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Reblogged this on Systems Community of Inquiry and commented:
Harish is one of those rare people who so completely gets it that he can *actually* communicate it.
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Thank you Ben for your kind words! Means a lot coming from you.
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Your nice post came at about the same time as I did a work shop About Time, on the Power of Time in facilitating groups. Also nice of you to mention Argyris and Schön.
In facilitating, one has to be “present”, stay in the “here and now”. With the word “time” one uses “di*”, which one recognizes in “di-vide”, “de-al” and even “du-o” and “du-al”. Dividing one into two. With time – “actual time”, I call this metaphor-in-use – one divides past from future.
With the word “difference” one uses “di*” also. And the Latin “facere”, or “to make”. So difference is made by you. And one “recognizes” one’s differences by making a second difference, judging the difference made against one-self. “Men is the measure of all things” (Protagoras of Abdera (l.c. 485-415 BCE)).
One does this implicitly, tacitly. Through language one is able to translate these differences into sounds and written words and make them explicit. In doing so, one needs to make two more differences: the language or jargon one uses and the actual words. I call this the metaphor-espoused.
I could have written “distinction”, “distinguished”, “dissimilarity”, “define”, “contrast”, “variation”, … Different words, differing meaning, but do words “make the difference”? I don’t think so, as the difference has already been made. I’m now refering to the actual observation and recognition of the distinction.
What difference do the words make? Two. A distinction between “me” and “you” – I’m using these words – and “us” and “them”, – using words from a vocabulary associated with a group of people; people who “define” the uses of words (meaning) and themselves as a group of people. Words don’t make a difference, (human) beings do.
Now, Spencer-Brown showed that making a difference (he actually used the word, “distinction”, I suppose to distinguish between and an actual difference – like the contrast between these letters and their back-ground – and observing that difference; or perhaps because he sensed that “making a difference” uses “to make” twice…) leads to paradox and time (or vice versa). Paradoxes are like energy, conserved.
Time, one of the participants in my latest work shop said this – “time is fictious”-, is a fiction, or “made-up”. In the very act of distinguishing, observing a distinction, one “makes time”. And – I like to say, “time ‘makes’ us”. Time – attributed both to Einstein and a toilet door in Texas – prevents things from happening “at the same time”, or here and now. Time exists only as an idea, in our mind, a fiction. One uses “time” to make sense of a situation.
Time is a real fiction. As Vaihinger (The Philosophy As-If) proposes, real fictions are inherently paradoxical. We use these ideas to construct models, useful models. But usefulness doesn’t make them (really) true. In any model, one also “makes up” time. Time, however, remains a fiction.
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Time has always been with me :-). The very first meeting in my first job after university (1984), was about “lead-time divided by two”. The lead time of producing telephone switches had to be cut in halve. It was considered an ambitious goal. I just asked, “How long is the lead time now?”.
“Fourteen months”.
“And how long does it actually take to acquire components, assemble and test a switch?”
“About 24 weeks”.
So I said: “all your time parameters stand too large in the information system, cut them in halve. Next project please”. [This is like setting a thermostat “too high”].
The then Chief Operations Officer said: “we can’t do that. Now the factory takes 6 months to produce a switch; when we cut it into three months, the factory will have no work for three month”. [Keeping the heat on: people will get cold]
I said: “they have now too, they just smear it out over six months”.
COO: “Mr Lelie, six minus three equals six”.
“No sir,” – I did make a mistake here in using his first name, I shouldn’t have done that -, ” with things it does, but not with time. Time is a variable, not an observable”.
Off course, I wasn’t listened too and a year later, the lead time hadden’t moved an inch. And I was taken off the project. Five years later – when I had become manager production – I had reduced the lead time to any time you want (I used to say 12 weeks, not to scare people). I was fired when aiming at “negative” lead times”. (Defining lead time as the quotient of Output and Inventory, – two observables – expressed in money and paying for components only after delivering the final product.)
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The difference – distinction – between an observable and a variable is that every one can observe an observable, irrespective of one’s model-in-use; a variable depends on one’s model-espoused. As Argyris showed, our real problem is in our tendency to maintain that there’s no difference between our model-in-use and model-espoused AND covering-up when the difference becomes manifest. It’s the source of all our current day problems, including climate change.
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In my work shop I just make participants more aware about their “time making”. Using Parkinson’s Law: “work fills the time available for its completion”. This is all I’ve had time for. Thanks for making time to read this.
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Thank you Jan for your your thoughtful comment, as always!
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Error: Mr Lelie, six minus three equals six should be six minus three equals three (But you figured that out, I suppose)
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All good. Do you know what the average production time now is for it? Very interesting story. Thank you for sharing.
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ha, ha. Non existant. At that time I had predicted that the factory would be closed within 10 years (it actually took 15, things go slower in a first phase and faster in the last). I always said that the telecom-factory of the future would be in two containers: one with the materials and one with the machines and they would be located at the site of the client. It’s called VOIP Voice over IP – internet protocol (it was just introduced around that time in the labs.
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Reblogged this on Writings on Business Design – by Prateek Vasisht.
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