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At the beginning of October, I felt afraid and stagnant. Let’s start there.

On fear—Bill McKibben writing on October 9, a few hours before Hurricane Milton hit Florida, a month before a consequential and confusing US election:

The fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future? And that’s as true as politics as it is in meteorology.

Fear

When It Helps, When It Hurts

The Crucial YearsBill McKibben

And stagnation—revisiting an essay by Mandy Brown:

Growth occurs in intervals: there are times of growth, and there are times of non-growth. The latter isn’t a failure so much as a necessary period of rest. Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to.

Latewood | everything changes

On the seasons of growth.

everything changes

While all this is going on, I keep busy at work. In my facilitation practice, I help people uncover their priorities and values and then, within those new structures, gleefully deliberate and take skillful action.

Here’s Chelsea Troy on group deliberation:

The perspectives that matter the most in decision-making, are precisely those perspectives that typically get excluded from participation in the thing we’re making decisions about. … When you’re facilitating a decision that’s going to have a wide impact crater, you have to go find precisely the interests that often aren’t represented for this kind of decision—who don’t even get a vote—or who always lose the vote.

These parties frequently have concerns that the vote completely fails to address. Recall from the last post that we introduced two categories of metric: optimizing metrics (where we need to find the best solution) and satisficing metrics (where we need a minimum acceptable solution). Marginalized concerns in decision-making often should be preliminary satisficing metrics: they should be table stakes, because they determine who gets to participate at all, rather than a slight preference.

How to flub (and not flub) group decision-making on technical teams

This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: They’ll solve for the general case without collecting or considering…

Chelsea TroyView all posts by Chelsea

By the way, the best method I know of for designing something new while ensuring that everybody’s minimum specs (what Troy calls table stakes) are identified, met, and exceeded is set-based design.

Books

Standard Ebooks has produced a beautifully formatted, freely available ebook edition of Mary Parker Follett’s “The New State” from 1919. Yes, it’s over a hundred years old. And it remains a readable, engaging look into group formation, deliberation, and decision-making.

The New State, by Mary Parker Follett - Free ebook download

Free epub ebook download of the Standard Ebooks edition of The New State: The theory of group organization is formulated and applied in an attempt to design a truly democratic political state.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

There are a million ideas in Follett’s writing. One that sticks with me is this:

Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed.

And finally, my friend Devon Persing’s book, “The Accessibility Operations Guidebook,” is out. She writes:

This book is two things. The first is a crash course in frameworks and ways of thinking from fields like information science, organizational theory, and DEI. The second is a walkthrough of building and operationalizing sustainable, data-driven accessibility programming.

Even though I don’t work in the digital accessibility field, I got a lot of practical information out of the back half of this book (chapters 10-14). Devon has great advice on org design + operations challenges, like:

• whether to couch an offering as a service and/or a program,
• ways to use or commission information, and
• tips on goal-setting in service of group decision-making.

Learn more about the book and buy a copy (if purchasing on Payhip, use coupon code PUMPKINTOAG for 25% off):

The Accessibility Operations Guidebook | Devon Persing

Lessons in making accessibility work more practical and sustainable for you and your organization.

Devon Persing

Gratitude

I entered October feeling afraid and stagnant: worried about the climate, about the US elections, about a dozen wars around the globe, about every horror ongoing and unabated and by this point nearly forgotten, about the health and wellbeing of my immediate family.

Thank you to Liana and our children and various folks at work and kind friends in town and around the globe, each of whom supported me in going on silent retreat for a week.

This month, that community of silence made all the difference.

So as we leave October, I’m still afraid. But I am also ready. I cling to these lines from Yu Xuanji (the 9th-century poet/courtesan/Daoist nun):

Water fits itself to the vessel that contains it.
Clouds drift artlessly, not thinking of return.
Spring breezes bear sorrow over the Chu river at dusk:

separated from the flock, a lone duck is flying.

The season has turned here in Tacoma. Rainfall and drifting clouds. I look out the window for the reminders I need: to fit myself to this vessel. To drift imperfectly and without thinking of return. To engage and assist and participate as much and as long as I can. To keep flying, in darkness.

Online reading

First, novelist Thea Lim on the many harms of algorithmic systems and the stultifying context their corporate owners want us all to be stuck in, where “every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit”:

If there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age | The Walrus

Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

The WalrusThea Lim

Next, Mandy Brown on a changed, distanced stance to social media:

There was a time when I felt some resonance between spending time in the social stream and doing my own work. As if the movement of the water imparted some energy or power I could make use of, and then return. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it. I do not want those memories to be a burden, like stones weighing down my pockets. I want, instead, to carry them lightly and tenderly, to have the fortitude to accept the grief that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.

I have become comfortable with my little nests on Mastodon and [REDACTED], with the small web goofiness of the moment, but I also think and worry sometimes about the countless people I’ve lost track of—or lost “ambient awareness” of—as tech+finance hollows out, immolates, and desecrates the places where we once played.

Coming home

Into the gap.

A Working LibraryMandy Brown

Not all is gloomy. A recording of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s famous 1982 lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” has recently been pried off some obsolete media and parked on YouTube.

This is an astonishing, hilarious, valuable talk. I watched it through twice. I took notes. You will benefit from this lecture if you are interested in systems stuff or continuous improvement stuff or working with smart, cranky, opinionated people. Here’s a taste:

Never in this office say, “but we’ve always done it that way.” If, during the next 12 months, any of you says, “but we’ve always done it that way,” I will instantly materialize beside you and I will haunt you for 24 hours.

Some additional context and links to the recordings:

We can now watch Grace Hopper’s famed 1982 lecture on YouTube

The lecture featured Hopper discussing future challenges of protecting information.

Ars TechnicaJennifer Ouellette

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• Created a new, simple Recommendations page with selected books, newsletters, blogs, and podcasts.
• For web-based readers, a new overall theme & organization. The old one was feeling that way. Read about this site for more detail.

Online event

Registration is now open for Abby Covert’s 4th annual Makesensemess, an affordable, online celebration coming up on November 1, 2024.

This is the hottest ticket in the nerdile, infinitely curious information architecture zone. Flexible pricing, anchored around $30.

I have attended several Makesensemesses prior and it’s a great event. If you like messes, or making sense of them, consider joining us.

That is all I have for now. I sit in a campus library looking idly out the window at some gorgeous trees in the arboretum whose leaves seem not more than a week away from turning into their fall colors and changing from there into the next thing. Change is here for each of us, it is all around us, and it is all, ultimately, somehow, good.

Online reading

Mark Rosenthal’s blog is always great. I recommend his recent post called “Boeing: The Turning Point(s).” He connects Boeing’s ongoing difficulties to two attempts to change company strategy twenty years ago. I enjoyed Mark’s detailed reminiscences from the time:

There were actually two lines running parallel, each one on a two day cycle. … Each time the line was indexed, it generally took a shift to, in succession, pull each plane back, then forward, then dock it into the next position. And because this was a schedule-driven line, the planes moved on time, ready or not. Incomplete work became “travelers”—jobs that traveled with the plane to be completed later when, for example, the parts became available. Exactly who was supposed to do that out-of-sequence work while everyone was busy with the scheduled jobs was a little vague.

The assembly manager for 737 then ran an experiment. Instead of trying to solve all of the problems they could think of before trying anything she took the opposite approach. She got an RV winch, bolted it to the floor by the door, hooked the cable to the last plane, and started pulling it—slowly—through the work position.

If everything was going smoothly, they kept pulling. If something disrupted the work, they stopped the winch, wrote that down, and picked off a few of those things to try to fix on the next cycle.

Boeing: The Turning Point(s)

In early spring of 1999 I was sitting in a classroom at Boeing with a couple of dozen other employees. Everyone with a “management” job code was being sent to this session over a few we…

The Lean ThinkerMark

Daniel Katz writes that, even though we add new people to groups in order to address medium- or long-term needs, there are also short-term benefits:

The act of adding a new person also has immediate benefits to the group, as a new person who doesn’t know the practices and culture of the group can reflect on them as they learn them, ideally leading to lessons and improvements for the whole group.

I think about this often as a consultant—e.g. a person sometimes inserted into groups on a temporary basis, and who sometimes pushes the dirt around when organizations expand, split, or rearrange.

How groups can immediately benefit when new members join

When thinking about a group adding a new person, we often think that while the group will benefit from adding the new person in the long run, there is a cost to the group in the initial period. But…

Daniel S. Katz's blogView all posts by Daniel S. Katz

And Michel Baudin assembled a long, informal survey of different attempts to define “quality” in operations & management contexts. The theme is that people love to talk about quality, but no expert knows, and no group agrees about, what it is:

What is Quality? – Michel Baudin’s Blog

Professionals wrongly assume a shared understanding of quality and talk past each other. Let’s address the issue.

the takt times groupMichel Baudin

This all becomes a problem in lean interventions—as transmitted by Lean Enterprise Institute, et al—which begin by spinning a group’s tires in an intractable, wasteful effort to produce a working definition of “customer value,” of which “quality” is one component. Of course, none of this is necessary and is best avoided. But the waste and confusion these conversations produce is one reason I walked away from those methods and found better ways to spend the time.

Baudin’s piece brought to mind this entertaining, possibly apocryphal, quote from designer Massimo Vignelli. It bears the confidence of someone who (a) knows quality when they see it, (b) does not care to explain, and (c) will be submitting an invoice:

There are no hierarchies when it comes to quality. Quality is there or is not there, and if is not there we have lost our time.

Disability Pride Month

July is Disability Pride Month, which commemorates the 1990 passage of a key civil rights law in the USA—the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

I wrote on this topic last year:

The world of silence: marking Disability Pride Month

Being a hearing-impaired person whose job is to listen. Quiet, noise, and rest.

Improve Something TodayBrian Kerr

Two points I’d add this time around:

1. The experience of disability has entered my family life in a different, terrifying way in 2024. I am grateful for the limited protections and affordances of the ADA that helped us these past months.
2. Many of those same protections are now at risk as a result of one of June’s disastrous set of US Supreme Court decisions.

Why discuss any of this at all? Because my disability has mostly been a “hidden” one, and at some point I became tired and ashamed of all the work that went into keeping it so. My disability is an important part of who I am, and—as I wrote in the piece—I have a good life and I do good work.

And that’s it for the moment. Be back next month with more links & notes, and hopefully some other updates in-between.

I’ve been looking for new ways of thinking about problem-solving beyond the tired lean frameworks, and better ways of helping groups decide what to do next. This month, I’ve found something.

Online reading

From Beth Sawin’s June 21st Multisolving Institute newsletter:

People are removing dams so salmon can spawn. They are replacing asphalt with urban gardens, to help cities stay cool and prevent flooding. Highways that divided neighborhoods for decades are being phased out, replaced with parks and walking paths and bikeways. … The systems that surround us—bricks and mortar infrastructure, the structure of healthcare, the endowments of universities—have not always been constructed in ways that respect the interconnection of our world. The tree cover of cities aligns with maps of racial segregation. The wealth of many powerful interests traces back to conquest, slavery, or extraction. Because of this, moving forward is going to sometimes require looking backward and removing structures (and laws, incentives, and habits) that are doing harm. 

I learned from my technical days that multi-objective optimization is hard. Yet it no longer makes sense to suppose that a group can solve one problem at a time—or to ignore the fact that when they do, they’re merely pushing problems around in ways that are unhelpful and unjust.

And “moving forward is going to sometimes require looking backwards and removing structures… that are doing harm.” This reminds me of TRIZ: the laughter that comes with noticing system behaviors that reliably produce bad outcomes. Stopping those and patiently seeing what happens next can be more fruitful than actively starting new things.

Facilitation for engagement with FLOWER

Also from the Multisolving Institute, The Framework for Long-term, Whole-system, Equity-based Reflection (FLOWER), which “helps a group explore the co-benefits a project might produce. … Who would need to be involved? How do we design for co-benefits? How do we ensure burdens and benefits are shared equitably?”

I haven’t had a chance to use FLOWER yet, but have slotted it right next to the strategy-culture bicycle as a method to help a group get real about evaluating projects and their benefits, impacts, and possibilities.

FLOWER - Multisolving Institute

FLOWER: Framework for Long-Term, Whole-System, Equity-Based Reflection FLOWER is an interactive community engagement tool about multisolving. FLOWER helps a group explore the co-benefits a project might produce. It prompts some of the most important questions about multisolving. Who would need to be involved? How do we design for co-benefits? How do we ensure burdens and […]

Multisolving Institute

How to fry a Mars rover

Let’s end on a lighter note. Enjoy Chris Lewicki’s story about a simple wiring mistake on the Spirit Mars rover:

The pulse was sent to the motor. As always, the result was immediate, but this time, alarmingly unfamiliar. The strip chart did not look like anything we had seen before. It did not even look like a broken motor. It was decidedly—something else. … My eyes followed the wires from our breakout box on the test cart to the spacecraft, and the reason for the unfamiliar signal landed like a dagger through my heart. All that power we just released did not go into the RAT-Revolve motor. Due to a mistake I had made with the break-out-box, it went the other direction on the connector interface, sending a surge of electricity straight into the spacecraft, instead of the motor.

My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story — Chris Lewicki

Some mistakes feel worse than death.

Chris LewickiChris Lewicki

It’s been a few months. Life happened in our home this spring, to the tune of a child who became very sick in February and is still slowly coming back into his own. A season of ongoing adjustment—see how much badness one can smuggle into that little word?—with abiding comfort in asinine clichés (“taking things one day at a time”), and big changes in how I’ve used the time. We are fine, and will be fine. I’m grateful for all the people who have given support or slack in one way or another.

All that said, it’s time to get back to words, a whole bunch of ’em, in deliberate sequence. Let’s go. ↓

Online reading

From Tom Wolfe’s absurdly fun 1983 profile of Robert Noyce:

“Some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn’t stand it, and he would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say: ‘Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.’ Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: ‘But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey … it’s your ass.’”

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce | Esquire | DECEMBER 1983

How the sun rose on the Silicon Valley

Esquire | The Complete ArchiveTom Wolfe

From Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon’s essay on rewilding the internet:

“When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit. The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies.”

We Need To Rewild The Internet | NOEMA

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

NOEMAMaria Farrell

Books

It is the English major’s way of scrabbling through a difficult time—I’ve been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. From his “Circles” essay:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Free ebook download

Free epub ebook download of the Standard Ebooks edition of Essays: A collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

During the past few months I’ve collected a few older kaizen books, but haven’t cracked these yet. They’re next, and coming up soon.

Recommended courses & workshops

The second cohort of Fenwick’s “Think Like a Writer” course begins next week, on June 3. (Still time to join up, or you can take it on your own time, anytime.) I was part of the first cohort. I encountered a breezy course loaded with rubrics, questions, and checklists that led to immediate improvements in my own business writing. I appreciate the respect this course extends to participants’ time and attention—I was able to complete it during a busy month of client work and in the midst of the aforementioned family health crisis. Use code PENPAL25 at checkout to knock $25 off the asking price:

Think Like A Writer

Clear writing starts with clear thinking. Practice three questions to clarify anyone’s writing, including your own

Fenwick Writing School

I also recently enjoyed Ryan and Greg’s half-day “Restart” workshop, the premise of which is to guide you through existential and scary stuff related to independent work. You’ll spend the morning designing a business, uncovering ways to talk about your services, and mapping out specific positioning and marketing opportunities. I’ve worked for myself before, would like to again someday, and have many nervous questions about the prospect right now. This workshop and the subsequent bi-weekly calls and take-home activities was perfect for me. When I think about some of the readers of this site & mailing list—well, it might be perfect for you, too. Next one planned for June 17:

Restart: A workshop to figure out if working for yourself is worth it.

Design a business plan you can see yourself in and figure out if working for yourself is worth it.

Jump Ship!Ryan Rumsey

Online reading

SessionLab’s second annual State of Facilitation report is out and it’s great. It covers topics like disability and methods for inclusion:

“Nobody had previously asked how many facilitators identify as having a disability themselves. About 20% of respondents identified as having a disability. Are our gatherings, communities and events designed to include them?”

And changes to facilitated session format and duration:

“One of the inheritances of the global pandemic has been the spread of shorter interventions. The circa 2 hours session is now the most common session length, whether online or remote.”

(Before the start of the pandemic, my experience was that more time-intensive “dedicated” lean workshops turned out better when decomposed into smaller kaizen activities anyways—allowing more time for reflection, getting new data and ideas, etc.)

These are just two items from this very thorough free report:

State of Facilitation 2024 – Report and Expert Insights

The second edition of SessionLab’s State of Facilitation report. Data, trends, and insights from a survey of workshop design and facilitation professionals.

SessionLabKeith McCandless (2014)

Next, “Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us” in The Leadership Quarterly:

“By only looking for leadership amongst leaders we only find it there and bury all signs of leadership from below. By only recognizing, training, selecting and nurturing a few in positions of leadership we ensure that only a few develop the qualities associated with leadership. Elitist theory scaffolds elitist practice which creates an elitist world. This helps us understand the true extent of the threat posed by zombie leadership: not that the world it describes is false but rather that it may help to create a world in which it becomes true.”

Finally, I enjoyed this thought-provoking article about a family’s day trip to visit a data center in a suburb of Dublin:

“Ireland is no exception to the rule that what we remember and what we forget are always contingent upon the power structures and hierarchies that shape our contemporary moment. At the birth of the state, we burned our history in an act of carelessness; we also freed ourselves to create a new national history. We entrusted the church with our moral guidance and guardianship, and then allowed it to commit unspeakable cruelties on our citizens … At the latter end of the century, and in the wake of joining the European Union, we moved away from our old bad memories and toward a prosperous new era, placing our faith in international investment, almost at any cost. But in a small country like Ireland, the old names — whether they be companies or state organizations or political dynasties — crop up again and again. Sometimes our faulty memories flash up a warning. But often that history is stored in the cloud: intangible, vulnerable to exploitation, and degrading over time.”

Ireland’s Memory Machines — The Dial

Data centers have proliferated across the country, at great cost.

The DialJessica Traynor

No books

I haven’t read much this month due to some family/schedule things. It is weird to not be reading a few books. I miss the sustained attention that comes with it. Also, that’s where the ideas are: inside books. I’ll get back to it soon!

Upcoming event

The Global Lean Summit returns for its fifth year (and second in-person). It will be held in Indiana in mid-September with a 3-day conference format including an onsite tour at Toyota Material Handling.

I went to the 2023 Summit and it was a remarkable experience. I hope to attend this one, and hope you consider it too. As of this writing, you have a week to dial in early-bird pricing:

The Global Lean Summit – The Global Lean Summit