Dan Erwin

No-Asshole Policy at the White House

Bob Sutton must be enjoying this. I certainly am.

At the virtual swearing in of his political appointees, Biden essentially told his appointees that if he catches “anyone of them treating someone else poorly, he’ll drop-kick them off the roof of the White House.”

Here’s his statement. “I am not joking when I say this, if you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,” No ifs, ands, or buts. Everybody, everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity. That’s been missing in a big way the last four years…. I’m confident you have the capacity to do it. We’re gonna be judged. We are gonna be judged whether or not we restore the integrity and competency in this government…. I need your help badly. We have to restore the soul of this country, and we’re counting on all of you to be part of that. It’s not hyperbole. The only thing I expect with absolute certitude is honesty and decency—the way you treat one another, the way you treat the people you deal with. And I mean that sincerely,” he said.

He clarified that even further with a letter to his staff, telling them, “I would like to take a moment to make something clear to everyone. I do not expect nor do I want any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include but are not limited to family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations, and times of need such as illness or a loss in the family.” Trump, on the other hand, expected aides to skip important family functions to sit in the residence with him while he binge-watched Fox News...

Russian Trolls and the Information Wars

Surprisingly, the most powerful source of false information is neither Trump nor the Russian trolls. It’s a unique American business model that drives the false information.

With all the hullaballoo about false information, the Russian trolls and Trump's ritualized falsehoods on Twitter, I’ve been at a loss to understand the reality and the actual facts behind all that’s going on. So I was delighted to see the data and insights in an article by Vera Tolz in the December 3 issue (“Shortcuts”) of the London Review of Books. Tolz holds an endowed professorship in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester (UK). My review is indicative of a slight bias toward Brit scholarship on issues like this.

The data presented and the resulting conclusions offer a far better background for our understanding of fake information and Russia’s supposed role in it. In addition, given the Washington riots of January 6, which happened after the article was written, we now have a far richer understanding of the role of the internet.

As Tolz argues, Trump’s November 5 press conference in which he claimed he won the election and there had been massive voter fraud are indicative of the fact that we had learned nothing from the election of 2016. The left claimed the press and broadcasters were indulging the right. In contrast, the right claimed that the media hadn’t indulged them enough.

Russian trolls?
By that time, there was a strong liberal consensus that much of the internet misinformation had come from Russia. Pro-Trump Russia wants to disrupt elections, create chaos and interfere with balloting. Tolz points out that both the States and the UK have fallen into the trap of believing in this “information war” paradigm. The paradigm assumes that the main threats to both countries come from the outside. A fact the data does not support.

It’s true that a history of Russian trolls attempting to

“If humans don’t keep on exercising their lips. . .their brains start working?”

Seeking solitude can be a serious mistake.

Ford Prefect, that alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse never quite understood earthlings’ peculiar “habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day,’ or ‘You’re very tall’.” He considers, then rejects the theory that human mouths seize up if not continually utilized.  He finally concludes that if human beings “don’t keep on exercising their lips…their brains start working.”

That was how the late Douglas Adams expressed a common high-flown opinion about “empty chatter”: it is trivial, or perhaps worse, a substitute for real speech and thought. “Should we talk about the weather?” sings Michael Stipe of REM in “Pop Song 89.”

As a business consultant, I learned that plenty of managers—and execs held that view in spades, that is--until I educated them. Evidently my education worked rather well, because probably twenty-percent of my several hundred clients over the last 15 years of my business consulting wanted help in small talk. One CFO at a multi-billion-dollar firm hired me for only that purpose. His wife had told him on several occasions after cocktail parties that he needed to learn how to do small talk. She was right on. It took eight to ten sessions to learn how. I never quite got over laughing all the way to the bank over teaching a business person how to do small talk.

But I eventually realized my judgment was unfair. Until I got started in the pastorate in the 1960s, I didn’t know how to do it either. But I quickly realized in the very first year out of seminary that I’d be in deep-doo-doo without small talk. So, I eventually became an expert in the subject. In the 1960s no one had ever written about small talk.  But today there are plenty of books on the supposedly inane subject of small talk, many of them quite inadequate. Inadequate because they are tone deaf to the subtexts of small talk.

What You Can Learn from a Political Disaster

Sensemaking and the rhetoric of pornography.

Donald Trump is a declaration of indifference and the rejection of the values making our democracy possible—a human, political disaster with anti-democratic instincts. After working through endless newspaper, magazine and journal articles by some of our best writers, my frustration with the various lines of thinking left a number of issues very much unanswered. One thing was clear: Trump is leaving a reality structure behind, the so-called “Trumpism,” that can still impact our lives destructively. So, this “political disaster” offered a fine case for the sensemaking process—a rhetorical strategy that can clarify situations, offer highly useful explanations for both individuals and organizations, and create new, constructive ways for thinking and behaving.  

Sensemaking is an unusually helpful tool because it creates the potential for change, adaptation, differing iterations, strategic decisioning and reality structuring. Nagged by Trump’s rhetoric and unsatisfied with most of the journalism, I decided to look more seriously at his rhetoric after the first debate with Biden. The September debate was a central, inherent learning opportunity that ought not go to waste.

From the start, the most obvious conclusion was that the interaction was not a debate. Trump interrupted with the obvious intent of keeping Biden from responding or making any contribution to a “debate.” So, no interaction, no conversation and no debate.

Notice, here, that I began my analysis with a conclusion. A crucial property of sensemaking is that human situations are progressively clarified, but this clarification often works in reverse. I can’t say it strongly enough that working backwards usually provides more insights and a richer sense of options. The conflict between ideas, sometimes weak and other times strong, always surfaces better insights than starting from scratch.

For example, though I had read tons of stuff about Trump, including analyses of his narcissism and constant lying, one of the more intriguing insights was Jay Tolson’s comment. In the Hedgehog Review, he wrote that what we got from Trump was a lesson in the authoritarian style. Tolson’s overall perspective is built upon the notion that we have an unhinged president who shamelessly lied and interrupted his way around a decent opponent while ignoring a moderator who tried vainly to uphold rules that both he and Biden had agreed upon. By definition, the debate was an attempt to concentrate power in his own hands, an analogy of his political attempts, too.