More Links

You know what I totally missed pointing out in all the excitement around Kyle MacDonald completing his paperclip-to-house trade was how instrumental Corbin Bernsen was in the whole deal. While his role in the trade is interesting, it's the interconnectedness that makes it even more fascinating to me.

First, we used to enjoy seeing Bernsen on LA Law so that spousal unit could poke fun at the various inaccuracies in how the legal profession was portrayed. I don't remember being nearly that bad about aviation-related portrayals but we both are pretty tough on broadcasting. In any case, I did always think the Arnie Becker character was pretty interesting.

Fast forward a few years, and our older son totally fell in love with the movie Major League to the point that we bought a copy. Of course the resident small person loves baseball (all my fault, I'm sure) so much that he too now watches the movie. Fortunately he hasn't picked up any of the foul language - yet.

Those are practically throwaway links though compared to Bernsen's role in the new show Psych that's airing on USA Network. I just discovered it this week in time to catch the pilot and fell in love with show. I sure hope the rest of the episodes live up to the quality of the pilot.

Everything is connected - it goes way beyond six degrees of separation for me. It makes me wonder if there are likely to be any additional connections made between Ripley's "American Idol"-format competition for the movie role and Lawyerpalooza... or whether someone in my family might be demanding a trip to Saskatchewan anytime soon although I figure it'd have to be at least as much fun as seeing the World's Only Corn Palace. I'm sort of hoping small person won't end up sending his entire snow globe collection to Corbin - though I can sort of get the temptation that might exist.

What sorts of connections and 'small world' stories have you collected in your life? Send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com and maybe we'll find even more connections!

How does the (real or imagined) interconnectedness of life impact your decisions and actions?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Another Link in the Chain

By the end of my senior year in high school, I was literally counting the days until my release. I made for myself a belt of paperclips, one for each day and then removed a paperclip from the chain each evening. Today, I build links out of ideas more often than paperclips. Sometimes the two go together - like just after having written about the movie Paper Clips, I learned that Red Paper Clip guy, Kyle MacDonald, is finally going to be getting his house.

Ultimately, both are stories about possibilities. And paper clips. I'll probably never see a paper clip the same way again.

What do the symbols in your life represent?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Countering Bias

Back in my television days, one of my news directors (wish I could remember for sure which one, but I'm betting it was Mack Berry) told me that the notion of being an unbiased reporter is pure fantasy. He always claimed that despite what students are told in journalism classes (apparently, anyway - my only classroom was the newsroom), it's simply not possible to report without any bias and it wasn't just that he was predicting the current views on journalism. Mack simply believed it was a losing battle to try to completely rid oneself of bias - that it is far more effective to recognize where we are prejudiced and do our best to consciously compensate for that.

Bias shows up in a variety of ways, including which ideas we will consider as well as how we react to and treat other people. Presumably it is obvious that prejudice can adversely impact our workplace relationships and business decisions as well as our personal lives. What isn't obvious is that bias itself isn't always obvious, even to ourselves. Unfortunately, sometimes we aren't even aware of such attitudes, making them very difficult to root out. It's tough enough to be honest with ourselves about what biases - or implicit attitudes, as they're called - we hold and even tougher when we don't even know they're there.

One solution is to check our biases with a tool developed by a team of academic researchers called the Implicit Association Test. Personally, I always find such things totally fascinating, even when what I learn can be somewhat disturbing at times. It takes some courage and willingness to be introspective and, in my book anyway, is worth it.

For instance, as much as I'd like to say that I am free of any racial bias, it turns out that this is not entirely true. Knowing this, however, means that I can actively work to ensure that such implicit attitudes don't have undue control over my perceptions and behavior. I'm considerably more gratified to learn that I do not appear to have any particular automatic preference for Microsoft or Open Source software, which is exactly as I'd prefer, given that my primary goal is to assess technology situations and appropriate solutions on their actual merits alone and without bias.

On a more amusing note, I'm not at all surprised to learn that I hold no particular associations between gender and either career or family (meaning I am just as likely to associate women with career and men with family as the other way around) and I have a rather contrary moderate preference for associating women with science and men with liberal arts. Yeah, that explains a few things...

I know my parents did a lot to overcome any natural or socialized tendencies I might otherwise have developed in terms of bias. One bias I know I hold and am glad for is a general assumption on my part that things are good rather than a problem. It's helped me in so many ways and I'm glad it's a preferential perspective that my parents passed along.

Having recently seen the movie Paper Clips, I really get that what the kids in Whitwell, Tennessee, have are amazing teachers. The teachers themselves apparently have incredible compassion and curiosity that is just as amazing and even more powerful in that they are also paired with a trust that by following that curiosity with compassion, they will find a meaningful path.

If you haven't seen it, I urge you to. The teachers started with a seemingly simple goal of helping their students understand prejudice, what causes it and the pain that it can cause. I realize that's a serious understatement given that fighting prejudice is itself not exactly a simple goal. And yet the truth is that they accomplished so very much more than they ever imagined, given where they thought they were going with all this when they started on that path.

Life is like that too for the rest of us if we can only keep bias from blinding us to the greater realm of possibilities before us. I realize that's a bit too rosy an outlook for a lot of the cynics I tend to hang out with but there you are. I keep seeing stories like this one and it reminds me not only of the power of human compassion but also that so much is possible when we just allow ourselves to take that first step and let curiosity guide the way rather than the preconceived ideas that tend to show up instead. I know that had Mack met these teachers and seen how they set their biases aside so that they could listen to their students, he'd have been very proud.

Send your thoughts on how you deal with your own biases to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com as well as any stories you have about what's happened as a result. I'm curious.

As for me, paperclips have taken on a whole new realm of meaning, both in terms of fighting prejudice and also in terms making really big things happen.

Where does curiosity lead you?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Archealogical Dig

This week I've been working on cleaning up my office a bit. I'm one of those who prefers to see everything so there ends up being a lot of stacks of paper around; not that you can really see it when it gets to that point but that's how it gets there. Now that I understand this, I actually am developing a better system that seems to be working but the old stacks are still there, hence the clean-up effort. What's fun (and sometimes annoying) is all the stuff you find - so that's where that's been all this time. See... so much for being able to see everything!

I started with just a few minutes at a time at the beginning, and now I can hardly stop. It's like the stuff demands to be organized, I swear - it's not like this is an activity I normally enjoy! Where I started was with my desk where all the papers that I felt I had to have right in front of me or I'd forget them had accumulated. Once I realized that I'd forgotten about pretty much everything from the third layer on down and couldn't even get to it if I did remember, it was a relatively simple task convince myself to scoop it all off into a pile on the floor. Of course, that meant one more pile on the floor but then with as many as there were, it was sort of tough to tell the difference.

So in ten minutes, I completely emptied the desk and in another ten minutes even took off every computer component so that the entire desk was bare. Then I walked away from it and left the house for the rest of the day. That's it.

The next day, I walked back into the office and took a fresh look. Did I want or feel the need to move the desk? Probably not, at least not yet. But I did re-arrange a few things and started immediately to like having things in their new places, like the fax machine next to me where I could actually see it and use it instead of on the lower shelf of the desk where I had to push the chair out of the way and kneel next to it if I ever wanted to send a fax.

I left it like that for a few days just trying to pay attention to how I work and how I wanted to use stuff. Then I started slowly, with a half hour of collecting stuff into paper sacks. The one labeled "Afraid I'll Lose Or Forget It" only narrowly edged out the one labeled "Sure I'll Need It For Something Someday" in terms of how quickly they filled. I will still have to figure out how to store the sorts of things I am so deathly afraid of losing or forgetting so they'll be readily accessible but I'm sure there's a lot of the stuff I've been so sure I'd need at some point that I can simply eliminate and that will make storing everything else so much better.

One of the things that's happened is that I actually have to work at limiting myself to 30 minutes a day an activity that normally you cannot beg or pay me to do. The willingness to devote myself to this is likely to fade a bit, so I am working on trying to find that delicate balance between taking advantage of the energy without totally burning myself out in the process. There is no 'done' in this kind of effort. We don't just stop collecting stuff - more gadgets and papers will continue to move through our lives. The trick is to be sure that at least as much is moving out as is coming in. To get there, you work simply on making progress a little bit at a time in such a way that is sustainable once you reach a satisfactory equilibrium. I know this is how it works and that helps a great deal.

And in the meantime, it's sort of like a treasure hunt. One of the things I unearthed yesterday is another of my old television contracts. I'd already found a more recent one, scanned it and have been working on chopping it up into pieces that I can share so we can all have a good laugh. Now we'll have even more to work with and compare. It'll be fun, I promise. Now that enough time has gone by, it's even fun for me - I haven't detected the slightest trace of bitterness yet, which is a very good sign.

After having gone for such a long time putting off doing this work, I have to say it feels very good to be getting rid of stuff I clearly no longer need. That's one of the benefits of waiting. My theory is there's always an upside to poor habits and/or there's something difficult about making a change, otherwise we'd have made the shift a long time ago.

Of course I'm also finding missed opportunities and that's the downside of not having kept up with stuff. And I realize that I can only be better going forward; it simply doesn't help to get annoyed about something that's so far past. No real worth for guilt.

Just clearing some space is worthy of celebration, no matter how it happens or how long it took to get to this point. I'm my own prodigal son.

The other sort of big thing I'm celebrating this week is the news that my ACC application was approved. It is nice to have had that effort rewarded and I'm proud of the accomplishment - now the clock is ticking on getting the next credential as this one has an expiration date. So I'll be collecting more hours (750 is the next milestone), and keeping better track of my Coaching Continuing Education Units. Wow, what a really great time to be better about how I file paperwork!

If you have favorite organizational tricks and tips, I'd be interested to hear about them so send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com or let me know if you'd like to hear more about the file system I'm currently using to keep active projects top of mind without having them clutter up the top of my desk.

How can you work with your tendencies and habits to get what you want instead of against them?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Shelf Life

It turns out there's a word for the reaction I typically have to most of the junk that people - even the people who are close to me & ought to know better - seem to feel with some degree of regularity a compelling need to forward to me. One bit of glurge that has shown up in my inbox from time to time is the one about the husband explaining how he came to see the importance of treating every day as a special occasion after his wife died before she ever found the right 'special occasion' for which to don an expensive piece of lingerie. Even though the story always made me gag, the sentiment isn't entirely lost on me either... though I find now that I have an easier time thinking about it in terms of shelf life.

I'll admit that I came by this notion much more slowly than was probably necessary. I went a long time letting things like bananas and other fruit go bad, thinking that I was leaving it for someone else who might want it. I even have let really good chocolate turn completely tasteless just because it wasn't mine, if you can believe that. In retrospect, it's actually rather amazing that after having been passed by on so many other feminine tendencies that I should somehow get both the interest in chocolate and the kind of self-sacrificing that many men just scratch their heads over. Surely, "You gonna eat that?" ought to apply to chocolate as readily as anything else, right?

While I still hold back on chocolate that actually does belong to someone else, I'm less inclined to stand by and wait for the bananas to get so far as to become candidates for the banana bread I never get around to baking (another of the distaff qualities I somehow missed). I understand now that they have a limited shelf life. If we don't enjoy them now while they're good, it will be too late. Saving such things for later, even if it's something we believe would get used up and not replaced, doesn't work. At least with used up and gone, there's the enjoyment of the experience. Letting it go bad is just wasting that opportunity.

This applies to time too, especially time with people we care about or time spent doing things that are important to us vs. extraneous junk that seems more important at the time than it really is. We usually don't know how much time we actually have; we only know that it is a limited amount like will go on longer than it really will.

There is a shelf life to time and we must enjoy it while it is available to us. Saving it for some unqualified "later" won't work any better than saving Jelly Bellies for a year or more - which I can tell you from personal experience doesn't work well at all. Chocolate Easter Robins' Eggs on the other hand survive pretty well, though I'm not sure if that's because of the armor-like candy coating or the fact that they start out bad enough that it's tough to tell the difference a year later.

So what's a cynic to do - get all gushy and introspective? Maybe. I find it works to remain skeptical if need be and at least temporarily set aside the cynicism long enough to figure out if there's anything worthwhile in the midst of all the glurge before deleting it. Even in falsity there can be truth.

Case in point - Merck is taking some heat for its Make a Connection campaign to create more public awareness around the causal link between HPV - the human papillomavirus responsible for genital warts - and cervical cancer. And guess what - the shelf life of that link is along the lines of 5 years or more.

That means that if you're 'fortunate' enough to have to make several inconvenient trips to someplace really fun like Harborview - and hey, what a treat that is - about the time you have forgotten all the fun you had and why, there's an opportunity to make another series of even less fun trips to investigate and deal with any pre-cancerous anomalies that may have shown up on an annual exam - and can anyone tell me why freezing things that one normally doesn't think of freezing is so often involved? The only thing I can think of that's more unpleasant is the cutting that sometimes happens too. Then, if you truly are fortunate for real, that's about the end of it; only for lots of people, it's not.

Of course Merck's interests are sure to be largely mercenary given the vaccine that they're about to release, and hence the criticism. Anyone who doesn't think so can explain why we haven't seen this campaign say, about twenty years ago when scientists first figured out the relationship.

That doesn't make the program itself a bad thing however. Who wouldn't want to save their sister, girlfriend, or daughter from a cervical cancer scare - or worse yet, the real thing? I'm just amazed that in twenty years, people don't already understand the connection any better than they do. But then ignorance can have a pretty long shelf life. I olnly wish chocolate lasted that long.

If you have thoughts about how long is appropriate to wait to see if someone else is going to take the last slice of pie when you've already had a slice yourself... or the about longest amount of time you've ever waited to eat your last piece of Halloween candy and had it still be good... or anything else along those lines, go ahead and send them to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com so we can compare notes. As long as it's not glurge, I'll promise to read what you send.

How do you tell the difference between patience and immobilization and what does it take to move back into action?

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Kimm Viebrock is an ICF-credentialed Associate Certified Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.

Strength in Numbers

I had to watch the video of FedEx arrivals into their Memphis hub during a major thunderstorm over and over. Someone has set the time-lapsed radar playback to music, which makes it look a lot like beautifully choreagraphed dancing ants. You can see the flights pick their way through the cells of the advancing storm and work their way into a queue for landing - right up until the storm is directly over the runway, at which point the ants all go running away from the airport, some to come back again after it passes but many finding their way to other nearby airports instead. It's hilarious... and I find myself wanting a voice-over too (Run away!).

Typically, though, I like to keep my love of flying and my interest in severe weather separate. They don't go well together. It's probably why I didn't do a lot of flying when I was in Omaha, which happened to be Stephen Colbert's target on his show Tuesday night. Between that and Jon Stewart's ongoing jabs at the Terre Haute weather team wars, I was feeling sort of deja vu all over again-ish, getting serious flashbacks of my days in small market television.

That, of course, is another story. While I was in Omaha, though, I nearly had a bit of a flashback of a different kind, coming close to getting caught up in a strike of my own, just like I used to see my father go through when I was a kid. Working in television in a lot of U.S. markets means joining up with AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and while I was working in Omaha, the local AFTRA chapter came close to taking action against the station where I worked, placing me in a rather difficult position.

As on-air talent, my contract was considerably different than what most of the rest of the employees had with the station and was negotiated individually. Not surprisingly, the station considered me and the other on-air folks as part of a separate category altogether. They threatened us with harsher action if we honored the picket lines which certainly seemed intimidating at the time and was of course exactly the point.

Needless to say, the rest of the union considered "us" to be part of them along with everyone else and needed our participation to gain the leverage they needed in any kind of strike that might occur. The fact that I essentially agreed with them didn't make being in the middle any easier.

Basically, both sides needed or at least wanted us - our faces, voices, and soubriquets - on their side. I was greatly conflicted (mostly from trying to figure out how not to get sued) and not at all looking forward to making what was sure to have been a difficult decision, should the matter come down to a walk-out. Fortunately, the union and the station were able to come to an agreement and I never had to figure out my part in the situation.

The strikes I lived through as a child always seemed far simpler. No matter how difficult it might be for us as a family, we supported any union action that took place. And my father was always very clear that he understood not everyone was in a position to honor picket lines but he drew the line at enjoying the benefits resulting from such a sacrifice and enjoying continued work (and paycheck) during the strike. That always seemed fair to me.

I learned something else during that time. Going on strike is very, very difficult. I don't wish that on anyone. And what I came to understand back then was that no one likes to go on strike. When it happens, it's because the people feel like it is the only way to get what they want and that what they want is important enough to sacrifice a great deal to get it.

As such, I've always tried to honor any picket lines I come up against in my everyday life, the kind that have nothing to do with me except that they happen to be taking place at the store where I usually shop or the company from whom I usually get my newspaper. I tend to believe that in most cases, they wouldn't be walking the picket lines unless they really thought it was worth it because who in their right minds would willingly put themselves through that trauma if that weren't the case.

Becoming a manager in the tech world shifted my perspective just a bit, seeing what kind of hassles unionization was likely to cause in the places where I worked. When a manager really does try to do the right thing, meeting the demands of a union can be hobbling even while those demands are in place to protect against real-life issues caused by problem owners and managers. As a result, the opinion I've developed over time is that it is in everyone's best interests to do whatever is necessary to avoid the need for unionization, not to avoid unionization itself. If unions are sometimes a necessary evil, avoid the evil part by making them unnecessary.

The tech industry is currently working through the risk analysis for unionization with some folks actively pushing for unionizing technology workers now. There's no doubt in my mind that labor movements are not dead and that they will continue to have value so long as there are forces in the marketplace that push owners and managers to make choices contrary to the best interests of their employees.

When good owners and managers can resist those forces and take a more balanced approach, however, unionization may be premature. Smart owners and managers will recognize that and keep doing their level best to make unionization unnecessary - an obsolete notion - while smart workers will recognize those efforts when they're successful and hold off the unionization call, at least for the time being. While there is no benefit to unionizing before it's really needed, when it is needed, taking advantage of the strength that comes with numbers is the only thing that will work.

Too bad such strength in numbers doesn't work as well against forces of nature but then we wouldn't have had such a cool video to talk about.

Send your stories, thoughts or observations about this column, flying, management, unionization and/or weather phenomona to me at techsurvivor@soaringmountain.com - I'm not picky; I'll work with just about anything

What are the important connections in your life?

Kimm Viebrock is a Certified Professional Coach who helps technology professionals and service-oriented technology groups develop and use their skills more effectively and increase their value within the larger organization, allowing them to do more, do it better and have more fun doing it. Kimm is devoted to finding the connectedness in life.