In rejecting the death penalty, one senator is a catalyst | The Connecticut Mirror

In rejecting the death penalty, one senator is a catalyst | The Connecticut Mirror

In rejecting the death penalty, one senator is a catalyst

April 9, 2012

By Mark Pazniokas

It is nearing 2:30 a.m., and the corridors of the State Capitol are almost empty. Two women, both longtime lobbyists in the cause of abolishing capital punishment, wait for Senate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn.

When Williams finally emerges from the Senate with an aide, the taller of the women, Kimberly Harrison, steps forward to kiss him on the cheek. The other, Betty Gallo, touches his arm. Williams, an introvert in a profession of extroverts, smiles self-consciously.

After starting the legislative session on Feb. 8 with only 16 Democratic votes for repeal, the Senate had just voted 20-16 to abolish the death penalty for future crimes.

The attention was on swing votes during the death penalty debate, not Senate leader Donald E. Williams Jr.

The surprisingly strong vote in the early hours of Holy Thursday emerged from six weeks of discreet conversations conducted by Williams, an unexpected phone call from a distant colleague, a pivotal tour of death row and, ultimately, a quiet cup of tea.

Four swing senators - one on no one's list of possible yes votes -- reached their own decision, completing what Williams called their own personal journey. And others had laid the groundwork, lobbyists and other legislators who have worked the issue for years.

But Williams was the catalyst.

On Feb. 23, he and Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, D-New Haven, met in Williams' spacious corner office on the third floor of the Legislative Office Building with three potential swing votes: Democrats Edith G. Prague of Columbia, Carlo Leone of Stamford and Joseph J. Crisco of Woodbridge.

"We talked about the various arguments." Williams said. "Is it a deterrent? Is it discriminatory? Is it a net plus or minus in terms of resources committed in our criminal justice system?"

It the start of a series of meetings initiated by Williams, as a group and individually. The point of the exercise was to decide in the next month if there was any purpose in Sen. Eric D. Coleman, D-Bloomfield, the co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, reporting a repeal bill out of his committee.

"I wasn't going to tell Eric to go and get that out if in my gut I knew we would not be able to have the votes," Williams said.

A clock was ticking.

Prague, 86, the oldest member of the Senate, had the highest profile among the trio invited to Williams' office. Her opposition to repeal shifted in 2009, when she joined a 19-17 majority in the Senate in favor of abolition, a measure that was vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a moderate Republican.

The election of 2010 brought good and bad for the repeal movement. Dannel P. Malloy and Nancy Wyman, Democrats opposed to capital punishment, were elected as governor and lieutenant governor.

From left to right, Kimberly Harrison and Betty Gallo congratulate Sen. Eric Coleman after death penalty vote.

But the new membership of the Senate, at best, seemed to yield an 18-18 deadlock over repeal. As the presiding officer of the Senate, Wyman would break the tie.

Passage was within reach, if just barely.

Then Prague and Sen. Andrew Maynard, D-Stonington, abandoned the cause, at least temporarily. They were unwilling or unable to go against the wishes of Dr. William A. Petit, who once was known at the State Capitol as an affable advocate on medical issues.

After he was beaten and his wife and two daughters murdered at their Cheshire home on a summer night in 2007, Petit took on a status somewhat akin to a secular saint when it came to questions of justice for the dead.

Petit asked them not to vote for repeal, at least not while the case still was pending against one of the two men who eventually would be convicted and sentenced to death for the attack on his family.

"For Dr. Petit, for me to do one more thing to cause him some kind of angst, I can't do it," Prague said in May 2011.

Conventional wisdom holds that controversial social issues like the death penalty are best tackled in odd years, when the session is longer and legislators aren't staring at re-election. The session in even years is a three-month sprint, whose end in early May marks the beginning of campaign season.

Williams said if there was an opportunity for repeal, it should be pursued, even in a short session.

"I thought shortly after the session began in February, it would make sense to start reaching out to the senators to see what they thought about the death penalty," said Williams, who ascended to the Senate's top leadership post July 1, 2004.

It was the day John G. Rowland resigned as governor, setting off a chain of successions that made Kevin Sullivan, who was Williams' strong-willed predecessor, the lieutenant governor. Legislative leaders often thrive with a mix of menace and back-slapping familiarity.

Williams was neither a back-slapper, nor a hammer. As a lawyer and former first selectman from the state's Quiet Corner, Williams led the Senate with a methodical diligence on issues, not charisma.

But the death penalty, perhaps, was the ideal issue for a leader who likes to be a facilitator.

Maynard was back in the fold at the start of the 2012 session.

"Sen. Prague was not sure, so from a vote count point of view, with Sen. Maynard on board, there would be 16 Democrats and one potential Republican. Even with Sen. Roraback, we'd be at 17, one short of a tie," Williams said.

Edith G. Prague

Andrew Roraback of Goshen was the only Republican senator to vote for repeal in 2009. A week before the Judiciary vote this year, Roraback would announce his opposition to repeal, unless Democrats ended a new early-release program for inmates.

At the first meeting Williams and Looney had with the trio of swing votes, the conversation eventually moved to the alternative to execution: a sentence of life without possibility of release. For the first time, they talked about the conditions of confinement.

"And as we had that discussion, all of us came to the realization that we had not seen death row," Williams said.

Calls were made. On March 5, all five senators would tour death row at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, a grim, high-security prison designed to segregate inmates who pose chronic disciplinary or security risks.

Then came "a call out of the blue" from Sen. Gayle S. Slossberg, D-Milford, whose relationship with leadership was strained, largely over her opposition to Democratic budget and tax packages, including Malloy's first budget in 2011.

Slossberg had heard about the tour and wanted to join them. Without being lobbied by him or the advocates, Slossberg was seriously considering supporting repeal.

"She had obviously been thinking about this for a long time, and this obviously was a very important and personal decision that she had been living with for a period of time," Williams said. He was not the only one stunned by the overture.

Joseph J. Crisco

Repeal advocates said Slossberg was on "no one's radar."

Slossberg joined them on the tour of death row.

The six senators were met at Northern by Leo Arnone, the commissioner of Correction, and Michael P. Lawlor, a former legislator now serving as Malloy's undersecretary for criminal justice policy.

The entrance to Northern is a long, windowless corridor that conveys passage from one world to another. Prisoners make the walk in shackles.

"It's like coming into a submarine. It has its desired effect, whether on prisoners or on visitors," Williams said. "By the time we got to death row, people weren't speaking. They were just walking by."

Arnone told them that death-row prisoners are locked up 22 hours a day. When they move, they are under guard. Exercise is a solitary activity in a small space open to the sky, giving the sense of standing at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

"The totality of the living conditions there, the grimness of the living conditions there, the totality of the grimness of the living conditions, had a profound effect," Williams said.

Gayle S. Slossberg

But the tour was not finished. The six senators next were taken to MacDougall-Walker just over the town line in Suffield. With 2,000 inmates, it is the largest prison in New England.

Its typical inmate is serving a long sentence, some doing life.

The senators were immediately struck by the contrast with Northern. Entrance was through what seemed to be a brightly lit, four-story atrium.

Williams says they were told that prisoners are in their cells between 18 and 20 hours a day, but they arrived at mid-afternoon, when many were out of their cells, some in prison jobs.

MacDougall is high-security, but it had a different feel, something approaching normalcy.

"When I set up this tour, my thought was this will be the defining moment when we get to the point where senators are ready to vote for repeal," Williams said. "In point of fact, it had the opposite effect."

In individual meetings with the four senators back at the Capitol, Williams and Looney concluded that repeal was possible only if those sentenced to the new crime of murder with special circumstances faced conditions closer to death row than MacDougall.

They devised an amendment to define the conditions of punishment for the new crime: confinement in a segregated housing unit, with privileges within that unit coming at the discretion of the Correction commissioner after a one-year assessment.

Carlo Leone

By Friday, March 16, a week before the informal deadline set for the Judiciary Committee, Williams sensed that Leone, Crisco and Slossberg were close to being able to commit. He now wanted all four.

For the good of the institution, he said, he preferred not to see an issue as significant as repealing the death penalty pass on a tie vote broken by Wyman. A vote of 19-17 was preferable, 20-16 even better.

Politics had not been part of their conversations, he said, but there was a strategic and political advantage to passage with 20 votes: No one senator would be tagged as the deciding vote.

On Saturday the 17^th, Williams called Prague and asked if he could visit. Soon, he was sitting in the kitchen of Prague's home, having a cup of tea.

"And we talked, and we talked, and we talked," Williams said.

Even though the bill was prospective. Prague was wary of casting a vote that could lead to the killers of Petit's family getting out from beneath the shadow of a death sentence. But she had met with James Tillman, a man who served 18 years in prison before DNA exonerated him of rape, and she was haunted by the fallibility of courts.

"At the end of it, I wasn't sure that she was ready to make the decision, but before I left she said, 'I will support repeal.' "

Williams saw her commitment as the last piece. He would have a 20-16 majority.

"And, uh..."

Williams paused for 10 seconds as he told the story of his cup of tea with Prague. One of the criticisms of his leadership style is it is too cerebral, too emotionally distant. He looked down and took a long breath, composing himself. Then he looked up and finished the sentence.

"... and that was a remarkable moment."

He smiled broadly.

Henry David Thoreau On Facebook | Bedlam Farm Journal

http://www.bedlamfarm.com/2012/04/07/henry-david-thoreau-on-facebook/

Henry David Thoreau On Facebook

Thoreau on Facebook

 

Thoreau finished his dinner  soon after moving to his cabin on Walden Pond – fried rat, wild cat, roots, berries,  raw fish, mushrooms – and he sat down to record the meal. He wanted to share the experience of living alone at Walden Pond, to demonstrate to himself and the world that he could live near nature, make his own decisions, shed some of the fears and restrictions of society,  live a life of self-determination. He saw his page as a living "Walden." When he finished eating, he clicked on the "Publish to Facebook" button and went outside to gaze at the stars, stretch and relieve himself in the woods.

Thoreau, committed to a life of simplicity and very little use of technology, was at first reluctant to bring a computer into his tiny cabin, or to get a Facebook Page. He didn't like the Internet, and had refused to do his banking online. Of course, he had no money, so that wasn't a huge sacrifice. But he really disliked social media, the idea of all these strangers coming into his life. Writers should work alone,  be mysterious, he complained. He didn't want to meet his friends from childhood, and he hated the idea of e-mail. His publisher persuaded him that waldenpond.com would help him market "Walden Pond," and sell more copies of this dubious project to people who did not want to live on a pond in the dark and hunt and cook for themselves. You know, his editor said, brand yourself.

When Thoreau came inside after swimming naked in the pond, and capturing a frog for dinner, he was surprised to see more than 100 comments on his Facebook posting.  "Fried rat!," said one comment, "you better get yourself to a doctor now. You will have parasites and worms in the morning." There were more than 20 comments from animal lovers horrified that he had eaten a cat, and there were warnings about berries, queries about the mushrooms, and questions from environmentalists about whether he had eliminated in the woods, properly disposed of the carcass. He was cautioned about drinking water that wasn't boiled, and told that he might freeze if he didn't dress more warmly in the winter.

Cuts should be bandaged, he was told, garbage removed, beard trimmed regularly, his cabin enlarged and expanded for air and smoke ventilation. Don't eat lizards, be careful of bees.  And then there were the many messages from the other naturalists who had set out into the woods – in Oregon, Canada, Africa, New Mexico. They faced bears, blizzards, Indians, lived on gekkos and berries, coped with alligators, lions, rattlesnakes, piranhas. "Wuss," said one message. You go out into a log cabin near Boston and you'd think you were in the wilderness or flew over the moon! Jerk. And your writing sucks, too."

Thoreau was shaken. Living in the woods, he had never been flamed. He never asked for advice. Wasn't that the point of self-determination?, he asked on his Facebook wall. To make your own decisions and take the consequences.  I don't want to know what everybody else is thinking, he wrote. I want to know what I am thinking.

Don't be so grumpy, came one replay. Why are you an ingrate?, asked another. Five or six FB friends said they wanted to send him money and gifts, bandages and socks, food and art for the cabin, despite his fervent protestations that he didn't need any of those things. The advice grew by the day. And the warnings. Packages began to arrive. And some suggestions he found patronizing: cook your food, wash your clothes, do not kill songbirds, lock your doors, do not shoot yourself in the foot or chop your hand off with an ax. Some of these comments seemed to suggest he could not care for himself or make rational decisions.

Thoreau  was irritated by the intrusive comments and questions. He fought back. He said his food habits and choices were private.  He had come to live a large life, not a small and fearful one. He thought about turning off the comments function. But his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson had 3,000 likes on his page. Emerson answered every comment and was selling his essays on Amazon Kindle for two cents each. He wasn't making any money, but he was busy. Thoreau wanted to slap him, but Emerson and his wife brought him dinner four or five times a week, so he sucked it up.

Thoreau loved his independence, but he liked royalties also. He couldn't stay in the woods forever. He meditated on this problem. The cautionary messages pored in. Wear dry boots. Eat three meals. Hike to Boston for a check-up and medications. What about his heart?  His spectacles? The cold? The heat?  Mad dogs? His next week was worse. He put a skiff in the water, and he was warned about leaky boats, no preservers. He was warned to get a permit. Use oars.  He wrote that his tiny stove was leaking smoke, and he was flooded with messages urging him to evacuate and call the fire brigade.

He whined about it. "Why do you share your life?," asked one reader, "if you don't want advice, don't want people to tell you what to do? Isn't that why people share their lives on Facebook?"

Well, replied an increasingly flummoxed Thoreau in his Timeline box, "I'm here because I want to give myself advice, because I don't want to be told what to do or to be helped. I'm offering you my story, not me or my life. When you are a writer, you are used to sharing your own experiences and observations, but you don't expect hundreds of people who don't know you to get to tell you what to do, or try and scare the hell out of you, or to warn you about every aspect of your life." His Facebook followers were not impressed. A Facebook page, one pointed out testily, is not a book.

No matter what Thoreau wrote, or how much he complained, the comments continued.  He was, however, pleased to note that the more the controversy and arguments raged, the more "likes" he got. People loved drama.  When he got up to 5,000, he decided to get a Mac, a video camera and an Ipad 3 to manage his media better.

One day, after several hundred messages offering herbal medications and gardening, journaling and foraging tips, Thoreau abruptly left Walden Pond. He bought a warm and clean condo and decided to stay out of the woods. He ate prepared food, take-out from a Chinese place. He got some smoke detectors, and built three fireplaces to be warm. He abandoned the book "Walden," and instead wrote a year-long guide book on how to cash in on the Westward Expansion.  Walden.com became a popular blog on investment banking,  living life safely and economically and without risk.

Thoreau hired the young and starving Emerson to write for his blog. Self-determination just didn't work, he told his friend. It doesn't square with the digital village. Reading his Facebook comments he came to believe that all of these people were right, and he was in fact, foolish and reckless. It was silly to hole up in a cabin in the woods for a year without heat or toilets.

His friend Emerson seemed disappointed. But Hank, he said, wasn't the whole point to reject conventional wisdom, to take some risks, to learn how to live your life without sticking your finger up to the wind to see what everybody else was saying?

Yes, said Thoreau. That was the point, Ralph, he said. It isn't now. I'm going corporate. We care about all of our customers. We want to know what you think. E-mail us. Ralph, you ought to beef up on some railroad stock. The cattle market is about to go crazy. It's on my Facebook Wall.

The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph - Derek Thompson - Technology - The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-100-year-march-of-technology-in-1-graph/255573/

The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph

In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away

This is the last episode in The Atlantic's trilogy on household spending in the 20th century. First, I followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. Second, I explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. Those two posts were all about numbers.

But you can't measure a century's progress by numbers alone.

It's not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women's ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.

That's why this graph below from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century, is one of my new favorites -- and a cousin to this beaut, which Alexis made viral ...

... Click it. Print it. Take your time with it. That's a lot of linear data. One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

-- In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones

-- In 1915, <10% of families owned a car

-- In 1930, <10% of families owned a refrigerator or clothes washer

-- In 1945, <10% of families owned a clothes dryer or air-conditioning

-- In 1960, <10% of families owned a dishwasher or color TV

-- In 1975, <10% of families owned a microwave

-- In 1990, <10% of families had a cell phone or access to the Internet

Today, at least 90% of the country has a stove, electricity, car, fridge, clothes washer, air-conditioning, color TV, microwave, and cell phone. They make our lives better. They might even make us happier. But they are not enough.

***

There is a strain of conservatism that suggests that the march of technology has made life so good for people at the bottom that we don't have to worry much about income inequality. Tens of millions of Americans are living in poverty, "but it's okay, because they have more microwaves than ever before," is an argument that exists, and is widely persuasive. It's accurate to say today's poor own stuff that yesterday's poor wouldn't recognize. But the ubiquity of microwaves doesn't displace the moral obligation of the richest country in the history of the world to protect people who literally can't afford food to put in that microwave. Medical bankruptcy is hardly alleviated by the falling price of flat screen televisions.

One hundred ago, what is now the modern world was considerably more vulnerable to agricultural crisis. After poor seasons of weather, thousands would starve. It was a tragedy. But this tragedy occurred in the context of what were then amazing new technologies. As Bill Bryson wrote in At Home, the world had never been more brilliantly lit by gas or more reliably cleaned by plumbing. Nobody today would claim that gas lamps and plumbing technologies obviate the need for welfare. And yet, I do often hear it said that microwaves and TVs have partially or wholly relieved us of the burden of worrying about the poor. If the position isn't simply wrong, it is at the very least historically myopic.

The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-next-time-someone-says-the-internet-ruined-literature-show-them-this-chart/255572/

The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart

Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone's favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.

Well, that time never existed. Check out these stats from Gallup surveys. In 1957, not even a quarter of Americans were reading a book or novel. By 2005, that number had shot up to 47 percent. I couldn't find a more recent number, but I think it's fair to say that reading probably hasn't declined to the horrific levels of the 1950s.

All this to say: our collective memory of past is astoundingly inaccurate. Not only has the number of people reading not declined precipitously, it's actually gone up since the perceived golden age of American letters.

So, then why is there this widespread perception that we are a fallen literary people? I think, as Marshall Kirkpatrick says, that social media acts as a kind of truth serum. Before, only the literary people had platforms. Now, all the people have platforms. And so we see that not everyone shares our love for Dos Passos. Or any books at all. Or reading in general.

After I posted this chart, Twitter friends made some good points: 1) This chart does not establish that high-quality literature readers have increased. That is true. 2) There are a lot of factors that go into these numbers and variables that are unaccounted for. 3) The big spike is partially driven by higher levels of higher education attainment. 4) Perhaps the quality of books has fallen, even as the number of readers has grown.

Point four comes with an embedded assumption that the books of the past were, on average, better than the ones today. But we tend to judge the past by the very best books (Nabokov!) and the present day by the worst books (Snooki!). The bad ones of yesteryear have gone out of print while the bad ones of today are alive and being sold in supermarkets.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether there is a larger or smaller market for great fiction and nonfiction than there used to be. But I think the onus is on those who think we have experienced a decline to prove it.

* I updated the headline of this post to more accurately reflect its contents thanks to Twitter critiques from @margafret and @amelapay. It used to read, "The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Ruined Literature, Show Them This Chart."

12 Truths to Tell Yourself Aft... (marcandangel.com)

12 Truths to Tell Yourself After a Mistake or Failure
http://www.marcandangel.com/2012/04/05/keep-you-motivated-after-a-mistake/

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The Killer Question: Phil McKinney on How to Spark Innovation - Knowledge@Wharton

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2969

The Killer Question: Phil McKinney on How to Spark Innovation

In order to generate new ideas, remain competitive and unlock breakthrough innovations, Phil McKinney argues that we need to ask more questions. Most recently vice president and chief technology officer for Hewlett-Packard's (HP) $40 billion personal systems group, McKinney retired in December 2011. During his nine-year tenure at HP, McKinney founded and directed the company's innovation program office. In his new book, Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions that Spark Game-Changing Innovation, McKinney argues that you have to ask "killer questions" to test your assumptions and break through what you know -- to find out what you don't know.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 1: "Why Questions Matter," which documents the thought process that led to the idea of killer questions.

One day when my kids were still little I was sitting in the car with my daughter Tara. She was about four years old at the time, and as we drove down the street she noticed the curb along the side of the road and got curious about it. Suddenly I was fielding question after question about curbs. Why did we need them? What would happen if there weren't a curb? What were they made of? What's so good about concrete? What's concrete made of? Every parent has had a similar experience, but that afternoon sticks in my mind because it was one of the first times I turned to one of my kids and said, "You know what, I don't know the answer to that. Why don't you find out for both of us?"

When we got home Tara ran to her room and started to try and figure out the answers to the questions. She was excited to find the answers because I hadn't known them, and I'd passed on the responsibility of figuring them out to her. What I realized at that moment was that the natural curiosity of kids gets lost over time. As adults we use our education and past experiences to solve the problems we face rather than relying on questions. It's these historical assumptions of what works that prevents organizations from generating new ideas. After all, you can't change your core beliefs about your organization or industry unless you change something in your perspective about your business, industry, your customers or yourself. Think of it this way; if you want to start generating new output you first need new input. And the only way to get new input is to either find new sources of information and inspiration or find new ways of looking at the same existing information you've been looking at for years.

There are many ways to generate new input, but the most effective is to learn to ask the kinds of questions that can lead you to a real discovery. This is true both of the kinds of questions you ask other people, and the ones you pose to yourself. It's also true both in the straightforward semantic sense (you need to be able to use words in order to phrase an effective question) and in the larger philosophical sense (you need to know how, why and when to ask the right kinds of questions).

In that moment with Tara I realized there was a difference questions can make in the discovery process. Learning how to effectively phrase, ask and use questions became one of the pillars of my innovation philosophy.

The Power of Questions

I've been fascinated by the power of questions, either good or bad, for my entire professional life. The more I thought about them, the more I began to notice how people used them. I started to see how some people had the innate ability to formulate and pose questions that propelled others to make investigations and discoveries of their own, and some people had the less desirable ability to shut their listeners down with bad questions, poorly asked. I believe that a good question is one that causes people to really think before they answer it, and one that reveals answers that had previously eluded them. I began to think more about how an individual could learn to ask good questions and avoid the pitfalls of asking bad questions. I also wondered whether a poor questioning technique could become a crutch, something that allows you to believe you are accomplishing something positive, when in fact you are doing the opposite.

As I listened to my children ask challenging questions of each other I realized I had taught them a profound skill. By passing on a love of questions I'd shared my belief in the importance of getting out there and proactively making our own discoveries about the world. My children weren't afraid or ashamed of not knowing an answer; instead they were invigorated by the process of finding it. I compared this attitude to the converse one that I'd seen throughout my career, namely employees who felt compelled to agree with their superiors or believed that saying "I don't know" would adversely affect their career. These men and women would have benefitted greatly from simply being empowered to admit that they didn't know, to ask good questions, and to seek out the relevant answers.

Bad Questions, Good Questions

The more I started to look at questions, and how essential they are to fostering creativity and innovation, the more I realized that there are bad questions and there are good questions. And within those good questions, some just aren't relevant to the process of ideation. The key to using this book is to develop the ability to separate the good, useful questions from the bad ones. Here's a quick guide:

Tag Questions:

During my search, I realized that some of the most important questions to avoid are ones that don't really ask for a response at all. For example, tag questions. Tag questions are statements that appear to be questions, but don't allow for any kind of answer except for agreement. A tag question is really a declarative statement turned into a question, and used to get validation for the speaker's "answer." Family members, authority figures, or executives who want to appear to care about the opinion of another person, but really want their instructions carried out without discussion, often favor tag questions. A tag question can show that the speaker is either overly confident of his or her beliefs, or so insecure that he has to bully others into agreeing with him. Either way, his phrasing of the question shows that he is not willing to consider an alternative point of view. You're not actually being asked for an opinion, simply for a confirmation that you agree with them. When lawyers use tag questions in a legal setting, they are sometimes referred to as leading the witness, the questions being posed in such a way as to guide the person in a desired direction, and that is how you should think of a tag question as well.

That presentation was fantastic, wasn't it?

The new brochure will be based on the last version, won't it?

Tag questions can be incredibly damaging both to an individual and to an organization because they shut down the creative process. Say you've been tasked to come up with a new product but your boss asks you to verify that "the new concepts that you are coming up with aren't going to be too different from the old ones, right?" By asking this question, she has taken away any power from your team to go out and do something really new. The fundamental point of asking a question is to get information, input, or ideas. Any question that restricts people from feeling free to honestly answer it is offensive; it reduces the quality of information you're going to get and makes the person being questioned feel that they are being dismissed.

Typically, a person who uses tag questions is a manager who believes that his role is to be directive. However, by doing so he misses out on the potential power of a team. Look at the way you communicate with your co-workers; if you find yourself asking tag questions ask yourself why. Do you doubt their ability to come up with their own answers, or do you already have an answer in mind that you would like them to validate? If you are simply looking to get validation for what you already want or believe, this runs counter to every philosophy about generating new and innovative ideas. When I'm working with a team, I'll always use a series of questions to see what they come up with, even when I already have an idea in mind of what the answer may be. Even if I give them that answer, it's always presented as a challenge for them to come up with something better.

Factual vs. Investigative:

After more searching and studying, I came up with two basic categories of good questions: factual and investigative. So, what are the differences between them? The objective of a factual question is to get information: "Do you want coffee or tea?" "How many units did we sell last week?" "Is there gas in the car?" You may not know the immediate answer to a factual question, but you know how to find it. There is no real discovery required beyond expressing your opinion, making a call, or looking at the gas gauge. Factual questions serve an important purpose in allowing us to communicate with each other and exchange information. They are limited in their ability to do anything more nuanced than gather information.

An investigative question, on the other hand, cannot be answered with a yes or a no and is much more useful for our purposes. By definition, it is a divergent question, meaning that there is more than one correct answer (unlike factual questions). It cannot be answered with one phone call, or a quick check at some stats or figures, and forces us to investigate all of the possibilities.

The Socratic Method:

So how do you generate some good investigative questions? One of my starting points is the Socratic Method. Socratic questions are, in their simplest definition, questions that challenge you to justify your beliefs about a subject, often over a series of questions, rather than responding with an answer that you've been taught is "correct." A well-phrased series of Socratic questions challenges you to think about why you believe your "answer" to be correct, and to supply some sort of evidence to back up your beliefs. At the same time a Socratic set of questions doesn't assume you are right or wrong.

When using this method, Socrates would lead his listener to a deeper understanding of his own beliefs and how and why he justified them. When a student attempted to fall back on a belief prefaced by "I've heard it said that such and such is true," Socrates would gently push further, asking him what he himself actually thought, until the student finally got to the heart of what he thought and believed. Socrates would also find contradictions in a student's expressed belief, and ask him questions that forced him to consider these contradictions. Ultimately Socrates' goal was to help the student unveil his own thoughts and his own beliefs, and see them clearly for the first time. It was only by finally articulating one's own thoughts and bringing them into "open air," that the student could fully understand the depths of his own knowledge.

Socrates believed that knowledge was possible, but believed that the first step toward knowledge was recognition of one's ignorance. It's the same in the idea-generation process; the first step to freeing yourself to find innovations is to recognize that the knowledge you currently have is insufficient, and that you need to go out and discover new information that will lead to new products or concepts.

My interest in the Socratic Method, and the glaring gap I found between Socrates' method of teaching with questions, and the way innovation and ideation is "taught" today, started me down the path of searching for specific questions that would challenge others to find opportunities for new ideas--questions I now call Killer Questions. It took me a while to determine them, but in the end I hit upon the old engineering standby; find something that works, and figure out why.

From BEYOND THE OBVIOUS, by Phil McKinney. Copyright © 2012 Philip McKinney. Published by Hyperion. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved.

The Biggest Mistake You (Probably) Make with Teams - Tammy Erickson - Harvard Business Review

http://blogs.hbr.org/erickson/2012/04/the_biggest_mistake_you_probab.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29

HBR Blog Network

Throughout most of my career, I've made a big mistake in the way I've lead teams — and wouldn't be surprised if you have, too.

Which is more important to promoting collaboration: a clearly defined approach toward achieving the goal, or clearly specified roles for individual team members? The common assumption — and my personal approach for many years — is that carefully spelling out the approach is essential, while leaving the roles of individuals within the team open and flexible will encourage people to share ideas and contribute in multiple dimensions.

But our research has shown that the opposite is true: collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.

We've also found that team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team's goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest more time and energy in collaboration.

Consider a team of doctors and nurses working in a hospital emergency room. Before the next ambulance to arrives, they have no idea of the nature of the task ahead. Will the patient require surgery, heart resuscitation, medications? The condition of the next patient is unknown; the tasks that will be required of the team, ambiguous. But at no time while the team waits, do they negotiate roles: "Who would like to administer the anesthesia? Who will set out the instruments? Who will make key decisions?" Each role is clear. As a result, when the patient arrives, the team is able to move quickly into action.

At the BBC, we studied the teams responsible for the radio and television broadcasts of special events and daytime television news. These teams were large — ranging from 66 people in one case to 133 in another — and included members with a wide range of skills and from many disciplines. One would imagine, therefore, that there was a high possibility of confusion among team members.

To the contrary, we found that the BBC's teams scored among the highest in our sample with regard to the clarity with which team members viewed their own roles and the roles of others. Every team was composed of specialists who had deep expertise in their given function, and each person had a clearly defined role. There was no overlap in the responsibilities of the sound technician and of the camera operator, and so on. Yet the tasks the BBC teams tackle are, by their very nature, uncertain and to some extent ambiguous, particularly when they involve covering breaking news. The trick the BBC and others in the film industry have pulled off has been to clarify team members' individual roles with so much precision that it keeps friction, internal competition and the possibility of mistakes of omission to a minimum.

In the same research, we also studied successful teams at Reuters — teams that worked out of far-flung locations and, in many cases, didn't speak a common language. (The primary languages were Russian, Chinese, Thai, and English.) These teams, largely composed of software programmers, were responsible for the rapid development of highly complex technical software and network products. Many of the programmers sat at their desks for 12 hours straight developing code, speaking with no one. Each individual was given autonomy for one discrete, well-defined piece of the project; the rapid pace and demanding project timelines encouraged individual members to work independently to get the job done. Yet because each individual's work had to fit seamlessly into the final product, shaped with an eye toward achieving the overall team goal, these teams judged collaborative behavior to be high among their members.

The leader's role, as I learned from this research, is to insure that the roles and responsibilities of the team members are clearly defined for the specific project at hand (members' roles may change from project to project to provide variety and broaden experience). Conversely, leaders should help team members understand the project's importance and ultimate objective but leave the exact approach to the discretion of the team.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center on The Secrets of Great Teams.

I’ve Been Knocked Down, Now What « Leadership Freak

http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/ive-been-knocked-down-now-what/

I've Been Knocked Down, Now What

Jack Dempsey on one knee. (From Washington Post)

*****

The ability to get up after being knocked down
is the most important ability in life.

*****

Alison asked, "After being knocked down it feels a lot slower to rise up? Is it ok to take it slow?"

Don't pop up quickly after being knocked down.

It's humbling to find yourself looking up from your back. Wise boxers climb to a knee – clearing their head – until the referee's count reaches eight.

Taking a knee isn't defeat its preparation – preparation to kick ass.

Pride yells bounce up quickly, "Get up you fool. Don't let anyone know it hurt." Pretending it doesn't hurt doesn't help.

8 Principles for getting up, again:

1. Self-reflection. Few things are talked more and done less. Few times are better than when you're on one knee. Don't talk to others before you talk with yourself.
2. Forgive. Forgiveness is a process not an event. Act without offenses in mind – even when they are. Acting with offenses in mind results in bitterness, revenge, or both. Feeling forgiveness isn't as important as acting in it.
3. Accountability. Holding someone accountable to make restitution and offering forgiveness may be separate issues.
4. Embrace. Few things change us more than brokenness, embrace it. Embracing frailty opens your heart and mind. You'll see yourself and others more clearly when you feel the burn and let it hurt.
5. Support. Channels of support are open when you're broken. Pretending it doesn't hurt, squeezes support out.
6. Honesty. Avoid whining. Open your heart to select trusted friends. Tell them the things you wish you didn't feel, but do.
7. Responsibility. Own personal weaknesses that tripped you up. "How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults…" Benjamin Franklin.
8. Adapt. You'll repeat the pain if you don't learn and adapt.

How can leaders make the most of "one knee" moments? 

What helped you when you were knocked down?

**********

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Tags: Growth, Leadership, Leadership Development, Power

This entry was posted on April 5, 2012 at 7:42 am and is filed under Backstabbers, Courage, Failure, Humility, Marks of leaders, Personal Growth, Taking others higher, weaknesses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review

TONY SCHWARTZ

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project.

Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

What do these words have in common? "Savor," "relish," " "luxuriate," "stroll," "muse," "dawdle," "mosey," "meander," and "linger?"

We rarely use them, because we rarely do them. We don't have time. We've got so much to do, so many balls to juggle, so many miles to go before we sleep.

I've been thinking about this a lot since I posted the blog "The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time" two weeks ago. It prompted a passionate outpouring of comments from people feeling overwhelmed by the relentless demands in their lives, and the sense that there's no way out.

We're all wired up, but we're melting down. We're dancing as fast as we can. Stroll? Mosey? Linger? That's what slackers do.

I'm not suggesting this is a new phenomenon. "More, bigger, faster" has been the rallying cry of capitalism for more than two centuries, since the advent of the industrial revolution. I first wrote about this subject 25 years ago in an article for Vanity Fair titled "Acceleration Syndrome: How Life Got Much, Much Too Fast." Even then it was before anyone had cell phones or an email address, and before Google, Facebook, texting, and tweeting existed.

But the acceleration has accelerated — crazily so. The speed of our digital devices now sets our pace and increasingly runs our lives. Any doubt? See if you can turn off your email for a day, or even for a few hours, or try holding the attention of a 12- year-old who has a smart phone in her hand.

I like getting more done, faster, as much as the next guy does. But I also recognize how costly it can be. Speed is the enemy of depth, nuance, subtlety, attention to detail, reflection, learning, and rich relationships — the enemy of much, in short, that makes life worth living.

Last week, my wife and I accompanied my older daughter, a theater director, to a play called "Gatz" at the Public Theater in New York City. The show is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The script is the novel itself, which the main character, Nick Carraway, reads from the stage over six and a half languorous hours between 2 pm and 10 pm. There are two 15-minute intermissions and an hour and fifteen minute break for dinner.

Honestly, this is not the sort of event I would have chosen to attend, but it was a gift from my daughter. To my amazement, I found it riveting. I savored and luxuriated in Fitzgerald's elegant sentences, and I became so immersed in the story and the era Fitzgerald so vividly evokes, that my attention rarely wandered. I felt enriched and enlivened by the experience. It has stuck with me.

Speed is a source of stimulation and fleeting pleasure. Slowing down is a route to depth, more enduring satisfaction, and to excellence.

How would you feel if you knew the surgeon operating on you was racing through your surgery, while checking email, and writing texts along the way? I notice my own impatience if the Internet doesn't come up fast enough on my phone when I'm walking from one appointment to another.

Am I nuts? It makes me think of a line from Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song: "Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last." Why can't I just take a deep breath when I've got a free moment, and appreciate my simple aliveness?

Here's one reason:

The faster we move, the less we feel, which may be a primary reason we move so fast. Most of us are more worried, uncertain, and insecure than we care to acknowledge, even to ourselves. Moving fast keeps those discomfiting feelings at bay.

So we deify doing. Just think about this senseless but venerable cliché: "No rest for the weary." Really? Isn't resting precisely what the weary ought to be doing?

To savor is to enjoy and appreciate something completely. It necessarily takes time and requires slowing down. So how might you build more savoring into your life? Try one of these:

1. Designate one meal a day — or even one a week — during which you take the time to notice the aroma, flavor, and texture of what you're eating.
2. Curl up in a favorite chair at some point after you return home from work and spend at least a half-hour reading a book purely for pleasure.
3. Take the time to really listen to someone you love — to give that person the space to speak without interruption, for as long as it takes.
4. Choose a place that interests you — it could be in the city or the country — and spend a couple of hours just exploring it without any specific end in mind.
5. Buy a journal, and before you go to bed, take a few minutes to reflect on what you feel grateful for that day, and what went right.

Above all, slowly build more strolling, dawdling, moseying, meandering, musing, lingering, relishing, and savoring into your life.

Writer's Almanac from Tuesday, April 3, 2012, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Glad sight wherever new with old

by William Wordsworth

Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
"Glad sight wherever new with old" by William Wordsworth, fromSelected Poems. © Penguin Books, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The first truly portable personal computer was released on this date in 1981. The 25-pound Osborne 1, sold by the Osborne Computer Company, with two floppy drives, a five-inch screen, was a big success, selling 10,000 units a month.

The Pony Express began mail delivery on this date in 1860. The first mail pouch contained 49 letters, five telegrams, and a variety of papers. A rider would switch to a fresh horse every 10 to 15 miles; each rider rode a leg of 75 to 100 miles. Seventy-five horses were needed to make a one-way trip between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, a distance of 1,800 miles. At an average speed of 10 miles an hour, the Pony Express could cover the distance in 10 days.

The Pony Express, as it came to be known, had only been in operation for about 10 weeks when Congress authorized construction of a telegraph line to stretch between the Missouri River and the California coast. Once the telegraph connection was completed, the Pony Express became obsolete, and it folded in October 1861.

Today is the birthday of Washington Irving (books by this author), born in New York City (1783), who publicized his bookA History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by pretending it was written by a man named Dietrich Knickerbocker. He put out missing person notices and posed as Knickerbocker's landlord, threatening to publish the manuscript to cover back rent. The reading public in 1809 was intrigued by all the drama, the book sold very well, and Irving became the first person in the United States to earn a living by writing. He then wrote a collection of short stories under the name of Geoffrey Crayon, which included his stories, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle."

The outlaw Jesse James was shot on this date in 1882. Jesse had fought on the side of the South in the Civil War and after the war, formed a gang with his brother Frank which ranged all over the Midwest for more than a decade, robbing banks, trains, and stagecoaches. He was shot in his home in Missouri by a member of his own gang, Bob Ford, who did it for the $10,000 reward. Jesse James was standing on a chair, dusting off a picture on the wall, and Bob Ford shot him in the back of his head.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®