“Under­neath the usual total unem­ploy­ment num­bers are the rea­sons an indi­vid­ual is unem­ployed: You are on tem­po­rary lay­off; you quit your job; you have reen­tered the labor mar­ket and have yet to find a job; or you are enter­ing the job mar­ket for the first time and have yet to find a job. Or, finally, you have been per­ma­nently sep­a­rated from your pre­vi­ous employer, who has no expec­ta­tion of hir­ing you back.

The last cat­e­gory is the dom­i­nant rea­son for unem­ploy­ment at this time. That might not seem sur­pris­ing, but it actu­ally is. Never, in the six reces­sions pre­ced­ing the lat­est one, did per­ma­nent sep­a­ra­tions account for more than 45 per­cent of the unem­ployed. The cur­rent per­cent­age stands at 56 per­cent as of Sep­tem­ber and appears to be still climbing:…”

“The 2010 Forum on Phi­los­o­phy, Engi­neer­ing & Tech­nol­ogy (fPET-​​2010) has issued its sec­ond call for papers (pdf here). fPET-​​2010 will be held 9–10 May 2010 (Sun­day evening – Mon­day) at the Col­orado School of Mines, Golden, Co. Orga­nized by the Com­mit­tee on Phi­los­o­phy, Engi­neer­ing & Tech­nol­ogy, the event is held in coop­er­a­tion with a num­ber of organizations:…”

“Let’s make the other deliv­er­able explicit: the team, and it’s grow­ing capability.

I’m increas­ingly inter­ested in the effect that social objects have on the way we work. There’s a grow­ing body of research that demon­strates the ways in which our envi­ron­ment affects our behaviour[1]. The scrum pic­ture has become a social object around which groups form — you see it in books, pre­sen­ta­tions, printed and stuck on walls, even (here at the Munich Scrum Gath­er­ing) on tat­toos (the stick-​​on vari­ety, though I won­der if any of the diehards has gone as far as mak­ing it per­ma­nent…). I worry about what hap­pens when we sur­round our­selves with process pic­tures which (1) don’t include peo­ple, and (2) only tell half the story. As soon as we regard our­selves as “means” to some other group’s “ends”, or even worse to some process’s, we are dis­em­pow­er­ing our­selves (thanks to Ari Tikka in his Scan-​​Agile 2009 pre­sen­ta­tion for point­ing this out).”

“This mys­ti­cal belief in the magic of cita­tion sta­tis– tics can be found through­out the doc­u­men­ta­tion for research assess­ment exer­cises, both national and in– sti­tu­tional. It can also be found in the work of those pro­mot­ing the h-​​index and its variants.”

“Now, as Jonathan Kohl would point out, many peo­ple march­ing behind the Agile ban­ner do the same: they use Agile as another club with which to beat peo­ple. I’m less wor­ried about Agile, though, because its base rhetoric is more explic­itly human­ist. Lean is more likely to be an attrac­tive nui­sance because the idea of dri­ving out waste appeals to exec­u­tives who find it less work to remove waste than to con­vert it into value—executives who get license to act socio­pathic because they have a fidu­ciary duty to treat busi­ness as a machine for max­i­miz­ing share­holder value, exter­nal­i­ties be damned. I worry about Lean in a busi­ness cul­ture where we are trained out of empa­thy for Lear, damned fool though he surely is.”

Abstracts of the Work­shop Phi­los­o­phy & Engi­neer­ing (2007)

Work­shop on Phi­los­o­phy & Engi­neer­ing, 2008