Schertzer Arts

I am reposting a blog entry that I posted nearly a decade ago about the role of art and the nonrational in evaluating risk. The key is that our nervous systems consume far more data than we are consciously aware, and make their own statistical analyses, using this data, though it is most often communcated up to consciousness in ways that are hard to read, and at times even harder to believe:

I recently got asked by a headhunter to consider a job as a project/implementation manager for a company that specializes in VaR, or “Value at Risk.” That’s high finance talk for software that risk departments in investment banks and other financial institutions use to evaluate the extent of the damage they could bring upon themselves, considering their current strategies. You load up all of your positions and it tells you how risky your portfolio is, and perhaps suggests ways of hedging your bets with others so that your investments might be safe and sound.

During the interview I asked a bit about what went into it. At first I was thinking, wow, this might be my opportunity to find out first hand about strange attractors and self-organizing systems, but the interviewer, an MBA and PhD in mathematics (because you have to be in order to understand this stuff) assured me that VaR uses normalized calculations, just very complex ones. I lost about 95% of my interest at that moment, but I was still curious, so we went on.

He was most confident that in all but very rare cases the calcs could pinpoint and closely predict riskiness, and even alleviate most of the risk due to chaos (the unexpected), by helping to stabilize everything that was easily assimilated into knowable and predictable patterns. This was a few weeks before the financial markets imploded.

I’m sure that Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, Fanny and Freddy, for instance, were all using some sort of VaR system to help stave off their own tribulations.

But when I think again about Laura Ward’s “Whistle Me Higher” (see review posted below following this section) and all of the figures that may have been taken as indicators that may have suggested financial peril (i.e. gambling casinos, radioactivity, pandemonium, superstition, the sweeping up of toxic money by people in breakout suits), I am left wondering: who’s got a better system? True enough, like all art, Laura’s work is a bit of a Rorschach, something like the Delphic Oracle pouring out of the mouth of a Python Priestess high on geologic gasses, later interpreted by a throng of specialized priests.

There are many oracular parallels throughout the history of the world, everything from the reading of tea leaves to the bumps on one’s head. The Tao De Ching, for instance, grew out of a practice people in ancient China had of turning over tortoise shells in order to seek a correspondence between static visual patterns and those being lived. Nowadays we have complex visualizations of numerical data, (i.e. graphical display) which attempt to convey information in a way a body can understand, alongside explanations that, after all, mathematics is built upon embodied metaphors, bringing us oddly back to where we had begun, with a little added perspiration (and perhaps precision).

Add to that the concept of expertise that Malcolm Gladwell puts across in Blink, or the theory that our neurologies enable us to make complex statistical-based decisions on an unconscious level, and you begin to gain a kind of insight into the possibility that the somewhat mystified and mistrusted operations of art-making may not be, in many ways, too different from those more reliable domains, such as the sciences.

This does not say that one should listen only to Laura, and ignore the complex, though normalized, mathematical formulas. But we might attempt to think, and experience, for ourselves and learn to weigh both into our judgements, in whatever proportion seems fit for the context. In other words, use the statistics the machine can give you, but also those that we give and receive as a system of biological machines. True, there is much that is quite primitive in there, but tempered by our other facilities (i.e. those that have built the complex mathematical models to begin with), we might find we have a much bigger net to catch things in.

Original post: http://howtowork.blogspot.com/2008/10/var.html

Prior post about Laura’s show:

A few months ago my wife Kathleen and I went to see an old friend’s dance company do a show at The Theater for the New City. We were pleasantly, enormously, surprised at how far Laura Ward’s work had come. While I always admired her quirky inventiveness, disturbing playfulness, her sense of surprise, as well as a number of other qualities, her most recent piece, called “Whistle Me Higher” was not only on par with the best dance performances I’ve ever witnessed, it was an amazingly ambitious collision of mythos centered around the experience of Las Vegas. Not only is the city the great cliche gambling and entertainment capital, but it is not far from sacred native American and nulcear weapons testing sites. All of this comes out in the show, with sparks flying where they strike each other like flint on steel. Petite dancers in glittering patriotic garb grin manically to throbbing electronica, winding at times with lounge and parade tune overtones. There are occasionally theatrical breaks where a woman and man in breakout suits sweep away piles of fallen dollar bills amid fallen dancers, who get carted away in wheelbarrows. The two exchange poetic and philosophic dialog, sometimes strewn with scraps of clinical hypnotic scripts, suggesting, of course, a culture of the entranced, in which any verbal exchange wavers between directive and guesswork.

I had lunch with Laura not long afterward, and asked her how she managed the whole thing, from conceptualization, to composition, choreography, music selection, costumes, set design, you name it. What I found out was that Laura has developed an incredible prediliction for a kind of project management that you just don’t see in people trained by professional organizations. It sounded similar to the way Charles Mingus described leading his band, where the core themes and spirit of the work was embodied by the participants (an amazing collection of performers, I need to mention), who worked out the details through their own impetus.

It’s hard to imagine how something like this could be translated to the ordinary job world (even Laura works a day job, or rather day jobs), but it’s a much different process than the task list and Gantt chart way of doing things, and it’s got me thinking that there has to be a compromise, at least, or so many ways to organize and lead from inception to completion, if only we studied the way we actually did things, tracked the intinsic path of our minds and bodies, and designed a methodology around that. I would want to learn project management from Laura, rather than the PMI, even if they do get Colin Powell as a keynote speaker.

http://howtowork.blogspot.com/2008/09/welcome-back.html

Pyramid Power: it was a big canard during the 1970s, when I was growing up, and every charlatan from Mumbai to Hoboken was trying to sell miniature pyramidal structures to wear on our heads, to increase thought-capacity beyond the once-thought 10% we were supposedly using.  Or to put over the goldfish bowl if little pet Goldy had the sniffles. It was supposed to sharpen razor blades, if you left them under its pointy apex overnight. There was some mysterious force, once known by the ancient Egyptians, and newly rediscovered that could do anything from fry eggs to cure cancer. I remember wanting one such devise. I was young, was often bullied, had no luck with girls, and my parents always got to watch what they wanted on TV.

It was a power advertised even on the back of the dollar bill – that creepy eye at the very top making me feel like I was always under surveillance, even at my most private moments. I wanted the ultimate toy, a talisman against the magic that was being used against me, humbling me past what was natural and acceptable for a suburban kid. Of course, I knew little about the humility and exploitation others faced, no matter how much the popular music I was listening to at that time made reference to it, and protested it. The singers sang about the plight of every disenfranchised population, from inner-city school children to poor villagers in Viet Nam, getting roasted in chemical flames dropped from helicopters manned by our honorable airborne divisions.

But the true power of the pyramid was the force of gravity, pressing down and outward to greater and greater widths to a foundation supporting the whole enterprise. It is actually a gradation of foundations, all the way down, that offers a tremendous stability and ability to endure centuries of the forces of weather and entropy.

Our social structures are pyramids as well, everything from governments, armies, leisure clubs and organizations, corporations – the ever-widening and layering of one management strata upon another, upon which all sit restlessly on the heads of those who often expend the most effort, and possibly produce, at least in its most raw form, the most value.

It’s a habit we seemed to have held onto from medieval times and before. We seem to like these forms of power relations, in spite of the fact that we also claim to love democracy, and to value freedom and equality. If I am prone to the rules of a corporation, in order to satisfy company standards, prove one’s professionalism, in order to maintain employment, feed myself, have a place to live, and that involves most of my waking time, then the whole notion of freedom is called into question. I can leave the corporation, all corporations, become self-employed, live off the grid, but the whole structure is so much a part of the way we live, who we have grown to know ourselves as, what we have been trained to be, both genetically and through acculturation.

We struggle with the rules, at least those of us who are among the more rebellious ilk, until we learn to internalize them, lest we are driven mad by having to adhere to a number of arbitrary behavior patterns that run against our grain. We take it on as we might a workout routine, or the Japanese Tea Ceremony. It becomes ours, which we then begin to dress up with so much ornamentation. We become hierarchical beings, its prophets and priests in full immersion.

Many things rely on our ability to organize ourselves in this way. Capital, for instance, would not exist without this form of traverse dominance. We would also not be able to bond in organized action they way we do today, whether it be in war, or in large scale projects such as landing on the moon. We would also not be able to have the kind of international trade we enjoy today, which engenders, for instance, the consumption of tropical fruit in temperate climates during the winter season, among other things.

But some of the functions implicit to our being hierarchal are not so nice. The fact that a man like Harvey Weinstein can assume that he is entitled to satisfaction of his desires with anyone he pleases, due to his position of dominance in the structure, is not an aberration or sickness of the hierarchy, but just another brick in the wall. He has not only the personal financial resources to make other people happy or miserable at his whim, but also the currency of connections with everyone on his level of strata and below, enforcing a near lockdown of every pathway in his vicinity. Yes, the pyramid is entitlement all the way down.

Let’s not assume Weinstein was always a wretched individual. He’s been involved in making some great movies, even films that show a particular ethical intelligence. No, something else happened to him perhaps that happens a bit to us all as we begin to internalize the system – he has become consumed by the mechanical and gravitational values of the system, the mechanical processes it comprises, i.e. the spirit of gravity, to such an extent that he has forgotten the values of his own that he had brought into the system to begin with. After all, it makes things easier.

Lesson number 1: just because you have entered the established order, and have mastered its rules, doesn’t mean you need leave everything else behind. It may take a certain amount of naiveté to maintain a desire to emulate the values of our heroes. I remember going through a very cynical period, during my coming of age, in which every value was turned upside down, but now that I am getting older, whether it be because of my settling down, or my brain shrinking, I want more and more to be like them – not the real people who we find out they actually were, but those idealized people, who are nice and wise at the same time, and seem to know what to do. At the same time, one needs to be patient with oneself – having values, one’s own deepest values, and living with them, isn’t easy.

On this end of the spectrum you have someone like Colin Kaepernick, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, by beginning his protest. He was near the very top of the hierarchy, and instead of letting it own him, he turned against its mechanical force and began to do what is right. He has suffered for it, though he has the resources to cushion that suffering. But one should not forget that he is swimming upstream against gravity, against the very structure he had become a iconic part of.

Weinstein is the property-obsessed libertarian/libertine, whereas Kaepernick is the nomadic and quixotic anarchist rattling against the windmills of the machine. We can know, comfortably or uncomfortably, who we aspire to align with, and who we may align more with in actuality. Even our working metaphors (climbing the ladder, waterfall, etc.) are imbued with the spirit of gravity and the power of pressure – why is it we assume that it takes a force, constantly applied and directed, in order to propagate productivity? This attitude goes back to the days of slavery, and continues to contaminate our thinking in everything from politics and education, to our work and everyday living. It is part of the weight of the pyramid, the power of it, which if we are going to advance ethically, as we have technologically, we need to work diligently and thoroughly to tease out each of the poisonous barbs of or beloved systems, and even our behavior, everywhere that they breed and are hidden.

 

 

 

 

John Ashbery, who passed away just over a month ago, was a poet revered by many of the smartest and fearlessly challenging poets alive today. If the term “poet’s poet” means anything, it surely applies to him. At the same time, just as many poets and readers of poetry disdain his work for being overly oblique, incomprehensible, even elitist.  And while on the face of it, there are arguments in their favor, I think there is a point that they are missing that distintegrates all of their criticism.

And that point is that Ashbery forces you to read in a way that is completely different fom almost anything else that you will read. And this is a point significant, not only to poets, and lovers of poetry, but to anyone who values the richness of their subjective experience, and who wish to challenge their assumptions and cognitive habits, even those who simply seek to work better, and perform which a richness of fluidity beyond what they know.

To fully appreciate and experience an Ashbery poem, at least one of his better pieces, one needs to surrender to it. There’s no amount of brain-splitting mental tension as if applying all the force of one’s neurology to solving a mathematical puzzle or quantum function. You have to fall into an Ashbery poem the way you would a bath of phonemes, morphological and syntactical strangeness. It’s more like meditation than philosophy, though it contains continents of philosophical significance.

Reading an Ashbery poem, once you’ve done the work to get into the flow – which again is more work you need to do on yourself and your expectations – it will feel the way it does when you are in the midst of an epiphany, without there actually being an epiphany. And that is because you are  the zone where epiphanies are made.

Forget the brain gym, and all those gimicky internet tools supposed to enhance your cognitive abilities. If you read enough Ashbery, your brain will function differently. You will find yourself more at home in conundrums that tend to drive you mad, and you will likely laugh more frequently.

My graduate school advisor, David Lehman, was a close friend JA’s, and there were several times I had the opportunity to speak with him, but I shied away, feeling myself overly timid in the face of this timid giant. A friend of mine had several times sat at the bar with him, sipping martinis, and when I asked what they talked about, he said it was jokey stuff about what the newscasters on the TV were wearing. No heavy French literary theory or deep impressions about the current state of the art world. I’m sorry to have missed the chance to take part in that kind of chat, as I’m sure it would have had its own novelties, a special type of fluidity. I will never know.

David used to say that he would often blurt out things he had heard other people say, as if they were whisps of signification that floated right through him. Very often, we were told, he was egoless, a living atmosphere of humanity. Something different from all of us…

After John Ashbery had died, David asked for similes from people that describe his work. What I thought was that Ashbery’s poems read like plants growing and chemical reactions occurring. That’s the best I can do.

But John can say it best.

 

 

 

Anabelle knew she could ring the doorbell and see Michel, but she could also do nothing. She did not know that these ten minutes were a concrete example of free will; she knew only that they were terrible and that when they had elapsed, she would never be quite the same again. Many years later Michel proposed a theory of human freedom using the flow of superfluid helium as an analogy. In principle, the transfer of electrons between neurons and synapses in the brain – as discrete atomic phenomena – is governed by quantum uncertainty. The sheer number of neurons, however, statistically cancels out elementary differences, ensuring that human behavior is as rigorously determined – in broad terms and in the smallest detail – as any other natural system. However, in rare cases – Christians refer to them as acts of grace – a different harmonic wave form causes changes in the brain which modify behavior, temporarily or permanently. It is this new harmonic resonance which gives rise to what is commonly called free will.– Michelle Houellebecq, from The Elementary Particles

I dunno, but I sometimes think I write this blog for people who secretly harbor some kind of artist’s hankering over novelty, the challenges of change and varieties of aesthetic experience.  At other times I think I do it for those I think who should, and don’t know it yet. I see them, and I wonder. I want to get in their faces and help them awaken to the fact that there is a very thin gauze between the world they think they’re living in, and that other world.

And who are those people? Well, just about anybody.  Joseph Beuys not only believed that everyone was an artist, but he invited just about anyone who wanted to attend his classes at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. And largely to the protest of the rest of the staff, who had a much more elitist view of art than he had.

Most of his students did not become professional artists, but likely benefited from what they learned in applying that understanding in whatever other fields they pursued, whether it was a social work, business, medicine or anything else. That’s because in their very core, these things are not so different. The reason we are all artists, according to Beuys’ way of thinking, is because we live necessarily in a creative flux of life that demands it of us. In is our engagement in life, all of the problem solving, the variations in behavior, and learning to see differently so that we can respond differently. It’s you at your desk job, or whatever it is you do.

To Artaud, however, art had a very special purpose, which is also relevant to your desk job in a different, though parallel way, as I tried to explain previously. I think of what Artaud was after as being a parallel to Rinzai Zen Buddhism, where the practitioner will attempt to create a specific type of cognitive dissonance to provoke a change that liberates them into a state of  blissful wakefulness and spontaneity. He wanted to provide propitious opportunities to create that different harmonic wave form.

It’s all about innovation and change, which are two things either on a spectrum, or where one is special type of the other. In our work lives we are hired to create some change in the environment, take a situation from one state to another, or to alter the effect of entropy, either to halt the way things would normally fall apart, or to redirect and utilize those tendencies. These are all creative pursuits, in a sense, though we may not think of them the way we think of a Monet’s Water Lilies, or a song we hear on the radio.

You hear a lot about innovation and disruption, and people who are trying to sell them as products and services, as if they were theirs to sell. Real freedom and innovation may be two sides of the same coin, and yes, there may be a reliance on disruptive forces and behaviors to produce either and both. But perhaps it’s more about how we each engage the forces that disrupt and traumatize our own work, and the rest of our lives, those moments like Annabelle’s above, in the midst of a dilemma or conundrum, where we seemingly have no good choices. At least none that have occurred to us yet.

 

You made a comment to a colleague the other day that one could hear more sighs than breaths in the pantry, where people escape from their desks to load up on caffeine beverages, or simply to walk it off for a moment. Yes, business is good, one supposes, if everyone’s so busy all of the time, but there’s an extra sense of exasperation in the air. No one thinks they have the necessary resources to do their work properly, or sales has contributed to the fiasco by overselling and promising the world. Expectations are high, something more appropriate perhaps in a Harry Potter world, impossible to meet, or even to provide moderate disappointment. Yet, the board of directors has offered C-level management huge incentives to cut costs further.

It all begins to form an agonizing and gyrating spectacle of increasing hysteria, of sinking deeper into impossibility. One wonders what can be done, where to go, whether there’s another job out there…

But alas, it’s happening everywhere. Every bank and software company, every startup and green grocer. Everyone is panting for breath, out of breath, or passed out from holding their breath too long.

Meanwhile Nazis are marching in the streets, we have a president who should be on anti-psychotic drugs and who is playing chicken with our lives, and the weather is flashing us signs that things are in fact the way many scientists have stated, though a large number of our leaders are too stubborn, blind or greedy to admit it.

What makes it worse is all of those positive messages out there, people selling paths to a miraculous recovery, bliss, and a wholly fulfilled life if you download their $95 special mp3’s that will teach you gratitude and mindfulness. But pooh-pooh all that. You already have everything you need. It’s your very experience that you are trying to escape that will give you back your salvation.

After experiencing, some in the trenches, others via the fallout, the utter absurdity of the first world war, a number of artists started what eventually became the loosely knit Dada moment, and subsequently Surrealism, all of which were an out and out rejection of the civilizaiton that brought about the absurdity in the first place.

One such Surrealist, a man named Antonin Artaud, went further, left the group, and decided to create what he called the Theater of Cruelty. Artaud felt that art wasn’t accomplishing its main task, which was to wake people up, that it was actually helping to create a deeper distancing and snoozing effect that kept people from a fully realized experience of reality. His theater was meant to be both jarring and disturbing to his audiences (just as aspects of our lives are to us), and to be a form of social and invidual therapy, to provide the cold-water splash to the face to help people achieve a “woke” state.

This life you have, this seeming impossibility, is your teacher. Listen to it and develop a fabulous sense of humor. It will help you survive and flourish. Walk into that pantry and see the other human beings in the room. Imagine what they are feeling. Drop the resentment you have toward your boss, the person who got the promotion you wanted, the guy in the corner office with the attitude, and most of all the story you’ve been telling yourself. Ask: what’s really happening here?

 

The social theorists Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari had one core complaint about Freud, saying that he saw Oedipus in everything, which interfered with his ability to truly understand the rich complexities of human beings and their systems and interactions; and that Marx was similar, in a way, because everything human had become part of a drama around a dialectic of economies.

Though Deleuze and Guattari were both influenced and inspired by the French student and worker uprisings of 1968, and were motivated along social justice and had socialist themes, they did however acknowledge that capitalism had a special talent for decoding the flows of desire and and in doing so actually engage with particular complexities that Freudian and Marxist thought would overlook. To Deleuze and Guattari, Freudian and Marxist thinking was arborescent, or tree-like, because everything group from the central trunk and roots.

On the other hand, capitalism was developing qualities that made it more rhizomatic, or grass-like, since it sprung up everywhere, had no center, and was therefore, at least in its most simple, ideal form, more democratic and anarchic, and in some ways resembles early anthropologic economic forms, such as barter.

This problem, as we know, is that captialism doesn’t end there. As it grows it begins to congeal. The spread of wealth begins to collect in specific pockets of leverage and power. It loses its rhizomatic qualities and becomes its opposite. It also begins to lose its ability to engage with complexity through its chief weakness – a tendency to simplify everything, all human value, to a single variable: capital.

And its arguable that this simplication has engendered something like a univeral language and system of evaluation, which has allowed for the profluence of great expanses of wealth. The problem is that we begin to measure things along that single variable, and compare things that have different qualities, as if they were the same, but of different relative values. When discussing Bergson in a previous post, I pointed out that we do not want to judge apples for being poorer oranges, and vice versa, but Capitalism, as it has manifested in our lives, has us doing just that.

One of the problems with the whole trend toward certification is that the entire business world has begun to convince itself that there are core skill-sets that can be taught to anyone so that human beings can be used as replaceable parts, or be replaced by a fairly simple set of computer code, without taking the whole of people’s education and experience into account. We talk of “throwing another body” on a problem, if someone with a certain level of expertise is no longer available.

And although this kind of thinking makes management seem a simpler and more fluid process, like the directing of liquids or grains of sand toward one goal or another, it’s up to us, on a perhaps different levels of our organizations, to keep an eye on and appreciate those differences, think against the trend of uniformity, not only because it’s smarter and more humane, but because it’s in our own interest, both on a large scale in regard to the economy as a whole, but also because we, as individuals, are best to maintain the resouces we have that cannot be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

It’s been a long time since my last blogpost, about a year, and I think I’m back because of a great deal of thinking I’ve done about the demands of my dayjob, my life in general, and how contradictory it is with so many things I’ve read that offer up a list of 10 things one needs to succeed at such and such.

And I admit that I am a sucker for those articles too. I want to find out the 10 things that are going to help me do my job, be richer, manage my stress, etc.. If only…

The problem is that I generally end up forgetting all of the points very quickly after reading the article, or even when I do remember, they seem either irrelevant to my current situation, or I don’t know how to apply their small trinkets of wisdom.

The real trick to the whole thing is that these suggestions are most often things I already know, or think I know. I could have written the article myself perhaps, which makes me suspicious. I ask myself, do these people really know what they’re talking about, or are they just repeating something they’ve heard in a bar, or read somewhere, and have repeated to themselves so often they believe that it’s originated with themselves?

But the problem, what I’m trying to get to, is that life is a lot more complex than we like to make it out to be. Our lazy left brains like easy formulas, but even some of the most successful people writing these articles don’t really know how they produce their success. Very often it’s a number of things they’ve learned long ago working in concert, things they have so fully integrated into who they are that they’re no more aware of them than they are of the air they are breathing, or the fact that their hearts are beating.

Some of you who have read my posts in the past may remember that I tend to rail against the trend toward certifications for this and that: certifications for project management, for business analysis, etc., etc.. Okay, it’s not that I think that they are a complete waste of time – after all many organizations now require them, so it’s useful to have the cert on your resume, I suppose. I just think there is a better way to learn how to think and get things done.

A project plan is really only a compositional model. It tells a story about how things are supposed to get done. It’s generally a composite of events, risks, costs and time relations. If you’ve read enough really good novels, biographies, histories, you’ll have this sort of thing tattooed into your backbrain, and in many ways a richer model, with more variation, and more pathways to solutions, than anything you’ll learn in a cert training. All you need to do is think.

Ever notice how your project is sometimes, with its false starts, miscommunications and drama, more like a 19th century novel than your project plan? That’s because – if you’re doing the project work you’re worthy of, not some simple cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, do-it-in-your-sleep, type of thing, that a machine will be doing, instead of you, in a few years – it is.

Most of what comprises a business education is borrowed from other areas: the humanities, sciences and mathematics. It’s not really its own thing. You’re really better off going back to the source material, rather than the leftover bones remaining after someone whittles it down to its remaining skeleton. Not only does a real skeleton not have any meaning outside the whole system of nerves and musculature, but someone’s simplification of someone else’s great ideas generally miss the point, leave things out, or are confused with other oversimplified models.

My alternative? Beyond reading my blog, it’s follow your curiosity and desire, and do some real heavy lifting in those areas that drive you from the inside. While I’m not one of those who believe that following your bliss insures marvelous results, I do believe the work you do that broadens your mental and psychological agility in any subject increases the scope of what you can and will accomplish.

It’s also merely a better way of living.

Don’t fear poetry.

I’ve been a little too busy to pay close attention, but there has been a lot of chatter in the news and pseudo-news about Pokémon Go. The first thing I heard was that it is a new surveillance plot by the government. Anyone using the app would be tracked by government and they would know where you are and what you’re up to. I can’t really think of why they would be interested, but that’s okay. Maybe they could begin to detect some Big Data patterns that could help make new discoveries about mass social behavior. Who knows?

It turned out to also be a security threat, since it has access to information on your device. Most laughable, and somewhat disturbing, is that it seems to be causing all sorts of mishaps. A news reporter drifts across the TV screen looking for little beasts, disrupting a weather report. There have been car accidents due to people playing the game.

That said, Pokémon Go seems like a pretty ingenious toy. It involves searching for imaginary beasties that are virtually positioned into GPS locations. They can be anywhere, and your job as a player is to go out and find them and to put the critters in the little balls on your screen. It has some of the qualities of games like Geocaching, which sends you out looking for various objects (real objects, not virtual) hidden by other players, but it is a Pokémon game, and anyone who has kids into Pokémon will realize the gravitas of that alone. One of the major pluses of games like Pokémon Go is that it gets kids (or any players) off the sofa, and out into the world (though a partially fabricated world imposed on the actual). Nintendo has done well, and should make out exceptionally well with this product.

I hesitate to say that Pokémon Go adds to the overall quality of life. Like all smartphone games it’s more of a distraction that anything else. One may be better off just going for a walk and looking at things that really exist in materiality. After all, if you wander around with your eyes and your mind open, you can never tell what you might see. It’s true that games like PG and Geocaching actually get people out by creating a context and agenda to their doing so, but people can make their own choices, unprompted by games and other commercial mechanizations. That’s what personal freedom is, I always thought. I would say that the game is neutral in that it sums up to about zero in regard to overall benefit to the planet, when all the pluses and minuses are added together. Sure, it will make some money, but that money will likely not be distributed efficiently.

I think about stuff like this often. I have had my own ideas about applications to develop, new ways of doing and streamlining things, but most of them didn’t really seem to be worth much in the long run, except maybe as possible methods of prospering personal gain, and the idea of benefitting without adding value has never sat with me easy.

The possibilities used to seem different. I remember when I was a child, we were told stories about how things would one day be automated to the point where we wouldn’t have to work, or we would have to work vastly fewer hours, and we would have more time to educate ourselves, move our bodies, make love, music, what have you, but what has happened instead is we have to a large degree automated ourselves out of jobs.

I worked supporting a securities finance sales desk, and we were one of the early adopters of automated borrowing and lending of securities. It was great, instead of spending 45 minutes on the phone typing requests into a computer terminal, the systems themselves could commucate and book the loans and borrows in a few seconds. I still had things to do, and eventually I got involved in the development side, since automating and streamlining processes like that seemed to be where the real value was.

But was it? Securities lending traders, even though their balances are far greater than they previously were, are making less money, and today there are fewer opportunities.

One of the selling points for our current implementations is to promise a higher return per body count, and that means by providing technology that will allow business to expand without hiring more people, or to allow for the elimination of staff. This can be a great benefit to a business on a one-by-one basis, but the trend is somewhat disturbing. In the US, especially, we have an ethic that equates personal value to hours worked (more so than value produced, it seems). If the net result of my work over the past few decades has been to eliminate jobs, then I end up being one of the people who is enabling people to go on government aid, not so much on a person-by-person basis, but systemically over time.

I would love things to be different. I would love to be eliminating jobs if that meant people could go on educating themselves, spending more valuable time with their families, or making love, art and music, but economic constraints the way they are don’t allow for that, and it may take forever for social and political values to catch up with the world that is happening around them. I don’t have a solution, beyond my typical hopeful dreaming.

But I will begin to ask myself in each case whether the automation I am working on really makes sense, and whether it benefits the whole, or is simply another one-off. I may not often have much impact, but perhaps hidden among all the minutiae of decisions and layers of detail there will be opportunities to create real value. What that might look like, I don’t know, but it seems like a good place to begin to attempt to make to difference.

 

 

 

The great literary and social theorist, Kenneth Burke, would often describe himself as a Neo-Aristotelian because of the way he saw the forms of human understanding as patterns derived from nature. All of our ways of mapping the world begin with the way it is presented to our senses and our experiential associations. The moral differentiation between light of good, and the dark of evil, he might say, was based on our fear of night and the our ability to better protect ourselves when the sun is out and better see predators and enemies. Most written languages developed in the northern hemisphere tend to proceed from left to right, just as the sun and moon move across the sky throughout the day, or tend to fall vertically, as objects do. Months are roughly the measure of moon cycles. There are innumerable patterns that have become implicit in literary form, but also in our general forms of mapping and activity making. These are shapes that we have evolved with, that are in essence a big part of who we are as biological and social creatures.

Poetic and musical forms have derived in part from the aural and physiological sensations of language, which in turn have derived from aural sensations of the natural world, and common things we experienced every day, for instance the rhythm of walking, and hence we have what is called the “walking bass” of jazz. At one point poetic and musical forms were established more as ways of storing and communicating information than as modes of self-expression. What we now call ancient “religious texts,” things like the earliest books of the Bible (the Torah), the Vedas and so forth, were records of the complete known universe of the people who composed them, were originally composed in verse and were often sung or chanted, long before they were written documents.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that our project management methodologies are named things like Waterfall, and what we call our spiral  methodologies, such as Agile turn out to be modeled on moon cycles. After all, we don’t really have anything else. In the same way, the GAANT charts and timelines we use move from left to right, as the sun and moon do across the sky, and fall downward on the page like gravity moves water downstream.

So, you may ask, we have things we’ve encoded in patterns derived from natural processes, and so forth, but what significance does that have to for me now? And my answer to that question is that I’m not sure, but I believe if you can loop back into that understanding, and draw upon a much larger world, you are liable to have a far greater set of resources to draw from, to provide solutions and adapt with. The MBA and certification programs will give you some very basic structures to work from, but those structures are such a finite set of the overall patterns available to us. One may argue that they are the accumulated best practices up to the present time, and that may be so, but as we’ve seen, many of those structures become mind-numbingly habitual, and that real progress happens when people are not weighed down by an accumulated hodgepodge of so-called practical wisdom, just as has benefitted us to go beyond the explanations and directives provided in those original religious texts.

Because I have been a musician, poet and martial artist the majority of my life, literally decades, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder and compare the forms of each, to synthesize connections among them, and use each as a backdrop and source of inspiration for the others. For instance, a Kung Fu form or Karate Kata, is a compact encyclopedia of movements one cycles through regularly in order to learn, not only fighting strategies, but body dynamics and mental states that one begins to draw on at will, just as poetic and musical forms serve as templates of investigation from which one begins to improvise new variations of experience. A piece of music I compose may end up as sort of a tai chi form or kata for the guitar, while a poem may be a condensation of specific types of information and ideas that I want to remember and exercise my way through to gain fluency with a particular  style or mode of thinking. This process can also to help me to break out of my current mental models and to learn and create new models and directions to take for solution generation.

A project or analysis methodology is in some ways a similar type of animal, at bottom a compositional model one uses to document and proceed with producing a finished product or process. It will help engender recognizable patterns, and therefore consistency and a way of measuring results. At bottom, a methodology is another form, or cluster of forms we have fused together, similar to the kata or harmonic/melodic structure of a jazz piece, which we adapt to the occasion, breaking them down into pieces and arranging them in variations, improvising when we need to. With an eye toward experimentation, and with the understanding of these methodologies in their greater context, the approach we take when applying them can help us to produce our own micro learning organizations, and spaces of innovation. 

 

 

 

 

The map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for it’s usefulness.

– Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

 

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.

– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

 

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

 

More than anything else, what you are as a business analyst (or a human being in general) is a maker of maps, but maps of what? Surely not the map that will get you from Baltimore to Kalamazoo, or Bangladesh to Bonn. We are also not talking about a map of the star field above our heads, or the treasure maps we may have made as children. By map I mean a shared understanding of the way things work. Nature may not proceed or measure things the same way we do, but mathematics is a useful way of mapping events that occur in nature, just as our descriptions of things in language allow us to agree and communicate about what those events are. For us, a particular map may be a requirement, or a set of requirements. Or it may be the distance between what already exists and what it is being proposed.

Let’s say you have a new requirement. You have to define how to make a software application that does A and B also do C. First you have to identify what A, B and C are. What you know about A and B right off the bat is that the software does something when you prompt it to do something. You might not even know the intention behind what it does. You might enter a group of numbers, and those numbers get used in some formula and another number appears. B might present the numbers you entered, and the resulting number in a  graphical representation. You see what it does, but you have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. On the other hand, with C you may understand the why, the intention, but not yet have a model for how to go about satisfying that intention.

Every piece of code ever written has an intention and it may be safe to presume that every piece of code that will ever be written will have an intention, except for occasions of art or pure experimentation where someone may actually decide to create code without intention, but let us presume that at its very essence a piece of code is intention-based, that all coding is based on intention.

Functions A and B may be, respectively, an algorithm that estimates the number of eggs someone’s chickens lay that actually get sold, based on statistical expectation, and a visual representation of sold eggs versus investment of chicken feed. The new function, C, may be a cost analysis of feed to yield that takes into consideration typical seasonal increases and decreases in both the price of feed and egg purchases. It is a somewhat imagined translation of what it costs to produce an average egg, though an average egg doesn’t in truth exist, since some chickens will eat more and lay less, and others will eat less and lay more. There are also always unexpected, unaccounted for, influences. Perhaps the chickens toward the middle of the chicken coup are better shielded from the weather in the winter, and more prone to the heat during the summer, so there will be variations in how individual chickens produce based on feed consumption over time.

The key is the cost analysis is a very high level generalization of an imagined relationship among things in the world that are made into variables. I emphasize the word imagined here because it will come up over and over again in our work. Yes, there is a real relationship between how much someone is going to feed her chickens and how well they produce. If she doesn’t feed her chickens they will die. If she overfeeds them, there may be some other unwanted result. But there is no way outside a laboratory, where all other variables (at least those one can account for) can be controlled, to define quantitatively how many grains of feed produce a single, saleable, egg. There are too many factors. All your work in developing the algorithm is based on very limited data and a simplified view of the interrelations of things, the very flows of life that allow for egg-development as well as the forces in the market that may enable and inhibit their distribution. Such and algorithm may however be useful to the chicken farmer who needs to estimate how much money she needs to set aside for feed, and how much she will have leftover to rebuild part of her coup that was damaged during a storm last winter, or to expand her business further.

In another scenario, you may not even asked what the proportion of feed costs to egg yield are, but given the net of all expenses for the entire farm, including payroll, construction costs, machinery and maintenance, and so forth. An investor in the farm may not even want to know that level of detail, but perhaps only wants to know the cost to revenue relationship per year for this farm compared to other egg farms. He may include his investments in this chicken farm as part of an investment portfolio that he sells to other investors, who know nothing about the farm, but only the numerical results of the investments. He may want you to chop up the entire portfolio into investment units, or shares, that represent a part of the ownership or debt to the purchaser of the units.

As you get further away from the actual physical things happening in the world, you go higher and higher up in the levels of abstraction, and into a world of pure invention. That’s where most of us live. And it’s all maps of various kinds, some of seemingly actual things, and some of generalizations made of other maps and ideas that may assume that there are patterns to look out for, conspiracy theories of sorts about the way events may haphazardly coalesce and influence each other.

A user of these maps may even decide to design farms, or the very genetic make-up of the eggs themselves, to conform with an investment strategy. There may be a presumed need for additional resources, like water, that may belong to the community, but is required by the algorithm to optimize the strategy. It’s hard sometimes to decide whether we are talking about a benevolent innovation, or merely the deceptive fascination of the simulacra – ideas run wild and generating a misleading and destructive parallel world, which may have been innocent enough at the outset.

And so our map-making can have social and moral implications as well. Maybe not this piece of code you are working on, but perhaps the accumulated codes you have and will have worked on, the very way you work and address the problem-to-solution process, your style of working, since it is the habits that emerge from today’s efforts that shape the assumptions you and others will conform to tomorrow. We need to be awake to these effects. At least awake, if not actively shaping something useful and beneficial. As the artist Joseph Beuys repeatedly said, we are all artists, and by that he didn’t mean that we all were the makers of decorative and petty things. We all create, every day, just to keep ourselves alive and happy. Our every step produces another line on the map we’re not even aware we are creating, another set of shifts of habit, assumptions.

So as a generator of requirements documentation, you may not have the opportunity at every turn – since on a day-to-day basis it can come down pretty mundane stuff – to create something awesome and beautiful, but over time you have a choice to move, at least through the development of style, those habits of practice in a direction that helps to shape a culture we can love and be happy to leave for others.