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Tonight is Christmas night, and one of my favorite Christmas carols is “Do You Hear What I Hear?”   I learned at a Unitarian Christmas Eve service that the carol has a surprising history:   it was written as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis which took place in October 1962.   There were two weeks in October 1962 when the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union was in danger of becoming a very hot war indeed.    You see, we almost had a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  At that time, John F. Kennedy was the president of the United States and Nikita Khrushchev was the Premier of the Soviet Union.

The United States had deployed nuclear missiles in Turkey that were capable of reaching Moscow, and so in a sort of global chess game, Khrushchev conceived of a plan to counter this by deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba that could be pointed towards the U.S.

On October 14^th, 1962, their plans were found out.   A US spy plane on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba took pictures of seemed to be a missile base construction site.

The CIA analyzed the photographs identified the objects as being medium-range ballistic missiles.   These were the rockets that would carry nuclear warheads to their targets in the U.S., but they did not see any warheads themselves.    So they assumed that the warheads had not yet been delivered, and that the Soviet Union would soon be sending ships to deliver them to Cuba.

The President was informed of the existence of the missiles in Cuba and he held a meeting with members of the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military.    There were three options discussed, diplomacy, a limited blockade to prevent the warheads from reaching Cuba, and a full-scale invasion.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that the only option to remove the threat was a full-scale attack and invasion.   They figured that since the nuclear warheads were not yet in Cuba, the Soviets would not be able to stop the U.S.

The National Security Council preferred the blockade option, which Kennedy accepted,  but the military was directed to prepared for the full invasion just in case.

Meanwhile, on a beach in Miami, Florida there was a little boy who was playing with his grandfather.    He and his mother had flown from Chicago to spend a vacation there.    That night they saw President Kennedy on the television who announced that Cuba had missiles aimed at the U.S. and that the U.S. would launch a blockade around Cuba.

The Soviet Union now gave its response, saying that it would view a blockade as an act of aggression and that their ships would defy the blockade.   The situation was now at a stalemate; the U.S. raised its defense level to condition red.   There is only condition beyond this, condition white, which just happens to be the color of the center of a nuclear explosion.

That night, the boy who staying with his grandfather heard the voice of his father on the telephone calling to tell him that he loved him very much.    You see, the father was a reporter who knew the seriousness of the situation, and knew that his son was in a place that would very likely be a target of a nuclear attack in the case that war broke out.   He wanted to memorize the sound of his son’s voice in case he never heard it again.

At 6:00 PM on the night of October 26^th, the State Department received by teletype a very long and emotional letter written by Khrushchev .

“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of a rope in which you have tied the knot of war.   Let us take measures to untie that knot.  We are ready for this.”

Tommy Thompson from the State Department,  a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, was sitting at the elbow of the President reading what he referred to as the soft, diplomatic message which he said had come directly from Khrushchev.    Just then, another message that came in that was more threatening and it was the message that had written by the hardliners in the Kremlin.

The crucial question now was:   which message should the U.S. respond to, the soft message or the hard message?

Tommy Thompson had knowledge of the Russian language, but even more importantly, because of his time as ambassador to the Soviet Union, he knew the Premier personally.   He could empathize with him, and knew exactly what the Premier was thinking.   He said that the Premier was being pushed by his hardliners into a military confrontation and he wanted desperately to find a diplomatic solution that would allow him to save not only the Cuban people from invasion, but to help him save face politically.   President Kennedy finally understood exactly how the Premier felt.

President Kennedy listened to Tommy Thompson, and made a deal with the Soviet Union.   You pull out the missiles from Cuba, and we will remove ours from Turkey.    Khrushchev agreed, and the crisis was now over.

In 1992, it was discovered that the CIA had made a mistake.    Remember how they had assumed there were no warheads in Cuba?   There were over 160 nuclear warheads already in Cuba.   So the blockade accomplished nothing.    But more importantly, if Kennedy had listened to the military, who based their strategic plans on what the CIA had told them, the invasion would have failed and nuclear war would have resulted.

And I would not be standing here today.    Why?   Because that boy I mentioned in the story–was me.

I urge you to see the documentary The Fog of War, the former Secretary of State Robert McNamara listed several lessons to be learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, among them 1) be prepared to re-examine your reasoning, which you can see by the fact that the CIA made a mistake regarding the warheads, and 2) empathize with your enemy, which was the key to Tommy Thompson’s diplomatic breakthrough.

And to that, I would like to add a lesson of my own.  We can learn from Tommy Thompson and use the power of language to engage the language of power.   And it is the power of language, and its ability to be an window of understanding, and through that window, to be an instrument of peace, that has motivated me throughout my life.

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At the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey (played by James Stewart) is proclaimed “the richest man in town” as the entire town crowds into his living room to offer him help and hope.   And yet, the richest man in the town of Bedford Falls is surely Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore), the 1946 version of “the 1% percent.”   George Bailey is considered the richest man in the town because he was the richest person in terms of relationships, of the number of lives he touched.

I was reminded of this scene just two months ago.   On 10/28/2014, my youngest brother Jim unexpected passed away from a heart attack.   After calling the fire department, and tending to the questions from the police and first responders, we then went into my father and told him the news.   It was a shock because he didn’t expect to outlive any of his children, particularly the youngest.   By that Saturday, we had told all of our relatives, my brother’s friends and colleagues from his stonemason’s union, and they gathered to pay their respects, not just to Jim but to my father as well.    It was a visitation, but also a memorial service in the sense that many people came up to my Dad and told him how his son had touched their lives with his cheerful personality and hopeful spirit in the face of adversity.   My Dad was very reflective afterwards and realized that, rather than mourning the loss of a son, he had spent the past few hours helping others celebrate my brother’s life and all the numerous connections he made, some of the unbeknownst to any of us until the day of his funeral.

And that’s when that line came back to me from “It’s a Wonderful Life”:   “he’s the richest man in town.”   When my older brother John and I had a chance to reflect on our lives this year, we found we both got part-time work in the past year, and are on our way towards recovering from the layoffs we both received back in 2010, almost five years ago.   John moved out to South Carolina, and I moved back to Chicago from Southern California in the last year (2013), and the past year has been good to us in many ways.    For me, the biggest difference has been that last summer, I came back to Chicago knowing absolutely no one other than my family, and after I finished helping my father recover my a stroke, I faced the decision of whether to return to California or try my luck here.

What tipped the scale was that, while helping my Dad recover from his stroke, with all of the physical and speech rehabilitation that required, I joined three groups:   1) a Unitarian church, 2) a Toastmasters Club, and 3) a professional association, the Project Management Institute.    I started getting to know people and, more importantly, starting leading other by taking on various leadership positions.    I was making relationship investments that after several months, started to pay off.   That’s why I decided to stay, because I had invested not financially, but emotionally in the relationships I had established.   Now, one year later, I have leadership positions in all three groups.   I am a member of the Board of Directors of my church, I am President of my Toastmasters Club and an Area Governor for the area my club is in, and I am the Director of Certification for the Chicagoland chapter of the Project Management Institute.

These positions, which I got through networking, are in turn bringing a lot of people into my network, and I am sure that next year, these new relationships in my expanded network will pay continued dividends into my life.   But whatever professional opportunities may come my way, I know this:   I was able to weather the storm of my brother’s passing with a lot more equanimity than if I had living alone with no support network.

So to those feeling the traumatic loss of a job or a loved one, start investing in your relationships with other people, and your grief will not disappear, but will be of greatly reduced duration.    When my brother passed away, there was about one week there when it was really hard to get back into the swing of things, until I realized that the celebration of my brother’s life rather than his death at his visitation and memorial service was a way of giving myself permission to, in a sense, celebrate my own life by going forward with enthusiasm and renewed purpose.    It increased the strength of my relationship with my own self, and for that, I feel truly wealthy!

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According to Ken Wilber, what we call “compassion” and “tough love”, apparently two different concepts, are the yin and yang dimensions of the same larger category of “compassion”, with what we normally think of as “compassion” encompassing the yin and “tough love” encompassing the yang form of compassion.

Like many other complementary types, the trick is to find the balance between the two.   And yet our two political parties show what happens when this is an imbalance.

Let’s take first the Republicans, who seem to be ideologically disposed to tough love and against compassion, meaning that rather than giving someone a handout, they would rather give that person the tools with which he can lift himself by his own bootstraps (or she can lift herself by her own bootstraps, as the case may be).    This is an admirable approach, one encapsulated by the saying “give a man a fish and he will eat for an evening, but teach a man to fish and he will eat his entire life”.    The problem of course is that in emergency, the person may not be capable of even holding a fishing pole, let alone catching a fish.   So to a Democrat, a Republican often seems heartless and lacking compassion.

On the other hand, if the Democrat just keeps giving the person a fish on a regular basis, it is true that that person will be less motivated to learn how to fish.   Then you have fostered a dependency on your fish, which only diminishes the stature of the person in the long run.    So to a Republican, a Democrat often seems manipulative and co-dependent.

The real trick is to forget the political labels and ask yourself, in this situation with this person, does he or she need immediate help, in which case compassion is needed, or is it a situation in which one can give the person the tools and the encouragement needed for the person to help him or herself?   Knowing when to use compassion and when to use tough love is the real wisdom.

For example, the homeless shelter I volunteer in once or twice a month gives homeless men a place to stay for the night and a hot meal, perhaps the only one they will have received all day.   But to enter the shelter, each man has to give information on an intake form so that the social service agencies can work with him to see if a more permanent shelter is available, or if job training is available for the person to be able to get back into the work force.   So the immediate needs are taken care of through compassion, but help is also given for the person to be able to stand up on his own two feet.

If the person refuses to be helped in this manner, then he is free to leave the shelter and find his own way.  But at least a choice is offered to the person–it is up to him to make the choice that he feels is best for him.   But staying in the shelter has its responsibilities–you can enter if you are intoxicated, and you can be removed if you start fighting with one of the others in the shelter.   So even with the limited help the person is getting, they are also being encouraged to take responsibility for their body, and for the communal space in which he is staying.

And it makes me feel sleep a little bit easier, knowing that I am part of a group of volunteers that offers them a step outside of the cold and towards a better life–if they are willing to take it.

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One of the phrases that have entered our vocabulary in the past few years is “pay it forward”, meaning to do a random act of kindness for someone whom you do not expect to pay you back (hence the phrase “pay it forward“).   This is a great concept, and is to be commended.

But what if you have received an unkindness, an insult, an injury, from someone?    In that case, you should not pay it forward, although that is the source of a lot of inter-generational family drama.   Rather, you should break the chain and let the unkindness stop at your doorstep.

Let me give you an example.   My parents both had one of their parents abandon them, one through alcoholism when he was a child, and the other one through her mother who didn’t want to stay in the same house with her abusive husband.   These created childhood issues that remained with them throughout adulthood, but one thing they were committed to was the idea that they would never abandon their own children.    Later when we had grown to adulthood, we found out that they did have their fights as all couples do, but whenever it would get seriously enough for one of them to think of walking out on the marriage, they always reconciled to stay together and work out their differences for the sake of remaining married for the sake of the children.    Being the recipient of such devotion, we never knew that they had never experienced the same security when they themselves were kids, which meant that their own performance as parents was even more exemplary by comparison.

In the past five years, I’ve grown to be a fan of Pema Chödrön, an ordained nun of Tibetan Buddhism, who in her book When things fall apart: heart advice for difficult times, describes the meditation practice known as tonglen, where you breathe in the suffering of others on the intake breath, and you breathe out peace, forgiving, and healing on the outtake breath.    It’s a very powerful technique, and at some point I realized my philosophy of choosing to pay it forward or to break the chain is a living manifestation of this meditation technique.   If you encounter suffering of others, or their negative emotions, you absorb it as you do on the intake breath of tonglen, but you neutralize it and do not breathe it out.    Instead you spread positive deeds by “paying it forward” as you do on the outtake breath of tonglen.

This is something that I weave into all my activities, including, for example, Toastmasters.   When I joined Toastmasters, I had no mentor.   For months, I stumbled into what I was supposed to do by the power of osmosis and observation from watching what others did.    I realized later on that there was a lot that I was doing wrong that I wasn’t aware of.   I could have been bitter about the wasted time and wasted opportunity, but instead I turned that negative emotion into a fierce determination that, when I was a club officer, I would make sure that new members got a mentor to help them figure out how to work the Toastmasters program.   And that’s what I did with Jeffrey Lewis, a new member in our club.   However, although I did not expect to be paid back for my kindness to him, I ended up being rewarded anyway.   Just recently, when I made my application for the Advanced Communicator Gold award, I used that experience as a mentor to Jeffrey Lewis as fulfilling one of my requirements for the award.   So three years later, it has come to be a help to me in my own advancement within Toastmasters.

So, although you should not “Pay it Forward” with an eye towards any benefit for yourself, don’t worry, the reward will come, even if not from the person to whom you paid that kindness.   And by NOT paying forward any unkindnesses you receive, but rather breaking the chain, you make the world a better place.

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“Human beings are memory machines, for better or for worse. There is an autobiographical narrative that is alive inside all of us.”  Dr. Keith Witt

A narrative is what creates continuity out of the chaos of experience.   Rather than history being the story of “one damned thing after another”, as Arnold Toynbee once said of some of his fellow historians, it is supposed to be a story, an interpretive lens through which one views the events of history.

But like anything else, a narrative can be something which obscures experience rather than illuminates it.   One way to view racism is to see it as the phenomenon viewing individuals through the narrative one has received about their race, rather than seeing them as, well, individuals.   When you see a black person or a white person, you see them in terms of the “black” or “white” rather than in terms of a “person.”    Then you paste over that person’s face a mental picture you have based on the narrative you have developed about their race.   In other words, you no longer see them, you see the label you have created, and it is therefore a form of blindness.   That’s why they call it prejudice, because you are prejudging the person based on that narrative and not who they really are.

The cure is to start seeing people as people.   I remember when I grew up in the village of Homewood, and there were only about a dozen black people in the local high school I went to.   Although I saw them in the hallways, I didn’t have any of them in my classes, and wasn’t personal friends with any of them, so I had no experience of them as individual people at that time of my life.   It was only after I left college and worked in the city of Chicago that I had colleagues who were black, and I lived in an area that was predominantly black rather than predominantly white that gradually “black people” became “people.”   How did this happen?

Through observation, I saw their personal characteristics and they became individuals to me.   And then through experience, I could see that I had interests in common with some of them.   This process continues today in my Toastmasters club, where our club has a mix of black and white members, but we are all there for the common purpose of improving our public speaking and leadership abilities.   I don’t care whether a new member is white or black, but whether he or she is committed to improving him or herself.

But if you have a narrative which says “black people are …”, or “white people are …” based on some narrative you have been handed to you in a prepackaged form, then you are cheating yourself of the experience of meeting real individuals.  There will be some individuals you meet of any race whom you will like more than others but that will be based on their personal qualities or values, not the color of their skin.

But to be fair to myself, I know that whenever I meet a new person, I have to fight against the tendency of prejudging people based on superficial characteristics.   I know that brains like wrapping the myriad impressions they receive into a package which makes simple to comprehend.    But if it is too simple, it becomes … simplistic and robs one of the variety lying underneath that surface.

When you truly experience the variety that exists in the other, then you naturally create connections based on correlations between the elements in their make-up and those same elements in your own.    But when you label them with a narrative, you aren’t really seeing them at all but a projection of your own self.   How many times have I heard a white person say “black people make me nervous”?    If that were true, one way to solve their problem would be, “well, then make sure to avoid black people.”   But I know that’s not the problem.

When I hear that phrase, I automatically translate it into “my idea of black people makes me nervous.”   The solution to that problem is obvious:   “well, then make sure to change your ideas about black people.”

In the end, it reminds me of saying #113 from the Gnostic Gospel according to St. Thomas:

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?” 

Jesus said, “It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”    

The kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth in the guise of other people.   Your job is to see it.

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I was planning to write a series of blog posts last week, but I was sandbagged by two events, 1) the decisions by grand juries not to prosecute anyone for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the ensuing protests, 2) the revelations of the so-called Torture Report that our government condoned the torturing of prisoners.

It seemed in both cases that both the values and the institutions of this country were somehow broken, and it was very disheartening.   I had no mental energy to blog, and in this lowly state I caught a cold which dug in and refused to dislodge itself for several days.   So the theme of “healing” had been on my mind earlier this week when suddenly the phrase “the parable of the sower” came to me while I was warming my body in the shower.

It was interesting because that phrase has a double connotation for me.   The phrase “Parable of the Sower” reminds me of the Biblical parable told by Jesus which most scholars think is optimistic in outlook, in that despite numerous initial failures of the seed to take because of the unreceptive ground on which it is cast, eventually the “seed” cast by the sower will be successful, take root and produce a large crop.   

The other connotation of the phrase “Parable of the Sower” for me is the science-fiction dystopic novel written by Octavia Butler.   It is set in a future where the government has collapsed and society has reverted to anarchy due to the extremes of economic inequality.   Lauren Olamina, a young African-American woman, develops hyperempathy, the ability to feel the pain and sensations of others, escapes with some survivors after her community is destroyed and her family murdered.   On the route north with some survivors, she tries to start a community where her religion called Earthseed which espouses the central tenet

“whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true:

All that you touch,

You Change,

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.”

I am inspired by Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” to write about trying to heal a fractured community.   However, it is not as grand as Lauren Olamina’s vision of a new religion which recreates a new community in the collapsed remnants of the old.   What I want to do is write about those ways in which I personally plan to try to “light a candle in the darkness” in order not to start a new community per se, but at least to make life in this little corner of the community a little bit better for those around me.   Some of my efforts will not bear fruit, so I have to focus on my actions themselves, and not the fruits of those actions.   I have to have faith in the “Parable of the Sower” from the Bible in that most of my efforts will not be successful, but the ones that are successful … will have an effect.

Here’s the series of posts I plan on writing as part of the series.

1.  Experience the Other, not the Narrative

2.  Choose:  Pay it Forward or Break the Chain

3.  Find a Balance between Compassion and Tough Love

4.  Increase your Relationship-Wealth

5.  Empathize with Your Enemies

6.  Come out of the Shadow

7.  Adjust your Attitude and your Altitude

8.  Communicate in a Sacred Manner

9.  Learn a New Language:  Become a Mapmaker

10.  Follow the Hero’s Journey: Become a Mythmaker

This is a series of personal posts that I plan to write until the New Year arrives, and I hope to reflect on what I have been able to learn in the past year and a half since I have moved back here to the Chicagoland area from Southern California.   Of course, I write out of my own experience in the hope that some readers will find some echo of their own experience in what I write.   Hey, I’m just planting seeds, after all!

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The last two chapters of the book Six Sigma:  The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations, by Mikel Harry, Ph.D., and Richard Schroeder, contain some very interesting material.

Most of the book is concerned with how to get the physical results changed through a Six Sigma process run by Black Belts.    Both of these are external phenomena, meaning that one deals with the physical environment, and the other with the social environment in the form of a Six Sigma project team.

The last two chapters deal with internal phenomena, namely, the psychology of Six Sigma (chapter 14) and the culture of Six Sigma (chapter 15).   A culture is a series of shared values, and the authors talk about how to prepare an organization’s culture so that Six Sigma can effectively change the organization.

Mikel Harry’s belief is that, rather than trying to change a company’s culture to adopt Six Sigma in order to achieve hard, unmistakable results, the adoption should be done first with an eye towards achieving hard, unmistakable results which then force an organization to reassess values and beliefs.

And yet … and yet I wonder if there has to be some sort of psychological and social priming that has to occur first.  It must become apparent that old practices no longer work.   This gives people a sense of being open to new solutions.    A very telling anecdote comes in the beginning of the section called “Results Change Cultures; Cultures Don’t Change Results.”

Joseph Juran was one of the masterminds behind the Japanese approach to quality.   Its focused efforts to recover after it lost in World War II made it more receptive to change than the Western world which had won the war.   It made the phrase “Made in Japan” go from being synonymous with shoddy goods prior to World War II to meaning world-class quality as it does now.  The words he and Dr. Edwards Deming were NO DIFFERENT than the ones they had been telling American audiences for years.   The difference was that the Japanese audiences heard and interpreted them.   It was only after economic shocks had rocked the Western world in the 1970s and 1980s that Americans started paying attention to what they had been saying.

You have to create success stories with your first Six Sigma projects that will break the resistance of others to its power to change the organization.   In retrospect, this is why the selection of Six Sigma projects has to start with those that have the greatest impact in terms of reduction of defects that are critical-to-quality and which impact the bottom line.

In fact, this is analogous to the success story of Six Sigma, but on a global scale.   Companies like GE and Motorola whose company culture has been transformed through the success brought about by Six Sigma cause other companies, first in similar industries, and then in industries totally unrelated, to think “maybe we can have a similar success?”   It is in the posing of that question of wonder that the mind becomes open to the possibility of it happening.   Unfortunately, like many great ideas, it doesn’t necessarily take hold in an organization like wildfire.   Why?  Because there are many “wet blankets” who are willing to put out that fire because the methods are new and are outside their comfort zone.   Well, you know what else is outside one’s comfort zone?   Having one’s company go out of business?

In the tumultuous economic times we now live in with global competition, one can literally not afford to be aware of Six Sigma.   That’s why in the first month of the new year coming up, my first New Year’s resolution is to obtain my Green Belt certification.   In today’s world, it is a vocabulary you need to learn in order to be able to converse fluently with those who speak the language of quality!

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to be continued on Sunday, December 7th

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to be completed on Sunday, 12/07/2014

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In explaining the psychology behind Six Sigma, the authors of the book Six Sigma:  The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations, Mikel Harry, Ph.D., and Richard Schroeder use a familiar figure from the psychology of human motivation, Abraham Maslow.

Maslow pointed out that human needs can be placed in a hierarchy as follows:

1. Physiological–hunger, thirst, shelter, sex
2. Safety–security, protection from physical and emotional harm
3. Social–affection, belonging, acceptance, and friendship
4. Esteem or ego–self-respect, autonomy, and achievement; status, recognition, and attention
5. Self-actualization–stretching to do things one hasn’t done before, learning new things, play

The basic idea of the hierarchy of needs is that if you don’t have category 1 fulfilled, you’re not going to really care about the needs at higher levels.   Only when the lower-level needs are fulfilled, will the human being crave those needs from the higher levels.

This is just a great ordering principle that I use it for my planning diary.   Here are the twelve categories I use:

1.  Health (physiological)

2.  Organization (safety)

3.  Finances (safety)

4.  Work (social)

5.  Family (social)

6.  Networking (social)

7.  Spiritual Community (social)

8.  Professional Development (esteem or ego)

9.  Toastmasters (esteem or ego)

10.  Reading (self-actualization)

11.  Language Learning (self-actualization)

12.  Games (self-actualization)

The twelve areas I organize my daily, weekly, and monthly goals in are arranged in the order of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.   How does this fit in with the author’s discussion of motivating black belts?

It is a given that black belts need compensation (physiological/safety needs), and that they need written and verbal recognition (social needs), and the promise of promotion (esteem or ego needs).   But they also need support in the sense of not worrying about the failure of a single project as long as they and the organization LEARN from the failure through a lessons learned process.   Punishing failure assures that no one dares to stretch, to “dream the impossible dream.”   It is in this area, of the willingness of Black Belts to pursue stretch goals (self-actualization needs) that the company can really motivate Black Belts to keep learning and to inspire others through teaching.

Don’t just worry about the company’s bottom line; if you get Black Belts to start feeling passionate about their projects and learn to be self-motivated through stretch goals, the financial needs of the company will be met, now and in the future.

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