Media's Era and a few challenges

Noam Chomsky’s most choice critique of the US presidential process in 2016 is the lack of effective priorities. Two stand out for him – global warming and nuclear arms. What is it about us as a species that eclipses what is important from what titillates or provides false cover for our realities? Perhaps it is the way content is pushed over electronic media.

Ashis Nandy may be considered as a well referred curator of India’s social dynamics. He responds to a question in a recent interview thus : “All developing societies, including China, have now acc­epted that they are backward. Our future is exactly the same as the future of all standardised nation-states. It is a new vision for them as well, except that their vision is 300 years old. We have now joined the bandwagon. India, therefore, doesn’t have a distinctive future.”

Such is the conditioning that can occur over decades of patterned information processing. However, evenso, cracks in patterns provide us clues to what we may have been or might choose to become. I spotted at least two recently.

The Ratnagiri Abode of King Thibaw

One was from Singapore’s ChannelNews Asia, that featured King Thibaw’s exile in 1885. Few would even link the histories between India and Myanmar in this manner, leave alone that between Buddhism and it’s spread from India. That the documentary could access through dogged enquiry living progeny of the characters from history is testimony to human investment in curiosity. As someone living in India, it astonished me to know that such a forlorn promontory lay unsung and neglected atop a Ratnagiri mound, as if the occurrence were unremarkable. British manipulation during their colonial period may perhaps have even more evidence than this documentary contained.

Myanmar's last Royal Family that was exiled to India

It is the contemporary somnambulance of 'free' India, that strikes me even more. Free from the British, but enslaved to economic paradigms indeed. To be sure, I revisited the Singapore based Channel to check if that quality and character for codification of cultural heritage were mere happenstance. Lo and behold, I find a spirited journalist exploring Sikhism’s influence through Amritsar’s history, in a variation of documentary style. Such consistency in curation on a news channel is surely a credit worthy feature. I have yet to see contemporary depictions of India made in India. So perhaps, my eyes and senses mediated through them are prejudiced through Singaporean newsbytes. After all, the template of governance in Singapore is exactly the substance and forerunner of Ashis Nandy’s ‘standardized nation-state’.

The Tasmanian Tiger with Canine like head

TV5 Monde is a French channel I peruse to ensure my knowledge of the French language does not rust. From its culinary shows, quiz formats, brilliant movies to its quaintly depictions of French territories like Guadeloupe, it represents a cultivated aesthetic, specific to its culture. However, it’s contemporariness was what caught me in it’s embrace of the global warming theme. What would a Frenchman do in the land of erstwhile British prisoners? That’s right, French investigators setting up equipment to scale the height of the slow growing high quality logwoods have a lot to do with the clash between climate, ecology and human economic activity. French polyvalence and multi-dimensionality comes through in this feature. It depicts generations of Tasmanian inhabitants, as well as lumberjack technology evolution. 

The endangered Tasmanian Swift Parrot

While on the one hand, the camera accompanies scientists from Hobart's university studying surviving birds species like the swift parrot, it reminds us that the Tasmanian devil lost its place in mainland Australia. Similarly, it reminds us of the extinction of marsupials like the Thylacine. It’s realistic depiction of ‘corporatization’ of forest wealth shines through, in the otherwise templated beauty of Australia’s untamed nature. 

While the documentary accommodates space for the social evil of lobbying in parliamentary systems, (with no less than the Australian Prime Minister saying that conservation had gone too far) it amplifies the maxim, that the map is not the territory. It’s sober reminder comes from depicting art in a fitting tribute on sculptor Greg Duncan’s 100 meter wall. UNESCO got into the picture lately, and declared acres under a sanctuary, where no human should enter. Through lives of lumbermen, the documentary however, makes it clear that even well intended global compacts like the UNESCO may get the picture wrong, and that it is the intersection between humans and forest systems that needs intervention.

Benefits of Leadership in Stewardship Mould

There’s a slow acknowledgment of confusion in long tenured employees, due to intermittent denials of change and a poverty of clarity regarding the content of ongoing change.  So, the significance of self-awareness becomes paramount again.  Moving from mind blindness to mindsight is crucial content of transitions in leadership. 

Strategic Leadership Talent is the pool from which future stewards of organization are nested in proximate, preparatory access for the top management to draw from. Let us assume that the top management cadres are the current stewards of resilient organizations. 

Stewardship is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control of, or dysfunctional dependence on, those around us.  Stated differently, stewardship is accountability without control or compliance pressures from external sources. It is an inside-out state of being, and not an outside-in dynamic. This is not an overnight transformation or a month or year of mindful sabbatical.

Organizations require leaders to be both awesome at their work, and likeable too to acquire credible mindshare, regardless of whether leaders assume stewardship accountability or not. In order that the growth towards corporate stewardship is seen worthy of attention in leadership transitions, it is useful to see the significance of stewardship markers too, as tabled below.

Stewardship Marker	Leadership Significance
Ø  Choosing partnership over parenting –	Information is increasingly accessible in an internet world, and the youngest are at greatest advantage and naturally poised in entitlement to its benefits. It is a reputational differentiator for leaders to partner with those with complementary knowledge, irrespective of age or experience.
Ø  People at the margin acting as owners –	This is the contemporary avatar of initiative and drive. It makes leaders more employable than also rans. Announcing one’s conception of problems to be picked in strategic mould from near boundary positions is the first gulp of stewardship challenges.
Ø  Minimum social distance between levels –	New generations of employees do not like to suffer for their growth. They flock toward the more inclusive leaders, or the young at heart at work.
Ø  Pay systems based on equity, transparency and common good –	With big-data analytics and corporate disclosures, leaders who cannot establish pay equity, will lose talent to competition faster. This dimension is a collective accountability of multiple stewards.
Ø  A purpose larger than the bottom line –	Increasing awareness of ecological impact and social compact makes socially responsible leadership an obligation, not a choice. It is however individual choice that aligns with one’s beliefs, values and capabilities that one’s own Purpose fuels.
Ø  Support groups that educate rather than control –	The tipping point of leadership is differentiating influence. Teaching or facilitating learning is a huge inimitable win that stewards master over time.
Ø  Learning chosen rather than cascaded –	Legacies leaders leave behind are a consequence of leadership focus. Among structures business leaders create is the content of learning and its levels of application, despite standing on the shoulders of other giant leaders.
Ø  Care for community over individualism –	This is the emerging circle of concern that influence seeks to map. The more it coincides, the more the community benefits from stewardship.
Ø  Investing in relationships –	Investing oneself in others is remarkably more about impactful influence. It is in less judgmental connect with others, that inspiring higher-self outcomes from others are born.
Ø  Every gathering an example of the above –	A self-aware steward knows how compassion empathy in care for community differs from relational empathy in invested relationships. Cognitive empathy or mere understanding of a current topic barely shifts the influence needle.

So, what do you think?

Not just your vowels, take your syntax along

The social sciences from which human resources development, social work and organization development draw a lot, relies on inter-linkages between the emotional, social self and the abstract conceptualizing, reasoning self in human beings, Language aids the construction, communication and comprehension of themes in such work. It is one thing to communicate for social transactions to influence actions in others. Quite another indeed to influence performative actions in colleagues. And indeed even more distinct to uncover such tendencies in light of their precedents and contexts for action.

With the denouement of reading, writing and communication of even perfunctory text in operational and procedural realms, crises in meaning and understanding are a corollary. Influence itself may not be conveyed by virtue of linguistic ability alone, but by the small cognizable chunks of immediate attentional value.

E.g. A data collection activity is a slice of evidence in this respect. If a big data platform provides with transaction details in one data stream, another may have biographic details of those who transact; while yet another may have contextual detail like place, time and date of transaction. If one does not have analytic prowess to crunch such data, computers and their software utilities may assist. However, to specify classes in demographics, and to derive relational patterns between specific demographic variables like income class and size of spends, embodied reflection of complex order is called for. The language to represent such an ask of the algorithm writer, is distinct from the language that persuades a buyer to choose suggested categories on a recommendation engine.

One reason why India will find it difficult to scale on design principles, will be because, in trying to leapfrog economic walls, we bypassed the rigor of language. Even among so called English medium educated engineers and scientists, the compromises made on language are not a laughing matter.

When I recommended an inexpensive route to auditory exposure to complement reading skills, the TED.com portal came handy. In acknowledgement, the ever compliant student wrote back that she would participate in TED conferences.Now, even I could not dream of that!

Biases in going along to get along

Of late, I have been reflecting on work issues that have to do with people from different parts of the world in their acts of relating to each other. As is to be expected in human affairs, some of these relations work better than others. But as is experienced of such trans-national, trans-cultural affairs, humans struggle to make connect of amiable kind without developing commonality of interests.

I turned to some base fundamental research on perception to understand the issue. Specifically, I was drawn to a research titled The Neural Substrates of In-Group Bias : A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation, (2008) Jay J. Van Bavel, Dominic J. Packer, and William A. Cunningham, The Ohio State University.  

Let me quote their abstract before presenting my propositions, thereof. “Classic minimal-group studies found that people arbitrarily assigned to a novel group quickly display a range of perceptual, affective, and behavioral in-group biases. We randomly assigned participants to a mixed-race team and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in processing novel in-group and out-group members independently of pre-existing attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity. Whereas previous research on intergroup perception found amygdala activity—typically interpreted as negativity—in response to stigmatized social groups, we found greater activity in the amygdala, fusiform gyri, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and dorsal striatum when participants viewed novel in-group faces than when they viewed novel out-group faces. Moreover, activity in orbitofrontal cortex mediated the in-group bias in self-reported liking for the faces. These in-group biases in neural activity were not moderated by race or by whether participants explicitly attended to team membership or race, a finding suggesting that they may occur automatically. This study helps clarify the role of neural substrates involved in perceptual and affective in-group biases.”

The news from this research is that in-group biases happen involuntarily or automatically, and that in-group members are processed in greater depth than outgroup members. In-group biases in perception is therefore highly motivated. Contexts of economic, psychological and evolutionary significance were salient triggers for such motivation. Why I lean a bit on this body of work is because of neural correlates to perception in evidence.

“Participants with a stronger preference for in-group members exhibited stronger OFC activity in response to in-group relative to outgroup members.”  “…this is the first fMRI study to identify the neural mediators of self-reported intergroup biases, and it demonstrates an important link between the pervasive preference for novel in-group members and brain regions that process reward and subjective value. In-group biases in neural activity did not require explicit attention to team membership. Although the tasks differed in difficulty (judging by the faster reaction times and higher accuracy in the implicit task), neural in-group biases did not differ across tasks. This finding suggests that these biases are relatively automatic.”

Hence, there is considerable implication in the way we participate, inter-relate or coordinate activities in a group. This is pertinent to learning and development because, of two basic processes. Firstly, we tend to categorize perceptions. Secondly, learning results in encoded memory.

While the Table below is a long-shot from automaticity of perception, I lay it out here in relation to language in developmental work in groups and organizations.

Value Precept	Socialized Attitude	Philosophy of Practice
Justice	Fairness	Social Contract
Truth	Honesty	Scientism
Transparency	Openness	Liberalism
Humanism	Caring	Service
Morality	Self-Regulation	Common Greater Good
Safety	Experimentation	Epistemology from Virtue

While the above table is an oversimplified first shot at propositional reasoning in group dynamic anchors, it also aims at provoking newer linkages between reality and abstraction.

Here again, I have two explorations. Firstly, that Terminal Values (a la Rokeach) are possibly the domain of automatic perception. Shareable attitudes in society get socialized through overt behaviors that are observed (even from facial cues) and thereafter role modeled. Treatment of experiences finds reflected meta-states of higher-order learning. These relate to superior use of the pre-frontal cortex, that tap into perceptual bases as also pertinent memory chained through categories of perceptual triggers. This chain of mentifacts become strings of belief systems as coherent distinct philosophies.

Secondly, social psychology has been processed rather superficially in professional education. Application of behavioural sciences may miss the link between competing values riddled with in-group attentional biases on the one hand, and fearful amygdala responses of threat or novelty, when known comforts – even if material or economic – numb our choices. So, virtues are impoverished further when philosophic thought is discouraged in the shorter-order comfort of predictability.

Alright, I am warned of your own attention span while reading what is here. What’s your reflection anyway?

Coping with Infantile Theocracy

The morphing of categories are a stealth technique in manipulation. So when the state assumes theocratic hegemony in the guise of moral conscience, it shifts from morality to religiosity in categories of perception and meaning. It uses linguistic schema to mask emergent motive.

Exceptions may prevail, but when speaking of generalities, morality is an inter-subjectively experienced truth; religion is a subjugation of experience to privileged interpreters of the experience of truth.

Inter-subjectivity requires unrestrained use of curiosity. In religion, unbridled curiosity is suffocatingly suicidal. Morality can survive only through mutual respect.

Religion seldom self-corrects. The texts of scripture are their own loudspeakers. They speak with none, but sermon at all.

Spirituality transcends religion, when it demonstrates emancipatory relief through human capacity of self-correction. It eschews divisions perpetuated by religion.

In reality then, the tensions in civic experience will require to be lived out fully before healing can grace us.

Senses Engulfed

I wrote thus as a mark of sorrow when Rohit Vemula’s death gathered news columns.

“Some felt sympathetically robbed of their own. Others felt purged of refuse to come into their own.
He took his own to the unknown.
And each living side finds their moment of lifeless renown.
In such illusion, postures that leave us disunited, all at once alone”

What was remarkably different about the note Rohit is said to have left behind, was ‘never mind’; as in the words of Leonard Cohen. “I had to leave, My life behind, I dug some graves, You’ll never find.”

Further still, the swoop of opinion vultures upon his mother, outdid the depths from which his decision to take his own life stunned many a soul.  To quote Cohen further, he may have written a nearer truth than many an analyst may provide, no matter what facts are on hand.  

“The story’s told
With facts and lies
I had a name
But never mind

Never mind
Never mind
The war was lost
The treaty signed

There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don’t know which
So never mind...”

The speed with which media reports is a known tendency. What is lesser reflected is the effect it has on our attention span. We are deflected from one event to another, with a cumulative feeling of external reality. No more than an elemental sigh or a passing eulogy for social approval hardens the essence in us. Then as the lights fade out of the incident, the case is lost from our empathetic radars. 

The antenna swivels towards the next flare, the next dare or scare, if you will. In this fearful world of insecurity conditioning, almost every place on earth would be in a state of perpetual vigil, with more controls over human freedoms, and less love and affect for fellow humans.

In mindless adulation of ideologies, people die at the altar of ideologues. In uncritical examination of our apathy, we live dead to the world’s issues, with voices hushed in an unrealistic hope of succor. Even titular heads of non-governmental organisations, community leaders and neighbors strike uncalibrated harmony with demagogues of their choosing, as if their time has arrived in dominion over others. Unwilling to tune in to their own inner voice, they pretend reality in an untenable myth of peace.

While the symptoms of unproductive desire are on homicide trails and the like, our uncritical thinking leads us astray from reality in many another spheres. Public good is lost to private gain in the economy, in the guise of free markets and liberal political values. Citizens numbed in consumerist appetites never have enough, for their wants exceed their needs. They surrender their truer wealth in the bargain. Lakes disappear for high-rise buildings in some places, while forests disappear for other dreams in other places. The sea entertains more plastic as it ejects its whales and dolphins with increasing regularity to the shores. 

While clarity of thinking helps name and frame problems affecting us as a species; it is not arrived at in logically facile ways. Indeed, the heart must move in acceptance of the issues at hand. And that is a space only inner knowing can see. For as Cohen has entrapped in poetic brilliance, the nature of the human dimension of our times, there is a palpable loss of reason in form, substance and spirit.

“Our law of peace
Which understands
A husband leads
A wife commands

And all of this
Expressions of
The Sweet Indifference
Some call Love

The High Indifference
Some call Fate
But we had Names
More intimate

Names so deep and
Names so true
They’re blood to me
They’re dust to you

There is no need
That this survive
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies”

And while abject surrender is a release from the burdens of insanity, it paradoxically enables connection. In abject retreat however, silence is but an illusion of escape at the altar of the power of fears.  This paradoxically fuels disconnection. And we don’t see it because the next event to engulf your senses is only a few moments from this line, in alternate diminishing space, of directionless gory.