Rowan's Future of Choice

What chance for choice in an over-structured world?

We have packaged and scripted our lives into discrete and repeatable events. Think of how scheduled your work day is. Weekends are even worse. Interruptions and “vacations” have to be planned. Kids' time is organized and controlled. Bells and hall passes regulate them at school. They have play time, quiet time, study time, time-outs, and time to grow up. They have different uniforms for different sports, and for school, church, going to the mall, and sleeping.

We have invented dozens of roles for our structures. We have buddies and mates, coaches and advisors, counselors and experts, friends and hostiles--and of course, friends “with benefits.” And that is just the short list. When we run out of people to play roles, we have games and TVs to baby-sit us. (See the TV Guide or your TiVo list for today’s schedule.)

Structure limits our choices. It helps us know where to be and what to do. It creates the illusion that we are in control—that each of us is not really spinning around the sun at 66,000 miles per hour. Structure has rules, steps, instructions, and 1-800 numbers. It tells us who to call and which button to push.

I believe it is making us stinking crazy because it rejects most of what makes us human. Too much structure renounces our emotions and instincts. It denies our sometimes spontaneous and unfathomable behaviors. It dehumanizes us. It often does not work.

There is a highly controversial drug control program, called Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and created by the law enforcement profession, that aims to provide a structure to help young people make better decisions about “risky behaviors.” Something like 36 million kids around the world have taken the program and earned their tee shirts.

I am assuming you are an adult. If not, pretend. Now, however old and wise you may be, I will bet that when you were younger you wanted to experience what some call “an alternate consciousness.” This is a fancy way of saying get drunk, high, wasted, tipsy, loaded, faced. (Each generation makes up its own words to show how clever it is.) The old and wise people around you at the time either warned you not to experiment with mind-altering liquids or substances, said do it carefully and in moderation, or simply looked the other way.

Instead of older and wiser people, we now have structured programs to direct us.

“The D.A.R.E. program allows the children to develop a positive relationship with police officers and provides them with decision making skills to deal with risky behavior, in turn enabling them to make better decisions about criminal activity they may be faced with…. The D.A.R.E. curriculum is based on a Decision Making Model that provides children with the skills to:

D efine..... any problem;
A ssess..... any problem by looking at all the choices or options they have;
R espond... to any problem by implementing the choice they have selected; and:
E valuate... the choice they have made as to whether it was a good or bad decision.

These skills can clearly be used for offers to use drugs, selling or giving drugs to others, impaired driving, vandalism, bullying, theft and other risky behavior…”

I say, if these skills do not work, call their toll-free number 8-to-5 to talk to one of their professional counselors.

Critical report: Drug Abuse Resistance Education: The Effectiveness of DARE
D.A.R.E. news story
D.A.R.E. web site
Wikipedia entry
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Cowboy wisdom

“If it weren’t for a good horse, a woman would be the sweetest thing in the world.”

Clarence Hailey Long

Others of my posts related to wisdom: The Wisdom of Everyone; Surowiecki: Leaders letting others make their decisions; and in a reader's comment in I Am Like Everybody Else.

 

"Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival."

I must be getting older: Deming's work seems really dated.

W. Edwards Deming at Wiki

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Will memory crowd out imagination?

Having just started reading Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, I am re-thinking a paradox I have been kicking around for some time: knowledge conflicts with learning.

Some of the patterns we learn from repetition and feedback also keep us from discovering new ideas and new patterns. Living longer, the boomer bulge, faith-versus-evidence-based beliefs, and electronically stored and accessible knowlege, all these may actually widen the gap between what we know and accept from the recorded patterns of the past, and what is possible in our future Universe.

The influence of this accumulating mass of past knowledge on our decision making will only grow. The question is, will our decisions get better? Will memory crowd out imagination?

I am obviously still processing this topic, and will be for some time.

But, as Yogi Berra said, "The future ain't what it used to be."

Ray Kurzweil web site

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Customer's customer

I want to share a tip you may not have thought about recently.

If you have customers, or other people you are trying to satisfy or help, try thinking beyond them to your customers' customer.

If you are an employee trying to satisfy your boss, think about what he or she is trying to accomplish. If you are selling a product or service, think about the life of that product or service after your sale.

How is your customer using it? How are their customers using it? Beyond the transaction at hand, how can you help your customer succeed?

Using contextual insights within immediate relationships can actually simplify your choices. There is less guesswork and people will be impressed that you care.

Please leave a comment.

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Second Thoughts

Last month, I bought a tomato plant of an experimental hybrid called "Hungry Iguana." I get my seedlings from DeBaggio's Herb Farm in Chantilly, Virginia. They have a huge selection of new and unusual varieties that usually do well in my garden. This one is starting to concern me....

(Click on the photo to enlarge.)

Debaggio's

The Supply and Demand of Drink

The devout Mormon—and abstaining--CEO of Marriott will do anything for his customers to keep the largest hotel company in the world competitive.

J.W. Marriott says in today’s Washington Post, titled, “Hotels Turn Attention to the Bar,” “I've got a company to run and I need to take care of customers…. I live my faith to the very best of my ability but I don't try to impose my beliefs on the customer.”

Marriott is making-over its hotel bars to increase demand and “find quick ways to increase value and generate revenue.” Fine, let’s get a drink.

On the supply side, today’s Post also reports on progress by Wal-Mart to implement its new corporate “philosophy,” called, “Doing well by doing good." Keep reading, because this next part is about the coffee you love to drink before driving home from the bar.

Supply chain outfits such as Wal-Mart talk a lot about direct-to-this and direct-to-that. What they really mean is “skip-this-and-skip-that-middleman.” In this case, the company is skipping the greedy guys who screw poor Brazilian coffee farmers by not sharing the fat profits they get from moving coffee from the farm to the grocery store.

Wal-Mart executives are now insisting that they be the greedy guys who are screwing the poor farmers, under the banners of Fair Trade and doing well by doing good. At the end of the check-out line are you and I, the half-asleep consumers with the cash, who also want to do well by doing good—without having to think about it too much.

We have the means to impact companies like Marriott and Wal-Mart by learning more about what we consume, then making deliberate choices about where and how we spend our money. Until we do, we are no more than little ants in a big world. Sorry ants, I do not mean to be cruel.

Bar story
Coffee story

Seize the delay

"There comes a time where delay, to get a slightly better decision, is worse than action to get a pretty good decision." --President Clinton

I would add that the best way to see exactly where you have just driven is to face the rear of the car.

Source: Eigen’s Political & Historical Quotations™

Looking good

Decades into dealing with Muslim extremist hatred for Westerners, we are finally becoming conscious of the importance of respect and honor in all cultures, even among bad guys. About the framed picture of Zarqawi that everyone saw yesterday:

"Major Gen Caldwell said they had "made a conscious decision that we were going to clean... his face up" for the photographs that were released."

Contrast this with the disrespect with which we treated the captured Saddam Hussein.

Quote is from BBC News story.

Time to learn

Incrementalism, which I define as "doing a little more to get a little more," can be a bane or a boost. When we seek the next higher step, the somewhat better design, or the higher success rate, we are betting that the benefits of the increment are worth any costs and delays.

In part, it is our simmering dissatisfaction with the status quo that makes us try to improve--as people, as companies, and as a nation. Money and material goods can be manipulated. Time is our only fixed resource; it can't be stored, stretched, or condensed. So when we waste one unit of time trying for an incrementally better solution, we have spent something we cannot recover.

The way to beat the clock is to use each increment to learn. Learning makes the next decision smarter, and hopefully, better.

We may even learn that what we already have is pretty good.

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