The Donald N. Michael Legacy
By
Edgar Schein
Transcript of a presentation made on the occasion of receiving the Donald N. Michael Award from Saybrook Graduate School
San Francisco,
November 9, 2002


Introduction : Elsa Porter
What is the Donald N Michael Award?
We have tried to meet the specifications that we think Don would have approved of for The Don Michael Award --No Cash Award, no plaques, but convocation of the Learning Community –people who were interested and passionate about his ideas. It was also important that there would be a party, because he liked good food. (Laughter)

We thought that we should select for an awardee either a person or an institution or a project that embodied the ideals and values of Don Michael. These include:
• Daring to look at the dark side of things
• Acknowledging uncertainty
• A passionate understanding of the existential fact that nothing is in our control
• Acceptance of the fact that we ourselves are not permanent but that nevertheless, in spite of all this impermanence and uncertainty, although we might not be able to justify being optimistic—certainly Don could never be said to be optimistic-- one does not have to live in despair. There are real and rational reasons to live and act with hope.
• A commitment to a deep understanding of psychology of leadership
• Recognition of the importance and function of leadership, and learning, and the future,
• And, all this infused with really deep compassion.

As the selection team looked around for an appropriate recipient for the first Don Michael Award, we set the bar very high when we selected Ed Shein. Ed not only meets all the criteria but he was also a long time friend of Don’s and they developed these philosophies together. Don and Ed were fellow graduate students at Harvard in the mid ‘50’s. Their friendship spreads a half of a century. Don was an usher in Ed’s wedding, and when Ed and Mary moved here to San Francisco for a half a year in the 80’s they renewed their friendship.

Part of this award is to recognize the deep friendships that Don has established with so many of us, how much energy and compassion he put into friendship and how much that has enriched our lives.

I would like to turn the microphone over to Ed Shein for a conversation that I think Don would love to hear.

Ed:
Thank you. Usually when I am asked to talk about someone I panic, what is worse than this kind of reminiscences? Except in Don’s case I looked forward to it. Because there is so much in my memory banks about him and with him, so I want to share what some of those memories are. I thought about writing this out and making a formal presentation then realized that’s not Don. He did not want to formalize things. I used to say to him all the time, “Why don’t you write some of these ideas down, they are so powerful”, and I always sensed in him there was a bit of reluctance in him to formalize. It was better to keep exploring and keep an open mind. These remarks are more of what I call a kaleidoscopic picture of Don Michael rather than a formal presentation.

The thing on the top of the list is what Elsa and Maureen have already referred to. Don had a capacity that I find in very few people, and that is the capacity to be a friend. Think about that, I think not everyone has the personal makeup and the compassion and the ability to be a friend. This is particularly significant because when we moved out here about 15 years ago in the winter, Mary and I were walking down the street and had not seen Don since 1956 when we were married in Washington. This was a good 20-year hiatus. We were walking down the street and we ran into Don Michael. From that moment on he became a friend to both Mary and me-- and that is very significant. How many of us can be friend to both partners in a marriage? But Mary would say that Don was as much a friend to her as I would say that Don was a friend to me; and I think that’s an extraordinary capacity --this ability to be a friend to people. Now, how did that manifest itself? He and I had many breakfasts together; these were wide-open conversations-- whatever was on our minds. We looked forward to it because we knew that we didn’t have an agenda. We could just sit down and have a cup of coffee usually at some interesting place up on one of the hills, or some café that he had found. And we would start talking, and by the end of an hour and a half we would both go away feeling refreshed and stimulated and having some new ideas. Then, Don, Mary and I share an interest in mushrooms, and when it was the right season off we would go into the Marin hills to secret places that only he knew about and find bluets and other wonderful mushrooms which we would then have so much of that we could divide it up and he would cook up some and we would cook up some. And then of course, he was interested in birds as we became interested. We would sometimes take a trip. We went to the Central Valley one year and I have this vivid memory; we were looking for the place where the Sandhill Cranes would land, and it was difficult to find because they move around. But this one night it was sunset and we had more or less given up and we just parked near a field and we were standing there, when all of a sudden out of the sky came the entire flock of probably several hundred Sandhill Cranes and landed within a hundred to two hundred feet of us. Pure luck, but what an experience. If you are looking for these birds and then to have them come to you! That was probably Don’s doing (laughter).

So, you know there is that kind of joint experience. Don insisted that we go with him to the Wednesday morning markets to buy Chinese vegetables because that’s a special event. What he was really doing was training Mary and me to how to live in San Francisco, because he had mastered that art --and that’s another point about Don, he took the art of living extremely seriously. This was not something you just did randomly, you set a target, you worked at it, and you gave up things. He pointed out repeatedly that in order to live successfully in the way that he lived, you had to let a lot of things go. And he was telling me, if I was going do this I had to be prepared to let things go. He was mentoring us on how to live in San Francisco and take advantage of what’s good out here.

Many of you have probably been asked to go to Golden Gate Park when the Rhododendrons bloom, because he knew exactly when what things happened in the biological – horticultural environment and was so enthusiastic about seeing these things at their peak that that infused enthusiasm in us. And so we would plan a lot of our activities around when Don said it was time to do something. (Laughter) Then we would go off to Point Reyes or Golden Gate Park or whatever, and pick the mushrooms, see the relevant flowers, and of course go to new restaurants. Staying very close to where the good and interesting foods was, not necessarily the pricey food, Don was very frugal, but he knew how to find the best food at low cost. (Laughter) and so we would search out these places. We shared a lot of theater over in Berkeley and would then have long critical discussions about the artistic merit of whatever we had seen. And so I bring up these examples, as this is what friends do. They do a lot of different kinds of things, together in a joyous way. It’s just something that worked very naturally. So that’s Don the person.

Let me talk a little bit now about Don the intellectual force. I’ve already said he was an artist in living and I have made a big issue in recent years saying we have completely underestimated the role of art in intellectual affairs. Good science is art, good consulting practice is art, good management is art, and I have used a term that I think would characterize Don beautifully. Strategic improvisation (laughter). I think that is what life really is, we do all have strategies of what we are trying to do in life. But we can’t predict in the next five seconds what’s going to happen, I don’t know who I am going to see and that’s going to produce a thought and something and that will change what’s going on in my head. And I’ll have to do something with the new thought or the new perception so improvisation is a key element. I have learned something about improvisation which some of you may know that absolutely blew my mind that in retrospect was so characteristic of Don. A few years ago we had a meeting at the academy of Management where they brought in Second City (a very good improvisation group) to not only do a performance but then to analyze for the audience what it took to make a good performance in this kind of improv theater. And the point among many that came through the most clearly to me, There are two parties a and b and they are bantering back and forth and getting laugh out of the crowd, the purpose, the strategy of a is to say something that will allow b to get a laugh. Now think of that as the principal of life that our job is not to get a laugh but to create a situation where someone else gets a laugh and eventually they will reciprocate; and they will create a situation where we will get a laugh. And I think Don did that for people, I think he set up conversations in such a way that you somehow felt you got something out of it. Rather than setting up the conversations in such a way that he got something out of it or all the credit. He knew how to question; he knew how to stimulate. And so this idea of strategic improv and helping others to clarify their thoughts, even if that becomes recursive because I think Don could be a pain in the butt (laughter) the way he kept nailing certain issues that we didn’t really want to pay attention to. But the motive was to entirely to help you think more clearly rather than just to make a point. And I think for many of us the residue was reducing more clearly, because we can still remember Don saying “but what about” “why haven’t you looked (as Maureen reminded us) at the dark side of what we are talking about”. So he was an artist in living and with that I think came another quality that I think was extraordinary and I would call that intellectual courage.

I think he got a lot of negative feedback, with “here you go again” but it didn’t slow him down. He had the feeling that we have to pay attention to these things and he had the courage to continue to push people to pay attention to them even when they didn’t want to hear it anymore. I think that kind of intellectual courage is lacking in a lot of us. We sort of make our point and if we don’t get an instant response we sort of give up and say “all right” when we really should be pushing, pushing, pushing until the other party really understands what we trying to get across.

Deep and broad curiosity. I don’t know if I have ever known a person who knew as much across so many different domains, from insects and flowers and mushrooms, animals and intellectual characteristics of all sorts, and that went back to his days in school. I think he really wanted to a physicist , when I met him at Harvard in the social relations department he always talked like he wanted to be a physicist and he really wanted to study science. And you may know that he had bought a ticket for the first flight to the moon (laughter). There were already then people saying that sooner or later we are going to this and he had signed up with whatever group was available, that if was possible to ever go to the moon that he would be on one of those early flights. And he was obsessed with that, his curiosity and his desire to do something new and different was simply extrodinary, an endless search and that of course is what led him to being something of a futurist. Although he never liked that term as I recall.

Then finally I would like to make a couple of points about willingness and tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. I think all of us would like the world to be a little more predictable than it is. I think we need people like Don to be the voice of realism, that we shouldn’t let that wish for certainty let us adopt certainty when it isn’t really there. I think it’s healthier to learn to live with uncertainty than to look for solutions prematurely only to discover later that they don’t work. That links for me (I was just talking to Elsa about this) very much with, some of you know the psychologist Ellen Langer who’s talked a lot about mindfulness and how we form on what we focus on, our attention. We got to know her at Cape Cod a few years ago and she made a point, that particularly Americans have a horrible tendency to judge everything immediately. Everything is good or bad, that we like it or didn’t like it. And wouldn’t it be better if we could let things happen and see what happens. I want to tell you one story that links to this. We were at the Cape and our two-year-old granddaughter at 8:00 p.m. Hit her head on the table and got a little cut. We called the local nurse at the local health center. She said “it probably better be sewed up, you should go to the Hyenas Hospital” which was 2 hours away from where we were, so we called and they said ok they would receive us. We were on the road by 9:00pm. We were at the hospital by 11:00pm, it was my son Peter, my wife, myself and the little girl. And finally saw a doctor by 12:30pm and he did glue it or sew or whatever needed to be done. We finally got back home by 3:00am and got to sleep. And what a horrible event, right? Ellen Langer really changed my view of that and it reminded me of Don. When we reviewed that we had about 5 hours of quality time with that little girl, she was a dream, she was not crying this whole time, she was sort of almost enjoying the experience, a big deal was happening. We had time with our son; we were experiencing this whole thing together as a family. So what’s the big deal here? Was it a horrible experience or was it simply an event from which we could drawout whatever we chose to drawout . We could sit there and say, “boy was that horrible, she cut her head, we spent the whole night at the emergency room”, which is one kind of response. Ellen and Don would say “No, why see it that way, why not see all the good that came out of that event rather than seeing the bad part”. I think to me, I remember Don would often take the position “what really happened” rather than judging something having been good or bad. And that to me is perhaps the most important lesson, I am slowly learning, because that judgmental tendency is terrifically strong. We want to evaluate post meeting reactions forms, we give them out the end of every lecture, wrong time to do it. Probably that’s the worse time to be evaluating something, that we should be at the end of the event saying “ let’s come back a week from now and see what happened here”, and then if there are any judgements to be made maybe we should then make them but lets avoid this tremendous tendency to want to say good or bad, liked it or didn/t like it. Let’s just reflect on what happened and maybe that would open our eyes and we could see a lot more that the judgement forecloses. So that’s the note on which I want to leave it. Don, the friend, the intellectual, the stimulant, the remarkable thing about him is that even though we haven’t had a breakfast for two years it’s like it happened yesterday. He’s still so present it’s a testimony to his incredible friendship, I guess. I’ll leave it at that. Thank you. And I think it would be nice if others of you added your own thoughts to this kaleidoscope.


Elsa.
I want to tell you of an instance when we lived in Washington DC along the Potomac River and there was a bird sanctuary, wild life refuge and I had gone down there many many times looking for a (bird) which was alleged to be in the weeds of the marsh. And the first time Don came to visit us guess what, we were walking down, “Look”, he says, “Elsa there’s a (?) “ I couldn’t see it, but his acquity, he saw things that other people couldn’t see. And yes, when I got the binoculars out I could see, that’s what he did very many times for me, was to point out things that I couldn’t see, that were right there in front of me. And when he did my life was totally enriched.

Gerald Harris from GBN–
I want to share something. I think when people were at GBN years ago one of the last things that Don said that stuck with me a for a long time. He had made a beautiful presentation and as usual I had asked him some ridiculous difficult question as I am wont to do, and Don’s answer was “I DON”T KNOW”. But it wasn’t like I don’t know because I am dumb or anything. The “I don’t know” was said in such a way that what he was indicating was 1) is that he was present within himself in terms with being comfortable with not knowing and 2) he was interested in knowing more about it. It was OK to say “I don’t know”. And the connection between the two of us, who are in the space of saying, “I don’t know” is actually pregnant with all kinds of possibilities. And that was the first time I really understood really what Don Michael was all about. He could make a simple statement like “I don’t know” mean so much.

Napier Collyns:
I would like to ask Ed little bit about Don’s scholarship. Some of you know that before he died Don and I went through all his papers. And just the bibliography was over 200 items covering an astonishing array of subjects. And I’d like to know you who have spent your life in academia, very distinguished physicians, and published a number of Don ‘s things in your magazine, Could you talk a little bit about his scholarship and his contributions.

Ed:
I think Don was ahead of his time, and that’s why he is not referred to more often. It goes way back, he wrote this book on Cybernation, well before people had any thought about that. And his learning to plan, and planning to learn or which ever …..(laugher)…I think it’s learning to plan was a very difficult book. It was so full of insights packaged into one book. That you had to kind of study it, you couldn’t just read it. And so that didn’t get the attention it should have gotten. Anytime you picked up his work and looked at it very carefully it was loaded with important insights. But he presented it in such a dense way that I think he probably did not get the recognition he deserved as a scholar. And that tells us something horrible about scholarship and academia, it has it’s marketing problems just like any other field. There are a lot of good people and good writers who have the right ideas but they are presented in a way that the world doesn’t pick them up. And I think that was Don’s problem, he was a good scholar who was not recognized sufficiently in his own time or thereafter. And he did not want to simplify. He could have said “alright, I can say this more directly easily” and that just wasn’t what he was interested in. Having said it correctly, that satisfied him. Even if that was hard for others to understand or to make sense of. I always experience it as a dilemma. Many of those breakfasts’ were “Don you’ve GOT to write this down”. And he would say, “Yea, but ….” and he did finally agree to re-issue his book. But I think he again fell into the same trap of wanting to say it in a correct but complex way that made it difficult for people to pick up and say “Wow, this is an important set of ideas” and I don’t know what we do about that, some people have that problem, they have the right ideas but they don’t get picked up.

New Person:
I actually put him in touch with the editor of Miles River Press in Washington, a friend of mine was the editor and she was very taken with his ideas and so I said “can you take Don’s work and take that lsrp out it and make it so ordinary people can read it and understand it” so she agreed to do that. Well it turned out it took two years of negotiation with that editor and Don on all these words, and then in addition he insisted on writing this huge preface to the book, so it was, it was, read it ok. (laughter)

Hallock Hoffman:
I’d like to say on at least one occasion at least his prose was relativity intelligible. He was at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions about 1964, made a presentation, the topic was something about the necessity of how _____________worked. And it turned out to be a little pamphlet. The Center in those days would tend to publish little things that people had said that would work. That was the second most wide spread pamphlet that we ever published. It must have gone to 80,000 requests. So at least a whole bunch of people thought they could understand it. We thought they could too.

Ed:
I republished some of his work in this journal “Reflections” . And when you put some of his stuff in front of people they say “Wow” but they don’t find it on their own. You have to say, “hey, you better read this, and be prepared it’s a little bit dense but you’ll find that is great” . So you know we haven’t seen the end of it. I think his work will still continue and from time to time one of us will decide to republish something that he wrote. And it will then get picked up again. It has a certain timeless quality to it. The way he analyzed things and the factors that he talked about that influenced the learning process, are in fact universal factors. And one can re read his stuff and continue to gain from it. But it’s never going to be popular stuff, or particularly easy to read. And that wasn’t his goal. His goal was to get us to face complexity. Get us to see that the world is really a very tough, tough place.

Napier:
And people want to keep it because he went to great effort to make sure that we had copies of everything he had written. I have about 90% of everything he wrote, out of this 200 item bibliography. Many of you who have seen this bibliography any of you who are interested I will certainly supply one, and if any of you want to see any of the articles, I can make copies, because I have the originals to make the copies from.

New Person:
There is one article here that I think is supremely well written, and it happened to be a collaboration with Walter Truett Anderson.

Walter (I think):
Well that piece was just a lot of dialogue that we tossed back and forth and back and forth. He let me ……to the last …..(something)(laughter)

New person:
One of his articles, Napier asked me to read a bunch of his articles to see what we might publish. I’ve been working with NASA for the last four or five years on science on the international space station. So I was really interested to find an article that he had written in 1956 on mans exploration of space. And in it he said “one of the difficulties in exploring space, in the past when people moved from Europe or came to explore America and to settle here they were refugees from something. And the condition of being a refugee from the planet earth had not yet occurred. The second thing was that our propulsion system was not powerful enough to get us out of lower orbit, and the third barrier was getting through the Van Allen radiation belts, we’d get fried. Well here it is 2002 and guess what, the big barriers NASA is facing right now? Propulsion systems, they are recommending nuclear, and the problems of humans getting through the radiation belts. And so what is being worked on is pharmaceutical protection, pill that will protect us from radiation either that or humans into little cocoons of protective gear that will allow them to go into outer space. This was almost a half a century ago, ahead of his time he saw the barriers and described them very well.

Question:
Are you saying that aren’t things occurring that might make us refugees. (Laughter)

Answer from person above:
Absolutely, as a matter of fact Carl Sagen in his book “The Blue Dot” predicted that that would be the case, that life on this planet would be so miserable that we would want to colonize outer planets.

New Person:
A major observation of Don’s wide ranging interest and expertise came to mind when Napier was talking about his writing. Napier showed me chronological list of types of Dons writings over the last 45 or 50 years. And it’s history. These were the headings of what is happening in no matter what the subject, no matter what the area of interest. Don had written on this subjects and it’s fascinating.

Ed:
And he did it with accuracy, the point that you just made about his perception of what the difficulties would be was based on his knowledge of physics, he really did understand science very well, which made his just deplore the Meg Quiggles of the world. I don’t know who’s toes I’m stepping on when I say that but he thought “what garbage because these people don’t know physics. So they think they are writing about physical phenomenon relating to organizational phenomenon but they don’t understand physics in the first place so the whole thing is nonsense”. He was very very purist about if you are going to make analogies to natural sciences then you better well understand the natural science and what’s really involved there instead of these vague analogies and chaos theory , and so on that he saw people misusing in the behavioral sciences. I sort of agreed with him there, I think there is a lot of analogizing going on based on very poor understanding of the other phenomenon to which we are drawing analogies.

New person:
I guess I’d like to make one comment based on something you said. Don was a good friend, it was one of the real experiences of him. Almost regardless of whether we were talking of anything significant. When he showed up we were friends, we cut communication with each other in a way that only friends do.

New Person:
And that’s what struck me about your comment about his understanding of science. Not that in any sense that he was Hawkin but he was clear , and given the power of his person and his mind the fact that he would make time in his life for the rest of us who would trail after him, long after, and was genuinely present there, who was supportive, who reveled in small things that we would care about. Who made several trips to Canada on our behalf, it was the generosity of his heart and the way he was present when you were in his presence and the delight he took in that, I found the range of his mind, but in this person who was so soulful and so present. That’s what I will carry with me the rest of my life. And the kind of encouragement he in that sense provided to do good work. To accept nothing less anything that might be tinged in any sense that which is hurried or shoddy. Awesome, this is rare.

Ed:
Does anyone still have connection with his son?

Maureen:
What you were saying triggered something for me is that one of the things that I still treasure about the relationship with Don, had to do with friendship and it has to do with love I think. That sometimes I would trying to understand something or exploring something and be really excited about some new article I had read or something and feel, this is really interesting. I would get with Don, and Don would in a very gentle and loving way he would just peel away my sort of blindness and help me see that it was really fools gold. That it really wasn’t what I thought it was. He could do in a way that didn’t leave me feeling stupid for having been excited about it in the first place. And doing it in such a way that what he was really saying was “Actually, Maureen you can do better than this, let’s hang in there for a bit, I understand why you are excited but let’s see if can go to somewhere where it is more rigorous it’s more though through, where we are using more of the data that really exists. And I think that it was the love in the relationship that made it safe to be a learner in that very deep sense of Don. That learning is terribly hard, particularly learning that requires you giving up your sort of treasured positions. And I don’t know really anybody in my life that was able to hold me while I unraveled some of my certainties and moved to somewhere new, the way Don would. And I think you are right I think you’ve hit it, it had to do with quality of the friendship. That he was not only enchanted by the mushrooms, he was also enchanted by the relationship with his friends and in that sort of field of enchantment I was willing to let go of the easy answers and glib. And it cost you something. These are the days when the glib and facile is the smooth road to affirmation and popularity. Don’s route was very much more the route of integrity, even if it cost him the recognition that some of the more superficial thinkers got. I really treasure him. I don’t know if I would have done it without the exchange of the love. That’s what you got in exchange for giving up the good of certainties. I think about that a lot, and it’s an enormous gap in my life that he is not there to help me do that. I look around at some of the people in the room who are currently serving that purpose for me and realize what a treasure that is. I miss him very much.

New person:
I wanted to say that even though he wrote in an obscure way, he spoke in an unbelievably clear way. I remember many years ago I was in a shop and I was asked to arrange a meeting on a very complicated subject in Tronto. Don came with me and we had a table for _(can’t understand)______. Don spoke about an hour and _ about the most complicated things in the most easy simple expressive way. I almost said “why can’t you express yourself that way in your writing” (laughter). All of us who, been with ten years with __(Can’t understand)__________ and 10 years with this group, that’s nearly 20 years of listening to Don in community. And I never remember him expressing himself in an ugly way or a difficult way, always just as clear as could be. It was an invitation to everybody else to explain what they had to say to, he never tried to outwit anybody, or put anybody down.