On the morning of 27 August, mom’s surviving boyfriend and I released her ashes into the Rio Grande river from the Alameda Bridge north of Albuquerque.

I had a lot of help, every single step of the way, from the wonderful women of the New Mexico Women’s Chorus, through friends from Ceremony, to family members including especially my brother. Mom herself guided me through the places she wanted to visit one last time, and made sure I checked in on Tommy.

Up

Mom wanted to be released from the air, but it is against FAA regulations to drop anything over the side of a hot air balloon.  So I just took her up in my backpack. We were framed by the rising sun to the east and the setting moon to the west. Skimming down low over the Rio Grande, I saw a turtle swimming fast ahead of the current! My co-riders were great. Vicki was taking care of ‘Mom’ before she knew what I was carrying in my backpack. Her sister Joann was having the time of her life. Roger and I had a nice conversation about doing the work of connecting (people to other people, within themselves, to larger contexts), Jean was being the adventurous one of her trio of friends/family, and Yong was enjoying tourism while her husband worked. Karen and I both managed to draw the hardest labor tasks involved with initial inflation and final packing. Joy might someday send me a photo of some of that!

Around

I drove mom along her favorite road, Rio Grande Boulevard through Los Ranchos de Albuquerque. She loved cruising leisurely along at the 25 mph speed limit, gazing at flowers and fields and landmarks near and far. 

Down

Eventually we would turn along Alameda, cross the Rio Grande, and turn to wind up through Corrales. I found a spot that captured the view of the Sandias that she loved so much. There, I tended the objects I would use to send her finally on her way.

I settled on roses because peonies are out of season.  (Mom’s mother, Rosaline, used to take peonies on family outings to her parents’ graves on Memorial Day.) The lavender was broken by the hot air balloon upon landing; the bit of sage was a gift from Ceremony. A male goldfinch had greeted me in Caroline’s yard upon return from Ceremony, and the necklace was a perfect find at Mama’s Minerals. About 9:30 the next morning, I warned Tommy that what we were doing wasn’t usual.  “Okay,” he said, and accompanied me onto the bridge.

Away

Lavender first, followed by a scoop of ashes. Alternating between a rose and ashes, I spoke a few words about each person’s relationship with Mom – highlighting when it was at its best or what seems notable about it to me.  Rich’s rose first, then Dad’s. Next came John’s, then mom’s siblings, Jane and Ed.  I included a rose for Bob Cockrum, one of mom’s childhood friends who is still in touch, and also for “Uncle” Sam. I included the wee bit of his cremains that Lee had given me: if their two spirits ever mix, the results will be awesome! Tommy had opted to keep his rose when I presented it to him the day before. Mine was last. We watched it float away through the shadow of the new bridge and out of sight.

Rene Pellerin froze in motion when the interpreter placed her hand on his back. While telling his story, he had been rotating gradually toward his right, giving the camera his profile and making it difficult for those in the audience to his left to read his signing clearly. Rene thanked Regan for saving him from talking to a wall. The laughter from the audience was rich with appreciation.

Rene shared several anecdotes from his personal life and professional career with the State of Vermont. Rene uses normal, everyday events that anyone can relate to in order  to draw us into his experience as a Deaf person gradually becoming blind. His detailed explanations take full advantage of the linguistic capacity of signed languages to put you in your body. For instance, when Rene described his train ride to college, he included walking through the carriages to get a drink from the cafe car. I didn’t just remember my own struggles with those dang doors, trying to balance against the rocking motion, and how many cars they can string together – I re-felt the embodied sensations that generate those memories.

You can perhaps imagine how relieved we were, then, when Regan pulled Rene back from his slow migration toward the front edge of the stage! And how we winced when he described the drastic shifts in visual perception that accompany moving from well-lighted environments to dark ones and vice-versa. And how we cringed when he recounted some of his strategies for getting around without his flashlight or cane. And groaned upon discovering the mistaken use of baking powder instead of starch.

only connect

Maybe I am projecting Rene’s desire to connect with us, the audience, as the reason for his movement in our direction. This is what the skilled use of interpreters enables – relationships across differences that appear insurmountable. Selecting Rene to provide the entertainment program for the conference is in keeping with a decades-long trend increasing the prominence of providing interpretation services for deafblind people. Giving Rene the stage also shows the deep heart of many interpreters, especially those who invest long hours becoming skilled providers of tactile sign language and often develop strong bonds with some of the people for whom they work.

As I watched Rene give humorous accounts of difficult situations, I was struck by the tremendous commitment to the social aspects of being human that is lived out by people associated with this profession.

“In the end,”
Thomas Merton said to a friend engaged in peacework,
“it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.“[1]

why pie?

I attended the Closing the Gap workshop offered by Young Professional Interpreters hoping they would show me some cool technology that they’re using to build bridges among experienced and new interpreters and/or with members of the deaf community.  We talked mainly about the informal peer support model that YPI is using to encourage and motivate each other while getting established in the profession. We seemed to agree that the best way for anyone to build a peer group (whether experienced or new – to an area as well as to the field) is to participate in their affiliate chapter. It is crucial for interpreters to feel good enough about our work to be able to go back to the job everyday. But emotional support is only one part of the comprehensive network of support for the high quality provision of service that is required by a practice profession like ours. Other mechanisms are needed to constantly build skill, not only knowledge. Dennis Cokely made the point in his Closing Address that building knowledge at three- or four-hour conference workshops is not the same as subjecting our skills to regular assessment in order to target and focus attention on improving particular and specific areas of performance.

Time for Supervision

Informal support is great. I’m not knocking it; indeed I wouldn’t mind more! It is just that informality, comfortable though it is, is not enough to strengthen ourselves for the immense challenges of the next decade or two. As Dennis Cokely pointed out, more people want mentoring than are able to receive it, and less than a third of the organization’s members are willing to provide it. Peer mentorship and process mediation are useful tools, but they each rely upon personal preferences and a kind of interpersonal chemistry to be effective. These supports are a significant step up from the casual informality promoted by the YPI (and we need all these types of support), but – as far as I am aware – none of them are standardized enough to be implemented in a systemic way. And, like it or not, want it or not, RID needs a system that can be institutionalized. By “institutionalized,” I mean organized procedurally so that it can be delivered across the country in a relatively uniform way to practicing interpreters of any language combination, in any setting, at every level of competence.

If you were inspired by Dennis’ argument that our profession is right now in a state of crisis, bear with me while I try to explain the logic. My argument is teleological and interpersonal.  The roots of our profession tell us that the relationship matters most. But which one? Aren’t there many relationships happening all at the same time? Where we are stuck (imho) is that we keep trying to make the entire profession about only one of the multiple ‘relationships’ present and active in any and every interaction involving simultaneous interpretation. We’re asking the deaf-interpreter relationship to bear the weight of the sum-total, all-encompassing, complete and irreducible whole of interpreted interaction as if all the other relationships are simply irrelevant. This bias made sense in the early days of the field. In fact, our profession could have begun no other way. But acting on the belief that the deaf-interpreter relationship is the only justification of our being a federally-mandated profession disregards the most important lesson we’ve learned from working as professionals providing simultaneous interpretation:  context matters.

Transnationalism is the context

Language policies are being contested around the world. Minority languages continue to fight for survival against the imposition of national languages and the spread of dominant languages.  Immigrants are moving in droves from country-to-country and most will need access to high-quality simultaneous interpretation at one time or another. We know that cultural diversity resides in languages!  Yet, in the embattled way of weary soldiers who can only perceive the outline of the trench they’ve been trapped in for the last … 100 years? … we are still strategizing as if the conditions of the fight are identical to what they were four decades ago.

What transnationalism does is inject global economics into interpersonal relationships. It isn’t only the interpreting profession that has become corporatized. Nearly everything has. The cushy middle-class lifestyle of professional interpreters is under threat, or at least the fear of threat. Some traditional ways of Deaf cultural life are changing, perhaps even vanishing, but these old ways are being replaced by new cultural forms of deafhood, some of which need interpreters less than they ever did before! We grieve the loss of ‘the origins’ so much because that era – the personalities and relationships – is a point of clear focus amidst a maze of multiple losses.

Vision looks ‘ahead’ to the unknown,
memory looks ‘back’ to the familiar

As many people said in various ways throughout the conference, RID needs a coherent vision. The birth was grand and the adolescent years were rough. Now, the sea is turbulent, but we’ve found a pool of calm by re-forging connections in sync with the original raison d’être.  This must remain our touchstone, but we need to enlarge our imagination to take in the ramifications of being players on the international scale. Sign language interpreters in the English-speaking countries are not only experts in sign language interpretation; we are uniquely positioned to become experts for all forms of simultaneous interpretation. Rather than looking to the charitable ethos of spoken language interpreters laboring under the voluntary or underpaid conditions of (the bad part) of ‘the good ol’ days’, we should be figuring out how to bring their working conditions up to par with our own! Strengthening the use of interpreting in all situations, with any languages, is a possibility that will open more doors for Deaf people than anything else we are in position to do.

Why? Because as people learn to interact well during interpreted interaction, they build new skills for communicating when the flow is un-even. The more flexibility in skill, the more capacity for making connections across difference. Increased capacity for connecting leads to more chances for relationships. This is the gift our profession can give the world: a specific practice of intercultural communication that improves equality, promotes justice, and even enables democratic participation in a more fair – and still diverse! – society.

]]> http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/08/the-kindness-of-interpreters/feed/ 0 http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/08/rights-responsibilities-of-simultaneous-interpreters/ http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/08/rights-responsibilities-of-simultaneous-interpreters/#comments Sat, 14 Aug 2010 22:18:31 +0000 Steph http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/?p=15028
Region 1 Conference
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf
Albany NY

Laughing our way to a healthy profession

I attend conferences in several different fields. No one laughs as often or as loud as sign language interpreters. Robyn Dean’s workshop, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be talking about this….” Case Conferencing and Supervision for Interpreters, was punctuated with humor a dozen times an hour, and occasionally we would hear outbursts from the neighboring workshop group as they took Steps to Feel More Comfortable Interpreting the Twelve Steps. Having a sense of humor is prerequisite for survival in this field, especially being able to make fun of oneself and teasing colleagues in affectionate ways. In the open comment time after Keynote Presenter Lewis Merkin’s small group activity about the passions we bring to the profession, Betty Colonomos commented on the health of growing pains: instead of staying stuck in comparative judgment, we’ve become more cooperative with each other time, allowing the recognition of each other’s humanity. Her reflection reminded me of Robyn’s definition of “responsibility” as the act of continuing in conversation. Instead of being stopped from communicating because of an unanticipated reaction, to be response-able means finding a way to respond again.

Lewis had just taken us on a journey back to RID’s founding and shown a few clips from the organization’s 25th anniversary video (Silver Threads). RID’s 50th anniversary arrives in 2014; it makes sense that thoughts turn to organizational history. It was fascinating to watch MJ Bienvenu describe her reluctant entry into RID in a calm, almost nonchalant, manner. At first, she explained, she didn’t want to be troubled by all the commotion, but was told that things were “getting better” (because by 1985 there were two Deaf interpreters) and eventually decided that she wanted to invest time and energy in this field. Patrick Graybill was prescient, forecasting ahead from the tumultuous ‘80s to indicators of maturity and stability as we close in on half-a-century of growth and development as an organization representing an increasingly significant profession.

Welcome to transnationalism!

There is no way to know what would have developed if dynamics from the 1980s had not been interrupted, but Video Relay Services happened. Mary Lightfoot’s presentation on Video Interpreting: The State of the Practice and Implications for Interpreters reinforced Janet Bailey’s information from RID’s Government Affairs Program. Although VRS was an industry initiative – a technological and entrepreneurial invention – it brought sign language interpretation to the attention of the FCC. Suddenly, interpreters were confronted with law.

The professionally-engaged American Deaf and interpreting communities are mainly of white/European descent, and thus have been cushioned by the global state of political affairs for several generations. The resulting mindset is the unconscious attitude of privilege. So far, the best way I’ve come up with for explaining “privilege” is the experience of flow. Everybody wants flow – the easy experience of thinking, doing, and communicating when comprehension is not a problem. It seems to me that white people in the US experience uninterrupted flow more consistently than nearly everyone else. This is not to say that other people do not experience flow! Everyone does. You are most likely to feel flow when you are with your own kind (however you define the groups you belong to) and are comfortable in your status/position among the members of that group. It is the presence of difference, often combined with some kind of force, that disrupts flow.

Coming from a background or context of privilege simply means that shocks and disruptions to the experience of flow are minimized. This is the essence of whiteness. At a certain very basic level, ethnicity or audition has nothing to do with privilege, because individually you may have been very well protected from difficult or challenging life events (by chance or design, it doesn’t matter). The problem with privilege isn’t that someone has privilege or comes from a privileged background. The problem with privilege is that it creates an incapacity for handling interactions that do not conform to expected or desired flow.

Beauties of bilingualism

Learning another language, and interacting with people who think in another language, requires us to cultivate the capacity for dealing with differences. But fluency doesn’t necessarily mean we manage the differences gracefully! Experience doesn’t make the relational challenges go away when the pushes and pulls of accommodating difference upset the intrapersonal experience of flow. While RID and NAD continue to celebrate the reunion of the Deaf and interpreting communities after the eighties’ uglies, some of the core tensions persist. The evidence from the large group attending the Region 1 Conference has to do with language policy. Do we use ASL all the time, exclusively and only? Or is spoken English allowable, and if so when and under what circumstances?

Upon arrival to the conference venue on Thursday afternoon, Hartmut Teuber greeted me at the end of the registration table. Did I understand the meaning of the ASL Committed! button? I had already seen – and misread – the button, thinking it was a club membership (for an ASL Committee). When I realized the slogan was intended as a political statement, I had played through the joke about being “committed” to a mental institution. (I wasn’t the only one, an interpreter from NYC made the same joke while arguing passionately in support of the ASL/signing policy after Lewis’ keynote address.) At any rate, in the way that I do this kind of live/action research, I have been watching the group dynamics about language use carefully.

Ethics and Effectiveness

Placing myself with all of those who remember Bob Pollard’s single slide on the liberal-conservative political spectrum of interpreter decision-making (more than the other 75 slides that Robyn Dean has created about the Demand-Control Schema, wink), there are at least two ways to frame the question of language policy for RID. One way is how I’ve introduced it above, as a matter of competition between privilege and disenfranchisement. Another way is as a contest between deontological and teleological ethics. Does RID want to be a rule-based organization (deontological) or an ends-based organization (teleological)? If only the choice was simple! Answers to the latter question (where does the profession base our ethics) are ‘in discussion’ with the former framing of language use in the dynamics of oppression/empowerment.

The way interpreters and the Deaf community talk with each other about privilege and oppression is one discourse. The way interpreters and the Deaf community talk with each other about ethics and effectiveness is another discourse. Each discourse has its own internal patterns, and the two discourses interact with each other in another layer of discursive patterning. Every individual, meanwhile, is situated within each of these discourses in a particular ‘position.’ It is these positions that bounce and bang off of each other or bond tightly with and to each other that result in various kinds of group dynamics.

The way we talk and interact with each other about language policy is another discourse. I would call it a nested discourse, because whether or not to sign or speak is a specific example that can be used in service of either of the ‘larger’ discourses about ethics/effectiveness or oppression/empowerment.

Button up!

I am a teleologist, which partly explains why I am not wearing the button. I have never been good at ‘going along with’ the dominant, main, or ‘in’ thing. I resist going along with ‘the rules’ just because it is the politically correct or otherwise fashionable thing to do. I am not criticizing people who are wearing the button – I support the cause! Signing in the presence of Deaf people is the right thing to do, and it should be the official policy of RID to use ASL whenever Deaf people are involved. Wearing the button is a symbol of intention, but wearing the button is not the actual behavior of signing in the presence of Deaf people. How does one build the common culture that inspires people to sign whether or not they are surrounded by political reminders?

What I’ve noticed during the course of the conference is that it really matters whether the presenter signs ASL or speaks in English. During the Thursday evening updates, Cheryl Moose and Janet Bailey set the tone by signing from the main stage. They generated enough momentum that when the next presenter used voice instead of sign, the group overall maintained the mode of signing (even though the percentage of Deaf to non-deaf attendees is small). It happened that both the workshops I attended on Friday were presented in spoken English. Please understand, I’m not slighting that choice! I have preferred to present in English too – I am more confident expressing myself in my native tongue. (I am also more competent, as the reparative (clarifying) captioning of my talk to the New England Deaf Studies Conference illustrates!)

During Mary’s workshop, we had several breakouts for small group activities, and I wound up in a group using spoken English. This communicative mode was good for me, as the challenge of taking notes while watching ASL is real. Karen, Julie, Elizabeth and Julaine were awesome: they knew I was double-tasking (listening/learning and watching/recording) and kept me in the loop, filling in whatever I missed, clarifying what I partially understood, and correcting misunderstandings. Other groups were using sign, but as the morning’s session drew on, the switch from ASL to English became more marked. At one point, a woman behind me complained (loudly) that she couldn’t hear the presenter because of the noise from everyone’s chatter. The sudden silence that filled the room was thick with guilt. It was as if the hundred of us had all been ‘caught’ and were stunned into suspended animation, waiting for the punitive blow.

The woman who made the intervention commented, “Wow, its quiet now” (or maybe she said, “Wow, that got everyone’s attention”), which broke the ice. Mary then engaged her around whether it was an issue with the mic and – after a few turns back-and-forth – clarified for all of us that there was so much talking occurring throughout the room at such a volume that Mary’s voice was drowned out, despite being broadcast through speakers from a microphone. The depth and starkness of the group-level silence, combined with the confusion about what exactly the problem was, suggested to me that this moment was about language policy.

Only a short time later, the session ended and I ‘caught’ a guy talking in the lunch line. At least, he made me feel as if I had ‘caught’ him. He said something to the woman across from him and then startled, turning to me and apologized, explaining how well they knew each other. It seemed he reacted as if I might report him for violating the signing rule. Perhaps he had just come out of the same workshop, and was still affected? At this point in the conference, there is probably a roughly equal percentage of signing and speaking. The background buzz of audible conversation accompanies the visual field of multiple moving hands and animated faces.

Discomfort: Adjusting to the Loss of Flow

That afternoon, during a break in Robyn’s workshop, one person walked away from talking with me in a rather abrupt fashion. Was it because I was speaking English or did she have something else on her mind? Probably I was oversensitive. Since I am deliberately trying to ‘tune in’ to these dynamics, I may be ‘reading’ them in interactions where they are not actually operating (especially at the interpersonal level, because one never knows what is going on in another person’s mind). Behaviors at the aggregated group level are a more reliable measure. So I was acutely aware of the stony lack of response to Lewis’ announcement of the target date of 2013 for RID to host a national conference with an all-signing policy.

Given all of the celebratory rhetoric about the special, happy relationship between RID & NAD and between interpreters and the Deaf community, the prospect of ASL as the preferred official language of our professional conferences ought to have been greeted with cheers! Instead, a sense of stillness passed through the room: the hint of displeasure, perhaps even a solidification of resistance. What is the right thing to do? How is one supposed to feel? Why do we have to be reminded – in the midst of enjoying each other so comfortably! – that there are still matters of justice and fairness to be addressed?

Scope of Responsibility

Social change usually involves a combination of breaking old rules and enforcing new ones. Each individual will have to come to terms with your own stance in relation to the changing language policies. The teleological question may be useful in figuring this out. What is the desired end result? Because we are talking about language policy for an entire profession, the end result has to be imagined in terms of the function we want sign language interpreting to play in the larger scheme of world affairs. My stance is that as an organization, RID needs to be positioned further toward the liberal end of the ethical decision-making spectrum. As individual practicing professionals, we may still perform mainly toward the conservative end of the spectrum, but as an organization, we have to attempt to direct the influence of our aggregated decisions within the larger society.

This means perceiving our individual actions from the outside, and projecting the accumulating impetus of our combined individual choices over time and in relation with other people’s choices. We cooperate to generate the social conditions of our work and our world. Whether we cooperate with awareness and consciousness of consequences, or by accident – come what may – is a measure of how seriously we embrace the responsibilities of providing simultaneous interpretation.

Where is your meaning?

Opening night at the Region 1 conference for American Sign Language/English interpreters featured two information-rich sessions on the strategic organizational development of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). The Government Affairs Program presentation by former RID President Janet Bailey illustrated RID’s progress in earning recognition as experts on interpreting with the federal government. The report from Tracey Frederick of the Strategic Challenges and Bylaws Review Task Force revealed intra-organizational schisms on issues such as the range and type of certifications authorized by RID, the extent of linkage between “certification” and “membership,” and the distribution of voting rights and limitations according to certification status. The question of control is at the core of both internally and externally oriented topics.

The historical inheritance of the sign language interpreting profession in the U.S. privileges the control of space over efforts to control time. The emphasis on controlling space parallels global patterns in communication technology since the invention of mail (the physical delivery of letters) and railroads (the industrial distribution of goods). Faster forms of travel (of material things as well as communicative messages) are a major contributor to the pace of today’s society. Control over territory (including the people within that area) is determined by the capacity to manage distance. Imagine a three-way chemical reaction: the further you can go, the faster you can get there, and the reliability with which you can go and return all interact to produce a desire for speed. The demand for speed is a result of attempts to control space.

Janet Bailey gave a brief history of RID showing how, as an organization, despite funding ties with the Department of Education and some connections with Vocational Rehabilitation, we were essentially unknown to the federal government until video relay technology blasted onto the scene in the 1990s. The technological capacity to transmit two-way video signals in synchronous time allows the Deaf Community to communicate with each other as easily as non-deaf people have been using the telephone for the past century. Curiously, the obvious fairness of making communication access as available and everyday for the Deaf as it already is for the non-deaf is one of the institutional challenges of our era. Actually, I overstate the case. Deaf people have figured out very well how to use technology to communicate among themselves and with anyone who is fluent in a sign language. The serious challenge for RID is leveraging the intercultural communication skills of video relay simultaneous interpreting to helping people connect across significant language differences.

Building relationships is a matter of time

Connecting with other people is a function of understanding. Humans tend to become friends with the people we understand, and enemies (or emotionally indifferent to) the people we do not understand. If understanding comes easily we appreciate the flow. When understanding requires a process, most people do not seem to enjoy the interaction as much. Wait. Let me qualify that last statement: most monolingual people do not enjoy interactions that require effort in understanding. My evidence is both personal and professional. As a simultaneous interpreter, I am constantly under pressure to understand instantly with a level of accuracy possible only by telepathy. Failures to immediately grasp meaning are heavily criticized by all parties to the interaction. In contrast, anyone who seriously begins to learn another language develops individual capacity for handling difference. If you want to connect with someone who uses a different language, the first step involves accepting the fact of differences – whether they are cultural, grammatical, or perceptual. The second step in building a relationship with someone who is not the same as you requires learning how to manage the time of trying to understand them and their ways.

Recently I was privileged to attend a wedding between two amazing people whose combined network of family and friends is a microcosm of diversity. During quieter activities before and after the main event, I observed the bride and groom’s family members and friends communicate with each other. All of the Italians and Romanians who had learned a bit of English made efforts to connect with each other as well as with the Americans (and guests of other nationalities using English as the lingua franca). Since both Italian and Romanian belong to the Romance family of languages, Italians speaking Italian to the Romanians and Romanians speaking Romanian to the Italians supplemented (in some situations) limited vocabularies in English. Spanish is also a Romance language, unlike English, so Spanish also served as a communicative bridge.

The point is that no one with any degree of bilingualism was upset about making the effort! No one complained that communicating took “extra” time! What was important was the mutual desire to connect, and whatever language was available was what was used. The relationships were forged in-and-by the process of figuring out the meanings together. There is a special quality to connections based on conscious cooperation that distinguishes them from relationships that stem from the automatic flow of using the same language. This is the zone where the intercultural communication skills of simultaneous interpreters have particular importance and special use. No other communicative practice has as much potential for forging individual, cultural, and systemic capacities for the equitable embrace of diversity and fair treatment of difference.

Dynamics of Simultaneously Interpreting Signed & Spoken Languages

Tracey shared results of the 2007 member survey with us, including the dismal statistic that a mere three percent identified as Deaf. Although RID is officially invested in putting a positive spin to recent efforts at increasing and enhancing the Deaf role in the organization, this figure represents a drastic drop from the percentages at the organization’s founding in 1964. What I want to emphasize is the disproportionate influence of this tiny slice of the membership on the organization overall. The success of such a numerical minority to shape organizational goals, mission, and culture brings to mind Margaret Mead’s famous quote about small groups of committed people being the only effective agent of large-scale change.

One of the historical puzzles that Janet clarified is why the law requiring sign language interpretation as a reasonable accommodation uses the adjective “qualified” instead of “certified” to establish a baseline measure of interpreter competence. This is because, at the time of the public hearings, RID was a small organization (less than 5000 members) and only a fraction of those members were actually certified. The law could not be written with a requirement that would be impossible to satisfy. The result is a chaotic and contested terrain that contributes to some of today’s tension among interpreters working in different institutional fields.

A distinction I heard in Janet’s talk that I will continue to listen for involves a difference between “consumers” and “clients.” Janet mentioned consumers referring specifically to the Deaf, and clients in reference to who pays the bill. One of my criticisms of our field is the general disregard for the non-deaf, “hearing” participants in interpreted interaction. Until we bring all interlocutors into the overall professional discourse, we cannot resolve persistent problems nor achieve the promise of the field: the unprecedented capacity of simultaneous interpretation to contribute to multicultural practices of equality and democracy.

That’s so #DEAF! from Stephanie Jo Kent on Vimeo.

This is the first ten minutes of a presentation about what the Deaf Community can teach the rest of the world about using interpreters. Later in the talk I explain some details in a timeline, ReTaking RID: A Story of Deaf Empowerment. I summarized the other events of the day-long conference event in Showing Empowerment.

I’ve been pitching Ryan Commerson’s video since I first saw it a year and a half ago. Redefining Deaf is a masterpiece of contemporary theory and political activism. His newest short film, Gallaudet, is the best artistic rendering of how the Deaf see/perceive that I’ve come across.

Can’t get enough of Deaf consciousness?  Watch the post-production video.

On a midsummer eve, at a magnificent location on Long Island, magic was afoot.

Although most celebrants would arrive at the designated hour that Saturday afternoon, many had begun the journey days and even weeks in advance. From Italy and Romania, the Dominican Republic and Dubai, from South and North America, the east and west coast and even the US heartland, homo sapiens and favored spirits (human and feline) advanced with hearts and minds firmly focused on the impending formal consecration of Holy Crap.

As all such spiritual occasions demand (even of those who are short), planning and preparation had commenced more than a year earlier: it was all about the party. The queens of Queens’ Castle cater exclusively to those with the highest standards, privileging the rare few blessed with creative capacities for combining The Ceremonial with The Corny.

Details having been meticulously tended since the beginning, the big day dawned with a long list of easily-managed minor tasks. The expectant mood was as calm as the balmy weather, deep and peaceful – despite the faux frenzy of bride and groom seeking reprieve from the upcoming ordeal. Would she trip down the stairs? Would he stumble over the confetti? Could they speak their vows loud enough for us to hear them?!

“I must warn you. I have fed.”

If the ceremony was all about the party; the party was all about the food. And the food. And the food. (The open bar didn’t hurt.) Mainly, it was about the food: the homemade wine and family-recipe red sauce, the award-winning chef’s six or eleven dishes, the family’s seven thousand home baked cookies, the surprise Muffin cake. Oh yea, there was some dancing, too (just a bit). One hundred and thirty-four personages drank, danced, devoured – and then devoured and drank more and danced to the max. That was homemade lemoncello! In handcrafted glasses made of frozen ice!

“It’s not a party until someone is wearing a basket on his head!”

Now, we don’t have to turn this into a competition. (I’m just saying.) Just because those of us at the Dragonfly table left the biggest mess and stayed longest doesn’t necessarily mean we had the most fun. (Emphasis on “necessarily.”) If we ranked by time logged on the dance floor, the (self-identified) “Black Section” probably pulled neck-and-neck with our domestic/international mix. A nod is definitely due Consuela Bananahammock and her mate from the Bumble Bee table for cutting the first turn on the dance floor – which (if you must know) was never near empty again.

Agnostics, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, a Sikh, gays and lesbians, citizens, immigrants, and welcome guests from other countries; conversations flowing in English, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish…. …. the diverse and unabashedly happy crowd is itself testimony to the lives these two have touched and will no doubt continue to inspire.

Time to get busy!

Did you see the full moon?

Future stories of our first gathering could invoke the mythology of creation. We met on the front porch. Katie warmed us up with crazy tales of personal adventure while Nancy kept everyone’s beverage refreshed. Oliver chose to stay with us. Casual conversation carried us through the initial moves of acquaintanceship until Katie deemed the moment for introductions had arrived. Her seamless facilitation would soon be complemented by a perfectly grilled summer supper. Nancy and Bruce’s hospitality was gracious without pretension. We were at home with each other – relaxed.

“Collaboration?” Vanessa’s critique rang out. “In grants they write about it, they have the script beautifully. But when it comes to working together? They don’t know how to do it.” Tim chimed in about how easy it is to become focused on “the Other” and how “they” are struggling, forgetting that “we are just muddling along, too.”  As outsiders, Raz and I spent most of the night listening and learning.

James spoke about creating “a safe space where learning can take place” and the need for “a strategy that is sustaining.” His work on fear and dominance in relation to masculinity linked him instantly with Tim, who wondered about the sense of power achieved from acts of violence. If you take that away from men who are otherwise rendered powerless by the way society is structured, what do you replace it with?

Following in her activist mother’s footsteps, Vanessa argues passionately that “people are just waiting for the moment….They’re asking the questions,” she continued, “but not to the right people.” She’s fighting what James described as his experience growing up in the Bronx: “the expectation that people who grew up where I did would not be instrumental in our communities.”  I recall Katie telling me about disenfranchised youth asking her, “How do we get to where you are?”

“I think of myself as an artist.”  Julie named one of the challenges of her work as avoiding preaching to the choir.  The Performance Project has successfully reached beyond immediate friends and family of prisoners to social workers and law enforcement officials. But did it effect change in policy?  I suppose that there must be an economic rationale to support any change. Tim told us about the “surprising conversation” he recently had with an economist working for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. He told Tim that business has realized it can’t afford prisons anymore, and is also facing waves of retiring employees. This makes me curious about post-jail employment possibilities.

Meanwhile, in Springfield, there are signs of gentrification in the North End. Formal high school education is emphasizing four broad areas (financial, health/medical, math & science, and media), while the alternative vocational education for those “disconnected, adult learners who didn’t make it” in regular school focuses on culinary arts and machining, with an emphasis on automotive maintenance and repair. There are concerns with literacy, too. In this town boasting thirty different languages, it is a shame that signs in four languages about some specific public health hazards remain unposted. And what is (not) going on that leaves a school moldering in “mold, mildew and water issues” for twenty years?

Power and Transformative Development

In an email exchange about his book, Tim wrote, “the bottom line is always power.” Throughout the evening, questions to me from potential faculty for a resiliency learning lab were ringing in my ears: Who needs what we want to deliver? What are we doing to learn about their needs? How can we meet those needs and still satisfy ours? I don’t have the answers yet, but I was encouraged by similar patterns in each group’s ways of talking. Although, as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (among other possible distinctions), we are coming at the issues from different perspectives, we do share commitments such as those expressed by Vanessa and Julie about the importance of people “telling their stories in their words” and “mak[ing] the connection to larger systems.”

When James told about us leaving formal education because he refused to participate in a system that required him to be threatening and punitive, he and a colleague established “programming in a different way.” That’s what we’re trying to do, establish a different kind of structure for multiple, diverse stakeholders to learn together, practice formulating comprehensive images of the problems they face, and – ideally – facilitate a process in which community members develop specific solutions for targeted priorities.

In short, we would provide an infrastructure for “that whole organizing piece” discussed by Vanessa and James (and possibly between Julie and Vanessa in their extended huddle). With the right design, the lab for learning resiliency could be coordinated to cultivate the changing of the guard at the political level, so that people currently living in Springfield (in whichever neighborhood) can be responsible for solidifying the economic bedrock that can meet the new needs of a growing economy. There are so many global trends as well as demographic dynamics that visionary Springfielders could seize! I see Mary’s work on tensions between recent and long-established immigrant Poles as a specific resource in this regard.

All around us there are burgeoning industries in energy, increasing need for practical trades such as demolition and salvage, service needs such as simultaneous interpretation… the ingredients for turning Springfield into a thriving city where recent graduates (young professionals who are highly-capitalized and have no job opportunities elsewhere) and returning vets (who will be back in droves, soon!) would want to live. Give them the right incentives and they will come. Once they come, they will find ways to enliven the city – through small businesses and entrepreneurship. Couple civic marketing with real options for employing the poor that gives them a desirable better alternative to the street and you’ve got a transformation underway.

On this scale, cooperation is vital but does not imply or require collaboration. To achieve collaboration, there has to be more than an alliance toward a particular shared goal. Working together toward the same thing is ultimately only self-serving. The process of identifying and defining that one, “same” thing consumes energy and deflects progress. For a project to be collaborative, there must be investment in each other’s different things. The best example I have from the evening’s interaction is from James’ conversation with Tim about his apprenticeship with a master craftsman in how to work with large groups. James told us about one of his earliest conversations, in which his mentor told him – at age 14! – to go out and “act like a father” to boys younger than himself.

James was incredulous – how could he do that if he, himself, had not been fathered? Use your imagination, his teacher told him. What would you have wished your father did for you?  When you act this way to others, it will be as if it is for you. James’ career as a symbolic parent now spans forty years and several countries. If we were to collaborate, I would have to care that James’ work satisfies his own need to be parented, just as he would have to care that my work satisfies deep needs in me. While that level of relating with each other may occur, collaboration is not necessary for us to become effective co-actors in growing Springfield.

What is necessary is that we achieve alignment with each other. As long as we agree that we are heading in roughly the same direction, then we can cooperate in modeling a learning and problem-solving culture that incubates young leaders and fosters the development of ideas that can transform the city from within. After two or three years and proceeding on for decades, on full moon nights, parents can tell their children stories about where and how it all began…

and one book:
Thinking Dangerously about Communication, Disaster and Risk
Integrating Research on Climate Change & Hazards
My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

Risk Management and Risk Perception

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: which comes first? The perception of risk, or attempts to manage it?  Don’t attempts to manage risk teach us how to perceive it? How can those who are tasked with managing risk (in whatever flavor) incorporate the range of human variability in perception to inform quality decision-making and effective system design? The dynamic of perception and management plays out in nested fashion from individual emotion & cognition to social interaction to the institutional mechanisms intended to regulate social relations which, in turn, shapes the boundaries of how a person is or isn’t supposed to behave in terms of expressing their emotions. If you’re a researcher, detachment is de rigueur.  I’m wondering how much of this subjectification comes from professionalizing the scientific method, and how much comes psychologically – as a protective buffer against the ramifications of what we know?

Emanual Derman published his autobiography in 2004, well before the mortgage-banking crash, and long before the BP-Gulf disaster. Derman’s work in financial engineering for Goldman-Sachs put him in league with the top echelon of traders and financial managers for nearly twenty years. When he writes, “The development of new options structures resembled an arms race” (p. 223), one understands that he is reflecting the violent realities at the core of economic risk. Indeed, he opens the book with a comparison and contrast between the culture of quantitative engineers (trained in theoretical physics & focused on current value) and financial risk managers & traders (thinking about the future). “The guts to lose a lot of money,” Derman asserts, “carries its own aura,” and “the capacity to wreak havoc with your models provides the ultimate respectability” (p. 12-13)

Respecting Collaboration regarding Slow Onset Hazards

The pressure to live fast-forward has contributed to deep, infrastructural level risks that require a new style of collaboration. I think incisive insiders like Derman, geographers exploring how (and why) to

1. facilitate adaptation to slow-onset hazards,
2. build local resilience,
3. map local knowledge into policy and practice, and
4. understand the relationship between land use, climate change, and hazards.

along with crisis communication researchers who are asking, “How do we develop communities who can talk with each other about:

• local and federal tensions in crisis planning, emergency management, and disaster recovery?
• normative questions concerning the role of experts, particularly in relation with regular people?
• distributive justice questions of who shoulders what kinds and amounts of societal-level risk?”

Shared references more effective than “a common language”

My primary career of the last fifteen years has been as a sign language interpreter.  I’ve witnessed (one could even say “participated”) in interactions where people misunderstand each other using the same words  (to mean different things), as well as using different words (to mean the same thing). No doubt there are many instances in which the same words do mean the same things (or similar enough), as well as those moments when people become aware that they are using different words to mean different things (usually called a communication breakdown).  Granted, there is tremendous comfort in being able to take words at face value and move ahead on the assumption that you are being understood as you desire and understanding others as they intend. In fact, this is part of the emotional experience of belonging, of feeling home, of being with one’s own kind.

The thing is, we’re rarely lucky enough to be only with our own kind, and there are paltry few problems facing us today that can be solved by sticking exclusively to our own kind. What we need is the perception to recognize when we’re missing each other and the perseverance to figure out the meaningfulness of these gaps. We need a few targets: conceptual reference points that we hash out and define together to use as guideposts and landmarks for collaboration that not only presumes difference, but actually values and wants to preserve it.

Real World Ethics

One thing I love about the sign language interpreting community is how seriously we take the matter of professional ethics. We have no choice, actually, because the Deaf community holds our feet to the fire on a regular basis. It is an extraordinary dynamic. The effects of participating in simultaneously-interpreted communication may appear to be concentrated in the interaction between the interpreter and the signer, but the significance of using interpreters extends as well to the entire group and among all languages. Patty Azzarello writes of a team-building activity without an interpreter, detailing the embarrassing lessons learned by the team that discounted the member who was not fluent in English.

He was the smartest guy in the room.

He tried to share his good ideas with us – over and over again.

We basically threw him overboard.

I cannot speculate as to how the dynamics in Patty’s team would have been changed if there had been an interpreter included, but I can say that interpreters witness Deaf people being “thrown overboard” on a far too regular basis.  Michael Harvey has researched and written about vicarious trauma  and interpreters. Notice the disturbing chain effect: Deaf empowerment is (largely) directed at interpreters, who are (often) traumatized by the effort to balance Deaf claims for accessibility to goods, resources, and other forms of participation in democratic society against the (too typical) non-Deaf person’s disregard not only of the claim, but even of the person asserting the claim.

What Can Be Done?

Two dozen interpreters gathered last fall to explore “The Intersection of Ethics and Interpreting” with Robert Nash (author of Real World Ethics: Frameworks for Educators and Human Service Professionals) and Patricia Chau Nguyen (Assistant Dean of Students and Director of  The Asian & Asian American Center at Cornell University). We spent the day exploring the “three moral languages” framework to our experiences as professional interpreters.  “Each of us,” Nash explains, “lives our lives in at least three overlapping moral worlds, and each world features its own special moral language” (Real World Ethics: A Holistic, Problem-Solving Framework, p. 3).

First we explored what Nash calls “zero-level first moral language.” His investigatory questions inspired a range of passionate identifications with deeply-felt personal beliefs:

• “giving back” as a volunteer because without that “we don’t survive as a community”
• “treating people equally,” “not making judgments on them”
• the absolute significance of children: “children have the right to claim my full attention without any preconceptions”
• the ultimate prioritization of right here, right now, “All that I’m sure of is being right here right now right away.”
• “I believe relationships are primary in this short life that we live.”

Among the challenges of making good moral decisions – and of being a good interpreter – is not getting stuck at the zero-level – because there is no “resolution” to be found there. The zero-level involves an individual’s intrapsychic being, which is usually not amenable to alteration. The second language refers to moral character and the role of a person in relation with others. Someone characterized the narratives of the second moral language as a “responsiveness” that is “more than duty.”  I jotted down two examples that captured the gist of this language in relation to sign language interpreters (who tend mainly to be female):

“I think I should be a big girl and stay.”

“I got my big girl pants on today.”

Interpreters are on the boundary not just between languages (and the cultural norms, values, pains, and pride of the people who use them) but also between the second and third moral languages. Naming and excavating our second moral language elicited as much – and in some cases even more – passion than we discovered at the zero-level!

“Brimming over with Beliefs”

• “people should be there for each other when there’s a need”
• “meaning is in deep connection”
• “there is a duty to love”
• “everybody should get what they  need”
• the need for balance: “If you push a virtue to an extreme, it becomes a vice.”  I think this was illustrated by someone’s tease: “You never had a feeling you didn’t express!”
• the skill of empathy, defined as “feeling for” (which raised questions about “the authenticity of generosity” and the risk of vice through “overgiving” and/or “becoming a doormat”)

While the second moral language occurs at the level of the community, Nash and Nguyen showed us how the third moral language is the one imposed by the professional working world. This third level of moral language eschews both the first (personal) and second (communal, cultural) moral languages, emphasizing codified rules and principles rooted in respect and tolerance of moral differences.  Rather than promoting one moral  language over another, Nash and Nguyen both shared examples of ways in which all three languages are always interwoven in any professional discussion of ethical behavior and decision-making.

Interrupting Moral Silence

“Whoa!” Patricia was excited. “That brought out the signing!”

A Spring Thunderstorm in New England

One of the interpreters shared a horrific situation that she’d just been through with a medical doctor who had aggressively refused to negotiate how to make the communication with a Deaf patient work. Her story hit us where we live; we’ve all been there.  Stuck.  Because there is a Code of Conduct that governs the boundaries of the professional delivery of services, and because you can’t reason with people who aren’t willing to listen. Implicit throughout the institutional-level moral language in the professional code is that we won’t disrupt the proceedings by making issues out of dynamics that are problematic. Debate over when and how we should and why we should or should not has raged over decades between the Deaf community and interpreters. Meanwhile non-Deaf users of interpretation services remain generally oblivious, content to assert the supposed role supremacy of their status and their normal ways of doing business.

Our colleague was still fuming over the blatant disrespect that the physician had shown for the client (not to mention herself). We took the situation as a case, and applied the nine questions Nash has developed for analyzing and deciding upon an ethical course of action. The involved interpreter reflected on the range of perceptions she had about the doctor being unaware that the (new) patient was Deaf, not knowing an interpreter had been hired for which his practice was financially responsible, and otherwise being completely unfamiliar with interpreted communication. In general, we agreed that all these factors combined still did not justify his reaction, however the involved interpreter was able to perceive that if he was already having a bad day and then “all this” happened….well, even doctors are human. After the initial exchange, he had made an effort to work with the situation and the patient did receive treatment.

Knowledge for Action

A few weeks later that same interpreter happened to be driving by the offending physician’s office with some time on her hands.  She decided to stop in. As it happened, the doctor was available, and they spoke about the incident, de-briefing it together.  I’d like to report that the doctor made a 180-degree shift, but that would be exaggerating. However he did apologize, and it seems possible that he won’t put another Deaf person through the trauma of watching non-Deaf people argue over whether or not communication access is going to be provided to them while they seek health care.

]]> http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/06/ethics-of-interpreting/feed/ 0 http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/05/implementing-an-organizational-vision-through-thinking-in-time/ http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2010/05/implementing-an-organizational-vision-through-thinking-in-time/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 13:03:06 +0000 Steph http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/?p=14857 Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

A vision is a product of imagination

By definition,  a vision is not the physical sense of sight by which we perceive shapes, colors, distance, and relative positions of objects in our immediate environment. We use the sensory perception of vision as a metaphor for the amorphous sensation of possibility that arises with certain synergies of thought. Possibilities may or may not be creative: likewise every possibility has some ratio of probability. A feature of good management is the skill of ascertaining the probability of achieving any particular possibility and taking action accordingly within a specific zone of risk. Drawing upon Dr John Kounios’ definition of creativity, cited in this New York Times article Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory, creative possibilities are those that involve an insight about how to restructure a situation in a non-obvious way. Organizationally speaking, these are the kinds of visions that earn the label, visionary.

Twin problems: expressing and placing the vision

As amorphous products of imagination, it can be challenging to craft language for expressing a visionary vision. To use a sailing metaphor, one has to tack against the wind toward a destination that is essentially mythical: the island isn’t there until you arrive on its shores and set foot on the ground, confirming its existence. The goal is regularly obscured by weather (fog, storms) and the route affected by the environment (tides, pirates). In order to navigate effectively in murky circumstances, there must be a clear reference point: for enterprises of human organization, providing this clarity is the job of language.

Communicating with language is not a linear process. Misunderstandings, for instance, provide empirical evidence of the non-linearity of language.  In every situation, in any culture, language use is transactional. Although it may seem like picking at hairs, there is a subtle difference between an “interaction” and a “transaction.”[1] Both terms refer to some kind of relationship, but interactions occur between entities that remain fixed and unchanging, whereas in a transaction all entities are affected and changed (to lesser or greater degrees, but always in some way). The precise effects on individuals engaging in transactionally-based vision planning cannot be predicted. This uncertainty can undermine or motivate the group’s dynamic processes.

Thinking in time: operationalizing a vision as an encounter with history

“Most people find it harder to
think about institutions than to think about individuals.”

~ Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R May (1986, p. 239)
Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers

“Placing the organization,” suggest Neustadt & May, “partly because it is the least natural of the various steps we suggest, may yield a high return in terms of questions that might otherwise be left unasked or answers left unexamined” (p. 240). It may be counterintuitive to draw upon their “mini-methods” for political crisis resolution as a guide for organizational vision design and implementation, but bear with me for a moment. The practice of thinking in time is a strategy for design. Conceiving of time as a stream frames a dialogue for collaborative teams to “get forward, as soon as possible, the questions that ought to be asked before anyone says, ‘This is what we should do,’ or ‘Here’s how to do it’” (p. 240).

“…visualizing issues in timestreams. To link conventional wisdoms of the present with past counterparts and future possibilities; to link interpretations of the past with the experiences of their interpreters, and both with their prescriptions; to link proposals for the future with the inhibitions of the present and inheritances of the past – all these mean to think relatively and in terms of time, opening one’s mind to possibilities as far back as the story’s start and to potentialities as far ahead as relevant (judged, of course, from now, hence subject to revision later). That entails seeing time as a stream. It calls for thinking of the future as emergent from the past and of the present as a channel that perhaps conveys, perhaps deflects, but cannot stop the flow. (Conveys? Deflects? In what degree? A critical concern!) Perception of time-in-flow cannot help but be encouraged by purposeful study of stretches of history, regardless of whose it is or what the focus.” (p. 246)

There are intriguing parallels among Neustadt and May’s recommendations for working with time and those of Peter Block (Flawless Consulting)[2] and Marvin Weisbord & Sandra Janoff (Keeping Difficult Situations from Becoming Difficult Groups).[3]

Neustadt & May’s mini-methods:

1. Get the story, build timelines (when & what), ask journalist questions (where, who, how, why)
2. Identify options for action (defined by current conditions & capabilities), consider marketing (is it preferable to return to what was before or reach to a new, more satisfactory situation?) Principally, what can be done, now? In other words, make “…judgments of the future as a product of the past affected by presumptions about the present. This playing off of future, past, and present is important work” (emphasis added, p. 237).
3. Test/pre-evaluate: “What expectations about causes and effects makes certain options preferable to others?” (p. 238) Play “bets and odds” in terms of your own money, what would you bet on (chances to win) and what avoid (risks of losing)? Explore what would change if new evidence comes to light.
4. Placement (still before deciding on a choice of action!): “…probing presumptions about relevant people and organizations on whose active aid success depends” (p. 238).

Flawless Consulting

Peter Block distinguishes between the manager who has direct control, and the consultant who can achieve only influence. While Newstadt and May’s model assumes several people already working collaboratively on a major issue, Block focuses on the interpersonal, professional client-consultant relationship. “Sometimes,” he explains, “it is not until after some implementation occurs that a clear picture of the real problem emerges” (p. 8). Block is assuming transactionalism and time-in-flow even though he does not state this directly.

The presumption of timeflow is more apparent in Block’s assertion that competence in the preliminary phases of planning “create the foundation for successful outcomes in the implementation stage” (p. 10). Following a path represents movement in time. “Each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with pretense is always self-destructive” (p. 11). Block emphasizes the interplay of present and future: if one behaves like this in the present, one can expect that in the future; whereas if one behaves as if then events will likely work out in such and so a manner.

Focus on structural issues that you can control

“To the extent that we treat differences as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be managed,” explains Weisbord & Janoff, “we set ourselves up for endless diagnosis and intervention at the expense of doing the work” (p. 2). They draw upon Solomon Asch’s (1952) discovery that for one person to maintain a perception of reality which differs from the rest of the group, that individual must have a known ally. Yvonne Agazarian’s (1997) research demonstrated that one can keep a group on task by finding that ally whenever a dynamic emerges that could take a group off-course.

In Weisbord & Janoff’s experience, “…when differences cause frustration, fear, or anger, people will keep working on the task to the extent that they view the situation as normal” (p. 3).  Weisbord & Janoff learned to normalize the emotion, not the difference. Recall the adage teachers use with students: if one person has the question, others have the question. In a task-oriented group, if one person feels the feeling, other people are feeling the feeling. Shared feelings generate natural allies and healthy subgroups. Normalizing the emotional life of a group enables the exploration of a full, wholistic range of questions and concerns – and answers! – available to a group, particularly a group that wants to act as a team.

The four conditions named by Weisbord & Janoff frame their philosophy of knowing “when to just stand there.” The crucial, transactional point of oscillation is between trusting the group to work through whatever dynamics are present toward task accomplishment, and intervening because of a risk to single member whose opinion or experience is dangling in solitary space.  In Weisbord & Janoff’s experience, diverse groups are most likely to accomplish their tasks when:

(1) people are well-matched to the task,
(2) enough time is allowed for each phase,
(3) everybody really knows the group’s goal, and
(4) potential conflict which might result in flight from the task is headed off by making differences and sub-grouping functional, i.e., as ‘‘contributing to growth’ (p 8).

The need to address and re-direct dysfunctional dynamics of fight or flight from the task is an acknowledgment of the streaming flow of time. What happens in the present affects the future, just as much as what is possible in the present has been significantly pre-figured by the past.

Notice group processes: when to slow down and give attention to small details

All of us are under a lot of pressure to move quickly.  The speed of today’s society is more than inertia, there is what appears to be an inexorable acceleration. The challenge is that the balance of time is held disproportionately between individuals and institutions. Institutionalized bureaucracies remain mired in slow time while individuals increase our frenzied activity as if to compensate for the plodding wheels of systemic change. Intriguingly, in the Charting Creativity article cited above, Dr Rex Jung of The Mind Research Network explains how creativity differs from intelligence. Creativity moves more slowly through the brain, wandering along “lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.” This difference in pace is a remarkable finding that distinguishes “creative thinking” from the lightning-fast-firing of neurons venerated by popular culture. Slowing down, Dr Jung suggests, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.”

This is the kind of creativity needed for implementing visionary visions, whether for business or for science. We need to understand, better, how teams promote creativity among each other. Building teams who know how to notice and respond to the dynamics of language use is one powerful way to harness the essential transactionalism of communication so that, together, we can learn to recognize and make conscious choices between dead-end tangents that distract us from the organizational vision and growth-enhancing sidestreams that act back to concentrate intentionality in the flow of time toward achievement.

Constant Calibrating

All along the way, the image of the vision must be kept in mind like a target in timespace. Its necessary conditions, and the steps required to achieve those conditions, must also be envisioned. These are also products of imagination – the steps have not yet been accomplished, the conditions do not yet exist. What one holds in mind – and talks about with collaborators, team-members, friends, and advisors – is the degree of fit between the current situation (as a snapshot of time-in-flow) with any of the previously-conceived steps and conditions (as the destination of time’s flow). Probably the trickiest part is maintaining equilibrium between management and control.

Management is your ability to direct the timestream of changing conditions and changeable steps along channels you anticipate will move you closer to the target. Control is the amount of force you exert against the nature of the conditions and the step tendencies of people in your system. The most effective and enjoyable teams are those in which all members contribute consciously to the transactional balancing act of management without control. A balanced team is alert to information and dynamics that effect the timeflow of implementation. Members of a balanced team share data, thoughts, and impressions openly; confirm differences that challenge previously accepted strategy; and maintain focus on a future timespace in which the organizational vision has been made real.

[2] 2^nd Edition, Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. 1981/2000.

[3] This article is adapted from “Principle 6: Master the Art of Subgrouping,” in Weisbord & Janoff, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! Ten Principles for Leading Meetings that Matter. 2007.