The (old) Alpha Mind

Crooked Timber on a law which, one hopes, won’t fly.

Just quoted Dee Hock in my last post and then I went and read Lee Hopkins on the “futility” of employee communications efforts. And I have to quote Dee again: “It is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism.”

With regard to the world that seems intent on self-destruction, it means that our only hope for turning things around is to have enough hope to take action.

With regard to employee communications, Clarence’s comment to Lee’s post, pessimistic as it is, tells precisely why companies will have to wake up—soon—and smell the coffee, and realize the importance of trust and communication in the workplace.

Just finished reading The Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee Hock, founder of Visa International and of The Chaordic Commons. I’ll make other comments later, but for now I just want to quote my favorite sentence from the book, which is also my quotation of the month:

It is far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism.

I love it. Needs to be the motto for the rest of my life.

Simple, short and fine little piece by Kim Klaver on pushing a product to people who don’t want it.

The post being short and simple, she stops short of mentioning that finding the two tennis players in a group may well be the route to making tennis converts within that group. A pair of people rejoining the group glowing and jazzed from a game of tennis is the best way to sell others.

In a longish, ramblyish post (he calls it the director’s cut), Paul Graham talks about the accents of Boston speakers. Reminds me of something I experienced in my time there.

Before I left Boston, the T (MBTA=transit system) got new-fangled, designer electronic voices to announce the stops. When I arrived in 1993, though, these were unheard-of, and the actual train operators did the work, over scarcely adequate PA systems.

I remember distinctly being on the T during orientation week at MIT, travelling home to Arlington, which took us past Harvard Square station. Late August, early September, the train is full of people from other parts of the country, new students lured to greater Boston’s 52 institutions of higher learning. And when a fresh batch of them first hears the train operator say “Hahvahd Squayah,” they can’t help themselves. They must mimic, two dozens or more voices at once trying out the sound of Boston’s working class, and then they must chortle, titter, guffaw.

It was an annual ritual that required no culture-bearers to maintain it. It arose spontaneously. The newcomers simply couldn’t help themselves. Their amused and supercilious reaction to the proletarian accent seemed as instinctive as the gag reflex, and not unrelated.

I’m planning a memorial for Tom Fox for this coming Sunday. I hope Friends and others from all over the bay area can attend.

I believe we can’t properly memorialize Tom without mourning all the war dead, and particularly the tremendous sufferings and losses of the Iraqi people. The memorial will honor them all.

Where: Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St., Berkeley 94702
When: Sunday, March 19, 5:00 PM

A thought after Quaker Heritage Day:

I posit two paradigms for exhortation, that is, for a communications act whose intent is to alter attitudes or behavior.

1. reasons-supplied
2. reasons-not-supplied

That is, you can tell your audience why there is a need to urge them to change, or you can simply urge them and not say why there’s a need.

I’m thinking of this because the messages of Peggy and Marge this weekend were largely hortatory, because the basic thrust of their message was firmly in line with exhortations I give frequently in my teaching and preaching, and because it seemed that their message met with less resistance than mine, a fact for which I am seeking a reason. And it occurs to me that I am an intense seeker and supplier of reasons, and Peggy and Marge, at least this past weekend, were not.

Now there can be many explanations for this phenomenon which have nothing to do with supplying reasons. To name a few:

• Guest speakers from out of town usually get more respect than the home-grown product. It’s why speaking is such a lucrative gig; organizations know the persuasion value of having an “expert” come from elsewhere to say what the leaders of the organization have been saying all along, knowing that the expert will be better heard.
• That the guest is paid and that the organization has put forth effort to bring them in heightens the perceived value of their opinions. As Gerald Weinberg has put it, “the more they pay you the more they respect you.”
• The larger the audience that is “going along” with what is being said, the greater the speaker’s credibility in the mind of the average audience member. “All these people aren’t disagreeing, therefore the speaker must be right.”

Thus, supplying or not supplying reasons can in no way make or break an audience’s receptivity. But I hypothesize that giving reasons within an exhortation can have a multivalent effect on that receptivity.

These are ways in which giving a reason can undermine a message:

• A hearer can judge that the reason does not apply to him/her, and thus feel exempt from hearing the message.
• A hearer can fail to understand the reason given. Since the reason is given as support for the exhortation, the exhortation loses credibility when the reason isn’t understood.
• A hearer can simply disagree with the reason given. Again the exhortation loses credibility.

On the other hand, despite these dangers, supplying reasons can greatly enhance a message’s effectiveness. I suspect this effect will show itself in the long run and not immediately. Why? Because when I listen to a rhetorically effective message, I can be led into a sense of strong immediate agreement. But if the purpose of the message was to change my behavior, then when I go out into the world and behave differently, the question will arise as to why I am behaving in the new way. It will arise in the minds of others to whom my behavior is peculiar, and in my own mind.

If the reasons I am able to give, to myself and others, are non-existent or weak, and if there is any social pressure to revert to my old and customary behavior, I’m very likely to revert. So, while in the message that asks me to adopt new behavior, the giving of reasons may undermine the immediate rhetorical aim of having the audience bond emotionally to the message, it may have an opposite long-range effect: of making the new behavior easier to adopt and to persist in.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll flesh out these abstract ideas with some examples.

For any of you from my own meeting who read my blog, go check out Peggy Parsons’ gracious thanks for our efforts.

I just left a longish comment on Quaker Renewal Forum. I won’t repeat it here, just link to it.

Last week while I was working full-out on the meeting’s first-ever television production, I failed to notice that FGC registration came and went.

Saturday night at Robin’s place, I was gratified to learn that two Quaker bloggers had signed up for my workshop at FGC. This was something of a wakeup call, reminding me that I’ll need to give some fresh thought to that workshop before July rolls around.

Rather more urgent wakeup call was today when I got an email from the Conference Coordinator saying that FGC was fully booked and registration was closed. As a workshop leader, I have to register and book housing, and I hadn’t done so.

Fortunately, they reserved spaces for workshop leaders and their families (I hope I can sneak in Giuseppe my elder under the “family” provision), and will let me register as soon as they can set up a password-protected site for that purpose.

Today I see the number of bloggers signed up for my workshop is three: Robin, Martin, and Joe G. The beginnings of a high-quality group, I’d say. My eagerness for the event has skyrocketed!