Are Eastman Governance Members Accountable?

At our recent June Special Place meeting a document regarding the Center labeled “ECA Owners’ Costs by Options" was distributed to all attendees and emailed to all Burpee Hill SP members. Shortly after receiving that document we asked our special place chair:

“Could you please identify who created the document you distributed and could you also provide the background financial information as to how the numbers displayed in that document where arrived at?”

Our request was forwarded to the CRC chairperson David Philippy who replied:

"Late last week the CRC decided that until the Referendum is complete and report results published, it will stand down from responding to questions about the Center and the various options other than referring people to the ECA website........."

As many members will remember, Council Chair Bob Parker stated at the June Council Meeting that the CRC Committee would remain as an informational resource and CRC Chair David Philippy stated that he would stay on as an informational source.

David Philippy's response is not an answer. It is a refusal to be accountable for unsubstantiated financial information that the CRC body is distributing.
 To hand out financial information such as the "ECA Owner's Costs by Options" and to not take responsibility for explaining its contents or to substantiate its contents is not responsible governance. (Note: We assume that D. Philippy is a reasonable person as are most Eastman members. At times, we all act more consistently with "herd behavior" than in our reason and independent thinking skills.)

The Eastman Core Value of Respect requires that any ECA governance member respectfully respond to a reasonable question with a reasonable answer.

This expectation of that Core Value applies to all members of ECA governance: volunteer or employee. As the governance member responsible for the dissemination of the document labeled "ECA Owner's Costs by Options", my Special Place Chair acted with respect in forwarding my request to the appropriate parties.

The issue of David Philippy's response raises the question of what do you do when essentially the governance parties responsible, refuse to provide a reasonable answer in a reasonable timeframe. If we are in an accountable society, my expectation would be that the Special Place Chair would withdraw his/her action of disseminating the document. 

How? The Special Place Chair would communicate to each member of the Burpee Hill Special Place that that document is unidentified as to its author and unsubstantiated as to the information contained within.

Perhaps David Brooks’ article (NY Times 11/14/2011): LET'S ALL FEEL SUPERIOR will shed some light on the behavior of governance members and perhaps all of us here at Eastman. Mr. Brooks addresses the idyllic thought process that we might act differently if we were in Joe Paterno's shoes etc. He paints a crystal clear picture that what people think they would do under difficult circumstances, in fact is not what they actually do. He refers to what is called “Normalcy Bias”, which is the tendency of people who find themselves in unsettling circumstances to shut down and pretend everything is normal. He then talks about “Motivated Blindness”; they don't see what is not in their interest to see.

Later he states "People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don't. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman  and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, Blind Spots, “when it comes time to make a decision our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear."

He concludes the article with the following statement "the proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive......?

That was the proper question after Abu Gharib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. It's a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature." This is a reflective question that ECA members need to ask themselves: Are we members responsible for the disparagement and disrespect that Eastman governance exhibits toward “dissident” Eastman members? Our earlier posting: Unintended Consequences (6/18/14) addressed how ordinary people tend to conform to “mass opinion”.