Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

This is a basic practice. It is unfortunate that many have either forgotten or never knew this practice concerning documents.

I find a document on the disk drive farm or network or whatever it is we call these things today. There are a jillion files out there, but I find the document I want to use.

Well, I think I found the document I want to use. There is no date or version number on the document. There is no author or authoring organization on the document. Hmmm, no one wrote this ever, but it seems to exist.

I wonder if this is the only document with the same title and filename on the bunch of disks I can access. There are all these different disks and all these different folders and folders in folders and so on. Some searches show me that there are several dozen files with the exact same file name scatter hither and yon.

Am I looking at “the right one?” Is there a “right one?” Gosh. This is confusing. Computers were supposed to make this simple(r).

Here is a fundamental practice:

• Have one file with one file name in one place.
• No duplicated copies anywhere else.
• All documents have authors, dates, and version numbers.
• If a document needs changing, the right people meet at the right time in the right place and change the document. The authors, dates, and version numbers change in a controlled manner.
• Anyone who needs the document can find it in the one place it is stored.

Boring? This depends on your point of view. Most people consider this document control stuff to be boring. Then again, most people who need the content of the document right now quickly find and use it, right now. They aren’t happy because they expect things to be this way.

Is this all passe’? Sorry, no it is not. I daily see people wasting hours trying to find the right copy of the right document in the right place at the right time.

We can do better.

by Dwayne Phillips

In which I consider what is the ultimate purchase for the home, family, and home business: the table.

Consider the humble flat horizontal surface. Narrow the consideration to the kitchen table with four chairs. A quick search shows plenty of choices from $100 on up. Let’s settle for $150.

A family eats two to three meals on this table six to seven days a week for 40 or 50 years. A quick napkin estimation shows about 30,000 uses. That’s about half a penny per use. Pretty darn inexpensive for a valuable experience.

Friends drink coffee, wine, or something at the table another three or four times a week. Children do their home work three days a week, nine months a year for twelve (or more) years each. A work-from-home professional sits at the table when all these other uses are not in progress.

Laughter, sorrow, love, angst, staring into another’s eyes, grasping hands in desperation.

All of this over a table.

The per use cost is now less than a tenth of a penny each. Is there a better value anywhere in the home or in a person’s life?

In 1983, my wife and I married. Her parents bought us a table and chairs. It sure seemed expensive to me at the time. Silly me. It was one of the best values in my life and it continues to be so.

by Dwayne Phillips

Aha! I was sort of right. Now companies have teams of folks hunting down stupid in their systems to keep the world safe from stupid.

Way back in 2015, I wrote a blog post about being a stupid hunter. This is not a hunter who is stupid, but a hunter whose job is to seek out and eliminate the stupidity in systems and organizations.

Well, this week I read of OpenAI (fill in the name of any AI-focused company) with its “red team” that hunts the answers its ChatGPT provides. When it finds “toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases in the model” they blow their horns and bring in the rabid dogs or something terrifying to rid the toxicity, prejudice and linguistic biases from the model. What’s a “model” anyway, and is the model afraid of rabid dogs or something terrifying?

Let’s say it simply: they seek out and eliminate the stupidity in their system.

Aha! I knew it. Well, I can claim I knew it. Then again, their is so much stupid in systems and organizations that stupid hunters will always have jobs called “red team” and some such polite thing. No one, aside from me, wants to wear a shirt that proclaims STUPID HUNTER.

by Dwayne Phillips

The passing of time is usually insufficient for a person to move from task to another. Sorry. Hopes and wishes are not plans.

I have seen this time and again. A person is hired for one job with the qualifications needed for that job. A few years later, that person is moved into another job. Other qualifications for the other job?

Two questions:

1. What did we hire this person to do in the first job?
2. What has changed in this person to qualify them for the second job?

Well, this person has matured five years and … or this person has watched me do the second job for five years and …

Sorry. Insufficient answers. This person is bright, teachable, willing to learn, hard working (don’t ya’ just love when that last one is tossed in?), has never been specifically trained for the second job, and is therefore unqualified for it and… What usually happens is lots of innocent bystanders are harmed (some irrevocably) while the person learns the second job on the job.

Hopes and wishes are not plans. We sure hope and wish this person has picked up enough to do the second job. That would sure make our lives easier if our hopes and wishes would come true. And, sometimes hopes and wishes come true. It is unfortunate that is about 1% of the time.

Sorry. We know better. Let’s do better. If we are “grooming” a person for that second job, let’s do it right.

by Dwayne Phillips

It is important to remember whose words we are discussing. If you mentioned something, we are discussing your words. If I mentioned something, we are discussing my words. There are ways to back away from our words.

I read the words from the PowerPoint. They were wrong. Simply wrong. 1 + 2 = 4. Wrong. When I questioned the words, arguments began. Finally, a third person said, “Wait. Those are your words on the PowerPoint. No one made you put them there. You put them there. We are merely discussing them.”

In that instance, the words originated with that other person. In other cases, the words originated with me. No one made me put the words on the PowerPoint. I put them there. They are my words. If they are wrong, I made the mistake.

It is possible to step away from my words. It is possible for you to step away from your words.

“You are correct. My words are incorrect. I was mistaken. Let’s find the correct words and move forward.”

It really is that simple. Own our words. Use them or toss them and find better ones.

by Dwayne Phillips

Someone is paid to lead the people and manage the work. They are paid to answer, “Yes, but how are they going to do that?”

Work can be difficult to accomplish at times. And there are times when you say, “This isn’t good enough. It must be better.”

A well-meaning person replies, “Yes, but how are they going to do that?”

The answer is simple, “So-and-so is paid to lead the people and manage the work. It is their job to figure it out and do it.”

Yes but, but, but…

Sorry. There are no “buts.” Figuring out how to accomplish difficult work is someone’s job. They are paid to do that job. If no one needed to figure out how to accomplish the difficult work, it wouldn’t be difficult and we wouldn’t pay someone to do it.

Sometimes this simple little exercise sounds trite. Sometimes it sounds mean. Sorry. This is the nature of human endeavors. Leaders of people and managers of work are called upon to do these things. Let’s get to it.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are things I don’t want to know. Knowing those things means I have to do some work that I just don’t want to do.

Life is full of headaches. There are more than enough headaches for each day. I don’t need any more headaches.

Then some well-meaning person walks in the door with, “I was just checking on the ABC regulations regarding ABC things, and we are supposed to be tracking something and filing weekly and monthly reports on something regarding ABC things.”

Huh? That’s six more headaches. I don’t need six more headaches. Can’t we ignore this?

“No,” replies the well-meaning person. “I’m lucky to have caught this early enough so that we don’t get into real trouble on ABC with the ABC regulations and regulators and investigators and …”

Lucky? Lucky to have caught this? No. That is not lucky. That is another big headache.

Now that I have been dutifully informed, I know a thing I don’t want to know. I know that I have another headache and another thing that must be done today. The day—and all the resources of the day—are the same. The list of things to do this day is longer.

There are things I don’t want to know.

by Dwayne Phillips

I think OpenAI did this before I get around to writing this blog post, but if you want AI to succeed, stop calling it AI.

There is a large part of society that doesn’t like “AI.”

First, how do you pronounce “AI?” Is it “A” then “I” or it some word that sort of sounds like “-ayiaiaiaiai?” Second, why doesn’t anyone expand that “AI” thing into a couple of words? What are they hiding? And another thing, “Why do you keep talking about the science behind something instead of just saying something. We don’t call it “liquid dynamics;” we call it plumbing.

Instead of calling it “AI,” let’s just have products that do something for us. Let’s have a product: I speak into my phone, “Get me plane tickets to Chicago for Tuesday morning coming back Thursday afternoon.” Boom. I got ’em and they’re paid for. We don’t need “a generative AI large language model with 17Billion parameters (what are parameters, anyway?) trained on travel data scooped off the Internet in privacy violating fashion…”

There are scheduling programs where I enter the names of everyone I wish to invite and the week I wish to meet them. Boom. Here is the day and time when everyone can meet. I don’t care if there is AI, IA, AAA, or a hamster running in a wheel. I just want a time that is open on everyone’s schedule.

OpenAI seems to have done this. They have ChatGPT. Oh, chat. I know what chat is. Good. I can chat to the computer and get real answers. “GPT?” That’s like a jeep, you know, that fun car. So I’m chit chatting in a fun way and getting answers. Good stuff.

Funny how that all became a super-successful product?

Want AI to succeed? Stop calling it AI.

by Dwayne Phillips

The systems we use at work are woefully behind what we use at home. This is especially true if we work in a government organization.

At the time I wrote this post, OpenAI demonstrated their GPT-4 with ChatGPT. That means I see how to summarize lots of things and understand what is in photos and save myself hours of typing well-known facts. Also, Microsoft has shown how all these things will appear in plain old boring Microsoft Word.

Anyone can use Microsoft Word and take advantage of all this writing and summarizing and looking really smart, right?

Wrong. I work inside a Federal government organization. We use Microsoft Word 2016. Yes, seven years behind. We will never see all these fancy AI Copilots and stuff at work. We are having a good day when the systems come on when scheduled and don’t crash during the day.

Okay, that’s our Federal government. But are most companies much better? Will all the companies have these new MS Word features on the same day that I have them at home on my personal account? Will their IT departments accredit them that fast? Will these things be deployed?

Accredit? Deploy? Well, all those things are important and they take time. I understand that. Big companies have a lot at stake and don’t want to mess up by moving too fast. Me at home? Whatever, just do it. I have a backup. I’ll be okay.

And that is why we hate IT at work. The Information Technology departments have a lot to do. They are worried about things I don’t understand. They have to move slowly. Sometimes laws require them to move slowly, and no one wants to go to jail.

Still, why can’t they just …

by Dwayne Phillips

A basic questions that managers should ask above the noise and bustle of the day.

Every group needs a person who asks a nagging question or two every day or week or month or two.

Is this working?

Of course this is working. What do you think? We are all busy; we are all working hard, and we are all accomplishing things.

Yes, but is this working? We gained 2% in efficiency last week, but how about over the last year? Have we lost weight? Have we gained salary? Did we help employees learn? What can we do now that we couldn’t do a year or a decade ago?

If you (me) are the person asking this question, expect bad things to come back to you. Frowns, scowls, derision, calls to “get a real job” and the like are coming your way. Folks are busy and working hard and don’t want extra questions to cloud their thinking.

Smile. With all due respect, directly and clearly ask, “Is this working?”