Website of Valerie Wilkinson

The Party*: Mapping Glory and Dancing with Chaos(1)
Valerie Anne Wilkinson

*Deepest gratitude to Virginia Bellott for patient interaction with this essay and to Neil McEwan and Janet Marsden for unfailing encouragement, insight and acuity.

Abstract
     The Party (any party(2)) is a microcosm. We can map the whole process structure(3) from inception to debriefing, but never get it all. This midsize, complex event is ideal for teaching General Systems Thinking and organizational communication, or so I thought. The team shares the process of networking, developing community, learning about people, teamwork, problem solving, and contingency management. Parties succeed(4); the teaching/learning goes awry.(5) Why? Situated learning makes sense for imparting concepts in organizational communication, or indeed, any communication. What obstacles make it difficult for students to grasp what I want to teach? Contextual levels, the seismic flux in the Japanese educational system, and the faculty’s organizational culture hold keys. In the analytic process the porous self meets systemic paradox and conflicting paradigms while working architecturally with a cultural field. Making sense of the problem is wrestling with Proteus(6).

Keywords: General Systems Thinking, fiasco, sense-making, community building, cultural change, Fifth Discipline.
References:
Education References
Education and Experience. (1953) John Dewey. New York: Macmillan.
We Make the Road by Walking. (1990) Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. Philadelphia: Temple UP.
Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way. (1994) Mary Catherine Bateson. New York: Harper Collins.
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. (1991) Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Reasoning Learning, and Action. (1983) Chris Argyris. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc.
Systems References
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. (1980) Gregory Bateson. New York: Fontana.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (1979) Gregory Bateson. New York: Ballantine.
Contemporary Conflict Resolution. (1999) Hugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse. Polity Press.
Frame Analysis. (1974) Erving Goffman. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Organizational Communication References
Images of Organization. Gareth Morgan
Sensemaking in Organizations. (1995) Karl E. Weick Sage Publications.
Dance of Change. (1999) Peter Senge et al. Cambridge: MIT
Strategies for Cultural Change. (1994) Paul Bate. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Critical Chain. Eliyahu Goldratt. (1997) Gold River Press.
Japanese and Culture References
The Book of Tea. (1956) [1906] Okakura Kakuzo. Tokyo: Tuttle.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. (1954) Ruth Benedict. Tokyo: Tuttle.
Japanese Culture and Communication. (1998) Ray T. Donahue. UP of America.
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei. (1992) David Mura. Anchor Books.
Vigilant Pleasure as Autoethnography: The Life of the Tea Mind as Critical History. (2003) Timothy Cross. Unpublished dissertation.
Wabi-Sabi. (1994) Leonard Koren. Berkely: Stone Bridge Press.
Parables
Being There. (1970) Jerzy Kosinski. New York: Grove Press.
Our Own Metaphor. Mary Catherine Bateson
Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (1970) Richard Bach. New York: Avon Books.
Four Quartets. (1995)[1943] T.S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Mrs. Dalloway. (1990)[1925] Virginia Woolf.
Lost in La Mancha (documentary of a fiasco). Dir. Fulton and Pepe (2002).

Introductory: Complexity is guaranteed.

“I must create my system or be enslaved by another man’s.” William Blake

A Parable
     Prometheus (7), on his way to a gala celebration, put up for the night with Procrustes, who offered him a bed. Well, Prometheus, being rather large, could manage to fit some parts to the bed, but not others. “Do you mind?” he said, affronted by the Procrustean offer to make some adjustments (mostly to Prometheus) so that he could fit. With his Promethean vision, the god could plainly see that none of the Procrustean beds would do (8), so he decided to push along.
     The gate-keeper at The Party happened to be a fellow named Proteus. “You can’t walk into the same party twice, (9)” he quipped as he waited for Prometheus to rummage for his ticket. As the gate-keeper handed Prometheus his name tag, he asked, “And what does The Party serve? (10)”
     That is how Promethean vision eluded Procrustean beds of academic thought and engaged in the Protean wrestle with words and meanings11 to cultivate (12) the sense that comprises the body of this inquiry.
The Original Concept of The Party
     When I started teaching a few lifetimes ago, it seemed so simple. A party was good for group dynamics and community building. I would even hold a party for a Latin class. The Foreign Language Department’s Christmas party was legendary. Later, when I got to Japan I felt that the silent obedient students could really use The Party’s injection of group cohesion that might make a difference, so I kept up the practice, one way or another.
     Then I read Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature (13), and while nothing was simple anymore, everything alive was part of it. I began to define my communication classes in Japan as “systems” and what went on in the classroom as “the text.” I had exhilarating successes with this framing at Hitotsubashi University in 1986-1988 and at Okayama University in 1992-1995, but this paper is not about those.
     I came to Shizuoka University to settle in for the long haul. We live in a post  “bubble economy” world; our students find it difficult to obtain satisfactory employment. Moreover, the relentless decline of incoming students year by year makes us scramble for enrollments. Meanwhile, the whole national university system has just been privatized; as of now, ready or not, because the government can no longer support us, we are on our own. Such global considerations modify my perceptions of what seemed to be “my” success in those heady times. That was a time for playful inspiration; now is a time for sobriety and caution.
     I’ve seen one “failure” (14) after another, partial successes, communication fiascos (15) – that no one but me seems to learn from due to the simple fact that the students are gone. We are very far from those halcyon days when I thought I knew what I was doing. The Party swells with mysterious, even obsessive significance as I try to understand what is going on, personally, culturally, globally, to thwart the project as an educational endeavor.
     This is where chaos begins. Which system is best for an orderly analysis? Which factors will turn out to be crucial and which trivial? Who am I talking to anyway? Before I begin, I think I should mention that I am specifically engineering for innovation (creativity) and personal autonomy as part of the overall educational endeavor. Moreover, I will not be satisfied until I have found some students who want to talk about everything. In other words, I am engineering an entity with survival power for a world in flux. My approach will concern not only mapping and description but praxis and criteria for success.

I) Methodology
A)Method: Dialectic
     The Party is a whole world, a culture and process structure situated in a Japanese world/culture, and everything is part of it. How does one deal with a world, in which is everything going on at once? Even with a discipline as powerful as Systems Thinking, you have to decide where to start, how to draw the first line.

1) Participant/Observer
     The drawing of the first line suggests a method. I use dialectic. One dialectic16 pertinent to a discussion about method in a cultural situation (17) might be participant/observer. In any kind of analysis of a world, the participant/observer toggle switch, which can work both voluntarily or involuntarily, can change the view in a flash and it works all the way down and up the possible levels of abstraction (18), from participating in a universal seasonal rite of celebrating community, known and understood throughout the world, and observing the whole process of The Party from “set date and place” to “Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building” (the abstract and global levels) to the minutiae of describing and analyzing problems of facilitating production of home-made popcorn or getting caught up so thoroughly in the problem of boiling 10 kilos of potatoes that nothing else exists in the world, (the concrete and local level).

£±a) Manager as Participant
     The managerial participant (that would be me, although the category includes anyone engaged in management) has a number of tasks, such as executive decision making, mentoring manager trainees, recruiting staff, evaluating the capacities and experience of personnel while training the management team to do likewise, facilitating team building (setting up contexts in which team building develops), keeping an experienced eye on the overall pattern of development of the whole project in all divisions – development of vision, designing of schedules for promotion/advertising campaign, ticketing, posters, development of menu, shopping lists, estimated budgets, room layout plans, etc. While the top executive cannot possibly know about every hotplate or gas range being used, she must know the problems and concerns and wattage of those things, know who is in charge of each team, and who to direct to whom, if there are problems. There are always ten thousand problems.
     Paradoxically, the participant manager’s job is to have “observer mode” switched on all the time.

1b) Manager as Observer
     The executive manager as observer requires access to theoretical, descriptive, and mapping disciplines. For example, when one realizes the crucial importance of a fluid communication system (19), it will result in an ever more advanced and accessible data base for interpersonal connection. Key persons will have all the information and all members will know the key persons.
     Paradoxically, system level (observer) thinking can flip into participation (application to a local situation) immediately.
     I provisionally (20) offer the “double-loop learning” of Chris Argyris as a metaphor for the routine practice of "stepping outside of the system", accessing informed vision, education, perspectives, and grid-systems (21) that offer insight into what we have to do. The world of learning provides an awesome fund of mapping techniques, categorization systems, procedures, criteria, and so on. When one remembers that The Party is a whole, complex, undifferentiated world, it serves to have a way of accessing those vast stores of knowledge. It can’t all be used. (And you really must read Argyris for yourself to get the true perspective he brings to organization vision.)
     For a person already actively engaged in the work, to spend too much time in study can be disastrous. What is necessary is focus and intuition. Also, paradoxically, all that learning (and footnotes) can exclude the very people (22) I want to invite to join in the talk.

B) Method: Perspectives—Primary Framings (23) /Lenses
     The idea of focus suggests the metaphor of lenses to focus vision. Depending on the aspect to be emphasized, I can change my glasses. Of many possible framings, I generally work from five academic disciplines. The choice (24) of discipline helps determine which features of the situation I will examine and with what language (25). Both my own purpose and the implied audience will affect my choice of discipline.

1) Pedagogical
     As an educator I was seeking models and procedures for implementing experience based and situated learning, especially to teach system thinking. The Party is a model system and replicates life. From the educational point of view, it doesn’t matter if we make mistakes, over-estimate, underestimate, and even suffer, because while the money and people and food are real, the mid-range size controls disaster, and insofar as we learn from everything, every problem becomes precious.
     Therefore, it is not in my interest to develop a slick, cut-and-dried procedure. We need rough edges so that successive teams can make their own decisions and mistakes, and learn from others.

      Note: I had realized for myself what moved Myles Horton to start Highlander (We Make the Road by Walking xxi). “What you must do is go back, get a simple place, move in, and YOU ARE THERE (caps mine). The situation is there. You start with this and let it grow. You know your goal. It will build its own structure and take its own form.”

2) General (26) Systems Thinking
     As a system thinker I work in the world of whole, open system and divergent process, utilizing mapping (27), iteration, and levels, to observe and develop more refined information feed-back, more sensitive mapping, and to cultivate a connected and healthy living system. I have my own system, of course. I have never read a system theorist who didn’t. Only from the stance of having developed and tested one’s own system can one have the discretion and gritty realism to test the validity and usefulness of other cognitive mapping systems.

      Note: In General Systems Theory, what you “see” is what you get. When you see more, you get more, and so General Systems Theory is its own reward. (28)

3) Communication
     I teach Organizational Communication. Admittedly, the academic discipline of communication itself is a transdisciplinary constellating of conceptual frameworks. In Communication Skills 1 for first year students, I teach interpersonal, group, networking, and “the communication of autonomy with a world”. In Communication Skills 2, building on those categories, I teach “human communication in complex system”. The Party is originally about communication and was originally the project of Communication Skills 2.

     Note: In General Systems Thinking, the fundamental precepts of communication are tautological, like the laws of thermodynamics. No communication without information and system/context. No information without communication and system/context. System is arbitrarily defined. (29)

4) Cultural Studies (in Japan)
     It always seems to me that we consumers/participants of cultural studies are making it up as we go (or read (30)) along (solvitur ambulando!). More than one book on my shelf has the name We Make The Road by Walking. We reify concepts, valorize aspects, position ourselves or our gaze, and give voice to the marginalized and disenfranchised. We question authority and interrogate the conscience of post-colonial power. We probe borders and dissolve definitions.
     I’ve been twenty some years in Japan. The world travelers of the 80’s who taught English to finance their continued travels gave way to the “bubble economy” and “career expats” while some hippy turned her counter-culture dreams to “changing the system from within”. I got hooked on Japan by “wabi-sabi” aesthetics, Aikido, and the romance of Tea, while knowing that this nation has a complex conscience, just like the United States. Hero come to bring authenticity to those trapped in institutional sleep? I don’t think so.(31) I must question myself. (32)
     Meanwhile, the very soul of this teacher is exercised by the cultural dialectics in Japan of tatemae (formal) and honne (instinctive or real), ura (back or seamy side) and omote (façade, for guests), uchi (inside) and soto (outside). I have felt that in Japan the weight of one’s voice (if one has one) depends on tachiba (standing). The voiceless seem to have no impact. If I am cynical, nonetheless, I am part of the system. I am well-treated, have some modest success, and even have some hope of being a contributing member to the faculty which has honored me with an excellent position. I also note that conclusions I draw from the relentless institutionalization of Tea, with concomitant display of money and power, apply with equal bite to Christianity.

Illustration 1: Primary Framings

     All these filmy transforms of information seduce and taunt the sense-making creator of The Party. It must not become an Institution. It must not be Co-opted or Appropriated. I must not “sell-out”!  Meanwhile, what Japanese dynamics of transmission and belonging might aid in transforming The Party into a fluid community event? Some might use the experience to learn about management, some as an excuse to be with their friends, still others might entertain the elusive hope that Synchronicity and Synergy will merge in an exciting chance encounter!
     The above framings, all synthesized from a variety of disciplines, constellated around an idiosyncratic core called  “The Party”, are buttressed by views from other disciplines such as Anthropology, Biology (Botany), Sociology, and Psychology all the time and at every level. I think that the most accessible explanation for the multitude of vision available to make sense of any given strip of experience lies in the shape of metaphor, the suggestive analogy. The defining moment (33) in my academic career, that actually preceded Systems Theory, came when I realized that “the world” can be read as a text and my job is exegesis.

5) Literary Criticism
     To work with exegesis (34) means ultimately to interpret allegorically, and that means to use metaphor as an informative device. Perhaps metaphor is the chief tool in my hand, even preceding Dialectic, cognitively speaking, since the division of a field into two is an image. My formal academic training in the Classics and literature has been comparative, constellated, and eclectic. Now, the text of my present world and dilemmas includes The Party as example, model, and metaphor.

C) Method: Abduction
     Along with Dialectic and my Primary Framings, I use Abduction, the third (35) logical technique (defined by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce). It is a logical technique, although it appears to be intuitive and spontaneous, because every cognitive moment has a structure or pattern.  Similarities/contrasts in structure and pattern are “semes” which provide access to memories and “second-loop learning” to inform the significance of present contingencies.

The Present – Part One: Can I Mention the Present?
     Despite the crucial urgency informing the use of any of the above ways of framing The Party, all of it turns out to be something of an excuse. The Party is a really good place to find oneself deep in real problems with no one to help or floating on a golden cloud of energy that is a system effect. To just ”be there” for the quiet planning talk at an isolated table during ticket sales or to realize that cooking dinner with friends at someone’s house is an exercise in “team-building”. Moments matter, moments in real time. Contingency and concurrence are the spice of bare moments. Sometimes higher vision comes. I’ve seen faces in bliss. They felt it, too, not knowing joy to be one of the purposes of The Party, feeling it only as a contingent by-product.
     I have one shot at saying out of context that the most important things often look like accident. Moreover, a chance for that perception of divine order in seeming chaos and a real joy in community are more likely in certain structures than others. This is real, this is important.

The Present – Part Two: A Meditation

At the still point, there the dance is.
And there is only the dance. (T.S. Eliot)

     Just now a woman came to my door offering me the “double loop learning” of books developed by a cult – possibly Sokka Gakkai – but I was too busy with this paper to focus properly. She took the opportunity to say in one concise sentence “tezukuri kazoku wa daiji ni shimasho.” (Let us care for our handmade family.) “Tezukuri” is a keyword in Japan for a quality of connection. It means handmade and implies human touch, a heart, hands, and eyes. As my blank eyes caused her to apologize and leave, I turned back to this work with a bell going off in my head – that is one of the criteria for The Party!

     Messy, ad hoc, three hours of organized chaos. The present. What is it? Why would it matter? The present is where love or disaster is waiting. Sometimes a contingency opens up, millions of ants appear out of nowhere on all the handmade sandwiches. A student drinks too much and weeping uncontrollably accuses me of betrayal of a whole group’s trust. Who could have guessed? What has never happened before? We name it “unforeseen circumstances” and calculate space, extras, make sure that more people know the general shape of what is supposed to happen, so that someone may carry on where one falls.
     But my practice of conscious appreciation of the present in all its maddening terror and glory is no preparation for people who seem to live in it, with no thought of whence they came or where they are going. It seems not to enter their minds to wonder why we are doing this or what is necessary to make it happen, or what will happen next.

Where We Are At

Illustration 2

     At least The Party does have an educational purpose. In Illustration 2 appear two shopping lists prepared by students before The Party. Christmas 2002 shows how the team of six women wrote down the required items but did not reckon the quantities at all. Part of my problem is that the follow-up scene in the educational endeavor, where we sit down and work through the list adding quantities, like 5 packages of hotcake mix or 24 cans of tuna, never happened. There never was another time for discussion, for they were very negative about debriefing, and there other pressing issues.
     The second list was made by a team leader. He gave us quantities all right. The kitchen coordinator and I looked at his list and wondered how he came up with it. We guessed, correctly, that he had written the required ingredients off the back of a package of curry roux, enough for scant servings for six. The chance to sit down with him and discuss the more than 100 people attending The Party, the estimated serving size (half an ordinary portion?), and rationalizing the quantities around that kind of information never happened.
     The biggest single problem is that for the most part the students have no idea at all what is supposed to happen, what can be learned, what planning means, and so on. There is no context for this kind of learning. This shopping problem would be the perfect exercise for a small group – i.e. “fix these shopping lists for a group of about 100”. But the “Party Project” class has vanished. For The Summer Party, I only have volunteers, whom I must handle as gently as honored guests.
      There is a huge gap between the raw inexperience of students and the real circumstances I face. Similar is the aching chasm between the “double loop” of what I know and have read, have tried, learned, and assimilated and what is possible to transmit to the students. In terms of management, directing the untrained is light, but creating a system with a lot of individual jobs (36) and conscious learning is heavy. If the students feel it is too heavy, they leave. So we aim for a light culture where there is work and talk all the time.
     I count heavily on the contextual effect over time of peer-learning and the “senpai/kohai” (seniors and juniors) relationship. That is a fundamental basis of vital information transmission in Japan. This year’s students may not have “gotten it”; next year’s will.

Where We Might be Going
     A former student, who arranged the room and purchased ice for the first party, graduated and went to work for a computer software company. Four years later, he looks at the problems of The Party with new, educated eyes and says, “That is project management training.” He speaks with authority because he has been doing that very thing. Now how can I get this person to pass on this precious knowing to my students?

     This is important. The students who have graduated and return or the students who have been managers and come back to train others, these are the ones whose voices can be heard. These are the ones who can be trusted. The community and culture need have no borders. But how can I position these voices so that they may have a hearing?
      The kind alumnus dashed off the above chart and told me the selling points, instructing me to have my students translate it into Japanese. (Yeah, right! Which students? I did ask someone, who promptly disappeared. I should have made him do it on the spot.)

That They May Shine

All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,
By the purification of the motive in the ground of our beseeching.
(T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”)

     There have been seven parties and the one scheduled for July 3 is the eighth. The Party as a cultural entity is already holding down its two slots in the first week of July and the first week of December, and therefore has a place in the minds of students (and the organizational mind).  I see The Party’s current shifting form as a place-holder.

     Two or three people talking together (it could be this time, or maybe next) start naturally using business management language, because the context supports it. The above pamphlet in Japanese will make the vocabulary more explicitly available to a variety of situations. They will see the experience as job-related and generally applicable. This will happen. I just don’t know when or the precise mechanism that will precipitate a cognitive re-setting.

      They will say that it was the influence of Satoko or Makoto. They will praise Ayako and Shinobu for excellence in leadership. When someone comes back with a tale of having done well at an interview because of the team work and management experience, some will believe. Then The Party will escape from me and become something I did not make, or even imagine. Just let me be here a little longer to see what happens next.

The Practical Problem of The Party at Present (PPPP)
      For the purpose of the SCOS conference, I define myself as working with the informal cultural infrastructure of my faculty. In any given conversation, I might frame it differently.  For example, a colleague met at a copy machine might discuss possible conceptions of the organization of The Party, whether to go for a profit making organization or NPO. Another colleague asks if The Party shouldn’t involve the surrounding community. At the student level, many volunteers want no more than a chance to have fun with their friends. More than the idea of fun would drive them away.
     I have been waiting for something that happened at the debriefing in July ’03. The volunteer who was the defacto kitchen coordinator declared that the learning would be wasted unless she had a chance to try again. Asked if she could do the job (managing the kitchen) better than me, she said “yes”, so at least one person understood the value of experience-based learning.
      Also several of the managers complained about my management. In the first place, I had failed to delegate enough. In the second place, well, my “place” was on the site, not haring around after items on the shopping list. Yes! Until that particular debriefing of that particular party, there had never been any complaints, and not because of the impeccability of the management! Students were fearful of voicing criticism. That the context supports frank talk is a shining success.
      As I begin to set up Summer ’04 staff-recruiting strategies, there is one person who says she is willing to try a more challenging management job. Also several persons may (no commitments) be willing to participate again as teams. In short, one person other than myself is committed to at least the next party. This is much better than it looks on paper. Even so, I look the project over as if from zero, because “zero-based” accounting is a good way to carry on in uncertainty.

In the Fall Weeds Grow by Themselves
       A zen koan reads "In the spring the grass grows by itself". So it can be with a healthy culture. Japanese gardeners can be pretty deft with the pruning shears, I've noticed. Healthy growth can sustain that. However, in the war of the beautiful "susuki" (pampas grass) with the Golden Rod, I saw the Golden Rod win. It was a biological war between a local culture with sweet integrity and an undesirable invading culture.

      I cannot just let The Party float away from me. Culture needs nurturing and vigilance. I have had a really good growing student culture appropriated suddenly by an entrepreneur. I was too naïve to see it coming and am still too naïve to know what to do, except to talk about it. Bad things can happen (and was it so bad?). Weeds can take over, or say, weed-like effects that I perceive as undesirable.

    “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes” (Juvenal, Satires. 6,347) we might ask when we question authority, holding the mirror to ourselves. I may not have anything as definite as a position, but I mean to stand by it!  Purposive muddling along may actually be a fairly good way.

     The criteria for sustainability include fun and transmission (of the concept, of the pattern). The culture is porous, but teams have integrity. The Party wants to be inclusive and receptive to change. I want to see a culture that is self conscious, resilient, and vocal. The goal is a potential space for personal empowerment in which anyone can participate, if they wish.

"If the fool would persist in his folly,

he would become wise." William Blake.