please tread lightly

Trying to tread lightly through the day, work and life

There is a first time for everything: my first online recorded discussion

Taking advantage of technology can be a bit intimidating. On the one hand we talk about all of the wonderful possibilities that technology offers, and on the other we don’t really use it. I have become a true Google+ aficionado (or addict) and yet, I seldom use one of the biggest advantages Google offer, the possibility for video chats with up to 10 people called Hangouts. However, in the last month or so I have also been following some Hangouts on Air (Hangouts that get recorded and are available on youtube) of some very smart and thoughtful people. So, yesterday I joined  David Amerland: (http://helpmyseo.com/)  Mark Traphagen, Director of Digital Marketing at Virante: https://plus.google.com/+MarkTraphagen/post and John Rakestraw.

They were a great group, and I thank them for making me welcome and providing great input about the cloud.

(It also didn’t hurt that they accepted me as the Cloud Goddess)

Is Mindset the same as ‘Haltung’ ?

For years now, my main language has been german. While I grew up in the U.S. and consider myself to be a native speaker of english, my post graduate education has all been in the german language.  So, when communicating with my english speaking friends, I sporadically find it challenging to translate ideas into english.

One of these difficult words is “Haltung”, which is a word that doesn’t seem to have a good translation in english. Haltung can be both your physical posture and … well:

  • your attitude?  no, too directed – you can have different attitudes toward different things
  • your predisposition? no, this seems to be a bit too temporary and volatile
  • your mindset?
According to Wikipedia (which is thankfully back up this morning) :

“a mindset is a set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people or groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools.”

Yes, ‘Haltung’ is a mindset.

Who cares?

Well, I do. I care because it is our mindset that determines how we meet and deal with others, what we expect of them and the world. Our mindset also determines how “set” our mind is. We all know the expression “My mind is set”. Just as the german version ‘Haltung’ can refer to a very stiff and straight posture, not very flexible and likely to break, so the same is true of mindset, which can be a kind of concrete, very solid, it will crumble rather than change its shape.

Both mindset and Haltung are an integral part of our personalities, we are seldom really aware of them, and yet they determine so much of our views, thoughts and actions. It determines whether you meet strangers with curiosity or distrust, see children and old people as a nuisance or as someone to be protected and a source for learning, and finally, whether you see employees as chess pieces to be moved around to achieve an end, or rather as individuals with

If you want to  achieve change, you must also change the mindset. Can mindsets be changed? Absolutely, but that is another story.

What I learned from a colporteur this morning

It’s monday,  it is once again, grey in grey,  and I have to go to work, where someone really irritated me last week.

I woke up unexpectedly at 5:05 am – the alarm does not go until 6:00am,  so I started a post full of outrage about the brutality of police towards Occupy Wall Street protesters  etc. - got caught up in the topic, did not have time to finish it and now have to race to work.

A colporteur (but not the one of this story)

There is a traffic jam.

….. you get the drift of how relaxed and happy I am at this point.   I sit in my car at a red light – telling myself that I need to let go of all of this, that it doesn’t get any better by dwelling on it, getting down on myself, so that now, not only is the office, the traffic,  weather, and life in general not my friend, I am beating up on myself as well. (R.D.Laing would have loved this)

And in the middle of my grumble-fest, I notice a movement outside the car – and there is a colporteur, he waves and mouths ‘good morning’ and goes back to his post.


Now, you need to know that here in Vienna, we have colporteurs – these are people (almost always foreign men), who stand at specific assigned locations and sell newspapers to passersby, often risking life and limb dancing through the traffic.

The location I am at now  is one that I drive by daily – been driving past here for at least 16  years. In all that time, this one specific man has been at this post. He was there when I drove my daughter to 1st grade and then school for 6 years (she is now working on her Master’s Degree). He has been there every morning when I drive to work. I have had at least 4 different cars in that time.

Never once did I buy a paper from him (don’t read his brand).  And this morning he makes a point of greeting me.

It is 28° F outside, he has on a fairly light jacket, no gloves and I notice that he has a number of teeth missing.

And I smile, and I am grateful to him, because now I can let go.  

 

PS: and I started many sentences with ‘and’  here, please rest assured that it was done on purpose and gave me great pleasure.

Put Your Best People On Your Most Boring Challenges

Via Scoop.it – Leading Lightly – Managing Mindfully

Michael Schrage writes in HBR about getting boring things done in organizations. Most enterprisess have boring tasks that somehow never really get done right – fixing manual processes and bottlenecks, getting those last 10% of an application performing just right, etc. These are tedious tasks that often take lots of effort and have no immediate visibility in the value chain for the customer. So, often these mundane tasks are given to average employees.  But Schrage writes about a discussion with successful entrepreneurs who advocate the opposite, to use top talent to ‘fix’ these problems. According to the saying: if you want something done, give it to a busy person, the rationale is that ‘talent’ will see and use the opportunity to fix it faster.  I would add that this type of assignement would have other, indirect benefits: having the ‘talent’ work along the ‘drones’ will hopefully give each a bit of appreciation for the other. The talent will see some of the problems the drones have to deal with and get to (hopefully help them) and the drones get to see the talent get its hands dirty with boring work, as well as having a chance to talk at eye-level. A very pragmatic way of mixing the 2 groups and hopefully leading to greater understanding and appreciation.   What do you think?
Via blogs.hbr.org

How (wrong) opinions are formed

You would expect articles appearing in Scientific American  (even on a blog) to be researched and written in such a way as to be sufficient basis for an informed opinion.  Especially when it was written by a staff member.  However, you would be wrong. 

“Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology. Following his report, Coburn proposed eliminating the National Science Foundation’s funding for these “human” sciences, writing: “…do any of these social studies represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie as astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics and oceanography?” 

Wow. That really sets a tone! This article then continues with a general  description of why studying the human mind is a worthwhile objective. This is followed by short explanations of 4 areas in which the social sciences have relevance for society.  The arguments presented all seem reasonable and the Article ends:

“So my colleagues and I are in the unique position of needing to explain what we’ve done not only for the purposes of getting future work funded, but also so our work can be as useful as possible. To improve health and society, the spoils of psychology and its sister fields must reach a wide audience and overturn the misguided notion—embodied by people like Tom Coburn—that the human sciences have nothing useful to say. Here’s hoping this helped.”

All well and good, and here I was, getting all enraged about those ignorant Republicans, etc. etc. Readers of this blog will have realized that my sympathies are not to be found with the current GOP, and I even started to mentally outline a post about this new outrage.

However, I remembered having jumped the gun with a post sometime this summer and decided to take a look at the report cited in the article :  Under the Microscope and I was very glad to have done so…

The impression given by the Scientific American post is that:

  • The republicans singled out human science as the main area of cuts
  • The republicans were thus going to help completely eliminate the basis for research in these areas
  • This is due to the basic ignorance of republicans (“any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important“)
  • The thinking community or researchers and scientists will now be forced to overturn “misguided notions” of people like Tom Coburn in regard to human sciences in order to receive future funding for important studies

When you actually bother to read the study in question, the proposal in the senate, and some of the original documents of the study, you get a somewhat different impression:

  •  The “Under the Microscope” report mentions 3 different areas where they believe significant cuts can be made, including the consolidation of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources – saving $9.67 billion.
  • Before proposing the cuts, the report lists a number of  studies in the area of human science whose uses for society are surely questionable such as “How long can shrimp run on treadmills”, or “If you trust your laundry folding to a robot, how long will you have to wait?”
  • The majority of studies funded either never turn in a final report, or are at least 5 months late. According to an Audit of the NSF Office of Inspector General in 2004, 25% of the Projects of the Human Sciences never filed a final report.
  • Funding for the Human Sciences is not limited to the NSF, in fact, the NSF accounts for only 4% of the total US federal spending on R&D. Existing programs in the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the Endowment of the Humanities are not touched by the findings of the report.

You can obviously disagree with the conclusions drawn by the people writing the report. But to dismiss the findings as invalid by insinuating ignorance of the authors and only very selectively presenting its findings is not helpful, not even in an opinion piece such as a blog entry.

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