Goals and Process

When my daughter was here a week ago, she started a jigsaw puzzle. I've been puttering on it over the week since and I'll likely finish it this afternoon.

While I was puzzling, I remembered some professional development class I took years ago. We had an exercise where each table was given a set of jigsaw puzzle pieces and 5 minutes to work on it. After the 5 minutes was up, each team was given the picture for their puzzle and another 5 minutes. After the exercise, we discussed the lesson of how it was much easier to accomplish the purpose (completing the puzzle) when we knew what the goal was (the picture).

At my table, though, we were only 4 pieces short of completion at the 5-minute mark and it was obvious where they went. The picture was moot by the time we got it.

What was different? We had TWO very experienced puzzlers who had PROCESS for tackling the problem - highly compatible processes with a common understanding of the ARCHITECTURE. We tasked the other 3 people with sorting out specific piece traits that we identified. Then together we worked the initial structure of the puzzle. It helped that we had a similar vocabulary for describing the pieces (meta-language) so when we described a space we had, the other easily handed over the matching piece.

The lesson is not that process is better than a common goal. We had a goal. By looking at the pieces, we knew a lot about the final goal - dimensions, texture, and complexity level, for example. Process enabled us to (1) divide and conquer the work with minimal discussion and making best use of skill sets and (2) accomplish the bulk of the work with a less defined goal, allowing the goal to evolve.

I read a lot toward professional development, including process and team management. In my readings, I've noticed two major approaches - one lead directing a team or a team of equals taking the assignments round robin. A team with one lead is limited by that lead's blind spots and by the team's willingness to follow the lead's personality. The lead is also a frequent bottleneck. A team of equals is limited by the average skill level of the team and how well the team handles their knowledge base. It suffers from a lot of rework. In the puzzle exercise, two leads institutionalized the authority and prevented the bottleneck. It also allowed for growth and skill development in the rest of the team.

I wonder why I've never seen a team model with two leads. I wonder if architecture and process life cycle models would be more effective and more workable with a dual-lead approach.

The only rational thing to do

I'm coming to the conclusion that Buddhism is the preeminent rational approach to the world - interacting with reality as it is rather than with models we construct in our minds for how we *think* reality works.

Many of the arguments I hear in American public discourse - what to do about the Gulf Coast oil spill, what to do about the continuing recession, what to do about health care, what to do about jobs, etc - suffers from two fundamental problems. (1) People aren't really talking about what they say they are talking about; and (2) people don't agree on how reality works.

How many times have you had a conversation where the person you are talking with agrees with all your premises but disagrees with your conclusion? My husband, Jon, has an example he likes to use: he and a friend talking about the Iraq war. They agreed that all of the stated reasons for war were debunked and that there were no other reasons out there to list and yet they vehemently disagreed whether the war was justified or a necessary thing.

I read an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about the rage of the Tea Party demanding, among other things, government to stay out of their health care and especially their Medicare (which is and always has been a government program). The piece lays out an interesting thesis that the Tea Partiers are really talking about dependence and not about the government.

This Wednesday, the US District Court for Northern California will be hearing closing arguments on the challenge to Proposition 8 passed by California voters in 2008 to ban same-sex marriages. The transcripts of this trial have been particularly interesting. One of the main "issues" around same sex marriage is that it harms heterosexual marriages (or the "institution of marriage") and/or that children are harmed. People sincerely believe both of those things and yet the actual evidence shows that neither is real. The lack of truth behind the concerns, though, is no barrier to people citing them as legitimate concerns. Why is that? Because we're not talking about actual reality. We're talking about the constructs people have built within their own minds about reality.

As a society and driven by the international media, people are too caught up with their fears of what might be and "messages" of people's actions to actually look at what is. We "know" more about Sarah Palin's family than the family next door to us in our own neighborhoods and even then, what we know is the superficial distortions we get from the media.

How much better off would we be to let the world go for a while and practice mindfulness in our day-to-day activities? What if we ate mindfully, did our work mindfully, paid real attention to the person we are talking with, really looked at and listened to our children? Maybe we could avoid the feeding frenzies and fear-driven stresses and actually have real civil discourse where we actually talk about what we're talking about and come to some solutions to the very real issues facing us today.