Management Fads (Habits, skills & time) LO9574

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Wed, 28 Aug 1996 21:20:43 -0400 (EDT)

Replying to LO9528 --

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996 BrooksJeff@aol.com wrote:

[ about learning to ride a bicycle ]
> I think that the important dimension is probably time - riding a
> bike takes place in real time, and the balancing, etc., has to be done
> "automatically" - without much conscious thought. The automaticity that such
> skills entail means that they are difficult to break apart into their
> component parts ("unlearn").

Now that you've said this, it seems obvious. Both Senge's explanation, as
quoted by Jack, and mine from yesterday's post, look, by comparison, just
plain wrong.

Wittgenstein once said something to the effect of "explanations have to
terminate, otherwise they're not explanations." I think sometimes in the
more leisurely discussion threads such as this one, we let our
explanations go on for so long that they lose focus. Then a note such as
yours comes in and snaps us awake again.

Well, more than that. I feel more awake than I've been in a *long* time:
this concept of "realtime" skills is a new one for me and I want to spend
some effort exploring it. Look, for example, at how some music students
attack their work too "analytically" -- never succeed in integrating
separately learned skills into a single realtime whole.

Isn't it true that we are culturally uncertain, as it were, whether
certain skills are of this "realtime" sort or not? Depending on who one
listens to, business management IS or ISN'T such a skill...

> This makes me think about time in general - microworlds tend to speed up time
> so we can see patterns that normally take too long for us to notice. With
> habits (of behavior and of thought) we need to slow time down so we can see
> how to break a pattern apart. Just musing....

Two bullseyes in a row. I've sometimes thought that if I had to identify
one single skill -- something teachable, communicable, not just raw random
"you-have-it-or-you-don't" ability -- that was worth spending the rest of
my life teaching people, it would be the ability to imagine any process at
will either slower or faster than realtime. Having a disciplined
imagination for this is the single most important tool I can think of for
understanding things.

Here are two examples.

a) computer hardware. Last fall, for some friends (you know how all the
neighbors who have computers joke loudly in your presence about how they
don't understand anything they're doing or how anything works but they
just press buttons until something happens), I gave a course about how
their PC's worked. This was not a learn-by-rote practical thing - they
know how to write and print with Microsoft Word - but a
basic-understanding thing. The one exercise we did more than any other
was just to slow everything down, mentally, until the bus clock was one
cycle every five minutes, and the CPU clock was running at a cycle a
minute. With that single exercise, iterated, we were able to develop
solid, durable, consistent, working mental models of all the hardware
operations in the computer. The test of a good mental model, in good
working order, is that it keeps on working even after all the details have
disappeared. And these did.

b) personal business dynamics. Take any recent short encounter or set
of interpersonal events. Start replaying it, either alone or in
discussion with another. Analyse every inflection, every gesture, body
statement, facial tic, word choice, sentence structure, implied thought.
The "slowdown" we're referring to here is more virtual than real -- it
has to do with all the additional data that the analysis is going to
unpack. But I think the skill involved is closely analogous to what we
did in case a. Continue the analysis until you are finished (see the
Wittgenstein quote above). Your goal is simply to describe and understand
but not to develop a grand unified theory.

The odd thing about such a skill as this is that you'll never have to
actually exercise it -- which is lucky because, of course, you could never
have *time* to exercise it. The world is in real time even if we're not.

But a few "slowdown" exercises like this can increase one's sensitiviy to
people by many order of magnitude -- no matter how you measure
magnitude here. It's like the exhaustive "deep" analyses of poetry we
used to do as undergraduates. In fact that's where I got the idea from.
If a single poem of Dylan Thomas or Philip Levine can be worth this,
shouldn't any ten-minute slice of the office Christmas party be worth the
same?

--
Regards
     Jim Michmerhuizen    jamzen@world.std.com
     web residence at     http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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