Dave's Whiteboard

About ten years ago, my parents got a computer. Dad was 87 and Mom was 81.  They weren’t really early adopters, except maybe among their age group.

The primary reason was my dad’s eyesight–he couldn’t drive safely at night to visit friends and play cards.  The computer allowed us to install card-game software.  The software created virtual partners for cribbage, pinochle, and euchre, as well as solitaire cards that never got sticky.

A few weeks later, my mother asked if they could get to the internet.  We got her an AOL account and bought two copies of a graphic-rich how-to book.  (That way, when she had a question, I’d use my copy and say, “Look on page 32.  I’ll walk you through the steps…”)

I printed the first email she sent, in May of 2000.  It read, in part:

I want to know what URL means.  I want to know if my address book has the e-mail addresses in it.  And how do I get it?

Those are great, goal-oriented questions.  And I had forgotten this from my dad, about a month later, until I found the copy this morning:

Hi David

Mom made me do it

This is the old fellow trying to compose a little note.

How am I doing?

Love Dad

For quite a while, they had fun with email (mostly receiving, since their typing skills weren’t the greatest). Over time, though, Mom and Dad had difficulties with the mechanics: they’d get attachments they couldn’t open, and their in-basket will fill up because they didn’t quite get the hang of filing.

Then I had an epiphany: I set up what I called the world’s smallest blog (audience: two).  Instead of writing letters or email, I started posting to the blog.  Instead of searching their in-basket, they’d click on the desktop shortcut I created.

With photos embedded in the posts, they didn’t have to open attachments.  The blog would automatically archive by month, and also by broad topic.  And my three children (who between them have more than half a dozen blogs) had author access, so they too could plop down at this digital kitchen table for a visit.

I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, Sunday was the blog’s fourth anniversary (official readership is down to just my mother).  Second, and not entirely by chance, Sunday also marked the blog’s one-thousandth post.

That’s right: for four years, my parents have had virtual guests about five posts a week.

By and large the posts on their blog are astonishingly mundane.  I write about a trip into Washington, or making chicken stew provençal, or (much less often) about a consulting project I’m working on.

Oh, and the weather.  My dad always wanted to know what our weather was like.

My kids tease me, but they know the real purpose: each post is a brief chat with my mother, often with pictures (she got a lot of pictures of last February’s snowpocalypse), letting her know what’s going on here.  They add their own comments, and a fair number of pictures of the great-grandchildren.

Another reason I mention this is that when I came up with the idea, I realized I’d broken through my own preconception of what a blog was.  Blogs are for the world at large?  Not necessarily.  They have your Big Thought of the Day?  Ehh, maybe not.  They’re all about ever-expanding readership?  It’s debatable.

What really happened is that I had a problem to solve–Mom and Dad’s challenges in working with email, and my own spotty record in sitting down to write them some email.  And by ignoring what I thought were conventions of the medium, I found a solution.

The only drawback?  My brother, who lives with my mother, urges me to post at least four times a week.  If I miss two days running, he says, my mother worries that there’s something wrong, either with her computer or with me.

I’m not sure which worries her more.

Screenshot from WordPress is mine; CC-licensed tea photo by adactio / Jeremy Keith.

A link on Twitter led me to a post at the Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal.  Ashby Jones had fun mocking Our Tech-Savvy Supreme Court.

They were hearing oral arguments in City of Ontario (California) v. Quon.  At issue was whether a member of the Ontario police could expect privacy for personal messages received on his SWAT-team pager, and whether people sending texts to that device could expect that the recipient’s employer would not review those texts.

Jones highlights some remarks by the justices:

• Chief Justice Roberts asked what the difference was between e-mail and a pager.
• Justice Kennedy wondered whether, if you’re sending a text as one arrives, the person who sent that one sees something like “you call is important to us; we’ll get back to you.”
• Justice Scalia asked whether a sent text doesn’t go right to the recipient.  (Jones thinks he was confused by the idea of a service provider.)

(You can judge for yourself, if you’d like.  Here’s the transcript of the oral arguments.  I think the remarks that Jones highlights are at pages 29 [Roberts, email and pages], 44 [Kennedy, your call is important], 48-49 [Scalia, service providers; printing texts].)

Yes, it is amusing if you think the youngest member of the Court doesn’t know the difference between email and a pager.  But that’s about all it is, amusing.  What I think is more pertinent here is that the justices were asking questions to better understand things unfamiliar to them, and that they were focusing on larger issues and not the details of technology.

For instance, Jones left off the first part of Roberts’ question, so I’ll highlight it here:

Maybe everybody else knows this, but what is the difference between the pager and the e-mail? (transcript, page 29)

I have no idea what level of techno-expertise Roberts has, but I’d guess he’s more familiar with email than with pagers, and trying to understand (a) what the difference might be, and (b) whether that difference makes a difference.

In terms of the busy-signal question from Justice Kennedy, it turns out that a few minutes earlier, Roberts had asked:

What happens, just out of curiosity, if you — he is on the pager and sending a message and they are trying to reach him for, you know, a SWAT team crisis?  Does he — does the one kind of trump the other, or do they get a busy signal?

To which the attorney answered, “I don’t think that’s in the record,” which is how a lawyer often phrases “I don’t know.”

As for Scalia’s remark about where a message goes, my guess is that he was being facetious (though we can’t know till there are audio recordings of oral arguments).

A discussion (starting about page 45 in the transcript) had to do with whether it made a difference that the text messages were handled by a service provider.  Scalia asked whether, when you send a text message, you’re pretty much aware that it remains private only if the recipient “or somebody else who has power over the recipient” chooses to look at it.  The lawyer said yes.

Roberts:  Well, then they can’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy based on the fact that their communication is routed through a communications company.

Dammeier (attorney): Well, they — they expect that some company, I’m sure, is going to have to be processing the delivery of this message.  And –

Roberts:  Well, I didn’t — I wouldn’t think that.  I thought, you know, you push a button, it goes right to the other thing.

Dammeier:  Well –

Scalia:  You mean it doesn’t go right to the other thing?

[Laughter]

You may not agree with the opinions that the justices issue, but I think the transcript illustrates several things.  First, they’ve gotten a grasp of the legal issues in the case (which is, after all, their job).  Second, they’re more than willing to ask questions.  Third, as evidenced by Roberts, at least some of them are unafraid of saying, “I don’t understand X.  Can you explain it to me?”

Which isn’t a bad way to start learning more about things you know that you don’t know.

Supreme Court image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Virginia Foxx.

Grad student Kathleen Bogart has Moebius syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis: no smiling, no blinking, no lateral eye movement.  A New York Times article, Seeking Emotional Clues Without Facial Cues, looked at her experience and that of others with Moebius.

When she tried working with refugees from Hurricane Katrina, Bogart often couldn’t connect with them.  They didn’t see sympathy or understanding in her face–because she can’t express those things facially.  People in conversations mirror and react to one another, and we’re usually very skilled at detecting and interpreting very small physical signals: a forced smile, a distracted glance.

This is a complicated area.  It’s not necessarily the case that people with similar paralysis can’t recognize emotion, but the inability to mimic is a barrier.  Some people cope through other channels: eye contact, for example, or voice.  The challenge has turned into a research field for Bogart.

I had no special interest in studying facial paralysis, even though I had it; there were many other things I could have done. But in college I looked to see what psychologists had to say about it, and there was nothing. Very, very little on facial paralysis at all. And I was just — well, I was angry.  Angry.  I thought, I might as well do it because certainly no one else is.

One result was a study of how people with Moebius recognize facial expressions (link is a PDF) of her study, demonstrating that the ability to mimic the expressions of others is not essential to recognizing their emotional state.  As the Times article suggests, if the strategies that people with Moebius use to understand emotion are “teachable,…they could help others with social awkwardness, whether because of anxiety, developmental problems like autism, or common causes of partial paralysis, like Bell’s palsy.”

The Times website has aslide show in which Bogart talks about having a face that can’t express emotion.

In an online conversation, I found myself again quoting Joe Harless. In this case, the quote was from a March 1975 interview with Training magazine.  I haven’t found this online anywhere, so thought I’d summarize a bit here.

A little background: Harless coined the term front-end analysis.  As he wrote in a workshop guide, to help our client achieve its business or organizational goals:

We begin at the end and work backwards in the basic progression:

1. We first find out what goals are not being achieved satisfactorily, or what the new goals are when they are set by the client.
2. We then find out what accomplishment is not being produced satisfactorily that is causing the goal not to be met.
3. We then find out what behaviors are not being obtained that cause the deficient accomplishment.
4. Then, and only then, can we determine which of the influences need to be manipulated.

The process just described is called Front-End Analysis.

The Training interview asked if FEA were “just the Joe Harless shtick.”  Harless replied that it was real “if you define real as having a definite set of procedures…and data and case histories” along with people who are applying these things.

Front-end analysis began with the realization that we could produce excellent training packages, ones that pleased not only the developer but the client.  And yet follow-up evaluation ( “which…we jokingly called rear-end analysis” ) revealed that, as often as not, skills didn’t transfer to the job.

So Harless wondered why.  “Being devotees of the scientific method, we advanced certain hypotheses… [And] we began testing these hypotheses.”

To Harless and his collaborators, rear-end analysis asks, “Why didn’t the training produce the intended result?”  Front-end analysis asks three other questions:

• What are the symptoms that a problem exists?
• What is the performance problem producing those symptoms?
• What is the value of solving that problem?

And that’s where the quote comes from:

Training: Value in terms of what?

Harless: In terms of money. Front-end analysis is about money first and foremost.  So is training.  If not, you’re baby-sitting or doing psychotherapy.

Harless said this as an aside to the main theme of his interview.  Even so, this is a lodestone for anyone working in organizational learning.  I agree that the individual needs to have some personal investment in order to learn effectively on the job.  She wants to raise her skills, or master a new task, or prepare for a new position, or gain satisfaction from resolving new challenges.

Those are her variables.  The organization has variables as well; the relationship between the two sets is an effort to balance the work-equation.  How can those skills, those tasks, those challenges make sense for her in the organization’s context?  “Is it worth  spending X to achieve Y?” Solve for the organization.  Solve for your personal goals.

I’m not trying to reduce this purely to dollars, and I don’t think Harless was, either.  (The same people who get nit-picky about “ROI for training” are strangely silent when a merger like Daimler-Chrysler–financially analyzed, you’d think, to a fare-thee-well–ends up vaporizing billions of dollars.)

When Harless says, “Value in terms of money,” I see it as shorthand.  Money is the most common and most convertible indicator of value in group activity.  You can choose other indicators; you just have to work harder.

1975 was fairly early in the history of performance improvement, though I don’t think we’ve yet reached the Golden Age.  Here’s the Reverend Harless preaching on a related theme:

You know, trainers are forever going around looking for respectability.  They’re always asking, “How can we sell management on the idea of training?”

Well, the answer is, you don’t.  You sell management on the benefits of solving human performance problems. You make it clear to management that you are there to avoid training when it’s not cost-effective.

That’s how you get to be a hero.  That’s how you get to be respectable…That’s how you avoid being stuck off in some personnel department somewhere.

By the way, Guy Wallace’s Pursuing Performance blog has a 2008 video interview with Joe Harless:

“Almost always, the client came to us requesting the development of some kind of training intervention… [in a typical situation, the workers] already knew how to detect and correct…defects….They were not doing so because…they were being paid for the quantity of production rather than the quality of the production.”