Competence
A negotiation masterclass—Competence, an appreciation—Institutional continuity
Is a short, weekly newsletter format from The Alpine Review, where we share three things that drew our attention. This is an experiment and will evolve based on perseverance and feedback. We’re curious to know what you think.
If you only want to hear when the next Alpine Review is ready, you can opt-out of Ticket No3 here.
I had other plans for this week’s newsletter. But then, perusing my old notes, I stumbled on this gut-wrenching interrogation of Russell Williams, the former colonel of the Canadian Armed Forces and convicted double-murderer who was sentenced to twenty-five years without parole in 2010. This, in turn, made me think of three things, listed below. (I apologize in advance if this stirs any negative emotions, so consider this a heads-up) — LJ
A negotiation masterclass
Former FBI lead hostage negotiator Chris Voss wrote a best-seller on negotiation titled Never Split the difference, and he also made a masterclass on the art of negotiation. But skip the book and masterclass fluff and just listen to his conversation with James Altucher. It’s all you need, and it’s good.
Like it or not, you have to negotiate all the time. Might as well get better at it.
But the interrogation of Russell Williams by Detective Sergeant Jim Smyth of the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), as troubling as it is to watch, is a masterpiece in psychology and the art of negotiation. Negotiation techniques like mirroring, context-setting, fostering trust, tolerating silence, non-violent confrontation, empathetic understanding, bluff, mindfulness, calm… it’s all in there. Not in theory, but in practice. Very well worth a listen.
(As an aside, watching the Williams interrogation I couldn’t help but remind myself how good I have things in my life, and to keep myself motivated to make the most out of every day. I hope you do too.)
Competence
The second thing the video made me think about is competence. Just think of the value of the confession Smyth was able to extract. For the family of the victims so that they get closure, and for society at large to avoid expensive court drama and, above all, to get this dangerous man out of the way. I call this Effective Competence, an ancestor of EA.
Everywhere it seems, we’ve seen institutions failing (magnified to some extreme during the pandemic) and it’s been argued that we might have entered a post-values and post-competence world.
Here’s FT’s Martin Wolf commenting in July 202 about Trump, US withdrawal and, generally, the case for seriousness and competence:
“Yet things have fallen apart. The US has succumbed to fierce internal divisions that have ended up in a destructive zero-sum nationalism. Mr Trump is the embodiment of these divisions, as former secretary of defence Jim Mattis has asserted. He is also the chief protagonist of his country’s rejection of its historic role as global model of liberal democracy and leader of an alliance of similarly inclined countries. Mr Trump’s is a post-values US. It is also post-competence. Even when people around the world did not like what the US did, they thought it knew what it was doing. The frightening success of the Trump administration in dismantling government has transformed that view during the coronavirus era.”
We can’t give up on institutions and we can’t become, as Martin Wolf warns, “post-competence”. Inside most institutions, there is a competent person doing important, potentially vital work. Granted, there are a lot of bullshit jobs, but we need to recognize institutional and personal competence when we see it. Competence matters and it was on full display when Jim Smyth walked into that interrogation room in 2010, and it made a difference.
Defund the police
There are ideas which germinate in the zeitgeist for good reasons but defunding the police isn’t one of them. Transform the police, re-imagine the police, reset the police, call it all you want, but a reductionist slogan like defund seems misguided and unwise. Competence is expensive. Safety is expensive, and crime is not a “construct”.
It’s useful to be reminded that, despite all the negative coverage, there is also good work being done in police departments every day (work that is largely invisible) and that we are safer for it.
This recent paper seems to confirm the point:
This paper finds that disbanding police departments leads to fewer police-related deaths, fewer reported crimes, and lower law enforcement expenditures. However, the number of crimes reported by the sheriff for the entire county increases by an amount commensurate to the decrease in the number of crimes reported by cities that disbanded their police department. Furthermore, disbanding police departments is associated with an increase in county sheriffs spending which offsets the city savings. Thus, disbanding police departments does not appear to impact overall crime, shifts responsibility for law enforcement onto other governments, and reduces the available information about cities’ crimes.
Fast, reductive formulas, dismantling narratives and luxury beliefs are not going to help repair our ailing institutions, but a renewed appreciation for competence might be a step in the right direction.
I call them tickets because they opened a door in my mind and briefly turned me into an investigator, wanting to know more. Perhaps they will have the same effect on you.
If you enjoy this issue, please share it on social media or by forwarding it to anyone else you think might find it interesting.