Ed Batista

If it appears that Germany is defeating England and France, should the United States declare war on Germany and send our army and navy to Europe to fight? This produces a useful and necessary tension between the leader's vision and everyone else's current reality, which, under the right circumstances, can move people to adopt this vision of the future and begin to act accordingly. The great leader steps into the future just far enough to encourage the people around them to consider the possibility of this alternative reality, but not so far ahead that their vision is dismissed or ignored. The great leader allows the combined force of their vision of the future and the movement of current trends to bring people along without unnecessary force by the leader or undue stress on others.

This seems to me an ineffective way of seeking to dismiss our natural responses to horror and tragedy, and it can be viewed as a variation on the widespread belief in a "just world," a concept first explored by psychologist Melvin Lerner: Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve. Since the belief that the world is just serves such an important adaptive function for the individual, people are very reluctant to give up this belief, and they can be greatly troubled if they encounter evidence that suggests that the world is not really just or orderly after all. And I'm reminded of something I wrote on February 8th, the last day I saw my friend Erik, reflecting on mortality without grasping just how close at hand it was: "I find myself considering how I spend my time--and with whom--and the image of a candle burning down readily comes to mind. Instead of adding items to a 'bucket list,' I feel motivated to let things go, to devote less and less time to activities I find unrewarding, and to focus my energy on the people and experiences I find most meaningful."

The ability to grasp context implies an ability to weigh a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. In a widely cited paper on how a loss of shared meaning can contribute to disastrous outcomes, Weick notes that our sense of life as a predictable process is an illusion: "People...act as if events cohere in time and space and that change unfolds in an orderly manner. The difficult decisions you now face will inevitably test others' trust in your judgment when they disagree with the actions you intend to take, but this is an easier problem to solve, because you may be able to explain your rationale and change their mind, or they may be willing to "disagree and commit." Let's return to Bennis and Thomas' definition here: the "ability to weigh a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective.

The primary theme of yesterday's post was that people who now find themselves living and working together need to establish effective boundaries, a concept explored over a decade ago by my former colleague Michael Gilbert, who drew on his training as a biologist: Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. While groups of people in close quarters need to manage their boundaries to support differentiation, people living alone need to manage their boundaries to support integration. As I've written before, three different types of boundaries--temporal, physical, and cognitive--promote "wholeness and synergy," and here's how they might be employed by someone living alone who's working from home for an extended period. The temporal and physical boundaries discussed above are all ultimately intended to help support cognitive boundaries that allow you to direct your attention as productively as possible.