DAYTIME - day job or destiny?

Who was Karl Popper, and why should we care?

2011-12-29T01:15:00.005+08:00

Well, Santa has been and gone. I hope it was that we have all been good little girls and boys over the past year so the patron Saint of Mercantile Magic was not required to leave Carboniferous anthracite in anybody's stocking?

No!? Good, then it's time to get on with the next stage of this drawn out solstice festival and start pretending we are going to refurbish body and soul with a complete set of new good habits. I used to do that - make new year's resolutions - and then forget about them. About a decade ago however I thought "Stuff that silly process!" and made my last ever new year's resolution. I decided to be a reasonable optimist, and it was so. Now I just have to remember this, any time of year, not just the beginning of January, and it is so once more.

Part of being a reasonable optimist involves thinking about why it is reasonable to 'think about the bright side' and 'see that the cup is half full'. I maintain it is very reasonable so long as we seek to know the truth about our world and not just listen to the opinions of others. Sure, everybody has a right to have their own opinion and be allowed to say what it is if they so desire; that is what democracy is about, amongst other things. One could even say it is almost a sacred duty to have an opinion, so long as it really is one's own opinion and not just an uncritical regurgitation of somebody else's thoughts.

To really have one's own opinion however requires a skeptical approach to the world. Being truly skeptical is not about being always negative and cynically disbelieving everything, but wanting to know what is really true; it is about habitually asking oneself: How do I know if this is true or not? How do I know this is not make believe?

If you stop to consider it, this process of questioning what is true is the very foundation of scientific method and the application of scientific method in the last four hundred years or so has brought about more change in human culture than occurred in the previous 40 thousand years. So skeptical method is not something trivial nor is it bad, quite the opposite; skepticism is a very powerful tool which can contribute mightily to keeping us safe, healthy and reasonably prosperous.

And here is the connection of all this to bureaucracy in contemporary Australia, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. If you must make a new year's resolution this coming Sunday, why not resolve to find out about Karl Popper! He was one of the great minds of the Twentieth Century and provided us with some really important conceptual tools for understanding how to get the most out of civilised life. I don't mean how to take as much as we can but rather how to understand what is needed to really contribute to the common good and what is needed to really release the potential for creativity and productive effort of all the people of [pretty much] any society.

Karl Popper wrote some big books about the nature of science and knowledge and about what is needed for maintaining a free and open society. Luckily there are many places now on the Internet and in other books and journals where one can find information on his ideas. And indeed Popper himself, over time, found better and easier ways to convey the essentials of his ideas so that later editions of some of his most important books have the essential concepts spelled out in a foreword, or in footnotes. One can find references to these on Wikipedia and other places.
An example:
Wikipedia - Karl Popper
another:
Wikipedia - Open Society

It is about time that Honchos of the Sausage Factory gave some thought to the theoretical underpinnings of open communication provided by Karl Popper.
Ignorance of Karl Popper's contributions to civilised life is probably not sinful but it sure ain't something to be proud of!

Happy New Year

Mark Peaty

Breadcrumbs and recipe books

2011-10-22T17:21:00.000+08:00

Dear Friends, [well, all right, the two of you that have actually looked at this site :-]

it is with amazement and pride I relate that great effort has been made to provide a search function for the Sanger Savers' Instant Recipe Book. And sometimes it comes up with what the user is looking for so that is truly wonderful! Still no breadcrumbs though which, for a recipe book, is an on-going cause of frustration and disappointment to its users.

As we approach the second anniversary of this particular marvel it can be seen to be lagging well behind the development curves of its predecessors. The recent history of the Sausage Factory shows that such devices require about two years before the original [and almost completely arbitrary] content, layout, and functionality come to reflect the requests made by users in their feedback. Relevant content with almost optimal layout and a degree of user friendliness *can* be achieved, even at the Sausage Factory and other large government organisations as long as feedback from users is taken on board as soon as possible.
The problem is this takes us into the time frame for a *major improvement*. The previous four incarnations of in-house on-line recipe book used by the Sanger Savers have each gone through such an evolution. Each has gone from well-nigh-hopeless to not-bad-at-all. Then each one in its turn was removed and replaced with something that did not embody the improvements which had evolved within its predecessor.

Why this has to be so is a mystery.
I hypothesise that it indicates the true rate of information flow from factory floor to the home of the honchos: about a year. This means that once a honcho has blessed the implementation of anything new that new thing is then by definition "Good" if not actually sacred. It follows then that nothing can be wrong with it, so all mid level managers are duty bound to speak this word. Potential insights of a contrary nature coming from users are by definition expressions of ignorance, incompetence or outright heresy. Thus it will take up to a year for such feedback to actually start having any effect. By this time the mid level managers have become aware of problems and may even be ready to admit they don't know all the answers. This watershed or tipping point bodes well for end-users because the pace of improvements picks up.

In the meantime rumours of dissatisfaction have actually started to reach the honchos. These can be ignored as ignorance, incompetence, etc, until somehow or other *someone of importance* mentions hearing of problems. Perhaps this takes place at a cocktail party or other social function [where real people meet?], who knows. But finally one or more honchos decides that that wonderful new thing has not lived up to first expectations; something must be done about it! And so the system which is finally approaching a condition of optimal content [the users are now voting for it by choosing to use it and telling each other that "it's got a lot better these last couple of months!"] is slated for replacement.
We shall see.

Tyrant solipsism as an indicator of intrinsic narcissism

2011-05-20T00:49:00.001+08:00

I think this may be one of the key questions of our time:

Does the manifestation of apparent tyrant solipsism necessarily indicate entrenched narcissism in the honcho concerned?

I should have known: "Newspeak" is the only language they know.

2011-03-27T00:17:00.000+08:00

I think I mentioned some time ago of my attempts to get an on-line discussion board in place so that front line sanger savers, [AKA phone specialists, service consultants, team mentors, technical support, whatever,] could put questions and suggestions to their peers. The need for this kind of consultation arises when some apparently novel question or problem comes up and the sanger saver cannot find an answer in the sacred scripting of TRAMS or the on-line oracles of the Sausage Factory website. I have been talking about the need for this kind of discussion facility for more than two years now. It has been more than 18 months since I first launched an official request/suggestion about it, 15 months since the first knock-back and just over 12 months since a High Level Honcho decided that it sounded like a good idea and endorsed it.

So after 12 months of, what we might foolishly believe to have been, official endorsement of the idea and umpteen attempts on my part to encourage implementation of the discussion board where is it now? Well, Friday last [25/3/2011] I was told by a manager that they had just discovered on Monday last [21/3] that someone back in 2008 had made a decree that no more discussion boards could be created using the Sharepoint software which is what we we proposing to use.

I was shown an email in which someone expressed the opinion that "a review was needed" and I realised that this meant: "this must stop!"
The opinion elaborated that: [in so many words] the use of Sharepoint should be considered by a committee and "a [factory]wide approach considered". I realised that this more or less meant that: "if we can't [centrally] control this, it must not exist." I believe my interpretation of this is fair enough in that two years have passed since that edict was handed down. That interpretation was confirmed by another email where it was noted that no new such discussion facilities have since come in to existence.

I think this demonstrates a couple of things fairly clearly.

that George Orwell's concept of "Newspeak" was not at all fanciful; words can be made to mean their opposite, particularly when apparently describing policies and/or responses to calls for change; we are again being taught that change is only good if it "comes from the top"
the Honchos of the Sausage Factory have no sense of any kind of urgency about the need for improved communication within the organisation, and quite possibly have no idea that the Factory is floundering through lack of real communication within and between the various far flung parts of its organisation. The evidence for this lack of communication is clear however, examples include:

letters are sent out by parts of the organisation which immediately create problems for public contact areas because the latter were not informed and phone staff struggle to find out what callers are talking about
various on-line facilities which may be crucial to particular types of client enquiry are unilaterally removed without consideration of the consequences - most recent example is a form for recording "community information" about wrongful or fraudulent behaviour relating to the bacon supply
changes to procedures laid down in TRAMS [AKA "the two tonne oxymoron in the room"] about how addresses may be updated where, for example, a member of the public or an organisation has need of a particular form to be sent out but the new process for updating the address has a minimum turn around time of 24 hours so the form cannot be sent until the poor phone staffer has confirmed that the new address has taken
the Factory has a policy of deliberately retaining out of date addresses on the records of clients who have ceased involvement in one or other of the channels of bacon supply; this means that if those clients restart such an involvement some years later, even though other information supplied by them in the mean time shows they have moved, the Factory will send forms and letters to an old address as a matter of course. This problem has been around for decades but the obvious solution has never been applied: simply ASK THEM on the annual sausage survey form. [The mind boggles!]

I could go on and on but the smell of over cooked bacon is not conducive to good sleep.

The challenges of our time

2011-02-10T03:17:00.001+08:00

"Public Enemy Number One" is, was, and maybe always shall be the microorganisms we share this planet with. The little buggers keep evolving and we humans are too stupid to realise that abusing the power of antibiotic chemicals is a recipe ultimately for public health disaster. [We are feeding antibiotics willy-nilly into farm animals before those animals are even sick; this is the perfect system for breeding robust resistance to antibiotics into the very bugs we want to keep at bay.]

But microbes will always be with us, so challenges to the health system are and will remain business as usual. We just need to acknowledge that too often the biggest health problems often arise from our willful ignorance and mismanagement.

Public Enemy #2
The next biggest challenge but probably the biggest-threat-with-a-deadline is ocean acidification. "Maybe no corral left by 2050" and "No fish to go with your chips" after 2100.

PE #3
After that clearly is global climate change. Only fools are still denying the reality of humanly created carbon dioxide increasing in the atmosphere and provoking the increase of heat energy stored in the atmosphere and ocean.

PE #4
Then comes bureaucracy which too arises from the inability or unwillingness of many humans to confront the truth of their lives. Maybe the work I do in the Sausage Factory leads me to have a jaundiced view because the bulk of the "customers" I have to deal with are people who don't understand some of the basic concepts of the Sausage-making process.

Yammer - the end of civilisation as we know it? Or ... just another opportunity missed ...

2010-12-02T02:42:00.000+08:00

Recently the Sausage Factory was stimulated by an incursion of potential communication. Workers at all levels and of all persuasions were being invited to join a new and user friendly social networking medium called Yammer. Yammer was designed by some as-yet-unsung genius specifically to facilitate communication and innovative cooperation within large organisations. Each Yammer domain is restricted to the people who have an email address with the particular organisation they work for. So Sausage Factory workers, who all have an email address of the form name.name@sausage.gov.au, would be able to create a blog or discussion group that could be seen only by other denizens of the Sausage Factory. It's a bit like a mini Facebook for factories.

Well the glorious light of enlightenment and potentially creative spontaneity lasted for less than a week really before being unceremoniously snuffed out. Access to Yammer from within the Sausage Factory was simply removed without any discussion; "the page cannot be displayed" is the only message anybody has ever got about this.

For those of us who have been struggling for ages to get some kind of discussion forum and networking facility into existence because we really need it for the kind of work we do, this experience is just one more definitive demonstration that the honchos of Bangers R Us are way out of touch with the workforce; in the area where I work it is particularly dysfunctional. Even though the main purpose of the area is public contact for the provision of advice and support to all the meat and stuffing suppliers, and the Factory has various slogans about treating people fairly with personalised service tailored to their particular needs, the largely unspoken but emphatically imposed practice is to enforce a tightly scripted, prepackaged set of "products" with a very 'one size ought to fit all' flavour [so to speak]. The phone staff in the main contact area of the factory must follow the dictates of an on-line information dispensing system which is essentially a gigantic recipe book. A recipe book without an index or table of contents, by the way [I kid you not!], and which furthermore does not have a search function of any significance. Can you imagine that? An on-line system which purports to be an all encompassing knowledge base and yet we cannot search for content; we cannot get to the actual page we want by searching! All the "search" facility does is indicate which "chapter" the information is in.

It is like someone giving you what they say is a map of a city but all it does is offer you a choice of which major road to start on; which city gate to go in through. But wait, there's more! Because this so called "industry standard" tool does not have "breadcrumbs"; there is no facility providing a a record of the path you followed to get where you did, all there is is the browser back button and history.

But I digressed didn't I. The issue is that often we come up against new situations which are not covered by the 'scripting'. Well it stands to reason that you can't fit the universe of sausage making into a neat little box, so there are often times when we need to do a bit of troubleshooting and innovative problem solving. That requires communicating with other people to see if someone else has already solved this new problem. May be it is just a case of knowing where the information is hiding. But the Sausage Factory honchos seem to have a profound aversion to front-line workers doing anything except "OBEY!" The real policy is Economies of Scale Through Specialisation of Function and total control from the Centre. It is as if nobody at the Sausage Factory has understood why the Soviet Union fell to bits!

Yammer had the potential to become a really useful networking facility, but it was squashed in the Sausage Factory with no discussion and presumably therefore with no recognition of the creative potential it could unleash. The impression we front-line workers get is that The Chief Sausage Maker and his trusted offsiders do NOT trust us.

Tyrant Solipsism

2010-06-19T01:23:00.000+08:00

Tyrant solipsism is the mental condition of persons in positions of power and authority who become less and less able to perceive or understand ideas and points of view which are different from their own. Maybe some academic somewhere has a fancy-pants term which means this but I haven't seen it, and somebody has to say it out loud!

This time I have been provoked - the last straw if you like - by a recent mind boggling experience in my part of the Sausage Factory. Great Changes have been afoot for a long time now as the Factory has creaked and rumbled into the twenty-first century. A big problem with the Factory though is that for every good idea that one of the workers has there is a committee somewhere ready and waiting to squash it flat. Sort of like one of the old jokes: "What is a cowpat?" Answer: a pancake designed by a committee.

Oops! I digressed - so easy to do. The thing is the workers in one of the main production lines have been given some completely new machinery for making one of our most, em prevalent, flavours ['popular' would not be a popular word for it]. Certainly this type of sausage is the sort most people end up with. Along with the new and very complicated production machinery have come a whole swag of new ways of doing things AND a brand new computerised reference tool come procedural guides system called "TRAMS". TRAMS is is supposed to be the first and main tool for those of us working in the Phone Orders, Recipes, and Culinary Tips department [PORCT].

TRAMS may be short for Trams an' dentural something or other, I dunno, but it is meant to be the bees knees and totally wonderful. In fact the damned thing is ten times worse than the previous on-line guide book we used. And to think how we used to complain about the old Culinary Express! That's learned us good and proper!

This TRAMS is a disaster because it is slow as slugs to use, is made like a labyrinth so you get lost in it all the time, and splits everything up into tiny micro morsels of information which you can't do a search for, and which are spread out umpteen layers deep without any facility for searching, no map [or 'breadcrumbs" either], and we are instructed NOT to reverse! So it's like trying to drive through a city of one-way streets at night in a heavy fog, with out a map, and your not even supposed to reverse back up to a previous signpost or any intersection we just want to check back on. But no matter how much we complain and demonstrate clearly how totally bad it is, the honchos - Senior Sausage Sages [SSS] - who decided we need it are steadfast in ignoring us. It is like as if some evil magic has blinded their eyes and twisted their noses so anything we say, write, cry, scream[or whimper], or otherwise try to do just seems to the SSS as a nasty smell. Some months ago the SSS enlisted the help of an outside organisation to run a survey of what staff think and feel about their work, managers, and so forth. The SSS were apparently shocked and amazed to discover that we the workers think it them who are on the nose.

So what did the SSS do in response to this report? Firstly spend months cooking up a mass of power points and graphs and buckets of whitewash to show that everything is mostly just fine and wonderful and they kn0w how we can learn to see things that way. But then secondly - which is the thing which has really p****d me off - they spent god knows how much for a trained, professional psychologist to come and talk to each team and basically tell us that we can only be happy if we resign ourselves to our fate.
NB: the Arabic word "KISMET" came to my mind. Wrong message folks!

The theory given was that we must learn to become totally accepting of the abject powerlessness of our situation and admit that we choose to be in this particular job. Othewise we can never bee happy and we will suffer from the affects of stress and it will be our own fault!

Well I don't blame the psychologist woman who was paid to deliver this message; she was clearly not told all the facts about the situation. Either that or she has a somewhat trite and facile view of life. It is one thing to remind people that sanity and well-being requires acceptance of things which are unchangeable but it is quite another to recommend sublime acceptance of obvious neglect, incompetence and wrongdoing in the organisation one works for. Basically the woman skated over and away from the whole ethical dimension of the situation. All the people I spoke to who experienced their team's session with this psychologist were definitely NOT impressed and many were really annoyed. Some just felt more disgruntled and more determined to try and find different employment. Some, like me, felt insulted. I think that if this psychology session was really thought to be a useful thing which will make if easier for workers in the PORCT area to do their work, then it was too facile. If on the other hand it was a deliberate attempt to hose down dissatisfaction and make workers believe that feeling bad about working in the place is all their own fault then it is an example of unconscionable cynicism and furthermore a waste of public monies.

Inefficiency dividend

2009-07-11T00:50:00.000+08:00

The Australian Federal Public Service has been subjected to the so-called 'efficiency dividend' for about twenty years now. This has been something like a general and arbitrary 1% cut in funding each year for the last two decades. That makes at least 20% reduction in real terms in the value of resources allocated to sustaining some of the really vital supports of Australian democracy.

I see the results of this now in the "Sausage Factory" where I work. Training is under resourced, the quality of work is becoming harder to sustain, and there are chronic and systematic failures of communication. This makes me think of an Economics lecturer I once heard saying that he couldn't really see what 'dis-economies of scale' might be. He had talked enthusiastically about economies of scale but said he just didn't see where any real problems would come from with continuous scaling up of work organisations.

Well I think there is one word mainly which covers most aspects of dis-economies of scale: communication. That is, real communication goes down the tubes within organisations as the size and complexity of the enterprise grows beyond a certain threshold. The standard bureaucratic answer to the extra efforts needed to keep an ever growing organisation going is to major on the establishment of COMMAND and the ever more detailed management of an exponentially growing corpus of official procedures. Micro management - majoring on minutiae - seems to become an end in itself and the ever more detailed prescriptions of procedures take on the aura and gravity of the Word of God. What can common sense and community do in the face of a seemingly remorseless and unstoppable depersonalisation of relationships? They go underground that's what. Networks, in so far as any do exist, become the means for escaping from the baleful influence of the command structure rather than a natural, organic complement to official chains of command.

When communication dies in an organisation, productivity dies with it. I just wish the Prime Minister and Treasurer of this country could realise that "the fat" has long since gone, now it is just nerves and muscle that are being carved off.

"Vatican should learn from Galileo mess" - what a hoot!

2009-07-05T23:17:00.000+08:00

The Vatican will never learn from Galileo - I mean ... excuse me but we are talking 360 years or so before they decide it might be wise to, ... um, acknowledge ... that maybe they backed the wrong horse!

Apparently a prelate is saying the Vatican should "learn from the Galileo mess" [http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5614dl-us-pope-science/]. But they caused it! The mess that is; the rest of the world has been absorbing and growing with the discoveries of science for more than 400 years now, but the popes and the cardinals? I don't think so.

I seem to remember reading somewhere in the last year or so that Pope Benny 16th [right number?], who was after all the head of the Inquisition while he was still a cardinal, still thinks that the way the Inquisition treated Giordani Bruno in the year 1600 was more or less OK. His words, as reported, were sort of along the lines of: "Yeah well that's how we did things in those days ..." But Giordani Bruno's "crime" was simply that he publicly asserted scepticism.

Because he would not recant and publicly state that everything the Church teaches is absolutely true, they stripped him naked in a public square somewhere in Rome, vilified him, flogged him, tortured him, then burned him alive, and Benny the Boss still thinks that is OK?. My guess is that Galileo knew damned well what happened to Giordani Bruno 33 years earlier and decided to kow-tow and pretend to renounce his assertions about the movement of the Earth about the Sun and so forth. He knew that the Copernican theory was the only reasonable way to explain what he and others could see through telescopes, but he knew also that the thought police were only interested in power, not truth.

The reason the Church had to kill Giordani Bruno was because the Catholic church is a command structure which holds power over people only for so long as they don't start questioning its authority. Its apparent legitimacy comes from people believing the doctrines without question. Unfortunately its doctrines are the products of a pre-scientific universe so there is an intrinsic dissonance attached to membership. This is why the Catholic church has always needed thought police, in the form of the Inquisition, to search out and silence or destroy those who would upset the establishment by asking awkward questions. They needed to destroy all other forms of belief which challenged their power as well. So for example Jews were also subject to intense discrimination and persecution and Muslims likewise. [This doesn't imply that Jews and Muslims as believers are any better than Christians. Modern history shows clearly that the purported benefits of any unquestioned belief system are always outweighed by the drawbacks.]

When Pope Benny 16th implies that it was OK "... at that time ..." to publicly torture and kill a dissident in the most agonising and humiliating way possible, it implies to me that he has not understood the implications; either that or he is himself an evil and despicable person who has nothing of real value to offer the human race.

What are schools really for?

2009-06-03T22:54:00.000+08:00

The thug's definition of power is:

The ability to make things happen;

The civilised person's definition of power is:

The ability to get others to accept your description of the world.

This provokes questions such as:

Who describes my world?
Who describes your world?
Who describes our world?

We send children to school to learn. But, to learn what?

The usual response to that question is something like: to learn useful things that will help them survive in society and have a good life. OK, that's pretty good, as far as it goes, but answer me this:

Where is the scientific evidence that shows clearly and unambiguously that schooling is the best way to cater for the needs of children?

My point is that most schools are bureaucratically organised production facilities. Yes, I know that most people would not like to put it that way. But surely it is clear that children are corralled, restrained and constrained by people - teachers and their assistants - organised on the basis of economies of scale through specialisation of function.

There are clearly many children who do not survive this experience very well, and for whom the outcome of their schooling is clearly not what was intended. Given that each of us lives only once upon this Earth, who does this system serve, if it does not serve all children properly?

The curse of the command structure

2009-04-16T01:25:00.000+08:00

This concept is the reason for this blog.

The basic insight I want people to look at and discuss is that all large organisations are built around a pyramid shaped power or command structure, but command structures are NOT communication networks. Discuss? Hey, prove it wrong if you can!

"Hierarchy of authority" is a more fluffy way of saying command structure. This means that each person in the organisation officially reports to just one direct superior but that each person above the very base level may have one or more people who report to him or her. This is true of armies, monasteries, government agencies, commercial and industrial firms and corporations, and educational institutions. "Old news" you might say, but "hierarchy of authority" misses the deep problem.

The deep problem is that communication - I mean real communication - is a two-way process, and bureaucratic command structures do NOT function well, if at all, as channels for the two way, equal to equal, interchange which is essential for real communication to occur.