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Published on 2024-07-12 22:54:00 | words: 1813
Rationale
The title of this episode is an appropriate description of what were are going to observe for a while.
Until the episode #7, I had done an experiment- preparing the preambles until that episode as a single unit, and then release them across few months.
From this episode, the preamble is still something more general, and you could actually eventually read all the preambles ignoring the commentary, but each preamble will be a source of reference for the commentary.
It is not just after elections that dancing begins.
When I was more often than not working on negotiations or organizational change and development with or for third parties, there was of course a phase when qualifying information had to be collected.
Not just about the target counterpart, but also about those I represented and "their angle".
As each negotiations or change initiative, also if it was an "encore" for a recurring customer, was to be treated as a new project.
You need information, not just hunches- and this takes time and people with the right information.
If you know the parties involved, for my kind of activities you had to resist the temptation of assuming that it was a routine.
As I was told when I was toying with photography, was better to get a photolab that was consistent in quality, rather than one who could alternate between fantastic and lame performance.
And the same was for information sources, but you had to recheck the information each time- just in case something had evolved.
Once you have the information, that is merely the end of the beginning.
You have to monitor how it evolves- including if you are "importing" external influences that might affect the profiling of the parties involved.
Except when the target were my own customers or prospects, most often had to work with others, who had their own evolving agenda.
Hence, the title of this article.
As I wrote in previous articles on this website, many assume that a negotiation ends when a contract is signed, but actually in most cases I was involved in (products or services), it extended across the whole lifecycle of the relationship.
Anyway, dancing requires a bit of coordination: unless you are looking forward to a rugby-style scrum.
Actually, more than coordination, when you are involving multiple parties with only partially converging motivation, you need harmonization.
To make a long story short, and also introduce another theme, I will drop few hundred words and instead refer to an old movie, "55 Days in Peking".
Let's start from a scene toward the end, when David Niven says that for a while they had been singing the same tune, but suddenly each of the nations involved had its own anthem- a cacophony.
So, the movie starts with a cacophony (before events start), and ends in a cacophony (when the events end).
The harmonization, which extended in that case up to coordination, and even what could be described as "synchronized swimming"?
Was motivated of course by an external challenge (historically, one that we Western powers (plus Japan) in that case brought on ourselves- like of not, the context was a side-effect of the Opium Wars of few decades before).
Hence... before praising harmonization, consider its context and its sustainability (and the externalities it generates).
Commentary
Next week there will be the first plenary session of the new European Parliament- this time, there will be plenty of posturing.
Reason? The expected shift to the right was significant but ignoring the reality of the European Parliament composition.
The reinforced presence of the extreme right might help regroup the coalition that supported the prior Commission, and help a shift to the centre, marginalizing also the left-most side.
Which, in turn, could affect a revision of the currently planned initiatives, notably the "green deal" and initiatives concerning security and external relationships.
So, those that announced their success and expansion, instead of coping with their (numeric) reality or relative marginality, risk to reinforce their own marginalization by being irrelevant for a full term- just in larger numbers.
Beware: you can ride voters disaffection for a while, but in the end you will be considered part of what they considered did not represent them anymore.
Maybe somebody, left and right (but also centre) should re-read a couple of books on what happens when distorting reality carries a prize for some, and you start making choices assuming that that information is true just because you funded it.
Of course, I am referring to "Our Man in Havana" by Graham Greene and "The Tailor of Panama" of John le Carré.
But if you prefer something quicker, I suggest a couple of movies- "Alexander Nevsky" and "The Billion Dollar Brain"- both really on the them of disinformation and its consequences, but the latter is funnier.
Within the European institutions, if there is something that there is not lack of is "group thinking".
Whenever a choice is made, few dare to express disagreement, for fear of weakening the shared European interest, but sometimes for the more mundane fear of future consequences.
This approach actually is something that allowed many jumps forward in European integration, a series of "Monnet moments".
The key issue is when this mindset develops within a group, e.g. the newly expanded representations on the left and the right at the European Parliament, or even the structural component of the European institutions, generates two things:
_ a tunnel vision that keeps feeding on itself, as the only sources of information considered acceptable are insiders
_ an increase in distance from reality, often coupled with attempts to have reality converge with expectactions.
And if it does not? Well, let's start another initiative and publish some more reports and statistics.
Summarized by the economist Ronald Coase in: "if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything".
More interesting is the decades of natural inclination to social engineering as a policy tool within the European Union.
Social engineering is something that has been repeatedly tried in Europe since at least the beginning of the XX century, considering just the era of (almost) universal vote and availability of mass media with a shorter delay between production and delivery of communication (i.e. starting from radio).
Let's just say that those attempts at social engineering in a mass society did deliver us in the first half of the XX century what few could dare to consider a successful outcome (except the followers of Malthus always looking for ways to reduce population): maybe you can find online data on what could have been the European economy and population without two World Wars in a century.
Biased or self-referential information is not necessarily a choice, but a consequence of decision-making patterns.
Over the decades, the European Union became good at presenting the positive side-effects of its own actions.
In these pivotal times, maybe should focus less on marketing and more on innovation- social innovation from the bottom, not just dropped or engineered from above, generally supported by helicopter money.
The latter had a reason to be considered an option when the famous phrase "whatever it takes" was uttered by Mario Draghi, and even during the COVID crisis, but should not become the standard approach to sweeten the pill of (sometimes really quixotic) social engineering attempts to push through policies that are unsubstantiated by reality or potential reality.
In my country, Italy, we still follow the centuries old motto "con la Francia o con la Spagna purché se magna" (i.e. does not matter which invader we supported, provided that it supported us).
When I lived in Brussels and attended events and workshops on e-something (e-health, e-inclusion, e-democracy) organized by the European institutions, was surprised to see how few Italian companies attended.
Once I met one that did not know- at all.
Asked what was their business focus.
And the answer was... they really worked on European projects, because in many cases having also an Italian company could ensure coverage of the quota of Member States required.
I hope that that was just boasting- but unfortunately remember when in Turin, Italy a colleague told me that companies often did not ask what support they could get for what they had planned to do, focusing instead on asking what they could do that would get supported.
So, a tool created to help develop innovation had become a tool to de facto subsidize lifestyle.
Setting up a continuous string of social engineering initiatives supported by funding could actually make endemic a similar distortion for European Union companies, undermining their capability to be competitive without that safety net.
It is true that other countries, even allies, routinely complained about European subsidies, but then subsidized directly and indirectly their own, but making that a constant is a risky choice.
So, considering its composition, the new European Parliament might actually rethink a bit some recent and planned initiatives, to avoid a distortion of the internal market that would then project into a distortion of the competitiveness of European companies.
I think that there is a place for incentives, notably when we are trying to continue to have a degree of harmonization and convergence across the European Union Member States, but the risk of a "Gosplan attitude", and it consequence on the mindset and planning capabilities of both business and society has been constantly increasing over the last couple of decades.
And, apparently, did not produce the desired effects, if you compare how the European Union economy evolved if compared with other leading global economies.
Stay tuned.