organization

Genetic Rot And Controlled Demolition

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Watching the Tories flail in Britain has been a bizarre thing. The party, vaguely the “British Republicans” hasn’t been doing well, and PM Rishi Sunak is shockingly clueless. This is a man who’s bizarre “send immigrants to Rwanda no matter where they’re from” plan got torn apart on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. Sunak, who I must remind you, is the PM of Britan, left D-day events early I don’t always pay attention to British politics, but Sunak has made it hard to ignore, even if no one’s dragging out any lettuce.

As I was swept into the vortex of Sunak’s incompetence, it seems like nearly every policy he choses is some strange cravenly obvious pandering. He then does stupid things and makes weird excuses. The Tories impress me as being somehow poisoned, as if they as a party are damaged on what we might call a genetic level, organizationally. They can’t do things that, I dunno, are effective, and instead resort to “look at me I am so trying to pander to you, yoo-hoo!”

Which isn’t working as people discuss the future death-rebirth of the party.

As I watch Sunak spin down the toilet of his own mind (there’s a phrase I need to save), I also think about the rot-com economy, as Ed Zitron calls it.. You know the growth-at-any-cost approach that has infiltrated too much tech. It’s why people put “AI” into things that don’t need it and why so many new things don’t seem to be things we want.

Zitron is worth following, every post or podcast is a treasure. Listening to his thoughts has led me to wonder if if the tech world is terminally poisoned, if the bad policies and so forth are, again, “genetic.” There’s something wrong on a fundamental level and the tech world, like the Tories, will probably face a reckoning – something else Zitron predicts often (specifically that one of the Big Tech companies is going to hurt BADLY).

How many organizations, parties, businesses, are now just basic bullshit-slinging, pander-at-all cost structures that can’t do anything else because that’s what they are. It’s in their structural and cultural DNA and it’s not going to change without the organization dying out or “mutating” due to strong external pressures.

Which is a scary question to ask when you look at the state of the world, climate, banks, and . . . well most everything. People fear Hapsburg AI, but I’m wondering if we have Hapsburg social structures, too damaged and too inbred they can’t recover. Are we ready for them to collapse?

Well, probably not. I mean yes, it sounds like the Tories are going to get crushed, but I imagine they’ll try to go out with a bang and their fall may make room for something worse. Sure it seems any number of tech companies may be facing legal if not technical and financial failure – but imagine the economic shop of a Big Boy falling apart.

Yeah, it’s not pleasant.

I’ve come to realize that, despite my love of fixing organization and process, we need to be able to declare political parties, businesses, etc. nonviable. There’s a point where they’re brain-dead, too genetically damaged to function, and moreso a danger to others. We need a way to shut them down, a controlled demolition, or whatever metaphor you want to throw into the metaphor gumbo I’m making here.

For that matter we also need to ask how to found, maintain, and improve healthy government, business, and social structures. But that’s for a different column – a column to be written in the shadow of collapsing organizations.

Steven Savage

Organization Is Inspiration

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

This is a bit of a personal take on things, not advice or anything. But I was talking with a friend about organization and planning and wanted to share something.

I find Organization inspires me.

Planning, scheduling, breaking work down, and so on gets me going. There’s something about it that gets my imagination going and gets me inspired. So yes, I preach a lot about organizing and Agile and the rest, but I want to note how it helps me imagine.

I realized in that talk that sometimes when I’m down, planning gets me going again.

For instance, recently I was feeling uninspired and didn’t have a sense of what I was doing. So I made some finer-grained plans on my major projects – in fact, I felt driven to do it. It made me a lot more aware, a lot more organized, and a lot more “into” what I was doing.

I think there’s two parts of this.

First, when you plan and organize projects, you get into them. You feel what made you want to do them. You imagine ways to do them. You become aware of them and experience them more intimately.

Secondly, when you plan and organize projects, you can see how to get them done. You see the end goals, you see the path, you know your challenges and your workarounds. You know how to get them done – which probably energizes you as well.

So ironically, now I the planning and organizing guy, realize I may need to do it a little more now and then. That’s a useful realization – sometimes even I need to do a little more work breakdown for reasons over work breakdown.

But that’s why I share these things. Putting it into words makes me think, feedback from you the readers helps me process, and we learn together.

So let’s get organized – in an inspiring way.

Steven Savage

A Writer’s View: System Thinking

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

This Tweet got me thinking:

Neat idea for a creative person, right?  Tracking their creative stages?  It’s a good example of a creative person finding a way to work with their inspiration and habits.  It’s a system.

Good creatives, successful creatives, have systems.  You can hear about the Snowflake Method, or the “X Habits of Whatever,” or endless ideas of how to write novels, or best ways to do art.  You doubtlessly have your own way of organizing your creativity – even if you’re not aware of it.  For all our raging imaginations, it seems we creative people often make ways to organize that fire that burns inside of us.

There are several reasons we do this – reasons we’re not always aware of, but by bringing it into awareness I hope it helps you make your own.

We organize our creativity to ensure things get done.  Being creative is nice, but if there’s no end result, there’s little point unless you’re doing something freeform.

We organize our creativity to provide focus.  So we make sure we don’t loose track, so we can bring projects to completion, so we don’t start anything new.

We organize our creativity to speed time to completion.  We get structure and organization, milestones and ways to track progress – so that creative dream sees the light of day.

We organize our creativity to embody our principles.  We take ideas of what matters, our mad methods, our special tricks and make them formal so we can use them that much easier.

Finally, an an oft missed benefit, is that by organizing our creativity we can find ways to improve.  When you build a system of ideas, of tracking, of documenting you can use that to find new ways to do better.  That organization of imagination can inspire you to think up new ways to get better.

So, go on, take a look at your creativity.  What systems and methods do you have?  What could you build?  How can you provide enough structure to your dreaming to make you dream better?

 

(Remember I do all sorts of books on creativity to help you out!)

– Steve