grouperlab

June 7, 2017

Fishes and Ponds

Among academic metaphors, it is one of the more popular, even among people who don’t have a pervasive aquatic metaphor infusing their entire lab. This time of year, it’s considered often, among new grad students, new faculty, and established faculty considering a new position:

Do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond?

Figure 1. Koi experiencing a bit of Japan in Washington, DC

(Let me not leap to “big fish, big pond” territory right away.) In essence, this is a question about “fit”. Some places are major research institutions, where annual expenditures for the college of engineering or science may be measured in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Some places want to be such research institutions, but may have additional emphasis on teaching, or lesser resources available, or just aren’t as committed to the task. And other places are not research focused at all. Maybe it’s the lovely undergraduate-only institution where the entire student body and faculty and staff can fit in the lower bowl of the basketball arena of Enormous State University (which may or may not be a major research institution).

Unfortunately, this is also a question about ego, and aspiration, and social desirability. What’s a big fish? Apparently, someone who is successful at “the game” of having a large research portfolio, lots of publications, lots of students. If there’s a competition, that’s okay with them, since they’ll probably win. Maybe they thrive on competition. Maybe they like the acknowledgement of winning the award, or touting their h-index, or their success in amassing whatever it is that counts (as my friend reminded me recently) as the coin of that realm. As Depeche Mode would sing (as I was first learning that I liked this research thing), “Everything Counts in Large Amounts”.

But, let’s be clear. Not everyone wants that life, or that world, or that type of competition. That does not make them lesser creatures. I am considering the story I just heard about a successful research faculty who decided to shift to a small, undergraduate teaching institution. I am learning about the cultures of university departments where, for whatever reason, tenure is extremely difficult, or moderately straightforward, to achieve. On the other hand, some folks are learning that the constant pressure to compete for funding, for publications, for attention, is not something that feeds their soul or enhances their quality of life: the extra dollars and accolades are just not worth it.

I continue to be amazed, and a little disappointed, at how frequently this issue comes up in questions to me and to my students. Will I be upset if one of the GROUPERs goes into industry, or to a regional or teaching university, or ***shudder*** has to take a job in government? For lots of faculty at research institutions, there is only one valid career path… and it just so happens to look like the path they took, to be faculty at a research institution. I don’t believe in that assumption, and I have said so in some fairly public settings. Why? Well, it’s not sour grapes. I have come to realize, I sit in a fairly unique spot: I have spent my entire academic career at leading research institutions. But what do we mean by big, or small, and why does it count?

A pond, or a lake, or an ocean may be big or small only in comparison to other scales of reference. If you’re plankton or a piece of algae, does it really matter if you’re part of the water bloom in a tiny county park, or a county-sized bloom in an ocean? It may not influence much of your daily life in any significant way. More importantly, one of those may be outside of your range of survival conditions. If I’m a thermophile animal, what I care about is the hot spring vent, not how big the body of water is. And this leads me to the second dimension: the ways that different bodies of water differ on not just what are the components for survival, but the sorts of creatures that you might find yourself sharing the body of water with that would make one’s life better or worse.

Figure 2. Where are you, and what do you reflect?

One of the unexpected lessons of this year in Washington is that the question of fish and ponds is wrong on several major dimensions. I’m very well known in my professional society, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, or so I’m told; it’s hard for me to spend a day at a conference without seeing 25 people I know from long experience. But we’re a “small society”. Obviously, the electrical engineers or the mechanical engineers really have it going. Except… maybe not. Most undergraduate-only teaching institutions don’t have any engineering departments at all… but if they have any STEM disciplines, it’s more likely to be physics or biology or chemistry. But, even then, and even in aggregate, that may not be the ecosystem that everyone wants to swim in.

I have spent a fair amount of time this week thinking about function allocation and expertise coordination and human-machine teaming… as I have done for much of my career. And I am in Washington. For many people, there is no bigger single pond. To paraphrase a colleague from this afternoon: I am swimming in the pond of the oldest Cabinet agency of the greatest superpower on the planet, so we should be able to have some resources at our disposal. But how much of those resources are actually from an ecosystem I recognize: folks who thrive on STEM food like I do? Several people I’ve met have pointed out the same thing: actually, there is relatively little science and technology expertise within the major “halls of power” in Washington. This is not a new thing. A recent article describes the general feeling for scientists and engineers from both Congress and the White House, at their respective locales on Pennsylvania Avenue, in these terms: “Officials in Washington don’t have a real taste for hard science, and only hire scientists when they must. ‘It’s like eating your spinach before your ice cream.’” (Note: this description doesn’t even distinguish science and engineering.) I would say that this is not very flattering, or very appealing. In one sense, most of what I spend my days thinking about, and most of the people I know of as famous, are not even at the level of side conversations for perhaps 85-90% of the people in my office building. Not great feeding, in other words.

So, am I a big fish, or a small one? In this pond, my level and type of expertise is fairly unique, and others would be hard pressed to duplicate it. In fact, this pond doesn’t even know what an h-index is, and doesn’t care to. Does that make it a small pond? If the documents we write and review this month affect the policies of 70% of the world’s economy over the next 10-15 years, I wouldn’t say that is a small pond (or an exaggeration of the impact of some of these emerging technologies on the world). I’m having an effect where I am, in ways that suit me. Overall, isn’t that the most we should ask of anyone, and the most we can hope to achieve for ourselves?

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May 5, 2017

Returning to Practice

I’ve been interviewing Millennials for work.

In one sense, that is no surprise at all. Many of the students applying for graduate programs stay in the same age range. I have, by contrast, gotten older. Incoming students who were approximately my age (or older) are now the age of my children (or younger). This is the nature of the cycle of life (cue the music from “The Lion King,” which is now considered “Classic Disney”). So, why was this experience different?

First, and most important, was that I was not interviewing people for work in the Lab. These were postdoctoral fellows applicants for Department of State positions. The vast majority of them are still just a few years from their PhD dissertation, experiencing a very different world and context than I did when I was interviewing for my first faculty position. Well, that suggests another difference: I interviewed for a faculty position, and never seriously considered a postdoc. I have spent months engaged with discussions of the role of scientists and engineers engaged in Science Diplomacy, and the interplay of innovation and policy—quite frankly, the education I had come to Washington to have in this very interesting and challenging period. These folks aren’t being recruited to work on my favorite projects, or to have exactly the sort of background I would like a GROUPER to have… but there was still a request from my unit chief for what sorts of people to identify in the stack of resumes and personal statements.

Signs of life.

I was starting to wonder about what that would look like in this context, and in fact, I was starting to question if my time away from the university had left me cynical or unable to see beyond my own narrow daily priorities. Maybe it was a broader sense of unease with the sudden transition from a snowstorm in late March to 90 degree days in late April. Where and how and when was I operating? (I had come to feel a certain sense of stress and negative anticipation regarding my transition back to Purdue, starting in late March when I was requested to provide new course syllabi for my Fall classes. There are new opportunities for next academic year, but after eight months here in Washington, I am neither ready to start right back in on the academic world, nor think in terms of another full annual cycle of activity here.)

And yet, my unit chief wanted me to not only be involved in the interviews, but to craft a few questions for them. It was, as I have said before, a bit different to operate in support of others, instead of being my own “Principal,” but that is part of my learning these days. I’ve also been learning a lot about the differences in cultures of science, and hearing about the distinct experiences of what I have come to call, “Millennial Scholars” (those who may be part of the generation born in 1985 or later, but also have completed their advanced STEM degree programs since 2010). I’ve even produced a few of those people myself, but I already knew enough not to look for people just like Ashley or Karim or Marissa or Jeff (or those who are in the lab now). The discussions in the AAAS meetings in Boston and Washington still had an immediacy and curiosity to me: I was meeting so many people interested in a concept, science policy, that I had long thought was an oxymoron. Why were they interested in this? What new was going on?

What are the challenges and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses, of these Millennial Scholars?

This is, in my experience with the lab, a “signs of life” question. Signs of life it had become a part of my thinking at a time where spring is definitely upon us in Washington. I’m walking much more around the city again, and over the past few weeks, I have been able to enjoy the cherry blossoms and new plants and warm weather. In other words, “signs of life returning” was part of my daily experience.

Figure 1. Signs of life: Tulips at the bus stop

The answers were also informative, as well as reminders of an earlier age. There were those who seemed to have trouble thinking about themselves, and their colleagues, in such a comparative context. However, this compared to several who actually commented about the relative lack of a sense of historical comparison as a weakness of Millennials. What was another weakness? There were several comments about the ease with which new information and new activities and experiences were available, leading to a sense of being dabblers in a variety of skills (“jacks / jills of all trades, masters of none”). In fact, that ease of collecting and novelty even extended to the strengths and weaknesses of networking. Although the world of embassies and interagency discussions and think tank receptions clearly indicates a value to the work of engaging with others… there is a difference between engaging in an effective, distributed knowledge network, and collecting friends and likes as a way of keeping score.

I found myself curiously replaying one conversation in my mind, about the concept that Millennials were more interested in finding ways to align their actions and employment with their passions. Now remember, I lived in Cambridge, MA and California during the 1980s startup crazes, where people were all about passion. I heard the Flower Children talking about living a life of meaning and service. And, most importantly, I have learned how much my career as a professor is actually well aligned with my passion for exploration and sharing what I found.

Figure 2. Albert sharing a sense of passion. Maybe science diplomacy was never so far from my thinking after all. (At the National Academies Keck Center, 500 E St NW)

Was this really different? And then I heard an interesting alternative take on this thought. “Well, if I can’t rely on a pension or Social Security to be around, there is no reason for me to trade boredom for security.” From that discussion, I was transported back to the first few times I taught the course Sociotechnical Systems at Wisconsin. I had known about two different models of work and income as “covenants”: income and status as a way of demonstrating success and favor, or work as a demonstration of one’s passion and artisan’s skills. It took discussion and debate in class for me to learn that there was a large population with a third approach: work was something one does to get enough income to spend the rest of one’s time doing what one really preferred to do. Apparently, lots of people live that way, whether they’re working second shift at the auto parts store, or vice president of global distribution for the auto parts company. I have not chosen to live that way, and I can’t really imagine doing something I hate just to have the income to do what I love, later. Is that what others were assuming we were all doing? Or were others doing this a lot more than I was ever aware?

I felt like I had come full circle in the discussion, and my awareness of my own experience as a young scholar. I am convinced that there are confusions in each generation, not sensing the range or intensity of experience from when prior generations were young and emerging, like new plants bursting into the sunlight and struggling against snow and wind and dangerous frost. I can appreciate it much more now, because I have been in both places, and I have come to feel them both. I am not yet done with the intensity of feeling and learning. And yes, I am still pleased to take a moment on a Spring day and feel the sensual joy of lamb’s ear as I walk from meeting to office or home. Because, even after a great enlightenment, a return to practice and repeat of small things still has value.

Figure 3. Lamb’s ear on 19th St NW. A good reminder of small lessons.

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April 9, 2017

… For Government Work

Although it was not that cold this winter, and we actually didn’t get a real snowstorm until after the Equinox, the real emergence of Spring here in DC allows me more time outside to appreciate my experience here and what I am learning during this Fellowship. There are lots of features for me to appreciate on a sunny day, such as the cherry blossoms in bloom, or the re-awakening of the flowers in the courtyards, along my walking and bus riding routes. Even my senses and sense of pace have been involved. (In late March, I had surgery to remove a polyp that was taking over my nose and sinuses. That forced a few days off, and a slower pace of activity while I was recovering. Now, my sense of smell, already acute, is coming back online with even more sensitivity and range.) It’s no longer the “time is money” or “he who hesitates is lost” lessons of childhood forcing me to rush to everything. It’s April, and literally, it’s time to stop and smell the blossoms.

During one of these sunny, warm days, I came to contemplate the impact of my experience at the Department of State on my sense of *self*. The look and sound of BSC in a suit and dress shoes, striding with purpose to his office at Main State, evokes a certain set of descriptions that aren’t really the same as BSC in a tweed jacket and cords and sneakers, keys jangling, walking around West Lafayette. Oh, and don’t forget the shades. A friend had asked me to send a picture of me in work mode, and so I did, wearing the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarers (they’re actually a vintage pair, with my own prescription inserted), standing in front of the Department of State sign (and taking care not to use an angle or direction that would disturb the Diplomatic Security folks)…

There were two responses to this picture. My friend commented that I wasn’t smiling, and looked upset and grim. (No, it was a combination of pain from the doctor checking on my nose, and just thinking hard about what I needed to do.) So, I took another picture, with a smile and a different background (the National Academies building across the street):

The second response was my own. For somewhat surprising reasons, I recognized in that picture a reminder of my research career. Compared to many psychologists and engineers, I spend a lot of time doing “fieldwork,” including a research method known as “participant observation” (where one spends time “embedded” in another culture or organization, working alongside of the regular people living that other life, in order to learn what’s important to them and how they come to view things—and not make foolish errors about what designs will or won’t work for them, or what their daily challenges are). Of course, cultural anthropologists might laugh at my calling this “fieldwork”: I’m not living in a hut somewhere 15 miles from the nearest paved road. But it does mean that much of my data and thinking comes from talking to people who are not me, and don’t have my world view—they’re not designers or researchers about systems, they’re performers in, or users of, the systems that I study. They may or may not reflect on how and why they do what they do. I’m fundamentally an outsider to those aspects of their organizational and social culture. (This is something that I’ve experienced for most of my life. More on that later.)

That insight quickly spawned a new one: the Department of State is the third federal government agency in which I have functioned as participant observer since I began my graduate research career over 30 years ago, for weeks or months at a time. My prior agencies were the National Park Service (NPS), and NASA. What is profoundly interesting about that collection of agencies is that they are profoundly mission driven, and have a great deal of unique visibility. (It’s said that a former Secretary of State defined their job, and the role of the Department in general, as “explaining the U.S. to the rest of the world, and explaining the rest of the world to the U.S.”) NPS is there to conserve and protect our natural and cultural heritage for future generations. NASA brings the universe to us, and takes us further out into the universe. (Yeah, I want more of that.)

BSC with NPS, 1989

BSC at NASA, 2001

I recognized as well that these are very romantic, idealistic views of the world and what we should be doing in and with it. Managing occupational safety, or confirming regulations over drug approvals, or ensuring people pay their taxes on time are in fact really important features of living in a complex society that is also a safe and healthy one. The folks who work there even have their official seals and logos and organizational cultures. However, I dare say that they do not capture the cultural imagination and romantic vision of the following:

a park ranger in their hat or baseball cap hiking in the backcountry, explaining the meadow flowers and the remnants of people who lived in the area 200-400 years ago;
an astronaut in their space suit, or flight controller in mission operations, or engineer or scientist analyzing data that enhances our exploration and understanding of the solar system;
a diplomat flashing their official passport in some far-flung airport, or at an embassy or ambassador’s reception, engaging in the gentle statecraft that enables a broader, richer, more peaceful world.

The challenge for romantic idealists is that they can get caught in their ideals, writing scripts for the movies that play in their own heads. I find myself doing this a lot, and maybe it’s a remnant of having a very vivid, broad imagination as a kid, combined with living in and between multiple cultures just a few miles from each other in Philadelphia. Not surprisingly, I caught myself a few days ago in such a “movie script” moment: I was writing a document, and imagining the cheers of a crowd as a “VERY SENIOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL” finishes an announcement and walks off the stage, shaking my hand and thanking me for putting together such an excellent policy. (It’s kind of like the scene in the movie, “A Christmas Story,” where Ralphie imagines an enraptured teacher marking a series of “+” after the “A” grade on his essay. I’m actually not that fond of the movie, but given the number of times it plays each December, it’s hard to avoid seeing the scenes again and again.) That is a nice movie scene, but in truth, it’s very rare that a solo author of a policy really gets the policy enacted, or their work acknowledged, in such a direct way.

When I get myself out of the movie and start to re-examine the real world (even the biographical movies, such as the recent hit, “Hidden Figures,” are not piecewise accurate, nor were they filmed in real time), I really need to bring myself back down to the ground and face the harsh reality… or is that a mistake, too? Consider the list above. I have been that ranger, and worked directly with them, working in the backcountry and the visitors’ center. I have been that engineer, working with those astronauts and flight controllers and flying in the vomit comet. And just this week, I was that diplomat, working to support the international relationship as a member of a country desk and enjoying a conversation at the Ambassador’s residence.

Am I enjoying my experience? Do I think it’s worth it? I keep getting asked that question, and the answer is even more true now than it was six months ago: without a doubt, this is one of the most important adventures and educational experiences I could have had at this stage of my life and career. These are lessons I could never learn if I stayed in the lab, no matter how brilliant or talented or hard working I might be there. The realities of these experiences themselves are amazing and precious and valuable beyond my ability to fully recognize in the moment. (Yes, it was ideas that I observed and learned and developed at NPS and NASA that have influenced the papers I’ve shared and work that I’ve been able to present while I’ve been here at State.) There is yet more for me to learn, and do, and integrate, as I continue to experience a world and career filled with opportunity and danger and change.

Not bad, as they say… for government work.

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February 10, 2017

Inertial Damping

I have been thinking a lot about damping lately. To be specific, inertial damping. You know, that aspect of your hybrid electric car’s regenerative braking system that recharges your batteries while you stop? Or the gyroscopic properties of a bicycle wheel that keeps you moving forward instead of falling over when you turn? Yeah, that stuff. People think about that all the time, don’t they? No?

This is what happens when a geek starts talking about their internal thought processes, and especially since I recently talked about postcards from the future, maybe I do need to explain my terms. Apparently, one of the first things I need to do is to explain that I am not talking about “inertial dampening,” which, as far as I can tell, is a science fiction plot device highly likely to get yourself into a fight with physicists for dissing their man Newton. That’s not my focus today. I’m trying to take a real physics and engineering term, and see how application of that term in a complex human setting helps me design, analyze, or improve sociotechnical systems in a more effective way… because that’s something that engineers do.

Actually, I started thinking about damping a lot based on a question that someone asked me at the end of the Jefferson Science Fellowship (JSF) lecture I gave on January 24. (For reference, the point of this lecture is to summarize the general area of work that each Fellow does, both for the policy audience of the State Department and Agency for International Development, and for the scientific audience of the National Academies.) I spoke about information flow and distributed expertise (because that’s something I do), including the challenges of appropriate coordination during event response for either physical (civil unrest, natural disaster) or cyber-physical (network or security operations) events. I got quite a few questions, as well as invitations for additional discussions with various groups across the State Dept. This was a very good feeling, in that it gave me the sense that some people could finally hear some of what I have been trying to study and communicate for years.

However, that does come with a price: when one of those people asks a question, can I give an answer that they understand and know what to do with it? In essence, that was the challenge when someone asked me a damping question. (They didn’t really ask it as a damping question, but since I am likely to see lots of things as connected feedback control systems, it’s not surprising that I heard it as one.)

If you have a large bureaucratic organization which lives on sending lots of messages to lots of people for their opinion and approval (aka “clearance”), don’t you run the risk of taking too long to respond to emerging, critical timeline events?

That’s a very reasonable question. And it takes me immediately to thoughts about damping. Imagine your new event as some sort of input function. However, the event isn’t always purely evident immediately, and it doesn’t just go from off to on instantaneously. There might be multiple events that may or may not be related to each other. You want your response (output function) to match the demands of the input function. The engineering version of this problem is one of “critical damping”. If your damping ratio is too high (over 1), your response to the new event is very slow. Although you may never over-respond to the event, it takes you a long time to actually respond to the event, and in fact, you may fail to do what needs to be done within the deadlines (people need fresh water and shelter and warmth within a matter of hours to days, or they die). We tend to assume that faster is always better. However, there is a limit / problem with that, which we now understand from the world of social media. Someone can respond *too quickly* with *too little* information, and be unable to tell the difference between the actual event that needs to be responded, and some distractor or misinformation. (Remember, I’m not trying to be political here, but since the lecture was just a few days after the Inauguration, I may have made a reference to a social media event or two.) This would be an example of having a damping ratio that is too low (close to 0), which is a different problem. (You might ask what is the inertial property here. Well, I have talked in the past about knowledge as “little inertial balls of expertise,” in the sense that expertise allows you to devote energy to efficient processing of the world and move to where you need to go in the future.) People going off on their first impression without checking sources or others’ understanding would be an “underdamped” response (damping ratio too low), which can be just as bad (but in a different way ) than a bureaucratic, “overdamped” response (damping ratio too high) that takes too long and doesn’t want to risk or challenge anything for fear of being wrong.

In essence, an effective inertial damper takes energy that comes at you, with bounces and noise and possible confusion that you don’t want to respond too much to, and turn it into energy that works for you in a time frame that makes for the tasks you need to do. That sounds great, and it’s a very interesting problem to work on. Perhaps the additional challenge is, How do I apply this to my own life? As much as I enjoy a string of fist-pumping, high-fiving successes in a non-athletic context, there is the challenge of appropriately damped responses when shifting from State Dept. to Purdue stuff. Reminder to Barrett: it’s not good to try to do two full-time jobs simultaneously for long periods, and I am feeling now the stress of trying to complete a large number of Purdue (or Indiana Space Grant) activities after spending all day working on Japan Desk activities. In fact, that stress might be better described as hysteresis, rather than damping. (Discuss.) More accurately, damping is the ability to take the frustration of emails and news feed updates and channel that energy into productive work, such as a book chapter, or journal manuscript, or even a blog entry. Like this one.

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January 7, 2017

Tangential Perspectives on Organization Learning

I always knew what I wanted to do: anything in the space program. Getting a job offer to come to work at NASA Mission Control in Houston was beyond my wildest dream. To tell the truth, I would have paid them to let me come and sweep out the floors. But it worked out much […]

via The Road Not Taken — Wayne Hale’s Blog

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January 7, 2017

Weekend Balance #2: Cassandra’s Postcards

Curiously, the concert that I left work to attend last night was something I discovered almost exactly one week earlier (even to the same clock time). The group I went to see was Black Violin, two classically trained violinists who are a) black, from Ft. Lauderdale; b) insistent on thinking outside of the box; and c) have a strong alternative vision of how the world can be different than it is, beyond existing stereotypes or interpretations. (Yes, the highlighted words and links are in fact the names of their albums. Go listen.) Last Friday, I was on the train to spend the New Year’s holiday in my hometown of Philadelphia with friends. I had put on the music just for some simple enjoyment, and found myself transformed and emotionally intense and resonant. (Yes, it’s also when I found out about their concern in Washington, DC last night.)

Black Violin, with the National Symphony Orchestra, Feb 6, 2017

One of my favorite descriptions of my approach to the world was provided by a GROUPER a couple of years ago, during a 1:1 meeting at a conference. (I can still see the design of the French patisserie / café in my memory.) The description was that I live part of my existence in the future, but the nice part is that I “send postcards”. This is a delightful image, but it hides a painful and problematic truth: not everyone can receive “postcards from the future,” or even know that they exist. I used to think this was a simple problem of better explanation, but I have had to come to the recognition that there is more at play. An alternative metaphor comes from my son, who once made a surprised and surprising revelation once when watching me dance to a piece of music to which I resonated very strongly. He admitted that he had thought that I simply didn’t have a very good sense of rhythm. Then, as he got older and started thinking more seriously about music composition and production as a career, he listened to more music, more often, at a deeper level. His statement at a friend’s house was with a type of confused awe: “You’re trying to dance to all of the notes, not just the normal beat.”

One of my favorite and most inspirational books of my life is called Cyteen, for a number of reasons (including some too complex to go into here). I am particularly taken by one of the descriptions of a major protagonist’s sense of their life’s work… that, if they are devoted and dedicated to their passion and their gifts and their uniqueness, because of and not simply despite their unique or alternative make-up, they may have the opportunity to someday speak their “Word,” their major contribution to history’s arc. While Speaking Words to History sounds pretty cool (at least for my sense of doing what I was built to do), it comes at a major, even profound cost. I am drawn most to the myth of Cassandra, who was cursed for defying the god Apollo (isn’t that usually how things like that turn out?) by being able to see and foretell the future, but being unable to alter it, and being doomed to have others not believe her when she told them. (I have to hand it to Apollo, though: that’s a pretty exquisite form of sadistic torture. But really, just because she turned you down for a date? I mean, you’re a god and all…)

Poor Cassandra. (From Wikipedia page, public domain image: Cassandra (metaphor)

It’s really hard to explain to GROUPERs the process of finding and sending postcards from the future, and more importantly, I don’t think it’s a proper thing for me to insist that they do so. For nearly all of the students I’ve met, it’s not the right lesson to be teaching, and there are certainly a wide range of valid and important jobs that one can take on without invoking divine curses. Having someone who can simply receive the postcard, and translate part of it, is worth a lot. For example, our current experiences of politics, local and national security, and even the nature of honest communication is based on elements of situational context, information cues, and media characteristics of different information and communication technology channels. We’re asking about tolerance and acceptance of new communications media in various organizations. That sounds like a really great research project, especially when combining new forms of social messaging as various types of an advanced, or evolved, model of email (written electronic communication), or other group interactions (with or without audio and video capabilities). It might still be considered a bit ahead of the curve, or timely, because we’re in the midst of it now. But consider a study of organizational acceptance of alternative media channels conducted in 1992, fully 25 years ago. That’s before there were any iPhones, or web browsers, or T1 lines (or many of my students). No graphical email or tweets with emojis. Do the questions even make sense? For most people, not really. (At least that’s the memory of reviewer comments for the Taha and Caldwell, 1992 submission to the Human Factors Society conference.)

Back to the train last Friday. Imagine me trying to dance to all of the notes as the train pulls into (and then out of) Philadelphia as I continue my journey. The lights of Philadelphia’s Boathouse row are still holiday festive. I am crying my resonance to the music playing in my ears. I finally feel like a type of homecoming has occurred, one that I had sought in vain for nearly 40 years. In the midst of this, an insight. Normally, I wouldn’t tell anyone, or I’d write it up piecewise in journal papers. Not this time. I’m going to show you the postcard here.

View #1: The Spectrogram

A few years ago, Jeremi London (not the actor) and I worked on a model of STEM education based on the concept that what we in fact try to teach engineers in order to be functional, productive engineers is not a single thing, but a large matrix of skills, habits, attributes, and techniques. Different courses supposedly load on different matrix elements, and different students have different strengths and weaknesses in those elements. I visualize this as a type of dynamic matrix of peaks and valleys, as you might get in a audio spectrogram. What we might think of as intelligence or skill or functionality is actually an aggregation of those peaks and valleys across that range of matrix elements: a person’s functionality is, generally, how well their peaks map onto the things they need to do on a daily basis. Zero functioning is actually hard to imagine, and if most of the population was in fact functioning at zero, we might not even see it as a relevant matrix attribute element to consider. (If someone had a peak there, would we even think about it as a peak? Consider the question of tetrachromats.) For the sake of analysis and comparison, it’s important to both retain the spectrogram as a matrix, and also consider a simplified representation of it. You could call it IQ or something. Let’s just describe it as the determinant of the functionality matrix.

View #2: The Bowl

Some of you know that I have a deep, longstanding, and personal interest in questions of neurodiversity: creating models of acceptance, encouragement, and tolerance for people with different sets of skills and forms of excellence. (This isn’t just a “feel good” about diversity and tolerance as a moral issue. This is about benefitting from excellence where it is found, including functionality peaks due to alternative wiring that represent “signs of life” not common in the general population. Well, if you’re training PhD students, that’s not a bad thing to look for: higher, and more distinct, functionality peaks than exist in the general population. After all, not that many folks get PhDs.)

So, the more your spectrogram pattern of peaks and valleys differs from the standard version (not just higher peaks, but peaks in different places), the less “standard” you are. (Standard, in this case, represents not just the population norm of the matrix determinants, but the modal matrix pattern.) In an extreme case, someone with a whole lot of peaks in places where standard people are close to zero, and very low functioning where standard people have peaks, would find it exceptionally hard or impossible to communicate with standard folks at all. (The concept of “communication” here might work as a multi-dimensional convolution integral, or a multiplication of functions against each other. You don’t worry about that just now, unless you really want to.) The more non-standard a person is, the further their pattern is from the standard pattern, and the more overall capability and functionality it might take to compensate for the mismatch, and be seen as equivalently functional as the modal, standard person. If we considered a function where the matrix determinant was the height, and the difference in pattern was a radius (different types of different patterns would be angles, so we’re in polar coordinates), the “bowl” would be a surface of “equivalent perceived functionality,” with an edge being at a place where someone, no matter how many peaks they had or how profoundly high those peaks are, could not interact with standard folks well enough to be seen as functional. (So, you can’t see in our standard visual spectrum? Well, we think you’re blind, even if you have a great visual experience of radio waves. Too bad if you can hear and sing the vibrations of the planet. We work in 200 – 4000 Hz, thank you, and if you can’t hear or produce in that range, we won’t hear what each other is saying. Literally.)

View #3: The Disk

Another of the elements we have been playing with in the lab gets the shorthand description of “The Six Dimensions of expertise,” with a corollary of “the disk”. As we described the matrix above, there are lots of different ways we could organize the elements of the matrix of ways people are good at different things. They may be socially skilled and charismatic; they may be great with tools and interfaces; they may enjoy structured rules and processes; they may enjoy mathematical analysis and quantitative exploration. There are other ways to slice skills up into different collections, but there’s been a lot of work recently into “four-quadrant” cognitive styles inventories that are used in organizational assessment. For the purposes of this discussion, all this tells us is where in the spectrogram the matrix elements of your peaks and valleys are likely to be found. Useful, if we want to do systematic comparisons of different patterns of functioning (and convolutions of functionality for communication or information alignment). Which is the “right” four-quadrant model? That’s not a proper question; it’s kind of like asking what is the “right” set of compass directions. We agree on one for the purposes of discussion, even though there isn’t even alignment between magnetic and geographic compass directions, and it’s even possible that we could have a situation where magnetic south points towards geographic north.

View #4 = Function (#1:#3)

What I’ve described for each of the views above is far from a standard description of how we consider psychological concepts of intelligence, personality, functionality, or cognitive diversity. Lots of researchers toil very intensely in intelligence assessment or engineering aptitude evaluations, or the genetic contributions to Asperger’s syndrome, or refinements of MMPI or Myers-Briggs inventories (to use examples of standard questions in each of the three views). Mathematically, however, what I have laid out can be combined (although it’s extremely hard to draw the picture in three dimensions). Imagine the spectrogram matrix (#1) of a “standard average person” (both in terms of normative / neurotypical wiring rather than autistic spectrum, and in terms of average intelligence), where the matrix is organized according to a four-quadrant disc model where different capabilities are ordered within quadrants with respect to their relative frequency and strength in the population. Take the determinant of that matrix (note that this result should be independent of how you order the matrix elements). We’ll now define that “value” of the bottom of the bowl as “standard normative functioning in the modal pattern”.

Whose Project is This?

Is this what the lab is currently working on? My goodness, no. I would NEVER assign this, in totality, as a project for a student thesis. It requires significant revisions of three or four major disciplines, as well as some advanced mathematics for the methodologies, and new forms of data collection on thousands or millions of persons on a set of variables we don’t even define well, let alone currently measure or collect. But, for the first time, I have been willing to describe a panoramic postcard of this type in a public venue. Why? For years, I was worried that lots of other people would understand, and jump on the problems, and start working on them, and that my best contributions would be left behind, meaningless and trivial. Then I started to think that this would be considered foolish and ridiculous, unless and until I took on myself the responsibility of being able to explain it better so that “most people” could get it. But, Words Spoken to History are not widely understood, even for years or decades, and the measure of the mark on the tree of knowledge is not how many people applaud when the mark is made. Galileo learned this lesson, as did Leonardo DaVinci, and Marie Curie, and Rachel Carson (and Ariane Emory). Am I comparing myself to them? No, not even close. I’m just trying to Speak my Words.

Thank you, C. J. Cherryh, for the concept of sets, and A-E, for the introduction.

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January 7, 2017

Weekend Balance #1: Learning the Right Things

Approximately 5:30 Friday (yesterday) evening, I told my unit chief that I was headed out for the evening and weekend. That was not only okay, it was expected; I’d been heading into work 11 hours earlier to work on a very active set of reports from the day’s activity in Japan, which I summarized and sent out to our colleagues. (Ah, the joy of nearly 24 hour coverage due to time zone differences: the Japanese Embassy in Tokyo starts to wind down about the same time that the first folks in Washington are getting on the Metro to start their work day.) He surprised me by encouraging me not to think about work for a couple of days as I went to a concert and planned for a quiet time at home. Well, those who know me will recognize an immediate disconnect: Barrett to not think about work for whole days at a time?

Well, that is a challenge these days, for multiple reasons. It’s actually something that we discussed in a couple of our (distributed, online) lab meetings last fall, about finding appropriate forms of balance and mechanisms for taking care of one’s internal resources. Now, it would have rung hollow if I were to take 3-4 hours on Christmas Day to write up a blog entry on work-life balance. (Don’t worry. I spent much of the day with a roaring fire, computer games, and lots of cookies.)

When I woke up this (Saturday) morning, I was looking forward to coming out to the kitchen to a waiting blanket of snow, to make some tea and settle in for a quiet day… of typing up notes and responding to Purdue emails and designing new projects. That is a day off? Well, it is a day away from reading media reports of Japan – Korea tensions or considering meeting preparations for trilateral engagement. But on the other hand, the truth is that I have somehow set myself to try to manage two full-time jobs. How does that really work?

McPherson Square, with the first snow of the season: a good day for learning.

One of the first recognitions is the difference between what I want and what is, and if there is a gap between the two, what do I want / choose to do about it? The truth is, I specifically chose the Jefferson Science Fellowship opportunity as a unique experience to expose me to activity and opportunity that I could not get in my past patterns at Purdue, with a few grad students and departmental responsibilities and a few obligations to the state of Indiana. Those aren’t bad things, but there was a gap that needed to be addressed. (When I return to Purdue, there will be another gap, because for me to return to exactly the set of activities I left this past August would be a waste of this experience, no matter how familiar, or comfortable, or well-prepared I am for them.)

I am seeing this recognition in another context when I think about the experiences of my students. To be here, in Washington DC, is more than anything an experience of learning. And sometimes, learning takes up all of my time: it is one of my primary job tasks. Learning is also a task that takes focus, and discipline, and patience. I’m not just talking about the process of collecting a bunch of facts for later regurgitation, which is what most students think of in the context of taking a class for a grade. I mean a deeper learning, about context and discernment and recognizing what aspect of this pattern is important, and real, and valuable for me to integrate into a larger whole.

Well, that can be a process of life discipline, which then applies to everything. Learning is about noticing how I balance on one leg during morning exercise, or how well I could run through the cold last night to catch the bus or rail, or… how I improve the management of the lab.

It’s often been suggested that I have a casual approach to managing the lab. Actually, this is not true. I could insist on clocked hours, minimum amounts of in-person time in the lab, weekly reports, and any number of other rules. Some people actually have de-selected the lab because I don’t have lots of those rules. As I experience this year as an immersion in this bureaucracy, I recognize that it’s not that students don’t learn anything if I impose such rules; however, it’s clear that they can easily learn the wrong things. Did you reflect on the task, or simply put in the time? Did you embrace the difficulty as a form of instruction, or simply as a burden? Do you examine the situation as a system with gaps in design or execution of objective functions, or just complain about how “they” don’t care about (fill in the blank with whatever you feel is important from your local perspective)? Do you even think about what the various objective functions are?

As a result, I now have a much deeper appreciation of what choices are being made when one of the members of the lab considers taking on a full time job at various stages of her/his graduate professional progression. These are not trivial decisions, and there are various reasons why someone may need to choose to work at a job during one’s graduate career. And I’m not casual in my feelings about this. But I need the student to learn the right lessons, and I have learned (with both students, and children, and other organizational participants) that the right lesson comes from a well-designed combination of the teacher, the student, and the lesson (there is an interesting book on this called The Seven Laws of Teaching, originally published in 1884. Read widely, question deeply.)

One of the lessons is that getting a PhD is about learning to think about questions, and developing answers, that others have not done so. If you can’t work your way all the way through your own dissertation topic and method and analysis and interpretation, you really don’t deserve the PhD. Yes, your advisor can help you, but if you need your advisor to give you all of the steps, then it’s not your PhD. (Thanks, I already have my own, and I don’t feel the need for another.) Another lesson is that very few people outside of academia, or those who do not have a PhD already, really understand what that first lesson is about. There is just a different way of thinking and working going on. Not bad, not good, just different. So, if you’re used to approaching the world with one set of priorities and tools, and you move to another place where people don’t approach the world that way, you’re going to have to shift back and forth… and most people don’t shift back and forth among ways of thinking that well.

On the other hand, given how much I think about rules and lessons and managing and studying humans for a living, if there is a rule or insight or lesson I try to share, it’s usually not just for the sake of the rule. (See above.) That’s not casual either. If there is a disagreement between myself and a student on a dissertation topic, or methodological approach, or insight available from a course, there is a possibility that the student is right and is operating based on information not available to me. (In other words, they are good and working in an alternative domain.) However, one observation of learning the right vs. wrong lesson is when I see students trying to fulfill the letter of a rule, but miss the spirit; or try to avoid the rule because it’s not ideal or fun or convenient (or “fair”?); or argue with me about how my accumulated experience is not relevant for a particular case. Again, there may be reasons why any of those is correct. But, to be honest, that’s not likely, and what concerns me more is, what lesson is the student learning or trying to execute?

So, as I move forward through 2017, there are lots more lessons to learn, and quite a few gaps to examine and determine how I might want to resolve them. I admit that I am nowhere near content with my resolution of how to perform both Purdue vs J Desk jobs ideally. (One lesson is, I really want to do this J Desk job really well, because that is the priority and opportunity available to, and surrounding, me now. I care about the Purdue version / job, but it’s hard for me to do that full time too, and still care for my health and sleep and eat properly. So it slips in priority right now… but I know that’s only for a year, not for an indefinite shift as a career. That’s a lesson also for the students.)

Lessons are, in fact, about resolving gaps—not just gaps of factual knowledge, but gaps of how experience can affect interaction with the world. I continue to explore how to find the right gaps, and resolve them in good and effective ways, to solve the right problems. That’s a fairly comforting and happy thought for me as an engineer. And although we didn’t get as much snow as I might have hoped, I can improve my recognition of what gaps were most important for me to close today.

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December 10, 2016

Icons and Orbits

Yesterday became a reminder of the special experience that this year has become. I didn’t really plan on it, but as they say, I was in the neighborhood. In the nature of adventures, that’s what made the exploration even more memorable and valuable.

On Friday morning, I had the opportunity to watch the launch of the Japanese H-II HTV-6 cargo transfer vehicle to the International Space Station from JAXA’s Washington DC Headquarters. Of course, this was a special privilege to be able to share the excitement with the U.S. office of JAXA; I was also honored that the staff was able to find a place for me to attend. I’m not sure they initially understood my enthusiasm for the launch as a rocket scientist, and not just a representative of the State Department, but after some discussions of orbital approach velocities and the functions of the GC, PAO, and PHALCON consoles in the ISS, I think my excitement was clearly interpreted as longstanding and real. Having completed that activity, and then walking over to my office at the State Dept., it was time for some research.

I’m supposed to finish a book chapter on aerospace human factors, and most of my references are back in Indiana. So, the thinking went, where’s the next best place? Although NASA Headquarters is also nearby, it was easy to pick up the bus to take me to the National Air & Space Museum (NASM), where I knew I could take some pictures and take some notes from one of the books in the museum shop. Upon entering the main hall, though, I was frozen in place. Even now, trying to write up this entry, my emotions threaten to get the best of me. The voices whispered to me from the ages and the vehicles:

Godspeed, John Glenn.

The children playing at the interactive wall couldn’t hear the voices. Maybe not yet.

Figure 1: Children at the Air and Space Museum interactive video wall

Of course, I couldn’t hear the voices either, the first time the words were spoken into the radio and broadcast. (I existed on February 20, 1962, but just barely. I wasn’t born until that September.) I remember learning them later, as part of the lesson of where bravery and commitment and ingenuity and perseverance could take us. One of the images on the wall was an iconic photo of Glenn with his Mercury capsule, where he would hear the voice and become the first American to orbit the earth. The New York Times had that iconic photo on its front page yesterday:

glenn-obit-1-blog427

Figure 2: John Glenn with Friendship 7, from New York Times story

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/12/08/us/glenn-obit-1/glenn-obit-1-blog427.jpg

But the power of the moment came a few minutes later, as I realized: it’s here. Friendship 7, just a few paces away. Surprisingly, there were only a few people there, providing me more than enough time to feel the prick of tears, appreciate the bouquet of memorial flowers, and recognize the sacred touch to my core.

Figure 3: Friendship 7 at NASM, with bouquets.

For years, I had thought that I was supposed to be like John Glenn. I wanted to be an astronaut, no? And there he was, not a fictional creation, but a real person. That’s achievable, right? That’s the model of what an astronaut can and should be? Well, not quite. Even the other Mercury astronauts didn’t live up to the image of John Glenn, a story of love and good behavior as an icon that only pushes down further on the scales of history. That’s not what or who I am, though I deeply honor someone who could be so completely that person: even meeting him years later, well after being Senator Glenn and the crew member responsible for the Space Shuttle moniker “Discovery 7”, I had a sense that he was just being himself. And yet there is a lesson in there for me, even if I cannot be that person.

In lab meeting this past week, GROUPERs and I discussed the future of the lab, and what would best achieve the goals I have for myself and the remainder of my career. In essence, my query and fear was over a lack of effect or impact. And yet, I can recognize that my best work is done when I am most devoted to doing what I am built to do, what lives at the depths of my core. There is a lot I “can” do, in the sense that I have a range of skills and aptitudes. But just because I can do it, that doesn’t mean that is what I must do. For some tasks, not only are there others better suited for it, but I am not ideally suited to do it; it would take away from what I am best designed to do. I wasn’t really ready for what I heard next (but I want to let you know that I am learning to hear these voices, too).

GROUPER doesn’t recruit in a standard way. It’s not about ranking applicants on the basis of grade point and GRE scores. It’s about detecting “signs of life,” as I describe it. But, from the other side, that of the students who thrive best, there seems to be something else. It’s about someone who listens, and cares, and is passionately able and willing to alter the trajectory of one’s life. That is something I love to do, burn to do. It’s not the most lucrative choice, or the one with the most fame or adoration associated. How many people have I affected in this way? All of my estimates are too low. I undercount my effect in the lab now. I undercount it among the lab alumni (but maybe I should start coming to visit you, just for a day or two, and have another conversation with you and those who you think might be good for me to talk to), and among the students in class who go about their lives in some different way because of something they saw, or heard, or felt. In more mature consideration, I realize that the real reward is to be doing what I need to be doing for its own sake, not because of the external acknowledgements or rewards.

Doing what one was built to do, out of a sense of duty to a broader purpose… a passionate life. Defining one’s work, and one’s job, differently than just being based on an income, but by being able to touch others and having left the world better. That’s perhaps not a common framing of holding, or doing, one’s job… but common or not, this sense of purpose was part of Glenn’s holding a job. Doing what Glenn did, because he did it, isn’t the point. Doing what I do, because it is what I should be doing, is.

All the flags are at half staff today. But I don’t feel like I’ve lost someone. I feel like I’ve gained. I welcome the reminders, the tears and the passion, and most of all, the voices.

Godspeed, John Glenn.

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November 26, 2016

Now That You’ve Caught the Car…

A year ago, when I finally decided that I did want to do the Jefferson Science Fellowship program, I said I wanted an adventure experience, unlike anything I would likely have back on campus. I said that I wanted a front-row seat for the challenge and complexity of governmental transition. I wanted to learn about the language of statecraft. Well, I hadn’t imagined that it would be like this. But of course, that is the nature of great adventures.

I came into work today, the day after Thanksgiving, not because I was too work obsessed to stay home, but because we need some coverage at the desk. For most of the world, this is just another work day. Who knows what might be happening? There are news stories about various Asian governments—how do they affect my science and technology portfolio? Has the President-elect selected a nominee for Secretary? Are there any more earthquake aftershocks affecting eastern Japan? Yes, this is exactly what it is to be embedded in a regional bureau of a high-profile international diplomatic alliance. And whether or not I knew it, that is what I was asking to learn.

The image I’ve had this week is that of a dog, just at the moment of catching the car it has been chasing, suddenly recognizing its success and now forced to ask a fundamental (even existential) question: Now what do I do? With a little extra time today, I was able to find some versions of exactly that image. I would like to say that it’s just coincidence that the contexts of the images are cars and politics, but I can’t really promise that. I do know that one of the nicer (apolitical) images does come from a blog that extols the pleasures of driving Porsches with manual transmissions.

catchcar1

http://pedrosboard.com/read.php?7,40968,40994

I cannot disagree with that philosophy, of course; it’s just that my time driving is limited these days to a few weekend visits back to Indiana. After years of dreaming and theorizing about it, I really do have the experience of “getting up at home, going to the very familiar home airport, flying a couple of hours, landing at the very familiar home airport, and going home”. I joked with a friend about “checking on the country manor on my days away from my suite of rooms at the capital, attending to affairs of State”. Perhaps amusing, perhaps pretentious… but very apt (except that the house in Lafayette is not quite the country… but it feels like it compared to downtown DC).

There is even a broader political version of this question that grips Washington. I don’t really want to spend my time engaged in national politics, but I do like the cartoon.

catchcar2

https://thewiddershins2.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/dog-catches-car/

Although I did say I wouldn’t do politics, I do want to describe something very wonderful and remarkable that has sustained me over the past fortnight. Every day, as I come to work, I get on the (public transit) bus with a number of other government workers. The security guards are just as friendly and engaging as they check my badge. I walk to my office, and there are still all of the elements of bureaucracy and statecraft on Nov 25 as there were on Oct 25. Some of the questions I field, and media reports I read, are very different because of ecstatic elephants rather than dancing donkeys in the neighborhood. But some of my colleagues remind me that this level of continuity would not have been the case in other places where they have worked.

Admittedly, there are protests and disillusionment and frustration; I think this would have been true even with the dancing donkeys outcome. I have managed to miss the protests that are active a few blocks from my apartment—not because I’m uncaring, but because I need to have something constructive to do in the face of confusion and disorder. My something to do is very concrete and actionable: support the science, technology and innovation elements of the U.S. – Japan alliance. Living in Washington as an engineer focusing on the social context of technology development and innovation does give me a dual view of the world. Understanding how technology works does change one’s view of how context matters, and how the stories that are told influence whether some innovation is considered a source of wonder or woe. I am also challenged by what seem to be violations of my empirical approach: I have a theory about the way I want the world to work. I have a set of data that conflict with that theory. I will now try to force the data to fit my pre-existing theory, rather than try to come to a broader understanding of the world (and develop an improved theory) based on the data I have observed.

Maybe I would have enjoyed history and social science classes in high school and college more if I could have learned more about triangulation and context description and system dynamics. But I don’t regret having this perspective, or even the sense of disorientation I feel when reading the news reports. There is some very pretty math emerging about developing the right configuration of dynamic applications of inertial policy to enable critically damped responses to geopolitical challenges using an optimal steering strategy (which Norbert and Jay might have called Cybernetic Statecraft). I have a close-up view of ways it’s working, and ways it is very poorly implemented (both now, and in the past). More importantly, I need to be able to explain this to people who *are* historians and policy studies and language majors.

Well, that’s a pretty clear view of what I need to do next, and why it’s good for me to be here, right now, doing it. Woof.

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October 31, 2016

Huddle Up!

(Also known as “Notes on a train,” otherwise described as the experiences of being on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor commuter rail system finishing a work task while watching the cities roll past.)

Although it is the middle of football season, my first thought these days when I hear the word “huddle” is not of grass-stained uniforms or winning touchdown drives, but of men and women in suits in an office or conference room with pads of paper. They are, in fact, one of the primary ways that State Department offices keep themselves organized and updated. I find these huddles fascinating for that reason; both the similarities and the differences compared to GROUPER meetings are critically important to me. Yes, the leader wants to hear from everyone, and there can be moments of banter and amusing references to recent activities (including those grass-stained uniforms). However, what differs is also important, especially as I consider what I’m learning now and what I will bring back to Purdue next year.

A primary difference: why is it that a weekly 9-12 person huddle at State can take as little as 20-40 minutes, or that in a schedule-fluxing day, a five-person huddle can be completed in 14 minutes? I had a sense that the reason had something to do with the experience, expertise, and professionalism of the team members. At first, I thought it was that these teams were not getting involved in the messiness of the scrum activity of recognizing and responding to problems; I was informed, though, that this was not correct. Yes, there are problems, and one purpose of the huddle is to inform the leader[1] when there is a situation that needs to be “escalated” in ways that only the leader has access or resources to accomplish. It’s not the formal structure of an agenda: most huddles I’ve attended only have advanced communication at the level of “9:15 Huddle”.

No, the professionalism takes a very different form: one of preparation. I have begun to notice that, on each pad of paper, there was a set of bullet points set off and highlighted about specific topics. In each case, these bullet points seem to evolve into “what do I want my person to know about this topic, and what is the BLUF (bottom line up front) that I can share in 10-20 seconds?” (Lest you dismiss this style of work as old-fashioned just because it’s on paper, keep in mind that some of our meetings are held in rooms where electronic devices are not permitted.) The leader may ask about a particular topic, or provide additional “top-down” updates, but this upward-flowing expertise is of vital importance.

Those who have spent time in GROUPER know that I directly address the distinctions of people, products, and projects in my interactions. Huddles aren’t professional development focused on people, although one may hear about when someone will be out or unavailable or otherwise tasked. There is a recognition of ongoing projects, with timelines ranging from days to months. But there is substantial focus on products: things due this week, or tomorrow, or maybe even in a couple of hours. (Remind me to write about “paper” sometime soon.) Huddles usually don’t get moved due to such deadlines, although they may be shortened. That also seems to be a fundamental aspect of the professionalism—a strong sense of, and respect for, both time and advance information as critical resources for effective recognition and response to dynamic events.

So, whether we are working to 2-3 day deadlines for paper, or highlighting preparation for international efforts requiring 4 months of preparation, it’s not just the product deadline cycle that drives efficiencies in huddles. I can’t generate the type of experience that a consular officer gets when trying to evacuate citizens after an earthquake or during political instability. But I do think there is a fundamental difference between “what do I need from my person” and “what does my person need from me” that is of significant importance here. Good huddles tend to focus on the latter? Stay tuned.

[1] Actually, the term “leader” is rarely used at State. I hear “principal” a lot, and I will admit that I have a certain reluctance to t calling someone my “boss”. So, let me use “person” as a very generic term of a member / leader in greater authority and responsibility in the huddle.

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