Rethinking Complexity

"Everybody’s Talking at Me": A Meditation on Influence

Harry Nilsson’s Grammy award winning song, "Everybody's Talking at Me," has been stuck in my head all day, specifically the lyric: Everybody’s talking at me, I don’t hear a word they’re saying, only the echoes of my mind.

I actually met Harry Nilsson years ago when I managed a restaurant in Southern California called Severino’s. Nilsson’s sister and her partner, Severino Surace, owned the place.

Nilsson decided to make a surprise visit to his sister and walked into the restaurant one busy Saturday night. He bypassed the Maitre D, walked into the bar, and started playing the piano. I didn’t recognize him, so I did what any attentive restaurant manager would do: I officiously insisted that a Grammy award winning singer/songwriter get up from the piano and stop disturbing the other patrons.

In my defense, he wasn’t exactly dressed for a night out at a high-end Italian restaurant. Luckily, Severino intervened before it turned into an argument by walking up to us and giving Harry Nilsson a big bear hug. Severino introduced me to Harry, after which I made some sort of lame apology and beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen.

The Value of Face-to-Face Conversations

Call me old-fashioned, but nothing beats having a face-to-face conversation with another person.

Sorry, Facebook. Sorry, Twitter. Sorry, Skype. But I really don’t think any social media site, gadget, or app can replace this method of communication—the most authentic way of connecting with another human being.

When you're chatting with someone in person, you can capture all sorts of subtle nuances that social media, Internet video calls, and email just can’t. There’s just something about the physical presence of another that speaks volumes without the need to utter a word.

When I first started interviewing for a newspaper reporting job after wrapping up my undergraduate studies in journalism almost a decade ago—before the birth of social media—many of the editors who interviewed me asked the same question: Do you prefer meeting with a source face-to-face or do you prefer sending them an email?

Humanistic Education: Remembering Our Interconnectedness

This is the first week of the fall semester at Saybrook University and we launched it with the residential conference in San Francisco. We are a distance learning institution, but the sense of community and connection that I have with colleagues and students is deep and real.

At commencement on Friday, the room was filled with the overflowing sense of gratitude that graduates expressed to their faculty, fellow students, family, and friends. The stories shared were testimony to the transformative learning journey that their education entailed.

I have always seen learning as a powerful, lifelong process. Collaborative learning—especially when it is connected to issues of care and concern for learners—has the power to catalyze change. This is the kind of learning that I have experienced here at Saybrook. We call it humanistic education.

For me, humanistic education is about learning for life. That is, meaningful learning that is relevant and enabling for each human being to become who they truly want and need to become. It is learning that celebrates life—learning that nourishes the human spirit in ways that make it possible to love and care for each other, for all living systems, and for the planet as a whole.

Beyond the Clouds of War: A Faint, Silver Lining

There's nothing inherently worthwhile about violent civil disturbance, armed conflict, and war. That's my personal opinion. By its very nature, war is the antithesis of peaceful, harmonious, sustainable co-existence. There are too many abominable, irretrievable, and destructive products of war.

So why would I—after growing up the child of a full-time military parent—join and serve more than two decades as a military officer myself? That's a very good question with a complex series of answers—most of which are too convoluted to chronicle here.

In the late 1980s, I was an ROTC instructor in the conservative, but primarily anti-military, state of Minnesota. Considering the conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean—Beirut, Syria, Jordan—and the growing unrest in the Middle East in the wake of the Iranian revolution, a fellow student asked me: "How can you go to a foreign area of the world and potentially carry out armed conflict? How can you fight and kill people?"

I answered, “You ought to be thankful that it’s me over there—hating every minute of it—rather than some fool who wants to be there.” 

Helping students “get a voice” through collective courage

I have been working with Laurie Mandel, Ed.D., founder and Executive Director of Get-A-Voice™, recently. As I dove deeply into her philosophy, I ended up revisiting elements of systems knowledge intermingled with a motivation to establish conscious school cultures—from the student level!

After nearly two months of work, these foundational systems Laurie “suspected” would spark cultures of acceptance have been interconnected through a comprehensive plan to bring Get-A-Voice™ (or GAV) to the national market. The GAV systems may appear to skirt around the real issue it intends to address—bullying in schools—but it doesn't. Instead, Dr. Mandel has opted for a systemic way to address human relationship building in the formation years of social interactions.

By contrast, last year I witnessed a school in a bit of a half-witted attempt—though I'm sure, well-intentioned—attack and reward students in a Pavlovian manner. It struck how the administrators were over-rewarding children with “blue slips” for standard behaviors—didn’t anyone read Ed Deci and Rich Ryan’s seminal work on self-determinism theory and human motivation? How unaware are administrators in establishing systems of sustaining humanistic values? What systems are baked into our schools that breed visions of limitation and reduction versus possibility and potential? Students are not dogs and blue slips aren’t biscuits.

The Luxury to Dream

In his 2008 novel, Rumours of Rain, Andre Brink’s main character, Marin Mynhardt, roils about in a crisis of self-doubt and self-discovery. He questions whether he can allow himself luxury—not the materialistic luxuries he enjoys as a white South African during Apartheid, but something much more visceral: 

“In my context luxury did not mean the house… or the Mercedes, the yellowwood, the red wine…  True luxury was:  the freedom to dream; the freedom to be unpractical.”

In the United States of 2011, do we have the luxury to dream as well? 

Considering the current amalgam of crises through which we are navigating—the national debt and subsequent budget troubles, concurrent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, rampant wildfires in California and the Southwest, flooding along the Mississippi—is there a place for dreaming, luxury, or even optimism?   

In Brink’s novel, Mynhardt reflects on his desire for freedom even as he plans to sell the farm his family has owned for generations—right out from under his elderly mother. He’s made a shady business deal based on practicality and fiscal motivation. But practicality doesn’t afford him happiness or even true satisfaction.

"Government" isn't a technology - and can't be developed like one

It’s been a bad week for government and technology.

 It was revealed this week that the medical records of over 300,000 Californians sat on unsecured servers … leaving everything from insurance claims to social security numbers available to anyone who wanted to Google it.

On the other side of the spectrum, Florida Governor Rick Scott admitted that months key emails from his transition team were deleted  … in violation of open records laws.  

These are some pretty big “oopses,” although arguable no bigger than many of the technology glitches most of us encounter day-in and day-out.  In fact, a credible case can be made that government crashes a lot less than computers. 

Still, would it help if government were run more like a technology company?

In a column called “What geeks can teach government,” William Eggers says yes.  The global director of public research at Deloitte, says that there would be significant advantages to a government that was willing to learn from software R&D.  He argues that government could be:

Libya and the Leverage Points of Change

We're on the cusp of watching real change sweep through Libya this week as rebel fighters seize the capital city of Tripoli in their ongoing effort to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

With a new political body ready to replace Gadhafi's 42-year regime, the rebels' plight toward freedom these past six months has been fueled by leverage points leading to change.

In her 2008 book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows defined a leverage point as a "point of power" within a system. A leverage point's essentially the silver bullet that can successfully change the system and achieve a desired goal or outcome.

Implementing them isn't as easy as it sounds.

"...Although people deeply  involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points," Meadows wrote, "more often than not they push the change in the wrong direction."

Engaging Conversations Across the Political Divide

Recently one of my previous students sent me an email inviting me to write to my senators asking them to get on board with spending cuts. The email made the argument that just as individuals cannot continue to spend more than they bring in, neither can governments. She noted that she would “fire” all members of the U.S. Congress for their inability to adequately address the issue and pointed to the recent agreement to cut spending and raise the debt ceiling as totally inadequate.

While I don’t disagree with the need to address the deficit, what compelled me to “respond to all” regarding this inquiry was the simplicity of thinking that was present.  We have so many people in the US who think that there are simple solutions to complex problems. This is not a surprise, since our education system does next to nothing to teach systems thinking. 

While I am sure there are still many places where spending can be cut, I find it appalling that many of the most affluent people in the U.S. continue to believe that the deficit can be curtailed without increasing revenues. I responded to this email noting my own embarrassment living in an affluent community and, as a result, caught up in having a mortgage that is far more than I can comfortably afford, which limits my ability to contribute to the good of the whole. When I walk around my neighborhood, I can’t help but notice that the people around me are not suffering from the economic downturn. Many of them have recently bought expensive, new vehicles priced above $50,000. Yet, my guess is that many of the same people would say they don’t want to pay more taxes.

Looking in all the Right Places

To find inspiration and clarify my latest thinking on embracing complexity, I recently turned to popular, off-the-shelf publications and the latest business books.

Not only did I not find inspiration and clarity, I experienced confusion and loss of interest from the dogma I found there.So much of what I read was filled with jargon, buzz words, and claims of a silver bullets that I had a hard time sorting out the message.

The advice or suggestions I found simply did not resonate with me. The literature didn't create a shift in thinking or a spark any curiosity on my part. I was left feeling drained and insufficient.

It was not that this information did not have value and was not useful. I simply could not connect with the message in a meaningful way. Upon reflection, I believe these feelings resulted from how I was searching for the answer. I was looking for something that was outside myself and assuming that “the answer” was out there if only I could find it. In essence, I was looking to the "experts" and abdicating my responsibility as a human being to think and reflect on what was important to me. Unfortunately, this process—however often I must re-experience it—did not generate inspiration and creative ways of embracing complexity.