038 - C is for Complacent

038 - C is for Complacent, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I see many problems with the managements of companies, and this is one of my least favourites - where managers rush around politicking with each other but ignoring basic issues of communication within and between departments. Guess who gets the blame when things don't go right? Guess who is called lazy?

It can be fun being a manager, getting tasks set by those above them, attending meetings, putting together reports - but what about the procedures that are already in place or none existent?

I have worked for companies that create new products as part of their basic existence and also service companies. The latter tend to apply product thinking to their own systems rather than solving issues in novel and applicable ways. I think this is the result of the education and experience of the management team. By product thinking I mean sending managers on management or product-related courses, or buying in ready-made computer solution or other systems. having spent a lot of time talking to people in management in service industries I can see that they believe they understand innovation, but assume that innovation really means 'new'. a new course, a new system - all pre-made by someone else.

The problem is that many in-house systems are very specific to the nature of the business and the geographical relationship of branches and clients, and the assignations of duties between departments. Innovation is finding a solution that fits by examining the problem, and accepting that you do not know what the answer is before you begin. Not what package you can buy to solve the problem, but understanding what the problem is. This is where it gets tricky, because understanding the problem means abandoning traditional thought, leaving yourself naked to the universe - and naked to your staff as you attempt to learn what it is that they actually do. Yep, you have to admit that you have no idea what the solution is. You don't know. And that is hard in a world of service company management politics.

Hence, rather than learn how to deal with the unknown, whole management teams play internal politics and waste vast resources on systems that mysteriously do not work as well as it said on the package.

Play, play, play, like me in the left hand image, having fun while unnoticed on the table in front of you your internals systems are a mess. that mess sets up friction, and eventually one of your cards catch fire. Run, run, run around with your ass/card on fire, look for someone to blame - and still not see that the processes are still a mess.

037 - D is for unnecessary Division

037 - D is for unnecessary Division, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I remember Lech Walesa, former president of Poland and leader of Solidarity at the Gdansk shipyards in the 1980s, during an attempted political comeback in about 2000 using the slogan 'black is black, white is white". For all his remarkable efforts with Solidarity, he had made a poor president, which to my mind is no shame, and there were not many people left in Poland who would trust him as their leader by this time. Still, the slogan was a wise move - for there are many people who believe in Right and Wrong, Law and Chaos, etc.

The reality is that Right/Wrong/Law/Chaos/etc are [i]limits[/i] - unattainable concepts of perfect in two opposite directions - infinity and negative infinity.

036 - E is for the End of Creation

036 - E is for the End of Creation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There are two ways of looking at life - from the small bits up or the big bit down. Imagine that you defined a car as being a three-box sedan - engine part, passenger part and trunk. If you made a car without a separate trunk, a fastback or hatchback say, then this would not be a true car but a derivative of a car, not a true car. This is the small-bits-up view of life - define a single element as the ideal and then anything that does not match must be some other element.

The big bits down would say that a car is something that is self-powered and primarily carries small numbers of people around - three-box, two-box, truck and the rest would all be 'car'.

Many people consider language to have an ideal model, and anything slightly different is dialect, emotional speaking, corruption and the rest, not true language. This is small-bit thinking. The problem with small-bit thinking is that it excludes original thought, although many would argue that excluding the attendant change is a good thing.

Polish linguistics is caught in a small-bit thinking trap, where many of the practitioners vehemently reject ideas from outside Poland under the very weak argument that "Polish is different'. Polish is not that different, but the result of this thinking is millions of wasted pupil-teaching hours every year in the teaching of language in Poland while at universities the lecturers and professors every day walk past opportunity of greater and deeper understanding, instead enmeshing the next generation in the same trap.

The same thinking traps millions of people around the world into narrow worlds where you cannot even be adventurous in the home you live in without heavy criticism - the question of whether your home is a good design or suits the environment is secondary as to the question of how well your home matches the three-box-sedan model of a house. You must have lots of tiny rooms to ensure that your family spends time apart, houses must be separate from the garden, and vast quantities of rarely used items must fill in the space. The rooms must be featureless boxes that you have to fill with decor and furniture merely to take away the mind-numbing boredom of it all - rather than designing spaces to fit us.

To me a car is a loose concept to describe a whole bucket full of personal transport concepts that has no hope of being filled completely. I am a big-bit thinker - I see humanity first and try to ensure that life and the world is a happy place by meeting our needs.

035 - L is for Learning

035 - L is for Learning, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Tools are nothing more than a manifestation of our imaginations, which we choose to use in order to make specific tasks easier or more comprehensible. The guiding force behind the use of all tools, including our own hands, is philosophy, that mental, sharable manifestation of our innermost selves.

Philosophy to many is something divorced from the practical world, something engaged in by lofty intellectuals either while wearing a white sheet and sandals or a tweedy jacket with a pipe hanging from the mouth, ready to be used to point out relevant facts.

Philosophy was once part and parcel of the whole learning thing, but somewhere along the way it lost contact with the sciences and barely remained in anything more than a nodding acquaintance of the arts. Philosophy forgot one of its own - if you step into a river today, then if you step into it tomorrow, it won't be the same river. Philosophy tried to remain the same river, not really noticing that the science had cut a whole new channel of its own.

If philosophers fail to keep in regular enough contact with science and its companion, business, can science and business at least keep an eye on philosophy? The answer is, generally no, because philosphy appears largely irrelevant. I mean, who cares whether the river today is or is not the same as it was yesterday, it's a just river, isn't it?

Actually, no, imagine if instead of a river, the example had been a market. This leads to two thoughts - the fiorst of which is that the market today is not the same as it was yesterday, even though it might not appear to have changed. Business, therefore, must continue to monitor the market day after day to see how it is changing in order to decide when the business must change its prices, products, internal procedures and so on. The second is that by putting your foot in a river, you change the river - and by entering a market, you change the market, either slightly or significantly, depending on how big one's business foot is.

I chose this well known piece of philosophy merely to illustrate a point - and that is philosophy is relevant, it is a special tool for managing our knowledge to relate it to our understanding. River, market, HR, family - the philosophic principal works all over the place, a general tool no different to a screwdriver.

If I were to hand you an unfamiliar tool and asked you to use it, you might be concerned - how is it supposed to be used, and when should one use it? A car is a good example of a special transport tool that you know how it is useful, and that special training will be needed in order to use it. With philosophy, on the other hand, no one thinks twice about needing special training in how to use it, hence most people cannot use it effectively and therefore it must be of little or no use.

I see this process every day - the philosophy of creation, for example, is taken for granted, is consequently done badly when attempted, and then when the result fails to meet expectations, the eventual users are blamed. Often the solution is to take more time at the initiation of the process, and to see the process as trying to find the best-fit solution and not the best-fit tradition to wrap around the process like a tired and over-size suit.

All tools are equal if they are equal to the task, and all tools effect whatever they are used on, even if only for observation. Your image of your own language is affected by the grammar you have been taught in relation to it, if you have learned a foriegn language then you are even more affected by the grammar you have been taught, while your image of an unlearned language is almost completely unaffected because you haven't learned any grammar for it. If you were to assess someone else's writings, then writings in your own language, your school-learned language and your unlearned language would all be different. You assessments would be unreliable, no matter how well trained you are, especially in your school-learned language, your assessment of that one is the least likely to be of any practical use them moment you meet a native. Your assessment of the unlearned language would at least have a chance of being safely curtailed by the lack of any understanding. This is the purpose of philosophy - to give you insight into processes without actually touching the processes with the inevitable changes to the processes, and to predict processes that as yet do not exist.

All tools need practice, and all tools need respect. If you cannot get the desired result with a tool then the4 first place to look for a fault is inside our heads.

Imagine you

034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans

034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I remember being quite surprised while teaching English to a class of university students here in Lublin, Poland, when one of the students told me there were no more philosophers. I cannot now remember whether this student attended the local state (i.e. former communist) university or the local catholic equivalent. Ah, Lublin - where communist and fascist universities abide peacably side-by-side!

Whichever, I soon discovered that this is a common opinion, philosophers are a thing of the past, people gaining degrees in philosophy these days, including professors, are simply unable to be philosophers. Imagine studying physics and being unable to become an physicist! I would not say this is a majority view, nor do i wish universities to become places of rote learning with carefully proscribed views. But - no philosophers? No dangerously exciting interplay of concepts and reality? Everything consigned to the dry pages of university texts like last summer's pressed flowers?

In my idea of the universe, anyone can be a philosopher as long as one takes the time to ponder life. A beer or two with friends is enough to trigger the philosopher among many of us - the results do not have to stun the world, they merely have to be perceptive. And since life is ever changing, especially those that we have influence over, the need for new philosophy is always with us.

My own philosophy, which like any philosophy can sound a little irrelevant to many, is always practical in the way that a screwdriver is eminently practical once you learn how to use one and can recognise those situations in which it can be used. One would not expect to be able to walk into a tool shop and buy the most complex tool and expect to know how to use it effectively without some experience or training, and yet the world is full of people flippant about the impracticality of philosophic tools they lack the skill to use. I would say that all philosophy is practical, but like physical tools, we do not all have the ability or training to use them or to use them effectively.

All human brains are very similar, everything that we perceive we perceive in largely the same ways - closer to the way that mammals think than insects, and infinitely more similar than with the way mountains think, assuming that they do. Combine this similarity with a regularly exercised creative talent and what you create new is remarkably similar to that produced by other, similar thinkers. We all believe the world to be as we see it, and we all have access to the same kind of knowledge thanks to us having very similar education systems.

As a result, I am very good at selecting future trends, not because I can see into the future, but that I have become adept at analysing current and past information in the human fashion. If I think of something, the chances are that someone someplace else is also having similar thoughts, possibly hundreds, thousands or even millions of other people.

If a human from some as-yet undiscovered tribe were to arrive at your door, assuming he or she were able to overcome her culture shock, would be able to function in our culture. The reverse situation is also true, so if you are practised in the creative use of human systems, there is no reason other than the limitations of time and resources and the natural resistance to change, why if you were dropped in this undiscovered village life why you should not recreate life something like you know it today.

To achieve this would require more than the simple regurgitation and application of knowledge, you simply cannot have enough knowledge of the disparate information of what makes the world what it is in all its parts safely tucked away in your head. You would have to rely on deduction - the acquisition of knowledge through use of your understanding of how we humans view the universe led by the light of the fact that you know the knowledge exists.

It is very common for people to talk about how different life is in another country, and there is an almost palpable desire for this to be so. The reality is that these foreign places are more like home than many people care to admit, they might not have the same tea ceremony there, but dig into the culture and you find the same things. I often talk to people about the 'pig culture' of northern Europe, a culture distinct from Mediterranean culture. No one has any problems with Mediterranean culture consisting of many different peoples, but they do in understanding that the Germanic, Slavic and other forgotten minor cultures absorbed or destroyed by the two, are basically the same. From Ireland, across Poland and beyond, we all ate pretty much the same things, farmed and cooked in similar ways and lived in similar houses.

I also watched a recent program on TV where someone bought timbers from an old house in a Pacific-rim country to use to make a four-poster bed in his 14th century English house - and it would have taken some specialist knowledge to know that these timbers were not period English.

The reason for the lack of philosophers in the minds of some people is the strong belief in the Church of Knowledge - where facts such as what a pen is has more importance than the understanding that a pen is a temporarily classed object we use for convenience of thinking and communication. What is important to be human is not the absorption of encyclopaedic quantities of data but to understand knowledge is simple convenience food for the mind and that it is understanding how we perceive and use knowledge that makes us human.

So, let's rescue those abandoned philosophers, the human brain has barely changed over recorded history, so if we lose the history that we have we can always create a new one. We have yet a long way to go before we even begin to really understand the universe, and hence creative philosophy still has a future.

033 - T is for Trust

033 - T is for Trust, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I believe that trust is one of the many keys to life as we know it. For many long years I never could decide whether God existed or not, but eventually I came to understand that it is not a matter of belief but trust.

From where I am sitting I could hit half a dozen believers with a stone, should I be so careless to toss one, but I would be hard put to find one who would trust God enough to argue the toss with him and still come out with both of you winning.

Whatever form your God or god takes, trust him or her enough that they are there to help you find you, rather than a causer of trouble when things go wrong or bonuses when things go right.

032-E is for Experience Trap

032-E is for Experience Trap, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We know people who have had summer cottages for decades, and it seems to us that rather than just being a benefit, they have twice as much cleaning to do and they spend a significant amount of time travelling to and fro almost every weekend during the summer.

We all have balconies, but they only use theirs for drying the washing, while we have an awning, a small herb garden and a place to eat, read and generally relax. It also means that we have total access to all our facilities, unlike in a summer cottage.

So, is it better to have a summer cottage or to choose a house or apartment location in the city that gives a relaxing dual purpose life?

Interestingly enough, when I first moved to Poland over a decade ago when I expressed the idea of living in a village or small town outside the city I was given some very odd looks; they thought I was crazy - you had to live in the city if you worked there. When the company I worked for changed locations to the other side of the city, everyone was worried how I was going to get there, and this is a small city of 400,000, where the bus ride would now take me a whole 30 minutes instead of 15!

However, now that more people are buying cars and getting some experience with travel they are beginning to take on board the idea that you can build a house just outside the city to live in and commute in. The next step is for people to build/buy houses in established villages and towns to live there, especially since so many Poles have recently been working for extended periods in the UK and Ireland and can see how many more living choices there are. Nowadays I get less strange looks and more wistful ones!