Category: Work

Life, Work

Indirectness

I read a fascinating article this week which gives the theoretical underpinnings – and even an equation – to make transparent why we are opaque.

Indirectness, innuendo, plausible deniability and nuance are all tricks of language we learn. But on the face of it they seem inefficient, unclear and downright unprofessional.

I’ve often felt put out – particularly at work – when people pull me up and say ‘what exactly do you mean’, or ‘what exactly are you suggesting?’ I sometimes find these sorts of questions irritating – even scalding. When the topic is complex or involves others, being suddenly pulled up can leave me feeling undermined, impugned or misunderstood. What’s going in feels far worse than a simple accusation of imprecision or rambling. Now I know why.

Steven Pinker of Harvard explains it all very straightforwardly in his 2007 paper ‘The logic of indirect speech’ which is vividly brought to life in an RSAnimation. Paraphrased in a [I admit large] nutshell, he writes:

Humans employ several, mutually incompatible, modes of cooperation and, as a result, are extremely touchy about their relationships. With some (typically family, lovers, and friends), they freely share and do favours; with others, they jockey for dominance; with still others, they trade goods and favours.

The ‘dominance’ relationship is governed by the ethos, “Don’t mess with me.” It has a basis in the dominance hierarchies common in the animal kingdom, although in humans, it is based not just on brawn or seniority but on social recognition: how much others are willing to defer to you.

The ‘communality’ relationship conforms to the ethos, “What’s mine is thine; what’s thine is mine.” It naturally arises among kin bound by shared genes, within monogamous pair-bonds, bound by their shared children and by close friends and allies bound by shared interests. It can be extended to others by nonverbal cues of solidarity such as physical contact, communal meals, and shared experiences.

The ‘reciprocity’ relationship obeys the ethos, “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.” It has an evolutionary basis in reciprocal altruism. It is usually signaled by fair exchanges or division into equal portions but, unlike the other two relationship types, can be negotiated by people via explicit verbal contracts.

People distinguish these relationships sharply, and when one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another, they both suffer an emotional cost. Nonetheless, humans often have to risk these breaches to get on with the business of life, and they often use language to do so. In exploring the boundaries of relationship types, humans anticipate what other humans think about the relationship: what the other party in the relationship thinks; what any gossipers think; and what the other party thinks about what they think about what the other party thinks about what they think, and so on.

The need to preserve our relationships while transacting the business of our lives can thus explain humans’ tendency to fill their lives with innuendo, hypocrisy, and taboo.

So now I understand why I sometimes say things in less than transparent ways at work – and feel put out when people don’t get my subtle drift. There’s always a complex interplay of ‘dominance’, ‘communality’ and ‘reciprocity’ in the workplace. It’s the most obvious place where the constantly shifting balance of cooperation and competition between humans means clarity isn’t always appropriate, realistic or welcome.

As Pinker shows, human relations are too just complex for plain speaking, sometimes we have to take the indirect route.

Aristotle, Ethics, Life, Work

Courage

I’ve been working in the USA this week – same language, quite different working cultures. Still Brits talking to Americans is easy enough. But add Germans, South Africans, Sudanese, Cameroonians, Central African Republicans, French, Colombians, Turks, Japanese and Koreans – and an age range from 18 to 70 and you have plenty of difference to accommodate.

The very different people I was working with cared about very different things. They wanted to talk about different things and wanted to do different things. My job was to facilitate and find a collective conclusion. Enough to give me a thumping headache. But not this time. Why?

Usually on overseas work trips the combination of travel, missed sleep, wall-to-wall meetings, some sort of set piece event to speak at and produce an outcome from – plus lunch meetings and formal dinners – gives me a throbbing headache by 3pm on day one. It then goes on to throb the whole time I’m away. But this time, no headache. Why? Mainly thanks to an Aristotelian virtue – drawing my courage a little more from confidence than fear.

When I first read: “Courage is the mean between confidence and fear” it didn’t seem a particularly significant insight. My first thought was Aristotle was on about ‘courage’ in the sense of ‘fight or flight’ – there was after all a lot of fighting in ancient Greece. Given the clank of metal and the clash of swords is rarer these days, I didn’t think much about Aristotelian courage – one for the battlefield I thought. Who knows whether I’d stand and fight or run into a hail of bullets. Hopefully I’ll never find out. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I see Aristotle’s point with ‘courage’ is as much about motivation as action.

I’ve come to realise that from school to university to the bigger world of work, I’ve used fear of failure as my prime motivation to perform. And it has always worked. Fear failure, worry the detail, think of what might go wrong, fire up the adrenaline, run flat out on intellectual broadband and the job gets done – and well. But at what cost? Stress, tiredness, raggedness, fraught, strung out and brittle.

So, thanks to Aristotle, once, a few months ago, when I started to feel the rising tide of anxiety and the throb of the vein in my head – the feeling of spotting and galvanising myself for another tough challenge – I stopped myself. I stopped myself from firing up my fear generator: what might go wrong, might I fail, what will people say, will I look like a duffer – and the killer: will someone say I did a bad job?

Instead I fumbled in my kitbag for something else – confidence. This could go well, I know how to do this sort of thing, I’ll be fine, who’s better than me to do this – and if someone says I did a bad job, so what, I’ll learn from it. The first few times I tried to do it I’d readily flip back to fear. I’d have to concentrate hard to find the courageous ‘golden mean’ with confidence. But with practice I’m learning how to plug in and stay more connected to confidence. And the courage to do new things with a smile flows from there.

As Aristotle said:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence [arete in his words], then, is not an act, but a habit.”

To help me form the habit, I’ve started to think of Aristotle’s courage as a choice between two different forms of energy. One is red, electrical, crackling and spitting like lightning or charge sparking from a Tesla coil – fear. The other is blue, pure, unwavering like a beam of laser light – confidence.

Both work. Both help me get the job done. But the red form is hot, sparky, volatile and the toxic by-products pollute my environment. The blue form is cool, reliable and powers me with clean reusable, renewable and sustainable energy.

In the USA I was running on ‘blue energy’ – better mastering myself, enjoying the experience more, enjoying the different people, performing and getting the job done. No headaches, heartaches, worries or lost sleep. I came home quietly pleased, quietly satisfied and with a spot more confidence to draw on.

Day to day courage, like the battlefield kind, is the mean between confidence and fear. Developing Aristotelian virtue and excellence is simply developing good habits. And, I’ve come to realise, what is at stake, is developing the courage to live a confident happy life – not one haunted by the spectre of constant fears, real or imagined.

Life, Work

Self Control

Interesting to read in Wired that exercising self-control carries a cognitive penalty which makes you more likely to develop a ‘bad mood’ and lose it with someone else. As Wired has it:

In a series of clever studies, the Northwestern psychologists David Gal and Wendy Liu demonstrate that the exertion of self-control doesn’t just make it harder for us to contain our own anger – it also make us more interested in watching anger-themed movies, or thinking about anger-related information, or looking an angry facial expressions. In other words, acts of self-control haven’t just exhausted the ego – they actually seem to have pissed it off.

I used to often get spiky at the end of the working day. The waifs and strays who came to unburden themselves would often get a sharp-tongued salvo as I hiccupped some bile.

I always kind of admired Zinedine Zidane for head butting Materazzi in the World Cup finals in 2006. I could relate to it in a strange way. A bit of brain science suggests Zidane and I aren’t just occasionally spiky, like everyone else we just have finite reserves of self-control.

One more reason it’s good to keep in touch with those emotions. Too much self-control and you’re en route to head-butting someone.

Ethics, Life, Work

Masterly Inaction

Along with its kissing cousin ‘benign neglect’, ‘masterly inaction’ was one of the useful survival tricks I learnt in the Civil Service. At least some of the impossible things you are asked to do get forgotten. Likewise, some of the huge problems you foresee are happily overtaken by ‘Events dear boy’.

But I always felt it was weak, passive and a sin of omission to indulge in masterly inaction. Having read my Primo Levi, and more recently visited and bourne witness to Auschwitz-Birkenau myself, the imagined sound of Alsatians barking and people standing by as great evil is perpetrated, haunt me. My omissions – especially when they potentially left people to get hurt – felt completely different in scale, but not completely different in kind.

‘Cynic’ was the school of Hellenic philosophy many senior Civil Service folk seemed to subscribe to. A sour worldliness, combined with acerbic wit, which allowed clever people to stand by and allow things they knew were wrong to pass them by. But perhaps more charitably they might have been ‘Skeptics’.

I’ve been reading this week about the Pyrrhonian Skeptics for whom the answer is not to jape or snipe, but simply to say ‘I know too little’ and ‘I do not know enough to judge’. Perhaps my judgements of those around me were too quick and too harsh.

Further back in my career, working in France, I had a piece of 360 degree feedback which sticks with me: “John could take a little more time making his decisions, which would save him time in justifying them”. That hurt. But it probably wasn’t wrong. I conflated leadership with decisiveness – two different things.

I read a while ago, that studies suggest, we should follow our gut, not our head, on things we have a lot of experience of. The corollary is we should have a good think, and get some facts and other views, before deciding on what we don’t know much about. The paradox is smart experienced people tend to do the opposite – think themselves out of their well-grounded judgements and over-confidently shoot from the hip when they know too little.

I’m not there yet, but perhaps I’m coming round to the view that ‘masterly inaction’ is not always a sin of omission. Sometimes as true sceptics would say, ‘I know too little’ and ‘I cannot judge’. So I conclude that to act may not always be the best course of action. However, appropriate ‘masterly inaction’ should not be framed by cynicism or cowardice, but by a healthy scepticism about one’s own capacity to make things better – and not inadvertently worse.

Life, Work

Cricket as Life

Part of the joy of cricket is that it is a game of the mind, the weather and the soil, as well as the body. On the face of it, it’s a lot of time for a sometimes indeterminate result. Many find it dull.

Even as a player, there were times when as I stood out on the boundary rope, I yearned for it to all be over. As a spectator, I infamously slept through one of the great days of English cricket at The Oval when Devon Malcolm improbably ripped through the South African batting line-up having been earlier smacked on the helmet by a bouncer. Sweet revenge, but I snored through it. Shame on me.

As any cricket lover knows though, the interplay between clouds, sun, wind, rain and pitch can transform a game in a matter of minutes. Batsmen steadily accumulating; then some swing, the ball hitting a crack in the pitch, a hot-headed heave or a lazy defence and it’s game on.

But perhaps more interesting are the mind games. Sometimes people play the reputation, not the player. A reputedly hard-hitting batsmen comes out and fielders are pre-emptively pushed to the ropes. The opening bowler returns and batsmen get fidgety. A ‘joke bowler’ comes on and a batsman doesn’t know whether to slog or block and oops they’re out.

Some great cricketers – notably bowlers – continued to master the minds of batsmen, even when their bowling lost its rip. Ian Botham was the best example I’ve seen – just the sight of his shaggy mane in his twilight years got good batsmen playing bad shots.

Many good cricketers are only good in certain circumstances. On certain pitches against certain players. Some good players were destroyed by a nemesis – Andrew Hilditch hooking and holing out to Ian Botham again and again is the most memorable example for me. The difference between good and great is getting results in all conditions against all types of player.

As a spin bowler myself, there were days when I knew I was evenly matched with a batsman. The pitch, ball and match situation meant I couldn’t get him out unless he did something rash. And, if I deviated from line and length, he’d soon knock me out of the attack. Precision and mind games are what’s left.

Four ‘dot balls’ in an over and you know on number five he’ll try to hit you over your head. Do you float it to tempt him – and risk a boundary if he connects? Or squirt an ugly ball low and flat and work for a maiden so the other bowler gets a go at the other increasingly frustrated batsman? Two consecutive raps on the pads and the embarrassment and physical smarting mean he’ll surely try to smack you. Do you pitch right up to try and york him – risking overpitching and gifting a free hit. It’s 90% in the mind 10% in the execution when you’re evenly matched.

But there are times also when the pitch is doing nothing, the ball is dead, your fielders are dropping catches and runs are ticking along. On those days you just need to stick at it, keep putting it up there, don’t lose your head and trust to luck that something will happen. Cricket is often as much endurance and luck as mental chess.

And so it is with life. All too often we take a view whether to attack or defend based on the person we face. We decide if they are fiery, defensive, tricky or predictable and choose a posture accordingly. This can be a big mistake.

Even the most unpredictable bowler can produce a surprise good ball, and the most reliable the odd bad one. Playing the ball – comment, question, proposal or decision – on it’s merits, not based on who says it, is the great player’s art.