Don't Compromise!

I’ve always had a ‘thing’ about the difference between ‘the possible’ and ‘the desirable’. Ideas are like people: even the seemingly good ones can go bad. But one possibility I can’t make my mind up about is intriguing me. We’ve already plugged a blog posting about micro-coaching here at dontcompromise, and then there’s Twitter, sitting there free of charge and ready to be applied to something. I’m not the first to wonder if 2 + 2 = 4 or more, so to speak, but I’m not sure if that’s what’s bothering me.

At one level, it’s a no-brainer. Free software that’s not complicated enough to need a lot of learning. Groups of people working together who could probably benefit from on-going feedback on their behaviour from those around them. Workplaces where people’s behaviours and habits are often one of the real ‘problems’. At this point, I should really run a bath so I can start shouting “Eureka”, no?

 Well, that “no” might equally be literal rather than rhetorical. “No” can be a good answer: for several reasons, the possibility of 360 degree haiku – each of us piping up with observational comments and feedback on each other’s behaviours and habits – does not necessarily lead straight to its putative desirability. For starters, our relationship with our tools is a complex one: one of the spiritual fathers of the modern, technologically-infused human condition, Marshall McLuhan, recognised as much when he said “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”

No doubt software engineers would protest that – now that most tools are digital – we (well ok, they) have the ability to continue to shape our tools, and to build in elements to their design that allow them to continue to adapt themselves to us. [Which is both true and very clever, as far as it goes, but misses McLuhan’s point: technology does not come with a built in moral bent, but our use of it changes us and not necessarily in ways we predict.] Joking aside, there is also a danger here of repeating a common failing among clever men: focusing on their tools rather than the real issue.

At a more basic level, how we apply new tools and technologies isn’t always what the developers and implementers had in mind. SMS texts on your mobile – another ‘instant’ medium with a tightly restrictive format – weren’t originally rolled out with all mobile phones as the providers hadn’t worked out the charging plan. A phone was a phone, after all. But we came, we saw, we pounced, and the rest is history.

Supposing we evolve a clever little “real-time” 360 feedback program that not just enables us to send timely, constructive feedback by private Tweets but gives us on-going scores (with auto-moderation of ratings to take account of those with personal grievances or pathological flatterers) against role-specific behavioural criteria frameworks, how far will it – in itself – help? In an organisation that sees people as an expense rather than an asset, would it become another stick for beating them – and driving some of them out? Will the on-screen nature of scores turn them into ‘gospel’ rather than information for reviewing? It would be a tool: but would we shape it, or would it shape us?

I’m reminded of another example of really short-messages, partly the work of a man who once complained about computers that “there is not enough Africa in them” – Brian Eno. Working with the painter, Peter Schmidt, he evolved Oblique Strategies – a sequence of aphoristic statements on cards, about which he has said:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

This strikes me as a potentially useful idea for managers and leaders too, although -  as ever – I have a few qualms. (Is the intellectual glamour of Eno making this appear to be more than just a set of flashcards? Isn’t there more to thinking outside the box than opening the box and taking a pre-printed card out of it?). Any pre-printed card can only be finitely adaptive: they cannot be definitive advice either to an individual person or to a situation. To me, the value of the idea lies elsewhere.

I’m conscious that Eno works much of the time as a musical producer. Importantly here, that doesn’t mean someone who produces music – the musicians still (largely) do that bit – but someone who oversees and directs others as they make it: an arena where ‘creativity’ relates to the creative arts as well as to problem-solving (one of my pet peeves in the devaluation of language), and one where ‘the right thing to do’ might be more subjective than in other situations.  To me, their potential value comes from interpretation: getting the card-reader to think about the situation afresh. By making them interpret, they make them think, review and assess. Given some of the actual Strategies, that might be an interesting process:

Not building a wall but making a brick

Towards the insignificant

Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap)

Sometimes, “throwing things out there” is a valuable exercise for the ripples they create, for the discoveries made as people respond to the disruptive effect, or the unexpected opportunity to see things in a new light … but not necessarily. Too much freely interpretable “wisdom”, and we might as well just read our tabloid horoscopes. The problem with gnomic advice is how it’s taken: as the Chinese proverb runs “when a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger”. Cast unduly gnomic pearls around and some people will see scatterings of wisdom while others will see only a tosser.

Clearly, if it is desirable to evolve the Oblique Strategies idea for managers and leaders, we would need to do some work on the content. The role of tools and technologies in teaching – and especially that seemingly inescapable human imperative to bend each new passing technology to each current problem – has fascinated some of those we consider ‘greats’:

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.”
Bill Gates

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the “naturals,” the ones who somehow know how to teach.”
Peter Drucker

The blogosphere is similarly exploring how to use the currently fashionable micro-blogging technologies for pedagogic ends, whether it be How to Use Twitter in Training & Learning, Is Twitter being used as a Learning Tool?, or to explore important differences of definition (Education vs Training: Using Twitter as a Research Tool – where some of the offered definitions are definitely worth a read). (One post – Twitter and micro learning – does look at the concept of redundancy from a longer-term perspective: what if Twitter goes under and our new learning platform dissolves beneath us? Digital tools have a finite shelf-life.)

I suspect the ‘right’ answer – as far as there can be one, and particularly when we look at ways of helping individuals both to learn and to continue to behave effectively, is that any tool that encourages and supports us as we work towards our goals (rather than those of the technology) is worth considering. But 360 degree and other forms of  feedback work best where there is skill in offering the feedback, support in receiving and responding to it and shaping new ways forward. They work best where the culture consciously supports them: we don’t need to be inventing new ways of blaming each other.

Our online tools don’t just need more than ‘more Africa’ in them – they need us in them. They need to be part of our processes rather than making us part of theirs. And whether they shape us or not, they certainly need to avoid restricting us and crassly simplifying our real complexities. You can’t say much in 140 characters. If we’re going to embrace micro-learning we need to understand why we used to have an old saying: a little learning is a dangerous thing.

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