I think that “X should have known better” can be legitimately true, but the implications and level of accusation/nurture needs to be calibrated in radically different ways when X is, for example: a child, an adult idiot, a college professor, or the leader of a large organization.
The idea of a teachable moment seems to be largely about noticing when someone has a problem that was caused by a more abstract process failure and intervening in the moment when they care deeply about the object level issue to help them solve that and also to notice the process failure. This happens all the time with children.
I think part of why the issue gets complicated is that competence of this sort seems like one of the obvious criteria that should be used to select a leader. Even though humans are not automatically strategic, a competent leader in their 40′s or 50′s should, by that age, have already cultivated strategic planning abilities that include proactively seeking out information related to the domain for which they have official responsibility, figuring it out, and applying it as appropriate.
If an organization experiences a major failure, people who don’t really understand all the details of what it would have taken to prevent can still infer that the existing leadership didn’t have the ability prevent it for some reason and to forestall a demand for regime change the leadership needs to explain why no alternative leaders could have handled the issue any better. This could be a legitimate point: the best poker player in the world will still lose some hands.
In our daily life, if someone says to us that “tragedy T happened because you didn’t check S first” that can be an act of helpful teaching or a social power grab or both. If someone is predisposed to see that sort of thing as a power grab, or is inordinately fond of autonomy, they might end up get a bit defensive when someone tries to teach them something. This might be adaptive, or not, depending on other factors.
I think that “X should have known better” can be legitimately true, but the implications and level of accusation/nurture needs to be calibrated in radically different ways when X is, for example: a child, an adult idiot, a college professor, or the leader of a large organization.
The idea of a teachable moment seems to be largely about noticing when someone has a problem that was caused by a more abstract process failure and intervening in the moment when they care deeply about the object level issue to help them solve that and also to notice the process failure. This happens all the time with children.
I think part of why the issue gets complicated is that competence of this sort seems like one of the obvious criteria that should be used to select a leader. Even though humans are not automatically strategic, a competent leader in their 40′s or 50′s should, by that age, have already cultivated strategic planning abilities that include proactively seeking out information related to the domain for which they have official responsibility, figuring it out, and applying it as appropriate.
If an organization experiences a major failure, people who don’t really understand all the details of what it would have taken to prevent can still infer that the existing leadership didn’t have the ability prevent it for some reason and to forestall a demand for regime change the leadership needs to explain why no alternative leaders could have handled the issue any better. This could be a legitimate point: the best poker player in the world will still lose some hands.
In our daily life, if someone says to us that “tragedy T happened because you didn’t check S first” that can be an act of helpful teaching or a social power grab or both. If someone is predisposed to see that sort of thing as a power grab, or is inordinately fond of autonomy, they might end up get a bit defensive when someone tries to teach them something. This might be adaptive, or not, depending on other factors.