Damage Control
Political damage is usually caused by political incompetence.
But is political competence actually possible in a world where many persons in positions of political power are incompetent?
When a Ship of State is damaged, who has the skills to repair it?
When a Ship of State is too big, in any dimension, it is either likely to be unstable or unable to be maneuvered through narrow channels and shallow seas.
When a Ship of State is too small, in any dimension, how is it to retain stability, particularly when other Ships of State are making big waves in the vicinity?
Who should have the power to control any Ship of State?
Who has the necessary skills?
What are the necessary skills?
How do you control damage in various situations?
How do you clean up messes?
How do you restore order?
How do you maintain order after it has been restored?
How do you define order?
How do you define control?
What is your acquaintance with the concept of the Ship of State?
What do you regard the skills of a good navigator to be?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee requires all its members and prospective members to provide insightful answers to the above questions.
How do you usually acquire insight?
How do you assess danger?
Perhaps you have at least once been in a situation where the refusal to comply with a demand has been dangerous for you, even when the demand itself has placed you in danger.
How do you usually assess demands?
A navigator only has adequate freedom when able to act upon the facts of a situation.
Perhaps you mainly assess yourself in terms of the experiences, and people, you like and dislike.
Perhaps the people and experiences you dislike often lower your mood.
Perhaps the people and experiences you like often lift your mood.
What do you know about the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee?
When a navigator is competent, what does that mean in practice?
When a navigator is incompetent, what does that mean?
How do you know when a navigator has been set up to fail, either with faulty equipment, outdated information or incompetent colleagues?A sensible navigator requires the ability to control the decision-making process between one location and another.
Yet knowing about navigation is not enough.
A competent navigator prevents emergencies from occurring.
That is why every captain should have highly developed skills of navigation and use them consistently well.
Many skills are required when emergencies arise.
How would you literally prevent a damaged watercraft from sinking?
What would you do in a medical emergency?
How would you assess the trauma triad of death and seek out competent damage control surgery?
How do you assess the urgency of necessary elective surgery?
How do you assess mental health?
What have been your experiences of emergency management?
What do you know about control as a function of management?
What have been your experiences of a state of emergency?
What is a political destination?
What is your knowledge of the psychology of control?
Perhaps you are currently experiencing an unpleasant mood.
If so, what is its origin?
If you are currently experiencing a pleasurable mood, what has caused it to arise?
The mission of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee is to help you make the world a much better place than it would be without you.
Are you sure you have the motivation with which to assist the committee?
The committee is an adhocracy with many organic features, including in the refreshment and clothing choices of its members.
What do you expect of yourself in terms of providing leadership and seeking guidance?
Who are your current mentors, and why?
What have the people who influence you taught you about probability, including the Bayesian interpretation of probability?
All members of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee mentor each other.
Who do you mentor, and why, and how?
What do you know about the mutual support of colleagues in terms of justice and injustice?
What do you know about bureaucracies?
What do you know about adhocracies?
How do you compare colleagues with missionaries and diplomats and philanthropists and patrons and political leaders?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee practices elegant egalitarianism, hence the desire of the committee members to assist you in your duties as an enlightened world leader.
Perhaps you have no desire to assist the committee with its mission.
How may the world become a much better place, in your view, and how could that be achieved?
What is your vision in relation to the mission?
Good morale is very important indeed when facing potential danger in social situations.
Good morale is especially important when attempting to save lives in emergencies.
Competent navigation is associated with good research, accurate observations through empirical evidence and suitable technologies, and all other reflections of adequate preparation.
Yet the world does not always act in accordance with the natural sciences in terms of accurate prediction.
Nature, in its natural state, is not amenable to scientific control.A competent navigator, in any situation, not only has the necessary technical skills but also suitable self-control.
That is why the assessment of mental health is so important when choosing navigators for particular journeys.
Whilst your knowledge of geoinformatics and the history of navigation may be immense, it is likely to be useless if you happen to be a control freak.
How do you know when someone is a control freak or otherwise abusive?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee gives emphasis to collegiality and congeniality in all its activities.
- Holding Powerful People Properly to Account
- Hot Air, Hopeful Heirs and Horrible Hotels
- Preparing for the Long-Term Future Appropriately
- The Quest for a Civilised Atmosphere
- Why COP26 will Inevitably be Crap
- From the Glorious Revolution to the Climatological Revolution
- The Butterflies are Dying
- Prickly Processes
You may or may not associate the Ship of State particularly closely with hydrography and other applied sciences, such as medicine and engineering.
Where and how did you learn about social control, particularly in terms of collective identity and critical thinking?
What do you know about collective identity in terms of a shared mission?
With whom are you currently part of a team and/or crew and/or committee, and why?
A standard operating procedure works in standard conditions. It requires a mindset amenable to the maintenance of suitable standards.
But what is a suitable standard if not one in which the maintenance of standards has priority?
What is your acquaintance with technical maintenance and reliability?
When do you know dangerous or otherwise problematic shortcuts have been taken?
How do you assess responsibility in such circumstances?
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee has had a heavy schedule of work over recent months, as you may be aware.
Assessing your temperament has been a very difficult task for the committee to achieve satisfactorily, with or without competent assistance. You have not been adequately co-operative.
What is your usual approach to investing in purposeful reviews?
How do you usually assess your temperament in terms of compatibility and incompatibility?
How do you usually assess the temperament of anyone else?
How do you assess your own personality?
Perhaps you are feeling resentful towards your current location in a social hierarchy and frustrated at not yet achieving a higher social status and/or higher income and/or particular perks.
Perhaps you resent being in your current geographical and/or socioeconomic and/or political location.
Who usually has the freedom to choose political destinations?
It is rarely the competent navigator.
Who owns the Ship of State?
It is rarely the competent navigator.
Who has helped to build the Ship of State?
It is rarely the competent navigator.
Who is seeking to destroy the Ship of State?
It is never the competent navigator.
Perhaps you have trouble navigating a health system or an education system or a justice system or another type of system.
Is your incompetence in that regard a reflection of your personal inadequacies and/or disabilities and/or disadvantages and/or the inadequacies within the system itself?
Art is the application of skill.
Technical skills count for little if they are applied with inadequate consistency.
The same applies to social skills.
What do you know about competence, particularly in terms of supervision?
What do you know about your locus of control?
How are you psychologically affected when circumstances are not as you expected or desire?
How, if at all, do you attempt to maintain equanimity, whether under normal conditions or abnormal ones?
What do you know about conflict and competition?
What have been your experiences of rivalry?
There is no rivalry within the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee. Any sharp words are meant to boost productivity reasonably, not deflate egos unjustly.
How are you investing in enlightened productivity at present?
If you usually work in a headquarters, command centre, control room, aircraft cockpit or on the bridge of a ship, how have you prepared for emergencies, and how do you prevent them from arising?
If you usually work in the emergency department of a hospital, how do you prevent yourself from experiencing occupational burnout?
The necessary collegiate atmosphere for standard procedures to be satisfactorily followed is absent in many workplaces. That probelm may be a consequence of managerialism and other forms of oppression.
How do you know you have not been indoctrinated into believing managerialism is justified?
Managerialism demands performance through irrational command. It sets people up to fail. Its practitioners ignore evidence. Their behaviour reduces morale.
Yet many organisations have managerialist structures and systems.
They have turned colleagues into competitors.
They have turned workers into functionaries, controlled by and as machines, even when at home.
They have turned people outside the organisation into marketing targets and/or nonentities.
No wonder so many people experience anxiety and/or depression.
But how can such problems be resolved?
How, for example, do you prevent excessive anxiety, depression and hedonism?
Too much hedonism leads to selfish and stupid complacency.
Self-indulgence is often used as a way to cope with anxiety and/or depression.
What are your qualities as a leader, a supervisor, a manager, a watchkeeper, a navigator, and as a captain?
What have been your experiences of planning voyages and other journeys?
What have been your experiences of various forms of project management?
What have been your experiences in assessing various types of damage?
What have been your experiences in the prevention of various types of damage, particularly in terms of assessing risks, acknowledging hazards and giving priority to health, safety and conservation?
There are many important matters to consider.
What do you know about civil defence?
What do you know about occupational health and safety?
What do you know about first aid?
What do you know about crisis management and disaster recovery?
Which sorts of global studies have you completed, and how do you know?
What do you know about common behaviours within organisations, groups and disaster areas?
While all the real sciences make use of the scientific method in the acquisition of knowledge, some knowledge can only be acquired through other methods.
How, for example, have you acquired language skills?
What do you regard as mechanical arts and useful arts and liberal arts and performing arts and fine arts and decorative arts and applied arts and the humanities?
How have you acquired an understanding of mathematics?
Where and when did you acquire knowledge of civility, and from whom?
Good management is not an ideology.
Managerialism is an ideology.
Good management is informed by preparedness through learning.
Managerialism and militarism have much in common.
Yet collegiate behaviour often has much in common with elitism, in much the same way as managerialism and militarism.
What do you know about warfare?
What do you know about serious injuries?
What do you know about severe weather?
Who has been steering a Ship of State towards warfare, serious injuries and severe weather, and why?
Perhaps you regard yourself as capable of navigating by the sun, moon, planets and stars in the absence of maps and signposts and other navigational tools.
Perhaps you have long been interested in the history of geodesy.
Perhaps you enjoy using the scientific method.
Perhaps you always perform scientific experiments and other procedures with suitable ethics and rigour.
Perhaps your sense of achievement provides you with a feeling of contentment.
Perhaps your need for achievement is yet to be satisfactorily met, you have experienced too many setbacks and you are suffering from emotional exhaustion, compassion fatigue, disillusionment and/or psychological burnout.
Perhaps you have a low mood as a consequence.
When standard procedures are necessary for the practical and efficient achievement of straightforward goals, such as successfully moving a maritime vessel, aircraft, train, truck, parcel, commodity, person or spaceship from one location to another, highly structured organisational practices tend to assist the process.
But when is an organic organisation most necessary?
When is creative problem-solving most necessary if not in the absence of straightforward goals and straightforward procedures?
Perhaps you feel more creative in a relatively natural environment than in a relatively non-natural one.
What do you know about organic architecture?
What do you know about organic democracy?
What do you know about wedge politics?
What do you know about the politics of spin?
Perhaps you lack the motivation to answer the above questions, for a variety of reasons.
What is your acquaintance with the concepts of self-efficacy and moral agency?
What is your acquaintance with the concept of goodness and how does it relate, in your view, to the concepts of justice, knowledge, truth, independent action, independent decision-making, and intelligibility?
What have been your contributions to humanitarianism and humanitarian aid, directly and/or indirectly?
What have been your contributions to co-operation and co-ordination in various emergencies, and how competent have those contributions been?
What do you know about humanism and post-humanism and how did you acquire that information?
When do you regard innovation as most necessary, and why?
When do you believe it is most necessary to act alone or informally to resolve a problem?
When do you believe it is most necessary to act as a colleague, or even as a college, to resolve a problem?
Perhaps you usually associate colleges with the provision of education and/or religion and/or medicine.
Perhaps you mainly regard the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee as a think tank.
What is your acquaintance with research institutes and their sources of funding?
What do you know about corporate social responsibility in terms of funding, and purpose?
How do you attempt to meet needs and prevent disasters if not through a suitable acquaintance with predictability and accountability?
If your temperament is not usually associated with self-discipline, how have you attempted to resolve the associated problems, if at all?
How do you usually assess discipline if not in terms of free will, good evidence and good reasoning?
Where and how have you sought advice on how to respond appropriately to ill-disciplined persons, particularly those who ignore your personal boundaries and intellectual authority, and either have a cruel sense of humour or no sense of humour at all?
Where have your investigations into the very best mental health taken you, physically, digitally, intellectually and emotionally?
How do you define good mental health and mental ill health at present, and why?
How are you currently investing in awareness, and how do you know?
What do you know about goodness in terms of necessary ethics?
The world has been badly damaged by greed, ignorance, hubris and hypocrisy.
How are you investing in urgent reforms, and with whom?
How can you be sure you are investing in the very best mental health?
How do you know you are properly investing in political kindness?
Perhaps you are seeking to know more about the collective intelligence of the Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee.
Perhaps you are seeking to know more about the collective intelligence within and between other organisations.
How do you distinguish between collective intelligence and public relations?
How do you tell the difference between a news agency and a press service?
Perhaps you view the planet on which you are currently living as Spaceship Earth.
Or perhaps you regard it as a Ship of Fools.
What do you know about seaworthiness?
What do you know about political competence and incompetence?
Of course, much political incompetence is associated with corruption and hypocrisy.
In Australia, for example, governments of whatever political persuasion do not bother with damage control in any way whatsoever. They merely ignore the truth and keep feeding public money towards the greedy at the expense of the needy, regardless of international agreements to the contrary.
The Revolutionary Climatological Needlepoint Committee in calling for world revolution of the Twaklinist variety, not the Marxist variety.
Which types of food do you expect on a Ship of State in the age of climate change?
What sorts of jobs do you expect to be available on the ship, and why?
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