"Deliberation Science" readings update

"Deliberation Science?"

 

There's so much yet to learn. And, even more yet to "unlearn." Some current readings.

First, a Christmas gift book from my sister.

 

The past several years, we’ve felt as if we’re all stuck in some weird Twilight Zone nightmare where we are constantly, relentlessly gaslit. Up is down, left is right, right is wrong. It feels as if the values of our society have changed almost overnight. We feel disoriented, frustrated, disaffected, and distrustful of each other. We ask ourselves whether we’ve gone crazy, or the world has, or both. No wonder people in the United States are waging a kind of war on trust, building elaborate castles of suspicion that imperil our personal happiness and national prosperity.

All around the world, democracy is now under strain due in part to social problems that cannot be solved through legislation or technology. In a very real sense, collective illusions do the most damage in free societies, precisely because they depend on shared reality, common values, and the willingness to engage with different viewpoints in order to function, let alone flourish. That is why I see collective illusions as an existential threat.

 The bad news is that we are all responsible for what is happening. And yet that is also the good news, because it means we have the power, individually and together, to solve the problem. The best news of all is that, as powerful as collective illusions are, they are also fragile because they are rooted in lies and can be dismantled through individual actions. With the right tools and some wise guidance, we can dismantle them…

…While our social nature is part of our biology, our reaction to our social instincts is within our control. When we’re armed with the right knowledge and skills, we don’t have to choose between being a maverick or being a lemming. This book aims to give you the tools you need to truly understand why and how we conform, how conformity leads directly to collective illusions, and how you can learn to control social influence so that it doesn’t control you…

…we often conform because we’re afraid of being embarrassed. Our stress levels rise at the thought of being mocked or viewed as incompetent, and when that happens, the fear-based part of the brain takes over. Confused and unsure of ourselves, we surrender to the crowd because doing so relieves our stress. Caving to the majority opinion also diffuses our personal responsibility for our decisions, making it easier to bear mistakes. When you find yourself making a decision on your own, it can feel isolating, and the personal responsibility can be intimidating. Indeed, whether our actions are right or wrong, they always feel better if we take them together with others.

Rose, Todd (2022-01-31T22:58:59.000). Collective Illusions. Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Persuasive case, eloquently made.
 

 

Think about Robert Cialdini's venerable "Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion" and how his "levers" model fits with Todd's thesis:

Liking;

Reciprocity;

Consistency and Commitment;

Social Proof;

Appeals to Evidence;

Appeals to Authority;

Appeals to Scarcity.

Dr. Cialdini's work is widely known in the advertising / marketing domains, re principles and techniques going to being "influential." Dr. Rose's work reveals an unhappy flip side of that—our vulnerability to malign influence given our social anxieties regarding "fitting in" to socioculturural norms (which includes the political space).

How about some Justin Gregg?

I would also recommend Todd Kashdan's book apropos of this topic:

 

 

Also, more on principles of influence by our esteemed Zoe B. Chance in a prior post.

I recently subscribed to some useful Substack readings. This recent Steven Pinker offering stood out:

Reason To Believe
How and why irrationality takes hold, and what do to about it.

When I tell people that I teach and write about human rationality, they aren’t curious about the canons of reason like logic and probability, nor the classic findings from the psychology lab on how people flout them. They want to know why humanity appears to be losing its mind…

…Can anything be done? Explicit instruction in “critical thinking” is a common suggestion. These curricula try to impart an awareness of fallacies such as arguments from anecdote and authority, and of cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning. They try to inculcate habits of active open-mindedness, namely to seek disconfirmatory as well as confirmatory evidence and to change one’s mind as the evidence changes.

But jaded teachers know that lessons tend to be forgotten as soon as the ink is dry on the exam. It’s hard, but vital, to embed active open-mindedness in our norms of intellectual exchange wherever it takes place. It should be conventional wisdom that humans are fallible and misconceptions ubiquitous in human history, and that the only route to knowledge is to broach and then evaluate hypotheses. Arguing ad hominem or by anecdote should be as mortifying as arguing from horoscopes or animal entrails; repressing honest opinion should be seen as risible as the doctrines of biblical inerrancy or Papal infallibility.

But of course we can no more engineer norms of discourse than we can dictate styles of hairstyling or tattooing. The norms of rationality must be implemented as the ground rules of institutions. It’s such institutions that resolve the paradox of how humanity has mustered feats of great rationality even though every human is vulnerable to fallacies. Though each of us is blind to the flaws in our own thinking, we tend to be better at spotting the flaws in other people’s thinking, and that is a talent that institutions can put to use. An arena in which one person broaches a hypothesis and others can evaluate it makes us more rational collectively than any of us is individually.

Examples of these rationality-promoting institutions include science, with its demands for empirical testing and peer review; democratic governance, with its checks and balances and freedom of speech and the press; journalism, with its demands for editing and fact-checking; and the judiciary, with its adversarial proceedings. Wikipedia, surprisingly reliable despite its decentralization, achieves its accuracy through a community of editors that correct each other's work, all of them committed to principles of objectivity, neutrality, and sourcing. (The same cannot be said for web platforms that are driven by instant sharing and liking.)

If we are to have any hope of advancing rational beliefs against the riptide of myside bias, primitive intuitions, and mythological thinking, we must safeguard the credibility of these institutions. Experts such as public health officials should be prepared to show their work rather than deliver pronouncements ex cathedra. Fallibility should be acknowledged: we all start out ignorant about everything, and whenever changing evidence calls for changing advice, that should be touted as a readiness to learn rather than stifled as a concession of weakness.

Perhaps most important, the gratuitous politicization of our truth-seeking institutions should be halted, since it stokes the cognitively crippling myside bias. Universities, scientific societies, scholarly journals, and public-interest nonprofits have increasingly been branding themselves with woke boilerplate and left-wing shibboleths. The institutions should not be surprised when they are then blown off by the center and right which make up the majority of the population. The results have been disastrous, including resistance to climate action and vaccination.

The defense of freedom of speech and thought must not be allowed to suffer that fate. Its champions should have at their fingertips the historical examples in which free speech has been indispensable to progressive causes such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and gay rights. They should go after the censors on the right as vigorously as those on the left, and should not give a pass to conservative intellectuals or firebrands who are no friends to free speech, but are merely enemies of their enemies.

The creed of universal truth-seeking is not the natural human way of believing. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is cognitively unnatural. The norms and institutions that support this radical creed are constantly undermined by our backsliding into tribalism and magical thinking, and must constantly be cherished and secured…

Hmmm… “critical thinking?” Yeah. “Necessary but insufficient?” One wonders.

Dr. Pinker cites Professor Keith Stanovich:

Myside bias is displayed by people holding all sorts of belief systems, values, and convictions. It is not limited to those with a particular worldview. Any belief that is held with conviction—any distal belief, to use Robert Abelson’s (1986) term—can be the driving force behind myside thinking. In short, as an information processing tendency, myside cognition is ubiquitous.

Some might argue that something so ubiquitous and universal must be grounded in the evolution of our cognitive systems (either as an adaptation or as a by-product). Others, however, might argue that myside bias could not be grounded in evolution because evolutionary mechanisms would be truth seeking, and myside bias is not. In fact, evolution does not guarantee perfect rationality in the maximizing sense used throughout cognitive science—whether as maximizing true beliefs (epistemic rationality) or as maximizing subjective expected utility (instrumental rationality). Although organisms have evolved to increase their reproductive fitness, increases in fitness do not always entail increases in epistemic or instrumental rationality. Beliefs need not always track the world with maximum accuracy in order for fitness to increase.

Evolution might fail to select out epistemic mechanisms of high accuracy when they are costly in terms of resources, such as memory, energy, or attention. Evolution operates on the same cost-benefit logic that signal detection theory does. Some of our perceptual processes and mechanisms of belief fixation are deeply unintelligent in that they yield many false alarms, but if the lack of intelligence confers other advantages such as extreme speed of processing and the noninterruption of other cognitive activities , the belief fixation errors might be worth their cost (Fodor 1983; Friedrich 1993; Haselton and Buss 2000; Haselton, Nettle, and Murray 2016). Likewise, since myside bias might tend to increase errors of a certain type but reduce errors of another type, there would be nothing strange about such a bias from an evolutionary point of view (Haselton, Nettle, and Murray 2016; Johnson and Fowler 2011; Kurzban and Aktipis 2007; McKay and Dennett 2009; Stanovich 2004). What might be the nature of such a trade-off?

For many years in cognitive science, there has been a growing tendency to see the roots of reasoning in the social world of early humans rather than in their need to understand the natural world (Dunbar 1998, 2016). Indeed, Stephen Levinson (1995) is just one of many theorists who speculate that evolutionary pressures were focused more on negotiating cooperative mutual intersubjectivity than on understanding the natural world. The view that some of our reasoning tendencies are grounded in the evolution of communication dates back at least to the work of Nicholas Humphrey (1976), and there are many variants of this view. For example, Robert Nozick (1993) has argued that in prehistory, when mechanisms for revealing what is true about the world were few, a crude route to reliable knowledge might have been to demand reasons for assertions by conspecifics (see also Dennett 1996, 126–127). Kim Sterelny (2001) developed similar ideas in arguing that social intelligence was the basis of our early ability to simulate (see also Gibbard 1990; Mithen 1996, 2000; Nichols and Stich 2003). All of these views are, despite subtle differences between them, sketching the genetic-cultural coevolutionary history (Richerson and Boyd 2005) of the negotiation of argument with conspecifics.

The most influential synthesis of these views—and the most relevant to myside bias—was achieved by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2011, 2017),whose subtle, nuanced theory of reasoning is grounded in the logic of the evolution of communication. Mercier and Sperber’s theory posits that reasoning evolved for the social function of persuading others through arguments. If persuasion by argument is the goal, then reasoning will be characterized by myside bias. We humans are programmed to try to convince others with arguments, not to use arguments to ferret out the truth. Like Levinson (1995) and the other theorists mentioned earlier, Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) see our reasoning abilities as arising from our need not to solve problems in the natural world but to persuade others in the social world. As Daniel Dennett (2017, 220) puts it: “Our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right.”

In several steps, Mercier and Sperber’s (2011, 2017) theory takes us from the evolution of reasoning to our ubiquitous tendency, as humans, to reason with myside bias. We must have a way of exercising what Mercier and Sperber call “epistemic vigilance.” Although we could adopt the inefficient strategy of differentiating trustworthy people from untrustworthy people by simply memorizing the history of our interactions with them, such a strategy would not work with new individuals. Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) point out that argumentation helps us to evaluate the truth of communications based simply on content rather than on prior knowledge about particular persons. Likewise, we learn to produce coherent and convincing arguments when we wish to transmit information to others with whom we have not established a trusting relationship. These skills of producing and evaluating arguments allow members of a society to exchange information with other members without the need to establish a prior relationship of trust with them.

If, however, the origins of our reasoning abilities lie in their having as a prime function the persuasion of others through argumentation, then our reasoning abilities in all domains will be strongly colored by persuasive argumentation. If the function of producing an argument is to convince another person, it is unlikely that the arguments produced will be an unbiased selection from both sides of the issue at hand. Such arguments would be unconvincing. Instead, we can be expected to have an overwhelming tendency to produce arguments that support our own opinion (see Mercier 2016).

Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that this myside bias carries over into situations where we are reasoning on our own about one of our opinions and that, in such situations, we are likely to anticipate a dialogue with others (see Kuhn 2019). The anticipation of a future dialogue will also cause us to think to ourselves in a mysided manner. Mercier and Sperber’s (2016, 2017) theory makes differential predictions about our ability to evaluate the arguments of others. Basically, it predicts that, though we will display a myside bias in evaluating arguments if the issue in question concerns a distal belief, we will display much less of a myside bias when the issue in question is a testable belief.

In short, Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) provide a model of how myside bias is inherent in the evolutionary foundations of reasoning. From their evolutionary story of origins, it is not hard to imagine how the gene-culture coevolutionary history (see Richerson and Boyd 2005) of argumentation abilities would reinforce the myside properties of our cognition (a subject of much speculation I can only allude to here). For example, in an early discussion of myside costs and benefits, Joshua Klayman (1995) suggests some of the gene-culture coevolutionary trade-offs that may have been involved. He discusses the cognitive costs of generating ideas outside the mainstream—“Just keeping an open mind can have psychic costs” (Klayman 1995, 411)—and the potential social disapproval of those who waffle. And he discusses the often-immediate benefits of myside confidence triumphing over the more long-term benefits of doubt and uncertainty. Anticipating Mercier and Sperber (2011) in some ways, Klayman (1995, 411) argues that “when other people lack good information about the accuracy of one’s judgments, they may take consistency as a sign of correctness”; he points to the many characteristics of myside argumentation (e.g., consistency, confidence) that can bootstrap social benefits to the individual and group. Dan Kahan’s discussions of his concept of identity protective cognition (Kahan 2013, 2015; see also Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011; Kahan et al. 2017) likewise suggest other potential mechanisms for myside bias to confer evolutionary benefit by facilitating group cohesion. These possible social benefits must be taken into account when we assess the overall rationality of mysided thinking…

Stanovich, Keith E. (2021-08-30T23:58:59.000). The Bias That Divides Us. MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

That blew me away. I am a long-time fan of Mercier & Sperber's "Why Do Humans Reason?"

 

"Why do humans reason?" Uhhh... to WIN the argument at hand. If objective truth happens along the way, so much the better.

A "Pen is Mightier Than The Sword" riff.

ANOTHER READ

 

I agreed to accept a comp hardcopy to read, evaluate, and review this book. Just finished it. Review pending. Tangential to the topic of this post, a Very enjoyable read nonetheless. The above quote sums it up succinctly and accurately. While the "pursuit of happiness" is an widely enduring yet often "aspirational" ideal, orienting toward consistently having more deliberate "fun" is easier to accomplish and helps in the achievement of rational, prosocial, stable "happiness."

RELATEDLY

Click

Goes beyond “fun.”

OFF-TOPIC TECH ERRATUM

You know those recent iPhone Max Pro ads, “Hollywood in your pocket?“ I guess we’re fixin’ to see. I just ordered the full Monty—a 14 Max Pro with a terabyte of capacity.

“Baltimore in my pocket.”

__________

 

Selling science: effective communication with decision makers

Finished this excellent, important book across the weekend, and spoke by phone with co-author Amy Aines today.

Highly recommended. Five stars. Not about communicating science to the public, but to decision makers, e.g., philanthropists, grant-making institutions, corporate entities, politicians and government agencies, venture capitalists, etc. #SciComm

"Selling" is the grubbier, lesser synonym of "championing," yeah, I know. The latter connotes educated, credible sincerity.

Let's cut right to the chase, shall we?

ELEVEN TENETS OF CHAMPIONING SCIENCE

…Executed well, these eleven actions can help every scientist communicate ideas to change the world. Throughout the book, we develop these concepts in detail, but if you get no further than absorbing this list, you will be on your way to becoming a more effective communicator and science champion.

1. Be passionate. Palpable enthusiasm is contagious. It will carry people along for the great ride of science. Sharing what inspires you about your work will help others see its potential.
2. Build the big picture first. Resist the temptation to dive into the details. Frame what you say by succinctly explaining what exists today, the future possibilities, and how your work will fill the gap.
3. Know who’s listening. Think carefully about what your audience knows and their prevailing sentiment. Determine what you want them to think, do, and feel after they hear from you. Find out how they like to receive information and adapt accordingly.
4. Spend more time on why it matters and less time on how you do it. Never promote science for the mere sake of science. Always demonstrate the value to people and the planet we inhabit.
5. Extract the essence. Formulate your overarching messages and support points. Tell that story. Never dumb it down.
6. Be understandable. Use plain, common language. Avoid or translate acronyms. Start from where your audience is, not from where you are. Use iconic references to anchor scientific concepts to everyday, familiar experiences.
7. Balance precision with impact. Choose language carefully to be clear and directionally accurate. Long phrases bog down the listener. Think and speak in short sentences. There is no need for hype. Learn to deliver a compelling narrative.
8. Be human and credible. The integrity of your word must be unquestionable. Verify your facts. Evaluate your sources. Be yourself. Make an emotional connection by showing up as a person first and a scientist second.
9. Influence patiently. Convincing decision makers is a process, not a single act of persuasion. Use information as a gift. Engage often to build understanding and show the value of supporting your science. Learn what matters to your audience.
10. Collaborate thoughtfully. Advancing your ideas doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. Seek out advisors, influencers, and partners who can help carry your science further.
11. Enable your listeners to act. Know the purpose of your communication. Make the ask every time. Leverage each conversation and presentation to build support for advancing your work. Remember that you are ultimately building relationships for the long run.

Aines, Amy L., Roger D., Championing Science, University of California Press. Kindle Edition locations 280- 295.

My advice? Commit these 11 tenets to memory. Repeat them to yourself aloud multiple times.

I read the book with intense interest and enjoyment, and can attest that they made the case thoroughly. I would make this required reading in scientific curricula.

Scientists are great communicators—with other scientists. We are schooled in the exacting art of talking to our professors and colleagues, people deeply steeped in both the importance and the nuance of our topic. We can talk about the incredible details of modern science in an efficient way, condensing complex arguments into short discourses. But once we go out beyond the academic world to make an impact, scientists from every discipline face a brand new challenge—communicating science to decision makers.

Decisions about which scientific endeavors are advanced and how they are pursued usually get made by people who are not experts in the field. Corporate chief technology officers, elected officials, government program managers, venture capitalists, heads of nongovernmental agencies, and, often, senior management have the power to award funding and support new discoveries. These decision makers are well educated, hardworking, sincere, and extremely busy. Over the course of a day, they may be expected to make important decisions on topics spanning a myriad of unrelated fields. It is incumbent on us as scientists to quickly and effectively make our case. We must learn to talk about our work in succinct and compelling ways that convince the people who are pivotal to our success to take action… [ibid, Kindle location 106]

Indeed, indeed. I am pretty well up to speed on the persuasion psych and "critical thinking" literature (with a particular focus on clinical reasoning), but after reading Amy and Roger's book I feel significantly better informed.

Below, from Amy's website:

Yes.

A lot to reflect on here. I jotted down an entire page of notes for my call with Amy. She had spot-on answers for all of my questions.

FROM AAAS, "DEMOCRACY'S PLIGHT"

Of direct relevance to Championing Science, recent OpEd in Science Magazine:

Scientists work with a deep sense that their quest for reliable knowledge leads somewhere—that following the evidence and excluding bias help to make sense of the world. It may be a slow process, and interactions in the scientific community are not without friction and false steps, yet scientists are devoted to the quest because they observe that it works. One can make sense of the world. Einstein famously said, “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” and scientists understand that evidence-based scientific thinking leads to this comprehension. Scientists could do a better job of sharing this powerful insight.

As I fret over recent challenges to democracy, it seems that a cure for what ails democracy may lie, in part, in science. Citizens are increasingly asserting their values, hopes, and opinions without apparent interest in finding a shared understanding of the actual state of things. Without such a shared understanding, those values and hopes cannot rationally be expressed and realized. Observers speak of “truth decay,” dismissal of expertise, and neglect of evidence. Collectively, these are problems of enormous importance because they threaten democracy itself. Democracy is at risk when it becomes simply a contest of fervently held opinions or values not grounded in evidence…

'eh?

Amy and I had a cool discussion concerning the word "evidence" (I asked what it meant to her). We use it all the time, but do we all mean the same thing? "Evidence," in my view, is simply that which makes a true conclusion more likely -- or, in rare cases proves it outright. Everything else is just noise -- language and data clutter. As such, evidence ranges from "nil" to "dispositive." Envision a bell curve distribution (or a skewed or flat distribution) of "evidence." In popular language we typically refer to evidence in qualitative terms, i.e., nil-to-weak-to-moderate-to-strong-to-incontrovertible. In science, they love their "p-values" (going to probability estimates). 

Another tangential point: evidence must not only have "truth value" but also "materiality," topical relevance. Ask any trial lawyer.

For now, speaking of "Science," recall my prior post "The Science of Success?"

I was dubious when I first saw that title, but, again, case made. Also highly recommended. As is this one below:

If you hope to initiate or change beliefs, it behooves you to understand the salient aspects of them.

UPDATE

Amy sent me this YouTube link:

An Evidence-Based Approach to Science Communication — Webinar

Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science

For all our careful work, scientists can still succumb to biases and assumptions that sabotage our efforts to engage with the public. Valuable new insights into public attitudes towards science are replacing conventional opinion with solid data. Learn how to avoid falling into the traps that still plague many in the scientific community...

BTW, You may have noticed that I'd accorded the Alan Alda Center a permanent right-hand column link on this blog.

Everything is "branding" these days.

Interesting, from the above webinar:

Christopher Volpe, PhD, @4:13 “...For the last 20 years, I’ve really been more of a professional marketer then I’ve been a scientist, and that makes some science folks cringe, but, believe it or not, the scientific method and the marketing method are remarkably similar, they just use different languages...”

Hmmm... how about "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs?"

Recommend you visit also the "Science Counts" website:

"ScienceCounts is deciphering Americans’ complex views about science to develop more effective ways to foster grassroot support for scientific research and exploration."

Cool.

CIALDINI and GARDNER

Championing Science cites Robert Cialdini's "Six Principles of Influence": reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

I am also reminded of Howard Gardner's book Changing Minds and his "7 Re's": seven levers for persuading others to embrace new ideas:

1. Reason: You present all relevant considerations of an idea, including its pros and cons.
2. Research: You provide numerical and other information about your idea’s ramifications, or data relevant to your idea.
3. Resonance: You and your ideas are convincing to your listener because of your track record, effective presentation, and sense of your audience.
4. Representational redescriptions: You deliver your message in a variety of formats, including stories, statistics, and graphics.
5. Resources and rewards: You draw on resources to demonstrate the value of your idea and provide incentives to adopt your idea.
6. Real-world events: You monitor events in the world on a daily basis and, whenever possible, draw on them to support your idea.
7. Resistances: You devote considerable energy to identifying the principal resistances to your ideas (both conscious and unconscious resistances) and try to defuse them directly and implicitly.

As I reflect on all of the foregoing, I should again note that I am not a scientist. Just an aware, concerned citizen. We have serious pressing issues that will be in ongoing need of science and public support for it. I would put climate control science at the top of the list. Failure there will exacerbate of host of other serious global social, public health, political, and economic problems, perhaps irremediably so.

I have no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in "selling science" where it butts up against powerful economic interests with huge stakes in an unsustainable status quo. We gotta Bring Our A-Game.

A REFLECTION

I've been pondering science issues for a long time, particularly in the medical space. From my "One in Three" essay in the late 1980s concerning my late elder daughter's cancer illness:

Is science the enemy? To the extremist "alternative healing" advocate, the answer is a resounding 'yes'! A disturbing refrain common to much of the radical "alternative" camp is that medical science is "just another belief system," one beholden to the economic and political powers of establishment institutions that dole out the research grants and control careers, one that actively suppresses simpler healing truths in the pursuit of profit, one committed to the belittlement and ostracism of any discerning practitioner willing to venture "outside the box" of orthodox medical and scientific paradigms.

One e-mail correspondent, a participant in the internet newsgroup alt.support.cancer, vented splenetic at length recently regarding U.S. authorities' alleged hounding, arrest, and imprisonment of alternative healers. He railed that law enforcement, at the behest of the AMA/FDA Conspiracy (a.k.a. the "corrupt AMA/FDA/NCI/ACS cartel"), had made the practice of alternative medicine illegal in the U.S. Moreover, he considered the fact that medical science can only claim "cures" for approximately 10% of the roughly 10,000 classified human diseases an a priori indictment of the mainstream profession.

I know: this is akin to the U.N. Black Helicopters/One-World-Government Conspiracy stuff of the not-too-tightly-wrapped…

Those anti-science attitudes have hardly gone away.

UPDATE: OF ACUTE RELEVANCE

Just came across this book via a MSNBC interview segment. Downloaded it and started my study.

…Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.

No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do… all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?

Those are the only questions that matter…

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 219). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Again, I refer you to my "Anthropocene Denial" series of posts.

From the foregoing page 219 near the conclusion of David's book, let us return to his onset, page 3.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.

None of this is true... [ibid, pg 3]

David expresses a bit of qualified caution at the beginning of his end notes section (which comprises roughly 30% of the book's volume).

NOTES

All science is speculative to some degree, subject to some future reconsideration or revision. But just how speculative varies from science to science, from specialty to specialty, indeed from study to s
study.

Within climate change research, both the fact of global warming (about 1.1 degrees Celsius since humans first began burning fossil fuels) and its mechanism (the greenhouse gases produced by that burning trap heat radiating upward into the planet’s atmosphere) are, at this point, established beyond any shadow of a doubt. Exactly how that warming will play out, over the next decades and then the next centuries, is less certain, both because we don’t know how quickly humans will drop their addiction to fossil fuels, and because we don’t know precisely how the climate system will recalibrate in response to human perturbation. But the notes that follow are, I hope, a road map to the state of that science, in addition to being a bibliography for this book.  [ibid, pg 233]

Since I posted the foregoing, I've run into some pushback from noted climate scientist Michael E. Mann (whom I've cited before).

"The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness."

More on all that in a bit. Are we to be continually stymied by "analysis paralysis" / credibility contention going to complex issues of science having significant economic and ethical policy implications?

UPDATE: I finished The Uninhabitable Earth. Riveting. Sobering. It will have to have its own review post. Highly recommended. 

ERRATUM

Trump’s pick to lead climate security panel calls climate science ‘a cult’
Rear admiral slams "extreme, fringe" pick to head White House climate and security panel.

In his ongoing war with U.S. intelligence agencies, President Donald Trump is now challenging the military’s longstanding conclusion that climate change poses a serious national security threat to America, appointing a fringe climate science denier to lead the effort…

UPDATE

apropos of the climate issue, ran into what looks to be another interesting book (available on Feb 26th).

The Amazon preview looks very intriguing.

For the entire globe, the era of plentiful water appears to be over.

Forget energy price shocks, mass unemployment, fiscal crises and financial failures. Even biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, human-made environmental catastrophes or the spread of infectious diseases pale in comparison…

Water problems are also strongly linked to two other prominent global risks—climate change and food insecurity. By 2050 more than 40 percent of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions, which is around 1 billion more people than live in such areas today. Around 2.7 billion people are also affected by water shortages each year. Meanwhile, 663 million people—one in ten of the world’s population—lack access to safe water and 2.4 billion—one in three—do not have use of a toilet. These water stresses and shortages will only worsen with the rising temperatures, more frequent droughts and variable rainfall that will accompany global warming. Growing water scarcity will, in turn, magnify the economic and environmental impacts of climate change.

Barbier, Ed (2019-02-25T22:58:59). The Water Paradox. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

You might like my 2015 rumination on "The Western US Drought."
_____________

More to come...

Yarrow Dunham and Jacob Ward

 

I just spent the past hour and seven minutes experiencing a totally wonderful discussion. Jacob Ward interviews Yale's Yarrow Dunham…

 

Relevant prior posts, "Moral Tribes." Also, I was pleased by their discussion of the work of Robert Cialdini (the "levers of influence" guy).

 

More ASAP.

What exactly is "Leadership," anyway?

First,

I'll be there starting Sunday. There will be Tech and "Thought Leaders" and "Futurists" galore to regale, wow, and inspire us.

On "leaders." I'm sure it's not news to you that we in the U.S. are now in the tediously extended and overwhelmingly melodramatic throes of vetting the myriad candidates for our next change in national political "governance." "Leadership" is probably too strong a word. Hell, even "governance" begs a question. Many of our national "leaders" and those who cyclically propose to succeed them seem increasingly less interested in actual (frequently boring) governance and more interested in endlessly campaigning for positions of authority. At the national level, it seems as though we pay for four incremental years of federal governance, but only really get one. The rest of the time is spent on ever-expanding periods of campaigning, first for the subsequent bi-yearly congressional mid-term election cycle, then for the next Presidential cycle.

Whatever. That will be what it will be. Much of it unfortunately in the form of crass, lowbrow "entertainment."

More broadly, what of "leadership" across socioeconomic and cultural domains writ large? I've reflected on the topic a lot across the years, and written about it here on KHIT a good bit. See, e.g., "If you're 10 feet ahead, you're a 'Leader.' If you're 100 feet ahead, you're a Target." - Brent James, MD, M.Stat, and "The "Talking Stick" and the three-legged stool of sustained, transformative healthcare QI. See also my posts on the 2015 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit.

"Leadership." We toss the word about cavalierly. We have an entire industry devoted to it. Do we all mean the same thing? Hell, even Forbes is confused.

"I’ve now written several books on leadership for employee engagement, and yet it occurred to me that I never actually paused to define leadership."

Seriously, dude?

What is Leadership?
Kevin Kruse, Forbes Contributor

What is leadership, anyway?

Such a simple question, and yet it continues to vex popular consultants and lay people alike. I’ve now written several books on leadership for employee engagement, and yet it occurred to me that I never actually paused to define leadership. Let’s start with what leadership is not…

Leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of a company. Too many talk about a company’s leadership referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that, senior executives. Leadership doesn’t automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.

Leadership has nothing to do with titles. Similar to the point above, just because you have a C-level title, doesn’t automatically make you a “leader.” In all of my talks I stress the fact that you don’t need a title to lead. In fact, you can be a leader in your place of worship, your neighborhood, in your family, all without having a title.

Leadership has nothing to do with personal attributes. Say the word “leader” and most people think of a domineering, take-charge charismatic individual. We often think of icons from history like General Patton or President Lincoln. But leadership isn’t an adjective. We don’t need extroverted charismatic traits to practice leadership. And those with charisma don’t automatically lead.

Leadership isn’t management. This is the big one. Leadership and management are not synonymous.  You have 15 people in your downline and P&L responsibility? Good for you, hopefully you are a good manager. Good management is needed. Managers need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve, hire, fire, and so many other things. Typically, managers manage things. Leaders lead people...

Better late than never, one supposes. Write the books first, clarify the core definition later. As we used to joke in my radlab in Oak Ridge, "the flowchart comes last."

"LEADER"

"A person who directs a military force or unit ... a person who has commanding authority or influence."

Interesting. I was once "a first or principal performer of a group." A "bandleader." Not sure whether "herding cats" counts much. But, seriously, "leadership" goes more to "influence" and "guiding" and "persuasion" than it does to outright "power" and "authority."

See, e.g., Howard Gardner's "Changing Minds" and Robert Cialdini's "Influence."

I recently binge-watched the entirety of the excellent, sobering HBO "docu-drama" series Band of Brothers.

One thing that jumped out at me was the repeated multi-tiered ad hoc examples of "leadership" at every level above the rank of Private. While the military is the prime exemplar of the vertically integrated "command and control" organizational architecture, wherein dereliction and insubordination are dealt with quickly and severely, "leadership" initiative is cultivated and rewarded at every level -- at least in combat theatres. While perhaps "there are no atheists in foxholes," neither are there any bureaucratic "managers."

"If you're 10 feet ahead, you're a 'Leader.' If you're 100 feet ahead, you're a Target."

Love that quote.

Brings me to my next read, just finished. An incredible, bracing, iconoclastic take-no-prisoners book. Scholarly writing with a delightful Lewis Lapham edge.

PREFACE

...I began the writing of Leadership BS with a simple, albeit ambitious, goal: to cause people to rethink, to reconceptualize, and to reorient their behaviors concerning the important topic of leadership. My purpose in all of this is for the next decades of what goes on in workplaces and in people’s careers to be, optimistically, a lot more humane and beneficent than the last decades have been.

I proceed from a historical analogy. Around the turn of the twentieth century, medical practice and medical education in America were pretty dismal. People were hawking untested and unproven “cures,” with their financial success dependent more on their slickness and persuasiveness than on the actual science or medical efficacy of what they were pushing. Almost anyone could practice medicine, as there was no license required. And while there were some outstanding doctors and scientists building the foundations of modern medicine, charlatans and quacks abounded. Many medical schools were proprietary, for-profit entities with little concern with science, lots of concern for financial gain, and little interest in doing evaluations of what they, or their students, were accomplishing (or, more accurately, the harm they were doing).

Into this morass, the Carnegie Foundation sent Abraham Flexner, who was notably a teacher and not a doctor, to survey the landscape of American medical education. His report, published in book-length form in 1910, transformed the training and also the science and practice of medicine. As a result of that report, one-third of the existing medical schools closed, formal licensing for doctors was instituted, and the biomedical, scientific foundation of medical practice— a goal still not perfectly achieved but widely embraced and something that has been responsible for so much progress in the prevention and treatment of disease— was put into place.

The parallels with the current state of the leadership industry are striking. Want to be a leadership coach? You can go to an institute or enroll in one of many programs, of varying quality and rigor, that train coaches with varying degrees of skill, but you don’t have to even do that. You can be a coach tomorrow.

Want to be an expert on leadership? You could get training and exposure to the relevant research literature, but it’s not necessary. If you are persuasive enough, articulate enough, or attractive enough, if you have an interesting enough, uplifting story or some combination of these traits, you are or can be a very successful leadership blogger, speaker, and consultant—consultant— whether or not you have ever read, let alone contributed to, any of the relevant social science on the topic.

To be sure, these days there are many fabulously fantastic people with exceptional credentials and ethics working mightily to improve organizational workplaces and leaders’ careers. But the leadership industry also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn’t. And much like the field of medicine prior to Flexner, what speaks the loudest in the leadership industry seems to be money, rather than evidence-based, useful knowledge. The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety— be it the requisite TED talks, blog posts, Twitter followers, or books filled with leadership advice that might or might not be valid and useful.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey (2015-09-15). Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

CHAPTER 8: Fixing Leadership Failures: You Can Handle the Truth

It’s September 2013, and I am giving a talk to alumni and other executives on some of the material covered in this book. About forty people are gathered at the newly opened Vlerick Business School facility in Brussels, Belgium. A hand goes up and an experienced senior executive comments, “I have seen everything you have described and can vouch for its accuracy. But this is depressing, even if it is true.”

In my reply, I acknowledge that what one finds depressing is a relative concept, and that while this individual may find my description of the work world quite sobering, a sentiment I can certainly understand, I don’t. Instead, I say, “I find it even more depressing that talented, earnest, young, and for that matter, not-so-young entrepreneurs and leaders in all types of organizations all over the world lose their jobs and their companies at unacceptably high rates.”

I continue, “I find it depressing that after decades of books, lectures, leadership-development programs, and all the other components of the large leadership industry, virtually every shred of evidence shows most workplaces filled with distrustful, disengaged, dissatisfied, despairing employees. And,” I conclude, forgoing any pretense of political correctness, “I find it depressing that we would want to discuss the state of leadership in organizations from the perspective of what feels good and uplifting, rather than what the evidence shows to be true.”

This executive’s comment is not all that unusual. After a talk about this book to an academic audience in Spain, I get a similar response— the material is provocative and probably true, but not “uplifting.”

The difference between management science and medical science is telling. “Depressing” may be an emotion felt by medical researchers and by practitioners confronted on a daily basis by the inevitable limitations of current treatments, and certainly people would love to be “uplifted.” But “depressing” or, conversely, “uplifting” are almost certainly not how doctors and other medical researchers evaluate evidence or figure out how to make progress in treatment. Averting our eyes from the facts may provide solace, but it does so at the price of progress. There is no theory or evidence that suggests that improvement comes from ignoring bad news, paying inordinate attention to rare, exceptional cases, or from failing to measure base rates for how often something occurs. No wonder medical science has made significant strides in treating many diseases while leadership as it is practiced daily all over the world has continued to produce a lot of disengaged, dissatisfied, and disaffected employees.

So we end where we began, with the pragmatic question of whether all the inspiration and feel-good stories produced over the decades have done any good. This is not a question about competence, motive, purpose, intentions, sincerity, or even hypocrisy (which there is in abundance). It is a simple question about the state of the world of work and leadership after the expenditure of so much time, effort, and money with so few results. Yes, some people would argue that things might even be worse without all these efforts. But holding aside the impossibility of empirically demonstrating the truth of that counterfactual argument, it is a tough argument to accept, given the dismal data on employee engagement, job dissatisfaction, trust in leaders, and career catastrophes.

The discussions about leadership often seem sort of like being under the effect of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) or other forms of mild anesthesia. By leaving people feeling good while somewhat uninformed about reality, the leadership enterprise helps produce people happily oblivious to many important truths about organizational life in the real world. In this zoned-out, semiconscious, blissful state, people are insufficiently prepared for what they will encounter at work and, most important, insufficiently energized to accurately diagnose and change that world of work. That’s because people think everything is just peachy fine, or soon will be. But if the world of work in a few more decades is to look any different— or better— than the one today, people need to understand the world not as we might want it to be, but as it is. To get from one place to another, you need to know as best as you can where you are, where you want to go, and, most important, the obstacles and barriers you will likely encounter en route [ibid, pp. 193-195].

Yikes. I bought my wife a hardbound copy for her convenience (so I can quit interrupting her and reading excerpts to her). She's a C-Suite exec at the top of her game, and an astute observer of and adroit survivor of carnivorous corporate politics. She'll dig it. She likely could have written it.

So, what of it, as it goes to things like process QI? Dr. Pfeffer cites Deming:

If leaders are, as everyone I know would admit, inevitably imperfect and impermanent, there are two possible solutions for the problems this fact causes for those who work for such leaders. The first solution is an approach advocated by many leadership-development practitioners and teachers: do a better job of developing, training, educating, and selecting leaders so we change the distribution of the leaders we have in the talent pool from selfish versus selfless, competent versus incompetent, egotistical versus modest, trustworthy versus untrustworthy— you get the picture.

This is a nice sentiment, and one that animates the leadership industry and its many practitioners, but one that, for all of the psychological and social psychological reasons already covered in this book, is not very likely to work, at least on a consistent basis. There is, however, a second approach worth considering, one that grew out of the quality movement; it’s an approach that helps explain why flying in an airplane has become so incredibly safe.

Whenever there is an airplane accident, or for that matter, a number of near-accidents or other problems, the customary response is to try to redesign the plane to make such problems less likely to occur in the future. This may entail changing the controls or the guidance systems, or increasing mechanical or other system redundancies— in short, doing things that make it easier for the people flying and servicing the plane to do the right thing and more difficult for them to screw up. Such an approach is completely consistent with the principles of the quality movement, which promotes fixing the system rather than relying on the skills of individuals— to produce, in other words, an environment in which ordinary, albeit conscientious, people can reliably produce desirable results.

The lesson of W. Edwards Deming and his peers in the quality movement is that relying on individual motivation and acts of great competence is a singularly unreliable way to produce consistently high levels of system performance. Deming argued that if there are performance problems and quality defects, one needs to understand how those problems arise almost naturally as a consequence of how a system has been designed— and then fix those design flaws. Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system— whether or not they deserved it.

Inside organizations of all kinds, there are many ways to redesign governance that would reduce the dependence of employee well-being on the vagaries of people’s doing a better job of selecting and training all-powerful leaders. Such solutions mostly entail building work systems that are less leader-dependent, and instead devolve more power to a wider set of organizational constituents, particularly employees. Such systems include employee ownership; building in formalized countervailing power, such as that provided by works councils in some European countries or unions in other places; building employment systems with more distributed power by having people elect their leaders, as occurs in some partnerships; and so forth. With more distributed and balanced power, the ability of a single individual to do remarkably good— or remarkably harmful— things becomes diminished. Interestingly, these approaches seldom get much attention. Instead, we hear more pleas for better leaders— pleas that have produced little improvement in any aspect of workplaces or leader tenure in the past fifty-plus years. But never mind, maybe the future will be better.

In the absence of any sustained movement to create better management and organizational governance systems that rely more on the “wisdom of crowds” and less on the hope that one’s leader is better than average and not overly self-interested, it seems sensible to look out for oneself [ibid, pp. 185-186].

I know the docs all hate the frequently-cited aviation allusion. Beyond that, though, this stuff goes straight to the heart of things like the Lean methodology and David Marx's Just Culture principles. Click here for more on my prior Marx cites. There's also some Maccoby in that post. He is also cited in Leadership BS.

[A]s Michael Maccoby notes in his book The Productive Narcissist, the pioneering innovation that, almost by definition, breaks with convention and reinvents products, industries, and business models requires the kind of disdain for the constraining views of others and persistence in the face of adversity and naysaying that characterize narcissists.  Indeed, Maccoby almost equates visionary leadership with leaders who have at least some reasonable degree of narcissism.

Narcissism 
While there is not much research evidence about modesty and its effectiveness as a leadership quality, there is an extensive literature on a very closely related, albeit opposite, concept: narcissism. Studies of narcissism can help us evaluate the usefulness of prescriptions for leaders to be modest and also see the extent to which leaders are narcissistic on the one hand or modest on the other.

Although sometimes considered a form of personality disorder, narcissism and narcissistic behaviors are quite common, particularly among leaders. Michael Maccoby has noted that many of the most well-known and well-regarded CEOs, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Jack Welch of General Electric, exhibited narcissistic traits and behaviors. Maccoby also includes John D. Rockefeller; Robert Johnson, the founder and leader of Black Entertainment Television; J. Craig Venter, the CEO of Celera Genomics; and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and the onetime CEO of Netscape among a long list of narcissistic business leaders. Other narcissistic leaders include David Geffen (cofounder of the Dreamworks movie studio), Michael Eisner (Disney), Kenneth Lay (Enron), and many politicians, including Joseph Stalin and President George W. Bush. For all these individuals, attention-seeking and a sense of entitlement nearly define their personalities.

Narcissism has been defined in the psychology research literature as a grandiose sense of self-importance; arrogant behavior or attitudes; a lack of empathy for others; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success or power; belief in one’s special or unique status, including a fixation on associating with high-status people or organizations; an unreasonable sense of expectations or entitlement; and a desire for excessive admiration from others, among other characteristics. Narcissism can be measured by a validated paper-and-pencil measure, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). It can also be assessed indirectly and unobtrusively. For instance, one study of the effect of CEO narcissism on companies examined the prominence of the CEO’s picture in the annual reports, the CEO’s use of the first-person singular pronoun (“ I”) in interviews, the CEO’s prominence in the company’s press releases, and the CEO’s compensation compared with the number-two ranking executive’s to assess narcissism. The use of first-person pronouns can be particularly revealing of narcissism, such as CEOs talking about themselves when they should be referring to their companies or executive teams.

You can use these and other similar indicators of immodesty and hubris to help structure your observations of the leaders you encounter, and to help answer the question for yourself: How does hubristic self-absorption affect the careers of people in work organizations? I believe that your own observations can be at least as convincing as any evidence I present. If you become attuned to assessing narcissism as exhibited in natural settings, you can learn a great deal about when, how, and why self-aggrandizement is or is not effective... [ibid, pp. 69-71].

A compelling read, this book.

UPDATE:

October 1st. The author was interviewed on KQED's "Forum."

__

apropos of the military, ran across this Atlantic article this morning:

The Military Isn’t Preparing People for Private-Sector Success
And that’s a good thing: Thriving in business requires a shallow, materialist outlook that is out of place in the armed forces.

Those considered successful in America seem, at least superficially, to cover a fairly broad spectrum: the business entrepreneur, the pop star, the professional athlete, perhaps a surgeon. Yet while their success derives from very different activities, one feature they all share in common is wealth. To be successful in America means to be rich, and much of our culture is monomaniacally focused on getting rich.

There is one major subset of Americans for whom this is not the case, who have not put making money at the center of their lives: service members. And it shows: Many retired service members are not doing well once they enter the private sector. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said at a Brookings Institution event last month, “If you go into the military at age 18—versus an identical person who stays in the private sector and takes a private sector job—10 years later, if you leave the military, your skills and wages are probably not going to be as quite as high on average as the private-sector person.” Living as we do in a climate where to say anything that could be vaguely construed as “anti-troop” is anathema, his remarks were quite controversial...

Good piece.

Also apropos of the military...

Couldn't resist. The four-deferments Vietnam war dodger recently insisted that he felt as though he'd actually been "in the military," given that his parents had sent him to a military-themed prep school prior to college. Yeah, Commander-in-Chief / Foreign Policy chops, yeah, forged in the crucible of a dress-up-like-a-West-Point-cadet private high school. Right.

Also apropos of "BS," as I've noted elsewhere:

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great. Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world…

Referencing another great book.

BTW: Pfeffer on the military:

Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves. That is one plausible explanation for why, in general, leadership in the military is not just better but why senior military officers typically show a higher level of concern for the well-being of their people than do leaders in many companies. Military leaders come up through the ranks, so they once were in the positions of the people they lead, and therefore have much more empathy for and understanding of their subordinates. Outside succession, and particularly succession by industry outsiders with limited frontline experience, exacerbates the tendency for leaders to not give the interests and well-being of others much priority. [op cit, pp. 166-167].

He goes on to give good discussion of the civilian corporate difference, in particular the leadership liabilities of "outside succession" (e.g., think the likes of a Carly Fiorina).

UPDATE

In my mail today, a postcard conference pitch from my professional society:

Theme and Focus Areas

Leadership at Every Level
We all strive to achieve results, and each of us strives to sustain the results we gain. There are a lot of factors that play into the level of success or failure that organizations achieve, whether it be the culture we work in, how aligned our efforts are, or the ability we have to deal with and mitigate risk. But out of all the factors at play, leadership is among the most critical. Studies show that anywhere from 50 to 95 percent of improvement programs fail. There are differing opinions as to just how high that number is, but also overwhelming consensus that leadership is a key component in avoiding such failures. Leadership through action, leadership with purpose, and leadership at all levels of an organization are critical to achieving and sustaining results.  

The efforts made to embrace and implement lean and Six Sigma methodologies can provide individuals with the tools they need to achieve results. However, sustaining those results is often a challenge that requires commitment, a culture of improvement, and most of all leadership. It requires leadership that goes beyond the top of the organization and spreads out to all levels of it; and it involves leadership that is both nurtured and sustained.

"Leadership," baby. It's not just for breakfast anymore Who can argue with those last two sentences?

Let the ongoing monetization of "leadership" proceed apace. Early Bird registration fee here for ASQ members, a mere $1,195 for the two-day conference.
__

Speaking of Health IT "Leadership,"

COMING UP, COMRADES, A NEW "FIVE YEAR PLAN" FROM ONC

PDF copy here (50 pages). When I'm pressed for time and have too much contending stuff to read, many times I'll do a keyword search of high-priority terms and phrases to get a sense of relative emphasis, and scan a few excerpts prior to subsequently devoting time to close front-to-back study. A quick selective rank-ordered tally here:

1. "Standards" - 42
2. "Value" - 29
3. "Interoperability" - 26
4. "exchange" - 20
5. "EHR"  - 18
6. "mobile" - 13
7. "usability" - 9
8. "telehealth" and "seamless" (a tie) - 8
9. "patient-centered" - 6
10. "performance" - 4
11. "governance" - 2
12. "portal" - 1
13. "leadership, API(s), HL7, HL-7, FHIR, use case(s), ACO, PCMH" - 0

Interesting. Particularly #13.

UPDATE

The incredible 15-part Steve Brill "Docu-Serial" on Johnson & Johnson and their Risperdal Rx is now complete.

___

More to come...