FRIDAY, girl you know it’s true, oo, oo, oo…sorry, my age is showing. Let me see if I can find seven takes to round out this autumnal week.
One
I’ve convinced all you sensible people out there to buy and read Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. I’m going at it glacially slowly, because—well, who cares why—but every time I find a moment I’m so happy. In the little bit I’m in now Friedman is narrating how he came to develop his laws for how families and other kinds of systems work:
Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional processes in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders tolerate abusers for similar reasons.)
And this:
It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of t*rrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality….
There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”
The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the t*rrorist—whether a b*mber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.
There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.”
For Heaven’s Sake, read the whole thing.
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