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Security theatre and the cult of doing

December 28, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 9 Comments

Dropped my spouse off at the water taxi this morning at 8am.  She’ll get to the airport by 10 which hopefully will give her enough time to get through security for a 2:30 flight.  But we’ll see.

I’ve been reflecting a little on the airborne events of the last few days and reading lots of blogs that say that the Transportation Security Administration in the United States (and CATSA here in Canada) has it all wrong when it comes to their latest response to an attempt to blow up an airplane.  The problem is that they are trapped in the fear loop that the United States government has created for itself since 9/11.

US (and by association, the rest of us) security policy has been driven, at a base level, by fear.  The thinking goes that the more we are doing, the safer we are, and if there is a breach of security we need to do more.  The problem with this line of thinking is that the world will never be perfectly safe.  This means that every perceived (and reported) security breach drives the need for SOMEBODY TO DO SOMETHING!.  If the TSA does not act, they are accused of being soft and endangering the lives of flyers.  I have heard friends say to others this week “do you want to be unsafe or bear a delay in getting on board?”  This question creates a ridiculous positive feedback loop, equating more DOING with safety.   And one wonders if it will ever happen that these measures will be rolled back.  How do you argue that doing more makes us safer and then stop doing pat downs for example without being accused of doing less to protect us?

Reactionary doing satisfies the appearance of safety and security, but it does not necessarily do anything to make people safer.  In fact, in times of panic or inconvenience, you could argue that people become more and more frustrated, their anger levels rise, and the skies are actually unsafer as a result, not from terrorism, but from air rage.

Security theatre comes from the school of management that respects measurables.  But it arises out of a short term thinking mindset that disconnects the activity from the systemic context.  You can certainly show that three or four new procedures have been put in place, and you can measure things like delays to flights, how many acts of terrorism have been committed in the next few months and so on.  But all that does is take away from the systemic context of security. The problem is that the major measureable for security is zero – zero terrorist attempts.  Zero is unattainable, and unmeasureable in the long run.  As soon as zero changes to one, a whole new set of reactions is triggered.

The net effect this has on the world is to make people more fearful of events that are highly improbable (I read yesterday somewhere that the probability of being on a plane that is the target of a terrorist attack over the last 10 years world wide is 20 times the probability of being struck by lightning).  And there is certainly no guarantee of safety, there never can be.  Mr. Abdultallab snuck explosives onto a plane after being cleared through an airport that had TSA certification.  He had a visa to the United States, and he got through Amsterdam’s security as well.  There are many ways to do this, and there will always be ways to do this.  Short of a strip search for every passenger and an xray to ensure that there is nothing INSIDE your body that could be dangerous, air travel is as secure as it has ever been.  Probably the best move of the last ten year shas been to lock the flight deck doors.  That alone has meant that there have only been 7 hijackings since 9/11. most of them in Africa, and all of them ending with no loss of life.  Crude attempts to fashion explosives in the cabin from innocuous materials have been tried twice and have failed.  One Bolivian claimed he had a bomb, but it was simply tins full of dirt and adorned with lightbulbs.

Air travel is safe – as safe as it has ever been.  This is totally at odds with what we are being told this week and shown in the actions of the security organizations that have lost themselves in a feedback loop of panic and reaction.  The more patting down, personal searches and confinement to your seat you experience, the less safe you feel, without being any more safe than you actually are.

“But we’re DOING something!”

PS…just as I finished this post, Caitlin called from the airport.  CATSA is not allowing any carry on baggage at all today on her flight to Los Angeles.  All she can bring on is her laptop.  Everything else has to go in the checked luggage.  One assumes this will speed up the boarding process, limiting the personal searches that have to happen, but that makes for a pretty boring 3 hours in teh air and another 4 hours on the ground.  Not even a book is allowed.

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Running the Goat

December 26, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Podcast 2 Comments

Resolution for the new year is to post more links to cool things I am listening too.  I’ve been a fan of podcasting for a long time, and get most of my radio and music now through the web.  There is so much out there that is cool.

For this first post, a podcast that was recently re-aired on Radio Netherlands.  It is called Running the Goat, and is a documentary about a dance from the vanished village of Harbour Deep, Newfoundland.  The dance was a staple in the community and is strongly associated with the 350 year history of the village.  Harbour Deep stopped existing in 2002, never managing to recover from the the 1992 closure of the inshore cod fishery.

The dance however, lives on.

Chris Brooks hosts Running the Goat.  And for more on Harbour Deep: visit A Map of The Sea.

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From the feed

December 25, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

Tasty holiday treats:

  • Meg Wheatley’s 10 ways to create healthy community change.  Nice set of videos.
  • Dave Pollard has moved his blog.  Update your bookmarks!
  • CBC News blogs the minute by minute development of the most productive thing to happen in Copenhagen last week: The Yes Men eviscerating our government’s shameful performance on the world stage.
  • Metafilter has a nice little article with some great links on the Christmas Truce of 1914

Merry Christmas!

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Open Space and the way forward for the world

December 22, 2009 By Chris Corrigan BC, Collaboration, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Invitation, Open Space 3 Comments

I was watching the Cop15 conference at a distance and I have been thinking that big conferences are maybe not what it will take to shift things.  Bigger and more may not be what is needed, or what works.  One of the problems is the pressure and expectation that comes from big gatherings – it tends to result in a level of planning and pre-ordained outcomes that actually suppresses emergent behaviour, and emergent behaviour is the mechanism I believe we need to evolve our next level of being, if we are to have a next level as a species.

An exception to my mind has always been the Open Space conference which is built on self-oganization as a mechanism for fostering emergent understanding and work.  In fact, recently I have been returning more and more to Open Space in its most pure and extended forms to generate emergent results embedded in sustainable relationships.  I find that as a designer I am maybe sometimes a little guilty of frankly pandering to the fears of clients who want me to design results rather than process.  The inclination to control is a strong one, to feel like there is much at stake and so therefore everything must be tightly scripted.  And yet the reality is that in the world outside of conference, innovation and emergence is happening all the time  in fact most conferences, even conferences of amazing and talented people, are a let down because a small group of people – the organizers – seek to control what happens, making sure everyone has a good experience, as if people aren’t perfectly capable of a good experience on their own.  It’s a bummer, and real life, where people get to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they care for, is a whole lot more exciting and productive.

Of course a sole four day Open Space, powerful as it is for fostering surprising levels of emergence and action, still requires much skillful design.  I place a great deal of emphasis on the quality and mode of the invitation.  How we invite people – how we ACT when we invite people – often says more about the invitation than the text of the invitation itself.  Assembling the right people around the right call is a deep art, and in fact might be the deepest art of all the arts of hosting.  But once they are in the room, I think most folks, and especially thoroughbreds, like to have the space to run.  To be scripted and moved around, have conversations prematurely cut off or started around false or half guessed-at topics, is a travesty.  To see a group of highly talented and motivated people create their own emergent agenda and go to work offering everything they can is a truly inspiring sight and to see them doing so over two, three and four days is to watch a community get born.  I have experienced three and four day Open Space gatherings a handful of times, both as a facilitator and as a participant and without exception powerful, enduring and totally unexpected results have emerged.  And these results have lasted, evolved and morphed into amazing things.  I have never seen those kinds of results from other kinds of tightly scripted conferences.

I have been thinking about this for a while, and the missed opportunity in Copenhagen combined with some other observations about over the top conference planning has led me to really question whether the ONE ALL PURPOSE GATHERING has not seen better days. We are so muich more able to work in local and disbursed ways that we don’t need to wait for the big conference to do good work.  We can just get on Skype and start going at it.  In fact I’m surprised how few people actually do do this.  Instead they wait for the big gathering to start something.  Having said that, Open Space offers the nearest conference based analogue to this marketplace of life.  As designers and conveners, we simply need a powerful invitation, the influence to connect to the right people, and then stand aside as skillful and motivated people connect with one another and find the work they are meant to do together.

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From the feed

December 18, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

Tasty morsels from the syndicated grapevines:

  • Thomas Arthur shares a beautiful reflection on his place and time.
  • Myriam Laberge with some excellent tips for improving information delivery in conferences.  For best results combine it with an insanely good slideshow.
  • Jordon Cooper has a nuanced take on big business and the environment.
  • Also from Jordon, Life’s pictures of the year.
  • Tom Atlee on Open Source Religion.
  • Worldchanging reports on young people using Google Wave to negotiate what the adults should be doing at Cop15

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