No Imagination
I saw about 4 minutes of Oprah yesterday. The show was about survivors of hurricane Katrina who are still living in appalling conditions in tents, trailers, and temporary housing.
I have to hand it to Oprah. She keeps the spotlight on things that a lot of people wish were invisible: 650 people living on a ferry that used to shuttle people from Maine to Canada. The 12,000 homeless survivors living in hotel rooms that FEMA cut off funding for on February 13. The rubble and debris of trashed communities so thoroughly destroyed they are still unsafe to travel in.
The question that everyone asks, as usual, is why? There are lots of reasons. At the top of the list, I think, is lack of imagination.
The people responsible for helping the survivors of the disaster can’t, or won’t, imagine what they are suffering through. George Bush doesn’t imagine it. The other officials in his administration don’t either. It seems as though there isn’t a single person alive who has both the power to help and an imagination.
Some might argue that the problem is a lack of compassion. “President Bush doesn’t care about black people,” said Kanye West. The real problem is that President Bush can’t imagine being a black person. Or a poor person. Or an Iraqi.
The problem with having no imagination isn’t just that it removes the impetus to act. It also removes the ability to act. If someone cannot imagine a way to deal with a problem, they are reduced to analyzing it, which is a great way to think of reasons why it can’t be done, or why a certain process needs to be followed. This means red tape.
I heard an appalling story today about a woman who divorced her abusive husband and moved into her own place. The terms of their settlement included the continuation of her benefits under his employer’s insurance coverage. Or so she thought.
When she actually tried to claim a prescription under her benefits, the insurance company informed her that they would cover her prescription costs – but that since her ex-husband was listed on the policy, the cheque would be sent to his house.
The insurance company expects her violently abusive partner to helpfully provide the claim cheques they send her. This utterly ridiculous situation is their “policy”, they unhelpfully explained.
This insurer, from the unhelpful customer “support” representatives at the bottom to the crafters of company policy at the top, does not imagine the circumstances of the people they are meant to serve. The real needs of human beings are subjugated to processes.
And so people are reduced to struggling against authoritarian structures instead of getting on with their lives. Structures that shuttle them from one useless conversation with a faceless representative to another. Policies that dictate they spend endless amounts of time on the phone, writing letters, filling out forms, and getting absolutely nowhere.
Robert and David Green lost their mother and a granddaughter to hurricane Katrina. Their mother drowned after falling through a hole in the roof, where they were clinging to try and stay out of the flood waters.
“The last image I had of my mother was [of her] laying on her back with a leaf in her mouth. Dead from the water that went in her lungs,” Robert said.
In the months that followed they kept calling Louisiana authorities to see if they had been able to recover her body. They gave them her exact location. They were told that numerous search parties had looked for her unsuccessfully.
Eventually, they got tired of the process and decided to look for her themselves. They found her in their first five minutes of searching, lying in full view.
When the structures that are supposed to serve us do nothing, they ought to be dismantled.
When those in power can’t imagine the lives of the people they are meant to serve, let alone imagine what needs to be done to serve them, they ought to be dismissed.
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:51 am
Don’t forget that the woman you are referring to was offered by the insurance company to have the cheque sent to her address but in his name? It makes me sad/angry that this red tape bullshit goes on everyday. Ade, I am happy that you are as positive and encouraged to attempt to make change. I however often feel tired and disappointed. I find myself advocating to a certain point and then saying to myself, fuck it because then I am given ridiculous statements like…well, that’s the policy so there is nothing else we can offer you mam. I can see why people give up and feel as though they have no power. I am in a position of power and I feel it so you can only imagine what “they” are feeling.
February 22nd, 2006 at 12:06 pm
I sense a theme in the examples you are providing here. They all have something to do with the commercialization of health and social services.
In the case of the the Katrina aftermath – the commercialization of the city’s reconstruction and support for citizens – at least once a humanitarian NGO like FEMA discontinues support. Who will foot the bill?
In the case of the woman’s insurance – the commercialization of fee for service health care, an issue that implies a dense bureacratization as ever-larger insurance carriers merge in the name of efficiency.
In the case of the mother’s body – the likely commercialization of EMS and security – at least once the Army leaves a disaster zone.
This issue has more to do with the structural requirements of the North American way-of-life than we might initially be willing to admit. I’m not advocating any particular position, but suggesting that a call to “dismatle” ineffective services on the grounds of ineffieciency, such as those mentioned above, is impossible. Better to start with a realization of what these instances represent. In my opinion, they underpin our way of life and are not capable of reform – their perfection requires that they become even further detached from individual human circumstances. Efficiency, in our liftetime, has nothing to do with the individual expereince.
The philosophy that guides the commercialization of public service is one that seeks to provide the least service for the most people, as opposed to the most service for the least people. In terms of pure-service, it means a little of nothing for everyone. Services created to help individuals do not exist – that’s one of the liabilities of our way of life. (Again, knowing the field who will read this, please don’t assume I support this model – I just disagree with the notion that it is easily fixed. I think we need to implicate the way of life that many Canadians and Americans are accustomed to before we posit solutions to commercial bureacracy. We invented the commercial bureacracy. We continuosly condone these practices with our commercial choices. In many cases, we could not do otherwise. )
Ade, recall the article by Darin Barney I sent you the other day on the de-politicization of the public in respect to media. I think this is the same kind of issue. I’ll paraphrase from the article: a society organized around the ongoing, massive state-support for capital accumulation ” requires a depoliticiziation of the mass of the population.”
In the case at hand, it is the depoliticization of consumer choice – disempowering the individual consumer in order to create the widest possible commercial terrain. Barney further points out that under the philosophical guidance of globalization, productivity, and innovation, we are perhaps more than ever living in a society that is structurally dependent on a depoliticized realm. Barney writes: “The problems associated with privitization and depoliticization may be anchored deeply in the political economy of contemporary liberal capitalism.”
George Bush’s imagination is not at fault, he could have hardly been expected to imagine otherwise.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
It’s an interesting article – I just read it now (I had it starred for future reading). My favourite part:
(This article is not available online as far as I know, but I will email it to anyone who emails me and asks for it.)
Your identification of a “commercialization of health and services” theme is interesting and perhaps accurate, although that is not what I had in mind when I wrote the post. What I was talking about really was imagination and the lack of it. Less to do with making bureaucracies more efficient, and more to do with making them more flexible. Flexibility born out of the ability to imagine the problems of the people they are meant to serve and the ability to imagine solutions for them.
After all, responding to disasters is FEMA’s job as a government agency (they are not an NGO, at least I don’t think they are), not an individual situation they just got thrown into (yes, Katrina is an anomaly, but adapt, damnit!). Similarly, it is the job of the various branches of the US government to look after American citizens.
In the case of the insurance company, the specific case of this woman is illustrative of a wider problem: surely there are many other women who have divorced their husbands and maintained benefits. So it’s not that the insurance company is incapable of imagining her circumstances – they don’t imagine the circumstances of all the other people who divorced their partners but maintained benefits.
After all, we’re not talking about a radical reorganization of the insurer. We’re talking about putting her name on a cheque and a different mailing address on an envelope.
In George Bush’s case, he ought to be expected to imagine otherwise. If he is willing to occupy a country because he thinks he is doing so on behalf of that country’s citizens, then he ought to spend a day or seven in their shoes. Meet with them. Hear what they have to say without the filters of his inner cabal.
But you and Barney are absolutely correct: these problems are “anchored deeply in the political economy of contemporary liberal capitalism”. What he later calls our “way of life”. When I said “when the structures that are supposed to serve us do nothing, they ought to be dismantled”, I didn’t mean shut down the insurance company. I meant what he was talking about that we are so frightened of: the revolutionary changes that will occur if we create a society of “masses of engaged, public-spirited citizens”.
As frightening as that may be to so many, the alternative is surely far worse.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:44 pm
The article is available online at the Institue for Research in Public Policy Website for their monthly publication “Policy Options”
PDFs are available at:
http://www.irpp.org/po/index.htm
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Here is a direct link to the article by Darin Barney (PDF) – it’s an excellent read. More in a moment.
February 23rd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Unsurprisingly given the topic of my original post, I want to connect this article by Barney to a lack of imagination.
First, I should say that when I say “imagination” I don’t mean flights of fantasy. I mean imagination in the sense of forming a mental picture, not in a logical or even thoughtful way, but in a way that is more basic than that. A kind of living knowledge that provides insight into a person or a situation.
“Knowing what it’s like to be in somebody else’s shoes” sums it up nicely, when it comes to people. When you hear that saying, you immediately understand that it’s not just the knowledge of what it’s like to be in someone’s shoes. It’s that once you have that knowledge, you will act according to it, in a substantially different way than if you hadn’t.
So, I condemned leaders and bureaucracies for their lack of imagination. But alevo, and the article above that he references, point out the foundations of this problem, even going so far as to suggest that this problem is a natural outcome of our way of life and the structure of our society.
To oppose that, to overcome the deeper problems of our society, requires action and engagement by citizens. Again, imagination – or the lack of it – plays an important role. I think that, perhaps, one of the reasons it seems so difficult to cause change is because we have difficulty imagining what the end result should be.
In other words, we want a different, better society, but we have trouble picturing what it might look like. We suspect that it is possible, and history tells us that it is, but after all, “we invented the commercial bureacracy”, and that makes it hard to imagine an alternative.
Darin Barney’s article points to the media, especially emerging media technology such as iPods, blogs, Blackberries and PlayStations, as one reason why the public is increasingly disengaged from public life – in fact, he says the idea of “the public” is disappearing. He suggests the “privatization” of these media as a reason: privatization not as public industries going private, but in the sense that they are increasingly focused and personal. I.e. if you start getting your information from a blog that less than 100 people read on a regular basis – like this one – you have essentially separated the information you receive from the information the general public is receiving. You have become a segment.
If this sounds confusing (sorry), go read the article. What I find interesting again relates to imagination.
Television is often cited as harmful to the imagination (to be brief and to make a complex issue simple: an imagination is not required to watch TV). Other media – such as video games and yes, iPods – arguably also fit the bill. Why create, when you can play? Why sing, when you can listen?
To get to my point: perhaps the privatization of the media doesn’t just destroy “public life”, causing the societal and democratic problems we have right now. Perhaps the burgeoning variety and sophistication of media is also directly harmful to our imaginations. So that the end result isn’t just a society that is fractured and privatized, unable to agree on a common vision, but also a society that is passive and unimaginative, unable to even conceive of a vision.
February 23rd, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Ade,
Your essay reminded me of John Ralston Saul. I don’t know if you’ve read On Equilibrium, but he makes a similar case regarding the role of imagination. If you want to read it, let me know and I can lend it to you.
Alevo points out that the problems you cite are structural. This is certainly the case regarding the insurance issue. I would argue that this springs largely from the computerization of processes and data flows.
Computers allow information management systems to become huge, permitting everything from continental insurance companies to global just-in-time logistical systems like Wal-Mart. They do so by rationalizing the movement of data in standardized forms that can accommodate most circumstances. (This is a progression of the bureaucracy invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but increased in scale by orders of magnitude.)
From time to time, an individual cirumstance arises that the system’s rationalized processes a) did not anticipate and b) cannot accommodate. This is where a lack of imagination obtains: a sensible company would dedicate a small group of competent employees with wide discretionary latitude to address these “out of scope” circumstances manually, bypassing inflexible processes altogether.
This accomplishes a number of purely instrumental benefits for the company, from retaining (and delighting) a customer to enjoying more general positive PR in the newsmedia. Unfortunately, a major tendency of hyper-bureaucratization is that avoiding customer interactions is transformed from a proxy for success (our systems handled it so we didn’t have to) into a goal in itself.
The multimillion dollar IVR system is an excellent example of this, since in most cases simply hiring an army of front-line representatives to answer phones and give personalized service works much better, costs less, and results in more satisfied customers.
So companies become victims of their own systems, in many cases simply unable to do for a given customer what needs to be done. A few years ago, my wife and I bought a table from Sears and then decided to return it. They reimbursed the cost of the table to our card, but we were under the impression that we hadn’t actually paid for it yet, and we said as much to the customer service rep when we called.
We were assured that all was well, but continued to call back every month when we received our bill to ask again whether they had made a mistake. Finally, after four months, they sent us an angry bill with a red border demanding that we pay the balance in full – plus interest! I called their customer service line immediately and spoke to an agent who accused me of lying when I said I had called several times already and insisted he couldn’t do anything about the charge. He also insisted that he didn’t have a manager I could talk to, despite the fact that he didn’t appear to be the CEO.
I demanded to speak to their executive support group (every big company has one, but in typical corporate silly-buggers fashion, they don’t advertise that fact and you have to ask for it by name), and after a few minutes of exasperating word-play, I hit the right combination and the agent agreed. He tried to give me a number to call, but I insisted that he warm-transfer me instead, which he reluctantly did.
The agent I spoke to was very polite and courteous. She confirmed that I had called several times (each call was logged in their system) and agreed that it was unfair for us to have to pay interest (I said I would like to take as long to pay the amount back as they took to find it – three months). She looked into the issue and called us back the next day. She couldn’t do anything about the charge or the interest (their computer system did not allow it), but offered us a credit in lieu of fixing the problem.
I guess that counts as imaginative, but ironically, the entire problem was an artifact of their own computer system, and her imagination was required to think around the limitations of that system at self-correcting.
February 24th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Ryan, good call: I’m finishing that book right now. I found the chapter on imagination especially inspiring (as well as the chapter on memory). I’ve read three books by Saul in the last six months or so, and in many ways I feel like I’m experiencing a kind of intellectual rebirth.
I know that sounds silly. But there is a lot in what he says that I feel as though I have known all along but been somehow frightened of acting according to it. Especially in his criticism of the way we tend to value rational thinking above all other qualities, which leads to a kind of mental rigidity.
I don’t mean to flatter, but alevo has also been instrumental in challenging me along similar lines. I remember getting into an argument elsewhere on the internet about science and religion and the meaning of truth, and linking to it here…alevo brought up some interesting points (exactly what they were I forget) but I remember he challenged my thinking that there is an absolute truth.
Which I remembered when I came across this part in the chapter called Reason:
Shortly after that, perhaps even the same night, I started reading The Nazi Doctors – Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide by Jay Robert Lifton, and I came across this passage in the introduction:
I am struck by the similarities that run through alevo’s viewpoint, Saul’s analysis, and Lifton’s caveat.
Ryan, regarding computer systems, I think you’re quite right. I build computer software too so I was expecting someone to point out that perhaps the insurance company was unable to fulfill the woman’s request because the computer system would not allow it. In a case like that, “policy” maybe sounds better as an explanation for a distraught client than “the computer won’t let me do it”.
Your solution – “a small group of competent employees with wide discretionary latitude” – is a good one. I am often surprised by how firm my clients are that the systems I build be capable of doing anything, which is impossible, but at the same time to so restrictive that they cannot be overridden. The idea that a computer system, which is perhaps the most rational of all processes, should be able to handle every possibility, is pervasive.
I run the risk of turning this into geek-talk, but Ryan, do you see a possibility that software might be built that is not a slave to the narrow-minded rational processes you discuss?
February 24th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Here’s my best customer service story ever. I think it encapsulates some of the things we’ve raised. It’s Friday.
My phone was cancelled by a computer last October. I think there was a touch of human help, but mostly it was the computer that cancelled the line. Claire and I were getting set to move, and I had asked Rogers Telecom to have our line cancelled Nov. 10th – 11/10/2005. I presume a clerical error led to the premature cancellation, because we awoke Oct. 10th – 10/11/2005 and had no active phone line.
I don’t need to point out why this was a problem. I would, however, like to emphasize the fact that we were getting ready to move – this multiplied the number of problems by a factor of five. I was very annoyed.
To make a long and complex story short (one with multiple angry phone calls and exchanges like the one Ryan mentioned above), I am going to fast-forward to approx. 1 week after my home phone was cancelled. No one to this point had been able to help me. It seemed that Rogers could not re-connect my phone line in a timeframe that was going to precede my move, so we were at an impasse. I was threatening legal action for breach of contract, even though I knew I had no grounds for a suit. I was threatening to contact the CRTC, which I did, and found to be no help.
Just when my resistance to apathy was almost gone, I received a phone call at work from…wait for it… “The Office of the President” at Rogers. Can you believe it?
Neither could I. There was no fucking way that any of this ccmpany’s presidents gave a shit about me, my phone, or my repeated complaints.
Nonetheless, Sylvie Hughes insisted that she worked for the President. Sure I thought, and when I worked in the federal government, I guess I worked for Jean Chretien. Whatever, someone wanted to do something about my phone problem.
Apparently, Sylvie possessed some “wide discretionary latitude” and was willing to exercise that power on my behalf. She was going to have a cell phone couriered to me overnight. This cell phone would be linked to my old home phone number. Anyone who called my cancelled home phone would get transferred to the cell. Problem solved. I was happy, Sylvie was happy, the President was happy. Ted Rogers presumably, was happy.
The next day came and went without any courier package from Sylvie. As did the next, and the next. I phoned her after the first day. However, her voice mail informed me that she was out of the office until the following Monday. At the end of the voicemail message there was a number provided for emergencies and immediate assistance. I had an emergency and I needed immediate assistance, so I called the number. This was the tipping point.
The phone number that Sylvie had left on her voicemail was a dead-end. It led to a barely audible message, one that I still think was partly in Punjabi, and had no voice box. I called the line four times. Everytime it played the Punjabi jibberish and hung up on me. I cross-referenced the number I was dialling with the number provided on Sylvie’s voicemail. It was true. I was super pissed-off.
I went online and found the corporate investors chapter on Rogers’ webpage. I printed off their executive listings and phoned the head office in Toronto. Here is the link to the executive list in case you ever have to do the same:
http://www.rogers.com/english/investorrelations/directors_officers.html
Upon reaching the Toronto office switchboard, I asked to speak to the President. Naturally, the receptionist asked “which President?” I described my scenario. She agreed to transfer me to someone who could help. I was forwarded to the voicemail of Stan Davis – no title provided. I left an angry message, threatening all manner of legal action and regulatory complaints. About an hour later, Stan replied.
It turned out that Stan was no more than a sales rep. for Rogers wireless in Winnepeg. We were both, confused, frustrated, and astonished at his company’s inability (or unwillingness) to deal with my problem. I was mad for obvious reasons – Rogers didn’t care about my business – Stan was mad because he had to sell people on the idea that Rogers really did care about their business. Rogers was clearly not helping Stan’s cause.
Stan was quick to act. He fired up his laptop, accessed his company directory, looked up the Senior Vice President of Customer Care, gave me his name and personal cell phone number, and said “Go get’em Tiger.”
I did. I phoned Don Moffat, Senior Vice President of Customer Care at Rogers. Here is his picture, online, if you want to try and visualize his stunned face when I phoned (he’s third from the top):
http://www.rogers.com/english/aboutrogers/newsroom/rsomediainfo/rso_exec_bios.html
I explained my problem to Don. He was professional enough. He agreed to get me the phone that Sylvie had promised me two days earlier. He agreed to have it processed and ready to be picked up at a Rogers Wireless retail outlet in downtown Ottawa that afternoon. He asked that I use the phone until the original cancellation date and return it to the retail outlet afterwards. Fair enough. He had a representative call me that night to make sure things were working properly. I was far from gracious. I let my brother-in-law’s foreign exchange student from Japan routinely call home on the free cell phone. I returned it in January.
I further complained to Don Moffat about Sylvie Hughes. Her number, if anyone ever wants to contact the Office of the President at Rogers, is 1-888-529-2882, x5809. What a donkey.
This story tells us two things. First, not even human imagination exercised by individaul employees can overcome a corporate culture of laziness and disregard. Second, companies like Rogers suck ass.
February 24th, 2006 at 11:00 am
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!
February 27th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Ade asked, “I run the risk of turning this into geek-talk, but Ryan, do you see a possibility that software might be built that is not a slave to the narrow-minded rational processes you discuss?”
I’m not geeky enough to answer that one definitively. I’m a mediocre, self-taught programmer who deals mostly in scripting languages, so my conception of what software can do, given the right, um, imagination, is constrained by my own limitations as a programmer.
Having written that, I would suspect that no algorithm short of a full-on artificial intelligence (and that’s decades away at a minimum, despite the relentlessly upbeat rhetoric coming from MID Media Lab) could make contingency plans for every possible circumstance.
The best I would hope for is a program that allows users – or at least a subset of users – to opt a given order/customer/unit of analysis out of the process flow in the assumption that the order will be processed manually. Unfortunately, this requires that the project managers developing the specifications for the program make a leap of faith and place their trust in those employees empowered to circumvent the normal process.
From an analysis point of view (my own background), the program would have to flag these orders as manual overrides and allow a place for the executive support employees to input what they did and why in a way that an analyst can draw trends out of the data without having to read each entry manually.
Software limitations are not an inherent obstacle to doing this; those systems that don’t allow it were programmed that way. Rather, it’s a policy limitation, a limitation imposed by a management structure that does not trust its employees to think.
March 2nd, 2006 at 10:02 am
Oops, that should be “MIT Media Lab”.
June 5th, 2006 at 8:52 am
Here’s a great essay by Joel Spolsky on computer applications and exception handling – i.e. how computer systems handle problems that fall outside the scope of their programs:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/05/05.html
April 5th, 2009 at 5:57 am
808s & Heartbreak…
Kanye West went to classify 808s & Heartbreak as a pop songs, stating his disdain towards the contemporary backlash to the concept of pop music and expressed admiration for what some pop stars have accomplished in their lives….