Becoming a more global player 9

For those with the right opportunity, learning to speak another language well can be a great way to get a more global view of the world and of your own culture. I just ran across Benny Lewis' blog today, and it gives away the secret I stumbled onto years ago: don't speak your native language!

For a significant period, I lived and worked in a small town where not even the second language was English. One might argue the first language was Alemannisch, the second German, and the third French. I was stubborn, and I forced myself to speak the local language. I seem to recall almost six months of headaches and tiredness in the evenings after struggling to be productive in a different language. Then one morning I woke up realizing I had just dreamed my first dream in German. From then on, I thought in German. What I learned from then on, I learned in German, and I eventually had to translate some of those concepts to English. I still think in German from time to time. Benny Lewis' experience mirrors mine precisely, except that I think I took a bit longer. As a practicing engineer at the time, a significant part of my day was spent in design and calculation, so I may not have had as much opportunity to converse as he.

So, if you get a chance to live in a different country, I strongly encourage you to try this approach. It will be hard—very hard—at first, but the payoff is great.

You might also like his How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months. You might also be interested in the previous posts in my series.

Creating sustainability in complex ecosystems

I recently had the privilege of teaching a course in system dynamic for Willamette University's Sustainable Enterprise certificate program. The course lasted two days, with a follow-up two-hour web seminar. We focused on qualitative system dynamics, but we treated it at a somewhat more rigorous level than many such courses, I think.

I'm writing because of one particular lesson I learned—we all learned. Early in the course, we used a simulation game to help people have a common, shared experience of interacting in a challenging system environment.

As with many such games, the expected result is that people fail in making the system work. Typically, the debrief is used to help people understand the ways of thinking that led them into trouble and to prepare them for the material that's to come.

Unexpectedly, this class managed their challenges quite sustainably. While their skill wrecked the planned flow of that part of the session, I was really pleased to see their skill in action. We spent some time talking about what made them successful and how that might carry over to real-world situations. Their insights were useful enough that I wanted to share them (with the students' permission) with a larger audience: you.

I first asked what made them succeed in the game and what provided the most challenges.

Goals were the first. While the game tells them the goal they should have, they rapidly realized that focusing on the stated goals would lead to ruin, and so they decided to set a much longer-term goal.

Communications was the second factor. After the first round, they began to spend most of their time huddled in the center of the room, talking animatedly through their decision-making processes instead of working in isolated teams.

They noted that delays provided a key challenge. As they worked to establish trust in the social system they had set up, they were both trusting other teams' commitments and verifying that they were indeed living up to their commitments. That takes time: commitments made today may not show up for quite a while.

Those delay effects were complicated by the natural delays in the system. Without revealing the game we used, I will say that the dynamics of the game included natural delays between actions and results that complicated decision making.

Some noted this seemed analogous to the situation OPEC finds itself in. They rely on mutual agreement to limit production as a way to manage prices. If anyone in OPEC breaks that agreement, the system can collapse. OPEC's problems are complicated by uncertain demand and uncertain prices, factors that had no analogy in our game.

Math skills created another success factor, which some may find surprising. A subset of the players rather immediatedly began developing quite a useful understanding of their system based on a mathematical model they developed. Once others saw that their results were accurate, everyone became driven by the data. Without some in the group being able to pull that off, they would likely not have succeeded.

Interestingly, trust and math worked together. At one point, the analyst team made a numerical error and then made an especial effort to communicate that they had made that error to others so that the others would be able to differentiate that error from a breaking of the trust relationship. Apologies were key. Information and the lack of information thus played a key role in the group's success. Even then, it took time for the others to regain their trust in the analysts' team.

Playing into this was the lack of external shareholders. Everyone on the teams had a serious take in the workings of the game; no one was in it just for the "money." Similarly, there were no new entrants into the field who might have upset the cartel relationship they had crafted.

I then asked them what they'd advise people in the real world.

Collaboration was the first clear answer. Work together across groups to align goals and actions.

They then said, "knowledge is power." After a bit of reflection and revision, they revised that to "timely, transferrable, actionable knowledge is power."

They felt it was important for everyone to be clear on a vision.

They would encourage people to watch their egos and to be visibly trustworthy.

At one point, in an attempt to test the strength of their commitment (okay, as an attempt to derail their commitment), I as facilitator announced I was the government and was giving them something they really didn't want. (To be accurate, that idea came from Anne Murray Allen, the executive director of the program, who was running the simulation computer.) For a while, I felt as if I were about to experience the French Revolution, as some rather emotionally argued for standing up to government and refusing my help, a bit of resistance I wasn't accepting.

As a result, their last bit of advice was to "Don't trust the wisdom of government, of the private sector, ... of either." In other words, test the data and the reasoning yourselves instead of blindly accepting what others say is good for you.

This was an intense and very exciting two-day workshop. I think those in the class learned a lot; I know I learned as they taught themselves and me (and now perhaps you) how to make sustainability work.

Perhaps I'll see some of you there next year.

Introducing literate modeling

Organizational modeling has much in common with programming. If you create or ask for organizational models in any one of a number of text-based systems, you likely realize that. If you use any one of a number of GUI-based systems, you may recognize what you're doing as visual programming.

In organizational modeling, the challenges are many:

• How to create a competent model
  
• How to make the process transparent so others can collaborate and still others can benefit
  
• How to organize the model in ways that are understandable both to people and the computer
  

It's both easier and harder than it sounds: it's easier to produce useful, insightful models than many might think, and it's harder to create solid models than some would have you believe.

Despite the claims of some, I don't think there's one right way: I think we need a diversity of approaches. To that end, I've been exploring text-based modeling and simulation for the last few years. Recently I've begun to merge the ideas of literate programming and organizational modeling into what you might call literate modeling. Strictly speaking, that's only doable with text-based modeling languages. It brings with it a few features that seem important:

• Thinking about the model and creating the model go hand-in-hand. I've already found that text-based modeling has helped me think in new and deeper ways about the problems I've addressed, and literate modeling strengthens that thinking by linking them even more tightly.
  
  Why is that so? Part of the reason has little to do with literate modeling and textual programming per se: I found that splitting up the work of modeling and simulation into different types of tasks (conceptualizing and modeling a problem, designing experiments to test theories of action, analyzing and thinking about experimental results, and communicating those results to others) helped me do a better job at each stage.
  
  Literate modeling adds a writing component, which may help us think more carefully about our modeling decisions, to the modeling process. Forcing the explanation of the model to go hand-in-hand with its creation seems to keep me from making assumptions I can't support. In fact, I tend to let the writing drive the modeling, which I think drives models even more from the aspect of hypothesized causality than from the aspect of what works technically. You can see what others have said about literate programming; I think those ideas apply to literate modeling, too.
  
  Of course, you can document normal models extensively, too. As others have said, literate approaches link the thinking required to explain a model (or a program) to other people tightly to the model (or program) itself; the model flows from the thinking and writing instead of the writing becoming partially a reverse engineering of the model code.
  



• Model consumers, collaborators, and even developers think most naturally about models in a sequence that doesn't necessarily match the sequence needed by the simulator. Literate modeling allows you to decouple those two sequences completely.
  



• To explain a model, you sometimes need graphs, diagrams, pictures, tables, or other non-textual components. A good literate modeling system can integrate all those components easily without being tied down to the features offered by a particular simulator. In a way, this is the old Unix philosophy: use a collection of smaller tools, each well-suited to the task at hand, and put them together flexibly as you need them.
  



• Literate modeling is one approach to applying some of the best of the lessons of software engineering to a related field in order to do better work.
  

Why do you care? Why should you care?

If you work with or use organizational simulation models to make better business or organizational decisions, perhaps literate modeling offers you a way to have more transparent, more collaborative, more understandable, and more well-thought-out models. Better models, applied appropriately to generate better insights, might just help you make better decisions. Better decisions, carried through with good implementation, might just lead to better results over the long haul.

Is literate modeling or, for that matter, text-based modeling the only way to go? By no means! By the rule of diversity, if nothing else, that would be wrong. Each of the graphical modeling tools I use has brought its unique strengths to the problem-solving process, and I continue to use them. "Horses for courses," as they say. Yet don't count out text-based tools for effectively engaging those with whom you're working, don't think that text-based modeling and literate modeling has to be ponderous, and don't count out the power of text and writing to help you think more effectively about the challenges you face.

What do you think?

The Age of Heretics: a review

I'm writing about a new book today, but first I have a disclaimer: I know the author, Art Kleiner, because I was on an extended panel discussion he led on organizational heresy that resulted in a small section of The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. He and I have kept in touch from time to time since then, and he provided me a review copy of this book.

There. That's out of the way.

Art Kleiner has published a second edition of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (J-B Warren Bennis Series). The executive summary: if you're in business, if you lead a business, if you consult to business, if you ever have thought of ways to make business work better, read this book!

Perhaps you read the first edition. So did I; I think I recommended it for the company library where I worked at the time and read it there. My recollection is that I liked that version, but I like this version so much more. Perhaps it's his new version; perhaps it's my added experience since I read that first edition (I no longer have easy access to check). Even if you read the first edition, read this one, too.

A heretic, in Art's view, is someone who simultaneously holds great loyalty to the organization to which they belong and a vision of a new truth the organization has yet to see. He has written about the evolution of organizational heresy by way of mini-biographies of archetypal heretics. There are too many for me to summarize, so let me simply refer to one as a way to whet your interest and to indicate what I think of the book.

I first discovered Chris Argyris's action science around 1992, about the time I began work with a group that eventually turned into a true high-performing work team. I had read The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
and discovered reference to Argyris's work. As is often my custom when I read of new ideas, I like to find the original to learn more (perhaps I owe that to Dr. Malcolm R. MacPhail of Rice University, who would give extra credit in quantum mechanics for our reading related, primary research in its original language and writing summaries).

I picked up one of Argyris's books, probably about 400 pages long, and began to read. By the time I had read 50 pages, I had determined both that it was one of the most important books I had ever read and that I didn't have a clue how to apply its ideas. I kept reading.

At the same time, I was working with—managing—a team that had serious intra-group communications difficulties. I'd practice what I was discovering in meetings I held with them. Then I would come back to the book and try to discover where I had gone wrong. After a year or two of weekly meetings as experimental labs and after reading perhaps seven, eight, or more of Argyris's books, I discovered that the application of action science can facilitate breakthrough improvements in group productivity. I determined that action science has certain attributes:

• Action science requires great skills at discernment to see important incongruities in words that can help us improve our abilities to hold productive discussions in the presence of disagreements and even conflict. It also offers approaches to help us build our capabilities in discernment.
  
• Action science is a revolutionary approach that upends normal work cultures and offers the promise of real, revolutionary gains in productivity.
  
• There's an ethical principle that permeates action science. It's vitally important for each of us to find it and internalize what it means to us. That was, I think, central to my eventual understanding and use of action science.
  

Action science was perhaps the hardest material I've ever learned (even harder than some of the technical material I learned as an engineer). I think it was only the long, intense action research approach of reading, studying, reflecting, and doing (and often failing) that enabled me to comprehend and internalize it without a mentor or teacher.

Most books and articles I've read about action science (Bob Dick's and Tim Dalmau's Values in Action is a notable exception) attempt to make action science approachable, incremental, and easy to do. As important as some of those books are, I've come to the conclusion that those who see action science as anything but earthshakingly revolutionary and demanding of great personal courage and discernment have missed (or are hiding) the point.

Why this discussion? Because Art is the first writer I've seen who conveys that spirit in his description. He, like no other I've read, made that essence come alive. While you won't learn how to practice action science in the pages he devotes to Argyris's work, you may come away with a better impression of what it can do for you and for groups with which you work. Reading his words in conjunction with other material on action science may help you develop a deeper understanding and better practice of the approach.

Art did much the same for each of the heretics and their heresies throughout The Age of Heretics. He neither shied away from their warts nor downplayed the essence of their contributions. That has helped me put many past business and management developments into context, and that is why I recommend it so highly to you.

Now go read it!

Road Maps to Peace

Yesterday I blogged about what I see as one of the two big problems we face: how we deal with the load we're placing on the planet. I think the other big problem is how we deal with disagreements among those of us who live on this planet. As the load we place on the planet increases, I think the importance of figuring out how to get along will increase, too.

Some of you may know of Rick Steves as a travel guide who also writes newspaper columns, produces TV and radio shows, owns a travel agency, and sells travel gear. He also has a more serious purpose in life, or, perhaps, as I've written about Bernie DeKoven and sustainability, his more serious purpose is inherent in what he does in his travel business.

On September 6, he hosted Lord Alderdice in a discussion called Road Maps to Peace. Lord Alderdice played a key role in helping people work to end the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, and he has continued his work by helping others to reduce conflict in their regions.

Rather than me taking the time to summarize Lord Alderdice's message, listen to him directly. The recording is about an hour long. I encourage you to listen carefully, with an open mind, to the end, for there are many good ideas. Often we hear people expressing opinions (or express them ourselves) about how peoples should get along; Lord Alderdice is talking about what has worked in helping peoples to get along together. I found ideas that I can apply in interpersonal relationships as well as in thinking about larger political issues we help decide at the ballot box or in dialog with our elected officials as well as in working with or inside organizations.

One message he gives (but not the most important—I'll let you listen to find the essence of his ideas) is that we should all listen to news from other parts of the world so that we gain a broader perspective. That's a message I've given here before. I've long thought we should strive to have personal friends and professional contacts in multiple parts of the world, for I suspect we'd be more likely to work things out and less likely to go to war with countries where we have those connections.

As with my previous message, I really would appreciate your comments on these ideas.

The Toyota Communications System and sliduments

Presentation Zen says it all.

All but blind

I stumbled upon "All but blind," a poem by Walter de la Mare, and I thought it might have a good message for those of us who work in organizations. You can find it as number 16 in this online collection. What do you think?

Incidentally, de la Mare started out his professional life as a statistician, but I don't think that qualifies this as another "Making sense with numbers" entry.

Rehearsing

I often help people with presentations, and I've noticed that those who rehearse seem to be those who do better. Now Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen has done an excellent job of explaining the creative process of presenting ideas to others in his Steve Jobs and the art of the swordsman.

Note the two keys to presentation success:

• Intense rehearsal in a team setting
  
• Absolutely no attention to technique or form in the actual presentation
  

Reread Garr's comments, if you need to, and note comments such as, "...once we allow our mind to drift to thoughts of success and failure or of outcomes and technique while performing our art we have at that moment begun our sure decent." [sic]

How can we possibly get through a presentation while following the second key? By following the first key until we have internalized what we want to say, how we want to say it, how others will hear it and respond, and what we can do if something goes differently than we expect. Then we have to rehearse it some more.

As someone once noted, we often rehearse something until we get it right. That means we may have done it wrong 20 times and right once; which do you think will stick with us better?

I think the same thing applies in other areas of our professional lives, and I think Dietrich Dörner and Harald Schaub might agree. That's why I wrote A somewhat unified view of decision making: to suggest the importance of spending time wrestling with what we do at a time that's apart from the actual doing. Whether we use computer simulation, scenario planning, role playing, or something else, the opportunity to rehearse what we do professionally before we do it and to learn from what we actually do afterwards to improve for next time is exceedingly valuable. And it's the cyclic action learning that helps us improve and helps keep us from getting fixated on a bad idea.

If you're still thinking of presentations, check out Garr's presentation tips.

Seeing things from another's point of view

There are many good policies that generally help us. One policy is to see things from other people's points of view in addition to our own. It's all too easy to get wrapped up in our own views of the world, believing that what we ourselves see, what we feel, what we think, and how we react must be universally true. It's not.

No matter how much I know that, it still sometimes takes effort to get out of my frame of reference and see things as others might. If I'm working by myself and don't need additional insights, perhaps that's okay. If I need to learn or to work or interact with others (which accounts for most of what I do), it's in my best interest to be able to see things from their view, too, and to be able to reflect on the differences. (Sure, I can try to force things to be my way, but I'll likely build up a stock of resentment in others by such coercion, and that resentment may end up making things harder for me later.)

Another useful policy is to make things more concrete. We often spend much time talking high up on the ladder of abstraction. We're taught that in school, as teachers try to help us see patterns where we once just saw chaos. It can make for efficient conversation when we all know we're talking about the same thing, but it can also make for misunderstanding, confusion, and either unnecessary conflict (when we don't realize we agree) or lost learning (when we don't realize we disagree).

Earlier this week, Brad Trnavsky put both of those together in a field that many of us find challenging: sales. His Creating Feature / Benefit Statements That Work is a good reminder of the importance of seeing things from the other person's point of view, and he gives a concrete example to make sure we understand.

Brad just joined the blogosphere this month. Welcome, Brad!

There's another problem, too

In my last two postings, I've written about what I think is a very important issue we face as individuals, as businesses, and as a society. I think there's another issue that goes hand-in-hand with that issue: how we deal with tough, stressful problems, how we deal with conflict, and how we deal with perceived inequities. In almost any significant situation, we'll have differences of opinion, some small, some very large. (If we didn't, we should perhaps wonder if we're considering all the evidence.) How we deal with those differences can make all the difference as to what sort of outcomes we achieve.

No matter whether we're talking about differences between individuals, differences between groups in our companies or organizations, differences between factions involved in our local or national governments, or differences between nations, we have various approaches. Some approaches are violent; some are not. Some seem to lead to good resolutions; others do not. Some seem coercive, at least to some involved in those deliberations; others do not. Some seem to solve the problem today while creating new problems for the future; others don't.

If we can't figure out how to act effectively in such situations, I fear we'll have increasingly difficult times as stress mounts from climate change, from energy shortages, from perceived inequities (whether between individuals, groups, or nations), or simply from the challenges of doing business in competitive markets.

There are many ways to make communications in such situations more productive. As I've advocated for the use of multiple approaches (triangulation) in making sense of problems, I will say that I don't think any one approach has ability to save all deliberations about differences. Yet I have found the work of Chris Argyis, work he calls action science, to be impressively powerful in helping groups to hold productive discussions, to make breakthroughs in their organizations' abilities to get work done, and, as a nice side benefit, to help people feel good about working in their groups, not because they get their way, but because they get heard. It's based on three premises about productive decision-making in times of conflict and stress:

• Free and open decision making
  
• Testable and tested data
  
• Mutual commitment
  

The first, among other things, means I can't force you to use this approach. I can at best model the behavior I believe in and that I would like you to adopt; I have to give you the right to decide whether you want to follow suit.

The second means that we are willing to test data about all our important assumptions, not just the ones about quantitative data. Perhaps I (think I) know you'll never accept a certain proposal. If I'm following my principles, I'll figure out a effective way to test that assumption on my part (perhaps as simple as asking); otherwise, I'm unilaterally taking one possible solution off the table without us having the ability to talk about it.

While these are all hard in practice, while they require great attention to one's self, and while they sometimes require great courage, the third sometimes seems the hardest. Perhaps you and I disagree about a situation. Perhaps you've made your best case, and I see important issues I perceive as favorable to your position that you didn't bring up. If I'm committed to the first two premises of making free and open decisions with tested and testable data, then I'm committed to bringing up those issues, even if I perceive they weaken my case, for that's the path towards more productive, effective decisions. That may sound easy now; it isn't always so easy when I'm in a discussion involving a strongly-held belief.

I can introduce this approach to a group in perhaps 15 minutes, including some techniques for applying these premises in practice. It's hard work, though; it may take months of active help before a group begins to internalize these ideas in their routine interactions. This work is some of the hardest and yet some of the most rewarding I do. The first time I saw a group I had helped really begin to act this way, I was blown away by the progress they had made. Using these ideas along with others, they had shortened their process times by over 80%. They were highly effective at working together, cutting the time of making decisions from hours and days down to minutes, and the quality of those decisions had improved markedly. Deliberations were sometimes amazingly direct, and yet people felt really good about them. As one said (paraphrasing), "Now I know that people really hear me." If you're curious, you can read about that project in "Emphasis on Business, Technology, and People Cuts Turnaround Time at Hewlett-Packard's Lake Stevens Division." If you'd like to talk about this for your organization, give me a call.

And, when you're thinking about the topics of climate change and oil depletion (or business strategy and customer satisfaction), remember that how we talk about those issues may be as important as what we now think about those issues in achieving good results.

Contribution

Yesterday I wrote about the power of narrative, as inspired by Andrew Taylor's posting. In searching for a link for my article, I discovered a powerful message about contribution in the last half of Presentation Zen's Two Questions: Why does it matter? What's your contribution?, the part I had skipped before. It builds on the three questions meme I wrote about previously, but it uses art to do it in a powerful fashion.

Watch the Benjamin Zander video from start to finish. Yes, it's just over six minutes long. Yes, some of it is probably promoting the speaker. Listen to it anyway; the message is important. If, after listening to it, you're not sure of its application to business, check out the "Fields of Interest" part of Hewlett-Packard's 1966 corporate objectives (scroll to the bottom).

But is it art?

Apparently The Diagram thought so. They found my TAFTO article (new URL), liked the graphics, and asked to publish one of its diagrams in their issue 7.2.

Perhaps that's another advantage of working slightly outside the mainstream approach—it gets noticed. Drawing a standard type of diagram with different tools made it stand out a bit and may help it communicate more effectively.

What do you think?

By the way, try their Graphviz interactive diagram.

An accidental experiment

I've published a number of At Any Rate™ columns through Pegasus Communications. They consist of text designed to capture people's interest up front and to remind them of what they experienced later as well as a simulation model people can download and explore. The model leads people through three stages: an initial stage-setting exercise, a more complete model to show added complexity in the problem at hand, and an exploration area where people can dig a bit deeper to try their hand at addressing the problem.

Pegasus Communications advertises each At Any Rate in their free Leverage Points newsletter that has a rather large circulation, and they set up a discussion area in their Pegasus Forums for each one.

In other words, that column seems to be planted in a fertile ground in which to talk about such things. The models are interactive. They tell a story. They are published on a high-visibility site and advertised in a high-distribution newsletter. There's a space established to enable discussion.

Yet I've gotten very few off-the-record comments (all favorable) about those columns. I've seen very few comments in the Pegasus Forum. I'm not sure anyone has contacted me about what they've seen there. I'm not complaining; I know that I don't write letters to the editor of the local newspaper, even if I strongly agree or disagree with what the newspaper has published. As a result, I don't necessarily expect (although I would welcome) lots of dialog about what I post online.

On Monday, April 9, I published a similar model (new URL) on Drew McManus's Adaptistration as part of his TAFTO 2007 (new URL) series. It was not interactive; rather, it contained diagrams, graphs, and a computer program (or a text-based model, which is the same thing). Admittedly, I tried hard to use literate programming ideas to intertwine the model and the story so that it would be more interesting and readable, and I let two others in the potential audience see an advance copy so I could find and fix any impenetrable sections.

Within a day, I had a thoughtful, lengthy comment added to that column. Two bloggers made quite favorable comments about the essay. I know of at least one person who had been telling me he'll get to the latest At Any Rate any day now who read and commented on my TAFTO column within a day.

What gives?

While I realize that the singular of data is anecdote, I think that this is showing me the barrier we erect when we ask people to download, run, and learn from an interactive model. While the barrier might be lower if I had used a simulator for At Any Rate that ran in a browser, I'm not sure; one would still need to take perhaps half an hour, perhaps more, to work through the model. It takes much less time to install the software, and i'ts a one-time action—a number of readers already have it.

The barrier may be more complex than simply the challenge of installing the isee Player required by the At Any Rate column. To explore and really learn from a simulation, someone needs to be willing to experiment. That means taking the time to understand the environment, to formulate hypotheses, to write those hypotheses down, to run various tests on the simulation model, to compare the results of the test with the hypotheses, and probably to try new experiments based on the learnings from initial experiments. That's far different than just opening the application, pressing a few buttons, and seeing what happens.

Needless to say, most of us who create such interactive simulations try hard to guide the user through the process. Most of us encourage people to form those hypotheses and to document them in writing or in graphs before starting a simulation. Yet I know (from personal experience—I'm not immune) that it's far too easy to treat a simulation as a video game: press the button, and see what happens. That's not often the path to deep learning.

With the non-interactive version, people can read just a paragraph or skim the entire article to see if it seems interesting. They can come back later to dig more deeply. They can print it out, if they wish, and read it on the bus on their commute. If a text version of the model is included, they can, if they want, copy it into the simulator and explore it themselves.

My lesson? Interactive simulation is no panacea, and it may be a disadvantage if I want to get my story told, especially if my audience consists of busy or high-level people. By telling a good story, I can help the reader learn something, most likely in less time.

Is there a role for exploration, experimentation, and interactive simulations? Certainly! But I need to be sure to consider the audience, their current interests, and what they know and want to learn.

I'd welcome others' insights and experiences. In an action research sense, I'll spend some time trying to disconfirm my conjecture; in the process, I might learn more.

A blast from the past

Joe Podolsky was one of the early online essayists. From 1994 through 2000 (and perhaps beyond), he wrote Joe's Jottings, an email journal. Joe always seemed to be a serious, interesting, and insightful thinker. While I haven't reviewed all of his Jottings today, I've probably read them all at some time. I encourage you to peruse a few and see what you think.

The "blast from the past" label comes from seeing a few of my decade-old replies to his essays. I sometimes make the point to people that some of the interventions I and others try with organizations to help them improve interpersonal communications don't quite have the flavor of "soft skills," nor do they seem "touchy-feely." One of my responses from 1996 tries to point that out. As much as that effort was about communications, it was also about the tough aspects of communicating effectively when there's disagreement and even conflict, and it was very much about how to achieve the organization's goals.

We succeeded, by the way, in that we reduced process cycle time by 83%, as promised. We also succeeded in that we helped make that organization a much more rewarding place in which to work, again, as promised. To a significant degree, it became a more rewarding place to work because people knew they would be heard and because they knew they owned the work and its results (the closer we got to the end, the more they were willing to remind me of that in an energetic fashion!). While it sounds suspect for the change initiator (me) to be making those claims, I think those in the group would say the same thing.