CHAPTER EIGHT
ON A FIERCELY HOT DAY IN LATE JUNE, I drove onto the sixty-nine-acre campus of The Seeing Eye, Inc., in historic and well-preserved Morristown, New Jersey, to meet with its current president and CEO, Dr. James Kutsch. Jim Kutsch is one heck of a smart and likeable man and an erudite, thoughtful, and decisive executive. He holds a doctoral degree in computer science and developed one of the world’s first screen-reading programs for the visually impaired. Jim is the first graduate of The Seeing Eye to become its president; Colby, his blonde Labrador retriever, stayed patiently in her bed in his office until needed to navigate the halls and campus.
You enter the main building on the campus through a walkway with paving stones donated by The Seeing Eye’s supporters, which are mostly inscribed with love messages to the dogs that have transformed lives. Imagine spending nearly a decade of your life with a loyal dog who never left your side, waking or sleeping, and who tended to your safety as her first priority. Now imagine losing that dog, as the difference in human and canine life spans predicts you will. Here is one of the tributes engraved in stone:
FENIX—7-16-2006
STRENGTH WITHOUT INSOLENCE, COURAGE WITHOUT FEROCITY.
ALL THE VIRTUES OF MAN WITHOUT HIS VICES.
Temperamentally, it takes a special dog to become a guide dog. It needs both the placid disposition to spend hours quietly under the handler’s feet in a restaurant, classroom, or airplane and the focus and energy to train and work in challenging environments, such as a busy commuter train station at rush hour.
When a puppy has been weaned, it is placed with a family who will raise it and help it become accustomed to the many social settings in which a guide dog will later find itself. That was the role of the woman in my class who had the dog she was training under her table.
What is so challenging about guide dog training? First, there is the need to focus. Your own dog walking down the street may be easily distracted by every passing movement and smell; a guide dog can never allow itself to be distracted. Of course, the dog needs to master obeying basic commands including forward, left, right, and stop, but that’s the easy part. The challenging part is mastering when not to obey.
You may have imagined the prospect of becoming blind. Even so, it can be surprisingly difficult to imagine what it is really like to navigate the world without the use of your eyes. Let me once again ask you to do a mental exercise with me. Imagine your shifting emotional states as you read the next few paragraphs.
You have lost the full use of your sight. Your world is filled with sounds and smells, shapes and textures, and a sense of spatial distances, but all visual cues are missing. You cannot tell if the driver in a car sees you before you step into the street, if a light has turned red or green by its color, or if workmen have dug up the street you are crossing. Two-ton behemoths we use by the millions for our transport whiz by with inches to spare, assuming that you can see them and will do your part to stay out of their way.
You choose to live in an urban environment where there are many amenities within walking distance so you can be somewhat independent. You cannot drive, so suburbs and country settings leave you even more dependent on others for everyday needs. (As this book is being published, driverless cars are just becoming a reality. Technology may one day even supplant the trusted guide dog or re-create vision for the blind. At this time, however, the guide dog remains an indispensable companion to thousands of those who have lost their sight.) The neighborhood you choose to live in becomes familiar to you; to get to the dry cleaners you walk four blocks straight ahead and two blocks to the right. You’ve had mobility training with a cane, so you are pretty good at maintaining your orientation and avoiding most obstacles with the sweeping back and forth motion of your cane. But there are always the unexpected obstacles—a branch that is lower than usual because of heavy rain, snow that has been piled against the sidewalk by plows, and, of course, the matter of crossing a street when cars can come speeding around a corner. After a few unpleasant encounters, near misses, and situations you found embarrassing or even humiliating, you begin limiting your outings and becoming more reclusive. This is not the path of a full life. Emotionally and socially, you are in danger of shutting down. You recognize you will need to do something different if you are to regain a sense of freedom to live your life the way you want.
In the hope of increasing your independence, you apply to a school that trains in the use of guide dogs. You are uncertain about this move—will you like having a dog with you every waking and sleeping moment, will you be able to care for it, will it make you stand out from other people even more than you do now? Despite these qualms, you feel cautiously excited when, after vigorous screening to assess your chances of success, you hear that you have been accepted to the school.
After four weeks of intensive training, morning to night, you and your new dog, Millie, return home. You have a new confidence that shows in your posture and your stride. The people who know you best are impressed by the transformation in so short a time. You are again ready to take that trip to the dry cleaners.
Walking confidently down the tree-lined street, Millie suddenly pulls you to the left instead of walking forward as commanded. What has happened? Unbeknown to you, but known to Millie, the delicatessen en route to the cleaners has hung a sign announcing its lunch special. The sign is dangling six feet above the ground, making it easy for Millie to pass under with plenty of headroom to spare. But you are six-feet-two and would get a rude jar and a nasty gash if Millie had kept going straight as commanded. How did Millie know to avoid that sign, which was no danger to her, and to firmly pull you in a different direction than you instructed? How did Millie learn this situational awareness and Intelligent Disobedience?
This is where Dave Johnson comes in. Dave is director of instruction and training at The Seeing Eye. He oversees the selection and training of 250 dogs at any given time, with the help of two dozen trainers who have each spent years learning their craft. Dave is responsible for the selection, instruction, and post-graduate support for twelve groups of blind students a year, with up to twenty-four students in each month-long class. He has been with The Seeing Eye for twenty-eight years. It is safe to say that he is as knowledgeable as anyone in his field.
Dave and Jim took me, Colby, and another small Labrador retriever to the very beautiful Morristown train station to demonstrate how Intelligent Disobedience works. Dave parked the van in a handicap spot, and we all disembarked. Normally, when the train pulls in, Dave would give the command “forward,” and the dog would find the nearest open doorway and lead him through it. In this case, the train hadn’t arrived. When he commanded the dog to go forward toward the edge of the platform, instead of obeying she did an about face and pulled him decisively away from it. This is known as a “counter-pull.” Those of us who work in hierarchical settings should take note: counter-pull may be a good term for us to adopt when the leader is about to step off the edge into whatever danger he or she is unaware of. It looks like insubordination but, in fact, a counter-pull may be lifesaving!
The Leader Sets the Direction
All guide dog training starts with a basic principle: the leader sets the direction and the guide dog finds a safe way to get there.
The day Jim and Dave and I met, the temperature was touching a hundred degrees. It was too hot to ask the dog to work on the street where the pavement would burn the pads of her feet. Dave described what we would have seen if he worked the dog at the crossing.
The dog is trained to stop at every intersection and wait for the next command, which may be “forward” or “left” or “right.” Both the leader and the dog maintain situational awareness through the senses available to them. The dog can see but does not see colors the way we do; it cannot tell when a light has turned from red to green. The human listens to the environment and knows from the sounds of people and cars, or low audibles built into the system, when the light has changed and it is apparently safe to cross. At that point the leader gives the forward command. The dog must decide if it is safe to obey it. At just that moment, a fast-moving messenger bike may be turning sharply around the corner! The dog disregards, or actually overrides the command, and stays put. It may be another cycle of the light before it is safe to cross the street.
Now here’s where we who are interested in Intelligent Disobedience need to pay close attention. How does Dave train his dogs in this faculty, which one observer called “the higher mathematics of dog training”? Which aspects of that training are transferrable to human training and education? What are the precise points that make it successful?
The first thing to know is that there is a great emphasis on praise. When the dog successfully executes any new skill it is learning, or applies that skill deftly, it is given hearty praise, verbally and at times physically. This is the foundation of building confidence and trust: praise when well deserved.
But praise alone is an incomplete tool kit for teaching the full range of behaviors needed to safely serve as a human’s eyes. There is no margin for error. If guide dogs occasionally stepped in front of an oncoming car, there would be no Seeing Eye—the risks would be too great. A complementary set of tools must be used to ensure that the training is completely effective. That is a higher bar of effectiveness than most of us ever have to meet.
In addition to the harness and rigid handle that permit clear communication in both directions between the guide dog and the human handler (note the derivation), there is also a leash. The leash can be utilized to correct the dog when it makes an error. The trainer or the blind handler can yank firmly on the leash to correct the dog, while using the expression “phooey” (phooey is an expression of displeasure used for its distinctiveness—“no” is used too frequently in human interaction and can confuse the dog). This may sound very ho-hum to the reader. What’s new here, positive and negative reinforcement? We all know about the impact of that on behavior, whether or not we apply it as consistently as we should. Is that all there is to it?
The Elements of Intelligent Disobedience Training
Jim had told me there is no “secret sauce” to Intelligent Disobedience training, but I think there are at least some essential ingredients that go into that sauce. Dave shared the exact application of positive and negative reinforcement that makes it effective in guide dog training.
When the dog does something requiring a “phooey” correction you always take it back to the starting point of that action and let it go through the sequence again, so it has a chance to do it right. If it does it right, you give it its due praise. In fact, and this is very important, you give it three chances to do it right. If the dog still doesn’t “get it,” it is equally important that you cease trying to teach that behavior that day. If not, you risk making the dog afraid, and at that point it cannot serve as a guide dog. This methodology of always allowing three times to get it right, whatever the “it” is, is an excellent point for any educator, trainer, coach, or manager to bear in mind. We are working toward competence, not failure and not anxiety!
The dog also must experience the consequence of obeying a command it should not. The train platform in Morristown is mostly very low, perhaps a foot above the rail bed, except for the short piece that is elevated to accommodate the lifts needed to bring passengers in wheelchairs aboard. If Dave were training a dog in Intelligent Disobedience on the platform, and it followed a “forward” command when it should not have, Dave will do a controlled stumble over the low edge while making unpleasant sounds and pulling the dog down with him. No one gets hurt, but it’s no fun either. The dog now has an experience of the consequences both to herself and to her human partner of obeying in that situation.
This technique is extended to crossing the street. Another trainer is at the wheel of a car that is coming around the corner. If Dave gives the “forward” command and the dog obeys, the car gently sideswipes him. Exaggerating the impact, Dave again stumbles, groans, and pulls the dog with him. No one is hurt, but no one is happy.
What’s interesting to me here is that once again we have the field of obedience and disobedience being explored and taught through actors and consequences. Milgram used his actors to elicit and study subjects’ responses. Dave uses his to mold those responses. Crew Resource Management training stages simulations to increase situational awareness and assertiveness when alerting authority to potential risks. One parallel we can take away is the value of staging and rehearsing scenarios in teaching Intelligent Disobedience.
These scenarios become increasingly complex. Dave and his trainers will create “box traps” for the dogs. They set up obstacles—boards, fences, barrels—along routes the dog usually walks. Following the “forward” command unexpectedly puts the dog and his human charge into a box. It is now up to the sighted partner, the guide dog, to problem solve. It is not enough to simply disobey.
To trust the well-being of a blind student to the dog requires that the training create dogs that can and will problem solve, not just for themselves, but for the team. If the dog goes over the barriers, which might work well for it but not for a blind person, it will get a “phooey” and be given three chances to develop a response that is safe and effective for both of them. If we are interested in developing Intelligent Disobedience in humans, we, too, will need to do so in ways that foster problem solving.
Nor is it acceptable when confronted with these obstacles and dangers for the dog to dither before problem solving. Dog dithering may take the form of prolonged sniffing or scratching. Although this instinctive behavior may calm its own anxiety in an unexpected situation, it does nothing toward getting the team out of the box. In animal training, this is referred to as displacement behavior. In humans, we call it procrastination. Faced with a tough decision to make? Let’s take a coffee break or check our email instead. Recognizing procrastination as displacement behavior is another piece of Intelligent Disobedience training we can transfer.
If the copilot is unsure whether to wait for instructions or to remind the surly air traffic controller that the plane is getting dangerously low on fuel, as occurred with Avianca Flight 52 over New York City in 1990, he may resort to rechecking other settings. That may help control his anxiety, but his focus should stay on getting landing permission immediately to avoid the crash and the seventy-three fatalities that resulted. Most of us can relate to displacement behavior. We may get away with it as civilians making low-consequence decisions. Guide dogs, like pilots, firefighters, war fighters, or emergency room personnel, don’t have that luxury. In the dog’s case, the displacement behavior earns another sharp “phooey.”
The principles of praise, correction, and giving the dog three chances to solve a problem are applied in this situation until the dog demonstrates understanding of what is expected of her and she leads her human partner out of the box, whether that day or, if necessary, in a subsequent day’s training.
When they are safely out of the box, the lead returns to the human. Switching the lead and follow roles, and then handing back the lead role to the human when the danger is past, is an aspect of the natural flow between Intelligent Disobedience and obedience, another salient point in human leader-follower relationships.
When the guide dog becomes confident in this role, she will be presented with more difficult constructed problems to solve. Perhaps it will be night, and flashing lights and distracting street-life sounds will be added. Although she has learned not to consciously walk into box traps, the next one isn’t as obvious. Once in it, she needs even greater focus to problem solve a way out of it. Increasing the complexity of simulations is a principle that transfers well to effectively inculcating Intelligent Disobedience in humans.
Dave and Jim report another sequence that I think contains parallels for our purposes. Initially, the dogs do or don’t do the expected behaviors because of the praise and corrections they receive. This is similar to the literature on the early stages of moral reasoning and ethical behavior in humans, in which children focus on doing things to avoid punishment and seek gratification.
At some point, guide dogs seem to progress beyond this stage to an intense awareness of the well-being, and the risks to that well-being, of the human with whom they have developed a trusting, even loving, relationship. There is no prescribed technique for achieving this transition; it is a manifestation of the bond that occurs through continuous mutual respect and care. I venture to identify this as another essential ingredient in the “secret sauce.” The human is caring for the guide dog’s needs every day through feeding, watering, grooming, exercise, and elimination routines, heartfelt praise, affection, and companionship. The guide dog forms an understanding that its work in life is the care of this precious human being. As Jim Kutsch says, he is this dog’s pack.
At the risk of stretching the analogy too far, it seems as if the guide dog is moving from the lower levels of moral reasoning observed in human development to higher levels. The guide dog’s attention moves from avoiding punishment or seeking praise for herself and becomes focused on the well-being of her human partner without any explicit directions to do so. There are numerous stories of guide dogs initiating behavior to protect their human partner when the human is unaware of danger. This is the fruit of any relationship in which there is mutual respect and caring—valuing the well-being of the other as much as one’s own and, at times, even more so.
In service dog training, this is equally true. In addition to guide dogs, there are many other types of service dogs. Different schools and trainers specialize in different competencies, such as hearing dogs, or mobility dogs. Lydia Wade was the founder of the nonprofit group Blue Ridge Assistance Dogs. Her service dogs were trained to assist individuals with limited mobility or those who had medical conditions such as diabetes or epilepsy that made them prone to seizures or comas. Lydia tells numerous stories of dogs she trained and placed that have prevented someone from walking down a flight of stairs when the individual was showing signs of fainting or of an impending seizure. The dog has literally blocked them moving forward. This is proactive disobedience. Not just failing to obey a dangerous command, but physically stopping the human’s own action to protect him or her from harm. Lydia, too, observes this growing out of the bond between dog and human and each dog finding its own way to warn against harm or to actively prevent it.
How Leaders Encourage or Discourage Intelligent Disobedience
Of course, the effectiveness of Intelligent Disobedience depends in part on the response of the authority that is being disobeyed. Another ingredient to the sauce!
The cofounder of The Seeing Eye, Inc., Morris Frank, and others tell stories of when they failed to respect a guide dog’s disobedience and sufficiently examine the reasons that might lay behind it before acting. Overriding the disobedience usually resulted in a nasty thump, or worse, from something the dog was protecting against.
Why were the dog’s warnings not heeded? This is an important question to explore if Intelligent Disobedience is to make a difference when it is employed.
We all proceed through life with mental maps of what we believe the situation to be as we pass from one situation to another. These do not depend on sight; they are the interior maps we create to help us make choices from among the moves available to us in any given circumstance. Once we form a map, it is hard for us to realize it may be incorrect and to imagine alternative scenarios. This is as dangerous as using ocean navigation charts that are out of date and don’t show recent shifts in the seafloor, or following maps in our satellite-based navigation device that don’t show current road closures. We could call this a blind spot, but it is even worse—it is a false picture of reality. That is why in creative problem solving and brainstorming exercises we strive to suspend judgment until we have entertained a range of plausible scenarios and responses to them. The initial scenario we envision may be woefully wrong and our initial responses significantly inferior to others we can generate.
Whether leaders are physically blind or metaphorically blind, they need to train themselves to be alert for and responsive to acts of Intelligent Disobedience. Why is a trusted dog, or a loyal aide, or a well-regarded employee disobeying an instruction? Betty Vinson might have taken a stand and refused to manipulate WorldCom’s monthly financial reports. That would have been Intelligent Disobedience. But her leaders would have needed the instinct or training to allow her refusal to impact them. The effective response would have been,
If this loyal and competent employee is refusing to comply with the request, perhaps we should examine alternatives before proceeding.
Only then might disaster have been averted.
Jim Kutsch reports that a significant barrier to guide dogs becoming fully proficient is when the handler is not completely blind. Most residents at The Seeing Eye who are being trained to work with their guide dog have no sight; a few are legally blind but have some degree of sight. The tendency of this latter group is to use their limited sight to discern barriers on their own and take evasive action. The dog quickly recognizes the human is not depending on it for this function. Sooner or later, the team is out for a stroll when the evening light is disappearing, or the individual’s eyesight has deteriorated further, and the handler can’t see a low limb before crashing into it. He is annoyed the dog didn’t steer him out of harm’s way, not realizing that he has trained the dog that it wasn’t necessary to do so. Jim’s advice to the partially sighted is to use that gift of sight to enjoy the beauty of their surroundings that they still have the pleasure of seeing—and to let the dog do the navigating. This takes self-awareness and self-discipline.
I hope that any organizational leaders reading this have paid attention to the last point. If your staff starts assuming that you surely see the pitfalls they see, they will not develop the habit of checking and alerting you to what they observe. We have already seen the tragic results of that dynamic from our examination of the aviation industry prior to the introduction of Crew Resource Management training.
Jim Kutsch, Dave Johnson, and I sat around Jim’s conference table discussing the implications of Intelligent Disobedience. I was drawing them into my agenda for translating the lessons of guide dog training to human training, particularly for youth. Dave’s expression grew more serious as he shared his thoughts with us.
He and his wife felt it would be good for their fourteen-year-old son to go to an outdoors camp in Canada to learn a range of skills and life lessons. They got their son’s agreement and were ready to submit the camp application and processing fee. That day, Dave read in the paper that Jerry Sandusky, the famed assistant football coach at Penn State University, had been arrested on multiple charges of child molestation. Dave confided his concerns to his wife: “How can we send our son away for three weeks into the care of strange men in an isolated setting?” This troubled him, but Dave is a strong individual who knows you can’t hide from life—trouble can come unexpectedly from anywhere, including from those you think you know, like Jerry Sandusky.
When the time came for Dave’s son to leave for camp, Dave decided he needed to sit him down and give him a direct talk about how to handle himself in troubling situations that might arise with other campers or counselors, including drugs, alcohol, smoking, or sexual advances. It was a good talk, preparing his son to listen to his own discomfort in situations, to recognize his own values, and to take his own stand, regardless of whether others did so or not. Dave also knew he had to be careful to warn his son about the potential of danger without scaring him about it. This was the same line Dave walked with training his dogs in Intelligent Disobedience.
I complimented Dave on his willingness to have a difficult talk with his son and to do so while remaining sensitive to the risks the talk itself held. I also pointed out that having this conversation the evening before his son’s departure would not necessarily be sufficient to equip him to take the right action in a given situation. Without wanting to scare Dave any more than he wanted to scare his son, having that talk at the eleventh hour seemed equivalent to giving a guide dog one lesson in Intelligent Disobedience and expecting it to perform thereafter when under pressure.
I asked Dave, somewhat rhetorically, if he could envision how society might instill the capacity his son needed through training activities woven into the school curriculum at different ages? Neither Dave nor Jim nor I came up with a blueprint for doing this during the conversation, but I appreciated their willingness to join me in considering the linkages between canine and human Intelligent Disobedience.
Having time to reflect on our conversation, I am better prepared now to integrate what I learned at The Seeing Eye with the material we have already covered in this book. There are two major themes emerging that hold promise for being woven together.
The first theme goes back to Stanley Milgram’s experiments. It is the primacy of social context. Milgram didn’t try to identify what type of personality was more likely to disobey destructive orders; nor did he speculate on what type of training might create the capacity for resistance. Milgram focused on the social context of his core experiment and each of its variations. He observed the ways in which the social context can be constructed to increase or decrease the incidence of compliance to orders that violate standards of human decency. From these variations we learned the impact on obedience of physical proximity to authority, of authorities disagreeing with one another, of peers refusing to comply with orders, and of other related social factors. These are important lessons. We saw the effectiveness of these variations at reducing harmful obedience from two-thirds of the population to as little as 10 percent or less. We must bear these lessons in mind when designing activities that hold potential for the misuse of power.
The second theme is the power of training. It runs through various scenarios we have examined, such as the captain who drilled the lieutenant on saying “That’s BS, sir!” until he could do it under stress, through the Crew Resource Management training on speaking assertively to command, through the nursing training that today places more emphasis on how to speak up to reduce physician mistakes, right through to guide dog training. Jim Kutsch made the point clearly: it is repetitive training, well done, that ensures the dog will make the right choice between obeying and disobeying in any given situation.
It is our good fortune that these two themes are not mutually exclusive. They are complementary. This is heartening to realize. Together they hold the potential for creating cultures in which the norm is to discern between appropriate and inappropriate obedience.
Let’s summarize lessons we have distilled from our observations of guide dog training that can transfer to developing human capacity for Intelligent Disobedience.
1. Intelligent Disobedience can be developed through carefully designed training and practice.
2. Start with simple simulations in which Intelligent Disobedience is called for and work toward more complex situations.
3. Emphasize praise for appropriate acts of Intelligent Disobedience during practice sessions.
4. If the individual fails to appropriately display Intelligent Disobedience in a simulation, give the individual a sense of the adverse consequences that can befall the team.
5. If the individual doesn’t display an Intelligent Disobedience response when he or she should, take the simulation back to the beginning and give the individual another try; build confidence.
6. Allow the individual being trained three tries to generate an effective Intelligent Disobedience response in a given situation; if the individual doesn’t get it right by then, cease further training that day and pick it up another day soon afterward.
7. In addition to practicing not obeying a poor or dangerous command, practice the equivalent of a counter-pull to bring the leader to a safer position.
8. Create more complex practice scenarios in which the individual not only exerts Intelligent Disobedience but also creatively finds alternative solutions to meet the legitimate needs of the authority.
9. When the danger has been avoided, have the follower hand the lead role back to the authorized leader.
10. Have the individual practice the lead role in a scenario he thinks he understands. Have the follower take an action that doesn’t conform to that understanding but is an act of Intelligent Disobedience. Debrief the exercise for what the individual in the lead will do in future situations to pay better attention to the follower.
This will be a learning experience for everyone involved—the simulation designers, the facilitators, those in the role plays, and those measuring the impact of the training. The task is to create a body of research and experience from which we learn effective ways at different ages, and in different cultures, to impart the awareness and skills that comprise Intelligent Disobedience.
