Review Five: Credible New Ideas, Anyone?

Review Five of Beyond Machiavelli: Credible New Ideas, Anyone?
Roger Fisher (et. al.) Penguin Books (1996)

There can be no definition but that of paradox which illustrates the current state of bureaucratic decision-making in developed nations of the world today other than that of the excessively competitive setting within which conflict seems to perpetuate itself and or derives itself from an endless cycle of missed opportunities for conflict resolution. Globally the politics of government and business so clearly define the interests of a series of majorities that the luxury of individual reason or independent thought are almost solely dependent on the fact that the best ideas are often never formulated, contemplated, or tabled. While the tenets of post-modernism almost always suggest that there is nothing new to be found in the minds of present day intellect and that all thought has been perpetually thought through, muddled, and withered once before then inevitably true must the thought be that the best ideas, those often the source of group concepts of innovation in a historical perspective on progress and perhaps that which has self-mollified a character of progress especially in the field of heterodox humanism are merely the luke-warm outcomes resultant to staying the course of the aims of the many which often ill-resource the complaints and conflicts of the world's perpetually unresolved current post-modernist issues.

Fisher et. al. suggest there are often too many men in the tub, that the water is too sparingly dispersed, that the tub itself is often too well defined and yet the scrub is equally as elusive, while the singular points of acclaimed eurekas are if ever even uttered are then thus inaudible, quelched, suppressed, denied, forced down or back, stifled and or filed under the interests of the precept of self-censorship. As well defined in the recent presentation of Ranjini Philip at the Fourteenth Annual Korea TESOL International Conference one cannot teach others freedom of expression without attempting the same expression and even under the bitter realities of state instituted censorship; self-censorship is as powerful a cultural factor in the definition of any concept of individuality as it may touched upon as filtered reality as a concept only of culture and not of individual realisation of self as defined by Edward T. Hall.

So too often the debates are ill-attended, as a concept of self is so equally ill-grasped, the representatives are often under-visited by undecided individuals. Where one would assume a majority would have insufficent information to affect judgements on a topic the opposite is often literally the case where too little research or too little observation of a topic might quickly decide one's views, particularly if they are of a fit or flavour of this or that particularly peer group of such use to the principle agents of marketing, advertising, and sales. So those who might render aid or even progress to an issue of the day are uniquely silent. Where if at first one were to choose to investigate a particular conflict even if the purposes were there to non-align and thus feed the intelligences with singularly self-defined realisations as nearly as impossible as they seem, one might seek to brave the concepts of epiphanies or divine interventions to approach such enlightenment and equally those especially able to reach the public in the vocalisation or discussion of any portion of approach to a professed individual opinion so humbly expressed and yet equally impossible to define. One which might neither qualify nor conclude as being of any other interest than to that of the widening of viewpoints, the building of conceptual bridges between disparately aligned parties where concepts of self unaligned to any particular politic, pragmatism, or debate might appreciate and thus to flower over a perspective of new, untried, still ever possible successful resolutions and not those of the often clarified polarisations of viewpoint so easily communciated through the media of our day. It would be hard to define such viewpoints as realistically achievable under the terms of cultural filtering of individual consciousness.

So in review five, one must applaud the concept of problem solving, if need be the unearthing of new ideas even out of the old, those that which many may have thought of and sprung before while observing the historical relevancy of old versus new ideas, and how their measure may only be seen in the past, while their future may yet be forecast but never so precisely as to be flawlessly executed in the present. If one were to equate new ideas with profit then we would most nearly all seek to share them. It is in Fisher et. al. a fitting description of the possible limits of negotiation analysis where best perhaps their pedigree is well coiffed and pranced upon a sack of thinly shackled human bones.

Four Step Analysis to Problem Solving

1. What is the matter?

2. Possible reasons and causes.

3. Possible strategies to turn problems into solutions to problems.

4. What and who might designate what should be done.

Fisher et. al. are quick to jump to the conclusion that people too often jump from deciding too quickly what is the problem to designating who should decide what should be done. So too fairly easily a conclusion can be made that far too often the wrong people are deciding what is the matter of the ways of the world and this great group defined as humanity and what should or should not be done about them. Thus one must conclude that the leaders of government and business are not well enough prepared for the resolution of conflict, nor are those experts who seek to support their quick-fix measures. Fisher et. al. also imply that an over-arching penchant

for steps two and three academically stratify knowledge bases and illegitamize pure research itself which would indicate a certain bias against academic pursuit of conflict reasons, causes, and possible strategies to turn such biases into solutions to problems. Especially if those solutions were to attempt to redress the bias against such academic pursuit. There is definitely a conundrum in such an outlook.

While the difficulties in generating new ideas out of the likes of tired or old brains are similarly nothing new or special in the field of theoretical approaches to resolutions to other peoples problems one often never reminds oneself of spiritualists to some and saints to others such as Mother Theresa who stipulated that one could never bring love or hope or joy to strangers without first settling those compassions within one's own house or family. So one must joust only with this best thinkers to tinker and salvage what remains of one's own proverbial castle in Spain? So it is problematic that race starters and finishers would heckle and joust with those very centralist runners and plodders ruminating about in the middle of the pact by virtue of contextuality having never been provisioned with the marketable skills of even ever starting or even ever finishing the race to solve problems.

It is such a diagramatic example of the utter lunacy intrinsic to assuming that such a four step process could be uniquely sold, consumed, or welded to the group cultural processes of many of the world's essentially non-linear cultural groups or that any one individual or group could claim singular defintion of the aims and thus steps to resolve even a simple process to analyze problem solving itself.