The Org Chart and the Middle Manager

I am completing the book, "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger, surely a must-read for budding records managers, librarians, and big-data affectionados. Before I lose it, I am capturing (from this book) the history of the organization chart, something that has eluded me for fifteen years.

Daniel McCallum drafted the first modern organization chart in 1857, to describe the complex reporting structure for New York and Erie Railroad.

The First Organization Chart

This question of origin and history has haunted me ever since a lawyer asked for the organization charts for Michener Centre dating back to the 1940's. I looked hard enough to say with confidence that if these organization charts were ever made, they do not exist now. I advised that if such a chart was needed, the lawyer would have to pull back individual employee files to reconstruct the reporting relationships. A simple request had become a slog.

So organization charts are a useful business tool, and help clarify relationships. They satisfy an underlying need in all of us for order, clarity. The jungle of existence is cleared away and we have focus and direction. I recommend Weinberger's book to understand how the third order of organization - big data and the cloud - can turn this sense of order on its' head.

This being early morning, my first desire to capture this history (for my own peace of mind) was quickly followed by a recollection of my own working organization chart for the middle manager. I have used this chart many times to explain to colleagues and subordinates how middle managers keep tabs of the "front line" and how we simultaneously reassure executive that all is in order.

I start by drawing in the "front line", the life-blood of the company. These are the workers who have daily contact with the customers. I want my employees to be smiling, because I want my customers to be smiling. Empowered, happy, confident workers are made by great supervisors. The middle manager's job is to mentor, coach, and guide supervisors to be the best they can be at taking good care of those front-line workers. 

The second half of the middle manager's job is to report to executive what is going on. They are too far removed from the day-to-day to know themselves if the front line is working and the customers happy. So they broadcast requests for information, and try and scout ahead. The good middle manager keeps executive abreast of what is going on, reporting on successes as well as potential problems before they become too large.

That's it. A little bit of book mining and brain mining. Find ways to be happy-happy, people.

Obesity, a Complex Disorder

I am going to put forth a thought that obesity is a complex disorder where the resolution is going to involve the complex interplay of several hormonal processes. I recently read Dr. Sharma's blog where he describes persistent weight loss as trying to run down the up escalator.

This fight against our own body's processes reminds me of a battle I had with the thermostat in our old apartment. It was a fancy thing, designed to keep temperature constant between a range of high and low temperatures. It had a flaw however. If temperatures snuck above the high setting, the furnace would blow full blast until it got cooler. Think about that for a minute. Our solution? If it were a cool day, we would open every window in the house in the hopes of beating the furnace. If it was a hot day, we would have to set the thermostat above the ambient temperature. Over the next few days, I would gradually lower the higher setting on the thermostat, as the apartment cooled. It was a trick to fix a flaw.

I have also been thinking of the complex interplay of hormones that regulate hunger and weight. The miracle of insulin was solved when the discoverers realized it has a balanced relationship with glucose. Neither can be too high.

This is a two-way relationship, complex enough to figure out. But what if the relationship between hunger and weight gain were even more complex; two-way, three-way or even more?

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2442789084598877880#editor/target=post;postID=7809158473050261965

Nicholas Perony's Bats

 

With a system that complex, how might we ever disentangle it? There's Cortisol, Leptin, Ghrelin, Insulin, Estrogen and Progesterone. There could be as many as forty hormones involved. It should not be surprising that so many processes are involved in eating, acquiring energy and storing it. Doing this efficiently is critical to our survival. I am reminded of Penfield's bain map.

Representation of Penfield's Brain Map

 We dedicate a good many of our resources to this interplay. It's complex, and it's central to our survival.

So again, back to the disentangling. Perhaps this could be mapped out using the new technology that allows us to build analogues of bodily systems; organs on a chip.

If we build a successful analogue that replicates the body's propensity to obesity (at least among a percentage of the population or under certain conditions), we can then more readily test adding or subtracting the various hormones/foods/interplays.

Perhaps the answer will be to add a new artificial organ/hormone, to create a "too high" setting on our thermostat. A trick to fix a flaw in our makeup.

id Whisperer

Using Haidt's model of intelligence and motivation, how can I influence my "inner elephant" to change old habit patterns?

This "inner elephant" is our inarticulate cognition that directs nearly all our activity. It handles spacial awareness, visual processing, autonomic functions, emotions, and all those things we call "unconscious". Haidt has turned my understanding on its' head. No only is my inarticulate side at least equal to my reasoning, it is running the show. Wherever my elephant heads, that is where I go. My reasoning side is left to chatter away to explain and justify my behavior. At times my reasoning may influence my judgement and intuition, but that is rare.

So if I am undertaking a new habit, I must engage my intuitive side in the process, convincing my ID that this is a useful, charming, and helpful change. It is now dazzlingly clear to me why trying to "tough through it" or beat my self in to submission has limited effect. As soon as my attention is diverted, my elephant is running away!

Also turned on its' head is my old image of ID as dark, mysterious, sexualized (thanks, Freud!) and slightly troubling in its' unknowability. An intelligent and friendly elephant I can relate to. This inexpressive side is not mysterious; it's me!

With these new revelations, might I find new ways to team up with my intuition/ID/elephant, by communicating in a language that it understands? After all, we have horse whisperers and dog whisperers who have dedicated themselves to understanding creatures with an alien and highly physical communication. I am always impressed at how quickly my daughter builds rapport with a dog, by being highly observant and providing a consistent message. Less chatter, and controlled body movements.

I have the added advantage in that I am speaking not to an alien form, but myself. My morals and judgements feel right, because they are my own.

On top of all this, affection is important. Love ourselves and all we've accomplished and give ourselves all the reassurance that new things are possible. Here's a rough list of ways I might communicate with my inner elephant.

• Read confirming authors and have imaginary conversations with them. 
• Write Haidt about the implications of his model to instigate permanent habit change. I would also like to describe the connection with coach Wooden's style, who instinctively taught his team that self-esteem comes from integrity. 
• Make posters.
• To get moving, chatter less, move more. Move the body, change the demeanor for the few crucial minutes to the new activity. I only have a few moments as my reasoning side is so disractable.
• Afterwards, chatter, reflect after on the positive outcomes, feelings, texture of the new experience. Use a little Buddhist mindfulness to anchor the new experience. 
• Find others of like mind for encouragement and support (mind's preference for consensus).
• What if I am an iconoclast, forging new pathways?
• Using my power of rhetoric, bring new converts alongside.
• Never try and beat my will in to submission. Rather, use gentle encouragement. Recall positive outcomes in the past. 

An example:
I see a re-occurring pattern of declining energy through the week, culminating in an extra-hungry Friday, as I try to use food to increase my energy levels. What might I try to break this pattern?

• Self-care Thursday night? But I did that with no noticeable effect.
• I did recall the positive feelings from the increased exercise, and attempted to duplicate it by exercising at home. Three sets of stairs instead of five (my knees were making crackling noises). Ten minutes instead of twenty on the lifecycle. 
• Dry popcorn on hand to get past the initial hunger?
• Caffeine in the morning? Two cups of green tea?

Old Lady Revives

I nearly slipped on the ice again last night....nearly. The parking lot is a mess. With all this freeze and melt, freeze and melt, we have great globs of slick mounds all over the place. Footing is precarious at best. Even worse, my cleats were safely stored in the closet at home. I had just put them away that afternoon.

Anyways, one foot went left, the other right, and it looked like I was going down for the count. Hubby called out in alarm. I bent my knees, stooped down, and scrambled like a scrum skater in front of the net. I did not go down. I did not go down!

With Naomi Last Night in Front of Skinny Fun-house Mirrors

It is the next morning and I still feel great about this. You see, the first time I went down this winter was in a hospital parking-lot last October, during one of our freaky snow storms. My knee hit hard, but nothing broke thank God. That darned knee has taken forever to heal, though, and is still swollen by a touch of bursitis. Jarring it leaves me blind with pain. Even worse, I've landed three more times on that accursed knee, once in the Bariatric Unit waiting room. So embarrassing.

About that Bariatric Unit. Which is also responsible for my triumphant euphoria this morning. I am signed up for surgery to help me with my weight loss. Success with this sort of surgery is dependent on lifestyle change, so I have been counting calories, counting everything in fact, attending classes, talking to my nurse, talking to dietitians and losing weight.

I've lost weight. A lot of weight.

I'm a lighter old lady, down a full dress size this week.

Lighter, stronger, and more mobile, which means I can recover from a slippery situation. I confidence this gives me, I tell you, I feel great.

Christmas Greetings 2013

There was a Latvian explorer and hermit who lived in the shadow of Angel Falls who abandoned his family to pursue the Mystery of Life. He was convinced both mystery and gold could be found in this wild place, if only he could be quiet long enough to hear it.

When we moved to Grande Cache, I was convinced that mystery and discovery, just out of reach, lives here. There were two treasures I hoped to find. This place is remote, hundreds of kilometers from any other community. The protected wildlife dominates, and people live to the very edge. This is a place where the forces of nature can be watched and understood. I believe I caught the mystery before I had to leave. You can ask me about it over a stiff tea, if you are so inclined.

The second treasure is more of a paradox in human behavior. It is easier to sympathize with the poor who are far away. We have our class distinctions and our prejudices here in Canada too, even if we are polite about it. Before Grande Cache, I had intellectualized this injustice, though I had done nothing about it. I had lived with my discomfort. Here we are in a small town with a larger than average income for its size, struggling like everyone else to provide basic services, and living right beside a community with a vastly lower standard of living. I mean, how many Canadians today live without running water?

To be fully human means embracing everyone as my brother, and here I am living right beside two communities largely ignoring each other. I was graced with the opportunity to work for Aseniwuche Winewak Nation and Rachelle MacDonald. This is a community of non-treaty, mostly Cree people whose quiet mountain culture was severely disrupted by progress. They are recovering by degrees, and visionaries like Rachelle and David (the man of the infectious laugh) are masters at finagling funds to lift the community. May they continue to grow strong. Ply me with more tea and I may speak more of this paradox. Here's David's famous smoke house:

David's Epic Smoke-House

But I had to leave this place. Like everyone else, we have to work to eat. I toyed with the idea of running for mayor, but the salary could not have kept us. So I have left so much. There's the mountains of many faces played by cloud and light and people of every description.

There are the Palette Pals ladies, anchors in the community and keepers of memories. And the Koffee Klatch outside Noelle's Cafe, pontificating large on matters big and small. We have churches and pastors building the community and fighting a losing battle with nature to attract attendance to their services. We have a local paper, the Mountaineer, and a hardware store of narrow aisles reminiscent of my childhood.

We have heavy equipment operators, miners, and prison guards putting in hard hours to power industry and police our convicts. This is a town of hope, a chance at prosperity, for a man of strength to pay off his debts or make new ones. This is a town of new Canadians, South Africans leaving a hard place, and starting fresh in a country dripping with peace and security. A rough paradise less and more than they hoped for.

And I had to leave this place. The grief is a barely remembered ache, brought fresh when I write a letter of remembrance like this. Or when I suddenly realize there is no-one like Billy in this city. A man of deliberate speech and broad heart who would give a man his last shirt if he needed it more. There is no Billy here to pull up beside me in his pickup just to make sure I am OK.I am crying.

Art in the cab of our U-Haul

Art and I left this place on a rainy day, feeling the ache in our bones and moaning at the mounds we had to load. Art and I did it, one foot in front of the other and with the help of a sturdy dolly brought in on order from the hardware store. Our old bodies reminded us we aren't cut out like we used to for this sort of work. The Filipino couple Art had befriended at the local Subway store will miss us, too. They worked for hours helping us load our stuff.

We are in a cute apartment in the City, not too far from where I work for an engineering firm in Sherwood Park. We battle the commute through the construction of the last leg of the Anthony Henday twice a day. I am closer to my family and Art is back with familiar faces at the Kingdom Hall.

This summer we played around at the Corn Maze in Bon Accord.  I've got photos.

There's an edge to the city, an energy, and a restlessness. A restlessness perhaps from living with barely perceived mysteries unsolved, padded over with busy work. Don't dare slow down or you might find yourself trapped in a cab with Billy, deliberately winding around to what is really important in life. Do you have the time to hear him?

The Tyranny of the Queue

Despite the great lengths we took to speed through the pharmacy line, there was a hiccup at the counter, and I was the cause of a quickly growing queue snaking behind us. As I growled my displeasure, hubby tried to shush me with mild threats, with little effect.

This should not have happened.

It matters, and I'll tell you why.

I decided some time ago that a passion to carry me through retirement might very well be to shorten these lines, in any way I can. It was a pharmacy failure that inspired me to start this blog years ago. The queue is dispiriting, it deadens the soul. Temporary strangers are caught, helpless, in a chain of events out of their control. In the heirarchy of petitioner and petitioned, the pharmacist has all the power. Social constraints keep us bound to the other side of the counter, unable to leap the barrier and rifle through the baskets ourselves. No matter how broken the process, all of us on the other side of the line are caught until someone untangles the mess.

I care because I carry some chronic health conditions. I will be spending time in lines. If there is a queue, I want someone to be alert, to parse the business process to catch the failures, and to make it better. I want my humanity to be recognized, to never be reduced to a number. I will not stand by, deadened to passivity.

From bureaucracy by dudayaduda

(Bureaucracy by dudayaduda)
I've had it very good the last few years, by the way of a small town pharmacist who remembered my name from the first day. He would see us coming from our entry in the store, and our medications would be waiting for us by the time we arrived at the counter. When we discussed the nuances of insurance or drug interactions, I felt like I was in the care of an informed professional, and that I received respect as a fellow human being. I knew from that first meeting that Jaime Fournier of Fournier Drugs, Grande Cache, would spoil me for any other sort of service.

So. Well. We leave my beloved small town, and it is big city again. I had a plan to conquer the queue, and I did so with a vengeance. Insurance plan cards and drug lists in hand, Jaimie's phone number displayed on my iPhone, I introduced ourselves to our chosen pharmacy. For that initial visit, there were no prescriptions to be filled. I was giving ample notice of our existence, to be vetted through the system. The attendant was a tad frazzled, I'll give her that. Two other pharmacists were busy at the filling station. An equally frazzled line had formed at the receiving end of the counter. That first visit was successful, and I made a mental note never to visit at "rush hour".

It's been a few weeks, and a small pile of vials were due for refills. Determined to bypass the rush, I had hubby drop off the prescriptions first thing in the morning.

So far, so good.

Granted, I took the chance at arriving after work, but things were looking up. There was but one customer ahead of me. Our prescriptions were found quickly. But.

But hubby's insurance had not gone through.

My strategy crashing around my ears, I am the outraged diva. Of course his insurance should work. I still had his card on me, and I made the girl look it up again. After some rushed number crunching, she calls out, "Good news, it took!".

"Of course it took," I growled. Hubby made nervous shushing sounds. A line started forming at our back.

Some further frantic number crunching, "And yours took, too!" Bravo, I silently rumble, the system works.

I fuss over payment, and we clear the counter to freedom.

I had done everything in my power to smooth the way for a speedy delivery. Insurance information was provided weeks ahead of time. Our orders were placed seven hours in advance. What went wrong? In my opinion there were two fails on Seth Godin's list, "It's not my job", and "I am not a fish." The attendants that day had the time, the process, and the tools in place to get the job done. What was missing was that element of humanity. The first time the insurance did not clear, during a slow period of the day, the attendant did not take a minute to put herself in my shoes. How might I feel at the end of the day if the insurance had not cleared? There's a husband and wife team here, on the same plan. Could something else have gone wrong?

She had done all that was required of her at the time, following process, and doing it efficiently. But she effectively doubled her effort at the worst time of day by not taking a moment to see not papers and slips but a human being at the end of the line.

The Almighty Signature, Last Stand for Paper Forms

Hubby and I have spent the past month preparing to move from Grande Cache back to Edmonton. There's a lot of paperwork from here to there, as we put our home on the market. Living in so remote a location, real estate forms, financial applications, rent applications, and leases all had to be done online. I have over an inch of paper generated in the past month just to get through this.

 The bugbear is the requirement for a signature.

This back-and-forth necessitated the printing and re-scanning of the forms multiple times, the quality degrading through each pass-through. How can integrity be maintained if the document is no longer readable?

 The process was so painful I was wondering if I might help industry take the leap to e-signature. Electronic transactions are legal, most governments having some form of electronic transactions legislation to ease the way for commerce. The process, however, must be proven confidential, secure, and valid. There must be some sort of validation to confirm that the Jane Doe signing is truly Jane. The signing must be password protected, and the transmission encrypted. Privacy watchdogs must be reassured that the identifying information and passwords are protected from loss or misuse.

I believe also there is public hesitation to trust an online process with their signature.

The potential benefits outweigh the risks, in my opinion, as society greens up, and is switching to electronic media wherever possible. Paper elimination saves trees.Crossing this final hurdle of e-signature could finally move offices to paper-free.

I was pleasantly surprised to find in my final transaction, a property management company that uses an online signature service. I initialed and forwarded my final forms completely online. The service is docusign, and it gets an excellent rating from PC magazine. A similar product for comparison is RPost Office. With several products out there, it is time to make the move to e-signature.

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As a post-script, I followed up this blog with an e-mail to the Alberta Real Estate Association, and I received a prompt and thorough reply. The ARCA has been hampered by legislation, specifically the Statute of Frauds and the Real Estate Act of Alberta, which requires "wet" signatures. Changes are in the works and the ARCA will be publishing forms that allow for e-signatures this September.