Perhaps the purpose of these inquires was never as I envisioned—to find that definitive answer—but to reassure myself that I had not overlooked another's scholarship and jumped to some hasty conclusion. And the searches, even the researches, were arduous enough to render attractive even weak resolutions. At times, I would have gladly traded for a single magic bean—even the promise of that bean for future delivery, such was the frustration, the crazy-making frenzy of my search. And I admit to taking respite on the occasional flimsy lilly pad, my weight swamping the damned thing, my sleeplessness eventually driving me back into the deep chilling water to ask again and then again.
But I was praying to a false God, worshiping a moldy idol, asking for the wrong prayers to be answered. And they were not answered. Thank heavens!
When I was first assigned to lead a project, I suspectedthat there were a few keys that, once discovered, might unlock the mystery to fulfilling the assignment. I was certainly not certified then, and definitely not qualified to fulfill the desperate demands of my management, who just wanted this embarrassment of a project done. They no more than I understood why this tar baby refused to be released, though they, unlike I, had a lot more reasons why it should have been a simple matter of a tweak here, a temporary reassignment there, and everything would resolve just as it should have resolved in the first place. And no reasons why it should not.
And I entered—probably because it was in my self-esteem's best interest to believe it so—believing that I could certainly right this slightly capsized vessel. It was not a very large ship and it was not anything like completely capsized.
It eventually washed ashore. No welcoming brass band, no grateful horns blaring. In the dark. Under considerable fog. Almost everyone survived. Cold, wet, thankful to be alive and wary of any opportunity to leave solid ground again.
But it was heady stuff, this blind navigation, this frenzied search for the presumed missing keys. I didn't know then and barely accept now that no one in the history of the world had ever managed to discover those presumed lost keys because they were not lost but had never been forged. It would take many dedicated, hopeful years before I would accept even the hint that those presumed keys could never and so would never be cast. They were not lost, just unfindable. Yet it was my steadfast belief that they had been cast and lost and that I could find them that motivated me through decades of delusional dedication. My enthusiasm was even infectious for a time, until it was no longer.
...to be continued ...
Yesterday afternoon, I heard the latest rehash of these classics on NPR's Marketplace program, where Rosabeth Moss Kantor, herself a NY Times Best selling author and Harvard B-School professor, warmly remembered Peter Drucker's legacy. What would Drucker have to say about the current business climate? Same old, same old.
It is apparently not any generation's job to change the world. I'm holding out for the idea that it might (I said MIGHT) be every generation's job to learn to better cope with the world as it is. Yet these sage bits of advice seem focused upon fundamentally changing the world
I don't mean to sound cynical here, because I'm not cynical, though I have concluded that simply telling another what they should be doing has little influence on that other person's actions. Yet the sages continue offering the same good advice, just as if, stated for the umpteenth time, it might finally change someone or something. How likely is that to happen?
Our business leaders are predators. Make no mistake. They pursue maximum profit, which means annex everything not nailed down. Given a choice between cutting head count and anything else, you already know what the predator will do. Drive knowledge workers? You bet! (Hey, they're not THAT smart if they're not the one driving!) Be of service? Sure, on my off hours. I volunteer for the Boy Scouts. Purpose? Destroy the competition!
Drucker was absolutely right. So was Deming and Gantt and Follett and every other visionary. But their message was somehow wrong. It bounced off the advice deflectors every predator was born with, reassuring only scholars and theorists and all those of us who engage in business without the predator gene. The game will not be changed.
But the game might be more wisely engaged in. How might we better engage, those of us who would otherwise be little beyond beach balls bouncing off the indifferent smirks of our shadowing bureaucracies? Telling 'em does not seem to work. Maybe, as I said in The Blind Men (click on the Buy My Book tab above), an ounce of acceptance is in order. After all, we knew they were snakes when we first picked them up. Who did we think we were that we believed we might talk them out of their nature?
You and I should have paid closer attention in Junior High.
Amen
This one was difficult to complete. Like drawing a self portrait from a fun house mirror image. Who IS that character in there? Is he the genuine article?
Like with any work of art, this construction finally forced my hand. I just had to choose. Wittgenstein once proclaimed that what he'd excluded from a manuscript was just as important as what he chose to include, and that to understand the work, both would necessarily need to be considered. And so it is here.
I believe I've identified some important considerations here, but I've doubtless excluded much more than I chose to include. What would you add if it was your hand etching the portrait of a stunt peddler, or a former one?
I might have never yet touched the face of any God, but I've shaved my share of them; bare blade barely separating achievement from ideal. These experiences were at least as humbling as elating, and no one else, no matter how close the shave, could feel the turbulence this perennial test pilot always feels.
My best work always scares the Hell out of me, and should. I might wake up under the bed, curled into a fetal coil, questioning my sanity along with my deeply suspect authority. Just who in the Hell did I think I was? And who in the Hell must that leave me being?
If my reading of history has taught me anything, I've grown to understand that there are no carefree geniuses. And those of us that occasionally glimpse some distant evidence of a tiny bit of our own genius do not dance away from these experiences, but slink. We are as exhausted as we've ever been. Drained. As if instead of shedding mere skin, we'd shed the inside out. Those of us that have done this in private are plenty breathless. Those who do this in public, on a stage, before a room filled with unavoidable strangers—inevitably intimate friends—are excused if they feel the compulsion to peek over their shoulder for a few days afterward.
I remind myself as I remind everyone who reads this prose. The geniuses you revere, fear. They hear a crazy horn and just start dancing, or singing, inflating always another trial balloon; their soul's inheritance, their sole legacy. They grow to expect bi-polar feedback, but never to comfortably settle beside it. One cheese never pleases everyone, and someone always expects Velvetta and just has to complain about the bleu, though nobody ever blew anything.
Adieu.
According to an official in a company closely related to the organization, the Project Management Institute will announce next week the creation of a totally new professional certification, CCI™, the Certified Complete Idiot designation.
The statement found on PMI’s Web site asserts, “since its founding in 1969, Project Management Institute (PMI®) has grown to be the organization of choice for project management professionalism. With over 80,000 members worldwide, PMI® is the leading nonprofit professional association in the area of Project Management. PMI® establishes Project Management standards, provides seminars, educational programs and professional certification that more and more organizations desire for their project leaders.”
“This CCI™ program is a natural extension of our traditional focus,” reported a PMI executive on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve been in the certification business longer than many organizations have been in existence. We’ve had an increasing number of requests from our certified members for additional certification programs. Further, member organizations find the promise of additional professional certifications to be a highly valued perquisite among their professional staff. They tell us that those we’ve already certified are among their most loyal and dedicated employees. Unlike software engineers, who jump ship on the promise of the tiniest increase in salary, most never leave once they become certified as a Project Management Professional.”
“We think of the Project Management Professional designation as a professional handcuff,” disclosed one client company spokesperson. Details of the new CCI™ program were sketchy at the time of publication, but one person close to the decision-makers at PMI® reported that an outline was nearly finalized. The program seems to closely map to the present PMBOK, or Project Management Body of Knowledge, with one important distinction. The CCI will be centered around a CCIBOE, pronounced “See Sigh Bow”, or Certified Completely Idiotic Body Of Experience. Unlike the PMBOK-based PMP certification program, however, the CCIBOE-based CCI™ certification’s course of study will include neither extensive reading nor rigorous testing.
“We’ve learned some things in our thirty plus years of certifying professionals,” disclosed a recently departed member of the PMI® executive board. "Our present Project Management Professional certification program requires extensive reading of the usual irrelevant materials and rigorous testing based upon rote memorization of inconsequential details. This program has attracted many who want to know about project management and many fewer who seem to have any desire to actually manage real world projects.”
“Our largest complaint from our client companies,” continued the ex-PMI board member, “Was that after certification, our project managers were so pumped up with theory that they didn’t have a clue about how to manage real world projects. So we decided to try a different approach this time. Since real learning seems to require making mistakes, our new program focuses upon accumulating a body of experience, rather than memorizing a body of knowledge. Accumulating a body of experience usually means engaging in ways that might lead an unenlightened observer to conclude that they are dealing with a certified complete idiot, hence the program’s name and focus.”
One PMI®-certified Project
Management Professional reached for comment was enthusiastic.
“With this certification, I might be able to actually engage
with my project’s community instead of manipulating them from
the isolation of the project office. With
the
PMP, I always felt
like I was supposed to make the project turn out the way it was
originally envisioned, which often left everyone worse off. If I
can be pre-certified as a Complete Idiot, I won’t have to
watch my every step. More important, if my community understands
from the beginning that I’m a Certified Complete
Idiot™, they won’t judge my stumbles as
harshly.”
Spokespeople for several PMI® client companies were similarly enthusiastic. It appears to this reporter that PMI® has another solid professional program on their hands.
Interested parties may phone
PMI’s Newtown Square, Pennsylvania headquarters at
610-356-4600, fax them at 610-356-4647 or E-Mail them at
pmihq@pmi.org.
Note: PMI, PIMBOK, PMP, CCI, project, the®, and® and are® registered trademarks of the® Project® Management® Institute® and® are used here against the® author’s better judgement.
What they're finding out there today is really no different than what their great grandfathers found: employers capable of insisting upon unconscionable irony. People struggling to hum along to tunes they do not really believe in.
This land grab for eternal exponential growth, the petty insistence on applying industrial-scale regulation strategies to operations too large to manage or too small to warrant such bureaucracy. Value creation displaced with slight-of-hand balance sheets and indictable (but usually not quite convict-able) income statements. A shell game played by touts to soak the gullible, of which they presume an infinite supply when there are actually ever fewer.
It's not a credit crunch, it's a credibility crunch. It's not a downturn in the markets, but evidence of markets designed to perform in ways ever fewer are even interested participating in. It's a dream turned nightmare. Sure, it would be great if, by cleverly accumulating ever more debt within an ever-expanding economy, we'd all outrun the unsustainable premise while trickling down prosperity on even the least of us. It actually doesn't work that way. Never has. (Evidence: the number of organizations gobbled up just to bolster 'temporary' sales shortfalls with a larger—albeit deeply indebted—pie, and the really, really successful ones who evaporated when their deliberately-constructed bubble burst. --- kinda sounds like the sub-prime mortgage debacle, where individuals were convinced they could manage their personal finances just like The Big Boys manage their corporate ones.)
This curious form of economy has migrated into government, non-profits, even social systems. We plan, track, then intend to control—we really do—even when, especially when, conditions shift into the uncontrollable. (We hold more firmly to our joysticks then.)
Here's the buried lead: most work is not industrial, yet we routinely employ industrial-scaled techniques to much of our work.
We lost the ability to relate. It's simple to undermine this natural human ability. Plan your future, then treat the plan as the arbiter of reality. Judge people by behaviors, not intentions, and make scant effort to understand intentions. Reward by performance to expectations, rather than by performance to conditions on the ground. Refuse to relate in any way except arm's-length, metrics-bound formality. Build your fiefdom and defend its boundaries.
Ninety years ago, Henry Lawrence Gantt declared that industry had lost its guiding compass, replacing it with profit. He claimed that if a company produces value, profits would follow, but if a company satisfied itself with merely pursuing profits, society would (and should) clamor in and take the reins away. This turns out to have been a prescient prediction of where our health care 'industry' has turned out to be today: The relational transformed into the industrial. How's that working for you, for us?
I've grown out of even being interested in working with such Big Dumb Companies.
The way it is never was the way it was ordained to be. The industrialists are engaging in yet another desperate attempt to maintain a moot status quo. They could succeed. There are plenty of organizations flying under that radar, those who accept that they are not industrial, and gain no benefit from industrial aspirations.
I am watching a massive project spend years developing their master program plan, which never informs those actually doing the work. This is vanity, the vanity of systems thinking twisted into mechanical decomposition. Their lunch is already cooked, and will be eaten by others. They will be surprised. Again. You and I won't be.
He illustrates innovation by improvising on a piano. He plays the standard transcribed melody to an old standard and relates this to business process. The result sounds wooden and lifeless. Then he improvises around the transcription and the result is transforming.
He plays a random series of notes, explaining that while this 'melody' might well be creative, it's not satisfying. Satisfaction... in both innovation and music ... requires respect for a few basic rules of construction, principles of harmony, rhythm, and tone. The manager's job involves letting go, removing barriers, and helping people believe in the objective.
Gardner mines the eternal argument between gut and brain, between what seems reasonable and what science shows isn't. When afraid, we are prone to jump out of the frying pan into a conveniently-located conflagration rather than extinguish the fire. This isn't crazy, just human.
Two weeks ago, the executives of our big three automobile companies hopped their private jets (having been ordered by their boards to travel by private jet) to shake their tin cups before Congress. Sent back to Detroit to produce plans to return to profitability, they returned with those plans a week later in hybrid cars.
A week to produce plans for returning to profitability after years of similar plans that only dug deeper holes? What's the likelihood that these plans, produced under extremity, will be more successful than the ones they produced last year or the year before?
The science of fear suggests that these plans are probably much worse AND will seem much better. We will see reflecting back at us from within them our hopes for a salvation from situations that could have no discrete path to resolution.
Planning might be our strangest response to fear and uncertainty. We are strangely comforted when we hear Obama propose a trillion dollar infusion into thousands of infrastructure development projects, each requiring much more than bucks and backhoes to succeed. The announcement amounts to Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland, saying, "I know, we could put on a show!", when the bank threatens to foreclose on Grandpa's farm.
There will be many complications between proposal and project, and even more between project initiation and delivery. These will be among the most complicated efforts imaginable. While they will be spawned to deliver infrastructure improvements, their purposes will conflict as each also intends to employ the unemployed (and sometimes the otherwise unemployable), spur local economies, satisfy regulations, find someone—anyone capable of auditing and overseeing their effort, while meeting hastily-concocted milestones and deadlines to avoid front-page accusations of cost-over-runs and malfeasance.
In the past, these conditions have resulted in massive malfeasance. Read The Confessions of an Economic Hitman to learn the sad story behind our attempts to spark Third World economies with infrastructure improvements. How money sold as economic improvement passed right through the target economy into the bank accounts of the multi-national development firms, leaving expensive infrastructure that simply crumbled under the inability of the local economy to maintain it or was managed by yet another US-based multi-national firm, charging heavy fees to the locals. Our Iraqi reconstruction effort attempted to follow this well-trod path, but failed. Ditto our reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan.
Haste clearly makes waste, but what's an economy to do when haste seems essential? Science suggests that we might seriously consider doing whatever seems unreasonable at these times. Hasten slowly, the ancient Romans suggested. The dismal science of economics screams for instant massive infusions of cash. Doing that, we recognize that we might have more mindfully considered the territory just beyond the infusion, when the way it's been asserts how it's always been done to start building a road to nowhere, a bridge back to a past that has already gone.
The big A&E firms are poised to make a killing. Whether the economy gets encouraged will be secondary unless we remember the purpose of these projects is not the medium we must use to achieve that purpose. We will not be simply building roads and bridges, but reconstructing an economy ravaged by self-serving abuse. You can bet the same old players are lined up just as if this were just another trough. And it might well be.
The plan ain't the thing. We will need to meld science, engineering, and inspiration to do this well. Our guts will be screaming throughout, insisting through our fear that we'd better hurry, time's-a'wastin', and we're already far behind. There is always at the beginning, a big suckin' hole just aching to be dug. We're rarely better off when we start frantically digging.
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)
I mention this duck because I've been deeply considering what it is that I do, and as usual, this reflection leaves me feeling like an odd duck.
Like my duck, I imprinted early on a medium of expression that few would equate to my later career(s). My first love was not cars or bikes or anything motorized or mechanical, but music. Specifically, creating music. Songwriting. Tunesmithing. Yea, I hated transcribing it. Never could read it worth a damn. Didn't much care for interpreting anyone else's, either. But I did revel in creating it. Silly or serious, I have pretty much always been a songwriter.
Because of this, I have an odd-duck sense of form and style that remains mysterious, even to me. I am an unrepentantly brutal critic and a very reluctant fan. There aren't more than a handful of songwriters I respect, and these for their lyrics more than their melodies. For me, melody is Musak™, the lyric makes the tune.
A well-crafted lyric is my personal model for coherence. A well-crafted lyric tells the story, guides the listener, and brings purpose to otherwise meaningless melody. When I first started hanging around projects, I noticed something missing. To my ear, it seemed as though the project leaders and planners and sponsors over-focused on performing music and missed crafting the song. The results sounded more like garage band jams than thoughtful renderings, and the words and the music never seemed to match for me. I'd try to explain what was missing, but even to me, my descriptions sounded like so much odd-duck quacking.
What is this felt sense? How can I explain? If you've never written a song, never stitched a lyric to dress a melody, it's a craft. Whether it's an art or not, I can't say, but it is a craft. As a craft, it's guided by some rules of thumb, some principles, and more felt-sense than specific technique. The most common question people who don't write songs ask me has always been: Which comes first, the melody or the words? My usual response: depends.
Depends upon what? Usually (I said usually) upon inspiration. Whatever comes, comes. It's not so much about what comes first as it is about what whatever comes comes into. (huh?) How receptive and accepting am I in that moment. That makes all the difference. The craft of songwriting is all about making silk purses out of sows ears.
Interestingly, so is the craft of project work. So is the craft of life.
Odd ducklings that we all are, we each imprinted early upon some primary means for expressing ourselves in the world. Whatever that might be doesn't matter. What matters is that we each figure out how to use what we've got to do what we want, what we need to do. For some, this will entail teaching others to do it the way you do it. For others, it will more revolve around you remembering to remind yourself that you do best doing it different than the way other ducks might do it. No need to explain or reform, just quack like the duck you know you are.
As a songwriter, I long ago abandoned the notion that I needed to write like Frank Loesser or Dave Frishberg, both true masters. I can be informed by their rules of thumb and leverage a bit of their wisdom, without mimicking their style, form, or substance. I don't write show tunes, or haven't so far. (Dave Frishberg has an eloquent word or two to say about Songwriting.)
In business as well as in life, the desire to mimic style seems imperative under the don't re-invent the wheel doctrine. But this seems a bad metaphor in general. It's not the wheel we're "re-inventing," but the terrain. We have no choice but to reinvent the terrain. Sitting down to rewrite Loesser's Baby It's Cold Outside won't satisfy anyone. Mustering a revival might. But for many, many, many efforts, nothing can adequately sit in for original tunes, melody expressing how it is here and lyrics clearly, compellingly telling the story. Infecting everyone within ear shot to tap their feet in nearly perfect unison.
For much of my working life, I have been a strong advocate for meaningful work. I've claimed that work quality improves whenever personal purpose gets involved. I've helped people imprint on the greater good and encouraged them to find their project within their project assignment. But today, I want to sing the praises of an under-appreciated kind of work, meaningless work.
Meaningless work is an act of selflessness. It is work divorced from tangible return, separated from productivity measurement, innocent of intention, innovation, and efficiency. It is work for work's sake. Unexamined action. Very human. Very Zen.
A meditation where thoughts do not float consciousness away, but remain present, just hanging around. No mugging for the virtual camera, no showing off for whatever passes for company.
When I am my work and my work is me, we transcend meaning. Meaning is beside our point, reward unthinkable. We, my work and I, become one, a dance of joy between hand and surface, between time and soul, between mine and mindlessness.
I labor to exhaustion, not to become exhausted. I work because the work needs doing---or not. I am not investing my time or consciously expressing myself, just being here---not there, now---not then, the purpose perfectly tautological, explaining nothing at all. Meaningless work is the soul of being in the body of nothingness. No one will long remember, not even I will notice that time and action performed in perfect silent harmony and that time, for an unmeasured moment, stopped moving in any discernible direction and simply was. Is. Always will be.
The unexamined life doesn't need to be lived or desire to no longer be, it just is. Perfectly comfortable naked, unselfconscious, unconscious, alive. Our analysis of the situation never was the situation. Meaningless work thrives without commentary, judgment, or critique. It is, without fussing about isn't. It ain't ain't, either. Neither. Or both sometimes.
I pose today, understanding that those who throw their rational mind between themselves and their sight might only see me working slowly, when I'm merely dancing with meaningless work, slow work. No time clock. No lunch break. No promise of a cold one at the end. No meaning higher than my weathered boots boost me. No calluses worth complaining about. Not stalking supper, but nourished nonetheless.
I am scraping an endless wall, indifferent to progress. Distinctly different duress than the working-class workingman blues. I will wear my Frankenstein pants, hand-sewn knee where the Henry Fonda rose nearly tore through me once, when meaning detached my mind. I will not create poetry, but be it. Those who watch (yawn) or later appreciate what someone must have done can find meaning for themselves, if meaning seems important then. Me, I will simply be: between, within, beside, atop, and as without as I can be. Not even becoming for a spell, meaningless and being.
Sing the praises of truly meaningless work.
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
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.
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.
"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."
Physicist Freeman Dyson is writing again. This time about global warming and the secular religion of environmentalism.
What I found most interesting about this article, which is actually a review of two books, is the characterization of science and economics, echoing Mark Gray's notion of physics envy—that every social science is jealous of the mathematical precision and replicability of physics.
Yet in all of the prominent arguments of the day, we seem to insist upon either searching for the final word or asserting some perspective as final, this as precondition for finding it useful or acceptable or credible. When the opposite might more reasonably be the case: Anyone asserting that they have found the final word is probably deceiving them self or trying to deceive someone else.
Quoting from the article: "All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
"Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
"Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard."
The final installment of my Unlearning Project Management series was posted this morning on the Projects@Work Executive Briefing site. The posting also features links to the first five installments.
What did I unlearn in the process of writing this series? Two months ago, when I started writing this series, I was smoking about ten exquisite little cigars every day. Just after I finished the third installment, I stopped smoking. For unlearning, I highly recommend this strategy: First, start smoking. Smoke pretty steadily for five or six years, then decide to stop.
If your experience turns out to be like mine, your first sensation will be of losing your identity, because smoking, whatever the chemical addiction, is a deeply personal, identity-involved activity. The anticipation of identity loss feels sad, and that sadness alone can chase even the most dedicated reformer into the weeds.
Learning usually occurs pre-consciously. Unlearning is not so benign. A level of awareness gets involved in the unlearning that is rarely present when the original knowledge parks its jalopy. And, like not thinking of a rhino, unlearning manifests the presence of what we don't want to acquire what we do want.
Better, perhaps, to focus upon relearning than unlearning. Relearning reframes while unlearning resuscitates into explicit awareness what might have been barely tacit. Ouch!
I'm past four weeks without an exquisite little cigar, and my identity is healing over the scab. I expect some scars will remain. How did I learn about project managing? Cripes, who could remember? How did I unlearn what I'd learned? Painfully aware. Half-filled with promise. Afraid I'd fail. Concerned who I might become should I succeed. Stumbling into interesting territory.
We are unlearning something all the time. Amy's ten-year-old granddaughter has already acquired a raft of unproductive habits and beliefs. Much of her challenge in school is about letting go of what she naively acquired to make space for new, perhaps better, previously unimagined beliefs. Reading entailed letting go of her need to pretend she could already read. Same with math. She lost her composure sometimes, but who wouldn't? Trading mastery for indentured apprenticeship, certainty for no more than the possibility of return. It might be impossible to learn anything without unlearning something previously parked and in the way.
Life, work, heck, even project managing, seems more like Calvin Ball than any of the professional sports featuring a ball. In Calvin Ball, as you might remember from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin made up the rules as he went along, much to the eternal frustration of Calvin's playmate Hobbes. Whatever made Calvin a winner usually dictated the rules of play. Slip that perspective out one notch, replace Calvin's egoism with care for the project's community, and this 'the rule is whatever makes me the winner' doesn't seem so terrible. What game do we play? Perhaps it's whatever game makes us the winner.
Now get out there are Play Ball!
The problem is that we believe we have a problem. Not all Christmases are merry and bright, and only about one in twelve are white in these parts. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman reported in his Learned Helplessness that one primary cause of depression is the self-help movement, which promises that we can deliver more than anyone can reliably deliver. In business, the romantic notion that success is achievable through "continuous improvement" has doubtless destroyed more companies than it has preserved.
We live in a curiously romantic culture, one which has almost successfully replaced performance with measurement, achievement with intention, and skill with luck. We follow whatever the latest study found, only to learn after years of bliss-filled ignorance that ... whoopsy! ... that study was apparently wrong. Romanticism breeds ignorant bliss in the short run and humiliating moments of enlightenment longer-term.
The following linked article, The Age of Educational Romanticism by Charles Murray got me thinking about how many activities have become romantically entwined and how awful these infatuations turn out to be. Whatever the field, without room for pragmatism and skepticism—let alone realism (I know, no such thing, but still the only place to get a really good steak)—romanticism guarantees its opposite. Mandating that no child be left behind ensures that many will leave on their own volition. Liberating another imprisons anyone who could have liberated himself.
"No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious. Starting that process can be as simple as more articles like this one."Link Here
from: BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL By Stuart A.
Kauffman
Whatever else you're reading, you just gotta read this. It's gorgeous!!
Read that posting before you read this one, to get the contiguous story!
... ...
Finally, we invite people to bring themselves to the workshop. Not the role you play or the title you display, but your shoes-off self. To arrive skeptical if you are skeptical. Optimistic if you are optimistic. Curious if you are curious.
We invite you to bring yourself to the workshop because I noticed, after attending many workshops, that I usually didn’t show up. I sent who I was supposed to be in my stead, and this surrogate postured and posed, and stayed in his head where no situated learning could really penetrate. If managing projects is a continuing act of self discovery, then bringing your self to the effort seems necessary, essential.
We cultivate individuals in this workshop.
“What do we mean by
individual cultivation? What is the theoretical background of
individual cultivation? More advanced forms of learning try to go
beyond the classical transfer model. That is to say, the
understanding of learning as a process of transferring more or less
stable chunks of knowledge from one brain to another is replaced by
a more dynamic perspective: learning as a continuous and active
process of adaptation and construction in which knowledge is
developed in permanent interaction between the cognitive system and
its environment.”
Markus F. Peschl -
Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation
for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical
Innovation
We’re interested in discovering what you see, what you prefer, how you respond to difficulties so that you can see yourself in action. This cultivation produces individuals properly situated to resolve the dilemmas they encounter on their project. We consider some of these dilemmas—Should you plan the whole, or just the foreseeable parts? Are you loyal to your manager or your assigned team? Who you discover yourself to be when situated within one of these dilemmas determines the choices available to resolve them. No method involved, other than mindful engagement.
Rather than transfer method-level information, this workshop employs focusing tools—a series of lenses through which to consider your project to help you make better informed choices. We believe that poorly informed choice is the most insidious form of slavery, and that latitude for action comes from becoming better informed about the actions you might take.
One of our focusing tools, for instance, considers your mindset about your project. Mindset, positive or negative, hopeful or hopeless, tends to be causative. We create what we believe we will create at some mysterious level. Considering what your mindset is and deliberately choosing what it will be is one way to gain leverage over even otherwise hopeless-seeming situations.
There is little in this workshop that’s covered in any way in the popular project management trainings. No instructions for calculating a critical path, no directions for controlling change, for this is not a deductive experience but an inductive one. We are conditioning you for the real work your project will bring you, and those deductive, technique-focused models for responding prove poorly situated to provide much real leverage. Besides, you can learn these techniques anywhere. We’re offering something quite different.
This is a difference that makes a real difference. When you return, and your boss asks you what you learned, you’ll probably find yourself unable to crisply respond. There might not be ten bullet items you can explain to anyone who was not there. Those who were there, though, will understand in ways no words could properly express. You’ll feel different as you engage in the same old activities. And you’ll notice choices that never seemed to be there before.
Whether this experience changes anything you do, it’s likely to profoundly change how you relate to your work. Ask your boss to watch. He’ll probably notice, too. And those you work with might ask you about the secret, what happened in that workshop you attended, and think you’ve made some pact of silence when you find yourself unable to explain. But they’ll notice the difference. Invite them to attend. They, too, will experience profound learning, and will find themselves unable to explain, too.
“... profound change does
not only happen in the cognitive domains, but touches a more
fundamental necessary to make changes in this domain than to change
one’s intellectual, philosophical, political, etc. position.
Philosophically, one can refer to this domain as the
“person.” It goes beyond the level of personal skills,
competencies, personality, etc. because it transcends the domain of
personality traits, behavioral and cognitive patterns, solely
quantifiable data, etc. It touches the person on his/her
fundamental level of being and, in many cases, concerns the domain
of wisdom."
Markus F. Peschl -
Triple-Loop Learning as Foundation
for Profound Change, Individual Cultivation, and Radical
Innovation
To claim uniqueness, however, does not explain much. This description might elicit many different negative comparisons, such as, “it is almost, but not entirely unlike this other workshop.”
How is this workshop unique? Most project workshops focus attention upon transferring explicit how-to skills: how to plan, how to track progress, how to control execution, and how to build a team. They focus upon the transfer and acquisition of explicit knowledge without ever considering how it is that one goes about acquiring and actually using that knowledge.
This is a different kind of learning, one not encapsulated in any method. Agile, for instance, represents a specific context within which certain techniques are appropriate and others are not. Becoming an Agile practitioner entails exposure to specific techniques, for instance, but practicing agility requires something else, too. It requires a level of awareness about who you are within that context, and not simply the ability to repeat pre-defined practices.
We consider all techniques situationally useful and none universally appropriate. So we focus upon how one might meaningfully pick and choose from among the array of possible approaches to discover, to design the approach best suited to a specific situation. This is at root a design process which includes both knowledge of explicit practices along with a deep awareness of tacit knowledge and personal preference.
To master a project is quite different than to manage a project. Mastery entails both a keen understanding of techniques and methods and a presence of mind while employing them. Mastering Projects focuses upon conditioning that presence of mind which is fundamental to adequately designing any complex undertaking.
How do we accomplish this? First, we ask each participant to bring their own set of learning objectives. Rather than pre-determine the purpose of the workshop for you, we ask you to deeply consider what, in your practice, you want to pursue. This means that the workshop will be pursuing at least as many different objectives as there are participants in the workshop. This context seems to more realistically mirror the context within which real-world projects exist. While a project might have a well-advertised public purpose, every one has imbedded within it innumerable personal purposes: why each individual is engaged. And no project succeeds without attending to these personal purposes as well as the publicly acknowledged ones.
In this way, like on real-world projects, the workshop becomes the medium within which each participant can deeply consider their own objectives and learn to use the workshop to achieve these. Along the way, participants discover clues that inform them about how they form and pursue objectives, and how these pre-conscious patterns of engagement help or hinder achievement.
These learnings take many different forms. Some appear as brilliant a-ha insights, others as less inspiring “oh Shit!” experiences. We employ a simply ethic, “learned if you do and learned if you don’t.” We help you appreciate whatever form your learning might take. We enlist every participant as both a student and a teacher, understanding that your most enduring insight might come from anyone in the room.
We also ask you to bring your own project to use as your own personal case study. Rather than feed you pre-packaged case studies, we help to properly situate your pursuit of your learning objectives by using your own project as the primary case study in the course. We guide you through a series of focusing tools intended to elicit a deeper understanding of yourself, as well as a deeper appreciation of the nature of your project and of the organization sponsoring your project. Not just what to do, but who you, your project, and your organization might be in the context of your specific project.
... More in the next installment ...
We (Amy and I), in our Mastering Projects Workshop, have found it essential to focus upon some form of relationship mapping BEFORE creating any task plan or even the roles and responsibility exposition, because acknowledging existing relationships can help create a plan that works with what's there. This can also head off some inevitable collisions.
We always find some busted relationship in the mapping, someone in the community who has the power to take another's lunch money without even intending to. Learning how to better cope with these subtly powerful people in our relationships adds a lot of potential to the person and to the project. Creating a task plan without acknowledging these powerful networks seems theoretical; not well grounded in reality.
Of course, these maps are no less notional than any task network, but they seem to carry deeper personal meaning. (Note that everyone, always, already carries an implicit relationship map around inside them. This activity merely moves what might have been only implicit onto more explicit ground.) We guide each participant in creating their personal map of their relationships, and never insist that these be shared or distilled into a single, comprehensive model. These are information, not definition. How I see you is not how you are, but a representation of how I see. How I cope with what I see is more important than agreeing that what I see defines anyone else's reality. Also, announcing that I characterize you as a jerk on my relationship map won't improve our relationship. This is personal information.
We focus upon what we call 'high-cost relationships.' Ones where we aspire for the relationship to be different than it seems to be. Where, for instance, we feel we need a committed relationship, but experience an indifferent one. Or where someone with an invariably different perspective has the power to say, "No!" and make it stick. Then we work through a little safe role-playing, where individuals get the opportunity, with a supportive coach on hand, to engage with their nemesis. The results are usually surprising. Whether the objective of the conversation is met or not, a deeper understanding of how that relationship might work results. Oh, and the one initiating the relationship usually learns how useful it is to have a coach.
I believe that in the future, most project "planning" will incorporate these techniques, and the explicit exposition of social networks will be recognized as an equal, perhaps greater contributor to project success. If the plan doesn't acknowledge informal relationships, focusing only upon formally-assigned roles and responsibilities, looking at formally-declared tasks as the premise for getting stuff done, the project can't work. Can it? When the plan falls apart, these networks kick in to actually get stuff done, whatever the plan might say.
This is a high-level outline of one of the key elements of creating a project community. More in later posts ...
One technique involves creating a portrait of the proposed project from each participant's perspective. Each is given a blank sheet of flip-chart paper and a selection of colored pens. The facilitator starts by asking everyone to, "Place yourself." By which s/he means, create some symbol to represent yourself and place that symbol somewhere on the sheet. Next, people are instructed to place "others," which means those others who seem germane to the context each is representing. The positioning, size, etc. represents relationship, perspective, ... many things.
Next, people are directed to list three adjectives that best describe the scene: i.e., hungry, happy, mystified. Next, people are asked to list three adverbs that best belong in the picture: i.e., extreme, sideways, quickly. Finally, people are invited to list three phrases anyone visiting this scene might expect to hear coming over the tops of the cubicle walls- or in the hallways between meetings - or around the water-cooler.
Finally, everyone is invited to sign their masterwork and post it in the appropriate place on the wall.
This exercise is very introspective until the last step, where we conduct an art gallery. Each artist is invited to explain their masterwork while the rest of the participants watch, listen, ask questions, and absorb.
By the end, whatever notion anyone had about how the project had to proceed has been challenged. A subtle and very powerful internal map of the territory emerges from this experience. Shared yet unspeakable. Understood, yet not physically projectable. We each leave with a deeper sense of knowing each other and the space we all share.
(This topic will be continued in a couple of future posts.)
Hi:
I work for a large
Telco that has a heavy waterfall Technology Development Process
that is used for all software projects. This process is actively
managed by an IT quality control group that has strong management
support and a strict enforcement process.Recently I argued the
benefits of Agile development to this group and asked for
permission to try it on my project.
Their response was:
1. Agile development requires business process changes so is out of
scope of the technology development process;
2. Agile development would require large across the board changes
to the current technology process and is therefore out of
scope;
3. There is no capacity to conduct a trial (even though I offered
to conduct a trial on my project);
4. Most projects are rolling out packages so Agile does not apply
(even though a large number of projects including all those in my
area are developing and enhancing software);
Frankly I'm thinking about giving up and going to work somewhere
more flexible but I would appreciate your advice on how to argue
successfully for the introduction of agile in the
organisation.
Any suggestions?
My Reply:First, you
might be asking the wrong question. "The best way to argue for
agile in a conservative organization" suggests two
questionable
objectives:
1-You might not need to find the best way, but merely a minimally effective way. Do you need the best or just a toe-hold that might well be the worst, but makes some forward progress? Remember, Columbus didn't know that he had to sail South before sailing West to reach the Indies. South seemed so wrong.
2-Arguing positions you 'one down', giving the status quo all the power. They just have to say no to disable your potential. An alternative objective: How might I create just enough space to convincingly demonstrate the benefits of Agile approaches to a conservative organization?" I could further deconstruct your objective, but my point is that you'll be better positioned to succeed if you formulate the problem so that YOU have the power and don't have to ask permission or change anyone's mind for them. (This might require some out-of-the-box imagining.)
Second, innovation doesn't usually ask for permission. I know the mythodology claims that the only way to implement an innovation like Agile is to get executive support to align the organization. Interesting fable. Almost never happens that way. Innovation more often results when some dedicated someone decides it's going to be different and starts building an inspired community around the effort. What I call an Organizational Insurgency. Traditional control methods are fairly powerless against a well-crafted insurgency. (Notice how I'm not mentioning Iraq.)
Your post left me imagining Thomas Paine posting a similar question to a pre-revolutionary war discussion group: What's the best way to argue for no taxation without representation in a conservative empire? Wrong question, Tommy. State your vision, attract some partisans, then act. Might get hung. The alternatives are kinda grim, too.
One tactic that has
worked some places, no guarantees, is to infect the Quality Control
group, which, if they're like all the other quality control groups
in the universe, neither deliver quality nor exert meaningful
control. What's in your initiative that might delight and attract
them? Of course, they'll insist upon compromising your purest
vision, but you might well find a positive evolutionary
toe hold together, a starting story, that could begin turning the
tanker.
Of course, you could get fired for your benevolence. But then, you're considering going somewhere else, anyway.
My advice: stop looking for the best when a little better (even a little worse) might do. Don't ask someone else for permission only you can provide. There will be plenty of time for the rest of the organization to catch up, once they catch on.
I refer you to the Masters and Slaves chapter in my book, excerpt below, link following.
We have arranged the training-room tables into four rectangles—each with five chairs, two on two sides and one on the end—facing the front of the room. In the back and on the north side, windows overlook the street, where, interspersed with detoured taxis, buses, and cars, a constant stream of trucks carry debris from the remains of the nearby World Trade Center. The background traffic noise leaves us straining to hear each other. A project management workshop started an hour before, and progress has already slowed. The walls are papered with half- completed lists of difficulties, and these glower down like gargoyles over twenty pairs of slackening shoulders as the reality of our project work lives settles over us. A darkening drizzle of rain starts outside, and the room feels uncomfortably warm. Time crawls.
We are considering difficulties, when one student stands, looks at those sitting around a table across the room, and with a gleam in his eye declares, “The problem with you is that you do not properly appreciate the Master-Slave relationship.”
No one shows any sign of surprise, shock, or indignation. A moment of silence introduces a twittering instead, as if he has expressed a universally recognized but unspeakable truth. His comment was a joke, of course. But like all excellent humor, it contained a painfully large portion of truth.
excerpted from The Blind Men and the Elephant- Mastering Project Work © 2003 by David A. Schmaltz - Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco - all rights reserved
Maybe you don't yet properly understand the Master-Slave Relationship. (Hint: The slaves are ALWAYS in charge...)
david
David A. Schmaltz david@projectcommunity.com
Buy my best-selling
book The Blind Men and the Elephant
here:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-1576752534-0
accepted as the king
of Quality, humanity, and what we now call lean.
He claimed that fewer than 5%
of those who sang his praise
understood a word he said
in all his books and brayings.
He was revered as the father of
a miracle, they claimed,
then continued what they'd always done,
that same domineering game.
And he was helpless to the end
to change the terrible course
those arrogant and thoughtless ones
insisted was his voice.
Deming Died Disappointed
We live in a time immersed in a culture focused upon processes. I believe this is a fundamental misinterpretation, one which causes many of its own shortcomings.
I warmly appreciate Gregory Howell and his colleagues for pointing out an obvious truth: the metaphor we unselfconsciously use to guide our work is faulty. We see work as a series of disembodied input-process-output processes, though much of the work we engage in these days cannot be effectively characterized in this way. How we think about work influences everything.
How would it be if we characterized work as primarily relational rather than primarily transformational. In this frame, work is the product of interacting relationships, not compliance with disembodied processes. Each is free, within ethical boundaries, to engage in offer-bid-accept trades intended to achieve results. How they engage, when they engage, and to a very large part how they produce results is in the individual trader’s hands, understanding that the future viability of the community depends upon sustaining relationships, not simply fulfilling a current need.
I invite you to join this consideration. I need your help, whether that comes as biting criticsm or encouragement. Consider how this frame of reference might change the work you do and we’ll talk.
Relational Work - A Manifesto
If we want to observe what people are capable of, watch what they do when their well-laid plans fall apart. When guided by their own personal desire to succeed, they become relational. They barter and trade, meet what any process designer might label unrealistic commitments, take charge, and often succeed in spite of what the master plan predicted.
But not all people respond to things falling apart in this way. Some hunker down, waiting for instruction and hold ever more tightly to reins no longer connected to anything. These unfortunate folks struggle to make the shift from compliant worker to skillful trader, and might well blame their overseers for their difficulty. And they might be right to blame.
Humans are naturally relational, but the conditions of our continued employment seem to mitigate against freely relating with others. We fear those who have control over our futures. We reasonably fear those who tell us what to do, expecting us to comply rather than question their directions. The effect of such conditioning is to reduce the judgment guiding a firm to that of its designated management and to rob the firm of its greatest potential competitive advantage.
What if we more deliberately approached work as being relationship-guided rather than process-driven? What would this do to our plans, our management, our control, and our results? If we merely encouraged people to do what they do from the outset? Would this change our experience when our plans fail? Would it eliminate the need for plans as we have known them?
This is no idle Utopian aspiration, but one rooted in solid principles. I have no idea how we’ve managed to evolve into a work paradigm that focuses upon processes and tasks as the primary means of production, but evidence strongly suggests that we’ve been following the wrong star. We engage in unplannable work yet insist upon finely-detailed plans before engaging in it. We control by means of comparing actual to expected and we lose larger purpose. We are not merely assembling a pre-fabricated appliance when we engage in work, but discovering and creating things. Yet we engage as if we really should be able to cognitively pre-fabricate and then simply follow our assembly instructions. In practice, this method usually falls apart, and when it falls apart, we do what we should have done in the first place.
We are wild in our work when the templates fail, but not completely feral. We might be better informed about the relational nature of our work beforehand, but have been sent to process-oriented training instead. An ounce of focus on relationships could replace every pound of process orientation. Yet we seem to invest in the process-oriented training.
And our experience when things fall apart might then reinforce the need for ever greater process control, not because people are not capable of making their own trades, but because they are not yet very practiced at it in their work. They have been trained away from their natural inclinations and are rusty and clumsy engaging in them as a result.
Some Principles Guiding Relational Work
The Trading Floor is theprimary metaphor guiding relational work.
Relational work is characterized not as a network of input-process-output transformations, but as a web of relationships facilitating trades. Trades are offer-bid-accept transactions which both require and reinforce relationships to consummate.
The medium of exchange is whatever is valued within a given community. Traders are free within the constraints of agreed upon ethics to barter to mutual satisfaction to achieve their objectives.
People are inherently trustworthy. They quite naturally work to improve their community and themselves.
People are responsible for their own trades and methods within a community. They choose what their judgment dictates is most workable for any given trade.
People will satisfy their ethical responsibilities if they know what they are.
There is no detail master plan, but rather a set of aspirations and intentions which are expected to be interpreted differently at first and more similarly by the end.
People will be responsible for satisfying their own commitments if they are freely made and just as freely renegotiated. People wisest about the work they perform.
The manager’s primary focus is to provide context, encourage relationships, and maintain transparency on the “trading floor”.
Communication is an essential element governing transparency.
Executive management chooses the strategic field of play and invites individual traders onto the field.
Individuals judge the effectiveness of their own performance, informed by transparency. People write their own performance evaluations drawing from publicly available data. Ultimately, effectiveness is judged by the willingness of others to trade with an individual.
Resource allocation is achieved by market forces informed by intention more than by dictate. It may be dictated within the bounds of ethics and relationships.
Relationships are tenaciously context-sensitive. They are inevitably resonances of the context interacting with individual intentions and beliefs.
The community is key. Who we believe is in and who we insist is out greatly influences performance.
Monoculture, as you say, is the practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area, i.e to ‘culture’ or grow one thing. In the Japanese auto industry, we have seen it applied in the setting of the large manufacturing corporation to utilize instruments of social control unique to their production environments. The corporate monoculture in Japan is facilitated by an environment that is very different than those here in the United States. Some factors include the relative absence of ethnic, racial, or religious subcultures. They have historically hired mostly men into permanent positions in their plants, providing corporate dormitory style housing or subsidized mortgage or construction loans under rotating shifts. Housing being scarce and expensive outside the corporate estate, this is a real benefit that instills loyalty. The corporation provides more than work but a work and personal life and livelihood where people socialize with each other and establish a unified identity. Back in Michigan we see a diverse group of people from many backgrounds, race, age, ethnicity, religion and gender living in private homes commuting on fixed shifts, each bringing to the work force their different and rich perspectives that are not as easily compressed into one entity.
We look to the East because of the degree of quality and efficiency we see from the items they produce and want to emulate that here. We want to reduce defects, optimize production, and squeeze everything we can out of each nickel. Out of this desire come concepts of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. I believe you can be pretty lean if you only produce one item – monoculture, and hopefully quality will fall out of this – though that is not a certainty. But are we trying to “make mono our corporate culture?” And, is that realistic? Will that be the key to success and larger profit margins, more efficiency, more responsiveness to the customer needs and the market?
So far, the jury’s still out. Clearly, in the short run, even a tightly enforced monoculture seems to be capable of producing remarkable increases in effeciency, larger profit margins, and more responsiveness to customer needs and the market. Perhaps even higher quality. Ask any take-over artist.
I say the jury’s still out, because the relevant range of mono-polist tactics is indeperminant. It is certainly shorter than longer, but how long they can remain viable remains indeterminable. What can be known, if only from perusing history, is that such houses of cards are stabile until they are not, collapsing with stunning speed and even greater efficiency. They are not (at least not yet) long term sustainable.
What one might call inefficieny, another might label requisite variety. We know that 80% of the effort to produce most effects in the world cannot be directly related to the observed effect. A trivial example is hanging wallpaper. Less than 20% of the effort to hang wallpaper has anything to do with actually hanging wallpaper. The rest includes absolutely essential, apparently non-value-added effort. The simmering discussions around deciding what wallpaper to hang. The surprises lurking beneath the old wallcovering, not to mention removing the old wallcovering and disposing of the mess.
Compare the efficiency of someone hanging wallpaper on virgin walls with another recovering hundred year old walls, and you’ll find innumerable apparent inefficiencies in the later effort. Some resolve this dilemma by hammering out the lathe and plaster, replacing it with modern sheetrock, then covering that. Others are more respectful of the character of the old place, and work very hard to maintain the original plaster. A superficial glance might not disclose any difference in the finished product, and if you’re judging results solely by cost and time, the decision to create the mono-wall is clearly superior.
It’s a matter of taste. I know, for instance, that Toyota has a world-renowned manufacturing process, but I’ve owned Toyotas and will never buy another one. I spent too many years trying to change the oil in a Toyota that was clearly designed for ease of manufacture, but with no attention to what any owner might have to do to maintain the resulting kludge.
If corporate culture is the unique personality of an organization then, like personality disorders, you can have cultural disorders. As you know recently, I left the National Laboratory environment and went back into private industry for an engineering company that supports the public sector. The history of my current company comes from many backgrounds due to the merger of 5 separate entities into one business unit. For such a long time now, I’ve been confused. I’m trying to socialize into my new culture; really I am, but… I get mixed messages. This is why. My current company has Multiple Personality Disorder – or Multiple Cultural Disorder – and not having the experience and the social network established yet, I never know which ‘personality’ is speaking to me. I came from an organization with Narcissistic Cultural Disorder and it took me years to integrate but looking back I can now see that I, too, slowly developed a small feeling of entitlement that came with that disease.
So, here I am trying to bathe myself clean of that and adopt the new way of ‘thinking’ that I will need to be successful here, only to discover the answer normally given by culture of “this is how we do it here” all depends upon where I'm standing at the time. We are working hard here to create “one” company – a corporate monoculture. We even have a new intranet web site introduced in 2008 that strips us from our past. To make matters worse, we are several companies all blended into one.
What will success look like at the end? What is the goal of this effort? Warren Bennis would say, “managers do things right and leaders do the right thing” so in this frame, managers work on being more efficient while leaders try to be more effective. And, aren’t things more efficient in a monoculture? I guess it depends upon what you want in the end.
The final questions I would ask you are: How do you stay competitive in this one culture? How do you preserve innovation? Where do the new ideas come from?
Ah, these are the questions. The deep paradox of the mono-polist mindset is that it optimizes on the past rather than focusing on the future. While the bubble sustains, the markets rage. Once the bubble bursts, it’s too late to decide how to stay competitive, where innovation might come back from, and where new ideas that were smothered might be resurrected.
Amy makes the distinction between the renter’s and the owner’s mindset. The renter consumes the resource while the owner preserves it. The owner plays a more infinite game, interested, sure, in short-run survival, but compromising that to ensure longer-run sustainability. Because they expect to pass on their legacy to another generation and not simply consume it in the present.
We’re seeing publicly held companies managing like the renters their stockholders have become. In it for the short-term profit, damn the long-run (in the long-run, this mindset insists, we’ll all be dead). But our children and our children’s children will not be dead, unless we leave them incapable of sustaining their life because we insisted upon consuming our legacy ourselves.
Peter Senge insists that the corporate world has ceased becoming the fount of innovation. They’ve optimized on making a lot of money, so much that we now have an unprecidented surplus of financial capital. And a concomitant deficit in both social and environmental capital. Because these three kinds of capital are in opposition, optimizing on one to the exclusion of the others, creates a zero-sum game. If you want efficiency in manufacture, you’ll shortchange society and the environment doing it. You might recognize the economic benefits of monoculture and ignore the social and environmental costs.
In the fifties, urban planners derived a nifty solution for the problem of inner-city poverty. They built huge, subsidized housing projects, which were very cost-effective to build. More cost effective than remodeling thousands of individual neighborhood houses. The resulting wearhouses tore apart the social fabric of the inhabitants, undermining social networks that had sustained even the very poor for generations.
Just a few weeks ago I read an article titled, “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” The message was that as “our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off.” Why? The walls of our boxes thicken with our increased level of experience as we approach our goal of maximum efficiency. Hmmm… So as you specialize in a field, you start seeing things only one way – building and thickening your box. Sounds like, “if all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. It’s for this reason that my new company tends to engineer itself out of business by designing products ultimately useful only to other engineers. We can’t think of why you wouldn’t want all 52 buttons on your DVD remote control. “It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”
The solution to the innovation killer, according to Cynthia Barton Rabe in her book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” is to bring in outsiders that she calls ‘zero-gravity thinkers’. (And so... I was brought in). Now… isn’t that contrary to adopting a corporate monoculture? Who better to tell management that “the emperor has no clothes” than the new person who doesn’t know better? I guess there has to be diversity for healthy 'evolvement' to exist. Those who don’t evolve, dissolve. Now, if we can just stop killing the messengers.
Who told you that you would be revered just because you can escape the bounds of gravity? No, Maysa, it’s a tough job. The monoculture robs even the most well-intended of some of their most human capabilities. You might find otherwise decent people savaging you as if you were an infection rather than a possible source of salvation. This is very hard work, not for ninnies or wimps. Hard, but worthy work. Keep chipping away.
Now, because I know you are a poet, I’ll leave this posting with a poem:
Finding Purpose
When efficiency become the purpose, purpose is gone
When low cost becomes the purpose, purpose is lost.
When conformity, consistency, and sameness become the first measure of goodness,
All goodness is gone.
Mistake the measure for the purpose, the process for the result, the glossy cover for the book,
and you’ll never find meaning in literature again.
Purpose lives beyond tomorrow, over the foreseeable horizon, in a dreamland banned from the bottom line.
Without it, every bottom line is meaningless.
With it, the bottom line today rarely matters.
So what is corporate culture? According to Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., “Corporate culture is a broad term used to define the unique personality or character of a particular company or organization, and includes such elements as core values and beliefs, corporate ethics, and rules of behavior.” Corporate culture thus guides how we think, act, and feel in our work environments. So understanding corporate culture is important because it affects us in many ways, such as hours worked per day or week, how you dress, whether you polish your nails or not, training and professional development, how people interact and corporate expectations.
Monoculture, as you say, is the practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area, i.e to ‘culture’ or grow one thing. In the Japanese auto industry, we have seen it applied in the setting of the large manufacturing corporation to utilize instruments of social control unique to their production environments. The corporate monoculture in Japan is facilitated by an environment that is very different than those here in the United States. Some factors include the relative absence of ethnic, racial, or religious subcultures. They have historically hired mostly men into permanent positions in their plants, providing corporate dormitory style housing or subsidized mortgage or construction loans under rotating shifts. Housing being scarce and expensive outside the corporate estate, this is a real benefit that instills loyalty. The corporation provides more than work but a work and personal life and livelihood where people socialize with each other and establish a unified identity. Back in Michigan we see a diverse group of people from many backgrounds, race, age, ethnicity, religion and gender living in private homes commuting on fixed shifts, each bringing to the work force their different and rich perspectives that are not as easily compressed into one entity.
We look to the East because of the degree of quality and efficiency we see from the items they produce and want to emulate that here. We want to reduce defects, optimize production, and squeeze everything we can out of each nickel. Out of this desire come concepts of lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. I believe you can be pretty lean if you only produce one item – monoculture, and hopefully quality will fall out of this – though that is not a certainty. But are we trying to “make mono our corporate culture?” And, is that realistic? Will that be the key to success and larger profit margins, more efficiency, more responsiveness to the customer needs and the market?
If corporate culture is the unique personality of an organization then, like personality disorders, you can have cultural disorders. As you know recently, I left the National Laboratory environment and went back into private industry for an engineering company that supports the public sector. The history of my current company comes from many backgrounds due to the merger of 5 separate entities into one business unit. For such a long time now, I’ve been confused. I’m trying to socialize into my new culture; really I am, but… I get mixed messages. This is why. My current company has Multiple Personality Disorder – or Multiple Cultural Disorder – and not having the experience and the social network established yet, I never know which ‘personality’ is speaking to me. I came from an organization with Narcissistic Cultural Disorder and it took me years to integrate but looking back I can now see that I, too, slowly developed a small feeling of entitlement that came with that disease.
So, here I am trying to bathe myself clean of that and adopt the new way of ‘thinking’ that I will need to be successful here, only to discover the answer normally given by culture of “this is how we do it here” all depends upon where I'm standing at the time. We are working hard here to create “one” company – a corporate monoculture. We even have a new intranet web site introduced in 2008 that strips us from our past. To make matters worse, we are several companies all blended into one.
What will success look like at the end? What is the goal of this effort? Warren Bennis would say, “managers do things right and leaders do the right thing” so in this frame, managers work on being more efficient while leaders try to be more effective. And, aren’t things more efficient in a monoculture? I guess it depends upon what you want in the end.
The final questions I would ask you are: How do you stay competitive in this one culture? How do you preserve innovation? Where do the new ideas come from?
Just a few weeks ago I read an article titled, “Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.” The message was that as “our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off.” Why? The walls of our boxes thicken with our increased level of experience as we approach our goal of maximum efficiency. Hmmm… So as you specialize in a field, you start seeing things only one way – building and thickening your box. Sounds like, “if all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. It’s for this reason that my new company tends to engineer itself out of business by designing products ultimately useful only to other engineers. We can’t think of why you wouldn’t want all 52 buttons on your DVD remote control. “It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”
The solution to the innovation killer, according to Cynthia Barton Rabe in her book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” is to bring in outsiders that she calls ‘zero-gravity thinkers’. (And so... I was brought in). Now… isn’t that contrary to adopting a corporate monoculture? Who better to tell management that “the emperor has no clothes” than the new person who doesn’t know better? I guess there has to be diversity for healthy 'evolvement' to exist. Those who don’t evolve, dissolve. Now, if we can just stop killing the messengers.
- “There’s a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
Maysa-Maria Peterson,Senior Principal Software Engineer
Software Engineering Center Six Sigma Expert,Raytheon Missile Systems
I'll respond to Maysa's questions in my next entry. david "pure" schmaltz
Some have argued that Microsoft has created a virtual monoculture, susceptible to incursion and failure due to viral attacks. I'm seeing organizations increasingly encouraging monoculture solutions to dilemmas arising from the natural diversity of such things as work styles and different kinds of projects and initiatives. The effects of these 'Earth flattening' approaches create another level of dilemma for those working within monoculture-aspiring organizations. Individuals might be expected to perform in ways that are more than simply alien to them, but counter-productive to the organization's overall objectives. As if 'one best way' could actually describe the one best way to accomplish anything.
The following YouTube video describes one of the risks of monoculture.
I'm interested in anyone's personal experiences coping with the increasingly monocultural perspective within organizations. How have you been selected, indoctrinated, incented, and encouraged to adopt 'one best way?' What contradictions have you encountered in coping with these expectations? Comment below or contact me via the Contact tab above.
Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?"
Today's New York Time presents a remarkable piece which, as many remarkable pieces seem to do, states the obvious. Innovative minds don't think alike.
This brings into question the many, exhausting, expensive efforts to conform knowledge-worker knowledge to a certain defined standard. As I've commented before, most of the work we do these days relies upon tacit knowledge, that kind of knowledge we might not even be aware we have. It's different for you and for me and for that other guy over there. When we manage to get to thinking on the same page, we're stuck on that page. This, I claim, is one reason we see every bank stumbling on the same sub-prime mortgage crisis (every one had a model that told them exactly when to sell, but, interestingly, not whom to sell to), and why every company that hires only PMPed project managers find their projects compromised in exactly the same old way. (Yawn.)
Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia
By BRENT BOWERS
Published: December 6, 2007 New York Times
It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought.
The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.
“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said in an interview. “If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you’ll hear over and over, ‘It won’t work. It can’t be done.’ But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems.”
Read the rest of the story here: http://tinyurl.com/yps3tv
I have written here and elsewhere about entrepreneurial energy, about how investigators have tried to identify those skills and teach them to others. What if these skills aren't really skills at all, but rather automatic responses to certain innate disabilities. The logic of collaboration might well get lost in the hustle IF the would-be collaborator really could take care of everything alone. But these dyslexic entrepreneurs have learned, as the founder of Kinkos learned, that anyone can do it better than they can, so sharing the reins becomes more likely under stress.
Can these different abilities be taught? This survey found that a paltry 1% of corporate managers are blessed with the gift of dyslexia, and recruiting strategies seem pretty effective at preventing these special people from ever entering the ranks of corporate management. They do show up in the ranks of those unlikely managers, those who find themselves managing projects, the most entrepreneurial activities in the enterprise.
The current certification craze has further limited entry for those apparently most likely to succeed in these entrepreneurial activities. This might explain why large companies continue to operationalize project work, as if it were just another manufacturing process improved by routinization. It also might explain why large corporations live for, on average, no longer than thirty years. A decade in entrepreneurial engagement, a decade cruising on the start-up's momentum, and a decade extinguishing the initiating spark through selective recruitment and process enforcement.
This is a powerful example of how all those so-called disabilities are situational strengths. If only we could learn to appreciate differences rather than exclude or try to reform them.
I’ve spent most of my current visit in Vienna, where my wife and I were invited to speak at a conference. We spent the first Sunday morning of our visit strolling through the Augarten, a park sited on the grounds of a former palace. (Vienna is lousy with former palaces.) This one, though, is different, because in it stands two flakturms, or flack towers, left over from the World War Two Nazi occupation. The Nazis built these dark towers as anti-aircraft platforms and bomb shelters. Each high-rise tower could hold ten thousand frightened people behind reinforced concrete walls so thick that they still stand today, barely pock-marked with the signatures of shells that benignly bounced off their stark grey exteriors. One is now wired as a cell tower. The other, simply fenced off. Built a few feet from densely-packed apartment blocks, these testaments to tyranny cannot be torn down. People jog by as if these abominations, feet-thick walls glowering over the lovely garden, were invisible. And perhaps they are.
There’s little left of the war years’ deprivation. Vienna today is a modern city populating a rebuilt, ancient infrastructure. Our conference was held in another old palace, dating from the fifteenth century, but remodeled into as modern a conference facility as any in the world. Not remodeled cheaply, but re-gilded, with fresh frescoes on the ceilings and finely-carved paneling on the walls. One friend there, who has been expanding his home, showed us his work. He said he built every addition expecting it to last at least two hundred years. Yes, he admitted, it’s expensive, but he feels an obligation to future generations to continue this tradition of building to last. If anything typifies this new Europe, it is this dedication to the long view.
Contrary to anyone believing that investors are only interested in short-term results, business is thriving there, but it’s anticipating the pinch of our sub-prime mortgage crisis. They expect that our financial flu will migrate to infect their economy, and they are not pleased at the prospect of economic sniffles caused by our short-sightedness.
America has lost influence in Europe since 2000. On prior visits, I found our hosts and the attendees at the conferences fluent in English. This time, several commented that their English has grown rusty with disuse. I felt embarrassed that they find little reason to follow the American media or stay current with what used to be considered the trend-setter nation. More than our dollar is falling behind.
The New Europe has resolved many social issues we Americans continue to stiff-arm. High fuel taxes keep cars off the road and encourage choosing public transportation, which is convenient, plentiful, and cheap. When we discovered that a cab ride to the train station would cost us a hundred dollars, we caught a municipal bus half a block away that arrived within ten minutes and cost less than ten bucks—and got us to the train just as quickly. Walking and bicycling are common and delightful in cities purposely designed to be compact. Mornings found legions of bicyclers—many more bicycles than cars—using the bike lanes bordering every road. Sure, there are a lot of regulations limiting choices there, but the European Union has actually made good on commitments to, for instance, leave a smaller ecological footprint while our congress argues over everything but resolves little.
Likewise, universal health care is impossible to argue against. I frustrated myself failing to explain the rationality of our system. They complain about paying half their income in taxes, but are astounded to learn that we pay more than that after adding up the private costs of all our government doesn’t provide. They’ve never had to make the choice between keeping the house and having an operation, and had never heard of anyone having to pay off childbirth expenses over years, like car payments.
And our paranoia over terrorism feels pathological compared to the EU’s responses, even though they’ve been threatened from terrorism for decades. Boarding a flight into an EU country is little different than boarding a domestic flight here. Flying back to the States, I’m cautioned to arrive two and a half hours before departure time, because every passenger must be personally interviewed by airline security personnel—a process that extends a wide-body’s loading time to two hours! Arriving here, I might be asked to exit the plane with my passport held open at arm’s length through a gauntlet of Homeland Security personnel, progress up the exit ramp slowed by repeated questions about my destination and purpose for the visit. And I was born here! Friends confided that they avoid the hassle of visiting the US, even though our weak dollar would make their trip cheap.
The misconceptions between our cultures are huge and growing larger. Our friends’ kids were surprised that we weren’t chubby because they’d heard that all Americans were fat from eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Neighbor kids stopped by to see some fabled ‘real Americans’, and left disappointed that we didn’t look much different from anyone else. Our friends served non-fat milk, and when I noted that I thought Europeans didn’t care about saturated fat, they just laughed at me.
Every conversation seems to eventually slip into mutually embarrassing questions about what we’re doing in Iraq. To anyone growing up in the shadows of flakterms, war is a futility one needn’t have personally experienced to choose to avoid. Our friends wonder how we’d ever extract ourselves from Middle Eastern quicksand, and I share their dismay.
Our distant cousins, left behind when we went to invent a new world, fear for us. They watch in dismay as we fall into the same traps our common ancestors stumbled into, and are genuinely concerned at the long shadows our modern, virtual flakterms will cast on future generations who will want nothing more than a walk in a well-tended garden on a frosty Sunday morning.
Travel, the old adage claims, broadens one. It broadens by highlighting the narrowness of parochial perspective. We still have a lot to learn from each other, if we can respect differing opinions to actually learn from each other. Our differences make us so much the same that we dare not dismiss each other now.
We are not the ugly Americans they too easily expect us to be. They are no longer the war-ravaged refugees our Marshal Plan revived. These facts become obvious over something as personal as coffee and strudel shared in a smoky Viennese coffeehouse. They’ve left the Intensive Care Unit of international relations and stand quite proudly upon what they are building with their own hands. And we are no longer the Daddy Warbucks they relied upon in the past. Neither of us seem sure who the other is now.
Any visit to Europe is a step into history and tradition so present that it colors everything. From the cobblestone streets to the ancient cathedrals, the new Europe stands on the shoulders of its past. Just like us.
I will return from this visit reminded of this simple fact. No one escapes from their past and our present is destined to be our future’s foundation. We can securely stand only upon sturdy shoulders. It’s up to each of us to deeply consider our future while we construct our present because the towers we build today will not be easily torn down then. What keeps us feeling secure today might well cast long shadows over our children and their children’s children long after whatever threatens us has gone.
from men who’s wisdom didn’t show, of whom they were afraid.
Their work was nothing special, leaning heavily upon routine.
They, too, swept the floors and kept the workshop clean.
The mindless hours melted, layering same upon more same,
and the point they gained their mastery came subtly, without a
name.
And then you came apprenticed to this unlikely trade,
and you, like them before you, strove to make the grade.
And you, like them, were baffled to learn that what you’d
done—
which seemed no more than trivial work—proved adequate to
run.
Those who hold the secret, dare not share it straight—
that years of mindless innocence define the master’s
fate.
And so another innocent arrives indentured here,
and you, unlikely as it seems, will teach what no one hears.
You’ll speak in muttered orders to focus all they do,
attending to daily details ‘till their mastery comes
through.
12/02/07
Epe, The Netherlands
Yes, even giving up. We're not nearly as clever as we might hope to be when it comes to designing our roadmaps into the future. Success stories are written ex post facto, after the success has been realized. Of course they might hope to explain what one should do beforehand to engineer success, but they would have to have been written beforehand, then result in success, to be credible testimony.
I'm writing this posting while feeling as though I've accomplished something remarkable. Last week, Amy and I created another Mastering Projects Workshop, and the experience was remarkable. I have not spent too much time post facto fussing about how we managed to create that experience because I'm sure that I have no idea what the real causes might have been for the satisfying result. You see, I've been around the block enough times to distrust cause/effect conclusions.
And I don't want to replicate my past success the next time. My next success will have to exceed my expectations to fully satisfy me, and replicating my past experiences won't cut it.
Daniel Gilbert wrote a very interesting book called Stumbling On Happiness. In it, he explained why it is that people who win the lottery typically end up feeling miserable. The scenario we envision as the source of our happiness is different when we experience it directly. We anticipate selectively, neglecting to consider the effect of all our instant relatives showing up, hat in hand, will have on our satisfaction. The same effect is at work even in our best laid plans.
The progression for me has moved from planful to present. Sure, I take care of the logistical details AND I remember to forget what I couldn't possibly know yet before stepping into another experience. I'm thinking my presence might well be more important contributors to my successes than my planning ever was.
I'm learning to lean into these experiences.
A huge part of leaning into experience for me involves becoming more aware of my surroundings. What under other circumstances might be an experience becomes at these times especially instructive, as if someone had produced a movie especially for my learning at this time. This morning, I stumbled upon a marvelous poem, written by Humbarto Maturana, Prayer of the Student.
I can imagine no better reminder of the real relationship between teacher and student than these fine thoughts
Prayer of the Student
Don't impose on me what you know.
I want to explore the unknown
And be the source of my own discoveries.
Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.
The world of your truth can be my limitations,
Your wisdom, my negation.
Don't instruct me; let's learn together.
Let my richness begin where yours ends.
Show me so that I can stand
On your shoulders.
Revel yourself so that I can be
Something different.
You believe that every human being
Can love and create.
I understand, then, your fear
When I ask you to live according to your wisdom.
You will not know who I am
By listening to yourself.
Don't instruct me; let me be.
Your failure is that I be identical to you.
Humbarto Maturana (translation byMarcial F. Losada)
I defer the act as long as possible. I never reset the alarm clock before going to bed the night before. If I leave the clock untouched, I'll gain an hour the next morning, when I might need it. But whenever I finally decide to cave into common practice and reset my clock, I feel myself falling backwards into short days and what will most certainly feel like mid-afternoon sunsets.
Today will be a warm day, but colder days are coming, days made dark by the early arrival of sunset and not improved a lick by the earlier sunrise.
So, I felt myself falling backwards this morning as I reset my watch. The alarm clock? I'll probably wait a few days before finally accepting the inevitable and falling backwards into my bed.
I am a time traveler. I don't make great leaps into the future or the past, but move a sparse hour either way. Forward with great anticipation every spring, then backwards, losing my optimism in the fall. Now a fallen man, I move forward slightly out of synch until spring brings my real time back on line.
Some might be under the mistaken impression that the Big Dig was just a large construction project. It wasn't. Sure, it featured a lot of construction work, much of it stuff that had quite literally never been tried before or never tried on such a scale. But as I've been saying for years and years, the greatest danger in projects, whether they be "construction" projects or "software" projects comes in the label we casually assign to the effort.
Big Dig has a lot of potential meanings, from large insult to deep pit, to huge bite.
Hey, this was complicated stuff. A third of the cost was spent on "mitigation." Mitigation is comprised of all that stuff that creates support for the effort. The helping others find their project within your project. And The Big Dig did a marvelous job of gaining initial support.
An article entitled Lessons of Boston’s Big Dig by Nicole Gelinasin appears in the Autumn 2007 issue of City Journal. Quoting from that article:
"Mitigation made downtown businesses happy, promising not to shut down any of the Central Artery’s six lanes during construction, and promising further that companies such as Fidelity Investments wouldn’t lack electricity or telephones for even a few hours as contractors dug up miles of utilities to make room for underground highways. Mitigation made Gillette, Boston’s biggest manufacturer, happy, working with the company to marry its complicated underwater infrastructure to the Big Dig’s. Mitigation made the post office happy, building temporary roads to a distribution station. Mitigation made airport neighbors happy, vowing that cars from the airport tunnel wouldn’t exit onto residential land. Mitigation also made environmentalists happy with its promise to preserve as open space three-quarters of the land that the Artery’s demolition would create (the highway tunnels that would run underneath couldn’t support heavy construction, anyway). It made more ambitious environmentalists happy, promising to improve mass transit and to use some of the excavated dirt—which, because it had saltwater in it, couldn’t be dumped inland—to transform a Boston Harbor island from a noxious landfill into a beachfront park. It made archaeologists happy, paying to catalog artifacts dating back to colonial days. It didn’t make rats happy: after near-hysteria that construction would unleash vermin whose underground lairs also dated to colonial days, the project launched an aggressive rodent-control program.
"The
mitigation, some of which was sensible, tempered even reasonable
criticism of the Big Dig. Few locals voiced skepticism during
planning. Once you got your own interest protected, you kept quiet,
to make sure that the project, free of local opposition, would win
federal funding. Thanks largely to mitigation efforts, more than 80
percent of Boston residents and nearly two-thirds of state
residents supported the Big Dig in its early years."
Gelinasin speaks of colossal mismanagement and I wonder how it might have been better managed, given the contradictions that existed at the time. There are lessons here for future Digs, but I have to wonder what they might be. How would you organize an innovative thirty year effort? My sense is that the effort was essentially unmanagable in the context within which it occurred. And also, that we'll have to wait perhaps thirty years to determine its success. By then, how the development was managed will be a fading memory. Performance over time will be the final judge.
My piece considering this curious contradiction is in today's Projects@Work. (Mildly annoying registration required.)
Here's the link!
"If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.
"Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus."
I continually see informational cascades at work. Heck, I even start some of them.
I read a headline, presume the story behind it, and repeat what I presumed as if it related to the headline. I see someone behaving in some way that would mean something very specific if I were behaving in that way. (God and the person I see only know what their behavior really means!) I don't check in with them before concluding exactly what their behavior actually means, then pass my clever conclusion on just as if it were fact.
Fact is, I don't very often check my facts. I live on a diet of impressions, projections, and unsupportable conclusions. You probably do, too. My prejudices probably influence more of my conclusions than provable fact ever will --- or even could.
Ever had a piece you've written "fact checked?" It can be a disconcerting experience, as someone armed with encyclopedia and a LEXUS/NEXUS account tries to verify the truth of what you've written. In practice, the quality of the story seems more important than the absolute facts behind any story. Who could (or should) ever let the truth stand in the way of telling a compelling story?
To learn that scientists no less than any of the rest of us fall prey to informational cascades shouldn't surprise me. I spent about ten good, middle adult years, eating stuff that was supposed to lower my cholesterol but didn't.
We live, and apparently thrive on speculation. Always have. Always, I speculate, will. But then what do I really know? Our time here is little different than our ancestors' time here. Different speculations, but speculations none-the-less. We are confident that we know a lot, much of which isn't actually so.
Pass it on!
The approaches outlined below sometimes work. The trouble is that they work just enough to keep us hooked into believing that they work unconditionally. We might never conclude that when continually repeated, they not only don’t work, but most often intensify the very behaviors and attitudes we are trying to change. The following lists contain most of the comments you’ve heard frustrated parents pass to their unruly children. Maybe you’ve heard yourself say these, too?
These approaches fail because they just do not work long term, regardless of your presentation skills, your unassailable logic, or the purity of your motivation. It seems to be a law of human nature: Humans cannot cooperate in the face of continual Unsolicited Lectures, Taking The Moral Highly Ground, Self Sacrifice/Denial, and expectations that say, “You really ought to want to!”
Unsolicited Lectures
This approach includes anything offered “for your own good!”
* Nagging
* Hints
* Encouragements- “Why don't you just try to...”
* Begging, Pleading, Justifying,
* Appealing to Logic or to Common Sense
* Any written material Strategically Left Around or Read Out
Loud
* Any Silent, Long-Suffering, or Angry “Look at How Patiently
and Bravely I am Not Saying or Noticing Anything” Approaches,
Repeated and/or Escalating Punishments Often Result in More of the
Same, or an Escalation of, Problem Behaviors.
Taking The Moral High Ground
Observing from a superior position, especially when using “unassailable” logic, moral outrage, or righteous indignation. Commenting as if the speaker controls the truth about how things “really” are or how they are “supposed” to be. Acting as if one has knowledge, abilities, or a set of morals in which another is clearly deficient.
* “If you were really committed...”
* “Surely you could see that if you...”
* “Why can't anyone realize that...”
* “Anyone with any sense...”
* “After all I've done...”
* “Look how sick I've made myself by worrying
about...”
* “I'll help you if you do exactly what I want.”
* “I will continue protecting you for as long as you behave
the way I want you to behave.”
Using this technique puts the target into the position of having to question his own judgment. Since he cannot access your judgment, except through you, this leaves him a prisoner to your pseudo-superior judgment. Your judgment cannot replace his.
Self Sacrifice Denial
Any technique that attempts to encourage change in another by denying something for yourself, as if equity means that you have to invest more than anyone else involved in the transaction:
* Keeping the Peace
* Tiptoeing So Others Won’t Be Upset Or Angry
* Putting the Happiness of Others Before Your Own
* Justifying Yourself
* Protecting Others From the Consequences Of Their Own
Actions
* Putting Your Own Life on Hold
* Hoping the Other Will Change
* Trying to Please Somebody/Everybody
“You Really Ought To Want To!”
Where a person or a group tries to make another change, demanding that they do it because they want to do it.
* “You ought to want to please me.”
* “All ya gotta do is...”
* “I want you to show the enthusiasm I know you’re
hiding inside.”
* “You helped resolve the problem, but I would have
* preferred that you chose to do it willingly.”
Trying to make somebody more responsible, more expressive, more reasonable, more thoughtful, more considerate, more assertive, etc., is an invitation for them to be obedient to your definition of how they should be, regardless of your actual intention. These rarely, if ever, work. They elicit at best obedience. By far the most likely response will be an increasing inability to respond, disobedience, anger, withdrawal, resentment, and failure.
Most people do not like to be obedient.
On the big day, Toyota won by a mile.
GM, very discouraged, decided to investigate the reason for their crushing defeat. A strategic management team, made up of senior management, was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. They concluded that Toyota had 8 non-union guest workers rowing on a twelve hour shift and 1 person steering, while the GM team had to include 4 pensioners who couldn’t row, 4 union employees who were restrained from rowing for more than four hours without a break (and had to comply with union rules limiting latitude for individual judgment), and 8 people steering: administering health plans, pension benefits, and compliance with union and government mandates, and maintaining narrowly-focused shareholder relationships.
Feeling a deeper study was in order, GM management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. They questioned the strategy that insisted upon competing with so many people steering and riding on the boat, and not enough people rowing.
Toyota prepared for a second race by conducting a joint rower/steerer retrospective, while GM rearranged deck chairs. GM lost the second race, too.
Destiny is the accumulation of choices interacting with DNA.
Toyota chose to populate its plants with cheap, non-union guest workers, GM chose to populate theirs with domestic, union workers. The Japanese government chose to provide universal health care, pension benefits, easy guest-worker immigration, and hefty corporate give-aways (and look-asides). The US Government chose to require corporations to also be in the health care and pension businesses and discourage non-union, guest-worker immigration that even hefty give-aways and look-asides couldn’t counterbalance.
Toyota focused upon economy of resource and quality of rowing while GM included deck chairs to hold quality of life on board.
After losing the second race, GM took a deep, long-range look at their business model and chose to stop racing Toyota in little boats. So, GM expanded their financing business (even helping Toyota finance their canoes), expanded their position in off-shore markets by forging joint manufacturing and marketing agreements (with, among others, Toyota), negotiated with their union to assume partial responsibility for administering their pension system, and (finally) started spending some serious lobbying money to support domestic universal health care and more progressive guest-worker laws. They chose to expand, broaden, and deepen their business. Direct manufacture and sales of automobiles fell as a contribution to gross revenue. Profitability eventually soared.
In business, it’s a good idea to drop out of competitions that don’t serve your purposes and change the game to something that balances the conditions you face and the aspirations you desire. If GM could divorce itself from its DNA, it might successfully compete in concrete canoe racing. Since it’s unlikely to lose its DNA, it’s wise to choose a strategy that holds the promise of delivering the quality of life it aspires to. Even if that doesn’t involve manufacturing as many cars or racing concrete canoes.
In any competition, success depends upon choosing not to compete where you cannot win. You might have to lose a canoe race or two before you figure out where you should be competing.
Moral:
Success almost never comes from collaboratively improving the processes by which you create what you don’t want.
The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.
In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.
In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.
“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”
The program is just in the early stages, and as the article reports, some feel strongly that this is militarizing the social sciences. Those involved claim to be better socalizing the military. Whatever.
This seems analogous to what I've seen when we focus upon how things really are, as we do when designing a project, as a means for better defining how they might be. As long as the target is killing more insurgents, the supply of insurgents seems inexhaustible. Reframe the purpose to undermining the reasons for people to become insurgents, and the whole game changes quite dramatically.
We probably should no more expect a programmer armed with technology, a manager focused upon controlling execution, or a soldier armed with a rifle to delve into these deeper -- or shallower -- social perspectives. But no project was ever mustered to simply deliver requirements. No project was ever managed simply to exert control. And no war was ever fought -- or, more importantly won -- by simply killing the bad guys.
An example: Set up a conference room into rows of chairs with a center aisle. Dim the lights. Place an open book, perhaps a candle, on a small table at the head of the room. Then invite people into that room and watch what they do. Conversation will hush as they enter. Some will fold their hands in front of them. Ask later why people sat where they sat and and you'll learn that quite a few chose a chair positioned where their family sat in church when they were kids. Were they aware that they were doing that? Most weren't until they reflected on it.
Someone was aware enough to recognize how that context marker might influence the people encountering it. This is an example of a light touch that works whether or not one is influencing an anarchist or an organization. We can become more aware of the contexts we find ourselves in and more deliberately choose how to respond, but without that awareness, we're pretty much slaves to these influences.
We find a lot of garbled context markers whenever we see an incoherent team at work. A team might, for example, espouse co-equal relationships but their leader "owns" a certain, dominant position at the table. No one consciously decided this "lowerarchy", but no one else would dare sit in that chair! Such groups seem to extend their 'storming' period. Perhaps because they are trying to resolve the pre-conscious incongruities surrounding them.
I'm always amused when I attend a class or a conference promoted as different and find the same old context markers: Lectern, PowerPoint slides, talking head or dancing bear holding forth in front of a room full of people who cannot see each others' eyes. Notice how the really interesting conversations happen in the hallways and the bar? Context markers.
When context markers are mixed or haphazard, don't be surprised if you find that you need to do a lot of coaching and reminding about principles and protocols. When markers are consistent and deliberate, people seem to just act right.
We are more sensitive to context markers than we are conscious of them. Explaining doesn't influence in the same way. They represent tacit knowledge, stuff anyone raised in a culture just understands. Anyone not raised in that culture might not get it.
Some mix-ups are unavoidable. Our contexts are remarkably incoherent these days. I'm always confused when I enter a company who claims to have a culture of trust, but also has an armed guard station and a metal detector at the entrance. Or one that claims a flat organization, but the managers have doors and gate-keepers. One of my colleagues, disturbed at the mixed message his office door induced, came in on a Sunday and took that door off its hinges and set it on two saw horses to make a conference table. A perfect metaphor for creating more congruent context markers.
Self-organization does just happen. Whether self-organization 'just happens' as intended might have more to do with the intention than any anarchist or leader might comfortably acknowledge. In Small Gods, Terry Pratchett introduced priests who had learned that if they prayed fervently (and quickly) for a rock to fall after they'd dropped it over a cliff, the Gods always answered their prayer. I've learned that if I can conjure up a sticky metaphor for what we're up to together and share it, we all seem to line up facing that goal. If I just explain where we're intending to go without attending to the context markers that correspond to people quite naturally going there, I'm herding cats.
Later, I was listening to a book called Dark Star, which tells the story of a Pravda journalist during the run-up to WWII. He, too, was surrounded by cynical certainty seeking to justify unthinkable actions. He lived in dread, too.
This got me thinking about uncertainty and realizing that I usually operate pretty well under conditions of uncertainty. Uncertainty is, after all, the human condition. I start going ginky, though, when a cynical kind of certainty slips into the conversation. Like when I'm certain of what I need to do and uncertain how to justify doing that. Or when I'm certain that something is going to happen and I can't imagine it turning out well. These combinations seem like the perfect breeding grounds for dread.
Dread seems to spring from the certain parts, not the uncertain ones. Cynicism has been defined as wounded optimism. And when my own certainty shifts from optimism to wounded optimism, I slide into dread. Maybe you do, too.
My problem is certainty then, not uncertainty. It won't respond to becoming more certain because the root cause already wallows in certainty. More certainty then just creates more muck to wallow in.
Perhaps, if the difficulty is certainty, the antidote lies in uncertainty. But not the "damn, I'm stuck with not knowing again!!" wounded certainty, but with another kind. An optimistic uncertainty. Since both my certainty and my uncertainty are about the future, they're both just stories, just fiction now. If the present fiction isn't working, a replacement fiction is called for.
I'm learning to appreciate my dread. It's evidence that I'm not yet as productive a writer as I might be. It challenges me to write a better story, one that might satisfy me now, today, rather than leave me huddled and fearful.
If this seems awfully notional to you (like it does to me!), it's only because it is. Our notions (aka our fictional certainties) have powerful influence, and might well be effectively neutralized by simply changing the story.
Writing isn't always 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. For me, it's often 90% milling around trying to maintain some semblance of self esteem while waiting for inspiration, 1/2 of 1 percent inspiration, and the other 9 1/2 percent mildly pleasing exercise. No sweat at all. Other times it's 100% just doing it. Still other times it's 110% not accomplishing anything at all.
I've been "repainting" my house this summer. No painting involved yet. The house is 100 years old. Last summer, Amy and I painted the west side of the house, and that job took a lot more time than estimated, mostly because we had no idea what was lurking underneath the paint.
Same challenge this summer, where the focus has been the south side. Different weather conditions aged the surface. Different past strategies for dealing with problem spots. Some genuis decided, for instance, to smear silicon caulk on the most weathered boards before the last repainting. The silicon protected the boards from further decay, but also provides a dandy barrier to refinishing the boards to eliminate the feathering and raised grain weathering produced.
I started in June, hopeful that I would just be able to scrape off the few visible bits of loose paint. But there was more loose paint than I’d anticipated. And a lot more securely stuck blobs of silicon than I could have imagined. Here’s how it looked after scraping:
So, I hesitantly accepted that if I wanted a proper paint job, and not just another color wash to cover and compound past mistakes, I’d have to take the surface down to bare wood.
It’s almost October now. When I’ve been home, I’ve managed five or six hours a day on what I’ve grown to lovingly (and sometimes not so enduringly) call The Wall. I’m still an indeterminate distance from finishing the preparation, and I see no relationship between work done and work remaining --- or preparation done and actual painting time to come. I feel autumn’s chill stalking me.
Today it’s raining, but since the roof overhang protects the current preparation spot, I’ll spend the day scraping again. Low and dry.
Dedication can replace prediction. Much of what we engage in these days cannot be estimated and the uncertainty will not be dispatched with clever little heuristics. The vision of the finished work helps fuel continued motivation. Much of the work we do can teach us how to do it if we can accept the role of student and discard the role of wise predictor.
The meta-preparation required to succeed in this work is mental, not physical. It is a dedication test which must be taken and passed over and over again. When the scraper hand swells and the shoulder aches, will you take to the ladder again? When it rains, will you find a convenient distraction? When autumn’s chill morning whispers discouragement, will you still stand and silently prepare, trusting that the time for painting will come?
The result is often an unmanagable effort supported by little more than hollow assumptions about the present and the future. Speculation masquerades as certainty. The effort proceeds until it encounters an unanticipated reality. Then what? Requirements are reconsidered, plans are redrafted, and the process is more-or-less repeated. Often, six times out of seven, expected results are not achieved.
The obvious strategies for resolving this difficulty include getting better at defining requirements, making better plans, and improving control of execution. Obvious and wrong, but not obviously wrong. Something is missing from the standard project execution strategy. This missing element is project design.
Designing in a project context is not the same as planning. Project planning focuses upon the steps between idea and end product. Project design considers the context within which idea might become product, while questioning both the idea and the product. Rather than gather requirements, project designers questions them.
Project designers questions requirements to find balance between initiating bright idea and resulting legacy effects, looking for useful variations outside the expected patterns of engagement.
We might aspire to satisfy ourselves and our clients by pulling a pre-packaged project design off some shelf, like some ready-to-eat meal. Will this project be lean cuisine or agile fare? Washed down with waterfall or wine? These are the wrong questions.
Fine meals, like fine projects, start with something other than gathering requirements. They start with deliberate design. Of course, the requirements for designing any project conflict and cannot be logically resolved. Perhaps this is why so many projects choose to just get to work, heading off in some direction, any familiar direction, rather than wrestle design dilemmas to ground.
Where does one learn project design? How does one, perhaps trained only in the traditions of project management and execution, stumble upon the principles of project design?
For the last decade or so, some have first encountered the fundamentals of project design by attending our Mastering Projects Workshop. Many enrolled thinking this to be a project management workshop. And I’m afraid that we unintentionally encouraged this misunderstanding. When the workshops started, people caught on that we were considering a different side of projects, one most had never stopped to consider. We were lacking, then, the descriptive term that might have better set expectations. No longer.
We are project designers. If you think design doesn’t make a difference, look around you. Most everything you see bears the marks of design. Some deliberate and fine. Others crude and inadvertant.
We see the same differences when we look at projects. The marks of deliberate, thoughtful design are obvious. The marks of inadvertent design even more so.
Where do you start to learn about designing projects? Attend our up-coming Mastering Projects Workshops in Spokane, Washington or Portland, Oregon. We think that if you engage in project work, and especially if you’ve found this work unsatisfying, this is absolutely essential training. If you and your clients are satisfied with a microwaveable methodology, God Bless You. You could make something better from scratch, at lower cost, with higher satisfaction. Let us show you how.
Here’s the link
Spokane, WA October 23-25, 2007
Portland, OR November 13-15, 2007
See the Bring Yourself To Work blog for more details
Listen to New Dimensions
Internet Radio (NDIR). Six hours of original programming
including the current "flagship" program and gems of timeless
wisdom from the extensive archives heard 24/7.
My Program #3074 will be
airing on our new New Dimensions Internet Radio (NDIR) during the
week of December 11, 2006.
www.newdimensions.org click on Listen to NDIR now!
ETHICS, VALUES, INTEGRITY AND MASTERY
Michael Toms' interview with David Schmaltz
Program Description:
If you work, you probably manage projects every day, and in the
process, experience frustration and no fun. How do we engage our
work life in ways that give us joy and meaning? Schmaltz says, "In
the instant between perception and action, belief and behavior,
lies the power to change the world." During this provocative and
intriguing conversation prepare yourself to hear how age-old
beliefs about how project work may, indeed, be the source of your
misery. He speaks about the difference between wickedness and
juiciness, and how disorganization, disorder and chaos can even
serve a project.
Topics explored in this dialogue:
* How "sitting with the mess" can be beneficial
* What is "informed choice?"
* Why trust is important
* How understanding your intentions is crucial
* Why forgetting "tidiness" can be an asset
Listen to New Dimensions Internet Radio (NDIR). Six hours
of original programming including the current "flagship" program
and gems of timeless wisdom from the extensive archives heard
24/7. My Program #3074 will be airing on New Dimensions
Internet Radio (NDIR) during the week of December 11, 2006.
www.newdimensions.org
click on Listen to NDIR now!
And please let everyone know about this. Thanks!
The reins management ended up killing the effort.
In theory, though, the concept was brilliant. We could add power by just harnessing up another chicken. Goodbye mainframe!
Modern server farms have figured out the reins management at levels of complexity our project could only dread. They’ve worked out some protocols we didn’t have. They employ some hardware we could only dream about. Somehow, the whole thing works. Even though some percentage of the individual computing units are broken at any point in time, the whole machine keeps crunching away in eternal conversation.
Marvelous!
I concluded from that early experience that projects are unmanagable. The chickens are always in charge. This observation led me to reject most of the techniques commonly embraced to control projects. Not only do they not work, they quite provably couldn’t work.
My early insight has had little influence on the now burgeoning industry cranking out project pseudo-control mechanisms. Nor has it dissuaded many from buying any placebo.
Yet we see strong evidence that project managers can’t manage projects. It’s clear from the front page of any newspaper. Companies continue to hire project managers, anyway, and project managers disappoint their employers with such regularity that dissatisfaction is expected. Project managers and their employers seem to be hardwired to do the same things and expect different results, even though the reins management seems to be killing them.
The reason why project managers can’t manage projects is answered by an under-respected law called Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Ross Ashby, a scientist who worked in the little-understood control theory field, concluded that control depends upon the controller having at least as much “variety” as the system he tries to control. Variety is one of those scientific terms with a very specific meaning, but let’s distill the convoluted definition down to say that the controller has to have enough hands to hold onto the reins.
All complex systems have more reins than their controllers have hands to hold those reins. Everyone’s familiar with trying to herd cats or control teenagers. Three strategies for dealing with this deficit have evolved through generations of practice.
The first strategy dumbs down the system—allowing no more reins than the limited number of hands. This approach can leave many chickens uncontrolled or take away so many chickens that the remaining birds can no longer pull the coach. Alternatively, it can require so many people to hold reins that the chickens can no longer pull the stage or shrink the stagecoach to where it can no longer carry anyone to hold the reins. If you’re stuck on pulling a stage with chickens, this strategy doesn’t really help much.
The second strategy calls for training the chickens so that they don’t need anyone controlling their reins. Chickens are relatively easy to train, and this strategy doesn’t seem completely absurd on the face of it, at least until the sponsor comes sniffing around wondering why the stagecoach isn’t moving yet. This strategy can transform the effort into more training than stagecoaching.
The third strategy entails accepting the unmanagability of the situation. This strategy doesn’t look very much like managing, and is, in my experience, the least acceptable of the three.
Yet it is the only workable strategy among them.
Who Controls the Controller?
We approached that system development project as if it were a system development project, when it was actually two systems developing each other. The chickens were in charge most of the time because we believed that we were always in charge. We’d initiate some grand plan and follow it, surprised when the fates denied us success. And it seemed to us as though we were just unlucky rather than unenlightened. We’d plan, track, and control only to find the effort out of control again and again.
Our strategy for resolving every roadblock was to do even more of the same stuff that wasn’t working. Eventually, the chickens prevailed and the project was canceled.
We might have succeeded, I reflected later, had we been more adaptable. Had we accepted that, because they could generate more variety than we could ever produce, the chickens were in charge, we might have learned from them how to succeed on something other than our terms. But this seemed bass-ackwards. After all, I was the project manager. My staff and I were supposed to be in charge of controlling the project.
Yet we could not be.
Had we copped to our fundamental inability, we might have managed to succeed. But we couldn’t talk about that. We’d been chartered, just as generations of project managers before us and a generation of them since were chartered, to manage the project. Not to be managed by it.
There’s a circularity about control. A give and take. Even a relatively simple controller, like a thermostat, relies upon feedback to determine its commands. In my house, there are several people with different ideas about how to control the thermostat. I like to turn the danged thing off when I go to bed, but my wife likes to leave it on. One of us invariably decides to turn the temperature setting up or down, hoping to violate the second law of thermodynamics by speeding up the process of heating or cooling the house. Our control of the controller complicates its job. Left alone to sense the temperature, it’s capable of maintaining a steady temperature without ignoring the second law of thermodynamics. It listens and it responds.
The thermostat doesn’t know that the granddaughter has left the back door open again. Or that I want it colder than my wife wants it. Given clear intentions and steady feedback, it manages fine. Given all of the variety it was never designed to sense, it fails frequently.
Any of this sound familiar?
Projects As Conversations
The chickens are always in charge because they can generate more variety than any single controller. The chickens cannot be trained to operate autonomously from the controller without some unrealistically detailed foreseeing, training, and choreography beforehand. We can find resolution for this eternal dilemma in conversation, and the recognition that everyone, both the chickens and the poor fool tapped to handle the reins, have important things to say about the stagecoach.
When it comes to managing complex systems, the most we can say is that no one knows and everyone could be learning. Whether they learn or not seems to depend upon everyone more fully acknowledging that they don’t yet know. Control emerges not from the driver or the chickens. Control, if it is to be achieved, will appear in the space between the system and its so-called controller. In the relationship. In the moments of recognition and insight.
Feed this space between with conversation or starve it with all you cannot say. Control of any complex system looks so different than the commanding control of a simple system, that those only experienced with simple controls—planning, tracking, etc—look right through their real point of leverage. And we’ve all been altogether too well trained on simple controls. So well trained that we instinctively shrink from our real points of leverage and label them too chaotic to consider.
Projects are conversations. Not scripted performances. Their purpose shifts, depending upon the meanings we make in conversation and the significances we acknowledge between us. When we can speak our truth—what’s true for us—without insisting that it be true for others, and when we can hear another’s truth without insisting that it must agree with ours, we are having a conversation. It’s not a conversation and it’s really not control unless we are prepared to be changed by whatever we hear. Ask the thermostat.
The reason project managers can’t manage projects is because projects are unmanagable. The project manager’s responsibilities, as written, describe a fool’s mission. Provably unachievable.
The few who succeed resolve this eternal dilemma by more fully acknowledging it. They accept that, while their project is unmanagable, it might be capable of controlling itself. Not, however, by management command and pseudo control, but through conversation. I believe that most every project is capable of learning how to control itself, and that every element, every contributor, has something to provide to that conversation. Even, especially, the chickens.
The project managers who can’t create successful results don’t acknowledge that their projects are unmanagable. This acknowledgement could take them out of the driver’s seat and open the possibility for surprising, even delightful results. The alternative seems to be a stagecoach that eternally intends to, but rarely actually does, arrive on time, on budget, and on spec.
Blame it on the damned chickens!
©2006 by David A. Schmaltz all rights reserved
The house has been the primary teacher. It winces when we do something naive. It seems to swell with something like a teacher's pride when we figure out how to do something just right.
The experience has reminded me that I am a reluctant student. I somehow never seem to be able to envision myself succeeding until I succeed -- or until just after I've succeeded. And, as I've long thought, doing well isn't the same as feeling good about the result.
I am learning on several levels. I'm getting a lot of reinforcement about just how eccentric I am in work. Amy's son, who (unlike me) is a mechanical savant, can barely bear to watch me figure stuff out. He's more amazed than I am when it turns out.
I certainly don't often feel very masterly. The windows taught me how to remove them. To strip a hundred years of layered care and neglect to find the original workmanship intact. To chisel out the old glazing putty around the glass without breaking the window. (Sometimes.) And how to replace the window when it broke. How to layer the paint to create a thirty year finish. And how to re-cord the sashes to last.
Half the work is slight of hand stuff. The misdirection intended to fool the eye. A shredded board can be made to look like new with sanding, putty, epoxy, and paint.
The primary muscle groups engaged are not between the ears. The adductors. The pull muscles on the insides of my arms ache with the deep reminder that I've done something intended to last.
I will never be the same.
The pace is agonizing, but it is the necessary pace. A day of drying between every layer. Work sandwiched between wait. Wait sandwiched between work. No rushing, no matter what the weather promises.
I have not been writing much. I have been reading while waiting and listening to books on tape while working. Curiously, painting a house is an extremely literary activity.
Amy and I are standing on a brick platform, waiting for the Ringstrasse tram that will carry us to the other side of Vienna. We are on a mission.
My front pants pockets bulge with almost seventeen Euro in small change. I collected this change by begging, which is illegal in Vienna. I shook a Starbuck's coffee cup—just having a Starbucks cup is, all by itself, a significant social sin in this birthplace of the coffeehouse—jingling with small change in the direction of the delegates to a professional conference. I stood near the top of the grand marble staircase in the historic Haus der Industrie, where every attendee except those who chose to ride the ancient lift had to pass. Few chose to ride the ancient lift.
“Got any spare change?” I pestered.
I was trying to learn about change. This conference was titled Changing Change Management, and Amy and I had been invited to convene two sessions. We'd traveled a long way to speak about the future, only to discover that the conference was being held in a marble mausoleum to the past. In the main auditorium, Emperor Franz Josef beamed beneficently from his portrait hung between gilded statuary. The furniture in the break-out rooms could not be arranged in circles, the shape that everyone who's anyone working on the cutting edge of change management, ourselves included, would certainly require.
Vienna, the source of modern bureaucracy, was hosting a conference aimed at reconsidering organizational change. Sonja Raditz, who's company, ISCT, was hosting the conference, had chosen well. The change masters were in a quiet uproar, unable to manipulate this infrastructure to create the proper context for change. Just like in the real world, we visited our meeting room and found it wholly inadequate for the purpose for which we intended to use it.
Our long, rectangular room featured a huge canoe-shaped conference table and a few more chairs than would comfortably fit around it. There was no obvious space front or back for us to ‘hold forth’ from. A huge projection screen dominated the far inside wall. We’d have to work with what we found there, not what we’d imagined finding there. How we’d do that, we didn’t yet know.
The change masters would have to change.
One attention divided by two does not create one half. Nor does it create a short-time whole. It creates something more like one third. Who took the other piece that mathematics said would be available to complete the work? Think of that time being spent changing shoes, clearing then re-populating the desk, getting oriented to the different focus, or simply lost, like heat, in the transfer. It will really be lost, and attempting to recover it will only further dissipate available time.
The dilemma you face when this tactic seduces your otherwise solid reasoning asks you to integrate some new information. Creating intricate choreography denies this integration. Exactly equivalent to thinning paint so it will cover more surface, creating Intricate Choreography works on paper. It appears to completely resolve the difficulty, until you actually apply it to the difficulty.
You will have no problem enlisting people in this response. Even those most stretched by the re-assignment will find this tactic more immediately acceptable than any other available response. No need, certainly, to completely replan because of this little perturbation. We should be able to absorb some of this shock without completely rethinking our approach.
You will eventually find yourself rethinking your approach. Usually after some time creating an Intricate Choreography that didn’t deliver as it seemed to promise.
The eternal desire to hire only the best person for the job results in what psychologists call The Lake Webegone Syndrome, after Garrison Keelor's mythical Midwestern town where "all the women and strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Of course, no population can be so skewed, yet the practice persists. The ldea being that if only one could successfully screen for traits, we'd have the best of all possible workforces.
This notion ignores at least two critical facts. First, in any population, no matter how carefully chosen, you tend to get a bell-curve-shaped distribution around some mean. Not every one will float above average. Second, these "tests" are tests for preference, not capability. I can do many things I'd prefer not to do, and even do them very well. Tests for preference never define capability.
The best of the companies publishing these "exams" fully acknowledge these facts, but support this with reams of validations. This seems only to encourage their misuse.
This I know: If the company you aspire to work for assaults you with one or more of these "tests," and uses the results in their selection decision, they tell you all you might need to know about their ethics and their judgment.
Our similarities attract us, as Virginia Satir said, but our differences make us strong. Those who pursue homogeniety achieve only mediocrity.
Reading through the management journal summaries in the Economist today, I came across mention of this piece, The Darker Side of Lean, written by an American who worked inside one of Toyota's divisions for three years. Smells interesting.
I'm really quite interested in how work feels, and how that feeling matches how one is supposed to feel. I suspect that a lot of anecdotal reporting about work experience is colored by how it's supposed to feel. Just reading a book (Stumbling On Happiness) that explains why this is the case. Something about our internal wiring.
I've skimmed through this piece (I did pop for the purchase price), and I'm moved by the differences between Japanese and American culture which explain how we might interpret how it's supposed to be for how it really is. This reminds me of my "world citizen" daughter returning from a year in Chile to report that she met no one there who ever said "No!". She had to learn layers of subtle cues to properly interpret the many shades of "Yes!" she received, and politely withdraw a request when the internal sensors interpreted a "yes" as really meaning "no". Most of the people she met there thought that she was nice, but sporadically thoughtless. ... ... and insensitive.
I suspect I'll have more comments after I read between the lines.
david
--- --- ---
Okay, I've read and considered.
This piece was written by an engineer who worked three years inside one of the Toyota subcontractors, who sole-supply to Toyota. Toyota, according to this author, doesn't innovate well, so they acquire innovations, bringing small operations into exclusive conglomerate relationships. As the author says, while Toyota does have smart and innovative engineers, their engineering isn't smart or innovative, but usually out-sourced.
The author suggests that the real story behind the Toyota miracle has more to do with Taylorism than with any human-infused collaboration. How could the many observers have reported otherwise? He claims that they spoke with the wrong people and that they failed to understand some fundamental facts about Japanese culture. There's what you're supposed to say and then there's how you feel.
It's considered rude in Japan, for instance, when a barber asks how your haircut looks, to say anything but that it looks terrific. It's permissible to complain endlessly in the barber's absence and to choose to never return to him again, but in his presence, honest feedback is determined by what one is supposed to say, not by what one wants to say.
Ramp this same ethic up into a more complex social context. On the manufacturing line, individuals claim responsibility for injuries the working conditions cause. To do otherwise would be "wrong." Individuals who are injured wait until their shift ends (some shifts run 36 hours during periods of extreme duress) so they can check themselves into the hospital because if they are injured on the job, their company will have to pay for their medical care. This would be wrong.
When an outsider asks how things are done, it is considered only proper to explain the way things are supposed to have been done, not the way they actually happen. The Lean principles might represent fine principles, but Toyota has little experience in actually implementing them---and they have had little influence on their success.
That's a pretty extreme statement. Two examples. Just-In-Time inventory control has contributed to both a dramatic reduction in inventory expense, but it has also served to increase the speed of the manufacturing line, causing a dramatic increase in worker injuries. The one didn't have to translate into the other, but management (not the workers, who consider the Kaizen meetings- which happen after work- opportunities to smoke while their bosses tell them how it is and how its going to be) has designed workflow so that 58 seconds of every minute is required to complete each work stage. (Some exceed that.) One physician who has studied workers at Toyota plants for over 30 years claims that more than 50% of Toyota's workers suffer from work-related injuries, but continue to work anyway.
Pull Manufacturing, where anyone on the line can stop the line if a quality defect is identified. In fact there are three states of the line. Green means everything flowing, yellow means someone's falling a little behind (this will usually get one extra person to assist, and a chewing out from management later), and red, which means there's no freaking way I can get this thing resolved in the three minutes the process line allows. This brings an emergency team, who helps pull the offending piece off the line, so the line can be started immediately again. If you're a guest worker, calling a red alert, even reporting an injury, guarantees that your contract won't be renewed. You're heading home.
The author reports on just how little collaboration occurs. Individuals might be expected to perform more than one job, but the speed of the line demands that most work as individuals or in small, very insular teams. Rather than group problem-solving, management encourages competition between groups, which encourages individuals to not help other groups. In fact, helping other groups can get you hassled. The open working environment means there is no privacy. There are rules for everything- formal, written rules, informal, unwritten rules, and cultural rules which everyone is just supposed to know. Violate a rule and a bully, who is one of the manager's "good old boys" will publicly harass you, intending to humiliate you into obeying in the future. The harassment might continue for a long time, especially if you are the type to be easily embarrassed.
The author learned that the dominant problem-solving method employed is induction, not deduction. He found this difficult, because as a US-trained engineer, he naturally worked first to identify principles, then deduce design. Toyota starts by getting examples of what everyone else has done, then refines those into their own. What the boss says, goes. In design meetings, he noticed that no matter how long a subordinate might argue their point, the choice always, always, always went the way the boss had proposed at the start of the argument. he says that the bosses are smart, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not group problem-solving and breeds timidity in otherwise innovation-capable professionals.
He tries hard to distinguish between cultural norms and work effectiveness. And I think he succeeds. Bottom line, the Lean story doesn't match the day-to-day practices at Toyota. This could be good news, an opportunity for someone else to compete effectively. While Toyota can't credibly claim that their "way" causes their success, someone actually implementing the practices in ways that more fully acknowledge the humanity involved could best them, unless Taylor was right.
I don't think Taylor was right. I know practitioners here who have taken lean principles and used them as they mistakenly believed they were intended to amplify human satisfaction and output capacity. Lessons the authors of the theory might well take to heart.
The reasons behind the Japanese manufacturing miracle might be myth, a public-relations campaign which reinforces some cultural prejudices of our own. (Those clever little devils!) Seems in practice they are mere window-dressing hiding some same old sweat shop shit. I remember conducting a workshop for the US subsidiary of a huge Japanese electronics firm. The major complaint of the US engineers was that their Japanese counterparts would not think or act outside of some invisible box. As an example, when the visiting Japanese engineers learned that they had been invited to a people-centered (as opposed to a process-oriented) workshop about improving project work, every one of them found a reason to both enthusiastically accept the invitation, then get called away on urgent business the morning of the workshop. That's how innovation and humanity works there.
In the early sixties, Heintz von Foerster founded the Biological Computing Laboratory at Champaign-Urbana. Over the following fifteen years, fueled by enthusiastic inquiry and heavy Defense Department funding, von Foerster attracted a remarkable collection of scientists to investigate how a computer might be engineered to think. It had been barely a generation since Turing had originally imagined how a machine might be enabled to reason, and this next step seemed, well, only reasonable at the time.
These scientists shortly encountered a class of problems which they labeled “fundamentally undecideable,” and from that discovery grew the eventual demise of their grand plan for a thinking computer. The field of Artificial Intelligence grew out of BCL’s work, but has yet to resolve the fundamental undecidability dilemma.
Today, we employ computers to accomplish tasks unimagined by the BCL, but we have not yet managed to create a computer capable of anything more than rapid reason. Our metaphors attribute thought, even wisdom to our machines, but they are capable of neither. At best, they can fuel insight impossible without some very rapid reasoning. They can assume the burden of many menial, literally mindless operations, freeing us up to sometimes think more clearly and productively.
But thinking more clearly and productively depends upon us retaining our native abilities, and not merely mimicking our computers’ marvelous memories and mindless operations. We cannot simultaneously think like a computer and retain our fully human capabilities to think.
Fundamentally Undecidable Problems
My sister has a degree in Performance Arts. She can sight-read piano music, yet she cannot interpret the music I write. This is reassuring to me, because while I have no degree in music, I write songs. But I’ve always stumbled when expected to transcribe my music into notation. I thought I had this dilemma resolved, finally, when I found a piece of software capable of transcribing, via a MIDI interface, my keystrokes into musical notation. So I wrote my sister a song for her birthday, performed it for her, and promised to send along the notation so she could recreate the melody whenever she wanted.
Two weeks later, a sheepish note came from my sister. “I warmly remember you performing that song for me on my birthday, but I just cannot recreate that feeling from the notes you sent. Thanks for trying, but I think I’d rather just hold the experience as a memory.”
This was a relief to me. I discovered when I tried to transcribe the melody that the metronome got in the way. When I perform, I quite naturally slow and stop, speed up and embellish, and the metronome’s click-click-click distracted me. My first result read wooden and lifeless. Then I turned off the metronome, following what’s called atonal transcription (which in this case was really a-rhythmic), and found little relationship between what the resulting measures so carefully and precisely enumerated and the flow of the song. The transcription software tried to fit what I played into a rational framework, and even succeeded, but the number of slurs and sixteenth notes told me that, while the melody had been captured, it looked like a nightmare on the printed page.
I remembered a question from Prigogine’s work on complex systems. How long is the English coastline? Prigogine decided that the length of the English coastline is infinite, depending upon the scale chosen to represent it. If that scale was large, the length could be resolved into finiteness, but at the cost of usefulness. If that scale was very small, the accuracy increased but also at the cost of utility. Who could ever fold a map where the scale is one micron equals one inch? Further, the tides changed constantly, which meant that there, in a very real sense, could be no provably accurate calculation of the length of the English coastline, absent some arbitrary assumptions.
Prigogine concluded that the length of the English coastline was arbitrary, a function of chosen assumptions. Precision was beside the point. The question was fundamentally unanswerable.
The same thing happens when transcribing music. The songwriter must divorce himself from the originating inspiration to satisfy the rules necessarily constraining transcription. The result, absent inspiring interpretation in performance, is a wooden, logical representation. Exact but lifeless. Muzak®.
I own several different recordings of the same piece of music. Each different. Each very much the same. The score behind these differences is the same rational transcription of the composer’s original inspiration, worthless except when infused with human interpretation. If I were to judge each performance by the degree to which it followed the original score, I would be thinking like a computer, not like a man. When I appreciate the differences, even those which seem quite different than I expected, I think like a man, not a computer.
Projects started employing computers before most present project practitioners were born, and well before the BCL stumbled onto the principle of fundamental undecideability. When I first encountered these scheduling engines, we still fed them with punch cards. I remember engaging enthusiastically, with the same redemptive spirit that I recently brought to transcribing my music with the MIDI interface, because I imagined all of the time I’d save by having the computer complete the many mindless calculations.
I remember my mentor at the time counseling me that if I couldn’t calculate the critical path by hand, the machine wouldn’t be much help. I didn’t completely discount this comment, but it didn’t blunt my enthusiastic first thrust into computing. So I painstakingly coded task durations and relationships onto a deck of cards, submitted them to Operations, and waited for the resulting printout. How very similar was my experience reviewing that first schedule printout to my more recent experience with musical transcription.
My reasonably accurate representation of that task series transcribed into a gawdawful mess! The machine had smoothed resources to show logical availability, utterly changing task sequence and overall duration. Click-click-click. Only the metronome was missing.
So I reworked the task series, this time anticipating the computer’s logical smoothing, and reran the card deck until the results sort of almost resembled my original intentions. It didn’t occur to me then, but the computer was teaching me to think like it thought, even though the computer never had an original thought in it’s ... er ... life. It wasn’t alive or thinking, but rationalizing.
I would be alive, or could be alive, unless I learned to think like a computer. The choice was not clear at the time, but something very like my songwriter’s distaste for transcription bloomed in my belly. Sure, I worked with the scheduling engine, after all, my plans would not be considered fully thought through plans unless accompanied by a pristine printout, but I was not fooled into believing that these transcriptions carried the inspiration I intended my compositions to carry.
The auditors didn’t make this fine distinction. Like cartographers who never actually had to navigate by their charts, they judged the goodness of my plans, not by the passion they imbued in performance, but by how well they satisfied the principles of transcription.
Later, I started managing what were called software development projects. Software is very much a form of transcription intended to instruct computers through rational operations, so I wasn’t surprised when I noticed that the computers and not the programmers were in charge. The computer had the final say, though it was supposed to be in service to resolve some business problem. In practice, the limitations of the computer more often decided whether and how a business problem would be resolved. Why? Many of the business problems these projects were chartered to resolve were fundamentally undecidable problems. Only if reframed into some rational framework could they ever be reduced to solution. Of course, these solutions rarely imbued the spirit intended by those sponsoring these efforts. They asked for music and got a lousy transcription. Muzak®, not music.
The users didn’t appreciate these outcomes, but we worked with them to help them think more like computers. Eventually, helped along by the evolution of colorful user interfaces, most of the dissatisfaction resolved itself into blinking, backlit, trance-like acceptance.
We have evolved into a state where we judge the goodness of our inspiration by our ability to transcribe it. We’ve learned to think like our computers. In a project context, we expend great energy to rationalize our methods, even though in execution, our projects behave non-rationally. Not exactly irrationally, but more like human inspiration at work. Or not. When we are able to squeeze the originating inspiration into a rational exposition, our computer-thinking brains are satisfied, and we might never miss the potential we squash out of the performance. Until we see an exceptionally performing project.
Then we ask after their best practices, innocently overlooking that the practice is never the performance. We might more thoughtfully ask after their inspiration, so we could look beyond their guiding notation and the distracting click-click-click of their metronome to appreciate, if not fully understand, the magic in their performance.
©2006 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
During this time, I catalogued gnomes under the heading of “lawn crap”, which includes anything needing moved before mowing the lawn. I naively included gnomes with such vulgarities as lawn butts, those annoying plywood cutouts that, from a distance, are supposed to look like the bending over backside of fat people. But gnomes add a bit of whimsey to a garden. And gardening, being such serious business, needs whimsey.
So I swallowed my pride and went looking for a garden gnome. I found one, which I will move periodically to maintain the surprise necessary to puncture my pride with whimsey.
The most serious undertakings always need a tiny bit, about a gnome-sized bit, of whimsey. The calculated surprise. The unanticipated delight. What gnomes will you hide inside your next serious undertaking? Let one loose in there and almost everything will remain the same. But whatever changes might delight you when you least expect and most need delight.
http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/229538.cfm
I finished part four yesterday instead of watching the Superbowl. But then I've never watched a Superbowl. I don't think I've ever actually watched an entire football game. Doesn't hold my attention, doesn't have any currency for me.
Link follows:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.podesta.html
∆
London, England
We were supposed to have a quick lunch meeting with the CIO, but a man three seats in front of us on the plane from Vienna had what appeared to be a heart attack, so our flight made an emergency landing in Frankfurt. Then we had to reclaim our baggage and rebook onto a later flight out of Dusseldorf, so we made a frantic call.
Then we waited. ... ... ...
Later, the CIO’s admin returned our call and asked if we could meet late that afternoon. “Sure,” we replied, “We’ll call you as soon as we land to let you know we’re on the way.”
We didn’t make that lunch meeting until just after five o’clock that afternoon. And we chatted for over two hours, then sauntered to a pub to continue the conversation with one of the participants. Had we met our original schedule, we never would have connected as we did.
From one perspective, our schedules are under constant threat. From another, the universe seems to be conspiring to guide us where we might have intended, had we only been wise enough to understand. Whether we end up wise or simply inconvenienced might be completely in our control.
The next time my schedule gets threatened, I intend to listen through my initial frustration and see what the universe has planned for me. I expect to be delighted with the result.
∆
Frankfurt, Germany
I was sick. We’d carefully planned the workshop. I was the lead dog. Amy was playing backup.
So I had a responsibility to deliver on my commitment. But just before noon on the third day, feeling as though I had spent the morning trudging through chest-deep snow, I bailed out.
Amy was a little peeved at first, but she took the reins as I fled to our over-heated hotel room to shiver the afternoon away. I could do nothing else.
The workshop ended delightfully well. It was in good, honest, skillful hands. Though some of the attendees had come to work with me, they received an unintended bonus.
I’ve refused to listen to my body enough to understand that it rarely lies to me. I wish I could say as much about my side of our relationship. I’ve learned through frequent, painful repetition, that my attempts at self-sacrifice for the good of the effort at best get in the way of delightful, surprising outcomes.
The math never worked. How could we achieve our best if I chose to insist upon self-sacrifice?
My most powerful learning experiences have arrived just like this. The lead I was following threw me the reins and disappeared, leaving me unprepared and disoriented. Had I been ready, I might have learned nothing.
There really is no adequate replacement for a sincere lack of preparation. How ever well you prepare.
Invited to present at the Changing Change Management Conference, our plane arrived an hour late.
I found my driver waiting for me just outside baggage claim. He held a sign, “Dr. (they call me doctor there) David Schmaltz”, so I approached him and identified myself. The man standing next to him held a similar sign, “Dr. (they call Amy doctor, too) Amy Schwab,” and Amy tried to explain that she didn’t need a separate ride. But her driver spoke little English, clarified that she was, indeed, Amy Schwab, took her rollaway, and headed for the garage. My driver and I followed.
We took separate cabs to the same hotel. Amy felt kidnapped.
Then, as I was registering for our room, I asked that Amy’s name be entered into the computer, in case someone called for her. “But you are in a single room, Herr Schmaltz,” the clerk replied. Amy had a separate reservation and a separate single room. They found adjoining rooms for us, but had no double room available that night.
I liked this. After two weeks on the road, my inner introvert craved some cave time. Amy’s steaming nearly went to boiling point when I closed my door to use “my” facilities. I fell asleep in “my” room shortly thereafter. Amy was up in “her” room until after two, feeling abandoned.
The next day, the hotel had promised to move us to a double room, but they had no doubles available. They did have a junior suite overlooking the most popular shopping street in Vienna, which was slightly less per night than two single rooms. We agreed to take that.
This story should be no surprise to anyone who travels much. Planes arrive late. Reservations get garbled or lost. At the point where difference first appears, everything just looks f***ed up. Maybe you feel kidnapped. Or abandoned. Only later, sometimes much later, does a delightful end result emerge.
If you want something to end up delightfully, wait until delight appears, then call that the end. If you choose to end on a sour note, you’ll accumulate few sweet memories.
"Interesting," I noted, "We're doing a workshop focused upon creating successful projects in uncontrollable environments." We checked with the participants after they arrived to see if we had the right focus, and each said that they worked in an apparently uncontrollable environment. What possible utility, I wondered, would a workshop limiting creating successful projects to controlled environments have in the real world?
The two workshops couldn't have been more different. In theirs, people arrived in suits and ties. No strange noises slipped out into the hall. They started and stopped on time. The Mastering Projects Workshop didn't stay in the assigned room. Exercises slipped out into the lobby and beyond. Some arrived in suits the first day, but not after. Strange noises permeated. We never once finished on time.
The last day, a few bleary-eyed students emerged from the PRINCE2 workshop, smelling as if they'd just survived a certification test, to find half the MPW group standing in a circle in the elevator lobby, with their backs to a table covered with strangely-arranged little rubber animals and packets of tea. "We wanted to be in your workshop," one of them said as she waited for the 'lift', "It looks like more fun."
More than more fun. Several of the MPW participants had survived PRINCE2 certification. They said MPW was more useful.
But not more useful for creating controlled environments. Not more useful for ensuring consistency.
Near the end of our stay, we dined with a couple who have the priviledge of being the parents of an Autistic son. They described his development (he's now six), and their development as his parents. I was struck by the similarities between the process-driven obsession with controlling environments and the common Autistic behavior pattern of closely controlling environments. The Autistic establish strict routines. They act out should these rituals be disrupted. They also exhibit great difficulty in establishing and maintaining relationships with others. They often become experts on some subject, able to endlessly recite arcaine details about dinosaurs, celestial mechanics, or, somewhat commonly, mathematics.
As Temple Grandin, an autistic adult who is also a college professor and prolific author, points out in her books, the autistic seem to process serially, unable to perceive patterns and relationships. Memory for them is a replaying, as if working with a video tape. There is, she points out, no concept of "cow", just a specific cow.
We found in our MPW participants, a deep longing for relationships in environments which seemed to deny their presence and importance. There were no real barriers to creating deeper relationships, but the opportunities didn't seem to present themselves. After a few years of out-sourcing, many of the long-standing relationships had been disrupted. One participant reported privately that he was in charge of a project to exchange his department's people interfacing with client departments with a generic phone bank. He acknowledged that the phone bank would be more mathematically efficient, but fussed that this efficiency might be beside the point, since the client departments would have little relationship with the people answering the phones, and the relationships seemed to resolve more difficulties that the reps' technical skill did. Quite a dilemma.
As we've managed (pun intended) to make our organizations more mathematically efficient, and focus ever more upon quarterly bottom line results, our organizations have started to behave as if they were austistic. Unable to engage in relationship. Very expert, savant-like in their particular speciality, and nearly illerate in everything else. Diversity of thought and practice gets discouraged in favor of once meaningful, but increasingly meaningless rituals. Controlling the environment becomes a chief concern.
Of course the environment cannot be controlled. Though the strict engagement in ritual might appear to be control, it fools no one, really. I'm not naive enough (damn!) to believe that it's my job, or anyone's, really, to reform these organizations. I'm just noting the pattern, which the autistic organization, thanks to their obsessive focus upon process, cannot see.
And I'm again wondering how I cope with this humbling acknowledgement. What can it teach me? How can I, not terribly ritualistic, engage in a fully human manner in an environment which acknowledges little of my basic human capabilities. Perhaps my friends, who found themselves parents of an uncontrollable environment, have some clues.
They've looked at the present state of the art and found it wanting, and are learning from their interactions with their lovely son. I think our autistic organizations are lovely sons, and we can learn a lot in our unacknowledged relationship with them. Their rituals are sacrosanct, but not unchangeable. Their perspective is golden, even if it's frustrating. We needn't buy into their behavior and world view to understand and learn from it.
