Pure Schmaltz

from: BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL By Stuart A. Kauffman

Whatever else you're reading, you just gotta read this. It's gorgeous!!

Question of the day: What does the following video have to do with unlearning?

Read that posting before you read this one, to get the contiguous story!

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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

I wish I could claim credit for the snappy title, but that is the work of P@W's fine editor, Aaron Smith.

The picture accompanying this posting comes from the final exercise of our Mastering Projects Workshop, where after two and a half days deeply considering how projects work, participants are assigned a planning exercise where traditional Management By Planning approaches fail. Few groups fail to create meaning with this experience, and none who succeed do so in ways they imagined beforehand. This installment considers alternatives to Management By Planning.

The first two installments generated a lot of comments. This one hasn't. Don't know why, but I'll appreciate any bark-back you might feel moved to post there.

Here's a taste of the content:

"Management By Planning, carried to its naturally recursive root, enlists every member of a project’s community as a planning project manager, which is far from Fayol and Taylor’s original Management By Planning intent. Each interprets the plan they receive, producing a locally situated version. Whether the plan received is wise depends, again, upon the mindfulness of each situated planner. Whether the project manager is wise might depend more upon their ability to listen than their authority to dispatch pre-planned work assignments.

"In the Spanish viceroy system, a bureaucracy that lasted more than 500 years, each viceroy reported directly to the king. Communications being slow in those days, a dispatch from the king, responding to a viceroy’s report, could take more than a year to reach an individual viceroy. So, the viceroys adopted a simple rule for interpreting directions from the king — The King Is Wise. This rule encouraged each local viceroy to interpret the king’s direction in some way that would preserve the apparent wisdom of the king, even if this meant utterly changing his specific instructions."

I commented that I agreed with Commissioner Clark, the flagpole IS out of scale and that it should not have been allowed to be built for aesthetic reasons. That the sponsors seemed to have mistaken size of the monument for the size of the feelings it represents. (A common male problem for which no handy blue pill has been devised.) I said that I preferred to keep my patriotism in my pocket. The Colonel looked up at me from across the table, as if I just didn't get it. (You see, to his mind erecting the grossly out of scale flagpole was a win for the forces of the right. To my mind it was the equivalent of someone painting their house bright purple to show that they are free to paint their house purple. Most people who pass by will not celebrate the painter's freedom, but question his sanity---or at least his taste). The Colonel asked, "So, you didn't serve?" To which I answered, as I slipped out to the kitchen to help Amy dish up the mango and sticky rice dessert, "No."

The conversation swerved back into less controversial territory when we returned, but my response bothered me then and has been poking at me since. Did I serve? I thought then, and still think today, that service is an important part of citizenship. I shovel my neighbor's walk. When I was drafted, I refused to appear because I had been denied my due process under the law, an oversight the local draft board acknowledged by inviting me to appear before them and plead my case. My case for being designated a non-military conscientious objector. A case I apparently successfully argued, since I was designated 1-CO, or whatever the military designation was at the time. (Thanks in no small part to a raft of patriots who wrote letters supporting my case, including Federal District Court Judge Dale Green --- one reason I attended his memorial last year).

My service was to be two years of service changing bed pans in an approved military hospital at less than minimum wage. The regulation governing my service required me to move at least sixty miles from my designated home, Walla Walla, to work in an approved military facility. The rub was that I had to find such a facility that was willing to hire me.

The following three years were my service. They included writing letters to approved facilities seeking employment and proving to the draft board that I was diligently seeking such work. It was kinda like being on unemployment except it didn't pay anything and it prevented me from actually being employed or going to school, because I could at any time be selected to move myself somewhere to change bed pans. I worked casual labor, day jobs like shoveling out horse stalls (a job for which I had to wear a friend's short hair wig because the labor contractor wouldn't hire long hairs.) I learned a lot about holding unpopular convictions.

No one ever responded to any of my requests for employment. Finally, Ford did away with the draft and my obligation evaporated. Did I serve? Well, I managed to prevent one person from getting ground up in that senseless folly called the Vietnam War. I proved that this is a country sometimes ruled by law and not jingoism. I proved that a man could stand on principles, and learned that if he did, he might well have to stand alone.

Even today, when a veteran asks if I served, I usually opt for the short answer, and just say, "No." I wonder why I do that.

I served to show that our might can be found in something other than our readiness to fight. To give peace a real chance, an alternative we forfeit whenever we decide to wage war. Whomever the adversary. Whatever the situation. Mine was not an uncourageous choice. It brought with it uncataloged inconvenience. It was my choice, choice being the principle democracy thrives upon.

I wonder in my lucid moments how military service would have worked had others who served been offered the same terms I'd been offered. Compelled to serve, but also compelled to find an outfit willing to have you serve with them. Pay your own transportation to get there.

Find your own housing and pay for it, along with food et al, out of a salary, a fraction of the minimum wage. I wonder how many other's service would have been spent failing to find anyplace to serve. It's an interesting idea.

So, I conclude that I did serve. To demonstrate that the ideals this country was founded to preserve have been preserved. No medals to line the bottom of my sock drawer (I like that) and no public recognition of the dedication to principle (I like that, too), and, importantly for me, no bragging rights. I keep my patriotism in my pocket. It fits comfortably there. I don't wave red (or even red, white, and blue) flags because they incite bullies, offend friends, and misrepresent the quiet confidence that anyone living in a representative democracy really should have. I believe that our public square now overwhelmed by that Tinkertoy flagpole was better without it, when the citizens used to gather there to dance on summer evenings. And that service is a principle one must choose to satisfy.

God Bless Us, everyone. Especially those who disagree with us. Pray that we learn to love our enemies as ourselves, for the alternative seems to insist that we hate ourselves so that we might hate our enemies.

What about WWII? A time of insanity, induced, perhaps by the Peace To End All Peace armistice "ending" WWI, which was fought to defend honor, but sacrificed all honor. WWII rose out of a sort of payback. Cut off the opposition, squeeze the loser. Before the Germans chose evil, they were desperate, hopeless, rendered powerless. Had we treated them with respect following the mutual humiliation in the trenches, what reason would they have had to militarize? The French, between the wars, saw the whole thing coming. The British pacifists insisted upon getting their pound of emaciated flesh by collecting reparations. WWII stands as a testament to the ultimate cost of humiliation. Everyone loses.

The war itself was neither masterfully planned nor competently executed. It was a mud wrestle, the outcome more ruled by chance and brutality than clever strategy. More innocents died than designated combatants. A lot of unnecessary engagements occurred simply because armed forces were available to fight. Many of the South Pacific battles were unnecessary and terribly costly, but they made good PR at the time.

I will argue that there are more effective ways to defeat terrorism than send armies out to fight it. Many of our allies concur. They are not fighting it with overwhelming military might because in their calculation, military might has little effect in such conflicts. One might co-opt insurgencies, but never in the history of the world so far, militarily defeat one. This humbling fact might well encourage a less militaristic, more strategic response, though it might encourage criticism from people so used to hammering every opponent that every one automatically looks like a nail.