Why am I still alive?

You may guess from the title that I have a potentially ultimate life altering story to tell.

Last week we had a big snow storm where I work in Northern Virginia.  During the work week I stay at my condo about a 30 minutes walk from work.  For the past 4 months, I have been walking to work. It is great, kind of a walking meditation and communing with reality at about 3 miles per hour instead of zipping by from behind a mobile box of steel and glass.  I thought, "great, I can experience walking in snow, should be beautiful." 

That morning, the temperature was just above freezing and the snow fell very heavy compressing on the ground semi-melting.  All the snow plows were out and threw all the snow onto the sidewalks.  So there I was slogging through about 5 inches of slush, it was a little like walking in soft sand above high tide at the beach.  What a workout.  I made it to work and was a bit tired. Awesome, I have developed a bit of endurance over the past few months.

After work, I check my blood sugar, I am a 41 years a type I diabetic. Levels are good, eat some melon left by the cafeteria staff and head out for home, confident that I am well equipped for the return walk.  Not much has been cleared from the sidewalks, so a similar slog back home.  All is well as I cross over the commuter rail track about a block from my condo. 

As I pass the rail station and step off a 4 inch curb onto the drive to the station parking lot, my knees buckle.  I think, where did that sudden fatigue come from.  I stumble across the drive and land in a snow drift.  A kind man stops his car and helps me stand up, asking if I am alright.  I say my legs are a little tired and that I will sit and rest on a rail station bench a few feet away for a few minutes.  I sit down, say thank you and am again all alone with my thoughts.

While I sit there taking stock, I realize that instead of gaining strength from resting, I am getting weaker.  I realize that my blood sugar level are steadily dropping.  I need to get some sugar into my system.  I try to get up, but I am so weak that I cannot move my self along the bench, let alone stand.

Ok, time to call for help.  I pull out my cell phone, press the button and now response.   I hold the power button to turn it on and the Nexus icon comes up for a few seconds and turns off. What? I had plenty of power when I left work! Why is it dead now? 

I remember shortly after leaving the building I had received a call. The wind was blowing so bad that I could only understand a word or two.  They said that they would call back later.  As is my habit, I hit the button to turn off the screen and put in in the holster.  Somehow the screen must have locked on completely draining the battery.

There I sit for over an hour at an empty dark train station with a dark winter coat that know one can see from the road.  Nobody is around because all the commuter trains were cancelled for the snow storm.  There was no foot traffic, and I don't remember seeing any cars after the one with the man that helped me stand up.

I realize that I am in real trouble and that I will likely die before some discovers my body the next morning.  Except for a moment of anger as I call myself an idiot for letting this happen, I am completely calm and present with the situation. I don't fear dying and there is no pain or comfort, so don't think that I am suffering in any way.  Actually it was very beautiful. Snow flakes whisking around each on its own errand.  The detail of each wood grain stands out on the post directly in front of me.  Time starts to become discontinuous.  Five minutes seems like twenty, then twenty minutes seem like five.

I look across the tracks and there is a Fosters hamburger restaurant.  Only 100 steps away lies my salvation.  There is only the guy working there, appearing in each window in turn and he goes about his business.  He can't possibly see me as it is quite dark and I am in a dark corner with a dark coat. I think to myself, I really have to get there! 

I must get there, but as hard as I try, I can't move my body.  I am looking at the sign on the post and realize that it is visually fractured.  Angular pieces with letters start to shift.  Then suddenly the rail sign becomes the menu at Fosters with all of the offerings in fractured pieces shifting as I try to focus on some of it. That is really strange! Am I remembering the last time I was eating at Fosters?

Something is touching the fingers on my left hand.  A voice says "Blood sugar 49."   49! I should be fairly lucid at 49, been there done that. What am I hallucinating!

The voice says "Drink this, it is fruit punch." A straw is put to my lips.  I then see a stretcher and am moving onto it. I then am told "move to the bed" as I am helped on to a hospital bed.  I start to gain more mental continuity as they are asking me for my insurance, medical and other personal information.

As I talk to the emergency room nurse, I start to shiver violently, my tee shirt, shirt and sweater are soaked from the the hypoglycemia sweating and I have a bit of hypothermia as the nurse has trouble getting a temperature. Replacing my shirts with a hospital gown, within about 20 minutes, I am back to normal and ready to go home. Call a cab, go home and get back to work at a normal 9am.

I don't remember walking across the tracks to the restaurant. I don't remember being put into the ambulance, the ambulance driving to the hospital or even being wheeled down the hallway in the hospital to the alcove in the emergency room where I recovered.  Except for the few flashes, I was totally unconscious.

So how did I get across the tracks?  I remember someone saying I had collapsed on the counter at Fosters causing them to call 911.  I take this to mean that no-one helped me there.

So it seems my unconscious body saved itself. My mind was not strong enough to move my body and I had calmly resigned myself to sit there. It would have been a very easy peaceful death.  But my body really wanted me to live and when my mind gave up, my body took over. 

People often ask, "why am I alive?", looking for their purpose.  Now I get to ask, "why am I still alive?" My body believes that I still have some purpose to fulfill, therefore on its own volition saved me from a sure death. 

I still seek my next purpose.

Stop Trying to Change the World

Lat night I listened to a lecture by Alan Watts on YouTube titled: Stop Trying to Change the World. It really took me back to earlier years when I was doing a lot of studying Buddhist philosophy, and caused me to reflect a bit.

It seems that I have been running full tilt at trying to change the world for about 7 years.  Seven is significant as I often make major life changes about ever 7 years or if I start something significant it either changes or is dropped after 7 years. Two examples are: my first marriage and time to a black belt and then switch schools and styles.

Before about 7 years ago I never really tried to change the world.  I was pretty easy going and tended to be open to most things. I had an easy life and made the best choices I could with what was in front of me. I rarely got excited or expressed much emotion.  In high school I was so subdued that if you stabbed me with a pin, I would pause to think about it before saying ouch. Really, the ultimate nerd.

Sometime in 2005 I attended a local SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) meeting.  The speaker was talking about some new concepts in software development in the area that we now call Agile and/or Extreme Programming.  I don't remember what he was calling it, but it caught my interest so I started reading related articles and books.

In 2006 I got the training to call myself a Certified Scrum Master.  I have followed the development in the Agile community ever since.  Used many of the concepts but never got a chance to work in a team that was fully embracing a complete Agile methodology.  However, staying active in the Agile community put me in the place to attend a Agile Philly meeting later in 2006 at Ternary software.  This happened to be, I think maybe one of the first public presentations of a new organizational governance system called Holacracy.

I remember the presentation well, it made a major impression on me.  Holacracy greatly expanded on the fundamental concepts that first attracted me to Agile.  After the meeting I approached the presenter, Brian the founder of Holacracy, and asked how could I join his company. I applied the next day and went through a rather novel and extensive interview process that included a full day simulation.  It was awesome, I learned so much.  This was the first signal that this may not be a good path for me, but I was so over whelmed by the implications of Holacracy and it's value for the future that I ignored my natural tendencies and grabbed hold as tightly as I could.  I tried to do everything I could to implement any piece of Holacracy into my live that was possible for where I was at the moment. And offered to do anything to help spread Holacracy.

So I was in position to attend the first 2 day Experiential seminar, and the first week long Facilitators class, I believe both were in 2007 maybe into early 2008. The Facilitators class eventually became the Certified Holacracy Practitioners class.

I worked with HolacracyOne to try and setup an Into to Holacracy near where I worked in VA, attended the first Washington DC seminar to lend whatever I could to the experience. For maybe a year I was participating in the Volunteer Circle reporting directly into HolacracyOne.  In the fall of 2008 I started a new consulting company I called HelloGovernance (the home for this blog) for the purpose of Holacracy consulting.  This was before the Licensed Consulting Firm policies were created so everything was being created as tensions arise.

In late 2008 maybe early 2009, I attended the first Certified Holacracy Instructor class.  This class was fairly quickly transformed into the current Certified Holacracy Coaches class.  With this Certification and my consulting company, in March I started hosting the first Introduction to Holacracy Webinars.  I saw a need and took individual action to fill it.  In June HolacracyOne started with Intro webinars so I stopped as the need was better filled by H1 and I wanted to keep more focus there than promote myself. I did make a number of sparsely attended public presentations. I found several companies that were willing to attend private webinars.  One company attended an hour long online simulation. It was based on a factious company called Mike's Flower Shop. It actually worked out rather well.

Coaching and training were the areas that long term I really wanted to do with Holacracy.  I have spent almost 6 years working with Toastmaster International to improve my presentation skills and through starting up and mentoring new clubs I worked on my coaching skills. But alas this was not meant to be.  I was doing contract programming which had very little time flexibility and chose that over abandoning my family to energize the HelloGovernance start up I was working on in evenings and weekends.  To much bandwidth to be able to be successful in both.  Still I really learned a lot about myself and consulting.

The effort in 2009 essentially burned me out, so in 2010 I reduced my efforts a bit from Holacracy and started writing Android apps as I had some specific apps that I wanted to use but were not likely to be written by anyone else.  Today I have 2 apps that  well received in their niche markets. Working with Holacracy was still my greatest desire so even to today it is still very much on my mind, constantly searching for ways to contribute of finding a job where I could use it and contribute to the spread of Holacracy.  I have written 2 Holacracy related apps but never published them.

20011 started major health problems leaving me with very little energy to do much more than go to work then come home and sleep.  May 2012 I got a kidney transplant which gave me back my energy.  I believe one of the first things I did when I got a smart phone in my hands after surgery was to respond to a question in the Holacracy Community of Practice.

As HolacracyOne started growing,  I believe I applied for every position. I wanted to help the advancement of Holacracy in any way that I could and the only game I saw was there. 

Never being a fit from Ternary to today, and given that my 7 year cycle is almost up, I am finally getting the message that this is not the work for which I am intended to focus on for the rest of my life.  I think 7 years is giving it a fair try. 

The Alan Watts speech really hit hard.  I so wanted to be involved with changing the world.  I have been elated, disappointed, encouraged and depressed; the greatest range of emotions in my life.  A very interesting journey.  It is time to take the Stop Trying to Change the World path.

I always have ideas to write about in this blog but recently I have not been motivated to actually write them down.  Maybe I will never write here again, who knows, but I know I will always have the ideas.

Holacracy will always hold a special place in me.  As I open up to more possibilities for the expression of my energy, I hope some day to be able to work with it again.   For now I am looking to get back on the meditation cushion as see the world through an even wider lens than the great one I developed studying and working with Holacracy.

Riding the wave

There is a well know adoption curve that looks somewhat like a wave that products surf going through their life cycle.  Just like the surfer, they start well before the main curve/wave with the pioneers.  In this stage new possibilities are created, new ideas, new language.  Soon there is a slight build up of the approaching wave as early adopters discover and use the new product basking in the novelty.  A critical point develops, where the novelty is not enough and a transition to the main wave must be made.  This is often called the early adopter chasm as it is usually very difficult to make the transition to a mainstream product surfing on the massive wave.  While there is excitement in the early phases, with all of the discoveries and new ideas, the real impact is in the actual surfing of the wave. Here you feel the presence of the masses and prove the general usefulness of the product under stress.  Flow state is needed here to maintain the equilibrium to stay on the face of the wave.  Losing the equilibrium can cause a wipe out or even simply sliding over the top and off the backside of the wave.

I have experience the full life cycle through this wave.  In the late 1970's into the early 1980's, I was a contributor to the creation and development of early computer network architectures as a developer, architect and standards body member.  It was an exciting time, creating new protocols defining how computers talk to each other, new ideas about how to use networks.

The company I worked for created a very advanced network architecture well out in front of any other networking product existing in the world at the time. Many ideas we developed into a product came into the open internet many years, sometimes decades later.  The down side was that most people at that time did not know how to effectively take advantage of the features.  The implementation was so big that it could only run on mainframe computers.  Instead, a light weight protocol called TCP/IP satisfied their needs at the current popular level of sophistication.  I watched our network architecture slide into niche markets as TCP/IP took over the world.  30 years later, I recently, helped the last major user complete the transition to TCP/IP.  So I have experienced the full life cycle from birth to death.

Directly experiencing this, I learned a lot of lessons. 

1) Pioneers and early adopters are essential to feed the product pipe line. But don't expect to take what is developed there directly to the main stream. It must be tempered to fit the following:

2) Main stream products must be barely ahead of the current needs of the main stream users.  Not so novel that they cannot immediately see their need and its value. But yet novel enough to be seen as a bit different. It must not introduce concepts that are so foreign that it scares them away from trying it.  It must not be perceived as being bloated with features that do not address some known need. 

Developing and enhancing a product at this precise point is like surfacing the face of a wave, you need to be in flow state sensing the current need of the masses and moving with that need. Staying to far ahead keeps you in the early adopter stage, falling behind put you on the back side of the wave to be quickly forgotten.

The practice of Holacracy directly supports the flow state needed to surf the wave.  The principles of sense and respond apply to both the agility to adapt the product but also in keeping the entire organization constantly aware of the surf board and adapting its form to stay on top of  it.

You Get What You ...

A while back I wrote a blog post titled "You get what you measure" discussing the importance of metrics in the change process.  A couple of days ago I read a blog post at ZenHabits on the theme "You get what you do" discussing the actual change happens in the doing.  It hit me that these two concepts are intimately intertwined. How do you change without doing and how do you understand what to do without measuring.

These two came together recently for me in the area of weight loss. I have been on a steady uphill slope with my weight and became very dissatisfied with how I felt, how out of breath I became and of course not liking looking like a stuffed sausage.  I have heard the story: "I keep reading diet books but I am not losing weight". The punch line is that you cannot lose weight by trying to understand the process, but only by actual practice.

But what is practice?  It seems to me to be a loop of measure, do, measure, do...

Back to my weight.  Several months ago I saw a program by Dr Joel Furman about changing eating habits (life style change) to focus on consuming a diet high in micro nutrients (vitamins, phyto-chemicals, anti-oxidants, etc) but low in the macro nutrients (carbohydrates, fats, protein). One premise is that we over eat because the body craves micro nutrients but the western diet is high calorie but low in micro nutrients.  Thus we over eat and get obese.

So I increased my intake of micro nutrient rich food and watched my high calorie foods. Weight kept going up. So I began to understand that the phrase "watch what I eat" means exactly that; observe the food as it move from my plate to my mouth. It is not a measurement technique, but a placebo in place of actually doing anything to moderate my input.

So with the micro nutrients, my hunger was well contained and my body felt healthier, and I was actually doing something in the right direction, but I did not have any handle on calories. What I was missing was any real measuring.

A couple of months ago one of my best friends at work came in with a high tech pedometer and an app on his smart phone, raving about how measuring his steps and logging his food was helping him lose weight. The device and app came from a company called Fitbit. 

I looked into it.  The system was very easy to use and fairly automatic.  They had a tracker device that would measure steps, stairs, distance, calories burned and if worn on your wrist at night, how well you slept. It would automatically sync through a blue tooth connection to your online account.  They also had a wifi connected scale that measured weight and fat content; which also automatically synced with your account.  Just wear the tracker and step on the scale every day.  The only piece of the puzzle that was not automatic was logging food consumed. With the phone app, you always have a tool at easy hand to do that.

Automatic enough that I would stick with it, I bought the set.  I now have the measurement tools with historical graphs, etc. I need to understand what to do and the motivation to actually do it.

I started just before Thanksgiving and slowed down the gain that first week.  During the 3 weeks after that, I lost 10 pounds.  Seems like a lot but I am a big guy so this might be more like 5 or 6 pounds for someone else.  Most days I meet my goals in calorie intake, and my goal of 10,000 steps and 10 flights of stairs. I feel so much better. My physical fitness has noticeably improved.  Better yet this system feels like something I can maintain for a very long time, ideally a permanent lifestyle change. High in micro nutrients and low in calorie measure diet with goals/feedback in a walking program.

My take away from this experience is that to be effective in making a change in your life, business, anything at all; is to dynamically steer with a constant cycle of measure, adjust, do, measure, adjust, do...

PS, just got this out before the Mayan calendar expires.. ;-)

Over the Cliff

We hear a lot about the fiscal cliff now, not quite as much as we did for the Presidential election and particularly no flood of ads.  However I think that all the rhetoric about how we have to avoid going over the cliff, how the politicians in Washington have to solve this problem before the end is a bunch of hot air.

No need to worry about it.  I predict that we are going over.  I believe that it is pretty much a done deal.

First it is to big a problem to solve in one month.  The politicians are so out of practice in compromising that it will take longer.  The same conditions that caused them to set up the cliff still exist. All the politicians are still saying that they will only accept everything they wanted a year ago.

Secondly, and probably a bigger issue, is that preventing going over the cliff is to neither Republican's or Democrat's political advantage. In fact any move to solve it will bee seen a weakness and be a major political defeat by anyone who blinks.

Most of the Republicans got elected by their district on the promise of never voting to raise taxes and reducing the cost of government.  Many Democrats got elected on the promise of raising taxes on the rich and not reducing the entitlement programs.  If either blinks, then they lose their job next election. And that is what is closest to the heart of a politician (and of course most of us) keeping their job.

But falling off the fiscal cliff solves all of those political problems!

After January 1, the baseline is drastically changed! 

Taxes are higher and government expense is reduced. It is a much better political position to negotiate from.  You can reduce the taxes for one segment of the population without voting for an increase in another.  As far as government spending, it requires some justification to increase any budget.  No one has to vote to reduce a budget and budgets don't just automatically get grandfathered at the old high levels. Everyone politician can claim to be a hero back home where they get elected.

Of course this political victory come at a cost to the economy.  The greatest is the level of uncertainty business and people will feel for the next month and as long as it takes to come to a settlement.  In uncertainty, business will avoid growth investment.  So employment will take a hit.  People will not know how to plan for 2013 taxes.  If they can save for higher taxes that reduces spending.  If they cannot afford the higher taxes, depression and panic sets in.

Given that all of this is pretty obvious and politicians are pretty savvy about protecting their political interest is why I say that going over is pretty much a done deal. I would not be surprised if this is already recognized in backroom deals and that any negotiation that is happening is already using Jan 1 as the baseline.  The question is how fast after Jan 1 will they be able to act.

Even with all this as a back drop, progress can be made if they try to create a number of smaller bills get the low hanging fruit were everyone pretty much agrees and not try to get one huge bill perfect. I have heard some thoughts in this direction, but it would be a new way for congress to operate.

I will check back to this blog entry early January and add some though about how I think I did. 

Kanban

Recently, I attended a webinar by Net Objectives titled "De-mystifying Kanban." It was a very well done presentation discussing the basic principles and practices of a Agile software development variant called Kanban.  They did a good job relating Kanban to the Agile software development practice of Scrum and also to the more general practices of Lean. There was a good discussion on how to use Lean's value stream analysis to organize the flow of the work.  This post is not intended to be a full review of Kanban or the presentation. This opening paragraph is to set the context for a couple of points I would like to discuss.

Most of Kanban fits in the tactical organizational space.  As in most Agile software practices Kanban emphasizes breaking software development into small distinct chunks usually expressed as a story and progressing them through various steps of development such as design, coding,  unit testing, integration, etc. depending on what makes sense for the particular particular organization.

The Agile software development systems tend to emphasize cross training so that most everyone in the team can execute in all steps of development. Emphasizing predominately a team of generalists. There are some specialists for certain activities, such as database or build specialists, but the emphasis is on generalizing the roles so that any team member can, for the most part, pickup any story at any point in its development or even work in pairs in a fast paced  test driven development pair programing model, switching back and forth between the tester and coder roles.

This emphasis on generalizing of roles in Agile software development seems to me to be different from the emphasis I see in Holacracy of differentiating  and separating roles to focused onto an individual. While this seems to be Holacracy"s emphasis, Holacracy works very well with teams focusing on role generalization in their operational activities.  There are a number of examples of Agile teams using Holacracy very successfully.

Back to the webinar, I heard many times the phrase "Kanban opens up the opportunity to have a conversation" on defining policies, roles, relationships, etc. It was always left at "having a conversation." No idea as how to structure the conversation.  This is where the Governance practices of Holacracy really shine. The purpose, inputs, outputs, and meeting practices are very well structured and defined in Holacracy. This leads to very clear results and a clear way forward from these "conversations".  Leaving the conversations undefined in Kanban, still leaves a lot of room for stalemates, politics, unclear definitions and directions, unproductive meetings.

I feel that Kanban has very strong operational characteristics for work that can be structured in such a way to effectively use it.  Kanban should be well understood by many organizations as it can be surprising how often it can be useful. But it is not sufficient in itself, Kanban needs the governance practices offered in Holacracy to develop clarity for the Kanban practices to be as effective as possible.

Leadership

Recently, HolacracyOne posted on Facebook:

There is a lot of buzz about "Leadership Development". Enlightened leaders are indeed needed to make up for the lack of organizational capacity to digest whatever comes from the environment. Holacracy precisely helps building this organizational capacity, making leadership development much less necessary.

This comes at a time when I have just finished the book "The End of Leadership" which talks about the Leadership industry. The book and Holacracy tend to agree that the current offerings of Leadership development are not what they should be. The book says that the leadership industry is failing us and is a self perpetuation sham. The book contains many pages of real world example. Holacracy says that leadership is not need to the level that our organizations think that it is needed. Both seem to me to shed good light on the issue, but I have a slightly different view.

My knowledge about the material taught in the current leadership training is about how a single person leads and motivates groups of small to very large people to do what the leader wants.

From the examples in the book, even with current organizations this has not worked very well but since it is very attractive to leaders in organizations, it really strokes their egos to think that everything revolves around the leader, leadership consultants teach what brings in the money. And it is a lot of money, to the tune of $50 billion a year.

Holacracy proposes a radically different distributed power system from conventional organizations in which this leader centric training has very little value.  There is still leadership, it is just radically different.

My proposition is that leadership training is very important, but not the leadership training that is currently being promoted by the industry today. 

With current organizations the leaders at the top are usually very autocratic. They give the orders and everyone below marches always looking over their shoulders in case the leader does not like the way they are marching.  Holacracy turns this on its head.  Purpose flows down from the top, but how each marches is determined autocratically by the person doing the marching.

As everyone in the organization is an autocrat over their own identified scope, they do need leadership training on how to lead that scope effectively.  As I indicated before, this leadership is fundamentally different.  Instead of learning how to get others to do what you want, you must learn how to get yourself motivated, how to stay organized and focused to do what is needed by the purpose guiding that scope.  Self-leadership is also need to effectively act a organizational sensors, to know how to recognize the tensions, how and when to speak-up to the organization, and how not to be personally attached to your idea as to how to resolve the tensions that you sense.

I see many people working in a conventional organization that will do nothing unless directly motivated and directed by the leader.  This approach will not work in Holacracy.  If a person executes a role with this do nothing unless externally directed approach, nothing will get done and after a while the holacratic organization will eject them as not being suitable for the role.

This failure is not a fundamental human weakness.  All humans are capable of working is such a system. Instead, it is a weakness in training and socialization of the person. Most of the skill are not taught at all or even worse suppressed by the more effective conventional leaders. It is a positive feedback loop, the more effective the conventional leader, the more repressed and dependent the follower.

These self leadership skills are the skills needed in leadership training for the future.  Even more, most people will need this training and refresher courses throughout their lives.  This new direction would seem to be a larger industry than the current leadership industry, providing more revenue if teachers and consultants can get past the sunk cost put into the existing models and experience. Further more, the new direction would meet the real needs of organizations instead of simply massaging the egos of the leaders and repressing the lead.