Satir workshops

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."

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 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.

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.

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.

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!"

Thanks.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.... 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.... 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.

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.