All Life Is Problem Solving

In an article by Ceci Connolly appearing in WaPo yesterday, President Obama, in a “pre-holiday call” with a small group of six high-level Democrats from both Houses of Congress expressed concern over efforts by progressive advocacy groups in online campaigns and advertisements to target “moderate” Democrats whose positions on health-care reform have expressed opposition or lack of commitment to health care proposals lacking a robust public option. The President, according to three sources who were parties to the conversation, asserted that these groups ought to stop using their resources in attacks on the moderates, focus on “winning the debate,” and build support for legislation that will expand coverage, control rising costs, and modernize the health care system. And he also “hinted” that he was trying to “discourage them from future attacks on Democrats.”

While I can’t be sure how the progressive advocacy groups will react to President Obama’s displeasure and his calls for unity, I can certainly tell him what my reaction is. It is to ask what have I gained by supporting him thus far, and what will I gain by focusing on building support for health care reform legislation that either doesn’t yet exist or that he will likely sell out at the last minute on the alter of bipartisan compromise anyway? Let’s look at the record shall we? [Read more →]

Once a friend from New England (who by the way was a strict Episcopalian who delighted in calling himself an Anglican to emphasize what an Anglophile he was) told me that the culinary thing to do on Independence day was to eat salmon and green peas, practicing a kind of symbolic cannibalism celebrating the American victory over the English Redcoats (also known as “lobsterbacks”). I’ve forgotten why green peas were part of the ritual, and have always wondered why it wasn’t lobster rather than salmon. Granted that lobster is much more expensive than salmon these days; but in colonial times lobster was the food of the common man in New England. [Read more →]

It’s not easy for people to accept that continuous critical evaluation of our ideas is a good thing. During the discussion in the actkm listserv Neil Olonoff responded very strongly to my view that continuous critical evaluation on a level playing field is a good thing. He pointed out that: “Many well-known products and services have been initially deep sixed by the criticism that they were “obviously” deficient in some way, viewed from the present frame of reference.”

I pointed out, in reply, that I didn’t think they were “deep sixed” by criticism, but by the people involved and the wrong kind of criticism. They weren’t subject to criticism using a level playing field, because the kind of critical approach to new ideas we get in our closed hierarchical organizations doesn’t represent a level playing field. Then I pointed out that what I favor is the kind of criticism I give: civil criticism using logic and reason. I don’t favor any kind of criticism. I don’t favor ad hominem criticism, or labeling, or ridicule. There are norms of criticism that need to be followed. I’d like to see norms of fair critical comparison followed. But, at a minimum, the rules discussed in this blog post would allow a more measured consideration of new ideas than we normally see in corporate or other organizational circles. [Read more →]

Tonight, my loving and lovely wife of close to 43 years told me she was angry. She said it had become just too much for her that both Houses of Congress had “taken single payer off the table.” She knows, of course, that a majority of Americans favor single payer. And she also knows that many centrist Democrats and the Republican Party in Congress have been bought and paid for by Health Insurance industry campaign contributions. She’s furious at that. She doesn’t care about the nuances of a public option. She doesn’t care about insurance company profits, or even about their continued existence, and she doesn’t see why any real Democrats should care about that either, after all the years they’ve been denying coverage and claims, and driving people into bankruptcy. And she doesn’t see why the Democratic Party should continue to exist if it can’t, out of concern for the insurance companies, or the Republicans, or the conservative Democrats, pass a single payer plan this year. [Read more →]

The issues of whether we should allow all ideas, both good and bad to flower, and whether bad ideas or fads don’t need to be experienced to be learned, have arisen in the actkm listserv discussion group in the context of my advocacy of critical evaluation of new ideas. This reminds me of the more general notion discussed by Kuhn and Lakatos in the 1960s and ’70s stating that new ideas were often developmentally weak and needed to be protected from criticism and evaluation to give them time to become strong enough to compete with established paradigms, and theories. To put this in my own words, in comparing new ideas to more established ones, it’s unfair to compare carefully worked out ideas with new ones still lacking development, because the competing conjectures and models are not equivalently specified and the new ideas can always be criticized on grounds of greater vagueness and ambiguity than the old ones. [Read more →]

Occasionally, someone in KM brings up the question of whether the discipline is a science. And then the arguments start. Some dislike the idea of science and deny that KM has anything to do science. Others identify science with knowledge that successfully describes, predicts and explains; and they conclude that the discipline of KM with its body of highly questionable and disputed knowledge, is in no way a science.

Still others think that science is not a matter of approach, but rather is a matter of “method” and that while Knowledge Management may not be science right now, it can easily become one, if only its practitioners will develop knowledge in the field by using the Scientific Method. Then they boldly assert that KM is a science since they are pursuing it using the scientific method. [Read more →]

The Democratic Party will be the first to tell you that it’s the Party of the people, especially working people and the middle class. Change we’re supposed to believe in is change from a society moving in the direction of the wealthy, to one that is clearly moving in a direction to restore the American Dream for all. Well, we’re coming to a critical test of the propositions that the Democrats represent working people and the middle class, and that the Party is capable of delivering change we can believe in. That test is its actions, and not its words, on health care reform. There are various bills on the table in the sense that they have been introduced in Congress. They can be divided into four categories. There are expensive bills that give many concessions to the insurance industry, expand the number of people covered, but do nothing to cut rising costs and profits, or to protect people from bankruptcy and foreclosures due to out of control medical bills. There are other bills that include a public health care option that retain the present role of the insurance companies, but provide a voluntary public plan similar to Medicare to compete with them. There are still others that claim to offer a public option, but that structure it in such a way that it could not compete very successfully with private insurance companies, and would not have much effect on health-related cost increases. There is even one lone bill based on a single payer plan idea introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I – Vermont), that provides for a health insurance plan that would severely curtail the activities of the health insurance industry in providing basic care by funding health care with tax revenue, providing payments to medical practitioners and private organizations that actually perform services, and setting prices to hold down cost increases. [Read more →]

During a discussion in the act-km group, Neil Olonoff expressed his distaste for the phrase “knowledge processing,” which I use frequently as a summary term for the activities in the second tier of the three-tier model of KM. In reply, I said that I’m not constitutionally wedded to the phrase “knowledge processing,” that the phrase “problem solving pattern” could be used instead, and that if we did that, KM could be defined as activities intended to enhance some aspects of the problem solving patterns of organizations. I also pointed out that any name was OK with me as long as it’s a reasonable label for: [Read more →]

This one’s addressed to progressives in the United States. OK, we’ve gotten our bright young President, his lovely family and his team of the “best and the brightest” into the White House. We’ve emotionally invested in him. We’ve celebrated with him. And we’ve trusted him during the opening months of his Administration. Now, what do we have to show for it?

I think we have a lot of mixed results: the S-CHIP bill, an inadequate stimulus package about 33-40% of the size it should have been which has so far produced little stimulus, rampant lemon socialism in bank bailouts absent any substantial regulation of salaries and bonuses in companies on the public dole or any real removal of toxic assets, failure to control consumer interest rates on credit cards, failure to provide effective relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, failure to analyze the causes of the recent economic collapse and to propose a regulation program based on such knowledge, failure to moderate in any substantial way executive claims about its rights to prevent disclosure of information that would be important to the political process, failure to moderate executive claims about its authority to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial or charge, failure to pursue investigations of lawbreaking and possible war crimes in the previous administration, and current legislative efforts on the Hill in health care and energy that give every promise of producing legislation that is inadequate to solve the problems motivating the legislation. In other words, from a progressive point of view, we already know that this administration is heading towards failure, a failure that will be apparent if it doesn’t go to the mat and succeed in producing a Health Care Reform bill with an effective public option, and if, more generally, it doesn’t take on the task of mobilizing the broader public against the lobbying-financial-health care-energy-military-industrial complex that for nearly 40 years now has successfully been redistributing wealth and income to an increasingly small percentage of the population. [Read more →]

I’ve written in the past on the counter-productiveness of bipartisanship for the President and the Democratic Party. Today, Nancy Cohen offered a nice analytical Huffington Post piece on bipartisanship that adds to the argument. She says:

”The supposed superiority of “bipartisanship” to “partisanship” is premised on three myths about the relationship between the people and the political parties. We have become hopelessly confused about ends and means, about why and when bipartisanship should matter. Here then, is a guide to the myths and realities of bipartisanship.”

Those myths are that: 1) bipartisanship “proves that a national consensus has been reached”; 2) “bipartisanship ensures that proper compromises will be made,” and 3) “without a bipartisan vote” . . . “the public will eventually turn against” the new health care program. [Read more →]