Change the world

"No, no, no, no, nooooOOOO!"

"Did Thib come out this way?"

It is a repeated conversation in my household.  I leave doors open where the dogs can get out and join me on the porch, in the yard, wherever.  They like to hang out with me, and love the freedom that being outside with me gives them.  I usually watch them pretty closely, so that they aren't eating stuff they aren't supposed to.  And they occasionally give chase to a squirrel or a chipmunk and stop listening for my commands.

Kathe is more of a preventive maintenance kind of gal.  She makes sure the gas level doesn't get dangerously low.  She gets her 50k mile car maintenance done at 45,000 miles.  Thanks to her, we have tp in every bathroom, clothes are clean and dry and in the closet, and there is always food in the pantry.

And the dogs do not spend any time running free in the yard.

They are two approaches, plain and simple. Neither one is better than the other.  My way leads to unnecessary excitement from time to time, when that 25-gallon truck tank gets down to 0.056 gallons left.

Seriously.

The dogs are not as well protected from harm under my care.  They might find something to munch on that would give them a bellyache or worse.  And Thib is notorious for eating stuff he isn't supposed to.... and has the enterotomy scars to show for it. (Not my fault, for what it's worth)

But without letting them run 'free', I have no chance to teach them what is allowed and what is not.  Which means if they do get out, I have no control.

The occasional loss of control allows me to teach, correct, and get them to accept the commands I give.  We can practice what we expect.

Trade off.

I work at an agency that works on the assumption that if you follow the process. the same way, every time, you end up with a consistent product.  We are engineers, and we are military, and we follow orders and we follow procedure, and we love templates and predictability.

There is truth to the old joke - you ask an engineer what the volume of the blue rubber ball is, he looks it up in his blue rubber ball table.  Same result, every time.

I was recently in a class.  It was a really good class on the procedure that our agency uses, with the compelling and immediately understandable acronym PMBP.  The class was good.  The speaker was engaging, and kept my attention for the full 8 hours of the class: no easy feat.  For some reason, however, my ears perked up at one of his assertions.  I had heard variations on this theme over and over through the years:

"Faster, Better, Cheaper.  Pick two.  You cannot do all three."   It is one of the basic tenets of project management.  If you require something fast, you have to cede efficiency on one level or another.

But there was something in that simple statement that bothered me, and it related to my aforementioned loss of control with the dogs.  After the class was over, I stopped him and challenged him on the statement.

"Sir, Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin.  Henry Ford with the assembly line. Edison with the light bulb.  Al Gore and his internet."

"OK," he said, "I'll grant you that. But those were not ordinary efforts.  What you are talking about are all things that changed the world - they are actions that changed the course of history."

"I understand," I told him.  "And during a lecture of process is not the right time to discuss it.  But what you describe here is the rule of efficiency, using the way that we are currently doing business.  If we look at things differently, there is a possibility of making changes that can do all three.

"If we are not allowing ourselves the possibility of thinking differently, we have no chance to change the world."

I know that the inside of a large Federal burrocrazy is not the likeliest place to look to make that kind of change.  But the principle is more pervasive than that.  Instead of working to train people in good planning, we are creating templates that even an idiot cannot screw up, with checklists to make sure that we did everything in the template.  We work at preventative maintenance, rather than at creative problem solving.  We look for our answers in look-up tables, and we make sure that the details are right. We use the everlasting go-by because it was approved before, rather than re-framing our documents to fit the organization of the problem and solution.

And sometimes, in our attempt to avoid loss of control, we miss the fact that our question is wrong, because we have never left our dogs running free in the yard.  There is no chance for learning, because we have prescribed the process so completely that there is no room for error.

Innovation should not be exclusively in the domain of the private sector.  It needs to be part of our Federal process as well.  We need to take a chance that something small will go wrong, so that we have the possibility of learning, growing, and creating for ourselves, making it so we can come up with the better solution when the big questions arise.  Without an investment in innovation, and without that commitment, we will have empty process, and no inculcated ability to think beyond the template, the checklist, the go-by.  In the process, we are safe.

In the process, we lose the chance to change the world.

Music of Joy - Change Ringing

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved to NYC and joined the Trinity Change Ringers.  When Jeremy told me he had made the change from choir member to church bell ringer, I was a little perplexed.  He had such a lovely tenor voice, and an amazing understanding of music; I did not see any benefit to having him pulling a rope instead.

And I told him so.

He asked me if I had ever heard of change ringing; I had to answer that I had not.  He shared a New York Times article with me and gave me insight into the amazing cascade of ringing church bells, and the difficult nature of making the music.  And of course, I geeked out about it and started reading.

"The 'music' consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls.  Variations in the order are introduced according to strict rules.  About five minutes of ringing is called a touch.  A full peal has 5,000 individual sequences.  Skillful ringing is like a steady stream of sand; poor ringing like clumps of earth".

I gotta say, that description does not make it sound much better.  Fortunately, the internets are filled with videos of amazing things (amazing things are not always good, just so you know - don't go looking for good things when you google 'Miranda Sings').  But then I listened to some, and was amazed.  Each of the notes, rung over and over again, with a pattern that defies expectation, and repeating in such a long loop that it is hard to even know that there is a repeating pattern.

Infinite variations. Each note, in isolation, providing just a toll. But together, instead of the expected cacophony, pure beauty.

The bells begin with a descending scale.  But then as the different rhythms for each bell continue, the character of the sound changes.  Listen to a little bit of it (or the whole thing, if you'd like!), but skip to about 3:00 to see how the sound changes.

I found myself thinking about that bell ringing and the beauty of the sound when I was in our church service a week ago.  One of the beloved members of the church was accepting a new job as minister of families out of state.  She had been involved with the children's ministry, and also with a ministry called Jacob's Ladder, which is a service to help adolescents and young adults with intellectual disabilities by helping them develop tools for adulthood.

The children sang.  The Jacob's Ladder youth played handbells.

My first thought was to expect cacophony.  Decades ago I played handbells in a youth bell choir, and quickly discovered how easy it was to botch a piece totally by playing at the wrong time.  Shortly after the first performance, I decided handbells might not be my way to fame and fortune.

As I listened to the bell ringers, however, I was amazed.  The sound was glorious.

Finally, the thought occurred to me that the out-of-time rhythm that  each of the players joyfully produced was, in essence, a form of change ringing.  Each of the ringers played their part of the chord in a rhythm that expressed their heart in a new way.  They started more or less together, cut off more or less together, and in between, they rang those bells.

Infinite variations. Each note, in isolation, providing just a toll.  But together, instead of the expected cacophony, pure beauty.

The end result was a beautiful experience.  One that touched me and reminded me of something important - that everyone has their note to play.  That where I expect dischord and tension, there is often beauty. 

And where I cannot find the beauty, it might just be because I haven't waited long enough to hear the pattern, and see the beauty. 

It also reminded me that I can play a melody by myself.  But that real joy and beauty comes from letting my note be joined with others, playing as imperfectly as I do, and with enthusiasm that brings joy with it, and make amazing music.  The music of the spheres.  Music of joy. 

I think I am going to listen for that beauty this week.  See if I can't listen for the change ringing in my life, and bring some much needed change.

Switchbacks

You know that feeling, when you are a passenger in a car being driven through the mountains, and you lean into the curves just a little too early, or a little too late?  As a driver, you never get the sensation -  you know exactly when the car will respond, because you are in control.

But as the passenger, you get all of the thrills of a roller coaster ride with none of the built-in security features that roller coasters are required to have.

I was surprised to find myself thinking of being a passenger in the mountains this weekend.  When we bought the house, it came with a lovely piece of lagniappe (see my blog entry on that term here).  In addition to owning a lovely house, we now also own a baby grand piano.

Yes.  The house comes partially furnished.  No, they did not leave the refrigerator.  No washer/dryer, either.

But we got ourselves a baby grand.

Our new piano.

It is an Ellington piano, which is was manufactured by Baldwin in the 1920s.  It has a lovely brown mahogany body, and was clearly in dire need of a little TLC.  One of the first things I did when I came into the house during our recon visit was to sit down and surreptitiously check out the tuning.

It was bad.  It was fingernails-on-chalkboard bad.  I grew up playing a piano that had been moved - twice - without being tuned.  So somewhat out-of-tune pianos are not such a big deal to me.  But this?  I have uploaded the video of the chromatic scale to youtube to show how awful it was.

Kathe ended up calling The Piano Man, a local piano tuner out of Jackson, MS.  I was there for some of the tuning (I had bought tools so that I could try and tune it myself, and Kathe wisely - and sneakily - called for a professional to do it before I could do any irreparable damage.)  And it was a pretty amazing process. (I still maintain I would have done a decent job, and I really, really, really wanted 'piano tuning' on my Renaissance Man Resume).

What I discovered after fifteen minutes of listening to him tune the piano