Ruthbert

Note: If you are looking at this blog for serious professional reasons, and only want to see the non-silly entries, skip this one.

Welcome to the next episode of Ruthbert, wherein two non-colocated sardonic female information workers search for life, love, meaning, and original puns about bears.
K2: I spelled "for example" as "for exmaple"
this particular field goes out to all of you ex maples out there
don't ever go back, man
Ruth: snort
K2: Oh god, I'm sorry for this:
"I know you're pining away.... but don't fall off the wagon"
Ruth: NO
K2: "I'm not ON the wagon, man. I AM the wagon"
Ruth: NO K2 that's a BAD K2
K2: HA
HA HA
Ruth: now you go to your room and THINK about what you did

Ruth's statuses for April 08:

• One two three o'clock four o'clock BARACK
• Solid as Barack
• Barack-a-bye baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will Barack
• We built this city on Barack and roll
• Hush little baby don't say a word, Obama's gonna buy you a Barackingbird
• Walk this way, Barack this way
• Barack me Amadeus

K2: His travel doctor ALSO suggested he get the same blood test I suggested he get.
Ruth: travel doctor? is that like a miniature version of a doctor, that comes in a plastic carrying case?
K2: it's nice because he's magnetic on the bottom and doesn't tip over
Ruth: makes it harder to lose him under the seat, too
K2: sometimes you drop him and find him sticking perpendicular out of the gearshift
Ruth status: "whipped topping" is a phrase disturbing in its vagueness
K2 status: Officemate: What would you do without me? Me: I don’t know! Probably become a Pollyanna optimist with nothing but hope for the future and respect for Microsoft products. Officemate: I doubt that.
K2: crashed
Ruth: oh, that's no good
K2: I would like to drive a requirement into today's Ruth Release
it's a pry 2, but will support many other releases
it's called: More Talking
you'll note if you take a look at the process workflows that we would like at least 15 Funny Jokes included in this piece of functionality
Ruth: I don't know if 15 Funny Jokes is a realistic expectation of deliverables this late in the Release
what are your KPIs for the jokes?
K2: well
we're measuring them by funny sounds
like "ingers" and "oogle"
that's going to have the greatest customer satisfaction impact
"eezle"
also references to bears
Ruth: Those success metrics sound reasonable
here is my counter-proposal:
I should be able to get you 10 Funny Jokes by EOD
Ruth: we can push the remaining 5 out to tomorrow's release
K2: hmm
Ruth: and supplement in the meantime with Talking About Boys
K2: iiiinteresting
Ruth: my research has shown that customers respond almost as well to Talking About Boys
but admittedly, the sample size is small
K2: that may be bad news to our Future Humor Writers of America division, but the 13 Year Old Girl stakeholder group has been trying to push that change request through forever
I think we can ship this one
I crashed again
K2: my midday lonesomes are hitting
Ruth: you are not alone
you are at Microsoft
Steve Ballmer is probably spying on you right now
K2: it's going to be cloudy all weekend
but warm
Ruth: it better not hail
K2: I screwed up and scheduled a bunch of meetings for Memorial Day because nobody had blocked it off
including me
Ruth: oopsie
K2: this is how I covered my tracks: "On second thought, I'm going to declare Monday Memorial Day and give all of you guys the day off. No need to thank me. "
I have godlike powers
this is why it's valid and useful for you to bring your concerns about hail straight to me

Ruth: cows
I am wearing jeans yay!
K2: ME TOO
Ruth: yay
K2: that's why we're friends
Ruth: does that mean we're only friends on fridays?
K2: yes
UNLESS
you are ALSO usually wearing something that I also am usually wearing
like shoes
we could base our friendship on shoes
Ruth: or a bra
or an air of superiority

Gina Neff: Work and Power

Note: I have resolved to: (1) make my posts shorter so they stop eating my life, and (2) swerve, with a deft flick of the steering wheel, from my former outline of stuff that I was going to cover, to concentrating on my "Technology as Social Intervention: Discuss" topic, where I hope to learn more and rant less. It's all the same basic subject, though, so you may not even notice the difference.

That said, I went out a few weeks ago and interviewed Gina Neff, who is faculty at the UW Department of Communication. Gina is very taken with the concept of "work and power," and I wanted to ask her: what's the connection between the two? How do organizational structures dictate how power gets allocated to its members? And what happens to those power structures-- or to the communication dynamics of the org as a whole-- when you introduce new problem-solving technologies? If you are also geeky enough to find these topics interesting, you will find some of Gina's answers to those questions in the following few blog entries.

Information, Power and Tools

Gina has been studying these type of questions for years, and she has seen organizations' implicit power structures change radically with the addition of new technological tools, "magnifying existing power disparities," she says, "or breaking them down." The power-holders in an org may try to restrict how a tool is distributed or employed, or might even rally against it, if it seems like it has the potential to redistribute the power to make things happen. Alternatively (as in the following example), it might level the playing field, causing an initial chaos that leads to large changes to the org's workflows and the way its members define their own roles.

Gina is currently undertaking a study about the adoption of building information modeling tools in the construction industry. She explains:

Historically, contractors (the folks who build the buildings) and architects have lived on opposite sides of the organizational divide. They spoke different languages and had different goal sets; they communicated via blueprints. This mutual organizational isolation allowed each group a lot of control over their spheres, but frequently made collaboration a painful, contentious mess. Each group guards its information and works at cross-purposes to the other, with miscommunications leading to mutual stereotyping, which itself helps reinforce the divide.
Gina is studying a transition that's taking place right now, before her eyes as she studies it: Today, builders and architects are beginning to share their visions via 3-D computer graphic tools and databases that represent the building being built. In other words, these groups are adopting a communications- and design- based technological innovation, and it is creating dramatic changes in the way they work together. The stereotypes are being put to the test as the groups are forced into proximity with one another, and each silo's private language is being opened up to the other. As Gina describes: "Their entire communications infrastructure has been channeled into different visual symbols, and is hardwired through different network pathways." Each group is also, in the process, losing some of the autonomy that came with that defended isolation.

Heterophily: Difference and Group Intelligence

It's not far-fetched to imagine that switching the wiring in an organization's communication structure could lead to huge changes. Cultures large and small, since the civilization of man, have kept themselves alive by employing one or another form of isolation: a mountain range, a separate language, secrecy, stereotyping, a forbidding initiation rite; Jews, for example, have kept Jewish culture alive, despite the diaspora, with the aid of lengthy and complex conversion processes, services conducted entirely in Hebrew, and dietary restrictions that can help limit who Jews eat with. If you move a culture's boundary devices, you change the way the culture lives. Build a highway, raise children bilingual, install a phone system, the internet: suddenly you find cultures blending, changing, and questioning the way they do things.


The contractors and architects in the system Gina is studying have historically been heterophilious. "Heterophily" is an amusingly polysyallabic term for "different in a way that makes communication between them hard." The words heterophily and homophily describe two ends of a spectrum: on the one side, you have two groups (or individuals) who are different to the point where they can't communicate at all (an American economist and a Bolivian witch woman); on the other side, you have groups who are so similar that communication between them is easy, but totally uninteresting (an American economist and an American economist ;) ). They have nothing to say to one another that they don't already know.

Want More of This Stuff? Check out:

• The next blog entry and maybe the one after it, where we talk about the consequences of these sorts of changes
• The stuff coming out of the The Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford.

And four "easily accessible" books Gina suggests everyone read:

• Sorting things out: Classification and its Consequences (Bawker and Star)
• Talking about Machines (Julian Orr)
• Human Machine Configurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Suchman)
• Cognition in the Wild (Hutchins)

... Gina recommends all of the above except, technically, the following blog entry. :)

Image pulled from here.

1.2 No I in Meme: Culture (White People are White)

Though it is a step further away from my basic focus on social systems and technology, I would be remiss in my duties as a lister-of-social-structures if I did not list the most pervasive and unconscious structure of all: culture.

I write this entry with a mild, throbbing pain in my left Heresy Lobe, an old sports injury incurred from climbing too many times up onto my old soapbox about individualism in American culture. I threw a tarp over it when I graduated from grad school, but I am formally breaking out my carnie barker voice and bowtie as we speak.
What, you ask, is my hangup about individualism and American culture? (Watch my friends dive into bushes and roll off screen as I respond.) Recall that my basic point here is that structure determines behavior: it affects our actions, belief systems, perception of ourselves, and our conception of our options in the world. If you know about the structure, you have a little more free will; if you don't, you run a high risk of unthinkingly incorporating its mandates.

We Americans are particularly susceptible to this, and particularly blind to that susceptibility. Perhaps you have heard the joke:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A: Trilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American!

The USA hosts one of the most geographically and linguistically isolated urban cultures in the world. That makes us Americans very different than (for example) European, Latin American or Asian cultures when it comes down to knowing that we have a culture at all. Even when we do travel, we rarely stay long or become fluent in the local language, and thus we miss volumes about what culture really is: arbitrary, powerful, silly or objectionable. We are convinced that everything we do as Americans is "just human nature" or "the same all over the world."

Living overseas for a year is a great way to recognize that what you are, and how you do things, is not "the default way." Most of us, though, can discover this bias in ourselves from our desk chairs. Give it a shot: if you are Black, say out loud "I am Black." If you're Chinese, Japanese or Korean, say so. If you are White, say "I am White."

So, the first two may come easily. But most White people will become very uncomfortable openly stating we are White. To us, we are not White: we are normal. We do not behave like White people; we behave normally, while Black people behave like black people and Japanese people behave like Asians.
I, the writer of this blog, am a White American person, and mostly I behave just like one. I am a consumer, I'm highly innovative, very individualistic, stuffy about sex, outgoing; I wait patiently in lines; I have a large "personal space" envelope, and get antsy when all but specific people touch me at all but agreed-upon times; I am more standoffish and disingenuous than the most uptight Latin American, and my friendships are usually shallower and more transient than the most cynical European (though I am working hard to shake those two).

Are you a White American? In what ways do you behave just like a White American, and in what ways do you behave differently? Does this whole section make you wince and hold your breath? If so, why?

We Americans have, by and large, "drunk the Kool-Aid" of American culture, and so we take the nourishment and the carcinogens together and call them "humanity." We are highly susceptible to the negative societal and psychological side-effects of our quirks. Where we are individualistic by culture, we fall prey to loneliness or rudeness; where we are materialistic, we fall prey to the existential vacuum. Etc etc.
The question of "what is human nature" vs "what is American culture" has always fascinated me, and so I learned some foreign languages, spent a non-small portion of my life living in third-world countries, and focused my undergraduate thesis on social-cultural constructs and how they affect self-perception and relationships.** I only suggest you also do this if you, too, want to contract the Tourette's Syndrome-esque tendency to rant uncontrollably. If you would instead prefer a more moderate and salmonella-free immersion in the topic of the great spectrum of cultural structures, I strongly recommend the book American Cultural Patterns. It was written some 20 years ago to prepare first-time Peace Corps workers for culture shock. It is short and highly readable and will completely mess up your mind. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read; I can't go five pages without bolting up from my chair to discuss it with someone.
Allowing yourself to question your own deep, foundational assumptions about human beings, relationships, success, time, reason and language can be a seriously unsettling experience. It can lead to cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that arises from a stark contradiction between what one believes to be so and what appears to be true; human beings are typically so extremely averse to that discomfort that they will usually become angry, or contstruct elaborate and transparent untruths, to avoid feeling it (a fascinating cognitive bias which I'll talk about sometime later).
This cognitive dissonance is sometimes fun for insensitve counterculturalists like to me to play with...

Next: >> I thought I could rant about this in one entry, but I was oh so very wrong. >>
**My web page is really really outdated. It's going to stay like that for a while.

Ruthbert

My hilarious friend Ruth and I have been keeping each other company from our disparate, cross-city desk-jockey gigs for going on three years now. She works in search optimization.

Here, for posterity, are some of my recent conversations with her:

Ruth: I just accidentally sent an email asking someone for an "estimeat"

Ruth: :'(\
mr. stabby-face feels your pain
Ruth: he is sad because he has been stabbed in the face

K2: oh I hate getting lunch
I always feel guilty that I did not prepare my own 
K2: I currently do all my cooking at D's on the weekends
weeknights I live on prayer and the non-kosher noodle bowls I keep in my bedroom
Ruth: you should prepare your own lunch then!
[Ruth delivers office lunch recipe]
K2: I have noted your recipe and will take it up with my manager for possible inclusion in a future release
however this week's release is full, I'm sorry
Ruth: mission statement: to increase lunch-eater value by improving lunch efficiency and reducing lunch spend, while maintaining current levels of lunch deliciousness 
K2: of course you realize you're going to have to get signoff from the downstairs cafeteria lady, she's a stakeholder in this
and they're veeeery preoccupied with their chicken parmesean release right now, so good luck getting on THEIR radar
Ruth: I'm confident that the impact to downstairs cafeteria lady will be within acceptable bounds to her organization, and will be more than offset by the increased value offered by the new K2 lunch plan 
K2: Have you consulted EMEA? I'm sure that the Latin regions will buy in to the tortillas, but I don't know if you're aware of this, EMEA's servers are all allergic to gluten
Ruth: it wouldnt' be stored on EMEA's servers, it would be stored directly on K2's work fridge servers
and tortillas can be desk-hosted for several days before losing optimum freshness

Ruth: I am gradually accumulating Buffy seasons, when sale prices coincide with coupon-having on my part. M calls the shelf where I store them the "Garden of Whedon."
K2: 7 more bottles of meetings on the wall, 7 more bottles of meetings
cancel one down, send it around, 6 more bottles of meetings on the wall
Ruth: I hope that someone gets my
meeting in a bottle yeah

K2: I wrote a song on the way in to the tune of that "Shorty got low" song.
Here it is:
She had the powerpoint deck
And the laser poin-ter
The whole conference call was lookin' at her
Ruth: She hit her visio
next thing you know
spending got low, low, low, low low low
she had the Excel spreadsheet
and that ThinkPad in her lap
she turned around and gave that big budget a slap
Hey! She hit her visio
next thing you know
spending got low low low low low low
Ruth: in the last 6 weeks there have been 133 searches for the phrase "nose bidet"

1.2 There is no "I" in "Meme": Language

The language we use, whether it beongs to our culture, subculture, technical tool or organization, affects our fundamental perceptions, choices, and behavior (and we rarely notice).

[T]he language a person speaks [affects] how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. [...] Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. -- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Wikipedia

The world, and the process of living, are inherently continuous and nameless. To communicate about them, we humans use our amazing minds to interpret them down into structures, finite bits with ends, beginnings and apparent affinities with other bits. We come up with those structures by drawing from our history, our cultural biases, our priorities, which themselves are created by language in an ongoing feedback loop. There is no "accurate" way of describing the world, and thus there is no objective way. There's just the way that you happen to be using.

A language is a very heavily biased cultural description of the parts of the world that it cares about, and its own priorities. For example:

In American culture (and some, but not all, other cultures), words about sex and sexual organs are used as the strongest forms of insults. It would be ridiculous for me to insult you by calling you a "stupid arm," but we find the word [cxxx] so offensive that I can't even directly reference it in this blog. This use of language reflects, and perpetuates, certain cultural assumptions about sex.

The languages of subcultures and organizations also codify, teach and perpetuate, unconscious cultural values and expectations.

A close friend of mine just became a cop. He is a deep and thoughtful person with a strong protective instinct. I was thus surprised, in recent conversations, to hear him talking about apprehending and charging people as "contacting" his "clients."

For me, "contacting a client" means calling someone who has voluntarily hired you and maybe leaving them, say, a voicemail, or perhaps a nice fruit basket. For his unit, "contacting" someone might mean chasing a guy four blocks, fighting him to the ground with the help of three other officers, finding a gun and a gram of coke on him, and taking him to jail where he will develop his first criminal record, permanently changing the course of his life.

Contrast this linguistic convention to some other options: instead of "Today I contacted four clients," make it "Today I handled, then made life-changing decisions towards, four human beings." Or, alternately: "Today, I wiped the floor with four more scumbags." The neutral language employed by my friend's unit serves two instructive purposes: it facilitates the emotional detachment that makes policework possible, and it restricts that detachment to the universe of professionalism and service.

So, yes: the linguistic structure you use effects how you think and act. But while changing a language is often a part of changing a social system's rules and behavior, it is rarely the direct route. If you had a goal, for example, to make all police highly sensitive to the human realities of the people they are arresting,* you might think it would be smart to change the institutional language from "contacting clients" to "Making Choices to affect Human Beings." But if your police still (for example) (1) have to fill an ambitious weekly quota of arrests to succeed at your unit, and (2) only see the perp at the time of the arrest (no exposure to context or after effects), your new language won't change their approach to the job. It will just irritate them as phony polish on top of the job's harsh reality.

I don't know about you, but I see surface-level language "fixes" in the industry all the time, and they drive me directly to drink.

To learn more about this fascinatng topic, you may want to read this highly-recommended book: Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences.**

* And I hope you do not
** Lord knows I want to read it. It's on my short list.

Stay tuned for: 1.3 There is No "I" in "Meme": Culture

1.1 How to Build Horrible Social Systems by Accident: Incentives

In the last entry, I proposed that tools and organizations, often (make that usually-- actually make that almost always) unintentionally bake into their very structures a set of implicit instructions for their members / users about what behavior is appropriate, rewarded, or discouraged.

How, exactly, do they do that? Here are some of many possible answers.Incentive Systems. Behaviors rewarded by your system or tool will grow in emphasis and frequency; behaviors that are punished will become less frequent. This statement may seem obvious; people are always trying to leverage positive or negative incentives to get one another to do things. Unfortunately, those conscious incentive programs are usually laid on top of preexisting incentive systems that are deeper, more subtle, more ubiquitous, and far less intentional. In other words, they are much more convincing to the people involved, and are impossible to casually override.

Example: You have a new software company, and you have to hire some people and then give them employee reviews of some kind. Like many orgs, you base your employee review system on whether or not an employee succeeds at his projects. If he succeeds at all of them, he gets a raise; if he fails at his projects, he gets a poor review and a lower bonus. If he gets three poor reviews in a row, he gets fired.

While this seems like a simple and obvious incentive system, you are literally incenting your average employee (let's call her Martha Generic) to succeed at her own projects… even if that messes up everyone else's. If she sacrifices her own project, one quarter, to enable four other projects to succeed, she will still be punished by your system.

Example, Cont'd: Five years down the line (after every manager in your company has worked your incentive system into dozens of mini-processes and deliverables), you discover your employees aren't collaborating. You say to yourself: "These poor geeks just don't know how to collaborate. I've got to get them thinking like a team…"

You start publishing some weekly articles on the importance of collaboration. You deliver a motivational speech to the whole company about how software development is really about putting "people first." You offer a trophy for the "most collaborative team member."

Will it work?

What would happen if you created an online community (let's say, a "resource group for workaholics") and let your members give each other public ratings (1-5 stars) on two things: "Humor" and "Best Vocabulary"? … What if it were an automated system that gave privileges based on "Most Links Contributed"?

Next up: 1.2 There is no I in Meme: Language and Messaging

1.1 How to Build Horrible Social Systems by Accident: Incentives

In the last entry, I proposed that tools and organizations, often (make that usually-- actually make that almost always) unintentionally bake into their very structures a set of implicit instructions for their members / users about what behavior is appropriate, rewarded, or discouraged.

How, exactly, do they do that? Here are some of many possible answers.
Incentive Systems. Behaviors rewarded by your system or tool will grow in emphasis and frequency; behaviors that are punished will become less frequent. This statement may seem obvious; people are always trying to leverage positive or negative incentives to get one another to do things. Unfortunately, those conscious incentive programs are usually laid on top of preexisting incentive systems that are deeper, more subtle, more ubiquitous, and far less intentional. In other words, they are much more convincing to the people involved, and are impossible to casually override.

Example: You have a new software company, and you have to hire some people and then give them employee reviews of some kind. Like many orgs, you base your employee review system on whether or not an employee succeeds at his projects. If he succeeds at all of them, he gets a raise; if he fails at his projects, he gets a poor review and a lower bonus. If he gets three poor reviews in a row, he gets fired.

While this seems like a simple and obvious incentive system, you are literally incenting your average employee (let's call her Martha Generic) to succeed at her own projects… even if that messes up everyone else's. If she sacrifices her own project, one quarter, to enable four other projects to succeed, she will still be punished by your system.

Example, Cont'd: Five years down the line (after every manager in your company has worked your incentive system into dozens of mini-processes and deliverables), you discover your employees aren't collaborating. You say to yourself: "These poor geeks just don't know how to collaborate. I've got to get them thinking like a team…"

You start publishing some weekly articles on the importance of collaboration. You deliver a motivational speech to the whole company about how software development is really about putting "people first." You offer a trophy for the "most collaborative team member."

Will it work?

What would happen if you created an online community (let's say, a "resource group for workaholics") and let your members give each other public ratings (1-5 stars) on two things: "Humor" and "Best Vocabulary"? … What if it were an automated system that gave privileges based on "Most Links Contributed"?

Next up: 1.2 There is no I in Meme: Language and Messaging

1 of 4: Structure Influences People

Premise #1.0: The structure of a tool influences the people who use it, and the structure of an organization influences the people who belong to it.

Premise #1.1: We don't act nearly as independently as we think we do. All day long, we are listening for cues about what behavior is appropriate in each context. We also broadcast cues as to what behavior is rewarded, acceptable, or inappropriate.

Example A: You're invited to an acquaintance's house; he's "having some cool people over." He has spiky hair and a nose ring. So, you grab your Immortal Technique CDs and take a cab out to his place, expecting to tie one on and get loose. You get there and discover that, (1) the table is set with a white tablecloth and matching silverware, and (2) there are wine glasses. You instantly realize this is a Grownup Party. Chagrined, you start greeting the other guests with conversation about work while privately lamenting your wasted $30 on cabfare.

Example B: Usually, the lady checker with the orange hair at the Red Apple asks "How are you?" in a monotone while she's typing your produce codes with one hand and checking her watch with the other. You respond: "Fine, thanks, and you?" But today, she notices you look kinda off. You come up to the counter, and she sets her pen down and places both hands on the counter. She looks into your eyes, and says: "How are you?" You say: "Pretty lousy. I'm just not sleeping well. I stress too much."

This is our symbolic, implicit, fantastically complex language of human aggregation: we tell each other what to do all day long without saying a word.

Organizations and tools bake these messages into formal structures that tell people what behavior is desirable and what is unacceptable. When we successfully and ritually use the tool or belong to the organization, we adopt those behaviors. Usually, we adopt them unknowingly; often, we do it involuntarily.

Premise #1.2: It's important to set up tools and systems to encourage the behaviors that you want, and discourage the behaviors that you don't.

The more unconscious those behavioral handshakes between us and our org/tool, the more likely they are to affect our perception of ourselves, and our ability to see a broad set of options and to make decisions.

Premise #1.3: If you have a system where a group of people are doing the same odious thing over and over again no matter how often you try to get them to stop, look at the rules of the system they belong to.

Next up: 1.5: How to Build Horrible Social Systems by Accident: Incentives. This is one of several entries fleshing out the theme of "Structure Influences People." It will be the first in, time willing, a short list of tools I learned about in academia that aim to analyze structure and its influences.

Like a Pimp

So I'm walking near my house and ahead of me is this very animated Black guy, mid-50s, talking exuberantly alongside his long-suffering, fat, disenfranchised girlfriend.

"You know, you know!" He's saying. "Like a pimp." He's faking a big hitch in his step. "You know."

I am highly amused by this. He looks over at me, catches my eyes/smirk, and, thrilled, re-directs his story to me. "YOU know," he calls, with a huge grin, exaggerating the hitch in his step. "Like a, like a pimp!"

I nod at him in empathy, continuing on my way. He calls back to me: "They said-- They said I couldn't be a pimp." I laugh, and his excitement redoubles. His fat long-suffering girlfriend pretends not to notice.

"See, I can't be a pimp," he yells down the block at me. "Mm-mm, yep! See I filled out, I filled out the paperwork to be a pimp, but they said I couldn't be a pimp. They said I couldn't be a pimp because I fall in LOVE too easy!"

I am trying to control my amusement as I enter my building. "See," he shouts after me, just delighted with himself: "You can't be a pimp if you fall in love!"