The Project: Final Remodel

I have begun the final remodel. I am in the Data phase, and the data almost killed me, as I added knowledge. I ended up with a fractured spine and one rib.

It was nothing that needed any medical attention except for some ibuprofen (drop that oxcondone as quick as you can), then go on muscle relaxers until you can feel that the bleeding has stopped.

I don’t know if this “cheep trick” works or not, but my pain is more real now and I don’t think that it is caused by spasmodic bleeding. I have stopped taking spasm medicine, and trying my back out.

But that is what knowledge is all about, pain, unless you handle the taking of all that data carefully.

I knew better than to use the top step of anything, much less of a 20+ years old step stool. but then I did use it as a platform to do my data-taking from.

Despite the knowledge that I had on how dangerous it is to work from a position of no leverage (top step), I kept using the top step of the stool because I didn’t want to stop and think what I really need in resources, to gather this data safety. I was neither craftsman nor a good manager.

Most people don’t understand that the real job of a millwright (my former job) is safety, and that means not only working with your hands, but ones mind.

In project class in college I was categorized as a mastermind. In one project I was the only one in class (including my team, ouch!) that wrote up the correct answer, and I think my experience as a millwright helped in that effort to categorize me.

I often wondered if anyone was interested in the answer, but nobody asked me about it, so it was hard to tell.

So, go ahead and start that narrative with data gathering, but understand that the odds of getting hurt can catch up with you as you gain knowledge, as I did when I found myself on the floor, on my back, above the edge of the stairs, and with my legs on the steps below me. Talk about a position with no leverage!

Beginning with the right “tempo” is very important in reducing those odds of getting hurt. With tempo you can find the time to become both an organizer and a millwright, a very safe position to be in.

I am just now getting in position to find were my advantage, at least in not getting hurt, will come from.

The Remodel

I have begun the final remodel. I am in the Data phase, and the data almost killed me, as I added knowledge. I ended up with a fractured spine and one rib.

It was nothing that needed any medical attention except for some ibuprofen (drop that oxcondone as quick as you can), then go on muscle relaxers until you can feel that the bleeding has stopped.

I don’t know if this “cheep trick” works or not, but my pain is more real now and I don’t think that it is caused by spasmodic bleeding. I have stopped taking spasm medicine, and trying my back out.

But that is what knowledge is all about, pain, unless you handle the taking of all that data carefully.

I knew better than to use the top step of anything, but then I did use it as a platform to do my data-taking from.

Despite the knowledge that I had on how dangerous it is to work from a position of no leverage (top step), I kept using the top step of the stool because I didn’t want to stop and think what I really need in resources, to gather this data safety. I was neither craftsman nor a good manager.

Most people don’t understand that the real job of a millwright (my former job) is safety, and that means not only working with your hands, but ones mind.

In project class in college I was categorized as a mastermind. In one project I was the only one in class (including my team, ouch!) and I think my experience as a millwright helped in that effort to categorize me.

I often wondered if anyone was interested in the answer, but nobody asked me about it, so it was hard to tell.

So, go ahead and start that narrative with data gathering, but understand that the odds of getting hurt can catch up with you as you gain knowledge, as I did when I found myself on the floor, on my back, above the edge of the stairs, and with my legs on the steps below me. Talk about a position with no leverage!

Beginning with the right “tempo” is very important in reducing those odds. I am just beginning to find mine.

Obama’s Strategic Shift: Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?

Obama’s Strategic shift did not just occur in the South China Sea, it also has apparently begun in his attack to keep his job.

.” But it got really interesting when the conversation turned to what the president considers the biggest mistake of his first term. It was, he said, “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.”

If you replace the word “policy” with process, then what this statement is saying is: “I have gone strategic.”

Policy builds and maintains the process inside a OODA loop. Strategy creates a moment of inertia to by-pass the policy.

Strategy is, as diagrammed, by the way of the Double Freytag Triangle, in the book Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao, narrative decision-making.

 “The nature of this office,” he said, “is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

Obama has “found” strategy and he is using it to continue the narrative (“story”-telling) that is the USA.

I wish him luck on this, because all strategy is flawed, and the worst environment to try and maintain strategy is one in which everyone puts the “bad breath” on you and your narrative. Ill-will puts the focus on your flaws, which is a distraction that keeps your “story” from becoming transparent.

The good news is: it does’t take much to hide/expose the narrative, because of the nature of complexity.

The environment that strategy runs in is so complex, in its policy, that the “tipping point” between a successful and failed strategy is very close in either direction. Policy is created to make sure the process is both accurate and precise, it is both of these (accuracy and precision) that “target” the “tipping point”, in any process.

In other words, strategy has just as much chance of success as failure despite the complexity, but it demands that you get the “story” out, which is an uncertain process.

The only thing that is certain, when using strategy instead of process, all strategy is flawed, in at least one point in the narrative. As Venkatesh Rao shows in the Double Freytag Triangle, all strategy starts out as a “Cheap Trick”, but, before the story ends, it changes into a more powerful form of the “Cheap Trick”. If it doesn’t change, then the “flaw” absorbs the strategy into the “story”, and the narrative continues, or not.

I think it is getting close to the time when we will be able to tell if Obama has found that flaw and is able to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps the “Cheap Trick” can be found inside the Constitution, and the story will move on to another “peak”.

As this article leads me to believe that Obama has bet his presidency on strategy, one has to admit that it took some guts and a whole lot of faith, in the process, which he built his strategy on, to change.

via Arianna Huffington: Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?.

Master sgt. says no to Chinese-made boots

“I’m troubled that the military continues to downsize because of the budget deficits — budget deficits which are in part a result of millions of unemployed American workers,” Adachi wrote in a letter to Air Force Times. “How many American workers are unemployed because military clothing is being produced in foreign countries?”

via Master sgt. says no to Chinese-made boots – Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq – Air Force Times.

Good question.

I wonder how many Americans even know how to build shoes anymore. Didn’t that industry leave this country long ago?

HBS; OODA loop vs The Double Freytag Triangle

I haven’t developed the Way of Twitter, to add much to a conversation, so I am late to and from the narrative.

The link Critt was asking for is the one in this Tweet feed, in the narrative I and Michael Gerald Moore had: Here are the two systems side by side, as drawn out in the HBS article:The OODA loop follows the Implicit Strategy Model of the Past Decade, while the Double Freytag Triangle follows the Sustainable Competitive Advantage.

While the OODA loop sustains itself by constant cycling, and positions it self through its Orientation, much like Sustainable Competitive Advantage, the position isn’t unique, because it is always receiving feed-ahead and feed-back, and the OODA loop doesn’t really sustain itself, because there is always another Act.

On the other hand the Double Freytag Triangle does sustain a Unique competitive position, because it first forms a “Cheap Trick” that is never the position at the peak of the second triangle. After the second Triangle the Double Freytag Triangle dies, and is reborn depending on if the position was sustainable or not.

What happens in an OODA loop, constructiveness and destructiveness occupy the same time/space.  The constructive and destructive forces acts, as flux does inside an electric motor.  In side an electric motor, the constructive and destructive forces hold each other to an optimum speed, or more precisely, tempo. The outcome of the Action of two forces in flux is the harmonization or the re-harmonization of the environment Observed.

In the Double Freytag Triangle, the constructive and destructive force are only used to sustain the structure of the triangle.

The Tempo in a Double Freytag Triangle is in the doing, unlike a OODA loop where the Tempo is in the being.

CDC Claims ‘No Zombies’ Despite Miami, Maryland Cannibal Attack Photos, Video Evidence

Still, zombie conspiracies are circulating the Internet at an alarming rate, becoming the second most-popular search term on Google even, because the news of zombie-like attacks apparently doesn’t stop in just Miami and Maryland.

via CDC Claims ‘No Zombies’ Despite Miami, Maryland Cannibal Attack Photos, Video Evidence.

 At one dollar for eight meals it’s a wonder Zombies are interested in brains.

Although if voter’s ability to carry out elections that involve missing chads are any indication, brains should fetch a premium price in Florida.

How Science Works

I don’t believe that we are educating Americans appropriately. Large portions of critical industries are in the hands of foreigners because of the failures of US education. These failures are deep and systematic — all stakeholders share blame — but must be addressed.

via tdaxp, Ph.D. » Blog Archive » How Science Works.

My reply to this comment was:

< If they are in the hands of foreigners, then it sounds like what you really need is an army. Perhaps an army of students who want to learn, testing or no testing, but an army just the same. You should build your army the old fashion way, by recruitment, instead of trying to find blame. It sounds to me, as you describe the situation of these (now) foreign companies, what you are proposing is just too little too late. >

I had to laugh at the thought that someone at this (tdaxp) web site was worried about “foreigners” occupying critical industries of America. Exactly what foreigners are they worried about, ha!

While I haven’t visited this site very often in the last few years, it has always been a pro-globalization, pro-military/industrial complex advocate, which if I understand correctly has little to do about “being” American, and more about following wealth.

It seems funny now that so-called “foreigners” have penetrated and make up the bulk of both markets (globalization and the military/industrial complex) that the authors  of this web site seems worried. As I said, exactly which “foreigners” are they talking about? Foreigners from another country, or the foreigners who are the opposite of our under-educated Americans in the topic deemed important by the critical (now foreign?) industries?

We are a culture of blame, and our education system (which tdaxp has narrowed the blame down to teachers and publishers) is now deemed to be the blame for the success of our Nation of Americans.

It seems funny to me also that the people who are educated, by our system of education, are the ones who are most critical of our education system. It is as if they had, without help from the system at all, elevate themselves in such a way that the system never touched them, as they went through it.

I admit, if they had gone through a system in which the system was built around the Teacher instead of Student, they may have become very good engineers. And maybe, because they were Students learning engineering, and because that is what they wanted to do, the system taught them how best to blame the system for what they didn’t want. Maybe that is what our system does best, create a nation of blamelessness in ourselves, and I don’t know maybe that is a plus.

What has become clear to me is that what our system does best is to produce people who are advocates of change, at least those with the time and resources to work at change, and I think they want change for the better.

This advocacy for change is something I don’t believe a system that is Teacher based can accomplish, but what a globalized world need now. Especially now at a time when the military/industrial complex and our critical industries have moved off-shore of the USA,  are against change, and especially against change coming from Students.