One of the great privileges we who worked at Lotus Development back in the eighties and nineties enjoyed was access to many remarkable events at MIT, Harvard, and other area institutions. In retrospect, some of these became legendary: Nicholas Negroponte at the Media Lab, the first public introduction of Project Athena, whose graphical interface later became the basis of X-Windows, and, ultimately, the Mac.
Perhaps the moment that stayed with me the most, however, and which I have since recounted any number of times, was a panel discussion in which Marvin Minsky (the father of AI) and Seymour Papert (co-inventor of the Logo programming language, among other things) took part.
Seymour (I don’t know if this is still true, but everybody in those days referred to everyone else, regardless of stature, by their first name; at one event the legendary Arthur C. Clarke conferenced in from his home in Sri Lanka — everybody called the inventor of the artificial satellite and author of 2001 “Arthur,” which I found a bit disconcerting) told a story of his youth, when he was a math teacher.
(A caveat before I start: it’s been over 30 years since this event took place; I may not have recalled the details precisely. But the main points — and the moral of the story — are correct.)
Anyway, it went like this:
Though born and raised in South Africa, Seymour received a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and then taught at various universities around Europe. Passionate about mathematics education, at one point in his life he returned to his homeland to instruct teachers about the “New Math,” that is, new approaches to mathematics pedagogy. (These days I suppose we’re all a bit jaded about “new maths,” since there have been so many of them.)
He went to village after village speaking in lecture and town halls, advocating for the new methodology. But he often noticed that as he spoke, slowly, but inevitably, people would quietly leave; sometimes only half the audience was left at the end of the lecture.
Finally he asked someone: why, he wanted to know, were people walking out on him?
It’s the way you present it, he was told. Western-educated people tend to resolve conflict in terms of deciding which of several viewpoints is right and wrong (or, in Hegelian terms, thesis and antithesis).
Here in the bush, however, we do things differently. We sit around in a circle round the acacia tree. One person proposes an idea. The next person respectfully acknowledges the idea and proposes some modifications.
And around the circle they go, until there is consensus.
Thus, at the end, they have a mutually agreed upon idea or plan. No one is “wrong.” No one is “right.” Since everyone has contributed, and agreed, everyone is “bought in,” to use the Western term.
I’ve used this approach countless times, and while it can be time-consuming, and does require a modicum of patience and maturity from all participants, it does work.
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