Complexity & Language

This is a brain dump of things that have been emerging for me today:

Complexity. One tool we can use for addressing complexity, or one tool we HAVE to use to manage complexity is language. Ultimately the language must be abstracted above the domain that is being used on, to a higher level. This is true in software, where binary is abstracted to machine language, to asm, to C or Java,and then to maybe UML or XML. With this I wonder if some of the more difficult Systems Thinking books, such as Theory U, are talking about when they try to create new, strange words such as Presence, and Auotpoesis. :)

Religion - Perhaps hell is a combination of connections to bad things or evil things, or broken things. Or maybe Hell is the absence of positive or healthy connections. The thing about this is that it is totally volitional. God cannot make you connect to Him or His people. You have to do that. A person who eschews people, who disconnects from the world will spiral into a narcissistic decline of self-obsession and delusion. The cycle of self cannot be broken from within, and without the check of the real world, you get Hitler in a Bunker syndrome. Their mental model cannot match reality that is literally falling all around them. Instead of moving, adapting, changing, they break, and the bitter loop reinforces itself. The world is bad, people are bad, they are bad.

Just some thoughts.

- Joe

Agile Notes

Did dinner with Jeff Sutherland, the CEO of VersionOne, its founder, and the CTO from SolutionsIQ! It was a great time and a complete honor to have this table of agile heavy hitters. Its too late in the evening to list what we spoke of, but alot of it had to do with impediments. I asked what the next step for agile was. Jeff said that impediment tracking and removal was a biggie, and that if you get really good at this, you'll get the gains he promises in his literature.

This is helpful to me, since it indicates that there is a real connection between Agile and change managment in almost a fractal way. Agile's precepts allow for the change that a software project birngs, and a good roll-out of agile will need those same precepts.

Working on it!

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
- George Orwell
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe"

Love the quotes. You see I have like six blogs to keep up to date,where i can't keep one up to date. :(


So, Cornerstone leadership will be my blog for all things Agile and Lean and Management. Better than this would be to join an existing site with actual traffic, but one thing at a time.

Greetings!

This new blog will contain my hopefully useful insights into management, leadership, and how to perform those things in an Information Technology setting. Its late now, so I'm not going to go into it much. The title is a key to what my current feelings are on the subject. If one is to be a leader today, in the knowledge workforce, how does that person manage? What is the purpose of managment when typically the managers haven't become the expert in the thing they're managing. Even if they're expert in the business, they rarely expert in the technolgy. And vice versa. Even when the rare bird comes along with both of those knowledge bases, how can he find the time to do both of them? How long before he burns out?

So, what I percieve as the ideal managmeent metaphor is the cornerstone. Long an analogy for many things, I choose it to illustrate how the cornerstone can enable the other stones to stand, to be where they are. The cornerstone is the unifying force, the stablizer, the enabler. Not the stongest stone, and perhaps not even the largest load-bearing stone, the cornerstone is the one stone that takes its potential energy and distributes it to others.

Thats what I try to do. :)

More soon.