When I was a little girl, the police came to the door with fair regularity. And they always had my grandmother in tow. The typical police visit would go something like this:
I’d answer the knock on the door. Standing there would be a giant New York State Police officer. Next to him, looking chastened, would be my 4′ 10″ Scottish grandmother, who lived with us. She was in her mid-80s at the time.
My mother would come to the door. “Good afternoon, Ma’am,” the officer would say. “Is this your mother?” “Yes, Officer,” my mother would reply calmly. “Ma’am, are you aware your mother is hitchhiking?” “Yes, Officer,” my mother would reply.
The officer would usually look a little nonplussed by that. “Are you aware that hitchhiking is illegal, Ma’am?” the officer would ask my mother. “Yes, Officer,” my mother would reply earnestly. “Then why don’t you stop her?” he’d ask. To which my mother would reply, “Officer, if you can stop her, please be my guest.”
Yes, my granny was a hitchhiker. It entertained her, gave her something to do, gave her lots of people to talk to. And it was still a relatively safe activity back then for an old woman with a thick Scottish burr and a desire to gab and go anywhere someone would take her in our region of upstate New York.
Then one day, when she was 86, she hitchhiked too long in the hot sun, got sunstroke, and toppled over into a ditch. After that, the doctor told my parents that they had to do whatever it took to stop Granny from thumbing rides. In desperation, my mother locked up Granny’s shoes. And felt terrible about it.
The police visits stopped for a few weeks. Then, early one morning, I heard my mother laughing hysterically from the living room. She happened to glance out one of the front windows and saw Granny on the edge of the road, purse over her arm. Thumb out. In her fuzzy pink slippers.
You know, there’s too much conflict associated with getting someone to do something they don’t want to do…or don’t think they should have to do. I call it “Get Them To” conflict. We can’t avoid all of it. But a sure-fire way to reduce conflict in your life is to remember that there are two sides to every negotiation and your chosen solution isn’t always the best or right one. The minute you notice yourself thinking, “I just want to get them to ___,” slow down and give yourself an attitude adjustment.
After what became known as the Fuzzy Pink Slipper Incident, my mother returned Granny’s shoes. “Have a ball, Mom,” she said. Granny agreed not to hitchhike on the hottest summer days. She hitchhiked regularly until she died at 89 in bed one morning. Dreaming, no doubt, of all those thumbed rides.
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Tammy, what an amazing story — and how important it is to choose your battles; realizing that your right way is not always the right way for someone else.
Thank you for this article.
Eudine, thanks so much for the lovely words! Thanks for stressing the importance of being flexible on the “how” in order to achieve the “what”!
This post got me thinking about two things: laws and culture. I have a problem with laws that tell people how to live. To me, laws should be in place to prevent people from doing harm to others. We have laws to deter people from killing or stealing, and to deter businesses from harming customers. Laws that keep people from harming themselves crosses a line. That’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to it. Similarly, your grandmother may have been entitled to hitchhike if it was her preference, but of course there are laws preventing it.
So that leads me to think about cultural differences, and how they are enforced. So in your family, by not hitchhiking yourself and by taking grandma’s shoes away, it sends the message that it (hitchhiking) is not how we do things here. Of course neither the law, nor culture prevented the thing both were trying to prevent.
So my question is, is either law/policy or culture a better influence of behavior than the other? Also, what happens when neither is effective? I’m thinking in particular about organizations. I can remember that a company I worked for had no formal policy around facial hair, but no one on the organization had any. I would go two days without shaving and could count on two hands how many people would comment to me that I must be growing a beard. When I did finally grow a beard, the comments were endless and the jokes got progressively more hurtful. The message was clear, but it in no way altered my behavior. I let my beard grow, in part to prove that it didn’t impact my work or change who I was at all, and in part to rebel.
So when you’re the organization, how do you influence behavior? When you’re the individual who sticks out, and if you can’t change the system, or leave, what do you do?
Hi, Rick – Well, you’ve certainly asked several academic tomes’ worth of questions here. I have taught entire courses to get at some of these! And you’re studying OD, yes? So I bet you’ve taken some courses that attempt to do the same…and yet your questions persist and haven’t been answered elsewhere. Let’s see what we might touch on here.
The first thing that struck me is that you framed your questions as dichotomies…law/policy vs culture, change the system vs leave the system. Framing them like that sets them up in opposition and also leaves out the richness of many other possible factors. Based on my own organizational experiences for 25 years, I just don’t see these as either/or and I know for sure that human behavior is so much more complex than discussing just these sets of factors would suggest.
What do you really want to know or discuss here?
Yes, my questions do persist. Although I do frame things as dichotomies here, I do see the options as two ends of a spectrum with a world of possibilities in between. I think a lot of us get stuck in the mindset of this vs. that, without seeing all of our possible choices. I believe a factor that often gets us stuck is thinking behind those two extremes: “I have no power to change the system, and therefore my only choice is to leave, walk away or end the relationship”. Though in reality, we probably can have some impact on the systems around us, and probably have broader options than we think. I keep coming back to your example. What do you do with that kind of impasse? One person thinks, “I have every right to do this and will keep on doing it, regardless of the outcome”, and another person who thinks, “You have no right to do this and I will keep punishing you every time you do it”? Is it a matter of honoring their self-determination or helping them change their way of thinking? I bring this up because it is the kind of dilemma that mediators approach me with all the time.
P.S. Yes, I am studying OD. Nice digging!
Rick, I handle stuck points like the one you describe by helping people change their thinking. They can stay wedded to their thinking and stay stuck, I tell them, but perhaps they’d be willing to experiment with some other ways to think about the problem they’re stuck in. In such instances, I’m as much of a coach as I am a mediator.
Thanks for a smile and a good bedtime story, Tammy. Sleep tight. (Judy at 9:40 pm). I love your grandmother — and your mom.