The Three-A Trap

The Three-A Trap

“No” may be the most important word in our vocabulary, but it is also the most difficult to say well..

When I ask the participants in my executive seminars at Harvard and elsewhere why they find it challenging to say No, the most common answers I receive are:

• I don't want to lose the deal.
• I don't want to spoil the relationship.
• I'm afraid of what they might do to me in retaliation.
• I'll lose my job.
• I feel guilty – I don't want to hurt them.

At the heart of the difficulty in saying No is the tension between exercising your power and tending to your relationship. Exercising your power, while central to the act of saying No, may strain your relationship, whereas tending to your relationship may weaken your power.

There are three common approaches to this power-versus-relationship dilemma:

Accommodate: We Say Yes When We Want to Say No

The first approach is to stress the relationship even if it means sacrificing our key interests. This ts the approach of accommodation. We say Yes when we want to say No.

Accommodation usually means an unhealthy Yes that buys a false temporary peace. I give in to a child's demand for a new toy to avoid feeling guilty that I am denying him something he wants, only to find that it just leads to more and more demands – and both of us being trapped in an endless unhappy loop. When the boss asks you to work over the very weekend that you and your spouse have been planning to get away, you grind your teeth and give in, fearing you will lose that promotion you want, even if your family life suffers. All too often, we go along to get along, even if we know it is not the right decision for us. Our Yes is actually a destructive Yes, for it undermines our deeper interests.

Accommodation can also hurt our organizations. Take an example from Chris, a participant in one of my seminars: “I was working on a huge $150 million deal with colleagues at my company. We had worked very hard on it and thought we had done a good job. Just before the deal was finalized I decided to double-check the numbers one last time. As I did the calculations, it became all too clear that the deal was not going to be profitable for us over the longer term. Because everyone was so excited about it, and people could not wait to make it official, I couldn't bring myself to throw a wrench into the works. So I went along, knowing that the project was bad for us and that I should speak up. Well, the deal happened and, as I had feared, a year later we were cleaning up a huge mess. If I had that situation in front of me now, I have no doubt I would speak up. It was a costly but valuable lesson.”

Think about Chris's fear of throwing “a wrench into the works” particularly because “everyone was so excited about it.” We all want to be liked and accepted. No one wants  to look like the bad guy. That is what Chris was afraid would happen if he brought up the uncomfortable facts. Everyone's excitement would turn into anger against him, or so he feared. So he proceeded to OK a dal that he and others later came to greatly regret.

There is a saying that half our problems today come from saying Yes when we should be saying No. The price of saying Yes when we should be saying No has never been higher.

We say No when we want to say Yes. Illustration by Elena.

Attack: We Say No Poorly

The opposite of accommodation is to attack. We use our power without concern for the relationship. If accommodation is driven by fear, attack is driven by anger. We may feel angry at the other for their hurtful behavior, or offended by an unreasonable demand, or simply frustrated by the situation. Naturally we lash out and attack – we say No in a way that is hurtful to the other and destructive of our relationship. To quote one of my favorite lines by Ambrose Bierce: “Speak when you are angry, and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

Consider what happened in one large business dealing between a state government and a large corporation the state had hired to build and run a computer system to manage the state's payments to the poor, elderly, and sick. A quarter of the way through the year, the computer system had eaten up half of the state's available budget. Naturally fearful that the budget would soon be exhausted, the state officials canceled the contract and took over the project from the company. The officials were angry at the company, and the company managers in turn were angry at the state, each blaming the other for the problem.

The state officials were nevertheless interested in acquiring the computer and its database from the company because of all its valuable information. The estimated value of the computer system was $50 million. To the company, which had no alternative use for the system, the value of the system was nothing if they could not sell it to the state. To the state, the system was easily worth the $50 million because trying to re-create the data might cost them more – and besides, they did not have the time. Normally, an agreement would not have been at all hard to reach since it was in the interest of both sides. However, because each side's anger led them to attack with destructive Nos, the negotiations descended into finger-pointing. Each side stood up for itself by attacking the other. The result was no agreement and $50 million in value going up in smoke. The years later, the state and the company remained locked in litigation, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on legal expenses. Both sides ended up losing heavily.

Many of our problems come from saying Yes when we should be saying No, surely just as many come from saying No but saying it poorly as the state government and its corporate supplier did. We live in a world in which conflict is ubiquitous – at home, at work, and in the larger society. Think of family feuds, bitter strikes, boardroom fights, or bloody wars. Each time people attack each other, what message are they really delivering? At the heart of every destructive conflict in the world, small or large, is a No. What is terrorism, the great threat of today, if not a terrible way of saying No?

We say No poorly! Photograph by Elena.

Avoid: We Say Nothing at All

A third common approach is avoidance. We don't say Yes and we don't say No; we say nothing at all. Avoidance is an exceedingly common response to conflicts today, particularly within families or organizations. Because we are afraid of offending others and drawing their anger and disapproval, we say nothing, hoping that the problem will go away even though we know it will not. We sit at the dinner table with our partner in cold silence. We pretend that nothing is bothering us at work when in fact we are seething with anger at our co-worker's behaviour. We ignore the injustice and abuse inflicted on others around us.

Avoidance can be costly not only to our personal health, producing high blood pressure and ulcers, but also to our organization's health, as problems fester until they become unavoidable crises.

Avoidance, in whatever domain of life, is deadening. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The Combination

The three A's – accommodation, attack and avoidance – are not just three separate approaches. Usually, one spills over into the other, resulting in what I call the three-A trap.

We all too often start by accommodating the other. Then, naturally, we begin to feel resentful. After suppressing our feelings for a while, there comes a point when we suddenly explode, only to feel guilty afterward at the destructive impact of our attack. So we lapse back into accommodation or avoidance, ignoring the problem and hoping it will disappear. We are like a mouse caught in a maze, rushing from one box to another but never getting to the cheese.

All three approaches were at work in the crises that hit Royal Dutch Shell in April 2004, when it was revealed to have over-reported its oil reserves by a whopping 20 percent. The company's public reputation was damaged, and its credit rating was reduced, while the chairman, the head of exploration, and the chief financial officer all lost their jobs.

The reason for the false reporting was the chairman's insistence that a barrel in oil reserves be recorded for every barrel pumped out of the ground – to which no one had the courage to say No, despite the clear evidence that what he was demanding was insupportable. Shell's head of exploration tried to raise the alarm but, pressured by the chairman, publicly accommodated even if he privately bristled. The tensions boiled over a year later when, after the chairman gave him a negative personnel evaluation, he counterattacked with a blistering e-mail message that surfaced publicly: “I am becoming sick and tired of lying about the extent of our reserves issues and the downward revisions that need to be done because of far too aggressive/optimistic bookings.”

While the chairman attacked and the head of exploration alternated between accommodation and attack, the chief financial officer resorted to avoidance, hoping that somehow the problem would go away. But it didn't and that somehow the problem would go away. But it didn't and, in the end, resulted in a huge mess with severe consequences for all involved.

We say nothing at all. Photograph by Elena.

Lion, panther, jaguar, tiger

Lion, panther, jaguar, tiger

Lions are social animals that live in prides, in which the females do most of the hunting. They inhabit open plains, though their once vast range is now reduced to the savannas of Africa. Lions are often followed by scavengers from vultures to hyenas, which has contributed to the idea that lions are kings attended by a court. The male has an enormous head and luxuriant mane, which suggests the sun sending forth rays.

Tigers, by contrast, are usually solitary, and they are found in the jungles of Asia and the forbidding hillsides of Siberia. Though normally shy near human settlements, they will occasionally attack human beings.

Panthers, which are almost identical to leopards apart from the color of their fur, are smaller than either lions or tigers, and they rely more on stealth and speed in hunting. They are able to climb trees, where they can hide meat from scavengers, observe while unnoticed, and pounce suddenly upon their prey. Panthers and leopards are solitary, nocturnal hunters, often associated with chthonic realms.

Even in Paleolithic times, the great cats seem to have had a special religious significance, and they were given a place of honor among the cave paintings of Lascaux in a cavern known as the “Chamber of Felines.” At the dawn of urban civilization, people already thought of these animals as primarily feminine. Our words “female” and “feline” both ultimately come from the Latin “felare”, meaning “to suck”. Several figurines of women, possibly goddesses, accompanied by great cats have been found at Çatal Huyuk in Turkey, the earliest known walled town.

In early pantheons, the great cats are most closely associated with feminine deities. Among the foremost of these was the Egyptian Hathor, who was the goddess of love, dance, feminine arts, but was also capable of great fury. When men rebelled against the sun god Ra, she attacked them as a lioness and soon developed an insatiable thirst for blood. When Ra himself was satisfied that the rebellion had been defeated, she continued to kill, and the gods feared that she would destroy all humankind. They left out bats of red wine, and she drank them, mistaking the liquor for blood, fell asleep, and finally awakened with her anger appeased. Hathor in her incarnation as a furious avenger was known as Sekmet and was depicted with the body of a woman and the head of a lioness. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar, in her capacity as a deity of war, was represented standing upon a lion. Lions were harnessed to the chariot of Cybel, the Syrian goddess who was adopted by the Romans as their Magna Mater.

Male lions, however, are just as common in the visual arts of the ancient world. Both the Egyptians and Mesopotamians placed stone lions as guardians on each side of the doorways to temples and palaces, a practice that eventually spread eastwards all the way to China.

In Sumero-Babylonian animal proverbs, which are among the very earliest literary works to have survived, the lion is already established as the king of beasts. This motif soon became one of the most widely established literary conventions, found in fables attributed to the semi-historical Aesop. The lion often appears as a figure of brute power that terrorizes other animals, and the sly fox in one fables observes that many tracks lead into his cave but non lead out. The lion is not always dominant, however, and in another fable the ass and other animals he once tormented beat the aged lion. In African legends as well, the majestic lion frequently falls victim to weaker but cleverer creatures such as the hare. The motif of a lion as monarch has been used in the Hindu-Persian Pancatantra, the Medieval European stories of Renard the Fox, the Narnia stories by C. S. Lewis, and countless other works throughout the world.

(From The mythical zoo by Boria Sax).

Leopard in the Toronto Zoo. Photo by Elena.

Bear in Myth and Legend

Bear in Myth and Legend

By Boria Sax, excerpt from The Mythical Zoo, Animals in Myth, Legend and Literature.

Of all animals, the bear is probably the one that most clearly resembles human beings in appearance. Even apes cannot stand fully upright, and only walk with difficulty. The bear, however, can run on two legs almost as well as a human. Like a person, a bear looks straight ahead, but the expression of bears are not easy for us to read. Often the wide eyes of a bear suggest perplexity, making it appear that the bear is a human being whose form has mysteriously been altered. Bears, however, are generally far larger and stronger than people, so they could easily be taken for giants.

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of bears is their ability to hibernate and then reemerge at the end of winter, which suggests death and resurrection. In part because bears give birth during hibernation, they have been associated with mother goddesses. The descent into caverns suggests an intimacy with the earth and with vegetation, and bears are also reputed to have special knowledge of herbs.

At Drachenloch, in a cave high in the Swiss Alps, skulls of the cave bear have been found facing the entrance in what appears to be a very deliberate arrangement. Some anthropologists believe this is a shrine consecrated to the bear by Neanderthals, which would make it the earliest know place of worship. Others dispute the claim; true or not, the very idea is testimony to the enormous power that the figure of the bear has over the human imagination.

The cult of the bear is widespread, almost universal, among people of the Far North, where the bear is both the most powerful predator and the most important food animal. Perhaps the principal example of this cult today is the one followed by the Ainu, the earliest inhabitants of Japan. They traditionally adopt a young bear, raise it as a pet, and then ceremoniously sacrifice the animal. Eskimo legends tell of humans learning to hunt from the polar bear. For the Inuit of Labrador, the polar bear is a form of the Great Spriti, Tuurngasuk. The name of Arthur, the legendary king of Britain, derives from “Artus,” which originally meant “bear”.

The Great Golden Bear overtaking the Transit Commission System Map. Photo taken by Elena.

Countless myths and legends reflect an intimacy between human beings and bears. The Koreans, for example, traditionally believe that they are descended from a bear. As the story goes, the tiger and the female bear had watched humans from a distance, and they became curious. As they talked together on a mountainside one day, both decided that they would like to become human. An oracle instructed them to first eat twenty-one cloves of garlic, and then remain in a cave for one month. They both did as instructed, but after a while the tiger became restless and left the cave. The mother bear remained, and at the end of a month she emerged as a beautiful woman. The son of Heaven, Han Woon, fell in love her and had a child with her., Tan Koon, who is the ancestor of the Koreans.

The Greek deity Artemis, whose name literally means “bear”, was the goddess of the moon, the hunt, and animals. The bear was also sacred to Diana, her Roman equivalent. In a story from the Roman poet Ovid, the god Jupiter disguised himself as Duana, and then raped her nymph companion Callisto. On realizing that Calliston was pregnant, Diana banished the young girl from her presence. Eventually Callisto gave birth to a boy named Arcas. Juno, the wife of Jupiter, turned Callisto into a bear and forced her to roam the forest in perpetual fear. Arcas grew to be a young man. He went hunting in the forest, saw his mother, and raised his bow to shoot her. At that moment, Jupiter looked down, took pity on his former mistress, and brought both mother and son up to Heaven, where they became the constellation of the great and little bear. This is only one version of the story among many, but the Arcadians traditionally trace their origin to Callisto and her son.

The ancient Hebrews, who were herders, regarded carnivorous animals as unclean, and the bear was no exception. In the Bible, the young David protected his flock against bears (1 Samuel 17:34). The bear became a scourge of God when small boys followed the prophet Elisha and made fun of his bald head. Elisha cursed them, and two she-bears came out of the woods and killed the children (2 Kings 2:23-24). According to tradition, however, Elisha was later punished with illness for his deed.

The Tingit and many other Indian tribes on the northwest coast of the North American continent have told stories of a young woman who was lost in the woods and was befriended by a bear. At first she was afraid, but the bear was kindly and taught her the ways of the forest. Eventually she became his wife. She grew thick hair and hunted like a bear. When the couple had children, she at first tried to teach them the ways of both bears and human beings. Her human family, however, would not accept the marriage, and her brothers killed her husband, whereupon she broke completely with the ways of humans.

No longer greatly feared, the bear has become a symbol of vulnerability. Everybody in the United States who was born before the 1970s or so has seen posters with Smokey the Bear, who was created during World War II to warn people that Japanese shelling might begin a conflagration in the woods of America. When the war ended, the United States Forest Service retained Smokey as a symbol in a campaign to prevent the careless ignition of forest fires. Far from being bestial, he has a rather parental image. He wears human clothes and a forester's hat. His facial expression is mature, friendly, and a little melancholy. Yet if Smokey seems almost absurdly civilized, his role remains that of bears since archaic times – protector of the wild. 

The enormous size of the bear, together with its similarity to human beings, often makes it an object of both awe and derision. Photograph by Elena.

Organic Bridges

Organic Bridges

The Nature of Things – the secret life of Inanimate Objects by Lyall Watson

Long before the circulatory system was described and understood, it was noticed that a loss ob blood resulted in a loss of vitality. Blood therefore must be the vital essence, and life, it was assumed, could be given or transferred with the help of some of this magic ingredient. Hence the Aboriginal practice of opening a vein to let blood drip on to a symbolic stone churinga, ensuring the the quickening and increase of totemic animals such as the kangaroo; the the ratification of the Mosaic covenant with God by the sprinkling on an altar of the blood of a sacrificial ox; and the taboo, still common in many parts of Africa, against taking first fruits until the vitality of the entire crop has been guaranteed by making a bloody oblation in the fields.

The assumption in each case is that blood animates, validates or vitalizes that on which it is shed, bringing the dead to life. The sacrificial victims of blood donors were invariably male. They still are. When a new house or shrine is built in West Africa a cock is killed and its body put into the main posthole. Stone-masons in Greece shed a ritual drop of blood into the foundations of a new home. And constructors and architects everywhere take part in “topping out” ceremonies when a project nears completion. Given that such rituals include symbolic sacrifice in the form of split red wine, or the actual beheading of a billy goat, talk of a building “getting topped” seems singularly appropriate.

During work on a Tudor house in London in 1963 a bricked-up recess was found to contain the bodies of four cockerels, two of which had been decapitated and two walled-in alive. Cats too were deliberately entombed, sometimes with a mouse or a bird for company, once in the roof of a church being restored by Sir Christopher Wren in 1691. Other organic charms concealed in buildings include old shoes on over seven hundred sites from Turkey to Australia, with a date range from the thirteenth century to 1935. All are men's shoes, presumably belonging to the builders, but always set with obvious care into their hiding places. Some are ritually marked or deliberately mutilated with mystic symbols, and a few somewhat disturbing examples are still attached to the feet of their owners.

It is interesting how often buildings, ships, roads and bridges seem still to take human toll just as the work on them is coming to an end, almost as though they “demand” a suitable sacrifice. Managers in the construction business recognize the phenomenon of “last day injuries”. And folklore in the industry is full of tales of missing workers whose bodies turn up later when ships are being demolished in the scrapyard, or bridge supports damaged by earthquake or flood. Then the deaths are discovered and rationalized by talk of laborers on their lunch breaks crawling into the cavities of double hulls or the shelter of wooden casements for a sleep, just before the last rivets are shot or the first concrete poured into place. But it is ominous how often River Kelang in Malaysia neared completion in the 1960s. And a measure of how seriously the question is still considered is that workers on project of the English Channel, while deploring the death of two of their fellows, should admit to a feeling of relief that at least “the bugger has had his taste of blood.”

Our daily lives are filled with obvious example of the organic bridge in action. Picture by Elena.

Social Life of Things

The Social Life of Things

The Nature of Things – the secret life of Inanimate Objects by Lyall Watson

Social Notions

When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a child, playing in the lot behind his home in Temuco, he discovered a hole in a fence board:

“I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared – a tiny hand of a boy about my age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvellous white toy sheep. The sheep's wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pine cone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep. I never saw either the hand of the boy again. And I have never seen a ship like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now... whenever I pass a toyshop, I look furtively into the window. It's no use. They don't make sheep like that anymore.”

Such things are super-notions, objects given value which is independent of their substance or appeal. Value by association. Very often they are gifts. And a real gift, almost by definition, cannot be static. Historically it is something that was intended to be shared, to lead a life of its own. Gifts, to be true to their nature, must move.

Some forms of property stand still, they resist momentum, like houses which exercise extraordinary control over the destiny of certain families. True gifts are not like that, they are not supposed to be kept, but to be given away again as soon as possible. Everywhere that gift rituals exist, those involved recognize that the first movement of a new thing is relatively weak. It is with the movement through the first recipient to a second and a third that an object begins to acquire real potency. Gifts are social things, they need to go out a lot, and those that are prevented from doing so seem to lose a good part of their national identity.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski recalled a visit to Edinburgh Castle where he was shown the Scottish crown jewels, and told how they had been taken away on several occasions by English kings and queens, and how pleased the nation was to have them back now, safe under lock and key, where no one could touch them again. Malinowski was appalled and could not help thinking “how ugly, useless, ungainly, even tawdry they were”, in comparison to a collection of “thin red strings, and big white, worn-out objects, clumsy to sight and greasy to touch” he had seen not long before on islands off the eastern tip of New Guinea. Malinowski spent the years of the First World War working among the Massim people who live in a spray of islands scattered across the Coral and Solomon Seas. They share a language and most of a common Melanesian culture, but are untied principally by an astonishingly ceremonial exchange of gifts known as the kula. The complex ritual – no one ever things of it in terms of trade – revolves around two main categories of gift. One is known as bagi and consists of small broken pieces of bright red shell taken from Chama imbricata, a frilly rock clam sometimes known as a “jewel box”. These are drilled and strung together into distinctive necklaces on cords of natural fibre decorated with smaller red shell beads. The other gift is called mwali and is a pair of armbands made from giant leopard cone shells, Conus leopards, by breaking off the blunt caps and narrow bases and polishing the central cylinders into shiny white bands like large napkin rings.

Candles are the most common offerings in churches, temples and shrines, where their immolation seems to be understood ad a form of sacrifice. Photo by Elena.