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Archive for worklife
Telegraphic reviews of my overdue library books with links to Amazon in them; you figure it out
Books overdue because I’ve been busy, but worth noting anyway because they’re worth noting.
- I got one: Sinclair Lewis Arrowsmith
One of the best earliest realist examinations of the motivations and lifestyle of American academic engineers (including in that fold “doctors”, as they should be, now and in the 1900s), Midwesternism (aka “Babbittism”), and the differences between our stated cultural expectations and the implicit ones we generate by the blind decisions we take in our lives. - To Reference: Clayton M. Christensen The Innovator’s Dilemma
Corporations—and by extension institutions of other types, like “medicine” and “the Academy”—obtain the well-deserved reputation as logy, stilted piles of dead wood because of their success, not despite it. Christensen’s observation, cunningly masked as common sense, seems to be that large institutions cannot pursue innovations because their adaptive moves are slower and more expensive for them than for smaller, new institutions. In other words: the bigger (and more successful) they are, the more likely to be replaced without even noticing. - Meh: Jack E. Graver Counting on Frameworks: Mathematics to Aid the Design of Rigid Structures (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
One of many mathematical “recreations” books I’ve been thumbing lately, as we gear up to build a genetic programming innovation engine that will be able to make “mathematical discoveries”. Graver’s monograph focuses on flexibility/rigidity of two- and three-dimensional frameworks (statics, essentially) and the discrete math and neat little theorems that connect (get it? a pun!) graph theory, linear algebra and engineering design principles. One would want it to be a bit more “popularized”, but it’s of interest as a landmark for the future, at least. - To Buy: Ross Honsberger More Mathematical Morsels (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
This is more along the lines of what I was looking for: a few dozen very interesting, solvable problems that cross the line from “brain teaser” to “advanced homework”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not sitting here with a graph pad and a pencil trying to do makework and proofs; I’m using these books to research the way we specify (and mis-specify) complex problems. Mostly plane geometry, number theory and a bit of (simple) probability theory, the Morsels series seems to be problems culled from those Math Olympiads I was never smart enough for, and various amateur math journals. Will buy because there are very few proofs; mathematically rigorous proofs are, to shine some clarifying light on my long-standing opinion, overwhelmingly a waste of the time of both the prover and his reader, since they are merely the algorithmic disguising of initial assumptions by wrapping them in hackneyed ritualized maneuvers that decrease one’s crucial ability to question the original crap you started from. - To Buy: Victor Klee and Stan Wagon Old and New Unsolved Problems in Plane Geometry and Number Theory (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
As with the previous, a nice pile of small, simply-stated problems, with the added fillip (for me, who Cf. above is interested in building computational affordances in support of project management for abstract problem-solving projects) that they’re mostly unsolved. Well, OK, they were; we have Fermat in here, and some others that will be familiar to folks who follow this kind of stuff. But there is plenty of grist in the mill here for me and my ilk, along the lines of, “How would you specify the goals and constraints of a problem like, ‘Are the digits of the decimal expansion of π devoid of any pattern?’” I like that. That’s what real work is about, since it begs so many other questions about who’s asking, what they really want to know, and why. - To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Chestnuts from around the World (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Like the other Honsberger books (all AFAIK from the Dolciani Mathematical Expositions series), full of interesting and useful levers to use when learning evolutionary computing and metaheuristics more generally. “The product of a billion positive integers is a billion. What is the greatest sum these billion numbers might have?” might be something you’d throw a search algorithm at, except then you’re answering more along the lines of “…What’s the largest sum you can find?” And that’s not the question. It’s my hope that by thinking about these problems as they’re stated, technical souls who by brainwashed in their homework and worklives to think of specific examples as something to solve in a one-off way might be pushed to thinking of how one can search for methods. In other words: Parametric models are the crutch of a weak mind. - To Buy: Louis L. Bucciarelli Engineering Philosophy
Too short, too little, almost too late, but very very nice. A lovely quick monograph that would serve as an introduction to several problems we’ve been wrestling with lately at “work” (What’s “work”? You’ll see, soon enough…): “Designing, like language, is a social process”, “What engineers don’t know and why they believe it”, and perhaps the most interesting and best jumping-off point for a real monograph of its own: “Learning Engineering.” Don’t get me started on the actual engineering students (and professors, and practitioners) I know, who on the whole tend to think about their own work and what it implies very poorly. Not least because they believe they are concerned only with “the real world”. See? You got me started. - To Borrow: Arthur T. Benjamin and Jennifer J. Quinn Proofs that Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
As I said before, proofs are not my cup of tea right now. But the mental processes that allow people to specify and design proofs are. So this, being a work about the design patterns of combinatorial proofs that deal with “what is the most…?”, “how quickly does…?” and “how many are…?” kind of questions is in fact more interesting than I first expected. The book starts, as do the other Dolciani books I’ve been browsing, with problems, but does go into a number of interesting work-them-through details that for me might be a shopping list of things to watch out for as we try to explain what evolved problem-solvers are actually doing. For the moment I don’t want a how-to, I want a what-was-that? book, and this might come in useful someday soon in that capacity. - Meh: Arthur T. Benjamin and Ezra Brown, eds Biscuits of Number Theory (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Mostly proofs, presented via a wide-ranging set of reprinted short papers. - To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Delights (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Another Honsberger collection of quick plane geometry, number theory and lightweight combinatorics. One cutely meta one explores the “shared properties of crank solutions to Fermat’s last theorem”. - To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Gems III (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions, No.9)
As above, with a nice section on cryptography and number theory that would open up a lovely pile of problems for genetic programming to be used on. - To Admire: Stewart Coffin Geometric Puzzle Design
You know those little wooden polyhedra things, where there are a bunch of sticks that interlock, and your goal is to slide and twist and poof they all fall apart, then your real goal of putting them all back together starts? So this is about how to make those, and more interestingly the design patterns you see: sliding blocks, coordinated motion, misleading similarities, ways of using and abusing symmetries, all the empty space (or complicated mechanism) hidden away on the inside. Very cool. - To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Diamonds (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Yeah, well, you get the picture by now: nice. Why are these books so hard to find? Why aren’t they in more libraries? - To Reference: Michael O’Neill and Conor Ryan Grammatical Evolution: Evolutionary Automatic Programming in an Arbitrary Language (Genetic Programming)
I know Conor from years back (Jesus, I’m old: back when he was doing this work, for example), and Grammatical Evolution (GE) actually features in a small way in the project I’ve been working on for more than a year. So while I personally don’t need to own this, it was a worthwhile read and if you’re interested in a different way (not stupid old S-expression GP) for evolutionary methods to be used to evolve complex structures like algorithms, proofs, classifiers, trading agents, or whatever, you should consider this book a good intro… if a wee bit outdated. Because, you know, life moves on, and a lot of the stuff this particular book has in it is old hat. In any case, more people ought to know about Grammatical Evolution; it’d do them good to understand there’s more that one way to solve the problem.And if you’re a computer kind of person interested in GE: Go have a look at Pavel Suchmann’s GERET system. I like it. Nice, clean code.
- To Admire: Conor Ryan Automatic Re-engineering of Software Using Genetic Programming (GENETIC PROGRAMMING Volume 2)
I said I knew Conor since way back; he was working on this thesis when I was working on mine at Penn. (Spoiler: he got his degree, unlike me.) Thank you, Conor, for both the size and utility of the chapter entitled “Practical Considerations”: a landmark notion in GP, now and then. - To Buy: Anthony Brabazon and Michael O’Neill Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling (Natural Computing Series)
Everybody who ever learned about metaheuristics (even before they earned that st00pid name) said, “Hey! This would be a great way to play the stock market!” A long time ago, Barbara and I were at a computational finance conference, watching the academics talk, and after a couple of days I observed, “You only ever hear these people talk once: either their work is dumb, and we stop inviting them, or their work is smart, and they stop accepting our invitations.” Brabazon and O’Neill have done something dramatically unexpected: written clearly and succinctly about how to build working trading and financial management systems. Throw all your other Springer books on Amazon; this one, if you’re interested in this stuff, is the real deal. Also: more Grammatical Evolution. Now you get the trend? - Meh: Dan Kalman Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomia and Related Realms (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
Somehow not quite the same stuff as Honsberger’s. I think my reaction is not because the subject matter is different (though it is, being concerned mostly with roots and structure of polynomial equations and stuff), but rather that it’s kind of pedagogically heavy-handed. Like a graduate seminar text or something. Not for beginners, not for amateurs even, in my opinion: more of a focused, progressive advanced training session.
We will take your holiday under consideration and contact you if an opening arises
I was handing out Laura Fisher’s “Better Without Bosses” stickers yesterday when somebody pointed out that it was Boss’s Day sometime soon.
That would be today.
I don’t have a boss. Most of the people I work with don’t have bosses. We don’t even feel the need to say we’re “our own bosses” without being ironic.
It is not your boss’s fault she is your boss. The role is not the person. I’m tempted to appropriate this thing from the useless Chamber of Commerce and make today the day we relieve bosses of their onerous and burdensome task of projecting an unwarranted air of authority.
They are still, after all, chained to that rock.
Wordpress exploit variant?
Go do it now. I’ll wait.
I mention this because the Not An Employee blog [offline for the moment] was recently discovered to have been compromised. We’re still doing surgery on the blog itself, since there seems to be a variant of the exploit floating around that we’re trying to identify and contain.
Having spent much of the weekend reading through accounts of the exploit’s signs and symptoms, what we find in this case seems to be be unique. Or at least unrecorded elsewhere:
- Three files present in the Wordpress blog folder’s root that we didn’t put there:
- css.txt, which is base-64 encoded
- docbook.txt, also base-64 encoded
- A file called Usage, which looks like a wget logfile that culminates in a successful download of docbook.txt from http://mdasla.org/help/css/
- No extra javascript or URLs were found in any of the other files in the install
- We’re still checking the database to see if anything was touched there
I haven’t seen this one before. The current wave of Wordpress exploits seem to involve URL modifications. Any insights? Any more information needed?
Working out the details of a real options framework
Suppose a prospective client approaches you to do work for hire. In many contracts for technical work, there will also be a requisite nondisclosure agreement (NDA), which may be unilateral or bilateral, but which in either case specifies that you (the contractor) will keep secret certain information regarding the client and contract.
Lacking such a nondisclosure agreement, it’s commonly understood that you could whenever you wish disclose whatever information you like about the name of the client, the nature of the work proposed or done, or even trade secrets you learned in the course of the conversation. Depending on the character and values of the client, one or more of those facts will probably be subject to nondisclosure clauses in the contract they want you to sign. And those clauses may (if you’re not thoughtful or careful) have no expiration date.
I’m thinking of one former client—a large Midwestern corn hybridizer—who made us sign an indefinite nondisclosure agreement that promised we would never state the name of the company. That’s it; just the name.
At any rate, let’s look for a moment at what you’re signing.
As we understand the law, until you sign that contract you possess the option to disclose whatever you want, at any time you want. Within certain extreme limits (libel, slander, state secrets, and so forth).
Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt as a contractor, and assume you’re not interested in revealing the pre-existing trade secrets of your client. Let’s just say you shouldn’t ever do that, and that they have a clear right to keep you from doing that before any are revealed to you, and that therefore the deal is broken if you demand the ability to tell anybody anything.
But common nondisclosure language also covers the broad range of knowledge and information that arise during the course of the project: not just the stuff you make together, but the name of the client, the terms of the contract, the outcome of the project… all kinds of new information that many clients would like to keep you from passing along.
What is the value of that option to speak about your collaboration with one another? Financially, I mean?
Well, the value to you might be substantial, especially in the current business culture: Assuming you’re a consultant, contractor, advisor, or other nonemployer firm, the relative marketing value of adding this information to your public portfolio of work may be huge, depending on the nature of the client and work. If you had completed contract work without the burden of the NDA, you would have the option to brag about the name of the client, the nature of the work, the details of the tools and cunning solutions you brought to bear, the amount you were paid… all inarguably useful information to trot out the next time you’re speaking with a similar client.
Lacking the ability to share any of that information, as an individual contractor or consultant, you have inarguably limited your ability to market yourself. Who did you work with? Can’t say. What did you do? Can’t say…. And (again, give the current business culture) that marketing value is not diminished even if the project was a total technical failure. So from the side of the consultant, it’s clear the ability to promote one’s own expertise has positive value.
Now suppose you do sign an NDA that restricts your ability to pass along this information for one year. In real options terms, it seems that you’re postponing the exercise of your implicit right to market your business. In exchange for compensation, of course: the payment you receive from the client, and whatever general knowledge and experience might be accrued during the course of the project.
So at this point it seems that the amount you should charge the client just to sign an NDA depends on the expected loss of revenue you will experience from limitations of your ability to market your work. If we pare away the decision to work on the project together, we cannot get looped into ridiculous conundrums like, “Well, if you don’t sign the NDA we aren’t going to have a contract.” The value of the NDA is not the value of the entire contract; the work you do for the client is what causes them to pay you.
The NDA’s value must be separable.
But there’s where I get hung up, somehow, so I keep mulling it over looking for a way to model the transaction that captures the risks and benefits of disclosure and nondisclosure so they can be made more explicit. Maybe because in this combined deal (contract-plus-NDA) there is also a set of complex options being created, sold and exercised by the client, I admit I get tied up.
I’m encouraged, though. Consider that a well-formed contract for work is above all an aid to the planning processes for both participants, in that it reduces the uncertainty regarding possible outcomes. As a contracted worker, you have more assurance of income in the near future; as a contracted client, you have more assurance that the project will proceed, and you have a better handle on the costs.
Still, the value of nondisclosure within one of these contracts feels complicated, though not necessarily from the standpoint of the contractor. What are the sources of value and uncertainty on the client’s side of this planning process?
Surely the client believes that by engaging you and applying your expertise and effort there will be positive business value compared to what they would achieve without your participation. Or perhaps your presence reduces the risk of failure by a detectable amount. In any case, let’s limit the scope of the analysis by assuming there is a clear-cut case in terms of risk and return for them to engage you.
But they clearly also believe—whether or not it’s true—that public disclosure of certain information will put them at a competitive disadvantage. As if you didn’t know it already, this is the assumption I’m most prone to challenge. It’s clearly the reason current practice so often makes nondisclosure a dealbreaker: it’s common knowledge that the revelation of trade secrets is expensive.
Now I confess there is a tendency among those of us who have been entrepreneurs or analysts or modelers or IT professionals or experts of any sort who type and draw on whiteboards a lot to imagine that the sort of trade secrets that a client might want to protect are the same kind of simple innovation that we create almost every day: better software, working analytics, cunning and insightful reports, graphic designs, improvements in institutional structure. Insights, call ‘em.
These “secrets” are the kind of thing we joke about around here by saying (quite accurately), “A good idea is born worth minus $25000.” Because ideas are cheap to formulate, but each one has real costs to implement. Over the course of a decade one inevitably hears the same idea pitched a dozen times in whispered tones as if it were made of gold: a real estate aggregator, a stock prediction system, a social site for book lovers, a killer app on the iPhone….
These are, in my experience, the most common kind of client projects: the sort any moderately smart professor or middle-manager or graduate student stumbles across in the course of their “real work”, sees unbounded upside potential of, and (without exploring the practicalities) pursues optimistically. And thus tends inevitably to overvalue.
In the case of such trivial secrets, let’s assume that the client’s model of the risks from disclosure of their “secret” greatly overestimates the chances or the losses, or both. Your model, or perhaps “the market’s” model, would produce a much lower risk for the client, and therefore a lower price for [non]disclosure.
But as an expert contributing skills to completing the project, the ability to promote the sort of work you are brought in to do is no less valuable to you—independent of its validity as a “secret”. You write, you type, you answer questions, you contribute insights whether they are building a hugely innovative first-mover, or a bog-standard also-ran.
So it strikes me that the problem in these cases lies with the quality of the client’s models of their intellectual property and competitive landscape. They overestimate the recoverable value (or underestimate risks) associated with the project, and as a result the realizable long-term value to them of keeping the secret appears to be greater than the immediate value to you—and to them—of promoting the work.
Because we shouldn’t disregard a qualitatively different model of the contract: Suppose instead of being client and customer you are partners, and you are faced with the decision whether to promote your project or keep it secret together. There is marketing value to both of you, but also risk from competition to both of you upon disclosure. And disclosure is irreversible, don’t forget.
So from a real options perspective if you can postpone the decision to disclose until the benefits of promotion definitely outweigh the risks of competition, you both win. Whether you’re partners, or consultant and client.
Hopefully you can see the same real options structure I do. At some point, if they’re paying attention, the client will eventually improve their model of the real value of their “secret information.” We just don’t know when that will be, externalities and uncertainties of life being what they are.
So suppose you enter into a suite of simple options contracts regarding disclosure in which (a) you cede your right to disclose the information for a fixed length of time (say a year) in exchange for a certain sum of money to offset your lost marketing value; (b) your client is granted an option to renew that contract for another year at its end; and (c) your client is granted an option to abandon the entire nondisclosure structure (including scheduled payments) at any time. They should exercise this option, obviously, when they’re out of the money: when the costs they will be paying in future outweigh the realizable benefits given new information.
What is the price for nondisclosure, here? It can be estimated as the loss of revenue you as contractor will experience from failure to market yourself. If your client receives new information at any time that reduces the perceived value of secrecy to the point it no longer seems to be worth paying you for it, they can abandon the agreement and your right to irreversibly disclose the information reverts to you. If at the end of a contract period they still perceive positive value in secrecy, they may renew (perhaps at a new price).
Now it’s been pointed out to me that there’s more than just this sort of “naive secrecy” I’ve sketched. While it’s common in startups and small businesses, a larger or more capable client probably has better models of the risks and values of disclosure. If nothing else, larger firms are more likely to be aware of real competitive landscapes and best practices, and tend to outsource development as opposed to research projects.
The secrets in these cases are not so much innovations as they are well-defined functional practices and information that’s been tried and tested. In many cases there are smart accounting models of exactly how much they’re worth.
But I don’t see how this negatively affects the calculation of the cost of secrecy. Indeed, it should improve matters and simplify for all involved if the components of the contract regarding secrecy are separate from those regarding work-for-hire. Give the customer the benefit of the doubt here, and assume we’re now at the opposite extreme from “naive secrecy”: now the least accurate predictive model is probably the contractor’s, in that it overestimates the value of marketing (disclosure).
What we do in this situation? I’m not sure.
And uncertainty is the key: that’s what real options pricing is all about. So maybe (after I think about it for a while) we can work the rest of the model out, and maybe slap some probabilities and prices on there.
In general, here’s where I feel like I am: The presence or absence of an NDA clause in a contract should not materially affect the expected cost of the actual work performed, and therefore it can be separated away from the work-for-hire clauses. Further, the matter of disclosure of pre-existing trade secrets (in either direction) is not what I’m thinking about here, and that should be separated as well; I’m talking about novel information material to one particular project, ranging from the existence of the project, to statements of the goals of the project, to descriptions of the particular techniques applied, to news of the eventual outcome.
This information would be of value to the contractor (and arguably the client, but we’ll ignore that) for marketing purposes, who therefore expects a financial advantage when it is disclosed. But the information is also (arguably) of value to competitors of the client, who therefore expects a financial cost should it be disclosed.
There is uncertainty associated with all these valuations, and with the probabilities of the events occurring. How do we model that in such a way as to make it simpler to separate agreements for work from agreements regarding nondisclosure?
It’s simple refactoring, really: The modules have very different functions, and yet they’re too often interconnected.
UnitedTalk #001: The Wisdom of Fun workshop, September 19, 2009
Because some folks may not follow me on Twitter, and I’m probably not going to advertise on Facebook:
THE WISDOM OF FUN: HARNESSING GAMES & PLAY FOR USEFUL WORK
Humans are habitual problem-solvers, so obsessed with puzzles and patterns that for millennia we’ve posed riddles and created games to fill our “idle time.” But these obsessive problem-solving habits are traditionally seen as a distraction from the “real work” of business, scholarship and public policy.
That is no longer true… if it ever was.
This is the first of a series of three open-format workshops scheduled for 2009 & 2010, where we’ll gather to explore the new ways game play is becoming “useful” work—useful for people and institutions.
On September 19, 2009 please join us for an open-format meeting in which the attendees set the schedule and specific focus for each session. In this first of three workshops, we hope to discuss
- immersive economic games and MMORPGs with developing social norms and virtual economies larger in actual value than some real nations;
- serious games designed to use humans’ innate skills to support search and optimization;
- prediction markets and related collective intelligence systems that harness the wisdom of crowds for robust business decision, forecasting and policy-making;
- crowdsourcing systems that divide up otherwise insurmountable complex problems so that thousands of distributed human solvers can incrementally attack them;
- agent-based simulations used to understand emergent behavior, and game-inspired classical artificial intelligence systems for exploring decision-making and analytics;
- changes in the business and technology of game design within the entertainment industry;
- Second Life and similar game-like virtual platforms, and the social worlds developing there, in which real institutions are struggling to discover their role.
…
Full information is available at the EventBrite registration site. Please consider passing it along or joining in if you’re able.
Notes on a remnant culture, part 1
In the last year I’ve had three, four dozen meetings with the local Chamber of Commerce CEO and staff, with the staff of the local “sole economic development provider”, with commercial real estate folks and developers and lawyers and entrepreneurship organizations and CEOs of local startups and community activists and landlords and marketing consultants and print newspaper editors and local government officials and retired executives and bank presidents. It’s not too rude, I hope, to call them the “traditional business community”. Most would be comfortable with this description.
In case some prejudice seems to be creeping in, I want immediately to clarify something important: these are nice folks as a rule. Admittedly many of them don’t seem to know what to make of “people like us”, and their responses to chats and conversations vary from dismissiveness to a kind of wishful yearning that they could have “my” lifestyle. But on the whole they’re doing what they perceive as their best to improve the world by whatever criteria they feel are most crucial.
But if I wanted a bit more hyperbolic effect, I might call these nice folks the remnant of the traditional business community. They may not feel so good about that, though I don’t mean them harm by imposing the modifier.
I admit though: I have, through these dozens of conversations and interviews, tried to convey that “people like us” often see them as a remnant, when we consider them at all.
Beyond a confirmation of the inherent niceness of people, and their critical diversity of toolkits, what have I learned with this two-year project? I’m making some notes.
Ubiquitous Overextension
As a rule these folks seem to schedule their time poorly. They’re always in a hurry, or late, or interrupting a conversation to take a call. They prefer to hold public meetings and events during the wee hours of the morning, or after work. They dilute even their nominally entertaining outings with one another (typically golf, of all things) with business concerns: “networking” or speeches or award-giving rituals.
I suspect that in part these habits are a mix of signaling and territorial behaviors, part the echoes of constraining sociotechnical infrastructure, and the habituation to the Received Clock.
Signaling is what you might expect, if you know some of “us” and some of the remnant.
“Somebody like me” signals I have the luxury of meeting you for two hours in the middle of the afternoon to discuss the philosophy of business and the next ten years’ forecast for banking and redevelopment in the state. I will meet you right now, if you like, or I can tweet you or phone you or send you an email or open up a Google Docs shared file for you to edit, right now. Because I can, you should be able to as well.
The signal of the remnant’s early morning meeting, the rushed meeting between other meetings, the truncated half-hour refresher or the hurried chat in the parking lot between events is: There is a hierarchy of demands on my time, and they are numerous. My hands are tied; we can go this far and no farther. Depending on the worldview of the person involved in sending this signal, the implication is either (1) a message about how egalitarian they are, that they have two dozen people from all walks of life to deal with, and that each gets their fair share, or (2) that you only rate this much time based on your relative importance in the scheme of things.
Both groups are saying something, in the way they set their time up, about their expectations for the other party. But those expectations are different for “us” and for institutional players.
The sociotechnical constraints seem to stem from these different senses of “institution”, as well.
I know (more or less) where everybody with whom I am concerned is, right now. Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, the phone (and SMS), email and a variety of tagged social media sites that work on a longer timescale keep my network in a kind of dynamic informative tension, like a spiderweb I suppose—though one that overlaps with all my friends’ and colleagues’ own spiderwebs. And when the unexpected comes up, I have these five or seven channels with which to reach somebody, ranging from speaking into the air to make the molecules vibrate in a sensible way, to a phone call to a for: tag on a delicious.com link.
The folks in the remnant, though, they seem blind and deaf somehow. I’ve often wondered if this is an adaptation; I suspect it’s a protective mechanism on a couple of levels. To have to be somewhere to communicate can be a feature or a bug, depending on what you want. To have to see somebody to have a conversation, to fail to record notes and make each meeting revisit old business, to spend so much time physically traveling… these offer up moments for planning, or for self-reflection. They reinforce immediate, physical social cues that are wired into our meat. They can be off-putting to “folks like us”, but if you think about it they can also help establish community boundaries and strengthen internal connections within larger-scale businesses “people like us” don’t interact with.
These cultural differences come up surprisingly often when you’re attuned to them.
I can think of several times I’ve watched “one of us” being told “I’ll have to get back to you once I’ve checked my schedule,” by a member of the remnant. You can see the frustration on both sides: schedules, among us, are made to be changed and adapted to on the spot; they’re agile and flexible and dynamic and our worklives are a matter of tracing an efficient path through the coming days. “Our” success comes from acting as quickly as possible upon the smallest tasks which provide the greatest return. The remnant’s schedules, on the other hand, are planned things, contingent on many stakeholders’ external decisions, written in the slow-flowing glass of institutional infrastructure.
The impatience “one of us” feels when told we’ll hear someday eventually about a scheduled event? That impatience comes from the execution risk that this imposes on our lives: risk that what would otherwise be a linearly separable quantum of social interaction and business value is left as an unknown in our agile schedules, with no clear likelihood of actually occurring at all, disrupting the flow through unaccounted linkages and forcing us to deal with unforeseen repercussions. The confusion one of the remnant feels when asked to make time right now is the disregard for the institution, for the plan, for the process that tries to be “rational” in balancing the utility functions of many stakeholders trying to cooperate on many schedules.
As a consequence, there are deep currents and implications of schedule-setting revolving around the notion of responsibility. “We” are responsible to ourselves, and to our social networks—an often global, contingent and ephemeral cloud of people who are effectively invisible to members of the remnant. The remnant have well-established channels for coordination, and the Company or the other large institutional boundaries make the breadth and bounds of those coordination networks publicly visible.
One correspondent of mine, living as he does at the peak of the local branch of a global remnant organization, often politely tells me how he envies “my flexibility in working whenever I want.” I’ve tried to explain that I work, in the sense of coordinating and driving this jinking spiderweb I ride through life from minute to minute, from the time I open my eyes to the time I fall asleep. But he cannot see that network or the effects I cause in it or I feel from it, and lacking an alternative signal he imagines I am sitting here philosophizing in a life of leisure and guileless meandering dilettantism. And I in turn write him off as a kind of fixed point in town, and expect him to be exactly the same in two weeks, doing exactly the same things as he was yesterday.
And think of planning and project management, across this cultural gap between the remnant and “us”: When I find my occasional correspondent is actually acting, when I discover she has unexpectedly “moved ahead” on a musing project notion we touched on briefly in our meeting three months back, when it comes to light she’s hared off like a juggernaut and done something that seemed like a good idea back then… how often was it the right thing for her to do? Our timescales are so often misaligned, that I can make a dozen iterative changes in a document or program or community design in a weekend, where she has scheduled an appointment with her staff to set up a committee in a few days. A crowd “of us” may have made three versions and discarded them, moved on and established both a position statement and a draft RFP in the time a government or business or church or other remnant institution has coordinated its way into considering what to do.
Just this week a friend in the remnant sent me a link to a “call for contributions” for a meeting to be held several months in the future, which will involve travel and planning and meetings and publishing and setting up bank accounts and LLCs and all kinds of stuff. But in the time between our original conversation and the “call for contributions”… the problem has gone away. It’s solved, at least in my context.
Our different attitudes toward time and action are alternate solutions to the same problems of coordination and planning and risk amelioration in an uncertain world. “We” are no better off for doing five times the work, for hiding or not even knowing who we affect in our ephemeral social networks, than the remnant is for spending all this energy on institutional identity and mid-range planning meetings.
But think for a moment about the remnant—whether you’re a member or not—and consider what happens when a traditional institution says they “need somebody to do social networks for them”, when they explore “modern” methods of customer response management, when they schedule meetings with “us” over golf outings (of all things) or at 7am in the morning, or in a City Hall five miles from “our” workplaces.
When we take the time to do the retrospectives, words like “blindsided” and “unmanageable” and “retrenching” always seem to crop up in internal discussions among the remnant. Terms like “obsolete” and “artificial” and “lame” tend to crop up in whatever appraisals of these remnant projects “we” are willing to record. “Lame” is particularly interesting, if you think about it etymologically: halting, crippled, disabled, slow.
How many times have you seen these clashes in the use and perception of time? In schedules and planning?
Can you see the remnant among the institutions around you? And can you see the ephemeral (nearly invisible) swarming social networks that “we” depend upon instead?
Which is bigger? Which is more important? Which should have the most influence in the coming economic transitions?
How prepared are you, whichever side you live on, for the role the other side must play? What will you do to reconcile these conflicts in habit and perception? How will you schedule your time and make coordinating plans across this cultural divide?
I want you to see a hundred or a thousand of “us” in every town of 100000, with our overlapping social networks and value streams and contingent agile plans thrashing wildly on a minute-by-minute basis on a dozen channels, permeating the infrastructure of the remnant. With little mass individually, but velocity enough to impart considerable momentum. Imagine then the effect on the remnant, these large, many-bodied institutions moving at a lockstep pace, surrounded by these thrashing waves of attention, of goals and actions changing faster than they can perceive them… invisibly in fact.
I see erosion. I see weathering, and seeds growing in cracks in a rock face.
But this doesn’t happen imperceptibly, from the rocky remnant’s point of view. The newspaper can perceive “us”, though it cannot make the connection between individuals and their invisible networks. The Chamber of Commerce can perceive “us” in their declining rolls, and executives there are scrambling to find ways to adapt. No doubt the remnant business development people are starting to falter and wonder what’s broken, though they (and the city) clearly imagine they stand firmly alone in a field. The University, the arts groups, the anchor businesses, the marketing infrastructure: what do they feel?
They are surrounded, invaded, and increasingly driven by things not planned for. Their plans erode and get revised to death, their boundaries and a century’s coordination strategies are made asynchronous and increasingly chaotic.
This is not a threat, but just a natural extension of the metaphor: every chip, every fragment and moment of their unscheduled time and attention, every lost cent of revenue slipping through the cracks in the remnant’s plans, that is a resource one of “us” can pick up, and pass along the networks we have built, that only “we” can see.
Whoever “we” are. I don’t know, myself, past the half-dozen friends I watch and interact with in my immediate social neighborhood. But then I don’t need to know more than that to make my way successfully. None of “us” do.
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