The Gold Medal
Shamir mentioned the Gold Medal in his discussion on Expired Methods, which required me to download and read the relevant section of the book Six Value Medals. I encourage others to do the same (you don't need a Kindle).
As I understand it, the Six Value Medals attempts to increase the range of benefits/drawbacks people think of when they make decisions by suggesting focus areas "human values, "organisation values" etc. Each of the Six Medals is tied to one area. Gijs van Beeck Calkoen sometimes uses this sort of fanning technique on Practise Thinking .com and the results are very good.
The Gold Medal focuses on "human values" and the book suggests a long list of human values that should be considered, most of which seem very important to me and a few I can't believe were written by Edward de Bono.
I haven't decided whether focusing on human values is such a good idea: If you ask someone what is important to you? they will give selfish answers (nothing wrong with that, since that's what you asked for), but then you ask other people and they give sometimes the same answers sometimes different. Someone says that important to me is the do my job without being bullied. The boss says important to me is respect for the organisation that pays their salary. Who wins out? Usually whoever holds the upper had, ie. whoever was already winning. Lots of people have a deep seated need to feel more important than the people around them.
Another concern is that if you articulate a large number of standard human values and then carry them over into a new situation you may well obscure areas of real human need in this new area.
Another concern is that the focus on all these human needs is the lack of focus on who is going to provide them all.
The Gold Medal may be excellent but only if you remember to OPV.
As I understand it, the Six Value Medals attempts to increase the range of benefits/drawbacks people think of when they make decisions by suggesting focus areas "human values, "organisation values" etc. Each of the Six Medals is tied to one area. Gijs van Beeck Calkoen sometimes uses this sort of fanning technique on Practise Thinking .com and the results are very good.
The Gold Medal focuses on "human values" and the book suggests a long list of human values that should be considered, most of which seem very important to me and a few I can't believe were written by Edward de Bono.
I haven't decided whether focusing on human values is such a good idea: If you ask someone what is important to you? they will give selfish answers (nothing wrong with that, since that's what you asked for), but then you ask other people and they give sometimes the same answers sometimes different. Someone says that important to me is the do my job without being bullied. The boss says important to me is respect for the organisation that pays their salary. Who wins out? Usually whoever holds the upper had, ie. whoever was already winning. Lots of people have a deep seated need to feel more important than the people around them.
Another concern is that if you articulate a large number of standard human values and then carry them over into a new situation you may well obscure areas of real human need in this new area.
Another concern is that the focus on all these human needs is the lack of focus on who is going to provide them all.
The Gold Medal may be excellent but only if you remember to OPV.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Asa Jomard on -
Maybe directing the attention to certain aspects does not solve the problem. Perphaps imagining the word from other people's point of view or what would happen if a certain solutions or ideas were carried out is a vital component in thinking. Simply directing the attention to human or organisational values etc does not mean that the thinking itself becomes better.
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Permalink Reply by Phil Bachmann on -
Yes I agree that articulating values is good and let's do it broadly (OPV).
I think it excellent that Edward left space at the end of the chapter on Gold Medal for readers to add their own values.
For example during the chapter an example of Gold Medal values was presented:
"It is very important that exmployers do not discriminate on the basis of gender or race."
Now there may be a legal reason for employers to do this but from a pure human values perspective I think this is too limiting. I would add at least:
- It's important that people not feel excluded from jobs because of things they can't do anything about.
- It's important to redress the balance when someone has an unfair advantage.
- It's important for employers to find ways of using the abilities of partially disabled people.
- It's important for employers to find ways of using the abilities of older people.
- Employers, and ultimately that means all the people working for the organisation, should value diversity and difference.
Sometimes it is hard to articulate the values. For example there was once a factory that hired a lot of process workers during peak months, then at the end of the peak time some people would be kept on but most asked to leave.
As examples of two temporary employees working during this peak time there was a man in his early twenties with a wife who was just about to have their first child. There was also a middle-aged woman who was supplementing her husband's income to pay for the demands of their teenager children.
I suspect that In the old days the man would have been kept on because the employer would have thought that this was "the right thing to do", now there is equal opportunity legislation etc.
Clearly there are human values involved in this situation but how do you say them in a way that does not offend modern sensibilities?
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on -
I would like to suggest that with respect to Gold Medal values we get the best use out of this tool when we do the exercise on page 47 and articulate our own. "Standard human values" are rather too easy to identify, which is why Phil's concerns are apt. All talk of respect, freedom, trust, reassurance, encouragement etc. can produce a big yawn in any audience. We all know these are things none of us attend to regularly or systematically as individuals and institutions even less so. I usually have a good giggle, for instance, when I read the "Mission Statement" of a school or education institution: "Yeah, right." The more we draw attention to the standard values, the less valuable they seem and the more idealogical and unobtainable they become. What we need are some surprising and new human values.
Here is one of mine: forgetting.
There is a great need to empty the mind from time to time. Well, you occasionally chuck a few things out from under your sink, don't you? You occasionally realise your Hard Disk is almost full, so don't you set about deleting a few unnecessary things?
Much emphasis is placed on the need to remember. At school, at work, in life generally. We honour people as "Masterminds" on TV quiz programs if they can remember what Napoleon had for breakfast on June 21, 1843. Of course remembering a bunch of stuff can be extremely important. But what about the value of forgetting a bunch of stuff? Why don't we teach kids at school how to forget the things that plague them and upset them? The older we become, the more we become obsessed with our past - the past which is basically a bunch of memories that continue to haunt us.
Learning to forget can be extremely good for you. I'm sure in reading this you have found this to be a surprising and somewhat novel value. Maybe someone might like to expand on the Gold Medal value of "forgetting".
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Permalink Reply by Phil Bachmann on
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Hi Kim,
I hadn't thought of this before, but forgetting does seem like an important skill. Too often people bring a lot of history to a situation which has nothing to do with that situation and so frustrate everyone else.
I'm not sure that this is what was intended under the Gold Medal which seems more about values ie. What's good for people (being appreciated), what's bad for people (having stuff stolen).
We could traspose "forgetting" into values perhaps by asking two questions:
"How does someone forgetting benefit others?"
- Freedom to move ahead given forgiveness for past misdemeanors.
- Freedom from hassle involved in dealing with someone else's ghosts.
"How does forgetting disadvantage others?"
- Feel unappreciated if past favours are not remembered.
- Feel unimportant if past achievements are forgotten.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on
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Indeed, Phil. It's very late and I don't have much brainpower left, but I just wanted to say that it's got me fascinated your referring to "forgetting" as a skill. We don't normally think of forgetting as a skill. People who forget stuff are normally supposed to be suffering from something or other (dementia, Alzheimer's, senility etc.) whereas the ability to remember an enormous amount of facts is praised as 'genius' or something close to it.
It's almost like we see the mind as a vessel that can be and should be filled up, to see how much can be fit into it.
Why do we have this rather unsophisticated view of the mind?
Why is remembering seen as a skill, whereas forgetting is seen as a sign of mental decay or mental flakiness?
Methinks we are onto something here. Have to go to bed. We partied a bit too hard in celebration of the death of Gaddafi this afternoon.......
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Permalink Reply by Franis on -
Yeah, forgetting is a skill. It's similar to being able to pause or "wipe the slate clean" when you want to think of something else. Important abilities - the emptying ones. We've all had a bit too much of "something" and every once in awhile, have need of less of it. So it would be great to "un-think" a few things.
Does anyone know about http://listofvalues.com/ ?
I thought of these being nice to have them printed on cards, like a deck of cards. Your job would be to order the cards, putting your cherished values in the front and assigning values you could care less about into the back, with the bulk of things in the middle that you don't have strong feelings about either way. Doing that ordering process multiple times would...be interesting. Sort of like using a thinking tool, you could reorder these cards depending on the situation you were addressing.
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Permalink Reply by Franis on
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thanks for doing this Luis. I'll be looking at this 424 item list. Of course, some of the descriptions are "lame," which means they need to be edited by ME!
I like the "bubble sort" idea; I'm not savvy on Excel techniques to sort, so I'll see what I can do about that idea of sorting...
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Permalink Reply by Asa Jomard on
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Maybe forgetting or remembering is not the value. The value could be in learning from experiences whether these are worth to remember or forget as such is not important.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on
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Yes Åsa, that's a good observation. If you actually do learn something however, you are in the business of cementing it into long-term memory. Anything residing in the short-term memory will not be remembered for long. The value of something immediately goes up if it is passed from short-term to long-term memory by the hippocampus (in the cerebral cortex) because in this case it cannot easily be forgotten. We usually place a range of values on things we remember. Or, as Luis has pointed out, it may be that we simply cannot rid ourselves of certain memories, so there was never any question of our forgetting certain high-value experiences.
Actually, it may be that you yourself do not decide the value of an experience, because your limbic system does this automatically for you. If someone menaces you in the middle of the night with a gun or a knife, your hippocampus will instantly pass this powerful fear experience to the long-term memory where it will haunt you, possibly for the rest of your life, such is the value of the experience as voted on by your limbic system.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on
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It was always going to be a tough call, this business of seeing forgetting as a valuable skill.
Skills can be learnt, but here we have a particular skill that I do not think can be easily learnt - if it can be learnt at all. The brain is not designed to forget, even if it does this. The brain is clearly designed to remember. But then, the brain is not really designed to think either; the brain's primary function is to recognise - and as Edward never tires of pointing out: recognition is not thinking. If thinking were a natural function of the brain then there would be no need for Edward de Bono skills and Phil Bachmann could pack up his brilliant website and go back to watching TV in the evenings.
Why I feel we are on to something important here. Let's face it: thinking is quite an unnatural skill. It doesn't come easily to anyone, least of all politicians and religious leaders. What most people classify as "thinking" would not raise either of Edward's eyebrows. Daydreaming? Ruminating? No. These things are easy. Thinking is hard. It requires effort and energy and leaves behind a corresponding state of exhaustion, just like physical effort; well - it is physical effort, when you look into it deeply.
Forgetting, like thinking, is hard. In some ways it seems impossible. The mother who saw her son murdered in cold blood will never be able to forget the experience short of some part of her brain being excised or some very heavy pharmacological dumbing down of her conscious mind.
Smoking Cannabis helps. Cannabis is the drug of forgetfulness. It affects the short-term memory only though, so probably would not help in excising the more ghastly experiences that are encoded into long-term memory.
You can go to the psychiatrist and undergo the talking cure. This does work for some people but takes a long time, in fact, many years of regular treatment before the subject can say they have moved on from certain things. The brain doesn't allow us to forget until it starts to go down the toilet, later in life.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on
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That's the stuff. So, if we are all interested now (as it would appear we are) in placing forgetting on a par with remembering as a skill, why the asymmetry of understanding this in society, generally?
To link this momentarily to Sinclair's thread on "War", and to mine on "History as a Core Subject in Schools", it seems the balance of understanding is usually in favour of the past - that safe place in our minds and in a myriad books and novels and TV programs and docos and films and artworks we can go to, to study something that will no longer jump up and bite us (we think).
Here in Australia and New Zealand, we celebrate ANZAC Day (April 25). This is a ceremony of remembrance of the undoubted heroism of the young blokes who got shot to pieces in a dreadful engagement at a place called Gallipoli (Turkey) in 1915. The high-point of the ceremony is the utterance of the "sacred vow": Lest We Forget.
If I had my way, I would cancel the ceremony and change the sacred vow to Let's Forget.
Why? I happen to believe that all focus on the business of war perpetuates war, that's all. Ceremonies like Anzac Day and similar remembrance ceremonies the world over seem designed to ensure that those who survived the conflict will forever be saddled with the horrific memory of it. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people appear to think that this is the right thing to do. To honour the dead. But the dead are dead - in this universe. They may have defaulted to another one of their parallel lives somewhere else. OK - some of you will see this as a gigantic excuse to be cavalier about human life. I very much doubt that the "dead" are aware anymore of our need to cling to this debilitating emotional guilt-ridden baggage that we remind ourselves of for roughly one week of every year.
How can you "do the right thing by the dead"? Even funerals give me the heeby-jeebies. I once jokingly said to my mother "I don't think I will bother attending my own funeral". To which she replied "Well, I sincerely hope you are going to attend mine!" To which I replied "What will you do about it if I don't?" She didn't have a comeback for that.
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Permalink Reply by Kim Jones on
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So, to summarise, I am putting on the table quite seriously that the skill of forgetting is a Gold Medal Value. This means that it has the highest value, because gold symbolises the highest value. Some people may well have difficulty with this notion of mine. Fair enough. It might now be worth revisiting Phil's thinking in response to this suggestion:
Phil:
I'm not sure that this is what was intended under the Gold Medal which seems more about values ie. What's good for people (being appreciated), what's bad for people (having stuff stolen).
We could traspose "forgetting" into values perhaps by asking two questions:
"How does someone forgetting benefit others?"
- Freedom to move ahead given forgiveness for past misdemeanors.
- Freedom from hassle involved in dealing with someone else's ghosts.
"How does forgetting disadvantage others?"
- Feel unappreciated if past favours are not remembered.
- Feel unimportant if past achievements are forgotten.
I'd like someone else to respond to this first. I could probably write a book about it, but that is my tendency. Actually, I am far more interested in other peoples' thinking about this than my own at this stage.
Might I suggest an AGO (following Luis's insights) on the art of forgetting or the skill of forgetting? We are now defining this as a skill, not an aberration. You learn a skill with a certain purpose in mind, the result of using the skill.
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