Where does integration start? This is a mostly meaningless question, but rather than simply walk away from it, I'll expound a tiny bit. Integration isn't a step-wise, serial process. I know, I know, step-wise seriality has become the popular method for describing everything, and while I could slip into that worn groove, I'll choose not to. If only because that groove misrepresents integration. It just ain't like that.
I believe that we miss many opportunities to integrate because we don't see them. Primed for one or another 'first step,' when we don't see that step appearing, we get discouraged, even to the point of convincing ourselves that integration is obviously not possible here, at this time, with THEM! So I'll explicitly dismiss the serial, step-wise recipe for integration in favor of a less misrepresenting form.
Because integration is an organic phenomenon, it manifests in distinctly un-machine-guises. No gears. No springs. Cause-effect, rendered largely irrelevant.
I always know integration is lurking when I notice a certain queasiness in my gut. My normal routine, my sense-making is off balance. I am not, in that moment, purposefully pursuing, though I'm not lost. This is the unease familiar to anyone aimlessly milling around. You're early for that appointment. The meeting is getting started a half hour late. The line is MUCH longer than you'd anticipated. You and a bunch of strangers are just milling around, maybe waiting for someone to show up and make the experience work.
That someone is you. Or not. Your choice. But respect the 'essential milling around period.' While it might seem as though time's a-wasting, useful stuff is simmering there. The 'essential milling around period' holds great potential, unseen. Unsensed. For me, the surest route to disintegration passes right through the short-cut around milling around. That short-cut leads right into premature stability, where people agree to hold their breath before they even learn to breathe, on the mere anticipation of sour smells. This is not integration.
Fortunately, integration is a forgiving phenomenon. My point is only that the opportunities for integration are endless and not obvious. If it's all falling together as you expected, enjoy the flight. It's likely to be brief, and provide a dandy opportunity for you to reset your expectations. I am learning to respect the essential milling around period, which might well come at the beginning, but might appear at any time, swiping every sensation of forward momentum. No worries, then. Foundational stuff is laying itself down unseen. Maybe we could together almost learn to appreciate the sensation of milling around?
Once behind Federal desks, these captains found little to do, for most had inherited their privileged position and maintained it by limiting wages and promoting equities. They knew little about production, considering fabrication to be work suitable only for common people.
Consequently, industry, which they had always managed to maximize profits, was minimally productive. One economist calculated that the typical enterprise was at best 15% efficient, though wildly profitable.
Over the emphatic protests of these Dollar Men, a small group of progressives “socialized” American industry for the war effort: dictating wages (which rose), fixing prices (which stabilized) and production levels (which nearly doubled, to almost 25% productivity), creating effective co-ops and combines (illegal under the Sherman Acts), and boosting the overall standard of living while dramatically increasing industrial output.
One progressive explained this unprecedented intrusion into the free market this way: Industry must be of service to the community. If an industry’s pursuit of profits threatens society, society holds the responsibility to put it back into service again.
The Dollar Men protested, but under these regulations, their stock market nearly doubled in value. Following the war, anyone championing continued regulation was labeled a socialist or a communist. The Dollar Men re-took the reins, and by 1929 had successfully captained their economy into The Great Depression. Progressives, many veterans of the old War Production Board, picked up the few remaining reins and eventually got the battered horse pulling the cart again.
What does this history lesson have to do with our current health care crisis?
Those who label as evil socialism anything intruding on the free market’s invisible hand might consider that the market exists to serve our community, and not merely the much narrower profit expectations of shareholders and speculators. If an industry provides real service, it has nothing to fear from any competitor. Occasionally, some seem to need a more visible thumb to goose them into proper focus.
Of course, the Dollar Men getting goosed into service honk loudest, but it’s no walk in the park for those doing the goosing, either. Just sometimes necessary.
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?
Disintegration is the father of integration, as well as its first born child.
Things fall apart—or seem to—then integrate again, then fall apart again. Different each time, and quite predictably so.
Stability is a myth; integration an active verb. Neither integration nor disintegration come with haunches to squat upon.
Living an integrative life depends upon punctuation. And you provide this. If you insert a hard stop period or a savoring semi-colon following an experience of integration, you will construct your history our of integrating experiences. Do the same with disintegration, and your history will be one damned thing after another or the same damned thing over and over again.
Because we believe in the Myth of Stability, we learn early to vilify our father and first-born child: disintegration. The Myth of Stability focuses our attention upon our self, as if we were somehow independent, viable, and not in inevitable relation with others. When things fall apart, we notice what's missing, and what's often missing is someone else.
Because we live in relation and people are unpredictable, disintegration is inevitable. Fortunately, disintegration is the father and first-born child of integration, and each integration becomes a father in his own right, siring his own child. Sandwiched between are those golden, glowing moments, creative, inspiring, integrating.
Appreciate the bitter flavors. Life is sweet, but also salty and savory, bitter and umami, sometimes tasteless. Altogether, tasty. This meal integrates disintegration.
The first principle of integration seems to be that the story I create to explain the integration might not make sense to anyone but me. You just had to be there at the 'point of integration' for the story to provide full impact, to experience that ah-ha instant. I got to experience it first hand. My story is inevitably used goods. What's well integrated for me might not seem very well combined to you.
Integration involves combining previously separated distinctions in such a way that their differences seem less important than their now obvious similarities.
There's always an Elephant Factor involved. What's an Elephant Factor? Drawing on my book, The Blind men and the Elephant, and the Hindu parable upon which I based it, the Elephant Factor is the degree to which the blind men are convinced that their differentiating experiences are definitive. "The elephant is obviously a Fan!" exclaimed the blind man touching the elephant's ear. This assertion alone is no barrier to integration. The certainty about what 'this fan' could not also be, or also be a part of, seems the real Elephant Factor at play.
Elephant Factors can be huge, such as the EF separating terrorist from pacifist, or tiny, such as the EF between me, myself, and I. But even small EFs can be troublesome, blinding, disintegrating.
We are fortunately integrative by nature. Gordon MacKenzie in his Orbiting The Giant Hairball recounts that when he asks a class of kindergardeners how many are artists, every single one of them raises their hand. By the time these same kids reach third grade, only one or two will admit to this, and they are chided by their fellows. Of course we are all artists, creators, and creative by our very nature. What could have convinced us otherwise?
Many things that are not things. There will be more, much more coming on this topic.
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.
