archives

I spent three days last week at JAOO, an IT developer conference.

On Wednesday I attended a tutorial on "The Art of Telling Your Design Story", given by Rebecca Wirf-Brocks [bio and summary].

There was a lot of good information on communication. Here are some of the points:

Five things to consider when preparing:

• Goal: What's the goal of your communication?
• Scope: How much material are you going to cover?
• Depth: How much detail are you going to go to?
• Tone: Formal, informal, diagrams, examples?
• Results: What's your concrete outcome?

Ways to Screw Up

• Inconsistency: example - a recent presentation on Krishna consciousness I attended contrasted material existence with "eternal life". The audience was left confused as the first part of the presentation was about reincarnation - isn't material life "eternal life" as well?
• Explaining too much: In answering questions on this point the presenter additionally introduced new concepts and points, further complicating understanding.
• Over precision: Too much detail about a minor issue

Remember that the audience comes from a "one life" understanding and to introduce reincarnation and then contrast it with spiritual life calling that "eternal life" is confusing. Let me just add that apart from that one small point the presentation was excellent. It used several media - video and whiteboard, and was very engaging.

Story Telling Basics

• Start from most fundamental and go to more detailed
• Things are more fundamental than relationships
• Large structures and shapes are more fundamental than details
• Order the elements of your story from the most to least fundamental
• Use multiple descriptions
• Is there a "natural order" to your story?
• Are there side stories that you are willing to take?
• What questions do you expect?

Speaking to a Diverse Crowd

• Cater to the majority
• Choose what to emphasize
• Defuse quacky ducks
• For impatient audiences: Park questions that will derail your story-telling
• For impatient audiences: Don't present fundamentals first
• For impatient audiences: Stick to the point

Communicating Complex Ideas

• Use progressive realization
• Give an overview
• Create views that move someone to where you want in gradual, interesting steps

Holding Attention

• Summarize important stuff
• Note important details
• Skip lightly over certain things
• Shift and illustrate different perspectives

Now in 2008 comes this story in the latest online Time magazine: the Boy Scouts are being evicted from a public building in Philadelphia for refusing to allow gays and atheists to join their organization ["The Boy Scouts' Free Speech Fight"].

Mayor Michael Nutter sums it up:

"If we were talking about an organization that discriminated against African Americans, Italians, the Irish, Catholics, people of the Jewish faith, or any of a number of other categories, there would be such an outrage that you wouldn't be able to contain it.

Now, I'm not prescribing Gay Marriage, I'm simply describing the evolution of the modern environment. Krishna-kirti prabhu [website] has also been following this development over the past few years. You might be interested to read my April 2005 post Preaching in the post-Gay-Marriage World for suggestions on preaching angles in this new environment.

Yes ISKCON, as the prophetic Krishna-kirti has been warning, your turn is coming:

If there are other groups and organizations similarly situated, we will certainly get to the bottom of it and take the appropriate action," Nutter said, "but for the moment, we're talking about the Boy Scouts... the right thing to do for the Boy Scouts is to stop discriminating against homosexuals and atheists."

Strategies to deal with this could include in the short term enforcing that only initiated ISKCON members can get married in ISKCON temples, rather than allowing uninitiated Indian congregational members to do so too. This will give us an arbitrary dividing line that doesn't involve "heterosexuals only", and prevent a militant activist in the congregation forcing the issue down the line. And, ultimately, I think we need to "allow" gay devotees to maintain their own temples where we (they? I'm confused...) can cater to that sector of the populace. We need more pure devotees amongst the gays.

It's a diverse world: you can't deny it, but you can construct (socially) to accommodate it. That's the Vedic paradigm. Vedic civilization encompasses and assimilates everything, and it has the Vaisnava brahmanas at the center - or at least our version of it does, and that's the version we're pushing.

On a related but separate note, further to the points that I made in Preaching in the post-Gay-Marriage World about de- and recontextualized quoting of Srila Prabhupada, I should add that cutting and pasting a whole lot of Prabhupada's statements from different places to create a compendium is also creating a different context, and thus quoting out of context. That is to say, if I take a whole lot of things that Srila Prabhupada said on one subject in different environments to different people, and then stick them all together and present this aggregation in a different environment I may be "quoting Prabhupada verbatim", but I'm doing so in a way and a context that he himself did not do, and one that does not necessarily reflect the same intent that he had when he made those statements.

In order to faithfully represent Srila Prabhupada we have to speak appropriately to the time, place, and circumstance with the same intent and purity of purpose that he had. That takes purification, not mere imitation.

The goal is to help people to become Krishna conscious. It's not just to prove to everyone how "right" we are. As His Holiness Devamrita Swami mentioned the other day, that was Prabhupada's genius - he did not compromise on the principle, but he was flexible in the application. So to follow his footsteps we have to do the same: be uncompromising on principle, and intelligently flexible in application. The Krishna Consciousness movement is not meant for blind following, but for creating independently thoughtful men.

That other group dedicated to the downfall of materialistic globalized civilization is also facing significant internal debate over traditional gender roles. From CNN comes the story: "Al Qaeda faces gender debate".

Muslim extremist women are challenging al Qaeda's refusal to include -- or at least acknowledge -- women in its ranks, in an emotional debate that gives rare insight into the gender conflicts lurking beneath one of the strictest strains of Islam.

It's interesting to note how a group that is arguably the quintessence of the agrarian backlash to post-industrial global society is also being pulled kicking and screaming into post-modernity.

Al-Zawahiri's remarks show the fine line al Qaeda walks in terms of public relations. In a modern Arab world where women work even in some conservative countries, al Qaeda's attitude could hurt its efforts to win over the public at large. On the other hand, noted SITE director Katz, al-Zawahiri has to consider that many al Qaeda supporters, such as the Taliban, do not believe women should play a military role in jihad.

Hmmm... perhaps they should consider annotations? Then again, that might be singularly divisive, since the two camps have practically diametrically opposed views.

Al-Zawahiri's question-and-answer campaign is one sign of al Qaeda's sophistication in using the Web to keep in touch with its popular base, even while its leaders remain in hiding. However, the Internet has also given those disenfranchised by al Qaeda -- in this case, women -- a voice they never had before.

Go the web and people who have figured out how it alters the game! ISKCON has the venerable D.A.S.I (Devotees Associating with Spiritual Intent) blog - which is not to be confused with the new (Vaisnava) Dasi blog, which is for the more militantly activist wing. The older, more established D.A.S.I blog is focused on individual spiritual practice, with a mission that includes focusing on developing members' Krishna consciousness and deepening their relationships, and a longer term focus of "Personal…Local…Global". The new Dasi blog, on the other hand, is more political in nature, focuses on day-to-day current events, and calls members to political action, including lobbying the individual members of the GBC (their email addresses are helpfully listed on the front page). Recent pronouncements coming from the GBC do give the impression that the body is responsive to this form of influence.

Interestingly I stumbled across this in my RSS-feeds today:

Bureaucracies tend to define their church’s mission as a form of liberalism for another reason: They are easily taken over by politically organized groups, both because such people tend to join them to advance their cause and because an organized group can easily be given a place in the process. Liberals are politically more active and better organized, in part because traditional believers are working on their sermons or running soup kitchens or raising their children or helping their neighbors.

- Reorganizing Religion - Why the Church Bureaucracies Have to Go

I'm not saying that this is the case in ISKCON, but if it were, the new Dasi blog deliberately or instinctively (woman's intuition?) homes in on that leverage point.

And if some Vaisnavis find even this level of political activism still too moderate for their taste, there's always that other revolutionary organization to go to, to take it to the next level:

Women bent on becoming militants have at least one place to turn to. A niche magazine called "al-Khansaa" -- named for a female poet in pre-Islamic Arabia who wrote lamentations for two brothers killed in battle -- has popped up online. The magazine is published by a group that calls itself the "women's information office in the Arab peninsula," and its contents include articles on women's terrorist training camps, according to SITE.

More power to the sisters!

(And no, I am not calling politically active women in ISKCON "terrorists", just to be clear on that point.)