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One of the questions we discussed in yesterday’s narratives and management class is what would constitute an ideal juror and whether the protagonists of A Trial by Jury (Graham Burnett) and Twelve Angry Men (juror number 8, portrayed by Henry Fonda) meet that definition. Burnett came off well in the discussion, with the conclusion that, as foreman, he managed the process effectively and when the discussion showed that most jurors favoured a not guilty verdict he found a respectful way to push the last holdouts to unanimity.

The assessment of juror number 8 was contested. The received opinion, of course, is that he heroically led the eleven other jurors to change their minds. The alternative opinion - presently very persuasively - is that he departed significantly from the profile of an ideal juror, someone rationally and dispassionately assessing the evidence. Rather he made up his mind quickly, and then used a wide variety of persuasive techniques - some more emotional than logical - to sell his conclusion to the others. One instance noted was his baiting of juror number 3 - the angry father - into a confrontation. By this standard, jurors closer to the ideal would be the eminently rational stockbroker (number 4) or European watchmaker (number 11).

I think this is a valuable and thought-provoking commentary on juror number 8. There are a few things, though, we could say in justifying his behaviour. First, it is clear from the deliberations that the accused had very ineffective legal representation. Juror number 8 was, in essence, acting as his lawyer. Second, the standard of decision-making in a jury - unanimity - requires intense interaction among jurors. Third, the movie made it clear that, if convicted, the accused would be executed. So, for the architect, the end - saving an innocent life - justified the means. Juror number 3 emerged from the process embarrassed and possibly humiliated, but juror number 8 would have claimed that he did what had to be done.

One might contrast Burnett and juror number 8 because juror number 8 had to sway eleven colleagues, while, in Burnett’s case, there was a strong majority favouring acquittal from the outset (eight in the first vote), so getting to unanimity was not as difficult.

One question that arose was that of intention and action. Because Twelve Angry Men is presented as a behavioural narrative and because juror number 8 revealed nothing of himself or his thinking, we don’t know whether, for instance, he thought the accused innocent right at the outset and was only feigning uncertainty as a tactic to start the discussion, or whether he was actually uncertain.

A Trial by Jury, as a first person narrative, was much more transparent about the relationship between intention and action in Burnett’s case. Burnett tells us how the trial left him favouring acquittal and how the discussion deepened that belief. Burnett also makes clear why he departed from his initial (and irresponsible) preference for a hung jury and began to push the process toward unanimity.

The three angriest men - juror numbers 3 (the angry father), 10 (the bigot), and 7 (the salesman with baseball tickets) - had what was in effect a meeting-before-the-meeting, where, in the presence of the other jurors, they were quite explicit about their agendas. Normally these would be hidden agendas, but they immediately revealed them. As the deliberations proceeded, it became increasingly evident to the other jurors and even to these three that these hidden agendas were illegitimate reasons for a conviction.

Juror number 8 was a much more skillful player of organizational politics. He knew the importance of keeping his cards close to his chest. The three angriest men were, in contrast, naïve and unsophisticated. Discussions of organizational politics - for example Graham Allison’s Model III - point out that shrewd and experienced players are often reticent about all the considerations they are weighing, thus creating a potential for misexpectation and miscommunication. Despite that systemic problem, experienced players recognize that information is power and that remarks cannot be retracted. Thus, they think very carefully about when and how during a meeting to reveal and commit themselves. But this is a topic for another post.

This week I was on the lookout for compelling narratives out there in the zeitgeist and found two worth discussing, both focusing on automobile safety (or the lack thereof).

The anchor story on the front page of last Monday’s (Feb. 1, 2010) New York Times was headlined “Toyota’s Slow Awakening to a Deadly Problem.” The writer, Bill Vlasic, instead of using the standard inverted pyramid approach that involves summarizing the entire story in the first sentence, took a narrative approach designed to grab the reader’s attention. He started with the story of a Lexus that sped out of control near San Diego last August 28, quoted the 911 call from the car (”we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … hold on and pray”), and told us the tragic outcome: the car colliding with an SUV, bursting into flames, and all four occupants dead. This narrative then introduced a more measured account of driver complaints of unintended acceleration of Toyotas and the history of government investigations of the problem.

I think the Toyota safety story will play out over the next few months, and possibly years, as a fascinating case of conflicting narratives. Toyota’s narrative will be the standard crisis management narrative: we’re aware there is a problem and we’re fixing it as fast as we can, in short, we’re in control. The US Government’s narrative is a retrospective one. We knew there was a problem long ago, we brought it to the attention of the company and, because they appear to have been dilatory, we will not only put pressure on them to solve the problem now, but hold them accountable - through civil litigation - for past errors. The third narrative is that of the victims, or relatives of deceased victims of unintentionally accelerating Toyotas, who will be launching huge law suits. The government and victims’ narratives have the potential to be with us for a long time, no matter how much Toyota tries to change the story.

The second narrative was from the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, a major teaching hospital in Toronto specializing in, among other things, emergency medicine. It appears as both a subway poster and 30 second commercial (the latter can be found on the banner at sunnybrook.ca). The narrative starts with a car crash, a flight to the hospital by helicopter, a team of 36 specialists having 36 minutes to “perform the impossible,” the victim in bed on a ventilator and then learning to walk with an artificial leg. The narrative ends by identifying Sunnybrook, its website, its slogan (innovation when it matters most), and its pitch for support.

In narrative terms, a lot was going on in those 30 seconds. It’s a clear instance of the heroic genre, in which a desperate situation is saved. In the classic case, the hero is an individual, but in this case it’s a team, an identification that presages the institutional identity that will be revealed at the end of the story. There are also some subtle messages about the nature of the hospital. In the second frame, the victim is airlifted, rather than brought by ambulance, implying that this is a major regional hospital, not just a local one. In the last frame, the victim is learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, implying that the hospital provides, not only acute care, but comprehensive care and rehabilitation.

The narrator is the omniscient voice behind the scenes. Where does the story fit on the scale running from historically accurate to purely invented? We don’t know if this is a true story and the victim in the story an actual patient or an actor. Or perhaps Sunnybrook’s communications department would tell us the story represents what happens there all the time. An alternative would have been to present the story as a first person narrative, explicitly labeled as a testimonial by a former patient. Would first person testimonial have been a better choice than reenactment (of some kind) with an omniscient narrator?

Finally, it was a good idea to get the audience’s attention by presenting a gripping life-and-death story first and only in the last five seconds revealing the sponsor and purpose of the story.

So here we have two examples of narrative around us, indeed so much a part of our consciousness that we likely take them for granted. But when we start to analyze the narratives we begin to understand why and how they were used, how they were shaped by their creator, and the role they play in communicating a message.

I see a final exam as an opportunity to challenge students to demonstrate what they have learned by applying the course material to situations they have not encountered in the course. But because the examinations are never returned, the learning loop is not completed. To rectify this, today’s post will be about the final exam in Management C35 (Narratives on Management and Organization) given last month.

The first question highlighted the work of young adults: learning to perform their chosen trade effectively, finding and learning from a mentor, and defining the boundary between professional obligations and personal life. Students had little difficulty choosing characters in the course (for example, Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers, Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and Kevin Calhoun in City Hall) and explaining how each dealt with each of the challenges. The most ambiguous of the challenges is finding a mentor. In some cases, such as City Hall, it turns out that the mentor has values his protégé, upon reflection, will reject. Therefore, if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket, choose that one mentor wisely. Another alternative, demonstrated by Erin Gruwell, is looking for a variety of partial mentors, each fulfilling a specific need.

The second question asked students to imagine any three of the characters in Twelve Angry Men being put through the Milgram Obedience Experiment and to predict how they would respond. Such a question has no definitive answers, only good explanations. I don’t know if Milgram or anyone subsequently replicating the experiment ever gathered data on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the subjects and used that data to explain their choices. It would seem to me that three crucial factors predicting the subject’s response would be deference to authority, willingness to inflict obvious pain on another human being for no good reason except that someone in a position of authority says so, and any personal experience that might provide a lens through which to see the experiment.

Applying those criteria, there are some jurors whose behaviour could readily be predicted. The architect (juror number 8) showed himself unwilling to inflict pain or defer to unreasonable authority and would not have administered the shocks. The European watchmaker (juror number 11), likely seeing the “scientist” in the experiment through the lens of his own escape from European authoritarianism and embrace of American democracy, would also refuse to administer electric shocks. The angry father (juror number 3) was certainly willing to inflict pain and would likely see the “learner” as his own recalcitrant son, and therefore would willingly shock the learner into unconsciousness.

The third question asked the students, in several cases, to distinguish between the narrator’s and creator’s point of view. In some, for example as a first-person memoir such as Graham Burnett’s A Trail by Jury, narrator and creator are identical. In others, such as Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, they are not. Both these narratives employ a misleading narrator, but it is from the creator’s point of view that the narrator is misleading.

Ishiguro uses irony to show us that the butler Stevens has wasted his life serving a misguided master and putting absurdly loyal service above a level of personal happiness to which any human should be entitled. Morris presents the forcefully articulate narrative of Robert McNamara, but Morris’s own questioning, choice of visuals to accompany McNamara’s voice, and ability to catch occasional disconnects between McNamara’s words and emotions, creates a point of view starkly different from McNamara’s.

The last question in the exam used John Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at The American University about world peace. I had read excerpts, but never the entire speech. It still remains a powerful and, for its time, radical denunciation of the nuclear arms race and search for an alternative. I asked students to interpret Kennedy’s rhetoric in light of the mid and late adult stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental model. I see the speech as strongly generative because Kennedy was searching for an alternative to the dead-end of nuclear warfare and doing so out of a concern for the lives of future generations, regardless of their nationality. He, of course, did not live to see late adulthood but - perhaps because of his seriously compromised health - was acutely aware of his own mortality. The line “and we are all mortal” strikes me as unusual on the lips of a world leader. And recognition of one’s own mortality relatively early in life would spur a concern for one’s legacy.

My students did well on the exam. I hope they learned from it. I know that I learned from reading their answers and thinking about it myself.

The movie In the Loop, released last summer in the cinemas and on DVD last week, is the successor to Armando Ianucci’s 2005 television series The Thick of It (the subject of my post last March 13). The series received considerable recognition when initially released, then was cancelled after its costar, Chris Langham, who played a cabinet minister, was convicted and served time for possessing child pornography - no, I’m not making this up.

The television series is the latest instance of the dominant fable of modern British politics, established three decades ago by the classic television series Yes Prime Minister. In this view, politicians and public servants are entirely and narrowly self-interested, and for them the quaint notion of public interest has no meaning, except as a pretext for power seeking.

The Thick of It, spoofing Blairite government, focused on the adversarial relationship between Secretary of State for Social Affairs Hugh Abbott and the prime minister’s Communications Director Malcolm Tucker. Their main concern was how policies, or more often policy gimmicks, would play in the media. Tucker, played by Scots actor Peter Capaldi, was a bespoke bully - expensively suited, spouting an inexhaustible stream of violent and profane invective.

The movie is also squarely within the dominant fable of public sector self-interest, but the context is considerably different. A hapless minister, Simon Foster, makes an unscripted reference to a war in the Middle East being “unforeseeable,” which puts him at odds with evolving United States and British government policy. The reference, of course, is to the Iraq war of 2003, when the Britain Government joined George Bush’s “coalition of the willing.”

Minister Foster is sent to Washington to meet with the Americans, and followed by Malcolm Tucker. The movie then focuses on the mid-ranks of the American bureaucracy: two feuding assistant secretaries of state - one a dove and the other a hawk - and a general. The president, prime minister, and senior cabinet secretaries or ministers on either side are never seen, nor are any senior advisers other than Tucker.

The rest of the plot involves jockeying for influence among these mid-level players. The ultimate decision to go to war is made at a higher level, unseen in the movie. Thus, the movie’s title, “In the Loop,” can be read satirically, because, as my title for this post implies, none of the characters encountered in the movie are in the loop where the real decisions are made.

There was considerable difference of opinion among movie critics regarding the effectiveness of this narrative. A.O. Scott, in The New York Times on July 24, 2009, wrote that “The audience is likely to die laughing. While “In the Loop” is a highly disciplined inquiry into a very serious subject, it is also, line by filthy line, scene by chaotic scene, by far the funniest big-screen satire in recent memory.” He concluded that “the people in whose hands momentous decisions rest are shown - convincingly and in squirming detail - to be duplicitous, vindictive, small-minded, and untrustworthy. But why should they be any different from the rest of us?”

In contrast, Anthony Lane, in the New Yorker on July 27, 2009, wrote that “by the end of the film, you just want to get away from these people” and “for the makers of “In the Loop,” everyone in politics is either a beast or a dithering dolt, there is no basis for public service other than the foaming rage for power, and anyone who dares to dream otherwise - anyone who enjoys ‘The West Wing’ for example - is the most credulous mug of all.”

I side with Lane. Compared to Yes Minister, the characters lack the wit, elegance, and occasional (if accidental) effectiveness of Sir Humphrey Appleby and Prime Minister Jim Hacker. Tucker’s profanity, initially inventive, quickly becomes tiresomely predictable. What’s more, when temporarily transplanted to Washington, he ceases to be a key player in any loop that really matters. His presence and his profanity are no longer expressions of power. He can swear all he wants: he too is ignored.

The other characters have all the flaws Scott enumerates, with no saving virtues. They are entirely unlikeable. And, interestingly, the actors chosen were as physically unappealing as they were morally repellant. Like Lane, by the end of the movie I too simply wanted to get away from them.

Would I use this movie in my narratives courses? No, I wouldn’t. It simply reinforces the bias most business students have against the public sector. The dominant fable about government in the UK in recent years has become ever more shrilly jaded and cynical. It is the exact opposite of the idealistic wish fulfillment of some American narratives such as “The West Wing” or its precursor “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Both these fables are equally unrealistic, and I prefer narratives that portray the public sector with more complexity, ambiguity, and subtlety. Some of them - Advise and Consent, The Candidate, Seven Days in May, City Hall and Charlie Wilson’s War - have been discussed in my posts over the last few months. These hold a clearer mirror up to governmental life, and I would rather direct my students’ eyes and minds to them.

With the sequel to Wall Street currently in production, I want to look back at one of the most memorable scenes in the original. Not the famous “greed is good” speech, but rather a scene early in the movie (33 minutes in, chapter 7 on DVD) in which corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) convinces his protégé Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) to take up illegal corporate espionage.

Gekko carefully chooses as a setting to make his pitch to Fox his own limousine. Gekko wants Fox to spy on rival corporate raider Larry Wildman as payback for Wildman’s snagging a company Gekko wanted. Breaking the law for the thrill of participating in his mentor’s vendetta doesn’t much appeal to Fox, so Gekko has to be more clever.

Earlier the movie makes it clear that Fox is earning an entry-level stock broker’s income of $50,000 and aspiring to an income of half-a-million (remember, that was in 1985 dollars). Gekko raises Fox’s aspiration level by pointing to a building he claims — without verification, I should add — he flipped a decade before for $800,000 profit, which is now simply “a day’s pay.” He sneers at the guy earning $400,000 as “a working Wall Street stiff, flying first class and being comfortable.” He suggests Bud should be aiming for a net worth of $50 to $100 million, which he describes as being “a player, rich enough to own your own jet, rich enough not to waste time.”

Just as he raises Bud’s aspiration level he reframes his perceived downside. Gekko mentions his own father as “working like an elephant pushing electrical supplies and dropping dead at 49 with a heart attack and tax bills” and contrasts two men on the street, one well-dressed and successful and the other panhandling. Gekko’s implicit message to Bud is that the downside is not respectability, but poverty and misery. Fox would be unlikely to break the law if his choice is between an income of $50,000 and an income of $400,000. But, if posed an all-or-nothing choice between being really rich and being on the street, breaking the law looks more attractive.

When Fox points out that Gekko is asking him to deal in insider information, Gekko reminds Fox that he previously disclosed inside information he got from his father about the airline where he works. Thus Fox has already broken the law. Metaphorically, he’s a little bit pregnant.

Finally, Gekko poses the all-or-nothing choice as dramatically as possible. He asks his driver to pull over and let Fox out. It’s either cooperate with Gekko and ride in the limo or walk on New York’s mean streets. Fox ponders his fate for a few agonizing seconds, then leans over the window and agrees to cooperate: “alright, Mr. Gekko, you got me.” Yes Gekko “got” Fox alright, and it’s clear from Fox’s anxious body language by exactly which part of his anatomy Gekko has got him.

That clip is a cinematic gem that I’d heartily recommend to any instructor teaching motivational theory in psychology. It might be necessary to provide a bit of explanation about the context, but I think the clip stands up pretty well on its own.

Finally, I can’t help but compare Gekko’s ability to persuade the initially-skeptical Fox to break the law to the ability of terrorist organizations to persuade more than a few people of a similar age to be suicide bombers. While the element of revenge — against the Americans and their Afghan or Iraqi or Pakistani or Israeli or Australian allies — is greater, the terrorist leaders also provide a psychological upside in terms of the portrait they paint of life in the afterworld and a material upside in terms of wealth for their families. It’s surprising - and depressing - some of the things some people can persuade other people to do.