Reflexivity

7 August 2010

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!

Popularity: 4% [?]

a triangulation of thoughts from two recent conferences

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

professional development workshop

certification maintenance, RID

Lebanon, NH (31 October 2009)

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!”

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.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

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[1] See Mustafa Emirbayer, Manifesto for a Relational Sociology, American Journal of Sociology Vol 103, No 2, September 1997, pp. 281-317 for a detailed discussion of the differences between “substantialism” and “relationalism.”

[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.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Entrepreneurship Initiative
University of Massachusetts Amherst

So says Valdis Krebs in Network Weaving 101 (redux). Maybe it’s fair to say that my ambition in life is to close triangles? Get people connected. Especially when we all can learn something worthwhile from each other. But “people” (to my mind) is groups more than it is individuals. Individuals are the ones who enact the relationships, but it i s the group-level implications that matter.

Predictive Marketing

Last Sunday I was at Schnipper’s – “a place of miracles” – waiting for a bus to depart the Port Authority in New York City. I had already missed two busses back to Amherst because I was absorbed in writing a summary blogpost after last week’s exciting, historic, first annual Science of Team Science conference hosted by Northwestern University’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute in Chicago.

Was it serendipity? Fate? Karma? Random happenstance? I don’t care what you call it. “It was a clean folder when I met you!” Michael was entertained by the notes I jotted down regarding “the gift and curse of entrepreneurship,” and “the new energy tycoons.” ‘Cisco (just don’t call him Frank) and Marcus (familiar with Auslan) and Mike and I talked connections. Funny how Mike is developing energy technology based on “algae that grows in the dark” and what he wants are suppliers who will “just give me the grease.” (I happen to know a couple of them!)

“I think you’re all awesome.”

I’m quoting Cliff (who was flirting with the entrepreneurs who composed the last panel of the UMass EI course) but I agree – not only with his assessment of the panelists but of everyone I met during this semester-long course. The four successful women who composed our closing panel revisited and emphasized with their own unique twists the most important lessons.

• “Karma is a boomerang, you put it out there. It might not be immediate but it does come back to you.” (Lisa)
• “To be a success, you have to take on the complexion of your community.” (Sarah)
• “Bring in people with different skills [than your own]. You have to learn their interactive ways, but you learn more from non-similar people [than from people who are like yourself].” (Lisa)
• “Use your business as a platform to advance your values. It’s a lot of fun; there’s a lot of power there.” (Nancy)
• “Risk is something the other person sees.” (Marjorie)

Sitting in the Chair

“There is nothing more lonely,” Marjorie explained, than sitting in the chair when … someone gets hurt on the floor? “You sit in the chair.” When losses occur? “You sit in the chair.” When payroll is hard to make? “You sit in the chair.” “We don’t really nurture,” Nancy explained, “how to make all these crazy connections you have to make. You have to learn how to view the world in such a way as to bring all those discrete experiences together.” Lisa offered a corrective, “Go with positive language. It’s contagious!” but you’ve got to come to grips with there being people “who want to build the clock” and people “who want to know what time it is.” Lisa elaborated, “People think differently from you and you can learn from them.” Running a business can be tricky, because you have “to figure out how to do it that breaks the bounds…but you have to know how to play inside before you play outside. You can’t take on City Hall all the time. Sometimes you have to go around.” And you’ve got to know the rewards. “I want to see what I can do,” Sarah explained. “Creating jobs really sets it off for me.”

“Food brings people together.”

Sarah backed up her words with action. Michael and his pals at Schnipper’s probably agree. And Rose and Mau can attest to another way food brings people together – even if we normally don’t think about where food waste goes.  Right now?  Mostly into landfills. But options are afoot! Can you imagine your organic waste becoming an energy source of the future? I can. It isn’t hard to imagine, although building the infrastructure to support it smoothly might take a bit of time and go through a few rough spells while the kinks get worked out. Re-engineering our energy infrastructure on the scale we need is a human adventure akin to that taken by every major wave of immigration. Marjorie emphasized that we all learned everything we need to know in kindergarten:

Life ain’t fair.

Don’t say ain’t.

Hugs feel good.

Naps are important.

She didn’t mention this one, but I think it ranks among the most important lessons: share.

Human potential doesn’t need to be restricted to the extraordinary accomplishments of isolated individuals in specific fields. Group-level accomplishments, such as engineering feats (space travel!) or athletic prowess (any team victory against the odds), demonstrate humanness in ways that exceed what any single person can achieve. Sharing does not imply equality or sameness. The willingness and the ability to share demonstrates respect for others and a measure of recognition that few of us survive in autonomy.  We are all implicated in vast systems of food and energy production that are so far removed from our daily lives we would hardly know what to do in the event of an institutional-level breakdown. Somehow, someway, we’ve got to reform the infrastructure enough so that consistently-increasing percentages of the global population can bounce back fast against inevitable disasters and systemic crises.

“If you can do it, you do”

Michael was bemoaning some of the roles he plays for his start-up, but our roles – in any context – are rarely exclusively determined by the scope of personal desire. The first group role I ever had that other people recognized was as a cheerleader. No no no, I didn’t wave pom poms or wear a short skirt! But I was motivational to the members of my high school’s volleyball team at a time when all the players were feeling down. The road since is rife with of experience, but I remain essentially optimistic: I do think there is plenty of room for hope.  People are so smart! We can design the tools that will enable the discovery and invention of solutions to our worst problems.  We just have to decide that doing so matters enough and follow through.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Voices from the In-Between: Aporias, Reverberations, and Audiences
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Massachusetts Amherst

“When I saw you with the laptop,” Cecilia said to me, “I thought you must be really far behind on your presentation.”  More or less! I was in my “live” discourse and dynamics mode, self-interestedly collecting connections with other presenters (or at least with their topics). I wanted to show as well as tell about my findings and speculations based on the research I’ve done concerning language, meaning, and simultaneous interpretation.  The conference would have gone by in a blur for me, otherwise. As it was, I had a handful of heartfelt conversations with fascinating human beings, beginning at the banquet, smuggled into the quiet of rehearsal/prep space in presentation rooms, and during breaks over the abundance of food.

Warning! Relationship implied!

Huda did not believe that I really wanted to quote her presentation. “You really are dangerous!” exclaimed Nimmi, before vanishing back to Texas. Jiwei questioned the possibility of as fluid an identity as I propose – that I am ‘called into being’ by the interactions I have with others, especially those that are overtly communicative. (I’m not saying its easy, only that it can be extraordinary.)

The keynote presenter, Vittorio Marchis, emphasized the importance of ritual to memory, explaining the mind’s need for regular re-freshing of knowledge and society’s need for icons representing history: lest we forget. He took us on a romp through Italian magazine covers in the era post-WWII, showing what he described as “the bearable weightness of things” in-between the use of images of current scientific progress and fine artistic works projecting images of the future, which he described as “prophecies.”

As far as invoking a certain quality of timespace, what more important social ritual than eating together? Juan checked in on everyone as we dined at the Faculty Club; the exuberant conviviality carried everyone through the cold rain we had to traverse afterward.

With the theory, you can move…

Nimmi set the tone for a great day by busting the title of my talk: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Could be! Her Rumblings included a quote from KS Maniam that struck me as a description of how I do action research.

“…me?

I’m going out there, into the … incomprehensible….”

When I got to this slide during my presentation, my peripheral vision detected Edwin nodding. I hope I haven’t taken Maniam’s words out of context, but I was gratified at the evidence of resonance that my usage fits what others experience when I’m “on.” (It’s not like I know where we’re going, either!) Nimmi was on the panel Negotiating Hybrid Identities with Xuefei and Huda, and (it seemed to me) they were all engaged with exploring the search for a center – for some thing or some way to ground be-ing – you know – living awake on this planet right now, wherever we are, with whomever is there, too! Huda’s presentation on Ghada Al-Samman suggested one’s orientation to time is relevant, as in, does one look to the past or the future for points-of-reference? A debate was inspired by Xuefei concerning whether “assimilation” can be construed as a mix of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ features or needs to be understand exclusively in the negative.

Industrialization, Race, and Displacement

Darlene asked me, later, about her claim of experiencing the brutality of displacement even though it happened four centuries ago. I think there is a qualitative difference between people who have suffered physically just to survive and those of us who have had that part soft, but I agree with Enhua’s response that it’s all about when industrialization happened to hit your family: this generation or several generations back. The cumulative effect of migration having occurred in historical time for most white Americans appears most obviously in the disconnect from the land. I am not atypical, having parents who met in a city distant from where they grew up, and then continued to move around.  I have no home rooted in place; only the sensibilities of comfort I create for myself in the spaces I happen to be.

Choosing what we carry

I met Maria waiting for the panel on Authorship and Narrative Techniques. The next day I would be stunned by her story, shocked by the contrast with our joyous first encounter. Meanwhile, Cecilia’s presentation, Blind Spot: The In-Between-ness of a Child Narrator sparked a lively post-panel discussion and reminded me of the interpersonal communication tool by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingram, the Johari Window. The dynamic processes of feedback (sharing what I know/perceive about you) and disclosure (telling about myself) are so important! (It crosses my mind, now, to wonder if there is a parallel with the Chinese “mirror” that Enhua mentioned, in which one is supposed to see one’s true self?

Navigators of the In-Between

Morna labeled us conference participants as “navigators of the in-between” while folks debated whether a child could be wise in the ways depicted by Lya Luft, the  author of O Ponto Cego, featured in Cecilia’s talk.  The Q&A following this session was the one I found most stimulating.

A quote from Herman Melville that Brian had used kept floating through my mind, in reference to the space of a sailing ship (one of its chronotopes): “We expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe.” From this forward-looking perspective (which I appreciate despite its reliance on the nation), I went to the panel on Theorizing Coloniality and Postcoloniality, where the gaze of the presenters was focused keenly on the past.

Where do creoles come from? Beccie enthused on her problematic. I’d like to think about this more in contemporary terms – when/why/how do new languages still come into being (or are we killing off this possibility as surely as old languages are dying?) Juan noticed the power of the colonizer everywhere, and Loc Pham’s description of the Vietnamese ‘non-identification’ strategy intrigues with the evidence of such apparent non-resistance being a powerful mode for preserving cultural integrity.

A frontier that unites rather than a barrier that divides

I’ll be honest, sometimes the theorizing gets too abstract for me – yes yes I know, as if my work doesn’t go there too (grin). Still, I’m with Javier when he said, “The fundamental issue is not to come up with a perfect name, but to understand what is going on and ____”. Funny, my notes stop there – did I not hear the rest? Was I distracted by someone or something else? For me it is the understanding in order to act, or even misunderstanding but still acting so as to stay engaged with those who are different than me – and together finding ways to be here and move on with attention to the implicit as well as explicit relationships. This is what I heard in the Personal Narratives of In-Between-ess shared by Maria, Claudio & Marcelo, and Elena: no matter what has happened to us – childhood trauma or adult humiliation – we must bear up, dig down, find an ethical way to go on.

The In-Betweeners

I was thrilled when Edwin said I “might be on to something” with the distinction I drew between interpretation and translation (dissertation forthcoming). And I’m eager for any uptake on my conjecture that the postmodern condition, defined by David Harvey (1990) as time-space compression, is the historical moment when white people figure out WTF we’ve been doing with language. The next time you’re reading social theory, just notice how many times the word “tension” is used, and then see if you can figure out “what” is “in tension” with “what”? Social theorists deploy “tension” as if it is self-explanatory and obvious (sortof like how people throw around the term “dialectic.”) An engineer (for instance) would be quite unlikely to discuss tension without its complement of compression.

If language (language use, language-in-action, English, Vietnamese, Chinese, Portuguese, literature, poetry, rhyme, whatever you want to include in the category) is the social means by which timespace has become compressed, then it is only through language that we are going to be able to un-compress it.  I support Vittorio Marchis’ conclusion:

“We need more time to talk together and find solutions.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Returning home after the Science of Team Science conference, I let concentration go subliminal. Cameron Norman’s brief history of developments in team science over the past few years, and his list of lessons learned/factors contributing to the success of this conference – sifted through my mind, along with conversations I had with two women who are on the ground in terms of dealing with the social in team science. A breadth and depth of wisdom and experience was present at the conference but untapped: not because of deliberate exclusion but due to the inertia of how both “science” and “academia” are typically done.

“The book is blank.”

This quote, from Junot Diaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, p. 302), refers to the future. Nothing is fixed, even if the most likely paths are already delimited. The class/status and gender hierarchies evident in the conference’s structure and dynamics do not need to remain barriers to the evolution of team science as a collaborative strategy for collective action capable of addressing and solving wicked problems.

Lessons from group development

A query about Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development roughly midway through the conference was left hanging… other parts of that participant’s question enabled panelists’ response. I wondered, at the time, if any of the panelists were familiar with models of the stages of group development. William Schutz’s sharper view on issues of inclusion, control, and affection adds necessary depth to Tuckman’s introductory-level model, most particularly when combined with the group process dimensions identified by Wilfred Bion. Now, in retrospect, I imagine this instance in the Q&A as a moment when a question back to the audience member would have served the entire conference well.

The storming phase of a group’s development involves a range of existential matters, including:

• authority/authorization in terms of the roles people perform for the team,
• individual assessments of worth/value from investing in the team’s group process, the
• staking-out of allegiances, as well as the
• identification of threats, and the
• (possible) emergence of irrational and unreasonable fears.

Most of these dynamics occur below the level of consciousness, either suppressed by politeness or repressed by deep training. Careful attention to patterns and disruptions to patterns in the group’s discourse and dynamics, however, can cue group members to the empirical presence of these unconscious dynamics, opening up opportunities for turning these potentially destructive social forces to operational advantage.

The apparent unanswerability of the question about group development suggests a problematic moment for the group, similar to those that arose later when very specific questions about application found panelists in (what seemed in the moment as) a kind of stunned temporary silence.

Problematics for the Science of Team Science

Science needs an object, and it became clear along the way that the proper target of study for team science remains undefined. In the ambiguity and uncertainty of trying to discover ‘the what’ of team science, ‘the how’ of establishing this object acquires marked significance. Michelle Bennett described this as the need for “teams being recognized as teams…we have experienced it – and are just not ‘talking’ about it.”

Deciding what to measure in & for team science will simultaneously determine which measurements to use. The usual dichotomies pit quantitative versus qualitative, macro against micro; the core question regards what is accepted as empirical evidence. Must one have a sample of thousands in order to produce something-called-knowledge, or can a case study generate and teach at a level of equivalent practical value? Can the discourse of this one conference inform us about the field as a whole? This idea is not far-fetched. When confronted by comparable non-linearity, math-minded scientists and engineers extrapolate, justifying generalizing assumptions in order to scale complex problems down to manageable size.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

It might sound hokey, but the question came up so many times, Who can help us? And the answer played variations of the same: Hire a facilitator. Find an un-invested moderator. Refer to the research. What about: train ourselves! It would mean

• adopting an ethic of co-learning,
• either de-privileging the individual expert or broadening the scope of expertise that is recognized as valuable/necessary, and
• making ourselves the object of analysis and reflection.

Teresa Woodruff’s statement bears repeating, “It is not that team science is in its infancy, it is that you are learning to work the way that women have always worked.”

Gender is not the whole story, I can name several men working as teammates even if the group’s membership and task is vague. But there may be something to noticing differences in the way men are typically trained in teamwork:  as tightly-knit athletic or military units with a clear and unambiguous objective toward which every member is supposed to equally strive. The boundaries and conditions within which men (in general) learn to identify themselves as part of a team are essentially linear, especially if compared with the constraints and styles by which women tend to identify with others who are moving only roughly in the same direction.

Constructing common ground or a new mental model?

I eavesdropped on a conversation between Stephen Fiore and Maria Scharf as they parsed the difference among the capacities of various team science tools, the diverse uses and interpretations of the uses of these tools, and the processes by which teams in team science might come to understand each other. They made an interesting distinction between “common ground” that is achieved through a process of building a shared vocabulary together over time and the “mental models” of parties to this common ground process – models that may or may not be shared, even though a basic understanding has been forged.

If I was to go out on a limb (or, further out on the one I’ve been crawling along already!), I would diagnose that practitioners and researchers of team science are in a process of constructing common ground. Further, I would prescribe that one way to promote the spread of commonality is to simultaneously generate and popularize a mental model that encourages acknowledgment of relationalism, i.e., of the co-constructed interrelations inherent in the social interaction processes of teaming.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Discourse patterns and outliers

By all measures, the first conference on the Science of Team Science is a resounding success. The speakers are excellent, the overall mood enthusiastic, questions and engagement from the audience compelling, and the basic organization flawless. I’ve met intriguing people doing fascinating stuff, and I couldn’t be happier with the participation in James’ and my action research project. Here is a preliminary summary of results of the critical discourse analysis of the conference’s group dynamics, culled from the backchannel twitter feed, conversations with participants, and formally presented material.

A tight rein on the social

This is a professional, academic event. The titillation of a problematic moment reconfigured the conference group yesterday afternoon, when a presenter used a sexual analogy to drive home a point. Suddenly we were a slightly more intimate group! I had been intrigued when an audience member asked about the utility of Tuckman’s stages of group development, asking about the possibility of getting through the storming stage quickly. If we are going to have ‘a storm’ here at this conference, it will involve trying to unsettle the normal science paradigm in order to discover and present practical information that is useful in application.

Different languages: Science versus the Social?

In the midst of the main discursive tone of praise and excitement, there have been quiet yet persistent voices of dissatisfaction. The theories, methodological research and analysis tools, and reports of research results are fascinating and … hard to make sense of in terms of practical guidelines for what to do on the ground while working in teams to ensure their success. The social is posed as measures of interaction, not as actual human interrelating. Getting into the nitty-gritty was even discouraged by one example shared from the floor. His advice to “focus on the problem” and “not on the process” was not countered in any significant way.

Applying what we’ve learned

The above summary is evidence confirming the hypotheses posed by our poster, Bringing the Social to Team Science.

1. The quality of content produced is directly related to the amount of attention paid to process issues.
2. It is very difficult to pay attention to content and process at the same time.
3. Nonetheless, events occur during the work of team members that signals the presence of process; these signals can be understood as cues to shift attention from content/task accomplishment to relational/process matters.
4. Groups and organizations are in a constant state of flex. You need a great deal of organization and energy to sustain continuity. This is accomplished though power relations embedded in the social.

A proposal to extend the scope of the action research project

What if several research teams self-selected, right here-and-now during this first annual conference, to participate in a continuing investigation of how to bring the social into the science? I believe we have the tools; do we have the will? The study could run over the course of the next year, with results to be reported at next year’s conference.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

Bill Trochim spent some time at the poster on “Bringing the Social to Team Science,” wondering out loud if it is possible for some kind of “social concerted action” to come out of this conference. I posed the question to the folks I had dinner with: “If we were to actually come up with something to do together – collaboratively – out of this conference, what could it be?”

Intellectual Liberation

One of the cool features of this conference is the permission to say, “I don’t understand.” A Trekkie clued me in to this emergent feature of the social interactions here, and I checked it out with my dinner companions. They explained that because people attending this conference are from such disparate fields the usual assumptions that one is ‘supposed to already understand’ are suspended. It is rare to be with a whole bunch of highly educated people who are asking all kinds of questions that you hadn’t yet thought to ask.

We’re all on the continuum somewhere

The process of panel presentations has provided an impressive amount of information, but it isn’t clear what we can actually do with this knowledge. If we were to consciously build a network that gets beyond sizzle to move an agenda and challenge implicit norms (such as the division between practitioners and researchers, or that team science occurs only inter-disciplinarily), we have to do something more/different than what has occurred so far. Are we here just learning or are we in a process to generate new knowledge?

Tackling Team Science’s Wicked Problem

Because everyone has their own thing that they’re into, whether its research or administration or whatever, we would have to come up with “a meta-thing” as a goal or aim that everyone – or at least a solid cadre of us – could get behind. What if we decided to answer the process question? Instead of focusing on, “What is ‘the what’ of team science?” which takes as its mission connecting the science; we propose an examination of self-reflective case studies in order to identify “what works” and thus be able to explain and train people in the skills and techniques of effective team science.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Science of Team Science
1st annual conference
Chicago

“Choose your adventure!”

I pitched our project to twenty people, learning also about their interests – some are attending the conference to learn, others are presenting posters or are part of the official program. I was shy to tweet anything except to record who I met, partly because I wanted to have the real-time conversation and partly because I wasn’t sure how far to go with attributions in this social setting (even though no one objected to being either tweeted or blogged by first name).  A few things caught my attention, though, such as Michael’s tease about where I had hidden the clues concerning James and my action research project. Was it a kind of “choose your own adventure” story? Michael and Cameron bantered their expertise, got me thinking more about secondary networks, wondering about team “formation stories” and unconferences.

Everyone was in a good mood, smiles and friendly chatter filled the room, definitely characterizing all the conversations that I had. Some “issues” did surface, such as

• the challenge of researchers or scientists “being recognized as a team,”
• the opinion that “scientists are divas,” and that there might be
• something to explore concerning presenters who are “organized and boring” compared with those who are “chaotic and creative.”

“Opening the net for serendipity”

Cameron mentioned some of the hazards of backchanneling, which is not what we’re doing with the #teamsci10 twitter hashtag but definitely something to keep in mind. Rather, we’re building an archive with as many views as possible on the knowledge being shared during this conference. A few people thought they should not participate because they are too blunt or provocative. I think this is all part of the mix of real groups; what’s interesting will be what we all, together, make of this journey together over the next three days.

Maria said followers need to have the same characteristics as leaders. I think this fits with what I wrote in the previous post about cooperation, and might jive with Michael’s emphasis on creating conditions for spontaneous connections. We’ve all got roles that contribute in various ways to a group’s functionality, the trick is shifting and switching among team members according to the skills, talents, techniques, experience or situated knowledge called for by the problem or task at hand.

Popularity: 1% [?]