Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I am a problem solver. Sometimes, however, solving a problem is the worst thing to do. This story made the rounds recently about how our military is experimenting with small jolts of electricity to keep sleep-deprived troops awake. The electricity might have fewer bad side affects than the current treatment — lots […]

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by Dwayne Phillips People often choose a development method without any reason other than, “that is what everyone is doing now.” I urge a bit more thought. More thought on day one brings more time and energy the rest of the way. Agile development is all the rage today. I know because I am unemployed […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Give yourself permission to not be involved with an argument, especially an argument between another person and yourself. I have often seen people argue. The vast majority of the time, I told myself: I won’t become involved in that argument. In essense, I give myself permission to stay out of a discussion […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sick people are harder to heal than healthy people. That sure makes everything more difficult, but that seems to be reality. Have you ever noticed that sick people are harder to heal than people who are well? Sick people have many problems. Those problems interact with one another in complex and often […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is the thing we are attempting and the way we are attempting it. Using this perspective, there are four cases to consider. Wrong Thing – Wrong Way: Here we chose the wrong problem to solve and the wrong process to solve it. Aargh. We will work very hard with grievous vexation […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes a fiasco provides an excellent learning opportunity as we can study the group dynamics that led smart people to a stupid place. Then again, the fiasco may just be yet another example of stupidity. “That’s fascinating!” That may be a nice way of saying, “How could a group of such smart […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are times when I ask if my situation was caused by one of two shortcomings. Neither answer is pleasing. Then I move on to ask why I am in such an unsatisfactory situation. A couple decades ago, I heard a statement about explaining a bad situation. One paraphrase of the statement […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All bureaucracies, in my experience, stop the flow of information at each level of the hierachy. About half the important information is stopped at each level. There is hope, but people at the top have to work hard at getting the information they are being denied. The title of this post is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I learned a problem-solving method when I was a sophomore in college (in the previous millenium). It still works. I have a problem today at work. I have no idea what to do. Let’s fall back in time to my second year of calculus in college. The professor told us something like: […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I often saw companies blamed for bad management. The real problem was estimating in time of greatest ignorance and customers not mitigating the risk of such estimates. For a couple of decades, I monitored the performance of companies on government contracts. Part of this job was to grade the companies on how […]

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