Gulf Shores 2021

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Our yearly trip to Gulf Shores happened this month after taking a year off for Covid precautions. That area was hit almost directly by Hurricane Sally last year and had lots of other flooding events during the tropical storm season. For the most part, they had bounced back but there were still clear areas of property damage especially along the Little Lagoon area where piers were washed away in the surge. For the most part, it seemed that our typical haunts had survived both Covid and the hurricane season.

This year our party totaled 11 with the Brent and Suzanne and their boys, Todd and Huy, and P.J. and Amy. We stayed in a house called Cheers on the Little Lagoon side at 2408 W Beach Blvd. This was one of the best houses we’ve stayed in with a huge open floorplan in the living and kitchen areas and patios on both sides of the house. They had rebuilt the pier on the lagoon so fishing was pretty good there. The house also included kayaks, canoes, paddleboards and bikes.

We left Plano June 4th at about 10:15 and drove to Slidell, LA with a brief stop in Rapides Parish LA at about the halfway point for an Arby’s lunch ($17.89). We arrived at the Holiday Inn Express in Slidell at 6:30 ($125). After unpacking just the suitcases out of the totally full truck, we hung out in the hotel for the evening. Dinner was from Olive Garden across the street.

Saturday morning, we got started around 10 AM but had to stop at Sam’s for supplies and gas ($2.57/gal, $68.82). Turning east, we drove to Lulu’s on the Intercoastal waterway in Gulf Shores which is our traditional beginning of the vacation there. Wobbles was really hoping to do the ropes course but had to be 42 inches tall unfortunately. This brought up the Pete the Cat episode where Sally can’t ride anything fun. It also brought up Papa telling her that if she ate her vegetables and tried new foods, maybe next year she’d be tall enough. I’ve turned into my grandmother.

We checked into the house at 4 PM. 11 people for a week is an event and much lifting, organizing and unpacking takes place. The back of the truck was totally packed though a portion of that was a massive non-folding crab trap I had purchased. After all that was done, I ran back into town to Rouse’s for birthday cake supplies for the early birthday party we were planning for Wobbles along with a few other essential sundry items like licorice and shaving cream ($43.98 total). I also ran in Al’s which is my usual stop for cigars ($44.37) for the beach. I got a Romeo y Julieta, Macanudo 1968 Church, Flor de la Antillas, and an Artero Fuente Rothschild. The Artero was the worst of the bunch and the Macanudo was the best. Also went to the Hooked up bait shop for frozen shrimp and some tackle that I didn’t have ($31.67).

The first part of the week had quite a bit of rain but nothing that kept us off the beach or out of the pool. Wednesday onward was typical early summer weather with humid heat and some wind. The beach this year had more seaweed than any year I remember. Large floating patches of brown kelp floated on the surface of the Gulf until they the were broken up in the surf and sent shoreward. Under the water, smaller thicker green seaweed was prominent most days which made shelling pretty difficult. The surf was stronger this year as well or perhaps my swimming was weaker. Overall, I spent very little time under the water.

One thing I definitely recommend should anyone else make a trip of this nature to Gulf Shores is to pay one of the local companies to put up a canopy or umbrellas plus chairs for you on the beach. In younger years, it might be amusing and certainly fodder for hilarious tales of sunburns and disaster to put up your own pop up canopy and drag folding chairs over from your house. However, regardless of my personal illusions, I am no longer young and it is worth and extra $100-200 to help the local economy so that I can have less struggles on vacation.

Wobbles loved the beach this year. Not going last year meant this was the first year where she had developed enough to enjoy the waves and the splashing and the fun of the beach. She lived in her water wing life vest and we spent hours swimming, digging for clams and boogie boarding on the boys borrowed boogie boards. Next year, we’ll need to buy our own boogie board before going (one more thing to pack). She also rapidly progressed in swimming with the pool in the back yard. Mornings and early afternoons were spent on the beach but then late afternoons were almost always in the pool. She overcame her fear of jumping in and with the life vest, swam all around the pool when people were in it.

One of the traditions of this trip is that every couple takes a turn making dinner. This keeps us from having to fight the insanity of restaurant crowds at night and eases the burdens of lunch as there is always far too much food left over. This year, B&S bought too much grouper and we ended up making the remainder for our night. I used a recipe from the Gulf Coast Fish cookbook for pan fried grouper and it turned out great. We served asparagus and pasta with it. All the meals this year were top notch and ranged from meatball subs by the boys to a massive crab and shrimp boil by P&A. B&S made their excellent grouper sandwiches and T&H made an excellent fried chicken.

Some years, we rent a boat and spend on day on Wolf Bay along with a trip to Pirate’s Cove. This year, the jury was out on that and we ended up not doing it. We did drive over to Pirate’s Cove on Wednesday morning for lunch which turned out to be just about right. Wobbles got to spend a little time with another little girl building sand castles. We bought our only souvenirs of the trip, a t-shirt for the family ($75).

Friday was maybe the best day of the trip which isn’t typical. Often, the stress of packing back up and a long week in a house with other practices, norms and schedules can make Friday difficult. But this year, it was totally relaxed. We spent the entire day at the beach. Todd unpacked the kite that we had bought and the weather was perfect for a beautiful rainbow kite flying above our canopy. Mary Poppins was on to something with that. Even after Wobbles was done and went in for lunch, I sat in the chair flying and watching it. Afterwards, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool. People came and went but Wobbles swam the whole time. Packing started around 5 and was done before sunset. We ate leftovers and then everyone went to the beach for some ghost crabbing with the lanterns T&H gave us. The surf was much calmer at night and tide was very low. This trip coincided with the new moon so not sure how much that had to do with it. But we saw large crabs and even learned how to dig up sand fleas which was exciting for everyone. In the future, I’d like to go over at least one evening for some fishing on the beach. The pompano were supposed to be running but just never made it over there. The low tide would have made it easy to get out to the slightly deeper water.

Saturday marked a 12 hour marathon back home. Perhaps next year, we’ll break this into two legs though it is nice having Sunday to totally decompress. The drive is about 10 and a half hours but by the time you make 2-3 stops, it’s always 12 for us. It’s a long time to spend in the car.

Overall, this was one of the best trips. We had a lot of fun and Wobbles is now old enough to really enjoy the experience. She interacts well with all the adults and the boys are friendly with her. I do wish there was one younger kid for her to play with but maybe in future years, she can bring a friend from home. Overall for the full week, we spent between $2300-2500. Given what it would take to fly somewhere and rent a hotel or take any other kind of vacation, I always find this a real value. This is one of my favorite yearly traditions and I’m thankful we have been included in it since 2014 or so. We’ve already booked our house for next year and I’ve spent some moments in meetings recently day dreaming about being back on the beach.

  • My reading material for the week
  • The pool
  • Dinner
  • Happy Friday
  • Family
  • Last sunset from the deck
  • Night crabbing
  • Sand fleas

Still Amusing Ourselves To Death

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Several months ago, a friend recommended a book (all my friends seem to recommend books to me, I assume as a form of torture) in a group Slack channel that we all avoid work with. That book was Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman, a book old by today’s standards (first published in 1985). It is about the author’s concern about the downfall of Western Civilization with the onset of the Age of Television. Heady stuff. I put in a request for the book at the Plano Library since they had a copy and it came up for loan about three weeks ago. Most of the time, I would have attempted to read the book, gotten slightly bored or very distracted, and moved on. But this book struck a chord with me and I managed to finish it in the allotted two week checkout window.

Originally about the cultural changes that television brought to American culture and political discourse, the book rings quite true today. Postman’s main thesis was that because television is designed around images and because images are by their nature decontextualized from any cohesive context, television was radically restructuring our civilization to be incapable of serious thought or discourse. In my mind, Postman’s fears were both accurate and incomplete. What television began, the Internet fully realized, specifically social media and the delivery of “news” to most people via that medium.

Postman was singularly concerned with our growing inability to have serious conversations about much of anything because the medium of television naturally controlled and guided what things we were capable of talking about. This idea isn’t novel to Postman as he notes in the book. Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” and Noam Chomsky has built a legacy on how mass media controls and frames what we believe. However, Postman fully fleshed out the idea that the medium of television had a direct impact on what topics we as a civilization were capable of discussing in the public sphere.

Because television was built to appeal to the most people possible and because it was built on images and not language, it set guardrails around what the sphere of available discourse was.

To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.

Postman, p.78.

The discussion of all these subjects of public interest began to be shaped by the biases of television, namely that everything was a performance and that credibility (or the appearance thereof) held more importance than reality. Postman talks deeply about the debates between Lincoln and Douglas where the two men talked and debated before an audience for long hours and the audience NEVER GOT BORED. Contrast that with the debates of the last election cycle, where answers to questions were time boxed to single digit minutes or less in a format that would seem almost Twitter-like in its brevity. The debates of today are about the appearance of winning and not about any serious logical issues that a candidate might bring up. This has happened because the medium of television (and I’d argue social media even more so) has biases that shape and frame the topics that appear there.

Today, Postman’s views seem both prescient and quaint. We just finished a four year Presidential cycle with a celebrity in the starring role, a role he was shockingly well built for. During that time, the media through TV and social media further polarized the American people. The American people have apparently lost all ability to deeply engage in moral and political issues. Our entire national discourse and attention span is built around disinformation and decontextualized beliefs. While there is plenty of blame to go round, I believe most of the problems lie in our mediums of information and their design.

Children grow up on social media. The ad economy controls and directs, with or without our consent (Chomsky would say most definitely without) and we are impotent in our actions because the events that impact us are decontexualized from reality. We joke about how short our attention spans are never bothering to realize how critical deep, intellectual discourse is to full understanding and power. One has to assume Postman would be appalled with the state of Western Civilization. Mass media frames and controls our understanding of the world and it is almost entirely performance art, devoid of context of history or depth of understanding.

So what can be done about it? Postman worried that the horse had left the barn regarding TV and it is even worse now. However, odd as it sounds, I think a return to active antitrust enforcement as it relates to the tech giants like Google and Facebook would have a second order effect of limiting the impacts. They are both known to increase polarization because it is in their ad economy based interests. Limiting their monopoly power would help.

A return to localization would also serve us well. Small, diverse communities that governed, provided for and protected each other would expand the options for discourse and discussion. By focusing on the nearby, those events that do not matter to us or that we can take no action on would fall farther down our attention span. The fact that we are currently bombarded with news upon which we can take no action at all is a major contributor to our depression, our anxiety and the impotency we live with. Our local communities are the only sphere of influence that we really have and by focusing on them instead of random events that happen in other states or countries, we could begin to expand beyond our current experiment with extreme polarization.

But it’s hard to be optimistic about the chances. Our national discourse has been reduced even further since Postman’s book to the point where politicians posting sound bytes on Twitter are considered the norm. It is hard to see a large majority of Americans deciding that they need to deepen their knowledge of anything when avoiding that depth is so much more entertaining. Postman’s work was a harbinger of a much darker time in the development of our national discourse. Where we go from here does not seem likely to be in a more promising direction.

Hallelujah Anyway

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I have been on an Anne Lamott kick lately. I’m reading her book on writing, Bird by Bird and I have checked out both Almost Everything and Hallelujah Anyway from the library. I managed to finish Hallelujah Anyway over the course of about 6 weeks of listening to it between sets while working out in the mornings. The book is about mercy, a concept greatly lacking in our modern world, one that if you were to ask the average human “Who is one person you wish you were more merciful with?”, they’d probably think you were deranged. This is unfortunate given its immense power to provide actual freedom, partially to the receiver but more importantly to the giver.

Mercy is defined as “compassion or forbearance shown especially to an offender or to one subject to one’s power.” Lamott’s book is almost entirely about mercy for ourselves even though where that often begins is with mercy with someone who has wronged us. The definition of the term implies a hierarchical relationship between two people as in a king and a subject or a judge and a criminal. In these instances, the ability to give mercy is built into the hierarchical relationship. A judge can show mercy on a criminal in certain circumstances. Perhaps it’s a first offense or a partially justifiable crime or any other situation that might warrant leniency. But the criminal cannot show mercy to the judge, not in the sense we might often interpret the word.

The beauty of Lamott’s book and her insight is that she turns this on its head by pointing out the fact that often when we need to impart mercy to someone in our lives, we have allowed the subject to hold the power over our freedom and our psychological health. We all have stories of people who have deeply hurt us. Many of us cling to these hurts as if they are treasure, building up a wall from them so that we can avoid being hurt again. The irony of this is that the offender often has no real power over us in the sense that a king or a judge has over those before them. We willingly give the offender the power to control our minds by focusing on what they have done to us, letting it fester or grow cancer-like for years. It consumes energy and causes anxiety. We become the slave, the subject, as if we need the mercy. We accept the sin against us as if it were a truth about our actual person.

Lamott shows in the book through her personal experiences with mercy how only by giving mercy to ourselves, often by first forgiving the original slight, can we gain back the wonderful freedom we had before. Instead of allowing the sin or slight against us to define who we are, convincing ourselves we really are dumb or ugly or fat or whatever else someone accused us of, we must show mercy to ourselves. Only then can we stop being the criminal in the transaction and become whole again. When we choose to cling to past hurts, we give up our freedom. The only way to regain that freedom is to forgive.

This is a powerful concept but not one found in wide use in our modern world of constant attacks, polarization, and antagonism framed as debate. The beauty of the concept is that once we become more merciful with ourselves, we become more merciful with the world. We become not weaker, which would be the common conception of someone who is merciful, but more powerful, able to withstand great events of fate that turn against us with grace and happiness. When we hold on to the hurts, we willingly take our freedom and give it away to ghosts that don’t even exist. To regain that freedom, we must be willing to be merciful, first with ourselves and then others.

I struggle with this a great deal. I have Imposter Syndrome about just about everything. I prefer justice, preferably fateful in nature, over mercy any day. Most people do. We have a keen sense of fairness as human beings and when we are hurt, we prefer to have the world make it right by imparting some justice for us. But this so rarely happens. Lamott teaches that it is ok to be an Impostor, that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t if you’d only allow yourself the right to forgive yourself for it all. It’s a battle but one worth jumping into because without it, my freedom is being given to people or things that don’t deserve it.

The book has a great deal more to it about regaining a sense of wonder and curiosity and joy through the power of mercy. It is a tonic for our modern world in many ways and definitely worth the read or listen. Lamott believes strongly in a spiritual, mystic Christianity but there is plenty in the book for people who do not. It’s a fast read and full of Lamott’s usual wit and subtle humor. If you are looking for a way out of the polarization and out of the trap of holding on to things that steal your freedom and joy, it’s a good start.

On Individual and Departmental Goals

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It’s that time of year again whereupon three months into the year, organizations everywhere begin the exciting task of examining the tabula rasa of a new year filled with potential of achieving amazing things. As part of that task, many organizations set goals for individuals and departments in hopes that they will lead said individuals and departments to greater success for the company. There is no shortage of information on this topic, freely available after a short Google search.

One common theme to goal setting is that they must be SMART which is a fun HR derived acronym for Specific, Measurable, Aggressive, Realistic and Time-bound. Substantial evidence shows that goals set in this manner are in fact correlated with happier, more motivated employees and greater success in the achievement of the goals. However, I would argue that the resultant success and happiness are not caused by the fact that goals are SMART but instead by the underlying process through which the goals are worked towards. It is quite feasible that an organization would set SMART goals and then still have highly unhappy employees who achieve few if any of the goals nine months later. This happens because goals alone are useless regardless of how SMART they are. Goal achievement relies on the underlying system and strategy that support the goals.

Scott Adams has written about the difference between systems and goals. We all have regular experience with goals gone awry. Many of us are sure this will be the time that we lose 20 lbs or exercise more or read more books or whatever. It does not matter if the goal is SMART or not. I can say “I will read 24 books in 2021” which is Specific (read more books), Measurable (24), Aggressive (I read 7 last year), Realistic (outside any context of course which is critical) and Time-Bound (one year). But if there is no underlying system and strategy for accomplishing this goal, all the smartness in the world will result in the same failure.

A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems

System has a specific definition and meaning in this setting. It is the interconnected nature of the pieces of the system that produce the results that the system outputs. In order for an organization or a department or an individual to achieve goals, there must be an underlying system of management designed at least in part to facilitate the necessary behavior of goal accomplishment. If this system is designed, either intentionally or more often haphazardly, to produce behavior other than goal accomplishment, no amount of SMARTness will ever overcome it.

A trivial example applied to my desire to read more books. On its face, the goal seems SMART. However, that is only so if the underlying system that I use to make choices with my free time has taken into consideration the constraints on that time. Unless I have examined the amount of free time I had in 2020 and discovered a great deal more of it and then dedicated my future expenditures of that time to reading via a disciplined schedule, the goal of 24 books is much more likely to be DUMB (Definitely Underestimating My Behavior) than it is to be SMART even though on the surface, the goal seems to conform to the definition.

I would actually argue that one of the core principles of good management is the diagnosis and analysis of the Realistic in SMART. This is the area where management skills make or break the underlying system that allow successful goal achievement. In order to determine if a goal is realistic, a manager must understand and be able to answer the following questions:

  • What is the underlying system of how work gets done by the organization?
  • What is the underlying system of how work gets done by the department?
  • What is the underlying motivational type of the individual (if setting individual goals)?
  • Are all of these cohesive with each other?
  • Are they congruent with each other? (see Esther Derby’s work on Change and Congruence)
  • What are the constraints on work within the system?
  • How much work can the org, department or individual realistically do given the system within which it operates?
  • And so on and so on.

The key to successful goal setting and achievement is to have an underlying system of behavior that clearly defines what is realistic. It is not realistic to lose 10 lbs if you do not throw away all the Cheetohs in the pantry and continue to eat donuts every Saturday morning because it is a family tradition. The system that includes Cheetohs and donuts will overcome any amount of SMART goal setting because it is the system that produces the behavior that leads to outcomes. It is not realistic to have 8 priority one departmental goals if the underlying system of the organization is such that at any moment the entire department may be reallocated to focus on unrelated organizational goals.

A good manager understands the constraints on what is and is not realistic for an organization, department and individual. Here lie the dragons of management. Most goal setting exercises I have been a part of have applied a great deal of wishful thinking and magical handwaving around the capacity of the organizational structure. Most of these exercises identify several things that seem highly desirable and then ask “can we do all this?” Because humans are naturally inclined to be good, your experience with social media notwithstanding, the result is often a half-hearted “yes” if only so that we can get on about the business of actually doing work. But in order to have not only successful goal setting but also goal achievement, we must have a more rigorous system around what is realistic. At the very least, a manager must understand the constraints of the system within which she operates and have a strategy for dealing with those constraints.

The strategy work of Richard Rumelt is very helpful here. Specifically, we must realize that good strategy is about policy choice and commitment to action. We have to write strategies for our goals that lay out policies to guide action towards the system behavior that we want. We must lay out consequences for violating the strategy and be prepared to defend them. Circling back to my personal goal, when I discover I have 30 minutes of free time and am thinking about practicing my guitar, I must realize that this hampers the realistic definition of my reading goal and that there are consequences to that choice. The same goes for reducing technical debt of an engineering organization. When faced with opportunity of some free time, if we fill it with yet another story delivering business value instead of dedicating it to removing NHibernate (don’t ask), we have violated the Realistic nature of our goal. To prevent this from happening, we have to have hard policies that say things like “when presented with available resource time, we will always choose to apply that time to the reduction of technical debt”. This guides teams actions but does not dictate it. They can still choose what actions to take within the guardrails of the policy. We must also then ensure that free time both exists and is encouraged. If it does not or cannot be created due to organizational constraints, no amount of SMART goal setting will ever result in a different behavior.

By building a system that produces the behavior we want, goals become mostly secondary in nature. If there are clear policies and feedback loops built into the system to confirm, analyze and affirm behavior, goals will just happen. We must understand the constraints of the system and operate within them as well. We must know the inputs and the outputs of the system and how those interact to balance or reinforce behavior. We must work to ensure that goals are written in such a way that they do not violate the boundaries of the system because that guarantees failure. Successful goal setting is really about system design and is just as hard as more concrete problems like making an API faster or migrating to the cloud.

On Being Present

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It occurred to me early this morning (I can only assume this happened because we watched Kung Fu Panda last night and Master Oogway’s words had an impact) that being present is difficult because the present is a tiny moment in time compared to the past or the future. I have been meditating somewhat consistently for 18 months or so now and the basic difficulty of staying present on the breath has certainly shown me this but it has never been made concrete in my rational mind.

Meditation, especially breath meditation where you focus attention on the breath, is designed to move focus to the present moment where air flows into your body through the nose and out again in the same manner. It is one of those things in life that sounds incredibly easy but is actually impossibly hard, at least in my experience. My tendency is to make it to about breath number two before something intrudes on my focus whether it’s a bad choice from the past, an anxious need from the future or an item on the always present TODO list that lurks like some evil spirit in the shadows of my mind.

One of the reasons this is so hard even in good circumstances is that the Past is a vast treasure trove of fears and delights, times when things went well and poorly, events that seem much more interesting to think about than the ennui of breath in, breath out. The Future is an equally vast cornucopia of possibilities, many of them terrible if the average social media timeline is to be believed, possibilities that spring to mind easily and often to interrupt the focus of the present moment. Add to this the anxiety and cognitive load of the TODO list which I am prone to and the result is a situation where being truly present can seem impossible. The human mind seems especially talented at focusing on the past (depression) or the future (anxiety). The present in contrast is a pinhead of space where this moment you are present in is so fleeting as to be imaginary, gone before it can even be recognized.

Yet the present is the key to practically everything. It is the way to happiness, to progress, and to health. When I watch Wobbles closely, her joie de vivre comes from her total immersion in the present. All children are like this. They run and leap and laugh and cry based on this moment. I believe much of the anxiety of the youth (and perhaps the world) of today can be tied directly to social media usage which is designed to turn our attention to either the past through reminders of what our life used to be five minutes or five years ago or to the future when hopefully we will be having a great dinner in Italy like our friends Karen and Bob and their two perfect children. Unless carefully managed, social media removes us from the present and places us into some other period over which we have almost no control.

The present on the other hand is within our control. What we choose to do with now is where all beauty and happiness lies. It is a great paradox that so many people obsess about the past as one long list of bad choices but obsess about the future as a time when we can get things right, ignoring the more likely outcome that they will continue to make the same choices then and get the same results. Being present is the way out of that trap.

The Stoics were masters at the present, putting forth a philosophy designed to recognize this situation that teaches us not to revel or dwell on our past or worry about the future because they are out of our control. Instead, we must focus only on what we can do in the current moment which results in peace of mind. It is also interesting to me, though probably the topic of another essay, that creation and experience and appreciation of art happens in the present moment. Writing, music, drawing, painting, it’s all done here and now. In fact, the book Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain is a book that specifically teaches you how to leave the judgmental and controlling left side of the brain and fall into the flow of the present that the right side of the brain is so in tune with.

Another interesting way to look at this is that the past and the future don’t actually exist, only the present moment as Master Oogway noted. The past is gone, a litany of present moments spent and cast aside. The future is unstable, a stream of present moments affected by randomness and contingency that we have less control over than we imagine. The only way to achieve a different past or future is to do things differently in the present. Whether that’s saving money or losing weight or learning Spanish, the way to achieve anything is by doing something in the present moment other than dreaming about the future or wallowing in the past. These present moments then compound over time to produce a savings account of memory and learning that redefine our past and change the opportunities for our future. The present is the only way to true happiness.

Change Requires System Change

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“Getting started begins with the simple, self-evident premise that every system is perfectly designed to deliver the results it produces.”

Paul Batalden, MD

At first glance, this seems cliche. A traffic system is perfectly designed to produce the results of safe, smooth traffic flow through an intersection. A plumbing system is perfectly designed to bring water in and take gray and black water out. A release and deploy system is perfectly designed to walk through 7 stages and take 2 days and involve 40 people even if one of the company’s stated goals is to get better at web delivery. Oops.

I came across the leading quote in Esther Derby’s excellent book, 7 Rules for Positive, Product Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results. At its heart, it is an idea about systems thinking, about how change must either work within the system to change the boundaries of the system or work without the system to alter the system itself. If you want to change something, you must change the system that produces the behavior you are interested in. Any effort to implement change without first taking into account the sociotechnical system within which you are operating will result in muddled results at best and failure at worst.

Where I work, we currently have an annual goal to improve Web Delivery Excellence. At this level, we can think of it more as a vision made up in some part by the following: improve the performance of our funnel and improve the engineering discipline and performance of the overall system. We’re now in March, almost into the second quarter of the year and we’ve struggled to make much headway on this vision. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and I think it’s directly attributable to Batalden’s quote. We have a sociotechnical system that is perfectly designed to produce mediocre web delivery. This is because the system wasn’t built to produce the result of Web Delivery Excellence. It was designed to Prevent Web Delivery Crappiness. Hoping to improve web delivery without explicitly addressing the underlying system will almost certainly result in failure.

What does the underlying system look like? Fairly common in the industry, we have a two week sprint cycle. We deploy everything at the end of the sprint. We have a waterfall designed SDLC even though we call it agile in that the reporting structure of teams is in silos with competing biases, incentives and directives. Teams are not empowered in any meaningful sense. The two week long feedback cycles are far too long to make immediate changes. Each silo (engineering, QA, ops) has built processes that serve the silo’s needs quite well while managing to serve the organization’s new needs quite poorly. The system that has been built is a direct artifact of Conway’s Law which is probably a corollary of Batalden’s quote.

Much of this system, perhaps all of it, was designed to protect against Web Delivery Crappiness, to wit, QA tests three times because QA often finds broken things in different types of environments and only Ops can deploy because the production environment is sacrosanct as a way to shield failures. There are many more examples, none particularly unique in the industry as it once existed. We’re actually quite good at this process. But today, after all the research that has come out of DORA and other organizations, we know this type of system is not the way to achieve excellence.

In order to implement change in a system like this, the system itself must be the target. You cannot will “Web Delivery Excellence” into a system that was specifically designed to protect against Web Delivery Crappiness. Protecting against Crappiness is not the flip side of the coin to Implementing Excellence unfortunately. To change the outcomes of your software delivery process, you must change your software delivery system that produces those outcomes. The good news is that the process for that is straightforward. Some people even wrote a book about it.

So often in my career, I have seen agents of change completely fail because they try to operate within the same system boundaries that produce the current situation the change agents want so desperately to change. Many times, they will intuitively understand this and will try to create an entirely new system. Unfortunately, this also often ends in failure because systems have evolved over time to prevent change unless the system is specifically designed to facilitate change. This is one of the reasons why rewrites go wrong so often because the sociotechnical system that the software system runs in has evolved to produce results designed specifically around the existing software. The only way to successfully rewrite a system like this is to also rewrite or rewire the surrounding sociotechnical system to accommodate it.

Change is hard. But it is also inevitable. In order for it to be orderly, change agents must alter the system that produces the outcomes. In order to do that, we must examine the sociotechnical system that produced the current outcomes we wish to change and then take steps to alter that meta system in a way that is likely to result in different outcomes. To achieve excellence as opposed to prevent crappiness, we must realize that fear of failure is a major part of the current system and we must ameliorate that fear by creating a system that welcomes failure as a path to learning. To achieve excellence as opposed to prevent crappiness, we must reduce process to a bare minimum so that we optimize for flow and feedback instead of gates and checkpoints. Until we begin to analyze the systems within which we operate and which are perfectly designed to produce the results we now no longer appreciate, we’ll continue to fail to change the outcomes we receive.

Mondays The Day After Funday

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You know it’s a solid Monday when the last thing you get to do before bed is clean up the projectile vomit of your 15 year old bulimic cat. Which is apparently what I get to do tonight. Today was already a solid 1 on the Likert scale of days as I spent the last few hours of the day trying to both figure out how to reduce the load time of our landing page and entertain a four year old who needs attention. Now I get to go around to the 5 (FIVE!) piles of cat puke and clean them up, scraping the grooves in the wood flooring with my fingernails so that it comes out.

One thing I miss about the office (of the two things, free donuts being the other) is the more natural impulse to get up and leave the computer throughout the day. I’ve noticed that my eyes are shot and my head is tight and my body aches for the sweet release of death at the end of most days when I’ve done nothing but stare at the computer all day. In the office, at least there were meetings, mostly meaningless, but away from the desk at least. Now, meetings are still just staring at a computer 24 inches from your face. It begins to wear on you. I’m only a pretend manager too, not that many meetings, mostly because I refuse a bunch of them, so I have no idea how real managers do it, their entire day soaked up in Zoom.

At least today was warm. Seven days ago, I think the high was 12. Today it was close to 65. The difference between 65 and 12 for Texans is like the difference between Ann Richards and Ted Cruz. Don’t give me any shit, analogies are never perfect. So Wobbles and I went for a walk to the park which helped.

I’m not burned out from the work though that’s certainly some of it. I don’t even have to work that much. It’s the monotony mostly. The only thing that makes today different from tomorrow is the five piles of regurgitated Blue Mountain I’m putting off dealing with. Probably just jinxed tomorrow. Having a kid and trying to juggle work and her is more than most people imagine. Luckily, it looks like she’ll be going back to school in June which frankly can’t get here soon enough.

I’m reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird which is a treatise on writing. The book opens with a story about her brother who has had 3 months to write an essay about birds. It’s due tomorrow and he hasn’t started it and is at the table, weeping inconsolably at the despair of writing an essay on who knows how many birds in 12 hours. And his father sits down beside of him and answers the question of how this will get done: “Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

I think that’s sort of going to be my approach to the days ahead. I can sort of rationally see the end of the tunnel way off in the distance but it’s so faint that I have no proof it’s not a mirage. And the only way to get there is day by day. Reminds me of the old saying “how do you eat an elephant?” “One bite at a time.” Tasks that seem insurmountable are if you look at the totality. But reaching totality requires ten thousand tiny steps along the way, each mostly in the same direction. I think that’s the only way to make it through this crazy time. Speaking of eating an elephant, I’ve got some cat puke to clean up.

Restricting Choice

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I’m in a book club at work and the current book we’re reading is Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. It is an examination of strategy mostly as it relates to the business world. Most books of this type are barely more than self-help books so one might wonder what makes this book particularly special. Five chapters in, my initial take on that question is that it highlights and enforces the idea that choice and the narrowing of choice is critical to success in almost all endeavors.

So much of strategy work in the world results in grand plans of goals, visions, dreamy ideas of success, and imagining yourself as successful. But none of these things are really strategy. None of them aid you in moving forward in coherent ways towards an end game. You have to establish what constraints you are trying to solve for, define some policies that act as guard rails for action and then begin to act within that structure. This necessarily restricts your actions in the problem space. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You must choose a direction and then act on it in order to improve. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will choose correctly and therefore you may not actually improve. But without that choice and the constriction of the problem space, you are guaranteed not to succeed.

This relates directly to my post on managing inertia. Inertia is the embodiment of inaction. Worse, it is the impedance of action because it is resisting, actively and passively, the effects of action on the body you are trying to move. Whether you are trying to push a car to a gas station or change how your organization writes software or get your four year old to clean up her room, the current movement of the body through space tends towards the same direction that has always been acting on the body in question. As these bodies grow in an organization, so does the complexity and the difficulty for change. As that complexity changes and grows, so does the problem space and the possible actions for the solution. Many times in an organization, without the difficult strategy work of restricting the problem space and thus the opportunities for action, nothing changes because either actions work in direct conflict with each other or are not coherent and contribute to different goals.

For example, you might want to migrate or reclaim some software or maybe improve some part of your engineering department. You grandly say “Go forth and do this”. Then, 5 months later, you find out that while lots of people have been talking about lots of actions, nothing has really happened. But why? You told people to go fix this thing. Unfortunately, no actual constraints were placed on the actions of teams and because there were competing goals that you explicitly or implicitly endorsed (like continue to make money and add features to said software), nothing meaningful happened.

To fix situations like this, policies must be written and then enforced that constrain the actions of teams down to the classes of behavior that solely support the goal. In the example above, a policy would need to be put in place that no new work will be done on the existing software other than bug fixes and critical patches. You know that you have written a good policy when you can read it and see that it will cause pain, perhaps for yourself. It will make some people upset or annoyed or worried because something they are used to doing (probably because you told them to in the past) is being eliminated. Without this feeling of pain through the restriction of choice, success will continue to be out of reach.

Much of this seems applicable to the personal as well. I struggle with making progress on almost everything because I never sit down and restrict the availability of choice. I want to learn the guitar and Spanish and do some writing and read more books and be a better woodworker and be a better father. In the end, the multitude of choices overwhelms each other. Even if I act on all of these in a given week, barely any progress is achieved because there is no focused effort on a singular goal. A better strategy would be to restrict choice to a single activity or set of actions until the desired level of mastery is achieved. This actually should be easier at a personal level because there are no competing organizations or groups all with their own inertia. The guiding policy wouldn’t be nearly as complex. “In my available free time for the next quarter, I will practice the guitar.” At first, it is very limiting. But it is also quite freeing. I don’t have to think about learning Spanish or woodworking (though being a better father is sort of just an overarching thing worth working on at all times).

Success only comes from the combination of decision and action. Constantly wanting the best of everything will necessarily result in wish-washy results whether personally or in business. This is the hard part of strategy work and involves difficult choices that most people prefer to avoid because of their implications. I may not learn Spanish if I only practice my guitar which depresses me so instead I never commit and therefore always have the potential to succeed at both. I may have to stop making as much money in my business if I commit to improving technical processes and outcomes which will make me sad and so I’ll just hope that I can do both and that it will all magically work out. This is what makes management so frustratingly hard. It’s something I’m coming to terms with through experience. The restriction of action space is the only way to truly succeed and that often will result in difficult conversations and directions even if only with the voice in my head. But without this restriction of action, the natural tendency is to keep doing the same things because of inertia and as they say, if you think you’ll get different results doing that, there’s a place at the asylum reserved.

On Being Still

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Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to be still.

T. S Eliot - Excerpt from the poem Ash Wednesday

I’m often struck by the serendipity of life if one only allows it in. I started a new book this morning, Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything and in it she quotes the excerpt from T. S. Eliot above. Living in the age of information, I was able to google the poem and discover its title. This is serendipitous because my main personal focus for Lent, which started yesterday with Ash Wednesday, is to write every day. Lamott’s book is about hope in our life of despair, how she has navigated the waters of an existentially sad world to find constant hope in the amazing things that humans do to and for each other. It is apropos that much of the first section of Eliot’s poem is about turning away from the ephemeral and towards the everlasting.

“Teach us to be still”. In the world of a pandemic and now a once in a lifetime winter storm that has brought much of what we expect to be normality to a stop, I have noticed that stillness is in short supply in my life. Some of this is due to having a four year old trapped in a house for hours and days on end. But much of it, the mental side, is of my own doing, constantly darting from one thing to the next, a tweet here, a message in Slack there, perhaps another email has come in. This is nothing new. I have struggled with this for years. But it has gotten worse in the last 12 months to the point where reading something of length that is mildly difficult seems beyond my capability.

I’ve noticed that it gets worse through the day as the notifications and the demands on attention grow. By the time the work day is over, my attention has been fragmented and my mind is exhausted, not in a pleasant way after great focus but as if it were a firefly trapped in a jar by a child, constantly flying into invisible walls until it can fly no more. I need to take time during the day for stillness, to allow quiet in the door of my mind.

It is interesting to me the use of “and” in the first line of the excerpt above. When I first thought about the line, I assumed it was an “or”. But an “or” there would have a different, sadder, more desolate meaning. It would be asking to be taught nothingness. Instead, the “and” asks for hope, to be able to care but also to not care, especially, within the context of the larger poem, to let go and be still. We should care about the inhumanity in the world but we should also know what we can affect. We should let go of that we cannot change, not unlike Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.

The irony of course is that a massive winter storm is the perfect time for stillness. There is nothing to else to do for several days. Yet I felt constant restlessness and irritation. I’m hoping that a return to more meditative pursuits during this Lenten season can teach me to be still again.

Managing Inertia

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In Simon Wardley’s business strategy methodology, Wardley Maps, there are a class of behaviors you can take in all contexts to improve your ability to act strategically and improve your chances of success. These are called doctrine, universal rules that one should use across contexts. By analogy, in war, you have a doctrine to train your soldiers to shoot before you go into battle or in chess, you should learn the moves of the pieces before playing your grandfather. Doctrine isn’t a sliver bullet but it is guiding principles broadly applicable to multiple situations.

These doctrine are applicable to certain broad categories of activities you might take: Communication, Development, Operation, Learning, Leading and Structure. One of the key ones in Operation that intrigues me is Manage Inertia. This applies to the broad category of operating the business, of doing the day to day things that allows progress to be made on a variety of fronts. A formal definition of inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its velocity. In business, the physical object takes on other definitions and could be a team, a process, a piece of software, or any number of other constructs. The fact that inertia exists in your business is A Good Thing. It’s a sign of success because without past success, continuing to do the same thing would be pointless. It is the fact that inertia rises out of past successes that creates a paradox and the need to deal with it. Much like your brokerage telling you that past success is no guarantee of future performance, Tesla notwithstanding, business success in the past must be often disregarded so that change can happen and the business can evolve.

Inertia in business manifests in particular ways. Organizational units that have achieved success in the past will be unwilling to try new things or learn new processes. Software that has become successful will over time become ossified as more features are added to it in its current structure, cementing design decisions into place. Processes like Scrum or Six Sigma fix initial problems and then are never revisited for examination. The paradox here is that the business landscape is always changing. Businesses must adapt in order to have continued success but they have tendencies to stay the same. This is how the brash startup can disrupt an established player in a vertical. The startup lacks the inertia of the established that acts on every part of the business to keep it from changing for its own good.

Often, certain elements within an organization will, consciously or not, chafe against the inertia and push to make radical changes. In the software landscape, this is often expressed as rewriting some piece of the business’ software after a period of time because technology has moved on and improved. In the best case, this often is a push out of the development teams who see improvements to technology and methodologies and want to do things better. In the worst case, it can be a lack of good business strategy that allows a rogue element to begin a project without guidance or a clear road map. Typically, it’s a little of both.

These rewrites can in fact be successful. With enough engineering firepower and good leadership that focuses on business value and quick wins, rewrites can be done in a way that leads to a rapid evolution of the existing software. However, more often than not, none of that is true. The business focuses engineering talent elsewhere leaving the rewrite understaffed. Management, somewhat out of touch with the landscape as well as the day to day activities, prefers to just sort of hope things will turn out ok. Hard decisions are avoided. The organizational inertia towards the success of the past weighs heavily. This inertia is far more powerful than the average engineer or engineering manager understands.

Other organizational units that interact with the working system have developed rules and processes for that interaction. Over time, through the success of the software, they themselves have become successful which leads to inertia from a different quarter. The marketing team has learned to use the software for its benefits. The business insights group has learned how to get data out and into the hands of stakeholders in a reliable manner. The business executives understand the vocabulary and the predictability of working software. All these sources of inertia work against a rewrite and must be managed thoughtfully and strategically or else the project is doomed.

So we have a paradox. The business must change in order to adapt to an evolving landscape. But the business must not change because what they are doing is successful. Navigating this landscape takes planning and must be done constantly as maintenance on existing systems, no differently than the oil must be changed in the car. Managing this inertia, while a general doctrine, involves critical thought applied to a particular context. There is no silver bullet. Perhaps you can reclaim your software. Perhaps a rewrite is the best plan. But if so, all the sources of inertia that act on the organization must be taken into account and mitigated. You cannot suddenly change a significant chunk in a successful business. The business reached a stable state through time and evolution and a sudden rupture in that stability will rarely succeed.

This management of inertia involves consensus and partnership across organizational units. The irony of course is that the drive for change often arises because one organizational unit has grown tired of the existing inertia and seeks to overcome it by moving alone. However, in a successful business, there is no alone. All units are connected, however tenuously, and the smaller the business, the stronger the bonds between units. So these moments of punctuated equilibrium where a unit thinks they can rapidly change something that the entire business relies on are largely doomed to failure. Conway’s Law cannot be ignored.

How then can we ensure inertia won’t kill us over time? Good strategy goes a long way. By analyzing the issue and developing policies that guide teams’ actions, inertia can be used against itself as small successes help teams develop confidence in their ability to manage change in the organization. A policy that says “we will always be on a framework version within one major version of the current accepted version” will guide teams actions in their planning process and insure that improvements in technology work their way through your system. A policy of “As a team, we will spend one week a year exploring the landscape of our current technology stack” will help sharpen skills and invites broad participation. Policies are critical to guide behaviors and actions. Without them, there can be no consensus on how to move forward.

Overall, the management of inertia is a function of good management. This seems trite but is critical. By defining strategies and policies that guide actions across an organization and then enforcing these policies over time, inertia can be prevented from becoming ossification. Without this management over time, software will grow in size and complexity to a point where changing it becomes perilous and rumblings of replacement will grow louder. It is unlikely at this point that excellent management will suddenly leap out of the fire to guide a difficult project to success. As in health, it is always more advisable to take small steps over time rather than have heart surgery as a strategy. Managing inertia must be consistent and well-guided to allow the business to evolve as circumstances warrant.