Category: Knowledge work

Trusting the team

Our 8:30 class was about to begin. I was settling in to my assigned seat in the top row trying to project an air of invisibility. I was a bit worse the wear from a class party the night before. This was a class I normally had under control, but not today. I hadn’t even opened the day’s case study and a very low profile was in order.

Our professor finished organizing his notes and looked up;

Today, we’re going to use a little role play to make the discussion more interesting. Jim, I’d like you to take the role of John Weldon. Jay, I’d like you to play the role of Peter Smith, John’s general counsel.

He then selected two other pairs of students and dispatched all of us into the corridor while he briefed the rest of the class on what was about to transpire.

In the corridor, I revealed my non-existent preparation to Jay with a simple question, “Who’s John Weldon?”

Jay was an attorney by training and, clearly, I was not the first befuddled client he had counseled:

Relax Jim.

Weldon is the CEO of Acme Industries and we’re in the middle of a negotiation with two other companies.

Keep your mouth shut, nod your head from time to time, and follow my lead

We were called back in to class. Jay and I sat in two chairs in the center of the pit across from our classmates in their roles, and I played my part as per Jay’s instructions. The negotiations were soon over and I was back in my regular seat as we debriefed the experience.

One of my section mates, who had been with me when I was busy not preparing the night before, oh so politely asked the professor how he had selected people for the various roles. Choosing three attorneys from the class was an obvious choice and no one objected. The rest of his explanation, however, was derailed when he said “I picked Jim because I knew he would have the case cracked.” The laughter this provoked required a confession on my part. Sadly, I’ve lost the certificate for “Best Bluff When Called on Unprepared” that my classmates awarded me at the end of the semester.

Lessons learned? I no longer drink, so staying sober before big meetings wasn’t one. Being prepared for the unexpected is a cliche and largely meaningless advice in the real world. Surrounding yourself with good people that you trust, on the other hand, is something you can control and puts you in a position where you do have a good chance to cope with the surprises that are inevitable.

Innovation in the small

I got two pieces of practical advice about writing many, many years ago. One from my mother. The other from one of two writers (Jerry Weinberg or Jerry Pournelle). Which one is lost in leaky memory.

Along about 1969-1970, Mom encouraged me to learn to touch type. This was when keyboards were connected to typewriters rather than computers. Her reasoning was that this would come in handy when I got to college and had to turn in papers on a regular basis. After a summer’s practice I was moderately skilled. Sixty years later, we’re somewhere deeper than muscle memory.

The second piece of advice was to learn to think at the keyboard. Handwritten drafts were too slow to keep up with my brain. Keyboards got closer. This is such routine practice today that it isn’t noticeable. I know that there are those who find the feel of pen on paper helpful to their thinking and writing practices. I am not one of them.

Doing this in the days before word processing was an option made me an oddity. Secretaries typed things. Professionals wrote longhand. Who was I to sit down at a secretary’s desk and write a rough draft? What other heresies might I commit in full view of the hierarchy? These may have been the seeds that led to my study of organizations, innovation, and technology.

There is always a layer of received wisdom that you either submit to or fight. Progress does not come from those who submit.

Nail it before it rots

I’ve been told that procrastination can be a symptom of perfectionism; you can’t turn something in until it is perfect. I wish I had known of that excuse when my father first called me on my tendency to put things off. Forty some odd years later I found an answer in ADD, but when I was about twelve my tendency to put off finishing things was a sore spot.

The incident that sticks was the day my father interrupted my working on a model airplane. He asked me to look up the word “procrastination.” Without looking up or skipping a beat, I answered “I’ll do it later.” Let’s just say that my attention was immediately and forcibly redirected to the dictionary on my desk. It’s a word that I’ve known for a long time.

While I was never especially adept at finishing things ahead of time, I did become very practiced at meeting deadlines. About the same time I was so memorably learning the word “procrastination,” my teachers also noted that I was a pretty competent writer. I was nudged into writing for our school paper and yearbook. I was tasked with editing the schools annual literary magazine. In college, I dated a girl who was the editor of the college yearbook and she assigned me quite a few articles when she was on a tight schedule. This pattern repeated itself in my professional work when I began to write consulting reports for clients.

The thread through all of this was my ability to produce a deliverable on deadline. There was a quality threshold to hit but deadlines ruled. The curtain goes up at eight because the show must go on. If the lead is throwing up in a bucket the understudy goes on that night.

If you could meet or exceed the quality gate by the deadline, you became the go to guy. Practice made you better. It also made you faster. “Done” was the metric. I became a carpenter not a cabinetmaker. Similar skill set, different expectations.

I learned my actual carpentry skills building stage sets. Again, the show must go on. You don’t want a set to fall on an actor mid-performance. But no one is going to live in that room when the run is over. The expression you will hear in the shop backstage is “nail it before it rots.”

You have to see the mess to manage the mess

Most days, at some point, my right shoulder will hurt. This is because of a bicycle accident twenty years ago, when I managed to shatter my shoulder by falling at zero miles per hour. With the help of a metal plate and half a dozen screws my orthopedic surgeon reassembled the jigsaw puzzle I had created . A year’s worth of physical therapy and rehab restored 90–95 percent of range of motion and function. I happen to be left-handed so there’s little that I can’t do, although I remain suspicious of bicycles. Last week, i was up on scaffolding installing siding on a house being built by Habitat for Humanity..

Pain is a message from your body that something needs attention. How much attention is a function of the level of pain plus whatever else in your life is demanding attention. The accident occurred just outside our house as my wife and I were beginning our ride. Before we could leave to visit the emergency department at the hospital, my wife insisted that she had to change out of her new spandex cycling outfit. How she thought she looked in that outfit demanded more attention than the fact that my right arm wasn’t working correctly. I still tease her about that.

Attention is what catches my interest about this moment. That pain message was adamant and demanded my immediate attention. A serious enough injury can cut through a lot. But it’s also a reminder to me that I struggle to manage my attention. My ability to ignore demands for attention can be both a strength and a weakness. This accident occurred when I was 53. That was perhaps three or four years after working out that I had a pretty clear case of ADD.

I grew up in an era and environment where ADD and ADHD were not something available to account for certain behaviors. They certainly weren’t something you thought of when trying to make sense out of someone with advanced academic degrees and a fair degree of career success.

The nuns in elementary school in the 1960s were quite comfortable managing your attention for you, although if you were quick-witted you could often fake your way out of most threatening moments. Natural curiosity can direct your attention in lots of interesting and productive ways. The theory, I suppose, is that you gradually learn to manage your attention on your own. Unfortunately, lots of people around you have strong opinions about where your attention should be directed. Most of us learn how to work within those opinions and expectations.

Some of us don’t. Or can’t.

My attention is a bit like a broken sense of pain. Some signals don’t register. Others get stuck on or off. I might easily miss a fire alarm if I am hyper-focused on a task that interests me. Or miss an opportunity to flirt with a pretty girl because I am absorbed in a book (that’s happened more than once in my past). General awareness helps a little bit. Medications not at all. A fair amount of mess in my life can be traced to this deficient sense of attention.

Becoming clueful

If you’re clever in school it can take a long time to grasp that you are clueless elsewhere. Gathering clues proceeds slowly.

An example that comes to mind was a math class in my second year in college. Professor Tucker mentioned that he had asked Professor Kuhn from the Economics Department to cover for him in Friday’s class. This was when it dawned on me that I was learning the Kuhn-Tucker algorithm in our textbook from its creators. Over the years, I’ve shared this story as an example of the quality of the education I was receiving. It only now occurs to me that it was equally a marker of my cluelessness.

My wife is on record that, based on photographic evidence of my sartorial choices then, she would have crossed the street to avoid me in college.

I could go on.

It’s hard to be surprised by something that you don’t notice. Professionally, I spent much of my career noticing systems and processes and designing better ones. To use Wendell Berry’s term, I “solved for pattern” I believed in organizations that wanted to behave more rationally. I cleaned up messes.

Where I got, and get, in trouble is with those who thrive on creating messes. This is less of an issue in retirement. I can avoid many chaos creators. In the wider world, that has become difficult of late. In the end it depends on getting better at noticing.

Addressing the Mess

Forty some odd years ago, I was part of a team that developed a new accounting system that let the State of New York pay its bills. The project took two years and involved over a hundred staff and consultants. One of the early steps in the project mapped all the steps from developing a budget for the Legislature to enact into law to the paperwork for cutting a check to a specific vendor for the paper to put in the copier outside our temporary offices.

My team met with legislators in the Capitol in Albany, analysts in the Budget Office, accountants in places like the State Police, and clerks in their warrens. As we traced the flow of paper we recorded the process on a wall in a large conference room. The final map was six feet high and twenty feet from end to end.

We transferred that map into a smaller version that went to the Graphics Department in our offices in New York City. Commercial artists there set the hand drawn flowchart into small type and printed the final flowchart as a three foot by five foot poster. We printed a hundred or so copies of that poster and delivered the first one to the Director of the Budget Office. The word “Accounting” in the title was spelled with one “C”.

Who knows how many eyes had reviewed how many drafts of this piece of work? How many times had I looked at it? Today, we could update a digital file and move on. Then, we simply moved on. I took what heat flowed from this mistake.

Messiness has been on my mind lately. It’s probably what triggered this memory. At the time, I was probably a lot more embarrassed than I can recall today. You can opt to be sloppy. You can attempt to be a perfectionist. Or you can get on with it. The world persists in being messy regardless of what you think. How do you factor that reality into your approach to work? Over the next few weeks I intend to dive into that particular mess.

Testing new writing tools

This is a test post using Dave Winer's newest tool/toy, Wordland. Always interesting to see what Dave is up to. One of the first blogging tools I used was his Radio Userland. As one of the ur-bloggers, Winer has thought about this more deeply than just about anyone. I may not always agree with him, but I always pay attention to his arguments. I'd be stupid not to, and I am not a fan of stupid.

I admit that I am always a bit leery of tools that insist on running in a browser. I am old school in that regard and want to know where my data resides. I'll be keeping an eye on this as it develops. The key question for me is whether it helps me get back into a more regular flow of writing and posting. That's not necessarily a function of the tool suite. 

We shall see how the tool and its value/utility to me unfold

Shaping or shaped by your environment

I am the eldest of seven baby boomers; born in 1953, my baby sister in 1961. My dad was an engineer who rose to middle management working in the space program for McDonnell Aircraft. I think we made decent money but everything gets smaller when divided by seven. I don’t recall that I had a room of my own until college except for a brief period when I was recovering from a broken leg (not a recommended path to privacy).

Looking back, one thing that amuses me was the advice on good study habits to “find a quiet, organized place for your work.” Never going to happen. Instead, I learned to tune out background noise and chaos. Getting my attention when I am concentrating can be a challenge.

Productivity thinking starts with controlling the environment. You design the assembly line to enable the flow you want. If the environment is not subject to your control, however, then you are forced onto a different path. Your task becomes how to be effective within the constraints of your environment. What can you control to make your work flow more smoothly?

Reflective practice makes better

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.

Serving two mistresses

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life came out while I was in college. One of, if not the first, thing I read in pursuit of better personal productivity.

I was in my second year of college. I had been granted what they called “advanced standing”, which meant I was on track to graduate in three rather than four years. This was courtesy of an exceptional high school education and some natural talent for standardized tests. I was also the production stage manager for a theater group’s spring production. This was an original Broadway scale musical comedy. As stage manager, I was responsible for managing all the rehearsals of the cast of 50 odd fellow students. Finally, as part of my financial aid package, I worked part time as a stage carpenter and electrician at McCarter Theater on campus.

To say that the title spoke to me might possibly have been an understatement.

Surely, I could get it all done if I was just a little bit better organized.

I think I actually believed that for many years.

This was the beginning of a love affair with two mistresses. On one side there was the “magic of the theater.” Bringing together sound, light, and movement to create a moment. On the other side, there was the work to organize and coordinate each of those elements so that they were ready when that moment arrived; systems.

Success depends on keeping both of these mistresses happy and in balance. It’s hard to create magic if you’ve forgotten to book the dance studio for rehearsal. On the other hand, no system can help you when the lead has locked themselves in their dressing room thirty minutes before the curtain is set to rise.

The challenge here is that the systems are easy to see and easy to tweak and easy to play with. They can be measured and reported on. So, you can find lots of advice on how to deal with systems.

Figuring out where to push or nudge to make the magic a bit more likely does not yield to systematic attack. Experience and a willingness to reflect on that experience can work over time. So can frank conversations with fellow travelers. There are fellow travelers out there. Your first step is to go look for them and strike up those conversations.