YAST

A blog? What is this, 2005?

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  • More Quotes I Think About All The Time

    This one is from Richard White‘s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (about the construction of the railroads in the late 19th century):

    I wish, if only for simplicity, that I could say, for better or worse, that these tycoons dreamed modernity, built empires, and gave us the world we know. They were, however, not that smart. Many were clever enough at soliciting money and not repaying debts. The shrewdest of them were masters at controlling and manipulating information. We have their equivalents today. They were more likely to feel abused and threatened than imperious. The power they achieved traveled porous channels. It leaked away and had unexpected outcomes. These were men whose failures often mattered as much as their successes. Their inability to turn the transcontinentals into profitable businesses led them into halls of power they otherwise would never have frequented. With perhaps the exception of Gould, there is a Sorcerer’s Apprentice quality to them. They laid hands on a technology they did not fully understand, initiated sweeping changes, and saw these changes often take on purposes they did not intend.

    This Sorcerer’s Apprentice quality is why I find them so interesting, and so important. They at least gesture toward one of the mysteries of modernity. How, when powerful people can on close examination seem so ignorant and inept; how, when so much work is done stupidly, shoddily, haphazardly, and selfishly; how, then, does the modern world function at all? It is no wonder that religious people see the hand of God and economists invent the invisible hand. The transcontinental railroads are sometimes fetishized as the ultimate manifestation of modern rationality, but, when seen from within, these astonishingly mismanaged railroads are the anteroom to mystery.

  • Work-life Balance

    Continuing my semi-occasional series of quotes I think about a lot, I realized a while back that work is basically a hobby of mine. I don’t mean the specific work I do for a given company for pay, but the larger themes of the kind of work I do, what’s important to me, what I want to encourage, how to do it better. It’s a cliche that we spend a huge chunk of our lives at work, so to me it makes sense to pay attention to it and not relegate it to “that thing I have to do”. (I recognize that part of this is that I’m incredibly fortunate to have the kind of job that repays this attitude, but — and I’ll write more about this later — we all have more control in our lives than we always realize. So in a lot of ways this is also psychological self-defense.)

    This ties into what I said in my first post about helping people find new jobs! During one of my various conversations with friends about the topic, one of them pointed me at this bit, from C. Wright Mills’ “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”, an essay included as an appendix to his The Sociological Imagination (which I still need to get around to reading).

    It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other. Of course, such a split is the prevailing convention among men in general, deriving, I suppose, from the hollowness of the work which men in general now do.

  • On the Value of “Data”

    A while back I read The Brompton – Engineering for Change by Will Butler-Adams (the CEO of Brompton Bikes) and Dan Davies (former blogger at Crooked Timber and author of The Unaccountability Machine, which I will have to write more about later). It’s the story of how Brompton Bikes came to be, how it’s evolved over time, and how the company thinks about running itself. There’s a quote from it that I think about all the time (this is Butler-Adams):

    I’ve always allocated a sum of money at the start of every year for people in the company to have ideas with. One day this may get institutionalised and then we’ll have a fund with a grand name like Greenford Innovations or Brompton Future or something, but at the moment it’s personally under my control and it’s called the ‘Fuck-It Fund’, because that’s what I generally say when giving someone permission to try something. The fund has grown over the years, but the principle is always that if someone has an idea that they’re passionate enough about to approach the chief executive with, and it won’t damage the brand or cost an absurd amount of money if it all goes wrong, then they can do it.

    And when it comes to new ideas, we don’t do corporate planning, discounted cash-flow forecasts and returns on investment. I did a few of those at ICI when I was an engineering project manager, making investment cases to go up to the committees that decided on new equipment or facilities for the Melinar plant. The experience taught me that if someone wants a project to go ahead, they can fudge a spreadsheet to deliver the required returns; conversely if they want to kill a project they can fudge numbers the other way. Since the returns calculation is always more or less dependent on how much someone wants to do the thing, you might as well cut out the middle stage. Not only do you save time and effort, but you avoid the issue of accidentally running a training course for your employees in how to lie to you.

  • What Dropping the Atomic Bomb Taught Me About Managing Up

    Years and years ago, a friend recommended James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, which opens with the “decision” to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I put decision in scare quotes because, in Carroll’s telling at least, there never was any specific point at which Truman was presented with the question “should we drop the atomic bomb or not?”; while FDR was still alive, the US prepared a list of potential targets assuming the bomb worked as hoped, and after his death that list went to Truman for approval. It would have taken specific initiative on Truman’s part to say “no, we’re not going to do this”, and of course he had so many other things on his plate (and so much less context on the Manhattan Project and the bombing plans than FDR had) that it was unlikely he would ever have done that.

    In addition to a lesson about complex systems and how bad outcomes can happen without anyone specifically making a decision you can point back to (which I’ll come back to in another post), this taught me something very important about managing up at work in my own life. In my experience, a lot of people’s mental model of how decisions get made at work is “I do some research, I present it to my management, and then they decide what we should do”; in other words, they leave it as an open-ended decision to their management. The problem is that they then often get frustrated at the outcome, because management makes a choice they don’t like, or gets upset at them for not considering other options, or doesn’t ever actually make a decision at all.

    The thing is, this is entirely rational from management’s perspective! They don’t have as much context on the issue as the people on the ground do, they have a ton of other things on their plate (just as we all do), and the decision often isn’t as important to them as it is to the people asking for it.

    Instead, what I suggest to people is that they prepare a short list of alternatives and present them to management for approval or choice. This changes the conversation from “should we do this thing?” to “which of these things should we do?”, which is much more bounded and easier for a busy and overloaded person to make a decision about.

    Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach. It means that people lower on the ladder can (intentionally or unintentionally) manipulate people higher on it, and it means that important context that the people lower on the ladder don’t have may never figure into the decision. And sometimes you end up doing things that in retrospect nobody would have ever wanted to happen. But I’ll talk about how to compensate for those things another time.

  • Don’t Ask Why

    Related to my last post, another way I’ve learned how to ask better questions is through Howard S. Becker’s Tricks of the Trade. This has probably been one of the most influential bits of writing I’ve ever run across

    I first understood that “How?” was better than “Why?” as a result of doing field research. When I interviewed people, asking them why they did something inevitably provoked a defensive response. […] Even cooperative, nondefensive interviewees gave short answers to “Why?” hey understood the question to be asking for a cause, maybe even causes, but in any event for something that could be summarized briefly in a few words. And not just any old cause, but the cause contained in the victim’s intentions. If you did it, you did it for a reason. OK, what’s your reason? Furthermore, “Why?” required a “good” answer, one that made sense and could be defended.

    At this point, it almost takes an active effort for me to ask a “why” question. I have learned so much more from conversations, and been able to talk about difficult subjects more easily, than I ever would have been if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to read Becker.

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  • What Post-Incident Reviews Taught Me About Job Hunting

    One of my hobbies is helping people find new jobs, and ideally find ones that will make them as happy as possible. I was talking to some friends yesterday about their travails job-hunting, and a recurring theme that came up was the challenge of understanding what an organization is like from the outside so that they could make an informed decision about whether or not they’d be successful there. And I realized that all of the advice I gave them was straight from lessons I’ve picked up in post-incident reviews/learning from incidents.

    There are a couple of core problems you face in reverse-interviewing a company. The people you’re talking to don’t know what’s important to you nearly as well as you do, and if you try to ask them general questions about those things they will either give you pat answers, try to sell you on the place and thus tell you what they think you want to hear, simply not be able to answer the question, or (inadvertently) lie to you (since they’ll answer based on their mental model of the org and not what actually happens in reality). These are all the same kinds of challenges you face when talking to people in the aftermath of an incident: they want to construct a story that makes sense, they have their own mental model of what happened, and they feel internal and external pressure to give a “good” answer to the questions interviewers ask. So the techniques we use to get past those barriers in post-incident reviews can help us in job hunting!

    For example, one of my friends is very interested in how decisions get made in any organization they’re considering joining; certain modes and methods will work well for them, others not as well, and they want to make sure they’re set up for success before they commit. So the question they planned to ask was “how do decisions get made here?”, which has the virtue of being open-ended while pretty straight to the point. Unfortunately it’s also very easy for an aware person to shape their answer to. So my suggestion was to ask instead “Tell me about the last major decision that got made at this level. Who was involved in it? How did the process play out?” By asking a more specific question, they can get at the kind of information they’re interested in without running as much risk of triggering a sales pitch.

    It can feel a little weird to ask interviewers these sorts of questions! But in the same way that post-incident interviewing plays on making people feel like an expert, asking a question like this in an interview allows the person conducting the job interview to feel like an expert in their org. And much like post-incident analysis, it may require a little more work on your part to tease out the information you really care about, but it will pay dividends in the quality of the information you get.