The problem with keyword searches? They give you what you've asked for, not what you really needed but were too ignorant to know you needed. That's why libraries catalogue their holdings by subject categories. Some books are general, some more specific. The specific are not classified as subsets of more general classifications. You want a book on blue crabs, ask for blue crabs, not the more general crustaceans.
Turns out that if you go looking for something under the wrong classification, you'll get exactly what you asked for, but not nearly what you expected. So, the first question is not always an obvious one: What is the proper question?
I wondered, as a little exercise in actually using the largest store of knowledge ever assembled in one place, The Library of Congress, how the Ancient Romans managed projects. So, I started, as instructed, by looking under "Ancient Romans" in the subject categories. Result: Nothing!
How about Romans Ancient? Ditto.
The instructor had passed us the first rule of library research: Don't even think about doing it yourself. Ask one of the research assistants for help. So I did. In about thirty seconds, he'd properly reframed my query into Roman Empire. Lots of hits on that.
Now, for the next layer. "Roman Empire Projects" Nada. What do they call projects in this subject index? I figured this one out on my own, by referencing a project book I knew existed and checking to see what subject classification they'd assigned to it. My mouth is still hanging open, slack-jawed.
Industrial Regulation.
Crap! That pretty much explains it all, doesn't it?
Frustrating additional hours found me pulling encyclopedias of various antiquities from the reference shelves, trying in vain to find any mention of industry, industrial activity, planning, scheduling, controlling, leading, sponsoring ... cripes but I nearly exhausted my synonym generator.
I found a little more than squat, and thought at first this was about me and my advanced Google Poisoning at work. But I started reading between the lines, and adjacent entries, and just trolling for something kinda-sorta-maybe related, the essence of great research, and began to understand.
One entry in the authoritative guide to the ancient world noted that there is damned little surviving about Roman industry, but that it's clear that they had no industry as we think of it today. It went on to claim that there is no evidence of enterprises comprised of more than about 100 people from that time. It was an empire supplied by craftspersons. I found other mentions of some rudimentary guilds, common craftspersons banding together for mutual protection and to provide burial services to their members, but these were never organized beyond locality, and were periodically banned outright after they'd threatened the status quo.
It was looking as if I'd asked an unanswerable question until I stumbled upon one text which had a section entitled Beliefs. It described the Roman world view, which could not be more different than ours. Perhaps this might explain the curious absence of project management from their empire.
One primary belief (the one mentioned most prominently in this text) was the apparently universal notion that The Fates determined destiny. The future was pre-ordained by the Gods. Romans could ask for divine intervention, but the results were transcribed before any of them were born. Romans were along for the ride.
This is a handy convention, and probably meant that Romans suffered far less from the self-helpless syndromes common today. We believe in our diets, and assume personal responsibility when they don't work: It's our fault. Any Roman could casually claim that the Gods had decided that he was to be a fatty and leave it at that.
So what regulated the work of Roman craftsmen? I think it likely that some variants on pre-destination did. First, by law, the sons of a craftsman were required to follow in their father's trade. This ensured that specialized knowledge would be passed down through successive generations. Second, the noble classes despised physical labor, and took great pains to distance themselves far away from what they considered occupations damaging to body and mind, aka work. It was left to those actually doing the work to determine how to do it, since those who might attempt to regulate it externally had no earthly interest in the degrading stuff.
This resulted in an empire that did not produce much in the way of technical innovation, but distributed production widely. They did not worship their aspirations, eliminating uncertainty not by cleverly planning it away, but by accepting it as the normal way of the world.
I left the library feeling strangely stupid. A sensation I've experienced enough that I really should have learned by now that I was experiencing learning. After a day of reflection, I'm integrating this new information into my previous expectations and finding some crude resolution in that.
And I believe that my problem with finding evidence of project management in Roman times is curiously similar to my difficulties finding what I consider project management in our own time. The Romans didn't have industrial regulation because they didn't have any industry. Look at any list of leading companies and consider how many of them can be fairly labeled Industrial. Sure, all of them are HUGE, as in too big to manage enormous. Hello? Are we attempting to apply Industrial Regulation in the absence of anything even remotely resembling Industry?
You answer the question for yourself. The Gods have prescribed a headache for me right now.
(Image of J. Smith, trailblazer)
Within SEI, there were (probably still are) two factions. I heard (just hearsay) that two principals at SEI approached two of the Agile Manifesto signatories to wish them luck shortly after the manifesto was made public. Apparently they had carried the same intentions in founding the SEI, but were compromised when the suits showed up.
One of the indices of a successful approach is that it attracts the attention of the suits. Think of the suits as the colonizers who follow the trailblazers and the pioneers. The trailblazers operate with extreme sensitivity to the context and appear to follow their noses and instincts because they have no roadmaps. The pioneers are content to follow the trailblazers' lead (head West), intent upon creating their own place in the world. The suits understand that there's no leverage in being a trailblazer (no royalties to earn on trails blazed, just perhaps a short-term commission to explore and write a report, maybe trap a few beaver along the way), or in being a pioneer (free land, but you have to build your own cabin and prove the land by living on it for X years). No economies of scale or speculation possible from either role.
The suits put up road signs, then pave the roads, levying taxes all along the way. They create municipalities so people don't have to trailblaze or pioneer, but just move (better yet, hire their moving company to move them). What was a self-motivated, self-organizing system becomes increasingly regulated and determined. Some call this civilization.
SEI has faced the same difficulties Agile faces. Professional managers are neither trailblazers nor pioneers, and most have no experience with either, though they might well aspire to gain from both T and P insight and experience. But they are also interested in leveraging these insights, and this means replication. So they start by asking innocently paradoxical questions: What do trailblazers do? How do pioneers achieve results? They eventually answer their own questions by creating a regime of what are called best practices, which can be leveraged and finely replicated. That this distillation moves quickly away from the originating practice ain't surprising. The trailblazers move on, never having been married to civilization. A generation later, the homesteaders are landed gentry.
Before the watch, everyone had a finely-tuned ability to intuit time by using their senses. After the invention and wide distribution of the watch, most lost this ability, it being easier to just check the wrist. Reading the senses for time is now considered an arcane practice, practical only for boy scouts to earn merit badges. Professionals wear watches, but also need to adopt processes to synchronize their watches.
We've all seen the suits in action. heck, some of us have actually suited up. The prototypical suits come from heavily regulated, invariably HUGE enterprises, and know well how things get done there. They've studied how decisions are made there and how choices are selected, and understand that whatever they promote must be dressed up properly to pass initial muster. No greasy trailblazers. No dusty sodbusters. Specific, measurable, reducible, civilized practices only, please.
So, SEI shoved out those pioneers who wouldn't submit, or drove them deep underground, replacing them with compliant, well-educated suits who know how things are supposed to be done, often without ever having actually done any of it themselves. But they have been certified as professionals, able to properly profess. And the enterprises warmly receive and submit, seeing possibilities for real leverage (read: dominion) over their projects. (Finally!) Well, at least they embrace the endless possibility of achieving this, without ever actually achieving this.
Well, they argue, most of what we do ain't properly characterized as either trailblazing or pioneering. They subsume the unpalatably feral practices by sanctioning them, by explaining how paving roads is actually the same as blazing trails, creating strange-sounding clones: Agile Waterfall, Agile + CMM "official" publication. (Note, Waterfall's trailblazers intended no less than Agile,'s but they were civilized over time. Civilized or moved on.)
I was reading the DoD's guidelines for Earned Value Program Management (I know, Satanic Verses), and was surprised to see in the introduction several interesting exhortations: 1- These are guidelines. Do not interpret them as mandated practices. 2- Do not use them if your project is: researchy, maintenancey, not well-characterized as strings of tasks/deliverables, or if the program is less than $20 million dollars in expected expenditures. Don't these caveats exclude most of the programs DoD initiates? The manual says little about what to do if the effort fails to satisfy these criteria, just threatens that EVM won't add enough value to be worth the effort otherwise.
A final analogy: The emerging farmers' market community has been trailblazing and pioneering a new way to produce and distribute food. Small farms. Cooperation between producers to distribute. A real community-organizing, ground-roots operation. Their opponent in everything they've done has been the Farm Bureau, the lobbying group encouraging subsidized industrial-scale production. The farmers' suits. The Farm Bureau has been insisting on 'a level playing field,' encouraging state and federal regulators to insist that small producers comply with the same rules that commodity producers are held to, even though the context is world's different. Farming 300,000 acres of commodity grain is not the same activity as farming a ten acre plot of arugula.
Same story with projects, I think. The vast majority of projects are smallish affairs, ten acres or less. Intending to produce for local consumption. Never interacting with ADM, but asking a fair price from people who appreciate the essential eccentricity of local customs, traditions, and production. They thrive on community involvement rather than distant regulation and subsidy. They've mastered their kind of agriculture, and have little interest, and can see even less utility, in scaling up. They have little leverage, when their crop fails they lose, unless the community supports them because they share aspirations to be self-sufficient. None of them would properly adopt as necessary the agricultural equivalent of the DoD's EVPM system or even CMM, which was never intended to be used in their context, anyway. But the little guys borrow and steal from even those, banding together to accept credit cards, educate themselves and their customers in the importance of sanitation, and to lease market space.
The little guys are small-a agile. The big guys might peek into their world and longingly sigh, remembering when farming was for them family and not corporate farming, but were they to adopt wholesale the agile practices, their system, which depends upon different leverage points, wouldn't sustain them. They aren't, except in fat years, so much farming land as farming the government, anyway. Still, the Farm Bureau has taken to using the language of the little guys, speaking of sustainability just as if their model was sustainable without heavy subsidy. Have you seen ADM's commercials on the news hour? They make me dewy-eyed. Suits are good at invoking genuine tears of association.
It's no gift to be sanctioned by SEI, but it needn't be a curse, either. It's just the suits again, trying to take credit for civilizing what was perfectly sustainable territory before. I think of this as a new SUV called 'trailblazer.' Just don't try to blaze any trails with it. Stay on the pavement at all times.
Hope this doesn't seem too cynical. I think we should know enough to be cynical, but choose not to become cynical. Don't know enough and you might be naive. No leverage in naivety. Choose to be cynical and you might as well surrender all aspiration. No leverage there, either.
Blazing too long of a trail for civilized consumption
here,
david
(image of J.
Smith, civilized)
News yesterday from a Silicon Valley correspondent reports that PMI meetings there have swelled with attendants. Why? Lots and lots of PMs looking for work. It's been several years since I attended any PM-related conference where the out-of-work PMs and PM consultant wanna-bes didn't greatly outnumber those who were there to share information.
Just yesterday, I reviewed yet another job description claiming to want someone capable of bringing projects in consistently on-time, on-budget, and on-spec.
Contracting for government work these days requires the applicant to engage in the most absurd fantasizing, as if, before work began, one could with some precision, spreadsheet hours by major task, then sign some dotted line validation of the bid's accuracy.
I thought we might have learned better by now. We have not. What passes for professional practice in the Project Management "Profession" today wouldn't quite qualify as prostitution in most professions, and would be indictable, even convict-able in several. What went wrong?
I think the aspiration that focused upon making project management a profession on par with dentistry or occupational therapy turned it into its opposite. Rather than attract strategic risk-takers, it has encouraged compliance and supplication, trading in trivial bromides to address extraordinarily non-trivial conditions. The result? Institutionalized ignorance. Conservative orthodoxy. Greater barriers to entry. Little progress.
If project management has become a profession in its own right, what has that achieved? What used to be attained by political cleverness and strategic side-stepping can now be mandated. Who retains the savvy to find their way through the dark woods, once the paths have been leveled and paved? More critically, where will we convince anyone chased away by all this foolishness to come back and risk doing some real discovering, some genuine skulduggery to accomplish something, anything never even imagined before?
In celebration of International Project Managers' Day, don't join in any celebration. Go get away with something instead. Get yourself fired for insubordination. Insult your customer's deepest sensibilities and walk away on your hind legs. What we used to have to earn with every engagement, the certification to actually guide the effort, could only be bestowed afterwards, and had little currency the next time. Hired with misgivings, misunderstood, sometimes reviled most of the way, the worthy ones walked away from the successful ones with a little less than a nod of appreciation, and needed not even that! Then, for us, it was the community that actually did anything. We were catalyst, the wax gratefully lost in lost-wax casting. Conveniently located, nearly invisible, dancing with the big professional egos to deliver something more than they could ever understand.
Amen.
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.
For centuries, tribes who’s territories bordered this region of endless rolling, silty loess hills, considered The Palouse to be neutral territory, common grazing land, a place where horses would not be stolen and war would not be waged. War had not been waged until US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe blundered into armed conflict near the present day Steptoe Butte, a jutting rock the natives called “power mountain.” Steptoe got his butt kicked and retreated back to Fort Walla Walla.
But that’s history. Today, the drive pulls you through capricious speed zones and expansive wheat and lentil fields. The place feels remote enough to allow for unregulated speeding, a false sense Whitman County depends upon to write a steady stream of speeding tickets. Best to pay attention and use the speed control to help you go slow enough to avoid the contribution to the county.
The drive up through The Palouse is a great place to talk, and Amy and I chatted last week as we chugged through. The topic? Consulting. The context? Why is it that so many of our colleagues are starving consultants? Why are we starving, too? Is it market or marketing?
The insight that came to me in that conversation was that the very term consultant serves as a context marker, one that poorly frames what consultants actually do.
Look at the questions clients ask: How much will it cost? What, specifically, do you recommend? What are the steps to achieve the goal? How long will it take?
These are questions best aimed at change. Aim them at transformation and invite endless confusion.
I used to define as contractor anyone who is hired to do defined work. They do the client’s bidding. Consultants I defined as those who do what needs doing, whether or not the client asked for that to be done. It’s common in consulting that the initiating purpose, target, goal, path, and cost shift. This is failure for a contractor, but success for a consultant.
Taking these rather limited definitions of contractor and consultant, I claim that contractors produce first-order change while consultants produce second-order transformation, but I might be the only one in the world making this distinction. What I didn’t fully appreciate until that drive through The Palouse, was that the label consultant introduces a change context rather than a transformation one. So of course the prospective client comes loaded with the usual change questions: How much? When? How long? How many? What process?
They come expecting to receive directions or methods, recipes or formulas. They expect the consultant to be an expert in the sort of problem they face and able to slay that dragon with experienced precision. That is contractor work.
The current Financial Panic is a decent example of a situation needing transformation. Listening to the floor speeches of our Representatives this morning. I was not surprised to hear many of them claim that the proposed bill would not solve the problem. These comments told me that some were approaching this difficulty as if it were a problem. The problem with that presumption is two-fold. If it is a problem, it must have a solution. If it has a solution, we really should find it. This encourages a lot of posturing and posing, since, clearly, the proposed bill wouldn’t solve anything. It wasn’t intended to.
The only way to solve the Financial Panic is to travel back in time and co-opt it before it gets to the present state. Since that’s not possible, we have to settle for something different than a solution. It’s helpful if, somewhere along the way, those seeking resolution realize that they are not going to solve anything. They might transform the situation, but never solve it.
No one ever seeks transformation at first. As I noted in my last post , we chase the old status quo first, trying to restore cows that have already escaped from the barn.
The Palouse Insight claims that the words we use to describe what we do confuse us all- client as well as consultant. Those in the transformation business struggle to find clients not because we are poor at producing results, but because our language is inadequate to describe what we do. We throw chaff in our client’s face and confuse the both of us. Transformation comes later, not at first.
We work by personal referral, not by clever marketing. No one, not even the most satisfied client, can ever describe what it is that we did. They can only say that they are satisfied, delighted usually. That their difficulty was resolved in some surprising way, never to be repeated, perfect for the conditions at hand then.
The contractor serves an installed base of problems, systems, situations. For the consultant, no two situations are similar enough to serve as template, though there are principles, meta-perspectives, which won’t make any sense to anyone except, perhaps, the practitioner.
So, consultant is a lousy label. It implies what it doesn’t intend. Like this explanation of the insight, perhaps meaningless except in the moment. I think, like transformation, you had to be there to really understand.
A
lot like the debate over granting war powers prior to the Iraqi
intrusion, and we know how THAT turned out.
Taking this to an area I know something about, on projects there
are four or five critical failure modes when it's discovered that a
project's in trouble. First, whatever the point of discovery, it
was busted a long time before the problem was recognized. The old
status quo was geriatric before it was acknowledged as aging. So
the first shock is great, but not terribly significant. We've
already lived for a long time with it busted.
Second, there's always a hair-on-fire urgency to do something -
literally anything, probably to recover our sense of mastery and
control more than to actually fix anything. Of course, the toup's
flaming creates the worst possible context for deciding
anything mindfully.
Third, the initial strategies for resolving always involve
recovery, rather than transformation, even though recovery will
only produce more of what's already proven to not work. We don't
know how to produce transformation in a systematic way. The paradox
is that by letting go, we're more likely to encourage
transformation. By holding on, we encourage continuing
dysfunction.
Fourth, why seems like the right question, though it almost never
is. What next? or what now? are each better questions, but each
initiates an investigation rather than a solution. The belief that
there is a root cause, and that finding that root cause will
necessarily allow undoing the past, is the real root cause. But
this is just the way it is, a stupid human trick.
Finally, the quality of the response is usually misunderstood to
necessarily mean clear, precise, predictable next steps. In this
way, we recreate old status quo rather than pursue
transformation.
If we can side-step these pitfalls, we might make a real
difference. If not, probably not.
The conversation around 'resolving the credit crisis' is stepping
into every one of these.
Often, in my experience, embracing an "Anything But That!" strategy
better encourages transformation, though it usually feels like the
worst possible approach.
You
Suck@Projects
(A
cautionary ballad for the executive palate)
Okay, okay, I get it!
Your non-existent experience successfully managing projects
didn’t get you promoted into your executive
position.
(I understand! Project managers aren’t on any executive
track!
It might be superstition, but they’ll never
get your commission.) Will they?
And now you’ve inherited these ungainly systems,
which are mostly pursuing projects as missions,
what will you do now?
You’ll do what you did in B-school: you’ll
cram.
You’ll grab a few books, and stuff like
exams.
I mean, how hard could managing projects be?
It ain’t rocket science, obviously.
What will you read? Maybe PMI's theories, Mythical Man Month,
and
Wylie’s acclaimed Executive Series.
What will you take away?
Well-distilled nostrums; real heady stuff.
A tiny ration of common sense.
And enough on-time, on-budget, on-spec horse shit to
compost a small country.
You’ll spout acronyms, my friend,
until no one ever questions your credentials again.
Then you’ll sound the horn, you’ll lead the
way,
and you’ll start making commitments for others that very
first day.
You’ll cite strategies, and competition, using buzzwords to
convey
A deepening dedication to whatever it is you
say.
And you’ll command, “Deliver by June,” and,
“Play some musical chairs!
Just tell me the kinda resources you need, and I’ll plead for
you upstairs.
Just justify your methods and rationalize your goals
and there’s no limit to how far all of us will
go.”
(I know, I know, you
won’t mention the fact
that project management ain’t on the executive track
---
while you motivate them through Hell and back.)
Then what? Yeah, then what?
They deliver over-runs and under-shots,
FUBARs, SNAFUs, and
you-don’t-even-wanna-know-whats.
Their best laid plans usually exceed fixed cost;
they embarrass you with your boss’s boss’s boss.
You miss a strategic deadline twice
and discover your old friends aren’t quite as nice as they
usta be at the club.
For you, bub, are boob of the month, moron of the quarter, and
idiot of the first half-year
‘till you wonder what in the devil ever enticed you over
here
when you could have positioned yourself to rise
through Sales or Marketing
and left this project crap to stumble, curse, and fail,
but nooooo, you just had to hop the fastest plane on your way to
the top of the top of your game.
Then you wear your career like a toilet seat crown
and nobody appreciates you hanging around.
Your project teams seem to notice your summit‘s
a pimple, a dimple, and your stock simply plummets.
‘Cause you suck at projects, you suck
like Merlot,
you suck at the stuff you were supposed to control:
the smooth operation of these things you don’t
know.
You’ve mistaken these efforts for something you’ve
seen,
for processes, metrics, and rational schemes.
But none of these projects perform to your skills!
Worse, each one insists upon threatening to kill
the one who, with his sincerity pure,
proposed what then seemed just a reasonable
cure.
And once you start sucking, you suck at your
life,
You suck to your company, colleagues,
and wife.
(Who by the way wonders why
you come home so late,
stumbling between mumbling and nearly irate.)
No one ever hinted in MBA school
That an executive’s lot could be
half this cruel, ... did they?
You wonder how the magic wand
you once claimed
Could betray you so quickly,
just whom should you blame?
But the breadth of your genius
at playing this game
Simply leads you to mandate
even more of the same,
’Cause you have mistaken what
might well be soccer
For baseball or football, and you bet like a
sucker.
You coach with the best of intentions and find
Your teams unresponsive to you and your bind.
You’re stuck with impossibles, a trussed suckling
pig,
But you won’t satisfy their concerns
and renege!
No, you’ll just put your head
down and fearlessly charge
Another objective both fuzzy and large.
And if you’re at all like
your fellow ’IOs
You’ll continue this dance until they let you go.
To merge with the mumbling executives
emeritus
Who once sucked at projects but
refuse to discuss
How they sucked at projects,
though their teams seemed to
fail,
And how you personally tried to guide them through Hell
And how if only they would
have noticed how wise ...
The guidance you offered coulda
won them the prize.
Instead, you have retired early to write
the book that your colleagues will
stuff down at night
Attempting to do what not one
of them can,
To not suck at projects again and
again.
And Wylie seems interested in a three volume deal,
to be published with the fanfare certain to seal
The professional fate of whomever might read ’em,
To just suck at projects forever and ever, and ever!
Amen.
©2008 by David A. Schmaltz -
all rights reserved
Festina Lente- Hasten Slowly
The numbing numbers don't add up! The Industrial Revolution was a great way to revolutionize production. It has become a lousy way to live. ...
Fast Work undermines our effectiveness, forcing us into living Fast Lives. ... A firm respect for our most human capabilities can co-opt the folly of Fast Work.
The group slowly turned into a no-op, where a few people ever more slowly replied to some rather long postings.
A recent study might explain why Slow Work slowly dematerialized. in Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind in the current issue of the online The Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Mark Bauerlein reports on Jakob Neilson's and Donald Norman's latest studies about how online content is read.
Their conclusion? It mostly isn't read.
... 'people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."'
Yes, there's apparently a serious disconnect between the easy distribution of weighty concepts and the assimilation of them. The web, blessed as it is, presents a cognitive hurricane within which we fail to absorb the driest material.
So, we Facebook, which provides a virtual wall to use for posting literary Graffiti. We Twitter. I continue to post rather long blog entries, which, if Nielson and Norman are correct, few of us can actually read.
Of course, there is value (for me, anyway) in creating this stuff. It's how I work out what I think. I don't write to expose what I know, but to stumble upon it. Should I expect my readers to engage in pursuit of insight rather than distilled information, I might be deluding myself. But probably not you, since your reading patterns here might well employ that 'F' and so yield an 'F' in comprehension, appreciation, and retention.
This says nothing about any of us. Sure, my writing is brilliant! And your reading and comprehension even more so. The challenge is that we are coming together in a context that strongly mitigates against achieving what any of us might desire.
I'm finding ever more agency from listening to recorded books while engaging in s-l-o-w w-o-r-k. Scrape that wall, prepping for paint, and I'm in what might be the perfect context to really hear and really learn.
Log into my blog and I'm distracted by the very context within which the content resides.
I've gotta go get busy. Slowly.
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!)
..............................................................
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
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?
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.
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.
v
Jerry Weinberg used to tell a story about one of his daughters who managed to get five Fs and a D one quarter in junior high school. Jerry's ex-wife asked him to speak with his daughter, so he did, asking her how come she didn't get straight Fs. Well, she explained, the D was in Arts and Crafts, and in that class, she gets a D no matter what she does. Well, apply yourself next quarter, he counseled, go for straight Fs.
The next quarter she received five As and a D, again in Arts and Crafts. Shortly thereafter, she wrangled herself into a junior college program that took her out of regular school. A year later, she ran away and joined a circus.
Later, she owned a successful arts and crafts company before opening a successful antiques business in Greenwich Village.
Jerry's point in telling the story was to highlight the fact that what gets taught in public school is not so much knowledge or life skills, but acculturation. How to fit into a culture. Not the universal American culture, but how to get along in a large company. Again and again, government statistics show that most of the jobs created in this country are created by small, tiny companies, not the huge industrial powerhouses. Yet our schooling, from No Child Left Behind to Almost Every Child Left Behind trains us for roles most of us will never actually fulfill.
The number of trade schools, you know, that low-rent alternative to "real schooling", has fallen as the number of students who never satisfy high school graduation requirements continues to climb. What's that about?
Again and again in companies, I see people trained in perspectives orthogonal to their job's demands struggling to fix their stupid jobs. From managers who try to lead by the book to executives inspired by something they imprinted on in grad school, the one skill that seems to be missing is the skill to learn from the present context. We judge ourselves and our companies against those people and organizations who manage to get press coverage. We rarely hear what real people are doing.
Ever seen a case study for an organization that refuses to participate in case studies? (Hint: That would be the vast majority of organizations.)
I read the organizational self-help books and learn that I'm supposed to have a marketing strategy, branding, customer satisfaction surveys, a whole raft of stuff that I've never had and probably never will have. Just because Nike or Intel or some big 'N' consulting operation has those doesn't mean anyone working off the grid should. The economy, business, works mostly off the grid, but you'd never know it by reading the popular press. Because the popular press reports on the grig doings.
Truth told, I've always felt a bit inadequate when interacting with the gridders. As if my little operation was somehow less professional, less real than theirs. But I do real work. No, I do not have a quarterly marketing budget or a five year sales projection. I live hand to mouth, sometimes hand to forehead. Ours is not an industrial organization, but more hunter-gatherer. The industrialists have always complained about those lazy hunter-gatherers, even the hunter-gatherers manage to sustain themselves with a fraction of the effort any industrial firm requires.
I was counting on my fingers the number of organizations I've personally visited that seemed to be trying to reform themselves away from their hunter-gatherer roots toward more industrial modes. I ran out of fingers. The number truly benefiting from such reformation probably tracks closely to the ratio of the population working for large industrial firms.
God love the industrialists. Somebody has to. Those of us not operating on an industrial scale are worthy of more than a little admiration, too. The industrial, management-ist mindset sometimes seems dead set to discount our presence, like when a Wal-Mart moves in to undercut the old, oil-stain floored hardware store. We can choose to continue to frequent the good old hardware store where they remember your name and have human-scale answers to your questions. Where you can buy a penny's-worth of ten penny nails if you want, instead of a handy (for someone) pre-packaged five pound box.
Today, I celebrate the corner grocery, the backyard bike shop, the two person consulting firm, and the people over at the ranch supply. We will never see any of them on the cover of Fortune, but they keep the world spinning. Do not judge them (us) by the industrial yardstick, we work closer to home. We trade not in tons of product but ounces of relationship. We do not serve with a painted-on smile. You can see us sweat. We don't show so well in the board room. Few do. We show where some small something really matters. We have not gone on retreat to plot our sales strategy, we open the door, sweep the floor, and let the word of mouth remind folks that we're here, open for a human-scaled kind of business. (One they forgot to mention in B-school.)
The management-ist might be suffering from a severe case of industrial pollution, mimicking a dance that looked really good at the conference and could never shake anyone's booty back home. Hoorah and hooray. There and then encounters here, today.
This is the next installment of the series considering the secular religion of Management-ism.
Here's the hard part: You gotta start where ever they start. You can't start where you know this is going, because you aren't there yet. And you can't insist that the relationship, which could only develop from digging out from naive beginnings, already be THERE at the very beginning. Can't do that without falling down a rabbit hole. That you know where this is going --- that's irrelevant now. Hush up. Start where ever they are. Travel with them to where you might go together. The journey's the thing. Gotta start at the beginning, not the end.
Do not mention that the end envisioned will not be the end achieved. Never has been before. Unlikely to be this time. Each engagement starts as half truth and half promise, like we know the future from the start. We must move through our lives with confident strides, just as if we knew stuff, just as if we controlled our hearts. Otherwise, our hearts could never become enchanted along the way with what we never anticipated.
Let the management-ist be. I have spent the last few weeks describing the secular religion of management-ism only to learn that I must accept these people as they are, because that's how they are. It's not MY job to reform them --- or to show them the supposed error of their ways. Or to guide them to the path of whatever passes for righteousness in MY book. That would be suspiciously similar to the driving I complain about THEM doing. It matters not even a little bit whether you or they are an SOB or an angel. And who you are today matters even less than who we might become together tomorrow.
More ... next time.
Prior installments:
How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It
Enablers
Who manages
the managers? A piece in the current New Yorker talks about the Tragedy of
the Anti-commons. We are all familiar with the tragedy of the
commons, where a free good gets destroyed because it's in every
individual user's short term interest to consume more than a
sustainable fair share. But I'd not considered the converse, where
the ownership of a property necessary for collective work is split
up into so many independent shares that cooperation becomes
impossible. The common lies unproductively fallow because every
owner wants too much in return for cooperation.
Sound familiar?
It sure does to me!
Each individual holds out for more than his fair share as a precondition for participating. Paying off everyone at the level they desire costs more than the perceived value, so the value lies untapped.
Each tragedy is tragic only because we cope so poorly with it. Viewed as a problem to be solved, which is the standard management-ist frame of reference, we engage in no more or less than a game without end, without resolution, which is in practice, in fact, tragic.
But these are not tragedies unless engaged in as if they were problems to be solved. The management-ist cannot seem to escape from his tenacious problem solving mindset, an act which all by itself could open up possibilities and create choices. Who manages the managers?
Tenacious belief or choice manages them. In fact, they (we) often fail to calculate anything more than the cost of doing business, neglecting the much more useful value of doing or having done business. And the value lost by not doing it.
What do we want? This or that? This is never the whole choice, and neither is that.
The trick is to find choices beyond this and that. This or that constitute an illusion of choice, since choosing either yields the same unwanted result. If you're damned if you do AND damned if you don't, it doesn't matter which option you choose. Either one will result in tragedy.
Here's the cue for any dedicated management-ist to roll his eyes. If you are a skilled problem-solver, you are at a disadvantage. Go ahead, solve the tragedy of the commons --- or the tragedy of the anti-commons. Just try! Neither are nails looking for a hammer. I'll bet you'll direct someone to hammer away anyway.
I recently interviewed a CFO about a soured project. He'd reassigned the Project Manager, who had been unable to get the leaden effort airborne. He was looking for a replacement PM to get the effort back on track. Someone, he hoped, with experience with the technology. Someone who would (at last!) hold the participants accountable. I commented that a) the project was not a train and there were never any tracks, b) I'd never seen a project like this fail because of the technology, and c) holding people accountable for what they cannot do doesn't improve anything.
What would I do? I'd want to talk with everyone involved to hear the story from their perspective. I'd want to understand why a group of people who have the innate ability to work well together managed to not work well together in this instance. Then, working together, I'd want to understand what could be responsibly promised and actually delivered. No hammer. No nails. Glue. Patience.
Well, you know, if I was to do that, the project might not make its target date and the CFO would have to go back to the board and ask for more money. Yup. If the project doesn't do that, it for certain won't make it's date and you might choose to go back to the board and tell them that you've decided to cancel the effort. Hummm. Damned whatever you do. Anti-commons!
I think he decided to hire a hammer.
Prior installments:
How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It
"I'm working to reinvent our company's operational practices. As I understand things, technology is a key enabler for making processes more efficient. At the same time to really improve things new processes should be developed which take advantage of increased communication and automation now available. I'm looking for a good forum which talks about "use this to do that", "this tool allows you to do this better", and possibly discuss streamlined processes."
Parse the language in this posting. Notice what isn't there!
What isn't there? People are missing, replaced, as F. W. Taylor long-ago predicted, by "the system." Who performs these 'operational practices?' Who does this disembodied 'communicating?'
What IS there? 'New processes,' 'technology,' 'efficiency,' and 'automation,' enablers for an unmentioned community of ... ... (wait for it) ... PEOPLE?
Isn't this where we've learned to go? What we've learned to do? To chase ephemeral efficiency with as-of-yet unimagined technology? And what do we imagine that technology to be? Something featuring software, no doubt. Something that comfortably integrates within the existing network. Platform independent. Licensed or open source. Upgradeable. A good, solid, tangible cause capable of making our aspirations real.
Notice one other word imbedded within this posting. Notice the 'should' innocuously standing there, just as if it weren't controlling the traffic flow for the whole danged inquiry. Also notice the tenaciously passive voice, which never specifies any who except for the author's innocent 'I'. He will be reinventing 'our' company's operational practices. 'I'm' looking for a good forum. I find no evidence of either 'us' or 'we' in the entire posting. Where did we go? Why no us?
Am I being too harsh? Reading too much into this posting? Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. We construct our world with language, and the world this language creates doesn't seem to include space for the object of the whole inquiry, speaking in what Bateson called 'the dormative,' language that induces sleep rather than action. It focuses upon derivatives rather than the underlying source. What IS that source?
In his remarkable book How Doctor's Think, Jerome Groopman, MD recounts how injecting technology into the practice of medicine brings unintended social consequences, typically because some manager somewhere focused upon derivatives rather than the actual practice. Easing the effort to invoice insurance carriers inhibits the doctor's ability to reliably diagnose. Simplifying diagnosis by documenting decisions using pre-formatted decision trees disables diagnosing. The cognitive confusion inherent in any social interaction becomes more complicated by streamlining apparently trivial tasks.
I could be arguing in favor of more whole system thinking, except what passes for the whole system in the management-ist's language excludes most of the system's holistic nature. Certainly, we can create notional models of any system, but can include in those models only those elements we characterize as causative; germane. The result is a curiously satisfying reduction, wholly comprised of derivatives sensitive to underlying, unseen, unaccounted for, uncountable components. Groopman labels the most commonly overlooked element 'context,' and claims that little any doctor actually does holds meaning out of context. Like the old thought experiment that proposed dissecting a cat to find the purr, decomposition discards the context, typically the social context.
Before the author of this post will be able to really reinvent 'our company's operational practices,' he will need to reinvent his way of describing reinvention. Were he to actually reinvent, his initiating notions of what characterizes reinvention must certainly crumble. Otherwise, he will merely reinvent more (perhaps even more) of the same.
That was a characteristically long-winded preface to what I intended to address in this posting: enablers. The manager is commonly represented as enabler, the cause of performance and efficiency, the 'driver' of results, the 're-inventor of operational practices'. In a social context, enablers are those individuals who assume the burden of someone else's addiction-induced dysfunction. In an organizational context, managers are expected to both make and take this heat, sometimes innocently (and sometimes not so innocently) encouraging the very dysfunction they intend to eradicate. Most commonly, this dysfunction centers around individual agency or the lack of it. We want to hold people accountable for their performance, but insist upon them agreeing to be irresponsible to achieve that.
Imagine a manager commanding a subordinate to do something that the subordinate knows he cannot do. Will he say yes? He knows his no will encourage a raft of 'get with the program' innuendo, insistences that he explain exactly why he can't, and 'help' getting over his cluelessness. Very probably all of these will occur if he says 'No!" while being managed by a management-ist, because his personal perspective is gumming up the system, and the organization is all about the system. Isn't it?
The under-apprecated technology we seek might well be what the eggheads at MIT are calling Social Technology. Social Technology is not before-the-fact causative, it involves no software, except the software imbedded in every individual at birth, though our sensitivity to it can be disabled by some of the socialization received thereafter. It includes two of Aristotle's Causations explicitly omitted from reductionist science and its progeny, scientific management; management-ism. Omitted as metaphysical: not countable, not reducible, not manageable. Omitting these two causations leaves only the most primitive two, those commonly labeled Material causation and Efficient causation.
Material Causation ascribes cause to the nature of material. The fireplace is rigid because it is constructed of brick. Efficient causation ascribes cause to some previous act. We're late because the last meeting ran long. Science, scientific management, even management-ism limit their domain of inquiry to these two dimensions, when their domain of existence includes and is subtly influenced by Aristotle's un-reducible and uncountable metaphysical causations: Formal Causation and Final Causation.
Formal Causation ascribes cause to form. An example of formal causation are the differences we experience when communicating face-to-face and via email. The form of communication subtly influences, affects, 'causes' difference. Asking exactly how or why these changes occur assumes a material or efficient causation at work, and while these questions might well elicit any number of interesting responses, none will be satisfying in the way that a material or efficient causation might provide.
Final Causation ascribes cause to some imagined future state, as if our aspiration caused the result. A common example of final causation at work is found in scheduling assumptions: the flight departs at four because we want to arrive at five. What caused the flight to depart at four? Our aspiration to arrive at five. Certainly a raft of material, efficient, and formal causations were also involved in arriving at five, but without the aspiration, none of them would mean anything. The root cause is our anticipation of future events.
When a management-ist searches for the root cause, he limits his search to material and efficient effects, though these will inevitably provide only the most primitive parts of the explanation. This is fine if identifying the material or efficient causes provides some leverage for useful action. Omitting formal and final causations limits possibility for change, and holds the source of what are commonly referred to as unintended consequences. These might be better described as unimagined consequences resulting from unseen and unconsidered contexts. Because science education focuses upon understanding the material world and cataloguing efficient causations (aka Best Practices and Procedures), it focuses the practitioner's attention away from powerful, causative points of leverage. Without acknowledging the influence of the metaphysical, any practitioner can degrade into focusing upon the purely physical, firmly believing that an efficient cause must be provided to enable performance. Hence, the enabling management-ist.
Who gets disabled in this context? Those who become addicted to the material and efficient world-view. The management-ist, all-powerful though he might seem, is just as addicted as those who firmly believe that he causes their performance. This aspiration might well be the final cause of this disabling enabling. Mention the metaphysical to a dedicated management-ist and watch his eyes roll.
Who manages the management-ist? Next time.
For the last fifteen years, I've been facilitating curious workshops. These never told anyone what they should do, and I've developed a strong aversion to anyone who presumes to know what I should do and when I should do it. Nothing I do involves procedures. Nothing seems suited to steps or checklists. This is an improvement over the years following my graduation from university, when I performed a lot of quantitative analysis on what was in retrospect subjective experiences. I attempted to routinize a lot of work which never as a result exhibited routine. For I was infected with the notion that I should measure and, more dangerously, that only if I measured could I properly manage. The people I was charged with managing were wiser than I was, however, and while some of them chased the measurable manageable metric god, none of us ever caught him. And we succeeded at an acceptable rate, anyway.
Jerry Weinberg's Problem Solving Leadership Workshop, which I helped facilitate for seven years, attracted many upwardly mobile middle management types. Some were team leaders tapped to move into management. Others were managers being groomed for executive futures. Some were executives trying to improve their effectiveness. Most came with little understanding of what this experience would bring. Many were frustrated that no one would tell them exactly what they would learn, being used to workshops that provided succinct lists of learning objectives and descriptions of what would be learned.
Jerry invited participants to create their own learning objectives, instead. A pre-work assignment that just baffled many.
The workshop served as a kind of introduction to self more than providing a set of general instructions. Each participant was encouraged to write in a personal journal, and us facilitators called frequent journal breaks for people to jot down their reflections. No one was ever required to share their personal reflections, and aside from an opening ritual where small groups distilled and reported their learning objectives and a closing ritual where each team reported on whether they'd achieved their objectives, personal learning stayed quite personal. No one knew what anyone else was really learning.
I attended my first PSL in the late 80s, when I was a driven middle manager. I was what I've since labeled 'zoned in' on my career, my work life, my company, my projects. I was monoral, single-minded, a driver. My wife at the time complained a lot about my schedule, my obsession with work, claiming that I'd changed since I went to university and took a management job. I couldn't see it. I claimed that while I was no longer the songwriter I once had been, I was "just playing a different-shaped guitar now."
PSL involved a series of simulations, experiential games intended to help people "catch themselves being themselves." I stumbled into myself on the first night, in the middle of a black box simulation. The me I encountered in that game differed so greatly from the persona I'd been inhabiting that I took sick, what I now recognize as soul sick, and missed much of the balance of the workshop. I was deeply changed by that experience.
I had no way to know this at the time, but many who attended PSL over the following years experienced similar results. Many encountered an unfinished or neglected side of themselves and found their resulting selves less willing and able to engage as they had previously unselfconsciously engaged. They woke up and were changed by the experience. Some left the companies that had sent them. Others struggled upon return to find a place for something that had not seemed germane before attending the workshop. Many stayed connected and started a now life-long conversation considering who they are and what they are doing in this world. I'm still connected to many people I first met attending and later facilitating PSL. My present wife, Amy, was a student at PSL when we first met.
What does this have to do with management-ism? Management-ism requires the subjugation of self, the often pre-conscious denial of who I am and what I am doing. To encounter self in a revelatory way, after not being aware of self's absence, unsets more than our carefully constructed house of cards. It changes the game.
As I said, I met Amy at a PSL, where she was 'just another student' when I first noticed her, the shortest member of her learning team, standing on a chair, painstakingly positioning the top tier of cards on a planned eight-foot house of cards. Her team had won the first round of competition, where the challenge was to build a four-foot house of cards, and had taken their proprietary technology and moved from the lobby where other teams could copy to an adjacent dining room for round two. As I approached their construction, yardstick in hand, her team members asked for a measurement. Taking my yardstick, they found that they were building their eight-foot house of cards in a seven-foot, ten-inch room. No way to succeed.
What Amy and her team did then was instructive. They became political. "Would it be good enough to show that we could have succeeded? Can we use Amy's foot in lieu of a standard one?" And they began to build faster. They continued building for a few minutes after time was called on that round in a kind of Wiley Coyote attempt to keep running after losing their ground.
On reflection, Amy realized that she'd stumbled upon a dandy metaphor for her life. Her work assignment was like trying to build an eight foot house of cards in a seven foot ten inch room. So was her marriage. So was her career. She was changed by her unanticipated experience of self.
Management-ists tell stories about how self-less they are, about how they sacrifice for their company, their team, their goals, their customer, just as if their selflessness contributed to creating more value, more results, more satisfaction, as if what matters to them doesn't really matter at all. They can encourage selfless cultures, where their curious affliction gets rewarded as the norm and any semblance of self experienced as evidence of less than full commitment.
F W Taylor deliberately omitted self from his efficient procedures, measuring only what he measured, not the inevitably self-infused organization. The workers complained a lot at the time, reasoning that since Midvale Steel was not competing in the small margin railroad rail market but the huge margin government armaments market, there was plenty of space for a variety of self in the fabrication. Nor did the calculated efficiencies prevent the company, or the bulk of it, from being acquired by the Pittsburgh steel combine and turned away from its DNA. We wonder now what that self-lessness really achieved.
But our training and the context within which we manage seems now to insist upon us acquiring the bug. Those who suffer from it might never suspect their infection. Those who recover from it usually stumble upon or over themselves, then work to incorporate their discovery into something quite distinct from the game they were originally certified in and the one they were convinced they just had to play. Those who've not yet made this discovery remain confident, certain that they are playing the right game right. This unchangeable certainty is clear evidence that something essential's missing from the mix.
wE iNterrupt
tHe rEgularly sCheduled bLog eNtry fOr a nEws fLash!Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Could be. An article in the current Atlantic considers how we acquire information, and the effect of our snippet-seeking culture on our brains and on our society. When was the last time you read a book? When was the last time you lost yourself in thought? Our brains rewire themselves, adapting to the conditions around us. The printing press changed not only how books are produced, but how readers' brains process information. Same story with the computer, it seems.
Have you been reading less and enjoying it more? Do you find yourself feeling bored after ten minutes of reading? Do you ever visit the library anymore?
Google is engaged in a massive experiment, and we are the willing, enthusiastic lab rats. We flock to the feeder, feeling fortunate. We read a paragraph or two and feel as if we've mastered the subject. We can chat endlessly online, but can we hold up our end of a real, face-to-face conversation? (Try posting a longer-than-two paragraph entry into an online discussion group and just see if you don't get people complaining about your "long-windedness!" As you might complain about mine now?)
This piece also looks at what happened when clocks proliferated. Instead of being oriented to the cues surrounding us, we became dependent upon a machine to tell us what time it is. Our experience of time, consequently, is much different than it was before clocks were handy.
In the same way, once MS-Project was available on every desk top, it became unthinkable to plan without it. We feel as if we're better provisioned, but this piece outlines some of what we're losing along the way.
I won't rail long today about what we're losing along the way. I recognize that the world my grandparents inhabited was materially different than the world we inhabit today. And that I am a different species than they were. I am better provisioned and, curiously, less well-provisioned at the same time.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the self-proclaimed father of "scientific management", insisted a hundred years ago that while work was once all about "men," it will someday be all about "the system." What he claimed would be "the one best way;" continuously refined, feeding while feeding upon its followers.
The problem is not that we will produce a computer that thinks like we do, but that we will start to think like computers. The evidence seems clear that we are well along that path already. Von Forester failed to predict this outcome when he proclaimed that no computer could ever be programmed to think like a human. Humans are (or should I say, "were then?") naturally able to cope with non-trivial situations, yielding inevitable uncomputability for any computer attempting to think like us. But what if we began thinking like computers, shunning the non-trivial. Rewiring our own brains by interacting with computers so that we think like computers, couldn't computers suddenly, miraculously think just like us?
I started this entry thinking it was a side-track birdwalk from the current series on management-ism, but now I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, it covers the next logical part of the story. What management was when work was about "men" is quite different than what management must be if work is about "the system." The ever-refined system is engineered to omit the diversity and variety any cadre of "men" would naturally bring to their collective efforts. Once individuals learn to submit to "the system," management becomes about the care and feeding of the system. What sustains the "men" involved? With practice, with iteration, we will no longer feel as Taylor's subjects at Midvale Steel felt, that they were mere cogs in a machine. We will, as our brains naturally rewire themselves into a cog-seeking identity, no longer feel the tug of what used to pass for humanity in our work, and willingly ... hell, enthusiastically ... subvert our former selves to comfortably co-exist within the machine. Our child, our mother, our holy grail.
When was the last time you read a whole book rather than the Wikipeadia summary of it? When did you last lose yourself in thought? When did your project's community last engage in a face-to-face conversation?
I have long held that projects are conversation, not scripted performances. But what if, through iteration, we imprint on the scripted performance paradigm? Then we might insist upon engineering only tiny, riskless efforts, ones than can be accomplished in a few days, and string those results together claiming that we'd done something huge, bigger than we are, profound. Did we really? Or did we merely dumb ourselves down to satisfy our notions of how we really should otta be?
Next time, I promise this time, Changed By It.
([Note: I am the Management-ist depicted here. I am also the one interviewing (or, in proper management-ist lingo, 'being interviewed by') the management-ist. I have been on both sides of this conference table.]
The chill will crawl up the back of your neck.
The surroundings are comfortable enough: a well-appointed office, a conference room decorated with fine art. The welcome will be genuinely warm. The conversation always starts with small talk—studied small talk, as if I'd been instructed to 'start from the heart' and engage with the 'person' first. Whether this takes the form of sports, the weather, the travel from there to here, or the nearly universal quick apology for being a few minutes late for the meeting, the first five minutes of the interview will be beside the point.
Study the scenery. What books are displayed? (These are clues to the form and texture of belief.) What clutter prevails? Am I wearing one of those absolutely unfunctional Polo dress shirts with a logo in lieu of a pocket? Tassled loafers or tasseled Top Siders? The tassel: the management-ist's curious decoration of choice!
Listen to the language. I will pass more than your maximum annual dose of unconditional superlatives. I will say 'best' when the context screams 'better', I will use 'accountability' as a synonym for 'responsibility', I will revere 'predictability' as if it were 'reliability.' Listen closely, you will not understand very much of what I say. I speak in deep code. Buzz words punctuated with references. I will not speak for myself, but quote noted authorities, just as if knowing who said what makes what I say meaningful. Mostly, my story will be garbled. Ask for clarification and expect to receive a puzzled frown.
Sometime within the conversation, I will disclose another's shortcoming. 'They' will have done something 'stupid.' 'They' won't have 'gotten it.' 'They' will be characterized as some form of clueless, a condition linguistically elevated to character flaw. You will sense that 'they' managed to fake it until this recent unmasking of the deeper truth. 'They' are the cause. Defend 'them' at your own peril.
If your mind wanders, reflect on how it is that such a smart and experienced individual could be surrounded by such blunder. If I confide that 'my people' are well-intended, but not very experienced, return a year later, and I will repeat the same story. Then wonder: How could that year have not resulted in someone acquiring experience?
Whatever the topic, notice the interview wandering back toward me, the management-ist. I am the final arbiter of experience. More interestingly, I have assumed the role of final arbiter of everyone else's experience, too, second-guessing whatever fails to make a priori sense or contradicts my personal convictions. I feel powerful, but I am stuck in a story I seem to star in, yet hold little culpability for creating.
Jung claimed that this sort of absent presence occurs when a secondary temperament component (Thinking/Feeling) overrides the two primary temperament modes (Intervert/Extravert-iNtuition/Sensing). Typically, where acquired knowledge is more valued than how one naturally relates to others and how one naturally prefers to acquire information. In other words, where one more highly prizes what they have acquired over what they are naturally endowed with. Perhaps this is the delusion of our age, our very culture writ large. We move to cities to escape where we're from. We take degrees to distinguish ourselves from others so we can get a high-paying job. We assume professional (literally, what we profess) roles, then fuss about not being able to talk about what theory doesn't really work. We believe ourselves to be what we know, not who we are.
Fine, I'd rather have a knowledgeable manager than an ignorant one. But the fine distinguishing line is not between knowing and not knowing, but between knowing and being. The management-ist is defined by what they know, rather than more properly informed by it. A management-ist without a litany of oft-quoted external references (whether from Heroclitus or Tom Peters) is to their mind, no manager at all.
Some worship before the alter of continuous improvement. Others, six sigma. Whatever their belief, you will notice explanations that do not and could not ground themselves. Each requires faith for closure. Each requires belief to work. Ask an innocent question about, for instance, who decided what would be called Best Practice, and notice the quivering eye movements that signal the search for qualifying references. Some noted authority, who invariably became noteworthy due to their own audacious commercial bluster, will be named. This dance can continue for as long as you care to play.
I call the dance between the management-ist and the human Idiot Making. Where another presumes to know better than you what your experience is. Where their 'superior' judgement co-opts your inferior perspective, robbing you of your experience and leaving little more than a promise that, with diligence, you could know better, too. This is where the fear will crawl up your spine and tickle the short hairs on the back of your neck. You will be in the presence of a person capable of justifying almost anything, of dis-qualifying anyone except, of course, himself. Be afraid. be very afraid.
If you glimpse yourself in the management-ist role, as I have glimpsed myself in the past, be even more afraid. This peek took my breath away. Whether or not you suffocate on this unwanted insight, hope to be changed by it.
Next time: Changed By It
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:
Enough for today. More next time
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.
