Skip to content

Automatic Redirection of Email to an External Domain

There are documented reasons why sending an email message to one email address would be redirected to another.  These are all mail-flow related to the recipient of the message.  If Bert sets up a forwarding rule to Ernie, then Ernie will get Bert’s mail.  Similarly, there are mail-flow settings for administrators that forward all mail from one mailbox to another.  However, this isn’t the only way that mail can get redirected.  First, we need to understand external records in your Azure Active Directory.

External Users

If you invite external users to your SharePoint or OneDrive resources, a user record will be created in your Azure Active Directory (Microsoft Entra ID).  This record will have the at sign (@) in the name replaced with an underscore and will be suffixed with #EXT#@primarytenantdomain.

So, for the leadinglambs.com domain, [email protected] becomes rob.bogue_thorprojects.com#EXT#@leadinglambs.com.

Thus, there is a record when Exchange goes to look up [email protected].  It does this without notification.  When that record has an email property set, the email will be redirected.  So, for instance, if you set the email address to [email protected], the messages sent to [email protected] will be transparently redirected to [email protected]

Only One

The confusing bit is, because this is configured in the sender’s domain, it’s hard to track down why one particular sender tenant/domain is redirecting messages.  However, take a look at what happens if you run a message trace:

Note that the resolve happens prior to the message being sent to the target.  It’s all because of the Email setting in the user record:

If you find mail is getting delivered to the wrong place – it’s worth checking the user’s record in Entra ID.

Book Review-Designing Dynamic Organizations

I never got to meet Jay Galbraith.  His first work was published just months after my birth.  However, Galbraith’s perspectives on organizations and change have reverberated over the years, and I finally got a chance to read some of his later work – Designing Dynamic Organizations.  Galbraith published many works over the years, nearly all about creating structures for organizations that would perform and adapt.

The Model

The primary contribution to the literature was the introduction of a five-part “star” model:

In Designing Dynamic Organizations, Galbraith and his co-authors walk through steps designed to create clarity around each of these components of the model.  The model starts with a strategy – and then the other four components of the model, which have no specific order, have an interconnected nature that means they’re likely to be worked simultaneously.

Strategy

The starting point for an organization and for a change effort is to develop the strategy.  What is it that you believe will work to propel the organization forward?  Often, approaches like SWOT and PESTLE are used to do this current state analysis.  (See our SWOT and PESTLE resource book for more on how to do this current state analysis.)

In Galbraith’s perspective, the other part is about clarifying limits and assumptions.  This is the same process that Immunity to Change seeks to unlock.  By clarifying what is in the way of changes and success you’re better able to define a strategy that will work.

Structure

An organization has a set of resources to deploy, and structure is the question about how to best deploy them.  Over the years, many have tried to define a single structure that is best for every organization.  Edith Penrose outlined a complete approach in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm.  Contemporary theorists, like Frederic LaLoux in Reinventing Organizations, challenge even the concept of structure as Galbraith considers it in his model.  Gareth Morgan exposes multiple ways of looking at the structure problem in Images of Organization by examining different ways of thinking of organizations.  The Heretic’s Guide to Management questions whether the structure is as meaningful as everyone assumes.

Ultimately, structure starts with the dimension across which you’ll primarily organize.  Are you organizing sales by geography or by product lines?  Historically, we saw many geographical organizations, but with better travel and virtual options for meetings, there’s a shift towards more product focused organizations.

Processes and Lateral Capability

Here, Galbraith is focused on how the organization works around the structure that’s put in place.  Some of it is the way that teams are formed.  Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham wrote Work Redesign to directly address the gyrations necessary to create more effective processes.  (See also Collaborative Intelligence for more on Hackman’s thoughts about effective teams.)  More than that, Galbraith is talking about fostering communities in the organization.  (See Digital Habitats for examples.)  Organizations aren’t made up of the official structure alone.  Instead, they’re the network of connections that are started by the structure and enhanced by the internal spirit of collaboration and working spaces.

Reward Systems

Recognizing people appropriately is a complex struggle for every organization.  It starts with the challenge of intrinsic motivation and the real possibility of explicit rewards disrupting that motivation.  (See Why We Do What We Do for more.)  Motivating employees is more than just money.  (See 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or No Money.)  Influencing others – building reward systems to systemically influence them – has a good deal of research, since it’s such a challenging and important task for organizations.  For instance, The Titleless Leader, Influence, Pre-Suasion, Influence Without Authority, and 42 Rules of Employee Engagement all provide clues to reward approaches that are effective.

However, the question about who you should reward is often overlooked.  The unfortunate reality is that most organizations don’t know what metrics would be appropriate their employees – and what values the metrics should have to indicate the need for recognition and reward.  (See our Metrics & Indicators resource book for more on setting the right metrics and targets.)

People

Organizations move forward because of the people they attract, screen, motivate, and retain.  These processes aren’t necessarily easy, but there are things that you can do to improve the people in the organization – and therefore what you’re capable of.

Greater attention is being paid to brand awareness – not just from the customer perspective but also because it impacts the degree to which people will want to work with an organization.  Building a strong brand is a cornerstone of attracting the right talent.

Screening the applicants is a process.  It’s a system that starts with a pool of applicants and ends with hiring one or more of those people for the available roles.  (See Who for more on this process.)  One of the key capabilities of people in today’s world is their ability and desire to learn, because it’s almost impossible to identify all the skills that an employee will need to be successful in today’s rapidly changing world.  (See The Adult Learner for more.)

Once they’re on board, it’s important to provide effective feedback for the employee.  (See Radical Candor for an integrated approach to feedback.)

Together

Collectively, Galbraith explains that these components can make – or break – an organization.  With his guidance, he believes that you can be good at Designing Dynamic Organizations.

When Inclusivity Goes Too Far

Inclusivity is a good thing, right?  Sure.  However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  When the benefits of inclusivity start to cause more negative consequences than positive ones, it’s time to reevaluate.  It’s time to find ways of including others without incurring the negative consequences.

We Share the Same Biology

Before I get to the limits of inclusivity and when it transitions from good to bad, it’s important to acknowledge that absolute necessity of it and the tragedy when we don’t have any.  For far too long, people have been marginalized.  It makes no difference whether we’re speaking of the caste system in India, the fate of Blacks and Latinos in America, the First Nations people in Canada, Aboriginal Australians, or the challenges that befall gender equality across the globe.  It’s wrong.  We share the same biology, and we deserve an equal shot at a life of happiness and prosperity.

When I speak of the limits of inclusivity, I’m not talking about the need to return the scales to balance and even to tip them towards the benefit of those who have suffered by oppressive hands – many of whom may have been my ancestors.  No apologies can undo what has been done.

What I am talking about is how we include every voice today.  What I’m talking about is who to include in a room full of old white dudes or in a room full of school children.  The key here isn’t about race or gender, but how, in an attempt to level these scales, we may cause more trouble than we solve.

Creating Space and Safety

Irrespective of who is in the room, their makeup or experiences, every interaction should be done in a place where people feel safe.  They should feel like they can share their whole selves.  If someone isn’t cisgender, but they aren’t comfortable in sharing that with their family, we should endeavor to create a space that makes it acceptable for them to share with us.  The best form of humanity is one that accepts others for who they are – regardless of who they are.

Creating safety is substantially easier said than done.  First, we’ve got to turn off our natural tendencies to judge, because judging creates separation.  Second, we need to turn up our desire for understanding.  Our goal in creating a safe space is to understand – not necessarily agree.

If we can’t create places of safety, then we’ve failed before we’ve begun.  We cannot expect that everyone we interact with will feel safe – they’ve got their own internal experiences to build expectations on, but we’re responsible for the environment that we create.

The truth is all of this is critical preamble to understand before we explain why too much inclusivity can be a bad thing.

Too Many Voices

You walk into a busy restaurant and realize that you can no longer make out the words your companion is saying.  They raise their voice to a volume akin to yelling at your kid on the other side of a football field, and you’re able to barely make out their words.  You wonder if they’re angry or if they’re just struggling to get their voice above the noise.  You’ve just experienced what it’s like to have too many voices.  It overwhelms the senses and makes communication nearly impossible.  Because of the noise, all the subtly and nuance is lost.

The same happens when we invite too many people to be included in what we’re doing.  In the name of inclusivity, we turn the noise up to a level where no one can understand the conversation.  Some of this is in the sheer number of people.  Some of this is in who we invite and their inability to modulate their voice in ways that create space for others.  Some of those we include may themselves exclude others.

Tone Deaf

It’s rare that I encounter someone who hasn’t invited a friend to a party, a person to speak, or an organization to a partnership and regretted it.  The people get added and instantly take over the conversation or insist on becoming the center of the attention.  Their additional voice may be necessary, but the way that they use it causes so much harm that it’s appropriate to wonder whether their voice was truly necessary or just useful and whether that utility is outweighed by the problems associated with the voice.

While I rarely find people who’ve not had the experience, it’s also true that it’s rare.  Though most of us bear the scars from such an interaction, we’ll admit it doesn’t happen frequently.  It’s not, however, so rare that we’re able to forget it.

Worst Case Scenario

Sometimes, the problem isn’t the need to be the center of attention but rather the fog that accompanies them.  One of the powers of diverse groups is their ability to see situations from multiple perspectives.  We want people who can see and help us avoid problems that are a part of potential solutions.  However, sometimes the feedback about potential problems are too much.

Consider for a moment that you want to ride a new roller coaster at your favorite theme park.  You assemble a group of friends to discuss the pros and cons of the experience.  While most of your friends egg you on and want you to come, there are some who are concerned about the dangers.  Some friends may consider things like losing your sunglasses, watch, or phone, others are concerned about less realistic things.  Instead of offering concerns and solutions to the problems that are most frequently encountered, they identify problems that almost never happen.

They might encourage you to consider what might happen if the ride gets stuck.  What would it be like to have to wait on the ride for an hour or more as the fire department is called to free you from a difficult position?  What happens if you come free from your restraint and fall to your death?  Perhaps an asteroid will come and hit the roller coaster.  It’s harder to see the line between the reasonable and unreasonable than it might appear.  Certainly, an asteroid is far-fetched, since we’ve not encountered something like that for a few million years, but getting stuck (though rare) may happen more commonly.

On the one hand, it’s probably a good idea to consider a quick stop to the rest room before riding; on the other hand, preparing for an asteroid is impossible.  This is the key as some people will bring up concerns that cannot be solved – but also are not about the decision at hand, they’re about living life or doing business.

We need to shape voices in ways that cause them to raise issues – but not disconnected concerns and certainly not raise concerns that are unrelated to the topic at hand.

Lack of Focus

Including additional voices also has the impact of reducing focus.  Each person has their own perspective and their own beliefs about what is the core of the problem.  Individuals’ core beliefs about the heart of the system are rarely in complete alignment.  Where one person may be laser focused on improving access to health care, the other person may be more concerned about efficacy of the treatments.  The net result can be a positive exploration about how the two relate – or it can be an unstated battle of wills as the two pull the discussion into two different but related paths.

Individually, the participants are clear with their focus, but they’ve not collectively reached complete understanding or agreement, and the result is a blurred sense of vision and approach.  If there isn’t sufficient effort to at least expose if not resolve the issues, the result is the lack of focus.  What’s particularly tragic about this is that these challenges often lie beneath the surface, undiscovered.  They eat efficacy and point towards problems ahead because of the distrust that builds as it becomes evident that others don’t believe in the same things that they do.  They’ve always believed the others understood the problem as they did – but that’s not the case.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Horst Rittel and his colleagues coined the term “wicked problem” and the ten criteria that make a problem wicked.  Wicked problems are the very kind of problem that we need diverse groups for.  They have no single definition nor solution, and often the actors trying to resolve the problem have no right to be wrong.  However, wicked problems amplify differences and conflicts.  They can be perceived in different ways by their very nature – and being able to see how others may see the problem differently is not always easy.

We must set the goal of inclusivity to the point of positive improvement in the outcomes we create.  When we’re being taken off track by people who can’t help us bring unity, acceptance, and coherence to our problems, then inclusivity has gone too far.

Certainly, getting more input and including more people is better than going alone.  An African proverb states that if you want to go faster, go alone; if you want to go further, go together.  In most cases today, we want to go further – but we can only go further with the right sized group.

Book Review-America’s Gun Wars: A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States

Some of my earliest memories are watching The Lone Ranger.  I remember cowboys in white hats and bandits in black hats.  When I picked up America’s Gun Wars: A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States, I never expected to find a reference to The Lone Ranger or other Westerns.  My stepfather was obsessed with Westerns and John Wayne in particular.  I grew up hunting deer and squirrels with him.  I hunted with a bow and with shotguns.  For me, guns – at least rifles and shotguns – were normal.  What I’ve come to realize is that this wasn’t normal for everyone.  For some, the mere thought of a gun is an anxiety-inducing event.  It’s not just those who have been victims of gun violence.  It’s so removed from some experiences that it induces anxiety.

What masquerades as a gun war is in many ways much deeper.  It’s about beliefs and identities that people have.

Bedrocks and Cosmopolitan

In America’s Gun Wars, Donald Campbell simplifies the positions around guns into “Bedrock America” (whom many would call gun rights advocates) and “Cosmopolitan America” (who believes that we need gun control to reduce violence and that guns are a holdover of a previous time).  The labels are shortcuts and a simplification of positions – but they are useful.

Bedrock America’s beliefs are summed up best with “rugged individualism.”  They share a fundamental set of beliefs that value independence, self-reliance, justice, and freedom.  It’s almost as if Campbell was reading from Jonathan Haidt’s foundations of morality.  (See The Righteous Mind.)

Cosmopolitan America’s beliefs are of shared values.  They’re distrustful of firearms and their need.  They see that society has evolved beyond the need for individuals to protect themselves.  We have professional fire and police protection.  Why would we need firearms to protect ourselves?  They’re frustrated by the explosive growth of violent crime in our urban centers far away in both time and place from the frontiers of old.

I’ll admit that I’m challenged by some of the views that Cosmopolitan America has.  For instance, the perception is that violent crime has been on the constant rise and it’s continuing to get worse.  The peak of violent crime in America occurred in the 1990s.  Even with the recent pandemic-related increase in violent crime, we’re still down substantially from the all-time highs.  (See Anthro-Vision.)

I also struggle to accept the premise that more guns means that there will be more violence.  There continues to be a rise in the number of firearms owned in the United States, which has in many ways corresponded to the drops in violent crimes.  I’m not willing to say – as some gun rights supporters would – that more guns equals fewer violent crimes.  I’m simply confused why the statistics don’t seem to support the assertion that more guns equate to more violence.

Inches to Miles

One of the ways that Bedrock America and Cosmopolitan America square off is when it comes to registration of firearms.  The argument of Cosmopolitan America is that it does no harm and helps police trace weapons after a crime.  There are fundamental problems with the argument in terms of the number of times a weapon is recovered but the offender isn’t apprehended.  Importantly, in those places that have required registration, it doesn’t appear to have improved gun tracing capabilities.  On its face, Bedrock America has asked for evidence to support efficacy of the approach and hasn’t seen an answer.

However, even if there were some evidence, Bedrock America has reason to be wary.  In 1967, Mayor John Lindsay enacted a rifle and shotgun registration law.  He promised the law was only to keep track of potentially dangerous firearms.  He kept his word.  However, in 1991, Mayor David Dinkins signed a law prohibiting some of the previously allowed firearms and the registration list was used to notify owners of the prohibition.  They were also required to return a sworn statement about what they had done to comply with the new law.  What started as registration had become a mechanism to “take” people’s guns from them.

Licensing

Another consideration for gun control is the concept of licensing.  It started with New York State’s Sullivan Act in 1911.  The act required that people obtain a license for guns, knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons.  The argument for it was that it would be possible to prevent unsavory people from obtaining such items, but, as New York State Senator Timothy Ferris at the time argued, “You can’t force a burglar to get a license to use a gun.”  Criminals, by definition, break laws.

This is at the heart of the argument against gun control laws.  Only a small portion of criminals – if any – will adhere to the laws.  If they’re willing to commit murder and accept the felony for it, why would a minor weapons charge be concerning to them?

National Rifle Association

Few groups are as polarizing as the National Rifle Association (NRA).  People either see them as defenders of the right to bear arms or the villains that push the means of killing children to the masses.

However, the organization was applauded in a 1945 letter from President Truman for their contributions to the war effort.  The NRA was a leading provider of training and an encouragement towards both hunting and marksmanship.  The skill necessary to effectively operate a firearm and hit a target would come in handy when the members were asked to fight in World War II.

Only to Kill

A sharp criticism of guns is their fundamental nature of killing.  They are, in fact, designed for this purpose.  The challenge comes when the killing moves from hunting to provide food for a family to harming other humans.  Chicago’s Mayor Daley and Time magazine both criticized guns as having no significant role in society other than to kill or maim human beings.  Of course, hunters and sports shooters vehemently disagreed with this assertion.

The truth is that automobiles still are responsible for more deaths than homicides (of all types), yet we don’t call for the elimination of automobiles.  We don’t because the perceived utility of them as a transportation means seems to justify the mortality rate.  If you don’t belong to a club that is gun-related, you don’t participate in a gun-related sport, and you don’t use guns for hunting, then there appears to be no reason for you to have a gun – except for personal protection.

Personal Protection

The purpose of having a gun for personal protection places the crosshairs on the idea that the gun is used to kill and maim.  That is, of course, what makes them an effective deterrent.  The question at the heart of the problem is whether the presence of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens increases or decreases violent crime including murder.  Here, the data isn’t clear.

If you compare the US murder rate with IDEC nations, the rate is higher.  If you include countries like Russia and Brazil in the mix, the murder rate drops.  The relative rate of murder is relative to what you compare it to.  To be clear, zero murder is a good thing, but achieving that isn’t a reality.

A common reference point is the United Kingdom with their restrictive gun laws.  They’re in the top third of countries with high violent crime rates with relatively low murder rates and higher property crime rates.  They do see less violent crime than the United States, but it’s not clear what the reasons for that are.

Lack of Certainty

Perhaps the most powerful thing that can be said is that, in every case where there seems to be a clear answer for what would solve our violence problem, it is less clear upon closer inspection.  Perhaps this is the reason why we still have America’s Gun Wars.

Angry With You

The English language has some problems.  Some of those problems can make conflict worse.  Take the simple statement, “I’m angry with you.”  Immediately, the amygdala leaps into action and starts the cascade of chemicals that causes us to decide to fight or flee.  Before we can blink, we wonder how angry the person is with us.

The problem is that the preposition “with” doesn’t explain whether we are the object of the anger or whether the person is standing beside us in the anger.  If they’re standing with us in our anger, then they’re an ally.  If we’re the object of their anger, then we’re an enemy.  We’re presented with dozens of these contradictions as we communicate with others.

Unconditional Positive Regard

Carl Rogers’ way of saying it was “unconditional positive regard.”  It conveyed judgement-free listening and the general expectation of positive things from the person he was with.  Instead of assuming the worst, he assumed the best.  Instead of looking for threats, he looked for ways to connect.  Instead of instantly judging what the other person said and assuming he knew what they meant, he maintained an element of curiosity about whether his perception was the one the other party intended.

Rogers’ framework is a good start.  It sets us up to differentiate between the times that someone has made us the object of their answer and when they stood beside us in solidarity with our anger.

Adaptive Anger

Buddhists speak of emotions as afflictive and non-afflictive.  That is, is the emotion harming us or not?  In Western terms, we speak of whether the emotion is adaptive – that is, providing value – or maladaptive.  Maladaptive emotions include those where the emotion and the responses it generates for us are harmful.  Given the trauma associated with anger – and the anger associated with trauma – one would assume that anger is maladaptive.  It does, after all, often cause harm.

Despite this, anger is more nuanced.  If one becomes angry for the right reason, at the right time, and at the right person, then anger can be adaptive.  That is, anger is not in and of itself a problem.  The problem is learning how to effectively manage our anger.  The anger that we associate with trauma is often not expressed in the right way, at the right person, at the right time, or for the right reasons.

The trauma-associated anger is different.  It exposes us to the disappointment that underlies the situation.  Whether the disappointment is in the behavior or lack of behavior of a person or is simply due to life not being fair, it’s anger that rises up to protect us when our expectations aren’t met.

Disappointment Directed

Anger is an emotion that many people struggle with.  Anger management has become both a phrase and a common source of humor.  Anger’s challenge lies in the fact that few have been taught what it is and what to do about it.  However, the Buddhists have a simple translation that can allow us to process our anger and get to its root.

The heart of this is the awareness that anger is disappointment directed.  We’re disappointed because someone or something didn’t meet our expectations.  We’ve directed this disappointment at someone – ourselves or others –and that disappointment takes the form of anger.

With this knowledge, we have a powerful set of questions.  We can ask what we’re disappointed in – and who we’re disappointed with.

Judgement Based

Our expectations are a part of the human condition.  In fact, more than anything else, our consciousness exists to allow us to prepare for potential threats – and that means prediction.  Given our limited ability to process and cognitive capacities, our ability to predict is nothing short of magic.  We can anticipate what others are thinking and what we expect them to do.  We apply patterns and rules of thumb.  When we’re missing data, we just make it up – which sometimes can be a bad thing.

Behind all these inferences and filling in the holes is a judgement system that is constantly making sense of the outside world.  Despite the wonderous machinery that makes this possible, it’s not infallible.  We make mistakes in our judgement – and anger is the result.

The reason that our judgement does so well with so little is that it’s constantly tuning itself.  Whether it’s laughter when a comedian makes us think one thing before snapping us back to their true meaning or the burn of anger, we’re constantly refining the prediction process to make it better.

Still, Rogers implores us to challenge our assumptions and to be surer that we understand the other person and the situation better.  That is, how do we slow down the judgement machine?

With

When someone we care about is angry, we listen to their anger and often we absorb it ourselves.  We listen to the evidence as they lay it out.  We, of course, draw the same conclusions they did.  We apply the same judgements, and we reach the same disappointed conclusions.  We accept their explanations, and we become angry with them – about the situation.

While this statement indicates solidarity, it does little to encourage us to seek our own data and our own conclusions.  We may be angry with the rude subway passenger who was letting his kids terrorize the other passengers in the car.  We may never ask the question about why.  Instead, we may believe, as they did, that the father was not a good father.  It’s only through asking that we can learn that he just buried his wife, and the family is now on their way home and desperately missing their mother.

Being angry with someone can be a show of solidarity – as long as we’re willing to investigate whether our anger is directed at the right person, in the right amount, and for the right reasons.

Book Review-Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, The Media, and Botched “Studies” Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control

Columbo’s catch phrase, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is strangely appropriate when it comes to understanding the facts around gun rights and gun control.  Gun Control Myths: How Politicians, The Media, and Botched “Studies” Have Twisted the Facts on Gun Control seeks to expose the facts or at least Lott’s perspectives on the facts.  He cites dozens of places where the media has made erroneous statements that the public presumably believes.

The Man

Before I can share Lott’s work, I need to acknowledge the controversy that surrounds him.  He’s a strong gun rights supporter.  That puts him in the crosshairs of people who believe that more gun control is a good thing.  Some of their criticisms are reasonable.  He is frustrated when other researchers refuse to share their data.  Lott has not shared much of the data from his first book, which he says is due to a hard drive crash.  He did, for some time, use a fake persona online – Mary Rosh – which he later admitted he should not have done.

Other than this reasonable criticism and reasonable response, , there’s a lot of attacks on John Lott that aren’t about his work but are instead about him as a person.  This instantly flags me that there are people who are threatened.  They’re resorting to logical fallacies to discredit him.  (See Mastering Logical Fallacies.)  Should we treat his research with skepticism?  Absolutely, the same skepticism as any other researcher.  Too many people have faked their data.  Too many people have hidden or partially hidden agendas.  At least with Lott, we’re relatively clear where he stands.

One point of contention about Lott is that he’s not associated with an academic institution.  My first response is “so what?”  Having contrary views in academia is hard.  Even established professors with tenure find it uncomfortable.  (See The Coddling of the American Mind for an example.)  I can’t imagine anyone wanting to choose that fight.  We know that the prevailing perspective in higher education is contrary to what Lott believes.  So why should he fight it from inside the system?  Again, challenge his work – and don’t get offended when he challenges yours.

In reviewing the research that backs the book – and more – I’ll say that there are times when I believe that Lott’s choices aren’t always fair.  However, on balance, I don’t think it’s intentional deceit.  I think it’s a perspective difference.  Donald Campbell in Guns in America uses some of Lott’s research and identifies when and how it differs from others.  In many cases, the differences seem reasonable.  I don’t think of gangs or home intrusions the same way I think of the mass murders that have befallen us over the years.  Separating the data makes sense.

Assault Rifles

Mass shootings are the thing that’s on everyone’s mind.  They’re concerning and tragic.  We want them to stop – all of us.  Here’s the problem: the ways we’re talking about doing it don’t make sense, and they don’t match the data.  Many politicians have declared war on assault rifles and don’t know enough about guns to realize when what they’re saying doesn’t make sense – and much of the public is taking their information from politicians and the media, so they’re similarly ill informed.

I’ve covered some bullet basics in a separate post to provide some context for the risk of the gun family – AR-15 – that’s been singled as an assault rifle.  I followed that up with a post on What is an Assault Rifle?  The short version is that the AR-15 isn’t responsible for many of the murders in the US – and it has substantially less power than many hunting rifles.  Any murder is too many – but even if we removed all of them from our streets, we wouldn’t make a big impact.

What makes this particularly impressive is that the AR-15 a very popular platform.  It represents many sales – and a tiny percentage of the murders.  As Jessica Rabbit said in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”  The appearance of the AR-15 is what makes it such a target for gun control advocates.

Which Yard Stick?

Whether the US has a larger or smaller problem with gun violence than most other countries depends a lot on what countries you’re comparing the US to.  Compare the rate to every country that reports numbers, and we’re less than the mean (average) and median.  Constrain the list to “developed” countries and the story is less compelling.  Brazil has a rate five times higher than the US – despite dramatically lower gun ownership.  Mexico is reported at six times the US rate of murders.

Of course, these numbers are a few years old now.  However, you can make pretty graphics that show how dramatically worse than other countries the US is – or how much better we are.  It all depends on which message you’re trying to sell.

But Gun Control Saves Lives

Some, absolutely.  Which gun control measures save lives is difficult to figure out.  It starts with the fact that the estimated number of firearms in the US is approaching one per person.  That doesn’t mean that everyone owns a firearm.  It means those who do tend to own more than one.  If we compare our murder rate with Chile or Estonia, we see that it is comparable, even though they have roughly 10% of the gun ownership as the US.

Even the National Institute of Justice estimates that a 1% increase in gun ownership reduces violent crime by 4.1%.  It’s a small sample and could easily be an artifact of sample bias – but the thing is that the effects can’t be large.  So undoubtedly there are things that we can do to reduce murders through laws, registrations, and regulations – but finding what those are isn’t easy.

It’s Got to Be High Capacity

Surely, banning high-capacity magazines has an impact, right?  Not really.  First, a review of the number of rounds fired with large capacity magazines is 71 compared to 65 with standard capacity magazines in mass-murder events.  The change is not zero but it’s around a 10% difference.  More challenging is that the 1994 federal ban on large capacity magazines didn’t seem to have any appreciable impact  on reducing gun violence.  We’ve tried it, and it didn’t work.  However, it’s a relatively constant source of conversation.

Admittedly, I don’t personally have a reason to need a high-capacity magazine, but I don’t see a ban on them as effective either.

Gun Free Zones on Target

Well, gun-free zones work, right?  No.  Have you ever seen the deer crossing signs?  Do you ever wonder how the deer read the signs to know where to cross?  Obviously, they don’t.  Instead, we tell drivers to be more cautious, because deer are known to cross in an area.  The thing is that a gun free zone doesn’t prevent a criminal from having a gun – it just prevents law abiding citizens from carrying one.  That means that the attacker knows the victims are unlikely to shoot back.  According to Lott, many mass murders have taken into consideration security and whether the people could be armed.

He points to the shooter in Aurora, CO as having selected the movie theatre for less security, and the shooter in Lafayette, LA selected not for the size nor proximity to his home but rather to being the closest to his home that prohibited patrons from arming themselves.

Armed Civilians

The natural argument about having armed civilians is that they’ll shoot other people, further increasing the harm – or that police will shoot the civilian attempting to stop the attack.  The problem is that, according to Lott’s research, this just doesn’t happen.  Instead, 94% of mass murders in the US took place where most people aren’t legally allowed to carry guns.

Psychiatric Evaluation

Psychiatry has a dirty little secret.  They’re not good at predicting who will commit murder or suicide.  (See Alternatives to Suicide.)  They simply can’t predict with high degrees of accuracy.  The arguments that people who are mass-murderers must be crazy is the same thinking that demonized people who die by suicide for centuries.  (See Why People Die by Suicide.)  The crazy thing is that Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the death of countless Jews in Nazi concentration camps, was certified as normal by six psychologists.  (See Trauma and Recovery, Moral Disengagement, and The Lucifer Effect for more.)  We intuitively know that this is wrong – but it simply proves the point that we can’t accept that psychiatry has it right all the time.

Sometimes we have to find the truth through the noise, even if that means that we expose Gun Control Myths.

What is an Assault Rifle?

There’s a lot of talk about assault rifles, but what are they really, and why is everyone so concerned about the AR-15?  To answer these questions, we’ll have to separate the hype from the data and get past the difference between appearances and reality.

Before we begin, I must state unequivocally that every loss of life is a tragedy.  No one wants to lose a loved one due to a firearm or any other means.  We forego the idea that we can prevent every tragedy, and instead look at ways that we can use our resources for the best possible outcome.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

The concern is that these assault rifles are weapons of mass destruction.  Their sole purpose is to kill as many people as possible, and therefore they shouldn’t be in the hands of civilians.  However, the story isn’t that simple.  First, let’s look at the data.  The FBI says that firearms make up 74% of murders.

Figure 1: 2019 Murder by Type, Source: US FBI UCR

Clearly, firearms are a big component of murder, but which types of firearms?  Figure 2 shows that it’s mostly handguns.

Figure 2: Murder by Firearm Type, Source: US FBI UCR

The unknown category – the ones where the weapon was unknown – is skewing the real picture.  If we assume that the unknown data is similar to the known data, we get Figure 3.  (Admittedly, this is an assumption, but it’s reasonable and doesn’t change the meaning of the analysis.)

Figure 3: Murder by Firearm Type when known, Source: US FBI UCR

What we see is that handguns account for 92% of the murders.  With rifles – the category under which assault rifles falls – represents 5% of the overall fatalities.  What most people would consider an assault rifle is a small subset of this.  Even if we ban all assault rifles, it will not make any substantial impact on fatalities.

Military Applications

The argument is that these weapons were designed for military application and therefore the public doesn’t need them.  There is a key difference between military weapons and the civilian versions.  The military versions allow for select fire.  Military weapons can fire in semi-automatic mode (one pull of the trigger fires one bullet), burst fire mode (one pull of the trigger fires three bullets), or automatic mode (one pull of the trigger fires bullets until the ammunition is exhausted or the trigger is released).

Though there are provisions for civilians owning fully automatic weapons, they’re rarely pursued because they’re time consuming and costly.  When we’re talking about the AR-15, however, we’re not talking about automatic weapons.  We’re talking about a weapon that is not fundamentally different than many of the hunting guns used by hunters today that accept a limited number of rounds in magazines and fire them with each pull of the trigger.

Often, the AR-15 platform is compared to the M16 military weapon.  There’s good reason for this: the M16 was based off the AR-15 and added select fire.  It also included a slightly more energetic cartridge – NATO 5.56x45mm instead of the .223 cartridge the AR-15 uses.  So, while visually similar, the M16 is capable of firing higher energy rounds in a fully automatic mode.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Ground effect lighting on a car doesn’t make it hover.  After the movie Back to the Future, it was popular for a while to put lights under people’s cars, not unlike the car in the movie or any of the other upgrades that people made to their cars like spinner hubcaps.  The visual appearance of a car with ground effect lighting may (or may not) have been cool, but it didn’t make the cars hover.  Appearances can be deceiving.

In the case of the AR-15, it looks like a military-style rifle – ironically, because the most popular military weapon was based on the platform.  However, the functionality is different – even if the looks are similar.

Modern Sporting Rifles

The National Sport Shooting Federation started using the term “modern sporting rifle” for the AR-15 platform in 2009.  Strangely, this signals a reduction in energy and the capacity to inflict injury than the weapons of the past.  As I explained in my post, Bullet Basics, the energy in a .223 cartridge, which the AR-15 uses, is substantially less than common hunting rifles.

Perhaps the AR-15 platform is a modern sporting rifle for the same reasons that it was selected by the military for newer weapons.  Lighter weapons are better – even if they are less deadly.

Book Review-Guns in America: Examining the Facts

It’s complicated.  That’s the best way to describe the answers that Guns in America: Examining the Facts seeks to give.  Like all wicked problems, if you define them one way the answers are simple; defined another, still legitimate, way, the answers are simple – but different.  Guns in America asks and attempts to answer 25 controversial questions about gun rights, gun control, and the evidence in America.

Gun Control and Gun Rights

There’s a somewhat obvious conflict between those who believe restricting gun rights would be better for the public and those who believe in the universal rights provided by the second amendment.  The Heller case held that the right to bear arms need not relate to militia service.  With limited exceptions, it’s a constitutional right to own a firearm in the United States.  What’s at issue is those exceptions – whether they are enough and whether they’re properly enforced.

It’s important to realize that there are parties on both sides who are so entrenched in their positions that they’re willing to select the statistics that most support their positions.  Donald Campbell in Guns in America seeks to call out when proponents of their position make choices that aren’t consistent with the truth.  In politics, this is known as gerrymandering, and while it still exists, we’re becoming less tolerant of attempts to manipulate things to get the answer you want rather than the answer that’s objectively more fair.

The Questions

The following table reports the questions that Campbell answers – and my shortest form summary of Campbell’s presentation.

Question   Answer
1. Does violent gun crime increase with increases in the availability of firearms? Unclear, but violent crime is down and gun ownership is up over the last several decades.
2. Do criminals have a preference for certain firearms over others? Yes: reliable handguns, just like the population.
3. Does the “gun show loophole” substantially contribute to violent crime? No, and it’s not a “gun show” or “loophole;” it was explicitly added for private sellers.
4. Do current gun regulation laws reduce violent crime and help apprehend violent criminals? No, but Rand reports inconclusive.
5. Do ballistic fingerprinting and microstamping techniques currently in use help police solve gun crimes? Yes; however, ballistics marks are only presumed to be unique, this hasn’t been tested.  Microstamping results have been disappointing.
6. Would a ban on “assault-style” rifles prevent or reduce violent crime? No, not in any meaningful way.  Note characterizations of “assault-style” is probably not accurate or fair. (See also It’s How We Play the Game.)
7. Does gun ownership and having a gun in the home increase personal safety? No, the dangers outstrip the protective value.
8. Does mandatory gun safety training reduce gun accidents and suicides? No, a lack of standardization hampers efficacy.  It doesn’t appear that the skills are transferred from training. See Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation for more.
9. Do mandatory safe storage laws reduce accidental shootings and suicides? Yes.
10. Do “stand your ground” laws increase an individual’s personal safety? Maybe.  The perceived impact is positive, but they appear to increase justifiable homicides and are likely to be overly impactful to minorities.
11. Do “red flag laws”/extreme risk orders increase domestic and family safety? Maybe.  For suicides, yes.  No evidence for homicides.  Serious concern about due process since the orders can be issued ex parte (without presence).
12. Is gun violence increasing in America? Not over timeframes measured in decades. The peak was the 1990s.  See The Blank Slate for more.
13. Are the police in favor of armed citizens? Yes.
14. Can implementing “smart gun” technology make society safer? Unknown.
15. Would banning “bump” stocks and large-capacity magazines (LCMs) reduce shooting casualties? Not materially.  Magazines are quick and easy to change and therefore aren’t a meaningful delay.  Bump stocks come at a huge cost of accuracy.
16. Can a comprehensive database on gun sales reduce gun violence? Unknown.  Even if it identified people newly prohibited from owning firearms due to situations after purchase, it’s unclear whether the danger to law enforcement would justify confrontation.
17. Would mandatory gun liability insurance decrease gun violence? Unlikely, but legal barriers exist in many states.
18. Do gun control regulations increase the safety of minority group communities? Unclear, but likely no.
19. Are school shootings increasing in America? No, but multiple victim shootings are.
20. Does intensive media coverage inspire school shootings? Yes. See also No Easy Answers.
21. Does allowing guns on college campuses increase campus gun violence? No, but it may not reduce it either.
22. Are current gun regulations effective at preventing school shootings? Unclear.
23. Does designating schools as “gun free” zones increase school safety? Unclear, but probably no.  There are very extreme positions being taken by different groups in this space.
24. Does arming willing teachers and school staff increase school safety? Unclear, but teachers don’t want it.
25. Are American gun laws laxly enforced? Yes, in some cases.

What Do I Mean by Unclear?

In the five instances I answered with “unclear” in the above table, there is mixed evidence.  Gun control advocates cite one set of statistics, and gun rights advocates cite a different set of statistics.  In some cases, they’re using the same raw data sources but they’re choosing different cutoffs.  How many casualties are needed for an event to be a mass shooting?  Is it 4 (as is common), or is it 6 (as has been used in some cases)?  Does it count as a mass shooting if it’s a rival gang fight?  What about the family where one parent kills everyone, including themselves?  The problem is that, depending on how you decide these questions, you get radically different answers.

“Simple” definitions like gun-free zones are even confusing.  Would you expect that a military base is a gun-free zone?  Soldiers, other than military police, aren’t permitted to carry their sidearms.  Does that make it a gun-free zone?  Military bases are the size of towns.  Do you say that, because military police can have guns, they’re not gun-free?  (Some have argued they shouldn’t be considered gun-free zones because military police can have firearms.)

Confident

Woody Allen once said, “Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the problem.”  That seems to be the case for most people when they speak about guns.  They don’t understand the problem – and they’re not willing to research the answers.  Their opinions are not formed on data, but they’re not willing to investigate, evaluate, and consider what we do know.  I applaud Campbell for being so intentional about providing balanced perspectives on difficult questions.  I’d encourage everyone to start by evaluating Guns in America and examine the facts.

Bullet Basics

To be able to have an effective discussion about gun control and gun rights, we all need a basic understanding and common vocabulary.  In this post, I’ll cover the basics you need to know about bullets to be conversant.

Cartridges

We start by using the more precise term of cartridges.  Cartridges are used in handguns and rifles.  Shotgun shells are similar but slightly different.

An unfired cartridge includes a propellant, the projectile, and the casing.  The propellant is gun powder.  The amount of gun powder is directly related to the amount of energy that can be imparted into the projectile.  The more energy, the more impact and damage.

The projectile has several characteristics that are important to its performance; however, at the most fundamental level, we know that energy is equal to mass times velocity squared.  The higher the mass of the projectile, the lower the velocity.  The narrative often focuses on the caliber of the projectile – but the real key is the overall energy being used to propel the projectile.

The casing is what is left in the gun after the firing.  In semi-automatic weapons, it’s typically automatically ejected, while in revolvers, the casing stays in until ejected.

Damage

The key concern when speaking of bullets is the amount of damage they do to the target.  Ultimately, this is the energy in the projectile.  If that’s the case, which is more important: mass or velocity?  The scientific and mathematical answer is that velocity is more important.  However, this ignores the impact of air resistance.

Resistance is a function of the aerodynamic properties of the projectile and, critically, its velocity.  Higher velocities for the same projectile result in higher friction and more energy loss over longer distances.  That’s why energy is measured at the end of the muzzle.  We’re measuring the total energy before resistance.  All things being equal, then, a heavier projectile with lower velocity will reduce the energy lost to friction.

The problem is that this ignores the fact that when a projectile leaves the barrel of the gun, it begins to drop.  The faster the bullet travels, the more distance it covers before a perceivable drop.  This is what is called “point-blank range” – the distance before the bullet begins to drop.  To get accuracy over long distances, you must have large velocities to minimize the drop due to the effects of gravity.  You also need a minimum velocity at the target to pierce or puncture the target.

In chart 1, you see a scatter plot of US cartridges, where the Y axis is momentum, and the X axis is the energy of the rounds.   The initial data comes from Wikipedia’s Table of Handgun and Rifle Cartridges and was filtered to remove entries that didn’t contain both values.   The axes were also constrained to exclude exotic rounds.

Chart 1: US Cartridge Energy Scatterplot

The clustering around the center shows that the values are both relative measures of the same potential energy in the cartridge.  Chart 2 shows the same data except further constrained to just five types of cartridges:

  • .22 Long Range – These are the rounds most frequently used in training people to shoot rifles. They are used in military settings for cadets, but also in community settings, including the Boy Scouts of America.
  • .223 Remington – These rounds are used in the controversial AR-15 rifle as well as many other common rifles.
  • NATO 5.56x45mm – The military standard round used in the M16 military rifle. These rounds are dimensionally similar to .223 Remington but have a slightly more powerful charge of propellant.
  • 30-30 Remington – The round size most frequently equated with the Wild West. The “cowboy” lever-action gun most frequently seen in movies.
  • 30-06 – A common deer hunting caliber.
  • .444 Marlin – A higher energy round used for hunting larger game.

These are marked in red in Chart 1 for reference.

Chart 2: Select Cartridge Scatterplot

Deadly

A common question is what amount of energy is necessary to make a gunshot lethal.  The answer depends upon what animal we’re talking about.  Small game, smaller than a coyote, can be killed by a .22 Long Rifle round – but only with a good shot.  The .444 Marlin is capable of stopping a charging bear.

When we’re talking about human fatalities, the answer is that every cartridge included in the second chart is technically capable of inflicting a mortal wound.  The probability of a fatality increases as we move towards the upper-right corner of the graph.  However, there are no simple answers.

Book Review-A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools

Who is the keeper of conventional wisdom?  Wouldn’t that be the educational establishment?  What would happen if conventional wisdom was wrong?  A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools is a reflection on what we’ve done to traditional primary education (K-12).  Most of what we’ve heard about how school should function – and what is happening – may not be exactly right.  Things that sound like good ideas may not be so good after all.

Grade Escalation

In my review of Range, I explained the Flynn Effect, which is the tendency for IQ to gradually creep higher over time.  It’s in this context that people try to explain the increasing propensities for As and Bs in the grading systems of schools.  However, evidence points to another cause.  The cause is a gradual shift towards scoring higher for lower levels of work.  In short, people don’t complain when they get better grades.  There’s no argument from a parent that their Johnny or Suzi should have received a B instead of an A, but the reverse is certainly true.  Teachers are under constant pressure from parents – and students – to increase their grades.  They believe they deserve better.

It’s no wonder that The Coddling of the American Mind is so frustrated with our “give everyone a participation trophy” approach to parenting and participating in the community.  It’s not what Robert Putnam had in mind when researching the outcomes of Our Kids.

Public Debate and Citizen Making

Public education is an expensive proposition.  If you think about the massive number of resources dedicated to it, it becomes clear that there must be a reason to do it.  The reason is supposed to prepare citizens.  That is, it’s believed that public education raises the level of the populace and therefore prepares more people for the needs of a civilized society.

Primary among these needs of a civilized society is the possibility of public debate.  That is, learning how to disagree and make rational arguments for – or against – positions.  It’s taking perspective, listening, and empathizing.  If I had to pick only one dimension where our public school system has failed, I’d have to say we’ve failed to develop a populace capable of reasoned debate with compassionate understanding.  We’re failing, but the question is why?

Voucher Deficit

The best laid plans of mice and men do fools folly follow.  Some of the ideas that on the surface seem to be the best create the worst outcomes.  Using our capitalistic society, we created a system of competition for schools.  The concept is that we offer parents who could send their children to public schools a voucher that they can apply to an alternative school – a charter school or a private school.  In concept, the school districts are out no money, because this is money they would be spending on a child that is now going someplace else.

However, in actuality there are two problems.  First, they were getting the benefits before as parents shouldered the burden of getting their children to alternative schools.  Second, many things come with economies of scale.  If you reduce the number of students too far, the entire system falls apart.  For some, this is ideal.  Unravel what’s not working.  If the voucher programs showed better results for everyone, it would be reasonable.  However, it doesn’t seem to work in whole – and certainly doesn’t work for those who are economically challenged, because they’re least able to use the vouchers, which often don’t cover the entire cost of the other schools.

Economic Expectations of College

There’s also a built in assumption that going to college increases your earning potential.  It’s the core of Human Capital.  However, as The Years That Matter Most explains, there’s differences in earning potential based on the school you go to.  More than that, we have to account for the roughly 70% of people who enter community colleges that fail to finish.  Their earning potential isn’t increased, but they’re often saddled with additional debt.

The challenge of student debt was one of the reasons that the US government cracked down on for-profit schools that weren’t graduating students with the valuable skills they needed to get a higher earning job – and were often failing to help the students get placed in good jobs.

Custom Curriculum

What if we knew a best practice but we didn’t want to listen?  Teachers are taught to develop their own curriculum despite the awareness that curriculum development and teaching are radically different skills, and being good at one has little correlation to the other.  Teachers are doing what they’ve been taught.  They’re creating their own materials.  They’re assembling it for free – and some sites, like Teachers Pay Teachers, are where they can get low-cost materials.  The problem is the materials aren’t engaging – and they’re often not at grade-level requirements.

We know that paying for high-quality, instructionally-designed materials creates better outcomes, but it’s not as much fun, it doesn’t match the way teachers are taught, and, as a result, it’s rarely done.  The people who are helping us learn have failed to learn the fundamentals of their own discipline – because their instructors failed them.

The Seven Great Distractors

There are hot topics in education today.  If you want to be in the “cool” teacher club, you’re doing these things.  The problem is that many of these new focuses simply distract us from doing the core things well.

Critical Thinking

What could be wrong with critical thinking?  Why shouldn’t we wonder if something is true or find ways to test what we don’t know?  Of course we should.  However, the problem is that critical thinking is being “taught” in ways that are devoid of context.  The problem is that you can’t learn how to think critically until you have something to work with.  Critical thinking about art, music, literature, science, etc., is contextually driven.

There is definitely some irony in the fact that teachers aren’t thinking critically about whether their critical thinking work is effective.

Growth Mindset

I’m a fan of Carol Dweck’s work on Mindset.  The problem is that we’re teaching a growth mindset without understanding it.  Instead of recognizing and rewarding work, teachers are often praising students – with or without reason.  The hidden message becomes that it doesn’t matter how much effort is put in, which is the opposite of the core message.  It’s no wonder that many of the studies focused on growth mindset efficacy show results that are statistically similar to zero.

Grit

Grit, too, is about hard work and perseverance.  Both Grit and Mindset should find solace in the work of Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak, which explains that purposeful practice – over a long period – is how to become a high performer.  However, grit has also become overrun with people who are teaching it without understanding the underlying principles or themselves doing the hard work required to make it effective.  They’ve not looked at works like Antifragile that encourage us to find optimal bands of stress to increase growth rate.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)

If there’s one of these distractors that I wish were working correctly, it would be SEL.  There’s such a great need for students to be able to better manage their emotions.  Daniel Goleman explains the basics in Emotional Intelligence.  David Richo explains many of the same skills in How to Be an Adult in Relationships.  Despite the need, it’s clear that SEL works only in schools where there’s a lack of safety.  Efficacy disappears in schools that have fewer disruption problems.  Amy Edmondson explains the power of psychological safety in The Fearless Organization, and it appears to show up when we’re looking at how to help schools work effectively.

Metacognition

Thinking about thinking is metacognition, and it sure sounds good.  However, it too quickly devolves into a pointless exercise in abstract thinking that yields nothing new.  The unflattering truth is that most teachers don’t do metacognition well themselves.  As a result, they can’t teach it.  Given no direct practicality, it makes it even harder to find value.

Of course, one of the major thrusts in public education is in the ability to teach students how to learn.  However, we’ve made them better at recall but not necessarily deep learning.  Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues took up the task of creating a taxonomy of educational objectives, and they completed the cognitive domain.  (See Schools Without Failure for more.)  What we teach rarely reaches above the bottom two levels of the model.

If you need proof, talk to a chemistry or physics teacher who must teach students for the first time to think beyond rote answers.  Thinking in Systems is rare – but powerful – and we’re not teaching it.

Twenty-First Century Skills

Is anyone really going to argue that we’ve never collaborated?  The Righteous Mind explains that our ability to work together and to have a theory of mind is what allowed us to become the dominant biomass on the planet.  (See also Mindreading.)  When people speak of the new skills that students need to learn for the 21st century, they speak of things that have been done for centuries.  Teams aren’t a new idea.  Sure, there’s some research on teams in the past century but it’s not new.  (See Collaborative Intelligence for more on teams.)

Obviously, we have new tools for collaboration and teamwork – but how much do we focus on the tool and how much do we focus on how to help people work more effectively?  There are lots of organizations that spend a lot of money on professional development companies to help here – and their results aren’t good.  Believing we can teach these skills to our K-12 students is optimistic.

Certainly, we need to integrate this into the curriculum – but where it serves other educational objectives.  Too often, we allow the tail to wag the dog.  (See Efficiency in Learning for more.)

Creative Thinking

I believe, as Creative Confidence says, that everyone is born creative.  I believe that, expressed in the language of business, creativity is innovation.  (See The Art of Innovation.)  But the best research about how you achieve innovation in organizations is largely a function of increasing the amount of experiences that are available.  Scott Page in The Difference achieves this by bringing people from different backgrounds, effectively creating a larger pool of options.  Works like The Innovator’s DNA, Unleashing Innovation, Unthink, Beyond Genius, and Competing Against Luck echo these ideas and occasionally add manipulating the constraints around the problem.

The net effect is that, while creative thinking is important to success, it may not be as much a teachable skill as it is the result of teaching large volumes of content and manipulating the constraints.

What the Author Means Isn’t Right

In the reductionist view of teaching, it’s about finding the right answer.  Even in the context of language arts, one can say that the work should mean whatever the author intended it to mean.  There’s one “right” way to interpret Hamlet – rather than accepting the way that it touched a student.  Instead of marking a student off for their creative interpretation, we should applaud them for the thinking they put into the process (growth mindset).  Instead of crushing their belief in themselves realizing they got it “wrong,” we should teach them other ways to view the situation (creative thinking).

How do we expect that students will remain engaged if we constantly criticize not just a minor mistake but a radically different view (grit)?  How do we demonstrate metacognition if we don’t wonder why the established answers for the interpretation of literature is “right?”  Ultimately, to be citizens, we need public debate.  We need to become A Nation at Thought.

Recent Posts

Public Speaking