Strengthening Counter Narratives

It occurred to me that a recommendation I read in a commentary shortly after the recent murders by Islamic extremists in Paris may also be applicable to other groups who feel under siege.

This could include guns rights activists and ethnic groups here in the United States including blacks and Hispanic and others fearful of losing rights or being profiled and stereotyped because of the actions of a few.

Dr. H.A. Hellyer points out that it isn’t enough for Muslins to condemn terrorism or to lay down their lives fighting extremist.

What is really needed, he suggests, is a strengthening of internal “counter narratives” within that religious culture including being more openly critical when there are abuses in Muslim states.

No doubt that law enforcement agencies need to purge the small number in their midst who are racist including those who hide abuses of their authority behind a badge.

Both police officers and protestors have valid points but the real solution for populations where the individuals feel unfairly criticized for the actions of a few is to admit there is some validity to other points of view and strengthen internal counter narratives.

Master narratives often anchor group behavior and attempt to purge outliers for “airing dirty laundry” on the premise that there is only one issue and one solution and admitting otherwise will bring disgrace.

Groups caught up in master narratives lose sympathy this way, even though internally they exhibit a far wider range of opinions.

Mormons, for example, were always divided about the practice of polygamy which before its ban by church leaders in 1890 was practiced by 20-30% of its members, most as a “calling” from local officials.

To have acknowledged the internal tension, which had been expressed since the mid-1830s, was considered off limits because it would show lack of solidarity, undermine authority and strengthen those who persecuted members.

The same could be said of blacks as a group since the mid-1960s who worry internally about self-inflicted problems but rarely admit them, other than to friends, for fear these more complicated concerns would undermine the master narrative of discrimination and victimization.

Occasionally, individuals and groups within that race, have spoken out, such as Dr. Shelby Steele who in 1990 authored a book entitled The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America.

He was roundly criticized by black leaders fearful that acknowledging the role of rearing and personal and neighborhood responsibility would dilute the master narrative, although many blacks agreed with him in private and began marches to that end.

Hispanics often do the same regarding illegal immigration or Hispanic gangs.  And the NRA and other gun rights groups have taken the master narrative to a new level.

But quietly or periodically condemning certain behaviors while insisting the problem is externally imposed never really works.  Counter narratives also don’t require airing “dirty laundry,” so to speak.

Granted, with today’s news feeding frenzies, it is hard for groups to hear themselves think and openly discussing shared responsibility when anecdotal news turns agenda-like, focused only, it seems, on “he said-she said” dialogue which quickly forces binary conclusions.

In the words of Steele,  this ends up pandering to those who “want to make a movement out of an anomaly.”  One activist recently wrote that the grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island had “refused to indict.”

Really?  Refused?  Or maybe their conclusion after seeing all of the evidence was just not convenient to some people’s master narrative.

One of the books I’ve mentioned reading for a few minutes each morning to get centered is A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can’t turn a page without reading a counter narrative.

If he were alive, I believe he may have joined the recent protests but he would have also pointedly shed light on the responsibilities on both sides of the tragedies and directed attention not just to institutional change but individual, family, neighborhood and community behavior.

In doing so, he gradually enlisted support from unlikely groups that he would have alienated with only the master narrative.

Newtown, Ferguson, Staten Island and Paris deserve more.

Why Brain Storming Doesn’t Work

I have participated in a zillion so-called brainstorming sessions in my life and I can't remember one that was very productive.  Now I know why: They simply don't work!

In his concise piece seven weeks ago in The New Yorker magazine, Jonah Lehrer gave an excellent overview.  He starts with a brief history about how the term was coined, coincidentally during the year I was born, by someone who was at the time about the age I am now and who wanted to share some perspective.

One of this gentleman's ground rules was the stipulation that brainstorming sessions must never include critical thinking, criticism or negative feedback.  I've probably heard that a zillion times too.

Within 10 years though that idea was debunked by scientific research, yet it has persisted to this day.  Lehrer summarizes research done as early as 1958 which found that people working solo came up with roughly twice as many solutions as did brainstorming groups, and the solo-generated ideas were judged more “feasible” and “effective.”

But the article is more about when and how creativity works well as a “group process.”  The article is well worth reading and rereading, especially the part about what determines successful Broadway Musical productions, even though that genre is not among my favorites except, of course, for the occasional popular power ballad which is often spawned.

Lehrer is also the author of a great book out just this month entitled Imagine – How Creativity Works.

Last week as I was listening to an excellent interview by Krista Tippett while writing a blog about the difference between intensity and passion, another part of that article in The New Yorker crossed my mind.  It dealt with a study which revealed that people who “debate and even criticize each other's ideas” during brainstorming sessions, are far more creative and generate “nearly twenty-percent more ideas.”

It turns out, based on many studies, that “imagination…thrives on conflict.”  Lehrer quotes the author of one of the studies who claims, “There's this Pollyannish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is to stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone's feelings. Well that's just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive.”

Based on the article, I'm thinking that the problem in Congress and in many state legislatures today is not that there is too much partisan debate but too little.  At the heart of so much dysfunction in those bodies is too little willingness to be exposed to contrary ideas and too little willingness to let them inform changes of opinion.

What if so-called “flip-flopping” is really a very positive ability to seek out and listen to differing opinions and then having the flexibility to let that moderate rather than harden previously-held conclusions. “Flip-flopping” as you know, is a characteristic for which both President Obama and hopeful Republican Party-nominee Mitt Romney are both criticized.

Krista Tippett's radio show On Being still doesn't appear to be carried by the public radio station of which I'm a sustainer, so while I'm working on blog posts I listen to podcasts or read transcripts delivered to me via e-mail , which is far more convenient anyway.

The interview a few days ago with Dr. Rex Jung was entitled Creativity and the Everyday Brain.  Interestingly, Jung is a neuropsychologist researcher who studies both intelligence and creativity at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque.  His inspiration to venture from intelligence into creativity came from his work with the Special Olympics.

I was surprised during the interview to hear Jung also refer to Lehrer’s article in The New Yorker.  Dr. Jung gives a great definition of intelligence as a “superhighway in the brain that allows you to get from point A to point B” and that “with creativity, it's a slower, more meandering process. We want to take the side roads and even the dirt roads to get there, to put the ideas together.”

People I often affectionately call list checkers hate to get off that superhighway and often form opinions with far too little information and devoid of creativity.

But the interview notes that you can't “meander forever.”  Eventually, you need other parts of your brain to form and test hypotheses, something that is equally irritating to list checkers.  Maybe they just don’t like the on-off ramps?

To me, I took the traditional form of brainstorming as meandering far too long and that the part of creativity where hypotheses are formed and tested is what makes sessions that permit critical thinking and evaluation so much more productive.

So I guess that's why I can seem to be equally irritating to both list checkers and Pollyannish creatives.

With all of this in mind, I'll still participate in brainstorming sessions when invited, but also suggest that they be accompanied by individual brainstorming sessions and that, when were together as a group, we are able to evaluate, debate and analyze ideas without getting personal.

I’ll report back on how that goes.  If the original ground rules have persisted more than five decades after they were debunked, I can imagine it may take facilitators to be much more open to contrary ideas before we see brainstorming practices begin to evolve and catch up with brain science.

Questions To Challenge “Groupthink”

I’m sure a lot of meetings are not only much shorter but maybe even a lot more boring now that I’m retired from a nearly four-decade-long career managing community/destination marketing organizations (DMOs.)

People called me a lot of things during my career and couple of groups even blackballed me, but that I know of, no one ever labeled me as being disengaged or apathetic or dispassionate.  Growing up, I was strongly encouraged to have opinions but then always required to be able to defend them.  If I ever did try to just “go along” my parents would change sides on me.

Long before adolescence I was well-schooled as a “devil’s advocate.”  “Going along just to get along” was just never an option.

Meetings are always meant to be collaborative, otherwise a simple email would suffice.  But during my working years, I was always puzzled by how many people would arrive and depart without saying a word, other than socializing during the breaks or before and after the meeting.

Asked for input they would sit stone silent, whenever someone else did speak up, their heads merely pivoted back and forth as if watching a tennis match. Rarely did even an imperceptible nod of the head or glint in of the eye betray what they were thinking.  Asked to vote, they waited until it was clear which way the majority would go.

They were probably victims of abuse by overexposure to groups whose members are controlled from within through “groupthink,” where dissent was censored, criticism rejected or rationalized and opposing beliefs demonized.

Coined in the 1950s, “groupthink” is a condition that was thoroughly scrutinized and tested when I was in college by research psychologist Dr. Irving Janis, an expert in group dynamics, who passed away in 1990, months after I arrived in Durham for my final DMO assignment.

In my experience, successfully inoculating or recovering an organization or group from groupthink doesn’t require tolerating gadflies or interference from special interests during meetings or even interminably extending them through incessant recycling of discussions which were already resolved.

The best and simplest preventative is to adopt “information or data-based decision-making” or as Janis termed it, simply seeking “outside input.”  TED 2011 speaker, self-proclaimed “wrongoligist” and author of a blog entitled The Wrong Stuff – What It Means To Makes Mistakes, Kathryn Schultz writes that “groupthink” arises from what she calls “disagreement deficit” created by:

• “disproportionate exposure to support for our beliefs
• underexposure to the opposition
• a tendency to discount opposition even if encountered and,
• suppression of doubt or difference of opinion within”

Schultz goes on to explain in her book that “sometimes the suppression is subtle, or even self-imposed – just an instinctive shying away from anything that could disturb a group to which we are loyal, or disrupt the materials and psychological infrastructure of our lives...Self-censorship.”  She notes research showing “groupthink” can occur in groups as small as three members.

Groups often form around certainty of mission and unless informed by information/data-driven decision-making, they become dominated from within through actions referenced in a series of essays edited in 1936 by experimental psychologist Dr. Joseph Jastrow entitled The Story of Human Error.

They involve violence, though rarely physical.  Far more effective today is violence to reputation or friendships or principles or ethics, often involving exile or ostracizing.  As the saying goes, “who needs good ideas when you can all agree on a bad one.”

Here are a handful of questions to ask if you sense a meeting you’re attending is grid-locked by or in danger of groupthink:

• How do you know that?
• What information do you have to support that belief?
• What would the opposition say to that?
• Why would otherwise reasonable people believe differently?
• Are we telling ourselves a story?
• Can we invite other viewpoints to the next meeting?