tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154450673364654394.post3599980720230754898..comments2024-03-03T20:07:36.541-08:00Comments on VISTA Expertise Weblog: It's the Culture, Stupid!Rick Marshallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01707062453047354335noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154450673364654394.post-50217789652155502202010-03-05T10:08:52.690-08:002010-03-05T10:08:52.690-08:00Dear Rodney,
Yes, I too often wonder about this.
...Dear Rodney,<br /><br />Yes, I too often wonder about this.<br /><br />I believe the more obvious but smaller cause is a misapplied notion of pragmatism that makes people think they can put off wisdom until later to focus on getting things done now. The obvious problem is how is one to know which things should be done if one has poor judgment?<br /><br />The less obvious but larger cause, I think, is what Heraclitus wrote about twenty-five hundred years ago when he wrote that the Logos (the hidden harmony of the cosmos) is right in front of everyone all the time. They look right at it but they don't see it because of their incredulity. They disbelieve that what steers all things actually does so. They replace the truth about the cosmos with simpler explanations that make them more comfortable, that better fit their past experience.<br /><br />The more successful someone has been in the past outside the VISTA arena, the more likely they are to do this, because they feel naturally enough that their past successes validate their worldview. Of course, since their mental models describe VISTA very poorly, they are frequently running up against situations that they didn't predict. Rather than concluding that their explanations might be too simplistic, they instead try to reinterpret what happened in terms of their faulty models, and when they can't they disregard these situations as anomalies and then do their best to forget about them.<br /><br />When too many expensive failures pile up, they change jobs and move on to things they think they can better manage, leaving chaos and destruction behind them for the next misguided soul to try to deal with. It would be interesting to see what would happen if a top-level manager were prevented from leaving, if he were forced to stay long enough to learn the consequences of his actions so he might have a chance of learning from them and changing strategies.<br /><br />So it is in part the turn-over among the political-appointee layer of management that perpetuates this system by keeping each manager's exposure to VISTA too brief to overturn a lifetime's worth of accumulated confidence. That's a stimulating line of speculation but ultimately futile, because unfortunately VISTA's history demonstrates that when bad managers' noses are rubbed in their past failures in an effort to get them to learn from their mistakes, rather than doing so they insulate themselves from the <em>facts </em>by reorganizing to add more layers of management between themselves and the damage they're causing, and they insulate themselves from <em>responsibility </em>by creating systems of authority that destroy accountability. The end result tends to be an organization with many layers of management in which no can explain who made the bad decisions.<br /><br />The human capacity to disregard reality inspires awe and dismay in any who study it for long.<br /><br />To someone who gets what's going on, it looks like all these people are sleepwalking, but where it gets surreal is that the sleepwalkers are generally in charge and making the decisions.<br /><br />Thus the failures of centralizing VISTA authority lead to further centralization, and the successes of the very different classical VISTA model are waved off as history and therefore irrelevant.<br /><br />As for the solution?<br /><br />Well.<br /><br />I conclude from studying our thirty-three years of VISTA history that no large centralized organization, neither government nor a large corporation, is competent to manage VISTA because sooner or later they will always try to centralize authority over it to fit their own structure. Doing that is committing a primal sin against VISTA that always leads to failure. Always. Since neither the federal government nor any individual corporation will permit itself to be decentralized, VISTA is going to have to be developed elsewhere.<br /><br />I predict the next couple years will be a very interesting time for our community as we proceed to do exactly that.Rick Marshallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01707062453047354335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6154450673364654394.post-69256898433760162182010-01-16T22:21:43.436-08:002010-01-16T22:21:43.436-08:00Do you ever wonder why this has been so hard to fi...Do you ever wonder why this has been so hard to figure out?Rodney H. Kayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10341052836880464907noreply@blogger.com