Goodness knows it's time for a retrospective

Since this is the age of instant analysis, I'm going to indulge myself in a bit of it here.

The big question that remains unanswered is "why?" Why did this happen? How did we end up with a result that nobody claimed to want. Well, people are strange creatures who are forever getting caught up in their own thing and forgetting what's important. Having been both blindsided by my own reactions to this and overly pessimistic about the outcome, I can't really criticize anyone else, but there were clearly miscalculations in the run-up to the strike.

I'd like to examine the larger point of how a bunch of smart people can make dumb choices. There are a number of ways this can happen, but the most common one is often described as an echo chamber. This occurs when there is a lack of dissent. Everybody in a group working together either sees the situation in the same way, or if they don't they are either too timid to bring it up or shouted down when they do. I don't know if that's what happened here, but it's a distinct possibility that everyone on one side thought the strike would play out in a certain way, and never considered any other possibilities. The lesson here is if you are in a group decision-making process and everyone is agreeing, especially about predicted outcomes, alarm bells should be going off in your head.

It took me a long time to learn to listen to those alarm bells, long enough to delay my progress in my business career. I was already in my 5th or 6th job before I realized I was only hurting myself by going along with what everyone else thought. It takes a lot of self-confidence to go against the group, but it can often be the most valuable role that anyone plays.

The other thing that happens is people confusing the three key elements of an action plan, those being objectives, strategies, and tactics. When I was running my little ad agency, I used to describe my job as follows: All day long, I sit in my office and people come in speaking quickly and excitedly and sometimes disagreeing with each other, and then I stop them and say, "Okay, what are we trying to accomplish here?" That's your objective, and you will rarely succeed if you forget that the objective is the most important thing. After that, you get your strategy, which is the planning part of achieving your objective, and then finally your tactics, which are the doing part of it. Do those in the wrong order or forget their relative importance and their interrelatedness and you are in big trouble.

Next comes, how do you react when you realize you were wrong and have gotten yourself into a tough spot? The Chinese are very big on the idea of saving face, where the situation has to be maneuvered so that even the person who screwed up is able to escape shame. This makes the Chinese infuriating to deal with, even for other Chinese, and we're better off accepting the that we've erred. It's almost as important to be able to recognize your errors quickly and correct them as it is to make the right decision in the first place. But you can't get caught up in fearing the consequences of being wrong. I've never had a situation where accepting blame made things any worse for me (because you can't control who other people will blame anyway, so you might as well be honest about it), and it has the effect of shielding the others on your team who might have been blamed, so then they like and respect you more.

I'm not sure how the error recognition and correction got accomplished in this instance, and even if I knew I couldn't share it because it's not mine to share. My hope is that someone or ones accepted the blame for miscalculating, because they surely did. But it may have been nothing more than a common desire to avoid having a couple hundred or more demonstrators showing up at the school on Tuesday. And keeping my own objectives in mind I will leave you with a passage from the great philosopher, Winnie-the-Pooh.

Well," said Owl, "the customary procedure in such cases is as follows."
"What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said Pooh. "For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me."
"It means the Thing to Do."
"As long as it means that, I don't mind," said Pooh humbly.

As long as it means I get to teach tomorrow and the days that follow, I don't mind.