Satir workshops

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

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

We've all been subjected to the next best thing, delivered by someone clueless about the present history supporting everything.... Change, whatever its intent, needs to be melded with the familiar status quo if it is to be meaningful and successful.

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

“Meaningless work is the soul of being in the body of nothingness.”

For much of my working life, I have been a strong advocate for meaningful work.... But today, I want to sing the praises of an under-appreciated kind of work, meaningless work.

Meaningless work is an act of selflessness.... No mugging for the virtual camera, no showing off for whatever passes for company.

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

I labor to exhaustion, not to become exhausted.... I am not investing my time or consciously expressing myself, just being here---not there, now---not then, the purpose perfectly tautological, explaining nothing at all.... No one will long remember, not even I will notice that time and action performed in perfect silent harmony and that time, for an unmeasured moment, stopped moving in any discernible direction and simply was.... Or both sometimes.

I pose today, understanding that those who throw their rational mind between themselves and their sight might only see me working slowly, when I'm merely dancing with meaningless work, slow work.

He even blamed his own staff for not performing as he expected.

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

This drive will take you through The Palouse country.

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

This drive will take you through The Palouse country.

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

I'm following with great interest the meltdown of the financial markets, and the curious response by investors, brokers, and regulators alike, noticing how much energy is being focused into restoring the old status quo.... We've nibbled the poison apple and the best response we seem to be able to produce is how to guarantee the future supply of poison apples. Yum!

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.... 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.... 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.... 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!"

Then, age-old usury laws fell out of fashion, and states went into the business of chasing each other to the bottom, promising “pay NO taxes, penalties, or fees, and charge your poorest customers whatever-the-heck you please.” There just had to be a prosperous underbelly down there somewhere.

Remember when a new company couldn’t float stock until they’d been profitable for three of the prior five years?... Why settle for a modest defined benefit amount when you could become Daddy Warbucks on steroids managing your own retirement account?

Why, indeed.

That set the stage for every mom and pop to speculate to live.... No, you didn’t speculate on stocks or buy sub-prime, you just supplemented your shrinking income, tapping the only asset you could ever call “mine.”...

Your collateral became your collateral damage.

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

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

Unless you were a hedge fund jockey or a golden parachute-wearing CFO, the bankruptcy judge will order you to submit to credit counseling.

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....

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

Then you wear your career like a toilet seat crown
and nobody appreciates you hanging around.
Your project teams seem to notice your summit‘s
a pimple, a dimple, and your stock simply plummets.
‘Cause you suck at projects, you suck like parole,
you suck at the stuff you were supposed to control:
the smooth operation of these things you don’t know....
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!

I've added a new page to the PureSchmaltz blog site. See the tabs above? Click on the P-S Fan Map tab and you'll display a map. You can add your location (even a picture) and a brief comment. I invite you to map yourself here.

Thanks.

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. ...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.... 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.... 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!... 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.

Sometimes people around me wonder where I am. Maybe you have too. I used to say, I don’t travel much, but I realized that is because some of my colleagues travel even more… So I added a list of upcoming trips to the sidebar of my blog. You can also subscribe to my trips through dopplr. I hope this makes it a little easier to meet up with other people while I am travelling.

The travel feed does not describe that clearly what I’m up to (only if you click through a couple of times), so I guess I’ll still be posting here about upcoming events every once in a while:

• Paris, next week, will see me and Emmanuel Gaillot co-present an in-house eXperience Refactoring in French - “des excursions dans le Rémaniement continu”. I have been brushing up on my french, and we have been talking French during the preparation. I am looking forward to it. We have been making a number of improvements to the course, e.g. a new exercise and the slides look intriguing in French
• Helsinki, 29 October sees me and Marc Evers co-present the revamped “right-sizing your unit tests” workshop at the Scandinavian Agile Conference. The past years we toured conferences mostly with systems thinking and other people oriented sessions (e.g. cultural patterns), we thought it would be fun to give people a taste of our technical sessions as well.
• Eindhoven, 20 and 21 November - together with Bath, UK one of my home towns -, sees yours truly and Rob Westgeest with a demonstration of story testing with rspec at XP Days Benelux and Responsibility-driven Design with Mocking with Marc Evers and Rob.
• London, 11th & 12th December, I look forward to join Rachel Davies in co-facilitating the large open space at XP day London. It is already their eighth conference, and the XP day London organisers show courage by going with a completely different format - less presentations and more interaction between the participants through Open Space. I think it is fitting. As agile software development progresses, practitioners need a place to push boundaries and work on problems they are (still) getting to grips with. With the high caliber audience that xp day usually draws, this should make for interesting topics and lively discussions.

That’s it for now. I will probably go to London and Bath somewhere in October as well. I don’t know when yet.

Several people have been asking me how we market and sell development projects, consultancy and courses. I don’t know exactly, and I don’t know many people who do…

Marc, Rob and I have been busy for a while, thinking about repositioning what is soon to be formerly known as eXperience Agile. We were feeling that what we are offering is more than ‘just agile’. We also want to reach pragmatists on the other side of the chasm, who don’t respond well to the zeal that seems to rear its’ ugly head around methods every once in a while.

In short, We’d like a new website, so that our regular customers can easily find out which courses are forthcoming. We want new versions of the brochure, so that people can see the new courses, and we want to send out mailings more often, so that we can keep our clients and alumni informed on interesting conferences and new developments. There must be a system to all this, most likely similar to a tale of website traffic. And we’d like a new name and logo, so the brand fits better with our aspirations and activities.

Not that we know much about branding (or are necessarily fond of it - I’ve even said Branding is for cows in the past). But we got to do something

So we spent a day brainstorming new names, and finally found one that we all liked and had an available domain name that was not too long. If I remember correctly, Rob came up with the name and it fits well with the name of Marc’s company (Piecemeal Growth) and mine (Living Software), as it is also inspired by patterns.

Rob and Marc brainstorming on the new name

We also decided to do some experiments. We moved slowly, we were all available at different times and registering the domain name took longer than expected.

One of the experiments we decided to do is sponsoring a conference with money - usually we sponsor conferences with blood, sweat, and tears (and a good portion of laughter of course). And then it took us a couple of months to get moving on it.

We were procrastinating, because not ‘everything was ready’…Sounds like a software development project, doesn’t it ;). We did not have a logo, nor did we have the new website we wanted so badly - the current one is inconvenient to maintain and could look nicer.

This week, I decided to get moving, even though the sponsoring deadline of the conference had already passed. Luckily, one of the organizers mailed me if we were still interested in sponsoring - I had talked to him at the agile2008 conference already. That was excellent timing.

So I decided to go for it, and pay for the sponsoring. Doing that helped us to move forward. The conference organizers helped us by giving us a deadline - the logo had to be in by friday to make the printed programme

We felt we can always iterate over the logo and change it later. We also had to give them a url to the website. Oops. Ok, so we don’t have the flashy new site yet, but we have the domain name, so we point it to the old one for now. Ah. brochures. We should have something to hand out at the conference. Hm. The previous one was quite succesful, but we didn’t get around to making a new one. What changes do we really, really want to make so we can send it to the printer this week? Let’s take out the course schedule so the brochure lasts a bit longer, add a new course and announce the rebranding in the brochure.

By now, I hope you are curious about which conference we are going to sponsor, what our new name is going to be, and what our new offerings are. Be the first to know, and subscribe to our - soon to be revamped - newsletter - leave your e-mail address in the box at www.experienceagile.eu or contact me directly.

Credits: Thanks to Marc Evers for simplifying the text.

I say presumed to run because I’ve grown to believe that this foundation is much more presumptive than genuine.

A couple of years ago, Rob Austin, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, invited me to his annual innovation symposium, the centerpiece of which was a presentation prepared by Austin describing his research into the sources of business innovation.... 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?... His first principle: Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

Sounds very much like Austin’s tactic, doesn’t it?... 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.... 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.... 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.... The ultimate cost of disqualifying—merely because their temperaments are not mechanical—three quarters of our citizens, of creating a counterfeit underclass of dreamers, poets, and innovators we punish for crimes against the machine.

Let this be a gentle engagement, inexorable.

He leaves behind a family,
Familiarity,
Hilarity.
He came from what today is called a ‘blended family,’
But during the Great Depression was just a busted home.
He swore that his kids wouldn’t grow up like that
And we did not.

He insisted upon eating the chicken backs
At Sunday chicken dinner
I was grown before I understood that
No one prefers to eat back meat,
Not even him!
He preferred for others to be satisfied
And could absorb more personal misery in pursuit of other’s happiness
Than anyone I’ve known.

My father hated infirmity
and growing older
was hard for him
A bungled surgery left his foot drooping,
and he walked with a cane after that.
He’d walk almost down to Sturm and back
at a turtle’s pace. ...And he played well.
He also played when he wasn’t well.
He had some down days in his life:
Sick sometimes, but never unshaven.
No time off without grooming.
His mornings smelled of Aqua Velva,
after he’d shaved until his face shone with satisfaction.

...This is the part I cannot say
It’s above my pay grade
He and my mother were bound by something
Few have found
I’m not qualified to expound on it other than to say
His dedication drove me crazy
Inspiring me.... He protected her.
More than a care-giver,
It was as if her fate was on his soul,
and he couldn’t let go.
We couldn’t know the depth of this devotion
“This is just a part of the deal,” he disclosed
Heaven might know what he meant by that.
I know I don’t.

I’ve been trying on
different songs,
unseen ways of seeing
But have not yet found the sort of tune
that might replace this being.
“I can’t complain,” he would explain
It’s all part of the deal.
He’d take his cane and his good name
and make it almost down to Sturm and back
at the speed of a screaming turtle.

True Story:

The evening before my dad died, a praying Mantis landed on the front screen door....

All that evening and into that long, long night, while family came and went, and we stepped out for soothing night air, that screen door opened and closed again and again and again. Through it all, that solitary Mantis held vigil, much as we inside held loving vigil over his final night.... As Nancy the hospice nurse came and went, and his loving CNA Kathy came to bathe and massage him, that mantis remained.... Still.

He drew his last labored breath mid-morning, and as we stepped outside to find consoling air, we noticed our mantis still in prayer. As family flocked together to share numb prayers, opening and closing his door another few dozen times, our monkish mantis never moved.... Only after his sons helped guide him one last time through that door—into eternity—did our freakish friar fly away.

The Ancients believed the mantis had divine and magical powers.

(Bob) Schmaltz, of 1015 Pleasant Street, died peacefully at home on Wednesday, September 3, 2008, aged 85 years. ...Wallace on October 28, 1945 in Condon, Oregon, where he served with the volunteer fire department, played on the town baseball team, worked with the county road crew, and began his long career with the US Postal Service. Bob moved his family to Walla Walla in 1952, continuing his Postal Service career, retiring in 1978 after 30 years service.... After retirement, Bob and Bonnie traveled the country in their motor home, visiting family and friends until ill health intervened.... He was the primary caregiver for Bonnie for the last fifteen years.

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

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

Harald Walker shot a little video at Agile Open in June. He edited it, so that it became a nice little explanation of the Open Space “rules” in three minutes.

Enjoy!

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.... 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.... (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.... 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.... 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 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.

I have been peg-legging for some time, working around a curious feature. A few weeks ago, my space bar and delete key started working intermittently.... Wait a minute or two, and the problem would fix itself.

I finally replaced the keyboard, something I procrastinated on because it is a 140 mile round trip to the nearest Mac shop, and because, actually, I was enjoying the increased consciousness this little frustration brought.

Along about Friday, though, the novelty wore off. I was trying to write something and thespacebar(thenewone!)refusedtoclickbacktoworkingmode.

The technician suggested I repair permissions, which I did to no effect.... I finally figured out that I could copy a space and type-paste my way through a document....

I am including a link to an entertaining piece about unlearning: Unlearning-Obsolete-Technologies. My peg-legging brings unearning into sharp relief, where I cannot freely exercise my same-old usta be.