I See

What we see vs. what we've not yet seen ...

We've all heard the wise 6th grader lecturing her friend on love or speaking confidently about solving relationship problems. We smile, knowing that such an early summation of things will likely be short of enough, and 'the rest of the story' may change everything.


We understand because now, we know the answers. We're old and wise, so we needn't be open to additional information, to a different point of view...  good grief, we sound like sixth graders.  Especially in Congress.

Public approval has averaged below 20% in each of the last four years, and in five

of the last six. Before this time, only in 1979 and 1992 did congressional approval

average less than 20% annually. Thus, 2013 extends an unprecedented period in

which Americans have given their elected representatives in Congress continually

poor marks for their job performance.

Congress' average approval this year has not only been the worst

 in Gallup history, but it also included the single lowest monthly 

approval rating of 9% in November.

Where does such narrow-minded resistance originate?  Right-wing conservatism?  Left-wing liberalism?  Learning lethargy?  ... but I repeat myself.

It's easy to blame Congress, but the origins of our problems are in the constituency, of course.  That's us.

Is there perhaps a higher goal for our wondrous productivity, our broadly tolerant culture, and our capacity for serving others ... ?

The most difficult of personal tasks, perhaps, is recognizing our own contribution to the problem.  It's easy to blame congress or liberals or conservatives or whatever.  Our own point might benefit from a critical review.  It was the confident, strongly opinionated among us who said the economy would collapse without slavery.

AVATAR

In a virtual reality, our avatar doesn't run out of steam, ...  The avatar plays a role on our behalf.  It exists in a limited world with simple rules, and the storyline runs along an expected path.

That's what avatars do.  It's realistic in a limited sense.

Religion can be like that.  Limited, with 

• a list of rules for the game,
• a short list of answers for the questions,
• a simple explanation for the difficult parts,
• and players who are sure they understand it all.

Then there's real life.

Real life can leave you tired before lunch, disappointed at the end of the meeting, discouraged by not having been heard, depressed after a string of failures and insults and accusations, wounded, worn out, done at the end of the day. Or decade.

I can't send an avatar to live my life.  I have to face it myself, and religion doesn't help; not at all. Real life, real difficulties ...

Jesus wasn't an avatar either.  He faced the real things we face. It was life, and it left him exhausted, discouraged, ... there was no button to pause the game and no do-overs.  Like us, he labored through it; no simple answers, no easy explanations, and in the end, he died.

    There's more, of course, but it seems important to know the life he lived was like ours.

It's all real, as best I can tell.  
Not the religion part, though.  

The Pushmi-pullyu

You can take this one to work with you!

From a flight dynamics perspective, it worked!

There have been many push-me-pull-you attempts with varying degrees of success.

Counter-canoeing was a bust.
Doolittleisms did OK.
Cartoon characters were well received.
International program management, not so well, and not surprisingly, small scale projects had similar experience and results.

For example, if it costs $1500/year to treat one AIDS patient and $20/year to prevent one AIDS case, where should resources be focused?  The number of lives saved points one way and the current need points to another.  Then a third issue arises as we learn we can prevent the transmission from mother to unborn child ...  The overwhelming majority of top-down programs are focused on cure when prevention would be an order of magnitude more effective.  New on the scene, addressing both treatment and prevention in the same program.

We're learning, at least in some fields.  Commonly, there's only a tenuous connection between (1) the top-down management issues and (2) the bottom-up perspective on what is needed and what works here and now. Expecting the two perspectives to rigidly agree is a bit fanciful; they don't even exist in the same timeline.

One of the best organizational examples of getting it right is World Vision.  Organizationally, they support in-country and in-community teams that settle in and work locally for decades.  Importantly, they measure and adjust based on results over time, a rarity in international efforts that are commonly 'fire-and-forget' programs.

It's not uncommon for a government-sponsored international aid effort to be a 1 or 2-year project, transferring some technology or capability. Without life-cycle support, maintenance training, or transition planning, it gets delivered and dies within a few years. The African coastline is littered with externally provided ocean-surveillance systems, delivered and abandoned.  Success is rare for such short-scoped efforts, and the damage from the practice is troubling.  A receiving nation will reallocate personnel and resources to accommodate the change, and after years, discover that their scant resources have been wasted on another badly conceived assistance effort.

Effective organizations implement continual evaluation of target and effect.  A one-time-through by management is nonsense; continuing, insightful leadership determines success or failure.

It's an annoyance having to regularly verify that you're on target, but the alternative is major failure, wasted money, and harm done to the folks you're trying to help.

Worth remembering?  Absolutely!  Take it to work with you as a reminder that leadership stays well informed and sensitive to the goals.  Management, by definition, may not.

Note to the over-30, over-40, and over-50 folks; just because you're sure you know doesn't mean you couldn't modernize your thinking a bit (understatement of the decade).  A typical recent-graduate can show you how to streamline work by as much as a third without significantly affecting the risks involved; you can actually hit your targets. How are you with change and new and different?

Examples?

• One-off reports that take 20-60+ labor hours to produce but are of little benefit ... standardize and automate the report/deliverable.  
• Large meetings to review what a few could resolve quickly ... insert asynchronous team tasks in process instead of the 'death by meeting' gatherings of all.  
• Refine process to be exclusively goal focused.
• Isolate programmatics from the work process. 
• Protect the work effort from interruption and unnecessary redirection by well intentioned players.  The boss can walk the factory floor, but if he's smart, he'll keep his hands off the tools and won't presume to direct the machinists.  
• If meetings are the norm, preload with agenda, action items, and decisions expected/required; if unable, cancel the meeting.  Etc., (and there are dozens more; like conducting meetings standing up, no chairs.)

Ever wondered ...

Ever wondered why religion engenders such disrespect?  It's perhaps a study worth pursuing; there's enough variance to suggest some useful lessons.  That's religions in general, you might note.  Western Christianity does have its share of detractors, of course.

Interestingly, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of history, is widely known and his teachings are generally well received.

What might it be about the practice of Christianity then, that causes such disaffection, even from within its own ranks?

• Anything worth noticing in the criticisms from outside?  
• Anything from insiders worth considering seriously?
• Or worth doing differently?  Is there a missing piece?

We might perhaps learn most from those who agree with us least.

惡人當離棄自己的道路，
不義的人當除掉自己的意念。    
歸向耶和華，耶和華就必憐恤他；         
當歸向我們的神，因為神必廣行赦免。          
耶和華說：「我的意念非同你們的意念，        
我的道路非同你們的道路。                          
天怎樣高過地，照樣，                              
我的道路高過你們的道路，                   
我的意念高過你們的意念。
以賽亞書 55           

宗教有一点说值得一听。
Religion has few answers for us, as the more experienced
will attest.  There is that which is beyond religion and
blindingly real, for which we're deeply grateful.

Subsidy

McDonald’s has closed its McResource website.
It had been a well-intended attempt to serve their employees, but it revealed a bit too much about corporate ethics.   There were a couple of problem areas.

• How to make ends meet:  The site offered financial advice for employees including how to tip an au pair or a pool cleaner, for example.  Not really helpful for McDonald’s workers.  For their low and minimum wage employees, they suggested that workers consider returning unopened Christmas gifts to get out of debt.  Workers who called the McResource help line was told to look into food stamps, Medicaid, and local pantries for the needy.

• How to eat healthy:  The site cautioned employees about the health effects of fast food, calling a cheeseburger and French fries an “unhealthy choice.”  To illustrate the difference between ‘unhealthy choice’ and the ‘healthier choice’, the website of the food chain that employs some 700,000 people worldwide, for some reason showed a typical McDonald’s meal and one very much resembling a meal at the company’s major competitor, Subway -- a sandwich with salad and a glass of water.

Most fast-food employees work less than 30 hours per week and are flex-scheduled; it saves the employer having to provide benefits, and they can be sent home occasionally when business slows. Half of fast-food workers in the US rely on public assistance to supplement their paychecks, costing American taxpayers an estimated $7 billion every year. The government effectively subsidizes the industry by providing benefits to their underpaid employees.

Injury

    or Illness?

A soldier comes home from the war with post-
traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. He's not ill,
 he's injured. As much as if he had been hit 
by gunfire or an IED, there's physical 
damage and he's wounded.

Although the horror of war is our common 
context for the injury, it occurs in less 
obvious circumstances.

Verbal abuse, neglect, and exposure to a threatening environment can result in brain damage, a PTSD equivalent in a child that can persist for the rest of their lives. It can be especially harmful during the middle-school years of development.

... but bullying? It’s easy to think that, as painful as bullying might be, all it hurts is our feelings. New research into bullying’s effects, however, is now suggesting something more than that — that in fact, bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being harshly ostracized by one’s peers, it seems, can throw adolescent hormones even further out of whack, lead to reduced connectivity in the brain, and even sabotage the growth of new neurons.

One thing we hear, especially when we talk to adult bullies or the parents of bullies, is that they feel this behavior is a “right of passage”. That “everyone grows up and gets over it”.

Perhaps it’s true that everyone grows up, but here we have evidence that bullying affects its victims' development and that they carry this trauma with them for the rest of their lives.

These neurological scars (physical damage to the brain), it turns out, closely resemble those borne by children who are physically and sexually abused in early childhood.

Consider the child who comes to school without the ability to respond to authority, without the ability to trust an adult, without the ability to shake off depression, all the result of neglect, verbal assault, and a hostile environment.  He, like the soldier, is not ill.  He has been injured, and the damage is more significant than we've previously understood.

The key element of verbal abuse is the persistent 'attack' focused on the individual, the intent to beat down.  Each of us is vulnerable.  In relationships that matter, we're the most vulnerable.  

• a child can be wounded by verbal abuse from parents or siblings
• a middle-schooler can be wounded by verbal abuse by bullying peers
• a husband or wife can be injured by verbal abuse from their partner
• an employee can be injured by verbal abuse in the workplace when they can't afford to leave.  A bullying supervisor is the same kind of harmful person, attacking the individual rather than dealing with tasks and performance.

While it's still a new understanding in the general population, the healthcare community has long known that persistent verbal abuse is injurious.  It doesn't just hurt your feelings and disappear; it does physical damage.  The damage can often persist for a lifetime.

NOTE: Interpersonal conflict is part of life, marriage, growing up, and business.  It's normal, often necessary, and not particularly troublesome as long as it stays focused on issues and not on personal assault.

It's worth noting that a verbal abuser is of the same heart and mind as the bully, the child abuser, the wife beater.  They've each chosen to deliberately do harm to another.  Not popular news, not popular at all.

Interestingly, the degree of our vulnerability to verbal abuse is tied to the degree our personal identity and worth depend on the abuser.  How much do we depend on the approval of others?  Can you guess who might be the least vulnerable or the most resilient?
Recovery is absolutely possible.

NIH-PTSD
NIH-Bullying
Workplace Law
The Bullied Brain
Complex Trauma

The medical profession works on a figure of about 25% of people developing PTSD after exposure to traumas such as a serious accident, physical or sexual assault, war or torture, or a natural disaster such as a bushfire or a flood,.

That said, here are best estimates of the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder for some specific populations:

30% of US Vietnam veterans
10% of US Desert Storm veterans
6-11% of US Afghanistan veterans
12-20% of US Iraq veterans

3%-6% of US high school students
30%-60% of US children who have survived specific disasters
2% after a natural disaster (tornado)
28% after an episode of terrorism (mass shooting)
29% after a plane crash
100% of US children who witness a parental homicide or sexual assault
90% of sexually abused children
77% of children exposed to a school shooting
35% of urban youth exposed to community violence

50% of UK sexually abused children,
45% of UK battered women,
35% of UK adult rape victims,
30% of UK veterans,
18% of UK professional fire-fighters

13% of suburban police officers
4-14% of US law enforcement officers
16.5% of US firefighters

37% of Cambodian refugees
3% of Cambodian civilians
86% of women refugees in Kabul and Pakistan
75% of Bosnian refugee women
60% of US female rape survivors
30% of those actually in the building or injured during the 9/11 New York City attacks.