Pure Schmaltz

Earlier this year, I posted a start of a sticky idea to mixed comments. I've been considering what I said there. I can spend a lot of time in consideration sometimes. Here's the link back to the earlier piece: Link Back

This past weekend, I received a notice from my friends at the International Society for Systems Sciences about a new field of study they're promoting called Relational Science. Smelled interesting.

Here's a link to the wiki they're put up to outline the basic idea: Link Here.

Feels like I stumbled upon an old friend. The material points out at least one powerful idea for me: that present investigations assume that the future can be some kind of derivative of the present. That, for instance, the present causes the future. This perspective can't quite explain discontinous change, however. And this omission seems material.

The models we create influence the future we experience, and this modeling behavior---how we characterize what we're in and what we expect to come next---needs to be included in our consideration to achieve a full understanding of what we're in and what we expect next, creating a recursive, self-referential relationship with ourselves, others, and our context. And also, seems to me, with our future, too. This relationship seems fundamental to understanding most everything.

Got me thinking. Considering some more. ...

There are ---ahem--- more adult ways to give explicit directions, the Danes, as usual, are WAY far ahead of the rest of us!

To expand a bit on the earlier The Multi-tasking Myth, we might call this the Explicit Direction Myth. The Explicit Direction Myth claims that providing explicit direction improves performance. How that direction is provided might matter more than anything. If I must refer to an ink-blot of a plan or unfold a passenger compartment-sized map---or, take my eyes off the road --- to access the information, explicit direction might well undermine my performance.

So, why all the signage? Years ago, I served on the Citizen's Advisory Committee for the City of Portland's Traffic Engineering Bureau. This bureau held responsibility for ensuring that signs were posted to reflect ordinances. These ordinances conflicted with each other, and fully complying with this aspiration would have required posting no fewer than twenty signs per city block. Individual engineers used their own best judgment, which meant that some neighborhoods had darned close to twenty signs per block while others had almost none. Us citizens advising the bureau noted the inconsistency, and recommended that fewer signs would be more effective than more signs. This advice pissed off the Bureau Chief, who almost-patiently explained that the absence of signs exposed the City to risk of lawsuits. (I should have figured something so danged stupid would have to be a risk avoidance strategy!) We seem as a society to have acquired an advanced case of The Erma Bombeck Disease, as described by the late syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck, this disorder is a compulsion, caused by spending too much time with children, that forces one to lean over and cut their dining partner's meat for them. We dare not trust another's judgment, so they never development any judgment. We look around for explicit direction instead. In a recent discussion of Soviet-style Five Year Planning, someone noted that the one thing those explicit plans preserved was the commissar's role as arbiter, judge, jury, and (sometimes) executioner, because when (not if!) the explicit plan went awry, those "following" it would have to seek judgement, dispensation, (or contrive some way to spin or cloak the result), and each of these responses elevated and preserved not the proletariat, who's fault was assumed if the plan failed, but the boss. Traffic signs seem to produce similar results. They don't make us safer, but they do assert authority. ... ... Or do they? Judging from the performance of most drivers (including me!), speed limits are interpreted as "posted speed plus five mph," STOP signs mean "slow down enough to shift into first gear before proceeding," and YIELD signs actually mean "YIELD (to the temptation to cut through opposing traffic)!" Maybe something inside us resists explicit direction, and we become bratty kids rather than more responsible adults under its influence. One final word on the subject. Last October, a former roommate of my son was killed in a truck-bicycle collision. As a result of this --- and several other --- accidents, the City of Portland started painting green boxes on the pavement at intersections. These boxes provide space for bicycles and focus drivers' attention ON THE ROAD, rather than away from it. An example that maybe it IS possible to teach an old hound dog a new trick or two.

One final short video which better explains the Explicit Direction Myth. There's always something more than we expect!

At eight thirty this morning, the phone rang. My mom. Five blocks away. My dad, diagnosed two months ago with terminal cancer, was having trouble breathing. Can I come over and rummage around in the basement to find that extension tubing, so he can move around the house while connected to his oxygen-generating machine? Had they called hospice? Nope. Yea, I'll be right over.

He seems small and scared when I arrive. Dressed in his bathrobe, not breakfasted yet. I found the tubing and extra connectors and plugged him in. Stayed to assemble breakfast. Coerced my mom into calling hospice ("They don't work weekends," she insisted!), and the nurse returned the call in five minutes. She called back an hour later. Stopped by to check vital signs an hour after that, and called every hour into early afternoon, when the morphine and the attention had lulled him into sleep in his chair.

Back later, made them some lunch. Back later to make some dinner.

He, embarrassed that he slept the day away while I puttered in the yard, plotting sprinkler positioning and well pump capacities. The huge yard half watered by day's end, I came home to my own dinner, my own life.

My own life is melding back into theirs now. I'm on call. I've been lurking, waiting for the moment when I might make a difference. They only call when they are really scared, and who am I to make a difference then? No one special. Able to move across the room as if their special gravity didn't affect me. As if I were immune. For now.

I can warm leftovers. Prepare the green beans so they are more than just a color contrast on the plate. Properly sauce the strawberries so they taste right, even to someone who's taste discolors every flavor. Small contributions. Just about the best anyone can do.

These are long days. The longest days of this year, and the longest days of any I remember experiencing in my own short life. Neighbors are disappearing. Old age is reaping her harvest. Across the street. Down the block this week. He sends cards for every occasion, especially the final ones. These he takes special care to acknowledge.

Now that he knows he's on the final approach, his temper is sharper. His patience thin. He submits to the help he needs, but complains about having to accept it, and, truth told, doesn't fully accept any of this.

So, a publisher's interested in my new book. I spent the morning until the phone call shuffling chapters and fine-tuning the stories. I left my marker, $$&&, at the point in the manuscript I was interrupted. I'll get back to my work early tomorrow, before the sun comes up. And I'll work until the phone rings or until my curiosity gets the better of me, then I'll go do that other work that consumes my days these days.

This is what's really going on. If I seem distracted, it's only because I'm distracted. I moved here, close, seven years ago, in preparation for these long days, but I'm no better prepared than I ever was to live them. I live them anyway.

This last week, Illustrator and author Tasha Tudor died. Early in her career, she published a book that allowed her to buy a derelict farm in Vermont where, for the last sixty five years, she's lived a lifestyle pretty indistinguishable from one typical of any early 19th century inhabitant of rural New England. Her neighbors considered her a crackpot. Her kids were embarrassed to be seen with her when they were young, though three of them adopted her lifestyle as adults.

But few of us achieved publishing success early in our career and even fewer aspire to step back into a time before our handy, time-saving gadgets. A friend gave me the most wonderful gadget. Called TV B Gone, it's a key ring-sized little button that turns off televisions. Waiting for a flight, trying to read but distracted into multitasking mindlessness by the murmuring CNN Airport News on the overhead television, one click of my TV B Gone and the screen goes dark, the speakers silent. I only wish they had such a device for the background music so thoughtlessly provided by restaurants, coffeehouses, and bars. One surreptitious click of my Tunes-B-Gone, and I can actually hear and focus on what you're saying instead of what the atmosphere is fogging.

Where was I? Oh yea, multitasking. Seems that this gift that some people claim to have and the rest of us wish we could do better is a myth. Like so many other beliefs: good children, skillful parenting, happy families, predictive planning, multitasking belongs in the museum of capabilities that exist in name only. The effect that makes you a dangerous driver when you yak on your cell phone makes you a dangerous boss when you multitask at work. “Attention Deficit Trait” is now rampant in the workplace, which itself has become as clouded by distracting din as any foundry—less noisy but just as cognitively distracting.

What to do? Wrong question. Perhaps the right question is, "What not to do?" I could prescribe turning off the television, but if you're easily bored, you'll probably turn on the radio or find someone to call. We medicate ourselves with distractions. Our brains feel clever when we shift focus between five simultaneous tasks. Worse, we sense that transcendent tingle of subtle awareness that convinces us that we really, really, really are doing the impossible several things at once. Achieved the juggle. No balls dropped. Someone should put us on stage.

Is this feeling just an illusion? Couldn't the science be wrong? Perhaps others are dumbed down when they walk and chew gum, and I --- probably you and I --- are the odd, reassuring exceptions. For we seem genius to ourselves, wizard to each other, and productive beyond imagination.

Read this and weep, cowboy. The pony bucked us both off again. Link to article

Years ago now, more than a decade ago, I sat with JR Clark in a conference room one long, long, very long Santa Clara afternoon. We were in deep dialogue about the nature of prescriptions, recipes, and process descriptions. We shifted through what Betty Crocker could teach us in her test kitchens, and concluded that the best we'd get there would be replication. We considered what might happen if we were to go looking for a recipe for innovation --- and what we might find if we found it, and found little opportunity for replication there. And we also pondered what might happen if we mistook a Betty Crocker-quality recipe (one thoroughly proven in her test kitchens) for something useful in a situation demanding innovation. This produced The Recipe For Not Doing The Impossible, complete with manic cycles of hopefulness and despair.

We found The Recipe for Doing the Impossible, though Betty would certainly find it wanting. This recipe is of an entirely different order than any recipe Betty might publish. Its main ingredients, as summarized above, are ignorance of what to do, meticulous attention to the way things are, and clarity about what in the world you want to end up with. Finding the ability to act (to wrest the inertia of motion from the inertia of rest) completes the ingredients. Unlikely. Betty should be disappointed in our work.

JR's gone now. So, I suspect, is that conference room. The recipe lives on. Unbelieved by many. Unlikely as it seems. It remains the stuff that stands between aspiration and the seen.

Cryptic enough?

I'll refer you to a remarkable author of a stunning book: Claudio Ciborra-The Labyrinths of Information. Ciborra, a professor (now, unfortunately, dead) at the London School of Economics, spent his career studying how large, successful companies dealt with system development and method acquisition. He found nearly universal "implicit resistance to continuous improvement methodologies, if not open critique of their scientific foundations ... ." He went on to claim tactics like work standardization are "apparations" — "symptoms of a malaise in the current ways of understanding and approaching systems development and use." He explains why by listing the common "pathologies" resulting from the continuous improvement mindset:

Excessive idealism (encouraging disillusion, frustration, and cynicism),

Speed and oblivion (new endlessly supplants the incompletely implemented),

Carbon copy projects (followed "disgruntingly" as bureaucratic procedure),

Narcissism ("strong actors" become the main driving force, creating a double bind: is this systemic rigor or forceful leadership?),

Technical bias (creativity is evicted by the "concern for the careful management of the means"),

Totalitarian bias (drastic simplification of reality), and

Ideological drift (preaching encapsulates science).

He claims that his research (the most unbiased by ideology I've found, except, perhaps, for my own :-}) concludes that "Painful and slow alignment of people, methods, and systems is the stuff of which actual implementation processes are made."

Of course, no one wants to hear this.

The a priori benefits of standardized work processes seem unapproachably obvious, but Ciborra found them mythical. He found no two companies (in 25 years of continuous study) ever implemented the same method, though most claimed to have implemented one or another standard. Further, he found that the odd eccentricities, the local divergences from standards, often comprised an organization's competitive advantage. He argued that when standard procedures are embraced, they create at best competitive parity. Real advantage was achieved by working in unreproducible, non-standard ways.

Besides, the terms standard and agile (especially if I deign to capitalize the term as Agile) sit together koan-like. A subject, perhaps, for reflection more than action.

Author of best-selling Fooled By Randomness and Black Swans Nassim Nicholas Taleb was being a curmudgeon again recently in The Sunday Times. A little of him goes a long, long way. AND his skepticism about how financial markets and complex systems are commonly managed seems properly placed, skepticism being as necessary to clear perception and good eyesight.

He claims that the US focuses upon managing to models of the world, while the Europeans attend more to adapting to the way the world shifts. And Talib claims that the world shifts unpredictably, under the influence of eventual but unpredictable Black Swan Events-once in a very long while occurances. These, he claims, wipe out the optimistic, who discount their risk because of their low probability of occurring. Wisdom, Talib claims (with considerable credibility), insists that one hedge these unlikely gut shots or risk catastrophy. This is a different mindset than our probability professors insisted we learn, and one quite alien to anyone producing plans, schedules, and "managing risks" in organizations today.

I can't verify his perspective, but I can confirm that the model madness here seems rampant. We do not deal with the world as it is, it seems, but are taught---rewarded even---for dealing with the world as it is supposed to be according to our models of it.

Read Fooled By Randomness if you have a strong stomach for blunt criticism. Read the whole Sunday Times piece if you'd like a gullet-full of his perspective. Watch his recitation of the following "life tips," if you want just a taste of his style. Or just read those tips below.

Taleb's top life tips:

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

I had no idea that cubicles were a Utopian statement, but I'm not really surprised that they are. More surprising is that someone out there is doing their PhD work on the cubicle as a statement of culture. Had to happen. Just had to happen.

"Those with moral aspirations for the cubicle—from countercultural Californians like Tom Peters to Midwestern Protestants like Max De Pree—sought to defend some idea of “humanity” against the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Yet, to say that bureaucracy is inhuman has not always been an objection to it. As defined by Max Weber a century ago, bureaucracy makes its great contribution to the world precisely by ignoring the human spirit. Operating according to fixed rules, policies, and positions, bureaucracy in its purest form functions, as Weber wrote, “without regard for persons.” As bureaucracy “develops more perfectly, the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.” The central impulse of bureaucracy is to fashion a world in conformity to the impersonal abstraction and precise relationships of an organizational chart."

Here's the link