Quote Me

"Management is the art of saying 'Good Question' until you find somebody to blame"

- MDG

Limits of Subjectivity

How about some interesting stuff on the limits of subjectivity rolled up in a presentation about how architecture (buildings and such) is like IT!??!

I quote (emphasis added by me):

"The essence of the experiments is that you take the two things you are trying to compare and ask, for each one, is my wholeness increasing in the presence of this object? How about in the presence of this one? Is it increasing more or less? You might say this is a strange question; What if the answer is Don't know or They don't have any effect on me? Perfectly reasonable! That can happen. But the resolution is easy. What turns out to happen is that if you say to a person �Yes, it is a difficult question, it might even sound a bit nutty. But anyway, please humor me and just answer the question.� Then it turns out that there is quite a striking statistical agreement, 80-90%, very strong, as strong a level of agreement as one gets in any experiments in social science."

- from http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm

The possibility of an objective and universal sense of 'wholeness' is pretty cool, I think... Something like a person's 'wholeness' smells like mumbo-jumbo and yet here is somebody sighting 'striking statistical agreement' on what it is...?

Origins of Pattern Theory

Just a link for now (handheld users will have to read it at their desks I'm afraid):

The Origins of Pattern Theory
the Future of the Theory,
And The Generation of a Living World

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm

This is the author of the forthcoming book mentioned in the previous post. I'll try and make some comments in the next few days.

In particular the author talks about the patterns he developed for architecture (as in buildings and such) actually having a 'moral' component. He suggests that the next step to translating the concept of design patterns to IT will introduce this moral component.

I think he's right.

Steal Their Word, Steal Their Theory

I talk about architectures all the time; and I therefore talk about architects - the people who design those architectures.

I'm stealing a word here - I'm not the only one. The whole IT industry also does it. So I'll admit I'm looking forward to this series (link to Amazon) coming out in July.

The first book in the series is:

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. The Phenomenon of Life, Book One
by Christopher Alexander

MWT talks about architect as the delineated shared understanding of a team of collaborating individuals. This shared environment could include anything, I guess - includes good old physical shared space - but I imagine the principles of designing such architectures are more universal than that.

The Amazon review says things like:

'Christopher Alexander, the humble messiah of good architectural design, invites readers to get comfortable with their inner judgments... thinking deeply about the nature of his work. Frustrated with the 20th century's reluctance to acknowledge human commonality and reliance on Cartesian mechanism, he urges us to rethink our understanding of space itself...'

The IT industry has already stolen the concept of 'design patterns' from people like this author - and that was for the better. Let's steal some more.

Human Warmth

"When Josef Stalin was on his deathbed he called in two likely successors, to test which one of the two had a better knack for ruling the country.

"He ordered two birds to be brought in and presented one bird to each of the two candidates.

"The first one grabbed the bird, but was so afraid that the bird could free himself from his grip and fly away that he squeezed his hand very hard, and when he opened his palm, the bird was dead.

"Seeing the disapproving look on Stalin's face and being afraid to repeat his rival's mistake, the second candidate loosened his grip so much that the bird freed himself and flew away.

"Stalin looked at both of them scornfully. "Bring me a bird!" he ordered.

They did.

"Stalin took the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, he plucked all the feathers from the bird's little body.

"Then he opened his palm. The bird was laying there naked, shivering, helpless.

"Stalin looked at him, smiled gently and said, "You see... and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm." "

- taken from Rich Geib's Universe

Governance Silo

Remember when everybody was complaining about stove-pipe organisations � organisations in which all the departments were operating as silos?

Well I've noticed a new trend. The more I see 'governance offices' and 'programme offices' in action the more it is apparent that governance, monitoring, scheduling, etc, are starting to operate in their own silos!

If this isn't an indication that something is wrong with management I don't know what is. Anybody else noticing this?

Straight

'When we started seeing each other, Miracle told me it was no big deal, that we were just friends who happened to be spending some time as lovers. Eventually, though, we moved in together and started a family. Seven years and three beautiful children later, she suddenly announced that she was leaving, that she had found somebody new. Between sobs I told her I felt let down and betrayed.

'Oh, come on,' she snapped, rolling those lovely, limpid eyes and shaking her head in disbelief. 'Don't give me all that. Are you seriously trying to say I wasn't straight with you?'

- Anthropology, Dan Rhodes

This guy is funny! Check out http://www.danrhodes.co.uk

The Importance of Philosophy

Yeah, sure it's another Ayn Rand rip-off � but it's quality content non-the-less. Check out ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com and in particular the section on Epistemology.

MWT has this theory which goes something like:

• management is required because of the division of labour

• in a knowledge-based economy division of labour equals division of knowledge (already recognised in Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society anyway)

• management of knowledge is therefore what management is all about (including both discipline specific knowledge and cross-discipline knowledge such as plans, strategies, etc)

• add to that the concept that management isn't so much a discipline as a 'technology' for integrating labour

• as a technology everybody must be actually using management for it to work

• to 'use' a mental technology such as management is to simply have a shared understanding of certain things

The question is then 'what to share?'. This is where the Epistemology page mentioned above might be useful. In the section on 'Specifics' it lists Concepts, Definitions, Words, Emotions, Integration, Values, Certainly, Deduction, Induction/Abstraction, Focus, and Evasion.

That list overlaps nicely which what a MWT management philosophy for cross-discipline collaboration might suggest you focus a shared understanding on.