Paradox and Punishment
Before I dive in, let me start by describing what I mean by paradox. Paradox refers to a statement or reality containing a contradiction, perhaps around common beliefs or expectations. Paradoxes are seemingly absurd, but they are also true. Paradox comes from the Greek para:beyond, next-to and doxa: opinion or belief. Dox in turn comes from the Greek doxein: to appear, to seem, to think. The last bit suggests to me that the part of a given paradox that seems obvious to you depends on when, and from what angle, you are looking at a situation. Our tendency is to choose only one of the contradictory truths in a paradox, seeing the other chunk as “the problem.” The stickiest and most pressing issues of our time are so sticky because they have paradoxes baked in. To make progress we will need tools, processes, methods, and mindsets to engage with the contradictions. There is a growing urgency around the need to invent, or at least experiment with, new ways of making sense of these issues — ones that re-imagine what it means to “win” a debate.
I’m going to make a big claim about reality… we are doing great evil in our collective responses to wrong-doing. I refer here to all manor of wrong-doing, from the subtle to the egregious, from the indisputable, to the debatable, to the barely perceived. The evil is the infliction of suffering on individuals by “us”, particularly the “us”es that have a mission (at least espoused missions) to foster the growth, education, and rehabilitation of other humans. This might include schools and school systems, educators, institutions of higher education, correctional institutions, the courts — I could go on, but you get the idea. One of the contexts I find most distressing right now are prisons. Our practice of caging people who have been convicted of a crime (or merely detained or charged) and depriving them (systemically even) of pathways of learning and earning.
The policies, institutional structures, thinking, and dynamics that have emerged around punishment, retribution, consequences, admonishment, accountability, and even liability have, at their core, a paradox: It is true that these responses work very well for many desired needs, goals, and/or outcomes, for instance: restoring order, or exacting revenge, or “teaching someone a lesson”, or meeting out justice. It is also true that these conventionally accepted responses come with hella unintended consequences. Leaving aside our state of mass incarceration for a minute, there are countless stories of people losing their jobs simply by not being able to pay bail to get out of jail for a crime. This can happen even when they have not yet been formally charged with a crime, much less been found guilty of one. In other words, the road to hell is paved with good (or at least reasonable) intentions. In not recognizing the paradoxical, interdependent nature of individuals and groups (the parts and wholes or social existence) we collectively create outcomes that none of us wants, wracking up what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called moral debt in the process.
Paradoxes, when not engaged, lead to more of what we don’t want.
While it often becomes crystal clear in hindsight, we cannot predict when or where the consequences — the manifestations of our moral debt — will become apparent to us. The collective awareness of these kinds of a-causal, emergent phenomena is a boiling frog scenario! Case in point, despite the best intentions of judges, lawyers, law clerks, police officers, teachers, principles, parents, neighbors,… we are a country that lays claim to being #1 in the world for incarceration — both by raw numbers and as a percentage of the population. I find it hard to believe that anyone would claim this as an achievement to be proud of.
If we drop down into a psychological frame, inside each of us there is something about the act of retribution that makes sense to us in the moment. Even the most subtle reactions, perhaps a sarcastic remark, can be thought of as a response to pain: inflicting a small hurt in reaction to a small hurt. How skilled are we in alternatives to these kinds of tit-for-tat, habitual reactions? What might shift when we have the skills to put our feelings and needs into words in response to an incident of hurt (whether intentional or unintentional). How successful are we in letting it go after that, not holding onto resentment, or staying in punish mode, as is the norm in our correctional facilities?
Back to the big point —I see a critical need to engage with the paradoxes “baked in” to our most complex challenges. You don’t need to buy my arguments around this, but if you have ever expressed frustration about the lack of progress around poverty, education, or politics, it might be worth at least suspending you’re conclusions around my claim. If you get this far you will no doubt want to know, how DO we engage with paradox? I have amassed a set of approaches — ways of making sense of these complex, “wicked” problems. These approaches don’t result in solutions or fixes or even plans, but they provide us with ways to influence the trajectory of these big issues. While there are probably gazillions of these approaches, my list of tools (or vehicles as I prefer to think of them) for Making Sense of Shit all seem to meet the following criteria:
- They entail externalizing processes (the use, creation, and refinement of artifacts, maps, drawings, stories, models, frameworks), preferably with others who bring some diverse perspectives.
- Yhey invite consideration of different time scales, local and distant spaces, and multiple levels of order. By this I mean wholes and their constituent parts, e.g. individuals as the parts making up teams, teams as the parts making up departments, departments as the parts making up organizations, etc…
- In addition, they entail
deep observation,
reflection,
being strategic, &
intentionality.
Here’s my current list of go-to vehicles for Making Sense of Shit:
- David Snowden’s cynefin sense-making framework
- Simon Wardley’s (swardley) Strategy Cycle and Wardley Mapping
- Ela Ben-Ur’s Innovators Compass
- Barry Johnson’s Polarity Mapping
- Ken Wilbur’s Four Quadrants sense-making framework
- Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey’s Model of Adult Development & Immunity to Change process
What are your methods, systems, tools, techniques for making sense of shit?
A closing disclaimer: I do not claim expertise in anything other than making sense of sh*t, and in that realm I have logged a good chunk of my lifetime.
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