At Presidential Conference, president says lesson of past failures shows sides need to close their eyes to the past, saying: You cannot make love and you cannot make peace with open eyes.
By Allison Kaplan Sommer | Jun.21, 2012
Israel can't make peace with "open eyes," President Shimon
Peres said at the fourth Israeli Presidential Conference on Thursday,
adding that sides must forget about the past and focus on the future to
end the years-long conflict.
Speaking at the “Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow,” the
president said that his "own conclusion of how not to make mistakes is
close your eyes a little. You cannot make love and you cannot make peace
with open eyes."
"The past is dead. You can't correct it. Can you correct something that
is dead? Can you correct the past? Focus on the future. You have to
take risks," he added, saying: "You have to choose between two sorts of
mistakes. You do nothing and that is a mistake, or you do something that
could cause the mistakes."
"It's better to try, do something and maybe you will have a success. If
you don’t try, you won’t make a mistake, but you won't have a success,"
he added.
Addressing the conference's participants, the president said that the
"first mistake I have learned from my life is don’t look for perfection.
You will make mistakes. You need to be satisfied with allowing people
to live together. Perfection can be a desire, but we can’t achieve it in
the foreseeable future."
"People set their goals too high. There is the story of the man who
looked for the ideal women. When he found her, found she was looking for
the ideal man, so she wouldn’t marry him," he added.
Peres said that the "ultimate difficulty with peace is not your enemy,
but your own people. I am asked 'why are you paying so much? Why do you
trust them so much?' Who can measure how much you can trust them? The
greatest problem is couples. They want to have a perfect life, and if
they try to keep life perfect they will get a divorce."
The president even went far as saying that avoiding early negotiations
with the PLO was one of his mistakes, saying: "They killed our people.
We said, 'how can we speak with murderers.' It was a mistake. By not
talking, they would continue to shoot. But talking, maybe they would
have stopped."
When the topic of the opening panel of the conference was chosen:
“Learning from Mistakes on the Way to Tomorrow,” there was no way of
knowing that while it was taking place, all of Israel would be engaged
in discussion of mistake-making in the case of the Carmel fire disaster.
As television journalist Dana Weiss pointed out earlier in the session,
it might be helpful to send a transcript of the panel directly to the
offices of government ministers.
Nobel laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman said that the whole concept of
learning from mistakes was generally based on flawed assumptions. “To
really learn from mistakes we need stable circumstances where there are
rules.”
Under these conditions, he said real expertise can develop. "This is
how chess masters develop their expertise in the game. Every game is the
same, the rules are fixed, and therefore they can learn from mistakes
over and over again until they don’t make mistakes."
"But the world isn’t like that, it’s an uncertain place, and therefore
'decisions are gambles.' What that means is that the best possible
decision can have bad outcomes and a bad decision can have good
outcomes,” he added.
Kahneman also said that in "the military there are generals who are
willing to take more risks than others, even risks that are that are
unacceptable, but it is possible for them to gamble several times and be
successful. When a general gambles and is successful, that he was a
military genius, and those who told him not to take those risks were
cowardly.”
“In the financial crisis, there are people who say they knew the crisis
would happen. But really, they thought the crisis was going to happen
and at the same time there were people with just as much knowledge and
expertise who thought the opposite,” he said.
“The world in general makes too much sense to us. We do not admit the
level of uncertainty.” Essentially, most of these decisions are just
‘going with our gut.’
So what is the alternative? Kahneman suggests that to lessen mistakes
we shouldn’t focus on outcomes, we should focus on the process of
decision-making.
"There is an absence of quality control, and on-going critiques of
decision-making. We don’t have it and we should. It is in fact
possible.... We should keep track of the considerations, of the
deliberations. This is very difficult to achieve in organization.
Organizations resist examining their decision-making process. When you
look for mistakes in real time, there is a feeling that someone is
looking over their shoulders and they will be blamed," he said.
Kahneman even added that "leaders should have coaches."
"A tennis coach doesn’t play better than the player, but he can look
objectively at the athlete and help him.... I have known some
organizations where leaders have taken someone they trust who can
critique the quality of the decision-making while it was going on and
not just relying on the outcome to determine whether the decision made
was the right one," he added.
Another panel speaker, Dr. James Sebenius, an international expert on
negotiations, says that common mistakes made is focusing on the other
sides’ statements and demands rather than probing on what the other side
wants. "Often," he said, "if you take the time to probe behind
incompatible positions and find interests that can both be met."
