This post began as an ad for an artist with traditional and AI graphic design skills. If you want to apply, please be my guest. But the post also presents a nice simplification of a way of thinking.
Right now I’m wondering how to illustrate what I call “the off-ramp from reality”.
We can be deflected from really looking reality in the eye with wishful thinking. H. A. Simon argues that this happens in corporations.
What managers know they should do — whether by analysis or intuitively — is very often different from what they actually do. A common failure of managers, which all of us have observed, is the postponement of difficult decisions. What is it that makes decisions difficult and hence tends to cause postponement? Often, the problem is that all of the alternatives have undesired consequences. When people have to choose the lesser of two evils, they do not simply behave like Bayesian statisticians, weighing the bad against the worse in the light of their respective possibilities. Instead, they avoid the decision, searching for alternatives that do not have negative outcomes. If such alternatives are not available, they are likely to continue to postpone making a choice. A choice between undesirables is a dilemma, something to be avoided or evaded.
I’d say that, since Simon wrote those words this process has been industrialised by various processes including the specification of ‘corporate values’. Invariably they’ll define them as a list of pleasing expressions. But usually, the real issue is how those values get traded off against each other. An organisation might agree on these three values among others.
- We’re a close-knit team
- We’re always keen to improve
- The customer is always right.
Lots of people will be happy to sign up to all three, but I’d argue that we only really understand the reality of those values when we face the discomfort of how and in what circumstances one would trade one off against the other. Each value will sometimes be impossible to honour without sacrificing one of the other two. Supporting a colleague — always a nice thing in the abstract — might have to give way to the need to improve or satisfy a customer (in each case by reproving or disagreeing with what a colleague has done).
Note — according to an older tradition, the teaching of medical ethics, or the process of applying codes of conduct would focus people precisely on the uncomfortable dilemmas. If you really wanted to explore corporate values at your strategy retreat, you wouldn’t list your favourite values (This always reminds me of Woody’s mother saying to his father “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”.) Instead each of the small tables might explore situations where value 1 would be sacrificed for value 2 and vice versa. And why. But I’m unaware of that ever happening and very open to any counter-examples from readers’ experiences.
Thinking you can have all the values is just wishful thinking — and that keeps us away from reality. My post inviting you to the ‘alt-centre’ endorses James Burnham’s assertion that more than nine-tenths of political debate is likewise, just wishful thinking, or in my terms, an invitation to the ‘off-ramp’. ‘Freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘fairness’ are transcendental/metaphysical values:
From a purely logical point of view, the arguments offered for the formal aims and goals may be valid or fallacious; but, except by accident, they are necessarily irrelevant to real political problems, since they are designed to prove the ostensible points of the formal structure—points of religion or metaphysics, or the abstract desirability of some utopian ideal. … We imagine we are arguing over the moral and legal status of the principle of the freedom of the seas when the real question is who is to control the seas. From this it follows that the real meaning, the real goal and aims, are left irresponsible. …
This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life. In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites or simply the self-deluded, this method is well designed, and the best, to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity in the service of the mighty.
This off-ramp from reality distracts us with chimeras. It takes us to a weightless world in which you don’t have the discomfort of choosing whether you’ll sacrifice this value or that one. So when we get tangled up in arguing for ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ as transcendent values or just the more mundane organisational values outlined above, we’ve already mostly lost contact with the more uncomfortable reality that these things do not exist in our world as abstract entities, but only ever in concrete situations and they do not appear with any force or clarity except where they are traded off against other things we also value.
There’s another off-ramp that operates not so much through our attraction to comfortable abstractions, but rather through our passions, particularly anger, self-righteousness and contempt. We take this off-ramp when a conversations fail to help us understand others or the world and lead instead to frustration and recrimination. The conversation takes the form of a discussion, but it’s really just an exchange in which two people stay in their own heads and talk past each other. Thus, for instance two people quarrel and each ends up thinking ‘that’s just what they would say’, without really trying to understand where the other is ‘coming from’.
Just as political debate takes the fantasy off-ramp from reality in the form of abstract values, it also takes this darker form. Let’s say you want to argue something about some ideologically contested issue — it might be whether we should be concerned about welfare cheating, or whether corporate tax should be increased or lowered or something more explosive like whether you sign up to a slogan which doesn’t solve some difficult edge case (trans-women are women?). That off-ramp of being accused of bad faith by those you suspect of bad faith won’t be far away. They would say that wouldn’t they?
And so the conversation never gets going. It just sits in preconfigured train tracks. More broadly political debate is mainly preoccupied with framing issues to provoke prejudices — the exact opposite of an engagement with reality and an invitation to thought.
And so to picturing this. …
Here’s the kind of thing I have in mind, though I’ve just put two AI images next to each other in a Powerpoint picture.
The idea is that the person is in the world and could travel somewhere real and find out more about it. But he takes the ‘offramp’ from reality to a fairyland of unicorns, rainbows and I think coloured ballons with people enjoying themselves, and then there’d be either one other pathway leading to reality — or as in the diagram with a number of other pathways.
But I’m discovering that, though AI can be amazingly good at generating some initial image, instructing it with additional text is often inadequate to get it to do what you want. Here’s the attempt of one person who’s worked on this. 
The off-ramp and the separate worlds aren’t very clear. Another person I worked with from Upwork who was shown this ended up saying this:
I spent some time trying to generate some of your ideas this afternoon. Unfortunately, I was unable to create the specific concepts with the AI generator I use. I thought I could create the component parts and compile them, but I was unable to execute the basic idea of a highway with an offramp during my trial. … I have been trying to conceptualize how to do it efficiently. I imagine you could create it with a digital painting, which is done by plugging a drawing pad into Photoshop. A person could create the base drawing that way, and then add the AI images behind them : ie paint the highway, paste in an exit sign and billboard from stock, then erase and add or overlay a section of AI fantasy world.
Anyway, you can see roughly the design I’m trying to work towards. It probably requires ‘mixed methods’ of AI generated images then supplemented with human-generated additions all worked on in a graphics program like photoshop. It could be varied — so that there could be a different off-ramp with a more menacing and angry hue to illustrate conversation that gets nasty on social media or perhaps several off-ramps of different kinds in the same diagram.
And there you have it. I hope the some people find the ideas in the post of some value on their own and whether they do or not, that this explains what kind of image I want to work towards.
Thanks, Nicholas for this thoughtful post. It’s a feature of innumerable government reports that a whole range of lofty ideals are presented, many of them incommensurable. Your model above explains how political and policy leaders allow themselves to publish such waffle. It’s much easier to articulate a range of noble sentiments than to work through how they might be reconciled. In fact, I think a lot of the “motherhood” language is a consequence of the inability of the authors to reconcile conflicting views put to them by different departments/advocates during the preparation; instead of inserting crisp language, they retreat to a higher level of generality, where the trade-offs don’t need to be articulated.
Having said that, there are two other reasons why many of these reports go nowhere. One reason is the absence of deliberative forums where the inherent incompatibilities between objectives can be thrashed out. From time to time governments recognise the need for an entity other than internal, interdepartmental committees to reconcile the tensions, but these bodies are often “cancelled” when their recommendations are unpalatable, or simply defunded through budget cuts. The Resources Assessment Commission and ATSIC are examples.
A second reason for uselessness is that the functionaries charged with implementing these idealistic reports may lack the several capacities necessary to give them effect. Operational people at the downstream or street level end can be capable of taking the mission statements and vision statements with a grain of salt and leaving them on the bookshelf while resolving the conflicts in the course of their day-to-day decisions. But for them to be effective, they need to have the resources at hand. I’ve written about this in a recent article in The Mandarin (paywalled unfortunately).
A street level officer on a given day might tell one welfare applicant to buzz off, they’re cheating; to apologise to another for their colleague’s mistake; to defend the official policy in one case and work around it in another. If they have the knowledge, legal authority et cetera to do so.
The failure of programs to work through lack of funding, skilled personnel, et cetera seems to be a reason different from incommensurability of the overall goals of the bureau or program.
The Madarin article on “feasible paths”. https://www.themandarin.com.au/218817-achieving-practical-results-requires-knowledge-and-four-other-capacities/
I can’t offer an example of meaningful discussion of values in organisational strategy as I don’t work at the ‘strategic’ level of organisations and have never been part of any of these discussions (meaningful or otherwise). I’m perplexed by statements of organisational “values”. Often these are a list of preferred behaviours (to influence staff, I guess), or “here’s how we would like people to see us” (to influence customer perceptions). If there is any theory or reasoning behind this managerial trend, I haven’t found it, and it is unrelated to any philosophical value theory. So I assume it is just managerial bullshit.
I’m keen to find ways to help people/organisations overcome habits of wishful thinking, but ambivalent about invoking “reality” given the history of people using this term to marginalise non-mainstream perspectives, disputes over “social reality”, the politics of realism/relativism debates, and the current philosophical movement between correspondence & coherence theories of truth/reality.
I tend to see the problem of wishful thinking as being the effect of a range of factors, including (a) preference for emotional comfort and a lack of conceptual resources for thinking through trade-offs, and (b) influence of the fact-value dichotomy in separating out a small space for ‘facts’ and leaving everything else as “values” while also defining values as personal, subjective and not amenable to reasoning. The combination of the vast and hard-to-navigate space of “values”, with assumptions of value subjectivism and a lack of conceptual resources makes it almost impossible for people in busy organisations to think their way out of these situations. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a shift from non-thinking and wishful thinking toward Simon’s idea of satisficing (which relies on some thinking about the details of a problem).
The quote from Herbert Simon is interesting. It begins with what managers “should do” but don’t, which sounds like the intro for a discussion of the knowing-doing gap in organisations. But the rest of the paragraph shows it’s not that simple. Having a belief about “should” is not sufficient to know “how” – to decide what that would look like in practice, whether it would lead to intended effects, how to enact it, or how to enact it in a way that leads to the intended effects. Moving from “should” to “how” requires both practical reasoning and judgement about trade-offs. Simon focuses on avoidance through delay. In my experience, managers often avoid thinking by outsourcing (with or without appreciating the challenges), converting it to a task or document-making exercise through administrative delegation. Frontline staff (or consultants) then discover the tensions, trade-offs and incommensurable expectatioms in the process of trying to meet the expectations of management but lack access to knowledge or resources to resolve these. By outsourcing, not only does the “decision-maker” avoid the work of thinking through the trade-offs, they can then blame the operational people for failing to deliver.
These are some thoughts based on reading your post. But it makes me wonder if there are organisations which routinely avoid wishful thinking, which have the time, conceptual resources, and interpersonal skills to think through trade-offs in the context of preferences, values, goals, priorities, constraints, etc. I’m curious about what this would look like and how an organisation develops this capability.
Thanks, Keryn.
I think the pressure of time has a lot of explanatory power for the situations you’re describing. I know everyone of us complains of being short of time, but the pressure of business at a ministerial/senior executive level is just insane. There isn’t time for deliberation. And when departments downsize, suffer salary caps or efficiency dividends, there aren’t the blue sky thinkers wandering around trying to reconcile conflicting objectives or smoothing the way for bright ideas to translate into practical decisions. So, many ministers and senior executives will simply do what is necessary to make problems go away at the time or drop off the headlines. To actually get at the heart of difficult questions where there are conflicting values requires time for deliberation, staff willing to deliberate without fear of loss of their positions, a political system willing to listen to unorthodox advice, and public servants willing to make a difference, as distinct from doing what their ministers tell them. It need only one of those to be missing and the process of thoughtful, critical policy analysis that reconciles pressures fails. In some offices, all of those are missing.
“When people have to choose the lesser of two evils, they do not simply behave like Bayesian statisticians, weighing the bad against the worse in the light of their respective possibilities.” That’s nothing to do with Bayes. It’s expected utility.
I should have made this point in the piece, which I make elsewhere discussing the economic rights in the proposed Chilean constitution.