Crossing Otter Creek near Smiths Falls, Ontario on the VIA 643.
I’m on the VIA train from Ottawa to Toronto. We’ve just passed through Smiths Falls, streaking past paper white birch trees, golden fields, blazing orange maple trees, marsh reeds turned red, scarlet sumac all under a clear blue sky.
I’m listening to The Great Lakes Suite by Rheostatics, which features poetry read by Ann Carson, who today was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I’ll meet my brother in Toronto and spend the next week with family in southern Ontario celebrating Thanksgiving together.
This just might be the most Canadian moment possible.
I work with lots of organizations in transition, and always have done. Specifically organizations who leadership is leaving, often representing a transition from a founder to the next generation. These situations are fraught with new and unexpected emotions, states, and situations. The folks that remain find themselves relying on stuff that was invisible before the transition but which is missed now. It is a time when movement forward needs to be slow and deliberate.
Today I read a lovely and heart-filled post from Jasmine Williams at the Interaction Institute for Social Change describing this moment. It's a moment of aporia – "being at a loss" – and a moment which demands that a group and individuals be in a different way. Jasmine writes about the practices she is relying on in these moments including ,
**What's for us will find us
**This is one of those affirmations, mantras, that I keep on a sticky note attached to my computer. It’s a grounding reminder to myself that we will move through this in the way we were supposed to. Whether you believe in fate or some grand design or not, I believe there’s wisdom to be found in returning to a foundational trust in the winding path that leads to the abundant future (however different that future may be from current expectations).
A side benefit of rooting in this reminder is that it’s allowed me to hold on more gently and leave space for the emergent, unexpected, and confronting. How freeing it can be to release the tight hold on an outcome when you trust it will be the right one, reached at the right time, by the right people!
There is an art to this kind of waiting-to-be-found. It requires sensitivity and awareness. It requires quieting and emptying so that one is available to be found. And it also requires slow movement and lots of scanning for possibilities. If what is needed hasn't revealed itself yet, it's a sign to slow down. It will come. I love that these virtual friends are being so transparent with what they are practicing.
Anne Lamott, from an old post on Labour Day (which she spells in the American way):
I guess it is a plank of the Christian right to be anti-union now. But remember, there are still a lot of us in the Christian left, and we don’t feel that way. When I was growing up, everyone I knew was pro-union, just like everyone used public libraries and everyone in California was proud of the public education system and loved the state’s natural beauty. People would fight and rally and protest and donate to help preserve it.
Then Ronald Reagan came along, and having seen one redwood, he had seen them all, and it was pretty much a straight line from there to Arnold’s shaking his mighty broom at us as he trash-talked the nurses and teachers.
I understand why politicians want to see labor as the cause of most of our societal and economic problems. It takes the focus off the banks, the corporations, the military-industrial complex. But public school teachers? I guess they really are sort of greedy and grabby — not to mention rich. Especially those greedy-grabby public school special ed teachers
Happy Labour Day.
Wendell Berry has died. Patti Digh's was the first obituary I saw this morning. And so here is her brilliance, as she offers a characteristic take on his work and legacy:
Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only from time. You cannot love a place in general. You can only love it in particular—this hillside, this river, this church pew where the same men have held court about the weather for thirty years.
My friend Scott has run a series of 20 Questions posts for years now, and today he released an edition with Andrea Jones-Rooy, a data scientist and circus performer. She has a solid take on why numbers are less important than what they mean:
Question 6: Where do you feel the general populace's level of data understanding tends to exist? Where do you feel data conversations tend to leave people lost?
Oh man this is a mega wonderful question and is maybe at the core of my VERY BEING!
Of course there's a ton of variation on this, but extremely generally speaking, I think most people without (much) formal training in data or statistics — or who haven't interacted with data training recently — tend to overly focus on specific numbers rather than broader trends or the actual context or validity of the number. As in, we get very sucked into conversations about whether a number is 2.66 or 2.67 and we lose sight of whether that number is meaningfully different from, say, the same value in a previous time period or whether we are even capturing the thing we are trying to understand in the first place.
For example, most large companies run engagement surveys. Sometimes they ask me to come in and help them analyze them — usually I find that when we present results even to the top level leaders, they get all wound up about ohhhh it's 5.6, how do you know it's not 5.5? Or 5.7? And is it statistically significant?
When what they really should be asking is:
_- Is this value meaningfully different from other times we've conducted similar surveys? Why or why not? How might we probe which of our plausible explanations are likely correct?
__- Is this value a number that I, as a leader of a company, am happy with? (Statistical significance tends to be less interesting to me, I recommend substantive significance)
_– Do I really think I'm measuring "engagement" at my company? Why or why not?
I'm in the process of preparing a proposal for a client, and making the case that the strategic question is more strategically important than the survey answer seems self-evident, but the seduction of numbers works hard against that.
I miss Bernie DeKoven. I had the chance to meet him once at the Applied Improv Network Conference in San Francisco. We played games. His website DeepFun, which is still up, was an endless source of inspiration to me when I was raising my kids. It also inspired teaching activities and work with clients. Today in Aeon is a lovely article exploring the vast territory about why play matters for it's own sake:
Simply put: adults need play as desperately as children do – a zone where inner life meets outer materiality and something unpredictable emerges. The Greeks, of course, had a term for this. Aristotle’s medieval fanboy Thomas Aquinas identified eutrapelia, the habit of knowing when and how to play well, as a genuine and discrete virtue. A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works. I’m not talking about ‘work-life balance’, an exhausted metaphor that still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing. To practise the virtue of eutrapelia means that a good life requires play. You don’t earn it. You practise it, daily.
If the writer Justin Neuman was sitting with Bernie right now trying to explain this, I'm sure old Blue would have invited him to make it into a game instead. Blogging is play for me. Finding neat little bits and pieces, letting them sit and sharing them with you. Thanks for playing along.
A technology professor in France provides an option for students to use chat bots in his exam and researches what happens. Here are the rules he set.
# Use of Chatbots
Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.
Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be considered cheating.
Option B: I may use a chatbot as it’s part of my toolbox. I will then respect the following rules:
1) I will inform the professor each time information come from a chatbot
2) When explaining my answers, I will share the prompts I’ve used so the professor understands how I use the tool
3) I will identify mistakes in answers from the chatbot and explain why those are mistakes
Not following those rules will be considered cheating. Mistakes made by chatbots will be considered more important than honest human mistakes, resulting in the loss of more points. If you use chatbots, you should be held accountable for the output.
Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.
The whole post is worth a read for what he learns, for his pedagogy and for the costumes.