attentive weeding, healthy communities must pay attention to all the factors that contribute to ultimate causation. If any one factor is weak or missing, the garden will suffer or die; if all the factors are just little bit deficient, the garden will still suffer and might not survive.
There is plenty of valid and reliable evidence that nasty, toxic rhetoric contributes to the tendency among a small fraction of the population to act out violently. In fact, the very presence of violence in any culture at any level, whether in real life or in the imaginative life of entertainment media and computer games, tends to generate copycat behavior among the small fraction of the population that just might act out the violence their eyes and ears and brains have absorbed. The process of desensitization to violence has been documented over and over again in many experimental and real-life contexts.
And it’s sheer common sense to realize that the ready availability of high-tech handguns makes it more likely that disturbed people will occasionally use them for their intended purpose.
Thus there is very good reason to ask our political representatives and our entertainment moguls to tone down the violence and the polarized nastiness that have been polluting our culture for some time now. We know that Old Testament episodes and Shakespeare’s plays are violent in places, but we are supposed to think about the reasons for and the consequences of such violence in the Bible and in Shakespeare. And nobody spends hours every day reading the Old Testament or Shakespeare.
The violence we see on television, however, is pervasive, graphic, and spectacular. It happens for no reason other than cheap entertainment, and many people watch it for hours every day. The nasty, polarized rhetoric to which we are subjected in our political life is never really intended to solve any significant problem, but just to work people up to attack or defend an ideology. And ideologies are not based on empirical evidence but on faith in some tradition or some authority; thus, when ideologies clash, there can never be a rational conversation with a satisfying conclusion. There can only be more and more rounds of pointless clash.
There is also good reason to expect our elected officials to take seriously the impact of guns in our culture. This would mean facing up to the unwarranted power of the gun lobby and looking carefully at all the available evidence on all the issues involved, including evidence from other nations where gun violence is a non-issue.
So what to do? The basic principles of collaborative leadership on which the Collaborative Leadership Network is founded can be very helpful here. One important principle is to recognize that the truth is often complex, and in human affairs it is always very complex.
Thus we should try to be patient and track down all the causes for a given problem before we propose solutions or take action. This means recognizing that we can only reduce the incidence of mass killing by addressing all the significant causes at once – in this case, by supporting civility in public discourse, by sensible limits on the kinds of guns that are only useful for killing people, by acknowledging the dangers of violence in mass media, by more effective monitoring and treatment of people with certifiable violent tendencies, and by whatever other means seem appropriate.
We should also be patient about turning prescriptions into actual solutions. In our instant-gratification quick-fix culture, patience is an often-neglected virtue. Legislation is not always the answer to large-scale social problems, but sometimes it is. And getting legislation passed can be a long, tedious process. In any case, for it to succeed, it should also be a collaborative process.
The first principle of effective collaboration, in fact, is that collaboration starts with relationships. Collaborative leaders spend a lot of time and energy building bridges, knocking down walls, and generally developing relationships with others, including those who seriously disagree with them, before they even think about achieving any particular goals together. This can be time-consuming and draining, but it ultimately works better than the old worn-out power games that depend on hierarchy, authority, intimidation, and competition.
Those who promote collaboration and collaborative leadership are frequently ridiculed by others for being idealistic, naïve, weak, or simply out of touch with the supposed realities of human interaction. Over the last two millennia, however, we have learned that collaboration based on concern for others actually works better than competition in many situations. Our wisest and most respected leaders, philosophers, and moral prophets have all said so. Of course, many of them have been assassinated or crucified as dangerous revolutionaries. Apparently, living out the lessons they taught takes considerable courage.
It may sound idealistic and naïve to claim that our first challenge is simply to get along with each other, but our wisest and most profound observers have been delivering pretty much that very message since well before the Sermon on the Mount, and contemporary psychology echoes much of that message.
It’s time we mustered the courage and the wisdom to take that message seriously.
As a community, we have witnessed so many of these violent episodes that the range of responses has become predictable. The resulting public conversation, in fact, has focused largely on who is supposedly to blame for this catastrophe and others like it. Among political partisans and some quarters of mass media, the talk has often been polarized, defensive, and accusatory.
Part of the problem, I think, is that too many people, especially those with a political or religious ideology to defend and promote, assume that cause and effect in human affairs can be reduced to simple one-cause-fits-all solutions. We are told that the horror in Tucson could have been prevented by more civility in our political discourse, by stricter limits on guns that are only good for killing lots of people in a few seconds, by reducing the amount of violence in mass media and entertainment, or by better monitoring of people with mental-health problems.
Some even argue that the best solution is to make sure that even more people have guns at the ready for self-defense. That argument may seem useful and personally satisfying after the fact, but it is not a prescription for prevention.
The fact is that people never do anything significant for just one reason. Causation in human affairs is always a matter of multiple causes. In cases like this, communities are a lot like gardens. Just as a garden’s growth requires healthy seeds, receptive soil, ample sunshine and water, perhaps some appropriate fertilizer, and attentive weeding, healthy communities must pay attention to all the factors that contribute to ultimate causation. If any one factor is weak or missing, the garden will suffer or die; if all the factors are just little bit deficient, the garden will still suffer and might not survive.
There is plenty of valid and reliable evidence that nasty, toxic rhetoric contributes to the tendency among a small fraction of the population to act out violently. In fact, the very presence of violence in any culture at any level, whether in real life or in the imaginative life of entertainment media and computer games, tends to generate copycat behavior among the small fraction of the population that just might act out the violence their eyes and ears and brains have absorbed. The process of desensitization to violence has been documented over and over again in many experimental and real-life contexts.
And it’s sheer common sense to realize that the ready availability of high-tech handguns makes it more likely that disturbed people will occasionally use them for their intended purpose.
Thus there is very good reason to ask our political representatives and our entertainment moguls to tone down the violence and the polarized nastiness that have been polluting our culture for some time now. We know that Old Testament episodes and Shakespeare’s plays are violent in places, but we are supposed to think about the reasons for and the consequences of such violence in the Bible and in Shakespeare. And nobody spends hours every day reading the Old Testament or Shakespeare.
The violence we see on television, however, is pervasive, graphic, and spectacular. It happens for no reason other than cheap entertainment, and many people watch it for hours every day. The nasty, polarized rhetoric to which we are subjected in our political life is never really intended to solve any significant problem, but just to work people up to attack or defend an ideology. And ideologies are not based on empirical evidence but on faith in some tradition or some authority; thus, when ideologies clash, there can never be a rational conversation with a satisfying conclusion. There can only be more and more rounds of pointless clash.
There is also good reason to expect our elected officials to take seriously the impact of guns in our culture. This would mean facing up to the unwarranted power of the gun lobby and looking carefully at all the available evidence on all the issues involved, including evidence from other nations where gun violence is a non-issue.
So what to do? The basic principles of collaborative leadership on which the Collaborative Leadership Network is founded can be very helpful here. One important principle is to recognize that the truth is often complex, and in human affairs it is always very complex.
Thus we should try to be patient and track down all the causes for a given problem before we propose solutions or take action. This means recognizing that we can only reduce the incidence of mass killing by addressing all the significant causes at once – in this case, by supporting civility in public discourse, by sensible limits on the kinds of guns that are only useful for killing people, by acknowledging the dangers of violence in mass media, by more effective monitoring and treatment of people with certifiable violent tendencies, and by whatever other means seem appropriate.
We should also be patient about turning prescriptions into actual solutions. In our instant-gratification quick-fix culture, patience is an often-neglected virtue. Legislation is not always the answer to large-scale social problems, but sometimes it is. And getting legislation passed can be a long, tedious process. In any case, for it to succeed, it should also be a collaborative process.
The first principle of effective collaboration, in fact, is that collaboration starts with relationships. Collaborative leaders spend a lot of time and energy building bridges, knocking down walls, and generally developing relationships with others, including those who seriously disagree with them, before they even think about achieving any particular goals together. This can be time-consuming and draining, but it ultimately works better than the old worn-out power games that depend on hierarchy, authority, intimidation, and competition.
Those who promote collaboration and collaborative leadership are frequently ridiculed by others for being idealistic, naïve, weak, or simply out of touch with the supposed realities of human interaction. Over the last two millennia, however, we have learned that collaboration based on concern for others actually works better than competition in many situations. Our wisest and most respected leaders, philosophers, and moral prophets have all said so. Of course, many of them have been assassinated or crucified as dangerous revolutionaries. Apparently, living out the lessons they taught takes considerable courage.
It may sound idealistic and naïve to claim that our first challenge is simply to get along with each other, but our wisest and most profound observers have been delivering pretty much that very message since well before the Sermon on the Mount, and contemporary psychology echoes much of that message.
It’s time we mustered the courage and the wisdom to take that message seriously.
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