Passionate about Quality without being Emotional

[Wes Bucey]

Today was a kind of epiphany for me - I decided I could be passionate about Quality without being emotional.

"What's the difference?" you might ask.

Without exploring all the possible definitions of each, I prefer to limit my discussion to these definitions of each word:

EMOTION:

1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion.

PASSION:
Boundless enthusiasm: His skills as a player don't quite match his passion for the game.

I realize we can quibble about definitions, but for the purpose of this thread, I'd like to characterize

• "passion" as an intellectually derived train of thought where one consciously develops a relationship with a field of activity or study
  
  and
• "emotion" as an unconsciously developed reaction to observing or experiencing an activity or presentation of data.

Passion and emotion can be positive or negative. (Love or hate at first sight is an emotion; love or hate derived after evaluating and balancing good points and bad points is a passion [for the discussion of this thread.])

Thus, given the foregoing definition, I have a passion about seeing organizations operate efficiently. Quality Management Systems and the various "tools" of Quality are merely factors to consider, evaluate, and use or discard on the road to an efficient operation.

I recognize different folks rank each factor on a different scale, depending on their knowledge and their authority or capacity to implement tools and expend capital and resources to support those tools. Therefore, two people passionate about efficient operations may have different views about the best route to achieve efficiency. They may lay out elaborate logic to promote their own views, but won't attack each other. Emotional folks often refuse to listen to or read an opposing view and will reject or attack it out of hand. (Think of folks who attack an upcoming book or movie based only on a rumor of what it might contain.)

Some folks rage blindly against ALL tools when circumstances frustrate an effort to implement one or more of those tools. (Think of the moral fable of the fox and the sour grapes.) Such rage and transfered dislike of the tool is an unconscious emotion.

If we think only of passion and emotion as the factors in our dealings with others, can a passionate person successfully convince the emotional person to consider a proposition contrary to the emotional bias already in place? What are the options for an emotional person faced with a passionate person with an opposite point of view? (Don't forget, the passionate person may have flawless logic, but a false premise.)

How does this little drama beween passion and emotion play out here in the Cove?

As I see it, the passionate person has a responsibility to recognize the dynamic when it occurs and move to ameliorate the situation to prevent the flames from overflowing. If the so-called passionate person can't rise to the occasion, perhaps his passion has deteriorated to emotion. That's the time to call in the moderators to mediate or arbitrate the situation instead of escalating the battle.

I am pleased to observe the Cove has evolved from

• a Forum with a few logical, passionate folks and a lot of emotional folks
  to
• one with a majority of passionate folks who deal effectively with a few emotional ones.

The job of Moderator has evolved from one of continual peacemaker to one of "gentle guide" for newbies and only rarely dealing with nuisances like spam advertisers and bored agitators who provoke heated arguments for "fun."

We still have a few folks whose nerves have been rubbed raw in their work lives and who take umbrage at an unintended slight (sometimes merely a result of dfferent cultural backgrounds or a poor choice of words.) Events like that engender a flurry of background activity among both moderators and regular members who want to forestall a public eruption of venom, revenge, or retaliation.

To those of our readers who count themselves "passionate," I'm glad to be in your camp. To those who are still "emotional," I feel your pain, because I was once in YOUR camp.

[Jim Wynne]

I'm going to mind your request to not quibble about definitions, because I think the ones you are using are useful here. But the thing is, sometimes it's necessary (and unavoidable) for passionate people to become emotional. Appealing to the emotions is a time-honored political debating technique which is sometimes very effective if raw logic isn't working. I think that those of us who are passionate about what we do need to spend more time evangelizing and less time wondering why there are some people who don't seem to get it.

I go back to a quote from Deming that appeared several years ago in a magazine story I read. I've mentioned it here before, I think, but it bears repeating in this context. The interviewer asked Deming (and this was shortly before he died) how he would like to be remembered. After pondering the question for a moment, he replied, "Well, if I could be remembered as someone who spent his life trying to keep American manufacturing from committing suicide..." The trailing ellipsis was in the original, and suggested that Deming's desire was, at that late date, rather wistful. It seemed that he realized that he was nearing the end, and that his patient was still perched on the ledge, ready to jump, and he wasn't going to be there much longer to help. It was, I like to think, Deming's call for reinforcements--a plea for someone to take over talking the patient down when he couldn't do it any longer.

Passion without at least occasional emotion isn't really passion at all. Our passion is the result of recognition that something very important is happening, and not enough people understand what to do about it, and we sometimes find ourselves shouting out of pure frustration at not being heard when we use a more dispassionate tone of voice.

So Wes, I will respectfully disagree with your treatise:

I decided I could be passionate about Quality without being emotional.

Not possible, I'm afraid, (at least not possible and still be optimally effective) but what we can do is temper our emotions, and try to use them to our best advantage.

[Wes Bucey]

I didn't say a passionate person could not dissemble and use emotion to sway others. (The audience's emotion, not the speaker's.) Demagogues do it all the time. One of the things I tell students in public speaking and acting courses [only half joking] is,
"The entire key to a successful presentation/performance is SINCERITY. Once you can fake sincerity, you'll have the audience in the palm of your hand."

Back in the 70's, I had the pain/pleasure of dealing with an internationally prominent public speaker/personality who was on the board of directors of a hospital I was pitching to refinance with tax-exempt bonds. The difference between his public persona and even his speech patterns when he was behind closed doors in tense negotiating sessions was like dealing with a different person. It was patently obvious he played to the lowest common denominator of the audience at hand. In the board room he never used his trademark rhyming and "sound bites." Instead he appealed to the logic of his fellow board members and my team of bankers, lawyers, and accountants. Gone were the ethnic pronunciation and religious references, replaced with impeccable Standard English and hard-nosed economic reasoning. When we walked out of the Board room, he would immediately fall into the cadenced speech and sound bites as he would encounter "constituents" in the hallways. Let me add he was no less "passionate" about his cause in the Board room, but he was projecting and appealng to a lot more emotion in public than in private.

[Jim Wynne]

Originally Posted by Wes Bucey

I didn't say a passionate person could not dissemble and use emotion to sway others. (The audience's emotion, not the speaker's.) Demagogues do it all the time. One of the things I tell students in public speaking and acting courses [only half joking] is,
"The entire key to a successful presentation/performance is SINCERITY. Once you can fake sincerity, you'll have the audience in the palm of your hand."

I wasn't referring to dissembling, being falsely emotive, or any sort of demagoguery, if you're referring to a "demagogue" as one who deliberately emotes as a method of obscuring his true purpose, which is the definition most often used in politics. The quote you cite is not original, by the way; it's usually attributed to George Burns, in the form of "Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

But I wasn't talking about acting. Genuine emotion will surface at times if the passion is sincere. It's certainly possible to erect a carefully designed facade, but those are almost always more tranparent than their designers intend them to be.