Detractors dismissed this Regan-era notion as a physical impossibility: like shooting a bullet with a bullet. In recent years, their argument has changed. Any enemy firing an ICBM would camouflage the warhead with decoys, making the challenge more like stopping a shotgun blast with a shotgun blast.
Fine, but couldn’t we zap them during the boost phase, before they deploy decoys? In 2003, a study group of top scientists from MIT, Cornell, Stanford, Sandia Labs, and Los Alamos were convened by the American Physical Society to examine the physical reality of shooting down an ICBM during that most vulnerable boost phase. They concluded that our interceptors are not fast enough to reach boosting ICBMs from either international waters or neighboring countries. Further, any enemy merely shifting from liquid to shorter burn-time solid fuels would render any boost-phase interception unlikely, no matter where or how interceptors are based.
What about airborne lasers? “Ineffective against solid-propellant ICBMs." Sea-launched missiles would have to be "positioned within a few tens of kilometers of the launch location of the attacking missile." They concluded that, with technology available within the next fifteen years, defending against a single ICBM would require a thousand or more interceptors. A shotgun blast to hit a bullet. We have twenty one interceptors left after shooting down that errant spy satellite.
What did we prove when we zapped that tumbling satellite? Given a few weeks for planning and a few additional off-budget millions, we can nail a bus-sized bit of defenseless space junk.
Why do such follies exist? Check the map of congressional districts blessed with contracts to build components.
Then ask, "Who will defend us against ourselves?"
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
David,
While this framework is interesting and may have limited application in some types of work, I do not believe that it corresponds to the world many of us live in on a daily basis.
The foundation of work is OUTPUT. Producing something of value to others. In some cases, it may be useful to work with others to obtain this value but in other cases it is not. While an over emphasis on process over people is never good, work is at its core about producing value. The HOW can and will vary based upon the work environment and relationships may play a part in this how but it is only a part.
I also find you Principles to be questionable at best. Just consider you statement on Ethical Responsibilities v. Enron, Qwest, etc. Or consider the trustworthly statement. Ask anyone who has been laid off after having the boss tell them that the company was in fine shape.
This framework might be interesting way to consider the role of relationships in the workplace but it is far too Utopian.
Tim Davidson | 02.18.08 - 11:36
As long as "biting" is OK, here we go...
Overall: with sincere appreciation for your attempts to re-cast 'work' or 'projects', I've begun to lose count of them all and what they were (somewhere back there is 'we're designers' and a fuzzy distant memory of not-project-management). My appreciation concerns giving a little jolt to my own thinking, but each new epiphany devalues the previous ones.
Concerning this idea of relational work: I've always carried around with me your ideas around the 'project community', this seems similarly rooted, but in your manifesto the dominant feeling is "instead of" where I think "and" might be a better place to start. This criticism may not recognize fully the intent of a manifesto.
You've described a lot of things that I already see in play today, but to put it in practice as the central model...well, I honestly think it might make for a decent exercise in a training class but can't see it working in even the smallest enterprise and not even a whiff of a chance in the types of companies that many of us are part of today.
Allowing myself to provoke a little, you seem to have described a bit of the school playground culture or "Lord of The Flies". And I keep thinking, "Is this who/how you'd get the Hoover Dam built?"
Joel L. Butler | 02.18.08 - 3:43 pm | #
Following is a first attempt at a curious manifesto. I create this manifesto to reframe our interpretation of work.
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.
The Republican Party will be moving from the White House to take up long-term residence in a well-deserved dog house. Unlike Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Mark-My-Territory Bush could not be accused of conducting anything like a civil war during his tenure, and it might well be two hundred years before any Republican, regardless of pedigree, has a prayer of being elected President again.
Against this backdrop, it’s distressing to watch pit bull conservatives nip the heels of their lead sled dog, Mr. McCain, for not being yellow enough! It doesn’t matter how yellow he is now. If he’s running as a Republican, he can’t win!
A few of the more feral Republicans are rooting for Hillary’s nomination, reasoning that she’s one unelectable, um, mother. But under the Yellow Dog Rule, it doesn’t matter who the Dems nominate this time around. The leash has been passed.
While it might well be that Mr. Bush’s enduring legacy will be to ensure the electability of any yellow dog running in the Dems’ pack, there are no dogs running under that label this cycle. While most of us would vote for a yellow dog rather than any Republican, we won’t have to this time.
Whomever the
candidate, whomever the running mate, there will be no fleas
joyriding on the Dems’ ticket this year. Let’s
fumi-gate the infested halls of Congress, liberate the soiled
copies of the Constitution from the floor of the West Wing, and get
on with the business of the people for the next century or
two.
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.
