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Granted it’s a mind-numbing service process, not some cutting-edge technological vision. Yes, I’m working on a — yawn — process control plan. Writing P Charts, U Charts, and C Charts by hand in Excel for a client. Not what I want, but a gift nonetheless.

My folly is that I am not seeing it as it Is. Here in my house, drinking fresh coffee of my own making, about to go take a walk with my dog and think about a sampling strategy, I am pretty damned priviledged. Undeservedly so, I guess. Ungratefully so, all too often. My commute is 20 feet and a login for a job that uses my training and supports my family, so what’s not to be thankful for?

I’m still waiting for some real futures work to come my way. Not giving up yet. Next meeting in Japan is May 14th and maybe after that I’ll know if I get to write weird technology scenarios again. Until then, statistical process control is my friend.

I’m sitting here half-working from the Beehive Coffee House on the South Side of Pittsburgh. I am out of place here amongst the hipsters and the too-carefully-honed bohemian aesthetic. The art for sale on the walls is the kind I like — makes me want to take out my pens and play around. Coffee’s okay. People are smoking. A boisterous D&D game going on a few tables behind me. Their unabashed geekitude in the midst of the hiply pierced eyebrow and inked-neck crowd makes me and my Christian T-shirt feel not so incredibly out of place.

But I am out of place. I am not home. My sense of dislocation is like a dull ache that can be diluted by activity but never dispersed completely. I know that I cannot get out of town earlier than my scheduled flight tomorrow. I know that my wife is having a stressful week without me, the kids miss me and are acting out, and I am simply not there. During the day I am busy with work and so I do not notice, but at night in the room, reading internet news and flipping through hotel cable channels, nothing holds my interest. Everything feels empty.

Two large, darkly dressed ladies walk up to me and query, “Nano?” Apparently I look like I am set for a NaNoWriMo meeting. I look like a blogger. Guys with ill-advised facial hair and even worse posture shuffle by me to kibitz with the Palladins and Dwarfs hooting it up in the imaginary dungeon behind me.

I am sitting here with a belly full of too much Lebanese food. Papers about process architecture and Malaysian agriculture scattered around me with torn up junk mail and a pile of unused art supplies, patiently waiting for me to finish whatever I think I need to finish before I am freed up to play. I subtract an hour from the time on my cell phone and realize it’s another hour and a half before I can call and pray with the kids for bedtime.

It occurs to me that sitting in a hipster haven saying Hail Marys into a cell phone might stand out a bit. But the dude with the ponytail in front of me is knitting a purple scarf, so what the Hell.

I wandered through the Mattress Factory before making the puzzling cross town trip to the South Side involving three bridges and the same tunnel twice. From room to room at the Mattress Factory I had to envy the focus and certainty of purpose that comes with filling a whole room with art that you will just dismantle in a few short months. You got to have a vision and know what you’re doing. Certainty of purpose and focus are what I am lacking. What am I doing here? Am I trying to be a hipster? The art on the walls is no better than what I do, but it’s Big. On Big canvases. Bold and assertive splotches and squggles. I do splotches and squiggles, but don’t have the certainty of purpose to do it on a big ass canvas and put a $1000 price tag on it. I play at art. Timidly.

I feel like I am playing too at being a consultant. My heart’s not in it. I don’t want to travel. And though I am a social person, I hate networking. I have only a few of the Habits Of A Successful Person. I don’t give a damn Who Moved My Cheese.

I just want to go home. And the hours aren’t moving fast enough.

I came across this great article which articulates a spiritual storm front that has been gathering up inside me over the last few weeks. At mid life I have become a pretty decent knowledge worker. I am the product of an education system that has groomed me to succeed in the cube farms of the world and, praise God, I have done pretty well in that environment. At least good enough to support my family pretty well.

But lately I have been lamenting the fact that I have missed out somehow on the opportunity for balance — knowing the satisfaction of being able to accomplish things with my mind and my hands together. Auto parts stores feel like foreign lands to me. Tools and harware mock me from the shelves of the Home Depot. I solve home repair problems with my checkbook.

Problem is that I equate the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to learn how to do something handy with the time it would take me to work at what I know to earn enough to pay somebody to do that same thing for me. The comparison does not make financial sense.

But what I don’t factor in is the value of seeing the effects of my work in the world instead of in conceptual space. The satisfaction of a result I can see. The fruits of my labors. There is spiritual value to be found in that.

And as I round the corner past middle age, I assess what frontiers still lie ahead of me. The world of skills and trades lie unexplored on the map of my life, kind of like Darkest Africa or the Orient to Victorian Era factory worker. As I drive my leaky car around and walk past small holes in my sheet rock or sticking doors I wonder if I will indeed go through the rest of my life feeling helpless in the face of such practicalities.

So here’s my question — how does a forty-something wannabe renassance man find basic instruction in the trades? Are there classes for this kind of thing — general handiness? Or do I teach myself and inflict my education on my own household? Anyone know of a really good book that summarizes the world of “handiness?”

Reading I
Jb 7:1-4, 6-7

Job spoke, saying:
Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Are not his days those of hirelings?
He is a slave who longs for the shade,
a hireling who waits for his wages.
So I have been assigned months of misery,
and troubled nights have been allotted to me.
If in bed I say, “When shall I arise?”
then the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle;
they come to an end without hope.
Remember that my life is like the wind;
I shall not see happiness again.

This Sunday’s first reading kind of fits my mood about work right now. I’ll get over it.

Okay, so I’m not updating much. Life is has been tumultuous lately. It will take a little while to get back into some kind of equilibrium, some kind of routine that is sustainable. Right now we are renegotiating the routines of our family life and our marriage.

But it’s a good thing. Ultimately good news. Heidi and I have a new job. Or two depending on how you look at it.

Heidi and I agreed to take on the youth ministry staff position at our parish which was in desperate need after the former youth minister left suddenly. We aren’t exactly Mr. and Mrs. Right for this position, but we were Mr. and Mrs. Right Now (and willing to help.) So for the past six weeks or so we’ve been playing catch up and rearranging our lives to make up for the fact that Heidi is no longer a stay at home mom anymore.

And then we were hired to fill the adult and family minsitry position at our church. The youth ministry is a temporary stop gap. This other is our passion. Heidi and I have had a couple vision of working together at something we love for years now. The opportunity to do so this early in our lives is a source of joy.

But the fact that the new new job overlaps the old new job is a source of chaos. At least until Heidi and I get remarried.

Yes, remarried. I plan to ask Heidi to remarry me for, like, the tenth time or so. Every time our lives change in some significant way — a new child, a new job, a new house — it’s a new marriage. All the routines, the plans, the expectations, the commitments need to be revisited, restated, and recommitted.

We have a lot of work to do, preparing for this new marriage, for this new life. Last night I was talking to the teens at bible study about Advent and how we need to prepare our hearts for the new life Christ brings into the world. I see the relationship work before us as just such a necessary preparation. And a joyful one!

I have several activites that are my barometers of life. Art, poetry, reading, exercise, prayer, and, yes, writing here in Overflow, are all activities that I have as part of my personal life if the rest of my life is to be sustainable. Right now it’s just not sustainable, but we’re doing the work to get there.

Whether you are a disciple of David Allen’s Getting Things Done or not, these two posts from 43 Folders:

Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I
Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II

are key if you want to be more productive and wish to have a to-do list that inspires productivity and not guilt.

They key is to have only things on your to-do list that are physical, actionable items that can be done in a sitting. Old school to-do items like “Clean Garage” or “Write paper” are really projects, not actions, and need to have their own separate list. Putting a project-sized item on your to-do list is like trying to eat an apple in one bite. You’ll choke trying and nothing will get eaten.

So to have an effective to-do list, you need to have a comprehensive current projects list. Where do you get that project list? Well, I’ve been talking about Mission and Vision lately. Your misson and your vision should be specific enough to be the source of all your projects. You can look at your mission, your vision, the current situation, and determine what your next projects should be. Once a week is the recommendation.

After that it comes down to doing the “next right thing” on any project that’s important to you. And the “next right thing” is all that we can really do anyway.

Yeah, I still owe a post on how to generate a good Mission. It’s on my to-do list.

Okay I’ve had this idea jangling around the bottom of my “round to it” file drawer for about a year and a half, but after yesterday’s meeting I am more motivated to dust it off and toss it out there. We need to hire ourselves a Process Ontologist

We spent about ten minutes in a process discussion yesterday talking about “milestones”, “milestone reviews”, “milestone events, and “technical reviews.” All “milestone reviews” are indeed “milestones.” All “technical reviews” are “milestones.” Some “technical reviews” can be “milestone reviews” but mostly those are two separate types of reviews, but both are milestones. And, as far as I can tell the “milestone event” term is just plain redundant, a synonym of “milestone” I guess. Clear now? After ten minutes in a room with twenty engineers and managers (an expensive ten minutes!) it was a bit clearer if only temporarily. Maybe. If only we had a way of writing that understanding down and communicating it.

Let’s not even start on the difference between a “peer review”, a “technical review”, an “inspection”, and a “walkthrough”. Whether they be “formal”, “informal”, or “virtual.”

And how about testing. We have “acceptance testing”, “verification testing”, “validation testing”, “certification testing”, “integration testing”, “regression testing”, “unit testing” – all related and somewhat overlapping.

We need a Rosetta Stone to help us relate the terms in the constellation of requirements and process documents that we must interpret to do our jobs. Having a discussion to clarify terms is good. But having the same discussion twelve times with varying results is bad.

Enter process ontology. We need someone to come and extract an ontological model of our current working terms and leave us with a process of using the model to integrate new terms. It’s not like its a new idea.

“Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don’t get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don’t perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free - ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I just got done with one of those intensive team building workshops where they put a bunch of strangers together and mold them into a team. In such situations, I am usually the “idea guy”. It just works out that way. My particular type of team role is a relatively small percentage of the population, so on most teams I end up on, I am the creative one, the “out-of-the-box” thinker, the visionary. I “pitch” ideas and have to rely on others to “catch” them and decide what to do with them and how to implement them. In a world of pitchers and catchers, I’m usually a pitcher. That’s rather simplistic, but you get the idea, right? (Catch!)

But on this team, as luck would have it, there were four of my type out of seven. And one was easily much better than me at my own game. At first I was all, “Hey. I’m the idea guy!” to myself. But I am also flexible, so I put on a catcher’s mitt for a few days and mostly played catch.

I could have spent three days in competition with this guy, trying to preserve my ego. But as Grace would have it, for these three days at least, my ability to let go of my own self-perception left me free to serve and love where I was needed.

That said, it’s also nice to come back to my home field and take the mound once more.

What good does it do to recognize that you’re in an Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma if no one else on your team or any of the other teams has ever heard of it? Whither Superrationality?

I start a new job today. Sort of. For the past four months I’ve been the Manager of my work group. Sort of. Make that Acting Manager. So now today a real manager comes to take my place and, instead of going back to being who I was before I became manager, I’m going back to school. Sort of.

Six months of training, seven weeks in the classroom, to become a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. (Hiiii Yaaa!) I have a lot to learn, not the least of which is a repertoire of retorts to those oh-so-witty-(and-original) karate jokes.

I wanted to post this to capture an idiom we use in our corner of the software world for the googlesphere – “coding a minivan.” It comes from this Dilbert comic strip (courtesy of Flubu.com):

When you do software maintainence work, the most exciting projects you get are the critical, subtle, and complex problems that you have to find and fix. For certain problems, heroics are involved to fix the problem before there is any significant mission impact. And sometimes those heroes deserve recognition for their feats of technical derring do.

Of course, when writing up the award, it feels a little weird because the hero being recognized for technical excellence is a part of the same software organization that likely introduced the problem that it took such heroics to fix. This is why it’s hard to get software maintainence people to feel really good about awards for their achivements – this catch-22 situation is referred to around here as “coding a minivan.”

There you go. A little glimpse into geek anthropology.

Reflect that the most delicate flower loses its fragrance and
withers fastest; therefore guard yourself against seeking to walk in
a spirit of delight, for you will not be constant. Choose rather for
yourself a robust spirit, detached from everything, and you will
discover abundant peace and sweetness, for delicious and durable
fruit is gathered in a cold and dry climate.

– Saint John of the Cross.

This is my prayer recently. Not to seek out discomfort, but not to avoid it either. And what’s more to appreciate unpleasantness for the gift that it is. Yes, it’s a tall order.

I have a senior co-worker who likes to bust my chops at work. I think he sees himself as a mentor of sorts, trying to call me on my weaknesses so I’ll improve. But he does it in front of others, pointedly, when I am supposed to be the leader of the meeting. And it is very uncomfortable for me.

My instinctive reaction in the face of confrontation is to withdraw, lick my wounds, draw out the symapthy of others. Adopt an “I’ll take my ball and go home” attitude. In fact, I could have used the above wisdom from St. John yesterday as I struggled to stay engaged and lead the meeting after yet another little potshot from my ersatz “mentor.”

Funny. Maybe he’s an effective mentor after all. Just not exactly in the way he thinks.

I sometimes feel a little guilty for not having one of those fancy gadgety things for keeping track of my ideas, appointments, to-dos, etc. But I’ve always thought that a PDA would be just another expensive time sink for me. But then I came across this idea for the Hipster PDA at 43 Folders (which I bookmarked post-haste) and fell in love instantly. Just the perfect companion for my duct tape wallet! Both are homemade from cheap ingredients and exact a relatively low overhead cost. And it doesn’t beep at me or anything. Beautiful.

I prefer not to call it a “Hipster PDA” as I find the word “Hipster” to be fraught with undesired pretense. Maybe I’ll call my version a “Poor Man’s PDA” or a “Slacker PDA.” Maybe it’s my “Analog PDA.” Yeah. Well, whatever I call it, I’m already carrying one.

Word in the cubes has it that I probably won’t get the management position. Lots of applicants with three “really strong” candidates emerging from the round of interviews. No word as to whether I’m one of the “really strong” candidates. So my chances are 33% at the very possible best. Now the people around me who’ve been talking me up are trying to let me down gently, telling me not to get my hopes up.

Like I told the interviewers, if I’m right for the job, then I want it, if not, then I don’t. What I really want is to find my place. Right now my job is to take all the low-priority, long term projects that nobody else wants to do. If we could just figure out a title for that job I’d feel a little better. Because it looks like I’m going to be stuck with it for a while.

Faced with the possibility of having to become rapidly familiar with the dynamics of a group of people I do not know, and being a math geek at heart, I am intrigued by the concept of Social Network Analysis. Graph theory meets interpersonal communication theory. Here’s an online textbook I’m reading on the subject. So far I’m skeptical about how useful it is in the long run, it might provide me with a good way to organize my accumulating knowledge of a bunch of people I might be suddenly tasked to manage. Maybe.

If you want to influence a group of people, it’d be useful to know who the “hubs” and “boundary spanners” are. Maybe a SNA model could help somewhat. The idea even has it’s own academic journal.