Category: Knowledge work

From Writing to Writer

Writing has been a core element of my professional identity for approximately forever. As a former consultant and academic, this isn’t surprising. It’s a skillset that has been rewarded and reinforced.

I’ve written a host of deliverables over the years;

  • Teaching cases
  • Blog posts
  • Magazine articles
  • Book reviews
  • Books
  • Keynote speeches
  • Lectures
  • Dissertation
  • Client Proposals
  • Client Reports
  • System Designs
  • Procedure Manuals
  • Training Manuals
  • Training Courses
  • Newspaper articles (High School Paper)
  • Yearbook articles (High School and College)

I’ve edited and been edited.

More than enough evidence to be comfortable knowing that I write better than most. And, well read enough to know how many better writers exist.

What’s on my mind is a shift in perspective.

What flows from thinking of myself as a writer rather than a consultant or teacher or executive? If I place this collection of skills, practices, and experiences center stage, dress it in a costume (tweed jacker perhaps), and hang a sign around my neck that says “WRITER” where does that lead?

There’s no shortage of advice about the importance of choosing the right word. I’ve also been troubled that I haven’t been finishing work as easily or as often as I would like. What can I discern from the perspective of “writer” that isn’t evident from that of “writing”?

In my world, writing was tied to deliverables and deadlines. There’s a product to create and an expectation of when it must be done. Nothing earthshaking in that observation. In my consulting career, I’ve called in freelance writers to handle those tasks for me. Good ones deliver product at or before the deadline. The others don’t get hired a second time.

A good freelance writer needs to manage their work beyond the individual deliverable. Whatever skills and techniques they bring to bear on completing an individual assignment, they need a separate set of skills and techniques to manage their writing practice.

Knowing how to complete individual deliverables has little bearing on managing a portfolio of requested deliverables. It has less bearing on how to think about or manage a queue of deliverables.

It’s hard to solve a problem when you’re looking in the wrong place. Which appears to be what I have been doing. So much for the benefit of experience.

When I was writing to spec for others, they managed the process. I focused on their deliverable and their deadline. As a writer, writing for myself, I must take responsibility for both the deliverables I know how to create and the overall process.

Elements of that process can be found within the emerging practice of personal knowledge management (PKM). Being more disciplined and systematics about keeping the intellectual tanks full of my own and others’ ideas, capturing ideas as they occur to me, noticing connections between ideas. Simple tasks that gain power from consistent practice.

These need not be discrete activities. They can become components of a larger process or system. That larger system might be the responsibilities of a knowledge work job or career. For example, that of a writer. Responsibilities that belonged to someone else in a larger, organizational context need to be folded into the writer’s individual context. Mapping individual ideas to potential deliverables, choosing which potential deliverables to develop into works in progress, managing the queues of potential deliverables and WIP, polishing and sharing WIP as finished material are elements of this larger system. They are no longer discrete activities. They are now components of a system that needs to be designed. A design that includes the capacity to monitor and manage the system.

I’ve developed a troubling habit of blaming my issues on my underlying neurodiversity. That’s a contributing factor. But the bigger issue is that I haven’t put the system in place that makes management possible.

What comes to mind is an old observation of Alan Kay’s, “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” There’s work to be done, but I believe I’m now looking at a promising framing of the task.

Asking Better Questions

You can’t fix a problem that you don’t see.

Like about ten percent of the world, I am left-handed (Why Are 90% Of Humans Right-Handed? An Evolutionary Biologist Explains). For any situation where hand-dominance matters, odds are the standard design solution will favor right-handers. Scissors, school desks, spiral bound notebooks, soup ladles, screw drivers. The list is surprisingly long. Curiously, you aren’t likely to notice, even as a left-hander. Your dominant hand is your dominant hand; it’s central to the way the world works for you. You don’t notice that the world is harder to navigate for you unless and until someone points it out. The first time I tried a pair of left-handed scissors was a revelation about how a proper tool could work. But someone had to tell me that such a thing as left-handed scissors existed. Until then, I simply felt clumsy. I assumed that the problem was internal, not connected to the tools available.

I’ve been wrestling with a vague sense that I’m not finishing writing at a satisfying pace. The beginnings of noticing a potential problem to solve.

I then made a mistake. A mistake that I spent significant time and effort encouraging my students to avoid when I was in the classroom. If any of them should come across this piece, they should feel free to mock me. I took my vague sense of a problem and framed it in terms of a potential solution. Rather than dig deeper to understand the problem, I jumped ahead to answer a question I had yet to fully formulate. Sometimes the accumulation of scar tissue isn’t sufficient to stay away from that hot stove.

Given that I’ve been concerned about the pace of finishing writing efforts, the question I posed to myself was;

What can or should I be doing to establish a cadence of writing that will more consistently lead to outputs and results that please me?

The lesson you are supposed to learn from all the questions you face in school and on the job is that the best answers flow from the best formulated questions. Your first task is not to answer the question in front of you; it’s to refine the question.

Unfortunately, this is a capstone lesson. It doesn’t surface in formal education until you work your way into doctoral programs. It’s there earlier but obscured by a system that, as a whole, rewards answers. Most people who ask questions get dinged for being annoying. “I’m just asking questions” has become the catchphrase of too many conspiracy cranks and general gadflies. Ask the wrong question of insecure people in positions of power and you risk worse than being deemed annoying.

Years of reinforcement tend to make my default response to questions posed the first answer that comes to mind. It’s a default that is actually pretty effective most of the time. It’s what gets rewarded in most of our educational settings and one I’ve had a lot of experience with. The confounding variable here was that I was answering a question I had formulated, rather than one crafted by a teacher. In my eagerness to supply an answer I made a rookie mistake.

Which is the worst kind to make when you are long past being a rookie.

My mistake was to hide an answer in the question. The question posed assumes that the problem to be solved had to do with “cadence.” It’s prefiguring a solution without any evidence that I understand the problem. I used to teach “Five Whys” to my students and to my junior consultants. One of many techniques to surface the hidden drivers of persistent problems. Techniques I’ve taught and applied for years. To other people’s problems.

Physician heal thyself indeed.

Let’s stick with my initial area of concern; finishing satisfactory writing efforts at a better, more consistent, pace. What are some additional questions that I might seek to answer?

  1. What is it about my writing outputs and results that I find pleasing?
  2. What differentiates those from ones that are not pleasing?
  3. How well do I understand the process I follow to produce those results?
  4. Can I predict how I will judge an output in advance of completing it?
  5. What are the markers that distinguish between outputs that please me and those that don’t?
  6. What can those markers tell me about the path I took to produce these outputs
  7. Can I articulate a process that I follow (whether conscious or instinctive) to get from germ of an idea to finished output?
  8. What can I learn from the practices of other creative sorts whose results I value
  9. How can I apply and adapt my experience evaluating and designing processes to my own process?

What’s the proverb? “Well begun is half done.” Too often, the only word in that proverb I see is “done.” The finish line beckons. And my tendencies to procrastinate make we wary of things that smell of delaying tactics. I have to remind myself to “stay in the question” long enough to unearth the questions that will yield the most return.

I was always a sprinter in my running days. The lesson I need to keep learning and relearning is that sprints are won or lost at the start. It’s a particularly bad start if you run in the wrong direction.

Or answer the wrong question.

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?