“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Category: Learning
Office Speak: Yak Shaving
Have you ever started something and regretted it soon after, that’s not a definition of Yak Shaving but is the way I’ve felt writing this post.
There is no law of office speak, no one is the overall governor of the meaning of office speak in different context. For this reason I like to research the meaning before I write these posts to see whether my understanding of the term is widespread. There are many useful places to do this research; if a number of them agree I generally go with that definition.
It’s interesting to research the history of office speak to see how long it’s been around and how many iterations it’s been through.
I think I’ve worked out the history of Yak Shaving but it’s not absolutely straightforward and neither is the explanation of that meaning.
In Wiktionary there are two definitions:
1. Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
2. A less useful activity done consciously or unconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
If you look into the discussion for these two definitions a number of people have commented that the second definition isn’t correct. I’m happy with that, because definition two doesn’t align to my understanding either. The first definition fits my understanding, so I’ll stick with that.
The history of Yak Shaving with this meaning appears to come from MIT where a student, Carlin Vieri, is credited with inventing it:
“Yak shaving.” Our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab. This is a shame, because it describes all too well what I find myself doing all too often.
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.
There’s a less clarity on where Carlin Vieri got the term from, but it’s probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.
Yak Shaving one of those terms that’s best described by an example:
//s.imgur.com/min/embed.jsThe other day I noticed that one of the lights in the bathroom wasn’t working. I’d recently changed the light-bulb so suspected that there may be a wiring problem. To investigate I needed to get into the loft.
To get into the loft I needed to get the step-ladders that were in the garage.
We’d recently had a number of large deliveries. The boxes from these deliveries were stacked in front of the step-ladders. To get access to the step-ladders I put the boxes in the car and took them to the nearest recycling centre.
On my way to the recycling centre I noticed that I was low on fuel so I went to the garage for some petrol.
As payment for the fuel I withdrew some money from the ATM at the garage.
This is the nature of Yak Shaving – my goal was to fix a light, but I ended up doing all sorts of necessary apparently useless things before I could complete the task. In business we spend much of our time Yak Shaving:
- Claiming expenses is Yak Shaving
- Approval processes are Yak Shaving
- Many, many meetings are Yak Shaving
Are you asking the right questions?
Some observations from me
There’s a line in a U2 song:
We thought that we had the answers
It was the questions we had wrong
We live in a world where the answer to a huge array of questions is just a few clicks away. There’s a massive expectation that typing a few keywords into Google will give us with all the knowledge that we need on the first screen. What’s more, we have access to all sorts of expertise and option through social media channels. Post a question on Facebook and you’ll get all sorts of people trying to help you find the answer.
For any of those answers to be useful, though, we need to ask good questions. If we ask an Internet search engine we need to recognise the limitations of the answers that are going to come back. Similarly, ask a bunch of Facebook friends and we need to recognise the limitations of their knowledge and their understanding of the question.
Asking good questions has been a bit of a topic for me, so I thought I would give a few observations:
Think about the question
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
Scott Adams (1957 – )
I find that most people blurt questions out without thinking about them.
Giving some thought to the question will make for a much richer answer. It might even stop you asking a stupid question.
Set the context
If you are going to ask good questions you need to understand the context in which you are asking the question and form your question appropriately. There are many searches that you can do on the internet that result in unexpected, sometimes shocking, answers. In English there are lots of words with dual meanings which lacking context produce erroneous answers – right, crane, date, foil and type to name just a few. There are numerous situations where an answer may be correct in one country, but not in another. How about situations where the answer was true previously, in 1990, but is no longer true; laws change all the time.
Search for the questions
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
You can only ask good questions if you know that the questions exist. Knowing that the questions exist requires an inquisitive mind. For me one of the most important aspect of feeding this inquisitive mind is reading. I regard most of my reading as reading to find questions. It can be tempting to read about things you know, but reading about things that are completely outside what you know helps to find better questions. If you don’t read broadly then you have a very narrow view of what the questions are. It’s often more exciting to find a good question than to find a good answer.
Ask the second and third question – Why?
Don’t be satisfied with the first answer, enrich the first question with a second question. “Why?” is often a good second question. “Why is that the answer?” This has two effects, it makes sure that you’ve got a good answer, it also opens up the potential for another questions. There are also great second and third questions to either side of the question you started with.
Form the question in a different way
Can you ask the question in a different way? If you do, does it get a different answer? Why does a different form of the question get a different answer? It could be because the answer to the question is more complicated than you thought it was. It could be because someone was answering a different question to the one you thought you were asking.
Answer with a question
Sometimes people want a straight factual answer, but there are times when it’s better to answer a question with another question. Creating this type of question requires great care – good questions open up the discussion and allow good answers to be found, poor questions sound like you are avoiding the original question.
Does that help? I really would like to know.
"Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just…
“Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes. What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.”
"Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a…
Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right
Aldous Huxley
Concept of the Day: Inattentional Blindness – Is seeing believing?
What you see and what I see may be completely different, which might be caused by Inattentional Blindness.
Picture this: a teen-ager, cruising down a familiar highway, keeping a conscientious eye on the speedometer, the rear view mirror, the oncoming traffic. Too late, he notices a deer standing in the road. He slams on the brakes but can’t avoid striking the animal.
Later, the teen insists to his skeptical parents that his eyes were on the road–he was paying attention to his driving. He just never saw the deer.
Why are the boy’s parents skeptical? Because intuitively, people believe that as long as our eyes are open, we are seeing. Even as we recognize that the brain does a lot of processing behind the scenes, we expect that at least salient objects–a large animal in our path, for example–will capture our attention.
It seems obvious that the teenager should see the deer, but he didn’t, and it’s not because he wasn’t giving the road the attention he should have. They were looking but they didn’t see.
This isn’t a teenage issue though, we all do it. We all miss what is in plain sight.
The article linked above will give you more details on the theories about why this is, but it’s sufficient for this post to highlight that there is a discrepancy between what is there and what we see, and that the discrepancy has something to do with what we expect to see. The poor teenager probably didn’t see the deer because he wasn’t expecting to see a deer, his limited driving experience hadn’t equipped him with that expectation.
That’s a really interesting thought for all of us who need to communicate – which is all of us. What are people expecting to see in what we are communicating and will they see the things they aren’t expecting to see.
Likewise, for those of us being communicated to – which is all of us – what is it that we are missing because we didn’t expect it to be there.
I don’t have any answers (again) all I wanted to do was highlight a situation that we may not be aware of.
There are numerous examples of Inattentional Blindness on YouTube, this is the most famous:
This first one was such an internet sensation that now everyone knows what they are expecting to see (did you see it?) Knowing this the creators of the original fashioned a sequel:
This sequel has also been quite popular, so perhaps you were even expecting to see the differences in this one.
Daniel Simmons TEDx talk on the subject is also worth watching as is his article in the Smithsonian Magazine where he highlights a criminal case where this phenomena may have created a miscarriage of justice.
The British, the Queue and the Tut
Institutions of a nation
The British relationship with the queue is renowned around the world but few realise how deep-seated and sophisticated that relationship is.
I was reminded of this earlier as I queued at the ticket check before boarding a train at London’s Euston Station.
This particular train is primarily occupied by people with seat reservations.
(The British train fares and ticketing system is also a uniquely British institution, but not one I’m going to attempt to get into today. There simply isn’t the room in one post.)
A seat reservation means precisely that; it means that you have a seat that is reserved for you. The worst that can happen is that someone sits in your seat and you have to ask them to move. In most instances the person will apologise and find themselves somewhere else to sit. I suppose it could get really nasty and you have to ask the guard to help you, but I’ve never witnessed such behavior. At the end of the day, you have a seat reservation and are guaranteed a seat.
Euston Station has one of the most unnerving places for British people, it has an open concourse. People join the open space in front of a set of screens. These screens tell us the status of the trains available for boarding, the trains being prepared for boarding and the trains that are to follow in the schedule. This is a place where, in our minds, anarchy rules. There is no queuing, just people standing around waiting for a screen to tell them where to go.
Then it happens, the screens change and a platform is announced for a train. People are so uncomfortable by the anarchy of the open concourse that they run, yes run, so that they can participate in the far more familiar surroundings of a queue.
Moving from the open concourse people queue up on the ramp to the platform ready to show their tickets. There’s a well structure etiquette to this situation, an order that we find comforting. Stood between two metal railings inching forward so that the ladies and men in bright red can inspect our pieces of paper we are happy. There’s no pushing or shoving, no one is trying to get ahead of anyone else, we have formed an orderly queue and we know what we are doing. All is well with Britain.
Then a betrayal happens and not a minor misdemeanor, this is a full-scale breach of all that is British. This is the type of scandal to make every British person question where our country is heading.
“Use both sides!” were the words that ignited consternation among the masses.
We all turned and looked in disbelief as they opened a second line.
They opened a second line!
THEY OPENED A SECOND LINE!
Those in the first line were trapped between the metal barriers left with no option but to stay in the first line as others further back in the queue had the audacity to move onto the second line and get through ahead of the first line. How dare they!
A man behind me issues the most typical of British retorts: “That’s just typical!”
Others use the full force of tutting. Tutting is the ultimate British complaint, no words can convey what a well-placed tut communicates.
A woman further back is so outraged she climbs over the barrier and joins the betrayal in the second line.
The fact that most of us have reserved seats makes no difference to the way that we feel about this situation. The opening of a second line makes no difference to the final outcome to the vast majority of people in the queue, they’ll sit in exactly the same seat whenever they get through the ticket check, we are still outraged.
At the front of the queue we hand over our tickets for inspection and say “thank you” as they give them back to us; no one complains. We are British, after all, and a tut is enough to register our outrage at every conceivable scandal.
Once through the barrier we scurry along the platform to our designated carriage and sit down in our reserved seats.
This is the second week that I have caught this train and the second week when this scandal has happened, I’m seriously considering writing a letter, but I won’t, I’m writing this instead. British people rarely complain to someone who could do something about our issue, we prefer to mutter and grumble, that’s why we love social media so much.
I’m using the same train again next week and if the same thing happens again…
(The heading picture is from a couple of weeks ago when the concourse was completely full of people due to train delays caused by adverse weather conditions, in these situations special queueing rules apply.)
"When you write the story…"
“When you own the story you get to write the ending.”
Bene Brown
Office Speak: In the Wheelhouse
I’ve heard this phrase quite a bit recently, it’s one of those that comes and then it goes again. It’s primarily used by my colleague from the other side of the Atlantic where I suspect it’s a common phrase.
That’s right in our wheelhouse
What do we need to do to get this nearer our wheelhouse?
I’d always assumed that it was a boating term – boats have wheelhouses and that’s the place where you control the boat – so being in the wheelhouse is the place where you are in control, but that’s not the common way that people are using it. The wheelhouse is also a baseball idiom, which explains why it’s not used very much on this side of the Atlantic.
I’m British; pessimism is my wheelhouse.
John Oliver
As baseball slang the wheelhouse is what we’d call in cricket the sweet-spot.
It’s the point in the swing action and on the bat where the batter/hitter has the most power.
In office speak the wheelhouse is the place of maximum competency for your organisation. If there’s a piece of business that’s right in your wheelhouse then you are confident in your ability to win it, it’s what you do.
Cultural slang can be just as challenging as difficult as other office speak.
Why didn't you know that?
How am I to know what you know?
I’ve had a few conversations recently along the lines of:
Someone else: “How do we do…”
Me: “Well that’s obvious…”
Someone else: “How did you know that?”
Me: “Doesn’t everyone know that?”
Someone else: “No, why didn’t you tell me?”
Me: I would have done if I’d known that you didn’t know…”
This is normally followed by a bit of embarrassment on both sides. I’m embarrassed because I made a false assumption about someone and made them feel dumb. They’re embarrassed because they aren’t sure whether they should have known and feel a bit dim. British people aren’t very comfortable with embarrassment.
This has always struck me as one of life’s great mysteries. How am I supposed to know what you know, and what you don’t know?
We spend hours and hours in meetings making sure that everyone is at the same level of understand. We endlessly recap which, by definition, is a waste of time for someone in the meeting and often for many people in the meeting.
If we assume that everyone knows we end up with a situation near the end of the meeting where it turns out that someone didn’t understand, but didn’t speak up to say they didn’t understand.
Knowing what the other person knows is essential to good communication, but how do we do achieve that?
I have no answers, as far as I am concerned it is a great mystery.
Office Speak: Millennial-washing
I’m starting to feel like we are in a world of Millennial-washing.
Unlike other Office Speak posts this one isn’t one I’ve heard in my office, but is one I think we should start using.
For those of you who have been on a multi-year retreat in the Himalayas without access to electricity, the Millennials are that group of people who are currently entering the workforce and were born somewhere between the early 1980’s and the early 2000’s. According to the commentators something happened around then that turned this group of individuals into magic other-beings, or something like that. Anyway, it’s safe to say that they are the current marketing buzzword.
This gets me to my current issue and that’s what I’m calling millennial-washing. This isn’t, as the name may suggest, the application of detergent to the extremities of people in their twenties and thirties, this is the gratuitous overuse of the term Millennial into each and every context particularly where it’s irrelevant. I’m not the first to use this term, a search on Google will highlight posts from 2012.
As an example of what is going on. I was listening to a presentation the other day about the Internet of Things (those of you recently back from the Himalayas click on the link. I don’t have time to describe it here and it’s not really that important what the talk was about). In that talk the presenter went on to explain how the Millennials were going to be the primary driver of the Internet of Things. My head hit the table in despair. The Internet of Things is a broad technology shift that is going to have an impact in all sorts of areas, industries and definitely across generations, but the presenter felt the need to wedge the Millennials in there as something unique. It was like they were needing to give their talk some relevance by calling on the M word.
A while back technology companies needed to put the word cloud into every announcement even when it had absolutely nothing to do with cloud. We came to know this as cloud-washing.
I’m starting to feel like we are in a world of Millennial-washing. In this world something is cool and relevant if you can attached the M word to it. I’ve seen articles about churches, synagogues, Broadway, underwear, power-bricks, newspapers, Mike Oldfield, shoes and hotels – all of which calling on the M word. There is a church with Millenial in its title. Are the Millennials requirements for power-bricks different from everyone else’s? Is Best Western’s new branding really about something unique for Millennials, or did the old branding get a bit dated and need refreshing (for everyone)? Isn’t this just Millennial-washing?
(Off now to speak to some snake people)
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is…
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Victor Frankl
Graham Chastney 