Author Archives: dr.hypercube

Dendrobates captivus

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The frog folk who visit the site know this already, but for people whose tastes may not run so much in the direction of anuran minutia – a dendrobatid that hasn’t been seen in 77 years has been rediscovered. With all the news about chytrid decimating tropical amphibians, this is the best thing I’ve heard in a while. Story and pictures here (there’s also an article in the April National Geographic, I’m told). The effort is already underway to protect and conserve these little gems. Congratulations and thanks to all involved.

Four quick links:

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  • Private police forces – mall cops with guns and real enforcement responsibilities? Bad idea on so many levels it’s not funny.
  • National Security Letters – abused by the FBI – abuse that was facilitated by the gag order that comes with the letters.
  • DMCA – threat or menace? “Our attempts at copyright control have not been successful” – duh.
  • Folk devils and identity theft. If you don’t correctly identify the cause, good solutions are unlikely.

Systems thinking

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In my post on internet radio I mentioned the adaptation vs. control choice that the media industry is facing. I’m going to eventually post Kauffman’s rules of systems thinking, but since there are 28 of them, I thought I’d soften everyone up with 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline (from Peter Senge’s book):

  1. today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions”
  2. the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back
  3. behavior grows better before it grows worse
  4. the easy way out usually leads back in
  5. the cure can be worse than the disease
  6. faster is slower
  7. cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
  8. small changes can produce big results –but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
  9. you can have your cake and eat it too –but not at once
  10. dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
  11. there is no blame

I remain suspicious of folks that lay out characteristics of effective organizations – the descriptive often segues into the prescriptive and as far as ‘just do these things and your organization will flourish’ – if it was that easy I’d think we’d see a lot fewer Dilbert meets Kafka workplaces. I spent many years working for a very large corporation; we had a CEO who was regularly fêted as a managerial genius. Down in the trenches one of my favorite inside jokes was filling in the blanks on a couple bits of management speak: the inside-out view (how do we see ourselves) and the outside-in view (how do our customers and suppliers see us).

  • inside-out = “I wish I worked for the company he’s talking about”
  • outside-in = “I wish I did business with that company”

In fairness to Jack, I think he realized that the company he liked to describe was some kind of idealized construct – that didn’t make the cube farms any more hospitable though… Whining aside, thinking about systems rather than a naive linear cause and effect is a habit all of us need to cultivate (IMHO).

Rule 10 makes me think of another rule from one of the best project management books out there – The Mythical Man Month. To paraphrase a point from Brook’s book in call and response form:

Q: How do you make a late project later?

A: Add more people!