Working Up

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 not original to me. I have read about it here and there in the past. Here is a link to one such mention of it.

Definition: The information thermocline is what happens in multi-level bureaucracies. Information does not pass freely through layers. About half the useful information is stopped at every level in both directions. I have seen this information thermocline in every bureaucracy in my life.

The Metaphor: This metaphor comes from the thermocline that exists in bodies of water.

The Thermocline: (one definition)

The thermocline is the transition layer between the mixed layer at the surface and the deep water layer. The definitions of these layers are based on temperature.

Some things don’t move up and down through the thermocline. Light is one, sound is another, and various life forms are another.

Information in the Bureaucracy: Now to complete the metaphor, we consider the flow of information through a bureaucracy.

Information flows up and down one level in a bureaucratic hierarchy. For example, I can tell my boss anything I want. No one is stopping me.

Information doesn’t flow through the hierarchical layers of the bureaucracy. In my experience, each layer of bureaucracy has about 3dB of attenuation. This means that half of the necessary information that should flow through is stopped. For example, I tell my boss ten things that are important for my boss’s boss to know, but only five things make it to my boss’s boss. This also happens in with information flow in the downwards direction. For example, my boss’s boss tells my boss ten important things. My boss tells me five of those things.

Universal Application: I have seen the information thermocline at work in every bureaucracy I have had the displeasure to be in during my life. I spent 25-plus years in government. Yuck. I have also seen the information thermocline (not) work in private industry and in volunteer organizations as well.

A Reminder: If you have created an organization that has a hierarchy, you have created information thermoclines. You are not an exception.

A Remedy: There is some hope for bureaucracies. First, people at the top have to admit that they have a thermocline and are not receiving all the necessary information through the layers below them no matter how smart and caring and well-meaning the people who work for you.

Second, you have to poke your head down through the levels of bureaucracy to learn the information that is being stopped at each level. Don’t ask the managers at each level as you already know what they are passing to you. Ask the workers at each level what they have given to their bosses. Compare that to what is being passed to you and discuss the filtering of information, a.k.a., stopping of information that is occurring.

Third, do not pretend that you can tell people “I have an open door policy” and they will poke upwards through the levels. Forget all those movies you saw as a kid where a Private pokes his head into the General’s tent and all is well. Those were movies, not real life. In real life, those people are smashed by the bureaucracy.

by Dwayne Phillips

Several years ago, I saw a sign proclaiming “Cubicle Suite” outside an office door. Cubicles are cubicles – yuck. A suite is some place really nice. The two works next to one another are nonsensical.

What other words can we place next to one another and make no sense?

How about:

Short meeting

Concise memo

Constructive criticism

Desktop computer (they are all under the desk)

Slightly obese

Short sermon

Lean bureaucracy

Suggestions?

by Dwayne Phillips

I suggest a method of measuring teacher effectiveness.  The vast majority of methods for measuring teachers rests on a simple question: do we trust students?

Bill Gates and his wife have been working towards improving education in America. I applaud their efforts as they could be using their billions of dollars to do things that are much easier. One of their recent efforts is to find a measure of effectiveness for teachers. After all, businesses can find ways to measure the effectiveness of employees. Why is it that education is the only endeavor that cannot measure worker effectiveness?

Here is a measure that I propose:

Does the teacher make you less interested in the subject?

This is a paraphrase of something that writer and consultant Jerry Weinberg has mentioned to me on several occasions.

Consider some examples. I had some good teachers when I was in school. What made them good teachers? It is difficult to remember and describe. What I can write is that I enjoyed going to their classes. That is it, but that is significant. If a person dreads being in the room with the “teacher,” little learning will occur.

A friend of my family has a daughter who is a senior in high school. The teacher in one of her classes is just plain mean. The teacher berates students daily. The young lady we know is disturbed by all this meanness and hatred. Her nerves are frazzled and, predictably, she isn’t learning anything. The mean teacher makes her less interested in the subject. (Please don’t write in about how this teacher should be removed and their are set processes in place to remove the teacher and all that. Yes, those procedures exist and, if followed, would result in the teacher not being hired again next academic year. That does my friend’s daughter and her classmates little good.)

So perhaps, the Gates should ask this question of students. Yes, there is plenty of room for abuse here in that some students are vindictive and will realize the power given them with such a question.

And now we have reached the crux of measuring teacher performance. Almost everything people have considered gives the power of the measure to the students.

Do we trust children to judge teachers?

by Dwayne Phillips

As much as we might wish otherwise, reality applies to us, too.

I was recently speaking with a group of people age 13 to 60. My question was:

How far back can you remember?

The near-unanimous answer was, “age three.” Some people could vaguely remember some things that happened when they were age two, but that was rare and the memories were pretty fuzzy.

At that moment, it struck me that my grandson, my oldest grandchild, would have his third birthday in a few weeks. I turned to my wife and told her that he probably won’t remember any of the things we have done with him up to this time.

She denied my claim. Surely, our grandson would remember all the things we had done together during his first two years of life. Surely, he would be the exception. Surely, he would share the wonderful memories that we have of his infant and toddler life.

My wife is not much different from the rest of us. We can sit in a room full of people who have one experience (e.g., not remembering life before age three) and then assume that we will be different. Reality will not apply to us.

I see this often in business and engineering. Reality shows that using practices A, B, and C on a project greatly increases the chance of success. The trouble is that A, B, and C aren’t much fun, and although they apply to 99% of organizations on 99% of projects, we can skip them and still succeed.

Wrong, because reality applies to us, too.

Why can’t someone fix this? Why can’t someone find a way that applies reality to everyone else, but no us? Someone could probably make a lot of money with that one.

by Dwayne Phillips

Often, greed is not the result of one great big greedy villain, but rather the sum of many well-meaning people who wanted to add just one little item to a system.

The Occupy Wall Street occupiers continue to occupy Wall Street and a few dozen other famous places in a few dozen cities in the U.S. One of the themes espoused by the occupiers is:

greed

The thought is that there are some really big, really greedy people out there somewhere who are taking far too much for themselves and leaving far too little for the rest of us, the 99%.

This thought may be true, but is outside of my experience. What I have seen is something else. I have seen many well-meaning people adding just one little thing to a big system. The one little thing is good, and since it is little, it won’t put a load on anyone.

I first saw this in college. Someone, just a lone student elected to the student council, wanted to added $2 to tuition fees. The $2 times 25,000 students would bring $50,000 that would fund something wonderful for all. And it was only $2. Thirty years later, and thirty years of just a couple of dollars added here and there, tuition has risen ten times more than the rate of inflation. College administrators are greedy. They must be greedy as what else would explain the unjustified rise in college tuition.

Hence, we come to a principle or two of general systems thinking:

One little thing added to a great big system will change that system.

and

The change will often be unintended.

“No,” cry the large group of small and well-meaning people. “We are not greedy. We are in the 99% and we want to improve life for all of us.”

I agree with these people I have known. They are not greedy, the are in the 99%, and they do want to improve life for all of us. A generation or two later, however, these people are gone, no one remembers why they wanted to add $2 to a large system, and someone else looks really greedy.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are many pleasures that come with managing a project. One is learning that you didn’t ruin the people who worked with you.

Author and consultant Jerry Weinberg once wrote:

One of the pleasures of having your children grow up is seeing that you didn’t ruin them after all.

My corollary of this for managing a project is:

One of the pleasures of managing a project is seeing that you didn’t ruin the other people on the project.

They still want to work on projects.

Some of them even want to work on projects with you.

I once worked in an office that prided itself on what it called “target teams.” Never mind the context; to be on a target team was some sort of honor (at least that is what upper managers wanted people to think). I met many people in that office who had worked on a target team and swore they would never be on one again.

The manager of that target team project flunked the above corollary.

I have had the pleasure of meeting people who worked with me on projects five, ten, and twenty years earlier. They told me they would love to work together again.

That phrase – love to work together again – is priceless.

by Dwayne Phillips

<rant>Baseball now moves into the World Series. You take the pennant winners from the National and American leagues and play a best-of-seven series to see who is the best in the world.

Now, let’s see if we can ruin this. People must be trying to ruin this, because they are succeeding at that.  They are trying to turn the World Series into the Super Bowl. It isn’t the Super Bowl; it is a series between the best of the two leagues.

When a team wins a league championship in baseball, they win the pennant. They actually get a pennant or flag to fly in their ball park. That is the prize.

Recently, however, some people who want to kill the game are trying to change the names. They now call the winners the “winner of the League Championship Series” or L-C-S. I’m sorry, “L-C-S” sounds like a disease or something. Maybe it is the Last Child Syndrome or the Lowest Calorie Syndrome or something like that.

Just remember, it’s called

Winning the pennant

not

Winning the LCS.

</rant>

by Dwayne Phillips

In government acquisition, the government employees make the decisions about projects. They often have to decide whether to continue or cancel a troubled project. The decision they often render is odd.

I worked in government acquisition circles for over 25 years. One of the principle tenets of that field is:

Contractor employees  make money

but

Government employees make decisions

In my experience, the above is true. It is one of the few things that keep people in government employment.

The government employee tells the contractor employee what to do.

There are many projects undertaken by the government-contractor partnership that go badly. There are many reasons for this including: the technology isn’t ready, the funding is off cycle, the economy places killer constraints. The list goes on and on and on.

In these bad situations, the government employees decide:

continue the project or cancel it.

An odd, but frequent, decision I saw government employees issue is:

Continue the project

and

Feel bad.

This occurs when people want to cancel a project, but cannot justify canceling it. The project should have been cancelled 6 or 12 months earlier. The decision makers, however, were not paying attention. Now they pay attention only to learn of the true and sad state of the project. They also learn that they have spent too much money to quit now. They are, as the cliche goes, beyond the point of return.

Therefore, they keep the project going. And they feel bad.

Feelings, however, don’t stop here. They make it well known that they expect everyone still working on the project to feel bad, really bad, really very bad every day.

Funny, they never seem to learn that they only control how they feel. They don’t realize that all the other people associated with the project are adults, and adults choose their own feelings.

The futility doesn’t stop there. Once the decision-makers notice that other adults don’t feel they way they “are supposed to feel,” the decision makers become angry and vindictive.

Yes, these are adults, at least that is what their birth certificates state.

by Dwayne Phillips

We have chased manufacturing out of America. We now have holes in our job structure and have lost the ability to adapt to a changing world.

I read a few posts on the “Econolypse” lately. Here is one post, and here is another.

We have chased the manufacturing jobs from the U.S. Some of this is from government regulations (I think that most of it is from government regulations, but that is just me), while some of it is from companies seeking to find less expensive ways to make good products for the American consumer. Governments in developing countries welcome American manufacturing jobs. The result is to build a factory in Cambodia. The product has the same quality at lower costs. The American consumer is pretty happy.

We have lost a few layers of our economy: These jobs that we lost to other countries,

they weren’t good jobs

How many times have you heard that one? Who wants to work on an assembly line all day that produces over-priced sneakers? That is a lousy job. Good riddance. Let those guys in Cambodia do that.

I’ll do something creative and fun and make lots of money

How many times have you your that one? Our highly educated masses of Generation Y (or whatever we call that big group of people born in the 1980s) will create, create, and create some more. They’ll make fun apps for our smart phones, produce entertaining videos for YouTube, and some other fun things that one day will pay them handsomely (just in time for us baby boomers to retire and be supported by all this new wealth).

So now we have a hole in our economy: Funny thing about all those fun and creative jobs – they haven’t shown up yet.

An economy is like a portfolio: Perhaps portfolio is not a good word for this, but consider a group of anything you have.  You can rank all the things you own by cost. You can rank all the things you own by how essential they are. You can rank all the things you own by all sorts of rank-ness.

Note the resemblance – no matter how you rank things, you have a spread across a spectrum.  You cannot label everything you own as essential or everything you own as frivolous. It just doesn’t work that way and it never has.

This is a property we learn from General Systems Thinking. If we optimize, e.g., we only own essentials, we lose the ability to adapt. By owning a few frivolous items, we learn something new. If an unforeseen future becomes a reality, some of the frivolous items are now essential and we can adapt because we already have them.

The world economy today is not predictable. I don’t think it was ever predictable. Hence, the ability to adapt to something new and unexpected is a good property. To optimize an entire economy for adaptability means that we don’t optimize for any one thing. We have a spectrum of industries and businesses and jobs and such. That means we have people who know how to make things on an assembly line as well as people who can create the next YouTube.

Perhaps we should bring back those things that we knew we would never need again. Things like manufacturing jobs. The trouble is, those jobs sometimes require big, dirty, energy-inefficient factories. And I’m not sure that we can tolerate those things anymore. Perhaps we have only forgotten how to see their value. We can re-learn.

by Dwayne Phillips

When things are going well, be careful about adding more “good” things. An addition is a foreign element and will change the situation.

I wish we had a bigger budget so we could do more of what we are doing now.

Wishes are often like the above. Granting a wish will surely make things better, even if they are pretty good already.

If you are in a good situation, please think twice (or thrice or more) about adding more resources to make things even “good-er.” Anything you add is a foreign element. It will disturb what you are experiencing and probably throw you into chaos (see note below).

Chaos may lead to another good situation, but, then again, it may not. And that brings us to the title of this post. If you are in a good experience, it might be best if you stay in that experience. Adding more “goodness” may tip things awry.

I have worked in good situations perhaps half a dozen times in the last 30 years. That leaves plenty of years for not-so-good situations. The good situations had just the right combination of people, challenges, solutions, and other resources. There are a few combinations of such items that bring a good situation. There are countless combinations of such items that bring a bad situation.

Enjoy good experiences. Cherish them, and nourish them carefully.

Note: The terms status quo, foreign element, and chaos are part of the Satir Change Model. For one description of the Satir Change Model, see this link.