The Periodic.... Spiral?

Many people know the Periodic Table of the Elements as a blocky diagram that hung on the wall of the freshman chemistry classroom. But there are other ways to envision the relationships between types of atoms. In particular, here is a modern version arranged as a spiral:

The New York Times > Science > Image > The Periodic Table Gets a Makeover (Link probably time-senstitive).

And there's more about it at periodicspiral.com

Personality and personal growth

One thing we did at this BGI intensive was to take the Meyers-Briggs (Kiersey) personality test. I have done it several times before, and enjoyed seeing the experience in a new light. I found that it solidified some more general thoughts bouncing around my mind on personality tests.

These tests can be addictive. We can spend many hours learning and analyzing our MBTI, our Enneagram, and so many other types, classifications, and psychological proclivities. Indeed, there are more personality tests than any of us have time to take. I was into this kind of thing for a couple years about a decade ago. It plays on our deep desire to understand “who we are.”

I would suggest that this information (like any) can be used wisely or unwisely. It is unwise when we begin to limit ourselves or others, either by hindering/holding back or by allowing poor behaviors to continue. Sometimes people declare their own failure in advance: “I’m such an emotional type, I’m sure I would be a disaster in an engineering class.” Or they eliminate entire swathes of options from their career goals: “Since I’m an introvert, I’m not going to consider anything that requires lots of communication with people.”

Or we can excuse behaviors based on personality type. “Oh, he’s just like that—he has such a strong need to talk, we have to condone his domination of all our meetings. He can’t help his loquacious personality, you know.” Or, perhaps: “You’ll just have to forgive the fact that I seem to insult you all the time. I have an aggressive personality, and it’s the only way I can express my views.”

Pretty unwise.

Here is a better option. We can use this information to treat ourselves or others kindly, and to play to our strengths in order to find happiness and peace in whatever situation we find ourselves in. For instance, knowing that I tend to get tired out talking to many strangers means that I can just smile and take my leave of parties, even if my more extroverted friends are still going strong. And if the circumstances do not allow that, I can still smile inside and hold my own tiredness with understanding.

Even wiser is to use our personality “type” and other known psychological tendencies to devise challenges for ourselves. Our personalities have formed partly through the habit of doing what is easiest, but we can teach ourselves to think more expansively. I read of someone who thought of herself as shy and uncertain, so she decided to get trained as an EMT. It was a huge step in personal growth for her. I found that I was not very spontaneous when interacting with children, nor was I comfortable with seeing children in pain, so I signed up to be a volunteer at Stanford Children’s Hospital. I just finished a 1-year tenure there, and found it to be an important growth experience.

Of course, such challenges must take place within an overall context of ethics. It is not positive personal growth to discover that you can find a way to fit into a group of liars, thieves, or drug dealers!

This is part of the reason I am at BGI also (there are many reasons, but this is one). BGI is not especially attuned to my personality habits — and indeed, neither is management. So it offers personal challenge. Each time I learn that I can adapt to something that seems “not me” — and make it just one more aspect of me — I become a little freer of the constraints of my self view.

We are not our personality. We are so much more than that.

[Relating this to management, I would suggest that as managers, we can actually do people a favor by assigning them tasks that might not fit their own image of themselves. This must be done cautiously and kindly, of course, but it is a great gift to help people realize how much more they can actually do than they think they can do.]

Yep, it was intense

... The "intensive" I just returned from, that is. That's what the 4-day weekends of classes at BGI are called. The October intensive was the first of the year, so there was lots to do in terms of getting people oriented and introduced. It was the first time the "C5s" (Cohort 5 -- the fifth class to be admitted) were mixing with the C4s, as well as a handful of C3 three-year students too. And within the C5s, only half of us had met before during the orientation trip to BC because we did that in two separate groups.

I think there were 100+ of us at Islandwood (an eco-retreat center on Bainbridge Island). We stayed in dorms there, which are really quite nice -- big wooden buildings with comfy rooms that each have their own bathroom and shower. The beds have nice down comforters. I was in a triple, and my two roommates seem to be cool with my getting up early, so that was good.

We eat together in the big dining hall, and the food is plentiful and quite good. One challenge with meals is the short time frame, usually only 45 minutes to an hour, which isn't really enough time to arrive, find a seat, get something to drink, eat the meal (they are served family-style to each table by the Islandwood staff), eat dessert (served separately after the main food is over), and self-bus our own dishes back to the kitchen. It's also really loud in the dining hall with so many of us, so coversation can sometimes be difficult.

Classes are held for 8 hours a day, plus there is usually an evening event. That means we're going from 7:30 am to about 9:30 pm. It can be exhausting, especially for us introverted types. But then again, it's only from Thurs noon to Sun noon. 36 hours is doable.

One of the neat parts is that there is a woman on the island who comes to give qi-gong instruction from 7-7:45 am. It's a great way to start the day. The form is different from the one I've been practicing for the past 6 months, but similar overall and quite invigorating. I also managed to meditate each morning before coming to qi-gong class. That helped a lot.

Actually being in class offered a wide range of experiences. In Accounting, we worked in teams to try to understand some case studies we were doing. It was a slightly chaotic team-learning environment with laptops open and 5 people trying to talk through the problems. It's not a learning style I am very adept at; I always preferred to study on my own. I will have to go over everything we did together by myself in order to cement it in my mind. Another class was more lecture style for at least part of it. And our Management class was busy with teamwork/leadership exercises to get us to notice group dynamics and how we "show up" in various situations.

We also self-organized into teams for our "Action Learning Projects" for the year. These are actual, practical projects working with real companies to help implement sustainability. We'll be developing the projects all the way through June so we'll have time to really dig in and get something done. I am on a 3-person team working with an outdoors company to reduce the wastestream at their retail stores. We may begin with basic "dumpster-diving" to see what they're throwing out! That's the "action" part of action learning.

There's a lot more. And I think each intensive will be just like this. Whew! But it's good stuff, and the other students are interesting, engaging, complex people.

Friends of the Earth Biofuels Database

Here is a neat new resource for getting familiar with the advantages, impacts, and costs of using various biofuel replacements for gasoline or diesel fuels.

Friends of the Earth Biofuels Database

What I find most valuable is that is distinguishes between many different types of biofuels that I only hazily differentiate in my mind. It offers two main categories with many subcategories:

Traditional Ethanol: Barley, cassava, corn, sorghum grain, sugar beets, sugar cane, wheat
Cellulosic Ethanol: Corn stover, manure, miscanthus, rice straw, switchgrass, waste wood, wheat straw, wood, wood (polar tree)

Each can be analyzed and compared along a large number of impacts, such as fuel yield/acre, nitrogen fertilizer input, water use, soil compression, and GHG emissions. Wow! This is a vital resource. It's still a little bit beta-phase, but I hope it will be cleaned up and well maintained.

The intrigue of Accounting

No, really. It's kind of interesting.

I'm taking Accounting for the first time, and went through an interesting lecture last night. (Some of the course is self-study using lectures-on-CD delivered by a guy named Norm Nemrow at BYU). Accounting itself might be called "intellectually titillating" -- it's got the hallmark that every Myers-Briggs "J" type can love: Details that all fit together so neatly. It actually has some elegance as a system of computation.

But what was interesting is how they are handling the fact that most accounting is actually done by computer programs these days. Companies used to need actual people sitting at desks entering transactions into ledger books, and then compiling the various accounts and totaling things up. Now, however, this is totally automated. When the grocery checker scans the can of Spam you are buying, a series of actions is launched, such as noting that one item of inventory has been sold and what price it sold for. The program automatically records the correct journal entries, debiting and crediting the expense, inventory, cash, and COGS accounts (it has access to how much the store paid to stock that can of Spam). Later, the program will total up the sales for that day. And at the end of the accounting period, it will make the necessary adjustments to the ledger, prepare the financial statements, and close the books.

This brings up two issues. First, why learn the nit-picky details of accrual basis accounting when it's all automated now? This is a more sophisticated version of the question, Why learn long division now that we have calculators? The CD lectures make the valid point that you really have to understand the process if you are going to be able to be responsible for, oh say, the accounting department at a company. I would certainly hope that the CFO of IBM knows the fundamentals backwards and forwards, no matter how tricky it is to remember that assets are debit accounts that get deducted when you receive cash. I was pleased that they stress the importance of learning things "manually" even when The Computer can mostly do it for you.

But this leads to the second issue. What, really, do accountants do at a company? Why have them? Well, it is certainly true that we have fewer of them than we used to. We just don't need banks of bean counters to keep track of everything. Instead, the accounting role has become much more strategic. Accountants now spend a lot of time analyzing the company's financial position in order to figure out where more cash can be squeezed out and where expenses can be lowered. This makes the accountant a more interactive company employee-- instead of mainly interfacing with the executives and the Sales department, they can usefully speak with Marketing and R&D in order to better understand how the business stays in business. I think this has the potential to be very positive: Getting the money people to talk to the product people has got to be better for coordinating the internal workings of a company.

Furthermore, there is a role for accountants in advocating more sustainable business practices. With an increasingly strategic (and less bean-counter-like) position, they could more easily see the advantages of operating an environmentally friendly and socially responsible business-- and be in a position to act on that knowledge by influencing executives.

With the rise of the Internet, librarians have been shrugging off their image as geeky quiet-freaks with sensible shoes. Maybe now accountants can show themselves to be intelligent and even forward-thinking.

Discussion and Dialogue

I am currently reading The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, about systems thinking. He brings up a very interesting point about different kinds of communication-- the contrast between discussion and dialogue.

Discussion has the same root as "percussion" or "concussion." It's about throwing things back and forth (views, mainly). It has the goal of convincing the other side to adopt your viewpoint, perhaps through the power of the salvos you are launching (this could be deductive logical power, or simply the forcefulness of your voice). Discussion is convergent; it's about narrowing down to fewer (or one) viewpoints.

Dialogue comes from a different root: dia and logos. It's about seeing more broadly through the exchange of words. Dialogue has a flow to it, where views are fluid rather than solid. Ideas are played with, picked up and dropped quickly as the words move through. It is divergent, resulting in an expansion of possibilities and an enhancement of connection.

That is not to say that discussion is inferior or useless. In fact it is critical for making decisions, which does have to happen in the real world. What is most important is that the interacting group of people have a sense of when they are in discussion and when they are in dialogue. It is easy to slip from dialogue to discussion. This will happen when people start to get attached to particular views and start trying to defend them. Vigilence can keep the flow open when the group is supposed to be engaged in dialogue. And then the shift to discussion can be more deliberate when a decision needs to be made.

This is my first practical glimpse at how group dynamics really works, and how it might actually be applied in real groups. Sure, I've had ad hoc training in how to run meetings and how to keep fiesty groups of people settled on one task. But this book makes it a lot more systematic. It's like discovering science after a decade of messing around with a chemistry set in the basement.

Human groups are systems, just like anthills, crystals, ecosytems, and the economy. They may be unpredictable at times, but they are not random. There are tools that can help us understand and manage what is going on. And there is a considerable portion of art mixed in with the science, and emotion mixed in with the logic/theory.

We are reading this book for a course in management. I am finding it interesting, and quite challenging. It draws on very different sources than my formal training in science.