Virtual Teams, Distance Work, Silence and Resentment

I work in Distance Ed, and I've been working on distance/virtual teams for a long time. The unique problem with distance work/distance management, I think, is the lack of shared context. When you all work in the same office, you know when someone is sick, on vacation, overloaded or working to a deadline on something. So if they do not respond to a request of yours right away, you understand. When you don't have that contextual information, then when somebody doesn't get back to you, the reason is a mystery. You just get a sense that the person is unreliable, or thinks you are unimportant. Then you resent them for that.

Basic attribution theory suggests that this is a natural way to respond when lacking contextual info, but it is very destructive on virtual/distance teams!!

One way around this is to spend time at the beginning of a distance collaboration with everybody together in one space, to synchronize everybody's internal sense/mental models of themselves, each other, the team, the task and the timeline. Then you have to meet face-to-face periodically to re-synchronize and keep your collective "groove" fresh.

Here's something I wrote elsewhere on this topic:

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Advantages of Collaboration at a Distance over Collocated (local) Collaboration (Shunn et al., 2002):

On virtual teams:

- Info sharing can be more even (all members have more to share, because as a group they have access to more/more varied information sources, by virtue of being in different contexts)
- Wider influx of ideas, wider variety of mental models (same idea as above)
- Less tendency for groupthink, regionalism, conformity
- Asynchronous communications more thoughtful, measured and complete than live conversation, and better-structured for persistence and re-use
- Asynchronous communications tend to be more durable
- Collaboration of any kind involves a rhythm of social integration and then going off to do solo work - the "solo" part of this work cycle unfolds with less disruption when collaborating at a distance

However:

- Frequent face-to-face meetings are important, esp. at beginning of a collaboration (e.g. weekly)

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WHY?
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DISTANCE COLLABORATION DISRUPTS INTERACTIVE GROUNDING

Copresent collaborators can build the common ground that will sustain the successful distance collaboration, through dense and rich interactions.

In copresent communications, they can coordinate conversational turn-taking, respond to the precisely timed conversational cues of their collaborators, repair misunderstandings in real time. As a result, the mental model each collaborator forms of the other collaborators' communication styles, frames of reference, assumption bases and cognitive processes, greatly facilitating coordination during solo work phases.

Collocal meetings inculcate task, team and context awareness. "People keep up with information about the demand for their work in the real world, how particular tasks are progressing, what fellow workers are doing, who is communicating with whom, what equipment is out of order, and many other details of the collaboration that concern them directly or tangentially. Here we distinguish between awareness of the task (e.g. what steps have to be taken next…) and awareness of the collaborative team (e.g., who knows what among the members…). Developing and maintaining this team awareness is much more difficult in distributed teams than collocated ones.

Task awareness, which includes collaborators' beliefs about the overall project, including its history, current status, and future directions, is crucial for successful coordination. When collaborators divide work, they need to monitor their partners' activities for personnel management and to understand the impact of their partners' progress on their own work. This monitoring can help people determine when and which collaborative actions are required (e.g. whether it is time to nag someone to complete his or her section of the project). The granularity with which collaborators need to maintain task awareness differs depending on the nature of the task…

Team awareness, on the other hand, refers to collaborators' beliefs about both stable and changing attributes of their partners. Detailed and accurate models of each other's knowledge, skills, and motivation help collaborators assign tasks appropriately and solicit and offer appropriate help. Collaborators share beliefs about project roles and responsibilities, interdependencies among team members, the current status of each person's assigned tasks, their availability for interaction, and the like…Equally important, when team members are collocated, they can passively monitor activities going on around them and pick up relevant information without explicit communication… This passive monitoring of other's activities aids collaboration… [e.g.]members of a team pick up information about each other while training side by side, which allows them to allocate tasks more effectively.
Not only do collocated teams pick up information implicitly, but they also share a context that helps them accurately interpret this information… the lack of shared context leads to misattributions for behaviour, resulting in poorer coordination and distrust. For example, one member may send another mail asking for an update, but does not get a response because the recipient is on vacation. In a distributed team, the lack of shared context often led to ambiguity about interpreting silence, which in turn resulted in failures of coordination and distrust… failure to respond to mail was attributed negatively to the person (that person is unreliable) rather than to the situation (the mail did not get through or the team was on vacation). By contrast, in a collocated setting, vacation schedules and availability would likely be known." (Kraut et al., 2002 p. 153-154)

THE IMPLICATION of the first study is that when collaborators take the time up front to build shared cognitive models through interactive grounding, then they can better withstand the corrosive effects of distance collaboration, and reap the rewards of distributive work efforts.

THE RISK to virtual organizations such as our own is that we fail to recognize the strategic importance of building a cohesive group through real-time, face to face interactions, and so many of our distance interactions will be compromised by insufficient shared grounding.

REFERENCES:
Kraut, Robert E., Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan and Jane Siegel, "Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work" p. 137. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Schunn, Christian, Kevin Crowley and Takeshi Okada, "What Makes Collaborations Across a Distance Succeed? The Case of the Cognitive Science Community", p. 407. in Hinds, Pamela and Sara Kiesler, Distributed Work. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass., 2002

Passionate Love as a Plot Arc

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how one might conceivably use Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" as an alternative plot arc for screenwriting - or at any rate as a plot arc for dramas of recognition. Actually, that book could support a whole genre of plot arcs, much like the Hero's journey does.

There is another sort of screenwriter's "scaffold" for creating plot arcs that I have found, and I think this one is even cooler. It is a model of passionate love described by Sharon S. Brehm in a book called "The Psychology of Love", edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes (Yale University Press, 1988).

In this article, Sharon Brehm describes her search for models of passionate love that are "passion-positive" rather than focusing on the destructive aspects of passion. She finds such models, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the writings of Christian mystics. Religious passion is ostensibly "desexualized", and hence escapes condemnation. However, clerics have often had occasion to tell certain zealots, ascetics and other passionate devout people to "tone down" their devotion... Excesses of passion are seen as dangerous everywhere, I guess...

Brehm did find a line of literary texts that dealt with passion, with a point of origin in the works of Marie-Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendhal, and a point of insertion in a book by Dorothy Tennov called "Love and Limerance" (1979). Tennov notes that Stendhal is virtually unique among the students of love ("sopho-philiacs?") in his 'failure' to criticise, scold, castigate or caution the lover, the beloved or the experience of passionate love.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the fact that, according to Brehm, Stendhal's theory of passionate love (developed in his work "De l'amour") describes several phases of the growth of passion, which turn out to be a loose but salient match to the vision of love described by St. Theresa of Avila (most fully described in "the Interior Castle" - her account of her own mystical experiences).

Hmmmm..... <=things that make ya go...

Each theory is summarized in turn. Keep in mind that my main interest is in a model for dramatic plotlines, not so much the theories per se.

STENDHAL's THEORY OF PASSIONATE LOVE

STAGE 1: ADMIRATION
The lover encounters the beloved and is attracted by his/her qualities. Since initial encounters are usually brief, these qualities are usually fairly superficial e.g. looks, sense of humor, charm, etc.

STAGE 2: ANTICIPATION
The lover begins to elaborate upon these impressions, imagining the pleasures that would come with a closer association with the beloved. The circumstances of the lover are important in this. If the lover is stuck in a boring routine, fantasy elaborations are more likely, as they are if the lover is romantically confident, bold or imaginative.

STAGE 3: HOPE
Once the lover starts investing time and energy in the elaboration of fantasies, hope must be evaluated to assess whether or not to escalate fantasies into plans or action preparedness. This evaluation is not a cold, rational accounting. It also depends greatly upon the circumstances the lover is in, as did stage 2.

STAGE 4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION
Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow. They give rise to what amounts to the *real* first stage of passionate love - "romantic attraction", or a "crush". This is the point at which the resolve to press things further is flirted with. Different subjects would do this with differing degrees of agency/patiency.

STAGE 5: CRYSTALIZATION
When you suddenly realize that you have fallen hard for somebody, they become outstandingly wonderful beings in your eyes. Stendhal referred to the "deification of a charming object", calling crystallization:

...that process of mind which discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at
every turn of events... it is sufficient to think of a perfection in order
to see it in the person you love...

Crystallization develops over time, and during this time, your friends begin to dread your late-night phone calls. Brehm describes it as "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate."

It *is* kind of pleasant... you have to admit!

Since the beloved comes to represent all joy and beauty, our anticipation of the delight we will experience with them expands in measure. This state is made only more intense by the terrible risk that the beloved might reject us, meaning that all of this anticipated wonderfulness will never come to pass. Eeeeeek!!

So there are three aspects of crystalization, which intermingle:
1) The increasingly self-perfecting image of the beloved
2) The imagined delights of being loved back by this perfect beloved
3) The terror of being rejected by irreplaceable source of delight

Increase or decrease any one of these pressures, and the others will increase or decrease along with it. In this, we find what Brehm calls the "quintessential Stendhalian proposition that passionate love depends on uncertainty and distance."
This quintessential proposition is so important that it supports the sixth stage of Love's progress...

STAGE 6: DOUBT
A serious blow, a serious threat, a rival, news that he/she may be moving... a major crisis of doubt is necessary to kick the obsession up a notch... up into...

STAGE 7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION
This is full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, reality-testing is seriously imaired. There is no more casual wondering about the beloved. Coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", a "sign", a "message"... Every nuance of the beloved's behaviour is scrutinized with intense focus on each detail and its posssible ramifications... for hints of interest, disinterest, acceptance, rejection... All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness.

At this point, your friends begin suggesting that you might want to consider getting professional help... you're scaring them now...

I think this gets us to the first major reversal of the second act. Motivation now exists for the exceptional course of action and its complications... or alternatively, for the tragic failure to act... or whatever...

--SIDEBAR--
What's good for love is good for hate, in dramatic terms, I would think... surely a passionate hate could be meaningfully represented as developing in essentially the same way that Stendhal describes for passionate love. This could be hatred of a person, like Iago's hatred for Othello, or the more abstract and global hatred of symbols of power, like "America", "Microsoft", "the market", "the right", "the left"... etc. Stendhal's progress of passion could be used to analyse the public rhetoric of polemicists of all stripes, and the process by which groups of people are induced to dehumanize other groups of people.

TERESA OF AVILA'S INTERIOR CASTLE
St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) is one of the great psychologists of the mystical experience, and many of her writings strive for the clearest possible description of them. A notable example of this is her _Interior Castle_: a text where she explains the process of loving God using a spatial metaphor - the metaphor of a journey through a great castle containing many "mansions" (rooms). In this work, she develops seven basic stages of the progress of the devotee's soul towards the beloved God.

(This, by the way, would be a really good way to get around writer's block for some dramatists - for writers with more of a structural/overview sense of design, rather than an event-by-event/act-consquence-act timeflow sense of design. If you find the Aristotelian-arc metaphor unhelpful, or if Robert McKee's Neo-Aristotelian act-goal-gap kinds of temporal/timeline models also fail to kick-start your engine, you can design your plot spatially, as a house or as a whole kingdom that your characters will have to voyage through to reach the goal. When I was a kid, before computers were common, we used to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in exactly this way. The Dungeon Master would design a world on graph paper - or hex paper for the hardcore players. There would be rumors of treasure, carried by strangers with information, shops for buying equipment, all kinds of hazards and obstacles to overcome along the journey, antagonists of increasing power, experience points gained by the players, etc... This spatial, Advanced D&D metaphor for plot design is a great way for spatially-minded dramatists to organize their plots... and this little rant was inspired by St. Teresa of Avila, so it can't be Satanic mind-control being channeled by Gary Gygax!!)

Teresa's model of devotional love is outlined below, with Stendhal's stages appended in square brackets, to explore the parallels.

STAGE 1: ENTERING THE CASTLE
The individual makes a decision to love God.
[S1: ADMIRATION - the accumulation of reasons to cathect to an object.]

STAGE 2: OPENING THE SELF
One prays to God and offers oneself to Him, if He should deign to accept, or not (one devotes oneself without holding out for recognition).
[S2: ANTICIPATION - An elaboration of one's focus on the beloved, and a sense of possible futures with him/her.]

STAGE 3: EMBODYING DEVOTION
Living an exemplary life of prayer and good works, defined throughout as an offering to Him.
[S3: HOPE - One begins to believe that a life with the beloved is possible.]

STAGE 4: ON GOD's HOOK
This is done through the Prayer of Recollection and the Prayer of Quiet. The Prayer of Recollection involves the active awareness of all of one's activities, and the growing realization that all of them are concentrated upon God. The Prayer of Quiet is the inward-focusing twin of the Prayer of Recollection. The Prayer of Quiet involves withdrawing inwards, with one's will totally concentrated on God, giving rise to the awareness that the soul is powerless to do anything else but serve God - nothing else is possible for the self.
[S4: ROMANTIC ATTRACTION - Admiration, anticipation and hope together form the hook - or cupid's arrow - "romantic attraction", or a "crush".]

STAGE 5: BETROTHAL - THE PROMISE OF UNION
Brief glimpses of God's perfection are permitted, in contemplative "absences" when all awareness of world and self melt away. One develops a sense of what it will mean to be fully given over to union with the divine. One has entered the penumbra of the divine presence, and one feels humility of place.[
S5: CRYSTALIZATION - The "deification of a charming object", "...an increasingly tight, closing system in which the world contracts to the beloved and the beloved fills all the world. The beloved becomes joy and beauty incarnate." <==Actually, all of Teresa's Stages 1-4 could be described as stages of crystallization...]

STAGE 6: BEING GRANTED INTIMACY WITH GOD
One enters the divine presence, enjoying experiences of rapture, transport and the famous Teresaen "wounding of the soul" - God's angel brandishing an iron-tipped spear with a flaming head, repeatedly piercing her heart and guts, causing her unimaginably ecstatically pleasurable agony... ahem... rapture and transport are altered states of consciousness, trance-like states wherein visions or revelations may be experienced. At this point, one is a full journeyman in the "God" business...
[S6: DOUBT - a threat or rival appears... the parallelism with Stendhal here is a parallelism of precise opposition. Teresa posits full confirmation at the point where Stendhal puts it into doubt. This would support the tactic - described below - of using Stendhal's progress as template for the beginning of act two, and Teresa's as a template for the latter part.]

STAGE 7: THE SPIRITUAL MARRIAGE
One is accepted by God in a permanent union. One is given over to God, one become's God's.
[S7: SECOND CRYSTALIZATION Full-blown obsession. The beloved is everything, coincidence and chance vanish. Everything that happens is "destiny", All other concerns and interests in life fade into nothingness. <== This sounds a bit like Teresa's Stage 4: On God's Hook.]

The parallels between Teresa's account of devotional love and Stendhal's theory of passionate love are suggestive, though not perfect. Passion and devotion intersect in each, but it is a matter of determining which comes first. The first form of love will frame or support the other. For Teresa, devotion comes first - the conscious choice to dedicate oneself. This produces passion in the end, as a kind of reward for devotion. Stendhal describes passion as coming first, and devotion (more accurately, obsession) then develops.

Passion is not willed in Stendhal's model. Rather it develops as an instance of what some psychologists describe as "elaborated intrusion". Due to some kind of subconscious (subcortical?) evaluation, a thought, image, name, memory, whatever, has enough valence or salience that it continually "pops up" in the minds, intruding on other thoughts upon the flimsiest of associative pretexts (or for no reason at all...). The active thought won't go away, and so it gets elaborated into further associations, further hypothetical action plans, further hypothetical scenarios... all of which increase the valence and salience of the intrusive thought...

Teresa's devotional love begins with a decision to love with no guarantee of reciprocation... so it has a very different, and much firmer, basis than elaborated intrusion. Elaborated intrusion does appear in Teresa's model, but it is cultivated through devotional effort - it is attained through practice - rather than appearing gratis courtesy of the subconscious. (In her *model*, anyhow. Those who psychoanalyse her writings do comment on the visceral/limbic "kick" she seems to have going for this "God" fellow!)

Maybe, as suggested earlier, in terms of a dramatic arc, if the development of passion takes us to the first major reveral of the second act, the devotional phase follows upon it as the struggle for redemption and the attainment of the beloved (be it a person, thing, achievement, state-of-being or state-of-affairs sought). This would carry us throught the second act. Once the one who is captivated is in danger of losing it all (Stendhal)... then... he/she *devotes* him/herself to achieving/deserving the passion again (Teresa).

Taking each progress of passion as its own arc, one can characterise them in various ways. Stendhal's begins with a patientive moment that revs up the motivational engine to spur a character to agency. It is an awakening of agency. That in itself is a drama. On a plot level it is a truncated version of a full three-act romantic master plot (e.g. the master-plot "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" would be shortened to "boy meets girl, boy los..."). By truncating the romantic master-plot, however, a well-loved genre of character-drama emerges - the "awakening/rejuvenation of the spirit by precarious desire." We get to see a shut-down, patientive character slowly deconstructed by passion, and awkwardly reconstructed into an agent with some chance of success. The whole drama of a person overcoming his/her own limitations can be very compelling.

These kinds of truncated-master-plot-character-dramas make great calendar-house/atrs-cable-station films.

The Teresean arc is an arc of devotion, dedication, ultimately of submission - as are most acts of religious devotion. Teresa begins as a strong-will agentive character, who goes about the process of stilling herself and bringing herself into alignment and under the guidance of an agency bigger than herself. A lot of social-conscience drama, addiction-recovery drama, escaping-the-ghetto drama and so on involve this kind of disciplined realignment under a new logic for the promise of a greater future as part of something else...

Another way to contrast the two arcs is to describe Stendhal's progress as the progress of Eros, and Teresa's as the progress towards Storge. In John Alan Lee's article on "Love Styles" (from the same awesome collection of articles as Brehm's artcle on Stendhal and Teresa: The Psychology of Love" edited by Robert J. Sterberg and Michael L. Barnes, Yale U Press, 1988) he describes Storge (Stor-Gay) as follows (fall-owes):

Typical storgic lovers often grew up in large, supportive families, or in stable, friendly communities. They enjoy their friends and are satisfied with life. They expect love will be a special friendship in which more than the usual time and activities are shared. No particular body type is strongly preferred. Storgic lovers are not anxious or preoccupied with an absent beloved. "Time will tell" whether they were meant to be together. They recoil from an excessive show of emotion in the partner, and prefer to talk about interests they share rather than about their feelings for each other. As the partnership matures, they become possessive in a quiet way unless a real threat to the relationship occurs, forcing them to declare stronger feelings. It's important to get to know the partner first as a friend before getting into sexual relations. Once deep friendship is secured, sexual problems can be "worked out". Mutual love is not a goal of life itself, but as an aspect of the greater goals of friendship and family.

The goal of Teresa's arc is the marriage, the settling or establishing of the loving relationship that will become the quiet, humble, background basis and support for a holy life. There is passion, but it is one-sided, and it quiets itself as one's position beside the beloved becomes defined. The slow development of companionate/storgic love is a great "weepy" story arc, particularly when it is non-sexual and develops within an odd-pairing, like an old man and a little boy. If their growing importance to each other is developed slowly, strongly and casually enough, then when you finally hit that moment where an unusual threat makes one of them act or speak out their dedication to the other - guaranteed waterworks!! (But like music or comedy, timing is everything.)

Like now, for instance... it's time I got back to work. Of course, I have been working on all of this love and drama stuff, but it's not what I get paid to do. As I have reflected in earlier posts... it is almost always more fun to do what you are not paid to do. Sigh...

Harmonic intervals and emotional characteristics

Okay, I almost gave up on this whole blogging concept, but this is just way too cool! It's a list of different harmonic intervals and the emotional responses we have to them. This is taken from _Exploring Sound Design for Interactive Media_ by Joseph Cancellaro (Thompson 2006). Here it is:

INTERVAL-------- EMOTIONAL QUALITY
Perfect octave----- Completeness, Openness, unity
Major seventh -----Spooky, eerie, off-centre, strange
Minor seventh----- Expectant, suspenseful, full but unbalanced
Major sixth---------Peaceful, balanced
Minor sixth---------A bit sad, soothing
Perfect fifth---------Power, centering, strength, victory
Tritone-------------Horror, terrifying, scary
Perfect fourth-------Ethereal, lightness, transparent, clarity
Major third---------Neutral, hopeful, resolved, nonabrasive
Minor third---------Uplifting, relaxed, positive feelings
Major second-------Unresolved, unsettled, unpredictability
Minor second-------Unclear, tense, anxious, uneasiness
Perfect unison------Peace, strength, calmness, security

There you go! You always knew different intervals had different emotional qualities. It just took someone to actually list them! Thanks Joseph!

When you Hate the Job you Always Wanted

Okay, I finally found that article I was looking for in the first ever post to this blog. It's Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science Volume 15—Number 11: 787-793. They wanted to see how compensation effected the effort people put into a task. Standard economic wisdom suggests that they more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

A long history of research has demonstrated that rewards can decrease motivation and attitudes (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), alter self-perception (Bem, 1965), increase overjustification (Lepper et al., 1973), and turn feelings of competence into feelings of being controlled (Deci & Ryan, 1985). The debate over these findings (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Ryan & Deci, 2000) has generally shifted to the question of what specific circumstances give rise to these counterintuitive effects.

Their proposal is that there are two kinds of markets: monetary markets and social markets. Different kinds of goods and services may be associated with each market, but more to the point, the form of compensation offered differs as well. When you offer to pay someone, you signal that you want to situate the transaction in the economic modality. If you offer to pay friends for helping you move apartments, they may get royally and truly offended! However, stocking your new fridge full of beer and ordering in pizzas will be gladly accepted - unless you mention the price! If you do that, you are trying to put a money-value on the asset of having friends who will help you. You will, in a sense, be rejecting them from the social market, driven by reciprocal altruism, esteem, social standing/reputation, social network position, and all the rest.

They continue:

[This h]ypothesis...1 also predicts a distinction between exchanges in which payment is not mentioned (‘‘not paying at all’’) and those in which individuals are told explicitly that they will not be paid (‘‘paying nothing’’). Whereas not mentioning payment is likely to cause individuals to consider themselves to be in a social-market relationship, telling individuals explicitly that they are not getting paid is likely to cause them to consider themselves to be in a money-market relationship. Our framework predicts that not paying at all in the context of social market relationships can create higher levels of incentives than low levels of compensation in the context of money-market relationships, a prediction that is shared by many other accounts (Bem, 1965; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000b; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973).

This means, they point out, that "Effort in exchange for no payment can be higher than effort in exchange for low monetary payment." Strictly economic rationality would not predict this, but strictly economic rationality has been slow to pick up on the impact of social exchange behavior on economic exchange behavior. I remember when I was in Fiji for awhile, and in some of the marketplaces where native Fijian businesses were predominant, there were signs all over the place telling vendors not to sell good on verbal credit! (I.e., a vague promise to repay the vendor later, somehow.) In the traditional Fijian village economy, the social exchange market dominates material exchange, and so a lot of the culture gives expression to social exchange values. In a modern cash economy, however, people had to learn to insist that business be business, and that payment be made.

I think some of us are biologically more sensitive to different kinds of signals of gain or loss. I for one basically don't notice money, don't think of it, would rather not think of it, etc. I care what my salary is, but mainly as an indicator of social status, and of how valuable my employer considers me as a resource. I love doing a good job, though. I love the recognition that comes from it, but I would far rather professionalize my work. I prefer to make my salary a background indicator of my social standing and status, and to then ignore it. When I do good work, I want it to be for intrinsic reasons - because I value good work, and because I have a will to constantly improve things, etc. I want to present my work to others, to discuss it with them, to gain recognition and to thereby gain social sanction to continue my apparently valuable work. However, getting paid for every product I deliver is profoundly de-motivating. I'd almost rather not work at all.

Weird but true.

Procrastinology

I'm still kind of hooked on this 2-motivational-systems idea... I am trying to figure out the conditions that will help me be motivated to reach short-term, mundane goals. Noodling around online, I bumped into descriptions of Lacan's model of the psyche. It's a tripartite model like Freud's psychodynamic model. The three parts are the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

The Real is inexpressible in language, and since the human subject is made in language, it is lost to us. Think of Helen Keller before she had words. It is a state of being driven by primal needs. In the Imaginary register, we no longer have raw needs, but rather a demand - the demand for wholeness, and thus the demand that the other be incorporated into the self. Think of Nietzsche's master-slave dynamic, where the powerful do not even realize that they are powerful because being powerful means you get your own (ego) goals met, and you never have to think to much about why. Those in a subservient position, however, are aware (and resentful) of the actions of the powerful, and they are able to counteract that by making the powerful self-conscious of their power and its enabling conditions. I think that Lacan's demand is like this bid from the less powerful to be like the more powerful. A bid for externally-supported narcissism.

The imaginary stage is all about image, identitifications, self-image, narcissism, ego-ideals, heros and idols, etc. Romantic attraction is heavily played out in the imaginary register.

The symbolic register is all about linguistically-constructed social entities. You are who it is said that you are, in all of the recording devices of linguistic society (including the brains of other people). Extramarital affairs are good examples of a conflict involving the real and the imaginary at war with the symbolic. According to names, to laws, to the explicit social understanding of roles, and so on, person A is married to person B. Person A has no business getting sexual with person C.

It seems to me that Lacan's insights could map nicely onto MacLean's triune brain hypothesis: that the Real could involve the lower "reptilian" brain and its role in controlling motivational systems, the Imaginary could involve the intermediate "mammalian" brain - the limbic system and its richer associational control over motivation, and the Symbolic could involve the highest brain - the isocortex in its specifically human configuration.

This point of contact might let someone interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis from a neurobiological point of view begin to cross-correlate the two literatures. The results might be interesting. New findings in neuroscience will be relevant for psychoanalysis, but mappings between the two discourses are needed.

I should mention in passing that Ichak Adizes, the inventor of a business intervention methodology that I have worked with in developing online management courses for Management Vitality, also uses a tripartite scheme that could be mapped to this triune structure. This is the distinction between what is, what we want, and what should be. Management teams can get into trouble when they confuse these three evaluations, believing that what they wish were true really is true (even though it is not). This can mislead decision-making processes.

So many ways to scratch at this itch. I wonder how to understand it all...

All of this flows from my curiosity around my own procrastination, hence the title of this post. "Procrastinology" was a coinage for me, but I'm not the first. Googling this term gives me four pages of hits as of the date of writing this post (17 Aug 2006).

When Pay Ruins Everything

Virgin post... what a feeling of freedom, and irrelevance! Do the two go together, I wonder? Are the relevant always burdened?

Blogging is great! I don't know why I didn't think of this before. You see, I suffer from an illness. You might have it too! Basically, my problem is my attitude towards work. My work is important to me. I like working and I like producing good output. I want to exercise my talents, and I have various kinds of writing contracts on the go that let me do just that. Those projects are actually really quite interesting - producing texts and documents that seem like fun to put together.

However...

As soon as I do this thing I enjoy (writing) for money, the project takes on all the appeal of calculating my income taxes. I just can't get motivated to do it! Rather than doing that writing task I have agreed to do for money, I goof off, doing other writing tasks (like blogging) that I feel more like doing, just for fun.

Getting paid for something you love can totally ruin the experience.

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many different investigators believe that humans have more than one motivational system, and these systems may compete in various ways.

One of these distinctions is prominent in social exchange theory (SEC). SEC distinguishes between social exchange and economic exchange. Social exchanges ares based on trust, mutual aid, the joint production of public goods, social networking and social standing. Economic exchanges are based on contracts and on the profit principle. It may be the case that some of us are much more plugged in to the social motivational system than the economic one. Sexual selection may have had a role in shaping that social motivational system, making it more developed than it might otherwise have become... Googling "social exchange theory" opens the door to this little world.

Other people define two motivational systems differently, e.g. a "hot" (emotional) and "cool" (instrumental/rational) system, or an "approach" system and a "withdraw" system. People for whom money ruins the pleasures of work may be more hot/approach types, rather than cool/withdraw types. We may have an insufficient fear of poverty, perhaps. Or perhaps the systems overlap each other differently - we don't get hot for instrumental gains, but rather for social status and networking gains, or something.

Of course, a venerable distinction in the world of motivational studies is the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Some of us may be so strong on the intrinsic motivation (e.g. high task-involvement and high control over our work) that extrinsic incentives actually ruin our motivation. In that case, managing people like us would involve surrounding us with the type of work we want to do anyway (which happens to be what our employers also want), and giving us enough money to feel important and respected (but not have that money connected to any specific task or project). Salary would be better than piecework, perhaps, for workers like us. Then we would need a social environment where we could distinguish ourselves, winning all of those social rewards (prominence, eminence, status, respect... etc.) which are the real things that motivate us...

This is exactly how the university system works, come to think of it! (Also possibly the entire country of France.)

It would be interesting to try to design or imagine a university-like company. Genetech apparently works this way: Employees don't get assignments, they get "appointments." ...Genentech awards sabbaticals to stave off burnout. To keep creativity alive, both it and Google encourage their scientists and engineers to spend fully 20% of each workweek pursuing pet projects.

Of course, blogging is pursuing a pet project, but for now I pursue it under the cloud of guilt. The shame, the shame...

I guess it's time to get back to work.