Pure Schmaltz

But this was a huge enterprise aiming at getting even larger, targeting economies of scale. Hypothetically, getting larger creates ever greater leverage, even faster growth, even more profits.

I once calculated that if my newborn son continued growing at the rate he grew that first month, he'd outweigh the Empire State Building before he was twenty. Economies of Scale seem to work fine until they don't. Once they cross over the point separating working from failing, they crumble. Big might have been better. Humungous gets horrible. Bigger-faster-cheaper only works until it doesn't.

Then we try hard to preserve the status quo, though the leg bone can't be scaled up to support weight distributed that way. Wylie Coyote- like, we keep running even after we've exceeded the mesa beneath us. Then we fall.

Looking around my small city, I see some struggling organizations and some thriving ones. The thriving ones seem to be the ones that never grew bigger than their britches. The struggling ones choose economy of scale, the grow or die strategy. The thriving ones chose an identity more focused upon sustaining their identity. A bank satisfied with their market share. A specialty manufacturer who doesn't demand ever more customers to survive. A lot of wineries that pre-sell everything they produce and don't aspire to get any bigger than they've ever been.

The seduction to keep growing seems certain to satisfy for a while. It seems certain that, mastering growth, we've mastered life. But life is not just about growth, but about sustenance. The part of life that grows endlessly is most closely correlated with death, not life. After eighty five years of sustainability, my dad's doctor diagnosed him with cancer. For the first few months following the diagnosis, nothing much changed, though the doctor assured us that the tumor was growing. The collapse came rather quickly. One day, everything seemed the same. Next day, we knew it would never be the same again.

Credit-default swaps were a great idea when they represented a tiny portion of the overall financial market. When their value outgrew the volume of all other trades, they became an ever-taller house of cards balanced on the head of a relatively ever-tinier pin. Unsustainable. When everyone rushes to the same side of the boat, it flips.

My talk at that financial institution was not warmly received. It seemed irrelevant, and probably was. I said that every project is personal, and depends upon not ever-greater control, but ever smaller. As their projects had grown to larger proportions, they had become increasingly impersonal. Planning became increasingly hands-off. Self- control morphed into distant oversight. Work itself became more and more a matter of complying rather than creating. Though this created ever more jobs for managers, it resulted in ever less space for the people populating those positions to do what people do well.

Well, now the masters of that universe have crashed back to earth. And what do they plead for? Bailout money. Help to sustain what was never going to be sustainable. They'd become too big to fail and too big to thrive. Damned whatever they do.

Those who embraced something less than the industrial ideal of growing to produce an ever-larger scale slime trail were marginalized during the recent run-up. We're still here. Deeply discounted. Humbled, yet wise. Working still at economies of snail. Our shells might be a bit harder. Our bodies slimier. Our antennae still searching for something our DNA compels us to pursue. We are not through. Perhaps just beginning anew.

(from a post on my SlowWork Google Group. Request to join this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Slow-Work?hl=en)

Project Ethics (Part III)

There's a link back to the second installment there, too.

This series, the final installment will be posted next week, encapsulates what I've retained about project work. The distillation might make some of it hard for you to swallow, but this is how it is for me over here. What seemed at first necessary knowledge has evaporated in practice to become beside the point. What wouldn't even register then on my innocent radar has taken central position in my understanding now.

The executive summary: Project Ethics are about choice. Once any action becomes a must-do mandate, ethics evaporates. Without choice, there can be no ethics. Does it follow then that creating choice is the key to satisfying the ethical responsibilities of project work?

The challenge is that the choice points are cloaked, hidden from casual observation. It might even be true for you, as it most certainly has been for me, that the greater the choice point, the less it feels like one in that moment where my choice might make all the difference.

The series became a treatise on mindfulness. Please feel free to comment on the P@W site. The editor there likes people to leave comments, and so do I, though I don't always know how to respond to them.

News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants. Why? Lots and lots of PMs looking for work. It's been several years since I attended any PM-related conference where the out-of-work PMs and PM consultant wanna-bes didn't greatly outnumber those who were there to share information.

Just yesterday, I reviewed yet another job description claiming to want someone capable of bringing projects in consistently on-time, on-budget, and on-spec.

Contracting for government work these days requires the applicant to engage in the most absurd fantasizing, as if, before work began, one could with some precision, spreadsheet hours by major task, then sign some dotted line validation of the bid's accuracy.

I thought we might have learned better by now. We have not. What passes for professional practice in the Project Management "Profession" today wouldn't quite qualify as prostitution in most professions, and would be indictable, even convict-able in several. What went wrong?

I think the aspiration that focused upon making project management a profession on par with dentistry or occupational therapy turned it into its opposite. Rather than attract strategic risk-takers, it has encouraged compliance and supplication, trading in trivial bromides to address extraordinarily non-trivial conditions. The result? Institutionalized ignorance. Conservative orthodoxy. Greater barriers to entry. Little progress.

If project management has become a profession in its own right, what has that achieved? What used to be attained by political cleverness and strategic side-stepping can now be mandated. Who retains the savvy to find their way through the dark woods, once the paths have been leveled and paved? More critically, where will we convince anyone chased away by all this foolishness to come back and risk doing some real discovering, some genuine skulduggery to accomplish something, anything never even imagined before?

In celebration of International Project Managers' Day, don't join in any celebration. Go get away with something instead. Get yourself fired for insubordination. Insult your customer's deepest sensibilities and walk away on your hind legs. What we used to have to earn with every engagement, the certification to actually guide the effort, could only be bestowed afterwards, and had little currency the next time. Hired with misgivings, misunderstood, sometimes reviled most of the way, the worthy ones walked away from the successful ones with a little less than a nod of appreciation, and needed not even that! Then, for us, it was the community that actually did anything. We were catalyst, the wax gratefully lost in lost-wax casting. Conveniently located, nearly invisible, dancing with the big professional egos to deliver something more than they could ever understand.

Amen.

I mention this duck because I've been deeply considering what it is that I do, and as usual, this reflection leaves me feeling like an odd duck.

Like my duck, I imprinted early on a medium of expression that few would equate to my later career(s). My first love was not cars or bikes or anything motorized or mechanical, but music. Specifically, creating music. Songwriting. Tunesmithing. Yea, I hated transcribing it. Never could read it worth a damn. Didn't much care for interpreting anyone else's, either. But I did revel in creating it. Silly or serious, I have pretty much always been a songwriter.

Because of this, I have an odd-duck sense of form and style that remains mysterious, even to me. I am an unrepentantly brutal critic and a very reluctant fan. There aren't more than a handful of songwriters I respect, and these for their lyrics more than their melodies. For me, melody is Musak™, the lyric makes the tune.

A well-crafted lyric is my personal model for coherence. A well-crafted lyric tells the story, guides the listener, and brings purpose to otherwise meaningless melody. When I first started hanging around projects, I noticed something missing. To my ear, it seemed as though the project leaders and planners and sponsors over-focused on performing music and missed crafting the song. The results sounded more like garage band jams than thoughtful renderings, and the words and the music never seemed to match for me. I'd try to explain what was missing, but even to me, my descriptions sounded like so much odd-duck quacking.

What is this felt sense? How can I explain? If you've never written a song, never stitched a lyric to dress a melody, it's a craft. Whether it's an art or not, I can't say, but it is a craft. As a craft, it's guided by some rules of thumb, some principles, and more felt-sense than specific technique. The most common question people who don't write songs ask me has always been: Which comes first, the melody or the words? My usual response: depends.

Depends upon what? Usually (I said usually) upon inspiration. Whatever comes, comes. It's not so much about what comes first as it is about what whatever comes comes into. (huh?) How receptive and accepting am I in that moment. That makes all the difference. The craft of songwriting is all about making silk purses out of sows ears.

Interestingly, so is the craft of project work. So is the craft of life.

Odd ducklings that we all are, we each imprinted early upon some primary means for expressing ourselves in the world. Whatever that might be doesn't matter. What matters is that we each figure out how to use what we've got to do what we want, what we need to do. For some, this will entail teaching others to do it the way you do it. For others, it will more revolve around you remembering to remind yourself that you do best doing it different than the way other ducks might do it. No need to explain or reform, just quack like the duck you know you are.

As a songwriter, I long ago abandoned the notion that I needed to write like Frank Loesser or Dave Frishberg, both true masters. I can be informed by their rules of thumb and leverage a bit of their wisdom, without mimicking their style, form, or substance. I don't write show tunes, or haven't so far. (Dave Frishberg has an eloquent word or two to say about Songwriting.)

In business as well as in life, the desire to mimic style seems imperative under the don't re-invent the wheel doctrine. But this seems a bad metaphor in general. It's not the wheel we're "re-inventing," but the terrain. We have no choice but to reinvent the terrain. Sitting down to rewrite Loesser's Baby It's Cold Outside won't satisfy anyone. Mustering a revival might. But for many, many, many efforts, nothing can adequately sit in for original tunes, melody expressing how it is here and lyrics clearly, compellingly telling the story. Infecting everyone within ear shot to tap their feet in nearly perfect unison.

What prompts me to write about ethics now? In Thomas Friedman's Sunday, October 18 NYT column, he makes the provocative assertion that "We’re all connected and nobody is in charge." It seems to this humble chronicler that management science ignores this one great truth, assuming that we are natively disconnected and that someone's in charge. Consider a world where Friedman's assertion holds true AND where we assume otherwise. What kind of witch hunt might result? I imagine torches and pitchforks, accusations and indictments, the righteous search for those who were supposed to be in charge and failed to properly connect us, initiating yet another round of symbolic regulations (how do you spell Sarbaines-Oxley?) intended to hold those SOBs accountable. Again.

If we do, indeed, actually live in a world where we are all connected and no one's in charge, what regulating force might we depend upon? Legislation is inherently moralistic, denoting right from wrong, commanding, in properly Biblical phrasing, "Thou Shalt!" Ethics pertains only to those actions which, acknowledging the way things are, we choose to do in recognition of the costs—personal and societal—of choosing otherwise. It seeks not to command others, but to more fully inform their choices. If no one is in charge, it means not necessarily chaos, but personal responsibility. We are all, each, deeply connected. We hold, therefore, some responsibilities to ourselves and to our tightly-coupled fellows. Our choices matter more simply because we are so tightly connected and because no one is in charge.

My mother, bless her heart, has lived her life trying to get away with something, anything. I think her great grandfather was ruined in one of the late-ninteenth century financial panics, and her family's language rails a lot about the plutocrats, those who lead simply because they are wealthy. She's lived her life working hard to slip under one or another radar and periodically getting caught cutting corners. She self-medicates, and after fifteen years of Parkinson's Disease, there is no externally-enforceable regimen that can manage her meds. Her doctors have put her in charge, though she doesn't always make wise choices. We learn later, sometimes after transporting her to the emergency room, that she just decided to suspend one or another medication. We accompany her when she visits her doctor now because she paints rosier than reality pictures of her condition. Always trying to get away with something, apparently for the simple joy of feeling in charge.

Her sense that she is not in charge seems to encourage some of her more irresponsible actions. We've been amplifying the feedback channels that highlight the personal costs her choices accrue. When she sees that she's not getting away scott-free, she makes more responsible choices.

Well, we see the same stuff happening on projects. Some mandate seems to suspend the necessity of enlisting supporters, for instance,so we muster by conscription, believing that we've achieved some economy, shortened the time-line, cut through encumbering red tape. Later, we learn that some critical constituent has been carrying stones in his pocket ever since, and has positioned himself squarely between our imagined efficiency and our aspired-to goal, and we cannot get there from where we've innocently positioned ourselves and our misbegotten project. We chose unwisely.

I've grown to believe that there are a few, a very few, ethical responsibilities that anyone engaging in project work is better off understanding. Whether yours mirror mine might not matter as much as that we are each mindful of the choices we make, particularly those choices that seem to make themselves. Ethics are simply choices, well-informed or poorly informed makes all the difference in a world or a project where we're all connected and no one's ever really in charge. The blind leading the blind.

For much of my working life, I have been a strong advocate for meaningful work. I've claimed that work quality improves whenever personal purpose gets involved. I've helped people imprint on the greater good and encouraged them to find their project within their project assignment. But today, I want to sing the praises of an under-appreciated kind of work, meaningless work.

Meaningless work is an act of selflessness. It is work divorced from tangible return, separated from productivity measurement, innocent of intention, innovation, and efficiency. It is work for work's sake. Unexamined action. Very human. Very Zen.

A meditation where thoughts do not float consciousness away, but remain present, just hanging around. No mugging for the virtual camera, no showing off for whatever passes for company.

When I am my work and my work is me, we transcend meaning. Meaning is beside our point, reward unthinkable. We, my work and I, become one, a dance of joy between hand and surface, between time and soul, between mine and mindlessness.

I labor to exhaustion, not to become exhausted. I work because the work needs doing---or not. I am not investing my time or consciously expressing myself, just being here---not there, now---not then, the purpose perfectly tautological, explaining nothing at all. Meaningless work is the soul of being in the body of nothingness. No one will long remember, not even I will notice that time and action performed in perfect silent harmony and that time, for an unmeasured moment, stopped moving in any discernible direction and simply was. Is. Always will be.

The unexamined life doesn't need to be lived or desire to no longer be, it just is. Perfectly comfortable naked, unselfconscious, unconscious, alive. Our analysis of the situation never was the situation. Meaningless work thrives without commentary, judgment, or critique. It is, without fussing about isn't. It ain't ain't, either. Neither. Or both sometimes.

I pose today, understanding that those who throw their rational mind between themselves and their sight might only see me working slowly, when I'm merely dancing with meaningless work, slow work. No time clock. No lunch break. No promise of a cold one at the end. No meaning higher than my weathered boots boost me. No calluses worth complaining about. Not stalking supper, but nourished nonetheless.

I am scraping an endless wall, indifferent to progress. Distinctly different duress than the working-class workingman blues. I will wear my Frankenstein pants, hand-sewn knee where the Henry Fonda rose nearly tore through me once, when meaning detached my mind. I will not create poetry, but be it. Those who watch (yawn) or later appreciate what someone must have done can find meaning for themselves, if meaning seems important then. Me, I will simply be: between, within, beside, atop, and as without as I can be. Not even becoming for a spell, meaningless and being.

Sing the praises of truly meaningless work.

For centuries, tribes who’s territories bordered this region of endless rolling, silty loess hills, considered The Palouse to be neutral territory, common grazing land, a place where horses would not be stolen and war would not be waged. War had not been waged until US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe blundered into armed conflict near the present day Steptoe Butte, a jutting rock the natives called “power mountain.” Steptoe got his butt kicked and retreated back to Fort Walla Walla.

But that’s history. Today, the drive pulls you through capricious speed zones and expansive wheat and lentil fields. The place feels remote enough to allow for unregulated speeding, a false sense Whitman County depends upon to write a steady stream of speeding tickets. Best to pay attention and use the speed control to help you go slow enough to avoid the contribution to the county.

The drive up through The Palouse is a great place to talk, and Amy and I chatted last week as we chugged through. The topic? Consulting. The context? Why is it that so many of our colleagues are starving consultants? Why are we starving, too? Is it market or marketing?

The insight that came to me in that conversation was that the very term consultant serves as a context marker, one that poorly frames what consultants actually do.

Look at the questions clients ask: How much will it cost? What, specifically, do you recommend? What are the steps to achieve the goal? How long will it take?

These are questions best aimed at change. Aim them at transformation and invite endless confusion.

I used to define as contractor anyone who is hired to do defined work. They do the client’s bidding. Consultants I defined as those who do what needs doing, whether or not the client asked for that to be done. It’s common in consulting that the initiating purpose, target, goal, path, and cost shift. This is failure for a contractor, but success for a consultant.

Taking these rather limited definitions of contractor and consultant, I claim that contractors produce first-order change while consultants produce second-order transformation, but I might be the only one in the world making this distinction. What I didn’t fully appreciate until that drive through The Palouse, was that the label consultant introduces a change context rather than a transformation one. So of course the prospective client comes loaded with the usual change questions: How much? When? How long? How many? What process?

They come expecting to receive directions or methods, recipes or formulas. They expect the consultant to be an expert in the sort of problem they face and able to slay that dragon with experienced precision. That is contractor work.

The current Financial Panic is a decent example of a situation needing transformation. Listening to the floor speeches of our Representatives this morning. I was not surprised to hear many of them claim that the proposed bill would not solve the problem. These comments told me that some were approaching this difficulty as if it were a problem. The problem with that presumption is two-fold. If it is a problem, it must have a solution. If it has a solution, we really should find it. This encourages a lot of posturing and posing, since, clearly, the proposed bill wouldn’t solve anything. It wasn’t intended to.

The only way to solve the Financial Panic is to travel back in time and co-opt it before it gets to the present state. Since that’s not possible, we have to settle for something different than a solution. It’s helpful if, somewhere along the way, those seeking resolution realize that they are not going to solve anything. They might transform the situation, but never solve it.

No one ever seeks transformation at first. As I noted in my last post , we chase the old status quo first, trying to restore cows that have already escaped from the barn.

The Palouse Insight claims that the words we use to describe what we do confuse us all- client as well as consultant. Those in the transformation business struggle to find clients not because we are poor at producing results, but because our language is inadequate to describe what we do. We throw chaff in our client’s face and confuse the both of us. Transformation comes later, not at first.

We work by personal referral, not by clever marketing. No one, not even the most satisfied client, can ever describe what it is that we did. They can only say that they are satisfied, delighted usually. That their difficulty was resolved in some surprising way, never to be repeated, perfect for the conditions at hand then.

The contractor serves an installed base of problems, systems, situations. For the consultant, no two situations are similar enough to serve as template, though there are principles, meta-perspectives, which won’t make any sense to anyone except, perhaps, the practitioner.

So, consultant is a lousy label. It implies what it doesn’t intend. Like this explanation of the insight, perhaps meaningless except in the moment. I think, like transformation, you had to be there to really understand.

A lot like the debate over granting war powers prior to the Iraqi intrusion, and we know how THAT turned out.

Taking this to an area I know something about, on projects there are four or five critical failure modes when it's discovered that a project's in trouble. First, whatever the point of discovery, it was busted a long time before the problem was recognized. The old status quo was geriatric before it was acknowledged as aging. So the first shock is great, but not terribly significant. We've already lived for a long time with it busted.

Second, there's always a hair-on-fire urgency to do something - literally anything, probably to recover our sense of mastery and control more than to actually fix anything. Of course, the toup's flaming  creates the worst possible context for deciding anything mindfully.

Third, the initial strategies for resolving always involve recovery, rather than transformation, even though recovery will only produce more of what's already proven to not work. We don't know how to produce transformation in a systematic way. The paradox is that by letting go, we're more likely to encourage transformation. By holding on, we encourage continuing dysfunction.

Fourth, why seems like the right question, though it almost never is. What next? or what now? are each better questions, but each initiates an investigation rather than a solution. The belief that there is a root cause, and that finding that root cause will necessarily allow undoing the past, is the real root cause. But this is just the way it is, a stupid human trick. 

Finally, the quality of the response is usually misunderstood to necessarily mean clear, precise, predictable next steps. In this way, we recreate old status quo rather than pursue transformation. 

If we can side-step these pitfalls, we might make a real difference. If not, probably not.

The conversation around 'resolving the credit crisis' is stepping into every one of these.

Often, in my experience, embracing an "Anything But That!" strategy better encourages transformation, though it usually feels like the worst possible approach.

You Suck@Projects
(A cautionary ballad for the executive palate)

Okay, okay, I get it!
Your non-existent experience successfully managing projects  
didn’t get you promoted into your executive position. 
(I understand! Project managers aren’t on any executive track! 
It might  be  superstition, but they’ll never get your  commission.) Will  they?
And now you’ve inherited these ungainly systems,  
which are mostly pursuing projects as missions,
what will you do now?

You’ll do what you did in B-school: you’ll cram. 
You’ll grab a few books, and stuff  like exams. 
I mean, how hard could managing projects be? 
It ain’t rocket science, obviously.

What will you read? Maybe PMI's theories, Mythical Man Month, and   
Wylie’s acclaimed Executive Series. 
What will you take away? 
Well-distilled nostrums; real heady stuff. 
A tiny ration of common sense. 
And enough on-time,  on-budget,  on-spec horse shit to compost a small country. 
You’ll spout acronyms, my friend, 
until no one ever questions your credentials again. 

Then you’ll sound the horn, you’ll lead the way, 
and you’ll start making commitments for others that very first day. 
You’ll cite strategies, and competition, using buzzwords to convey
 A  deepening dedication to whatever it is you say.
And you’ll command, “Deliver by June,” and, “Play some  musical  chairs!
Just tell me the kinda resources you need, and I’ll plead for you upstairs. 
Just justify your methods and rationalize your goals 
and there’s no limit to how far all of us will go.” 

(I know, I know, you won’t mention the fact 
that project management ain’t on the executive track ---
while you motivate them through Hell and back.)

Then what? Yeah, then what? 
They deliver over-runs and under-shots, 
FUBARs, SNAFUs, and you-don’t-even-wanna-know-whats. 
Their best laid plans usually exceed fixed cost;
they embarrass you with your boss’s boss’s boss.
You miss a strategic deadline twice 
and discover your old friends aren’t quite as nice as they usta be at the club. 
For you, bub, are boob of the month, moron of the quarter, and idiot of the first half-year 
‘till you wonder what in the devil ever enticed you over here 
when you could have positioned yourself to rise through Sales or Marketing 
and left this project crap to stumble, curse, and fail, 
but nooooo, you just had to hop the fastest plane on your way to the top of the top of your game. 

Then you wear your career like a toilet seat crown
and nobody appreciates you hanging around.
Your project teams seem to notice your summit‘s 
a  pimple, a dimple, and your stock simply plummets.
‘Cause you suck at projects, you suck like  parole, 
you suck at the stuff you were supposed to control: 
the smooth operation of these things you don’t know. 
You’ve mistaken these efforts for something you’ve seen, 
for processes, metrics, and rational schemes. 
But none of these projects perform to your skills! 
Worse, each one insists upon threatening to kill 
the one who, with his sincerity pure,
proposed what then seemed  just  a  reasonable  cure.

And once you start sucking, you suck  at  your  life,
You  suck  to  your  company, colleagues,  and  wife.
(Who  by  the  way  wonders  why  you  come  home  so  late,  
stumbling  between mumbling and nearly irate.)
No one ever hinted in MBA school
That an  executive’s lot  could  be  half  this  cruel, ... did they?
You  wonder  how  the  magic  wand  you  once  claimed
Could  betray  you  so  quickly,  just  whom  should  you  blame?

But the  breadth  of  your  genius  at  playing  this  game
Simply  leads  you  to  mandate  even  more  of  the  same,
’Cause  you  have  mistaken  what  might  well  be  soccer
For  baseball or football,  and you bet like a sucker.
You coach with the best of intentions and find
Your teams unresponsive to you and your bind.
You’re  stuck  with impossibles, a trussed suckling pig,
But you won’t satisfy  their  concerns  and  renege!
No, you’ll  just   put  your  head  down and fearlessly  charge
Another objective  both  fuzzy and large.

And  if  you’re  at  all  like  your  fellow ’IOs
You’ll continue this dance until they let you go.
To merge  with  the  mumbling executives emeritus
Who  once  sucked  at  projects  but  refuse  to  discuss
How  they  sucked  at  projects,  though  their  teams  seemed  to  fail,
And how you personally tried to guide them through Hell
And  how  if  only  they  would  have  noticed  how  wise  ...
The  guidance  you  offered  coulda  won  them  the  prize.
Instead,  you have  retired early to  write
the  book  that your colleagues  will  stuff  down  at  night
Attempting  to  do  what  not  one  of  them  can,
To  not  suck  at  projects again and again.

And Wylie seems interested in a three volume deal,
to be published with the fanfare certain to seal
The professional fate of whomever might read ’em,
To just suck at projects forever and  ever, and  ever! Amen.

©2008   by   David  A.  Schmaltz  - all  rights  reserved

Festina Lente- Hasten Slowly

The numbing numbers don't add up! The Industrial Revolution was a great way to revolutionize production. It has become a lousy way to live. ...

Fast Work undermines our effectiveness, forcing us into living Fast Lives. ... A firm respect for our most human capabilities can co-opt the folly of Fast Work.

The group slowly turned into a no-op, where a few people ever more slowly replied to some rather long postings.

A recent study might explain why Slow Work slowly dematerialized. in Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind in the current issue of the online The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Mark Bauerlein reports on Jakob Neilson's and Donald Norman's latest studies about how online content is read.

Here's the link!

Their conclusion? It mostly isn't read.

... 'people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."'

Yes, there's apparently a serious disconnect between the easy distribution of weighty concepts and the assimilation of them. The web, blessed as it is, presents a cognitive hurricane within which we fail to absorb the driest material.

So, we Facebook, which provides a virtual wall to use for posting literary Graffiti. We Twitter. I continue to post rather long blog entries, which, if Nielson and Norman are correct, few of us can actually read.

Of course, there is value (for me, anyway) in creating this stuff. It's how I work out what I think. I don't write to expose what I know, but to stumble upon it. Should I expect my readers to engage in pursuit of insight rather than distilled information, I might be deluding myself. But probably not you, since your reading patterns here might well employ that 'F' and so yield an 'F' in comprehension, appreciation, and retention.

This says nothing about any of us. Sure, my writing is brilliant! And your reading and comprehension even more so. The challenge is that we are coming together in a context that strongly mitigates against achieving what any of us might desire.

I'm finding ever more agency from listening to recorded books while engaging in s-l-o-w w-o-r-k. Scrape that wall, prepping for paint, and I'm in what might be the perfect context to really hear and really learn.

Log into my blog and I'm distracted by the very context within which the content resides.

I've gotta go get busy. Slowly.

Jerry Weinberg used to tell a story about one of his daughters who managed to get five Fs and a D one quarter in junior high school. Jerry's ex-wife asked him to speak with his daughter, so he did, asking her how come she didn't get straight Fs. Well, she explained, the D was in Arts and Crafts, and in that class, she gets a D no matter what she does. Well, apply yourself next quarter, he counseled, go for straight Fs.

The next quarter she received five As and a D, again in Arts and Crafts. Shortly thereafter, she wrangled herself into a junior college program that took her out of regular school. A year later, she ran away and joined a circus.

Later, she owned a successful arts and crafts company before opening a successful antiques business in Greenwich Village.

Jerry's point in telling the story was to highlight the fact that what gets taught in public school is not so much knowledge or life skills, but acculturation. How to fit into a culture. Not the universal American culture, but how to get along in a large company. Again and again, government statistics show that most of the jobs created in this country are created by small, tiny companies, not the huge industrial powerhouses. Yet our schooling, from No Child Left Behind to Almost Every Child Left Behind trains us for roles most of us will never actually fulfill.

The number of trade schools, you know, that low-rent alternative to "real schooling", has fallen as the number of students who never satisfy high school graduation requirements continues to climb. What's that about?

Again and again in companies, I see people trained in perspectives orthogonal to their job's demands struggling to fix their stupid jobs. From managers who try to lead by the book to executives inspired by something they imprinted on in grad school, the one skill that seems to be missing is the skill to learn from the present context. We judge ourselves and our companies against those people and organizations who manage to get press coverage. We rarely hear what real people are doing.

Ever seen a case study for an organization that refuses to participate in case studies? (Hint: That would be the vast majority of organizations.)

I read the organizational self-help books and learn that I'm supposed to have a marketing strategy, branding, customer satisfaction surveys, a whole raft of stuff that I've never had and probably never will have. Just because Nike or Intel or some big 'N' consulting operation has those doesn't mean anyone working off the grid should. The economy, business, works mostly off the grid, but you'd never know it by reading the popular press. Because the popular press reports on the grig doings.

Truth told, I've always felt a bit inadequate when interacting with the gridders. As if my little operation was somehow less professional, less real than theirs. But I do real work. No, I do not have a quarterly marketing budget or a five year sales projection. I live hand to mouth, sometimes hand to forehead. Ours is not an industrial organization, but more hunter-gatherer. The industrialists have always complained about those lazy hunter-gatherers, even the hunter-gatherers manage to sustain themselves with a fraction of the effort any industrial firm requires.

I was counting on my fingers the number of organizations I've personally visited that seemed to be trying to reform themselves away from their hunter-gatherer roots toward more industrial modes. I ran out of fingers. The number truly benefiting from such reformation probably tracks closely to the ratio of the population working for large industrial firms.

God love the industrialists. Somebody has to. Those of us not operating on an industrial scale are worthy of more than a little admiration, too. The industrial, management-ist mindset sometimes seems dead set to discount our presence, like when a Wal-Mart moves in to undercut the old, oil-stain floored hardware store. We can choose to continue to frequent the good old hardware store where they remember your name and have human-scale answers to your questions. Where you can buy a penny's-worth of ten penny nails if you want, instead of a handy (for someone) pre-packaged five pound box.

Today, I celebrate the corner grocery, the backyard bike shop, the two person consulting firm, and the people over at the ranch supply. We will never see any of them on the cover of Fortune, but they keep the world spinning. Do not judge them (us) by the industrial yardstick, we work closer to home. We trade not in tons of product but ounces of relationship. We do not serve with a painted-on smile. You can see us sweat. We don't show so well in the board room. Few do. We show where some small something really matters. We have not gone on retreat to plot our sales strategy, we open the door, sweep the floor, and let the word of mouth remind folks that we're here, open for a human-scaled kind of business. (One they forgot to mention in B-school.)

The management-ist might be suffering from a severe case of industrial pollution, mimicking a dance that looked really good at the conference and could never shake anyone's booty back home. Hoorah and hooray. There and then encounters here, today.

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.

But few of us achieved publishing success early in our career and even fewer aspire to step back into a time before our handy, time-saving gadgets. A friend gave me the most wonderful gadget. Called TV B Gone, it's a key ring-sized little button that turns off televisions. Waiting for a flight, trying to read but distracted into multitasking mindlessness by the murmuring CNN Airport News on the overhead television, one click of my TV B Gone and the screen goes dark, the speakers silent. I only wish they had such a device for the background music so thoughtlessly provided by restaurants, coffeehouses, and bars. One surreptitious click of my Tunes-B-Gone, and I can actually hear and focus on what you're saying instead of what the atmosphere is fogging.

Where was I? Oh yea, multitasking. Seems that this gift that some people claim to have and the rest of us wish we could do better is a myth. Like so many other beliefs: good children, skillful parenting, happy families, predictive planning, multitasking belongs in the museum of capabilities that exist in name only. The effect that makes you a dangerous driver when you yak on your cell phone makes you a dangerous boss when you multitask at work. “Attention Deficit Trait” is now rampant in the workplace, which itself has become as clouded by distracting din as any foundry—less noisy but just as cognitively distracting.

What to do? Wrong question. Perhaps the right question is, "What not to do?" I could prescribe turning off the television, but if you're easily bored, you'll probably turn on the radio or find someone to call. We medicate ourselves with distractions. Our brains feel clever when we shift focus between five simultaneous tasks. Worse, we sense that transcendent tingle of subtle awareness that convinces us that we really, really, really are doing the impossible several things at once. Achieved the juggle. No balls dropped. Someone should put us on stage.

Is this feeling just an illusion? Couldn't the science be wrong? Perhaps others are dumbed down when they walk and chew gum, and I --- probably you and I --- are the odd, reassuring exceptions. For we seem genius to ourselves, wizard to each other, and productive beyond imagination.

Read this and weep, cowboy. The pony bucked us both off again. Link to article

Excessive idealism (encouraging disillusion, frustration, and cynicism),

Speed and oblivion (new endlessly supplants the incompletely implemented),

Carbon copy projects (followed "disgruntingly" as bureaucratic procedure),

Narcissism ("strong actors" become the main driving force, creating a double bind: is this systemic rigor or forceful leadership?),

Technical bias (creativity is evicted by the "concern for the careful management of the means"),

Totalitarian bias (drastic simplification of reality), and

Ideological drift (preaching encapsulates science).

He claims that his research (the most unbiased by ideology I've found, except, perhaps, for my own :-}) concludes that "Painful and slow alignment of people, methods, and systems is the stuff of which actual implementation processes are made."

Of course, no one wants to hear this.

The a priori benefits of standardized work processes seem unapproachably obvious, but Ciborra found them mythical. He found no two companies (in 25 years of continuous study) ever implemented the same method, though most claimed to have implemented one or another standard. Further, he found that the odd eccentricities, the local divergences from standards, often comprised an organization's competitive advantage. He argued that when standard procedures are embraced, they create at best competitive parity. Real advantage was achieved by working in unreproducible, non-standard ways.

Besides, the terms standard and agile (especially if I deign to capitalize the term as Agile) sit together koan-like. A subject, perhaps, for reflection more than action.

He claims that the US focuses upon managing to models of the world, while the Europeans attend more to adapting to the way the world shifts. And Talib claims that the world shifts unpredictably, under the influence of eventual but unpredictable Black Swan Events-once in a very long while occurances. These, he claims, wipe out the optimistic, who discount their risk because of their low probability of occurring. Wisdom, Talib claims (with considerable credibility), insists that one hedge these unlikely gut shots or risk catastrophy. This is a different mindset than our probability professors insisted we learn, and one quite alien to anyone producing plans, schedules, and "managing risks" in organizations today.

I can't verify his perspective, but I can confirm that the model madness here seems rampant. We do not deal with the world as it is, it seems, but are taught---rewarded even---for dealing with the world as it is supposed to be according to our models of it.

Read Fooled By Randomness if you have a strong stomach for blunt criticism. Read the whole Sunday Times piece if you'd like a gullet-full of his perspective. Watch his recitation of the following "life tips," if you want just a taste of his style. Or just read those tips below.

Taleb's top life tips:

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

I had no idea that cubicles were a Utopian statement, but I'm not really surprised that they are. More surprising is that someone out there is doing their PhD work on the cubicle as a statement of culture. Had to happen. Just had to happen.

"Those with moral aspirations for the cubicle—from countercultural Californians like Tom Peters to Midwestern Protestants like Max De Pree—sought to defend some idea of “humanity” against the inhumanity of bureaucracy. Yet, to say that bureaucracy is inhuman has not always been an objection to it. As defined by Max Weber a century ago, bureaucracy makes its great contribution to the world precisely by ignoring the human spirit. Operating according to fixed rules, policies, and positions, bureaucracy in its purest form functions, as Weber wrote, “without regard for persons.” As bureaucracy “develops more perfectly, the more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.” The central impulse of bureaucracy is to fashion a world in conformity to the impersonal abstraction and precise relationships of an organizational chart."

Here's the link

Physicist Freeman Dyson is writing again. This time about global warming and the secular religion of environmentalism.

What I found most interesting about this article, which is actually a review of two books, is the characterization of science and economics, echoing Mark Gray's notion of physics envy—that every social science is jealous of the mathematical precision and replicability of physics.

Link to article

Yet in all of the prominent arguments of the day, we seem to insist upon either searching for the final word or asserting some perspective as final, this as precondition for finding it useful or acceptable or credible. When the opposite might more reasonably be the case: Anyone asserting that they have found the final word is probably deceiving them self or trying to deceive someone else.

Quoting from the article: "All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

"Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

"Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard."

The final installment of my Unlearning Project Management series was posted this morning on the Projects@Work Executive Briefing site. The posting also features links to the first five installments.

What did I unlearn in the process of writing this series? Two months ago, when I started writing this series, I was smoking about ten exquisite little cigars every day. Just after I finished the third installment, I stopped smoking. For unlearning, I highly recommend this strategy: First, start smoking. Smoke pretty steadily for five or six years, then decide to stop.

If your experience turns out to be like mine, your first sensation will be of losing your identity, because smoking, whatever the chemical addiction, is a deeply personal, identity-involved activity. The anticipation of identity loss feels sad, and that sadness alone can chase even the most dedicated reformer into the weeds.

Learning usually occurs pre-consciously. Unlearning is not so benign. A level of awareness gets involved in the unlearning that is rarely present when the original knowledge parks its jalopy. And, like not thinking of a rhino, unlearning manifests the presence of what we don't want to acquire what we do want.

Better, perhaps, to focus upon relearning than unlearning. Relearning reframes while unlearning resuscitates into explicit awareness what might have been barely tacit. Ouch!

I'm past four weeks without an exquisite little cigar, and my identity is healing over the scab. I expect some scars will remain. How did I learn about project managing? Cripes, who could remember? How did I unlearn what I'd learned? Painfully aware. Half-filled with promise. Afraid I'd fail. Concerned who I might become should I succeed. Stumbling into interesting territory.

We are unlearning something all the time. Amy's ten-year-old granddaughter has already acquired a raft of unproductive habits and beliefs. Much of her challenge in school is about letting go of what she naively acquired to make space for new, perhaps better, previously unimagined beliefs. Reading entailed letting go of her need to pretend she could already read. Same with math. She lost her composure sometimes, but who wouldn't? Trading mastery for indentured apprenticeship, certainty for no more than the possibility of return. It might be impossible to learn anything without unlearning something previously parked and in the way.

Life, work, heck, even project managing, seems more like Calvin Ball than any of the professional sports featuring a ball. In Calvin Ball, as you might remember from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin made up the rules as he went along, much to the eternal frustration of Calvin's playmate Hobbes. Whatever made Calvin a winner usually dictated the rules of play. Slip that perspective out one notch, replace Calvin's egoism with care for the project's community, and this 'the rule is whatever makes me the winner' doesn't seem so terrible. What game do we play? Perhaps it's whatever game makes us the winner.

Now get out there are Play Ball!

The fifth installment of my Unlearning Project Management series has been posted online. Here's the link.

"In a recent conversation, Howell remarked, “Current project controls increase risk in projects ... external risk is rarely the killer. Things most often go wrong because of the wreckage caused by the feedback and control used in current PM: control for cost, squeeze ‘em down, and the people will find a way to do just what you ask — reduce the immediate cost of their work. This reduces the predictability of workflow in the system, further reducing performance. Hazing managers in response to further cost increases puts projects into the death spiral.”

The problem is that we believe we have a problem. Not all Christmases are merry and bright, and only about one in twelve are white in these parts. Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman reported in his Learned Helplessness that one primary cause of depression is the self-help movement, which promises that we can deliver more than anyone can reliably deliver. In business, the romantic notion that success is achievable through "continuous improvement" has doubtless destroyed more companies than it has preserved.

We live in a curiously romantic culture, one which has almost successfully replaced performance with measurement, achievement with intention, and skill with luck. We follow whatever the latest study found, only to learn after years of bliss-filled ignorance that ... whoopsy! ... that study was apparently wrong. Romanticism breeds ignorant bliss in the short run and humiliating moments of enlightenment longer-term.

The following linked article, The Age of Educational Romanticism by Charles Murray got me thinking about how many activities have become romantically entwined and how awful these infatuations turn out to be. Whatever the field, without room for pragmatism and skepticism—let alone realism (I know, no such thing, but still the only place to get a really good steak)—romanticism guarantees its opposite. Mandating that no child be left behind ensures that many will leave on their own volition. Liberating another imprisons anyone who could have liberated himself.

"No one but the most starry-eyed denies in private the reality of differences in intellectual ability that we are powerless to change with K-12 education. People are unwilling to talk about those differences in public, but it is a classic emperor’s-clothes scenario waiting for someone to point out the obvious. Starting that process can be as simple as more articles like this one."Link Here

from: BREAKING THE GALILEAN SPELL By Stuart A. Kauffman

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

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!

... ...

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."

To claim uniqueness, however, does not explain much. This description might elicit many different negative comparisons, such as, “it is almost, but not entirely unlike this other workshop.”

How is this workshop unique? Most project workshops focus attention upon transferring explicit how-to skills: how to plan, how to track progress, how to control execution, and how to build a team. They focus upon the transfer and acquisition of explicit knowledge without ever considering how it is that one goes about acquiring and actually using that knowledge.

This is a different kind of learning, one not encapsulated in any method. Agile, for instance, represents a specific context within which certain techniques are appropriate and others are not. Becoming an Agile practitioner entails exposure to specific techniques, for instance, but practicing agility requires something else, too. It requires a level of awareness about who you are within that context, and not simply the ability to repeat pre-defined practices.

We consider all techniques situationally useful and none universally appropriate. So we focus upon how one might meaningfully pick and choose from among the array of possible approaches to discover, to design the approach best suited to a specific situation. This is at root a design process which includes both knowledge of explicit practices along with a deep awareness of tacit knowledge and personal preference.

To master a project is quite different than to manage a project. Mastery entails both a keen understanding of techniques and methods and a presence of mind while employing them. Mastering Projects focuses upon conditioning that presence of mind which is fundamental to adequately designing any complex undertaking.

How do we accomplish this? First, we ask each participant to bring their own set of learning objectives. Rather than pre-determine the purpose of the workshop for you, we ask you to deeply consider what, in your practice, you want to pursue. This means that the workshop will be pursuing at least as many different objectives as there are participants in the workshop. This context seems to more realistically mirror the context within which real-world projects exist. While a project might have a well-advertised public purpose, every one has imbedded within it innumerable personal purposes: why each individual is engaged. And no project succeeds without attending to these personal purposes as well as the publicly acknowledged ones.

In this way, like on real-world projects, the workshop becomes the medium within which each participant can deeply consider their own objectives and learn to use the workshop to achieve these. Along the way, participants discover clues that inform them about how they form and pursue objectives, and how these pre-conscious patterns of engagement help or hinder achievement.

These learnings take many different forms. Some appear as brilliant a-ha insights, others as less inspiring “oh Shit!” experiences. We employ a simply ethic, “learned if you do and learned if you don’t.” We help you appreciate whatever form your learning might take. We enlist every participant as both a student and a teacher, understanding that your most enduring insight might come from anyone in the room.

We also ask you to bring your own project to use as your own personal case study. Rather than feed you pre-packaged case studies, we help to properly situate your pursuit of your learning objectives by using your own project as the primary case study in the course. We guide you through a series of focusing tools intended to elicit a deeper understanding of yourself, as well as a deeper appreciation of the nature of your project and of the organization sponsoring your project. Not just what to do, but who you, your project, and your organization might be in the context of your specific project.

... More in the next installment ...

I'm investigating some ways to spread the contents of this blog more widely using Technorati. I might as well start here:

I have been, over the past month, developing a series of articles for Projects@Work entitled Unlearning Project Management. The first in this series was published last week to varied critical reception; mostly, it seems, quite critical. My editor there didn't report any death threats, but he did say that several people recommended that he black ball me from further contribution. He said he'd stick with me through this series, hoping that I might "win over a few of my critics" by the time I've finished the series.

What IS my problem with project management as I see it increasingly practiced? Here's some background from an email exchange with one of the critics of the first installment:

Here's something like a root foundation beneath my assertion. Over the past decade, I have visited dozens of companies struggling to deliver project results. The PMBoK-addicted ones seem to struggle much more. I know this says nothing about the PMBoK, but a lot about how people interpret PMBoK. Perhaps if it was titled, "Some Potentially Useful Project Management Information" this imprinting would be less severe. And, honestly, the problem imprint is rarely at the project manager level, but several levels above that. Executive edict commands that projects will henceforth be managed according to some Hoyle's model, and people within the organization just shut down their natural ability to pick and choose what seems right for their context in favor of pleasing their management. The stories proliferate (most falsely) that if they fail to live up to the promise of PMBoK by choosing differently, they'll be fired (or worse, whatever that might be.) So then their projects are saddled with the obligation to both do their projects "right" AND deliver results. The disconnect is not lost on many, but the disconnect is not easily reconnected.

I have seen many, many, many projects expend more energy failing to fulfill high church expectations that are inappropriate to the scale of their engagements. And lose connection to what works there in the process. So, I'm not on a rail against PMBoK, but, as you'll see in upcoming parts of the series, about how people, in the presence of the """Body Of Knowledge""" respond as if in the presence of something smarter, more knowledgeable, than they already are.

Napoleon claimed that the pursuit of perfection was the greatest evil. I think my moral outrage at the continuous improvement mindset is somehow rooted in this observation.

So, I'm trying to reconnect people to their natural genuis, the one that pre-dates their innocent adoption of an essentially mechanical mindset, which insisted that work is about process and process-improvement, and not about organic human interaction. This is a tough sell, and an even tougher 'think.' Once imprinted on a frame of reference, it's next to impossible to consider any other way; and even more difficult, this experience is teaching me, to explain an alternative in any way that makes sense from within the imprinted frame of reference. I teach about dissolving dilemmas, and I've adopted a dandy one here.

We (Amy and I), in our Mastering Projects Workshop, have found it essential to focus upon some form of relationship mapping BEFORE creating any task plan or even the roles and responsibility exposition, because acknowledging existing relationships can help create a plan that works with what's there. This can also head off some inevitable collisions.

We always find some busted relationship in the mapping, someone in the community who has the power to take another's lunch money without even intending to. Learning how to better cope with these subtly powerful people in our relationships adds a lot of potential to the person and to the project. Creating a task plan without acknowledging these powerful networks seems theoretical; not well grounded in reality.