The Essay that Would not Die

There follows the essay that would not die, the latest addition to the Badi Mailing List, which is now given new life by being extended to a blog.



The Essay That Would Not Die; On Leaders and their Dashboards; 17 May, 2004


My reveries on cockpit displays go on without end. In writing I can tell when I have not asked the right question. Strange things start to happen; instead of going forward I find myself writing backwards. I scrape out beginnings only and no ends. I scrabble in a gaping hole that feels more and more like a grave.

This morning I took a break from this Essay That Would Not Die and drove Silvie to Baha'i school. On the radio I heard a female classical singer doing a lovely rendition of Rummy's famous philosophy, which I paraphrase,


"There are things that you know and things you don't know but there are also things that you know you don't know. But worst of all are the things that you don't know that you don't know. Those are the ones that will rise up and bite you in the butt."


Was this what has been eating me, things that I don't know that I don't know? I guess the underlying question gnawing away at me is this: how did those events in the news last week, revelations of systematic torture in Iraq followed by that retaliatory beheading ... how did this come about? I am not talking details here, clues of a mystery story. I do not watch television news and my shock was probably more muted than most. My question is just: how did this truly awesome machine -- and let us not fool ourselves, it is not just military or technological, it is an administrative hegemony, the most efficient organizational grouping the world has seen, how did longstanding and systematic abuse ever manage to stay off their radar screens as long as it did?

What I mean is, I am no leader of men but if I were I'd be shaking in my boots. If something like that can escape the notice of the world's most efficient administrators for so long, how can anybody head any organization, large or small, without living in constant fear that somebody is knocking out the central pillars of their mission, one by one?

I've been looking at advances in technique for bosses, which are truly amazing. They order custom made displays to capsulate their area of responsibility and alert them to subtle changes in extremely complex situations. Made up by cutting edge software engineers, these "cockpits" or "dashboards" are designed to simplify abstruse statistics and other indicators into a clear array of customized meters and "idiot lights." Such heads up displays (HUD's) normally are shown on computer monitors, but they can also be projected on a wall or desk, directly onto the eyeball or onto the inside of eyeglasses. Someday, futurist predict, the managers in a workplace will be recognizable by their virtual reality goggles, just as we now know doctors and nurses in a hospital by their surgical scrubs.

Every light and meter is designed to alert them in time to some relevant factor, but the indicators also act as portals for interacting directly with the data, either by testing out simulated solutions or direct interaction with given parameters. Since each dashboard is different, specially tailored to that particular manager's interest and expertise, the cockpit should not reduce accountability or necessarily lessen room for personal style, since they all use the same underlying database available to anyone else in the company.

What might Kofi Annan's "dashboard" display look like? What might his HUD dashboard summary state about our world's sorry situation? The horror! Judging just by the shocking headlines of the past week, today's breed of leaders are sinking into feuding, revenge and mutual humiliation. Surely there must be idiot lights to warn against the "bickering syndrome," not unlike the so-called "China Syndrome," the expression for total meltdown in a nuclear facility. In the bickering syndrome the fault has to be everywhere, top to bottom, for neither leaders nor their underlings can have reliable compasses, or be reading them right.

The question that should surely be on everyone's mind is: Would the right HUD dashboards have warned of this emerging scandal before it broke into the press? Would more open accountability, the right display for every level linked to those of everyone else, would that have averted this crisis?

I did not find my answer to my version of this question until I just gave up. I was idly surfing the web looking for something else, alone in the dark, very late at night when I found myself browsing through the large number of pilgrim's notes on Baha'i Library dot com.

Eventually I came across the notes of some fellow, evidently an ordinary American believer, whose wife went to Haifa to cook. She got sick and they were delayed while she recovered. He ended up living my wildest dream, staying a week alone with the Guardian doing nothing else but listening to his personal views and perspectives. This happened just before Shoghi Effendi died, as it turned out.

The opinions he recorded reveal nothing we did not know but coming when they did they provided a perfect answer to my questions. It hit me like a runaway cement truck. How could I have been so blind? I will not spell it out for you; you can read the notes for yourself on that website, the world's largest online collection of works to do with the Baha'i Faith. It does no good to cite pilgrim's notes anyway.