On making people productive

I just finished reading Drive by Daniel H. Pink.  It talks primarily about how to motivate people and get them doing their best work, primarily in business.  It was a quick read but solidly written and I think both businesses and people would do well to incorporate its lessons into their lives.  The message is that the old way of thinking that you can motivate people to do their best work by simply dangling monetary incentives or threats in front of them simply doesn't work for most jobs.  People digging ditches or making sales calls can be usefully motivated by these sorts of rewards because their jobs are very mechanical in nature but creative work is stifled by it instead.  The idea is that work involving imagination is best attempted with a lot of freedom to choose how to do the work, who to do it with, and what work to do.

I completely buy into the idea and having been in commission based jobs I am intimately familiar with the messes that get created when the wrong incentives are in place.  When it comes to things like making outgoing sales calls there is very little imagination or creativity so you pretty much have to pay by performance... and you can, because you can usefully measure performance day by day.  When doing work like writing however you can't just expect to pay 25 cents a word and get anything at all good out of people. More than that if you tell people exactly what to write, when to write it, and how it must be written you are going to get crap out the other end.  Tell me I have to push out 500 words about coal mining in China between 3 and 5 oclock and you will get your 500 words but tell me to write something awesome as soon as possible and you will get 1000 words and they will be better.

This is very well demonstrated by the constant messes that executives get into when they have huge bonuses associated with specific performance targets.  They shift the entire company around to put up a specific amount of profit for the last day in March instead of working to make the company successful five years from now.  When you have someone in a job with a lot of creativity and flexibility you need them to look at long term goals; your company is not defined entirely by the sales logged in March specifically so why are you trying to make sure that is the only thing the people in charge care about?  Moreover the size of their paychecks simply doesn't get you better people; while some CEOs are better than others you can't actually improve the quality of the person you get once you get past a couple hundred grand a year.  I saw this constantly both in mattress sales and medical sales - doing ridiculous and damaging things to get an order delivered before month end just to hit targets was the norm.

The great thing about unleashing people's potential through autonomy and general goals rather than bonus targets is that not only do you get better results in creative jobs but you also have much happier people.  It isn't just a way for an organization to get more out of workers but also a way for society itself to improve as everyone enjoys their work more.  Admittedly it doesn't do much for those flipping burgers or operating a widget machine but it is a big step forward for everyone else.

Internet aggregate guacamole

Awhile ago I decided to learn to make guacamole since Wendy loves it.  It turns out that I love it too, and the way I arrived at my recipe was to use my internet aggregate cooking system.  In short, you google your dish, guacamole in this case, normalize the ingredients (as if they were all using 2 avocados, in this case) and then look at the secondary ingredients.  If a secondary ingredient appears on at least 3 of the 5 recipes you average the amounts and put it in.  You have to be smart of course because if 2 recipes list lime juice and 2 lemon juice you really need one or the other, but mostly it works out very easily.

The great thing is that any given recipe on the internet might suck but averaging them like this works great.  People as a whole are fantastic at coming up with great food and Google is great and finding the recipes that people recommend and return to.  Voila,

Internet Aggregate Guacamole

2 ripe avocados (soft to the touch, must compress when squeezed hard)
1 very large tomato
1/2 a small onion, or 1/4 of  large one
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp olive oil
2/3 tsp salt
2/3 tsp pepper

Dice the tomato and onion finely, mix everything in, and mash the avocados until they are somewhere between a paste and tiny pieces.  Serve!  I like using round hard wheat crackers to eat with but you can honestly put this on nearly anything from hamburgers to salad.  Wendy just eats it with a spoon.  Om nom nom.  Adding in two cloves of finely chopped garlic also works nicely if you swing that way.

The word is vagina

Last night we spent a couple hours at The Hospital for Sick Children.  Elli is going to be fine as it was mostly a precautionary measure but I was somewhat boggled by a nurse we ran into there.  Nearly everybody we ran into there seemed great except for that one person who made me wonder if she had any place in the profession.  Here is the story:

The nurse was telling us that we needed to get a urine sample the next time Elli went to the bathroom.  Getting urine samples from adults is a fairly straightforward process but doing so from a six year old who is feeling utterly rotten is another matter entirely.  Thankfully (?) I am familiar enough with this process that it works out all right.

The nurse turned to Wendy and began to explain how to go about getting the sample.  Wendy told her that I would in fact be the one collecting the sample so I should be the one getting the explanation.  The nurse looked at us like we were crazy and got us to repeat the assertion that Daddy would be collecting urine from the little girl instead of Mommy.  This incredulity would make some sense if the hospital had single gender washrooms but because it is a kids hospital they don't.  The explanation continued and concluded with "you use this wipe to uh... clean her thing."

The word is vagina.

Elli is a girl, and like most girls she has a vagina.  I should note that I don't have one but that doesn't mean I don't know the word or that I will somehow be offended by the use of a proper medical term.  Hell, I fathered a child... I presumably have some kind of familiarity with vaginas!  I totally get that giving this explanation to a male is not the norm - the mothers are going to be the ones doing this 99 times out of 100.  The nurse wasn't at a dinner party trying to avoid offending dear old Auntie's delicate sensibilities though - she was, and is, a medical professional in a hospital.

There are several good reasons to make sure medical terminology is precise.  First off, regardless of who nurses are talking to they need to make sure instructions are clear and unambiguous for purely medical reasons.  You really don't want parents guessing as to how to perform a procedure and accidentally doing things wrong.  Secondly, declining to use the proper terms for female genitalia contributes to the demonization of female sexuality and one would hope that in a hospital that sort of thing would not occur.  Sadly that is not always the case.

Prince Charming

Children's programming has all kinds of weird and unfortunate messages embedded in it.  For example, count the number of gay characters in children's movies and tv shows... not exactly a big list.  Obviously most characters in little kid's entertainment are safely asexual but anyone that has a sex drive is hetero.  Feminists have long decried the Prince Charming story where the helpless heroine sits around and waits for her perfect match to show up and save her and these days that is actually a lot less of a thing but there is still a long way to go.  While it is common now for females to take a large role and to save the day the end result is still almost uniformly presented as eternal love with a perfect partner.

That assumption that finding just the right person is the secret to a perfect life is something that really bothers me.  I love Wendy deeply but there is no such thing as a mystical soul mate nor a perfect partner; we are simply two people who work rather well together and are fantastic partners in life and love.  That doesn't mean that we will always fulfill every need the other has and it doesn't mean that we are fated to be each other's one and only forever.  Real life tends to interfere with that plan and there is no reason to think that partnerships need to follow the path of

Meet
Fall in Love
Tragic Misunderstanding
Dangerous Circumstance
Selfless Act
Perfect Love FOREVER

I think that these sorts of standards really hammer it into children's heads that once you meet someone who you love they are obviously supposed to become perfect and be with you forever and that just isn't reasonable or realistic.  People fall out of love, they grow in different directions, and sometimes love just ain't enough.  Ending a relationship is not failure and should not be viewed as such.  Certainly sometimes relationships are torpedoed by somebody doing something singularly selfish or dumb but an awful lot of them just end because it is time (or long past time...) for them to be over.

I have been reading Open:  Love Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage and it really brought home how damaging this idea of perfect love FOREVER is.  The author was in a marriage that regularly made her miserable for years because she simply couldn't figure out how to get around society's insistence that her marriage work a particular way.  Of course most marriages don't work like the Prince Charming story because much more than half of them have infidelity and the great majority have some amount of conflict and misery but we as a society insist on pretending otherwise to our children.

One man, one woman is a marriage 'norm' that is on its way out.  I suspect and I hope that other damaging and silly standards will follow the same path.  Standards like marriage must have precisely two people, marriage is FOREVER, and 'my partner must be all things to me'.  We will be far better off when the message we send to our children is that they should surround themselves with people who make them feel good and love them rather than that they should expect anyone to be their Prince Charming.  We can and should search for people who are awesome but expecting perfection leads to nothing but disappointment.

Games in Waterloo on Easter, again.

So for all those who either know me in real life or who live near Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and like games there will be a big games day in the Comfy Lounge at the Math and Computers building on the University of Waterloo campus on Easter Friday.  We will play games, and talk, and probably a lot of small children will show up and run around and remind us all that we are getting seriously old.

You should be there!  March 29th.  Save that date.  No excuses, not even 'boo hoo, I live in the wrong part of the country.'  Use the intervening time to invent teleportation, cloning, or some other solution.

On not being everything to everyone

Recently I have been spending a lot of time hanging around with stay at home moms that I met through Elli's school.  Initially I just saw them at school while I volunteered but I have been slowly integrating myself into the whole social scene that is interconnected with the school and it has illuminated a few things.  Mostly it has made it clear to me that I have been a bit dumb in my life in terms of who I have been friends with.  Not that my friends have been bad, quite the contrary, but I have pursued friendships with particular sorts of people to the exclusion of others.

Since I got to university I have been friends almost exclusively with gamers and math geeks.  They understand my jokes, obscure science references, and gamer culture.  If I talk about taking a hook, first picking Morphling, or rolling to see who has to play the cleric they get it.  Because being a gamer geek is a huge part of my personality and history this is awesome and really important; I need that outlet.  Unfortunately I think I have, in the past, spent too much time focusing on people who share that aspect of my personality and have lost out on the breadth of humanity.

For example, I have had lots of conversations about marriage, sex, and children recently that the great majority of my gamer friends simply wouldn't be interested in or knowledgeable about.  Talking about how it feels when you are in the middle of sex and a small person knocks on the bedroom door asking for a drink of water is something you need a certain amount of experience to appreciate!  Also, talking about wanting to punt said child off the balcony after getting them said water and parking them back in bed is best done with those who have been there.

It is fantastic to have that sort of community and it really got me thinking about how I have in the past expected my friends to be everything.  I understood that our experiences differed of course but I never really openly acknowledged to myself that my friendships with people can and should be entirely different from each other.  There is no need for the person I play board games with to be the one I confide in when I am worried about something, nor for a friend I met through Elli's school to be somebody I get drunk/high with.  I can happily see some people constantly and others twice a year.  Rather than searching for people who can be all things at all times I should really focus on spending time with people who fill niches that I need and who make me happy.

You get what you pay for

A few weeks ago I went to Elli's classroom to help with their Scientist in the School program.  It seemed to me that the program itself was really good but the big thing that was beneficial was simply having more adults in the classroom.  When the teacher was trying to control all of the kids herself it was such a challenge - some kids listened reasonably but half of them were just sitting there twitching and bouncing while staring off into the distance.  Nearly all of those were boys, to no one's great surprise, and while I could get through to them when I was in charge of 4 kids at a time I can't imagine they could absorb much with one adult watching over 20 at once.

Recently I read an article about how our schools are failing boys and I feel like it had some good points but missed the essential lesson, which is that to educate everyone effectively costs a truckload of money.  It is all well and good to talk about how schools are set up to reward children who can sit still, focus, and be happy with desk work and note that girls are far better than boys at that.  Unfortunately it isn't as if we can just change our attitudes and magically fix things so that kids who have to be constantly running around and doing whatever they want can be taught effectively.  To manage that sort of chaos you need more people and resources, and given that our schools are facing substantial cutbacks as it is that is not going to happen.  We can do better than we currently do certainly but paradigm shifts only go so far.

There is a shift towards home schooling these days that goes along with a criticism of schools as just warehouses for kids.  While I think the warehousing metaphor is sometimes apt I don't think that universal homeschooling is actually the answer since what a lot of parents actually want is warehousing.  They love their kids but staying at home with them all day every day is a lifestyle many people do not enjoy.  Kids who have a safe place to go where they will learn some things and spend a lot of time playing and just doing their thing are doing fine.  They don't all need special enrichment or constant attention and parents don't need to be their everything.  This is coming from someone who has a pretty miserable time in school for a good decade - academics were easy, but actually dealing with the hellions who were my peers was mostly wretched.

We need child warehousing, which we have, but we certainly could do better at making sure that the kids being so warehoused learn and enjoy their experience more.  To accomplish that though takes resources and empowerment of teachers rather than the current government strategy around here which is to demonize the teachers, interfere excessively with their work, and make sure they don't have the tools they need to do their job.