McGee's Musings

The curtain goes up in 45 minutes.

Actually, it won’t do anything until I give the order. But the order will come on time. I’ve just put my stage manager’s prompt script on a music stand just off stage left in the wings. It identifies everything that will happen offstage to make the magic happen onstage; lighting cues, sound cues, scenery movement. I check in with the tech crew, the music director, the house manager. At thirty minutes before curtain, I call “half hour,” then “5 minutes”, then “places” and we’re off.

For the next two hours, what we’ve practiced and rehearsed for weeks plays out under my direction. Most of the people in the audience have no idea that I exist, much less what I am doing. As it should be. Knowing how the magic is made is rarely as rewarding as simply enjoying it.

There are some of us, however, who develop an interest in how to make magic. Taking things apart to understand how they work has its own rewards. There are any number of cliches I could use to talk about pulling off this kind of performance magic; shared purpose, shared struggle, traditions. rituals. They are cliches because they are anchored in deep truths. I could have chosen to simply continue to accumulate experience and get better over time.

Practice makes perfect.

Although I didn’t have the language or concepts at the time, I chose a slightly different path. Call it reflective pratice. Which I learned some fifteen years later. Rather than striving to perfect some technique, I opted for working on understanding and improving the techniques in parallel with practicing and performing them. A slower and less certain path to travel. But one that turns out to be better suited to a world of innovation and change.

Over the last several years I’ve been noodling on what author Steve Johnson would describe as a “slow hunch.” As someone who has done knowledge work and managed knowledge workers, I’ve been trying to understand what it means to set aside productivity and pursue effectiveness instead. I’m planning on taking the next several weeks to take a deeper look at that hunch.

There’s no lack of commentary about productivity. It’s relatively easy to do but I’ve come to believe that it is anchored in a mistaken focus on the word worker at the expense of the word knowledge.

Here’s a simple example. I use a program called TextExpander on my Mac (if you’re on Windows, ActiveWords would be the equivalent). These programs let you create shortcuts for frequently used words or phrases. Their sales pitch is typically anchored in productivity thinking. Every week I get a little message from the program congratulating me on the time I have saved by using their shortcuts instead of typing out a phrase in full. The premise is that I am a machine for cranking out words and the faster I crank the better.

I don’t care how fast I type; I care about how well I think. Things that slow down my thinking are a problem worth attacking. I can never remember how to spell the word “individual.” Trying to work that out breaks my concentration and flow. I can remember to type “indv” however and let a piece of software worry about my spelling. TextExpander happily informs me of the seconds I have saved by not having to type those extra six characters. It cannot track or understand how it contributes to my state of flow when I’m trying to create. That’s the difference between productivity and effectiveness at a micro level.

It’s time to bring some sustained focus to this slow hunch that productivity and effectiveness are different. Feedback on whether I am making any sense will help.

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker

This has been the tagline here since near the beginning, although there is some question about its provenance (Quote Origin: The Cure for Boredom Is Curiosity. There Is No Cure for Curiosity – Quote Investigator®). One of the forces contributing to my starting this experiment was Dave Winer, whose ur-blog Scripting News just celebrated its 30th birthday (The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted).

When I created an MBA-level course on knowledge management at the Kellogg School, Winer donated licenses to his blogging software tool, Radio UserLand, so that my students could experiment with blogging. The experiment was not terribly successful. I made a slew of mistakes in how I set up and ran that particular experiment. Winer has a theory that some people are what he labels Natural-born bloggers.

Perhaps.

I do think there are some perspectives or attitudes you can bring to blogging (or writing in general) that make a difference. Nicole van der Hoeven offers a perspective that particularly resonates for me when she talks about learning in public. This ties into what I’ve said in the past about the observability of knowledge work.

Curiosity is at the root of all of this. I write as part of figuring out the world and what I think about it. Sharing what I learn is about the excitement of discovering something new and interesting. It’s the toddler showing off the frog she found in the backyard. If you’re lucky you show it to someone who shows you where to find another one in the creek nearby.

But it all starts with committing to your own curiosity.

I have this fuzzy memory of a standoff with my mother when I would have been about five years old. I was playing by myself in the front yard and she called for me to come in. I mouthed off somehow about not being ready or interested in doing what she wanted at that moment.

She responded with a “what did you just say?” in a tone that did not bode well for my immediate future. I remember thinking to myself “what can I say this instant that will get me out of trouble?” A quick “I love you” was sufficient to defuse the situation. While I did indeed love my mother, what sticks with me to this day is the sense of quickly thinking about how to manipulate the conversation to my advantage.

Another early reinforcement for speed and quickness as a default response.

While I think I’m on to something important in focusing on rhythm and cadence in my writing, I also need to sort out this speed response. This is something other than being an adrenaline junkie. I’ve never been one to seek out thrills for the sake of thrills. But I do find that I get impatient when the world around me unfolds too slowly for my tastes. Took me a long time to break myself of the habit of finishing other people’s sentences, for example.

I feel as though most other people tune into the rhythm of situations more easily than I do. For me, it depends on whether the underlying rhythm aligns with my natural “clock speed”. I’m fine when everything is moving briskly. Makes me a good consultant and problem solver.

Most of the time.

When the circumstances say “slow down,” I have to be very deliberate and mindful to match my outside to the appropriate pace. Whether my insides slow down can be another story. A story that will likely take some time to unpack further.

Some things you have to be taught. Others you learn largely on your own. I’ve gotten lots of feedback and editing on my writing over the years. And I got plenty of training on the mechanics of grammar in my youth. But 99% of that input came after I had produced something to react to. I can’t ever recall getting any input on how to create something in the first place.

There was a nun at some point who taught me something about preparing outlines, but I took the same lesson from that as any middle schooler, which was to produce the outline after you’d finished the piece. There’s Anne Lamott’s classic advice on “shitty first drafts.” And I did eventually learn about freewriting somewhere along the way.

For all the writing I’ve done, it isn’t at all clear how much of a process exists behind it. I’m reminded here of an observation that Peter Drucker once made that “whenever we have looked at any job – no matter how many thousands of years it has been performed – we have found that the traditional tools are wrong for the task.”

We feel our way to methods that work for us. When we succeed, we try to repeat what we think we did that worked. When we fail, we change something and try again.

For large scale, industrial, processes we’ve developed a body of knowledge and techniques for improving a process until it can reliably hit measures of performance, output, and quality. We don’t have a similar body of knowledge for creative work, although we pretend that we do. That’s because we can scarcely measure performance, output, or quality. And, whatever crude metrics we do cobble together don’t tell us which aspects of what passes for process connect to what we struggle to measure.

Once you start looking for it, you can find advice on aspects of the writing process. I can’t speak to any of the fancy programs on creative writing or what’s to be found within MFA programs. I have no aspirations to write the great American novel, so I haven’t looked in that direction. I never cracked the code of writing for academic journals. I suppose I’m an amateur writer in the sense of liking to have written.

I’m competent at something that many people find intimidating. Over time, I’ve become interested in getting better at this craft. I’ve sought out the advice and work of those who’ve demonstrated their great skill and graciously set down their thoughts on how this process works for them.

Among the other things I can claim some competence at is the analysis and design of systems and processes. The challenge here, of course, is akin to the old saw that a lawyer who represents themselves in a case has a fool for a client. It’s remarkably hard to coach yourself. How do you stand outside your process effectively enough to improve it?

I’m at a point in this draft, for example, where I’m struggling with what to do next. Do I pull back a bit to see if there is a better high level structure or flow to try? Do I push this line of thought to something that might resemble a close or conclusion of some sort? Have I found some sort of point that I can now articulate or am I about to start another cycle and wander off into the weeds?

It’s now late in the day, I’m running out of steam, and I don’t see any flashes of insight looming on the horizon. Back when I was building sets for the theater, we would sometimes encourage one another to “nail it before it rots.” Time to set the hammer down.

My wife and I spent fifteen months living in Nazaré, Portugal. We sold our house, sold our car, gave away our furniture, handed off our dog to our younger son, and embarked on what we are now describing as our “senior year abroad.” It was indeed an excellent adventure.

One of the principal reasons it became an adventure rather than a permanent relocation was my inability to acquire any meaningful facility with the Portuguese language nor demonstrate any likelihood of ever doing so.

I did study French in high school and, for a short while, in college. I never developed any real conversational facility there either. I thought I understood why that hadn’t worked well and I thought I was ready to do the necessary work to make a better run at Portuguese.

What I got instead was yet one more lesson that motivation is not the only relevant component in learning. For one, I don’t have a particularly good ear for language. I struggled to hear the distinctions my teachers and tutors were pointing out. I struggled even more to reproduce them. For another, my environment didn’t provide suitable forcing functions to block falling back on my English.

What I wished were true wasn’t enough. An essential reminder as I contemplate ways to improve my writing practice. I won’t solve the problem of better rhythm and cadence in my practice simply by wishing it so.

I need to design solutions that call for the least effort and least motivation possible. I need to be thinking in terms of designing paths of least resistance.