When Judgment Closes the Door to Productive Communication

What is your MBTI score? Are you and a “P” or a “J”? P-types are people who are good at observing, researching, analyzing, etc. J-types are people who are decisive, finishers, doers, etc. Actually, people are generally a mix of “P” and “J”. A person’s type can be measured along a P-J scale, where his mix is leaning either towards “P” or towards “J”.

An “extreme P” or an “extreme J” is both a curse and a blessing. An “extreme J” person is a very quick decision maker, but he tends to jump to conclusions/decisions based on bias, impressions or insufficient information. An “extreme P” is excellent in making studies, but his weakness is indecision and “analysis paralysis”. The balanced person is one who can be a “P” or a “J” depending on what is appropriate for a specific situation. He can suspend judgment in order to better sense what is going on, but he can also make a quick decision when a situation calls for it.

Ability to suspend judgment is an ingredient in organizational learning; it is a necessary ingredient in generative dialogue.

You wish to now your MBTI score? You can take a free online test (press “Ctrl” while clicking HERE). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Carl Jung’s observation about personality types. The fourth or last letter in your MBTI type is either P or J. Your score there will tell you how far you are from the midpoint or balance.

In problematic relationships or in situations of hostility between groups, productive communication can be killed by inability to suspend judgement on the part of both parties, which in turn can be the consequence of an inability to be aware of one’s judgments. If both parties entertain opposing or incompatible judgments, and both hold judgments based on what to each of them are fundamental values, absolute truth or even God’s will, then the door to productive communication or negotiation between them closes.

This can happen in international relations, between religious fundamentalists, between political parties holding extreme views, in marriages, in civil disputes, etc.

Take these two incompatible judgments:

Hamas suicide bomber: “I should give my life for my people and our just cause; if I die, God will reward me with paradise.”

Israeli soldier: “I should fight for Israel and for my people; God gave this land to us.”

The result is violence, a sign of failure of communication:

—

Note that there are embedded links in this blog post. They show up as colored text. While pressing “Ctrl” click on any link to create a new tab to reach the webpages pointed to. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the image in this blog post.

=>Back to main page of Apin Talisayon’s Weblog
=>Jump to Clickable Master Index

Q20- Israel versus Hamas and Hezbollah: Lessons(?) in Relationship Capital

Let us apply the expanded KM framework to the conflict between Israel on the one hand and Hamas and Hezbollah on the other hand.

Below I reproduce in the upper diagram the expanded KM framework, while the lower diagram shows which metacapitals the Israeli war machinery is hitting Hamas and Hezbollah, and which metacapitals are the strength of Hamas and Hezbollah. Note that Hamas and Hezbollah are more than just fighting groups, more so they provide or they ARE community development and support systems (relationship capital) intensely motivated by their particular but strong religious beliefs (motivational factor).

What do we notice?

• The Israeli armed forces are not only missing the areas of strengths of Hamas and Hezbollah, their conventional military offensives are likely to be further strengthening them. The latest “disproportional” Israeli offensive in Gaza may have created the motivational energy to spawn one more generation of Palestinian suicide bombers!

• Conventional military means that seek to kill people (human capital) and destroy infrastructures (tangible assets) are utterly inappropriate to deal with an adversary whose strength and means of warfare are elsewhere: on strong network or sense of community (relational capital) and on strong belief or ideology (motivational factor). Killing a terrorist does not kill what inspires more terrorists to volunteer. Cruise missiles and aircraft carriers cannot defeat terrorism. In blog post Q18 I wrote how a smaller and less militarily and economically powerful Vietnam defeated its foe, the United States, who had superior technology and war machinery: an example of stronger motivational factor and relational capital overcoming tangible assets no matter how superior!
• Conventional military doctrine is inappropriate in the context of “clash of civilizations”.
• Conventional military doctrine may eventually be seen as counter-productive in a shrinking world where human groups need to learn to live together in diversity but peace and harmony.

What’s in your mind now? Please share it by clicking the “Comment” link below and converting your tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge for more people to see.

=>Back to main page of Apin Talisayon’s Weblog
=>Jump to Clickable Master Index

Q12- Clash of Civilizations or Dialogue among Civilizations?

In front of me are two books.

The first book is Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” (1996). He said that the end of the Cold War and its ideological conflict is paving the way to global clashes between major cultures: Western vs. Chinese, Western vs. Islamic, Hindu vs. Islamic, Hindu vs. Chinese, etc.

The second book tells a story (Adam Kahane’s “Solving Tough Problems”: an Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities, 2004) of how leaders of warring political groups in apartheid South Africa met and talked together at Mont Fleur Conference Center — a fateful meeting where they mustered the courage and goodwill to clarify together the stark choices and futures South Africa faces, and which eventually paved the way towards the end of apartheid and the rise of Nelson Mandela.

As I read these two books, I feel both fear and hope. I am afraid of a nuclear holocaust started by trigger-happy leaders. What will Israel do once Iran develops a nuclear weapons capability? What will a fundamentalist Islamic group do if they are able to steal Pakistani nuclear weapons? Would desperation push North Korea to send a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile to their Korean cousins in the south?

We may yet save humankind from mutual assured destruction of a nuclear holocaust if we, especially our leaders, learn how to truly talk together.

Harvard Professor David Bohm and Mark Edwards, in their book “Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing Our World,” said

“Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or to conform to those of others and without distortion and self deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?”

I feel guardedly hopeful because I could see the solution, or at least the direction where humankind can find a solution, namely, generative dialogue (see “D19- Debate versus Discussion versus Dialogue”). This is what happened in 1991 at Mont Fleur. I said “guardedly” because there are people who think it is wrong for their leaders to compromise and who will use violence to stop their leaders. The 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat after he dialogued with Israel in 1978-79 leading to the Camp David Accords is an example. The 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin after the Oslo Accords of 1993 — the first official dialogue between the Israel government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization — is another example.

We all engage in conversations many times a day. It is so common, many tend to think they know how to engage in a productive conversation.

“Managing Conversations” is an entire chapter in the book, “Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation,” by von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka. According to them

“…good conversations are the cradle of social knowledge in any organization…(which) allows for the first and most essential step of knowledge creation: sharing tacit knowledge within a microcommunity.”

Referring to the events after September 11, former President Khatami of Iran — who wrote the book “Dialogue Among Civilizations: a Paradigm for Peace” (2006) — said

“Two superficially opposing voices are heard in America and Afghanistan, which in fact are the two sides of the same coin… One says whoever is not with America is a terrorist and the other says whoever does not accept this behavior is an opponent of Islam and a proponent of America… Such false and arrogant judgments are the root cause of violence and terror as well as war.”

William Isaacs, who studied under learning organization guru Peter Senge and double-loop learning proponent Chris Argyris, wrote about how generative dialogue can be achieved (“Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together”, 1999).

Civilizational divides are threatening the security and stability of the planet and all of us, we need to learn how to truly talk to each other. If we can practice dialogue towards learning organizations, perhaps we can next practice it towards learning nations.

=>Back to main page
=>Jump to Clickable Master Index

Q7- We Found the Enemy: Our Own Concepts!?

Let us do a thought experiment (Gedanken Experiment).

One day, I visited a forest. With me are four friends: an entomologist, a logger, a civil engineer and an ethnographer. The entomologist proceeded to examine many varieties of insects hiding in the cracks of trees’ barks and underneath fallen leaves. He starts to tell everyone stories about each kind of insect he discovers. The logger is not listening because he was busy mentally estimating the commercial volume and market value of a tree in front of him based on its diameter-at-breast-height. He was also estimating the timber density of this forest. The civil engineer was looking elsewhere: at the elevation, slopes and the flow rate and drop of a nearby small waterfall. He wanted to estimate how many kilowatts a micro-hydro power generator can produce from the waterfall. The ethnographer was a bit disappointed. She could not find anything interesting in the forest so she just observed the behavior of her companions and asked them a few questions.

What is happening here? The entomologist, logger, civil engineer and ethnographer are each seeing different things. Their individual academic trainings, experiences and habits are boxing in how they see the world around them. They see only their own familiar SLICES of the real world. No one is looking at the entire forest!

In the previous blogpost(Q6- KM for development: a triple(?) bottom line?), I have no doubt the Philippine Government and the World Bank hired the best engineers. The engineers who conceived and designed the Chico River Dam project where doing their darn best. But engineers are not trained in sociology or cultural anthropology or ecology. They were trained well to look elsewhere. So they missed and failed to anticipate social and cultural costs of the project. The engineers, the Philippine Government, the World Bank, the soldiers sent to the area by the Philippine Government, etc. were not our enemies. Our common enemy was the wrong development model or the purely engineering framework (a SINGLE-SLICE framework) for viewing a hydroelectric power plant project.

Every one of us is making choices we think are best for the situation we are in, given our individual worldviews and value systems. Don’t you think so? Do you agree that the Hamas, given their viewpoints and values, are making decisions they think are the best? Do you also agree that the Israeli cabinet, given their viewpoints and values, are making decisions they think are the best?

After 178 nations learned and woke up from the terrible costs of development disasters, and adopted the principle of sustainable development, they are also making decisions they think are best or at least better than those based on earlier development models. Sustainable development is a THREE-SLICE framework (see Q6- KM for development: a triple? bottom line). So now, sixteen years after the Rio Summit, sustainable development has become the mainstream development model. With sustainable development, have we finally vanquished our enemy, namely, wrong or incomplete development framework?

Wait. Let us not quickly jump to the conclusion that we have found THE final solution. In blogpost F15 (“Our Development Concepts may be THE Problem”), I showed data hinting at the possibility that even sustainable development may not be THE perfect development model. So our real enemy may be OUR OWN cherished beliefs about development.

Please allow me to repeat what I said in the introduction to this Q Series.

In the movie “Men in Black,” Kay (played by Tommy Lee Jones) told Jay (played by Will Smith):

“Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

Our beliefs about the world keep changing. Chances are, our beliefs today are not final; something better will be discovered in the future. KM guru Ikujiro Nonaka defined “knowledge” as “justified belief that increases an entity’s capacity for effective action.” And so, our knowledge is exactly that: beliefs. Tomorrow, better beliefs or assumptions can replace our current beliefs if the former justifiably work better or they help us produce the results we say we want. So, we should not get stuck in “right-and-wrong” thinking or “I-am-always-right” thinking, but try to replace it with “what-could-work-better” thinking.

Peter Senge said that in a truly learning organization, members are skilled in being aware, in re-examining or testing and if needed, in revising their mental models (=assumptions or beliefs).

I wonder, what could be the development model 100 years from now? 1000 years from now? (assuming the human race is still around).

What belief could be the common enemy of Hamas and Israel? What belief could work better?

Do you have any thoughts on this? Please go ahead and share it with the 700-800 visitors per week of this blogsite (click the Comment link below).

=>Back to main page
=>Jump to Clickable Master Index