Keating!

Last night I organised a group of people to attend the hilarious Keating! at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne.  It is one of the best productions that I have seen; very professionally performed, incredibly funny, highly satirical and very irreverent.  No one was spared - except perhaps Keating himself.  (warning below gives away some plotlines).

For those outside of Australia, the actors take off Australian politicians of the early to mid 1990s, of the rise and fall of the invective wittiness of Paul Keating, Australia’s last Labor Prime Minister.  This is the last week of the show in Melbourne after touring the country for the last two years.  The backing band is simply superb.

My highlights were the reggae hit “I’m the Man”, the rap between Keating and Hewson followed by “I Wanna Do You Slowly”, the outrageous Downer act of “Freaky” of which I will never be able to take Downer seriously again, the duet between Gareth and Cheryl (the line “My Peril, Cheryl” is very funny), the election night multimedia presentation, Howard’s “The Mateship” with some excellent costume changes and impersonations - especially the wave, and the finale.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, try and get to it wherever it plays.  Good political satire in Australia has been scant of late with few shows since the time of Max Gillies.  Keating! reengages with the genre in a delicious manner. 

For other reviews, see wikipedia, The Age, SMH.

Shifting narratives for war legitimacy

Good article last week (12 Jan 2007) in the Fin Review by Ferdinand Mount.  He comments on the shifting narratives for the legitimacy of recent wars.  He notes the history of Asian wars in the latter half of the 20th century that failed to leave behind effective democracies (apart from Malaysia and South Korea).  “We have continued to plunge into proxy wars at regular intervals” as we forget the pain and agony of the last one. 

He makes an interesting comment about the need to effectively name a war and that the current war in Iraq lacks a legitimising name.  Iraq War, Second Gulf War, Long Gulf War, War on Terror are all used but “that there is at present no public narrative that will carry the weight of the second Saddam war”. 

This remonds me of the benefits of effectively naming or branding an initiative to help it gain traction.  Within our department, we have Improving Justice seminars and I was talking today with someone about having a Doing KM conference rather than just seeing a bunch of talking heads.  But then this requires a common and consistent purpose and for the current Iraw war, this was lacking as another article in the same Review section by James Bamford notes:  “The White House took our [intelligence] work and twisted it for its own ends and Tenet (then CIA Director) set a tone whereby people know what he and the White House wanted to hear.” 

Perhaps the intelligence community suffered from not heeding the old saying: “Never fight a story with a bunch of facts:  you have to fight it with another story”.  And that is almost impossible if the dominant narrative keeps shifting!

Future Empires

Good article by Niall Ferguson in the Review section of the Fin last week (15 Dec).  He talks about the limits of imperial power and how more recent empires (eg Russian, German) are lasting less time than previous ones (Roman, Ottoman, etc).  He makes the point that empires emerge as world powers because of the economies of scale they make possible.  They can build bigger armies, tax more subjects, provide more public goods.  They endure so long as the benefits of exerting power over others exceed the costs of doing so and that resistance is outweighed by the benefits of being dominated.

He cites three reasons why the current US imperial ambitions will be short-lived.  These are troop deficits (which has long been a sore point for military commanders on the ground), the budget deficit (which is reducing the capacity to fund Iraqi reconstruction), and the American attention deficit with the lack of public support for this foreign war. 

This reminds me of the excellent polemic book by Zia Sardar and Merryl Wynn Davies American Dream: Global Nightmare.  The book explores the mythology of America and finds that Americans believe that they have a right to be imperial, that cinema is the engine of this empire with celebrity its common currency and that war is a necessity.  To combat this mythology, the authors state that America must rejoin the human community through dispelling the notion that America is the lone conscience of the world and then join human history through self-reflection on the perils of what happened to the Roman empire that had a powerful Executive, an irrelevant legislature and a content and distracted populace.

Of course, this does not mean that empires are history.  The Ferguson article concludes with the premise that as population increases and natural resources (like oil and water) become more scarce, imperialism can easily resurface.  The Chinese links to resource rich countries is just one example of this resurfacing.

FEARLESS (the movie), synchronicity and resisting power imbalances

For Father’s Day, the family went to see the movie, Fearless, this morning.  It stars Jet Li playing Huo Yuan Jia, a martial arts master in China in the very early 1900’s.  It showed a bit more blood than the old David Carradine Kung Fu shows which was a bit much for my daughter unfortunately!  The movie was a classic Hero’s story and it was intriguing watching it unfold in the various stages (Call to action, denial, mentor’s advice, transformation, return, overcoming obstacles, etc).

The movie spoke about power imbalances and approaches to counteract them.  The message was that violent revenge is our enemy and that one needs to use martial arts for self-discipline and inner development rather than violence.  A very similar message to my last blog post on resisting power through rebellious acts of insubordination from a different sort of Hero.  I was intrigued about the synchronicity of that post yesterday and seeing this movie today (since I had no idea of the similar themes).  Synchronicity is often a sign or symbol of some message that we are meant to be open towards.

I think the universe is advising me to consider some alternative means of addressing the power balance at work with a current task that I will be completing over the next couple of months.  Simply providing an intelligent product will not be sufficient; it will need to be encapsulated around some stories and subtle techniques to address some of the issues that will be confronted.  Sorry about the cryptic nature of the remarks but some people at work might be reading these entries!

Resisting Power and Understanding the Context in Story: Lessons from a Rebellious Messiah

One of the lines that I like out of the Richard Bach book, Illusions, states:
“I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you.”  Truth, or at least that part of knowledge we deem to be true, can be found in the most remarkable of places.

In the Review section of the Fin Review yesterday was an article by Gerard Windsor on the strange personality of Jesus.  Strange in the sense of appearing rebellious, paradoxical, a maverick - sort of like the shapeshifter archetype from Joseph Campbell’s Hero Stories.  Sort of like how KM and foresight practitioners can sometimes feel facing people in powerful positions who don’t seem “to get” what we are preaching. 

What does religion and theology have to do with KM?  When it consists of a couple of stories, the use of language, context and reversing the power balance, I think that it could be a really good examples for us to consider.

It reminded me of an article I read a while ago and which I quoted from in a KM talk last year to show how the messages in stories change over time.  Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 5:38-41

You have heard that it was said. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist who is evil.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

This sounds like be obedient and docile against evil, be non-violent and go the extra distance.  Yet the real message is quite different and has been somewhat lost in translation over time.

Do not resist who is evil is taken from the Greek word “anistenai”.  This actually means do not use violence against someone who is evil.  His three examples point to alternative approaches. 

1. Turn the other cheek refers to a situation when you are hit on the right cheek from a backhand, reinforcing your lowly role.  Turning the left cheek denotes hit me like a man with a fist which means being treated as a peer. 
2. Giving someone who you are indebted to your cloak as well as coat means that you become naked, which in those days caused offence to the one who caused the nudity.
3. Walk a second mile refers to a custom where Roman soldiers could seek the support of a civilian to take his pack one mile but no more.  Offering to take it a second mile caused discomfort to the soldier.

In all of these instances, Jesus is fomenting insurrection and insubordination in a manner tht embarasses and discomforts the oppressors without advocating violence.  He is encouraging breaking the cycle of humiliation, exposing injustice and asserting a moral position. 

These little historical examples have lost their context when we read them without an understanding of their culturally-sensitive full meaning. Apart from the message of context and translation, it also demonstrates some insubordinate methods to generate change in society though identifying abuses of power. 

A similar example was in The Age today, that of an Indian woman who has taken to photographing lechers and gropers on packed public transport in Bangalore and publishing them on a blog.  She and a group of women together stare back at leerers or board buses to read the testimony of victims of sexual harassment.  A great example of reversing the normal power balance.

Shipping Containers and Urban Redevelopment

Great main article in the AFR Review last Friday 25 Aug 2006 by Witold Rybczynski.  It is only 50 years ago that the first full-fledged container shipping occurred.  Major change has occurred in cities worldwide with the introduction of containerisation.  He cites that London and New York each had about 50,000 dock workers in the decade after World War II.  With containers, large workforces are no longer required, wharves no longer need to be located close to cities and large container ports such as Swanston Dock here in Melbourne negated the need for the large number of small docks along the Yarra River.  Cultual change also occurred with the removal of petty crime from the docks (with lots of items previously falling off the back of trucks available for sale - no longer possible in secure containers).

Fifty years ago, it would have been almost impossible to foresee this.  Large numbers of displaced workers, the decay of breakbulk wharves along the Yarra, the introduction of large container ships have allowed the Docklands to be redeveloped for housing.  An interesting question then is if this has occurred in the past 50 years, will there be a major change to shipping goods over the next 20 to 30 years that similarly results in major change, or will this come from another source?