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1.0 Introduction to critical thinking used in 1999 Public Relations White Paper

A short title for this chronical is:

The Chan Academy 1999 PR White Paper.

Its PR aim is to given understanding to our clients ofo critical thinking about our public management tactics.

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

Our organisation's international Dhamma activities require training of many volunteers who, over time, become key management persons.

As part of their training, they apply their learned knowledge to develop critical thinking to the direction of our local area planning, asset management, knowledge management, corporate governance, reporting, and giving delivery of our generated or acquired resources to be of service to others and help show the way to persons looking for Buddha Dhamma.

There is no widely accepted definition of critical thinking.

Beyer (1985) has criticised the very wide use of the label "critical thinking".

According to Beyer, critical thinking, as a mental operation, is not a single discrete operation of the same order as recall or extrapolation or interpretation.

James Herri And Ken Dillon (1992) define a critical thinker as a person who approaches information, assertions and experience with a healthy scepticism about what is really true or accurate or real, as well as a desire to search through all kinds of evidence to find what is what - the " truth".

We encourage persons to examine their current type of proficiency to see if they use divergent, convergent, linear or lateral thinking and then improve their current thinking skills to get pliability of mind which is handy as the precursor for critical thinking.

Critical thinking is needed for two reasons; one being to coach those new Members who will govern our organisation in the future, the other being to introduce Buddha Dhamma.

Persons can overcome interruption to their life plans when they can understand the correlation between an ability to use critical thikning and the skill of applying some of Budda's Teachings to their everyday life.

For some persons, the reason they search for a wise path is that they have been saddened by interruption in their life stream.

Dhamma teaching becomes feasible for the individual who recognises that his or her present thinking patterns are inadequate to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information, claims or reason and then wish to learn to search for a better type of mind.

Pali checklists of types of minds abound in Buddha Dhamma.

Librarians have familiarity with a non-Buddhist list of thinking skills compiled by Herri and Dillon's published in The Australian Library Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2., May 1992.

These include:

Connecting, generating, relating, associating, sorting, intuiting, projecting, suspending, hazarding, inventing, proving, improving, clarifying, disrupting, arguing, analysing, composing, sequencing, imagining, predicting, questioning, wondering, modifying, extending, hypothesising, rehearsing, reflecting, co-operating, convincing, capitulating, retracting, suggesting, comparing, contrasting, reconciling, rejecting, including, accommodating, refining, testing, judging, synchronising, harmonising, assimilating, refuting, inducing, deducing, solving, eliciting, speculating, empathising, internalising, approximating, generalising, matching, soliciting, contradicting, compromising, abstracting, selecting, alluding, probing, and synthesising.

This year (1999), part of our public relations will be expressed as examples of critical thinking to familiarise our audiences with the ways we convey Buddha Dhamma Teachings to non-specialists.

Members are not paid a salary for their services.

We look forward to the emergence of electronic services that will provide the fastest and least expensive information to our clients.

This white paper illustrates the four directions to positive sum games we suggest will appear from use of critical thinking about our current management tactics.

1.1 Management tactics having contingencies for our Data Warehouse

We are developing a warehouse of proprietary "hard-to-replicate" Buddha Dhamma information in electronic form on our Local Area Network (LAN) running on LINUX with the file server component emulating a NETWARE 3.12 system.

Our email system runs on LINUX using a native POP3 mail server.

During 1998, all our active Members became proficient in the notion of using email, rather than paper on a notice board, to handle information more effectively.

This proficiency was achieved by using the PINE email software for LINUX during the year 1998, via terminals.

The present level of development of our LAN gives clients accessibility to incoming mail, outgoing mail, asset registers, profit and loss statements, Membership lists, international contact lists, minutes of meetings, managerial reports, best practice forms, our Articles of Association and Memorandum of Association.

As Michael Buckland observed in 1992, "The on-line library catalogue is probably the most sophisticated computer system of any type in routine direct use by the general public".

The file server of our LAN system makes our library catalogue readable on-line.

Another external LINUX web box running APACHE web server software system makes our library catalogue readable internationally from our Victorian Internet site at www.bdcu.org.au.

We can use our email to update different websites with contemporary proposals.

In short, use of our central storage of data (Data Warehousing) gives us the capability to provide others with distributed access to any of our Company documentation, reports and policy documents.

This is a perspective of how we practice the Buddhist first perfection - generosity (Pali: dana) for local and international clients.

1.2 Formulating A View For Persons In Task Units To Look To Our Future With A Sense Of Purpose And Confidence

Upon accepting our Heritage, our Managers' training gives them the minds that can find the needed sense of beginning to deal with current realities for the future.

In November 1998, the feasibility of self-directed Task Units was tested more than once by those 10 managers who attended the WFB Conference and by those 5 managers who ran the Centre as usual during that period.

This Conference gave many Members a vision that our foundations make sense and that possibilities exist for us to help WFB international Conferences extend into the next Century and beyond.

Once we establish a time scale of a few hundred years, we can think about new things, such as a total rebuilding at our premises occurring next Century, provided we maintain the existing property at a high level.

In the economic life of an office building, about four times as much will be spent on maintenance as the initial cost of the building.

So, within the next five hundred years, even if we avoid cheap solutions to maintenance, it is reasonable to expect the present wooden building to be knocked down or gutted for re-furbishing at least once a century.

However, our data warehouse and library holdings may be changed in format but are not to be knocked down or gutted.

Our library and our data warehouse can be expected to last at least five times longer than the knocking down and rebuilding of our buildings and at least a hundred times longer than the present infrastructure.

Our Managers probe the need to reduce running costs before they have to be addressed.

For example, we installed five water tanks before the cost of water rose as "user pays" for excess water has become the order of the day.

The main advantage of having five water tanks is in the case of forest fires, as we have the ability to fight fires even if the mains water supply fails.

If the building burnt down, it would destroy our library and data warehouse.

It appears likely that the complexity of e-commerce is being more and more accepted by our organisation because our key managers have shown they are capable of rapid, interactive experimentation and "learning by doing" in these new technologies.

Over time our management tactics have evolved in order to meet this goal in more efficient and effective ways.

1.3 A quick review

A quick 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 Dharma.

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.

1.4 The training paradigm used for effective team building

While many of our staff have been given theory of teams and had experience in committees, task forces and work groups, it took attendance at the WFB Conference for most to begin to understand what a real task unit is and how real team work can make a difference in both individual performance and overall organisational success.

ARL/OMS consultant Maureen Sullivan (1993) identified components of an effective team building program as:
- Orientation to teams and teamwork
- Stages in building a team
- Roles and responsibilities in a team
- Developing commitment
- Communication skills
- Negotiating and dealing with conflict
- Facilitation skills
- Holding effective meetings
- Presentation skills
- Group problem solving and decision making
- Assessing team performance
- Creative problem solving techniques
- Reaching consensus and closure
- Valuing diversity
- Training and coaching others
- Quality improvement programs
- Quality tools and techniques

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 which 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.

Defence 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 analysed and found to be wanting.

There are defence mechanisms in persons which 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 scrutinised. 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 which 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 websiite 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 which centralises control of the distribution of information at the top. We are seeking directions which 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 Asia or America or any other continent, but to the 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 that our research 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 which 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 in research 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 which are to operate throughout many countries.

So, our new managers must set up research systems which 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 which 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 research using 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 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 appears to be based on the premise that the target market of libraries requires one or more of these defence mechanisms to drive their learning. We do not share the same belief that this will lead to effective or efficient learning outcomes.

Some persons view the world with ideas that were applicable in 1860 or perhaps even in 1890, when information was difficult to find, 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.

May all beings be well and happy.

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

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Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Chan Academy Australia (Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.)

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