Angry men..

I've been thinking a lot lately about the film Twelve Angry Men.

If you've not seen it, Henry Fonda plays the one guy on a jury reluctant to convict. He faces initially overwhelming hostility from his fellow jurors. Gradually, with reasoned argument about the room for doubt, he patiently persuades each in turn to switch to 'not guilty'. It's a film about many things: prejudice, doubt, the rule of law.

For me at the moment, it's about the challenge of standing for decency, reason and reflection against violent emotion. It's a very American film, representing challenges that nation has constantly faced. I think it faces those challenges today again when deciding whether to angrily swipe aside a scrupulous examination of the evidence of torture. I'm hearing a lot of angry claims about about "efficacy", the need for secrecy and executive privilege. These voices remind me of Ed Begley's role in this clip, as the last standout against reason and decency on the jury. I don't know if those voices will end up as isolated as Begley, but I hope they do.

In the movie, the jury finds the defendant not guilty because of reasonable doubt. It looks to me at the moment as though the factual evidence about torture leaves very little room for doubt. We'll see.

Not so dark?

Doug Rushkoff writes:

First off, the Dark Ages were not dark. The Late Middle Ages, in particular, were extremely prosperous. Population and wealth went up, work hours went down. Height and health went up, death and taxes went down. This is when the cathedrals were built, with local profits generated by local economies.

The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began.

That’s right: the plague didn’t happen during the Middle Ages - it was the direct result of centralized monetary and business policy in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. Once the plague killed off more than half of Europe, people got healthier and wealthier again, because the crippled, centralized economy could support that few.

The pitfalls of buy-in and action planning

Quite often in meetings there´s a big assumption that we must end with action planning, without which the event will be deemed unproductive.

Action planning has its place, and Chris Corrigan has a good post looking at some choices in the context of open space meetings.

But I think the demand for action planning can often be a tremendous if unintended red herring.

For example, I often host meetings where a very diverse group of people gather from many different backgrounds. These people will never meet again as this group and while they share some common interests, it would be quite wrong to treat them as a single entity whose purpose is to agree on some common plan. Trying to get them to agree a list of joint actions feels like an avoidance of a more interesting truth: the actions that will emerge from such a group will almost certainly NOT be agreeable, acceptable or even remotely interesting to all. Let´s not force people to sit through a pantomine at the end of an otherwise engaging meeting so that some can maintain an illusion that this diverse group can be ordered and controlled.

I´ll go further and say that action planning can be pretty toxic even where the people in the room are from the same movement or organisation and are supposed to working together going into the future. Sure, sometimes it´s important to co-ordinate, but the reality in most groups is that there is never a real consensus about anything really energising, and the actions that actually do result are not the product of some tidy consensus, but the result of a mess of politics, differing personal motivations and - crucially - the driving and sometimes unreasonable passion of a smaller number of agitators.

So when people start talking about the need for everyone singing from the same songsheet, or arguing vehemently that everyone must "buy in", I try to maintain a sanguine dispostion. It seems to me such vehemence could go different ways: it can slide into inadvertent control-freakery and lead us to a heavy handed group process... or it can be shifted with a good question towards something (IMHO) much more useful: for example, what it is YOU want to do and do you want to find the people who also want to do it, and deal in some way or other with the resistance that almost any really exciting idea must generate?

Which pool would you swim in?

Rob put up a great post the other day making a whole load of challenging points about how see the world. I want to pick a couple of his images to make a slightly narrower point about meetings and how we play them.

Here´s exhibit A:

This is a conventional swimming pool, and a particularly attractive one I´d say. It´s what we´ve been trained to think of as a nice, safe place to swim... and in many ways it is, if you don´t mind the chlorine. But for reasons elaborated by Rob in his post, this pool has a lot of downsides: it´s expensive, hard to sustain, uses lots of energy and chemicals, and if the maintenance fails even a little, it quite quickly becomes a pretty nasty place to be. it´s a very artificial space, sterile if you will.

Then there´s Exhibit B:

This is also a swimming pool, Jim, but not as most of us know it. No chlorine. As Rob puts it:

If designed to work with nature, Nature becomes your pool service. Not a chemical in sight! No scum on the way and if you have the right surrounding environment with the right birds and insects then no mossies either. As each year passes this pool gets easier to run and gets more attractive.

So here´s my point: too many meetings are like the conventional pool - they´re safe but a bit smelly, comfortable in a way but at the price of being sterile. Where the pool has chlorine, maintenance men and ugly cleaning machines the conventional meeting has keynotes, powerpoint and often overbearing chairmen and, er, facilitators.

The second pool is more like open space and other conversational formats: intially intimidating and messy looking but more sustainable and, at least in a sense, natural.

I know which I´d rather jump into...

Hobby Economy

Rob Horning has an interesting article speculating that much of the benefits of the networked economy aren't going to show up in conventional economic statistics. This makes sense to me.

...gains in productivity derived from things like the internet aren’t showing up as more money in our pockets, and they are not showing up as corporate profit, but they do exist in a kind of nascent alternative economy. The “consumer surplus” is being generated outside of capitalist structures, outside of the market, though it is still occurring within a capitalist, consumerist society. It’s being made through activity that has in the past been generally dismissed as hobby behavior—collaborative open-source projects, online content production and archiving, tagging information, sharing and organizing useful data, etc., etc. The internet amasses this effort, consolidates it, distributes the example and rewards of it, and draws more people into contributing.

Time to act and learn

There's a lot to chew on in Chris Corrigan's latest post, Leading from a platform of reverence, but this part particularly struck me today:

We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. Those machinations took the last great global attempt at Kyoto and scuttled it and now we are out of time. The time for planning is over, and the time for a myriad of experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activities, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but who are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. And they are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.

Stand by me, global edition

I loved this video: a globalised version of Stand by Me.

Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo. Originally from RedWire

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Unstoppable force, have you met Immovable Object?

I've met Matt Weinstein several times at Improv conferences and always found him hilarious, engaging and unrelentlingly enthusiastic about life.

So what happens when someone this positive is cheated of his entire life savings by Bernie Madoff?

I'll let Matt speak for himself.

Noticing

In Dublin last week, Kay Scorah and I ran our first Day of Noticing Workshop. Kay and I are good friends but we've not actually run anything together before and it was great to do so, and to share some games and activities.

One of the highlights for me was a painting activity that Kay introduced me to. Stick some bright poster paints in front of a group of adults and something interesting is likely to happen. We followed a simple structure: in round one, all you do is grab a brush and use it to wet the sheet of paper in front of you. Then pass the sheet to the right, so you now have someone else's wet paper in front of you. Now, you're asked to choose just one colour and paint the entire sheet that colour.

Sounds simple enough, but looking around, you realise that already there's huge variety in each painting, as even these simple instructions have generated very different results. And already, you start to feel like this stuff is now art.

The next step is to move one place along so you're now sitting in front of someone else's brightly coloured sheet of wet paper. Then you make one simple brush stroke in a contrasting colour. And then you move more place, where you're invited to reflect on what's in front of you for two minutes, seeing what is there. Then you get to pick up your brush and do whatever you feel is needed to complete the painting.

The results of this activity were - to me - stunning. I'd love to have had them framed and on the walls of my home. (I didn't because of a final step in the process I'm choosing not to share here).

It was later in the day that I realised the painting I finished captured something about the whole day. I was faced with a big yellow sheet with a narrow, rectangular blue band in the middle. As I stared at it, what I saw was a big yellow curtain in which a small slot had been cut. I had a sense of there being a whole lot more blue behind the curtain waiting to be seen... so I painted in a few lines to suggest that the curtain was being torn as what was behind started to come through.

As we spent the day on activities that invited us to pay more attention to what was before us, I was constantly reminded of just how much there is going on before us that we easily miss; that we're constantly editing out vast amounts of detail. We see yellow, if you will, and miss the mass of blue bursting to get out. There is never nothing happening.

In another activity I put on a blindfold and was guided by a partner who led me by my index finger, bringing that finger into contact with a variety of surfaces in the room. When you get to experience the world through a fingertip, you suddenly realise that just that tiny surface area can expose you to extraordinary detail.

By then end of the day, I found myself absolutely exhausted, in a good way. Looking back, I think I was a bit overwhelmed by what happens when you slow down enough to really notice...