Showing posts with label dissent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dissent. Show all posts
Sunday, 28 July 2024
Thursday, 8 July 2021
Friday, 18 June 2021
Friday, 4 June 2021
Have you seen Groupthink in action?
Tim Harford in The FT
In his acid parliamentary testimony last week, Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, blamed a lot of different people and things for the UK’s failure to fight Covid-19 — including “groupthink”.
Groupthink is unlikely to fight back. It already has a terrible reputation, not helped by its Orwellian ring, and the term is used so often that I begin to fear that we have groupthink about groupthink.
So let’s step back. Groupthink was made famous in a 1972 book by psychologist Irving Janis. He was fascinated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, in which a group of perfectly intelligent people in John F Kennedy’s administration made a series of perfectly ridiculous decisions to support a botched coup in Cuba. How had that happened? How can groups of smart people do such stupid things?
An illuminating metaphor from Scott Page, author of The Difference, a book about the power of diversity, is that of the cognitive toolbox. A good toolbox is not the same thing as a toolbox full of good tools: two dozen top-quality hammers will not do the job. Instead, what’s needed is variety: a hammer, pliers, a saw, a choice of screwdrivers and more.
This is obvious enough and, in principle, it should be obvious for decision-making too: a group needs a range of ideas, skills, experience and perspectives. Yet when you put three hammers on a hiring committee, they are likely to hire another hammer. This “homophily” — hanging out with people like ourselves — is the original sin of group decision-making, and there is no mystery as to how it happens.
But things get worse. One problem, investigated by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie in their book Wiser, is that groups intensify existing biases. One study looked at group discussions about then-controversial topics (climate change, same-sex marriage, affirmative action) by groups in left-leaning Boulder, Colorado, and in right-leaning Colorado Springs.
Each group contained six individuals with a range of views, but after discussing those views with each other, the Boulder groups bunched sharply to the left and the Colorado Springs groups bunched similarly to the right, becoming both more extreme and more uniform within the group. In some cases, the emergent view of the group was more extreme than the prior view of any single member.
One reason for this is that when surrounded with fellow travellers, people became more confident in their own views. They felt reassured by the support of others.
Meanwhile, people with contrary views tended to stay silent. Few people enjoy being publicly outnumbered. As a result, a false consensus emerged, with potential dissenters censoring themselves and the rest of the group gaining a misplaced sense of unanimity.
The Colorado experiments studied polarisation but this is not just a problem of polarisation. Groups tend to seek common ground on any subject from politics to the weather, a fact revealed by “hidden profile” psychology experiments. In such experiments, groups are given a task (for example, to choose the best candidate for a job) and each member of the group is given different pieces of information.
One might hope that each individual would share everything they knew, but instead what tends to happen is that people focus, redundantly, on what everybody already knows, rather than unearthing facts known to only one individual. The result is a decision-making disaster.
These “hidden profile” studies point to the heart of the problem: group discussions aren’t just about sharing information and making wise decisions. They are about cohesion — or, at least, finding common ground to chat about.
Reading Charlan Nemeth’s No! The Power of Disagreement In A World That Wants To Get Along, one theme is that while dissent leads to better, more robust decisions, it also leads to discomfort and even distress. Disagreement is valuable but agreement feels so much more comfortable.
There is no shortage of solutions to the problem of groupthink, but to list them is to understand why they are often overlooked. The first and simplest is to embrace decision-making processes that require disagreement: appoint a “devil’s advocate” whose job is to be a contrarian, or practise “red-teaming”, with an internal group whose task is to play the role of hostile actors (hackers, invaders or simply critics) and to find vulnerabilities. The evidence suggests that red-teaming works better than having a devil’s advocate, perhaps because dissent needs strength in numbers.
A more fundamental reform is to ensure that there is a real diversity of skills, experience and perspectives in the room: the screwdrivers and the saws as well as the hammers. This seems to be murderously hard.
When it comes to social interaction, the aphorism is wrong: opposites do not attract. We unconsciously surround ourselves with like-minded people.
Indeed, the process is not always unconscious. Boris Johnson’s cabinet could have contained Greg Clark and Jeremy Hunt, the two senior Conservative backbenchers who chair the committees to which Dominic Cummings gave his evidence about groupthink. But it does not. Why? Because they disagree with him too often.
The right groups, with the right processes, can make excellent decisions. But most of us don’t join groups to make better decisions. We join them because we want to belong. Groupthink persists because groupthink feels good.
Wednesday, 15 April 2020
Friday, 15 June 2018
“Subhashit Vidya Vivadaya…” - The Deep Roots of RSS's Anti-Intellectualism and its Disregard for Dissent
The history of the organisation makes it clear that its ranks have been taught to develop an aversion to fresh thinking. Mohan Bhagwat's comments confirmed that this is the case last week when Pranab Mukherjee attended an RSS event in Nagpur.
Vidyadhar Date in The Wire
The antipathy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to liberal values is well known. But even then, it is astonishing that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat should have condemned as wicked those who use vidya or knowledge for dissent.
He did this in the presence of former president Pranab Mukherjee at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 7 by quoting a Sanskrit saying that begins, “Subhashit Vidya Vivadaya…” . This observation seems to have attracted little attention in the media.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat speaks as former president Pranab Mukherjee looks on, June 7, 2018. Credit: PTI
What an unhappy contrast Bhagwat’s observation makes to the understanding of vidya by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, two of the foremost and relevant social thinkers of Maharashtra.
Back in the 19th century Phule had said, “Vidyevina Mati Geli…”, essentially that a lack of education leads to lack of wisdom, which leads to lack of morals, which leads to lack of progress, which leads to lack of money, which leads to the oppression of the lower classes (see what havoc lack of education can cause).
And Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s main exhortation to the downtrodden masses was: “Educate, Agitate, Organise“.
So, for these wise men, education and knowledge was the basic need for the common people. For the RSS, an enlightened mass of people are a severe threat to the established order. This is perhaps why it fears dissent and harbours a hostility towards it.
Maharashtra has a formidable tradition of learning and dissent in the modern period since the 19th century and it is not surprising that the RSS should be so uneasy with it. Lokmanya Tilak, though seen by many as a conservative, also had strong working class sympathies, so much so that Shapurji Saklatvala, a Communist MP of Britain, wrote to him in 1920 to launch an international communist labour party in India, (as quoted in an article on Karl Marx and class conflict by Prof J.V. Naik, the well known history researcher).
V.K. Rajwade, a fiercely independent historian in the early 20 century wrote a radical history of marriage in ancient India. The then young Communist S.A. Dange thought it was in line with Engels’s treatise Family, Private Property and the State. Rajwade also wandered all over Maharashtra at his own expense, collecting valuable records that became a great source for other historians.
Such was the passion for knowledge of S.V. Ketkar, a sociologist trained in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, that he single-handedly compiled an Encyclopedia in Marathi, also working as its publisher and salesman. For this he came to known as Dnyankoshkar .
The anti-intellectualism of the RSS and its role as a counter revolutionary force in politics and cultural life needs to be seen in this light.
Much of the thinking and teaching of cadres in its set-up is extremely uninspiring, monotonous, repetitive and boring as one of its former insiders, S.H. Deshpande, an ex-professor in the department of economics in Mumbai University has recorded in his writings of his days in the RSS. In contrast to the RSS leadership, V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva exponent, at least had a highly poetic imagination and was a creative writer of no small standing. Some of his poems sung by Lata Mangeshkar, including one about the longing for a return to the motherland, are moving.
V.D. Savarkar.
In contrast to the RSS’s aversion for fresh thinking, Savarkar emphasised the acquisition of knowledge. He said the moderates had produced many men of eminence. Can you name among you any man of the calibre of Gopal Krishna Gokhale or R.C. Dutt, he asked his followers.
Like Deshpande another dissenter was Raghunath Vishnu Ranade, (who happens to be my maternal uncle), political science professor who was close to M.S. Golwalkar, the then RSS chief, before he turned into a Marxist and a supporter of all progressive causes.
The leading light of the RSS in the thirties, Gopal alias Balaji Huddar, rebelled totally, became a Communist, fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco’s fascism in 1937, was imprisoned there for six months and had assumed the name of John Smith. He fought in the international battalion named after Sakaltvala, who had passed away a year earlier. Huddar had gone to Spain after studying in London and when he returned he was publicly felicitated in London at a meeting presided over by no less than Rajni Palme Dutt, a theoretician of the Communist Party of Britain and author of several books including India Today. No wonder the RSS does not like internationalism and dissent. (Huddar’s son, an engineer in the electricity board, lived in the same housing colony as mine in Nagpur during my younger days – he used to talk to me about his father.)
In contrast to Balaji Huddar, another Nagpur leader, B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, embraced the fascists and had a personal meeting with Mussolini in Italy in 1931. Nehru had studiously avoided meeting Mussolini during his visit to Europe.
In contrast to men like Moonje, the Communists produced a galaxy of stalwarts, internationalists and men of science. Dr Gangadhar Adhikari, a founder of the Communist party in India, had done his Ph. D. in chemistry in Germany and drawn inspiration from Einstein and Max Planck.
His nephew Dr Hemu Adhikari, who passed away in Mumbai last month, was a leading campaigner for promoting a scientific temper and rationality; he was a prominent stage and film actor and also a scientist in BARC, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. So it was natural that he should have played a prominent role in Marxist Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo. Dissent is at the core of the play.
Hemu Adhikari was also very particular that one should not only acquire knowledge of science and other subjects, one should also develop a scientific temper. That is why he was troubled when some of his scientist colleagues behaved unscientifically during the solar eclipse, considering it as inauspicious, closed their windows.
One organisation which came close to rivalling the RSS in terms of cadres and drills and shakhas was the Rashtra Seva Dal formed by socialists like N.G. Goray , Shirubhai Limaye, V.M. Hardikar and S.M.Joshi in 1941. Congress and socialists leaders woke up when their own children began getting attracted to the RSS and started attending shakhas.
Some socialists spread out to other states to launch work there like Bapu Kaldate went to Bihar where picked up Bhojpuri. Sane Guruji, a revered Gandhian writer, did a lot of work for the Dal with his satyagraha for entry of Dalits to the Pandharpur temple .
The Dal had a rich cultural repertoire with many prominent figures including poet Vasant Bapat, P.L. Deshpande, Nilu Phule and it influenced many including actor Smita Patil.
However, some Congressmen, who wanted to take over the Dal, were biased against the socialists and Morarji Desai, the then home minister of the Bombay state, placed curbs on the activities of the Dal in 1947 and the organisation subsequently went into a gradual decline.
In contrast to the RSS, Phule’s excellent movement was aptly named Satyashodhak Chalwal, dedicated to the pursuit of truth with an independent mind, education and social reform. But then some people converted the movement into a movement against Brahmins, not Brahminism and it was led by the upper class who kept out Dalits. That shattered the dream of creating a new society based on social and economic equality.
The RSS stands in opposition to this fine tradition of progressive thinking and debate in Maharashtra. By speaking out against dissent so openly, Bhagwat made it clear, even before waiting to see what Pranab Mukherjee would say, that he had no interest in debate and was not open to other ideas. Instead of talking about social ills, the RSS has closed all its windows.
Vidyadhar Date in The Wire
The antipathy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to liberal values is well known. But even then, it is astonishing that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat should have condemned as wicked those who use vidya or knowledge for dissent.
He did this in the presence of former president Pranab Mukherjee at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 7 by quoting a Sanskrit saying that begins, “Subhashit Vidya Vivadaya…” . This observation seems to have attracted little attention in the media.
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat speaks as former president Pranab Mukherjee looks on, June 7, 2018. Credit: PTI
What an unhappy contrast Bhagwat’s observation makes to the understanding of vidya by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Dr B.R. Ambedkar, two of the foremost and relevant social thinkers of Maharashtra.
Back in the 19th century Phule had said, “Vidyevina Mati Geli…”, essentially that a lack of education leads to lack of wisdom, which leads to lack of morals, which leads to lack of progress, which leads to lack of money, which leads to the oppression of the lower classes (see what havoc lack of education can cause).
And Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s main exhortation to the downtrodden masses was: “Educate, Agitate, Organise“.
So, for these wise men, education and knowledge was the basic need for the common people. For the RSS, an enlightened mass of people are a severe threat to the established order. This is perhaps why it fears dissent and harbours a hostility towards it.
Maharashtra has a formidable tradition of learning and dissent in the modern period since the 19th century and it is not surprising that the RSS should be so uneasy with it. Lokmanya Tilak, though seen by many as a conservative, also had strong working class sympathies, so much so that Shapurji Saklatvala, a Communist MP of Britain, wrote to him in 1920 to launch an international communist labour party in India, (as quoted in an article on Karl Marx and class conflict by Prof J.V. Naik, the well known history researcher).
V.K. Rajwade, a fiercely independent historian in the early 20 century wrote a radical history of marriage in ancient India. The then young Communist S.A. Dange thought it was in line with Engels’s treatise Family, Private Property and the State. Rajwade also wandered all over Maharashtra at his own expense, collecting valuable records that became a great source for other historians.
Such was the passion for knowledge of S.V. Ketkar, a sociologist trained in the US in the first decade of the 20th century, that he single-handedly compiled an Encyclopedia in Marathi, also working as its publisher and salesman. For this he came to known as Dnyankoshkar .
The anti-intellectualism of the RSS and its role as a counter revolutionary force in politics and cultural life needs to be seen in this light.
Much of the thinking and teaching of cadres in its set-up is extremely uninspiring, monotonous, repetitive and boring as one of its former insiders, S.H. Deshpande, an ex-professor in the department of economics in Mumbai University has recorded in his writings of his days in the RSS. In contrast to the RSS leadership, V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva exponent, at least had a highly poetic imagination and was a creative writer of no small standing. Some of his poems sung by Lata Mangeshkar, including one about the longing for a return to the motherland, are moving.
V.D. Savarkar.
In contrast to the RSS’s aversion for fresh thinking, Savarkar emphasised the acquisition of knowledge. He said the moderates had produced many men of eminence. Can you name among you any man of the calibre of Gopal Krishna Gokhale or R.C. Dutt, he asked his followers.
Like Deshpande another dissenter was Raghunath Vishnu Ranade, (who happens to be my maternal uncle), political science professor who was close to M.S. Golwalkar, the then RSS chief, before he turned into a Marxist and a supporter of all progressive causes.
The leading light of the RSS in the thirties, Gopal alias Balaji Huddar, rebelled totally, became a Communist, fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco’s fascism in 1937, was imprisoned there for six months and had assumed the name of John Smith. He fought in the international battalion named after Sakaltvala, who had passed away a year earlier. Huddar had gone to Spain after studying in London and when he returned he was publicly felicitated in London at a meeting presided over by no less than Rajni Palme Dutt, a theoretician of the Communist Party of Britain and author of several books including India Today. No wonder the RSS does not like internationalism and dissent. (Huddar’s son, an engineer in the electricity board, lived in the same housing colony as mine in Nagpur during my younger days – he used to talk to me about his father.)
In contrast to Balaji Huddar, another Nagpur leader, B.S. Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, embraced the fascists and had a personal meeting with Mussolini in Italy in 1931. Nehru had studiously avoided meeting Mussolini during his visit to Europe.
In contrast to men like Moonje, the Communists produced a galaxy of stalwarts, internationalists and men of science. Dr Gangadhar Adhikari, a founder of the Communist party in India, had done his Ph. D. in chemistry in Germany and drawn inspiration from Einstein and Max Planck.
His nephew Dr Hemu Adhikari, who passed away in Mumbai last month, was a leading campaigner for promoting a scientific temper and rationality; he was a prominent stage and film actor and also a scientist in BARC, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. So it was natural that he should have played a prominent role in Marxist Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo. Dissent is at the core of the play.
Hemu Adhikari was also very particular that one should not only acquire knowledge of science and other subjects, one should also develop a scientific temper. That is why he was troubled when some of his scientist colleagues behaved unscientifically during the solar eclipse, considering it as inauspicious, closed their windows.
One organisation which came close to rivalling the RSS in terms of cadres and drills and shakhas was the Rashtra Seva Dal formed by socialists like N.G. Goray , Shirubhai Limaye, V.M. Hardikar and S.M.Joshi in 1941. Congress and socialists leaders woke up when their own children began getting attracted to the RSS and started attending shakhas.
Some socialists spread out to other states to launch work there like Bapu Kaldate went to Bihar where picked up Bhojpuri. Sane Guruji, a revered Gandhian writer, did a lot of work for the Dal with his satyagraha for entry of Dalits to the Pandharpur temple .
The Dal had a rich cultural repertoire with many prominent figures including poet Vasant Bapat, P.L. Deshpande, Nilu Phule and it influenced many including actor Smita Patil.
However, some Congressmen, who wanted to take over the Dal, were biased against the socialists and Morarji Desai, the then home minister of the Bombay state, placed curbs on the activities of the Dal in 1947 and the organisation subsequently went into a gradual decline.
In contrast to the RSS, Phule’s excellent movement was aptly named Satyashodhak Chalwal, dedicated to the pursuit of truth with an independent mind, education and social reform. But then some people converted the movement into a movement against Brahmins, not Brahminism and it was led by the upper class who kept out Dalits. That shattered the dream of creating a new society based on social and economic equality.
The RSS stands in opposition to this fine tradition of progressive thinking and debate in Maharashtra. By speaking out against dissent so openly, Bhagwat made it clear, even before waiting to see what Pranab Mukherjee would say, that he had no interest in debate and was not open to other ideas. Instead of talking about social ills, the RSS has closed all its windows.
Tuesday, 27 December 2016
What is Strategic Thinking
Ron Carucci in Harvard Business Review
It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.
How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?
In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.
Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.
Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.
Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
It’s a common complaint among top executives: “I’m spending all my time managing trivial and tactical problems, and I don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.” And yet when I ask my executive clients, “If I cleared your calendar for an entire day to free you up to be ‘more strategic,’ what would you actually do?” most have no idea. I often get a shrug and a blank stare in response. Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Others assume that watching TED talks or lectures by futurists will help them think more strategically.
How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?
In our 10-year longitudinal study of over 2,700 newly appointed executives, 67% of them said they struggled with letting go of work from previous roles. More than half (58%) said they were expected to know details about work and projects they believed were beneath their level, and more than half also felt they were involved in decisions that those below them should be making. This suggests that the problem of too little strategic leadership may be as much a function of doing as of thinking.
Rich Horwath, CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, found in his research that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness. Nearly all leaders (96%) claimed they lacked time for strategic thinking, again, because they were too busy putting out fires. Both issues appear to be symptoms masking a fundamental issue. In my experience helping executives succeed at the top of companies, the best content for great strategic thinking comes right from one’s own job.
Here are three practical ways I’ve helped executives shift their roles to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs.
Identify the strategic requirements of your job. One chief operating officer I worked with was appointed to her newly created role with the expressed purpose of integrating two supply chain organizations resulting from an acquisition. Having risen through the supply chain ranks, she spent most of her time reacting to operational missteps and customer complaints. Her adept problem-solving skill had trained the organization to look to her for quick decisions to resolve issues. I asked her, “What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?” She answered readily, “To take out duplicate costs from redundant work and to get the organization on one technology platform to manage our supply chain.” Her succinct clarity surprised even her, though she quickly realized how little she was engaged in activities that would reach that outcome. We broke the mandate into four focus areas for her organization, realigned her team to include leaders from both organizations, and ensured all meetings and decisions she was involved in directly connected to her mandate.
Unfortunately, for many executives, the connection between their role and the strategic contribution they should make is not so obvious. As quoted in Horwath’s study, Harvard Business School professor David Collis says, “It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else.” He also cites Roger Martin’s research, which found that 43% of managers cannot state their own strategy. Executives with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction. In some cases, shedding the collection of bad habits that have consumed how they embody their role will be their greatest challenge to embodying strategic thinking.
Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.
This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.
For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.
Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.
Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.
That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.
To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.
Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.
Uncover patterns to focus resource investments. Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. For many new executives, the large pile of resources they now get to direct has far greater consequence than anything they’ve allocated before. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm. Too often, immediate crises cause executives to whiplash people and money.
This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.
For some, the word insight may conjure up notions of breakthrough ideas or “aha moments.” But studying basic patterns within available data gives simple insights that pinpoint what truly sets a company apart. In the case of the supply chain executive above, rather than a blanket cost reduction, she uncovered patterns within her data that identified and protected the most competitive work of her organization: getting products to customers on time and accurately. She isolated those activities from work that added little value or was redundant, which is where she focused her cost-cutting efforts. She was able to dramatically reduce costs while improving the customer’s experience.
Such focus helps leaders allocate money and people with confidence. They know they are working on the right things without reacting to impulsive ideas or distracting minutia.
Invite dissent to build others’ commitment. Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. An executive needs those she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.
That’s far more difficult than it sounds. One study found that only 14% of people understood their company’s strategy and only 24% felt the strategy was linked to their individual accountabilities. Most executives mistakenly assume that repeated explanations through dense PowerPoint presentations are what increases understanding and ownership of strategy.
To the contrary, people’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.
Sound strategic thinking doesn’t have to remain an abstract mystery only a few are able to realize. Despite the common complaint, it’s not the result of making time for it. Executives must extract themselves from day-to-day problems and do the work that aligns their job with the company’s strategy. They need to be armed with insights that predict where best to focus resources. And they need to build a coalition of support by inviting those who must execute to disagree with and improve their strategic thinking. Taking these three practical steps will raise the altitude of executives to the appropriate strategic work of the future, freeing those they lead to direct the operational activities of today.
Monday, 14 March 2016
Lecture on Nationalism at JNU #5 - Nivedita Menon
This attack on Nivedita Menon
Mary E John in The Hindu
A notable feature of the university protests that have rocked the nation in recent times is the prominent presence of women. Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula’s mother Radhika was hounded by the media, and her personal life vilified in the attempt to prove that Rohith was not a Dalit. The faculty members from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who came to the Patiala House courts for JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar’s bail hearing and were attacked by irate ‘patriotic lawyers’ were mostly women. In Allahabad, the first woman president of the Allahabad University Students’ Union, Richa Singh, has faced physical intimidation from her political opponents who are now seeking other ways to oust her from the university. The latest in this series is JNU professor Nivedita Menon against whom a concerted campaign seems to have been launched, including media attacks and malicious police complaints.
One of the events that JNU teachers conducted in solidarity with students in the course of the campaign against JNU as a supposed den of anti-nationals was a series of lectures on nationalism. Professor Menon delivered a lecture in Hindi called “Nation, a daily plebiscite” (see video above) in which she made the argument that the formation of one nation does not automatically end all nationalist aspirations. Drawing attention to histories of nation formation as crucial to understanding present-day conflicts, she also discussed Kashmir’s complicated history of accession to India.
These lectures are available on YouTube, and some days afterwards, a TV channel started a campaign, continuously playing video clips taken out of context (including a clip from a speech at a political event in 2014), calling Prof. Menon anti-national, and creating an atmosphere of threat, intimidation and incitement to mob violence. In addition, according to media reports, two police complaints have been filed against her in Delhi by organisations linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a complaint lodged against her in a court in Kanpur. The complaints against her are, in effect, part of a right-wing offensive to lay claim to nationalism by attacking any mode of dissent as anti-national.
Does this mean that men are ‘patriots’ and women ‘dissenters’? Any such claim is immediately demolished, of course, by the powerful presence of militant right-wing women like Uma Bharti and generations of ‘sadhvis’ known for their incendiary demagoguery, from Rithambhara to Prachi. So there are plenty of women ‘patriots’. The real distinction is that it is those women who lay claim to the legacy of feminism who are being singled out as ‘dissenters’. Why is this happening? Why are feminist scholars like Prof. Menon being targeted? What exactly is Indian feminism and what are the forms of dissent that feminists in India have adopted? How have feminists become leaders in the present struggles over democracy in India and why is this being perceived as dangerous?
Feminism in India
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
First and foremost, feminism in India, going back to the nineteenth century, has never had the luxury to simply be about women. This is because the struggles over women’s wrongs and rights in the Indian context have always been tied to larger issues — to the histories of colonialism and nationalism before Independence; to the meanings of development after 1947; and to the conflicts over democracy today. Feminists have been demonstrating how the hierarchies of gender in India are intertwined with those of caste; how the promises of national development remained unfulfilled for the vast majority of women; and how families have often turned into sites of the worst violence against their very own women.
Second, we as feminists have had to learn over and over again that our movements can only grow if we do not claim immunity from our own tools of critique and dissent. Some of the fiercest debates witnessed in the Indian women’s movement have therefore been internal ones, addressed to each other. Prominent examples of such debates include those over a uniform civil code; over the need and direction for reserved seats for women in Parliament and legislatures; and over how best to combat the scourge of female foeticide.
It is therefore particularly shameful, but also revealing, that sections of the electronic media and countless vicious trolls on social media have tried to instil fear by singling out Prof. Menon among other teachers as an alleged ‘anti-national’. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with her writings should know better. Prof. Menon has drawn from prior scholarship (both in India and abroad) to lay out why, in fact, simple universal theories of women’s subordination will not work in contexts like India. By tracing the effects of colonial rule and the many responses to it, she has demonstrated how both community rights and individual rights have played themselves out in our history, and continue to have a massive impact on women’s equality and freedom to this very day. Some of her finest work takes issue with other feminists in offering a dissenting interpretation of the problems women face. Will a blanket demand for one-third reservation of seats actually be the best strategy for the women’s movement, or should we ‘call the bluff’ of those who demanded a sub-quota? Equally provocatively, might the sheer demand to combat sexual violence against women rebound against the basic freedom from violence that the women’s movement seeks to protect? Such examples could be multiplied. Lest anyone be misled, these are all feminist arguments that work through a form of dissent that simultaneously upholds feminist ways of seeing and feminist forms of struggle.
Does this mean that everything that a scholar like Prof. Menon writes or believes should demand our assent? Not at all. I cannot think of anyone who is more open to disagreement and welcoming of constructive dissent, and who, in fact, encourages this attitude from students and colleagues alike.
An undemocratic mindset
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
That is precisely why we are outraged not by the fact that people disagree with Prof. Menon or want to question her views, but by the mode in which they are choosing to do so. The malicious campaign we have witnessed in recent days is not about expressing dissent; it is about bullying and intimidation. It reveals a deeply undemocratic mindset that offers no arguments of its own, but tries to capture public attention by repeated, sensationalised attacks that work by twisting statements and taking them out of their context. What is truly worrisome is that it does not just stop at this; this campaign goes far beyond the limits of public debate to make opponents fear for their lives by whipping up a frenzy and creating a situation where the laws of the land are seen as irrelevant. These are acts of cowardice, not bravery, least of all acts of heroism in the service of Mother India.
Such campaigns are also revealing because they inadvertently recognise the transformational potential of feminism in India today. For feminism believes that genuine gender equality can only come about where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed for all, and where no other forms of oppression can flourish. This is the legacy that feminists in India have been striving for so long to bring to fruition, and which is therefore perceived as being so dangerous. This is also the tradition that Prof. Menon has embodied with integrity and force. And if there are those who would attack such a feminism, they should at least have the courage to attack us all.
Tuesday, 9 December 2014
Beware Russia’s links with Europe’s right
Moscow is handing cash to the Front National and others in order to exploit popular dissent against the European Union
It sounds like a chapter from a cheesy spy novel: former KGB agent, chucked out of Britain in the 80s, lends a large sum of money to a far-right European party. His goal? To undermine the European Union and consolidate ties between Moscow and the future possible leader of pro-Kremlin France.
In fact this is exactly what’s just happened. The founder of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, borrowed €2m from a Cyprus-based company, Veronisa Holdings,owned by a flamboyant character and cold war operative called Yuri Kudimov.
Kudimov is a former KGB agent turned banker with close links to the Kremlin and the network of big money around it. Back in 1985 Kudimov was based in London. His cover story was that he was a journalist working for a Soviet newspaper; in 1985 the Thatcher government expelled him for alleged spying. (During the same period Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden.)
In Paris, the FN confirmed last week that it had taken a whopping €9.4m (£7.4m) loan from the First Czech Russian bank in Moscow. This loan is logical enough. The FN’s leader, Marine Le Pen, makes no secret of her admiration for Putin; her party has links to senior Kremlin figures including Dmitry Rogozin, now Russia’s deputy prime minister, who in 2005 ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan “Clean Up Moscow’s Trash”. Le Pen defended her decision to take the Kremlin money, complaining that she had been refused her access to capital: “What is scandalous here is that the French banks are not lending.” She also denied reports by the news website Mediapart, which broke the story, that the €9.4m was merely the first instalment of a bigger €40m loan.
The Russian money will fuel Marine Le Pen’s run for the French presidency in two years’ time. Nobody expects her to win, but the FN topped the polls in May’s European elections, winning an unprecedented 25% of the vote; Le Pen’s 25 new MEPs already form a pro-Russian bloc inside the European parliament.
In part, the Moscow loan can be understood as an act of minor and demonstrative revenge. It follows President François Hollande’s decision to postpone the delivery to Moscow of the first of two Mistral helicopter carriers, in a deal worth €1.2bn. His U-turn follows considerable western pressure, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its ongoing covert invasion of eastern Ukraine.
But there is also a more profound and sinister aspect to the Moscow cheque. Since at least 2009 Russia has actively cultivated links with the far right in eastern Europe. It has established ties with Hungary’s Jobbik, Slovakia’s far-right People’s party and Bulgaria’s nationalist, anti-EU Attack movement. Here, political elites have become increasingly sympathetic to pro-Putin views.
According to Political Capital, a Budapest-based research institute which first observed this trend, the Kremlin has recently been wooing the far-right in western Europe as well. In a report in March it argued that Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is now a “phenomenon seen all over Europe”. Moscow’s goal is to promote its economic and political interests – and in particular to ensure the EU remains heavily dependent on Russian gas.
In Soviet times the KGB used “active measures” to sponsor front organisations in the west including pro-Moscow communist parties. The Kremlin didn’t invent Europe’s far-right parties. But in an analogous way Moscow is now lending them support, political and financial, thereby boosting European neo-fascism.
In part this kinship is about ideology or, as Political Capital puts it, “post-communist neo-conservatism”. The European far right and the Kremlin are united by their hostility to the EU. Since becoming president for the third time in 2012, Putin has been busy promoting his vision for a rival Eurasian Union. This is an alternative political bloc meant to encompass now-independent Soviet republics, with Moscow rather than Brussels as the dominant pole.
The Kremlin has also discovered that the western political system is weak, permeable and susceptible to foreign cash. Putin has always believed that European politicians, like Russian ones, can be bought if the money is right. According to US diplomatic cables leaked in 2010, Silvio Berlusconi has benefited “personally and handsomely” from energy deals with Russia; the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Putin’s greatest European ally, sits on the board of the Nord Steam Russian-German gas pipeline.
Far-right and rightwing British politicians, meanwhile, have also expressed their admiration for Russia’s ex-KGB president. In March Nigel Farage named Putin as the world leader he most admires, and praised the “brilliant” way “he handled the whole Syria thing”. In 2011 the BNP’s Nick Griffin went to Moscow to observe Russia’s Duma election. Afterwards he announced that “Russian elections are much fairer than Britain’s”. Last week Griffin tweeted praise for Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language TV propaganda news channel: “RT – For People Who Want the Truth”.
There are many ironies here. In his state of the nation address last Friday, Putin implicitly compared the west to Hitler, and said it was plotting Russia’s dismemberment and collapse. In March Putin defended his land-grab in Crimea by arguing he was rescuing the peninsula from Ukrainian “fascists”. A few weeks later a motley group of radical rightwing European populists turned up in Crimea to watch its hastily arranged “referendum”.
Tactically, Russia is exploiting the popular dissent against the EU – fuelled by both immigration and austerity. But as rightwing movements grow in influence across the continent, Europe must wake up to their insidious means of funding, or risk seeing its own institutions subverted.
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
Police are cracking down on students
Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?
For most of my life student politics has been little more than a joke. Suddenly it's become both serious and admirable
A protester against the proposed closure of the ULU student union last week. Photograph: Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis
Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other "student-union type stuff". Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.
The 24-year-old has since been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn't "engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university". Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out whether that applies to any London college, any British university – or just any institute of higher education anywhere in the world. As full-time head of the University of London's student union, Chessum's job is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his work. But I suppose there's no telling just what threat to law and order might be posed by an over-articulate history graduate.
While we're trawling for the ridiculous, let us remember another incident this summer at the University of London, when a 25-year-old woman was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. That's right: dragged off by the police for writing in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she used PowerPoint.
It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – until you delve into the details. Take the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university staff were filming their own students from a balcony of Senate House (the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately enough). Such surveillance is a recent tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no problem.
That link with the police is becoming increasingly important across more and more of our universities. London students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations while staff comment on the increased police presence around campus. At Sussex, student protests against outsourcing services were broken up this April, when the university called in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A similar thing happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a small number of students occupied one measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies; the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited "health and safety" and called in the police to clear away the young people paying their salaries.
For most of my life, student politics has been little more than a joke – the stuff of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the past few years it has suddenly become both serious and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 against £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that point, both the police and university management have become very jumpy.
For the police, this is part of the age-old work of clamping down on possible sources of civil disobedience. But the motivation for the universities is much more complicated. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market of higher education, when universities are competing with each other to be both conveyor belts to the jobs market and vehicles for private investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it's dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble, puts it: "Anything too disruptive gets in the way of the business plan."
Last month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is allowed to make any public criticism of the university without giving at least 48 hours' notice. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any funds.
The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the end of this academic year. The plan – which is why Chessum and co were marching last week – is to keep the swimming pool and the various sports clubs, but to quash all university-wide student representation. After all, the students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The plan, it may not surprise you to learn, was drawn up by a panel that didn't number a single student. What with sky-high fees and rocketing rents in the capital, you might think that the need for a pan-London student body had never been higher. But then, you're not a university manager on a six-figure salary.
Where universities were historically places of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that role for the sake of the free market. For students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. Yet the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our businesses and our media. You might want these future leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a woman chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you should be troubled.
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
Is cheekiness a truly British concept?
Cheekiness is a defining British characteristic and a valuable check on power, says Farrah Jarral.
Picture the scene. I am a doctor in a clinic, seeing an elderly patient whose last urine sample sent to the lab to check for infection has come back contaminated. We need to repeat the test - but this time with a proper mid-stream sample. He has white hair, leathery skin, twinkly eyes. He is a little hard of hearing, and English is not his first language.
So, slowly and clearly I explain how to perform this task, simple and yet easy to get wrong. I ask him to repeat the instructions back to me just to make sure he understands - a consultation tool I've been trained to use.
He says: "OK, so, first I start peeing." Yes, that's right. "And then halfway through I open the pot?"
Mm hmm, mm hmm.
"I pee into the pot." He pauses for effect. I nod earnestly and vigorously.
"And then... I drink it?"
In these three words, this gentleman had burst the bubble of order in that consultation. My seasoned, medical poker face didn't manage to get through that one. His urine-quaffing suggestion dispensed with decorum and smashed the usual doctor-patient power gradient, and I surrendered willingly.
Although I quite rightly don't often have the chance to be cheeky myself in my rather serious day job, I am a great lover of cheekiness and my experiences of such behaviour, particularly in my patients, have convinced me that there is far greater depth to this arguably very British concept than meets the eye.
So what is it exactly? Well, maybe it's easier to define what it's not. It's not quite the same as audacity - it takes itself less seriously than that. And it's not as rude as impudence because cheekiness never sets out to truly offend. Cheekiness, then, is neither high-minded nor aggressive. Its hallmark is good-hearted humour, a certain cheeriness of spirit.
Often it is loud - think of the effectiveness of the whoopee cushion left on the unsuspecting teacher's chair. But it can be just as deadly when silent, or even sartorial.
Cheekiness isn't just funny, though. It has the power to deflate pomposity faster than any whoopee cushion.
And no cultural form exemplifies this irreverence quite like British political satire. In what other country would Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell get away with casually encasing our prime minister's head in a condom in all his drawings? These moments of absolute bare-faced cheek could quite literally get you killed in many parts of the world, and yet they form a robust part of our political self-expression.
Translating cheekiness to someone unfamiliar with the concept in Britain can be tricky. Could it be that cheekiness as a concept is untranslatable, unique to the UK?
I looked at two of the cheekiest languages on earth - Yiddish and Punjabi - to see if they had any equivalents. In Yiddish, chutzpah does embody perhaps 90% of what it means to be cheeky. But the flexibility of cheekiness somehow outdoes the necessary boldness of chutzpah. Cheeky can be subtle.
Punjabi, too, is also a highly cheeky language, which is full of words to call people who are a bit forward. Paada is someone precocious, a chatty kind of character, jigr aala literally means she or he who has liver, the organ of courage, and maacha describes a blagger, a chancer. But none of them quite captures the essence of cheekiness correctly.
Even across nations that speak the same language, it's unclear. I asked several American friends if the term had a US equivalent, but some told me that the concept doesn't even exist in the same way. Meanwhile the internet turned up the frankly inexcusable translation of "cheeky monkey" as "zesty little chipmunk".
I can't comment on the cultural nuances of zesty chipmunks, but science has suggested that cheeky monkeys really do exist. The primatologist Franz de Waal famously showed the world a piece of footage of an outraged Capuchin monkey reacting to inequality. When its monkey friend received better food - a delicious succulent, sweet grape rather than the pedestrian cucumber they had both been enjoying previously - the cheeky monkey threw the piece of cucumber back into the face of the researcher who fed him.
Monkeys are cheeky because they are intelligent enough to be aware not only of complex social rules and expectations of behaviour, but also of the ways in which they can deliberately break these rules and thus express their refusal to accept the way things are.
So cheekiness can be a serious matter - and not just for monkeys. Despite the chances of social humiliation, it is a low-risk way of breaking the rules and protesting. It says, in a gentle way, that you do not consent to something - some dynamic, some power structure, some constraint imposed on you by a bigger force.
Cheekiness is a way of creatively, often playfully, injecting resistance into the quotidian. It creates a space in which to push back against inequality, against commoditisation, colonisation, against the rules that say who you can talk to, what you are allowed to talk about, and how you talk, what your aspirations can be, what constitutes success or beauty, or how you are supposed to wear your masculinity or femininity. Scratch the surface, and you will find that beneath the silliest acts of cheekiness, there is often a deeply important matter that is being negotiated.
Some people may argue that cheekiness, in its very smallness and apparent harmlessness, is an ineffective form of resistance that simply serves to reinforce the very power structures that it wants to challenge.
But even the anarchist James C Scott, champion of "non-revolutionary resistance", suggested breaking the odd trivial law here and there as a form of "anarchist calisthenics" to prepare for a broader struggle. And the people that threaten, imprison or kill Iranian cartoonists, naked Egyptian bloggers or Burmese stand-up comedians certainly don't think that cheekiness is a trifling matter.
Is it too much to imagine that cheekiness as part of the national character is one of the reasons the UK has largely avoided a bloody revolution like so many other democracies?
Could it be that expressing bubbling dissent and resistance through humour has been like letting off steam through a pressure valve, thus avoiding a full-blown explosion?
Cheekiness is the checking of power - and power needs checking. It is the individual or group giving the machine a bit of backchat. It's a reclaiming of dignity, a playful subversion of the status quo, however briefly, a challenge to authority.
The fact that no glamorous, perfect Hollywood star is ever safe from having a ridiculous moustache drawn on their face on London Underground posters is resistance. And when my twinkly-eyed joker wryly suggested a sip of his own frothy amber nectar, poking fun at my unwittingly disempowering manner, he demonstrated with elegance and panache how cheekiness can rebalance an ancient power asymmetry - in a way that all my earnest medical-school attempts could not.
Our lives are monitored, constrained and pressured both explicitly and implicitly in almost every waking minute of our existence. Open protest, staring down tanks, self-immolation, is hard, but if we can't bring ourselves to mount a full-scale rebellion, we can still exercise our right to cheekiness in little everyday ways - loudly, quietly, in song, art, or style, jokes or poems, to push back for the things that deep down, do mean something to us.
So if we aren't going to break out and take over, the very least we can do is practice our anarchist calisthenics and fling back those cucumber chunks from inside the cage.
This is an edited version of Farrah Jarral's Four Thought, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 20:45 BST on 16 October 2013.
Monday, 15 April 2013
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