The Touro Communication Club Notes - #121–June 23, 2010 Tourocommunicationclub.blogspot.com

Contents:

1. Quotations about “Being Organized”

2. Upcoming Club program: “Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized”

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 @ 2 pm in Room 223

3. Logical Fallacy of the Week # 10 – “Moving the Goal Posts”

4. A Note to Communicators: “Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized

5. Upcoming Conversations

6. Possible club topics – please add your topic to the list

7. What happened last week: “Rodney King: Can’t We Just Get Along?”

Six Quotes about Being Organized

"A place for everything, everything in its place.”

Benjamin Franklin, 18^th century American author of “Poor Richard’s Almanac

“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."

Charles Peguy, 19^th century French poet and essayist

“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."

A.A. Milne, 19^th century British author of “Winnie The Pooh”

“It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war, but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not organized.”

Aristotle, 5^th century Greek philosopher.

“In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.”

Jesse Jackson, American civil rights activist

“That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.”

Joan Baez, American folk singer and civil rights activist

The Touro Communication Club

2 pm - Wednesday, June 16, 2010– Room 223

“Getting Organized: First Things First”

How do I prioritize? What rationale do I use? Which system best suits me? How do I measure my improvement? An invisible part of everyone’s life is being organized. As our lives get busier, we need to be organized. No one starts off being organized. Some learn more quickly than others. The business people are usually ones who are very organized without being overbearing. We’ll try to identify the tricks people employ to keep their lives together. What about distractions? We’ll talk about how increased pressure affects our organization. This should be a very practical session.

Logical Fallacy of the Week #11: “Moving the Goal Posts”

The name of the fallacy comes from a game like soccer or football which has goal posts. In an actual game, it would quite angering if one team decided to change the position of the goal posts. All strategy would change.

In another context, you might call this fallacy, “Changing the Deal.” You think you have agreed to one set of circumstances and suddenly you find details of the deal have been changed. You find many people moving the goalposts when it benefits them.

· Real estate – A tenant agrees to rent an apartment with a refrigerator and stove. When she arrives, she discovers they are not in the apartment and the landlord denies that they were part of the agreement.

· Car sales – You think that you are buying a particular car, but find that only the more expensive model is available. (Also called ‘bait and switch.”) This behavior applies to all sales situations.

· Academic classes – Your professor changes the criteria on which you thought you were being evaluated. Perhaps a student argues that the professor gave her an A when the professor’s grade book shows a “B.”

· Relationships – Either the male or female promises his intended that certain things will happen– a fancy car, a fancy vacation, lots of luxuries and blings - and they don’t, some is mighty angry.

· The TV commercial – two children are promised ponies by a male adult; one gets a toy, the other gets a real one. The jilted child feels cheated because the adult changes the deal.

· Product content – the price of the product is kept the same but the amount of the ingredients is decreased

There are dozens of situations in which the deal is changed by a shark preying on the innocent. The greatest tragedy is the loss of trust by the deceived party. Trust is fragile to begin with but naïve trust is brutalized by predators. Its extreme is date rape when the woman has one set of expectations and the male has another.

Strategies – Realize that trust evaporates in the face of betrayal. Sad to say, the reality of our learning curve almost demands some level of betrayal in order to toughen awareness at the risk of instilling a permanent fear. Obviously, you need to read the very small print of every contract. Less obvious, you need to listen closely to what is said by the salesperson or the teacher or the love interest.

.

.A Note to Communicators:

Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized

This is a sign that appeared several years ago, along with another sign “PLAN Ahead” Humorous as they might be, they point to the daily challenge each of us has to get our individual acts together.

Personal management is not at the top of the education agenda. We may teach management in business and education, but how each of us manages our own lives is largely left up to our accidental learning in the College of Hard Knocks.

What are some of the characteristics of organization?

· Activities happen on time.

· Lateness is not a difficulty.

· In our writing and speaking, our organization is sequential, coherent and understandable. It is “clear.”

· Planning is only the beginning of being organized.

· Monitoring of the process at every step of the way is a vital part of organization.

· Follow-through is a vial part of organization.

· Organization is an endemic part of process.

My rule of thumb about someone or something being well organized is that if it looks easy, the person or event has been well organized. If there is sloppiness or mistakes, the organization is a major part of the problem.

· The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a result of poor organization, either accidental or deliberate.

· Although the final results of the current financial crisis are not yet conclusive, early returns indicate that deliberate lack of regulation enforcement, an important part of organization.

· The perennial lack of an Albany budget is a function of poor organization, derived from conflicting political interests.

· The execution of a business plan, any team sport strategy is dependent on good organization.

· A political campaign cannot begin to attract votes without strong organization.

Because organization is invisible, you only know something is wrong when the roof falls in.

· Have you ever planned for a trip and didn’t think about what you are going take with you?

· Have you not studied during a course and prepared for an exam?

· Have you ever gone food shopping without a list?

· Have you had guests over for dinner and scrambled to prepare for the meal?

Aesop’s fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant is a comparison of good planning and no planning. While the Ant continues to store away food for the winter, the Grasshopper flits about during the summer. When the winter comes, the Grasshopper doesn’t have any food and dies.

Many projects are very complicated in the number of details. A check list is required to remember them all. My son, who has been a pilot for American Airlines for over 20 years, has a pre-flight check list to execute every time. A surgeon now has a check list to complete before operating. A building engineer has a check list to follow on every construction site.

A recent New York Times bestseller speaks to the power of organization: “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon in Boston, a MacArthur Fellow, a writer for the New Yorker and associate professor at the Harvard Medical School. Taking a cue from the airline pilot’s preflight check list, he writes about incessant surgical mistakes that were dramatically reduced with a checklist of organizational procedures.

I learned the necessity of being organized from over 300 productions of plays, operas, musicals and experimental theatre pieces. As either producer, director or designer, I learned the hard way that every aspect of a theatre production is deadline driven. Everything has to be rehearsed and ready by curtain time. Despite its careful preparation, even the Metropolitan Opera makes mistakes once in a while, witness the recent crashing down of a piece of scenery.

Despite the best efforts of some people to organize themselves, they may be diagnosed with a learning disability know as “Executive Functioning.” According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Executive Functioning (EF) difficulties have some of these warning signs:may involve abilities such as:

· Difficulty planning and completing projects;

· Problems understanding how long a project will take to complete;

· Struggling with telling a story in the right sequence with important details and minimal irrelevant details;

· Trouble communicating details in an organized, sequential manner;

· Problems initiating activities or tasks, or generating ideas independently; and

· Difficulty retaining information while doing something with it such as remembering a phone number while dialing.

This EF disability is fascinating because we all share some of these dysfunctional behaviors. For your own research, you have a goldmine of information by just googling “Executive Function disability.”

In order to become better organized, you need to become aware that disorganization is a problem for you. Start with a date calendar and record your appointments and your assignments. Forgetting to do this will add to your disorganization until you decide to make a commitment to becoming better organized.

The only worry about being organized is acquiring O.C.D. (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). But we’ll worry about this when you transform yourself into Adrian Monk. Or, his opposite, Alfred E. Newman, of “What Me Worry?” fame.

UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS:

June 30, 2010 – Emotions: Anger: Fighting Fury; Clues to recognizing triggers of rage whether they are people, places or things and ways to overtake them before they overtake you. This is a familiar emotion to all of us. We may recognize it others, but do we recognize it in ourselves? We cannot hope to fully understand this emotion, but we’ll try to discover how many ways the emotion of “anger” manifests itself in ourselves, in others, in the world. With luck, this will be a cool and dispassionate discussion about a very hot topic.

The 6/30/10 meeting will be our last for the summer. The Club will go on vacation until the Fall semester. Because of the Jewish holidays, our first Club meeting will be on Wednesday, October 17 – same place, same time, new and old people. See you then.

What about one of these topics?

“Repetition”

“Meaning”

“Why Does History Repeat Itself?”

“Heroism”

“Concentration”

“Coping with Adversity”

Student Poetry showcase

“Empathy”

“Connecting the Dots”

Role play of cynical people

“Cold Calling in Sales”

“He’s Just Not That into You”

“Money”

“Critical Listening Institute: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’”

“Criticism – Giving and Receiving”

“Logical Fallacies”

“Freedom II”

“Gender Communication II”

“SPAR Debate”

“Distraction II”

“Negotiation II”

“Imagination II”

“Rodney King: ‘Can’t we just get along?” II”

“Political Savvy”

And dozens of others!

Compare the notice of the session with what really happened!

What happened on Wednesday, June 16, 2010?

“Rodney King: ‘Can’t We Just Get Along?”

In 1991, Rodney King was the subject of a violent beating at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department which was videoed and shown around the world We won’t recount here the details which led up to the beating, but the acquittal of the LAPD officers led to the 1992 LA riots. During the riots, King appeared on television, pleading with the rioters, “Can’t we just get along?” His question continues to reverberate in any discussion about peace. We’ll examine the many sides to King’s provocative question.

A quartet of familiar faculty faces, Richard Green, Markus Vayandorf, Dean Donne Kampel Hal Wicke, chatted for about an hour on an increasingly wide series of virtual non-sequiturs, some of which related to the topic.

and

We circled around some causes of not getting along with the consensus that many people have difficulty setting aside their own points of view. This observation led to a discussion about the inability of some people to have their point of view challenged.

Hal offered that the Communication Department is undertaking a campaign to introduce video recording of student speeches for analysis. Richard has used video in his Communication classes for years.

Political savvy was a term raised in Dean Kampel’s workshop. It will be added to the laundry list of topics.

At Hal’s request, Markus promised to develop an algorithm for gossip.

Lightheartedly, we adjourned.

---

We always have a great time exploring these issues. So often our daily life never focuses on these Communication issues. If you have something you want us to discuss please let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Next time bring a friend. The Communication Club is always an open discussion, limited only by time. Everyone gets a chance to speak. All opinions are welcome. Here is an opportunity for students to challenge professors’ views outside the class without any homework or assignments. You just have to show up and listen and talk if you want.

Hal Wicke