MEETING OF MIND -- PREVIEW OF THE WORKS OF A DISTINGUISHED THINKER!

MEETING OF MIND – Preview of the Works of a Distinguished Thinker

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006




William L. Livingston III is a friend of mine who once wrote three provocative books. The way he and I came to know each other was through the exchange of books. He saw my book Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches (1990) in a Book Fair in New York City, and said, “Send me a copy of your book, and I’ll send you a copy of mine.”

In his note, he said if ever in New York City look me up, which I did early in 1991. I found he was a nuclear engineering specialist with a large international consulting firm located in the Twin Towers. I visited him there, and subsequently at his home in the suburbs (Bayside, NY). To my surprise, he assembled an impressive group of his friends: nuclear scientists, journalists, Wall Street types, and their wives and children.

All the men were familiar with my book, and were full of questions about it. Since I was totally out of my technical depth – there wasn’t a chemist in the bunch – I was relieved that I could at least converse with them at some level.

Bill Livingston had just completed a two-year stint in South Korea where his firm built a nuclear power plant. I learned from one of the group that Bill also was the holder of some 101 patents besides being a consultant and fledgling writer.

For the past fifteen years, we have been friends and have communicated regularly. Where we differ is that he now desists from writing about organization and management while I persist. I say this with sadness because he has a lot to say that remains relevant to this day.

The quality of his thought is so penetrating that it disappoints me that his literary efforts have not been more receptively received. He epitomizes the frustrated highly technical scientist that is managed, manipulated, motivated, and marginalized by a much less sophisticated management, leading to the growing entropy and collapse of many organizations.

I have attempted to address this problem with seven books and more than 400 articles over the past twenty years, but I must admit I share his frustration. Like him, I am on the fringe, an unknown entity. This drove him from publishing, while it seems only to spur me on. The best way to give you some measure of his mind is to share bits and pieces of his three published books, books, unfortunately, not listed on www.amazon.com. These are a few of the highlighted passages that appealed to me, and should not be taken out of the context of the respective books, but be seen only in that sense.


THE NEW PLAGUE (1985)

HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988)

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990)

* * * * * * * * *
THE NEW PLAGUE

This was the first book he autographed for me, subtitled “Organizations in Complexity.” He signed it: “To Fearless Fisher, Fellow traveler in the Big Muddy”

Quoted passages follow:

PREFACE

My purpose in writing this book is to promote awareness of a great new plague that is suffocating humanity and to show that the plague is unnecessary.

CHAPTER 1

The quantity of scientific facts is now doubling every seven years. Fresh complications emerge before old ones are digested. The New Plague is the colossal mess being made with this large and increasing quantity of unresolved complex matters.

A thing is complex when it exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal.

At the heart of every case of The New Plague is an organization. Organizations are man-made contrivances to provide order and structure for collaboration. For complex problems, the grand organizational scheme for collaboration so efficient for simple matters produces disaster.

Corporations famous for being so much in control are most certainly not.

There is no doubt that the workers in the shops who have long labored to make the project go are mad as hell at somebody. Our society is good at composing solutions.

An undiscussable refers to a subject or information about a discussable subject that is known to individuals but not verbalized in the occupational environment. Seven-eights of everything significant isn’t discussed.

CHAPTER 2

Preserving culture is far more important than preserving life.

In one computer application for the control of a nuclear power plant, the initial projection of $3 million ended up to be over $50 million and the system failed to meet half the expectations of performance.

The worse the project the earlier it is widely known that it is in trouble.

There is no extreme to which a cultural entity will not resort to justify its performance.

If enough people do a thing wrong often enough, it becomes right. Quantity is protection from criticism.

The reaction of management to the wreckage caused by its practices is to increase the intensity of their application. Management has no functionality for problems that don’t fit its practices.

The worse a project turns out the less likely that lessons learned will be used in the next assault . . . That is, meaningful feedback from practices and designs causing the wreckage reduces as the amount of wreckage increases.

CHAPTER 3

Unfortunately, but inevitably, the sharks dismember the wrong problem . . . No one knows and no one is tasked to care. EOPMD (end of the project mismatch discovery) is a long way off. The important thing is to reduce the unknown complexity as fast as possible to fit into the known organizational compartments. It is the only way to remove the anxiety. Get parts in order. Rush into action, any action. We must know what we are doing. Look at all the activity. Nothing else matters. The feeding frenzy ceremony announces to all that the project is and will continue to be out of control.

During party time the working groups each realize that no one is in control of the project, and they silently disconnect from one another and retrench their positions to a sphere of domain over which they know they can exercise rational control.

Whistleblowers are never attacked for the information they reveal to the press, which comes as a surprise to no one. They are assaulted for having the asocial audacity to go public.

HAVE FUN AT WORK

This second book I received at his home in Bayside (NY) and it had this inscription: “To Jim, off to the races on the great crusade to organization sanity.”

CHAPTER One

(He has simply a captivating illustration on the opposite page to this chapter. It shows a man in the rafters with his shirtsleeves rolled up as a puppeteer working the strings on a manager standing in front of a bar graph in a conference room, who in turn is working the strings as a puppeteer of seven men around a conference table with windup keys in their backs.)

The natural process of forming a belief system prefers myths to truth.

In a screwed up situation, turnover is not related to turnaround.

When the remedies are unrelated to the malady, large doses only make more maladies. The mess process is not something that is exhibited piecemeal, or in gradual increments. It is either florid or it is absent.

CHAPTER Three

In terms of unfun, we call a thing complex when we perceive an imbalance between what we think the situation requires of us and what we think we can handle.

When everyone thinks the same, no one has to think.

Human suffering has never been a factor of influence to the corporate decision-making.

Adjusting to the diseases of a sick organization will not make you well.

POSIWID (purpose of a system is what it does) shows that espoused values like health, wealth, dignity and survival don’t rank very high in the social totem pole.

The establishment does not understand technology.

CHAPTER Four

To join an organization is to grant an unconditional surrender of your option space. The right of the organization to constrict your behavior and limit your freedom for action is a basic social assumption.

There is never any time for problem definition. As POSIWID, then the function of the Feeding Frenzy is to take a problem that is not understood and to grind it into organizational components that are.

There are many sides to a decision until you take one.

When the cleverest tongues rather than the most appropriate solutions control dialogue, what you fear is what you get.

The higher the spirits of management the less they are aware of what is going on.

When you don’t know who is coordinating the solution, then no one is.

It is the genius of management that keeps the workery from questioning the inequity of the system.

As long as the disaster outcome is accepted as inevitable, it is guaranteed.

When managers start to purl about form rather than content, projects waste is at its peak.

Changing managers changes nothing.

Without feedback, there can be no correction.

An organization of sheep begets an administration of wolves.

Recognizing the language of failure is the first step to have fun at work.


CHAPTER Six

The only thing well organized by an organization is hypocrisy.

Technical literature on organizations can be classified into two categories: irrelevancies and lies. Most people who write books on these topics are salaried employees of particularly gruesome organizations called universities.

Authority is harsh in direct proportion to its ignorance.

When computers learn to cover up their limitations and their errors, the day of true artificial intelligence will have arrived.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

(This was William Livingston’s last book, and his inscription was a bit sentimental and optimistic: “To F, thanks for all the great insights, and meshing of energies. A great step forward.”)

(The remarkable illustration opposite chapter one of HAVE FUN AT WORK is now the cover of this book.)

PREFACE

Your friends in the highest places are the laws of nature.

As the most significant event concerning the individual since the Industrial Revolution, the constellation marks the swing of the pendulum of power away from the impersonal corporation, where totalitarianism reigns supreme, to the individual and into the Skunkworks (collection of specialists dedicated to a specific project with decision authority), where the real business of solving problems always takes place.

CHAPTER One

So much of what we have been encouraged to believe about solving problems has turned out, instead, to be problem amplification . . . The stuff of problem-solving works like a charm, especially in the trenches where we labor, and the payoff is now (Livingston’s italics).

Facing up to big bad problems can be postponed. The ostrich crisis coping posture can be observed everywhere. Officials in the establishment have turned evasion into an art form. Think of all the big problems, which are bypassed day by day. You are discouraged from thinking for yourself and you are persuaded to ignore complex matters rather than to face them. The establishment wants you to grow only in your narrow specialty and react to everything else by reliance on feelings. The herd likes company.

(And finally)

While the increasingly complex work demands more understanding, we are encouraged to think less and less for ourselves. What this establishment-designed context does, in effect, is to outlaw the complex problem and its solution from the forums of science and public debate. With no suitable arena for large scope matters, the technical community, in one stroke, has cut itself off from the growth experience of solving complex problems. Denial of complexity, the first defense of weak minds, leads directly to the consequences of complexity unchained.

Communication about problem-solving matters runs right into this dilemma. Because everything is connected to everything else, concepts and embodiments of concepts about complexity are messy to understand. If the particulars are presented before the concepts, they can only be recognized as particulars. When the concepts are presented before the examples, they are imaged as abstract rather than tangible forms. If concepts and examples are presented piecemeal, the relationship among pieces is obscure. Writing about complexity is complex matter itself. We still do not know how to make understanding complexity easy. We don’t think it is necessarily possible anymore, and we make no apologies for fundamental truth.

* * * * * * * * * *

I share these Livingston gems with you because organizational life remains a challenge, and I sense that his passion will make connection with you. He comes out of the incubator of science and so it should come as no surprise that he thinks in terms of acronyms and epigrams. Like reading Hemingway, much is left out.

For example, in the last piece, he is implying inductive and deductive reasoning are not enough; that linear logic can become simplistic as applied to complex problems. In other words, everything flies apart or goes around and around in cyclic confusion.

We are all aware of cyclic logic. One experiences the same problems over and over again never reaching resolution. Indeed, it describes many of our lives.

Lateral thinking (right brain), the complement to this vertical thinking (left brain), does not adapt so willingly to acronyms and epigrams, but rather to conceptual forays emboldened by intuitive perspectives. It so happens I feel more comfortable thinking intuitively, while Bill appears more comfortable thinking cognitively. This should come as no surprise to those that read me.

Beautiful Betty has suggested that we would make a good writing team, he with his epigrams and acronyms and me with my whimsical conceptual intuitions. But alas, I am not a collaborator, nor is he.

Be always well,

Jim