January 21, 2020
“All right Sergeant, there won’t be any changes. We’ll run it like you’ve been running it until I get the knack.” The year was 1945, the place was the Italian mountains that overlooked the Po River Valley, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during World War II, the goal was to drive the German troops out of Northern Italy, the “I” who didn’t have the knack was Bob Dole, newly-commissioned second lieutenant and the new leader of the 2nd Platoon in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 85th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division, and the Sergeant to whom Dole was talking was Sgt. Carafa, who had led the platoon after the death of the previous commanding officer. “I was easy to spot as the new guy,” wrote Dole many years later. “I was the one with a clean uniform.”
The word “knack” Lt. Dole used is familiar to most of us. Defined in Merriam-Webster as “An ability, talent, or special skill,” it is an old word, first appearing in English in 1580 as “krak,” and meaning a “sharp blow.” These days, when we say someone has a knack, we mean that they are especially capable at something. While often used in a positive sense (“She has a knack for making people welcome”.), it is also used to make a judgement about negative behaviors (“He has a knack for getting into trouble.”) Either way, people who demonstrate a knack for something are capable of knowing what to do, when to do it, and doing it well.
When Lt. Dole – who survived the war and went on to acquire a knack for politics – took command of the 2nd Platoon, he was acutely aware that he didn’t know how to lead an infantry platoon in battle. He didn’t have the knack for it. If he were to be successful, he would have to learn it. And not just learn it, but then – even more difficult – put it into practice. The lives of the men under his command as well as his own were on the line.
Having a Knack
The play, The Traveling Lady, described by the critic Terry Teachout as, “Among the most tenderly poignant of the soft-spoken studies of small-town life in which Horton Foote specialized,” opened on Broadway in 1954, failed to attract an audience, and closed after only three weeks. During the next several decades, it struggled through difficult times. In 1957, it was adapted for TV’s Studio One, and in 1965, it was unsuccessfully made into a film for Steve McQueen titled Baby, the Rain Must Fall.
The play’s future looked bleak until the playwright, Horton Foote, revised it in 2004, reducing it from three acts to one. In 2019, the new version opened Off Broadway in a production directed by Austin Pendleton and became a great success. “Pendleton,” according to Teachout, “has a knack for making smart things happen in small theaters. He’s done it again. I feel certain that Mr. Foote himself would have delighted in the perfect stylistic unity of this lovely revival.”
After a long journey to nowhere, the play found in Mr. Pendleton a person with a knack for making it into an unqualified success.
“Comedy Tonight”
Theatre director Michael Blakemore once said that when the first act curtain opens on a play, the audience has a problem: Who’s who, what’s what, what’s important and what isn’t. “Audiences really like to be told a definitive story in a compelling way,” said Mr. Blakemore. “It has to have captivating characters, an exciting challenge for them to solve, and the solution that’s worthy of the time [they’ve] taken to watch it.” Failing to close the deal on any of these requirements leaves the audience with the tensions of unresolved problems. Ultimately, it is the director who is responsible for addressing the audience’s problems, and in order to be successful, a good director must have a knack for understanding the audience’s problems and for addressing them. If the director fails in this, chances are good that the play will be a flop.
A director who was able to help the audience solve its problems occurred with the 1962 smash hit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Except that when it opened on the road in New Haven, Connecticut, it was not a smash hit, but a colossal failure. It got bad reviews and played to mostly empty houses. There was a problem lurking in the play that threatened to sink it before it got to Broadway, but, since no one knew what it was, no one knew what needed to be done to save it.
The premise behind the musical was simple: The producers, writers, and director, planned it to be a hilarious romp through ancient Rome which would generate unending waves of laughter. But, as author Jack Vertel in The Secret Life of the American Musical,” wrote,”…it was actually much brainer and more sophisticated in its construction than it pretended to be. Its authors were not only smart,” he wrote, “but they were also smart-asses.” They were too clever when being clever wasn’t what was needed.
Panicked by its failure, the producer and director, who had between them seventy years of experience in the theatre, were at a loss to know what to do. They looked for someone who had the knack for finding and fixing problems with musicals which were on their way to oblivion. So they turned to dancer, choreographer, and director Jerome Robbins who shortly thereafter traveled from New York to Connecticut and took a look. He spotted the problem at once – it was the opening number. The show began with a charming song called “Love is in the Air.” “It was a sweet, soft shoe number about how romance tends to drive people nuts,” wrote Vertel. “It’s a honey of a number but it tells us nothing about where Forum is headed.” People in the audience, anxious to learn what was coming, heard the number and expected that what would follow would be sweet, gentle, and tender. Instead, what they got was vaudeville in spades: raunchy humor, sexy insinuations, skimpy costumes, pratfalls, double takes and old jokes crammed into new situations. They were discombobulated to say the least. Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics and the music, was charged with writing a new opening number, and after some resistance, delivered “Comedy Tonight,” a song that informed the audience that “Something convulsive, Something repulsive” was coming. It would have “Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns/Bring on the lovers, liars, and clowns,”and ended with a list of what they would soon see:
“Pantaloons and tunics,
Courtesans and eunuchs,
Funerals and chases,
Baritones and basses.
Panderers,
Philanderers,
Cupidity,
Timidity,
Mistakes,
Fakes,
Rhymes,
Crimes,
Tumblers,
Grumblers,
Bumblers,
Fumblers.”
After hearing all this, the audience was ready and raring to go. And when Forum opened later that year in New York, it was a smash success, winning several Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Author (Musical).
But without someone who had the knack for finding problems on the stage and fixing them, Forum would have died an ignoble death in Connecticut.
Lacking The Knack
Imagine for a moment it is 1935, that your name is Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten and you are eleven years old. One day your mother, Lady Edwina Ashley Mountbattten, wife of Admiral of the Fleet, the 1st Earl of Mountbatten of Burma, tells you that you and your nine-year-old sister, Pamela, must leave your home at the British Naval Base on the island of Malta and travel to Hungary and stay there for a few weeks. She tells you that you are going because of “international tensions” in Europe, an explanation that makes no sense to you. Within weeks, you and your sister arrive in Budapest, accompanied by your mother, a nanny, and Bunny, whose real name is Lt. Col. Harold Simmons of the Coldstream Guards, and who is also your mother’s latest lover and, for many years, a member of your household. Within a few days your mother finds a small hotel two hours outside of Budapest that she is comfortable with, settles you and your sister there, gives you both a peck on the cheek, then she and Bunny are gone. Four months pass, and as summer turns into fall, you are still at the Keles Szalio Hotel. Even though your nanny has sent many messages to your mother – she has run out of money and the hotel owner wants the account settled – there has been no reply. When you left the Mediterranean in July your nanny packed clothes suitable for the summer. Now winter is coming, and the weather has turned cold.
Several weeks later, you are surprised to find your mother and Bunny downstairs in the hotel lobby. At last, they have come to get you. What took them so long was not the “international tensions” in Europe, but that your mother couldn’t remember where she had left you. In July, as she and Bunny were leaving, she wrote down the name of the hotel and then promptly lost it. For over four months your mother had no idea where you were or how to find you.
Once you were “found,” however, your parents weren’t quite sure what to do with you. Their problem was solved when after a week or two of being reunited with your mother and Bunny – your father was away at sea – it was decided that you and Pamela would stay with your great-aunt and great-uncle in Darmstadt, Germany, while your mother and Bunny spent the next year traveling around the world. Christmas came but no parents came with it. “It was strange being away from our parents that Christmas,” wrote Pamela in her memoir, Daughter of Empire. You and Patricia celebrated the holidays in Darmstadt, while your mother and Bunny were still on their world tour. And your father? “Poor Daddy spent Christmas Day alone in Malta, his meal leftovers from the staff lunch.”
Most first-time mothers lack the knack for motherhood. Humans are not endowed as are other species with strong instincts for taking care of their young, and so for their newborn children to survive, at least one parent – usually the mother – has to acquire a knack for watching out for them. An essential requirement for learning a knack for anything is a desire to learn it. Edwina seemed to lack any desire for caring for her children, either newborns or as they grew up. After all, not many mothers “misplace” their children for months at a time, and instead of frantically searching for them, decide instead to go off on a holiday with their live-in lover. “As a young child,” wrote Pamela, “I rarely saw my mother. Even in 1924, when my sister Patricia was born, she partied in the South of France, leaving her baby daughter home at just a month old. It seemed she couldn’t stop indulging in…the endless adventure and travel that so thrilled her.”
Their father, on the other hand, never turned away. Pamela wrote that it was their father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who made family life possible: “It wasn’t until years later…that I realized that it was his complete lack of jealousy that prevented our family from fragmenting and how, in so many areas of his life, he sought a practical solution to life’s tricky problems.”
Endless Problems at the Center
Lord Mountbatten acquired his ability to find practical solutions to “life tricky problems” the same way we all do: He learned it. At birth we are programmed with a limited number of reflexive behaviors necessary to sustain life: breathe, suck, sneeze, cough, cry, poop and pee, plus a few others that are built into our nervous systems. Acquiring a knack for learning the skills required for dealing with the rest of “life’s tricky problems” is a challenge that begins almost at once. From our birth to our death, having a knack for problems is crucial for one major reason: problems are at the center of our lives. “From a birth no one chooses, to a death few desire, we have to cope with endless problems,” wrote philosopher John Kekes in The Art of Living. “To fail is to suffer. And what is gained from success?…some pleasure, a brief sense of triumph, perhaps a little peace of mind. But these are only brief interludes of well-being because the difficulties never cease.” If we are to experience a desirable level of satisfaction and success in our lives, coming to terms with our “endless” problems is required.
Acquiring a Knack is The Key
Even though the unbidden and unwelcome problems that enter our lives are endless, we are not helpless. By acquiring a knack for understanding them, then expanding our knowledge by learning the skills for solving them, we can enlarge our sense of triumph, increase of our peace of mind, and expand the interludes of well-being. The endlessness of the problems we must face is mostly beyond our control. What is under our control is how we go about confronting them.
Where can we start to get a knack for problems? Our best option is to turn to other people who know more than we do. Suppose you are interested in learning to write poetry. “How hard could it be,” you say to yourself, and pick up a pencil and a piece of of paper and begin. Two hours later you examine the “poem” you have written and conclude that it is pretty lousy. “This is much harder than I thought,” you say to yourself. But if you are really serious about poetry, help is available. In 1992, two renowned poets, Steven Dunning and William Stafford wrote, Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises. Their book has helped thousands of high school students learn to write poetry. The authors are not shy about their purpose: “Our modest aim for Getting the Knack,” they write in the Foreword, “is to help you change your life, for the better.”
We agree. Getting a knack for writing poetry can change one’s life for the better. And so can learning a knack for any worthwhile endeavor: teaching children in school, giving speeches in public, cooking gourmet meals, managing conflict and disagreement, working as a psychiatric nurse, forgiving those who offend us, leading a large business organization, negotiating solutions that benefit all sides, listening with empathy and compassion to those who are suffering, and on and on. For all of this and more, having a knack for it is the key.
Lt. Dole Gets The Knack for Leading in Battle
We find another example of seeking help from other people in Lt. Dole’s attempts to learn to lead a platoon of soldiers into battle. When he reported for duty in Italy in 1945, he arrived with an important advantage: He knew he didn’t have the knack to be a platoon leader, and so did the men in the platoon. Yet the evidence is compelling that within a few weeks, Lt. Dole was well on his way toward acquiring the knack for leading troops in battle.
How did he do it? In 1945, during the fierce fighting in Italy, there were no books available titled “How to Lead Men in Battle” with 20 exercises. He had to learn it, as they say in Spanish, “sobre la marcha, “- on the march, – and he had to learn it mostly from the men that he commanded.
As reported by those who served under him, here are eight ways that Dole went about acquiring the knack for leading the platoon:
He knew who he was and what was expected of him.
“He wasn’t like some of those ninety-day wonders, graduates of the Benning School for Boys, who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in Bob Dole. A lieutenant of infantry was the man with binoculars and a map case and a target on his back, something that Dole learned quickly. German snipers aimed at the lieutenants, knowing that by killing them, they could disrupt the chain of command and throw their unit into chaos. Yet not once did he shirk from the responsibilities of command.
He made personal connections.
“I introduced myself to each man,” Dole wrote in his memoir many years later. “I’m Lt Dole. I’m going to be leading the platoon.” Then after a brief pause, “Dole. Like the pineapple juice.” The men always smiled. “Hey, this guy’s ok.” When Dole arrived, there was a lull in the fighting. “[It] gave me an opportunity to get acquainted with the men,” he wrote, “joke around with them a bit and establish some rapport. I purposely tried to stay out of the command tent as much as possible, eating with the guys…talking casually with my new comrades, allowing then to get to know me, and learning something about their capabilities.”
From the beginning it was not “I” but “we.”
When Lt. Dole reported to 2nd Platoon, he was aware that he had no clear idea about what to do or how to do it. He understood that to avoid getting himself and his men killed, he had to learn quickly. He was also aware that he could only learn it from the soldiers in the platoon. But would they help? When he said to Sgt Carafa, “All right soldier, there won’t be any changes. We’ll run it like you’ve been running it until I get the knack,” he sent two important messages: “We’ll run it,” not “I’ll run it,” and, “There won’t be any changes” until I learn how to do this. The soldiers who were watching breathed sighs of relief. They’d had their fill of newly commissioned, second lieutenants who swaggered in and threw their weight around, bringing more problems than solutions. As Dole became more active in leading the platoon, he told Sgt Carafa that if “he thought something needed to be changed, we’d talk about it.”
He didn’t push himself forward or call attention to himself.
“He wasn’t an outspoken person,” said one soldier. “He just quietly did his job…He wasn’t out there to prove anything.” “He was not like those ninety-day wonders… who thought they owned the world because they got a strip of brass on their collars,” said another.
He asked for help.
“He asked what we thought, and I was happy to work with him,” said a soldier, “because not all officers are like that.”
He listened.
“He listened to the non-coms, the senior enlisted men, who had more experience than newly commissioned lieutenants like himself,” said another.
He valued those who knew what to do and showed respect for them.
“[Sgt Carafa] was a good seasoned soldier, one who had been serving his men well,” wrote Dole in his memoir. “I had no desire to usurp his position in the platoon. I was not the guy in charge. [Even though] I had a strip of brass on my collar, this man was golden.”
He was brave. He led by example.
When his platoon went on patrol, the noncommissioned officers told him, “It would be better if you stayed in the center of the platoon. That’s what most of the lieutenants do.” Dole demurred: “No, I’ll take the point,” he wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t know much about leadership at the time, but instinct told me that a leader must be out front. He must be willing to endure the fire, rather than hide from it or let someone else take the brunt of the blows.” The lieutenant was brave,” said twenty-year old Deveraux Jennings. “When Dole’s platoon came under fire from the Germans, he’d walk out to [the] men on post even though he did not have to.”
His success in becoming an effective platoon leader is best expressed by his men: “I thought he was the best officer I’d seen,” said one soldier in the platoon. “The men loved him,” said Sgt Carafa.
Four Steps Toward Getting a Knack
Often, however, there are few people to whom we can turn for guidance and advice. We find ourselves up against problems that are mostly alien and unknown to ourselves and to the others who around us. We are pretty much on our own. Here are four steps that can help one get a knack for addressing important problems:
Master the concepts, principles and guidelines. Learning the different languages of problems is the first step, one that is achieved primarily by reading and studying. It is a necessity that cannot be skipped. If someone attempts to address a problem with little or no understanding of its nature or substance, things will go downhill rapidly. As someone once said, “There is a profound difference between getting it and getting it done” The sequence is inviolate: first we must “get it,” and only then can we move to “getting it done.”
Moving from “learning about” to “learning to do” is next. While “getting it” is necessary, it doesn’t take us very far. The central idea behind grappling with any problem is to “solve it,” which means making changes for the better in relationships, teams, organizations, societies and lives
For this crucial step in Dole’s case, there were other people he could rely upon. Dole asked the men in his platoon for help, and then listened when they shared their experiences. By showing respect for his men, they became his willing teachers and avid supporters.
Here are some suggestions for finding others who can help: Find someone who is good at solving problems like those you are struggling with and ask them for suggestions and ideas; seek out mentors who “know the ropes,” then find ways to take advantage of their experiences. Acquiring a knack for problems is not only learning new concepts and behaviors, it is also ridding yourself of counterproductive attitudes and behaviors and replacing them with attitudes and behaviors that will help you reach your goals. Finding a coach who can offer helpful and timely feedback is among the most effective ways to move toward gaining a knack for problems.
Follow Isaac Stern’s advice: A number of years ago, while Isaac Stern, then America’s premier violinist, was walking in New York City, a man stopped him and asked, “How to I get to Carnegie Hall?” Stern’s answer was both simple and profound: “practice, practice, practice.” Solving easy problems is easy. Solving the complex and complicated ones that trouble us is exceedingly difficult, and if one is to excel at it, endless practicing is required.
Examine ruthlessly the consequences of your actions. Among the innovations that have helped organizations become more effective is one that was pioneered by the U. S. Army: the After Action Review (AAR). After ending a training exercise or a battle, the officers of the Brigade, Division or Army would address several questions in depth First: “What did we do that was successful? And then, “Let’s make sure we continue those successful practices in the future.” The second question addressed the other side of the coin: “What did we do that was shoddy, sloppy, or ineffective? Let’s be sure to identify them, understand why they happened, and work to get rid of them next time.” Adopting a personal After Action Review is the best way – and may be the only way – for one to make improvements in how things are done. It involves examining the consequences of one’s actions, determining what worked and what didn’t, then using this knowledge to make changes into the future. And making the process “ruthless” is not optional.
Mastering Life’s Tricky Problems
In her memoir, Daughter of Empire, cited earlier, Pamela Mountbatten honored her father, Lord Louis Mountbatten, for his abilities to “bring practical solutions to life’s tricky problems.” And with these words, Ms. Mountbatten has identified a task that we all share: Finding practical solutions to “life’s tricky problems.” No one is excused, no one is exempt, no one gets a free pass from dealing with these problems, which in addition to “tricky,” are often messy, ambiguous, demanding, and confusing. Like it or not – and most people don’t – all sorts of problems will arrive at our doorsteps and demand to be let in.
Three Flawed Strategies vs. Competence and Confidence
Many attempts to deal with these endless, tricky problems rely upon three flawed strategies: Denial, procrastination, and blaming others. All are losing propositions. Denying that tricky problems exist may seem to work temporarily, but the problems always return, and often with a vengeance; relying on procrastination is a losing tactic since by the time we get back to the problems (if we ever do), they almost always will have become worse; blaming others for our problems does nothing to make things better, and those who got the blame are not pleased. When they get a chance, they are happy to reciprocate in kind: take their turn to blame us for the problems they are struggling with. People who blame others for their problems will end up with a new problem: the enmity of the ones that they blamed.
Surprisingly, some people are not only ready to confront their endless, tricky problems, but actually enjoy the struggle. They have no need for denial, procrastination or blaming. Rather, they confront their problems directly with a realistic understanding of what they are up against. They have acquired valuable perspectives and skills which will serve them well in many situations. In short, they have acquired a knack for solving problems. They have become competent in facing up to problems and confident in moving towards rather than away from them. For life’s tricky problems, a combination of competence and confidence is, to use Lt. Dole’s term for Sgt. Carafa, “golden,” and almost always results in moving the ball closer to the goal.
In sum, gaining a knack for problems is a very good idea indeed.