Nudge Management

As a high-school freshman I, along with most of my classmates, was subjected to the gauntlet. Upperclassmen would line a hallway and push us from one side of the hall to the other. As you made your way down the hall you would be shoved first from one side, then from the other.

The natural reaction to this was to resist the shoving. So you would manage to stop your sideways motion by the time you got three quarters of the way across the hall. You would then be fully susceptible to a shove from the other direction.

I found it much more effective to go with the flow. When someone shoves you, just keep on barreling over to the other side. Bounce of the guy across the hall back to the first side. It could be rather a fun “ride.” It also had the effect of endangering the upperclass bullies, who would  "oof" as you leaned your shoulder into their chests for the bounce. I didn’t have much bulk at the time and didn't inflict much damage, but the mass of schoolbooks I was carrying helped.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson for life here, but I think so. There have always been those heroes of faith or culture who stood against the flow. “Pull and be damned.” Or, at least, pull (or push) and damn the consequences. In some cases these stands have brought great and good changes.

But I expect a great deal more has been achieved by going with the flow and then steering toward the shore when the tide allows. “Nudge management” I’ve called it when working in the corporate world. Take someone’s passion or perspective and direct it toward a worthy goal.

I worked on the pond at Weyerhauser. The pond was actually part of the river which drained down from the mountains but was also affected by tides. When the tide was coming in, the pond was almost still (sometimes flowing upstream). In these times you could use your pike pole to move the logs to wherever you wanted them, and line them up for feeding into the mill. But when the rain water was heavy in the river and the tide was rushing out, it was impossible to resist the flow. The best you could do was to nudge one end or the other of a log and try to get it lined up with the others.

When log jams occurred, you might be tempted to push against the flow. You could do this when the flow was weak. But of course the worst jams occurred when the flow was heaviest. Pushing against the flow was futile. I watched an experienced pond man pick which logs to pull or push just enough to let the flow work in his favor.

Pushy people can achieve their goals by brute force—sometimes verbal rather than physical. But in the confluence of receding tide and high river, they are likely to be crushed. Social tides occur as well. Revolutions are born of these. Bashir Assad has been pushing hard against the flow. He has a tugboat with many horsepower, and he might win. Most analysts believe (or did until recently) that it is only a matter of time before he is crushed by the tide. The harder and longer he pushes against it, the more likely he will end in ruin.

I am sure my analogy has its faults. Should America’s native populations have gone more with the flow or should they have fought harder? The “civilizing” inclinations of the Cherokees seemed to do them little if any good in the long run. Others might say better to take a stand and die for your principles than become a turncoat and survive without honor.

Yes, but there are different approaches. When the tide and the river are nearly matched, you can redirect the logs. When they are combined, attempts to redirect are limited to minor but strategic nudges. A dead pond man is remarkably ineffective for everything but shutting down the mill.

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Note (Dec 2016): I first wrote this in my journal in 2012. At the time not many thought that Assad would last this long. At the mill we had a powerful tugboat to transport log rafts and to move logs around when needed. Assad has a very powerful tug named Russia.