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.

What makes you give?

"When Sean V. sends me an email, I can ignore it.  When he comes to my desk, I pay attention."

Heads nodded around the room. They knew the guy, and had all done the same.

Thursday I met with some co-workers and colleagues about the CFC. The Combined Federal Campaign is the Fed's version of United Way.  It is a clearinghouse for money donated by federal employees to national and local charities.  Hundreds of charities to choose from, each with their own mission, overhead, and goals.

And every year, we go through the same thing.  Skits.  Poking fun at the bosses, who are asked to humiliate themselves - pie throwing, dunking booth, silly skits, whatever.  But the result has been a decline over time in participation rate. 

It used to be the case that employees donated to the church and to whatever the office charity was.  And the donations continued throughout the career, adjusting for increases in pay and promotions.  If you were in charge of getting donations, you could pretty much count on the combination of peer pressure (everyone is doing their part) and a little bit of amusement to get full compliance.

And then came Dateline.

Now, with 24-hour news channels, we have exposés about everything under the sun.  And there is little that we love more than seeing the CEO of a non-profit go down.  So hidden cameras and gotcha moments and microphones stuffed into the face of people who are gaming the system... all part and parcel of our modern lives.

Corporate Stinkeye

And so begins a distrust of charity.  The mistrust does not only extend to the one charity who was exposed, but to all.  The underlying assumption now is, everybody cheats.  Only one got caught.

So the youngest workers tend to have no faith in the system we are in charge of pushing.  They are demanding; they want to see real results for what they do. They are ready to volunteer than donate, and they give the stink-eye to large, corporate-style fundraising.  Like what we are doing.

Unfortunately, the resulting harm is often greater than the benefit.

I am no homebuilder.  My volunteer hours are better spent apprenticing for a job where I show some aptitude - say, cleaning latrines or shoveling horse manure.  (Maybe removing bees from columns - but that one comes up very rarely in charity work.) 

LMJ Word of the week - haruspex

So we continue with this week's episode in the continuing saga of unusual words to be used for just the right occasion.  Le mot juste....

Haruspex (pl: haruspices) one of a class of minor priests who practiced divination, esp. from the entrails of anumals killed in sacrifice (>L haru = gut + spec = to look at)

It is the end of the fiscal year, and we are working up schedules for each of our projects. And the budgets. All of us project maangers are playing with the numbers, taking stock of how much money remains in odd places (I am pretty sure that they won't need any more survey money....), and re-baselining our projects.

Re-baselining is an odd term.  It means that we have a new chance to lock in a schedule for the year - and detail what we intend to accomplish for each of our projects.  After the schedules are locked in, we are responsible for getting those items accomplished.  It is a delicate dance.  If we push too fast, too hard, we risk missing a deadline.  If we pad the schedule with too much float, the labor money runs out before we get the work done.

We rely on tea leaves.  Well, coffee dregs.  Whatever.

The scheduling is as much art as it is science.  Some things, like grass growing, is outside of our control.  Weather delays are somewhat predictable - bad weather usually starts in late December, and extends through March.  Other delays are not predictable - if team members are pulled off of the project for an emergency effort.  And then there is the discovery of a black bear on our project area - resulting in delays as we figure out how to avoid endangered species.

Regardless, we are called to explain each delay.  So we rely on historical data, available funds, and a certain amount of haruscopy to determine what our schedule should be. 

I am re-naming my position.  And having cards made up.

Crorey Lawton
Haruspex
US Army Corps of Engineers

Anybody know where I can get a good, healthy sheep liver?  Heptascopy, here I come.

Many happy returns of the day to my lovely god-daughter, Allie Griffeth!
 

Call me Ishmael

Call me Ishmael.

 

A friend loaned me a record once.  Yes, that old-timey grooved vinyl frisbee that made scratchy, skippy music.  The album title is not important, but what I did with it next was. 

I put it in the hatch of my Toyota Corolla.  In South Carolina.  In July. 

Four hours later, the record was destroyed.  Warped beyond any ability to even pretend that I hadn't destroyed it.  The next week, Jack asked me if I had liked the album, and I had to admit that I had never even listened to it.  And I showed him the results.

What was it that I was supposed to do?  Shrug my shoulders, and say, 'It wasn't really my fault'? Give it back to him?  Offer him a protection plan to avoid future meltings?

Of course not.  The right thing to do would be to buy a new album to replace the one I destroyed. 

Remembering this episode yesterday, I realized that I have come up with the perfect, just, and equitable solution to the problem of the OPM data breach. 

Scope Creep

"And while you're over there...."

Scope creep is an unfortunate fact of life.  It is a common enough word in business and project management, but not something I had run into as a concept before I got into the business of protecting my projects against it.

Scope creep happens when you start to do one thing, and it just changes a little to include one more thing.  And then another.  And another.  And eventually you realize that the project has cost more time, money and effort than you had ever wanted. It happens everywhere; a friend of mine was bankrupted when a high school teacher of mine asked for change after change after change, and then refused to pay for the changes.  John was a victim of scope creep, but that AP English teacher who bankrupted him was just a creep.

Rubric - words in RED

If I had a tail, I would wag it right now.

I was writing a technical response to an official request for information, looking for just the right word, and thought 'rubric' might work.  It would never make the final editorial cut - this is, after all, a burrocracy in which I work.  But it felt close, and so I started looking for similar words, and in the process, looked up the word "rubric".

Huh.  Rubric refers to the words printed in red to distinguish them from the remainder of the text.

Rubric: noun

1.  a title, heading, direction, or the like, in a manuscript, book, statute, etc., written or printed in red or otherwise distinguished from the rest of the text.

2.  a direction for the conduct of divine service or the administration of the sacraments, inserted in liturgical books.  

Image stolen without permission from http://net.lib.byu.edu/scm/medieval/liturgical.html
 

The third definition was what I was looking for: any established mode of conduct or procedure; protocol.

 

But I loved the first two definitions, and had no idea! 

 

I have written before about a Red Letter Day and how in Korea, signing a name in red is something that is done to honor the dead.  But this one just made my inner lexophile do a dance. I'm going to go find Rufus and redline his document.

 

 

Ellipses

My name is Crorey Lawton, and I am a mid-level bureaucrat with the Federal government.

This is not how it was supposed to be. This is not the dream.  Even when I started down this burrocratic pathway, I recognized that I was selling out; at least it seemed like that. Listen to how it sounded at first:

My name is Crorey Lawton, and I am a mid level bure‎aucrat....and I am finishing my dissertation in Maya archaeology.

See the difference? The first one has a sense of finality‎. The second has an ellipsis. Those three dots are so important to the ego. They define who we are in ways that let the dust mote scream to the universe.

So when I got ‎booted unceremoniously from the PhD program at Tulane, I could no longer use that ellipsis. I was surprised at how much I missed it. It let me tell people that there was more to me. That I was worthy of consideration. That I was of note.

Losing the dots was harder than losing the three letters I had hoped to put behind my name. I had lost an essential part of who I defined myself to be, and its loss was something that I mourned deeply.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the key to 'who we are' is held in those three dots. 

But....

But there is great joy, and even fun, in finding the ellipses in those around us.

Suzanne, a friend of mine, is a master at seeing the ellipsis in others.  She is a novelist, and so she is always looking at the cast of characters around her with an eye for what makes them unique. (Chicken/egg problem - does she see the unique, and is therefore a writer, or is it a developed tool?) So she speaks to the homeless guy outside her office, asking his opinion on last night's game, and the blossom of his personality opens like a flower under the sunlight of her questions.  

That, right there, is a magical moment.  He is no longer just the homeless guy.  Clyde is defined by his ellipsis, by those unspoken parts that make him special.

It makes me want to look carefully and see those around me in a different light.  That Tea Party co-worker that makes me grind my teeth every single day?  What does he do when he goes home?  Does he volunteer to coach little league?  Does he give every extra dime to feed kids at a foodbank?  Is he a novelist, or a closeted clarinetist?

The cashier.... the gas attendant at Costco.... the people around us all the time that we don't see.  What are their stories, and what are the pieces of their lives that make them special? Those who are closer have ellipses, too. 

Go, find out about somebody's ellipsis, because that is where their life is being lived. Finding that special-ness in others means that you get to share with them the wonder of who they are.

And it brings us closer together.  

Turkeys and extractive economy in Louisiana

In the mid-1980s, a social program was introduced in Yucatan, and it was one of the more brilliant programs I have ever encountered. The government gave out turkey chicks to people in villages.

Strange thing to give, right? Free program. Just take the chicks, and raise them. No strings attached. But we will be back in a year, and will offer to buy the turkeys back.

The turkeys thrived in the village setting. The villagers got some money for minimal upkeep (the turkeys usually took up residence in a chicken coop that was already being used, and ate scraps and insects along the margin of the property) and the government got turkeys for redistribution. At a time when many young villagers were flocking (sorry) to the cities, following jobs, it provided one easy source of cash for villagers, and an additional source of protein for lean times.

Image from www.yucatanliving.com

To me, that seems to be the way an extractive economy should work. Yes, there should be profits that go to the group enacting the program. And yes, the guys providing the turkey chicks should make money - whether it is a government, or a non-profit - there should be a way to turn one turkey into a bunch more.

But the people who provide turkey with room and board get something, too. After all, when the turkey is gone, they are left to clean up the poop.

So it is with the Gulf of Mexico.

The people of the Gulf of Mexico have put up with the poop of turkeys for decades. In 1901, a well in Jennings, Louisiana first produced oil within the state. Since then, the oil industry has provided jobs for the people of Louisiana, oil companies made a profit and sent the final product across the nation, but it was the local environment has paid the price. Canals cut through healthy marsh to access wells, leading to saltwater intrusion and the death of the marsh. Oil leaks occurred, small and large. The fat turkeys grown here are sent out of state for the benefit of the nation (as well as for the benefit of the stockholders).


Progressive erosion in Coastal Louisiana, 1958, 1996.

But in this case, the villagers are not being paid for cleaning up turkey poop.

Essentially, in some ways, Louisiana is being treated as an American colony with an extractive economy. (And typical of such colonies, corruption seems to go hand in hand with the tie between the imperials and the colonial governance).

Oil companies are not the only responsible agents for the marsh that is disappearing at an alarming rate. If they were, the solutions would be easy. Unfortunately, there are a number of forces at play. 

The levees that prevent the Mississippi River from overflowing its banks and flooding resident also prevents the Mississippi River from overflowing its banks and nourishing the marshes. Managing the flow of the Mississippi River upstream starves the downstream area of sediment that would rebuild marshes. Storms tear through wetlands and tear them up, and have been doing more tearing since we have started seeing climate change. Nutria are unchecked destroyers of wetlands. Sea level rise and subsidence are brutal influences on marshes and swamps in coastal Louisiana. Added to all of these pressures, the canals carved into the marshes by the oil companies introduce saltwater into fresh marshes and essentially poison the plants.

I don’t believe that Louisiana has not benefitted from the relationship[i]. Concessions are always being made to avoid losing jobs and tax revenue for the state, so clearly the state has a vested interest in the investments made by the oil companies. And we, like all other states, benefit from the reduced cost of petroleum products. But the investment of 113 years of oil extraction has not resulted in huge strides towards development, while the impact from that investment has been increased at every step along the way.

It might be an exaggeration to say that Louisiana has not received any revenue from the offshore oil drilling, as Mary Landrieu famously claimed after the BP spill, but the state has certainly received very little (see an interesting breakdown here). Landrieu used the BP disaster as an opportunity to push for revenue sharing, a successful effort which will begin to show up in our state coffers in 2017.  We’ll see if the additional income can be used to reverse the impacts.

It would be an interesting comparison to take the income from the seafood industry and the oil industry and compare the two. Louisiana supplies 35% of the shrimp and oyster consumed by the US. We have a $220M sport hunting industry. Coastal fisheries in Louisiana make up 30% of the national total.

I suspect that a far greater proportion of the income from those industries stays in Louisiana than from the oil industry.

Turkeys.

---

[i] Davis (1995) found that extractive economies as a whole have higher levels of development than economies without a substantial extractive sector. “Learning to love the Dutch disease: evidence from the mineral economies.” World Development 23(10):1765–1779.

Red Zone

In my agency, we hold Red Zone Meetings when construction nears completion. It allows us to identify the areas in which we need to make adjustments before completing the project.  Stakeholders, construction folk, contractors, local sponsors, project managers, and even some of the brass from the Corps join together to see what remains to be completed.

It gives everyone a chance to revisit expectations, to discuss the way that the project should be completed, to talk about lessons learned, and to lay out the plans for turning the completed project over to the local sponsor.

For those of you who are not football fans, the Red Zone is the area within the opponent's 20-yard line; the area where the offense has gone 80 yards, and only have 20% before they can cross the goal line and score. Each team hase Red Zone offensive plays that are developed specifically to address the problems of finishing strong.  RZ offense is tricky: the closer you are to your goal, the things holding you back from reaching your goal seem to multiply.  When those obstacles are compressed between the project plan and project completion, it is much harder to slog your way, and frustration is greater, at the same time that execution is the most critical.

I love the metaphor.  And I have recently begun to reflect on the process of planning for the finish line. (I have always worked in the planning process, which takes place before ANY of the construction is done; this part of the process is new to me.)  And some questions have started to occur to me: What changes would you make if you knew that you were 80% done?  What adjustments?  What new plans would you put in place?

Last month, I joined a group of guys in hiking the Inka trail.  Beforehand, we heard horror stories of day 2; one co-worker who had done it said that going through her chemo treatments was easier than Day 2.  The first part of the day was brutal - we hiked from 9,000 feet above sea level to the impossible elevation of 13,800 feet, and celebrated at the top of Dead Woman's Pass.  Then we hustled down to 9,000', where we met the porters, who had run the same route (loaded down with our equipment and food and tents and....) who had lunch prepared for us.  Thirty minutes later, we were headed back up to the second pass, at 13,200'.  It was an exhausting climb: the oxygen was thin and climbing was tough.  More than anyone on our trip, I struggled with the thin air, and for every fifty steps I took uphill, I had to stop for two full minutes until the gasping for air receded.

And finally, we had made it through the pass, and were headed back downhill, for the rest of the day.  Out of a ten-hour hike, the last two hours were going to be all downslope. We were exhausted, but the camp slowly started to get closer and closer. 

And with only a half mile to go, we were able to see the bright red tents welcoming us with the promise of popcorn and hot chocolate (Llama Path's version of happy hour).  And the guide looked at us and said, "OK, that archaeological site (he pointed to the left of the trail) is the last thing we do before we head to camp."

Straight up.

My friend Miles and I had an honest conversation about whether we were going to go up and participate.  I mean, a huge amount of the appeal of the trip was the archaeology.  But after 11 hours of the hardest hiking I had ever done, I wasn't sure if I was up to another push.  I had not included the uphill climb at the end of the day in my RZ plan.

What happens in the Red Zone is more important than what heppens on the rest of the field.  The decisions made there are more critical, and affect outcome more than any other location. 

So what am I doing in the last hour of an eight-hour day?  Coasting?  What does my Friday afternoon feel like?  Am I pushing hard to get things done, or already mentally cracking the revenue on the bottle at home?

Football teams are defined by the success of their Red Zone offense. And more importantly than reputation, the really good things happen if the effort in the RZ is successful. 

My friend Miles looked at me, and told me it was my choice.  That he would go with me straight to camp, skipping the archaeological site, or we could go up and see what the guide was showing us.  The result was one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. 

Maybe, just maybe... I'll push a little bit harder in the Red Zone. The payoff is pretty awesome.