Present - 12/18/2006

Blog titles: I'm getting hung up on creating a title for these entries. I am glad the title line is there because I want to flag the entries to show if I am doing a current post (like now) or am transcribing a journal entry from my past or I am writing as Anne from 2106.

Which 50% is wasted: I have been outraged by advertising for years. To lure people into spending money as a way to assuage emotional needs that the products for sale are irrelevant to, and certainly contribute in no way to meeting is despicable. But just one more menopausal irony. Now that I can see the death of advertising on the horizon, I am feeling tender toward the creative service agencies and amused by the frantic attempts to get our attention. I don't know if I see starving commercial artists out on the streets or companies who make consumer goods that we really don't want that much struggling or what. But as shallow as it was, this buy junk to feel better culture is the one I am familiar with. And I am starting to feel all this connectedness which is making me start to view corporations as masses of regular people -- so I have some care for their survival.

The solution mosaic: One of my common struggles in my work is this. In the world of IT, there are lots of sources of good advice about what things to do and how to do them. I spend a good deal of time online and reading books and articles to understand as many of these things as I can. But I find that real work is always messier even than the advice that starts with assertions about messiness implies. So I pick through all kinds of theories and models and "best practices" and spend my time trying to build some kind of mosaic that looks more like what I really see. This doesn't really work, of course, because what I am doing is simply adding yet another model to the infinity of them that already exists. However, I think that I figure out a lot of useful stuff during the exercise of picking apart and mosaic building. So in making all this work actually helpful to my employer I have two challenges. The first is that my ideas inevitably compete with various folks who are married to some particular single model or construct. It seems to me that very few IT folks have an appetite for the way that I work things out. Most seem to want a religion to adhere to like zealots. They are always trying to get me to drink their Kool-Aid. The other challenge is that I have been infected with wikiness. I think that my mosaic may just be the right set of tiles, drawn from all over the place, but that what is needed is for me to put them in play in some initial condition, and make it possible for the practioners to keep rearranging them to suit themselves. And add new ones. And fling some of mine out. My ongoing role then is to keep looking for likely tiles to drop into gaps that I notice and then step back and see what happens. This is so not how PMOs and other bodies that can influence projects like to work. It wasn't so long ago that I was explaining to everybody why the SEI Capability Maturity Model made so much sense and stressing the importance of defined and repeatable process to getting things right. As it happens, I do have a really good argument for my wiki-world being a natural outcome of reaching level 5 maturity, but I am not going into that right now.

Unintended Consequences: There is an interesting web site (will find link in a minute) that talks about systems theory and posted some diagrams and other info that got me really excited. The reason was that I think that things go wrong in projects often because of unintended consequences. These seem after the debriefs to be things that "should" have been known. But this key information that should have been known is always tucked away in some corner behind a cardboard box, so none of the busy people notice it. I am looking for ways that you can know that you're missing something and go looking around when it is earlier enough to avoid someone having to be voted off the island over it. So anyway, systems theory, in the distilled form above, seemed promising. But the leap from abstractions to concrete examples isn't working for me.
Something else about me. I like to scuba. I was not a natural, and I still am pretty much on the timid side of things. But the lure of that world overcomes my fears. I recently went to the aquarium that's in Long Beach CA and they have some really nice tropical fish displays. Seeing how amazing visitors found that glimpse into the sea made me realize what an incredible privilege it is to be able to drop down into that world and just hang out.