Prior installments:
How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It
"I'm working to reinvent our company's operational practices. As I understand things, technology is a key enabler for making processes more efficient. At the same time to really improve things new processes should be developed which take advantage of increased communication and automation now available. I'm looking for a good forum which talks about "use this to do that", "this tool allows you to do this better", and possibly discuss streamlined processes."
Parse the language in this posting. Notice what isn't there!
What isn't there? People are missing, replaced, as F. W. Taylor long-ago predicted, by "the system." Who performs these 'operational practices?' Who does this disembodied 'communicating?' Slip over here for more ...
For the last fifteen years, I've been facilitating curious workshops. These never told anyone what they should do, and I've developed a strong aversion to anyone who presumes to know what I should do and when I should do it. Nothing I do involves procedures. Nothing seems suited to steps or checklists. This is an improvement over the years following my graduation from university, when I performed a lot of quantitative analysis on what was in retrospect subjective experiences. I attempted to routinize a lot of work which never as a result exhibited routine. For I was infected with the notion that I should measure and, more dangerously, that only if I measured could I properly manage. The people I was charged with managing were wiser than I was, however, and while some of them chased the measurable manageable metric god, none of us ever caught him. And we succeeded at an acceptable rate, anyway.
wE iNterrupt tHe rEgularly sCheduled bLog eNtry fOr a nEws
fLash!Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Could be. An article in the current Atlantic considers how we acquire information, and the effect of our snippet-seeking culture on our brains and on our society. When was the last time you read a book? When was the last time you lost yourself in thought? Our brains rewire themselves, adapting to the conditions around us. The printing press changed not only how books are produced, but how readers' brains process information. Same story with the computer, it seems.
Have you been reading less and enjoying it more? Do you find yourself feeling bored after ten minutes of reading? Do you ever visit the library anymore? Slip over here for more ...
(Note: I am the Management-ist depicted here. I am also the one interviewing (or, in proper management-ist lingo, 'being interviewed by') the management-ist. I have been on both sides of this conference table.)
The chill will crawl up the back of your neck.
The surroundings are comfortable enough: a well-appointed office, a conference room decorated with fine art. The welcome will be genuinely warm. The conversation always starts with small talk—studied small talk, as if I'd been instructed to 'start from the heart' and engage with the 'person' first. Whether this takes the form of sports, the weather, the travel from there to here, or the nearly universal quick apology for being a few minutes late for the meeting, the first five minutes of the interview will be beside the point. Slip over here for more ...
"There's a show going down
tonight
It's the hottest show in town
Down to that Gypsy Cafe
Where the freeway turns around
Once a week or so you know
These people show up to play
And they're gonna be stars someday
They're gonna be stars someday!" Slip over here for
more ...
In the last installment, I introduced the character behind management-ism. The 'can't manage what can't be measured' mindset that seeks metrics for measuring everything. Peter Block once asked the question, "If performance appraisals are so good, why don't we perform them on our spouses?" We don't perform them on our spouses because we have better ways to assess the goodness of that relationship. In absence of relationship, though, where we merely inhabit roles and perform process scripts, managing by such metrics might seem to make all the sense in the world. The management-ist sees no contradiction in employing 360 degree feedback strategies. The rest of us certainly do! Slip over here for more ...
Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, continued HERE and HERE ...
The last installment introduced Dr. Bob Ironside, a General Practitioner who fled the managed care system to start a subscription-based health advocacy clinic, where his clients actively collaborate WITH him to maintain health rather than simply treat illness.
Dan Starr, in his comment on the third installment, noted that the HMO (Health MAINTENANCE Organization) concept originated in just this idea, a physician/client partnership focused positively, to maintain health and so reduce health care costs. It morphed into its opposite, where the object became negative, to reduce health care costs by aggressively "managing" allocation: dictating delivery terms, questioning diagnoses and treatment recommendations, and tightly limiting reimbursements to minimize costs. How maintaining health shifted into minimizing costs might serve as the general pattern defining the difference between the manager and the management-ist. Slip over here for more ...
Last Tuesday, Amy and I convened a conversation. Sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce to bring the business community together to consider: Surviving the downturn.
To our surprise, most reported no loss of lift, no panic. No one wore a barrel.
How does one take the temperature of a town? I'd spent the morning waiting with my dad while my mother was injected, inspected, reflected, and ultimately rejected for now: no obvious cause. Scheduled for continuing tests. Conclusions inconclusive.
Life, being holographic, presents herself in various equivalent disguises. Where ever I go, there she is. The phantom hitchhiker. "Say, isn't that the same woman we passed a hundred miles back?" Rod Serling authors every life.
So we convened, listening more than facilitating. Prepared to be changed by what we heard. What DID we hear? The conclusions inconclusive. More tests coming.
How to represent what we heard? One way is a word cloud- see above graphic. Another is word jazz, where the sound and shape and meter carry as much meaning as the words: see below- Slip over here for more ...
This posting continues the story started HERE and continued HERE. This third installment of my investigation of Managementism, the profoundly popular theology influencing everything from food production to health care, looks at one example of one practitioner who choose to step "Off The Grid."
In the last installment, I introduced a doctor, Bob Ironside, who, dissatisfied with the management of the health care system he was a part of, took personal agency to make his part work much better. I was sitting in an extremely comfortable room—I would not call it a waiting room, because it was clearly not designed for any activity as wasteful as waiting—for a chat with Bob about his life off the grid. Slip over here for more ...
This post is the second installment in a series considering Management-ism, which I started here.
I first met Bob Ironside in the early eighties. He was then a General Practitioner, working in a typical clinic he shared with a half dozen other docs. The waiting room was large enough to hold twenty or thirty patients. Staff worked behind a counter with a sliding glass window. A receptionist, several nurses, rows of shelves with patient files. The doctors saw patients in small rooms along a central hall, which was closed off from the waiting room by a door, guarded by one or another of the nurses. When a doctor was ready, a patient's name was called out, and the door to the examination rooms opened, and that patient was ushered down the hall. Slip over here for more ...
