Dave's Whiteboard

Scotland’s most famous poet wasn’t much of a success by the age of 26.  He’d farmed, but not successfully, though he has more success in sowing certain kinds of oats.  Out of prospects, he’d accepted a job as a bookkeeper on a plantation in Jamaica… but didn’t have the money for the voyage.

His friend Gavin Hamilton, in whose memory I’ll have a little something this evening, suggested that Burns publish his poems “as a likely way of getting a little money to provide him… in necessaries for Jamaica.”

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect appeared in July of 1786.  By September there was interest in a second edition.  Within six months he was a celebrated artist.  Jamaica was forgotten–until yet another of his loves, Agnes McLehose (known as Nancy to her friends), chose to rejoin her estranged husband… in Jamaica.

In a final letter before she left Scotland, Burns sent her the poem known as Ae Fond Kiss.  It’s his birthday today; not a bad way to celebrate.

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee!  (pledge)

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerfu’ twinkle lights me,
Dark despair around benights me.

I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy;
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her,
Love but her, and love for ever.

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee! (pledge)

I’ve been thinking about the less-than-obvious struggle we (meaning “I”) have with behavior and accomplishment.  Behavior is what you do; accomplishment is what gets done.  In the workplace, people go on a lot about accomplishment. They want results: closed sales, increased share, service delivered at lower cost, and so on.  But people also tend to praise and reinforce behavior, even when its connection to accomplishment is tenuous.

Let’s get something to eat

Think about what you see as critical to quality for your workday lunchtime experience.  For me, at least in part, that involves:

• Acceptable food (Bombay Bistro is great; I don’t demand two Michelin stars)
• A space that’s clean (I don’t want to clean a table)
• Room to eat without bumping other people
• A wait time that’s less than 10% of total time

I think many managers of cafeterias, coffee shops, and similar faster-food places would sign up for those as performance standards for their business.  That’s one reason they often have the touch-screen cash registers: the cashier can punch in items, and the machine does the pricing.  The idea is to produce a worthwhile accomplishment: fast, accurate billing.

In her new book, Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen talks about fast-food drink dispensers.  Sometimes, she says, you get a really skillful food worker:

She can start a drink pouring a the soda machine, turn to ring a customer, and know exactly how long she has before she needs to turn around and keep the cup from overfilling.  That’s the sign of an expert who really knows their job, and has internalized that knowledge over time.

That kind of skill is expensive to acquire, which explains the drink dispensers with size buttons. A worker can press “large” and move on to another part of the order.  The dispenser isn’t (usually) going to overfill the cup, and so it helps him produce a high-quality result–a fast, accurate meal–with less deliberate investment in skill development.

We presume accomplishment; we notice behavior

We tend to disparage that button-pushing, though. We like interacting with high-skill behavior.  It’s enjoyable and maybe reassuring to have our order handled by someone who’s clearly expert in her work.   Even if we get our order just as quickly from the press-the-size worker, we almost feel as if he’s cheating.  It’s the on-the-job equivalent of “he had to look it up.”

If you disagree, how do you feel about cashiers who have trouble making change on their own?  Admit it–it drives you nuts, because people ought to be able to make change.  And how hard can it be?

I tend to agree.  Making change seems like a straightforward application of match.  But I worked for years in a job where I had to make change, often. And I’ve had to teach people to make change accurately, for the sake of the customer and the sake of the business. If someone isn’t fluent at making change, it takes time to develop that fluency.

You know the project-management nostrum: things can be fast, good, and cheap.  Pick the two you want.

In the context of a fast(er) food business, it makes sense to have a cash register that does the change-computing task.  Otherwise, you have to hire people with more skill, or else devote time and energy to helping them acquire that skill.  (At the end of this post, I’ve written up one method for counting change.)

Change and accomplishment

You’d think that any fast-food place would want employees who can count change.  And maybe that’s true–the place wants them, but can’t always find them.  So it needs to hone in more on what the real accomplishment is: is it accurate change that’s handed to the customer quickly?  Do you need to crank in the behavior involved ( “employee calculates” versus “employee uses a tool” )?

Figuring out what results matter, so you can work on delivering them, is ultimately what work is about.  It’s easy to latch onto behavior, because it’s usually observable and seems obvious.  As Robert Mager says, people really oughta wanna do this.  I think accomplishment is a better guide, though it does require you to question assumptions and perhaps discard predispositions.

Change–it isn’t easy.  Take it from a guy who once said to a customer, “I’m sorry, I don’t have change for a ten, but I do have change for a twelve.”

Bonus Feature: the Count Up Twice method for making change

This example uses a small cash purchase, such as a fast-food meal, for which the customer is paying in cash, with one or more bills totaling more than the price of the meal.

1. State the amount of the sale.  (“That comes to $7.32.”)
2. Accept the customer’s payment.
3. Check the payment and state the amount.   (“Out of twenty dollars.”)
4. Set the payment down without putting it into the individual register spaces.
5. Make change by counting up to yourself from the amount of the sale as you remove money from the register.
• That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35…
• 7.40… 45… 50…
• 7.75… 8…
• 9… 10…
• $20.00.
6. Count the change again for the customer, starting with the amount of the sale. Give the customer each coin and bill as you work toward the amount tendered.  Say the amounts out loud.
• That’s $7.32… 33… 34… 35…
• 7.40… 45… 50...
• 7.75… 8 …
• 9… 10…
• $20.00.
7. Thank the customer.
8. As the customer leaves, put the payment into the proper cash register spaces.

Note that I haven’t spelled out the rule of thumb that you should move to the next coin or bill size when the total so far allows you to. And I haven’t addressed complications like what to do if the customer offers bills and coins as payment ($10.50 for that $7.32 meal).  Nor have I address cash-register use, underpayment, or attempts by tricksters to trip up the cashier in mid-count.

CC-licensed images:
Cash register keys by zizzybaloobah.
Generic text by Yongho Kim.

My grade school was St. Brigid’s, in northwest Detroit. The parish has been closed for 22 years, and I suppose the school closed before that. I remember getting half a day off school for Father Brennan’s feast day. I remember teachers like Sister Patrick Elizabeth and Sister Mary Eamon (Eamon, as in de Valera–the school had lots of green on St. Patrick’s Day).

More than anything, I remember my sixth-grade English teacher, Mr. Strunk.  He was only the second teacher I’d had at St. Brigid’s who wasn’t a nun, and the only one who was male.

In hindsight, I suppose I didn’t have a mental model for what a male teacher would be like.  I was disconcerted at first by how different he seemed.  I need to say that I had some very good teachers:  I don’t recall any of that whacking-with-rulers stuff that people seem to assume was mandatory in pre-Vatican II Catholic schools.

But Mr. Strunk was really different.  He said things that were funny, wry, unexpected.  He read to us from Mad Magazine–and may have been planting a crop of critical thinking with the seed-starter of parody.  He went far beyond the stuffy borders of our textbook.

Early in the school year, when he’d said something funny, I responded with with a sarcastic laugh.  (I suppose it was my ten-year-old’s critique: teachers weren’t supposed to be cracking wise.)  He said, not harshly, “If you don’t think it’s funny, don’t laugh.”

That was a door he opened just for me, but he spent a lot of time opening doors like it: “Think for yourself.  You can do it.”

He’d open them by assigning sixth graders a 1,500 word composition.  Topic: The Dime.  That was it; a two-word topic and a length.  What can you do with that?

Another assignment: a 48-line poem.  This time, he assigned the title: “The Last Voyage of The Albatross.”

I don’t recall anything I wrote–but I have a vivid sense of enjoying the writing.  I have an even more vivid sense of what he wrote on my paper, because it leapt into my memory and has never left:

Your poetry improves, my friend,
with each brand new endeavor.
I wish that I had words to lend
to serve you as a level.

But while such things as kings and men
on your mind’s sea do toss,
don’t let this be the last voyage
of your young Albatross.

School was never the same, and a few teachers after him suffered by comparison.  I lost contact with him after going out of state for most of high school.  In pre-Facebook days, it was hard to track down someone out of state; in post-Facebook days, it can still hard to connect with someone who was over 25 when John Kennedy was assassinated.

Through a friend of my younger brother’s, I learned last year that Mr. Strunk was still in the Detroit area; he spent 40 years teaching and coaching.  The friend sent me an address, but warned me that his health was poor.  I wrote a letter that week; I’d sealed it and stamped it, then realized he might not be up to a written reply.  I reprinted the letter and included a phone number, on the outside chance that he might remember me and might be up to calling.

No such luck, but that was all right.  The important thing for me was to say to him directly, more personally, the kinds of things I’ve talked about here.

I have not seen Mr. Strunk since, I suppose, 1963.  Many of my classmates will remember one of his weekend gigs at the parish’s activities building: hosting a hootenanny (and that’s a word well on its way to joining “floppy disk” and “antimacassar” ) .  One of his standards was The MTA Song – about a hapless Boston commuter who lacked the “exit fare” and so couldn’t pay to get off the train.

And did he ever return?
No, he never returned
And his fate is still unlearned.
He may ride forever
‘Neath the streets of Boston:
He’s the man who never returned.

For me, Mr. Strunk was the man who always returned.  I decided to become a teacher in part because of his example. Even after leaving the education field, I would recall his intelligent encouragement, his genuine interest in his students, his respect for their intelligence that included challenging them.

I learned only today that Mr. Strunk died last month.  One woman wrote in the funeral home’s online guestbook, “My all time favorite teacher and I will never forget how honored I felt when he told me to call him Frank.”

It’d be hard to top that. I am grateful to be able to say “Mr. Strunk” and still feel his presence.  I’ve read comments from people who were students in his final years of teaching, and from classmates of mine–we who were the first class he taught, more than 50 years ago.  There are teachers I will always cherish–Brother Leo and Brother André, Father McKendrick and Dr. MacDonald, Professor Bauder — but there was only one Frank Strunk.

When I read about the Organize Series plugin for WordPress (a focus of Monday’s post), I thought, “This could do it.”

No I didn’t.  I don’t know about you, but I rarely think to myself in complete sentences.  Phrasing like this is how we capsulize a more complex experience.  What I believe was going on at the time was something like this: I had a situation I wanted to change (the way I used to manage a series of posts here on my blog no longer worked). And the Organize Series plugin at first glance looked like it could accomplish at least two things:

• Provide automatic navigation between posts in a series (so I wouldn’t have to hard-wire the links).
• Display a list of all the posts in a given series (for me to use as a summary or as a table of contents for the series).

If I’d thought about it longer, I might have articulated another goal: have some way to list all the different series I have.  But I’m not usually that strategic.  Still, what I came up with (provide navigation, display a list) acted as my critical-to-quality elements.  CTQs were widely used at GE when I worked there; I use that acronym partly tongue-in-cheek and partly to highlight informal criteria.

So, I put Organize Series to work, and within 10 minutes I had automatic next/previous navigation for posts in a series, along with an indication that they were part of a series:

(You can click the image to see the entire post.)

When I was still considering whether to use the plugin, I said to my wife, “Wouldn’t it be great to know how to write a plugin?”  On reflection, I realize this statement was another capsulization–a series of them, nested inside each other.  ”Know how to write a plugin” really means:

• “Know how to write a plugin” really means “write a plugin that works….”
• Which in turn means “write one that produces results…”
• Which means “write one that people use to accomplish things that matter to them.”

To me, this is an important distinction for workplace learning: You can learn on your own for your personal satisfaction, and if you’re satisfied, then that’s a sufficient result.  In the workplace, though, you’re part of a larger group (even if that group is you and one individual client), and so the result has to matter within that context.

What’s this got to do with my plugin tinkering?

Think of it as my own workplace learning.  At this point, I was still some distance from my (loosely articulated) end state.  I hadn’t moved much toward my other CTQ of displaying a list of all the posts in a series. In fact, I didn’t yet grasp all the options in the plugin, let alone know how to make them work in a way useful to me.

About 5% of the info from the plugin's page of options

But…In my first 15 minutes with the plugin, I’d achieved a result that I found valuable.  That left me more willing to experiment–which, put another way, says I was somewhat more willing to spend time trying to achieve the next valuable result.

To me, this is a core principle for any type of workplace learning: formal or informal, face-to-face or virtual.  I need to be able to accomplish something that looks to me like real work–produce something that I see has having on-the-job value.  And I need to do that sooner rather than later, which is why twenty minutes on introductions, half an hour on expectations for this workshop, and twenty minutes on learning objectives will invariably drive me to teeth-clenching frustration. Or to eating more of those lowest-bid-hotel pastries.

One of the unexpected outcomes of achieving an initial on-the-job goal is that you end up better able to visualize other goals.  In a sense, learning leads to new problems (or opportunites) because you’re better at grasping the current situation and at visualizing different ones.

In the course of my experimenting with the Organize Series plugin, I did find at least one way to display a list of all the posts in a series.  I can make a box like this appear alongside the title for each post:

The posts in my most complex series

You can click that image if you’d like to see the first post in the series, though I’ve turned this “series post list box” feature off for now, until I learn how to control the way it displays.  Having managed to produce it, though, I’ve picked up several more goals for myself.  I was about to write “learning goals,” but I want to stress that they’re all tied to accomplishment.

• I want to learn how to use code that’s part of the plugin to, for example, display a list of posts like the last example where and when I want it.
• I want to find out how to modify the plugin’s template (the tool it uses to display the full text of all the posts in a series).
• I may even want to learn how to modify the PHP or CSS code to make things happen.

That last is quite a goal for someone who doesn’t really know how to program.  But my various experiments to date, and especially the things I see as successes, have taught me that I can learn to successfully modify small bits of PHP code and achieve relatively high-value results.

So I’m accomplishing what looks like real work to me.

Dave’s Whiteboard marked its fifth anniversary last month.  (No, I didn’t notice, either.)  You might not think it, given my recent output, but my Whiteboard means a lot to me — so much so that whenever I think about changing the theme (the package of files that controls the appearance) I end up considering one that looks much like what I’m currently using.

Sticking with what I’ve had has more and more often meant I run into technical problems.  My current theme is out of date in several ways–for example, it’s not widget-aware.  That means is that I can’t take advantage of simple ways to customize and control the appearance.

I’ve occasionally written several posts on a single topic (a series of posts).  At the time I used a WordPress addon (a plugin) that automatically added previous/next links so that a reader could work through a series without worrying about date or about intervening but unrelated posts.  That same plugin created a table of contents as well, so you could tell where you were in the series.

That plugin stopped working a few months back; I have no idea why.  The effort to manually input the links–to hard-wire them, so to speak–was more than I was ready to expend.  Still, I plan to write a series or two in the coming months, and I wanted to have a low-maintenance way to present all my series.

So this past weekend I started experimenting with the Organize Series plugin. I tested to see if it could link the three posts in my series about the book Improving Performance, by Rummler and Brache.

And it could.  What’s more, with a $15 add-on, I’m able to use a little bit of code and automatically generate a list of posts in a series, like this:

Improving Performance (the book)

Rummler and Brache: Improving Performance

Three levels of performance

Process is a verb, output is a noun

Dirt in the performance engine

I had to do some tinkering, and I had to purchase a $15 add-on for the plugin, but I’m content so far: I’ve accomplished my short-term goal of making each of my series work like a series again–without a lot of hand wiring.

That list of posts in the Improving Performance series, for instance: to make it appear here after installing the Organize Series plugin and the add-on, I inserted the following code into my post:

[ post_list_box series=65 ]

Enough WordPress mumbo-jumbo.  I’m going to revisit this from the perspective of learning on the job.  My hunch is that there’s a kind tradeoff that a person’s willing to make when he has a problem to solve (or an opportunity to seize).  What going into figuring worth is the amount of effort expended, and the value of the results… as seen by the person with the problem or opportunity.

CC-licensed photo by Craig Bennett / theclyde.