Summary: I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sidetracked on some trivial matter, my dad would silently lift the sign off his lap. What are we talking about? He was asking people to step out of their stances within a conversation to notice what the conversation was about and then to compare it to other alternative conversations including whatever was really on the agenda. The sign was as if to say, "Notice the tree you’re barking up. If you step back to see the tree, you’ll notice that you’ve lost sight of the forest. If you see the forest, maybe you’ll reprioritize. Maybe the tree you’re barking up is the wrong tree.” I’m sure you can relate to my father’s frustration. Your agenda item finally gets the floor and some klutz inadvertently boots it into the dusty corner with an over-earnest “Yes, but what about my (petty) concern?” The meeting attendees follow his “concern” like Dug the dog after a squirrel in the movie “Up” and forget it--they’re never coming back to your priority topic. I feel that frustration these days about how climate legislation got tabled and now all we can talk about is the immorality of allowing a Muslim YMCA to open between the Dunkin Donuts, off-track betting parlor and sex clubs two blocks from the former World Trade Center. The more meeting participants; the harder it is to keep the conversation on track. At present the nation’s conversation has the attention discipline of a two-year-old with ADD on LSD wandering the strip in Las Vegas. And you also know what its like to be seen as that klutz, because you’ve been in meetings where the agenda gets within inches of a real high-priority issue, and you do what you can to boot the conversation to what really counts even if others think yours is a petty concern. I feel like that kind of klutz sometimes writing these columns, which are slightly offset from conventional conversation. People complain. They don’t understand why, for example, I always go for the big picture. In my defense, I could counter that these complainers “can’t see the forest for the trees,” as though the big picture perspective is simply and always better. As I argued last week, it isn’t. Sometimes the details are what really count. But as I also argued last week, the big picture on the relationship between big and small pictures is really worth a visit, so that’s what we’re talking about this week, back to hierarchy, the relationship between forest and trees and what’s really involved there. Shifts between bigger and smaller pictures explain an enormous amount of what goes on in our lives--our victories and defeats, what makes us savvy or stupid, insightful or frustrating. The ability to zoom the lens of one’s attention to the right level of analysis is one of the greatest gifts one can have. For lack of a conventional term, I’ve called it “rung-running skill” the ability to deftly move up and down the rungs of the ladder overlooking your circumstances, to see it from up high and down low, depending on what the situation calls for. We intuit that perspectives are nested in some kind of hierarchy from small too large, but where do nested hierarchies come from? Simplifying, there are three sources. There’s nature itself. For example, nature produced you, and you are undeniably hierarchical, what with your cells making up your organs making up your body, etc. Second, words. Our capacity to represent things symbolically frees us to make hierarchy, chiefly by applying symbols to themselves. I can talk about talking, write about writing, think a
