Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Everyone claims agreement. Great. Let’s just test that statement with a blank sheet of paper.

“We all agree on what we are to do!” claimed a person full of hope and anxious to get to work.

“Wow, great,” said a second person who likes to hear good news, but is skeptical when hearing that, “Everyone is in agreement.”

“Let’s confirm that,” suggests the second person.

The first person, pauses and stops breathing. “Well,” says the first person, “everyone is nodding, so that confirms it.”

“Maybe,” says the second person, “and since you are so confident, let’s take just a couple of minutes to confirm.”

All the persons who were nodding stop nodding and also stop breathing.

“Please,” says the second person, “No one say anything while we confirm this and no one look at what your neighbor will be writing.”

The second person gives all the agree-ers a blank sheet of paper. Each person has a pen or pencil.

“Okay,” says the second person, “everyone write the agreement on their sheet of paper. Please, no talking and no peaking at anyone else’s piece of paper. Just jot the agreement, a few lines or sentences will be fine. And don’t write your name on your paper.”

Two minutes later, the second person collects all the pieces of paper.

You know what happens next. A glance through the pieces of paper show that the group is not in agreement. Even given leeway for wording the same thought differently, the pieces of paper all differ. Maybe there is one small thing on every piece of paper, but the main thoughts vary wildly.

There is, however, a several points of unanimity among the persons in the room. (1) They are all tired of discussing what they were discussing. (2) They all wish the group would agree. (3) They all want to do something else.

Now what? Go home. Take a long break. Come back next week and try again. Try to find some items of agreement other than the three points listed in the prior paragraph.

This isn’t easy. No one said it would be.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are many tasks that are difficult and require fine motor control and dexterity. They are darn near impossible—unless you have a tool.

A few years ago, we were building a system that had a sensor. The sensor would sense the state of an other system and relay signals to a processor. The sensor was small—less than a half inch in size. The part of the sensor that attached to the other system was about a quarter inch in size.

Attaching the sensor was difficult. Persons in the lab fumbled with it and usually needed half an hour to attach it just right. This wasn’t going to work. We wanted the sensor to be small, but “small” meant that no one could handle it.

Then someone in the back of the room blurted out the answer, “Unless you have a tool!”

The world changed. Three engineers each drew sketches of a tool that would hold the sensor and allow a person to attach it to the system we wanted to monitor. The tools were the size of a regular wrench. Once prototypes of the tools were built, persons in the lab attached the sensor in a few seconds with ease.

Simple. Obvious. Unless it isn’t.

Struggling with something? Anything. Not just physical, but mental, emotional, financial, any “-al.” Stop struggling. Stop trying harder. Find a tool that removes the struggles. The tool is probably much easier to make than the original task is to accomplish.

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.”