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The eminent social scientist Karl Weick once said that social problems are often defined in ways that prevent us doing anything about them.
I have been watching the Zimbabwean elections closely. As facts emerge, I have been listing them on a “secondary” blog.
The situation in Zimbabwe is as dire any conflict in history. Can we move here? Can we move there? It seems the ultimate Catch 22. Whatever we do may create more damage.
I believe however that much of our hopelessness comes from our own representation of what is happening. Could we not, instead, look at difficult objective conditions that require resolution?
Today, people are starting close in, as the poet David Whyte would say.
Today, we are going to do something positive. Today we are going to say thank you. Today we are going to say we are with you. Today we are going to send emails to the President of Zambia who is the current chairman of SADC. Today, we are going to take 3 minutes to write a short, brief, courteous email saying,
Dear President Mwanawasa,
I write to thank you and the leaders of SADC sincerely for convening the extraordinary meeting concerning Zimbabwe and to extend my support and goodwill for a resolution that is satisfactory to all the people of Zimbabwe and her neighbours.
Sincerely,
I am patching in a long excerpt of a post from Sokwanele that gives the email addresses of SADC. Zimbabwe for a positive future.
TAKE ACTION
Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa has called an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to discuss the Zimbabwean presidential poll delay. This is the first move by Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours to intervene since the elections on 29th March 2008. President Mwanawasa is the current Chairman of the 14-nation South African Development Community. This is what he said yesterday:
I wish to take this opportunity to commend the people of Zimbabwe for the calm and peaceful manner in which the elections were conducted.
Similarly, I appeal to them to maintain the same spirit of calmness which they exhibited during the elections as they await the results of the presidential elections.
However, given developments immediately following the elections, I have decided, as Chair of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to call an extraordinary summit on Saturday 12th April, 2008 to discuss ways and means of assisting the people of Zimbabwe with the current impasse as well as adopt a co-ordinated approach to the situation in that country.
Both President Morgan Tsvangirai and opposition leader Robert Mugabe will be attending the emergency meeting.
Support our democratically elected leader and take action.
What YOU can do
You can voice your feelings and SHOUT OUT for FREEDOM. Communicate with key SADC people attending the meeting.
Tell them that Zimbabweans have the right to live in a democratic, free and peaceful country. Tell them your personal experiences and why you want change. Make them understand what it is like to be in Zimbabwe today. Tell them we voted for change, we got change, and we want change now. Speak the TRUTH.
HOW you can do it
Email, fax or phone using the details provided below. Keep your messages real and honest but also short and to the point. Remember: thousands of us will be doing this so they will have a lot to read. Let’s make sure they can read and hear it all!
Be polite at all times. People don’t pay attention to angry messages (look at us: Mugabe has been angry with the people for many years now and we just ignored him and voted him out anyway). Anger does not work.
1. Call or fax or email the Zambian State House with a message for President Levy Mwanawasa:
- Tel: +260 1 266147 or 262094
- Fax: +260 1 266092
- Send an email to Mr John Musukuma, Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations: johnmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
- Use the contact form on the Zambian State House website here to send an email:
http://www.statehouse.gov.zm/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3 - Bonus email: we’re not sure if this is a direct contact for President Mwanawasa, but just in case it is, copy all the emails you send to: differmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
2. Call or fax a message to President Thabo Mbeki - President of South Africa
- Tel: +27 (0)12 300 5200 and +27 (0)21 464 2100
- Fax: +27 (0)12 323 8246 and +27 (0)21 462 2838
- Send an email to Mr Mukoni Ratshitanga Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Spokesperson: mukoni@po.gov.za
3. Call or email Lieutenant Colonel Tanki Mothae - Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs at SADC
- Tel: +267 361 1001 or +267 397 2848
- E-mail: tmothae@sadc.int
4. Copy all your emails to this general SADC email address:
- Email: registry@sadc.int
5. If you want to attach images to your emails, you can download copies of the photographs at the top of this mailing from the Sokwanele flickr account here:
6. Forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to take action too.
7. Be positive, stay strong, and never forget that we have won.
I have never been totally happy, no pun intended, with positive psychology’s approach to objectively bad situations. I am totally persuaded by our ability to make the best of good situation. I am persuaded by our contribution to sort-of-bad situations. I am persuaded that in a terminal situation, we may as well be happy. I can also point you towards little experiments that cost you nothing but your time and that you can try on your own.
But there are three situations where I am not persuaded positive psychology can help us much, though in truth, nothing much helps in these situations.
First, when you are in a bad situation alone, and I mean socially alone. I haven’t looked closely at being physically alone.
Second, when other people will harm you, unless you harm them first.
Third, when you have experienced sustained social abuse and your fight/flight mechanism is on a hair trigger.
I watched a Scottish movie over the weekend, 16 Years of Alcohol, that illustrated a combination of these three situations. The protagonist grew up with an alcoholic father and joined a gang. While he was generally terrorizing the neighborhood, he met a girl and was motivated to change his life. The story is about his intelligent and thoughtful attempts and ultimately his death on the streets.
We can compare this story to Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched last weekend, and the well known movie about hope, Shawshank Redemption. In Shawshank, we have a protagonist who out-thinks and outwits people and is able to leave the situation by tunneling out of the jail. In Goodbye Mr Chips, the protagonist has a mentor who is slightly above the situation and he is able to grow himself and ultimately change the environment around him. Put this starkly, I think you already see the shape of my point.
In 16 Years of Alcohol, the agent of change, a young woman, was a resource but not sufficient to change the situation for the protagonist. And importantly, he did not exit the situation. I’m afraid he should have left town!
The protagonist asks himself at one point: where is hope in a hopeless place? There was an excellent line though where the young lady suggests to the protagonist that the past does not come looking for him - that he went looking for the past. And he talks about stopping the past leaking into your heart. These are good points - with slightly more resources and slightly less stress, he might have made it.
This is a realistic account of dealing with extreme hardship. If you are interested in using positive psychology to move on from bad places, you should have a look. Though a tragedy and not a feel good movie, you are left with an abiding memory of struggle and courage. It is a respectful account of people brought up in the hardest places in our society.
Advice from an ‘old hand’ to a ‘new teacher’ whose class got the better of him : in Goodbye Mr Chips, which I watched over the weekened.
“You have some hours before prep starts. Go out. Out there under the sky. Look around. What is the saying? Distance lends enchantment to the view. Go out. Come back refreshed.”
Paulo Coelho offers the same advice. Don’t spend the day looking down. Look to the horizon.
David Whyte has the same advice. Sometimes the answer depends upon a walk around the lake.
Whenever life is bad, look to the horizon. Close your eyes and listen to the furthest sounds that you can hear.
And if you can, do it when you awake. Do it in short 1 minute break. Do it commuting on the way home.
Is that why you pay so much for a house or office with a view?
A long back story
I took out Goodbye Mr Chips from my local library thinking it would be nice to relax for a couple of hours with this gentle, slightly sentimental, very inspirational movie. For non-Brits, this is a classic pygmalion, teacher story with romance thrown in. Think To Sir With Love, History Boys and Freedom Writers. I think when Yanks write pygmalion stories they are typically about basketball coaches. Britain has teacher stories.
Goodbye Mr Chips is a double-pygmalion story. Mr Chipping is an awkward “Latin master” in a “public school”. If you are non-Brit, read exclusive private school (or prep school in Americanese - a prep school here preps you to go to public school which takes you to the army academy or university).
Mr Chipping has two mentors. A charming relaxed fellow teacher and his wife. They are the catalysts in allowing Mr Chipping, or Chips as he comes to be called, to incorporate the softer side of his nature in his teaching style, reform the rugged-masculine-bullying culture of the school, and to encourage boy-after-boy, and their sons after them, to blend the feminine sides of their nature with the masculine demands of their school and obligations to country.
I thought I was borrowing the musical version with Peter O’Toole from the library. When I got home, I discovered I a new version with Martin Clunes, the star of the TV show, Doc Martin. He makes a marvellous Mr Chips with the mixture of clumsiness and kindness that we also see in Doc Martin. (He doesn’t sing btw, and nor do we hear the boys singing which we did in the earlier version).
The story seems slightly different too - but so be it. After this long back story, this is the quote I wanted to give you.
“I found that when I stopped judging myself harshly, the world became kinder to me. Remember I told you once, go out, and look around the world. Do that now. Only this time, let the world look at you. And the difference, I assure you, the world will like what it sees.”
Positive psychology is more than positive thinking
This is the concept which takes positive psychology far beyond positive thinking. It has echoes of the pygmalion effect, popularized in the musical My Fair Lady in which a flower girl becomes a lady. It includes the Galatea effect, ably researched by Dov Eden, who also researches the pygmalion effect in work settings. Basically, the Pygmalion effect is the effect of other people’s expectations on us. So a teacher creates clever pupils by expecting more of them. A teacher creates dull pupils by expecting failure and subtly communicating doubts and restricting the resources and time we need to learn. The Galatea effect works the other way around. It is the effect of our own self-perception. It is not that seeing is believing. But that, believing is seeing.
Is this new?
George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion 100 years ago. 150 years ago Goethe wrote:
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
- Goethe
The idea that we shape the future is so new to us in the west. The idea that the universe comes to us sounds a little new age.
Of course, we cannot do anything. We don’t want to do anything.
But there are some things, we want to do. And if we can imagine those things, if we believe in them deeply without effort, if they make sense, if they seem right in themselves, if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,
if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,then the universe conspires to help us.
Skeptical?
This is tautological, of course. It will work because it is right and it is right because it works.
Ask only whether what you want is right, and why you would want anything that doesn’t work!
I discovered Paulo Coelho this year. I am amazed I spent this long on this earth without finding his books.
His stories have mystical settings. By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept is about a woman and her childhood sweetheart who meet up again in their twenties to make a hard decision: should they get together or should he follow his vocation into a Catholic seminary and a life as charismatic and healer.
All Coelho’s books (I think) have a happy ending, but not a silly ending. After many trials, the protagonists resolve to take the high road: living in solidarity with this world. These may be mystical stories, but they are neither fantasies nor escapist.
And the trials faced by the characters are never gratuitous. Each in itself offers a perspective on relating to the world and, I think, the tension between commitment and uncertainty.
They are a remarkably “open” read too. He has a light style that draws you into the story. And then releases you from time to time to ponder what he or one of his characters has just said.
Wikipedia describes the book as “a week in the life of someone ordinary to whom something extraordinary happens”. Read it at the end of a long week to ponder extraordinary people who live ordinary lives.
Don’t blog in a vacuum - comment on other people’s blogs
Any “coldie” as I have heard people from the 1.0 or cold-war era called, will hesitate to take part in online discussions, and is amazed that “post-coldies” do, and quite happily. Do! Do take part!
I have just discovered Barbara Sliter’s site Creatorship and I discovered it in inimitable 2.0 style. I went to the Chief Happiness Officer blog. Alex was doing something with snow (pardon me I’m from Africa); Steve Roesler was guesting; Galba Bright joined the discussion of one of Steve’s posts; he had a look at one of my blog’s and said you will enjoy . . . You are right. Thank you. I do.
Thanks Galba, Steve, Alex and not least, Barbara. If you are interested in leadership, personal development and real-world applications of complexity theory, you should have Creatorship on your feed reader.
The promise of the 21st century
I know a lot of people my age who are rather gloomy about the way the world is going. Change is certainly in the air. Whether we see it as good or bad, depends on the meaning we perceive and more so, on our intuitions about how we will be connected in the new order of things.
That is why I love Barbara Sliter’s site. She has the gift of pointing to a horizon that welcomes everyone, young and old, experienced and inexperienced, from your country and mine.
One excerpt:
“we’re ready for more: more meaning, more challenge, better environments, interesting work, balance in life. We’re ready to be co-creators”
Alex from alwaysnewmistakes asks whether hope is responsible to achieving more than we think we are able.
I think of three gurus.
I think of Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese General (Sun Zi if you are used to modern Mandarin). He counsels us that battles are fought or won before they are started. He advises to pick our battles wisely and to only engage if the probabilities are with us. To fight in the “hope” of winning is to court disappointment.
I think of David Whyte and his story of coming across a frayed rope bridge across a canyon in Tibet and freezing in terror. I am not sure if he ever used the bridge. The point is that often we are not happy with where we are, we are reasonably clear where we want to be (over the other side), and we look at the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and our stomach lurches. In terror not hope. The contribution of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship is how to move forward when we feel the absence of hope - or puke-making terror. The trick is to “Start close in, not with the second step or the third, but with the first thing”. It is also called recrafting, appreciative inquiry, and building the bridge as you walk on it. That ability to stomach, rather literally, the original fear and to look at what you can do rather than at what you cannot do, is key. Would I call it hope? Building hope I think. In my last post, I suggested ways of structuring to contain the terror of people around you. Sometimes we have to start with ourselves. We can’t think let alone lead when we are paralysed with fear. And if this sounds excessive, it is not. Even when you write a paper at uni, when you give your first lecture after the summer break, you can be frozen in fear. You could also be facing a cashflow crisis, or the loss of your biggest customer through no fault of your own, etc. etc. Things happen, to real people, and real people contain the fear and start “close in”. With immense self-discipline, because they are fortunate to understand the mechanisms of hope, and that hope is grounded in what we can do.
The third guru or set of gurus are the people who work on generative psychologies. Some of this work is very technical stuff on how we can produce more together than when we work alone. Great advances hardly ever come from having the right answers up front. They usually come from having enormous faith in the system. Birds seem to fly in a flock by following each other and taking care not collide - from those simple actions we get a flock. Great leadership is when you pose a question (much as Alex has done for me here) and through engagement with the question and each other, we draw out answers we couldn’t have imagined. It can be done alone but we do so much together. Alex’s point about synergy.
So great leaders have a sense of what is possible (get across the canyon), they contain their own terror and start working to establish the next step usually on the basis of what we have in hand and what we are good at doing, and then they work with the group to work out what to do next. Their belief in the ‘followers’ and customers and employees in business, must be massive. They must believe that the solution will emerge from the interaction. They must believe in the quality of people around them.
So is hope essential? Yes. But it is not ungrounded. it is so grounded that we can build the bridge forward. It is so grounded, it is credible and infectious. It is so grounded, we learn as we go with others with us on our journey.
Thanks, Alex
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