Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes the key to doing something better is really quite simple.

Over the years I have improved various things in my life. People ask me,

• How did I improve my handwriting from awful to neat?
• How did I improve my grammar and punctuation?
• How did I improve my fiction writing?
• How did I…?

The answer is,

I tried harder.

Yes, the answer is grammatically incorrect, but I hope the point comes across. Sometimes the simplest thing is the answer. I didn’t use any great new method; I didn’t hire someone to teach me something. I simply tried harder.

Something not working as well as you wish it to work? Failing again and again at the same old thing? Looking for answers?

Try trying harder.

by Dwayne Phillips

Privacy is gone. Prevent terrible things happening as a result of an inevitable mistake by earning the benefit of the doubt.

Donald Sterling was recorded in a private phone conversation. Boom. The end. No one gave him a break; no one gave him the benefit of the doubt. Why not? Because he had a reputation of being a bad person.

We all make mistakes. We all say the wrong thing or write the wrong thing. Something we utter “in private” becomes known to more people than we intended and we regret it. Do we get the boom like Donald Sterling? Even a little boom?

I believe that the answer depends on our reputation. Do people know us as a good person? (whatever that may mean in whatever situation we find ourselves) If the answer is, “Yes,” we have a chance.

Example: I was at a wedding reception. I saw a man pick up a snack from a snack tray, take a bite, then put the bitten snack back on the tray with the bite marks hidden.

How in the world can any responsible adult commit such a disgusting act? Later I learned that he was suffering from a terrible migraine, was dizzy, could barely stand, and was literally out of his mind for a few moments.

I didn’t scream to the whole world about the disgusting action committed in what the man thought was private. I knew the man as a good man. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He had earned that from years of exemplary living.

Privacy is gone. I could have easily recorded a video of the man putting a half-eaten snack back on the snack tray. With one button press, that video would have been available to the world. One simple, headache-induced mistake would have ruined the man. Boom.

How do we survive in a world without privacy? Earn the benefit of the doubt.

by Dwayne Phillips

Automation is replacing human jobs. Sorry. That is bad news for people who want to work, and there is no way around it. Such is the nature of today’s new technologies.

In recent centuries, new technology arrives and displaces workers. Those unemployed eventually find jobs in new industries that build and maintain the technology that took away their job. That is just the way it works, right?

I am sorry to write that the new technology of today actually eliminates jobs. Period. There are no new jobs created to build the new technology. That is the nature of today’s new technology.

One smart person creates an algorithm. That smart person writes a computer program to implement that algorithm. That is a simplification of a complex ordeal, but it summarizes it. Jobs go away. There are no new jobs created to build the new technology. The one smart person built it once, and the new technology only needs to be built once. Yes, there may be one new job for the one hundred lost to help distribute the software automation created by the one smart person.

The employment news is worse. That one smart person rests on the fortune made by the algorithm and implementation for five or ten years. The one smart person then invents another algorithm and implements it. Poof. There go another set of jobs replaced by the smart person’s automation.

I wish I could find a way around this shrinking need for people to work. One thing I can find is that many of the displaced can become counselors to help many of the other displaced workers to cope with their lack of purpose. Another thing is the smart person uses the fortune made from the algorithms and implementations to create a charitable foundation that hires people to run around trying to solve society’s unsolvable problems like trying to pull the poor out of poverty. Those are both made up jobs that really don’t accomplish much other than paying someone a salary instead of government welfare.

by Dwayne Phillips

Once again I delve into the question, but what was the objective?

I find myself planning events more than previously. At least I find myself involved in planning events. And, as I have written before, I tend to ask some variation of, “What is the objective?”

I have been involved with many events where the after-event review concluded with the title of this post. People were happy they attended the event. That is a good thing as happiness is a good thing (at least I believe so).

But, and yes I must introduce a “but,” did you accomplish your objective of the event? If the objective was happiness, the event was a success. If the objective was learning, the event was a failure. I can replace “learning” in the previous sentence with a few dozen other words that would lead me to the same conclusion.

Allow me to emphasize this:

A great time had by me does not make an event a success.

I can think of a lot of ways to have a great time. Most are far less costly than an event that consumes a lot of resources from a lot of persons.

by Dwayne Phillips

A review of the writing rule about writing small numbers.

Sometimes you just feel the need to write a blog post about something in writing that everyone is supposed to know. Then you read a stack of papers and see that almost no one knows it. So here goes:

Write small numbers as words.

There. I wrote it.

Two questions: (1) why do this and (2) how small is small?

Why do it: We all make mistakes. We all make typographical mistakes. If I intend to press the 5 on the keyboard and instead press the 6, I have made a mistake that is about 20% error. If I type 2,3014 when I intended to type 2,3015 I have made a mistake that is about 0.1% error. Typographical mistakes in small numbers introduce a much larger percent error. Hence, I should type six and not 6 as I am far less likely to introduce a 20% error.

How small: This is open to debate for those who debate such things. Some authorities want us to type the numbers zero through ten while others want this to continue up through ninety-nine. I leave that to those authorities to debate.

A bigger point: Don’t put numbers in the middle of your writing. Point to a table or something that holds the numbers. Writing is difficult enough without have numbers in the middle of it.

by Dwayne Phillips

The more things change, well, you know, they don’t change.

The world is now ruled by hashtags. There are no more standard categories for anything. Everyone makes their own category when they want. This was all described several years ago in Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Since nothing has a category, how do we find anything? Well, perhaps things aren’t as bad as they seem for us categorizing organizers of the world. People still seem to be using those old building blocks of the English (and other) language: nouns and verbs.

Yes, we fall back on the things and actions of our world for our miscellaneous categories. Perhaps the world has not ended.

And perhaps, just perhaps, I will learn how to spell “miscellaneous” without depending on the spell checker.

by Dwayne Phillips

Many people love a classroom that has lots of class discussion, a.k.a., the discussion class. What, however, is the goal of a class?

I am one of those irritating people who ask,

What was the goal?

I often hear people say, “It was a great event. There was lots of fill-in-the-blank-with-something-that-someone-would-consider-wonderful-at-some-time-in-some-place.”

I often encounter this regarding an educational event. Most of my educational events are with adults—not teenagers or younger. Adult educational events often have muddied goals. Some of the goals are:

• fun
• chats with old friends
• emotional release
• and even sometimes, learning new things, a.k.a., education

If chats with old friends is the goal, the discussion class is a great idea. If, however, education is the goal, I highly recommend against the class discussion. The lecture—dreaded by many adults—is far more effective for education. There are other class formats that are also for more effective for education.

“We had a good discussion, lots of class participation,” is nice if lots of people talking is the goal of the class. It isn’t necessarily good if education is the goal.

by Dwayne Phillips

There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult.

I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world:

Writing doesn’t scale.

Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece.

I continue to work with engineering students at George Mason University on their writing, and the students continue to teach me things. One thing that has been hammered into me by the students (I am a slow learner) is the topic of this post. Some students are assigned a three-page paper. They do fine. Other students, who are older and more experienced, are assigned a ten-page paper, and they make a terrible mess of everything.

For example,

Writing a sentence is writing a sentence is writing a sentence. Wrong.

Writing a sentence in a three-page paper is much easier than writing a sentence in a ten-page paper. For some reason, when many people are in the middle of a ten-page paper, sentences become garbled, long, complex, impossible to understand, and all other matter of angst.

Why? Please, someone explain it to me because I don’t know. What I do know is that this exists, that writing doesn’t scale.

by Dwayne Phillips

Senior managers issue policy. That is one of the more important tasks they do. A misunderstanding of policy statements and their purpose has given them a bad name. A better understanding of policy statements aids everyone in an organization.

Issuing policy is one of the more important tasks that managers can do. Please keep reading. I promise this may make sense in a few sentences.

“Policy” is one of the more hated items in the workplace. That is because people don’t understand what policy should be and how policy should be used.
In essence:

Policies are broad statements that help everyone working with the policy issuer decide.

Note the word in the middle of that statement: help. A policy helps people accomplish their daily work—notably a policy helps people with the many choices they face everyday.

For example,

All software written should be easier to port to a mobile application.

(This may seem to be obvious, but nothing is obvious.)

This policy helps everyone, especially the programmers, in the development of software. Any time a team leader or programmer must choose between this detail and that detail, they look to the policy, they literally look to the policy as it is posted on the wall or as a line at the top of their monitor display, to help them choose. They choose to do whatever will make it easier to port the software to a mobile application.

Senior managers should have the magic number of policies in affect at any one time (seven, plus or minus two). If a senior manager wants to issue a new policy, they will probably have to remove an existing one.

Keep policies simple and direct. Always remember that the policy is supposed to help people decide what to do in their daily job.

by Dwayne Phillips

There is a big difference between reasons for a decision and justifications created after a decision. Justifications, just a farce, succeed unless someone cares and is attentive.

Someone announces a decision; then they announce the reasons behind the decision.

Question: did they use those reasons in deciding or did they create those reasons after deciding as a justification for their decision?

Why would anyone care to know the answer to that question?

If we don’t care about the decision, we don’t care. If, however, we do care, the answer to the question is important. If the “reasons” being touted are really “justifications,” the deciders didn’t really decide. They knew which way they were going and did need any reasons for that. They were merely searching for some nice sounding platitudes to put on a PowerPoint presentation and read while they turned their back to an audience and hoped that no one would notice what they were doing.

Justifications are something created to fill time.

Justifications, however, succeed some 98.6% of the time. They only fail when someone asks the question and pays attention to the answer.