Glen/Marcus -
Once again, lots of good back-forth here. I can't claim to follow each
of the subthreads of your arguments and in the interest of not flooding
the airwaves with my nonsense have been holding back a bit.
I've been having lots of good conversations about the distinction
between "identity" and "self" on other mailing lists lately. In
particular, you are not who you _think_ you are. This type of
internally negotiated truth seems to relate ... or, more likely, I'm
just a muddy thinker.
I am reminded of the aphorism "I am who you think I think I am". This
has to be unpacked thoroughly to be appreciated for it's (fairly
tautological) truth. I think this 2 levels of indirection is both the
least and most that is appropriate.
Internally negotiated truth is not a bug. It's a feature. The trick
is that organizational truth is negotiated slower than individual
truth. And societal truth is even more inertial.
I think this is a very key concept... and while I whinge at the implied
"moral relativism" in this talk-talk, I think it is not that. I think
some of our discussions about "what is Science" a while back relates to
this. To the uninitiated, it might sound as if Scientific Truth were a
simple popularity contest. Were that true, I think that the ratio of
the circumference of a circle to it's diameter *would be* precisely "3"
inside the state of Kansas (and probably many of the Red States?). But
this doesn't mean that truth isn't in some sense also negotiated... I
don't have a clear way to express this, but appreciate that this
conversation is chipping away at the edges of this odd conundrum.
In some cases (Manning and the Army, Snowden and CIA/NSA/BAH),
individual's have a higher turnover (material as well as intellectual
and emotional) than organizations, it makes complete sense to me that
a ladder-climber would lose sight of their motivations by the time
they reached the appropriate rung on the ladder. (I think this is
very clear in Obama's climb from community organizer to president.)
And, in that context, the slower organizational turnover should
provide a stabilizer for the individual (and society should provide a
stabilizer for the organizations).
"truth" is like encrypted or compressed symbol streams which require a
certain amount of context to decompress and/or decrypt. If you don't
have the proper codebook/keys/etc... you either have nonsense or at
least poorly rendered versions. Obama's "truth" may have been highly
adaptive in the context of the community organizing context but not so
much as president (this was the best argument against his candidacy) but
then we WERE looking for HOPE and CHANGE (well, something like 50% were)
which *requires* injecting some new perspective into the context.
The real trick is whether these negotiated truths have an objective
ground, something to which they can be recalibrated if/when the error
(distance between their negotiated truth and the ground) grows too
large. I don't know if/how such a "compass" is related to the health
of an organization. But it seems more actionable than health ...
something metrics like financials or social responsibility might be
more able to quantify.
I have a hard time imagining a fully objective ground, only one with a
larger base perhaps? What is a negotiated/negotiateable truth across a
whole "tribe" might be served by negotiating across a larger group
(think federation), and across a whole broad category of "culture" (e.g.
Western, etc.). or even interspecies (primate/cetacean?)... but It isn't
clear to me how to obtain this kind of "greater truth" outside of the
context of those for/by whom it is to be experienced?
- Steve
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