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On learning in respect of our Centre's management tactics

Our Centre's management tactics are directed at developing and sustaining suitable conditions for the practice of Buddha Dhamma.

Over time our management tactics have evolved in order to meet this goal in more efficient and effective ways. A review of the ontogeny of our current and future management tactics helps develop understanding of those skilful means being engaged to train and benefit beings through Buddha dhamma.

The methodological dilemma in a review of the organisation's management tactics is to inquire on the evidence of present or anticipated encounters what factors were underrated by the human energies and minds of those who wrote down the image of our change tactics in the past (what was planned).

The idea of progress as a process rather than an event is a useful concept here.

For example, our notions of tactics and using computer tools have evolved, slowly but surely, like two halves of an arch which may eventually stand firm - and are built piece by piece.

What we can say is that the "trickle down effect", the time it takes for new tactics to operate as the major paradigm for each tier set in motion, is becoming shorter at this Centre.

There are three tiers our tactics effect:

The first tier includes our early adopters.

These are those Members in our organisation who have the leisure, determination and patience to examine our heritage information architecture and make real progress in delivery of our goods and services.

Such Members have the people skills to gather funding to encourage technocrat Members to develop our information technology hardware and software.

Enriched information services then become affordable to more persons who we can designate as our clients.

The second tier involves training persons so the information improvements are adopted by the majority of volunteer staff.

This tier involves the usual public relations needed for normalisation of the new technology within our organisation.

The third tier could be called the slow learners.

A fourth tier could be called those who frustrate adoption of the system. These are the modern-day luddites who destroy the means of production.

So far, we have assumed that persons in all four tiers want to communicate.

However, this is not always the case.

There is a difference between those in the third tier, who have weak ability to communicate and those in the fourth tier who have an emphatic unwillingness to communicate.

As the playwright, Harold Pinter observed, for some persons:

"Communication is too alarming. To enter someone's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility".

Very often, "The flow of speech is a desperate rearguard attempt to keep ourselves to ourselves".

These words describe the alarm of those in the fourth tier.

Sometimes, a Member in the fourth tier believes he or she has been taught some detail of practice and feels privileged to special information that they believe other Members should not know about.

Persons who have this mindset will attempt to argue a case that the information is "too complex" or "too simple" to be shared, "too sensitive" or "too inhuman" to be disclosed, "too easily misunderstood" or "too hard to understand"; "too radical" or "too conservative"; "too much an abuse of democracy" or "too elitist": "too impersonal" or "too personal", and so on.

The difficulty is that the supply of information seems to be controlled by impersonal forces rather than forces which are designed to perpetuate individual differences. Preservation of individual differences may be blanketed under pseudo-democracy.

Defense mechanisms and rationalisations abound in behind-the-scenes discussions and negotiations that managers use to talk to the chief executives to justify their own position or to justify alienating staff with a change of work culture.

When it is proposed that new technology would make it possible for the details to widely publicised; it is possible that such a manager becomes confused and actively resists adoption of the new technology which makes their decision-making redundant. There is no doubt that modern technology well applied can be one major element of the decision-making process because it can produce a lot of relevant data of the heritage culture that failed.

Managers feel threatened when projects, which they were responsible for, are analyzed and found to be wanting.

There are defence mechanisms in persons that resist evaluation. Modern computer systems can disclose minute details of earlier projects to such an extent that the work group responsible is exposed to evaluation without their permission to be scrutinized. This is how they feel.

In the worst case, they may attempt to sabotage an evaluation system that delivers the details of their past effectiveness or attempt to sabotage implementation of corrections which revise the former work methods.

Psychologists will recognise this type of behaviour as the operation of a defence mechanism. Persons involved in the need to evaluate a change face long, frustrating deadlocks when a former manager presides over the process. The manager may insist that the evaluation members work as a team or work with mutual understanding of the past position instead of letting the facts speak for themselves.

Former managers may appeal to the notion that it makes good public relations not to debate or admit to unwise tactics that were used in the past on the grounds that if a report disclosing such things was presented the goodwill of the work group or the committee which made these proposals would be diminished and therefore this would be bad public relations.

One can observe these defences being erected in the minutes of a number of communication systems. Minutes that do not specify performance indicators enable previous managers to maintain face.

Once there is an acceptable culture such as S5 which accepts that some projects may fail to some extent then this is the right approach. The difficulty then is to find some sort of acceptable public relations exercise that explains this culture.

For example, paper and print is not the only publication method available to librarians to transmit information to users. We use our Internet website and our radio broadcasts for non-paper delivery of important information. We encourage the use of indicators other than attendance at our Library and the number of books read or borrowed to gauge our performance in transmitting information.

It is difficult for a traditional librarian to modify the pyramid structure of command that centralises control of the distribution of information at the top. We are seeking directions that will increase autonomy of our information providers at all levels of our organisation.

We are committed to operate locally and internationally because we are a Regional Centre of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, and an Approved Associated Centre for Spiritual Training of the World Buddhist University.

We do not wish to overstate our case for international operations but we can see that it could not be obtained by stop-go policies about the flow of information. We must be prepared to support values that have shaped our own liberalism and prosperity with generosity of information.

We must at all times be aware that the next century belongs not to researchers in Asia or America or any other continent, but to the research learning values which we teach to bring about the good life.

These values do not depend on the emergence or suppression of civil society in any country. We regard what is happening in Asia, despite the recent setbacks, on the whole as exciting unique and good for the region and the world.

It cannot be attributed to some value system called "Asian values", but must be judged by rational accountability in economic management. We maintain such values are universal.

We can work with market economics in any part of the globe although naturally we prefer the laissez-faire market economics of Australia simply because we are acclimatised to their use.

When we design systems for researching information we need to make sure they do not include assumptions that offend Asian cultural values if we intend the delivery systems be available to Asia.

Using the same arguments, we think there is a way of delivering information that would be acceptable to say, Singaporeans and persons from Hong Kong.

We hold that things like research happen because of cause and effect.

Some places become richer or poorer than other places because of cause and effect, and cause and effect is universal in every country.

Labelling something as " European values" or "Asian values" does not help us design information systems that are to operate throughout many countries.

So, our new managers must set up research systems that are not biased locally or appear too parochial.

What is the message in terms of public relations to impress this upon ourselves and others?

Bob Usherwood (1981) wrote about public relations for public librarians dealing with staff. Good, continuous communication is a way of avoiding misunderstandings that can seriously damage our library's internal and external public relations.

The ability to keep communication channels clear is one of the most important and potentially productive skills that our library managers can possess. Like it or not like it, we must spend more time talking to other library managers.

An increase in the use of our library services following a publicity campaign may be a measure of the effect of a campaign, but not necessarily so.

It would require quite sophisticated research techniques to isolate the effects of a campaign from all the other internal and external factors that may, or may not, have led to an increase in the use of a service.

Good public relations will bring more books, more information, more artefacts and more library equipment to our library.

Poor public relations will diminish any goodwill we have built up in the community. The important thing to note about public relations is that it is planned and continuous.

In 1973, McGarry and Burrell identified six persuasive messages that can be used by librarians. These are:

1. Social appeal: Everybody uses the library!
2. Prestige appeal: All the best people use the library!
3. Survival appeal: No-one can compete in modern life without help from the library.
4. Fun appeal: Use the library for fun and leisure!
5. Egomaniac appeal: Knowledge is power!
6. Fear appeal: If you don't use the library your friends will ostracise you!

This type of public relations may be based on an antiquated paradigm that persons in the world use as six closed defence mechanisms to drive themselves to learning new things.

Some persons view the world with ideas that were applicable in 1860 or perhaps even in 1890, when information was difficult to find and hard to learn, but if good information was put into practice in the manufacture of goods and the goods were exported then a higher standard of living could be expected.

But what happens when players have the same information at the same time? Where is the comparative advantage? That goods are the primary mechanism for enhancing a nation's standard of living by trade is an assumption that may not be the primary engine that generates economic wealth in the world today. It isn't the production of manufactured goods, and it isn't trade.

There was an idea that Japan was the world's foremost economic power even when Japanese productivity was below the USA productivity figure.

When Japan's productivity in the manufacturing sector exceeded that of the United States, it was assumed that Japan had overtaken the U.S.A.

But, what was overlooked was the percentage of the labor force that was engaged in the service industry proportional to the agricultural, machinery manufacturing, electronics and transport equipment industries.

The dollar value of a person in a service industry such as the communications industry can exceed that of a person in a manufacturing industry.

The error is assuming that productivity of the manufacturing sector is a valid proxy for the productivity of the entire economy.

Workers released by agriculture 100 years ago were absorbed into manufacturing; those released from manufacturing in our time, it turns out, are finding work in the service sector.

According to Ted W. Hall (1995), there are two conventional views of this situation, both negative. One is that "bad" service sector jobs (or " McJobs") at places like supermarkets and McDonald's are displacing manufacturing jobs. The other is that the "good" manufacturing jobs are moving to Japan and elsewhere.

How do you measure output at MacDonald's? That was a hard question, and it didn't seem important. So it went unanswered.

The consequences of taking an antiquated paradigm and applying it to a very different world are grave. What usually happens is a leap of presumption - a perverse interpretation of the facts as reinforcing evidence for the old model, rather than as reasons for re-examining the assumptions behind it.

This is unfortunate, because it leads to economic policies that are misguided in intent, in timing, and in recommendation. The difficulty with fixating on trade in a service economy is that a haircut produced in Hong Kong does me no good if I'm in Melbourne. So generally speaking services which are produced locally must be consumed locally. In such a situation, there is nothing to export and the small employment base of the traded goods sector cannot raise national productivity in any meaningful way.

When we examine our wish to supply information that is locally produced but globally exposed from our website, for example, we produce something more than the information per se. What we produce is a management system, S5 or better, which can be exported as global best practice.

We are quite willing to be exposed to worldwide competition in producing such teaching material and we are ready to fight the outdated paradigms and join the information providers with a management system that looks to the idea of communicating to a large audience of readers as the affordability of the delivery systems is lowered worldwide.

Modern technology has now replaced nearly all forms of communication involving the written word. It is thought that email, voice mail and faxes outnumber written letters in Australia today. We cannot afford to champion only one new technology. We must be willing to equip ourselves to handle several types of technology.

Within the next two years, we plan to look at the next generation of voice production software, so instead of just reading a file, it will speak to you. This will further threaten managers who might be told "there are twenty-two outstanding letters you have not answered" by a machine. This is because we will scan paper letters received to electronic form and have the machines keep count of replies required.

As we implement these tactics, it would be nice to be understood.

It would be nice to be understood by two sets of audiences, one internal - our own staff, the other external - the community at large. We have to consider methods for delivering our public relations internally to our second tier audience comprising our own staff, because there may not be a second chance to deliver public relations in another form to a set of external audiences.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes and Leanne Eames.

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As we, the Chan Academy Australia, Chan Academy being a registered business name of the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or another source accessed through our website(s).

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