Forty-some years ago, I wrote my first song. It seems kinda silly now, but it was enough to infect me pretty thoroughly.
Thirty-some years ago, I recorded some tracks in a barn studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just about a year after that I decided to drop out of the music business and finally, after a seven year delay, enroll in university.
Well, I've done a few different things since then, but I've always gravitated back into writing songs. Last weekend some friends stayed with us and, as usual, I performed a few of my songs for them. In the course of that evening rediscovered this ditty I started an awfully long time ago, but never finished. I decided this week to finish it, and managed to complete that today. Here's the first recording of Paint Me A Picture, and my first musical recording in a very, very long time. (Just click the "Podcast" link below.) I hope you enjoy it.
Paint Me A Picture
I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of
it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Hey, hey.
I’ve been feelin’ way past due,
and smelling your smile in every other song.
I thought these spotlights ought to free me,
how was I to know
that they would hold so strong?
Here I am living my dream of the best of it,
while dreaming of the rest I left behind to play.
Hey hey!
Paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms.
and write me a letter on old motel paper,
Just anything handy could brighten my day.
You’re so far away
I know you’ll trundle off to bed
Thinkin’, “He’s out there somewhere,
Singin’ his heart out to a room full of recent
strangers,
While the one he really cares about sleeps soundly.”
Is life ever what it seems?
Does my voice betray what I dare not say in song?
Before this spotlight ever caught me,
We’d managed to survive
by simply holdin’ on.
we held on tight through the thick of it,
Though I’ve been losing my grip when I slip onto this
stage.
hey, hey!!
So paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms
And write me a letter on old motel paper
Just anything handy could brighten my day
You’re so far away
I know you hate to go to bed
Thinkin’ I’m out there somewhere,
Singin’ My Heart Out to a room full of empty strangers
While the one I really care about sleeps lonely.
I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of
it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Still hopin’ to make the best of it someday,
Hopin’ to make the best of this someday.
11/29/2008
©2008 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
(Image of J. Smith, trailblazer)
Within SEI, there were (probably still are) two factions. I heard (just hearsay) that two principals at SEI approached two of the Agile Manifesto signatories to wish them luck shortly after the manifesto was made public. Apparently they had carried the same intentions in founding the SEI, but were compromised when the suits showed up.
One of the indices of a successful approach is that it attracts the attention of the suits. Think of the suits as the colonizers who follow the trailblazers and the pioneers. The trailblazers operate with extreme sensitivity to the context and appear to follow their noses and instincts because they have no roadmaps. The pioneers are content to follow the trailblazers' lead (head West), intent upon creating their own place in the world. The suits understand that there's no leverage in being a trailblazer (no royalties to earn on trails blazed, just perhaps a short-term commission to explore and write a report, maybe trap a few beaver along the way), or in being a pioneer (free land, but you have to build your own cabin and prove the land by living on it for X years). No economies of scale or speculation possible from either role.
The suits put up road signs, then pave the roads, levying taxes all along the way. They create municipalities so people don't have to trailblaze or pioneer, but just move (better yet, hire their moving company to move them). What was a self-motivated, self-organizing system becomes increasingly regulated and determined. Some call this civilization.
SEI has faced the same difficulties Agile faces. Professional managers are neither trailblazers nor pioneers, and most have no experience with either, though they might well aspire to gain from both T and P insight and experience. But they are also interested in leveraging these insights, and this means replication. So they start by asking innocently paradoxical questions: What do trailblazers do? How do pioneers achieve results? They eventually answer their own questions by creating a regime of what are called best practices, which can be leveraged and finely replicated. That this distillation moves quickly away from the originating practice ain't surprising. The trailblazers move on, never having been married to civilization. A generation later, the homesteaders are landed gentry.
Before the watch, everyone had a finely-tuned ability to intuit time by using their senses. After the invention and wide distribution of the watch, most lost this ability, it being easier to just check the wrist. Reading the senses for time is now considered an arcane practice, practical only for boy scouts to earn merit badges. Professionals wear watches, but also need to adopt processes to synchronize their watches.
We've all seen the suits in action. heck, some of us have actually suited up. The prototypical suits come from heavily regulated, invariably HUGE enterprises, and know well how things get done there. They've studied how decisions are made there and how choices are selected, and understand that whatever they promote must be dressed up properly to pass initial muster. No greasy trailblazers. No dusty sodbusters. Specific, measurable, reducible, civilized practices only, please.
So, SEI shoved out those pioneers who wouldn't submit, or drove them deep underground, replacing them with compliant, well-educated suits who know how things are supposed to be done, often without ever having actually done any of it themselves. But they have been certified as professionals, able to properly profess. And the enterprises warmly receive and submit, seeing possibilities for real leverage (read: dominion) over their projects. (Finally!) Well, at least they embrace the endless possibility of achieving this, without ever actually achieving this.
Well, they argue, most of what we do ain't properly characterized as either trailblazing or pioneering. They subsume the unpalatably feral practices by sanctioning them, by explaining how paving roads is actually the same as blazing trails, creating strange-sounding clones: Agile Waterfall, Agile + CMM "official" publication. (Note, Waterfall's trailblazers intended no less than Agile,'s but they were civilized over time. Civilized or moved on.)
I was reading the DoD's guidelines for Earned Value Program Management (I know, Satanic Verses), and was surprised to see in the introduction several interesting exhortations: 1- These are guidelines. Do not interpret them as mandated practices. 2- Do not use them if your project is: researchy, maintenancey, not well-characterized as strings of tasks/deliverables, or if the program is less than $20 million dollars in expected expenditures. Don't these caveats exclude most of the programs DoD initiates? The manual says little about what to do if the effort fails to satisfy these criteria, just threatens that EVM won't add enough value to be worth the effort otherwise.
A final analogy: The emerging farmers' market community has been trailblazing and pioneering a new way to produce and distribute food. Small farms. Cooperation between producers to distribute. A real community-organizing, ground-roots operation. Their opponent in everything they've done has been the Farm Bureau, the lobbying group encouraging subsidized industrial-scale production. The farmers' suits. The Farm Bureau has been insisting on 'a level playing field,' encouraging state and federal regulators to insist that small producers comply with the same rules that commodity producers are held to, even though the context is world's different. Farming 300,000 acres of commodity grain is not the same activity as farming a ten acre plot of arugula.
Same story with projects, I think. The vast majority of projects are smallish affairs, ten acres or less. Intending to produce for local consumption. Never interacting with ADM, but asking a fair price from people who appreciate the essential eccentricity of local customs, traditions, and production. They thrive on community involvement rather than distant regulation and subsidy. They've mastered their kind of agriculture, and have little interest, and can see even less utility, in scaling up. They have little leverage, when their crop fails they lose, unless the community supports them because they share aspirations to be self-sufficient. None of them would properly adopt as necessary the agricultural equivalent of the DoD's EVPM system or even CMM, which was never intended to be used in their context, anyway. But the little guys borrow and steal from even those, banding together to accept credit cards, educate themselves and their customers in the importance of sanitation, and to lease market space.
The little guys are small-a agile. The big guys might peek into their world and longingly sigh, remembering when farming was for them family and not corporate farming, but were they to adopt wholesale the agile practices, their system, which depends upon different leverage points, wouldn't sustain them. They aren't, except in fat years, so much farming land as farming the government, anyway. Still, the Farm Bureau has taken to using the language of the little guys, speaking of sustainability just as if their model was sustainable without heavy subsidy. Have you seen ADM's commercials on the news hour? They make me dewy-eyed. Suits are good at invoking genuine tears of association.
It's no gift to be sanctioned by SEI, but it needn't be a curse, either. It's just the suits again, trying to take credit for civilizing what was perfectly sustainable territory before. I think of this as a new SUV called 'trailblazer.' Just don't try to blaze any trails with it. Stay on the pavement at all times.
Hope this doesn't seem too cynical. I think we should know enough to be cynical, but choose not to become cynical. Don't know enough and you might be naive. No leverage in naivety. Choose to be cynical and you might as well surrender all aspiration. No leverage there, either.
Blazing too long of a trail for civilized consumption
here,
david
(image of J.
Smith, civilized)
Interesting piece in a recent American Scientist on the critical importance of metaphor to the forward progress of science. While objective observation and rigorous measurement are important to science, narrative and metaphor are no less crucial. It is through translating discoveries into stories that real meaning and real understanding emerge for the author no less than for the reader.
Metaphors paint pictures we can see, and imagine ourselves stepping into. Arguably less real than the science bits, they unchain the door to deeper understanding. Even science depends upon myth-making and story-telling to make real progress.
"When I ask a project manager to describe her ethics, I
usually get a bit of mumbled motherhood and some mangled apple pie.
Sometimes fife and drum music wafts in the distant background. I
ask to encourage her mindfulness, not to test her knowledge of
what’s wrong and right. I couldn’t possibly know for
her, and neither of us are situated, in that moment, to choose
exactly what either of us should do. I am genuinely curious,
though, how she will go about choosing when that moment
comes."
The final installment of my series considering The Ethical Responsibilities of Project Work appeared last week in Projects@Work.
What did I learn? The critical importance that Mindfulness makes, but also how little mindfulness is really needed to make a real difference. I relearned that as a human, I can't expect myself to be endlessly mindful, but I can appreciate just how critical my own mindfulness is. I will find myself stuck and, in that moment, mindfulness will help. Of course, as a human, I'm likely to yank and faunch for a while before I remember mindfulness, but that's okay, too.
The failure modes are polar opposites and exact equivalents: expecting to avoid mindlessness and expecting to be mindful. We can reasonably assume that mindlessness will intrude, but never when. We can likewise depend upon mindfulness, but not always upon where we'll find it.
This is, as I wrote long ago, a sloppy opera and a stupid ballet. If it isn't for the best, at least it is forever. I stumbled upon choice writing this article, as I have stumbled upon choice many times before. Perhaps, I muse, that choice can only be stumbled upon, never jiggered. What we choose to do when we don't know what to do makes all the difference in the world.
We're all familiar with the concept of Tipping Point,
that point in a progression where one trajectory turns into
another, cannot help but turn. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bestseller
about it. He spoke of mavens and connectors and social networks and
transformation. Where word of mouth transformed unknowns into
unforgettables. This posting isn't about Tipping Points.
Tipping Points are powerful, but iffy. No way to say for sure if your effort will result in a tip. This posting is about Tickle Points. Tickle Points are small things with powerful influence.
Even been to Schiphol airport? In the men's rooms there, each urinal has the image of a fly etched near the bottom of the bowl. This subtle bit of context architecture has reduced the amount of 'spashback' needing to be cleaned up. This without a single maven, connector, or clever 'we aim to please, so please aim' poster. The image of a fly works as a pee magnet. What boy could resist aiming at that alluring target? What boy worth his salt could miss?
Tickle Points are tiny nudges, guiding you where you probably prefer to go (excuse the expression) anyway. Where posters encourage disobedience, and process descriptions produce zzzzzzzs, Tickle Points gently nudge compliance into being.
Ever notice how no one ever cusses at grandma's table, though no one ever prohibits it? Grandma's table is a powerful context marker that renders the urge to cuss unthinkable, and so undoable.
In our process-obscessed culture, we miss this subtle point. The subtle cue speaks louder than words. And more meaningfully than even a maven's marveling. Look for the tickle points and change everything. Find me a feather and I'll change the world!
But this was a huge enterprise aiming at getting even larger, targeting economies of scale. Hypothetically, getting larger creates ever greater leverage, even faster growth, even more profits.
I once calculated that if my newborn son continued growing at the rate he grew that first month, he'd outweigh the Empire State Building before he was twenty. Economies of Scale seem to work fine until they don't. Once they cross over the point separating working from failing, they crumble. Big might have been better. Humungous gets horrible. Bigger-faster-cheaper only works until it doesn't.
Then we try hard to preserve the status quo, though the leg bone can't be scaled up to support weight distributed that way. Wylie Coyote- like, we keep running even after we've exceeded the mesa beneath us. Then we fall.
Looking around my small city, I see some struggling organizations and some thriving ones. The thriving ones seem to be the ones that never grew bigger than their britches. The struggling ones choose economy of scale, the grow or die strategy. The thriving ones chose an identity more focused upon sustaining their identity. A bank satisfied with their market share. A specialty manufacturer who doesn't demand ever more customers to survive. A lot of wineries that pre-sell everything they produce and don't aspire to get any bigger than they've ever been.
The seduction to keep growing seems certain to satisfy for a while. It seems certain that, mastering growth, we've mastered life. But life is not just about growth, but about sustenance. The part of life that grows endlessly is most closely correlated with death, not life. After eighty five years of sustainability, my dad's doctor diagnosed him with cancer. For the first few months following the diagnosis, nothing much changed, though the doctor assured us that the tumor was growing. The collapse came rather quickly. One day, everything seemed the same. Next day, we knew it would never be the same again.
Credit-default swaps were a great idea when they represented a tiny portion of the overall financial market. When their value outgrew the volume of all other trades, they became an ever-taller house of cards balanced on the head of a relatively ever-tinier pin. Unsustainable. When everyone rushes to the same side of the boat, it flips.
My talk at that financial institution was not warmly received. It seemed irrelevant, and probably was. I said that every project is personal, and depends upon not ever-greater control, but ever smaller. As their projects had grown to larger proportions, they had become increasingly impersonal. Planning became increasingly hands-off. Self- control morphed into distant oversight. Work itself became more and more a matter of complying rather than creating. Though this created ever more jobs for managers, it resulted in ever less space for the people populating those positions to do what people do well.
Well, now the masters of that universe have crashed back to earth. And what do they plead for? Bailout money. Help to sustain what was never going to be sustainable. They'd become too big to fail and too big to thrive. Damned whatever they do.
Those who embraced something less than the industrial ideal of growing to produce an ever-larger scale slime trail were marginalized during the recent run-up. We're still here. Deeply discounted. Humbled, yet wise. Working still at economies of snail. Our shells might be a bit harder. Our bodies slimier. Our antennae still searching for something our DNA compels us to pursue. We are not through. Perhaps just beginning anew.
(from a post on my SlowWork Google Group. Request to join this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Slow-Work?hl=en)
It's pretty clear to me that no one, much less economists, understand our present economy. Those who might really understand are so distrusted by those who don't, they can't explain a thing to anyone else's satisfaction. Many who don't understand, believe they do understand. As Laing said, "What you don't know you don't know, you think you know." Ever was thus. Dismal again.
Fact might be that none of us have any personal experience with 'an economy,' which doesn't exist anywhere but as a network of figments. But then figments have always taken most of our first row seating. We thrive on 'em. Until they do us in.
Our certainty is the most curious part of our relationship with figments. We, for instance, hedge our risks, believing that we have mediated risk as a result. Ceteris Paribus, all other things remaining equal, is small defense against a credit crunch or a full-tilt meltdown. All other things do not, as a general rule, remain equal, just especially uncountable and unpredictable. Small insurance this, against the first person experience of loss.
Now comes the bailout. And I've been thinking about the leverage one has - or doesn't have - when bailing out. Ever been in a boat that's sprung a leak? The size of the boat relative to the size of the body of water that formerly floated it puts the bailer in a weak position. Even should the leak get fixed, the effort required to remove the accumulated water is great. And the bucket remarkably small in comparison.
I read this week that the value of hedged instruments was estimated at perhaps ten times the annual gross world product. That's a big pond. How big is the leak? No one knows how to value what's left. Well, few understood how to value what was there before, either, but it's easier to float on a positive figment than a negative one. We love positive figments and fear the negative ones.
Maybe we only ever come close to experience the real power of collective figment certainty when the bottom falls out from under our confidently maintained fantasy because we experience real hunger then. Perhaps even genuine privation.
Projects@Work published the third installment of my Project
Ethics series this morning.
There's a link back to the second installment there, too.
This series, the final installment will be posted next week, encapsulates what I've retained about project work. The distillation might make some of it hard for you to swallow, but this is how it is for me over here. What seemed at first necessary knowledge has evaporated in practice to become beside the point. What wouldn't even register then on my innocent radar has taken central position in my understanding now.
The executive summary: Project Ethics are about choice. Once any action becomes a must-do mandate, ethics evaporates. Without choice, there can be no ethics. Does it follow then that creating choice is the key to satisfying the ethical responsibilities of project work?
The challenge is that the choice points are cloaked, hidden from casual observation. It might even be true for you, as it most certainly has been for me, that the greater the choice point, the less it feels like one in that moment where my choice might make all the difference.
The series became a treatise on mindfulness. Please feel free to comment on the P@W site. The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.
"The M&M or Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy was conceived by the American strategist, Col. John R. Boyd. The basic goal of an M&M strategy is to build support for and attract the uncommitted to your cause by framing a "motherhood" position -- i.e., a position no one can object to, like the mythical "motherhood, apple pie, and the American way" -- and then inviting your opponent in to repeatedly attack it and, in so doing, smash himself to pieces at the mental and the even more decisive moral level of conflict. Self-destruction will happen inevitably, if you can successfully induce your adversary into attacking your motherhood position in a way that exposes mismatches among the three poles of his moral triangle, defined by (1) What your opponent says he is; (2) What he really is as defined by his actions; and (3) the World he has to deal with. Whether consciously or not, I believe Obama has an intuitive feel for the moral leverage inherent in the M&M strategy and this enabled him to outmaneuver McCain and his campaign and bring them to the verge of mental and moral collapse. That Obama also did this to Hillary Clinton suggests it is no accident."
I have inadvertently employed something like this strategy when introducing companies to the practice of ProjectCommunity. I claim that while teamwork is nice and even useful, it cannot meaningfully influence outcome without using it with a broader, ProjectCommunity mindset that considers everyone who can effect and everyone effected by the effort on equal us-ness with the core team. Those who deny this obvious (to me, anyway) fact, inevitably find their cordoned effort under the influence of some unconsidered, discounted constituency. And while this outcome might, from within the team trance, seem like evidence of bad luck, this bad luck and trouble becomes pretty much their only friend. Even those who concede, but continue to consider the community to be comprised of 'stakeholders', over time grow to appreciate what it feels like to be considered a vampire with stakeholders stalking them.
I'm also seeing this strategy used in what feels to me to be a destructive way, though I guess any strategy that succeeds in producing an outcome I don't support might be fairly characterized as destructive. The burgeoning 'sustainability movement,' which is rapidly creating a cadre of ideologues worthy of any mass movement, has taken the same motherhood and apple pie position that the Zero Growth movement occupied thirty years ago. Locally, the City has agreed to convene a sustainability committee. Who could oppose such a thing? Their first objective: To define what sustainability means here.
As near as I can tell, anyone successfully defining sustainability would say that it means continuing surprising change, since that's how the world seems to actually work. Instead, it seems to be widely interpreted as meaning 'retain what we like' and 'eliminate what we don't.' Since when has anyone successfully sustained an agenda like this? Further, I personally have survived long periods of conditions that should have done away with me, my teen-aged years not excepted. Yet here I am. Mysteriously. Even surprisingly.
Not to be cynical, but I keep running into anti-progressive attitudes traveling under the sustainability label. But that does sound cynical, doesn't it? I'm arguing against motherhood and apple pie, even though sustainability remains, as Spinney says, an empty vessel. I'm just beating myself to bits railing about it.
I was re-reading Jay Haley's remarkable essay The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ, and concluded that maybe he knew something about this strategy centuries before the candy ever appeared. He didn't challenge the orthodoxy, but claimed instead to represent a truer instantiation of it. He commanded no one to follow, but invited followers instead. How could anyone successfully challenge such high ground?
News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants. Why? Lots and lots of PMs looking for work. It's been several years since I attended any PM-related conference where the out-of-work PMs and PM consultant wanna-bes didn't greatly outnumber those who were there to share information.
Just yesterday, I reviewed yet another job description claiming to want someone capable of bringing projects in consistently on-time, on-budget, and on-spec.
Contracting for government work these days requires the applicant to engage in the most absurd fantasizing, as if, before work began, one could with some precision, spreadsheet hours by major task, then sign some dotted line validation of the bid's accuracy.
I thought we might have learned better by now. We have not. What passes for professional practice in the Project Management "Profession" today wouldn't quite qualify as prostitution in most professions, and would be indictable, even convict-able in several. What went wrong?
I think the aspiration that focused upon making project management a profession on par with dentistry or occupational therapy turned it into its opposite. Rather than attract strategic risk-takers, it has encouraged compliance and supplication, trading in trivial bromides to address extraordinarily non-trivial conditions. The result? Institutionalized ignorance. Conservative orthodoxy. Greater barriers to entry. Little progress.
If project management has become a profession in its own right, what has that achieved? What used to be attained by political cleverness and strategic side-stepping can now be mandated. Who retains the savvy to find their way through the dark woods, once the paths have been leveled and paved? More critically, where will we convince anyone chased away by all this foolishness to come back and risk doing some real discovering, some genuine skulduggery to accomplish something, anything never even imagined before?
In celebration of International Project Managers' Day, don't join in any celebration. Go get away with something instead. Get yourself fired for insubordination. Insult your customer's deepest sensibilities and walk away on your hind legs. What we used to have to earn with every engagement, the certification to actually guide the effort, could only be bestowed afterwards, and had little currency the next time. Hired with misgivings, misunderstood, sometimes reviled most of the way, the worthy ones walked away from the successful ones with a little less than a nod of appreciation, and needed not even that! Then, for us, it was the community that actually did anything. We were catalyst, the wax gratefully lost in lost-wax casting. Conveniently located, nearly invisible, dancing with the big professional egos to deliver something more than they could ever understand.
Amen.
