The Art of Torture and a Poor Rendering

"Well hey, it's about my pregnant wife let me pull out my cell right now and we can call her together, Officer... what's your name again?  Can I borrow a pen, any of you civilians all around me, to take a name down? You'll love meeting my boy Jeremy, he loves his constitutional rights.  How about you, Officer? Love rights? Of course you do. I was asking about kids."

I fear you speak upon the rack

Where men enforced do speak anything.

If you have never seen the movie Rendition, don't watch it on the same day as seeing The Bourne Ultimatum.  While both are Hollywood films about the darker aspects of national security, the extreme attention to detail in the title character of the former makes it much harder to connect with any of heroes in the latter.

For the record, I do not support assassination or rendition, nor do I particularly see torture as an effective tool in stopping practices like espionage and terrorism.  In fact, I think both practices are placebos worse than the disease, creating a PR nightmare for practitioners, only fueling more resentment and cause for attacks.  The whole thing, really, is a cycle of feudal escalation - the games entities like the NSA, CSEC or the CIA play in the name of national security are really just scaled-up versions of gangland machinations with cooler toys and less abrasive jargon.

But back to the movies.

There is nobody who has the superhuman abilities of Jason Bourne.  You'd need to roll up high-functioning autism, extreme social-emotional intuition, an in-depth awareness of general behavioural economics but also multiple culture variances and of course, the kick-ass fightery of a Bruce Lee (not to mention the physical indestructibility of John McClane).  I have met a few folk who work in this space and I'll tell ya, they're not perfect.  The ones who delude themselves they are tend to be the worst long-term investments.

But there aren't that many people as formulaic as you see in Rendition, either.  The performances were honest, but the writing and logic gaps of the characters were cringe-worthy.  It's as though the writers (and therefore, the production team) felt that the point they needed to make was so crystal pure they didn't want to mire it in realism.

The questions asked (and not asked) by various characters are face-plant inducing.  The whole "calls came in to a cell, ergo you're a terrorist" is the lamest, most thinly veiled excuse to render someone over.  Look at the detailed investigation into Rob Ford's acquaintances to see the sort of information one should be collating before making an assessment.  It's almost like a horror film - someone wants to scream about about following police into stairwells or going into showers, but to no avail.

But back to terrorism.

Someone will make the argument that when it becomes clear a terrorist attack is about to occur, there's no time to play nice - dirty tricks that save lives become fair tricks.

We see this kind of logic in politics all the time - pick your scandal at any level of office and behind the scenes was someone who said "we have to be quick/tough but we'll get this thing tied off and behind us."  The details were a sidebar and the consequences can always be spun with rhetoric tomorrow.

It does not work - it's trading off one one woe today for multiple tomorrow, or even more heinous, ignoring the big burning issue now only to have it blow up later.

More to the point, everyone has these grandiose visions of secret conversations in darkened booths - the fact is, a ridiculous wealth of relevant information is divulged, regularly, in random public settings like coffee shops, restaurants or even on the subway.  In other words, a lot of casual convos will have more influence on major policy decisions than evidence-based information, which at least in Canada we're stymieing anyway.

You don't need to extract and torture people for information - you need to get out there, listen and connect the dots.  It's basic Sun-tzu - if you're responding to an attack, you've already fallen behind.  

If I wanted to know what special activities someone was engaged in, I would first get the necessary legal protocols and then go through the process of getting inside a target's head, their communications flow and their narrative baseline.  Spend some time with people in different context, they reveal a lot more about their thoughts, intentions, fears, and egocentricities than they ever realize.  The true applies to information.

The goal should never be to forcibly extract information from closed minds - that's a poor approach to dismantling artificial cognitive architecture that might not be there in the first place.  If you reduce a poor person into a limbic mess, than you might as well teach the puppy tricks as expect added value.  If you break your asset in an effort to get crucial info in a short time frame, you've rendered them useless for any future uses (like behaviour change).

The Alpha Predators can keep playing their predatory game, but it's not the ones who "bend the rules" who set the future.  It's the ones who understand the inescapable laws of human nature that escape the left-right pendulum swing and push us into the third dimension that is tomorrow.

We've all gotten a little tired of the two-dimensional leaders we've had to live with of late.

Labouring Economy

People in power are not usually inclined to come out and argue they're powerless, though, and they can't afford just to pull levers - retraining laid-off workers, for instance - that might not bear fruit until they're out of office.  So in search of a counter-narrative, their best play is to generate good news of the sort we saw on Friday, even if it doesn't come cheap.

People in power stuck between needing to sound confident, but not being sure what will actually work?

No sustainable way to retain old jobs that are fleeing to Bangladesh?

It's true, government traditionally has few tools to get the big players to play in their sandbox - frankly, there are lots of places in the world with cheaper labour, little regulation (like Bangladesh) and so on.

But there's no reason government needs to play by the traditional rules, either, nor focus on traditional businesses for success.

There's lots Ontario can do at all levels to get more bang for their buck, bring more people into the economy and set some world standards for the 21st century.  They just need to think differently.

Hope - For Tomorrow

 

We found that more than half of them believe that in the future business will have a greater impact than anyone else in solving society's biggest challenges.  And 86% of them believe business will have at least as much potential as government to meet society's challenges.  Clearly, taken as a whole, millenials do not see business as a waste.

We live in interesting times.

In Canada, a country that's never had much need to be innovative, there's still a strong sentiment on Bay Street and in the natural resource extraction sector that nothing's changed, the way the world works remains the same as it's been for the past age.  For these folk, youth have gotten uppity and need to start developing the skills and expectations that will help them get ahead in the real world.

Meanwhile there are some firms who are bucking the trend and doing things differently - embracing Corporate Social Responsibility not as a PR gimmick but as a core value for their operations.  They want to empower youth, not manage them.  There's also a growing number of idealistic, cause-driven or simply passionate youth going the entrepreneur route, knowing what they want to achieve and not willing to compromise their integrity for old-guard, profit-driven enterprise.

Then there's government, saddled with an increasingly impossible mandate of delivering quality services to everyone, with both everyone and the cost of service expanding exponentially.

Then, of course, there's a festering sentiment of civic unrest slowly building towards critical mass.

I've written about all this before, and will probably do so again, but the threads that will weave the tapestry of tomorrow are being unspooled now.  You just need to look beyond yourself to see them.

Emotional Fatigue

In a voice loud enough for several of their cabinet colleagues to hear, Flaherty told Kenney to "shut the fuck up" about Ford.

Kenney responded angrily in kind, and although the two men were separated by four other ministers, alarmed caucus colleagues, who requested anonymity, were concerned the bilious debate might escalate beyond their control.

I know an employer who once had an employee that was an absolute disaster - he'd swear at clients on the phone, get sloppy drunk at events and generally cause his employer and company completely avoidable grief.  I always thought it odd, as the employer was proud in a rustic way and not overly fond of poor social etiquette.  It was something that always interested me, this - how a decent man could overlook such detrimental behaviour in someone who represented him.

It was much later that I saw this man in the presence of a family member who was behaving in much the same was as the employee - drunk and disorderly in public, making a scene, embarrassing everyone, themselves and family included.    The employer had this look of almost paralyzed fatigue on his face, like this was an inescapable but unfortunate reality.

That was the moment it all made sense.  Some sort of psychological association had been made in the employer's mind between the employee and the family member - to abandon the one as a hopeless case would be to do the same with the family member.

It's a look a lot of parents have when they see their children going down dark paths or, perhaps even worse, being consumed by a mental health/learning disability condition that seems to forever shut the doors of normalcy to them.

I don't have anywhere near enough intel on what happened between Kenney and Flaherty to know the context of their spat - it could have strictly been about politics.  Flaherty's a man of discipline, though, an internalized Irish Catholic to the core - it's hard to imagine him losing his cool in such a public place over something as pedestrian as politics.

Part of me wonders if Jim Flaherty feels some degree of responsibility for the offspring of his former Leg colleague Doug Sr.  It must be painful to watch how both sons are spiralling out of control, bringing havoc to their community and also tarnishing their father's good name.

Flaherty's life has been filled with unmet expectations and surprise disappointments - he is, I think, a bit entitled to some emotional fatigue.  Meanwhile, none of this registers with Kenney - younger, more political, more ambitious, more righteous.  To his Ford is a liability to be tossed away.

At a deeper level there's a much more poignant, tragic story playing out that, hopefully, can serve as a catalyst to a renewed and open conversation about how we can do better around mental health in general.

Because yes, that is the underlying theme here.  There are no good people nor bad people just choices, and the internal hardware / external environments and accommodations that shape our moods and reactions/actions.  All of us.

This is the lesson I ultimately hope comes out of this mess.

The Constructed Self

I love Lego, I enjoy art and like everyone else, I live metaphor.  It's not hard to see why the above resonated with me.

The pic below came in second.  You can see a whole host of Lego coolness here.

The Hudak Leadership Paradox, Revisited

Hudak appears to be taking a two-track approach to making himself more palatable to the two-thirds of Ontarians who would not vote for him if an election were held today.  He very much wants to reduce the size of the public sector, promising to freeze pay for civil servants, take away the "gold plated pensions" of future hires, and reduce the size of his cabinet as well."

Tim Hudak wants to be your Leader.  What he'll do there, he's working hard to make clear: despite spending his entire working career in politics, he doesn't like government much.  Government, in his view, does a bad job managing things.  The private sector would do better.

What tricks he'll use to become Premier are clear; he's doing to do what he's always done, playing the populist card.  He'll find people and programs for voters to get mad at and tell us, "elect me and I'll punish them for you."  His last outing, this approach focused on foreign students and workers, with a side-bar about turning prisoners into serfs.  This time out, it's unions and bureaucrats he's after.

What Hudak has never articulated, though, is why.  Why does he want to be leader?  To cut stuff, he'll tell us.  To cut loose the greedy people, cut off the needy people and generally punish the other parties and those who support them. 

That's al fine, if you're the conservative base, but any guy or gal on the right can do that.  Why him?

I honestly don't think he has an answer to that question - I think that he, like many people in politics and positions of power in general, likes the idea of being in charge. 

He wants to be the boss.

That means being in a position where he doesn't need to care what people think or what personal impact his approach has, he can just get things done.

When he tell us "he'll make the hard decisions," what he's really saying is "I won't waste time thinking things through, I'll shoot first and ask questions later."

The big problem with this top-down, "so what" leadership model is that it's been widely recognized as a failure.  Boss-thinking is narrow in its scope, does a terrible job of motivating excellence in teams and, as a side bar, results in less innovation and more internal resource abuse. 

Remember - Hudak pushed Peter Shurman to run in a riding he didn't live in so as to keep the seat, turned a blind eye when the Shurmanator started claiming expenses to make up for this deficit and then canned him when the story broke out. 

One mistake after another, all in the name of getting ahead.

I doubt Hudak even sees how he was the architect of his own (and Shurman's, and his Party's) misery in this.  If that's how he treats one of his caucus star performers, how would he treat the civil service?  If that's how Shurman responded, how would everyone else respond?

Hudak has also refused to criticize Doug Ford for lying, bullying and now even handing out cash to his constituents.  Why would that be?  Likely because he sees Ford as a potential seat-winner, full-stop.  Just as he used to see Shurman, until he canned him.

So, let's theorize Hudak gets in with a majority and can do whatever he wants.  What happens next?

He freezes public sector wages, fires a bunch of bureaucrats and reduces the number of departments.  Everyone is put on notice - do as I say, when I say it, or you're done.  Perform above expectations with less resources, well, that's what's expected - don't expect any form of recognition for just doing your job. 

Maybe he privatizes the LCBO, OPG, sells off a bunch of provincial holdings, effectively reducing the capacity of future governments to grow again. 

The 407 is an example of how that plays out. 

Funding for non-essential services, largely funding programs for Not-For-Profits, youth engagement and entrepreneurial supports disappears.  By his logic, you throw people into the deep end and the strong performers will show you they can swim all on their own.

The public servants who aren't canned won't perform better - they'll perform worse.  It's basic behavioural economics; if you don't empower, support and provide a sense of sustainability for your team, you kill their performance.  What services remain will be less efficient, less likely to add value or provide basic connections (can't help you, not my department, try someone else) and beyond this, you'll have an increase in presenteeism and burnout. 

Firing these people doesn't open up space for more dedicated talent - it does the reverse.  That's not speculation - that's simple behavioural math.

By cutting funding to Not-For-Profits that provide front-line services that provide programs like skills development for marginalized youth or diabetes type II information and training for at-risk communities, he's going to be tearing out some key threads of the social fabric. 

Maybe he could find creative ways to encourage the Private Sector to pick up the slack, but how?  Remember, he's just killed creativity among bureaucrats.  He's going to have to outsource innovation to consultants.

Private sector consultants in a regulation-free, market-driven world are going to be focused on profit.  It doesn't matter if a reduced government opens up a competitive bidding process for undefined creative solutions - government's a shrunken beast now, so why would business want to do business with them?  The only players who will jump at bids like this are either the usual suspects who don't care about systematic solutions, but only want to tweak legislation and such to further their interests or former staff.

As a result of this starving of public resources and general innovative growth (which has never been great in Canada and shows no signs of generally improving at the corporate level any time soon) there are going to be increased societal problems, with unemployment, poverty and related concerns varying from health and mental health to crime and civil disobedience growing as a result.

No no, you might say - reduced red tape and lower taxes will encourage the private sector to pick up more employees and innovate.  Look at Ontario's already-competitive tax and regulatory environment - where's that gotten us?  Nowhere.

The only way you can motivate hiring through reductions is by motivating the kinds of front-line manufacturing/transactional service industries that have migrated to Bangladesh to come back. 

Again, forcing people who used to have meaningful employent to work in Dickensian factories is a recipe for revolution. 

Then consider the commitment to a reduced cabinet.  I guess if government is giving up on public service, then you could get away with less Ministers, but unless Hudak wants to completely decimate his Party's fortunes for all time he would need to maintain some core functions like Community Safety and Correctional Services, Healthcare and Government Services.  Just these three Ministries, in their current configuration, are unsustainable. 

CSCS is actively (and wisely) pursing proactive measures to reduce crime and improve corrections, including more training and online/social media tools, the kind of stuff bottom-line minded politicians and bureaucrats love to cut.  Without system change, you're only going to see an increase of Sammy Yatim and Ashley Smith-style cases.

Healthcare.  Hudak pilloried Deb Matthews for not reading a report, because it was convenient, but he's willfully ignoring the fact that Matthews has more on her plate than most of Canada's Premiers. 

Ontario's health system is a monster, and largely a reactive one.  The Minister's job is impossible, no one person can in any reasonable fashion stay on top of the constant crises or hope to develop structural solutions.  Health needs to be broken up into more Ministries, which Hudak couldn't do - shrinking the cabinet and all.

Government Services is going big in the Open Government, Open Data direction, which means the sausage-making process of politics will be open to all. 

Hudak couldn't afford to stick with this approach, no matter what the rest of the world is doing; after all, he's spent his whole tenure as Opposition Leader jumping on every glitch or poor decision as an excuse to call for Liberal and bureaucratic heads.

With demotivated OPS dealing with an increased workload, less communication flow and of course, Ministers that are being pressured to do and know more than is humanly possible, Hudak would need to shut down anything resembling openness lest his opponents turn the tables on him.

If you throw everyone into the deep-end, you create a crisis situation - those who can swim will get out of the pool as fast as they can so as not to be pulled down by the non-swimmers.  The non-swimmers will drown.  The majority of everyone else will drown, too, being pushed aside by the aggressive swimmers and pulled under by the weaker ones.

Whoever is at poolside won't know who's job it is to throw in a life-preserver (or be willing to take the risk of reaching beyond their mandate).  The life-preserver won't work anyway, because nobody's been inspecting it regularly.

Hudak represents the kind of tough-minded leadership we embraced in the industrial economy, when the world and work was more linear, social problems were easier to ignore and frankly, it cost less to live. 

We don't live in that world any more.  The my-way-right-or-wrong leadership model Hudak is modeling is a bust.  His policy approach is not only a proven failure, long-term politically - it's proven to make the broader social situation worse.

There's time yet for Hudak to reinvent himself and his approach before a likely Spring election, but I see no reason to expect that to change - like his Conservative colleagues Stephen Harper and Rob Ford, he's demonstrated a distinct functional fixedness to how he thinks and acts.

Leadership isn't about being liked - it's about having a vision that represents the people (in the case of a Premier, all the people in the province) and being trusted to deliver. 

Hudak has none of this, nor does he care to.  He figures what worked before will work again - get angry, get tough, pick fights, divide and conquer.

Which brings us back to why.  Hudak doesn't know why he wants to be a leader because he doesn't want to be a leader.  He wants to be the boss.

If Hudak or his senior planners thinks there's appetite for boss-type governance these days, they clearly haven't been paying attention - which is what happens when you focus strictly on low-hanging fruit.

Living On the Edge of Emergence

#LiveDieRepeat all over again!

Since we already know there are no new stories under the sun (only new retellings) you'd think that by now, we'd be more consciously recognizing the underpinning themes.

I mean, The Hero With A Thousand Faces was written in 1949 - and the concepts within Campbell's words have been winked at by countless writers over the course of history.

There's the fall.  We were better off, once - happier, more in control, stronger, healthier, more in tune with The Presence.  

There's the cycle.  Death, rebirth, the slow progress towards understanding over time.  

There's the enemy.  External, alien, inscrutable and as often as not expressed as a hive mind, like a murmuration.

There's tomorrow.  It can be represented by light, by nothingness, it can lie before us or behind us but is always a world removed from the matrix of our present.  

There's the Presence; a Force or Being that is unknowable, not the enemy but somehow beyond us all and conducting events in some purposeful direction.

And of course there's us, living on the raggedy edge.

Between us and the temporal or physical Undiscovered Country of tomorrow lies cataclysm, some horrific event we fear (or hope) will rip our world open and forever sever our connection with where we are now.  

If we can somehow navigate all these competing pieces, at the end lies emergence.

Exactly.