How Many Times Must I Tell You?

Being told something is generally the consequence of someone else’s desire to bring it to your attention – that there’s a deadline looming that you need to meet, that you need to be aware that a particular activity is forbidden wherever you are, or that your choice of outfit might not be showing you in your best light. Sometimes the information is useful, sometimes it’s inadvertently amusing (I always enjoyed a friend’s office door that had a stern ‘No Tapdancing’ sign on it, in case anyone was about to break into the best Fred and Ginger routine); sometimes, however, it can have effects that we can only assume weren’t intended.

Mark Gould, writing at his Enlightened Tradition blog, provides a personal example to illustrate this point – and an explanation as to why a reminder might not have the intended effect:

I recall reading many years ago about a study which suggested that waiting staff in restaurants tended to break more crockery when they were reminded to take care than when there was no such reminder. As I once washed dishes and made coffee in a wine bar, this made sense to me. There is a lack of trust implicit in a reminder, which might make one doubt one’s abilities and therefore lead to more breakages. An alternative explanation might be that the reminder causes people to concentrate on the wrong thing — a broken plate, rather than a plate conveyed safely to its destination.”

 

Machines of Loving Grace, and the odd ghost …

I’ve always had a soft spot for the work of Adam Curtis, historian and film-maker. His BAFTA for The Power of Nightmares seemed richly deserved – it was a compelling piece of film-making arguing that Islamism and Neoconservatism not only needed each other – ie having a bogeyman to contest is a short route to credibility – but had more in common than they’d care to admit: both at least partially achieved power by promising to protect us from the spectres they promoted. His work is characterised by rich webs of connection and lateral leaps: it always reminds me, rightly or wrongly, of the conception sequence in Amelie, although the plot is invariably a little darker.

But this time around, with his three-part film All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (the third is shown next Monday), his penchant for yoking together Big Themes seems to have got a little tangled somewhere in the Big Sewing Machine of Metaphor. Watchable, as ever, but in a more baffling way than usual, he sought to demonstrate links between the Objectivism of Ayn Rand, the cybernetic thinking of Jay Forrester, and the influence of these trains of thought to explain the financial crash and the oligarchy nature of Western democracies. These trains of thought made many an intervening stop too: Buckminster Fuller, the Californian communes of the 1960s and 70s, and the initial ecological concept of eco-systems as naturally self-balancing. (If you’ve not watched episodes 1 or 2 yet, be warned this synopsis leaves out an awful lot more.)

 

More than saying Grace

In his 1960 novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth posed a question about manners:

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o’er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man’s gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel’s arse?”

Either way, I can’t help but feel that they are innate. Manners – like grace or ‘cool’ – are one of those things that either you possess or you don’t: they cannot truly be feigned. They are something you evidence, rather than something you simply ‘do’: manners are not a form of karaoke. Needless to say, Oscar Wilde had a relevant quote – “A true gentlemen is one who is never unintentionally rude” – but opinions on the importance, meaning and role of manners are as variable as standards of behaviour themselves.

 

“Well said, that man” – the modern speech

The Guardian recently ran a feature article about great speeches – a timeless topic, even in an age where – despite the dreams of the digital prophets, and the predictions of the demise of language under an onslaught of little dancing icons – words are probably being read more than ever. (Is it just me, or is the Kindle the most ironic invention yet? Wireless connectivity, USB, cloud computing, mobile that, digital the other – and it does what: mimics a book? Mmm.) So, still timeless, but let’s ignore the fact that the times are changing. Significant moments still call for The Big Speech – usually now televised (and then YouTubed and viralled off across the Internet’s virtual pontoon of social networking platforms): Kennedy in Berlin, Obama in Tuscon, Gaddafi in Tripoli, Cameron in Battersea Power Station …

Some situations – whether they are a time of crisis, a sense of a crisis that may occur later unless they are pre-empted, or an urgent desire to kindle change (rather than merely changing Kindle) – demand a response. As there is only so much that any of us can achieve single-handedly, that response is very often a statement: the first action is the call to the action that will – it is hoped – follow. It helps to be mindful of the ‘meta message’ you’re sending, of course.

 

Book review: Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Are you getting your five a day? No, not fruit & veg. Not even superfruits. Emails. That little red light lighting up on your crac … sorry, BlackBerry to help you feel needed, wanted, useful: after all, if you’re on call 24/7, you’re somebody, right? Having been totally absorbed for the last few days, using both thumbs to navigate my way through Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, I’m wondering if the question isn’t actually how much of a somebody you might be becoming, and what your Blackberry says about you – and your relationship not so much with technology, but with the rest of humanity.

 

Professional? Business-like? Of words and weasels …

Language is a tricky affair: not such ‘slippery when wet’ as ‘slippery when used as a protective coating’. We’re all aware of the nightmares of jargon, and the insidious effects of euphemism: when you hear the word ‘review’ does your mind first think ‘excellent, an opportunity to analyse, re-assess and optimise’, or is it closer to ‘mmm, cuts on the way: must ‘review’ the finances when I get home’? It depends on the context, and who said the word ‘review’, but one person’s opportunity can quite easily be another’s crisis. It’s all in the telling.

As someone who tries to go through life with my ears open, it amuses me – admittedly, in a rather dry, wry fashion – that there are two words I hear quite frequently used in offices as examples of what someone is, in someone else’s opinion, failing to be. Those words are ‘professional’ and – more especially – ‘businesslike’. Both have dictionary definitions, of course, although they don’t necessarily help to understand how the words wind up being used in such an accusatory manner. We are all in the building because a) we’re being paid, and b) we’re invoicing people so that we can continue to be paid, aren’t we? If we’re forgetting those little fundamentals, it’s a miracle we remembered to change out of our pyjamas and managed not to put our jacket on inside out. But what do they really mean, and what are we omitting from their definitions that they would gain from including?

 

Communication Skills: outlining a crisis, or scripting a drama?

Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”
Howard Rheingold

If I were the sensationalist type, life would have handed me a perfect opportunity this morning, and you’d be reading an article called Balls to the Treasury. If this isn’t just a case of delayed reaction on the search engine’s behalf, it’s almost encouraging: the easy attention-grabbing option has, for once, been resisted. Maybe there is hope – in a way that I’ve been pondering since listening to Lord Puttnam’s keynote speech at the Workworld Media Awards earlier this week.

 

Death of a Salesman: the sequel

Sorry for the rather un-festive title, but it’s triggered by reading a fascinating article at Harvard Business Review’s blog – Employees See Death When You Change Their Routines. It seems our sense of mortality is built on three pillars – consistency, standards of justice and culture – that the authors (James R Bailey and Jonathan Raelin) describe as existential buffers. The authors cite examples of actions that can undermine each of these, but the essential message – change knocks away one or more of those pillars and reminds us that all things (including, most importantly, our self and our sense of self) are transitory. Change is therefore perceived as threatening, and it is understandable that we therefore respond with ‘fight or flight’.

It’s a story of investment, in an emotional and psychological sense. Aware of our own mortality, we play down our own fears by using culture (in the broadest sense) to give us a sense of meaning, organisation and continuity, and to create feelings of belonging, security and self-esteem. Provided, of course, that we engage with and buy into the cultural values and standards in question. (And even those who see themselves as ‘outsiders’ have a perceived sense of something that they are outside: you can’t be outside something you don’t see as being there.)