August 2004 archive

Speaking of Çatalhöyük...

Science had a great article on Çatalhöyük (there are various spellings) a few years ago that reviews the latest research, as of 1998 ["THE FIRST CITIES: Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities", DOI: 10.1126 / science.282.5393.1442]. There's even a website of the latest excavations at Çatalhöyük. Be warned, though: it's not that exciting. The Science article, constrastingly, should keep your attention.

Of course, just because I found it interesting does not mean anyone else will.

I found some of the speculation amusing, especially in light of Jane Jacobs's earlier writings saying that mining probably led to permanent dwellings and villages, not agriculture:

Many archaeologists are parting company with the view that settled life and agriculture were closely linked. "We have always thought that sedentism and agriculture were two sides of the same coin," says Algaze. "But as we start getting into the nitty-gritty details across the world, it becomes increasingly clear that while they are very much related, they are not necessarily coterminous."

Like that's so revolutionary. People who talk about good management techniques trumping IT spending are just as bad.

In Search of Deep Time and Sudden Origins

I've been reading a couple of books on evolution, a topic I find fascinating for no really good reason. Of the two, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life by Henry Gee (Chief Science Writer for the journal Nature) is the better written. "Deep Time" refers to the problem of the fossil record. Our knowledge of time comes from our experience of it, the normal flow of causes and effects. Unfortunately, the fossil record stretches so far out into the past that it constitutes "deep time", something so far out that we cannot make cause-effect arguments from what we know.

Take, for example, the usual textbook diagrams of the evolutionary progression from earliest form to successors, such as the classic diagram showing man emerging from fish that flop onto the shore, becoming mammals and then apes and then pseudo-human ancestors. The only problem is that this represents 1 billion years of elapsed time. We may know that something came before another, but the time between them can be millions of years. To put this into perspective, the total elapsed time of any known civilisation &8212; that is, a group of humans living within a city — is, I think, �atal H�y�k in modern Turkey at about 7500 BCE or 9500 years ago. Neanderthals lived 50,000 years ago, or more than five times the distance between us and �atal H�y�k. Dinosaurs appeared about 250 million years ago and died about about 65 million years ago, which means they lived on earth for a length 20,000x the distance between us and �atal H�y�k, and died out 6,500x farther than �atal H�y�k lived. If we can't make any sense of something that is only 10,000 years away, how can we even think of timespans in the millions? "Deep Time," he writes, "cannot sustain scenarios based on narrative." (116)

Endings and Leavings

Tonight, I leave some relationships. I've left the interpretive schema I shared with these folks long behind now: it's hard to keep the relationships. They were based on the axioms of our time, of the modern psychotherapeutic culture (MPC). I've written about my reservations about the MPC before, if not here. Over the last few months, I've come to a variety of different beliefs.

First, I started studying Requisite Organization / Stratified Systems Theory (RO/SST). I learned about the discovery of natural hierarchical organizations and, well, everything started changing. I stopped beating my head against the wall and started accepting who I was and my limitations. I started doing what I wanted to do all along. I haven't become something new: only started being who I am.

It's odd that RO/SST led me to settle down, to join a church (although not the one that I wanted to join), to develop real friendships out here, to pursue only certain types of jobs.

And then I found Martin Seligman's What You Can Change .... and What You Can't (Learning to Accept Who You Are): The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement, which describes the scientific evidence that certain parts of you can't be changed. That led to reading his Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, which describes the culture of learned helplessness in America. It turns out that the evidence does not support that talking about your pain makes you get better: there is, however, a lot of evidence that says that mulling over your pain leads to depression. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them..." Turns out it's better to take action or keep your mind of it. His little books of scientific data led me farther away from the psychotherapeutic axioms that underlie American culture.

Voluntary Contribution to YHWH

I was reading Fox's interesting translation of The Five Books of Moses (The Schocken Bible) and came across something in the building of the Holy-Shrine of YHWH.

Now YHWH spoke to Moshe, saying:
Speak to the children of Israel,
that they may takeme a raised-contribution;
from every man whose heart makes him-willing, you are to take my contribution
— Exodus 25:1-2

Odd isn't it? YHWH, when he tells them to build the Ark of the Covenant to house the tablets on which the Holy Law was written, doesn't just tell them to go out and get the expensive elements to make it. No, he says get contributions from the people. The Lord God Almighty is asking for a "love offerring."

I am totally blown away by this.

You might mention this the next time you want to do a stewardship service.

Organizations are the ultimate cross-functional team

From Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information

Well, duh.

Wish I had thought of that. The current cry for "cross-functional teams" results from the inability of the organization to manage its divisions. The local divisions will occur in any group that gets larger than about 12. Put fifty people in a church even and you will get a set of groups; cliques, if you will. And these are people who see each other only sporadically during the week. You work with your coworkers all week long. You are going to develop subgroups within the organization. It is the job of management to enable the cross-pollination of ideas. I'm not sure what the mechanisms of that are. I know that you need to have the right people, and the right people in the right place. Part of that involves Requisite Organization. Part of it involves other issues of "fit".

Carroll Quigley and a New Word ("Adventitious")

I spent most of yesterday sidetracked on Carroll Quigley. All I wanted was to get a small reference about Milner's Kindergarten because I realized that I had come up with an idea for changing the world that suspiciously resembled it. In one of the more rational articles, "From Mesopotamia through Carroll Quigley to Bill Clinton: World Historical Systems, the Civilizationist, and the President" (David Wilkinson, Journal of World-Systems Research, 1[1]: 1995), I found several word I actually had to look up. Adventitious appeared in the following:

A theoretical defense of free trade could certainly have been couched in Quigleyan terms (as promoting increased per capita production); so could a polemic (against vested interests preferring their own sectoral prosperity to the general interest). Clinton avoided such discourses, preferring a populist rhetoric of "jobs" and an inspirational rhetoric of fearlessness. But these were adventitious, and do not seem to reflect the reasoning process which led him to favor NAFTA in principle, and free trade in principle. [emphasis added]

From Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: ad-ven-ti-tious
Pronunciation: "ad-(")ven-'ti-sh&s, -v&n-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin adventicius
   1 : coming from another source and not inherent or innate
   2 : arising or occurring sporadically or in other than the usual location [adventitious roots]
- ad-ven-ti-tious�ly adverb

JMS on Your Dreams

J. Michael Straczynski, the man behind Babylon 5 and the current writer of Amazing Spiderman, recently showed up at the Hawthorne High School Comic Con. One of the folks there asked him the following question:

"You're well known for advising and encouraging people to follow their dreams. What about people who may not have found their dream yet or may have lost it along the way? What would you say to them?"

JMS: I say bullshit. You know in your heart what you want to do. You may be denying it, but you always know. Kids...if you look at kids, they spontaneously sing, spontaneously dance, tell stories, act things out. Then somewhere along the line someone says to them, "You can't do that. You shouldn't do that. Professionals do that, you shouldn't be doing that." And you stop doing these things. You stop listening to the voice in your head that says "I enjoy this!" What you want to do is what gives you pleasure. My parents said, "Comic books, bad! You'll never make a living at that stuff." [laughter] "Stop watching television all the time." I've made a living doing what I love. The first part being, of course, finding out what it is you love. And you know that, in your heart. So when someone says to me "I don't know what I want to do" — bullshit! They should do it. They may be afraid to try it, that's a whole different scenario. People want to try and find lives where courage is not necessary. One small problem - it's not possible. I'm foursquare for courage, always have been. I don't believe in denying the obvious. You in this room know what you want to do with your lives. Whether it is apparent to you up front up here [gestures to his heart], back here you know [gestures to the back of his head]. What gives you pleasure. What you like doing.

Conquer the World in 100 Easy Years

It struck me over the weekend, while explaining to a friend of mine my theory of why he left his engineering job to go to law school, that one could easily use the Jaques/Cason theory of "human capability" to change the world, or at least build one's own private army. You would have to take the long view, of course: I would reckon that this will take about 50 years to pay off, 100 to have substantial change.

Oddly enough, it actually sounds a lot like the Conspiracy Theorists' "history" of Cecil Rhodes's influence network run by Alfred Milner, especially as detailed by Carroll Quigley (The Anglo-American Establishment, I think was the title). There are oodles of websites with conspiracy quotes from these books (WARNING! The NSA / Masons / Catholic Church / Council on Foreign Relations / Bogey Man / Warner Bro.s [and their sister, Dot] will probably be just waiting to discover that you're visiting that site!), and they all start with None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Wells [not Northwestern's Garry Wills], although I only read Larry Abrahams's Call It Conspiracy, published a decade or more later. Which I find unnerving. I hadn't thought that I wanted to create a conspiracy to dominate the world with an Anglo-American alliance, but it certainly has almost all the pieces of what Quigley describes as "Milner's Kindergarten".

Quigley, of course, has been dead for a long time. And he certainly never intended for his thoughts about Rhodes's legacy to be used for conspiracy theorists' ends. According to Boyle, a student and fan, he personally thought that they were just wacked: "Instead of a secret cabal now being in charge, no one is in charge. We have instead a kind of chaos or anarchy." I suppose that I should mention that Quigley was a professor at Georgetown and cited by Pres. Clinton as a strong influence on him, especially his 1960s ideas of the evolution of civilisation.

Perhaps that's just the best way to do it. The Rhodes Myth has Cecil Rhodes, the wonderman of South Africa and "founder" of Rhodesia and De Beers ("We Make Diamonds Expensive!"), creating the Rhodes Scholarships so that English-speakers would dominate the world. Okay, so it was that the English would dominate the world, but the Union Jack stretched too far and snapped back, except for that war with Argentina over that cold pile of rocks in the South Atlantic. Which left simply influencing the Americans, something they pretty came to at the end of the First War, meeting up at the Paris treaty thingy.

The Lightning Speed of Florida's Legislature At Work

From todays New York Times (not The Times, a Murdoch paper, if I recall correctly):

Prompted by reports of widespread shoddy construction in Miami after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the Legislature adopted a statewide building code in 2001 that replaced a patchwork of county and municipal codes. — "After Hurricane Charley, a New Look at Stiffer Building Codes" by ABBY GOODNOUGH

Now that's speedy legislative action against an eminent threat!

Speaking of Rob...

Having just told one Rev Rob story, let me tell another:

Rob, a Christian Reformed Church pastor, sent out a newsletter to his parishioners today. At the end, he teased with the announcement:

Big Change is coming! Watch for it.

I hate having these things teased. I always assume the worst (e.g., Rob's gotten fired and moving to Topeka or the church is moving to an all naturist service style), so I went fishing for information with the following email:

From: manasclerkSent: Thursday, August 19, 2004 5:32 PM
To: rev rob
Subject: "Big Changes"

We're going to an all dogs and ponies led worship style, aren't we? Should've known those darn ponies would get the part, with their flashy tails and sour tempers!

The response was unexpected:

Rambling Meaninglessly About the Only Thing That Matters

I saw a comment on Russell Mann's blog about his post about (mis)understanding grace. I was cited as "getting it" (I find it really hard to believe that this could in any way be true) so I thought I'd reply to Neb, who said:

Just read your post on "grace" over at the BHT...but the comments are disabled! I agree that grace is grace, unconditionally. However...what about the "ye shall know them by their fruits" issue? A Christian, somebody saved by grace, continuing to flaunt sinful habits is still saved, but is totally missing out on a full relationship with God and is also a terrible witness. At the very least, it just shows a bad attitude! At worst, it calls in to question whether that person truly made a committment to Christ in the first place.

Anyway, that's how I see it, and I'm open to discussion.

Neb

I went long on it, so I figured I would say it here, too. If you haven't read Russell's very honest struggles as he works out his faith, take a walk through.

My overly long comment:

Another Reason Why Most Performance Systems Are Silly

From "Structural Holes and Good Ideas", by Ronald S. Burt (U of Chicago), 2003:pp. 23 [preprint of article to appear in AJS]:

In the annual ccyle preceding the network survey, 17% of the managers were judged "poor", 55% were judged "good", and 28% were judged "outstanding". Under pressure from top management to identify more weak performers, the proportion of managers assigned to the "poor" category increased to 25% in the second year, with 53% judged "good" and the remaining 22% judged "outstanding.

When you force people to have more under-performers, you actually just steal them from the top. More people became mediocre as a result: you didn't take from the bottom, but from the top performers. When you do this, you create problems among groups that don't have poor performers (why would I have hired a poor performer?) and you never take a look at your management practices and structures that are actually creating your performance problem.

The rest of the article is interesting, too. But he keeps finding what are really system that have the components:

• Bad Performance


• Bad performance rating


• Social Isolation from peers, those above you


• Lower pay

You can see how these would feed on each other. It's interesting. I'm not sure what comes first: bad performance or bad rating. Certainly, being rated poorly can lead to social isolation which in turn leads to poorer perceived performance.

No Reason for Bad Writing

I'm reading some documents describing a new software development process that the good folks of Big Insurance Group (BIG) have created for their internal development. And any external development organisations who have fallen in league with them. The process may indeed make some sense, but since it has never been implemented, there are massive holes in the efficacy of its use. The old process was around long enough for most of the holes to be filled but still didn't work because they were trying to do work at too low a level for their goals. So it goes. Nothing like being set up with failure as the known conclusion.

So it may be good. It's just impossilbe to tell with this terrible documentation. There's no reason why documents have to be wretched any longer. This set has a multitude of problems:

< LI>Excessive use of the passive voice. You can use "verbs to be" when you have mastered using "subject-verb-object" sentences for documenting processes. Every time I see that somethinng "is done" I want to scream.

1. Never use a line more than 50 characters across. That means that you must use columns if you choose to use Landscape oritentation (which they did). Long lines in documents are just as bad as long lines at the grocery store. Avoid them.


2. If you say that some role is accountable, state what that accountability means. Who holds this person accountable? What consequences will these others apply to the accountable role if he oe she fails to deliver the specified goods? Simple stuff: subject-verb, again.


3. Use vector images when you include diagrams. This way, I can zoom into the document and see more detail. I find rasterized diagrams in Adobe Acrobat files especially frustrating.


4. Presentation files are for presentations. If you want users to read something, figure out a decent communication vehicle and use it. Powerpoint works for showing speaking aids during a talk. It fails miserably as a way to disseminate information.


5. Speaking of Powerpoint: please do not use 12-pt type on a slide. Great horny toads, man! what do you think we are, eagles? I have already past the time when I can squint. Put this leve of detail into the handouts.


6. Yes, that's right: Powerpoint can create handouts with further information on them. Wow. Learn something everyday.


7. Avoid this snide tone. Do as I say, after all.

There. That's off my chest. It was driving me crazy. Like the time I had to watch a guy with a terrible, stacato accent deliver some of the most interesting information in the most boring way possible. I just wanted to run up, relieve him of his laser pointer and show him how it is done. Sorry state when I can do a better job by just showing up and going through slides than some guy who has prepared and written the presentation.

Another party in the Backyard

L and I had the good church people over Sunday. I love having these folks over. Okay, so what I really like is showing off my grilling ability. I'm a guy! I do like being able to greet a visitor and say, "We're having a mess of folks over for burgers and dogs; you're welcome to come, too." D, our new Thai high-schooler (long involved story about why I had to go to O'Hare on Friday on my way home from Bloomington) whose living with our young friends who were missionaries over there — D. came, as did A., our adopted college student. Everyone should adopt a college student at church. It's fun and easy! Plus you can feed them any old thing and they will be so relieved it's not dorm food.

I kind of like having everyone over in the summer. Our house is only 900 sq ft (84m²) at the base: our old apartment in Chicago had more area. It makes for a tight squeeze when you have ten kids, twelve old adults, three college kids and four teenagers all trying to eat lunch and talk. I like the place, but the backyard makes that 900 sq ft look bigger. Plus, I get to showoff my flower garden which just went gangbusters this year, even though the chipmunks ate all my bulbs.

Rob, our pastor over at the Church of Powerpoint, talked about the lessons from the prophet Micah. He talked about how the way we work out doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God looks as different as each of us do from the other. What that means for an accounant will be worked out differently than for me in organizational consulting. Which made me think about how I can love mercy and bring justice in my job.

One of the reasons that I like what Jaques had to say (and the many wonderful folks I have met who have extended his original findings) is that it brings mercy and justice together. You are let off of having a job that you hate because you don't fit it; you get out of having a boss who is too small or too big to manage you. The oppressed get freed, whether too high up or too far down for them to succeed. Of course, I'm just a bleeding heart liberal anyway. But I like to think that I can work out my faith with fear and trembling even in my work.

And while grilling those David Bergs and Johnsonvilles.

Make Your Workplace the Village!

In my quest for more data about Karen Stephenson's work (my advice: read her patents, amigos), I came across an old New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, the happy camper behind The Tipping Point. The article, "Designs for Working: Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village", originally appeared 2000 Dec 11. He starts off with a scene from the great Jane Jacobs book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which immediately earned the rest of my eyeballs. I read Death and Life as an undergraduate after reading The Economy of Cities (1970) for a class that I scored a 95 in, but unfortunately was taking pass fail. Death and Life opened my eyes to what life could be like after spending the last ten years locked on a section with only six houses and having to tend a monstrous garden all summer. (Oh, woe!) For a guy who gets physically ill when he doesn't talk to people all day, it was a severe treatment and Jacobs provided a stiff antidote. Not to mention a small preparation for moving to south Chicago a couple of years later.

The gist of his article — which he stays on, very unlike me — is that while Jacobs's ideas for the city may have failed until recently (and people inexplicably still move out to the suburbs) they have been taken up by office planners. It turns out that you have not been talking enough with your co-workers, especially those with whom you do not work. I have always been admonished to shut up and let them do some work, for Pete's sake!, but apparently Gladwell has discovered other firms that are trying desperately to create a networking environment. The goal is to create an atmosphere conducive to weak ties.

Declaring, Not Asking For, Independence

I got thinking this week about that great declaration of my ancestors, or those they elected to represent them: "When, in the Course of human events,

it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

Bizarre Dictionary Example (1)

From The Free Dictionary's definition of "16", they list the following as an example from classic literature.

Before they died the brilliant one was detected in seventy languages as the author of but two or three books of fiction and poetry, while the other was honoured in the Bureau of Statistics of his native land as the compiler of sixteen volumes of tabulated information relating to the domestic hog.

Fables by Aesop...

Amazing how darned bureacratic those statisticians were in ancient Greece!

The illustrated "16" is pretty, though.

"Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives"

"The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives" by Sydney Finkelstein, Ivey Business Journal (University of Western Ontario), Jan/Feb 2004.

I recently passed by Finkelstein's book, on which this article is based, as I was picking up Social Life of Information, Linked and Six Degrees. (My quest for information on network theory continues.) I wish I hadn't.

This article is both fun from a "let's watch someone else go down" experience and a timely reminder of the importance of the virtues, especially humility. There's a reason that the CEOs of Jim Collins's Good to Great companies exhibit the opposite of these habits. Take a look and see how much you would match up if given the chance.

I mean, thank God I'm part of a Calvinistic congregation that looks down on any form of external display of wealth or I'd be a goner, as prone to showboating as I am. I think that would cover me on habits 1-4.

Anyone care to do a review of the RO implications? Oh, yeah, Mark Van Clieaf already has in "Are Boards and CEOs Accountable for the Right Level of Work?", also in the Ivey Business Journal. Those smart Canadians and Canadiennes!

Plus, it's a neat antidote to the Seven Habits of the Heart That Knows....

Vacation, it's all I ever wanted, really

L and I went on a mixed business and pleasure trip over the last two weeks. We rolled down to West Virginia for awhile, to spend some time together at my folks' house on the Greenbrier River, outside Lewisburg. It's actually at an old mill site that is still has a name on the map (unincorporated). We spent some time roaming the countryside and getting hopelessly lost, something that a non-native should never do in West Virginia. Of course, I have pretty good hillbilly credentials, what with my great-great-grandfather being raised in "Devil" Anse Hatfield's house and ending the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Plus, my grandfather and great-grandfather were coal miners and my dad holds a few distinctions in the state. He ever taught some of the Rocket Boys of October Sky movie fame when he as a graduate assistant at Marshall.