I know that the relationship between the USA and France is a difficult one, although it has improved recently. To my knowledge, Freedom fries are back to being French fries, and ideas and products from France have access to the States again.
One French Gentleman we can learn from is Michel Eyquem de Montaigne who lived in the 16th century on a small chateau in Perigord. When he withdrew from official duties he started to write and developed a new literary genre: the essay. What’s so nice about essays is that somehow they are never really finished. They are more like thoughts in process and often follow different but related paths. An essay starts with a thought and eventually ends with ideas that nobody expected at the beginning. An essay is an exploration and as such can be understood as an invitation to discussion.
Montaigne continued to add to his essays throughout his lifetime. He was a sceptic and used his essays to challenge current dogmas; thus the need to continually update his thinking.
He had a room reserved for reading and writing in one of the towers of his chateau. My flat has neither a tower nor a room reserved for reading and writing, which might explain the quality of my writing, although causal connections are tricky.
My writing is of mediocre quality because I have no room reserved for it and no tower to accommodate this room? Doesn’t seem that convincing does it? But it is not only about finding the cause of my inferior writing or finding its root cause! The whole concept of cause is tricky.
Which brings me to security. Security experts are expected to do nothing but search for the causes of accidents and mishaps. Many of them suggest that we abandon the concept of cause completely. They tell us that a root cause is nothing but the place where we stop asking further. Erik Hollnagel, in his book Barriers and Accident Prevention, writes: a cause is “the identification, after the fact, of a limited set of aspects of the situation that are seen as necessary and sufficient conditions for the observed effect(s) to have occurred. The cause, in other words, is constructed rather than found.”
And Sidney Dekker in his Field Guide to Understanding Human Error shows that error as well as performance are emerging properties of a system. If you want to understand, say, a mishap or an instance of outstanding performance, in either case you have to understand the system behind it – not the root cause. He states: “The reality, however, is that the “human error” does not come out of the blue. Error has its roots in the system surrounding it; connecting systematically to mechanical, programmed, paper-based, procedural, organizational and other aspects to such an extent that the contributions from system and human begin to blur.” Swap error with human performance and you get the picture. An obvious consequence is that a focus on human performance will always fall short. The focus has to be on the system in which people are working and then on their performance within that system.
If you think these thinkers might be overdoing it, look at science. Physicists like W. Daniel Hill tell us that causes and effects don’t exist in nature and are only convenient methods of story telling that work particularly well in engineering. In quantum physics, cause and effect doesn’t work. Our mere observation “causes” a particle to be in a different state.
And both groups agree that causation isn’t an appropriate concept in complex dynamic systems because these systems have patterns of information flow that do not lend themselves to the cause and effect story. Scientists tell us that we will need more powerful explanatory tools, and these tools are connected to system thinking.
What a relief! If I want to improve my writing I don’t have to focus that much on the missing tower and the missing room. Looking for further guidance, I thought the ISPI website would be the place to go to. There (after considerable searching and digging) I ran into the ten standards. Standard 2 told me to take a systemic view. This made me go Wow! Exactly what I was looking for. Then Standard 6 told me to determine cause. This made me go fffffffffffft. Determine cause in a complex system???
Are the standards incoherent? Do they represent correct understanding of the complexity of today’s work and of system thinking? I might have a limited capacity to comprehend the beauty of the ten standards working together to form a whole – one always has to consider this. But for me this looks like a serious problem. The standards are supposed to guide people and to introduce them (on a very high level) to our thinking. They should be coherent and leading-edge.
So now what? Imagine building a tower and reserving a room just for developing standards that guide the Society and are up-to-date. Montaigne would have been sceptical that such standards should be carved in stone, but he might have been willing to give it a chance in an essay.
Which gets me back to my writing. I have decided to buy some bricks and mortar.
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