Gee, fouro, why all the politics on a biz blog?

Cuz it's the same thing. Life is 360. Strategery is 360, too.

And politics is getting what you want. There is no failure, only feedback.

Politics is a perfect lab to study why your change management ideas don't get embraced. And why markets refuse to obey your advertsing "commands." In many examples, the best solution or policy in the political realm doesn't get adopted because of all the psychological and self-image issues that are ignored. We think facts should triumph, when, as mathematician Blaise Pascal noted, the heart has reasons that REASON does not know.

We are not robots, nor are we really rationalists. One believes what they believe often for "gut" or group identity reasons, not because of the footnotes.

The only time I REALLY need footnotes is when I'm trying to feel "mature" about denying your pleas to see things your way. My answer is often NO! Usually an immediate NO!, but one that may takes weeks to escape my lips. Why? Because you've ignored some sequence or struture that I have in my head that allows me to engage with a confusing and often equally irrational world. But, hey, I think to myself, I'm fair-minded. Give me your reasons and I'll weave them into a fairly sensible-sounding thesis that drives a semi-plausible NO!

Why do I go to all the trouble? Because I need to feel rational in my irrationality. And if you keep pressing me once I've made my decision; if you think my logic sucks, I will learn to dislike you. Keep pressing and you will become a threat.

And I'll vote for your opponent, or buy from the competion, on principle. Which principle? On the principle of I don't like you--because you made me question myself, and my pretense to rationality and fair-mindedness.

At this point many of us try to understand.

Too little, too late.

Raise your hand if you've ever pled for a solution or an avenue of pursuit in your company only to have it poo-pooed. Fast forward a year or two, and suddenly the absence of your idea or warning and it's implementation or heed has people buffing resumes and clients or voters fleeing.

Suddenly, "clarity!" on the part of people writing the checks or calling the shots. Now, no amount of money or time or task forces is too much in service of the "tardy revelation."

But in 90% of cases, too little too late. It was timed-release Kool-aid.

Drinking the Kool-aid is no jooke. Those people died--gave their children poison, too--because Jim Jones learned, from God-knows what source, for whatever reason--that rationality is a la carte. And that "reality" is gestalt and zeitgeist. "Taken all at once" and "in the spirit of the time."

Another way to describe the above definitions is: All or nothing. And are you you with us or against us?

At least, that's what's happening in the deeper reaches of your brain as depicted in the flow above. Community subsumes rationality, or, rather, it reframes it. It bends the ruler and then proclaims its penchant for fastidious measurement. And, measure twice, cut once, goes my understanding of the carpenter's creed. Taken that way, Jonestown made perfect sense. If you were there. Likewise, "New Coke." Or Watergate.

They "measured" plenty, you just weren't at the benchmarking meetings.
The sequential nature of many left-brain oriented processes and data accumulation methods means many of us are still collating while some other guy is cackling on his way to the bank, or to the White House. Sometimes those other guys--Watergate, say--leave their White House early for the pokey. Such is the way of the person with even asmidge of the deeper knowledge of the "why" of human exertion and seemingly "unexplained" market explosions. They know the progression is not Fact, Feeling, Fancy. Just the opposite, as listed above.

Yeah, what about that sequence thing?

Here's where I'll trash Democrats AND CIOs:

Too much sequence, not enough gestalt. IF anyone should get this, and benefit from admitting it, those two groups should.

The facts are on the side of lefties with regard to the science of Climate Change, the *salutary* effects of most regulation found in workplace, finance or manufacturing, on phantom WMDs, Terri Schiavo, or you name it.

Now flip to the tech side. In many cases, the facts are on the side of CIOs, but once the Y2K problem was past, once the very human desire to believe that life was different and more exciting thanks to tech banged up against fiscal absurdity of share prices at 300 times EPS, well, life got a whole lot harder. Facts and incremental common sense were't enough once the tsunami of crashing business continuity lost it's fear factor. And once the blue-sky, gold-rush windfall dream experienced gravity.

Why? Because the stuff that gets our primary motivator, the R-Complex--our paleo mammal and reptile brains--the stuff that gets it up off its ass and moving is simplicity and stark choices.

Simplicity and stark choices.

Those are gestalt, big picture, all at once and almost autonomic responses. I see feel and experience and I respond, automatically, instinctively. I just may nt tell you about it.

The "left" brain isn't called Left for political reasons near as I can discover, but it might as well be. The navel pondering and refusal to admit cognitive dissance and flights of fancy into its calculations doom it to technician status--yes, like many of theose IT folk and exactly like democrats.

Not heeded early because "early" is the job of our limbic brain. No, left brain gets to come in and cleanup after the right brain warriors have made a mess and some sensible, methodical thinking is required.

Think Y2K, Depression and Governance. Or next year's "sudden" mainstream political fascination and legitimization of "Peak Oil" and climate change. (Yeah, that's a prediction.)

But spadework do suck, don't it? And it's true: moonshots, statues or tsunamis ARE the things great advancements, movements or realizations are made of. But still, most of us plod along, metering and sensing things sequentially, not looking for links or grand thematic strategy. Democrats need beware on this count. They need be more cynical in the right places, more peotic when appropriate, and most of all they need to get closer to their R-Cx. It's very good at discerning something:

Once an accident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern.

RULE: let the right brain wander, making connections and searching for "ooh gotta have it" feelings, then ask the left brain to come into the room and sort it out. Sort out, not denature and defang it.

Seeing big is Right's job. Sensing "gotta do"--grand dreams and primal response--and giving permission or demanding exeertion is R-Cx's. The Left brain's job is to make it work. But realize, politics is business is love is deciding Chinese or Italian. It's gestalt. It's decided. The rest is clockwatching: folks feeling for their balls to act or say they've got an opinion.

[feels like more ramble left in me on this general topic, but I've got some pooltime coming. More later.]