Satir workshops

With the holiday season almost ending it is time to make plans for the rest of the year. Summer was enjoyable; After Marc and I went to the ESSAP summer school in Varese, we drove to Luzern, Switzerland for the first, and very succesful, in-house run of the Unit Testing Masterclass. Marc, Rob and I learnt a lot about what works (and what doesn’t) in our courses in the first half of this year, and it was very satisfying to see it come together… when we experiment it does’nt always, of course - the price of a little courage. I took two full weeks of holiday - highly recommended to you (yes you!), my fellow workaholics. Then on to agile2008 in Toronto, which I took as a sort of extended holiday, swimming everyday, chatting with people, the occasional session, and my last meetings as a member of the agile alliance board - I want to focus more on my business and travel less between timezones if it’s not business. And then a small roadtrip afterwards.

Now I’m ‘not travelling’ - visiting my girfriend in Bath, while working remotely, and meeting some people in London at the eXtreme Tuesday Club tonight.

I’m busy brainstorming some new training courses, and turning the spike of a customer relationship management system for eXperience Agile (soon to be relaunched under a different name, watch this space ) into something that is tested and ready for production. With Emmanuel Gaillot we’re translating eXperience Refactoring into “des excursions dans le rémaniement continu”, which we’ll do in-house in September, and hope to do an open enrollment one in Paris in October. In the Netherlands we’re planning to do some more open enrollment courses:

• Unit Testing Masterclass in Tilburg, 8 and 9 September
• eXperience Agile in Tilburg, 17-19 September
• Unit Testing Masterclass in Utrecht 29 and 30 September

And 29 October I’ll be presenting “right sizing your unit tests” (a taster session for our unit testing masterclass) with Marc at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. I’ll probably also be running a session (wich one to be decided yet) at Xp Days Benelux November 20 & 21 in my hometown of Eindhoven and then later on enjoying the open space at XpDay London, 11th & 12th December.

And of course I’m planning to make more plans and blogging to make more blogs

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

Prior installments:
How We 'Managed' To Screw It Up,
Getting Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Abstractions
Going Organic
Interview With A Management-ist
eXtreme tAylorism
Changed By It
Enablers
Who Manages Managers?

Here's the hard part: You gotta start where ever they start.... 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.... Gotta start at the beginning, not the end.

Do not mention that the end envisioned will not be the end achieved.... 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.... And who you are today matters even less than who we might become together tomorrow.

More ...

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?... 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.... 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.... 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.... 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?... 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.... 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.

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

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

I had no way to know this at the time, but many who attended PSL over the following years experienced similar results.... 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.... 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.... 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.... 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.

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 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.... 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.... 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 ...

([Note: I am the Management-ist depicted here.... 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.... 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.... 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.... 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).... We believe ourselves to be what we know, not who we are.

Fine, I'd rather have a knowledgeable manager than an ignorant one.... 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.

"There's a show going down tonight
It's the hottest show in town
Down to that Gypsy Cafe
Where the freeway turns around
Once a week or so you know
These people show up to play
And they're gonna be stars someday
They're gonna be stars someday!"

This morning I heard this guy on the radio who's music evoked those days.... He carries his own polish that smells faintly of the stale beer and cigarette smoke-infused shag carpeting that decorates every Open Mike venue and sticks to more than the lining of the performer's guitar case.

Those of us who performed there mostly performed for each other.... I walked late night streets looking for inspiration, moving to the cadence of my boots, trusting my eyes, returning to try something by ear, then building up the story, the melody, and the hook.... Never could, never did figure out notation.

Amos Lee reminded me of those sweet, tough days, the days before I learned to play this different-shaped guitar I play for you today.... Those old men in short-sleeved dress shirts and straw dress hats no longer smoke sullenly in the back of the bar invaded once each week by kids seeking stars. And those world-weary kids we were, who in the hell even knows where we are now?

Here's to The Last Exit on Brooklyn and the Little Red Rooster, to Clinkerdagger's, The Mordor, and that place they tore down (what was its name?)