Marcus wrote:
*Roger writes:*
**
*“*I don't get it, is it detailed technical planning or dog fighting?
Or some kind of mixed martial art?”
Imagine you work in team made of up of unmotivated, uninterested or
untalented individuals. Assume it is impossible to fire or move them
out of the way. They mainly want predictability they can get out of
the office by 5:00pm every day; they want a process for everything so
that they can measure-up and continue to get steady raises. The last
thing these lemmings want are individuals running ahead with proposals
they would have to work to understand. That could have bad
consequences like having their expertise or productivity questioned
and them moving lower in the curve.
One that happens in this situation is that people don’t want to have
deep technical conversations. They want shallow, easily-digestible
guidance and at a pace that isn’t going to cause them to miss their
daughter’s soccer practice or forget to water their garden or whatever
it is they do care about. They want it put on their `agile feed’ so
they can turn their crank and get their points for the day. Other
people may mainly care about their `emotional health’ and this will
involve similar considerations about never feel condescended to, even
if they aren’t be condescended to, but are simply experiencing ignorance.
Sounds just like what I remember from when I worked at LANL? Oh wait!
The desire to enforce norms on group behavior invariably involves
isolating the top performers. Much of the prattle in that 18F markup
file is about how to do that without looking like a total moron.
It’s the same kind of note-comparing social contagion where one
Trump voter convinces the other that it is okay to engage in a bizarre
act of national sabotage.
The question is, who makes the rules and for what purpose? The
lemmings will want the line between normal and abnormal behavior in
one area, and the frontier-pushers will want it in another. An
organization that gives the lemmings what they want will have more
stability, but they probably won’t be innovators. They may even fail
to be competitive.
Frontier-pushers aren’t going to like Trump-like behavior, because
Trump-like behavior is stupid and leads to more dittohead lemmings.
So it is also in their interest to find a faster or bigger dog to take
down uncivil (in their definition) behavior too. Depending on their
culture they may do this quietly or by making an example out of that
individual in front of everyone.
I've heard rumor that there was an official memo at LANL (a month or
more ago) forbidding political discussions at work? Can you confirm or
deny?
- Steve
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