Up in the Arctic, the leasing of fields and new well drilling continue: with BP the industry’s star pupil, having found through its errors and corrections, what the rest of the class needs to know so that drilling might continue, marginally wiser in the sphere of industrial safety, or as a spokesman for Cairn Oil recently put it, with “belt and braces”.

Selective attention is what we choose to pay attention to: and currently, that is our own desire to mete punishment and blame to BP. Management needs to understand “why” if it is to contain that spill. My current hypothesis is that as consumers, we wish NOT TO SEE: we don’t want to know the messiness, corruption, damage, and plain ugliness that supplies our needs. And like Oz, outed from behind the curtain by Toto, BP’s terrible Gulf accident disturbs us because we now see something that we have chosen not to see in order that our lives proceed without disruption.

We blame BP because it has disturbed our willed ignorance. It has challenged the world we have selected to see.

Unfortunately, next to this, given human behavior, environmental catastrophe is just collateral damage.

Characters in no special order include: Transocean, Haliburton, BP, Tony Haywood, Obama, Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans, Hillary Clinton, the new and old British Prime Ministers, the Lockerbie bomber held in Scotland, Energy Secretary Chu, Interior Secretary Salazar, Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, among others.

I’m trying to make sense of it; and am writing about it because that’s how I do it. Here’s a bit I’ve arrived about how we moderns, hooked into our media, surf the waves of information pounding against our minds:

We choose what we seek to integrate until satisfied with our closures, we turn away, more or less content though aware of the continuous presence of more. Too much, and we are overwhelmed and feel burnt-out; too little, and we feel under-informed. Jumping in and out of a relentless event timeline, our actions are continuous— more or less engaged and attuned from time to time. Our times present us daily with a Jamesian “buzzing, blooming confusion” to parse, not only as new-born, but throughout our adult lives.  Our adaptive responses in and out are the cognitive equivalent of short-term market day trades, with the implicit personal information of experience and emotion adding its complexity.

How do you feel about all this? How do you make sense of it?

1) Globalization. Theroux’s post-Vietnam account describes a history left far behind: it occurs before the Iranian Revolution, before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, before, before, before………. I think about where we are now, how globalization has transformed the world: all business, all the time

2) I think of the Singapore Airlines office on Orchard Road: of the hours spent there, with the throngs of others this April, waylaid in the East by a volcano in the West, waiting patiently for our numbers to appear on the digital screen– heralding appointments with the smiling functionaries who would see to the possibility of new itineraries.

3) Odd to consider: a similar dynamic to Theroux’s: the crowd, the uncertainties, but delightfully air conditioned and modernized: the sanitized foreign, with cappuccino and iced latte available outside the offices, in the luxury mall.

4) My trip? Recently completed, it took months to conclude. It began with a routing from Changi Airport to San Francisco (later changed, at the last minute, when the skies over Europe cleared….); but required that I purchase a new ticket from San Francisco, home, on the internet because my original round-trip fare had been revised to a 3/4 trip!!! I had traveled from New York to Singapore and was now, to be dropped off in California!

A few days later, the situation changed again, and my New York trip was renewed.

But: now my carrier refused to credit the canceled ticket: well, not exactly. They were willing to take a 30% deduction from it, in application to another ticket: and their customer service department could not comprehend that I’d bought the thing only because my original round trip ticket had been canceled.

Unlike Theroux’s experiences, one-to-one with the people he’d encountered, mine were by e-mails (affirmed by responsive “tracking numbers” assigned to me by the airline). There were never people to speak to: only dead-end websites to consult, e-mails to send.

The final arbiter was my credit card company: I refused to pay for the unnecessary purchase while my airline insisted that internet-purchases were non-refundable. A friend suggested that I write to the CEO of the carrier. I did– but only received response when I filed a small-claims action: a representative from the airlines traveled 2000 miles to oppose my action in New York City Small Claims Court.

After a two-minute talk, the thing was settled: I won, and received both my refund and damages; but had to agree that the airline was blameless.

Unlike Theroux, the joys of travel were not immediate: globalization followed me to internet purchases in Singapore, only resolved on Center Street in Manhattan: all air conditioned, digitized, and corporate. What feels oddly disjointed in comparison to Theroux’s 1975 trip is that a certain comfort level of corporate modernity lies over today’s business-travel; the irritations remain- such as my ticketing problem— but are resolvable anywhere and over a time-line of customer service grievance, through internet access and local legal procedures: the unique vexations of international travel, past, become just another personal transaction with a nameless, faceless, corporation.

What do we really know? Only what we pay attention to. Selective attention determines what we think of as risk factors. When corporate units meet their targets, we are well pleased. We do not consider that the decisions and acts eventuating either in success or failure are compromises, compounds of actions that, at best, are sufficient enough to satisfy goals.

Meeting targets allow us to believe that there are no gaps in what we do. BP’s board, for example, has transformed the top levels of corporate culture in elevating safety to a major concern. Then Macondo: and our scrupulous attention to those inefficiencies, those warnings— discernible in retrospect— that the seemingly sufficient would never be good enough.

And no, it wasn’t. The outcome was disastrous.

But the business lesson is about how we dig down suddenly, after the disaster and not before: not as investors, not as boards, not as business stakeholders. Only when the inefficiency becomes clear, when it emerges on the radar screen, do we all become seers.

Unfortunately, disjunctions in corporate communications, in differences of message at different levels of the corporate hierarchy, of judgment calls made incorrectly by experts and teams, are the stuff of daily business as usual.

What is remarkable today, with BP front and center, is that we think BP’s situation so unusual rather than common. In so doing, we betray our ignorance of organizational risk assessment: and choose to credit only what we see rather than what is knowable, but currently meeting its unobjectionable targets. Its not some obscure “unconscious” process. Its only what we elect not to see.

Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed.  Their “security”, they say, is their portfolio of trading assets: and they have proven, even in perilous markets, their executive capabilities in assessing the corporate world to locate niches upon which their willingness to lay their own money down in exchange for future gain, may be centered.

They tell me that the reality they embrace differs from the realities they have left along one dimension: their fate is entirely in their own hands. Each day. Every day.

The worst has occurred: they have been extruded. But they have recognized their anguish, uncertainties, and the necessities of negotiating the dread of redundancy as their strength. And embraced that strength as their first principle in day trading.

Their chief difficulty as a group? It becomes imperative to “clear the mind” by getting up from one’s computer regularly and doing something enjoyable, reliable, and satisfying: whether yoga, basketball, or reading group—- to restore the frequently jarred sense of equanimity and judgment which comes with living daily between your own mind and the changing numbers on a computer screen.

The context is familiar: the American populace, desirous of continuing our oil addiction, has tasked the Federal Government (Congress and the White House) with exploiting all possible natural resources; the Feds, in turn, have tasked BP as their agent for drilling for oil beyond the limits of imagination, deep in the Gulf of Mexico. BP, of course, together with its subcontractors, dropped the ball. As the oil-producing agents of the American voter, BP is to be blamed as the party of last resort.

Washington, looking at its credibility in light of upcoming elections, is the cheerleader of blame: as a tragic, hideous, and environmentally disastrous scenario, participated in by consumers, government, and industry, unfolds.

Enter Mr Crooks and Mr Morris. They document the vicissitudes of collaborative and integrated effort between BP and the Federal Government in addressing a situation that neither have the equipment or expertise to control: the blown out well.

While pointing out the new difficulties in this relationship, attendant upon the political pressures felt by Federal actors— such as complicating an already complex integration of 3 Louisiana and 1 Texas response bases with another in Florida— or the Coast Guard’s new demand for a paper trail of communication rather than telephone communication with BP— Crooks and Morris also contextualize the enormous cooperation between the players in this strategic alliance of government and corporation.

They document the continuous contact between Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, and Admiral Thad Allen, the chief federal officer in charge of the response. They document the integration of teams composed of government officials together with 400 BP workers and 150 workers from other oil giants— with team meetings chaired by a BP manager and Coast Guard officer– together with continuous input from Ken Salazar, the US Secretary of the Interior and Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu and other scientific experts.

What they document is that: IT WORKS. And this working through will be the only way disaster will be contained.

It is entirely possible that customer discomfort is handled neatly within the system: it never appears as a distress signal that the organization may be in trouble. How? Well, several of the people I spoke with about the problem— customer service personnel all– verbally sympathized with my situation ( I can’t imagine the emotional residue at day’s end on that job, fielding frustrated complaints all day…..) and then asked me if THEIR performance was correct. They asked me to award them a “5″ on a 5-point scale, should I be contacted by the organization, assessing their performance.

The brilliance of this move is that the organization has neatly compartmentalized the relation between customer and itself— locating all difficulty in the performance of the customer service personnel, who are graded by unsatisfied customers. Graded for what? Adequacy of performance in a limited range of behaviors that do not achieve genuine adequacy of service delivery. Here is the brilliance: each of the people I spoke to DESERVED their 5’s!!!! Each functioned within the bounded range of their authority to full capacity. The customer service people were able to call, but not to influence the dispatchers. They were also able to report to me, as did the dispatchers, that no one was able to contact the field technician: and the almost comical assumption on their part (and so my own hope) was that he would certainly be arriving late. But perhaps he took the day off and never told anyone. Didn’t matter. The system contained this information within its separate parts. It never had to flow upwards.

If anyone felt distress beyond the customer, it was the customer service telephone operator: and she was at the bottom of the corporate food chain, containing distress and channeling it however she might. So, the organization was regulating its own dysfunctional emotional life (remember: it could not locate its field technician!) by 1) outsourcing anxiety to the customer; and 2) limiting internal anxiety to low-grade personnel, whose job description is to placate angry customers (the “why” of their annoyance, systemically irrelevant). One can almost hear an executive, higher up, say, “let them suck it up.”

As with Jim’s example of the power company, my phone company example concerned a monopoly. The customer has only one possibility for service: so the power rests entirely with the organization. There is no demand to listen. When and how does the monopoly begin to hear? As in the current case with BP, when consumer outrage becomes so loud that Obama announces that BP must cut its dividend and the stock value plummets 15%, something gets through. But unfortunately, its amplification generally obscures the message: the customer is always right.

From the organization’s perspective, the answer is sure, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Here’s an example of what I was talking about a few posts back in “Thinking Out Loud”: the considerations within the scope of the organizational manager tasked to handle a problem (in the present case, telephone service disruption) are too limited to do anything effective about the problem. She is constrained to placating the customer and passing the word to dispatch. Limitation of her role and fragmentation of service delivery maintain the organizational fiction that all is well. The problems seem to disappear within the confines of organizational boundaries.

WHAT IS MISSING IS REFLECTION: AN INDIVIDUAL OR INTERNAL GROUP, TASKED WITH LOOKING AT THE KNOWLEDGE CONTAINED WITHIN THE SYSTEM (all conversations with customer service were recorded!) THAT SOMETHING IS WRONG.

Of course, until that information is recognized as potentially meaningful systemic knowledge, nothing will happen.

The customer’s service disruption mirrors the organization’s disinterest or incapability in recognizing systemic knowledge linking its internal functioning with the external world of the end user: the telephone company’s line is dead.

Well, prosaically enough, my telephone land-line simply ceased to function a few days back. I think it is a modem problem— but insoluble via customer service half-way around the world. So…. I was offered an array of options for a technician to visit my home: three hour windows of customer (my) availability were required. I picked one.

Roughly two hours of waiting in, a representative from the dispatcher called me: seemed as if the technician would be late. He wasn’t answering his calls. My immediate sense was worry: was this a case for 911? for CSI New York? What happened to this fellow out there on tough city streets in his monopoly-monogrammed van?

It was only a moment later, when I realized that the emotion of organizational dysfunction was being actively extruded: over the organizational boundary and into the customer. As new container of my own anxiety– waiting at home for a repairman who never ultimately came after 7 hours— and the firm’s rationalization. Indeed, 5 separate customer service agents responded to me, as did 3 agents of the dispatcher. Four asked me to grade their helpful performance on a survey they promised I would get, assessing their utility. Each was Mr Lynch: each had the same message and the identical inability to summon another serviceman in a city of millions served by a large monopoly. Each directed my call to 10 minute waits for the dispatcher– and if I was lucky and someone picked up before i hung up (my limit is 20 minutes)– I was told about their inability to find that poor poor unanswering tech: and the promise that he would come, if late. Of course, he never came.

Godot indeed! I still had no telephone service.

When all was said and done, they left a voicemail on my cel-phone: we could try again two days from now (tomorrow is booked, they said): I, of course, yoked to them via my need for a phone, will await them, as did those two other helpless chaps, their Godot.

The modern perversion is that this kind of customer service serves the customer— except in redoubling the anxiety that prompted an appeal to customer service in the first place. The organizational deceit is that the frustrated customer is unaware that “service” is anything but: 1) linguistic hypocrisy and 2) exploiting the customer to absorb organizational incapability.

Individual, group, and organizational systems share a number of common attributes. These include: a recognizable systemic identity; distinct rituals and practices; differences between the subject and other entities; specific intra-system roles and specializations; a capability to change; the fact that change operates in multiple dimensions; the presence of memory as a referent; and the possibility of systemic learning by reflection.

Let’s add another: Nobel laureate Herbert Simon wrote extensively about the limited boundaries of individuals within organizational roles. Not only is “rationality” bounded by the number of hot items on any executive’s plate at a given time, but also the general scope of considerations formally or informally attributed to the scope of executive role, limit the boundaries of thought.

As I mentioned in last week’s posting, I’ve been reading the psychology of Paul Valery this summer— dating from the early days of academic psychology: roughly the time of Dewey, Freud, and James. Valery examines the limited capability of the individual to concentrate as a function of emotion and attention—- predating George Miller’s notion of cognitive chunking by half a century. Valery’s qualitative, introspective description of attentional emphasis and turning from the wider set of possible thoughts within the potential ken of our minds, is both familiar, and aligned with the organizational notion of bounded fields of inquiry.

Here then is another linkage, via attention and the emotional pull of what we attend to, to link individual psychology with the psychology of small and large grousp

And they were right. Consulting projects and teaching assignments claimed my attention. Until, one day, last week, it occurred to me that I’d not written in a long time and was not sure why. The problem was, how to begin again?

Tonight, I logged on. I’ve been reading Paul Valery’s reflections on European politics from the late 19th Century to  the late 1920’s; and I was struck by a quote that might have come from last week’s Financial Times about the unanticipated effects of an interconnected globalizing planet:

“Henceforward every action will be re-echoed by many unforeseen interests on all sides; it will produce a chain of immediate events- confused reverberations in a closed space. The effect of effects, which were formerly imperceptible or negligible in relation to the length of a human life and to the radius of action of any human power, are now felt almost instantly at any distance; they return immediately to their causes, and only die away in the unpredictable. The expectations of the predictor are always disappointed, and that in a matter of months or a very few years.” (Valery, 1931, Forward for “Regards sur le monde actuel”)

Sounds like something written by the Bank of England last year, on the rationality of profit maximization by individual banks resulting in the destabilization of the banking system. Or the effects of German internal politics on Greek debt; or spiking Eurolibor because banks in one country don’t trust the viability of banks in another. Or last Friday’s 300 point drop in the Dow because the 400,000 spike in US job growth was mostly in part-time census workers (more on that next time).

The wheel continues to spin faster and faster: but Valery reminds us, we’re just in a later moment of modern times.