review

Train Dreams

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Grave Peak, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, North Idaho

One of the most amazing books-on-tape I listened to recently is Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Following the story of a life of a literal nobody — this was Johnson’s forte — Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West, he writes in unsparing style about Grainier’s life from his perspective. The events that happened, both good and bad, are raw, and unscripted. The basic plot — an orphaned man living in the Inland Northwest, outside of Bonner’s Ferry Idaho — is never broken by much comfort, at least for very long. Living here myself, and sitting here watching the December rain fall outside, it was an act of constant endurance, without a pile jacket or Gore-Tex raincoat in sight. Johnson, besides being an elegiac writer, also embodies Robert Heinlein’s concept of a fair witness. – an unsparing, but non-critical analyst of a situation.

The book reading is stunning, and if you have time, I highly recommend you listen to it. It is disorienting in a strange, immersive way, and showcases Johnson as one of the premier writers of the last 50 years, at least. Johnson doesn’t attempt any intentional emotional manipulation of the reader. Instead, there is just the narrator telling his ghost story from his point of view. The story centers around losing his wife and child in a fire, and I won’t say more than that.

At the same time I had the book recommended to me by an X pal (Amanda Fortini, also a writer, and wife of yet another X pal, Walter Kirn) a movie made from the plot of the book was also released. While the movie is not terrible — the cinematography is evocative, and if you’re familiar with the landscape, as I am (I live adjacent) they do a fine job of capturing what it means to be set in the wild landscapes of the Inland Northwest — an area crossing over from eastern Washington to Northern Idaho.

But instead of scrupulously adhering to Johnson’s book, the movie struck me as a psy-op designed to manipulate the viewer on the issues of our day – not the issues of the 1920s. In the book, for example, a Chinaman caught stealing from the company store is attempted to be executed by a mob, but manages to escape. In the movie, he commits no crime (of course) but is summarily executed, and becomes a ghost that haunts Robert. And Grainier, after the fire, instead of being befriended by a drunk Indian with a bad habit of laying on railroad tracks, as happened in the books, is instead lifted up by a prosperous local native merchant. Magic realism is one thing. But this is so preposterous as to defy belief, especially when one considers the dominant time period being set in the early 1920s. Finally, Grainier isn’t even allowed the elevation of his enlightenment through meditation. Instead, he is lifted up by a woman. White men really cannot save themselves.

I actually enjoyed the movie as much as I’ve enjoyed any movie made in the last five years. And I find myself pondering whether I’m hallucinating these things. But that’s the thing about a good psy-op, especially one aimed at sophisticated audiences. When they had a black vigilante kill a white preacher in the movie, an absolute plot insertion with no match in the book, I was pretty sure I was being had. But the scenery was nice — I love my backyard, having dedicated an enormous amount of my life to saving it from destruction, and the movie turned into at least a watchable movie.

Maybe that has to pass for “good enough” in a time period with a collapsing film industry. But it’s still a shame. Ordinary people — even drunk Indians — can walk through life with a certain dignity that does not ascribe to Hollywood’s current morality plays. And people deserve to understand exactly how difficult life was for all the actors on the last frontier of the lower 48 states.

Where’s a cinematic fair witness when you need one?

Back to Basics – Conway’s Law – the Mechanics of It All

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

A day at the beach

In between babbling about memetics to friends, every now and then one will get a word in edgewise, and ask “OK, Mr. Smartypants. How do we change outcomes?” My answer is always the same. “You have to consciously and deliberately apply Conway’s Law and change the social structure. If you don’t change the social structure, the emergent outcomes that you’re complaining about won’t change.”

They look at me, somewhat knowingly, like they MIGHT have gotten it. And then they walk away, just hoping their organization is going to suddenly morph into something that will produce different outcomes than the current version. Of course, this is insane. What they’re really doing is retreating back into The Matrix. And what people don’t get is that The Matrix has physical laws. You don’t get to break them. Like Grandma always used to say, “wish in one hand, shit in another, and tell me which one fills up first.”

That Grandma.

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to assume that you might be looking for an example (or something) that really conveys to management how this is true, and how they might need to readjust their thinking, as well as their org. chart, if they want a different product design.

Look at a nuclear reactor power plant. It’s a big thing, and at the center is a nuclear reactor. The reactor has support services that connect to it, like cooling fluid, and maintenance departments in charge of things like pumps, environmental controls and whatnot. You better believe that the org. chart looks like that hierarchy.

Last week, I had a visitor from Germany, an organic farming advocate. I was explaining to him that if he wanted small, robotic crawlers and grabbers, as opposed to enormous wheat combines (he got to ride in one) that had to start with a change in social structure of the organization producing them. Not easy to do with no obvious market, and folks making fine money on giant machines, now even driven by satellite.

But let’s take an even simpler design example. An airplane.

Virtually all but a handful of modern aircraft have a tube, called a fuselage, in the middle, upon which are hung wings. Engines then are hung off the wings, and then of course, there are subsystems inside the wings that drive things like flaps, ailerons and control wires.

But getting back to the social configuration, you’d better believe there is a wing group, concerned with the aforementioned components, and there is a primary structures/fuselage group. (Remember this is a simplification.) Within the wing structures group is a sub-group who talks to the fuselage folks regarding attaching the wings to the fuselage. Those folks might even hang out together, because pinning the wings to the fuselage correctly has all sorts of issues, and is obviously critical to entire system integrity. This probably seems obvious (it is). There’s also going to be a vertical stabilizer group (that’s the tail) and a horizontal stabilizer group as well. That’s aircraft 101. The people that interface all that in the design will talk to each other. And then at a large aircraft manufacturer like Boeing, they even have people called “Liaison Engineers” (which they pronounce “Lie-uh-zon” accent on the first syllable) that basically cruise around and make sure the interface people, as well as other folks having integration issues, are taken care of.

I’ve trained my share of Liaison Engineers.

All this seems obvious. But how would such a group ever change an aircraft design to something like a blended wing/body design? See below.

They couldn’t, of course. They are locked inside their social structure, refining the parts of the airplane they are responsible for. This is not entirely a bad thing, in that in the process of refinement increases reliability of the current configuration. Which is a primary reason that airplanes don’t drop out of the sky, and the biggest thing you have to worry about on a flight is whether you’re going to get a package of mixed nuts. Or not.

Any development of such a blended wing-body aircraft would require major redesign, with a major reshuffling and pulling of experts out of all the current groups into an entirely different social structure. Because you’d take some of the old v-Meme NA of the design (e.g. probably attaching engines works much the same way, and trust me, Boeing has specialists for nailing engines to wings) but other things would be entirely different. You’d definitely have to have an entire group for ground crew liaison, and on and on. Those people would then have to talk to the outside vendors providing those sky bridges we’re all accustomed to.

Short version — you’d have to create an entirely new social structure, which then would have to create an entirely new CAD model (think knowledge structure) which would then be instantiated in the final blended-wing-body design.

On top of that, I’m willing to bet that the people in the current organization aren’t used to jumping out of their hierarchy to talk to other technical specialists in the other hierarchies producing the other large parts. Remember — they have those Liaison Engineers for reasons. But you’d need that, and then you’d also have to have some evolved leadership so that if people aren’t “staying in their lane” they know that’s OK, and even encouraged to bring issues that the other parts of the new configuration might need to know about. People that are used to phoning it in because they’re master of their small square of real estate in the old design are going to have to be encouraged to seek out places where the new design requires design synergy.

And without that, you couldn’t make that cool new design at all. Now take that down to manufacturing and you’ll have a markedly different assembly line for such an aircraft. Boeing 737s are built on a continually moving line. If you wanted to build that new plane, you’d have to rethink all of that. And that would require a very different org. chart as well. As well as integrating the manufacturing people far earlier in the process, so you could actually build the thing. It would be revelatory to put the 737 assembly process org. chart up next to a B-2 assembly org chart. While there would be commonalities, I guarantee they’d be significantly different in topology.

If you’ve been reading much of this blog, you now can start seeing how you have different conflicts, as well as synergies in reliability and validity. And that’s going to require different brains, with different abilities to talk to other people with different brains. If you haven’t had an organization that has evolved empathy, that’s not going to exist. And trust me on this one — the thought of jumping out of the org. chart won’t even occur to most people, except in the context of whistle-blowing wrongdoing.

So that’s Conway’s Law in a nutshell. Your org. chart, and how you develop your people, which is largely due to how you set up your communication culture, is destiny.

Because Conway’s Law is The Law.