Why Feynman?
The astute reader will quickly notice that the design of this site is influenced to no small degree by one of my heroes, Richard P. Feynman. I keep Feynman’s books in my home, bag, and office. I frequently quote him and use his work to draw my own analogies. My reasons are simple and personal; Feynman helps me to be a better person. Even though I never met the man and he passed 20 years ago, he’s still the most effective teacher I’ve ever had.
Yes, Feynman was an undeniable genius. Yes, he was a bit of a self-admitted scoundrel. It’s those qualities and his very approach to the world, his deep sense of scientific and educational morality, and his reputation as the “Great Explainer” that inspire me the most. I believe that while the common definition of a hero is someone that exhibits outstanding courage and nobility, the most important characteristic of a hero is their ability to inspire. Richard Feynman certainly meets those qualifications as far as I’m concerned.
A good friend and former boss of mine once did as other bosses have in the past and took me aside for some coaching. He said, ”Greg, you are a dragon among sheep.” and he was speaking, of course, about my tendency to get frustrated and upset when I don’t feel like those around me are “getting it”. His message was clear and since that brief, candid coaching I’ve tried to find ways to keep those frustrations in check. Ultimately, I’ve come to realize that it’s okay to be frustrated and it’s okay to be upset, but it’s important to express that only within the context of a respect for others (even if I sometimes fail at doing so).
As I get a little older and I move along my professional career arc, I will continue to strive and molt away the scales of the dragon. It’s difficult to make those sorts of fundamental changes. Not because I fear change. Quite the contrary! It’s often because I wonder silently if it’s too late to make the change and history will record me as the dragon rather than the man. The people I respect the most are those that have high personal standards and go out of their way to offer something substantial to the world and to others. People like Richard Feynman, my brother Joel, and many of my friends. With their help, maybe I can make those changes and be a little more like them. In return, I promise to help them learn to snort a little fire every now and again.
Posted on Jul 06 2008 in General | Comments (3) | PermalinkNotable Quote 2
”If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.”
Posted on Jul 06 2008 in | Comments (0) | PermalinkDesigning For Rewarding Behavior: Part One
Recently, I’ve spent some time with SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Development Studio. One of my goals was to create a series of dashboard widgets that could be published to the SSRS server and incorporated into various Windows Sharepoint Services team portals.
My first target wasn’t the Team Foundation Server data warehouse, it was our time reporting tool, Web TimeSheet. Like many organizations, it is critical that our IT staff collect and report time spent on various projects in an accurate and timely manner so that our company may, in turn, bill our various clients. Creating the dashboard widgets was a drop-kick. I’m reasonably impressed with the BI Studio (with add-ons from vendors such as Dundas, it can be made quite powerful). The experience, however, gave me some time to consider the implications of designing for rewarding behavior.
Time reporting is an excellent culture media for this particular petri dish. Why? Because only the most very twisted individual enjoys logging their time, but it is a necessary function in many organizations. My own hypothesis is that many companies struggle with this because they haven’t considered the system holistically and, as a consequence, have failed to design for rewarding behavior. By acknowledging the system and allowing the need to design it for rewarding behavior to influence changes, perhaps you can make substantial improvements in the accuracy and timeliness of the data.
As reasonably sentient beings, our actions are conciously and subconciously influenced by the need to be rewarded. Put simply, our nature is to invest energy into that from which we will reap a reward. Everyone’s rewarding mechanism is the product of his or her own experiences in life. Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditional reflex has context here, but the point is that our brains are wired so that we spend our time and make our emotional investments in the things that we realize value from.
So what about time reporting? At our company, everyone is required to account for each hour spent during the week and have that data, in the form of a timesheet, submitted to their supervisor at the end of the week. Easy enough, except that most of us spend time working on hundreds of different tasks that dozens of projects in that time period. We know that the company places value on entering the time accurately and we understand the need to be timely so that our finance team can collect the data and bill our clients. Still, it’s a thankless task that we put off until the last minute only to find ourselves scrambling to recall what we’ve done until we finally get frustrated, exclaim to ourselves, ”That’s good enough!”, and grab our car keys.
I began developing dashboard widgets based on our timesheet data for the same reasons that most organizations do: to provide management with Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data at their fingertips. Shortly after I began, however, I began to realize there was greater opportunity to be had from the same investment of my time. I stepped back from the program and the data. I stepped back from the people and their managers. I stepped back and began consider the system. It didn’t take long to conclude that what I was doing was fundamentally flawed. Creating those widgets for management wasn’t going to improve how accurate or how timely the information was. In fact, I was probably going to make things worse.
When an organization is faced with assigning a task that nobody wants to do, it frequently takes the brute force approach to influencing an individual’s rewarding mechanism. Someone near the top of the organizational heirarchy proclaims, ”Do this thing or else!” and people (begrudgingly) oblige. It works because people want to keep their jobs, but it certainly isn’t an enlightened strategy. The way that I believe the most successful organizations would approach the situation would be to consider the system; to define the desired behavior and the nature of the rewarding mechanism and effect the changes necessary to that system in order to acheive the desired behavior more often than not.
Make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing.
Posted on Jul 06 2008 in Programming | Comments (0) | PermalinkNotable Quote 1
”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
Posted on Jul 06 2008 in Quotes | Comments (0) | PermalinkA Series of Hills
Nelson Mandela is frequently credited with the quote, ”After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” Whether he said it or not, the words ring true for anyone that has accomplished anything of significance. I wonder, does this realization, consciously or not, somehow dovetail with people’s fear of change? Is fear of change actually a manifestation of that realization?
Perhaps at some age we all realize that there is no “downhill run” in our lives, but rather a series of hills. We have personal hills, professional hills, family hills… maybe some people react to that realization with hopelessness and dismay. Those people might be the ones to allow others to push them up the hills (complaining the entire time). I’ll call these people the “flatlanders”. Others, on the other hand, might embrace the uphill challenge knowing that is the best way to be truly satisfied with success. Those are the “mountaineers”.
Philosophy is, in my opinion, idle speculation when not applied to one’s self. After all, the true value of philosophy is to give us reason to think and reflect on our own beliefs. So if we all, at some point, realize that there are hills and how we react to that realization becomes one of our defining characteristics, where do I fit on the scale? Am I a flatlander or a mountaineer? I like to believe that, at least professionally, I am a mountaineer. I embrace the uphill and more often than not I do my part to push the flatlanders over the hills as well.
In the end, I believe that you’re free to chose how you’ll react to the hills. Success as an organization, however, can only be assured when the mountaineers outnumber the flatlanders, when the organization aggressively eliminates those that prevent others from climbing, and when the culture supports celebrating each and every summit.
Posted on Jul 03 2008 in General | Comments (0) | Permalink