Pure Schmaltz

I finally replaced the keyboard, something I procrastinated on because it is a 140 mile round trip to the nearest Mac shop, and because, actually, I was enjoying the increased consciousness this little frustration brought.

Along about Friday, though, the novelty wore off. I was trying to write something and thespacebar(thenewone!)refusedtoclickbacktoworkingmode.

The technician suggested I repair permissions, which I did to no effect. Next, she suggestedreloading the operating system, which, with help from Amy, got done. Again, to no effect. I finally figured out that I could copy a space and type-paste my way through a document. Sort of. This procedure so jangles flow as to render me functionally primitive. (I know, how would anyone ever know?)

I am including a link to an entertaining piece about unlearning: Unlearning-Obsolete-Technologies. My peg-legging brings unearning into sharp relief, where I cannot freely exercise my same-old usta be. Painful.

After the holiday, I will go get another keyboard installed. Until then, I am taking an extended break. Cheers!

This is the next installment of the series considering the secular religion of Management-ism.

Here's the hard part: You gotta start where ever they start. You can't start where you know this is going, because you aren't there yet. And you can't insist that the relationship, which could only develop from digging out from naive beginnings, already be THERE at the very beginning. Can't do that without falling down a rabbit hole. That you know where this is going --- that's irrelevant now. Hush up. Start where ever they are. Travel with them to where you might go together. The journey's the thing. Gotta start at the beginning, not the end.

Do not mention that the end envisioned will not be the end achieved. Never has been before. Unlikely to be this time. Each engagement starts as half truth and half promise, like we know the future from the start. We must move through our lives with confident strides, just as if we knew stuff, just as if we controlled our hearts. Otherwise, our hearts could never become enchanted along the way with what we never anticipated.

Let the management-ist be. I have spent the last few weeks describing the secular religion of management-ism only to learn that I must accept these people as they are, because that's how they are. It's not MY job to reform them --- or to show them the supposed error of their ways. Or to guide them to the path of whatever passes for righteousness in MY book. That would be suspiciously similar to the driving I complain about THEM doing. It matters not even a little bit whether you or they are an SOB or an angel. And who you are today matters even less than who we might become together tomorrow.

More ... next time.

Prior installments:

How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It
Enablers

Who manages the managers? A piece in the current New Yorker talks about the Tragedy of the Anti-commons. We are all familiar with the tragedy of the commons, where a free good gets destroyed because it's in every individual user's short term interest to consume more than a sustainable fair share. But I'd not considered the converse, where the ownership of a property necessary for collective work is split up into so many independent shares that cooperation becomes impossible. The common lies unproductively fallow because every owner wants too much in return for cooperation.

Sound familiar?

It sure does to me!

Each individual holds out for more than his fair share as a precondition for participating. Paying off everyone at the level they desire costs more than the perceived value, so the value lies untapped.

Each tragedy is tragic only because we cope so poorly with it. Viewed as a problem to be solved, which is the standard management-ist frame of reference, we engage in no more or less than a game without end, without resolution, which is in practice, in fact, tragic.

But these are not tragedies unless engaged in as if they were problems to be solved. The management-ist cannot seem to escape from his tenacious problem solving mindset, an act which all by itself could open up possibilities and create choices. Who manages the managers?

Tenacious belief or choice manages them. In fact, they (we) often fail to calculate anything more than the cost of doing business, neglecting the much more useful value of doing or having done business. And the value lost by not doing it.

What do we want? This or that? This is never the whole choice, and neither is that.

The trick is to find choices beyond this and that. This or that constitute an illusion of choice, since choosing either yields the same unwanted result. If you're damned if you do AND damned if you don't, it doesn't matter which option you choose. Either one will result in tragedy.

Here's the cue for any dedicated management-ist to roll his eyes. If you are a skilled problem-solver, you are at a disadvantage. Go ahead, solve the tragedy of the commons --- or the tragedy of the anti-commons. Just try! Neither are nails looking for a hammer. I'll bet you'll direct someone to hammer away anyway.

I recently interviewed a CFO about a soured project. He'd reassigned the Project Manager, who had been unable to get the leaden effort airborne. He was looking for a replacement PM to get the effort back on track. Someone, he hoped, with experience with the technology. Someone who would (at last!) hold the participants accountable. I commented that a) the project was not a train and there were never any tracks, b) I'd never seen a project like this fail because of the technology, and c) holding people accountable for what they cannot do doesn't improve anything.

What would I do? I'd want to talk with everyone involved to hear the story from their perspective. I'd want to understand why a group of people who have the innate ability to work well together managed to not work well together in this instance. Then, working together, I'd want to understand what could be responsibly promised and actually delivered. No hammer. No nails. Glue. Patience.

Well, you know, if I was to do that, the project might not make its target date and the CFO would have to go back to the board and ask for more money. Yup. If the project doesn't do that, it for certain won't make it's date and you might choose to go back to the board and tell them that you've decided to cancel the effort. Hummm. Damned whatever you do. Anti-commons!

I think he decided to hire a hammer.

Prior installments:

How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It

"I'm working to reinvent our company's operational practices. As I understand things, technology is a key enabler for making processes more efficient. At the same time to really improve things new processes should be developed which take advantage of increased communication and automation now available. I'm looking for a good forum which talks about "use this to do that", "this tool allows you to do this better", and possibly discuss streamlined processes."

Parse the language in this posting. Notice what isn't there!

What isn't there? People are missing, replaced, as F. W. Taylor long-ago predicted, by "the system." Who performs these 'operational practices?' Who does this disembodied 'communicating?'

What IS there? 'New processes,' 'technology,' 'efficiency,' and 'automation,' enablers for an unmentioned community of ... ... (wait for it) ... PEOPLE?

Isn't this where we've learned to go? What we've learned to do? To chase ephemeral efficiency with as-of-yet unimagined technology? And what do we imagine that technology to be? Something featuring software, no doubt. Something that comfortably integrates within the existing network. Platform independent. Licensed or open source. Upgradeable. A good, solid, tangible cause capable of making our aspirations real.

Notice one other word imbedded within this posting. Notice the 'should' innocuously standing there, just as if it weren't controlling the traffic flow for the whole danged inquiry. Also notice the tenaciously passive voice, which never specifies any who except for the author's innocent 'I'. He will be reinventing 'our' company's operational practices. 'I'm' looking for a good forum. I find no evidence of either 'us' or 'we' in the entire posting. Where did we go? Why no us?

Am I being too harsh? Reading too much into this posting? Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. We construct our world with language, and the world this language creates doesn't seem to include space for the object of the whole inquiry, speaking in what Bateson called 'the dormative,' language that induces sleep rather than action. It focuses upon derivatives rather than the underlying source. What IS that source?

In his remarkable book How Doctor's Think, Jerome Groopman, MD recounts how injecting technology into the practice of medicine brings unintended social consequences, typically because some manager somewhere focused upon derivatives rather than the actual practice. Easing the effort to invoice insurance carriers inhibits the doctor's ability to reliably diagnose. Simplifying diagnosis by documenting decisions using pre-formatted decision trees disables diagnosing. The cognitive confusion inherent in any social interaction becomes more complicated by streamlining apparently trivial tasks.

I could be arguing in favor of more whole system thinking, except what passes for the whole system in the management-ist's language excludes most of the system's holistic nature. Certainly, we can create notional models of any system, but can include in those models only those elements we characterize as causative; germane. The result is a curiously satisfying reduction, wholly comprised of derivatives sensitive to underlying, unseen, unaccounted for, uncountable components. Groopman labels the most commonly overlooked element 'context,' and claims that little any doctor actually does holds meaning out of context. Like the old thought experiment that proposed dissecting a cat to find the purr, decomposition discards the context, typically the social context.

Before the author of this post will be able to really reinvent 'our company's operational practices,' he will need to reinvent his way of describing reinvention. Were he to actually reinvent, his initiating notions of what characterizes reinvention must certainly crumble. Otherwise, he will merely reinvent more (perhaps even more) of the same.

That was a characteristically long-winded preface to what I intended to address in this posting: enablers. The manager is commonly represented as enabler, the cause of performance and efficiency, the 'driver' of results, the 're-inventor of operational practices'. In a social context, enablers are those individuals who assume the burden of someone else's addiction-induced dysfunction. In an organizational context, managers are expected to both make and take this heat, sometimes innocently (and sometimes not so innocently) encouraging the very dysfunction they intend to eradicate. Most commonly, this dysfunction centers around individual agency or the lack of it. We want to hold people accountable for their performance, but insist upon them agreeing to be irresponsible to achieve that.

Imagine a manager commanding a subordinate to do something that the subordinate knows he cannot do. Will he say yes? He knows his no will encourage a raft of 'get with the program' innuendo, insistences that he explain exactly why he can't, and 'help' getting over his cluelessness. Very probably all of these will occur if he says 'No!" while being managed by a management-ist, because his personal perspective is gumming up the system, and the organization is all about the system. Isn't it?

The under-apprecated technology we seek might well be what the eggheads at MIT are calling Social Technology. Social Technology is not before-the-fact causative, it involves no software, except the software imbedded in every individual at birth, though our sensitivity to it can be disabled by some of the socialization received thereafter. It includes two of Aristotle's Causations explicitly omitted from reductionist science and its progeny, scientific management; management-ism. Omitted as metaphysical: not countable, not reducible, not manageable. Omitting these two causations leaves only the most primitive two, those commonly labeled Material causation and Efficient causation.

Material Causation ascribes cause to the nature of material. The fireplace is rigid because it is constructed of brick. Efficient causation ascribes cause to some previous act. We're late because the last meeting ran long. Science, scientific management, even management-ism limit their domain of inquiry to these two dimensions, when their domain of existence includes and is subtly influenced by Aristotle's un-reducible and uncountable metaphysical causations: Formal Causation and Final Causation.

Formal Causation ascribes cause to form. An example of formal causation are the differences we experience when communicating face-to-face and via email. The form of communication subtly influences, affects, 'causes' difference. Asking exactly how or why these changes occur assumes a material or efficient causation at work, and while these questions might well elicit any number of interesting responses, none will be satisfying in the way that a material or efficient causation might provide.

Final Causation ascribes cause to some imagined future state, as if our aspiration caused the result. A common example of final causation at work is found in scheduling assumptions: the flight departs at four because we want to arrive at five. What caused the flight to depart at four? Our aspiration to arrive at five. Certainly a raft of material, efficient, and formal causations were also involved in arriving at five, but without the aspiration, none of them would mean anything. The root cause is our anticipation of future events.

When a management-ist searches for the root cause, he limits his search to material and efficient effects, though these will inevitably provide only the most primitive parts of the explanation. This is fine if identifying the material or efficient causes provides some leverage for useful action. Omitting formal and final causations limits possibility for change, and holds the source of what are commonly referred to as unintended consequences. These might be better described as unimagined consequences resulting from unseen and unconsidered contexts. Because science education focuses upon understanding the material world and cataloguing efficient causations (aka Best Practices and Procedures), it focuses the practitioner's attention away from powerful, causative points of leverage. Without acknowledging the influence of the metaphysical, any practitioner can degrade into focusing upon the purely physical, firmly believing that an efficient cause must be provided to enable performance. Hence, the enabling management-ist.

Who gets disabled in this context? Those who become addicted to the material and efficient world-view. The management-ist, all-powerful though he might seem, is just as addicted as those who firmly believe that he causes their performance. This aspiration might well be the final cause of this disabling enabling. Mention the metaphysical to a dedicated management-ist and watch his eyes roll.

Who manages the management-ist? Next time.

For the last fifteen years, I've been facilitating curious workshops. These never told anyone what they should do, and I've developed a strong aversion to anyone who presumes to know what I should do and when I should do it. Nothing I do involves procedures. Nothing seems suited to steps or checklists. This is an improvement over the years following my graduation from university, when I performed a lot of quantitative analysis on what was in retrospect subjective experiences. I attempted to routinize a lot of work which never as a result exhibited routine. For I was infected with the notion that I should measure and, more dangerously, that only if I measured could I properly manage. The people I was charged with managing were wiser than I was, however, and while some of them chased the measurable manageable metric god, none of us ever caught him. And we succeeded at an acceptable rate, anyway.

Jerry Weinberg's Problem Solving Leadership Workshop, which I helped facilitate for seven years, attracted many upwardly mobile middle management types. Some were team leaders tapped to move into management. Others were managers being groomed for executive futures. Some were executives trying to improve their effectiveness. Most came with little understanding of what this experience would bring. Many were frustrated that no one would tell them exactly what they would learn, being used to workshops that provided succinct lists of learning objectives and descriptions of what would be learned.

Jerry invited participants to create their own learning objectives, instead. A pre-work assignment that just baffled many.

The workshop served as a kind of introduction to self more than providing a set of general instructions. Each participant was encouraged to write in a personal journal, and us facilitators called frequent journal breaks for people to jot down their reflections. No one was ever required to share their personal reflections, and aside from an opening ritual where small groups distilled and reported their learning objectives and a closing ritual where each team reported on whether they'd achieved their objectives, personal learning stayed quite personal. No one knew what anyone else was really learning.

I attended my first PSL in the late 80s, when I was a driven middle manager. I was what I've since labeled 'zoned in' on my career, my work life, my company, my projects. I was monoral, single-minded, a driver. My wife at the time complained a lot about my schedule, my obsession with work, claiming that I'd changed since I went to university and took a management job. I couldn't see it. I claimed that while I was no longer the songwriter I once had been, I was "just playing a different-shaped guitar now."

PSL involved a series of simulations, experiential games intended to help people "catch themselves being themselves." I stumbled into myself on the first night, in the middle of a black box simulation. The me I encountered in that game differed so greatly from the persona I'd been inhabiting that I took sick, what I now recognize as soul sick, and missed much of the balance of the workshop. I was deeply changed by that experience.

I had no way to know this at the time, but many who attended PSL over the following years experienced similar results. Many encountered an unfinished or neglected side of themselves and found their resulting selves less willing and able to engage as they had previously unselfconsciously engaged. They woke up and were changed by the experience. Some left the companies that had sent them. Others struggled upon return to find a place for something that had not seemed germane before attending the workshop. Many stayed connected and started a now life-long conversation considering who they are and what they are doing in this world. I'm still connected to many people I first met attending and later facilitating PSL. My present wife, Amy, was a student at PSL when we first met.

What does this have to do with management-ism? Management-ism requires the subjugation of self, the often pre-conscious denial of who I am and what I am doing. To encounter self in a revelatory way, after not being aware of self's absence, unsets more than our carefully constructed house of cards. It changes the game.

As I said, I met Amy at a PSL, where she was 'just another student' when I first noticed her, the shortest member of her learning team, standing on a chair, painstakingly positioning the top tier of cards on a planned eight-foot house of cards. Her team had won the first round of competition, where the challenge was to build a four-foot house of cards, and had taken their proprietary technology and moved from the lobby where other teams could copy to an adjacent dining room for round two. As I approached their construction, yardstick in hand, her team members asked for a measurement. Taking my yardstick, they found that they were building their eight-foot house of cards in a seven-foot, ten-inch room. No way to succeed.

What Amy and her team did then was instructive. They became political. "Would it be good enough to show that we could have succeeded? Can we use Amy's foot in lieu of a standard one?" And they began to build faster. They continued building for a few minutes after time was called on that round in a kind of Wiley Coyote attempt to keep running after losing their ground.

On reflection, Amy realized that she'd stumbled upon a dandy metaphor for her life. Her work assignment was like trying to build an eight foot house of cards in a seven foot ten inch room. So was her marriage. So was her career. She was changed by her unanticipated experience of self.

Management-ists tell stories about how self-less they are, about how they sacrifice for their company, their team, their goals, their customer, just as if their selflessness contributed to creating more value, more results, more satisfaction, as if what matters to them doesn't really matter at all. They can encourage selfless cultures, where their curious affliction gets rewarded as the norm and any semblance of self experienced as evidence of less than full commitment.

F W Taylor deliberately omitted self from his efficient procedures, measuring only what he measured, not the inevitably self-infused organization. The workers complained a lot at the time, reasoning that since Midvale Steel was not competing in the small margin railroad rail market but the huge margin government armaments market, there was plenty of space for a variety of self in the fabrication. Nor did the calculated efficiencies prevent the company, or the bulk of it, from being acquired by the Pittsburgh steel combine and turned away from its DNA. We wonder now what that self-lessness really achieved.

But our training and the context within which we manage seems now to insist upon us acquiring the bug. Those who suffer from it might never suspect their infection. Those who recover from it usually stumble upon or over themselves, then work to incorporate their discovery into something quite distinct from the game they were originally certified in and the one they were convinced they just had to play. Those who've not yet made this discovery remain confident, certain that they are playing the right game right. This unchangeable certainty is clear evidence that something essential's missing from the mix.

wE iNterrupt tHe rEgularly sCheduled bLog eNtry fOr a nEws fLash!

Could be. An article in the current Atlantic considers how we acquire information, and the effect of our snippet-seeking culture on our brains and on our society. When was the last time you read a book? When was the last time you lost yourself in thought? Our brains rewire themselves, adapting to the conditions around us. The printing press changed not only how books are produced, but how readers' brains process information. Same story with the computer, it seems.

Have you been reading less and enjoying it more? Do you find yourself feeling bored after ten minutes of reading? Do you ever visit the library anymore?

Google is engaged in a massive experiment, and we are the willing, enthusiastic lab rats. We flock to the feeder, feeling fortunate. We read a paragraph or two and feel as if we've mastered the subject. We can chat endlessly online, but can we hold up our end of a real, face-to-face conversation? (Try posting a longer-than-two paragraph entry into an online discussion group and just see if you don't get people complaining about your "long-windedness!" As you might complain about mine now?)

This piece also looks at what happened when clocks proliferated. Instead of being oriented to the cues surrounding us, we became dependent upon a machine to tell us what time it is. Our experience of time, consequently, is much different than it was before clocks were handy.

In the same way, once MS-Project was available on every desk top, it became unthinkable to plan without it. We feel as if we're better provisioned, but this piece outlines some of what we're losing along the way.

I won't rail long today about what we're losing along the way. I recognize that the world my grandparents inhabited was materially different than the world we inhabit today. And that I am a different species than they were. I am better provisioned and, curiously, less well-provisioned at the same time.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the self-proclaimed father of "scientific management", insisted a hundred years ago that while work was once all about "men," it will someday be all about "the system." What he claimed would be "the one best way;" continuously refined, feeding while feeding upon its followers.

The problem is not that we will produce a computer that thinks like we do, but that we will start to think like computers. The evidence seems clear that we are well along that path already. Von Forester failed to predict this outcome when he proclaimed that no computer could ever be programmed to think like a human. Humans are (or should I say, "were then?") naturally able to cope with non-trivial situations, yielding inevitable uncomputability for any computer attempting to think like us. But what if we began thinking like computers, shunning the non-trivial. Rewiring our own brains by interacting with computers so that we think like computers, couldn't computers suddenly, miraculously think just like us?

I started this entry thinking it was a side-track birdwalk from the current series on management-ism, but now I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, it covers the next logical part of the story. What management was when work was about "men" is quite different than what management must be if work is about "the system." The ever-refined system is engineered to omit the diversity and variety any cadre of "men" would naturally bring to their collective efforts. Once individuals learn to submit to "the system," management becomes about the care and feeding of the system. What sustains the "men" involved? With practice, with iteration, we will no longer feel as Taylor's subjects at Midvale Steel felt, that they were mere cogs in a machine. We will, as our brains naturally rewire themselves into a cog-seeking identity, no longer feel the tug of what used to pass for humanity in our work, and willingly ... hell, enthusiastically ... subvert our former selves to comfortably co-exist within the machine. Our child, our mother, our holy grail.

When was the last time you read a whole book rather than the Wikipeadia summary of it? When did you last lose yourself in thought? When did your project's community last engage in a face-to-face conversation?

I have long held that projects are conversation, not scripted performances. But what if, through iteration, we imprint on the scripted performance paradigm? Then we might insist upon engineering only tiny, riskless efforts, ones than can be accomplished in a few days, and string those results together claiming that we'd done something huge, bigger than we are, profound. Did we really? Or did we merely dumb ourselves down to satisfy our notions of how we really should otta be?

Next time, I promise this time, Changed By It.

([Note: I am the Management-ist depicted here. I am also the one interviewing (or, in proper management-ist lingo, 'being interviewed by') the management-ist. I have been on both sides of this conference table.]

The chill will crawl up the back of your neck.

The surroundings are comfortable enough: a well-appointed office, a conference room decorated with fine art. The welcome will be genuinely warm. The conversation always starts with small talk—studied small talk, as if I'd been instructed to 'start from the heart' and engage with the 'person' first. Whether this takes the form of sports, the weather, the travel from there to here, or the nearly universal quick apology for being a few minutes late for the meeting, the first five minutes of the interview will be beside the point.

Study the scenery. What books are displayed? (These are clues to the form and texture of belief.) What clutter prevails? Am I wearing one of those absolutely unfunctional Polo dress shirts with a logo in lieu of a pocket? Tassled loafers or tasseled Top Siders? The tassel: the management-ist's curious decoration of choice!

Listen to the language. I will pass more than your maximum annual dose of unconditional superlatives. I will say 'best' when the context screams 'better', I will use 'accountability' as a synonym for 'responsibility', I will revere 'predictability' as if it were 'reliability.' Listen closely, you will not understand very much of what I say. I speak in deep code. Buzz words punctuated with references. I will not speak for myself, but quote noted authorities, just as if knowing who said what makes what I say meaningful. Mostly, my story will be garbled. Ask for clarification and expect to receive a puzzled frown.

Sometime within the conversation, I will disclose another's shortcoming. 'They' will have done something 'stupid.' 'They' won't have 'gotten it.' 'They' will be characterized as some form of clueless, a condition linguistically elevated to character flaw. You will sense that 'they' managed to fake it until this recent unmasking of the deeper truth. 'They' are the cause. Defend 'them' at your own peril.

If your mind wanders, reflect on how it is that such a smart and experienced individual could be surrounded by such blunder. If I confide that 'my people' are well-intended, but not very experienced, return a year later, and I will repeat the same story. Then wonder: How could that year have not resulted in someone acquiring experience?

Whatever the topic, notice the interview wandering back toward me, the management-ist. I am the final arbiter of experience. More interestingly, I have assumed the role of final arbiter of everyone else's experience, too, second-guessing whatever fails to make a priori sense or contradicts my personal convictions. I feel powerful, but I am stuck in a story I seem to star in, yet hold little culpability for creating.

Jung claimed that this sort of absent presence occurs when a secondary temperament component (Thinking/Feeling) overrides the two primary temperament modes (Intervert/Extravert-iNtuition/Sensing). Typically, where acquired knowledge is more valued than how one naturally relates to others and how one naturally prefers to acquire information. In other words, where one more highly prizes what they have acquired over what they are naturally endowed with. Perhaps this is the delusion of our age, our very culture writ large. We move to cities to escape where we're from. We take degrees to distinguish ourselves from others so we can get a high-paying job. We assume professional (literally, what we profess) roles, then fuss about not being able to talk about what theory doesn't really work. We believe ourselves to be what we know, not who we are.

Fine, I'd rather have a knowledgeable manager than an ignorant one. But the fine distinguishing line is not between knowing and not knowing, but between knowing and being. The management-ist is defined by what they know, rather than more properly informed by it. A management-ist without a litany of oft-quoted external references (whether from Heroclitus or Tom Peters) is to their mind, no manager at all.

Some worship before the alter of continuous improvement. Others, six sigma. Whatever their belief, you will notice explanations that do not and could not ground themselves. Each requires faith for closure. Each requires belief to work. Ask an innocent question about, for instance, who decided what would be called Best Practice, and notice the quivering eye movements that signal the search for qualifying references. Some noted authority, who invariably became noteworthy due to their own audacious commercial bluster, will be named. This dance can continue for as long as you care to play.

I call the dance between the management-ist and the human Idiot Making. Where another presumes to know better than you what your experience is. Where their 'superior' judgement co-opts your inferior perspective, robbing you of your experience and leaving little more than a promise that, with diligence, you could know better, too. This is where the fear will crawl up your spine and tickle the short hairs on the back of your neck. You will be in the presence of a person capable of justifying almost anything, of dis-qualifying anyone except, of course, himself. Be afraid. be very afraid.

If you glimpse yourself in the management-ist role, as I have glimpsed myself in the past, be even more afraid. This peek took my breath away. Whether or not you suffocate on this unwanted insight, hope to be changed by it.

Next time: Changed By It