Pure Schmaltz

Father.

Father is the painting of a blue house green. Father lives on the other side of the sky. Father is a cloudy day with sun. Father is an email, a phone call. Father is paperwork and publishers. Father is books and drives in the country. Father is fireplaces and snow. Father is the ocean I swim in. Father is a cascades volcano, a skyscraper. Father is large and powerful. Father is a bold line across a blank page. Father is a bowl of pasta, an arugula salad, a Christmas goose. Father is a day in June. A long day, where the sun shines almost till midnight.

Love,

Heidi

©2009 by Heidi Astrid Schmaltz, all rights reserved

We made an unusually rich haul at the Clarendon Farmers' Market this morning. Probably the last of the season's asparagus. Two quarts of the most delightful strawberries, and a pint of the first blueberries. A bag of beets, tops on. Another bag of yellow baby patty-pan squash. Garlic scapes (at last)! More of that perfect Greek yogurt, rich and sour, perfect for strawberry-dipping. One enormous fresh mozzarella ball. A bunch of fresh, yellow-stalked chard. Four perfect little purple eggplants for grilling. Some brown free-range eggs. A fresh sprig of Italian parsley.

Perfect until it came time to store our wonderful finds. This little apartment doesn't have a root cellar or an auxiliary beer fridge in the garage, not even a garage. It was time to clean out the also-rans. Time to make stock.

Stock, properly made, makes the stuff sold as stock in grocery store seem like cat piss. Real stock is rich in color and flavor, but also in texture, the way no other liquid I know of can carry texture. The little fat in it shimmers enticingly. The color, ranging from a tawny tan to a rich amber, depends upon what was taken stock of in making it. What do I mean, taking stock of?

Stock is free if you make it yourself, or as nearly free as anything consumable might aspire to be. It sells for four buck a quart or more in the store, and isn't even real at that price. Made at home, it's leverage with no downside; trash utterly transformed.

Daily, I throw every veg peeling and odd stalk, every ugly leftover bit into a plastic bag and into the freezer. On stock day, which invariably arrives when too much great new stuff displaces the increasingly marginal stuff I have just not gotten around to trashing yet, the fridge gets a through cleaning. The crisper drawers get sorted through and anything not yet skanky gets set aside for the stock pot. The freezer, which by this time is filled with odd little plastic bags of asparagus butts, Brussel sprout trimmings, parsnip and carrot peelings, and rejected artichoke leaves, also gets a thorough going over, with ingredients selected as if in their prime to create a once-in-a-lifetime combination.

Today was a lucky day. I had a couple of pounds of veal bones, which I'd spotted a couple of weeks ago while cruising the Eastern Market. In other words, a couple of bucks worth of collagen-rich leftovers, bought for pocket change. The bones, which are worth more than anyone ever charges for them, are the only thing worth paying top-dollar for when making stock. The rest of the brew involves stuff you would have thrown to the worms in the composter or the garbage disposal if you weren't so damned wise.

The process starts with roasting the bones for an hour in a 500 degree F (260 C) oven. For young bones like veal, this will just start to crispen the exterior. After an hour, roughly chop that odd end of parsnip you found in the bottom of the veg crisper, the larger of the two wilting turnips, a carrot or two, and an onion, and take the garlic that's starting to sprout and wilt, no need to even take the paper off those. Throw the whole chopped mess into another pan, like a deep frying pan, that's been preheating in that hot oven for a while. Drizzle a little olive oil over the mess, then return it to the seemingly way-too hot oven. Turn dem bones while you're at it. Go read a novel for a half hour or so while this mess crazes.

At the end of the half hour, plop dem bones in right in on top of the glistening veg, then deglaze the pan they were roasting in. This is simple, just pour a bit of that leftover white wine you bought for someone who never showed at your last soiree, drizzle that into the hot pan the bones left behind, and swirl with a whisk until the stuck bits come loose. Pour the result into your deepest stock pot. Throw in all the odds and ends you selected from your frozen inventory---asparagus butts, etc---, put that pot on moderately high heat and add enough water to cover the mess. Then go back to reading that cliff-hanger, cat on lap optional, but appreciated.

About a half hour later, after two hours of roasting, the bones are ready for a bath. Transfer them into the now serenely bubbling nascent broth on the stove top and revel in the satisfying sizzle each yelps when dropped in. Nothing like a hot bath after a long sauna! Throw the roasted veg in, too. Add more water if you're greedy and want as much stock as possible from this mess, then go back to see what the villains are plotting in that novel.

Ninety minutes might be enough time. Certainly no less time, and the liquid will have reduced a little bit, but not too much, because you left the mess on moderately high heat before you disappeared back into fantasy land. When the time is right, and your nose will tell you that the veg is exhausted and won't give another drizzle to the performance, drain the mess and pour into your wide-mouth jars (perhaps with a little finely chopped leek to dress it up a bit.) Make this transfer when the liquid is HOT! seal the jars immediately, and they'll seal tight as they cool and last forever in the back of the fridge. I ran short of jars (as I knew I would in this little place), and stored the last liter and a half in empty olive oil bottles, sealing the tops with aluminum foil and rubber bands. (Yes, Amy threw out my left-over olive oil bottle lids as apparent garbage.)

There, you're almost done. Separate the bones from the veg, discard the veg, it's exhausted. It's given its all. Transfer the bones back into the stock pot, cover with fresh water, and boil them for another hour or more on high, high, high heat. You're extracting the final collagen to make something that will utterly transform anything it's added to. After an hour or so, when the liquid is almost gone, remove the bones and give them to Amy, who's always trolling for soft cartilage to chew, then boil down the remaining liquid until it's almost nothing. Sticky. Gooey. Chilled to room temperature it will look like shoe leather. A mere sliver added to anything will ennoble that thing. A pinch on an egg, a dollop into a sauce, you'll find yourself carving bits off to just pop into your mouth as you cruise the kitchen. It's knighthood on a knife. I don't have much variety for storage, so I poured this into an unused ashtray. I'll dress the garlic scapes and asparagus with it at dinner.

If you don't stop and take stock, and make stock every few weeks, we have to wonder about you. Do you usually eat out? You know, real stock is the only reason their sauce tastes so much better than yours (or better than the Lean Cuisine you innocently thought would be faster to make). If you make your own stock, though, you might never be satisfied with another restaurant meal again. Your stock will be so much better than even the celebrity chefs', you'll wish you'd just stayed at home.

Cheap but good is great. The best there is in this life. If you don't make your own stock (yet), take stock of your life. It's short and brutish, save for the small differences something like stock makes.

(Store the jars, leftover olive oil bottle, whatever ... of broth in the corner of the fridge that usually freezes stuff. Only fill the jars 7/8ths full, or the expanding frozen contents might (will definitely) break the container, and you'll lose the contents. ... how and when should you use the stock you've taken? Cripes, if you don't know the answer to that question, you're worthless. Move to freaking Virginia and eat ham!)

ps: notice how I didn't instruct you to salt or 'fresh ground pepper' this mess? Good. Don't even think of salting it. The goo will be perfectly seasoned. You can add salt to taste when you actually use this stuff. No one could know how much to add to satisfy taste before actually using...

"King Charles II once invited members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered him." excerpted from After Virtue-a study in moral theory by Alasdair MacIntyre

Can you explain the scientific reason why?

The deck looks less lush without the resident spider plant I delivered to Amy's office on Friday. Rose noticed, and lay forlornly near where the spider has sat. The cats are not yet resigned to apartment living. They still shake their little fists at whatever gods got them here, and seem to remember lounging in the shadows beneath endless expanses of plant shadow and yard. Rose munches on the cat grass occasionally, and spends every night when it's not thunder-storming holding watch on the beige artificial carpeting on the balcony. Outside, sniffing the breeze, neither purring nor sleeping. Watching. Listening. Perhaps seething.

Crash is mostly sociable. He seems pleased whenever either one of us returns, but also crying plaintively as if mourning. I've taken to offering a few kitty treats when I return, which, I know!, encourages infantile behavior. I scratch heads and switch out their water bowl for some cold water from the filter pitcher from the fridge. I don't expect them to drink the musty tap water here either.

Part of every afternoon involves the changing of the cat box ritual. The cat box, which I secreted in the bottom of the six-foot tall television cabinet in the corner of the living room next to the glass wall onto the balcony, lies behind two doors. The cats pass through the open back to do their business in private, but I swing open the front doors to sort out their leavings. I carry the kitchen garbage can into the living room and filter the bad stuff into it before adding the bathroom trash then tying off the liner and stepping out the door, down the hall one door to the right to the garbage chute room, and dropping the bag in for its six floor drop to the basement.

Easy ritual. The cats want more treats when I return. Hey, I was technically gone, if only for a half minute. ... No dice, guys.

I might pull the vacuum out and quickly de-fur the place. Both cats are shedding like Llamas, with Crash even making daily deposits of partially ingested fur around the place, punctuated with that emphatic retching  that sounds like the end of the world coming up, but doesn't seem to bother him a bit.

Rose huddles under the too-big bed whenever thunder strikes, but she and Crash have no lingering fear of fire truck noises, which are far more fearsome to me. We try to keep the sliding glass door to the balcony open, so Rose has her perch, but the outside noise makes it next to impossible to watch TV (well, actually to hear the television) or even talk. The airplanes do not land between midnight and six am, but promptly at six, a steady line of them pass over, one every couple of minutes, so low I can read the lettering on their sides and so loud I can't hear myself stink. Several times each day, the fire brigade rushes out to blaring sirens and a startling kind of quacking. Deafening, but Rose just sits there placidly, twitching her ears. The first time they heard the fire trucks, they panicked and Rose wouldn't come out from under the bed for a day.

Rose is still that way with the thunder, shivering beneath the bed even the morning after. Crash has claimed the sole desk chair, which is so uncomfortable we rarely use it. It's upholstered in a thick mat of Crash hair, no matter how often we brush it clean.

Each evening, I pull out my ball of string with the feathery thingy attached to the end and play cat fishing. It's rather like fly fishing. I swing out an adequate length of line, then lazily pass the birdy in the direction of the cat, sharply pulling the string back to mimic a startled bird. Rose seems genuinely disinterested, groggy. And so does Crash until he just can't help respond to the killer inside. Suddenly, he'll sweep out a paw and tap the birdy, eyes gleaming. Further snaps bring more aggressive responses. He stands, crouches, moves to a more invisible position, batting, swatting, sometimes snagging his prey. When he does snag it, he chews briefly before letting loose, which prompts me to snap again and him to, instinctively I guess, swat and bat. He sometimes goes completely airborne in response, hungrily pawing the air.

Rose will play grace notes behind Crash's full concerto, slipping in the odd bat, the disinterested swat. I will sometimes land the bird on the glass-topped coffee table, where the cats can see it preening from the floor. They will slip into grooming or idle purring, disinterestedly eying the offender. Then, quite suddenly, one or the other or both will perform some gravity-defying pounce, moving from lounging to lunging without a clue that they had been winding up. Then the birdy gets chewed, and chewed good, before it mysteriously snaps back into frustrating flight. Swinging back into range, we get another couple of good leaps and catches before they relax and regain their distant disregard.

This can go on for quite a while, and they need the exercise. It's reassuring to see that they still have their reflexes, that apartment living hasn't eroded their instinct to kill feathery things. They mostly ignore the cat toys in favor of a good nap. Crash either on the chair by the desk or in the corner under the plastic tree, Rose on the balcony, on our side of the partition or on the neighbor's side. She slips between the two just as if she owned the place.

And maybe she does. She still pounces on Crash's head. Crash is still a ninny in response. Amy brushes the couch and Crash's chair as part of her morning ritual. I service their cat box and feed them the little kitty treat bribes they insist upon as the price of my every absence. Crash is restless in his long napping, jumping onto and back off of the too-big bed several times each night. He'll cosy in for a while, even manage some limited scream purring, but he paces through the night and dozes through the day, pacing in yowling frustration every morning (mourning?) around five. Rose refuses to be petted in the night, taking her accustomed corner at the bottom of Amy's side of the too-big bed, out of reach. Beyond consolation.

I try to explain that we've found them a wonderful new territory, even counting down the days remaining, but my promises can't bridge the present chasm. The tall glass wall between them and the outside world and the screaming noise of this strange place could convince anyone that they've moved to somewhere altogether too settled for any wild thing to thrive. The catnip banana is small consolidation, and seems like a kid's toy offered to console a thoroughly discouraged adult.

The world turns in fitful bursts, slowing terribly through the most difficult times and slipping almost silently through the sweet ones. This is a bitter time for these cats accustomed to sweetness. Their little crying pleads, which I try to mollify with soft smelly treats, might cease when they have some wild territory to roam again. Until then, they have only the silent dance of two inept apartment dwellers who speak in indecipherable dialect, dispose of the stuff they've already buried out of sight, and tap on the covers, calling them to come dream in a way too-big bed. 

We all understand that no map is the territory it portrays. Whatever the chosen projection, glaring differences remain between what can be drawn and what's being represented. Prague famously proclaims that there are no accurate maps of the place, and that getting lost is the only way to learn how to navigate the city. Their map explicitly misleads. Not to be perverse, but to help map readers better cope with the inevitable.

If only every map-maker was this thoughtful. It seems to me that every map suffers from the same shortcoming as Prague's. Whether it's a hastily-drawn scribble intended to guide someone to the neighborhood deli or some laminated intended-to-be permanent portrait of a city's streets, it's wrong, and wrong in some indefinable but none-the-less situationally significant aspect. The value of each incorrect projection ultimately depends upon the perspective of the user, not the accuracy of the map.

And there's no better perspective for any map user than the one reminding themselves that the guide they are following is wrong in some indefinable way. This to avoid over-dependence and to help each remain open to accepting the unavoidable misunderstandings encountered when following any map.

Mercator's Projection still says more about Mercator than it says about the world it projected. It extended more metaphor than accuracy, allowing relatively easy understanding and even easier misunderstanding. Bucky Fuller noted that on a sphere, there is no up and down, only over, yet we speak of North just as if it was up, and South, as if it was down, subtly classifying everyone who falls beneath us in a metaphor we created in the first place. How likely are we to catch on that our projection created the world we imagine we inhabit?

I've been reflecting on my relationship with maps as I learn to get around in a new city. Fortunately for me, my primary map is explicitly limited; it's missing significant parts of the territory I traverse. Traveling beyond the mapped area, I notice myself unplugging from my dependence on presumed predictability and relying upon my own senses and sensibilities, which prove remarkably reliable. There are no mountains here to provide permanent position for triangulation, and the sky hangs low over this pancake terrain. The sun is no reliable assistant, either. And, so far, I have no felt-sense jist of this place, making me a frequent fool to my intentions. I don't, for instance, know whether an on-ramp will be to the right or the left, so I stay in the middle until I can visually verify which, then squeeze into the proper lane, looking every bit like I'm taking cuts in line. Next time, if I remember, I'll know what my map could never disclose.

I am learning when I can depend upon my printed map and when I cannot. But there's no way that I can imagine to slip-stream this frustrating process. I am developing a relationship with this place, both hindered and helped by the kind assistance of McGraw-Hill, Google Maps, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. I can only blame myself for the many misunderstandings, but there's really no blame to assign. I suffer from another case of the normals, hopeless-feeling at times, but not terribly serious.

I was wondering how any map-maker might more accurately represent how the street grid is actually used. There are eight-lane freeways here that have less utility than the two-lane side streets paralleling them. Where are the secret passages, the chutes in this Chutes and Ladders game? These, I realize, could never be represented on any but my own personal map. If the secret short-cuts were well known, they would provide no more respite than any eight-lane moving parking lot.

So we live and we learn, hoping to take advantage of what others have learned before us. And we will and we do learn from our living. We learn that our maps are wrong and, if we are very fortunate, that this little feature of life couldn't matter less. Yes, you'll find yourself going way out of your way at first, when your map demonstrates another limit to its reliability. You might notice yourself redrawing that part to replace line and color with cloud. Try again and maybe you'll resolve the disparity between what you expected and what you experienced. Or not. Just don't give up too soon. One or two or three or four experiences might well convince you that you cannot get there from here, but you probably can. Whether you feel stupid or smart when you finally figure out what the map-maker intended you to figure out in the first place is entirely in your hands.

Just remember, that map, that process, those instructions, even these directions are wrong in ways that no one could possibly predict beforehand. Keep trying.

In the Jazz world, the term chops refers to skill in execution. This, distinct from talent, dedication, knowledge, or experience. Each performance challenges even the most experienced performers to once again show their chops.

And we know when it's present and when it isn't.

This has nothing much to do with following the score and everything to do with satisfying, even exceeding the audience's highest expectations. This is not schlock improv, nor is it simply showing off. It's more like really showing up.

Anyone experiencing an ensemble with chops holds the memory very, very, very close to their heart. It gets under their skin, and stays there.

Chops cannot be prescribed. It takes a lot of personal work to achieve it, but in ensemble performing, personal mastery isn't nearly enough. We've all heard ensembles where one performer out-performs every other, and this ain't chops. Ensemble chops requires balancing, and balancing at a higher level than any individual could achieve alone. Wynton Marsalis claims that chops emerges from each individual finding permission to be no more (or less) than who they truly are, and then finding or forging or fomenting an honest identity together.

This seems like it would be easy, but it's not. Chops is as informed by shortcomings as successes, both feed the context necessary to realize it. We too easily discount our stumbles as unrepresentative of our true potential, when they are solid representations of who we are and what we do at a particular time.

It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing is more than a Duke Ellington song. It's a fundamental fact of life.

Last night, I attended The Washington DC premier showing of the documentary Chops, which tells the story of a high school jazz band's success in the annual Essentially Ellington competition at Lincoln Center. Their teacher was the least inspiring of those profiled. Their story was not one of unending success from inception, but one of a surprising success. One no one in the audience expected them to win until they pulled off that great, moving, memorable performance on stage. Chops! They deserved to win, but anyone would had to have been delusional to think that this group would actually rise to the occasion. But rise they did.

Pivotal to their success was a brief visit from a consultant working with the Essentially Ellington foundation. He stopped in for a day and utterly transformed each member's relationship with their music, talent, and each other. When he left, those kids had soul. Before his visit, they were mere talented posers.

How does a project community get chops? Where does their soul come from? Where do they get permission, the ultimatum, to expose their true selves to achieve great things? Some claim this can't be done, except by accident. And that it almost never occurs accidently, that we need to guide and control to achieve even modest results. Interestingly, at the winning performance, the uninspiring band teacher introduced the band, then left the stage, understanding that the group's potential was far greater than he could imagine or direct.

They would succeed or fail on their own chops, which, if they could not produce themselves, could not otherwise be produced.

I'm thinking about chops. Thinking they are well within the reach of anyone, any team, any community. This has certainly been my experience as a brief consultant. Much like the Essentially Ellington consultant, after the brief intervention, people started stumbling upon their own chops. Some even accused me of inducing the result, but I fooled them. They really did it themselves after being reminded of what they could actually achieve if they really showed up, and receiving no more than small permission to do what they already knew full well how to do.

We could be better than we are, we could be swingin' on a star! (Thank you, Jimmy and Johnny!)

From this morning's Writer's Almanac comes a remarkable poem. I've excerpted a couple of verses below, and left a link to the whole show, which features Garrison reading the entire poem, below that. We each understand the difficulties with the rules of the game. Playing the same game by different rules promises little. Playing a different game altogether? Perhaps priceless.

Paper, Scissors, Stone

by Tom Wayman

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.


Completed over here: Link

Yesterday, my local newspaper, The Walla Walla Union Bulletin, published the final installment of my White Collar Recession series. The series started when I sent my Dispatch From The Front Lines blog post to one of the UB's editors, then went in for an uncomfortable conversation. The editor connected me with a reporter, Vicki Hillhouse, who later wrote this feature piece to accompany publication of the first installment, Awareness: Coyote Continuity.

Over the following seven issues, another installment appeared on each front page.

I fashioned the series using Jeannie McLendon's Seven A-s, an outline intended to help individuals, families, and groups work through catastrophic change: Awareness, Acceptance, Authorship, Articulation, Application, Activism, and Altruism. (I added in an eighth A, Adventure, later, to explain what I'd learned and where I think I'm going next.)

The series has received overwhelming response, including an upcoming mention in Laura Rowley's Yahoo! Finance Column. This column receives 42 million unique hits per week.

When I say the series has received overwhelming response, I do not mean 'overwhelmingly positive response,' but simply overwhelming. Bi-polar overwhelming, very positive along with some excruciatingly negative.

Musta worked.

I could ruin your experience of simply reading the columns by explaining them, but I guess I won't (this time)! Instead, I'll just list 'em in order and wait for your contribution to the pile of bi-polar feedback.

Part two, Acceptance: The Panhandler’s Paradox, where I bum for change in Vienna and end up changing myself.
Part three, Authorship: My Own Self-Help Book, where I learn enough to be cynical but choose not to become cynical.
Part four, Articulation: Finding My Voice Again, where I channel my tough-skinned, tight-lipped ancestors.
Part five, Application: Working Anyway, where the cost of idleness outweighs the price of work.
Part six, Activism: Can You Hear Me Now?, where I explain how my business managed to make over four billion dollars more than General Motors.
Part seven, Altruism: Greater Gifts, (Amy likes this one best), where I start chipping my new self from solid stone.
And the final installment, Adventure: Neighborly Naked, where I rediscover the transformative power of tighty whiteys.

I will comment further on the experience in a later post.

Continuing with the investigation of the covenants of work, I introduce another universal understanding in the form of a caution. Keep an eye on the BIG mean guys.

One of my first survival jobs found me working day shift in what I called The Asparagus Factory. I suppose this was a perfectly normal industrial venue, but aside from experience watching Industry On Parade, a TV program that showed conveyor belts and assembly lines in action, I'd never actually set foot inside a factory.

The first context marker I noticed? NOISE! I was issued a pair of ear plugs along with my hair net and green hard hat, but even so, stepping into that machinery-filled warehouse blew the breath out of me. Conveyor belts whining, lift truck motors mumbling, a hundred poorly synchronized electric motors squealing, the place was simply deafening.

Of course, working in such turmoil just has to be unsettling. Imagine what it must do to productivity, with mechanical arrhythmia not so subtly influencing every action. So, the thoughtful folks at the Bird's Eye Division of General Foods had installed speakers everywhere, from which blared at decibels above the overwhelming mechanical noise, ... wait for it ... John Phillip Sousa marches! Yes, the Stars and Freaking Stripes Forever! Really ... forever!

I was the lead hand dancer on the sorting line. The basic job of the sorters involved arranging freshly blanched and trimmed asparagus into little paperboard boxes, which would then be sent on for flavoring and flash freezing. Sounds simple. The asparagus was loaded steaming from the blancher onto the conveyor a floor above the sorting line, from huge bins, by guys in blue hard hats. Big Mean Guys.

The BMGs mostly hung around smoking and joking outside the Authorized Parties Only door, returning at their seeming leisure to buzz around in their lift trucks and complicate my life.

As lead hand dancer, I tried (and usually failed) to pre-arrange the stalks to ease the down-line sorting. I was very, very good at this, but never quite good enough because the BMGs reveled in dumping multiple bins, throwing in everything from steamed bits of wood to blanched snakes and rodents. So I would receive, down the long inexorable line, Mount Everest-sized clogs of carelessly braided veg while the BMGs smirked and shuffled off to smoke.

The supervisors, middle-aged drill sergeant females with 30+ years experience in this Hell, marched around keeping cadence, barking "Get those white butts! Get those white butts!" as reminder to sort the tough stalks into the cull line.

And so, from this month or so of experience came for me the first hint of a universal truth about work. There are always Big Mean Guys. It behooves ya to keep at least one eye on them. Keep an eye on the BIG mean guys.

Since, I have experienced nothing to persuade me that the BIG mean guys are not always lurking. Whether in the form of the ne'er do well relative of the owner or the veteran ideologue, BMGs complicate everyone elses' existence. They will not be eliminated from even the most carefully crafted process.

Most unsettling have been the times when I've caught myself in the BMG role. I admit that I've pulled rank and inflicted unnecessary complications. We probably all have. I carry the question about how much I might have contributed to the existence of the BMGs. They were of a class, the blue hard hats, that rendered me, a mere green hat, speechless. I might have stepped up to their sniggering circle and conspired with them to make my life easier, but chose to seethe as victim instead.

I'm learning to keep one eye on the BIG mean guys, and the other eye on my own response to their presence. I know I won't always find the foolhardiness to comment on the curiosities, but I sometimes remember that I could.

Oh, and GET THOSE WHITE BUTTS!!!!!!!

I started this series a few weeks ago, inspired to write down a few of the stickier lessons I've learned about how to engage in work. Showing up involves more than proper attire, skill training, and a go-get-'em attitude. There's some subtle stuff going on underneath. For most, the subtlety goes unnoticed until someone, some kind mentor, points out what was certainly always lurking there.

So far, I've noted that One Does Not Drive Results, gotten myself into some trouble claiming that The Gods Are Always In Charge (controversy surrounding my use of the divine capital Gods), reminded myself that There Are No Marginal Players, reflected that No One Is Apathetic Except When Pursuing Someone Else's Goals, and finally, that Relationships Trump Everything.

Today's installment is about Telling Compelling Stories.

One of my more exciting survival jobs back when I was a songwriter had little on the surface of it to do with writing songs. Early shift pot washer in the steaming basement of a world class restaurant, my job entailed cleaning up after sloppy chefs from the bottom of the intricate social pecking order. Probably no better place than the bottom to see what's really going on up top.

I declared myself The Pot Wizard, and wizard I most certainly was. I thanked people for dumping fresh messes beside my steaming sinks. I delighted in the appreciations I received when a chef found his favorite pot perfectly cleaned. I enthusiastically helped the freight guy when deliveries overwhelmed him, shot endless breeze with Andelino, the Filipino salad chef, and became the sweetheart of the wait staff because I was never too busy to help.

But mostly, the job involved telling compelling stories. Reframing the mess into more compelling forms. Transforming shit into Shine-ola. Fantasy endlessly forming compelling reality.

This lesson I strive to remember. Whatever the job, the real job involves telling compelling stories. We are each writing our story. Part mystery. Part cookbook. Part epic novel. Should we forget this fundamental fact, we are left with nothing to interest the grand children, our neighbors, and, curiously, ourselves.

We live in our stories. That we work within them, is not always so obvious. Tell compelling stories to create a compelling work life.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I take a break from the Covenant series today to reflect on change. I know, I know, change has been so done, we're sick to death of it. The endless strategies for inducing it, for enforcing it, for managing it. But today, I want to reflect on a different kind of change. Second Order Change.

Some background: Google Second Order Change and you'll get something like 132 million hits, most of the resulting links guide you to indecipherable pages. (One notable exception here.) Bergquist knows his stuff, but few seem to be able to explain, describe, or coherently define second order change.

Let me add to that body of obfuscation!

First order change, Bergquist explains, is rather like a pendulum, moving, sure, but always within rather predictable patterns. Back then forth. Change intending to recover a lost status quo falls into the realm of first order change, which is sometimes referred to as "rearranging deck chairs." Changing salary ranges is a common first order change within organizations, so, curiously enough, are reorganizations. These switch one order for another order, typically without questioning the underlying concept of order. In project work, an organization can embrace Agile project management without ever questioning what it might *really* mean to manage and without shifting its underlying notions of project.

Changing the meaning steps into Second Order Change. Instead of rearranging deck chairs, we fashion life rafts out of them. Instead of replacing one management system with another, we do away with management. Second Order Changes are irreversible. Once initiated, like fire, they cannot be undone. We cannot simply flop back, pendulum-like, toward the familiar status quo.

Second Order Changes shift paradigms, another over-used word failing to describe a poorly understood phenomenon. We see with first order eyes, we reason with first order logic, we can dream and imagine in second order space, but never reduce it to method or technique.

Never is a strong word. How then, if no cookbook could be devised, could a group ever achieve second order change? One imagination at a time.

Bergquist claims, and I couldn't agree more, that such shifts emerge from stories, and very special kinds of stories: parables. These, as I explained in The Blind Men (see Buy My Book tab above), are stories that might mean something quite different things to different people, and even different meanings to the same person upon different readings or different hearings. These shift perception from the preconscious status quo toward a more conscious status quo or sometimes toward a different preconscious perspective. Whatever, perspective shifts and cannot return. Prior perspective might seem naive from this new perspective, or irrelevant, or simply unseeable. Out of sight, following insight, out of mind.

I have spoken before here about the normal human response to change, to attempt to flee backward toward the comforting illusion of the old status quo. Bank failing? Prop it up! Corruption corroding? Punish it back into line. These are first order responses to invitations for second order change. The way we manage change projects, for instance, guarantees first order responses. Identify intended result, enumerate the steps to achieving that result, assess and mediate risks to satisfying the steps, ... . Deck chairs.

The way we contract for change also encourages first-order responses. We want certainty, not transformation. We want familiarity, not change.

Second Order Change is transformative, irreversible, and permanent. One cannot undo fire. Nor does extinguishing it recover what was consumed.

Our society teeters now on the edge of transformation. The conservatives complain about the lack of specific details in the emerging plans, wondering what pattern the deck chairs will display afterward. Notice how the administration uses stories to describe how it is and how it might become, two principles of Second Order Change. Changing the story changes everything, so change the story first. Acknowledge how it is and how it has been, as painful and demotivating as this might seem, rather than sugar coating the "good old" status quo. Envision how it might be, what it might become, deflecting the details for how it must occur. Forgetabout the freaking deck chairs for a while, and focus instead on what really matters now.

In this reflected light, heading backwards to the old status quo feels like underachieving. Irrelevant. Why would we choose to go backwards, when backwards left us where we are today, when we can see (now, finally) that even better outcomes might well emerge in the future? Heck, the warm anticipation, the very promise can consume (FIRE-LIKE) the seduction of the old useda be.

What's the highest best use of our familiar deck chairs now?

Spindly thin, devoid of splatter;
Certain something’s not the matter!
Still, lethargic, dragging heels,
Don’t dare ask how this one feels!

Me, I’ve tried—maybe not THAT hard—
to build my tenuous house of cards
with rains and winds, my chief assistants,
confused if this defines what isn’t.

Me, I’m dangling from bare threads,
turning on nonexistent treads,
hatless here on weathered ground,
mere threadbare glove without a hand.

Not too many can flip my switch,
fewer care to scratch my itch,
fingers folding upon themselves,
whispered, silent, stifled yells.

Such is the stuff of inspiration,
sparking from no clear revelation.
Who could imagine their redemption
arriving on THAT fool contraption?

A black dog slips in through the gate
surveying our space inviolate.
He sniffs shrubs and noses roses
with careless, thoughtful three-legged poses.

The cats, of course, beyond distressed,
flee to the safety of their nests,
Cowering courageously
until that pup will take her leave.

If life were smooth and soft and warm,
if trivial things could do no harm,
If we knew for sure no sky would fall
What would we do ‘tween short and tall?

Short, the obvious underling,
And Tall, outgrown most everything;
Between the start and the tippy top
lies pretty much everything we’ve sought.

And in that swirl of clear privation
lies the solace, inspiration,
wearing ragged, useless clothes
He comes as capriciously as he goes.

No need to set the visitor’s table
or change the linen, he is able
to slip in and out without a rustle,
timing clearly short of hustle.

But you can depend upon his step,
appearing many times, mid-schlep,
stumbling already humbling hobble
bringing some bright and beautiful bobble.

No one will ever understand
when you try your best to explain the plan.
They’ll insist upon some explanation,
when inspiration refused to leave one.

Take the credit with the blame,
nothing could ever be the same.
You can depend upon this friend.
No one could ever comprehend.

Twenty nine years ago, feeling shut in—in the way one really feels shut in with a nine month old son in the house—my wife and I took off on a toodle down the Willamette Valley in the general direction of Mt Angel. Just east of the town, we came upon a field of sheep with gangly, new-born lambs. We stopped, jumping the shallow ditch to get closer, starting a tradition that has lasted ever since.

Never interested in football, I've never once watched a Superbowl game, and Superbowl Sunday seems like an alien religious holiday. Me, I reframed it. This one Sunday of the year, the toodling back roads have no traffic. It's the first Sunday of the year that anyone's reliably likely to see newborn lambs gamboling in the fields. In my families since, we call it Lamb Lookin' Sunday.

The rules are simple. First, start driving in the general direction of lambs. While it is illegal to pre-determine the exact location of any lambs, and it's strongly preferred that a new lamb pasture be discovered each year, it's perfectly appropriate to plot a course that seems likely to pass past lambs. They must be discovered, not simply revisited.

Second, before returning to home base, a new tune must be added to Dadbo's Terrible Top Fifty Traveling Tunes. These are songs, composed during the ride, which feature some aspect of lambiness. After twenty eight successful excursions, we have quite a portfolio of past melodies and a raft of sparking lyrics, each of which first bring warm reminiscence before finally morphing into distraction. The new one's just gotta be, well, new.

Three: If you see lambs, you gotta stop. It is an obligation, a responsibility, a matter of character and ethics. When sheep are spotted, it's traditional to simply shout out, "Sheep!" as a warning to all in the car. Should there be no evident lambs, the all-clear sign is, "Sheep, no lambs." This returns the watch to watchfulness and halts the search for someplace to pull off the road without ending up in the ditch.

What do we do when we find lambs? We park the car, get out next to the fence, and revel in the innocence of a Spring who's promise can finally be confirmed, though her presence might not yet be felt. The wet, cold winds bother the lambs not even a little as they butt their mother's udder between playing hide and seek, umbilicals brushing the wet grass.

This is the Sunday marking the acknowledgment that we have survived another winter, that another in a truly endless stream of Springs is stalking us, and that right here, unlikely as it seemed just yesterday, hope thrives.

I won't comment on anyone elses' taste in Buffalo wings and half-time extravaganzas. We each receive our reassuring succor from our preferred cup. For me, it's family toodling down a country lane dedicated to a foolish mission, making up another memorably ridiculous tune.

Little tiny baby saying, "Who I am?
Who I am? Who I am?"
Little tiny baby saying, "Who I am?
I'm a lamb!"

John Updike died this week.

I remember most warmly an Updike story the New Yorker published in the eighties. In it, he described a New England weekend trip. Several apparently successful couples sharing a large country house. In the morning, he captured the tenuous space between the professional and the deeply personal by describing how, in spite of every doctor's best advice (at least one of these vacationers was, I seem to remember, a doctor), the house was filled with the illicit smell of bacon.

I love the image. My life, probably yours too, is punctuated with the illicit smell of bacon. We don't smoke except sometimes. We are, like the couples in Updike's story, generally faithful. We are kind, usually. Nothing unconditionally.

Life is conditional. Our balance beam is altogether too narrow, our feet occasionally insubstantial. We live until we die.

Bye, John. Delightful knowing you.

Yesterday's New York Times carried the following fitting requiem.

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

In honor of Inauguration Day 2009, I post this true story from the middle of the recent storm. Happy Day! david

August 29, 2003, Dulles International Airport

Washington DC was a swamp before the federals built our nation’s capital city here. It remains a swamp today. In the last week of August, thunder punctuates the end of each steaming day and the torrential rains recharge the source of tomorrow’s mugginess. No one escapes the humidity or the counter measures put up to thwart it. Either sweat or surrender, captive within the soft hum of artificially de-humidified isolation. Choose one.

A walk down the block nearly guarantees that I’ll sweat through whatever I’m wearing. Shirt, Pants, Socks. Shoes. Knap-sack shoulder straps. Monte Christo fedora. The natives seem better able to move through this semi-solid atmosphere. Some wear suits without appearing to sweat. Their sweat glands must have long ago shut down from over-use, having produced their allotted lifetime’s volume. Nothing else explains it.

The city has changed since my last visit. 9/11 happened and, while the district was heavily secured on that last stop, it was wide open compared to the present state. Large cement planters ring every government building, and most of the buildings are government buildings. Homeland Security's response to terrorist threats created a delightful unintended outcome- flowers. Each planter holds a well-tended little garden, brightly blooming within the constant humidification. The planters are there, I suppose, to prevent attack from car bombings, but they, encroaching into the District's wide boulevards, silently disrupt the traffic flow. The sidewalks narrow and access to the usual vistas strictly limited, when entry is allowed at all. The Capitol building looks like it’s under siege, the once open parking lot surrounded by a seven foot metal wall, which fails to hide the cement plant behind it. Someone’s building something’s behind that wall; probably not planters.

Gardens and sculptures are obscured by traffic baffles. Walking is detour-ridden. I was surprised to find access to the two large fountains on either side of the National Gallery of Art open and empty at seven on a Thursday evening. A semi-cool, bubbling respite spot. There are few such spots left in DC. Most of the Capitol grounds, an arboretum with trees from every state, is cordoned off. Barricades block off access to that wonderful view overlooking the Mall from the front of the Capitol building on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech.

The White House has annexed another block on its Eastern side. The Stonewall Jackson memorial now stands behind crime scene tape. Planters block Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th. Only the street to the North of Layfayette Park carries traffic. Where planters and guard boxes do not limit access, small wire and cedar-slat fences and crime scene tape do.

Crime scene tape.

Most of downtown has been gentrified. New construction continues at a blazing rate, further narrowing many streets and creating moments of unbearable noise. The homeless are present in greater numbers than in San Francisco. The small parks L’Enfant designed as places for a moment out of the sun have become hobo camps. Enter these only if your heart is cold enough to deny a flurry of plaintive requests for money or food. The benches beneath the signs declaring sleeping illegal are homes for the homeless. Some still sleep.

Another crime scene.

The afternoon storms were extraordinary. On Tuesday afternoon, I took a wrong turn coming out of the Metro and found myself walking a few extra blocks. As I passed by Lafayette Park, I noticed a strange electricity in the air and a sudden puff of unanticipated wind. I had time to cross the street and take refuge in the doorway of St. John’s church [ editor’s note: the so-called Presidents’ Church, where this morning President-elect Obama attended services before his inaguration...] before a torrent of wind-driven rain arrived.

A small community huddled there; some homeless, some tourists, some natives on their way home from government jobs. The wind blew from the North, the wrong way down 16th street across Layfayette Park and into the face of the White House, while huge rain drops Kamikazes crashed into a swirling flood. Trees bent and broke under the assault. Lightening struck the buildings surrounding us. Thunder crashed terrifyingly. Still, some continued their hikes. A young mother pushing a stroller with two small children rushed by, kids soaked through and holding their hands over their faces. Some held futile umbrellas before them while the wind-driven rain soaked them anyway Every few minutes another group would wash up drenched under the church's overhang to huddle and stay or continue their upstream migration. I stayed put, watching, dry except for the unavoidable splash from the door jam above me.

The church’s doors were locked, though someone inside peeked out through the glass and nodded, acknowledging our presence. I imagined that he would invite us in out of the fury, but he sauntered back into the sanctuary, leaving the doors unopened. I imagined the storm to be retribution, an angry front pounding on the increasingly unreasonable administration, but the President was not home to answer the onslaught. We huddled, the homeless among us wondering whether their usual bedding spot would be habitable that night, the rest of us considering cabs. Some managed to flag taxis down. One group of six over-sized tourists crammed themselves into a single cab, soaking themselves while impossibly squeezing in like desperate clowns. Two young lovers stopped for a moment, shivering, saturated, before continuing their light jog into the maw.

I had met earlier with a colleague, retired Army, who delicately introduced the subject of the present administration. He fussed over the disrespect shown the departing head of the Army, who was co-opted by tenacious ideologues. The whole city, he explained, is hunkered down, afraid to do what they know is right, their leaders directing them toward irresponsible objectives. Fear and loathing reign. The government has become the exclusive property of a few. The day before, Amy called to report on her visit to a Howard Dean rally in Spokane, where a thousand people appeared to hear an eloquent speaker tell it like it is. Fifteen thousand showed up the night before in Seattle. While the President travels in closed circles, inviting a few wealthy supporters to gather and congratulate themselves, Howard Dean invites everyone and responds to their questions and concerns not with hollow promises but with open explanations and honest disagreement when he honestly disagrees.

Half of the present Federal workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next five years, and many can't wait to leave. The cost of service has become too high. The price of fulfilling policies they cannot in good conscience support has become too great. I suppose many of these jobs will be outsourced to third world countries where someone with fewer scruples than needs will gladly accept them. And the government of, by, and for the people will take another step away from its center, toward a government that simply exploits and oppresses while ignoring the legitimate interests of those who were supposed to be employing it as a means for owning their own destinies.

The homeless man huddled in that doorway with me looks like an honest citizen. The homeless woman next to him complains about having to walk across town to her storage locker to get dry clothes so she can go to work. None of us despaired within the storm. We huddled together, otherwise inappropriately close, staying as dry as we could, hoping for an early secession of hostilities. And the storm cleared, albeit begrudgingly. Pedestrians reappeared. Some soaked. Others dry. Office buildings emptied and the commute continued. The oppressive heat humbled for a few hours. The sky distantly grumbling like a stomach recovering from an over-rich meal.

I was here to research. Here to access the greatest store of knowledge in the world. To sit humbly in the Library of Congress’ Art-Deco reading rooms, fingering books. Gathering data. Considering deeply. The visit included more considering than research. There are only so many external sources of one’s own wisdom. Was I looking for confirmation more than information? I was seeking patterns, which arrived in their usual, well-performed forms. The cordoned walkways and flower-edged buildings were there expressly for my consideration. The long walks past parks cordoned with crime scene tape brought enough of the movie to life before my eyes. As always, plotline and purpose open to my own interpretation.

I leave with a pack filled with notes which I might not refer to again. I will most certainly not carefully reconstruct the facts I collected in my long library hours. I took notes and carefully captured sources, but such precision could not have been the purpose of my investigation. Such material can be at best the medium within which some understanding emerges. What understanding is that? Not an important question. Like the traveler who’s journey is more purposeful than his destination, the time spent huddled in a doorway considering this storm will become the real purpose of my research. The day spent visiting my book in bookstores reminded me what a very small world this continues to be- and how very well connected we are. I walked down K Street, sweating from my hike from Georgetown, and spotting a bookstore, enter to find that my book had been there, sold out, and is on re-order. The book buyer was delighted to order a few extra copies and take some promotional cards. All this reassures me.

We might imagine ourselves strangers, separated by unfathomable distances, or family, isolated only by the illusion of separation. Our choice. When the storm comes none of us will get to choose which doorway we take refuge in. We will take the one most convenient at the time. And that stranger beside us then will not seem so strange once you’ve survived together a close lightening strike or two, and successfully out-witted a determined wind. Class differences dissolve in these torrents, and every meaningful distinction that should collapse- does. The St. Regis hotel stood solidly across the street from my protecting doorway. It’s broad portico sheltering the taxis and their passengers as they arrived and departed untouched by the storm. I thought for a while that, had I been smart, I would have stepped into that glittering lobby and sat out the trouble in a brass and marble bar, but my feelings switched to deep gratitude for having avoided that indifferent isolation.

The storm burped back into being as I hurried back to my hotel, so I stepped into what I mistook for a neighborhood bar for a quick beer to avoid a drenching. The bartender wondered how I could be so dry. “I walked between the raindrops,” I replied, noticing only then that the small stage in the back held a naked young woman dancing by herself. In the soft, reddish light, her body looked featureless. Some men sat rapt before her, projecting details and soaking up something that no storm could provide them. I gulped the flat Guinness and left before I discovered the secret attracting them there.

Back into my tiny hotel room, I showered away the residue from my day's three full sweat drenchings. I had successfully avoided the external dousing, but had three times soaked myself from the inside out that day. I'd found much to consider. Sitting on top of my cool, dry bed, temporarily isolated within a dehumidifying hum and three stories above any crime scene, my considering continued.

david

I’ve never been much of a flag-waver, but I am passionate about good citizenship. By citizenship, I do not intend to imply anything about country of origin, immigration status, or political belief. I speak instead to what any thriving society requires of its citizens, people like you and me.

First: Shovel your neighbor’s walk. If his car’s stuck, stop to help. If you’re neighbor’s out of town on garbage day, get his trash can to the curb and back.

Second: Return that grocery cart to the place provided for returning carts, never leaving it in the handicapped stall or half jacked up on the curb of the planter with a nearly-finished Big Gulp in the cup holder. When you see a lost cart, guide it to where it belongs.

Third: Whenever you see a kid selling lemonade from a sidewalk stand, stop and buy a glass. Even if you hate lemonade. Especially if you’re running late. Your quarter means nothing to you and everything to her.

Fourth: Give cuts in line. Hold doors for everyone, not just for women. Life is not a race. Never was. First one through the door should be saying, “Thank you.”

Fifth: Move your lips when you read. Spend some time every week reading out loud to someone you love. We each need story time.

Civil society requires personal civility. It might seem silly that our way of life relies more upon you returning an empty grocery cart than your willingness to bear arms, but consider the number of opportunities you have to defend our way of life. Few of them involve much more than shoveling your neighbor’s walk. So do that. Zealously, if you prefer.

Instead of waving a flag, wave your behavior. Together, with tiny generous acts, good citizens create and sustain a truly civil society.

Here's a reverent moment for the man today. 
A man who had a place for everything, 
literally everything.
Who never 86ed a thing in his 85 year-long life.
Never gave up on nothing. And nobody.

I still haven't figured out the key
But maybe my difficulty could be that
There never was a key.
But if there was, it's escaped me.

I found the bits to that beautiful drill brace
Not near by, but in another room
Inside that heavy green tool box,
wrapped in a bit of old shirt fabric,
well-disguised. 
Finding them was just a simple matter
of having sorted through everything there
and remembering exactly where
I'd seen what I was looking for before.

I found a partially petrified squirrel in the driveway there this week.
Black and leathery, with little hand-like feet bones protruding.
No fur, no fuzzy tail.
Either a squirrel or a small bat-like demon. 
Dreaming headless in the leaves.

I also found a walnut,
one perhaps left by that same demon squirrel
who died trying to retrieve it
from that dusty, too-secure sanctuary. 
Or, more probably, just forgot
where he'd stashed it.
That would explain why that walnut sat
unmolested for decades on that shelf.

I'd thought many times,
passing it through the years,
that the squirrel had out-smarted himself,
finding the perfect storage spot,
neglecting retrieval. 

But now I think there's something there,
perhaps in the water,
in the well-spring silently seeping beneath the place,
That sticks stuff there.
 The past has needed chiseling out of there
And the present remains awfully thick.
After sorting through every god-damned walnut
I'm sure and likely to kick another one 
out from the baseboard today, 
or in yet another impossibly over-looked cupboard,
stashed rather than trashed,
a cache of the past eternal.

How would you organize the place,
Other than how it just naturally 
seemed to organize itself? 
With fruit in the fruit room, sure,
But also Chlordane and curtain rods in there too.
And paint.
And simple repetition would eventually seize the fate.
With a certain place for everything
and each thing in that place.
A store ignoring organization
in favor of routine
Where every thing would have a place
 but no one knew the scheme.

And here was a man who made his living
sorting like with kind,
little cards into Coke case chords,
memory versus time.
Who's home was a game of Husker Du,
As if organized by a squirrel's brain,
Walnuts remembered from year to year
But rarely retrieved again. 

Who but us, who were born to this,
could possibly unwind
the tentacles tightly tethering
all those ties that bind?
Some days I feel like the prince
chopping Rose Red free
lip-deep in a thick thorn patch
that's out to puncture me.
Other times I'm almost eight
rediscovering mine
or yours or theirs or ours still there
from another time.
What am I to make of this?
Or do with this? Or do without?
The archive pile possesses far too many
pictures from the past
Still unlabeled, precious, specious,
Certain to outlast
The stories recalling who was whom
and what was certainly what.
Was that your grandmother's brother's wife
Or your grandpa's maiden aunt?

"We used to drive over to Bend back then
to visit Ed's brother there.
I remember that one of the daughters was Emily,
She's still alive somewhere."
The pencils didn't come to attention
when the old man would hold forth,
His memories were semi-unreliable
sharing stories more than truth.
We are a part of that mythos now
Each true to our roles
Weavers raveling, knotting, nattering
worried to our souls.
Unworthy, unable, incapable of
remembering what they entrusted to us.
Dusty, trending toward more dust,
Ashes to ashes, eighty-six the fuss.

I'm no better at predicting the future than the next guy. Probably much worse than some. Marginally better than some others. But I don't believe that life depends upon anyone's ability to accurately predict the future. We humans remain interested in prediction even though it's kind of an anti-life occupation.

There's probably no better way to undermine the present than to stick your head far into the future. Time spent focusing upon there is necessarily time spent not being present here. We live only in the present.

Yesterday, I was negotiating with a potential client and discovered (again): the notion that we somehow manifest our future based upon how well we envision it is nothing like a universal law. The engineering class of manifesting might be enabled by accurate, attractive envisioning, but other classes are undermined by it. In a work context, insisting upon clear requirements and measurable completion criteria as a prerequisite for approving pursuit causes at least as much harm as good, and probably more. Anyone satisfied receiving just what they expected often finds their partner dissatisfied by the very same thing. Sometimes, in retrospect, we discover that our insistence on pursuing what we believe we must achieve causes no end of suffering all along the way. So much suffering that even fully achieving the objective can't extinguish the awfulness of the experience.

We are always creating our present while we chase our future. The great tragedy at the end of a pursuit, the end of a project, happens when we realize that while we achieved or even exceeded what we said we wanted, at the end, none of us want to do another one anything like that one together again. Our success destroys our ability to succeed together again because we ignored our present, not because we failed to achieve our future.

One of the Tarot cards advises to consider how you want it to feel, not just what you want to achieve, to avoid hollow victories. This counsel also might help avoid hollow failures.

Last week, I took a short trip to visit some in my community. As a possible sign of our times writ small, no one I visited with expected to be employed full time a year from now. Most are currently unemployed or underemployed, but even those employed full time were facing the certainty or high likelihood of layoff, slowdown, or shutdown in the near future.

One friend owns a twenty year old rare book business. Volume fell 50% this year. His wife, who has held the stabile, non-entrepreneurial job in the family, works for Washington Mutual and will be made redundant by next September. Another, the Chief Technology Officer for an e-business, will be laid-off this month. His wife has been unemployed the past year and has so-far experienced several bait-and-switch job offers, where the advertised position was downgraded between offer and acceptance.

Yet another, an experienced event planner, can't find any but volunteer work. Her new husband, a successful contract data architect, learned last week that his contracting firm was downsizing him out the door. An attorney admitted he was helping a friend structure a buy-out, but beyond that, no work looms on the horizon. Another couple, world-class consultants, have no idea what they will be doing after the first of the year.

Just this morning I learn that a friend with decades of executive experience in the Pharma industry, who transferred to a spin-off start-up, will lose his job this month.

None of these folks predicted --- or could have predicted --- any of this. None of these people can or could collect unemployment or pass muster to receive food stamps. Most of them have some equity in their homes, and some are already trying to maintain their lifestyles by bleeding value from underneath the roof over their family's heads. Each understand that this strategy is even less sustainable than they believed their former success was.

So, we can live in dread of the future, it seems, or hold on tight through these troubles. To the extent that we focus upon the apparently certain future, we might miss the gifts our present brings and disable the value our presence might bring. The rules change. When the paycheck no longer appears, do we stop doing our work? Our work is complicated by the absence of the familiar financial reinforcement, but not---unless we insist---eliminated by it.

This posting is the first in a series focusing upon a new phenomenon in our culture, where systemic unemployment is not centered on the industrial working class, the under-educated, or the traditionally disenfranchised. The new bread line cannot be satisfied by bread alone. Our national empathy might increase as a result. We might find reason to hold on even tighter to each other than we ever found reason to hold on tight before. Our choice?

Forty-some years ago, I wrote my first song. It seems kinda silly now, but it was enough to infect me pretty thoroughly.

Thirty-some years ago, I recorded some tracks in a barn studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just about a year after that I decided to drop out of the music business and finally, after a seven year delay, enroll in university.

Well, I've done a few different things since then, but I've always gravitated back into writing songs. Last weekend some friends stayed with us and, as usual, I performed a few of my songs for them. In the course of that evening rediscovered this ditty I started an awfully long time ago, but never finished. I decided this week to finish it, and managed to complete that today. Here's the first recording of Paint Me A Picture, and my first musical recording in a very, very long time. (Just click the "Podcast" link below.) I hope you enjoy it.

Podcast

Paint Me A Picture

I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Hey, hey.

I’ve been feelin’ way past due,
and smelling your smile in every other song.
I thought these spotlights ought to free me,
how was I to know
that they would hold so strong?
Here I am living my dream of the best of it,
while dreaming of the rest I left behind to play.
Hey hey!

Paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms.
and write me a letter on old motel paper,
Just anything handy could brighten my day.
You’re so far away
I know you’ll trundle off to bed
Thinkin’, “He’s out there somewhere,
Singin’ his heart out to a room full of recent strangers,
While the one he really cares about sleeps soundly.”

Is life ever what it seems?
Does my voice betray what I dare not say in song?
Before this spotlight ever caught me,
We’d managed to survive
by simply holdin’ on.
we held on tight through the thick of it,
Though I’ve been losing my grip when I slip onto this stage.
hey, hey!!

So paint me a picture of the world as it should be
The world as it could be with all of her charms
And write me a letter on old motel paper
Just anything handy could brighten my day
You’re so far away
I know you hate to go to bed
Thinkin’ I’m out there somewhere,
Singin’ My Heart Out to a room full of empty strangers
While the one I really care about sleeps lonely.

I’m workin’ my way through
Only two more sets to go and I’ll be gone.
The spotlight sees right through me,
But I don’t think it shows,
I mean I’m holdin’ on.
‘Cause I’ve been deceiving myself through the worst of it
Just hopin’ to make the best of it someday
Still hopin’ to make the best of it someday,
Hopin’ to make the best of this someday.

11/29/2008

©2008 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Whoever labeled economics 'The Dismal Science' was right on the money. Maybe even right on the money supply. But probably not right about anything else. Economists specialize in counting uncountable things, gathering statistics that serve as 'indicators', and posing future scenarios based upon schools of thought. Dismal.

It's pretty clear to me that no one, much less economists, understand our present economy. Those who might really understand are so distrusted by those who don't, they can't explain a thing to anyone else's satisfaction. Many who don't understand, believe they do understand. As Laing said, "What you don't know you don't know, you think you know." Ever was thus. Dismal again.

Fact might be that none of us have any personal experience with 'an economy,' which doesn't exist anywhere but as a network of figments. But then figments have always taken most of our first row seating. We thrive on 'em. Until they do us in.

Our certainty is the most curious part of our relationship with figments. We, for instance, hedge our risks, believing that we have mediated risk as a result. Ceteris Paribus, all other things remaining equal, is small defense against a credit crunch or a full-tilt meltdown. All other things do not, as a general rule, remain equal, just especially uncountable and unpredictable. Small insurance this, against the first person experience of loss.

Now comes the bailout. And I've been thinking about the leverage one has - or doesn't have - when bailing out. Ever been in a boat that's sprung a leak? The size of the boat relative to the size of the body of water that formerly floated it puts the bailer in a weak position. Even should the leak get fixed, the effort required to remove the accumulated water is great. And the bucket remarkably small in comparison.

I read this week that the value of hedged instruments was estimated at perhaps ten times the annual gross world product. That's a big pond. How big is the leak? No one knows how to value what's left. Well, few understood how to value what was there before, either, but it's easier to float on a positive figment than a negative one. We love positive figments and fear the negative ones.

Maybe we only ever come close to experience the real power of collective figment certainty when the bottom falls out from under our confidently maintained fantasy because we experience real hunger then. Perhaps even genuine privation.

Chuck Spinney is at it again. This time, he unwraps what might well be the strategy behind Obama's remarkable election victory (although I did hear a Faux News commentator yesterday wondering why he only won by such a narrow popular vote margin---had his strategy been mindless, he suggested, he should have won by a much greater margin...). Anyway, this explanation (the one linked to below, not the Faux commentator's) is interesting, even if it isn't really explaining anything remarkable.

"The M&M or Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy was conceived by the American strategist, Col. John R. Boyd. The basic goal of an M&M strategy is to build support for and attract the uncommitted to your cause by framing a "motherhood" position -- i.e., a position no one can object to, like the mythical "motherhood, apple pie, and the American way" -- and then inviting your opponent in to repeatedly attack it and, in so doing, smash himself to pieces at the mental and the even more decisive moral level of conflict. Self-destruction will happen inevitably, if you can successfully induce your adversary into attacking your motherhood position in a way that exposes mismatches among the three poles of his moral triangle, defined by (1) What your opponent says he is; (2) What he really is as defined by his actions; and (3) the World he has to deal with. Whether consciously or not, I believe Obama has an intuitive feel for the moral leverage inherent in the M&M strategy and this enabled him to outmaneuver McCain and his campaign and bring them to the verge of mental and moral collapse. That Obama also did this to Hillary Clinton suggests it is no accident."

How Obama Won

I have inadvertently employed something like this strategy when introducing companies to the practice of ProjectCommunity. I claim that while teamwork is nice and even useful, it cannot meaningfully influence outcome without using it with a broader, ProjectCommunity mindset that considers everyone who can effect and everyone effected by the effort on equal us-ness with the core team. Those who deny this obvious (to me, anyway) fact, inevitably find their cordoned effort under the influence of some unconsidered, discounted constituency. And while this outcome might, from within the team trance, seem like evidence of bad luck, this bad luck and trouble becomes pretty much their only friend. Even those who concede, but continue to consider the community to be comprised of 'stakeholders', over time grow to appreciate what it feels like to be considered a vampire with stakeholders stalking them.

I'm also seeing this strategy used in what feels to me to be a destructive way, though I guess any strategy that succeeds in producing an outcome I don't support might be fairly characterized as destructive. The burgeoning 'sustainability movement,' which is rapidly creating a cadre of ideologues worthy of any mass movement, has taken the same motherhood and apple pie position that the Zero Growth movement occupied thirty years ago. Locally, the City has agreed to convene a sustainability committee. Who could oppose such a thing? Their first objective: To define what sustainability means here.

As near as I can tell, anyone successfully defining sustainability would say that it means continuing surprising change, since that's how the world seems to actually work. Instead, it seems to be widely interpreted as meaning 'retain what we like' and 'eliminate what we don't.' Since when has anyone successfully sustained an agenda like this? Further, I personally have survived long periods of conditions that should have done away with me, my teen-aged years not excepted. Yet here I am. Mysteriously. Even surprisingly.

Not to be cynical, but I keep running into anti-progressive attitudes traveling under the sustainability label. But that does sound cynical, doesn't it? I'm arguing against motherhood and apple pie, even though sustainability remains, as Spinney says, an empty vessel. I'm just beating myself to bits railing about it.

I was re-reading Jay Haley's remarkable essay The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ, and concluded that maybe he knew something about this strategy centuries before the candy ever appeared. He didn't challenge the orthodoxy, but claimed instead to represent a truer instantiation of it. He commanded no one to follow, but invited followers instead. How could anyone successfully challenge such high ground?

Just before election day in 1968, a fellow in advertising who worked for Nixon wrote a newspaper ad that began, "It will be quiet on Tuesday. No speeches. No motorcades. No paid political announcements. It's a very special day, just for grown-ups. America votes Tuesday…and . . . on Tuesday, the shouting and the begging and the threatening and the heckling will be silenced. It's very quiet in a voting booth. And nobody's going to help you make up your mind. So - just for that instant - you'll know what the man you're voting for will do a thousand times a day for the next four years. Now it's your turn." (from Bill Moyers Journal October 31, 2008 essay)

The road to best practice seems twisty, bumpy, and fog-shrouded. The most frequently overheard phrase throughout my career? "We tried that once and it didn't work."

Once? You tried it once? Then concluded that it never would work?

Well, it wasn't just them saying this, I've said it myself.

What happened to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again?"

Not in the modern corporation, thank yew. Not in my backyard, either. There, the phrase is , "if at first you don't succeed, you've failed." Utterly. Supported by, "We tried that once and it didn't work."

We live in a society poised to throw some bum out on his ... bum. Not terribly generous when money, time, or public reputation gets involved. Fail for me once and you're outta here!

What sort of practices get reinforced under this regime? Nothing bold or innovative (aka, likely to fail.) Whatever can keep its head furthest down, shadow most secret, and profile thinnest.

How wise are our 'throw out da bum' choices? How much difference does it make what we choose? (I know, I know, it's supposed to matter a lot who we vote off the island, and who gets to stay. Does it, really?)

The first eXtreme programming project utterly failed. The sponsor threw out da bums! Not even I want to read my first few hundred essays. I cringe when someone requests one of my earlier songs. Looking back (and then projecting forward), I can't see a single situation, other than that time when I decided to jump out of that tree onto a steep slope and cracked a metatarsal bone where, "We tried that once and it didn't work" actually worked. What worked, or seems to have worked so far, involved a lot of "We kept trying, even though it didn't work at first." Some stubborn someone wasting time, money, and reputation on what they (and perhaps no other at first) were convinced held some potential merit, until it did. Best born from one hell of a lot worse.

But none of this might really matter. Maybe change itself catalyzes improvements, like the long ago-discovered Hawthorne Effect. Maybe (cringe) we have no influence on outcome at all.

Interesting piece about the rationality of voters in the current Wilson Quarterly. Maybe these findings are appropriate metaphors for how we choose our methods, maybe not. What if they are?

"It’s not only in the United States that the ­Depression-­era tendency to “throw the bums out” looks like something less than a rational policy judgment. In the United States, voters replaced Republicans with Democrats in 1932 and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy im­proved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher peddling a flighty ­share-­the-­wealth scheme, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and ­longer ­lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased went on to dominate politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems far-fetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented ­well-­considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters ­simply—­and ­simple-­mindedly—­rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got ­better."

We were doing an extended engagement in NYC a few years ago and, as we often do when working there, we played what we call Broadway Roulette. Show up at Duffy Square a half hour before curtain time and see what tickets are left, buy a couple and head off to a show. We happened one evening on the revival of Kiss Me, Kate, and were delighted. This one piece (in the above YouTube video), where two hoodlums, backstage to shakedown the male lead for gambling debts "accidently" wander on stage during a performance, was the highlight of the show for me, because it reminded me that whatever truth we might nudge out at the client's shop, we needed to respect their traditions, or, more to the point, Brush Up Our Shakespeare.

Of course, it's silly that merely reciting the Bard would make the difference our clients sought, but not knowing the Bard might well prevent the change we all aspired to.

We've all been subjected to the next best thing, delivered by someone clueless about the present history supporting everything. We can't really ditch what we've always been. Change, whatever its intent, needs to be melded with the familiar status quo if it is to be meaningful and successful.

So, the next time I (even you) intend to make something different, remember to brush up on whatever amounts to Shakespeare there first. As Virginia Satir said a very long time ago, "Change rests upon the full, albeit temporary acknowledgment of the way things are." And always have been.

Years ago, I wrote the story of an interview with a Chief Financial Officer of a major American corporation. He had underwritten a project that had grown by insignificant increment to threaten his company’s financial standing. He spent most of the session pointing fingers. That damned VP of IT was really to blame. She was an upstart lesbian trying to play with the big boys in the big leagues. That damned Big N consulting firm was to blame. They were booking hundreds of thousands per month and not making any progress. He even blamed his own staff for not performing as he expected.

He finally proclaimed, exasperated, that “this isn’t rocket science!”

I disagreed. It was more like rocket science than not. The larger problem, as I later told him, was that he was not a rocket scientist.

I suggested in my recent post, You Suck@Projects, that the lousy level of understanding in the executive suite about projects contributes a great deal --- quite probably more than any other single factor --- to the continuing poor performance of projects. One common executive-sponsored strategy has been to operationalize projects, enforce method, techinque, standards, and metrics. This can make projects more predictable while transforming adaptable efforts into lethargic bureaucracies. Kinda like making a mustang manageable by turning it into a cow.

Another common executive strategy is to command results. Hardball negotiate outcomes, insisting upon what everyone not hydrocephalic or suffering from altitude sickness can see could never work. Tighten down the screws until no degree of freedom remains, then complain about how unresponsive the effort is.

Ignorance fueled by authority equals true stupidity.

This week, we’ve been watching while a Congress, clearly ignorant about even the first principles of economics, wrestles with a shit-simple decision. Distracting each other with finger pointing from atop lofty principles, insisting upon a label that misrepresents the outcome, insisting infant-like that irrelevant issues also be addressed as a part of the “solution,” then complaining that the resulting response doesn’t actually solve anything.

Where has the metaphor machine gone that managed to label a bill destined to disenfranchise a third of students No Child Left Behind? Wall Street Bail-out? Reframe first! That’s what any responsible rocket scientist would do. No, it’s not just a matter of simply hitting the chosen target, rocket science is all about maintaining scrupulous attention to just how far off course you are at any point in time.

Where did we get these boobs, anyway? We elected them! We, who know little about the responsible operation of government, chose people for their opinion on fleeting issues. Where do they stand on some social issue that government has no business fiddling with? How Christian are they?

The rest of the world stands gape-mouthed as we chop the legs out from under ourselves --- and them, too.

We are no more rocket scientists than we are project managers. We are ignorant executives complaining about our cruel fate, steadfastly refusing the necessary because it conflicts with our notions of how it should be.

The real looting started back in the Reagan years, when installment credit interest was suddenly disallowed as a tax deduction. Then, age-old usury laws fell out of fashion, and states went into the business of chasing each other to the bottom, promising “pay NO taxes, penalties, or fees, and charge your poorest customers whatever-the-heck you please.” There just had to be a prosperous underbelly down there somewhere.

Remember when a new company couldn’t float stock until they’d been profitable for three of the prior five years? Oh dear, how arcane that all seems today!  

Forcing people into defined contribution pension plans was as easy as promising the moon. Why settle for a modest defined benefit amount when you could become Daddy Warbucks on steroids managing your own retirement account?

Why, indeed.

That set the stage for every mom and pop to speculate to live. It’s better to bleat than bleed. To avoid those non-deductible credit charges, why not open a fully-deductible credit line secured by your home? Monthly payments optional. In the long run, we’ll all be ahead. 

In the long run, actually, everyone’s just dead.

When the hedge funds went bust, we snickered, “Suckers!” When Wall Street hit the wall, we secretly smiled, “Schmucks!” When our local banks bottomed out we thanked God for the FDIC. 

(It couldn’t possibly happen to me.)

Then margin calls came to Main Street. No, you didn’t speculate on stocks or buy sub-prime, you just supplemented your shrinking income, tapping the only asset you could ever call “mine.” When Wall Street stumbled, your good old reliable home value slipped. 

Your collateral became your collateral damage.

The Feds were pre-emptively bailing out the Big Boys, the ones who’d pitched the sale, who’d grown through acquisitions ‘till they were just too big to fail. While you and I were working hard to weather wind and hail, the Feds were just too busy to help the little guys bail.

Swamped and sinking, homeless now, we’ve finally found the cure for unaffordable housing here: Can I make you a deal? 

Unless you were a hedge fund jockey or a golden parachute-wearing CFO, the bankruptcy judge will order you to submit to credit counseling. Submit as serenely as you speculated. Remember fondly, friends, the good old days, when all we fussed about was the price of gas?

The Last Day of Summer smelled like Fall
Rain had slipped in overnight, soaking the half-scraped wall
But I still tacked the tarpaulins over the coldframe and
climbed that clammy scaffolding to stand and scrape and sand.

It was Easter when we'd moved the poles and bracing down the wall
and all through May I watched each day usher in the fall.
For I was working some other walls while this one stood half-scraped
Though I hoped I could get back to here before this summer escaped

Into June each afternoon found me blocks away
engaged in chores meant to adore my Father's final days.
I'd decided to try to say goodbye by hovering close to him
Reviving that weed-choked lawn of his and catering to his whims:

Watermelon was the only meal that sorta seemed like food
So I delivered more than he would ever eat, uncued.
For I was chipping away at paint, laid down long before
When he was still all-powerful and I could still ignore
The walls that came between us and the paint we'd slathered on
When time was still so young and fresh it never would be gone.

But this summer our old hourglass began to spit,
hinting that remaining sand would surely, shortly stick.
Inexorably inflexible, our time together came
with me the much more powerful player in the game.
And all this time I worked behind the scaffolding standing there
More than aware I'd not prepared for primer or despair.

July saundered in with almost nothing changed
and slipped right through the lines we drew, leaving none the same.
And then we tried to satisfy his ever expanding needs
while layers of sticky surface scab resisted every plead
The well went dry on August first and and the yard went back to weed
while we began to count the days, unwilling to concede.

Through August I never spent a thought on my untouched wall,
I spent my time climbing his and mine, hoping to ease his fall.
And in the end that dear old friend was pretty thoroughly scraped
and ready for whatever paint might tempt the taste of fate.

And I, exhausted from the time, emotionally drained
decided it was well-past time for me to finally paint.
And so, a few days following his final, labored gasp
It being Indian Summer, and my obligations past,
I placed the soggy planking on the rusting steel shell
And set about to scraping down to bare wood on MY wall.

Ten days later, with September slowing down
the first marine intrusion turned the temperature around.
Though Thursday felt like ninety, Friday felt much less,
Saturday rained all morning, but the afternoon digressed.
And here I stand on the morning of the last day before fall
Still in preparation to prepare my weathered wall.

Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

(Thanks,Wikipeadia!)

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Schmaltz’ Principles of Practical Performance
1. Leverage rule-of-thumb wisdom by appreciating differences in perspective.
2. Work together in community to more fully acknowledge the context governing purpose, and design situated approaches for creating sustainable value.
3. Match work with the preferences of individuals.
4. Acknowledge and appreciate the necessity of self-management to the discovery, definition, and realization of purpose and the creation of lasting value.

..............................................................

1. Acknowledging the Way It Is

I did not catch the bug. Or, perhaps I am just recovering from it. Some accuse me of betraying my class. Others, of heresy. I have been questioning the foundation upon which business and industry is presumed to run. I say presumed to run because I’ve grown to believe that this foundation is much more presumptive than genuine.

A couple of years ago, Rob Austin, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, invited me to his annual innovation symposium, the centerpiece of which was a presentation prepared by Austin describing his research into the sources of business innovation. His research involved filming innovators at work, then, through a process of rigorous observation, cataloging the behaviors common to innovators.

Rob had developed a shorthand notation to describe observations and trained a few graduate students in its use. He claimed objectivity because different observers similarly classified actions when viewing the same film.

I sat teetering between boredom and fascination throughout this presentation. Rob’s method was doubtless scientific, but to what end? He might prove that he can condition graduate students, the lab rats of higher education, to observe and interpret in the same way, but then what? Would knowing, for instance, that the observed innovators opened up conversation rather than dominating it translate into anything useful to the aspiring innovator? I couldn’t stretch my meager imagination to believe it could.

No innovator was observed carefully cataloging the actions of other innovators. This omission was not scientifically observable, yet it seemed a material contribution to—and the very soul of—the practice of innovating. Vaguely acknowledged rules of thumb seemed adequate to guide the innovators, while Rob’s study of innovation demanded statistical rigor, proven objectivity, and repeatable methods. Curiously, innovation involves none of these. It thrives on gut feel over statistical rigor, sensitivity to subjective qualities over objective observation, and blazing trails rather than replicating them.

But what method could describe—let alone prescribe and induce—gut feel, subjective sensitivity, and unique response? Kind of a paradox, isn’t it?

I can’t argue that scientific analysis is impossible for some kinds of work. Mechanical work has long been well-represented by flow charts and innumerable similar process diagramming methods, because machines are programmatic. They are designed to do what they are told to do, and they can be engineered to behave. The recipe for insanity starts when this innocent technique starts charting unchartable territory. Like Rob’s scientific investigation of innovation, charts can be produced describing even the most subjective experiences, but how could anyone know whether the resulting charts represent the successful training of graduate students or an accurate—let alone useful—portrait of subjectivity? Distilled into predictive process descriptions, even love couldn’t help but seem understandable.

Poor Rob. He had managed to attract National Science Foundation funding, but had chosen a paradoxical field of study. The best his techniques might produce is a homogenization of something only useful raw, an absurd average, a silly statistic. But why would anyone chase such chimera? For science? For fortune? For fame?

What If Mechanical Engineers Ruled The World?

Austin seems to have stumbled into Frederick Winslow Taylor’s first principle of scientific management. Taylor, a nineteenth-century mechanical engineer, developed four engineering principles he claimed would dramatically improve all work. His first principle: Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

Sounds very much like Austin’s tactic, doesn’t it? The mechanical engineer’s world is mechanical, prescriptive, predictive. Unlike the pattern-producing chaos other world views describe, the mechanical engineer inhabits a tidy, knowable universe, or one capable of being tidied up. So they tidy. They hammer and nail and paint, oblivious to deeper philosophical questions, focused upon completing the assignment.

Hooray for them! If only the rest of us could perform so carefreely. But we are tangled in one or another conundrum. We fuss. We fear. We experience a more organic, subjective, surprising world; a messy universe glimpsed in shifting patterns of meaning and feeling and not so easily mastered. We, too, might hammer and nail and paint, but while struggling with deeper philosophical conundrums, leaving, if not a physical mess, at least some deeper meaning unresolved. Because we are not mechanical engineers. We are not any more or less human than mechanical engineers, but our humanity seems to play a more dominant role in our lives.

I’m merely describing temperaments. The decisive and the phlegmatic. The journalist and the poet. The realist and the dreamer. If mechanical engineers ruled the world, the dreamer might well be classified as unproductive rather than inventive. Placed on an assembly line, dreamers are dangerous, but wouldn’t immersing a realist in ambiguity produce similarly disjointed results?

One client described as an outright assault on intuitive thinkers by sensing doers the Bush administration’s attempt to reform via process improvements Los Alamos scientists’ proven generations-old practices. Physicists do not approach their work as a mechanical engineer might, and their methods seem inefficient and meandering in comparison to the straight-forward mechanics any engineer would employ. But the problems physicists pursue are different in class than those engineers resolve. They demand meandering, intuitive thoughtfulness, rather than active, predictive solution. They are not merely employing hammers, but inventing them.

The result? At Los Alamos, the assault yielded dramatic improvement in the productivity of the scientific investigation, not because the speed of scientific discovery was increased, but because a significant number of scientists choose to leave the Labs, reducing the overhead cost. What will this savings cost long term? No engineer could calculate this cost.

In Mark Frost’s novel The Second Objective, Nazi spies hold counterfeit passes to gain entry to Allied headquarters, but discover that “headquarters” is misspelled as “haedquarters” on their counterfeits. The Nazi spies produce replacement counterfeits to correct this error, only to learn later, after their intrusion is thwarted, that the genuine passes contained the misspelling. A French detective who helped crack the case comments about the Nazis, “They didn’t really make the trains run on time, either.” Their attention to the way it was supposed to be blinded them to the way it was.

And this kind of blindness is the very foundation of the mechanical engineer’s world view. Their certainty about how things should be, supported by rigorous scientific investigation, blinds them to the way things actually are. We can observe only the observable, and much of what dictates success in human endeavors remains tenaciously unobservable. We might decide that behavior can serve as a stand-in for all we cannot see, and conclude much based upon easily observable actions, and miss seeing the presumption this construction teeters atop. A house of cards.

If Mechanical Engineers ruled the world, we might find a world obsessed with measurement, one focused upon mechanical efficiency, and one improving meaningless as well as meaningful processes. This mysterious world would be characterized as ultimately predictable, and our economies would become roulette wheels rigged by a cruel fate. Our governments would be endlessly bailing out institutions grown so huge and essential that we cannot afford for them to fail, but ones which ultimately fail from focusing upon engineering clockworks to master organics. When they crumble, we find few guilty of any crime save those crimes classified as collusion, conspiracies created to contain natural messiness into predictable portfolios. We wonder how different these outcomes might have been had their energies been focused upon more fully acknowledging the way it is rather than enforcing the way it otta be.

Our survival might well depend upon us fighting this global movement toward Taylorism. In education as well as business, in government as well as industry, the mechanical mindset has gained significant credibility. And no wonder. It can, does, and has produced dramatic short-term improvements in the standard of living, as measured by income, capital, and wealth. But as the roller-coaster performance of our industries as well as our governments show, these improvements are short-lived. They boom then bust. They provide before producing privation. They are ultimately unsustainable.

So I declare today, September 11, a global war on Taylorism, a form of terrorism more terrifying than any suicide bomber might induce. A threat to civilization, to humanity, that is subtle, seductive, and ultimately suicidal. We know, or should know, the thin thread from which our viability dangles. The small God efficiency invokes. The slim salvation a monkey wrench, even one in the hands of the most skilled mechanical engineer, might provide. The ultimate cost of disqualifying—merely because their temperaments are not mechanical—three quarters of our citizens, of creating a counterfeit underclass of dreamers, poets, and innovators we punish for crimes against the machine.

Let this be a gentle engagement, inexorable. Fought not with the machines of war, but with the hearts and minds of thoughtful and caring people. One fueled by insight rather than hard rules of engagement. One informed by ethical responsibilities rather than by marching orders. Our goal cannot be to vanquish an enemy, but to encourage and nurture our own humanity. To appreciate differing gifts and build robust communities of otherwise individually inadequate individuals. To sustain rather than contain. To imagine rather than enforce. To build rather then destroy. To see science as something more than a metaphor for predictability, but as a method of genuine inquiry, one intended to generate more questions than answers, more insights than injunctions, and more sustainable humanity than mechanical precision.

I delivered this eulogy for my father today:

My father was a gentleman,

A gentle man.

A Republican.

He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

He was a soft touch;

He loaned much but borrowed little.

My father was a noble man,

A nobleman,

An able man.

He wasn’t handy, but he was persistent!

He persevered much

And gave so freely, he seemed rich.

He leaves behind a family,

Familiarity,

Hilarity.

He came from what today is called a ‘blended family,’

But during the Great Depression was just a busted home.

He swore that his kids wouldn’t grow up like that

And we did not.

He insisted upon eating the chicken backs

At Sunday chicken dinner

I was grown before I understood that

No one prefers to eat back meat,

Not even him!

He preferred for others to be satisfied

And could absorb more personal misery in pursuit of other’s happiness

Than anyone I’ve known.

My father hated infirmity

and growing older

was hard for him

A bungled surgery left his foot drooping,

and he walked with a cane after that.

He’d walk almost down to Sturm and back

at a turtle’s pace. But he walked.

My father was a working man,

A hard-working man,

Never a hard man.

He held his own convictions,

forgiving others their’s.

He seemed to know someone everywhere he went.

He was a gentle spirit

Who just couldn’t get

Why we couldn’t get along.

He loved songs. Country songs and crooner’s songs

Charlie Pride and Nat King Cole,

And old familiar melodies we’d never heard before

back-lit him like sheet lightening.

He stood up for his kin.

He believed in them,

Even when others’ faith was thin.

He’d shake his head and remember when

They were younger, I guess, and clueless,

And he seemed to understand.

He leaves behind a closet filled with free umbrellas

Blind Native Americans sent

Pleading for his pennies for their programs.

They got their annual check. An obligation he fulfilled

Even though he had no use for those umbrellas.

He read voraciously

Deliciously

Endlessly.

When he’d read every book in the house,

and started in reading them twice,

it pained him to give those friends away

He filled those shelves again before he left.

He loved baseball

tolerated football

hated basketball.

He coached but hated competition.

Sportsmanship was more important—

That everyone could play.

Winning or losing meant less to him than how he played the game.

And he played well.

He also played when he wasn’t well.

He had some down days in his life:

Sick sometimes, but never unshaven.

No time off without grooming.

His mornings smelled of Aqua Velva,

after he’d shaved until his face shone with satisfaction.

He had a lead palate

preferring veal cutlet

to any fancier cut.

He despised mayonnaise,

revered anything with gravy,

He let his beans melt his cheese,

and he counted his cholesterol.

This is the part I cannot say

It’s above my pay grade

He and my mother were bound by something

Few have found

I’m not qualified to expound on it other than to say

His dedication drove me crazy

Inspiring me. A rock. A bickering mountain.

He protected her.

More than a care-giver,

It was as if her fate was on his soul,

and he couldn’t let go.

We couldn’t know the depth of this devotion

“This is just a part of the deal,” he disclosed

Heaven might know what he meant by that.

I know I don’t.

I’ve been trying on

different songs,

unseen ways of seeing

But have not yet found the sort of tune

that might replace this being.

“I can’t complain,” he would explain

It’s all part of the deal.

He’d take his cane and his good name

and make it almost down to Sturm and back

at the speed of a screaming turtle.

note: Sturm is the name of a street about two blocksfrommy father’s home.

True Story:

The evening before my dad died, a praying Mantis landed on the front screen door. Mother recalled that a mantis takes up temporary residence on that porch this time every year.

All that evening and into that long, long night, while family came and went, and we stepped out for soothing night air, that screen door opened and closed again and again and again. Through it all, that solitary Mantis held vigil, much as we inside held loving vigil over his final night.

Morning light found our mantis devotional still. As Nancy the hospice nurse came and went, and his loving CNA Kathy came to bathe and massage him, that mantis remained. Silent. Still.

He drew his last labored breath mid-morning, and as we stepped outside to find consoling air, we noticed our mantis still in prayer. As family flocked together to share numb prayers, opening and closing his door another few dozen times, our monkish mantis never moved.

And later, as the mortician arrived, minister mantis stood steadfast. Only after his sons helped guide him one last time through that door—into eternity—did our freakish friar fly away.

The Ancients believed the mantis had divine and magical powers. May a divine and magical mantis sing kaddish for each of us in our time. Amen

Robert C. (Bob) Schmaltz, of 1015 Pleasant Street, died peacefully at home on Wednesday, September 3, 2008, aged 85 years. We celebrate his life at Central Christian Church on Monday, September 8 at 10 a.m.

Bob was born January 15, 1923 in Mt. Angel, Oregon, to Nicholas D. Schmaltz and Caroline P. Bounds. He was raised in Mt. Angel, Scotts Mills, Yachats and Waldport, Oregon, attending Waldport High School. He married Bonnie M. Wallace on October 28, 1945 in Condon, Oregon, where he served with the volunteer fire department, played on the town baseball team, worked with the county road crew, and began his long career with the US Postal Service. Bob moved his family to Walla Walla in 1952, continuing his Postal Service career, retiring in 1978 after 30 years service. Bob and Bonnie raised five children in their Pleasant Street home. After retirement, Bob and Bonnie traveled the country in their motor home, visiting family and friends until ill health intervened.

Bob was an avid reader, enthusiastic baseball fan, resonant singer, and quiet-spoken storyteller. Bob was a member of the Central Christian Church and the local Parkinson's Support Group. He was the primary caregiver for Bonnie for the last fifteen years.

He is survived by his wife, Bonnie, his half-brother Darwin Stewart of Downey, Idaho, half sisters Leta Dibble of Corvalis, OR, and Victoria Nelson of Walla Walla, step-sister Vanessa Clemons of LaGrande, OR, children R. Carol Smith of Walla Walla, Robert A. Schmaltz and wife Lana of College Place, David A. Schmaltz and wife Amy Schwab of Walla Walla, and Kathy (Schmaltz) Carey and husband Greg of Tulsa, OK, 12 grandchildren, and 25 great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, his brother, his step-brothers and sister, one daughter, Susan McCormack, one son-in-law, and one great grand-daughter.

The family requests memorial donations be made in Bob's name to Walla Walla Community Hospice.

This will be a brief, peg-legged posting. I have been peg-legging for some time, working around a curious feature. A few weeks ago, my space bar and delete key started working intermittently. Just here and there would I noticethatwhatIhadjusttypedcameoutasonevery,verylongword. Wait a minute or two, and the problem would fix itself.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Posting on a ListServ (honest, these things just appear. Really!)

"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.

Here is the promised next installment of the series considering the secular religion of Management-ism. It started HERE, went THERE then OVER-HERE before bouncing back HERE and WHERE? then finally coming to rest UNDER HERE. So where are we now?

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.

Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, continued HERE and HERE with the story of an HMO-weary Internist "Going Off The Grid" to establish a real Health Maintenance Organization, before delving into deep Abstractions HERE and the mechanical mindset HERE.

([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

Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, where I started explaining, "How We "Managed" to Screw It Up," finding a curious kind of management lurking, and continued HERE and HERE with the story of an HMO-weary doctor "Going Off The Grid" to establish a real Health Maintenance Organization, before delving into the deep Abstractions nourishing management-ism HERE.

In the last installment, I introduced the character behind management-ism. The 'can't manage what can't be measured' mindset that seeks metrics for measuring everything. Peter Block once asked the question, "If performance appraisals are so good, why don't we perform them on our spouses?" We don't perform them on our spouses because we have better ways to assess the goodness of that relationship. In absence of relationship, though, where we merely inhabit roles and perform process scripts, managing by such metrics might seem to make all the sense in the world. The management-ist sees no contradiction in employing 360 degree feedback strategies. The rest of us certainly do!

Within industrial-scale organizations, some new (read:old) paradigms are emerging. When Nike realized that the gas used in their air-cusioned sole was a volatile greenhouse gas, a movement started within the company. As Peter Senge explained it, three people—not executives, not powerful middle managers, but three rank and file employees—started a movement. They hosted lunch-time chats. They networked to gain influence. Their goal? A carbon-neutral Nike. Impossible? Certainly not on the corporate radar at that time. It is now. Nike's long-term strategy includes carbon neutrality. This started as a conversation among the powerless to become the stated goal of the whole organization!

How did THAT happen? You already know!

This is no isolated incident, though it might serve as the model or pattern for an under-recognized reality operating within even industrial-scale organizations. Innovation isn't top-down. Inspiration isn't either. The motive power that actually moves even the behemoths is organic, not mechanistic. Though the literature focusing upon processes and the improvement thereof leans heavily upon mechanical metaphor, the mechanism they fail to describe isn't mechanical, but organic. Quite remarkably human-scale. (Don't let the management-ist know, okay? They think they're in charge.)

If the management-ists aren't in charge, who is? As unlikely as this might seem, you are. I can't count the conversations I've had with individuals imbedded within industrial-scale organizations, where they cheerfully recount how they get away with things. These are not native sneak thieves, but deeply benevolent and loyal employees who routinely work the system so that system can work. The management-ists are blithely ignorant of the catastrophes avoided, believing, I guess, that their grand strategy is working more or less as they intended. It isn't. It never does.

The machine has remarkably little influence over this organic spirit. I have seen it thrive under the harshest conditions. In fact, harsh conditions seem to encourage it. Telling it "No!" won't deflect it much. This will just get its conniving imagination working harder.

The choice is not to work for someone else or work for yourself, you're always working for yourself, no matter who signs the paycheck. Working for yourself carries some ethical responsibilities, which can become lost in the overly-responsible dance management-ism embodies. In fact, everyone is managing all the time, it's not just the responsibility of the designated managers to manage. Where management becomes the sole purview of designated managers to do unto others and descends to the level of religious conviction, the net available management power within the organization plummets. These organizations are not certified organic. Where everyone understands that, regardless of what the mythodology claims, they are responsible for managing themselves first, interesting things happen. They happen as a resonance of a set of ancient ethical responsibilities that every human was born with but that the industrial, management-ist mindset scrupulously ignores. Kinda like what happens when organic methods reconnect a plant with its source of macro-nourishment. (Some just call this bullshit.)

One of these ethical responsibilities is:

You hold the ethical responsibility to work the system so the system can work. No system, however cleverly devised, is capable of working as designed. It will not reliably work for you, so you will have to change it in order for it to work for you, and for your organization. How should you change it? Use your best judgment.

Enough for today. More next time

150 Years ago, phrenology---the practice of interpreting bumps on the head---was considered perfectly reasonable. Today, we have Management-ism instead of that foolish practice.

Continuing the investigation of the secular religion of Management-ism started HERE, continued HERE and HERE ...

The last installment introduced Dr. Bob Ironside, an Internist who fled the managed care system to start a subscription-based health advocacy clinic, where his clients actively collaborate WITH him to maintain health rather than simply treat illness.

Dan Starr, in his comment on the third installment, noted that the HMO (Health MAINTENANCE Organization) concept originated in just this idea, a physician/client partnership focused positively, to maintain health and so reduce health care costs. It morphed into its opposite, where the object became negative, to reduce health care costs by aggressively "managing" allocation: dictating delivery terms, questioning diagnoses and treatment recommendations, and tightly limiting reimbursements to minimize costs. How maintaining health shifted into minimizing costs might serve as the general pattern defining the difference between the manager and the management-ist.

Management-ism thrives on homily and abstraction. Read any number of popular management books and you might reasonably conclude that management is more art than science, or so many commentators have concluded. The science seems rooted in something other than carefully considered propositions, relying heavily upon rumor, personal preference, and "consensus". It can't quite qualify as an art, either, as anyone who's formally studied art or lived as an artist quickly acknowledges. Some descriptions devolve into the even murkier realm of "leadership", which has all of the sparkle and promise common to personality cults.

In a Harvard-sponsored teleconference on leadership training, one of their B-school researchers admitted that not even Harvard knew how to train for leadership, and that their efforts would probably be best focused not on the B-school, but upon the Divinity School. She characterized B-school candidates as being more aggressive and self-centered than D-school students. Neither of these preferences are closely associated with good leadership. They are, however, common to forceful governance.

But how to transform responsible guidance or leadership into forceful governance? One must have a code, an ethic if you will, that justifies aggressive, self-centered acts. A force, ahem ... to be reckoned with. And that force was found in rules of thumb elevated to imperative, in promoting specific experiences into Best Practices, and otherwise mindless homilies into mind-numbing necessities. By creating an enforceable myth, a compelling story, and, above all, a plausibly believable fiction: Organization Man. (I imagine a kind of superhero who wears a spandex Brooks Brothers suit, high-luster wing-tips, and a sixties-style, narrow snap-brimmed hat. What Frank Loesser called "a Scarsdale Galahad, the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type." Think Bob McNamara in his prime.)

Where to begin? Lets begin with what managers, according to their mythodology, can't do. They "can't manage what they can't measure." Moral: Anchor the organization to clear, objective, measurable metrics: SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound) goals. "Balanced" Scorecards. Focus upon predicting the future as the present reality. Tether everything to numbers. [Or, as everyone with much experience "managing" to these knows them, "NUMB-ers."] There, the perfect ambiguity cocktail, a steady diet of which utterly fogs reality.

One thing I noticed missing from Dr. Bob's description of his practice was the absence of any mention of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals. I'm certain his operation carries a few of these, as all businesses do, but they were nowhere apparent in the space between Dr. Bob and I. They were not foreground dominant. There, he seemed to be managing by instinct, by gut feel, by sparkly-eyed purpose. Exactly how he will satisfy his mission was not even germane to his realization of it. His clarity of purpose was obvious in his very presence. He was not managing his clinic, he was being it.

The professional management-ist is careful to maintain clear boundaries between self, others, and organization; he remains above all else "professional." He is not emotional—the constant focus upon the numb-ers helps there. Not introspective, but extrospective, taking cues from what he characterizes as external objectivity. He keeps score. He is fiercely loyal to his allies and fiercely allied against his enemies. You'll never see him sweat. He plays high-stakes poker. He knows the odds, the margin, the vigorish, and the game. He makes the rules when he can, bends them when he can't, and is tenaciously competitive; but a cardboard competitor, two dimensional, shallow. He's ruthless if he needs to be, generous when he must, heartless in the face of doubt, and stingy extending trust. He's convinced of the rightness of his cause, skeptical about your reliability, and cynical about his fellow man. He's negotiated a generous package for himself that will guarantee that he leaves "whole", whatever the contingency. He is, above all else, politically astute.

Quite a stereotype, huh?

In practice, the management-ist might well exhibit all of these patterns, but would never characterize himself in this way. Or, he might well exhibit none of these characteristics. He is, as the soothing voice-over in a Walt Disney short describes Goofy, "just your average guy looking to get by in the world." He's been infected with a perspective, though, one which comfortably justifies cold-hearted compartmentalizing, removing the person from the personality, leaving a caricature, an actor playing a role. An abstraction. Not present. Human absent soul.

He is curiously not curious. He can be quite dismissive toward anything he doesn't a priori understand and especially toward anything he cannot measure. If you cannot speak in his curious, limited dialect, it's YOU that will be judged clueless. As a class, they suffer from the one truly incurable disease: certainty. Consequently, they are addicted to risk-taking.

The seductions of this life are huge and, not surprisingly, measurable! Money. Position. Power. Authority. Security. Tenure. The costs, too, are enormous but fuzzy. Obligation. Responsibility. Accountability. Indictability. And, curiously, tremendous insecurity. (What do you do when you reach the top of your profession? Move to a gated community!)

Their world is abstracted by objective measurement. Like the mythical character who falls in love with the swan, the management-ist falls in love with his gauges, managing what he can measure and trying to measure whatever he aspires to manage. This might explain what transformed health maintenance into managed care. The gauges associated with managing care might just be as close as any management-ist could come to getting their arms around health maintenance. Health is subjective. Care can be metered by definite abstraction. It's all in the numbers, somewhere.

More next time. I've gotta go check the bumps on my head. ...

This posting continues the story started HERE and continued HERE. This third installment of my investigation of Managementism, the profoundly popular theology influencing everything from food production to health care, looks at one example of one practitioner who choose to step "Off The Grid."

In the last installment, I introduced a doctor, Bob Ironside, who, dissatisfied with the management of the health care system he was a part of, took personal agency to make his part work much better. I was sitting in an extremely comfortable room—I would not call it a waiting room, because it was clearly not designed for any activity as wasteful as waiting—for a chat with Bob about his life off the grid.

...I spent the few minutes after the receptionist left checking out the room. My chair was extremely comfortable. Three other matched chairs were, like mine, set around a large, low table, which held a bouquet of fresh flowers. Just behind me, on a sideboard, a Bose Wave Radio softly bled classical music. The windows to my right overlooked the mansions and forest just above NW Portland. I sipped my water, wondering where this conversation would start. And where it might lead.

Bob quietly opened the sliding panel and slipped into the room. I stood, and we shook hands like old friends before settling back into those comfortable chairs. I asked, "Bob, why don't I feel like a cow in a cattle car waiting for the conductor to call my stop?"

He explained that people don't open up when you treat them like cattle. He'd designed this clinic to not feel very much like a clinic because the traditional design shuts people down, and he needs people to speak freely there.

He went on to explain how his clinic works. "If Tim Russert had been our client, I'm convinced that he wouldn't be dead," he asserted. Bob's clients do not suffer catastrophic illness. Sure, they get sick, but in every case, he's seen the trouble coming and caught it in the earliest, most treatable stages. He helped one client, an ex-Olympic athlete, avoid a heart attack by carefully listening to his family's health history. Though he was in excellent health and showed no symptoms of heart disease, he ordered a battery of tests which showed that he did, indeed have heart disease, which he's treating before it became a catastrophe.

He shared several examples of clients who came to him dissatisfied with the diagnoses (and mis-diagnoses) they'd received (or not received) from their harried managed care physicians. Bob's great skill, I knew from my earlier relationship with him, was his exceptional ability to create rapport and really get to know his clients. He gets to know their story and can weave the intricate threads together. Perhaps just as importantly, his clients get to know Bob's story, too. He discloses a lot of his personal stuff as a part of his work.

This, it seems to me, is one hallmark of the self-manager. They do not aspire to an emotionally or intellectually or politically-neutral professional presence, but a disarmingly personal one. He is a very skilled and deeply respected practitioner, but he doesn't present himself as a Mr. Know-It-All. Instead, he creates a sense of joint inquiry, fueled by deep personal interest and, as I already knew but was about to learn even more profoundly, an uncommon advocacy.

His practice is now all about advocacy. When he refers a client to a specialist, he visits the specialist WITH them. He doesn't second-guess or upstage the specialist, and rarely says a word during these visits. If the client has questions, he lets the specialist answer unless explicitly invited into the conversation. Too many times, Bob noted, clients have questions after a specialist visit or don't understand that they don't fully understand what the specialist tells them. Bob forwards extensive patient history to each specialist beforehand, but admitted that specialists do not always make time to review them before the client arrives. Having been there, Bob can help position the puzzle pieces so the whole portrait makes sense to his clients, their specialists, and himself, too, making for much better-informed choices.

I was astounded! I wondered how he could possibly schedule those visits. (He also visits any client who's hospitalized.) Bob explained that client load has a lot to do with disabling a doctor's ability to fully advocate. Under managed care, he needed to carry a client load of about 3000 to make the numbers work, and even then, the numbers didn't work very well. Fully three-quarters of his staff then worked on billing and collections, and his performance was hampered by the normal intrigues that come with any large staff. Now he has a client load of about a hundred.

Incredulous again, I wondered, "So, you can do more with less, but what about the bottom line."

"It's much healthier than it ever was before," he smiled."

How does this work? People subscribe to Bob's service, paying an annual flat fee in advance. In exchange, Bob provides exceptional internist attention and health care advocacy. One of his clients, the Board Chair of a local hospital, was dissatisfied with the specialist Bob had referred him to at that hospital. "He was brusk, and 'all-knowing,' and we didn't feel like he'd delved deeply enough before diagnosing. So, I looked nation-wide, and ended up referring him to a colleague at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, who found a potentially life-threatening condition before it could threaten. Did Bob accompany his client there, too? You betcha!

This is an admittedly small-scale operation, but it's getting noticed by the HMOs. Bob's clients are healthy because they proactively attend to their health, rather than retroactively respond to often avoidable illness. The reimbursement for treating a single modest health crisis could pay for a lot of pro-active advocacy. Bob's practice doesn't replace the need for personal insurance coverage, but it quite effectively reduces the need to resort to it in crisis.

I asked Bob if he'd become a pariah in the local medical community, and he recounted a conversation with a local cardiologist at a recent meeting. "You're the envy of everyone practicing medicine in this town," his colleague confided. To those who might criticize Bob for taking an admittedly top-tier clientele, he responds that he's always treated the indigent and still does. Some of his clients pay noithing. Under the 'put on your own oxygen mask first' principle, Bob claims to be much more interested in volunteering his time now that he has time to volunteer. And now that his practice is supporting him well, rather than struggling to make ends meet. What was once mostly obligation has become a welcomed and more frequently engaged in opportunity.

I'm afraid that this posting has grown much larger than I intended, so I'll sign off here. There's more story to come. To be continued. ... ...

This post is the second installment in a series considering Management-ism, which I started here.

I first met Bob Ironside in the early eighties. He was then an Internist, working in a typical clinic he shared with a half dozen other docs. The waiting room was large enough to hold twenty or thirty patients. Staff worked behind a counter with a sliding glass window. A receptionist, several nurses, rows of shelves with patient files. The doctors saw patients in small rooms along a central hall, which was closed off from the waiting room by a door, guarded by one or another of the nurses. When a doctor was ready, a patient's name was called out, and the door to the examination rooms opened, and that patient was ushered down the hall.

In other words, a typical doctor's office.

The most important information, more important it seemed than the patient's condition, was the condition of their insurance, for upon entering the office, every patient visited the sliding glass window and discussed how they would be paying. I was using my insurance, so the receptionist photocopied my insurance card, calculating the co-pay amount while I filled out forms. I felt like I was purchasing a vacuum cleaner on the installment plan.

All typical doctor's office stuff.

I waited quite a long time, and since I had left work in the middle of the afternoon for the appointment, I noticed the time going by. Finally, my name was called and a nurse accompanied me to the examination room where she weighed me, took my blood pressure, and told me that the doctor would arrive momentarily. A few minutes later, Bob entered the room.

We chatted. His "manner" was casual and focused. He seemed genuinely interested in knowing about me. A few minutes into the examination, he explained that he was breaking a rule. What rule, I wondered.

"The Health Management Organization (HMO) monitoring this clinic," he reported, "has calculated that I should need to spend no more than seven minutes with any individual patient." he announced. "But I need at least a half hour to get to know anyone well enough to diagnose for them, so I break the rule, especially when the patient is someone interesting like you."

I felt flattered, but also felt the indignation Bob was spewing. He was genuinely upset. He continued, explaining that the geniuses at the HMO were not doctors but statisticians, accountants, auditors, and professional managers, none of whom had ever performed even the simplest diagnoses on any patient. I felt as oppressed as Bob obviously did.

He spent his half hour, made a recommendation or two, and we parted.

Over the following years, I followed Bob to a couple of other clinics, one's he and his colleagues started to try to sidestep the hated HMO. Over a decade later, he confided to me that he was not making it, that the management oversight had become simply absurd. Three quarters of the employees of his latest clinic worked not in patient care, but in billing and collections. Insurance companies further discounted standard charges by an average of 40% (for the service they provided processing their client's claims), and extended payment terms beyond 180 days. "How can anyone run a business with conditions like this? The efficiency experts claim savings by adding overhead to my organization, while the insurance companies walk away with terms favorable only to them. They're bankrupting me!" He also reported that insurance coverage seemed to encourage patients to be less responsible about their health, seeing health care as a right rather than a shared responsibility. He went on to say that he was thinking very seriously of simply going off the grid.

I'd not heard that term before, so he explained that his vision was to start a clinic where insurance would not be accepted as a valid form of payment, where patients contracted directly with him for his services, prepaying to eliminate billing and collections, in return for care without the management.

Fast forward a decade. I have been thinking about the off the grid model, and wanted to get a horse's mouth description of it, so I emailed Bob, asking for some face-time to chat. I spoke with his admin, and scheduled a late afternoon hour in his new off-the-grid office.

The offices of D² are on the top floor of a medical office building directly across one of Portland's familiar tree-lined streets from Good Sam Hospital. I take the elevator up, and find the smoked glass door inscribed with the message "Admittance By Prior Appointment Only." A speakeasy doorbell adjacent. I ring the bell and the shadow of a young woman appears behind the door. The receptionist is not dressed like a nurse. She greets me by name, shakes my hand, and escorts me down a dimly-lit hallway, decorated with fine Oriental art, to a small sitting room overlooking the West Hills. Classical music softly fills the background space as she asks me if I'd like anything to drink. I order water and she brings a bottle and a glass, pouring from the bottle before closing the thin Japanese room divider panel to give me privacy while I wait for Bob to appear.

To be continued. This posting is long enough for today.

This entry might turn into a bit of a rant.

My question, How did we manage to f@#^ up our age-of-Aquarius opportunity in the world? When I look around, I notice that, not only is my generation worse off than the prior one, it's worse off than the one before that! The next generation seems to be even worse off than mine was. How did we manage to do that?

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which continues his commentary, started in The Omnivore's Dilemma, on the sorry state of food production and distribution. He cites the close correlation between the introduction of what he calls Nutritionism and increases in everything from heart disease to attention deficit syndrome. Pollan speaks at length about the curious science of nutrition, which he claims more closely resembles a religion than a disciplined science. Post WWII, food became increasingly replaced by nutrition, typically vitamins and minerals added to a corn starch base and sold in lieu of food. This strategy enables industrial food producers to enjoy huge margins, but it ignored something important about food. Food apparently cannot be successfully separated from its context. We can't just distill a meal into a prescribed set of nutritional elements and expect to thrive. a) We don't yet understand what all the elements are and how they actually relate, and b) We have been misusing science to support the notion that we DO know what we actually do not. (Oh, and successfully lobbying to make this speculation the law of the land.)

... We have apparently been following a similar path in other areas, too. What Pollan noticed in the food system is at work in other areas of our society as well. His description of the Industrial Food System and the emerging Industrial ORGANIC Food System can pass for a reasonable description of our Managed Health Care system, too, and our Homeland Security System, as well as our business management system. What do these systems have in common?

Managers!

Not, as my daughter used to explain when she came home from grade school, "Self Managers," but what might be best described as "Other Managers." People who's primary job is to manage the interactions of others.

Who am I pointing my finger at? An old friend once confided an old bit of Brazilian folk wisdom: If it smells like dog shit where ever you go, check your own shoes first." Full disclosure: I have a degree in management. It seems as though I've been trying to unlearn ever since what I learned to earn my degree.

Okay, this IS turning into a rant. Perhaps a rant aimed at myself, but a rant nonetheless.

Peter Drucker claimed that the rise of the professional manager was the most significant achievement of the 20th century. I'm thinking that the replacement of the professional manager by the rise of the self manager might be the most significant achievement of this new century. If we can pull it off.

The professional manager is informed by a body of knowledge referred to as "management science," but like Pollan's description of nutritionism, management science is a curious kind of science, indeed. Based, as Stafford Beer noted a generation ago, more on authority, a priority, and tenacious belief than replicable science, and much more reductionist than holistic in perspective. My management training did little more than indoctrinate me into a way of thinking that separated me from some of my more important human capabilities, inducting me into a social class bred to be nourished by self sacrifice and rewarded according to my ability to encourage others to sacrifice themselves, too. For this effort, I was paid more than the rank and file.

Pollin labels nutrition science "nutritionism" because it became science in service not to nutrition or to humanity, but to short-term competitive advantage. Why would anyone create Wonder "helps build strong bodies twelve ways" Bread when the bread everyone was already eating built stronger bodies in innumerably more ways? Because if you take all of the complexity out of flour and replace some of it with simple, artificial ingredients, it won't spoil AND the producer can realize the mammon of all mammon, economy of scale! Big success.

In the same way that nutritionism misused nutritional science, manage-ism misuses science, employing it primarily as justification for what the machine already intended to do anyway. What's the primary problem with project management? Managers. Why does Scott Adams continually poke at the PM as the lowliest life form? People do not like to be managed. They are perfectly capable of managing themselves. But we've lost that knowledge somewhere. Somehow.

In conversation with an engineering manager recently, he was recounting how, early in his career, he would hop on a plane without any authorization, and fly to corporate headquarters to chat with the CEO. He noticed in that conversation that he had never done anything that outrageous or productive in his current job, that he'd "shut down" here. I asked him when he'd shut down, and he responded "nine years ago, about a week after I started working here." There, where management managed everything, creating a permission-focused culture where otherwise sentient adults ask their managers permission before doing anything.

In the next installment, I'll tell the story of a doctor who decided to go "off the grid" and stop accepting insurance claims as reimbursement for his services. His break-even patient load fell from 3,000 to under a hundred. His office staff went from 3/4 dedicated to billing and collection to two, with no one doing any accounting of any kind. His story describes how taking the manager out of managed care resulted in ... ahem ... more care.

Huff Puff.

Earlier this year, I posted a start of a sticky idea to mixed comments. I've been considering what I said there. I can spend a lot of time in consideration sometimes. Here's the link back to the earlier piece: Link Back

This past weekend, I received a notice from my friends at the International Society for Systems Sciences about a new field of study they're promoting called Relational Science. Smelled interesting.

Here's a link to the wiki they're put up to outline the basic idea: Link Here.

Feels like I stumbled upon an old friend. The material points out at least one powerful idea for me: that present investigations assume that the future can be some kind of derivative of the present. That, for instance, the present causes the future. This perspective can't quite explain discontinous change, however. And this omission seems material.

The models we create influence the future we experience, and this modeling behavior---how we characterize what we're in and what we expect to come next---needs to be included in our consideration to achieve a full understanding of what we're in and what we expect next, creating a recursive, self-referential relationship with ourselves, others, and our context. And also, seems to me, with our future, too. This relationship seems fundamental to understanding most everything.

Got me thinking. Considering some more. ...

There are ---ahem--- more adult ways to give explicit directions, the Danes, as usual, are WAY far ahead of the rest of us!

To expand a bit on the earlier The Multi-tasking Myth, we might call this the Explicit Direction Myth. The Explicit Direction Myth claims that providing explicit direction improves performance. How that direction is provided might matter more than anything. If I must refer to an ink-blot of a plan or unfold a passenger compartment-sized map---or, take my eyes off the road --- to access the information, explicit direction might well undermine my performance.

So, why all the signage? Years ago, I served on the Citizen's Advisory Committee for the City of Portland's Traffic Engineering Bureau. This bureau held responsibility for ensuring that signs were posted to reflect ordinances. These ordinances conflicted with each other, and fully complying with this aspiration would have required posting no fewer than twenty signs per city block. Individual engineers used their own best judgment, which meant that some neighborhoods had darned close to twenty signs per block while others had almost none. Us citizens advising the bureau noted the inconsistency, and recommended that fewer signs would be more effective than more signs. This advice pissed off the Bureau Chief, who almost-patiently explained that the absence of signs exposed the City to risk of lawsuits. (I should have figured something so danged stupid would have to be a risk avoidance strategy!) We seem as a society to have acquired an advanced case of The Erma Bombeck Disease, as described by the late syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck, this disorder is a compulsion, caused by spending too much time with children, that forces one to lean over and cut their dining partner's meat for them. We dare not trust another's judgment, so they never development any judgment. We look around for explicit direction instead. In a recent discussion of Soviet-style Five Year Planning, someone noted that the one thing those explicit plans preserved was the commissar's role as arbiter, judge, jury, and (sometimes) executioner, because when (not if!) the explicit plan went awry, those "following" it would have to seek judgement, dispensation, (or contrive some way to spin or cloak the result), and each of these responses elevated and preserved not the proletariat, who's fault was assumed if the plan failed, but the boss. Traffic signs seem to produce similar results. They don't make us safer, but they do assert authority. ... ... Or do they? Judging from the performance of most drivers (including me!), speed limits are interpreted as "posted speed plus five mph," STOP signs mean "slow down enough to shift into first gear before proceeding," and YIELD signs actually mean "YIELD (to the temptation to cut through opposing traffic)!" Maybe something inside us resists explicit direction, and we become bratty kids rather than more responsible adults under its influence. One final word on the subject. Last October, a former roommate of my son was killed in a truck-bicycle collision. As a result of this --- and several other --- accidents, the City of Portland started painting green boxes on the pavement at intersections. These boxes provide space for bicycles and focus drivers' attention ON THE ROAD, rather than away from it. An example that maybe it IS possible to teach an old hound dog a new trick or two.

One final short video which better explains the Explicit Direction Myth. There's always something more than we expect!

At eight thirty this morning, the phone rang. My mom. Five blocks away. My dad, diagnosed two months ago with terminal cancer, was having trouble breathing. Can I come over and rummage around in the basement to find that extension tubing, so he can move around the house while connected to his oxygen-generating machine? Had they called hospice? Nope. Yea, I'll be right over.

He seems small and scared when I arrive. Dressed in his bathrobe, not breakfasted yet. I found the tubing and extra connectors and plugged him in. Stayed to assemble breakfast. Coerced my mom into calling hospice ("They don't work weekends," she insisted!), and the nurse returned the call in five minutes. She called back an hour later. Stopped by to check vital signs an hour after that, and called every hour into early afternoon, when the morphine and the attention had lulled him into sleep in his chair.

Back later, made them some lunch. Back later to make some dinner.

He, embarrassed that he slept the day away while I puttered in the yard, plotting sprinkler positioning and well pump capacities. The huge yard half watered by day's end, I came home to my own dinner, my own life.

My own life is melding back into theirs now. I'm on call. I've been lurking, waiting for the moment when I might make a difference. They only call when they are really scared, and who am I to make a difference then? No one special. Able to move across the room as if their special gravity didn't affect me. As if I were immune. For now.

I can warm leftovers. Prepare the green beans so they are more than just a color contrast on the plate. Properly sauce the strawberries so they taste right, even to someone who's taste discolors every flavor. Small contributions. Just about the best anyone can do.

These are long days. The longest days of this year, and the longest days of any I remember experiencing in my own short life. Neighbors are disappearing. Old age is reaping her harvest. Across the street. Down the block this week. He sends cards for every occasion, especially the final ones. These he takes special care to acknowledge.

Now that he knows he's on the final approach, his temper is sharper. His patience thin. He submits to the help he needs, but complains about having to accept it, and, truth told, doesn't fully accept any of this.

So, a publisher's interested in my new book. I spent the morning until the phone call shuffling chapters and fine-tuning the stories. I left my marker, $$&&, at the point in the manuscript I was interrupted. I'll get back to my work early tomorrow, before the sun comes up. And I'll work until the phone rings or until my curiosity gets the better of me, then I'll go do that other work that consumes my days these days.

This is what's really going on. If I seem distracted, it's only because I'm distracted. I moved here, close, seven years ago, in preparation for these long days, but I'm no better prepared than I ever was to live them. I live them anyway.