Signal your turns

“People change and forget to tell each other.” – Lillian Hellman

My sweet, old Ford Bronco II has 172,000 miles of history in it, a broken driver’s side door that has to be opened from the outside, a passenger window stuck in one position not quite all the way up to the top (very exciting when it’s snowing), no air conditioning, and a busted driver’s seat that has to be bolstered up with a very large pillow unless you prefer driving in the blessed horizontal. Add the effluvia of a toddler (Cheerios) and a teenager (Napoleon Dynamite temporary tattoos) and you might approximate my Hot Ride. A Lamborghini Murcielago it ain’t.

But this Jethro-mobile is a dear, old friend, transporting me through many, many transitions, like the big one during which I bought it 14 years ago. I was pregnant with my older daughter, Emma.

Until then, I didn’t have a car. Living in a big city with an extensive Metro system, no parking to speak of, and a police force with a healthy ticket quota system, I didn’t much need one.

Instead, I rode my blue 1968 Schwinn 3-speed bicycle everywhere, with the brrriing-brrriing of my ladybug bell and two wire baskets on the back, the perfect size and shape for paper grocery bags, one on each side, balanced. It was the kind of bike on which you sit up real straight, like the Wicked Witch of the West toting Toto around in that Big Wind or a bike you could imagine Kitty from Gunsmoke wearing to accommodate her long skirts.

When I got good and big and pregnant, people started veering away when they saw me wobble down the street on that bike, my balance affected by the addition in the middle front, their faces frozen like Munch’s “Scream,” fearing I might give birth in second gear.

Finally, my lovely, soft-spoken and powerful OB-GYN laid down the law: stay off the bike and she would give me an epidural when the time came. Seemed like a reasonable bribe and later, in the throes of labor, one I’m quite, quite happy I took. So I asked my stepfather to find me a little used car. Within days, he had found me a pristine Ford Bronco for sale by a friend of his who evidently vacuumed it daily and wiped down the engine with Q-tips after every use, it was so clean. And the love affair began.

When I was 16 and lived in Sri Lanka as an exchange student, I swore I would never, ever, ever (ah, to be 16 again, so sure of ever) take modern conveniences for granted again (oh, things like flush toilets, running water, mosquito repellant, air conditioning, and ice cubes). Cars were included in that blanket statement of appreciation: after walking everywhere, from village to village, I vowed to stop whining about not getting a new car like my next door neighbor. But it’s hard to maintain that level of gratefulness, isn’t it?

And as my little truck has started failing, I’ve grown embarrassed of her lack rather than thankful for her gifts. Do I believe that others might make assumptions about me based solely on the aged car I’m driving? Probably. Does it color people’s impressions of me when I reach outside the driver’s side door to open it? Probably. Should it? No, but it does. Do we have another car I could be driving? Yes, but I like this one.

Lately, I’ve gotten increasingly irritated looks from drivers as I toodle my way around town in little Bronky. “Road rage is really out of control,” I think to myself as people gesture harshly. “Maybe they’re irritated because I’m not able to accelerate from zero to sixty in two seconds.”  “Perhaps they are good Samaritans trying to warn me that my poncho is hanging out of the door and in danger of wrapping around the wheel well and strangling me to death like that nice ballerina, how nice!”

Finally, a friend saw me downtown. “By the way,” she said. “Did you know that you don’t have any turn signals on your car?”

All that time, I thought I was signaling my turns, but I wasn’t. The people around me couldn’t tell what I was going to do next and got angry as they realized I was turning (or not). There was no indication of my intention. They didn’t know and yet, I thought I was clearly telling them, dutifully shifting my turn signal lever up and down, hearing a click, click, click, and not knowing that it didn’t translate into the outside world. I thought they knew; they didn’t. They thought I was withholding information from them; I wasn’t, or at least I didn’t think that I was.

It reminded me of a bright fall day many years ago when I realized for the very first time (and too late and with a hot rush to my cheeks) that people couldn’t see my intentions, they could only see my actions. So, for example, while I knew about your birthday for weeks, with a smile at the very thought of it and a daily note to myself to send you a card, you couldn’t know that, could you, when the day came and went and you never heard from me? You can just imagine how much the stakes increase with different, more complex, more important scenarios.

As in cars, human beings “change lanes” all the time, don’t we?, shifting our direction, slowing and accelerating, taking detours and turns. The people around us just need to know sometimes—so they can shift, make room, slow down, yield.

Like this traffic conundrum (and metaphor), there’s also a gap sometimes between what I intended and what you received. There’s a gap sometimes between what I believe I’m demonstrating to the world (my turn signal) and what is really being put out into the world by me (my non-working turn signal).

Paul Watzlawick is one smart man. Author of Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (and many other books), he defines 5 basic axioms in his theory on communication that are necessary to have a functioning communication between two individuals. If one of these axioms is disturbed, communication might fail, he asserts:

• One Cannot Not Communicate: Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate. Even not signaling signals.

• Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication: all communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information –information on how the talker wants to be understood and how he himself sees his relation to the receiver of information. Signals indicate both intention and connection to.

• The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners’ communication procedures: Both the talker and the receiver of information structure the communication flow differently and interpret their own behavior as merely a reaction on the other’s behavior (i.e. every partner thinks the other one is the cause of a specific behavior). Human communication cannot be devolved into plain causation and reaction strings, communication rather appears to be cyclic. The dance at the traffic light is a dance of partners: it takes two to tango.

• Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal      communication as well. Signals are not always literal, but contextual.

• Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or parity. Like most things, signals depend on power—who has the right of way?

When we change lanes, and particularly if we don’t use our turn signal, we trigger a lot of reactions (the emphasis is mine):

“Resistance to change has generally been understood as a result of personal experiences and assessments about the reliability of others. Why is there resistance to change in organizations? An overview of the literature reveals that resistance occurs because it threatens the status quo (Beer, 1980; Hannan & Freeman, 1988; Spector, 1989), or increases fear and the anxiety of real or imagined consequences (Morris & Raben, 1995; Smith & Berg, 1987) including threats to personal security (Bryant, 1989) and confidence in an ability to perform (Morris & Raben, 1995; O’Toole, 1995).  Change may also be resisted because it threatens the way people make sense of the world, calling into question their values and rationality (Ledford, et al., 1989), and prompting some form of self justification (Staw, 1981) or defensive reasoning (Argyris, 1990). “

I’m at the traffic light, waiting to turn. You don’t signal so I don’t know which way you are going. People have cut me off in this situation before, so I make a quick assessment of whether I can trust you. I’m also fearful because I’m afraid you’ll either hit me or make me waste 5 seconds of my precious time while I watch you so I can know how to react. Your not signaling threatens my safety, diminishes my confidence in my ability to perform, and undermines my understanding of the traffic pattern. If I make the wrong move once the light turns green, I’ll justify it to myself by blaming you for not signaling.

Everything, yes, is a metaphor.

We are all connected at those traffic lights, aren’t we?

David and I use an exercise in our work that we call Triangle Boid. We’ve done it with small groups and groups with hundreds of people, to the same end. Each person in the group is asked to secretly identify two other people in the room who will serve as two points of a triangle for them, using themselves as the third point.

As a participant, once those other two points of my triangle are identified, after the word “go,” my job is to maintain a triangle shape using myself and those other two points as we move around the room without speaking. Where those two points move, I must move, keeping equidistant from each of them.

An oddly beautiful dance ensues, one that I’ve seen play out in so many organizations daily: I’m dancing, watching where my boss moves, and moving with him, then seeing him move in a different direction and moving there too, like seaweed. Everyone in the room becomes hyper-alert to the actions of others around them, maintaining their triangle, basing their own movements on the movements of others, understanding themselves only in relation to others.

Before starting, we’ve told the group that at some point in the exercise, we will tap one of them on the shoulder. If they feel that tap, they should sit down on the floor where they are. Everyone is told: “if one of the points of your triangle goes down, you must also go down.”

Once that tap is given—just one tap on one shoulder—even in a room of hundreds of people, every person in the room is down in a short period of time. Like a quiet and odd ballet, people fall. It is a striking image.

We are all interconnected. What I do affects you; what you do affects me. Even the slightest action, just one tap, just one point of the triangle, just one green light.

The Bronco is still going strong-ish, but I fear for its health as it reaches 16 this year. I’m (not so) secretly desiring a Vespa. With turn signals.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Check your turn signals. Signal your intent.

Own your triangle. Acknowledge the domino effect.

Love your old car. Cherish the history of turns it represents.