Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I find a little trick that helps me write something “for the record” each day.

I write. I tell myself that every day. Most days that is true. Most days I will write something of some substance or “for the record.”

I have worked from home for the past six months (almost seven by now). I am fortunate to be able to do so. I am fortunate to be paid while doing that.

I am not very good at working from home in that I tend to work 45 to 50 hours a week from home. There just seems to be something that applies to work every evening. Maybe I will learn—maybe not.

Therefore, if I don’t pay attention, I have days when I don’t write something that qualifies as substance or for the record.

Along comes a new trick. In my paper journal—journal writing is one of the few practices I recommend for everyone—I make a note at the bottom of each page: WDYWT? That is short for, “What Did You Write Today?”

The following morning, I write a note next to WDYWT? Tomorrow morning I will note that I wrote this blog post—for what it is worth, that counts as something of substance or for the record.

It is a little trick. I’ve only used it the past couple of weeks. Perhaps in a few more weeks we shall “return to normal,” and this little trick will no longer be useful.

Lessons? Pay attention. Find little tricks or whatever that keep us on track. Use them as long as they are useful, but no longer.

by Dwayne Phillips

You have met with a group of smart persons. You all worked hard. You decided what to do. Now, do you do it or…

You gathered with a group of smart persons and worked hard. Discussion, question, discussion, alternative, question, answer, do it all over again.

Decision.

How do you take a step back to examine the decision before announcing it?

Bring in an outside consultant? Take a five-minute walk around the block? Count to ten? Ask your mother? Ask your wife? Ask anyone who wasn’t sitting in the five-hour excruciatingly painful meeting where you decided?

Do you intend to do what you say you will do? Can you do what you say you will do? Have you planned the doing? What will it mean if you say one thing and do another?

It is at this point that the blog post writer writes a few brilliant things to answer all these questions. Let’s go with a couple more questions.

• If you do what you decided and it doesn’t work, how much will that cost?

• If you don’t do what you decided, how much will that cost?

Compare the costs. And consider that “cost” does not necessarily mean money.

by Dwayne Phillips

The first step, if taken carefully, eliminates almost all other directions from consideration and frees the mind for everything else.

I’ve read about trackers, i.e., those persons who are assigned to find someone who is lost. They find people lost in the woods.

The most important thing the tracker does is to find the first step the lost person took when departing camp and becoming lost. That first step means the lost person went in that direction.

All other directions are eliminated from consideration.

“We are all going in this general direction,” the tracker declares. No one goes elsewhere.

“We are all going in this general direction,” is also one of the more important things anyone can say in a group endeavor. As a project manager, be sure to say such regardless of how obvious you might think the statement. Everyone will thank you later.

by Dwayne Phillips

In which we reward folks for solving problems, but we don’t ask about how the problem arrived or who created it.

This is an old story told to me by a long-retired colleague.

There was once this big contract that lasted several years. At the monthly review, the project manager for the contracted company would report a problem and the horror of it all and how they were gathering the forces to fix it.

At the next monthly review, the company’s project manager would report that they fixed the problem and saved the damsel or the day or the project or something that deserved saving. What the project manager wouldn’t explain was that they had solved the problem the day after they found it and the week after they caused it.

The company’s project manager wasn’t a good actor, and everyone knew what was happening.

They awarded the company’s project manager a Dragon Slayer Award. There are no such things as dragons; dragons are merely myths and live only in our imagination. The great and horrible problems solved by the project manager were equally mythical.

We see this example in many places today. Facebook—just one famous example, we could cite others— now and then announces how they have found and vanquished a dragon from our midst. Of course Facebook created a situation where dragons could walk in the the front door and sit in our living room. They don’t report that bad mistake.

Beware of the Dragon Slayer and the mythical dragons they slay. They often created these dragons just so they could have something to slay and something to say during a monthly review. You gotta’ justify your salary somehow.

by Dwayne Phillips

If I work directly for you, I will do as you say. If, however, your are three or four levels distant, meh.

A number of years ago I wrote about the information thermocline. Bureaucracies tend to reduce the flow of information as it attempts to pass from the top to the bottom. About half the information stops at each level so that at the bottom of your average organization, well, huh, what were you saying?

In the same manner, I have observed an Authority Thermocline. The authority of a person to direct those in an organization tends to halve at each level of that organization.

My direct supervisor tells me to do something. Unless illegal, immoral, or otherwise objectionable, I do it. I do like a salary, and most direct supervisors won’t tell me to do something that is so objectionable that I’ll quit instead.

Consider when my supervisor’s supervisor tells my supervisor that, “Everyone in our organization will do such and such.”

Only one of the two “such-es” passes through the layers. After all, it takes twice as long for my supervisor’s supervisor to fire me as it takes my supervisor. Half the authority falls to the wayside of the org chart.

Then there is my supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor (did I write that correctly?) states, “Everyone in our organization will do such and such.”

This time, only half of a “such” reaches me. It’s pretty easy to do a little and have that be sufficient to satisfy my supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor.

We continue up the chain of supervisory supervisors where I merely have to shrug to satisfy someone’s proclamation that,”Everyone in our organization will do such and such.” There are so many “everyone-s” at this point that no one notices my subservience or lake thereof.

Cynical? Perhaps. Realistic? Yes, at least in my experience.

Now we come to the advice portion of this post. What do you do if you are up the chain of supervisory supervisors? Notice in the above description who has the most influence—the direct supervisor.

1. Go to the working level, those persons who do the work (me in this post).
2. Bring with you all the supervisors in the supervisory chain.
3. All supervisors stand side by side.
4. The direct supervisor of the workers present says, “Everyone in our organization will do such and such.”
5. All the supervisors nod “Yes.”

This is a lot of work. This burns a lot of resources. This works.

I suppose we have to decide if doing such and such is worth the expense. If not, do nothing.

by Dwayne Phillips

One of the better things to do in a thinking meeting is to find things you don’t want to do.

“That’s not it!” is one of the better things you can hear at a thinking meeting.

For example, a few years or decades ago—I lose track—I was standing at the white board with a couple dozen thinkers in the room. We were trying to find a strategy for something that needed strategizing and such. I wrote feverishly on the white board for a few moments, turned to the rest of the thinkers, and asked, “Well, what do you think?”

Nothing but frowns and side-to-side wagging of heads greeted me. A few mumbled “nah.”

I immediately replied, “Great! That’s not it!” as I turned to the board and erased everything.

We had eliminated a major line of thought from consideration and saved ourselves months of wasted effort. It was a triumph—one of the more significant things I had done in a meeting in years.

At such a moment, when suggesting an idea that everyone else hates, don’t be down on yourself. Celebrate with the group. Move forward with enthusiasm to the next idea.

It really is easier than you might think.

by Dwayne Phillips

In which professionals show Parkinson how to make some real dough.

Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

When work is slow, it expands. That is, the workers expand it to fill the day. I have seen in it practice.

And I have seen professionals make Parkinson look like an amateur. At 2 p.m. on Friday a simple one-hour task didn’t become a three-hour task per Parkinson, it became a full-size study that would take three weeks.

The rallying cry of such professionals is, “but what if?” It is easy to add, “but what if?” to any answer, to any sentence, to any, “I think we’re done now.”

How does anyone “get away with” this? Simple. No one is watching. No one is supervising. No one is saying, “No, this is plenty.”

Solutions? There are many, and many of them are harsh. These situations come from good people having nothing to do. Find something positive to do. Find a book to read, a no-cost online course to take, an experiment to perform. Maybe these things are not in the main line of the business, but neither is expanding the work to fill the month.

by Dwayne Phillips

Fail fast, fair early is a mantra in today’s knowledge work. Sometimes, however, we are confused about what is a failure.

Fail fast, fail early! (Some persons say it the other way around and mean the same thing.) The idea is simple:

1. Try something
2. Learn something
3. Adjust
4. Go back to step 1.

“But we are not allowed to fail,” protest some. True. If you are a firefighter, you need to extinguish the house fire on the first try. Same thing with heart surgeons. The list goes on.

And then there is the notion of what constitutes “failure.” “We tested the product, and it failed the test.”

Wrong. A test or an experiment fails when it does not provide information. Consider:

“We built a product that should work at zero degrees F. We tested it, and it stopped working at 20 degrees F.”

That test was a success. It provided information. The product does not work as desired. Our activities succeeded. We learned. Our product failed. We learned.

The main point is, “we learned.”

Let us strive to conduct good experiments often.

So instead of

“Fail fast, fail early”

how about

“Experiment often.”

by Dwayne Phillips

Some persons “think out loud.” This is okay only when done properly.

Some persons “think out loud.” They state a list of ideas quickly. This is a rough draft spoken instead of jotted on paper. The ideas are only partially formed and should be worked and reworked until they make sense.

That is fine, but only when done properly.

Persons, especially those in position of authority, need to provide context to what they say. If a person is “thinking out loud,” state that first so that everyone else knows what follows are partially formed ideas. Otherwise, everyone else may take the rough-draft-ideas as final direction. They immediately implement the thoughts—most of which should have been ignored.

“I’m thinking out loud, go with me a few minutes, and let’s see where this takes us.”

There, that isn’t too hard, is it? It allows the speaker to completely spew everything that it swirling in the mind.

And everyone else knows they can suggest changes to the speakers rough draft.

by Dwayne Phillips

We have another variation of the “silence is agreement” notion. Let’s refute that notion—again.

Looking back through this blog, it appears that I have written about this topic every four years. Once in 2012, once in 2016, so I guess it is time again. This time around “silence is complicity” is being used in current protests about social justice and such.

You are talking.

I am silent, because:

• No one asked me what I think.
• I am listening, not talking.
• I am thinking, not talking.
• I would rather discuss root issues instead of surface issues.
• I feel no need to state the obvious (we are discussing murder, and we agreed murder was wrong some 4,000 or 7,000 years ago)

In the past month or two, persons who have been silent for years are now talking. To those, I say:

For several years, I have repeatedly said what you are saying for the first time right now. And if you don’t believe me, we can look it up.