Making a Difference – Taming Wicked Problems

Success Story: John Woolman Confronts His Brethren

Joseph Bentley — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 17:06:57 +0000

February 6, 2016

What is the eternal and ultimate problem of a free society?

It is the problem of the individual who thinks that one man [or woman] cannot possibility make a difference in the destiny of that society.

Norman Cousins

John Woolman’s Story (1720-1772)

Radio Announcer:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our weekly program, “Voices from The Past.” I am your host, J. C. Bentley, and tonight it is my honor to welcome to our radio microphone Mr. John Woolman. Mr. Woolman, thank you for coming.

John Woolman:

Thee are welcome. It is my pleasure.

Radio Announcer:

First of all, tell us a little about yourself. I understand you were born in 1720.

John Woolman:

Yes, that is correct. I was born in 1720 in colonial New Jersey, long before there was any “United States.” I was raised in New Jersey when I was young, but spent the last twenty years of my life traveling throughout the American colonies, visiting those places where there were members of the Society. I died in 1772, having reached my 52nd birthday.

Radio Announcer:

You say you visited the members of the Society. What do you mean?

John Woolman:

I was a member of the Society of Friends. I believe that thee refers to us as Quakers.

Radio Announcer:

How did you make your living?

John Woolman:

I was a tailor by trade, but the last half of my life I did no tailoring. I was busy doing my real work.

Radio Announcer:

And what was this “real work?”

John Woolman:

One day, with no warning, I gained the knowledge that slavery was an abomination with God, and that members of our faith who held slaves should free them at once.

Radio Announcer:

Gained knowledge? What do you mean when you say you “gained knowledge?”

John Woolman:

God spoke to me and told me.

Radio Announcer:

God spoke to you?

John Woolman:

Yes, that is what I said.

Radio Announcer:

Alright…So God spoke to you. Then what did you do?

John Woolman:

I knew at once what I should do. I would tell the Brethren what God told me, that they must free their slaves. I put a few things in a bag and left home, and only returned twenty years later to die.

Radio Announcer:

How did that go for you? Did they accept your message?

John Woolman:

I must explain something to you. As members of the Society, our most important belief is “God is in every person,” and therefore all persons are children of God. We forgot what we believed, and we were treating Negro slaves not as people but as beasts of burden. It was wrong and, as God told me, an abomination in His Eyes. And no, they did not listen to me.

Radio Announcer:

Did many of the Quakers own slaves?

John Woolman:

Oh yes, I would say most, if not all.

Radio Announcer:

This is surprising. I would have thought that religious people like yourselves, who believed so strongly in equality before God, would never have owned slaves.

John Woolman:

Thee would have thought wrong. Like many others, we said one thing and did another. We came to this land seeking religious liberty, and soon we fell into the trap of materialism and greed. We used slave labor to enrich ourselves.

Radio Announcer:

When you told your brethren that they had to free their slaves, what did they say?

John Woolman:

Some laughted, some shouted, some sent their dogs after me, and some threw me off their property. They did not like hearing what I told them.

Radio Announcer:

And by the end of your life had any slaves been freed?

John Woolman:

No. I never heard of any slaves being freed by Quakers while I was alive.

Radio Personality:

And so, would you say that your life was wasted?

John Woolman:

So it would seem.

Radio Announcer:

In preparation for this interview our research department has been busy tracking down what happened after your passing. We have discovered that within ten years of your death in 1772, your community reached a consensus that no one should hold men and women in bondage, and all their slaves were freed. In 1783 the Quaker community petitioned the Congress of the United States to correct the “complicated evils” and “unrighteous commerce” created by the enslavement of human beings. Starting in 1827 and onward it was the Quakers who played a key role in founding and operating the Underground Railroad, moving thousands of slaves from the south to freedom in Canada. Your words did have an impact on your Brethren, it just took a while for your words to move people to action.

John Woolman:

For twenty years I told the Brethren what they did not want to hear, that they were wrong and needed to change. At the time they were not ready to hear what God wanted them to hear and they paid me no heed. (Pause) With what I have learned tonight it has become clear that the seeds I planted in each heart began to sprout and produce fruit. Now I see that I was able to make a difference. My life was not wasted after all.

Radio Announcer:

Thank you Mr. Woolman.

John Woolman:

Thee are welcome.

Two Remarkable Women Add Their Voices

We can do
no great things;
We can only do small things
with great love.

Mother Teresa

How wonderful it is that
Nobody need wait a single
Moment before starting to
Improve the world.

Anne Frank

Do What You Can Do

Once John Woolman knew that slavery was an abomination in the Eyes of God, he decided he would spend the rest of his life confronting this evil. But then he came face to face with a truly wicked problem: individuals who choose to attack an institution head-on are, as was Don Quixote, doomed either to irrelevance, abject failure, or the risk of being committed to a mental institution or put in jail.

Woolman’s first step was to consider the basic question: What can I do that may make a difference? His answer? “Since there are many Brethren who hold slaves, I can visit them one at a time and persuade them to free their slaves.” He choose to do what was doable, what he could do, and what held the promise of making a difference.

What Woolman did has a name: it is what I have referred earlier to as “extracting a problem from the mess.” Problems are not apples on trees to be picked. They do not exist independently of human awareness and understanding. Potential problems exist by the dozens in the middle of “messes.” But they only become “problems-to-be-attacked” when they are created by people who care enough about the situation or issue to get down into the swamp of the “mess,” who want to see changes made, and make persistent efforts to bring a problem into existence. And then, and only then, can they begin to make productive efforts.

This is what Woolman did. He cared deeply about the evils of slavery, but he also sensed that he could not attack it successfully. So he ignored the larger institution and defined a problem he could attack: Brethren who own slaves. Then his action plan came into focus: “I will visit my slave-holding Brethren and persuade them to free their slaves.”

When we find ourselves in the middle of a “mess,” we have, as did Woolman, several questions to address:

What manageable part of this chaotic and confusing situation do I really care about?
Can I define it in a way that I can bring to it what I have to offer?

Answers to these questions can lead us to a problem definition that, as we struggle with it, offers us a real hope of making a difference.

Voices from the Swamp

Joseph Bentley — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 17:26:16 +0000

January 6

PERSONAL REPORTS FROM THE SWAMP

John Maynard Keynes, Economist: On the Great Depression of 1929-1939

We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.

Steve Rothmeier, Former CEO of Northwest Airlines

I thought it would beat any Indiana Jones movie. The change effort starts off with a real nice beginning, and then suddenly you get one disaster after another: The boulder just misses you, and you get a snake in the cockpit of the plane. That’s what it’s all about. You’ve got to get down in the blood and the mud and the beer.

Executive in a Fortune 500 Company

Remember I told you that nothing shocks me anymore? Well, this shocked me…You have to be on guard all of the time here. You can’t trust anyone in this place.

Poet John Keats

There is nothing stable…Uproar’s your only music.

Husband and Wife Waiting in the Train Station

Man: You said pound cake.

Woman: I didn’t say pound cake. I said crumb cake.

Man: You said pound cake.

Woman: Don’t tell me what I said.

Man: You said pound cake.

Woman: I said crumb cake.

Man: I actually saw the crumb cake but I did’t get it because you said pound cake.

Woman: I said pound cake.

Man: Well, I heard crumb cake.

Woman: Then you obviously weren’t listening. Crumb cake doesn’t even sound like pound cake.

Man: Well, maybe you accidentally said pound cake.

Woman: I said crumb cake.

Andy Grove, Intel Corporation

Given the gradual nature of these changes…the old rules of business no longer worked. New rules prevailed now – and they were powerful enough to force us into actions that cost us nearly half a billion dollars.

The trouble was, not only didn’t we realize that the rules had changed – what was worse, we didn’t know what rules we now had to abide by.

Robert Gates, Senior Government Official in Four Administrations: On Life in the White House

The pace is frenetic and the hours impossible. Intrigue. Backstabbing. Ruthless ambition. Constant conflict. Informers. Leaders. Spies. Egos as big as the surrounding monuments. Battles between Titans. Cabinet officers behaving like children. High-level temper tantrums. I would ultimately work for four presidents and I saw it all. The struggles for pride and place, the preoccupying quest for “FaceTime”…with the President or even his most senior advisors, the cheap thrill of flashing a badge and walking through those massive gates as tourists look on and wonder who you are…

The constant pushing and shoving to get on lists. Lists for NSC meetings, Oval Office meetings, to go on Air Force One or the presidential helicopter (Marine One), State Dinner guest lists, participation in presidential foreign trips, access to the White House tennis court…and countless more lists. Given the effort at every level on a daily basis to get on lists, it is amazing that as much work got done as it did.

Albert Einstein, Physicist

How do I work? I grope.

Jack Gilbert, Poet

Marrying is like somebody

throwing the baby up.

It happy and them throwing it

higher. To the ceiling.

Which jars the loose bulb

and it goes out

as the baby starts down.

Michael Hammer, Author, The Agenda (2001)

Feeling overwhelmed? You should be, but you have no choice but to proceed.

Michael Grunenhagen, Engineer

Before you can even get close to the High Ground, you have to wade through swamps, one after another. And it’s getting worse. Technology is getting more complicated and you need more instruments to describe the messes you are faced with…Before you can [make sense of it all]…you have to rely on incomplete data, [then] struggle to get a good data set to determine Order.

Richard Abdoo, Former CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corp.

There is only one way to describe the transition – hell. From doing things very, very successfully, being a leader, on top, we had to go down into the pit, if you will, in order to come out the other side; moving faster, better, with higher targets, is a hell to go through…There are times…when I wonder, “What am I doing here? Do I really need to go through this hell?

Jack Welch, Former CEO of GE

“You have to wallow in it.”

Jewish Rabbi

Then my wife of fourteen years left me, condemning everything I had done, complaining that I never really cared about her, and that she had lost herself in the marriage, and her life in the bargain. She fought fiercely for custody of our three children, to gain most of our money and the house we had lived in. She got angrier and more destructive. She publicly denounced me to friends and community as her demands increased. As I spiritual teacher, I found it the most agonizing period…in my whole spiritual life. It felt like I was dying over and over, being ripped apart, forced to go through the fire of letting go of my children, my reputation, and still keeping my heart open.

Rosabeth Kanter, Author and Consultant

…organizations are riddled with problems, dysfunctional practices, and counterproductive arrangements. Though externally they may appear to be sophisticated and deliberate instruments of collective purpose, operationally they are…bulls in societies’ china shop, with people lurching from one point to another, often seemingly out of control, and steered more by their sheer momentum and by chance encounters than by design.

Senior Executive in a Major Company

We are dying. In the meantime, my boss goes around reducing everything to numbers and charts. He leaves the real task of leadership to others. Because we no longer believe in the organization’s future, we’re all tending to our own personal futures. I would love to be thinking about constructive alternatives, but it’s simply too late.

David Lawrence, Former CEO of Kaiser Permanente

If leading…were nothing more than an intellectual exercise in rearranging structures and redesigning processes, our lives would be a lot simpler. But the CEO’s job is to lead change, not just manage it. Leading people in a new direction means reshaping their view of the world. It means shattering their sense of stability, tossing out their old standards of success, and prying them loose from the status quo. And then it means replacing what you’ve wiped out with a new, coherent and energizing vision of what you believe the future can and should be.

Ben Horowitz, Entrepreneur and Business Leader

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, ‘That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation. The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those ‘great people’ develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

Don DeLillo, Novelist (White Noise, 1985)

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of the older shoppers. They walk in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it. The scouring pads are with the hand soap now, the condiments are scattered…They turn into the wrong aisle, peer along the shelves, sometimes stop abruptly, causing other carts to run into them…there is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of second level betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, they women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words…In the altered shelves…they try to work their way through the confusion.

Henry David Thoreau

The world is a cow that is hard to milk – and oh, how thinly it is watered ere we get it.

Edward O. Wilson, Biologist and Author

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.

YET IN THE SWAMP NOT EVERYTHING IS DOOM AND GLOOM!

Nobel Prize winner P. B. Medawar once observed that successful scientists work on the most important problems “they think they can solve.” After all, he suggests, “…it is their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.”

The rest of us do not have the luxury of choosing only the high ground where the solvable problems can be found. We must also go down into the swamp where we have no choice but to grapple with the wicked problems we find there. Philosopher E. F. Schumacher writes, Man’s [sic] life can thus be seen and understood as a succession of [wicked] problems which must inevitably be encountered and coped with in some way.”

Paradoxically , however, it is because of our efforts at grappling and coping with these unsolvable problems in the swamp that we make our most important personal gains: We learn lessons we could not learn anywhere else; we gain perspective and understanding for the struggles of others; we become very clear on what is important; we acquire skills and abilities that are transferable to other difficult situations; we make progress in narrowing the gaps between where we are and where we want to be; we gain invaluable knowledge about ourselves, especially about our strengths and weaknesses, our willingness and capability to “hang in” and not give up, and our capacity for resilience; and we gain understanding that it is through struggle that we find purpose and meaning.

“...when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, continues Schumacher, then, just then, life really makes sense. ”

Here is another voice from the swamp – one’s own:

Even though things are difficult, frustrating, and really complicated right now, if I pay close attention, stay involved, learn from others and from what is happening around me, then I have a real chance of making sense of things, taking steps that matter, and may make a real difference.

The work to be done in the swamp is among the most important of all. Here is how poet T. S. Eliot summarized it:

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the messes we have made of things.