Is Australia losing it's religion?

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via mpegmedia.abc.net.au

A interesting exploration for theist and non-theist alike (via http://twitter.com/misssandy)

Posted via web from tayls81's posterous

The Decline in the Management of Defence and Defence Capability Development, Acquisition, Preparedness, and Sustainment

via ausairpower.net

Very critical

Posted via web from tayls81's posterous

And who should appear

Yesterday I posted on the discussion and today as I am catching up on my RSS feeds (in my breaks), Dave Snowden provides the necessary expansion. In my argument, I represented that as human's are natural, they can not violate nature. I think that the introduction of Niche Construction might better represent the point of the argument, showing that there are differences between the knocking down of a tree to dam a brook and mass irrigation depriving the Murray mouth of fresh water. Or am I missing something?

Posted via email from tayls81's posterous

The nature of things

By means of a debut post via posterous and through all of the automation that follows I thought I would paraphrase a vigorous debate held at work this morning over coffee.

Essentially, my colleague and I disagreed over whether Human action is natural. His point, as I understood it was that man manipulates the environment so significantly and severely that it ceases to be natural. I on the other hand argue that man's actions can not violate nature as they are just another modulator in the system.

I am certain that many of my colleague's arguments are used to beat the drums of despair about the destruction and offence (although his words were rape and pillage) of Mother Nature. To this I can not deny that much of the procession of human history has been in ignorance, oblivion and arrogance to its impact on the biosphere, but this is not a reason for the actions to be considered un-natural nor beyond the biosphere to deal with (albeit not to humankind's liking). I will not entice Sandy into another debate about the validity of Climate Change...

More than hearing opinions on the debate, I wouldn't mind the odd link to some links to some expert debate on such thinking/musings 

Posted via email from tayls81's posterous

Guest Post From Wal:

Wal is a colleague of mine that offered this criticism of the workshops that he assisted facillitating:

(NB: Comments in this instance were the SMI's [frustrations and improvements] captured over a number of weeks)

My main concern with the model creation was that the end result didn't leave me with an action plan that would solve the participants problems. The information used came from anyone within the organisation, which is what you are after. However, the problem I had with it was that each comment was placed straight onto the model and then allotted a position within one of the four sectors. These comments were not agreed upon by consensus or catalogued as the same point with other comments. They were looked at individually, allocated a sector then the group moved onto the next comment. Furthermore, if you have more than one group working on the same comments, each comment can be placed under any sector dependant on the groups thoughts. So it is possible you could end up with same comment under all four sectors, what does that prove??? If this did occur I would almost guarantee during the action planning phase all the groups would still come out with the near / same solution even though they were in different sectors. I say this because most participants in these form of workshops are not keen to be there, thus they will take the easy path out to get to the final result. Hence, even though the comments have been sorted into their respective sector the participants will not truly acknowledge that sector's title in problem solving, rather than they will concentrate on the comment itself and ignore that it is a complicated or simple problem.

Because the comments can emerge in any domain, I feel that the process doesn't allow for looking at the problems holistically. Each comment is looked at individually then allocated a sector, move on to the next problem. Because the comments are in no particular order, commonality between points or the holistic problem can be missed, especially if the group is not excited about being there. During the action planning they may be able to fix up a symptom but miss the real problem.

Duplication is also a problem. Because each group is working within their own table, they do not know what is happening on other tables. A situation could transpire where four groups are working on the same problem, yet come out with either four different solutions or all the same, either result doesn't seem to be an efficient method or use of participants time.

My last concern is again knowing your customer. As I have mentioned before many of these workshops have people who don't won't to be there but are volunteered. There attitude is not there so when the process is told to them and it is slightly confusing they shut down even more. When I saw this process done the facilitator explained it very well due to his thorough understanding of the process and theory behind it, but the group did not have the same comprehension of the facilitator. So even though it was well explained he still had to go through each separate table to explain again the process. Still further he was explaining the process whilst the table were doing it as they were still getting it wrong. From an observers point of view it was confusing for the group because they are not use to these types of processes and were not putting too much mind space into the tasks. Of course this is a problem with many workshops.

On Flexible Work Practices

It's an interesting thought this one. Reality is that employers hire people to go to work, to put in an appearance for 38-ish hours a week and to produce outcomes during that time. At least if employees are in the workplace there is a reasonable degree of confidence that they are working on something productive. Letting people work from home leaves them open to the distractions of personal tasks, tv, family and multitude of other activites that provide no benefit whatsoever to the business.

Then there's the equality issue. Do you allow people to opt out of the workplace once they reach a certain level in the hierarchy? Or is it based on their job function? Some combination of the two? Do you allow for the reality that some people are extremely productive working from home whereas others struggle against the distractions? How do you justify the decision to those who aren't extended the option of flexible work hours without impacting of their motivation?

At the end of the day there may be some value to be had at an individual level in allowing people the option of flexible work practices but I have doubts as to whether that value exceeds the cost of implementing the practice within an organisation.

On Serendipity

The best counter argument to this is provided by Scott Adams