Marriage

I'm getting married on December 29th. To my first girlfriend from high school. A full twenty years after we dated. Imagine that.

Got to thinking about efficiency today while driving around, alone in the car, doing errands. We leave tomorrow for a bed & breakfast, and we had a long list to accomplish in a short amount of time. Often we work together to accomplish tasks. The work goes more quickly, and it's more fun when there's someone to do it with. "Many hands make light work," my grandmother used to say.

Today was different. I realized this morning that if we were to meet our collective goals, that the most efficient way to get our work done was to split up and work separately. I think of old Scooby Doo cartoons, where the gang splits up--"You go that way, we'll go this way." Like that.

Splitting up today, for a while, was the only viable way for us to get our work done. More than that, it gave us both some alone time. Her to talk with a close girlfriend or two, about whatever close girlfriends talk about. And me to turn inward, think deeply, reflect on the changes taking place in my life. I never thought I'd get married. Not the type. Don't believe in the institution of marriage. Anything that fails around 50% of the time is in need of an overhaul anyway. It's hell to come face-to-face with something I don't believe in. A bit humbling, too.

We completed our chores, and now we're making the last few preparations. Ceremony and vows are written. Immediate family have maps and directions and know what is expected of them. Cousins on-board to house-sit and feed the dogs. Officiant is coming early on Saturday. Bed and breakfast owner has a CD player we can use. Marriage license is packed in our bags.

It feels to me like the start of a grand adventure. Happy New Year.

Four Horsemen

I participated in a graduate seminar, as a student, around 1999. I forget the exact topic of the course--media and values, or some such title that may have pleased Neil Postman.

What I recall about the course was reading about how the Internet was marketed. I recall four distinct value propositions that, at the time, were being touted as what the Internet would bring for the common folk: education, community, employment, democracy.

I'll be brief.

Education: the idea that everyone with a computer would have access to information and learning.

Community: the ability to create distinct and unique communities, to connect with other like-minded groups.

Employment: not only job training (a branch of education), but also finding work--work itself--would be enhanced by way of Internet technologies.

Democracy: finally technology arrives to enable the masses to participate more fully in our democratic processes.

Has the Internet delivered on these four promises?

Universal Telegram

One of my favorite questions to ask, in good times and in challenging ones:

"If the universe were trying to send you a message, what do you think it would be trying to say?"

I like to think of the universe sending me an actual telegram...and if I opened it up, to wonder what words might grace the thin telegram paper in my hands.

Organic Change

By organic change I mean change that occurs on its own, from its own source, more or less undirected. An individual, family, organization, or system shifts of its own accord in a direction, and the change sticks.

Organic change differs from directed change. With directed change, some program or intervention is amassed or developed and brought to bear on a system. In an organization, directed change may include a program or intervention, such as training education around a desired behavior. In a family system, a directed change might mean seeking help around a problem behavior that adversely affects relationships. Leadership and organizational development focuses on directed change--the intervention that helps to move a system, ideally in a more healthful direction.

I'm curious about organic changes--the kind that happen naturally, without programs, non-directed or self-directed, and that result in lasting, sticking change.

Time enough at last

The title of this entry comes from a Twilight Zone episode that originally aired on November 20, 1959. In this episode, the character Henry Bemis (played by Burgess Meredith), derided by his boss and wife as a "reader," is the sole survivor of a nuclear blast and finally has his time freed from work and family life to devote to his cherished hobby, reading books. Unfortunately for Mr. Bemis, his thick reading spectacles fall to the ground and shatter, leaving him with opportunity but not ability to enjoy his sudden surplus of time. Like Mr. Bemis, I too am a reader, and of late I've been thinking a bit about what some writers have to say about the subject of time.

---

In a two-paged essay entitled No So Fast!, Donnella Meadows proposes a solution for the world's activists and thinkers and people who generally think the world is need of saving:

Slowing down. Yes, that's what I said. Slowing down.

Slowing down could be the single most effective solution to the particular save-the-world struggle I immerse myself in -- the struggle for sustainability, for living harmoniously and well within the limits and laws of the earth.

Meadows reasons that reducing our constant hurry might change the ways we live and think such that the world mightn't need so much saving.

Said Thomas Merton, who spent his time in a Trappist monastery: "There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist...most easily succumbs: activism and over-work.... To allow oneself to be carried away by a
multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many people, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

In closing, Meadows coyly notes that she's too busy to take her own advice.

---

In a three-paged essay entitled Someone is stealing your life, Michael Ventura talks about time in the context of work. Ventura writes, "I learned about drones by droning," and his peculiar list of jobs sounds as if they're taken from Studs Terkel's book Working. Ventura's central point is that his employers are the ones stealing his life:

It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. A year has 52 weeks. Even a comparatively unskilled, uneducated worker like me..., even I had enough math to figure out that two goes into 52 ... how many times? Twenty-six. Meaning it would take me 26 years on the job to accumulate one year for myself. And I could only have that in 26 pieces, so it wouldn't even feel like a year. In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space in which to catch my breath, in between the 50 weeks that I lived that he owned.

Ventura acknowledges that those who finance or invest in a company deserve a fair return on their investment; he pushes convention when he says that the people doing the work also deserve a fair return on their investment, a return that includes a stake in the game and some decision making power over their own lives and livelihoods.

---

In an eighteen-paged article entitled Time & Its Discontents, John Zerzan examines the epistemology and values of time. What is time? How do we know time really exists? How did people think of time before the technology for measuring time came into being? Did the invention of machines that measure time actually create modern conceptions of time?

Zerzan's themes revolve around hierarchy in its various forms. One form is the system of division of labor that arose with factory systems, about which he writes:

An increasingly complex class society requires an ever larger array of time signals. Fights against time...gave way to struggles of time; resistance to being yolked to time and its inherent demands was defeated in general, replaced, typically, by disputes over the fair determination of time schedules or the length of the work day.

In other words, the question shifted away from whether people ought to be "yolked to time"--and instead the question shifted toward one of degree--how much ought people be yolked to time?

A second form of hierarchy is civilization itself. He writes:

In the world of alienation no adult can contrive or decree the freedom from time that the child habitually enjoys -- and must be made to lose. Time training, the essence of schooling, is vitally important to society. This training, as Fraser (1984) very cogently puts it, "bears in almost paradigmatic form the features of a civilizing process." A patient of Joost Meerlo (1966) "expressed it sarcastically: 'Time is civilization,' by which she meant that scheduling and meticulousness were the great weapons used by adults to force the youngsters into submission and servility."

What I like the most about Zerzan's article is how it asks difficult questions about time--a concept that most of us take for granted. What is time? How do we know time really exists? What are the effects and consequences of our current conceptions and socially constructed beliefs about time?

Dichotomies: thinking errors?

Friend of mine recently went from being the "golden child" to being the "black sheep." Some decision she made didn't wash with her family, and they let her know it.

Her experience reminded me of the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, who in his baseball exploits always wanted to be the "hero" with a game-winning strikeout, yet usually ended up being the "goat" as he gave up a game-losing home run. I'm also reminded of Colonel Cathart in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. Cathart was forever struggling to take action that result in a "feather in his cap" with his superiors, yet often his attempts backfired, resulting instead in a "black eye" in how others viewed him.

Where might we be without binary thinking?

In my view, the dichotomy robs humans of their unique and wide range of experiences. Rather than having a myriad of behavioral options and descriptions, dichotomies limit our experiences (or the labels we put on our experiences) into very narrow categories: good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, etc.

Another way of saying this would be to say that dichotomies represent thinking errors. The field of General Semantics has a saying: "the map is not the territory." This shorthand depicts the distinction between the world of words and the world of experience, and how sometimes our word-maps fail to adequately represent reality-territory. Dichotomies nearly always presume faulty maps by under-representing shades of gray into one distinct black and one distinct white.

Moreover, dichotomies do not exist outside the linguistic structures inside our own heads. Ever go for a walk in the woods, through leaves and over bridges, and stumble across a dichotomy? "Hey, there's one, near that old stump." They're a function of one way of thinking, and rarely test out in real life.

So why do we use dichotomies so often? Got ideas? Please share.

Dialysis friends

A few months ago, I had 3 people cancel appointments with me within a 24 hour time frame. It got me to thinking about a number of things...such as work/life balance, priorities, and commitment. I got to talking with a peer about this cancellation pattern. I didn't like it. There seemed to be something for me to learn in the experience.

This is what I think: if I have a kidney dialysis appointment, odds are that a "fire drill" at work or at home won't keep me from it. I likely won't be late, either. But if I have a lunch with a friend, the same doesn't hold true--I may be tempted to expect my friend or family member to understand my last-minute re-scheduling. "Sorry, something came up." Or I may just show up late and rely on a canned apology to smooth the waters.

With my friends, I want to be right up there with dialysis in the priority list. If they wouldn't cancel their dialysis appointment, then they shouldn't cancel their appointment with me, either. I want dialysis friends, and I want to be a dialysis friend as well. Because, really, in today's busy work/life climate, something always comes up. And we tend to make time for the things we truly find important.

So what I learned was this: if I want dialysis friends, I've gotta be really honest about saying how I feel about missed and/or late appointments. And then it's my job to quit making appointments with people who don't follow through.

I've solved the problem for myself, but the systems thinker in me wonders: why is it that this behavior is so prevalent in our culture? What about the structure of our systems encourage us to prioritize the unimportant above the important, such as imagined work crises over family, friends, and health? Got ideas? Share 'em.

A Heavy Burden Lifted

Years ago my friend Heidi and I were digging up an area of the yard for the purpose of making a garden plot. Suddenly Heidi called out: "Hey, I just found a fan." Sure enough, she had. And it wasn't budging.

So we dug around some more. I'll shorten the story a bit here. The fan was connected to a V8 engine, with the bell housing still attached, as well as an oil filter and motor mounts. The valve covers were absent. And the entire thing was buried in my back yard. It was a tank. We couldn't budge the thing. Ended up dragging it out with a come-along, winching it bit by bit until I got it as far as the cherry tree, to which the come-along was attached. And that's where it sat for years.

I'm selling my house. So the motor had to go. Plus the neighbor lady decided to replace the fence, so I had a shorter distance to get the thing out of my yard and onto her driveway. Sounds easy, right?

Not so easy. I'm six foot two, my brother's got an inch on me, and we're each big, strong Norwegian farm boys. We tried to lift the thing one day, and couldn't hardly budge it. The thing was a tank. We couldn't even roll or drag it. Too heavy. I'll shorten the story a bit more. With an appliance dolly, I managed to get that engine out of my yard and out near the street by the front of my house. With the help of my brother and father, all of us pulling or pushing. Closer. Out from under the cherry tree, and now out by the street. What I couldn't figure out next was how to get it into the back of my pickup. And even if I could, what would I do with it?

I felt a fair bit of emotion about this motor. Somehow this heavy burden had fallen onto me. I felt angry at whoever would bury a motor in a yard. I felt frustration at not knowing how to get rid of the damned thing. And mostly I just wanted it gone, out of my life, this enormously heavy, unmovable, awkward weight. I had some of my energy tied up in this beast, and I needed that energy back.

I called Chuck. From Chuck's Hauling. From http://www.chuckshauling.com/. On the phone he sounded worried--he had a minimum charge, and it hardly seemed worth it for one item. I told him to come anyway, it'd be worth his minimum if he could haul this thing away.

And you know what? He did. Chuck is a first-class guy. He's retired, but didn't care for the retired life, so he started a business. Hired a crew. And now he hauls things away for people.

So he has this truck with a bed that rises, and in the front of it is an electric winch with a long remote wire. Amazing stuff. Now that motor was big and awkward, and it gave Chuck a bit of a hard time. It proved difficult to find a good point on the motor where the cable hook would have a solid purchase and also could lift up at the correct angle. But after a couple of tries, as I walked outside with a cup of coffee, Chuck had that sucker dragged up a ramp and into the back of his truck. I thanked him and paid him and promptly referred him to a half dozen family and friends and neighbors.

What I found most strange was how I felt after he had left. Although I had a list of chores, I couldn't concentrate. I felt overjoyed that he had come and removed this heavy engine from my life. When I saw my neighbor, I pointed to where the motor had sat for a week. "Look! Gone!" Big smile. Joy. Really, it felt like a religious experience. Someone came and lightened my load. Some people seek Jesus. I sought Chuck. I was giddy all day. My concentration was ruined. Even now, as I write, past 2:00 AM, I'm unable to drift off to sleep. Big changes are ahead, and I'm excited.

I think it's that heavy burden that Chuck lifted from me. Thank you, Chuck.

Perfectly Edited Movie

Sometimes I imagine I'm a character in a perfectly edited movie, where there are no extraneous scenes, where everything serves a purpose in creating the story.

This from a Seattle friend. Seems like a charitable point of view. That would make the mouthy jerk at the hardware store...well, just part of the perfectly edited movie. He's serving some purpose in the film, even if I'm not aware of what it might be. Maybe that's the challenge...admitting that I'm just playing my role, and that I'm not the editor.
...

A quote from David Milch, creator of the HBO program Deadwood, seems relevant or related:

The chemist Friedrich Kekule worked on the structure of the benzene ring for 20 years, and then it came to him in a dream about a snake swallowing its tail. He said that visions come to prepared spirits. ...I've said that I believe our sense of ourselves as individuals is an illusion, and that we're organs of a larger organism that knows us, even though we don't know it. If that's the case, I regard myself as a vessel of that organism, not the source. I try to get out of the way. The work I do now is as good as it can be no matter how long I spend on it, and I think that's a matter of readiness of the spirit.

I think my friend's perfectly edited movie and Milch's readiness of the spirit have something in common, a sense of grace, deflation of ego, something that enables connection to the divine. Thoughts?

Alternative energy

Late in 2005, George Monbiot wrote an article on the subject of biodiesel. His central point is that, in terms of overall ecological footprint, biodiesel may be much worse than fossil fuels. The article is worth a read.

What stood out, to me, was this quote:

In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 1018 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota". In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals.

In even more plain English, this means that we are consuming energy 400 times in exceess of what is coming into the global system. Imagine spending 400 times what you earn...how long could you do it?

What I find significant--most of the press I read about the future of energy focuses on replacement fuels for oil, and not on the fundamentally unsustainable rate of consumption. No amount of wind, hydro, solar, biodiesel, or even solar roadways, are really an answer for the rate at which humans are spending energy. It is the energy consumption rate, and not the source, that must shift if carbon emissions are to be reduced.

...

Fine print:
Some people will argue the number 400. I'll concede that the number may be wrong--it may be high, it may be low. The accuracy of the number 400 may be questioned--what is unquestionable, however, is the fact that we're using reserves more quickly than they can replenish.

Be quiet

I spent some time away from home and away from work. I left without an agenda, with the intention only to get away from the normal routine and think a bit about what's next.

Something stands out. I don't spend enough time sitting still and being quiet. I find a lot of distracting noise in my world, and damned little of it helps me get more of what I really want.

The field of General Semantics drew my awareness toward things that occur on the silent, pre-linguistic levels of reality and awareness. The concept is difficult for me to describe, but I'll try anyway. It goes something like this: when I'm sitting at the river, I'm having a first-hand experience that occurs before language. As soon as I translate that silent experience into language, I have changed it, transformed the silent experience into an intermediate form--language. But the experience itself isn't language, isn't the words. The experience itself is what comes before words. It's what is meant by the phrase, "The map is not the territory." The words I use to describe my experience are not the experience itself.

In the film Havana, the character Jack Weil (Robert Redford) tries to convince Roberta Duran (Lena Olin), the wife of a fallen revolutionary with whom he's fallen in love, to leave Cuba with him. Duran feels strongly about the revolution, and Weil, an American, thinks the revolution isn't any of their business.

"Jesus, you can't live ideas. Most thing that are alive don't even have ideas. What's really going on happens before ideas, before talk, before anyone says anything. And after...in the quiet."

Customer service

I read a bit today about customer service. Apparently, a survey tells us that 75% of high tech CEOs think that their customer service is "above average." The article goes on to discuss the importance of customer retention and customer loyalty.

And yet...I've seen the wild successes of many industries--large discount stores, large hardware stores, computers, food--that indicate to me that consumers care more about price than quality or service. Price seems to win out in the marketplace over both quality and service. The author points out, in one of three tips toward the article's end, for consumers to "be less price-centric."

It seems to me that CEOs, whether or not they're in touch with their customer service quality, have the right idea. Again and again consumers choose lower prices over quality and service. What we consumers say (in miles of service horror story comments) doesn't match what we do (buy on the cheap).

Not one comment that I read said, "Well, shoot, I guess I got what I paid for. Next time I'll focus more on quality and service over price." Again and again, a poor customer experience is always someone else's fault.

Do interviews work?

I had coffee with a colleague last week and we got on the topic of interviews. My friend is a musician. She told me that the structure of an orchestra audition is ideal for selecting a soloist. Everything about the audition tests how well a musician performs individually. Predictably, she tells me, many orchestras are full of people who would make great soloists, but who aren't as well suited to play as a member of a larger team.

I have to take my friend's word--I know very little about music auditions. But I do know a bit about interviews, and to me they've always felt like amateur psychology hour, no matter what side I've sat on. Today I read a blurb in a blog that suggested that, at one company, they ought only allow "successful" interviewers (ones whose past choices reflect solid candidates) to interview. And my colleague sent me a pointer to a Tom Peters interview with Nick Corcodilos, which touches on a similar theme of interviewing:

Hypothetical situations and tests are nonsense. Psychologists have been telling us for decades about test-taking skills. People can pass tests and interviews with flying colors and not know a damn thing. Annette Flippen, an organizational psychologist, read my book and said, "We already know the traditional interview has little or no statistical utility as a selection technique." Most people don't know it.

Here's a great question that fits many situations, including this one: If this isn't working, why do we keep doing it?

Joy, Magic, and Flow

Joy at Work. That's the title of a book I finished reading last week. It gets me to wondering: are we finally starting to see the value of engaged, valued, empowered employees? Are we finally moving away from workplace ideas and thinking that originated during the industrial revolution?

"Magic @ Work." That's the title of the 4/23/07 PNODN meeting presentation by OD pros Geoff Bellman and Kathleen Ryan. Here again, the pattern of focusing on what makes magic happen in groups and teams.

Finding Flow. Another good book. Talks about those situations, unique to each individual, where we lose track of ourselves and of time. It's not specifically about organizational development, nor about work...but sometimes these moments do occur at work. Don't they?

My question: how might we help create work structures that bring out more joy, magic, and flow?

Connecting the Disconnected

Three pages, of the three dozen or so I read today, stand out thematically. Each points to a slightly different part of the elephant, but all, I think, have something interesting to say about the whole.

(1) "Souls of the New Machine", by Gail Caldwell, 2007
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/03/18/souls_of_the_new_machine/

From the day the first Walkman appeared (remember Walkmans? The iPod's arthritic granddad?), we've been heading into techno-tunnels of separation. The seats on Jet Blue these days have individual TV screens, so that even the communal laughs on in-flight movies (granted, a paltry pleasure) are gone. With our iPods and ear mikes and tiny laptops, we look like the spooky characters in George Tooker's paintings of modern alienation from the 1950s -- lost souls in waiting rooms and subway corridors, looking anywhere but toward one another.

Ah, but what about the blog, says the technophile, where one can relay one's own story ad infinitum, and strangers can reach out and become soulmates? The fact is that our pixel-driven anonymity is correlative to the false sense of intimacy it induces. (There is also an argument to be made that this online exchange has been robbed of everything that enriches dialogue, including but not limited to caring about the teller.) The fragmentation of culture and technology in the past decade has exploded the dialogue of mass culture into a million conversations; the only common thread that exists is the fact that there isn't one.

(2) "The Humanism of Media Ecology," Neil Postman, 2000
http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/proceedings/v1/humanism_of_media_ecology.html

In the 19th century, we clearly suffered from the problem of information scarcity. In the 1830s information could travel only as fast as a human being, which was about 35 miles per hour on a fast train. And so, we addressed the question, How can we get more information, to more people, faster, and in diverse forms? We started to solve this problem with the invention of telegraphy and photography in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the early attempts to solve that problem. Henry David Thoreau remarked in Walden,

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

Nonetheless, the issue of what is significant or useful information was not much discussed, and for 170 years we have been obsessed with machinery that would give access, and give it fast, to a Niagara of information.

Obviously, the Internet does that and we must give all due praise for its efficiency. But it does not help us, neither does television or any other 19th- or 20th-century medium (except perhaps the telephone), to solve the problem of what is significant information. As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage.

(3) Excerpt from Vonnegut's last book, A Man Without a Country, 2005
http://www.wnyc.org/books/52135

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story—just a very simple one—about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to cry? Don’t you know how that little girl feels? And you’d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

So What?

What ties these three writings together? All hint at the unintended consequences of an increasingly mediated society: individuation and isolation, quality of available information, and the decline of imagination. And yet I'm left with the "So what?" question.

If these three writers indeed point to different parts of an elephant, what are we to learn from their words? What does it mean that you're reading my electronic text, and that I'm excerpting from others' electronic texts, and that you may add your electronic comment to this electronic page?

And for cryin' out loud, what happens to all this text when the power goes out?

Please share your thoughts.