From Alternative Investments to Zucchini

Somehow it became that time of year again – that time of year where I begin to think about next year and find myself reflecting on the events of the year drawing to its close.  Luckily, the fact that it gets dark at five, everything is pumpkin, gingerbread or some form of spice flavored, and I can enjoy a good cup of coffee or soup without sweating to death helps me to do this. 

 I will probably remember this year as cementing my personal pragmatic outlook on life.  I began sinking the posts that I hope will some day form the bridge between my two personalities – the one that is hopelessly idealistic, dreamy, restless and searching and the one that values tangible action and measurable progress.  I am both dreamer and doer and up until this point these two aspects of myself have played sort of a Jekyll and Hyde wrestling match for control of my psyche and energy. This year I became fed up with just dreaming and also, equally as fed up with just doing.

 I have spent the year in flux – changing jobs twice, taking my studies in a new direction and trying to overcome a hopeless brown thumb.  I have met many new people, heard many new ideas, seen the same old BS and have subjected many of the ‘great’ ideas I had collected over the past three years to the test of time, critical review, and often crushing empirical defeat in the battlefield of application.

 So as I sit here I think – now what for 2011?  I wish I could find my 2010 list because I am pretty sure any actual successes would be riddled with caveats – yet even so, I found this to be a productive year in many unanticipated ways.  What I did accomplish in 2010:

1. For all my planting (and there was a good bit) I did manage to grow two puny cucumbers and a pepper. I also grew some broccoli and carrot foliage, but not actually any broccoli or carrots. I blame the ants for the zucchini.
2. I found two new jobs in this economy.
3. I studied for and took my Level I CFA (though I don’t know whether or not yet this was successful) and actually discovered I enjoyed it much more than a good social sciences girl should.
4. I taught my first class – and realized – that while I am a good teacher, people aren’t always going to appreciate it.
5. I found myself in my first work situation where no amount of brains, charm, hard work, or any form of flattery, bribery, cajoling, etc. was going to change the outcome.
6. I crocheted a doily that looked like a drunken rhombus in an attempt to find a way to sit through a whole TV show.
7. I have realized that it will be absolutely impossible to keep up with my reading list unless cloning becomes both effective and legal.
8. I have become one iota less perfectionistic – which is actually hilarious because my brand of perfectionism looks an awful lot like total chaos. 
9. I survived parenting the terrible 2s and the terrible 3s and there is hope that 4 is a lot more fun.

In many ways, I am grateful because I hope the successes 2011 will build on 2010 and that is perhaps the most measurable sign of a good year – its ability to support the future. Now if I could only find more hours in the day, a desire to sleep less, or a four year old who enjoys playing by himself . . .

Lessons Learned

Perhaps in my young/old age I had gotten overly comfortable that my combination of life experience and education gave me a sort of unique perspective on people and events, such that I felt I was at least competently well-equipped to handle most any people-management situation.

The last six months have led me to see the error of my ways.  Before that, I had proudly worn the noble OD badge that ‘effective communication’ was the way to right most of the plagues that faced projects and teams and that learning about people and teams would serve me to do things ‘differently’.  If people could just learn how to communicate clearly, focus on the common goals and  respect each other than many of the quibbles and conflicts we experience would disappear in a poof of pure Disney-esque magic.

I must admit I have had some sobering experiences since then.  What I have learned is that some teams will not work, some people cannot be changed and some projects truly are doomed if they are executed according to the ‘project plan’. 

My last project turned out more like a covert war operation than a PMP Gantt chart.  The schedule was revised – at least twenty times, but apparently was written in invisible ink as status meetings always included the comment ‘what schedule?  we never got one.’.  Scope creep ran rampant to the point where it became easier to think of the project in terms of what it wasn’t supposed to accomplish, i.e. ‘world peace’ or ‘human cloning’, rather than what it was and the project team began to resemble a dramatic reenactment of 17th century Scottish clan fights.

The project was simple, the plan straightforward, but the reality turned out to be a soap opera.

So that brought me to the question . . . when and how do you fire your project team or perhaps even fire yourself?  I generally consider myself to be a competent project manager, but what made me so ineffective in this particular situation?

A few things that stood out:

1. Old drama.  This should be the biggest warning flag to any PM taking over a project.  Old drama has a way of reaching new heights in critical projects.  Plus it sets the scene for the game that never ends – the blame game.  If there is old drama between team members or project departments, my advice is either hire outside or put off the project.  Unless there are strict accountability expectations and/or consequences in place, this is a ticking time bomb.

2. New drama.  If new drama arises and is not easily put to bed, change your project team.  If you can’t change your project team, you must have really strict accountability policies that are reinforced by key stakeholders.

3. Excuses.  To me, if it doesn’t belong on a risk register as something you would sign your name to, then it should stay out of the project.  In hindsight, I would have managed the project this way.  Any complaint or excuse posed for missing a deadline would have to be documented in writing with a John Hancock.  I have found most people prefer not to endorse their excuses.

4. Teamwork.  If the team can’t work together, you need a new team.  If you aren’t going to get a new team, be prepared to spend more time and money, or just bite the bullet and get a new team.

5. Scope.  What does it mean to be a project manager?  To me, it meant doing everything possible to ensure that the project was on time and on budget.  Apparently this job description is subject to a lot of scope creep which included: mediator, counselor, errand girl, anger management coach, computer programmer, technical writer and trainer.  Similar role definition is a benefit for the entire team. 

6. Documentation.  Obviously project documentation is crucial, but I don’t need to write a blog about that as the PMBOK already exists.  I would focus my documentation on deviations that affect the team.  Some deviations in role, responsibilities, or tasks may proposed or required.  These should be presented to the team member, who should sign off on them and debates need to be taken to the steering committee.  It may seem like a waste of time, but it’s not.  Especially, if there are issues of accountability in the project.

7.  Accountability.  If any one person on your team or any department can successfully blame someone else for something, you don’t have it.

And as for projects going forward, my battle wounds and bruised ego have almost healed enough to take on the next project.

Zeros

Too much time spent reading philosophy and layman’s books on quantum mechanics has reminded me that time is relative.  A day can last forever and a year can fly by.  Years are just arbitrary measures of time bookended by the completion of a revolution of a watery rock around a burning mass of hydrogen and helium, but some years create milestones purely by the importance given to them by our reverence of the metric system – 20, 30, 40 and so on.  With each passage of ten – we are suddenly thrown into introspection by the round, glassy zero at the end of the number.

I can tell you that at 20 I didn’t feel this pull so much – my eyes were set on the legal liberation of the following year.  But suddenly, looking at 30 with all the childhood and civil rights of passage behind me, I have started to feel the pull of decadal reflection. 

So today, on the last day of my twenties I reflect on who I am, what I have learned and – most Socraticly – what I don’t know.

1.  Progress

Sometimes I look around and I amazed at the progress we have made.  I am amazed by simple things such as the fact that I can drive anywhere in the country on a system of roads or that I can converse face to face (or at least screen to screen) with someone across the world from my computer.  But increasingly, I am reminded of how superficial these things are when viewed in terms of the progress of humanity. Granted these things are cool, really cool sometimes, but they are really accessories in the larger scheme of true progress.  The reality is that for all our window dressings we still face many of the same core, human problems that we have always faced – greed, violence, power struggles, deceit, etc.

So it leads me to the question are we better or just better dressed?

In my studies of adult development, many theorists show the most advanced levels of adult development as having a more fluid, accepting relationship with the world but this has always presented a fundamental problem to me.  Acknowledgement and adaptation to the current state of things I can buy, but acceptance I find much more difficult to (ahem) except if it is uncoupled from its usual partner, passivity.  And because these higher states of development are much more rare in the literature and speculative – I find difficulty having my tough questions answered.  But what I do see, is a fundamental difficulty associated deciding what it means to be ‘better’ which I believe has led us to our current point of stagnation and gradual (or sometimes not so gradual) erosion.

2.  Power

I must admit I find books like The Secret laughable at best and offensive at worst, because they fail to recognize the distinction that will/effort lies with the individual but power lies with the relationship.  You can have the strongest will and put forth the most effort of anyone around you, but it can all be for naught.  The Secret is that goals are realized and ‘you have the life of your dreams’ if your will somehow manages to align itself with the relationships around you.  Can this be helped by hard work, preparation and an extra bit of doggedness fortified with a little PMA, sure, but I believe the notion that if you don’t have the life you want it’s your fault because you didn’t will the universe enough to be misleading at best and contributing to mounting individual anxiety and depression at worst. 

Hayek once claimed that individualism as a collective system would eventually result in stagnation because of the inability of large collectives of individuals to reach consensus.  This makes inherent sense as power is constructed by the alignment of relationships toward a certain goal as power is inherently contained within the relationship itself (these relationships may be active or passive).  This stagnation has allowed smaller groups, which might not normally possess as much influence to gain ground such as noted by Stigler in his article about economic regulation.  Wall Street or corn farmers or social lobbies wins because they speak with one voice and the rest of us wonder how it happened.

The theory isn’t all that hard to understand but it carries with it a specter, a specter that leads to books like the aforementioned Secret (but there are a host of others) that claim that we have more individual power than ever, that we are masters of our destiny from the brand of band aids we buy to making our retirement dreams a reality.  I believe a great amount of the stress that exists in the modern world – the kind of stress that doesn’t seem to have a source – that leads us to buzz around with no direction, to check our blackberry every 20 seconds and to obsess over Dawn versus Palmolive.  It’s the stress that boils down to the fact that some part of us isn’t fooled.  It’s the part of us that realizes that the whole master of one’s own universe thing has its limits and those limits aren’t so wide as we are often placated into believing during good times.  I have spent a lot of time debating and at time pontificating that I don’t really make a large distinction between modern and post-modern as I believe they are one in the same – they just focus their lenses on different parts of the problem.  In some respects we are held accountable as if we were masters of our universe by ourselves and often by others, but the reality is that there is always a part of us that understands we do not have control over so much in our lives. Power, being encapsulated in the relationship and being connected to all relationships can never be guaranteed.  It is always, fundamentally by its nature, outside the self. 

3. Lives to be envied and lives to be admired.

It seems that as a society we have chosen the former.  More effort, resources and time is devoted to Paris Hilton’s latest exploit than to those around us who are truly doing admirable things.  During the heat of the 2008/2009 financial crisis we saw a few minutes of the nightly news dedicated to ‘feel-good’ stories of people helping each other but by and large it seems that by promoting tangible success as the pinnacle individualistic power we have intentionally or inadvertently placed envy over admiration

4.  For my child.

Everyone hopes that his/her child will inherit a world that is better than the current one, but I think that for happen we must all become more realistic about our current situation. The reality is that our current ways of doing  things are, for the most part, very inefficient.  Everywhere I look I see inefficiency – we manage capital inefficiently through a strange financial dance of default, inflation and restructuring.  We manage our resources inefficiently.  We often manage our relationships inefficiently, including our relationship with our own bodies and eventually as we race around we realize we manage our time in this world inefficiently in so many ways as these inefficiencies mount. 

I hope that my child inherits a more efficient world because in a strange way at the core of efficiency is a respect for what one has and a desire to make the most of it.

So on that note, let the thirties begin.

Chiasm

“Thought is a relationship with oneself and with the world as well as a relationship with the other; hence it is established in three dimensions at the same time”. – Merleau Ponty (pg. 145)

I am still trying to grasp the real nature of Merleau-Ponty’s Chiasm, even as the words around it seem more lucid to me. I found myself beginning to write this post last night only to find myself at a loss to put the experience of chiasm down on paper in a cogent manner.  If I am understanding it right it is the experience of the self as both subject and object simultaneously, as given in the example of the left-hand touching the right and is meant to embody the aspect of reversibility.

If I think about it, I am constantly experiencing myself as both subject and object. There are many moments when I, in a sense ‘watch myself do something’ – such as catching myself in an interaction, watching the scene in a sense as I am experiencing it.  When I am attuned I can see all dynamics of the interaction:  1. How I am feeling/experiencing it, 2. How well or not well the other subject and I are interacting, and 3. The physical aspects of the interaction both in my felt sense as object and the empirical ‘vision’ sense of watching the other person yet having an awareness of what the scene would probably look like were I viewing it as an outsider.  It is funny how the word self-conscious has a bad rap in some senses.  I have always been very self-conscious – conscious of the way I enter and interact in situations – very attuned to the multiple dynamics of the situation, aware of how I am experiencing and ‘acting’ simultaneously. 

We tend to give the word self-conscious a bad rap – that it implies a sort of hesitance, awkwardness and stiltedness to encounters and this can be very true.  Yet, I also believe (now that I am getting older) that there can be a grace in self-consciousness – a wisdom, fluidity and flexibility that extends from an understanding of and comfort in what Merleau-Ponty would deem ‘the flesh’.

I have always been fascinated by the ‘space between’ in the sense that Proust and in our reading Merleau-Ponty has described – where space is not defined as ‘nothing’ or as ‘empty’ in so much a sense as its presence fundamentally shapes the whole confluence of the parts or as Merleau-Ponty states, “the invisible that renders the world visible” (pg. 151).

I experience the chiasm as the this interplay – this shifting of viewpoints, of interpretations – as the movement between the various inputs that manages to tie them together into a melodic (or sometimes discordant) interpretation.  To me, the chiasm is much like music – points that stand alone, but create something different when strung together, basic inputs that can be combined in so many different ways to tell the story of the present – things that are both actively inflicted upon the environment (the striking of the note into silence) and received from it (the creative).  In many ways, probably because I have such a background in music, music actually colors my perception – situations have soundtracks – the altercation between my son and myself has the discordance of differing wills, the mourning violin of empathy in that I know where he is coming from and the sometime desperate attempts to ‘return to the tonic’ by compromise.

I must admit I always get a bit bogged down in Husserl and this was no exception.  There is just something about it that always strains me; however, inclined I am to agree with him on some points.  However, I must admit that in my initial exposure to Merleau-Ponty I fell in love – not always in agreement but definitely in love. 

“ . . . what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are tow aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth” (p.155).

 It is all interaction in this sense – physics, communication, psychology . . .  And this interaction seems to have some essence by virtue of existing in a world that is both homogenous in its fundamental material creation and variegated in its expression. If the world were completely uniform interaction would not take place (there would be no need to communicate (either in the energy of physics or in interaction) because there would be no need transfer as everything would be fundamentally the same – fundamentally static.  And yet, if the universe was completely chaotic interaction could not exist because there would be no point of the relation other than the completeness of the chaos which would serve as another type of uniformity in its anti-thesis.  So we exist in a world where the left hand can touch the right because they are the same but different.  Such is it with others and such it is with the world.  Indeed, Depraz (pg. 176) quotes Husserl as saying “isn’t it possible that we all become insane and that many subjects live without relying on a life-world, without any communal experience? We would have to do then with a plurality of solipsistic subjects?”  – This would be akin to my description of physical chaos above whereby one of the three links M-P describes, communication with other, fundamentally drops out and indeed many insane people often lose this and the ability to interact with the world (and it could be argued with themselves as object or object-in-the-world) descending into a solipsistic reality where interaction cannot be understood.  We all have the potential for insanity, reminding us that this ability to communicate does not fundamentally comprise us (we can exist without it) but does raise the question of whether we can BE without it.

So as not to be a bad citationist – I will update the bibliography!

Foxes and Hedgehogs

 πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα -”The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” – Archilochus

In my experience, most people are hedgehogs and whether we admit or not, despite all the touting that what the world needs is more foxes, it seems to me that most people get somewhere by being hedgehogs.  We have countless colloquialisms stating this: the 10,000 hour rule that is now in vogue as a predictor of success, the advice that you have to do one thing and do it well, or that you have to narrow your options to move forward. And for most people I think this is true, because, in my experience, most people are hedgehogs or at least hedgehog-inclined. 

It takes a certain amount of insanity to be a fox – a certain racing mind, a certain pluralism, a certain tolerance of ambiguity and a willingness to always be wrong or defect to the other side on a whim.  This is difficult for most people.  In my survey of writers on adult development, there are many claims that higher levels of development can account for some of this as they are described as more flexible, more tolerant of ambiguity and give the person a greater capacity to place themselves outside the situation, allowing for more objectivity.  This does seem to hold some validity when people are viewed over time; however, I think we cannot discount the fact that this course of development looks radically different depending on one’s natural inclination to be a fox or a hedgehog.

Often creativity or innovation can give its possessor the guise of foxishness as can less admirable traits of indecision, multi-tasking and ADD; yet I believe both these positive and negative traits can also be misleading.  Foxes can best be described as connectors, as those who see patterns and as those who can combine disparate sets of data or disciplines into a cohesive argument through some tenuous thread of commonality, while hedgehogs are builders.  Builders make firm connections that are reinforced at every possible point of weakness.  They construct walls and patterns to shape the world into some design.  In essence, foxes adapt themselves to the world and hedgehogs attempt to make the world adapt to them.

In his book, The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo states that what we need is more foxes.  In some senses, he is right.  Hedgehogs can be notoriously short-sided and have the ability to deny what is right in front of them – not always because they can’t see it, but rather, because they fully believe in their ability to change it to meet their expectations or to build walls that will keep it from affecting them. Our world is currently a world of hedgehogs.  It is the hedgehog’s hubris that allows any man, company or nation to speak the words “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”, and many of the problems facing our ‘flat world’ stem from the disconnect between this hubris and reality.  Though the modern world may have taken fate out of the equation, the fundamental lesson of Oedipus still applies, in that, although we may do everything in our power to influence, control or prevent a certain outcome, the number of variables contained in even the smallest decision makes it impossible.

Yet the history of humanity is a hedgehog history.  Since the Agricultural Revolution we have been a species of hedgehogs.  Ideology is a product of the hedgehog, as is singularity of purpose and teleological organization.  Even groups such as Hezbollah, mentioned by Cooper Ramo as an example of fox-like thinking is centered around an ideology that is fundamentally still the product of the hedgehog.  So perhaps we are moving into a world where the day-to-day strategy is more conducive to the fox, but our structures of organization are those of the hedgehog. and in my musings I wonder, can we ever truly be a species of foxes?  If so, what would this culture look like and what events would serve to shift the balance of power from the hedgehogs to the foxes?

Introduction

I must admit I have a chronic condition of curiousness – the type that causes me to expend abnormal amounts of time, energy and resources learning about every random thing that comes my way. They say you should stick with one thing to truly make your place in the world.  They are probably right. And I probably won’t . . .  This has led me down a strange road over the past few years, such that I am sitting here with all these questions and all this information and wondering what it all means and what to do with it.  Francis Bacon once said that “knowledge is power” and I have turned that phrase over many times lately. I think we can no longer make that blanket statement. 

Sometime knowledge is power.  Sometimes ignorance is power.  And sometimes knowledge correlates to wisdom and sometimes just the opposite. 

So this blog begins as a journey – a journey through the chaotic journey of a hungry mind.  I can ‘t promise any cohesion to these posts – just questions, random information and a healthy dose of peckish ADD.