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The Troughs of Disillusionment

Once again, my experience with music delivers an epiphany that sheds light on other aspects of my personal and professional life. Bear with me on this somewhat wandering blog as I tie several seemingly disparate threads together into a tapestry of personal meaning. (I also apologize for that last sentence, but as burdensome as it might be to read, it was a lot of fun to write.)

Thread One

I was collaborating with some IBM colleagues on an article, and one of the collaborators introduced me to the term hype cycle. It was coined by the Gartner Group to describe a predictable pattern associated with technology breakthroughs.

Initially everyone gets all excited and expectations soar to unwarranted heights. Then comes the trough of disillusionment as reality sets in. Eventually, the audience resets its expectations, and acting on those new expectations, the technology is put to productive use.

Thread Two

I've been really digging in on my Dobro and have made a lot of headway in the last six months. I have a goal to reach a certain level of competence within a selected repertoire of songs by the time I go to the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp in June, and I'm just about where I wanted to be. I had one of my monthly lessons with David Ellis this weekend and reviewed the fiddle tunes (popular in the nightly jam sessions at camp). While doing so, I realized that I don't have great breaks, what I have are good fakes. At one point as I'm about to do Blackberry Blossom for David, I say, "The only thing this will have in common with Blackberry Blossom is the chord progression." In other words, I play simplified versions that capture the spirit of the melody, while allowing me to play at jam speed.

Thread Three

I'm almost 63 and it seems anytime I get an ache or I feel a bit puny, I immediately imagine it to be some fatal illness. During one of those funks and on my way to a recent checkup, I asked myself what I would do if the doctor said I had six months to live. I was surprised by the spontaneity and the clarity of my response: "I'd quit trying to play Saint Ann's Reel so damn fast and just enjoy playing all the notes."

Thread Four

OK, this is the last thread and the one that really triggered this blog. I was driving to the monthly SEBA jam on Sunday, feeling tired and even a tad bit depressed. Something in me didn't want to go--I just wanted to turn around and go home, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over my head. I did an uncharacteristically mature thing: I turned around and went home.

The Epiphany

I think that with anything (and possibly anyone) we love, we go through similar patterns to the hype cycle. But instead of being a one time thing resulting in a static plateau--it has the potential to keep repeating itself at increasingly higher levels of satisfaction (or competence, depending on what you're measuring). But each of those cycles is separated by a trough of disillusionment.

For example, I had great expectations that I would become good with all of my practice and dedication. But at my new level of good, I could see a level of better that was still ahead. So instead of feeling good, I felt not-so-good.

At this point, I think there are two mistakes one can make:

• Mistake One: Quit trying to get faster at Saint Ann's Reel and just enjoy playing all the notes. What's so wrong with that? Well, if I KNOW I only have six months, then nothing is wrong with that. But what if I could know with that same certainty that I had another 20 years? In that case, I'd like to get better at it during that time.
• Mistake Two: Do the cowboy thing and "get right back on the horse that threw you." That can lead to an even deeper trough of disillusionment as you learn to not enjoy the thing (or person) you are passionate about.

What we need to do when we hit the trough is to stop for awhile and enjoy what we have. Sure, slow down on Saint Ann's Reel for a while and enjoy it. There needs to be a period where we cash in some of our satisfaction equity and just appreciate what we have accomplished. So what if my breaks aren't great, that's OK. I'm going to go to camp with some good fakes that will let me jump into the jams and pull my own weight. It's going to be a lot of fun.

And I've already talked with David, and after June, he and I will sit down and set some new goals. So until then, I'm going to have some fun and not worry about how good I need/should/could be.

In the meantime, I know I would like to get better, and I know I will get better. But for now I'm giving myself permission to enjoy where I am today.

Is 'Useful' the New 'Usable?'

I have recently written two separate pieces that are starting to converge for me. One was a guest blog at Usabilla.com: Useful, Saleable, Buildable: The Role of UX in Defining Requirements.  The other was a column in UXmatters.com: UX Dimensions of Conflict

In the first, I mention that I have been shifting my design focus from being usable to being useful. In the second, I discuss the risk of innovative design versus conventional solutions. I wonder if I am becoming the IKEA of user experience, looking for products that are functional, reasonably attractive, but most important, easy to ship and warehouse.

And I'm wondering how I feel about that.

Useful and/or Useable

Let me start by differentiating these two terms.

• Usable has to do with attributes like user-friendly, intuitive, learnable, error-tolerant, etc. Essentially, how easily does the design help the user meet the goal of the design?  For example, a print dialog can be very usable if it enables a user to make all the right decisions and efficiently provide the required inputs to print a document.
• Useful has to do with does the feature serve a goal of the user? Let's go back to the print dialog example. If the user doesn't want to print documents, if instead the user wants to export them as .XML files, then the print dialog is not very useful.

I think we would all agree that useful and usable are not mutually exclusive, but I definitely see where I spend most of my effort on useful, whereas not that long ago it seemed most of my effort was on usable. And I think it has been an appropriate shift.

I know that sounds heretical, but hear me out. There are some dynamics in my world that have made this a logical transition:

• I work for a company that has a well-defined style guide and philosophy for its UIs.
• I work in an engineering group that has a designated library of UI widgets.
• My engineering group uses Agile as its development methodology.
• I work with UI developers who are well-grounded in principles of HCI.

My interaction design is pretty well bounded by compliance and the widget library at our disposal. So there is not a lot of wiggle room for interaction design decisions--and interaction is at the core of usability.

Being Agile means that to a large degree the building of it is the designing of it. Couple this with the fact that I work with talented UI developers who have a finite bag of widgets, and I really should not waste a lot of time defining interactions they can build faster and better than I can design.


So most of my energy is spent at the front end defining scenarios and sketching wireframes that help encapsulate what the user wants to do. So when I put a calendar widget on a wireframe it tells users and stakeholders "Yes, we will accommodate the fact that you want to set date parameters around this feature." It tells the developer, "Use your stock date selector here."

In an ideal world I would circle around and do usability testing to see if all of this was usable, but I rely on our staying compliant with corporate guidelines and industry practices and the skill of the developers to reduce our usability risk. Usability is becoming a triage victim of the new economy--but largely because its risk is getting low for all of the reasons I've stated. It is a better business decision for me to worry about are we building a product the user will value, i.e., find useful, rather than are we building interactions that will be usable.

Innovative versus Conventional

OK, notice there is no and/or on this one--I went all the way to 'versus.' Yes you can have both, but it is like the treble/bass knob on your radio. The more you have one, the less you get of the other. Here, the trick is balance. I am particularly sensitive about this because I think the kind of environment I have been describing does not naturally stimulate innovation. Technology constraints, widget library limitations, and the tight time-boxing that comes with Agile means I probably will not do a lot of revolutionary interaction design. In fact, I argue in my UXmatters column that innovation can often work against usability. Users know and understand conventional interactions such as radio buttons, text fields, calendar widgets. Change those rules and you introduce usability issues.

So when should you bother with innovation?

When usefulness demands it! I just had my socks blown off this week by something that came out of the Watson Center for Research. Let's just say it was a very innovative way to have users interact with the UI. It so happened that it can be applied to a problem I'm trying to solve around helping users navigate through complex risk components that have a lot of interaction with each other. So why am I now (uncharacteristically) willing to go to bat for a UI that can't be built out of our standard widgets and which will initially befuddle the user due to its novelty? Because it will be so damn useful!

I really do believe the landscape has shifted and UX professionals should be focusing on usefulness. We can't ignore usability, but we do need to be sensitive to where usability risk is getting mitigated by well-thought out style guides, practices, pre-developed widgets, and skilled developers--and make good business decisions about putting our efforts further upstream in designing products that are useful

Not right does not mean wrong

I'm reading a really good document about risk analysis, and the author makes the point that when using probabilities to make predictions, at some point the future will unfold in a way that will make others perceive you were wrong. He emphasized "perceive" and that got me thinking.

We do that a lot. Someone does their analysis, makes a decision, and then acts on it. Like a football coach that decides to go for it on fourth down in overtime rather than punt and put the ball in the hands of the opponents' red hot quarterback. The play doesn't work and everyone says he was wrong. Oh yeah, based on what?

"Well, the play didn't work, that proves he was wrong." No it doesn't. It could merely be an instance where the future took the less probable path. It's gonna happen! Chances are good that his decision was right.

Someone's analysis and decisions should be judged only over time and against a pattern of how often the predictions come true. Additionally, we should judge them by whether their analysis has a feedback loop that learns from failure and how quickly they respond to the unexpected outcome.

Anything else is just Monday morning quarterbacking.

Think Aloud Is More than Talk Aloud

Nielsen's current Alert Box reinforces that think-aloud is a great usability test tool. I couldn't agree more, but I'd like to add some in-the-trenches wisdom I learned from my first usability mentor, Loren Burke. There is a big difference between someone thinking out loud about the task they are doing and someone voicing their opinion about the design. The first is very valuable; the second, meh at best and dangerous at worst.

Here is the kind of data you WANT to get from a user who is thinking out loud:

• "I'm looking at the UI and I think it does..."
• "I want to do..."
• "Hmmm, that's not what I expected, I thought it was going to..."
• "That took longer than I expected/wanted."

In short, you want to learn about how the user sees her task and how she is making sense out of the UI in terms of that task.

What you don't need to hear is stuff like:

• "I think the background should be blue."
• "I don't think other users are going to understand..."

For one, this kind of information does not enlighten the problem space, it just adds one more opinion into a mix that probably has no shortage of opinions already. At best, it's a distraction; at worst it leads developers to make bad design decisions based on what the "users told us they wanted." First of all, the user who specified blue as the background, did he have any background in visual design? I'm amazed how quickly we are willing to overturn the opinion of our in-house visual design expert with the degree from SCAD just because an accountant tells us he likes blue.

Ok, but how do you get users to give you the kind of feedback you need? I use two techniques to improve the think-aloud I get:

• Instructive practice
• Reinforcement and extinction (a la B. F. Skinner)

Instructive Practice
I picked this exercise up from Mike Hannafin at the University of Georgia. Before I start my first task with a user I explain the think-aloud protocol and then ask the participant to count the windows in his house while practicing thinking out loud. I tell them, "I'm not interested in how many windows you have, but I am interested in how you go about doing this." Some will sit quietly and then say, "12." I then point out that I have learned nothing about how they solved the problem. I ask them to try again but to work real hard at thinking out loud. They try again, "OK, in my kitchen I have one over the sink, in the living room there are three, the den has one behind the couch..." At that point I stop them. "OK, now I have some insight into how you solve the problem, you imagine yourself inside your house and you kind of go from room to room counting the windows--starting with the kitchen." Usually their light bulb goes on and they say something like, "Oh, I see, you want me to think out loud." I suppress my instinctive response of "Duh!" and say, "Exactly, I'm going to want to know how you are making sense of the product while you do what you do."

Another useful tip is to have a safe and short first task, so if the person is having trouble thinking out loud you have a chance to work with them some more before getting into longer, meatier tasks.

Reinforcement and Extinction
Reinforcement and extinction are two principles from B.F. Skinner's Operant Conditioning. Most of us are pretty familiar with reinforcement, but extinction might be a new concept.

Reinforce user behavior only when they give you data, and praise them for exactly that: giving you data. Do NOT reinforce them for giving design suggestions.

For example, if a user tells me "This instruction here is really confusing," I first try to clarify where the confusion is, e.g. a word they don't understand, an ambiguity or whatever. Then I usually say "Thanks, that's useful to know." Same thing if they're trying to get the product to do something it doesn't. "So you expect it to automatically correct the word 'manger' to 'manager' because manger wouldn't make sense here. Thank's that's useful to know." Notice, I did NOT say, "That's a good suggestion." Why not? For one, I've got a room full of developers watching this test that know it's an unreasonable expectation for a spell checker. Also, when I praise a user for making a good design suggestion, what behavior am I reinforcing? Making design suggestions. But I didn't bring this user in to make design suggestions, I wanted to see how real people made sense of the UI in the context of doing authentic tasks.



The next technique, extinction, is how I deal with unwanted feedback such as style preferences, design suggestions, etc. I do nothing. That is what extinction is, the removal of feedback that would reinforce the behavior. Essentially, reinforced behavior continues, behavior that is not reinforced eventually goes away (becomes extinct). So a typical exchange would go something like this.

User: I didn't see the Submit button.
Me: So you didn't know what to do when you finsished the form because you didn't see the Submit button. Thanks, that's useful information.
User: Yeah, I think you should make it red.
Me: In this next task we are going to ask you to...

My first response: positive reinforcement for the insight--didn't notice the button.
My second response: moved right along without acknowledging the design suggestion. Thanks to the first response, we know we have a problem with Submit not being noticed. I'll let that visual designer with the degree from SCAD run with that.

I know there are some who would want the user's design ideas. But once you start down that path, the user quits sharing their insight into the problem space and starts giving you their solutions. It's like the user who says "12 windows." OK, I know your answer but I have no insight into how you got there. And again, usually I have no shortage of experts in the subject of the solution; what I lack is understanding the problem from the user's perspective.

So by all means, get your users thinking out loud, but encourage talk that illuminates the problem space--that's what a usability test is all about.

It ain't the walk, it's the talk.

I have a new column out today in UXmatters. It has to do with managing design tensions, but I talk a little in it about Action Science.

During my doctoral research, in which I studied how development teams learn collectively during usability tests, I came across a field called Action Science, which analyzes dysfunctional communication with a focus on resolving contradictions between stated beliefs and theories in use. In cliched terms: A lot goes wrong when there is a disconnect between our talk and our walk. When confronted with such disconnects, most of us tend to blame our walk for failing to meet the standards of our talk—and we vow to do better. But Action Science also challenges the validity of the talk. Many times, it provides a surprisingly simple answer: Stop saying what you obviously do not believe. You’re just confusing people.

It seems we carry a lot of scripts with us that are so ingrained we never question them. Yet, they don't seem to really work for us, so we behave to a different set of norms. What I personally found so liberating about Action Science was the throwing out of these scripts that just confused me and those around me.

As I say in my column, however, we have a natural response to beat ourselves up when our walk doesn't match our talk, as if we are failing to meet our standards. As we get ready to go into the new year, I invite us all to review some of our talk that doesn't match our walk and ask ourselves if we are reading from irrelevant scripts.

Some examples:

• When I hear writers discuss the writing process (including many a writing professor) they invariably say "Start with an outline." I said that for years. But I never actually started with an outline, and most writers I have observed don't either. Most of us jump in and do some stream of consciousness writing or we jot down disconnected snippets of ideas that we don't want to lose. Later, we start to see a pattern or structure emerge and then we start rearranging the pieces. So why do we say we start with an outline? There's a script I plan to throw away.
• Companies love to talk about teams and how they evaluate employees based on the success of the team. Yet, I've never been called in for my annual review as a team. It always feels like it is about me. Why can't companies say, "We will certainly consider how well you support teams we put you on, but essentially you will be evaluated and your raise based on your individual performance."
• For many years I worked in management because my script said "I want to coach others." I was unhappy and the people I managed weren't all that thrilled. Finally I threw away the script that said "I want to be the coach," and replaced it with what I really wanted:" I want to be the quarterback." Nothing wrong with that. I'm happier and all the folks who do not work for me should be delighted as well.

So think about this. At this stage in your life, there is a good chance that you do a lot of what you do because IT WORKS FOR YOU! If you find a big disconnect between what you say and what you do, don't forget to challenge what you say with the same rigor that you challenge what you do. It might not be your walk, it could be your talk.

A Picture Is Worth...hmmmm

I think we use icons way too much!

I'm working on a project right now where we are updating a web app and so I'm getting to talk to users and customers. One weakness that keeps coming up is that they can't figure out the icons.

Not all of them, and that's been the important aha for me. Here's my new insight:

• Icons that differentiate among broad categories = good
• Icons that differentiate among nuances within a category = not good

For example, imagine a menu bar that has career choices like doctor, lawyer, butcher, baker, construction worker. Icons would work pretty well in that instance. Now imagine clicking on the doctor icon and getting a drop down of specialties, identified by icons. Not so clear (even ignoring Bevis and Butthead out there giggling over icons for urologist, gynecologist,  etc).

In practical terms, I see this problem showing up in grids a lot. For example, in a web app that manages customer service tickets, we have columns for things like priority and status. Our priorities are High, Medium, and Low, and we have about six statuses like New, Assigned, In Progress, etc.

In our zeal to be more graphic, we have icons for the priority levels and for the statuses. Looks good! Problem is that no one can remember the icons and they have to mouse over the icon to see the tool tip.

In this case I think words are better than pictures, and users would rather have  dull and useful over graphically rich and obtuse.

A Most Unlikely Pub

On Wednesday I went to the Irish Bred Pub in Rex, Georgia.

Rex (now that I've been there, I feel as if I am on a first-name basis with the town) is a bit south of Atlanta, just off exit 2 on I-675. I went there to celebrate David Ellis's birthday and to hear his band, 3-Way Street, play.

I've been in pubs all around Ireland and consider myself to know one when I see one. The one in Rex is, shall I say, a unique interpretation.

For one thing, no Guinness.
Not much along the lines of Irish food either. No, O'Potato Skins, Kelly Green Spinach Dip, or that kind of thing. I do think there was fish and chips on the menu, but it was more like the Captain Dee's and not what you would find wrapped in newspaper in Dublin. I had the Patty melt--sounds Irish at any rate, as in Saint...

Other interesting features:

• Decorated for Christmas on November 9. Couldn't tell if it was decorated already or decorated still.
• Brightly lit on the inside
• Pool tables
• Overwhelming smell of french fries--reminded me of the fries they used to serve at the Dew Drop Inn, a "private club" my parents belonged to in Mobile
• Smoky 
• Clientele that said the parking lot would be filled with pick-ups and harleys. Not a Prius/Audi crowd

And one more thing. Their logo was a leprechaun  dropping his pants in a "kiss my ass" pose. They explained that in the menu. It is their way of saying it's an adult bar and they don't want any "snotty-nosed kids" in it.

Well, you put all of that together with a 90-minute set from David and 3-Way Street and what do you get?

MY KIND OF PUB!

3-Way Street plays there every Wednesday. Go there, trust me, it's great.

And oh! That patty melt? I put it right up there with The Grill in Athens, GA.


[photos from Tim Harlan's FB]

The crowd goes wild

When working on new material, pick a small venue and pay attention to the audience reaction.

Note to self: Don't make Wagon Wheel a signature piece

Less tap, more glide

About three years ago I had a big Aha! moment. I had just decided to get serious about playing the reso I had fooled around with for 15 years and went online to learn about this box that had the cool sound and why I wasn't sounding a bit like the stuff that got me interested in the first place. I found a lesson by Ivan Rosenbeg and learned Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Well, the light went on.  I had been playing the reso like it was just an open tuned guitar played with a slide. I applied what I had learned from over 40 years playing folk music. I was using my basic Travis style picking, occasionally throwing in some rolls from my banjo days. You know, laying down a substrate of notes from the chord and weaving the melody line through it.

That's not what Ivan was doing. He was throwing something into the mix that had never occurred to me: silence. He was shaping the sound as he played individual notes, sometimes with some picking around it, but a lot of the time just letting the voice of the reso sing the melody. And he'd let it stop to breathe. And sometimes he'd slide the low D up to a G and let it drone the open G string right above it. I got it! This was a unique instrument and not meant to be played the same way I would a regular guitar.

Lesson learned and apparently forgotten. As I was getting ready for my first Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp last year, I bought Steve's four-hour bluegrass workout book and CD and started learning some fiddle tunes. One I learned was Saint Ann's Reel, arguably the prettiest fiddle tune of them all. But Steve's arrangements were for flat pickers, either guitar or mandolin. None the less, I learned them note for note and played them on my reso. Pretty, but one problem--practice as much as I have, I just can't get up to jamming speed.

Then the next Aha! There is no way that I was ever going to be able to match what a flat picker with fingers and frets could do by finger picking and playing with a slide. Please spare me your links to some Jerry Douglas recording and your "Oh Yeah?" I didn't say Jerry couldn't do it; I said I couldn't. So last night I'm jamming at the Red Light Cafe in Midtown Atlanta and sure enough the mandolin player says "Let's do Saint Ann's Reel." Well I tried to keep up but ended up playing what felt like every other note just to stay with the others. Hmmmm, it didn't sound real awful. So this morning I worked through it and paid attention to the "money notes," i.e., the ones that really defined the melody, and I ignored the flourish notes. All of a sudden what came out was Saint Ann's Reel at jamming speed.

So I opened up my Mike Witcher book to see how he played it and, lo and behold, I wasn't too far off of what he did. Just for grins, I counted the number of notes in the first three bars of the B part. Steve's flat picker arrangement had 21 notes. I was playing 15. (Mike's arrangement for reso had 17--well, that's why he's Mike Witcher and I'm Mike Hughes.) Just that small reduction in notes, though, was all it took to get me up to jamming speed.

Being a tech writer by trade, my first analogy was that it was like editing a text, taking out the non-essentials and leaving the meat. But that wasn't quite right. In editing, we take out parts that don't add value, but in this case Steve's extra notes all added value.

It's more like watching Gregory Hines tap dance. Fast, furious, fantastic! But now imagine another dancer joins him on stage, Fred Astaire. Fred dances to the same beat, but fewer movements. He glides, lingers in space for a moment, then seemingly falls into the next step. Beautiful!

One's not better than the other; each is bringing his unique artistry and talents to the stage. The reso is more like Fred Astaire. It glides, it lingers, it uses its special tonality to add voice to the melody.

So my new mantra is "Less tap, more glide." I think there are some life lessons outside of music somewhere in that.

Live vs. Recorded

Warning: I have absolutely NO data to support the following assertion.

People have different tolerance levels for filler talk depending on if it is a live presentation versus a recorded one.

If I dial into a webcast, it doesn't bother me so much when the speaker starts off, "I'd like to thank Frank for inviting me here today, before I get started I'd like to let him say a few words." "Thanks, we are thrilled..."

BUT, if I encounter that at the start of a recorded webcast (where all of this goes on with just the boring cover slide up for the first five minutes) I go bonkers and drop off.

I'll leave it to others to prove such an experience is general (which I think it is) or to examine why we have different expectations. But if you believe it to be true, you should do two things:

• Prompt the opening speaker to have a clear jumping point from intro filler to meaty start of the presentation.
• Edit the intro filler out and start the recorded webcast at the meaty start.

Why not just start with the meaty start? Because I think the intro filler serves some real need in live presentations, it lets folks jostle the chairs and get situated, in reality or in virtual equivalents.

At any rate, think about it the next time you are doing a presentation that will get distributed in a recorded format. Right before you get into the meat, pretend the camera just got turned on.

Consultancy 101

I have a really important presentation today in which I am bringing major stakeholders who have diverse opinions into an overview of a proposed UI redesign. I'm anxious because I already know they are opinionated and their opinions do not agree. Hence the meeting.

I'd like to get out of this alive and on good terms with everyone, so I am drawing on my old consultant days and a three step process that has served me well:

1. Share my data with them, including the problems the solution is trying to solve.
2. Give them my expert recommendation (after all, they've paid for it, they're entitled to it).
3. Do what they want. It's their money; it's their project.

The warning signs that you are pushing for an unwarranted change

Seth Godin has an excellent blog called "The warning signs of defending the status quo."  It's good and I agree with everything in it.

But I find it interesting that the rather obvious assumption is that defending the status quo is wrong--something that deserves a warning. Often the existing state of affairs is a desirable state--that's why it is the status quo.

So I did a little Zen thing where you contradict your assumptions to shake yourself up a bit. Here are some of Seth's warning signs in their original (in italics) and then in their contrary form.

When confronted with a new idea do you:

• Consider the cost of switching before you consider the benefits? Consider the fun of switching before you consider the costs?
• Highlight the pain to a few instead of the benefits for the many? Highlight the benefit to a few instead of the pain for the many?
• Exaggerate how good things are now in order to reduce your fear of change? Exaggerate how bad things are now in order to instigate a change?
• Undercut the credibility, authority or experience of people behind the change? Undercut the credibility, authority or experience of people who support  the status quo?
• Grab onto the rare thing that could go wrong instead of amplifying the likely thing that will go right? Grab onto the rare thing that goes wrong with the status quo instead of amplifying the many things that go right?
• Focus on short-term costs instead of long-term benefits, because the short-term is more vivid for you? Focus on short-term benefits instead of long-term costs, because the short-term is more fun for you?
• Etc, etc. I'll let you do the rest if you want.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against change. I just don't have anything against the status quo either.

What to do when you screw up

I screwed up at work. Details are not important. We all screw up in a number of ways: We make a bad decision, we behave poorly, or we just make a mistake ("Hmmm, it was such a small change, who would have thought it would have taken the entire stage environment down"), etc.

So you're telling me icebergs are bad things?

However you get there, you find yourself in the uncomfortable situation of having caused a problem and now having some degree of scrutiny coming at you. There are three ways you can handle it (hint: two of them are not good):

• Aggressively snap back. "I wouldn't have made the mistake in the first place if so and so hadn't done such and such."
• Get all passive and pouty. "Fine, I'll just do exactly like I'm told, Now, exactly, how do you want me to do my job?"
• Take the beating and move on.

 I would never advocate deliberately making a mistake, but the truth is that mistakes can have an upside. People will watch how you handle yourself. When I used to play golf, I would occasionally land in the sand trap. So do the pros. The difference is that it would take me three strokes to get out and my exit shot generally landed on another fairway. Pros get out in one shot and put it next to the hole.

The aggressive reaction will be your first and instinctive one. Find something to distract you for 24 hours until it passes. Updating your resume is a good activity for a number of reasons. For one, it restores your self-esteem. It can also come in handy if it turns out that this was a really really major screw up.

When the aggressive reaction passes, you slip into the passive one. Have a drink and keep reminding yourself that this is a much bigger deal to you than it is to them. Go back to work with a bounce in your step.

Then take the beating. Admit the screw up, have a recovery plan, and get back to business. Do something visible that shows you have moved on and you are back in the saddle. It's better if that something is unrelated to the screw up. Something that establishes "Storm's moved on, nothing to see here."

Just like golf, people remember the recovery stroke that lands in the hole, not the slice that got you into the sand trap.

Notes from a Grammar Anarchist

I've been involved in some grammar conversations lately, and I have been reading some recent articles about grammar in Twitter posts. It has reminded me that I am the opposite of a grammar Nazi, I am a grammar anarchist. Man, I am the Che Guevara of grammar!

I hold that as long as the communication is clearly understood, standing on points of grammar is hegemonic. By that I mean that we apply somewhat arbitrary rules as codes to tell "our kind" from "them." The power class assigns the concept of "correct" to their way of speaking and "wrong" to other dialects that identify someone as not being in the power group.

Easy example: the double emphatic negative in English. No one has ever been confused by a sentence like "I don't have no money," although many English teachers pretend to be. We in power have made the somewhat arbitrary decision not to use it (Spanish, on the other hand, includes it as part of its standard grammar) and we wield that rule to sort out those who do use it. There is usually a very slippery slope that gets attached to this: Different = Wrong = Uneducated = Unintelligent.

Let's take an example that might make us a little uncomfortable. Some people pronounce the word "ask" as "aks." This is often viewed as "wrong" by people who pronounce it as spelled, and the insinuation is that the one pronouncing it "aks" lacks education or sophistication.

Instead of branding it as wrong, let's describe it for what it is: it's called a metathesis, i.e., a "transposition, more especially of the letters, sounds, or syllables of a word." There are lots of them around. But if you are a member of the power class, your metathesis is deemed "how the word is pronounced."


Everyone I know who rails against "aks," blithely pronounces the day after Tuesday as "Wenzday" as if it were spelled Wendsday. But it is spelled Wednesday and should be pronounced Wed-nes-day. After all, the day is named after Woden, not Woned. BTW, Woned is the mythical husband of Wonelly and the two of them are the German deities who go around stopping mules.


So why is "our" Wenzday right and "their" aks is wrong? They're both just examples of a common language phenomenon of metathesis.


Don't get me wrong, I'm all for speaking clearly and unambiguously, but grammar Nazis stop the conversation. Their corrections are more distracting than whatever aberration they might be attacking.

Example:
Bill: "This evening couldn't have been more perfect."
Mary: "You shouldn't modify an absolute--if something is perfect there is no way it could ever be more perfect. So will you call me tomorrow?"
Bill: "Uh, I think I'm leaving the country, yeah, I have to go on a secret mission and will be out of touch for about three years."

So here's my point: Language is pretty screwed up and is full of inconsistencies. We need to be careful when we brand our inconsistencies as "the way it is" and others as "that's wrong."

Why did it take this long?

Getting old has its compensations for what it extracts from us. Case in point:

I did a demo yesterday of a mobile application we are about to release. The manager of the product management group was monitoring the chat during the demo and forwarded a comment to me over SameTime chat.

"One of the participants noted that the email follow-up icon was not intuitive and looked more like it would be to edit the ticket being displayed. Did you consider other icons, maybe something more intuitive like an envelope?

No action required, I'm just passing this along to you."

I started to respond that we wrestled a lot with the icon selection on that and eventually decided to use the standard mobile icon for email.

I then thought about explaining that icons are a crap shoot at best and that we would have some customer education to explain that entire feature.

Finally I responded:

"Thanks"

Why did it take me so long to develop that communication skill?

Two reasons you don't want to carpool with me...

Two reasons not to carpool with me:

The first is easy; I'm a terrible driver. I know this because I just finished a road trip with my 34-year old son who is also my insurance agent. His critiques aside, even I noticed it. I drive like an old man. (Well, I'm 62!) I run over curbs at the drive-through, miss exits, take my attention off the road while I fiddle with x (x can equal radio, CD, GPS, etc), get befuddled about which way I was going before I exited for gas, start the car even though it's already running, etc. In my defense, I did avert an accident when someone who drives worse than I do turned into our side of the four-lane divided highway, but instead of turning into the near lane swung all the way over into my lane (I was doing sixty). I've been meaning to take the new Jeep off roading but the dirt shoulder of a highway wasn't what I had in mind.

But that's not the only reason you don't want to carpool with me.

I just got a new instructional book and CD for Dobro. This one is by Mike Witcher. Now instructional CDs are a lot like girlfriends. At first you go through a lot of them, looking for "the one." Each time, I would think, now I will be able to play like x (x = yadda yadda yadda). But somehow it just doesn't work out. But this time I'm very optimistic for two reasons. One, like with girlfriends, there has to be a bit of "this one is right for where I am now in my personal development." Instructional CDs, like girlfriends, aren't bad, but they might not be the right one for where you are right now. I had Mike Witcher as an instructor this year at the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp, and as I listen to the songs on his CD I can tell that I will be able to learn them. But I've also learned a lot about learning in the last year. For one, I've learned about the incredible amount of repetition it takes for the finger muscles to learn something new. So I'm not so easily discouraged. "This is too hard" has been replaced with "This is new." I know it will be easy--by the 100th repetition.

And there is another trick I picked up at Kamp. This one I got from one of the other kampers at lunch who got it from one of his flat pick instructors. "You can't learn to play a song until you learn to sing it first." That's been one of my problems, I've been trying to learn a song by picking it out from the tab or sheet music. Sure, I would listen to it first, but not learn it. But now I'm trying just to learn the song first by singing along with the CD. And that's the other reason you don't want to carpool with me. I've been playing the 1 min:15 sec version (medium speed) of Angelina Baker back to back to back during my commute to work. I sing along with it, "Lah dee dah, lah diddy dah..." Again and again and again. Not playing (hey, I'm a bad driver but not THAT bad), just singing the melody to nonsense syllables. Now the tablature tells me how to play a song I know, so it's not so frustrating to grind through it trying to figure out how it's supposed to sound in three weeks when I get some kind of reasonable speed.

It's a 20-song set and I've set an aggressive pace of one song every two weeks. So in forty weeks I'll have it. Man, that's gonna be a lot of lah dee dah.

Better to be Dominant (Than Diminished)

[ I first wrote on this over a year ago. I've since gotten some additional insight from my tech writer perspective.]

My first Dobro lesson was with Mark Van Allen who spent two hours reviewing theory with me. It was a fascinating tour of the fret board, scales, and chords. Mark pointed out that if you play the scale of G on all the strings, and if you put a dot down every place you "fretted" a string, you create the basic chords included in the key of G.

G  B  D
0  0  0  GBD  G major
2  1  2  ACE  A minor
4  3  4  BDF# B minor
5  5  5  CEG  C major
7  7  7  DF#A D major
9  8  9  EGB  E minor
11 10 10 F#AC F# dim

Mark describes the patterns as bar, chevron, chevron, bar, bar, chevron, hockey stick (oh yeah, we'll talk more about that hockey stick later).

Recently, I was at the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp where Ivan Rosenberg established the same set of patterns. He did it by applying the following technique for making a triad chord: "Play a note, skip a note, play a note, skip a note, play a note." He started at G and went up the scale, producing the same pattern that Mark had.

The first six chords have a particular beauty and closure about them. The three major chords are the tonic (G) dominant (D) and subdominant (C) chords. The three minor chords are their respective relative minors. (A relative minor is the minor that has the same key signature as its relative major. Their scales share the same notes but start on different roots-one yielding a major scale and one yielding a minor scale.) So for G, we have E min, for C we have A min, and for D we have B min.

Then we get that darn F# diminished! What's with that? It's like meeting the folks in a jam: The banjo guy says, "I'm Fred," the mandolin player says, "I'm Skip," the guitar player says, "I'm Jack," and then the fiddler says, "I'm Throckmorton." What the...??!! How did he end up with the others?

Even Ivan kind of dismissed the F# diminished saying it wasn't very useful for what he wanted to cover that day. The problem I have with it is that it just doesn't seem to belong. Have you EVER played a song in G where an F# diminished showed up? I haven't. But the other six chords are mainstays for G progressions.

I've fretted (no pun intended) over this for a while, and I think I've resolved it, at least for me. That seventh chord is a D7 without the root D. A seventh is the 1 3 5 b7 and in the case of D the 3, 5, and flatted 7 would be F#, A, C--exactly what we have. That would make more sense, except now I have the problem of where did the lost root go? That's the problem I have been pondering for the last year or so.

Then my tech writer background kicked in and solved it. Think of these seven chords as a seven-page document in a word processor. The first six are in Portrait and the page is three strings wide. That's plenty wide enough because major and minor chords are properly rendered with three notes. 1, 3, 5 or a 1, b3, 5.

But what if the last page is supposed to be in Landscape? That would make the page four strings wide and--lo and behold--look what we now see if we go into Landscape view: D, F#, A, C  our D7. We were missing the root because it takes four notes to properly render a dominant 7th and we were looking at just the last three! Now it's as if that fiddler named Throckmorton winks at me and adds, "But my friends call me Buddy." The world makes sense again.

OK, one problem solved, but I now have two more: (1) Why doesn't F# get its own chord and (2) why does D get two chords?

Once again my tech writer perspective kicks in on the first one. In document design or screen layout, there is a well-known phenomenon that if two elements are too close they create a visual tension. For example, text too close to table borders are the visual equivalent of nails on a chalk board. Or put a button too close to the edge of the screen and the user begs for some padding to give it some breathing room. I think F# is just too close to G! Our ears don't like a chord that is only a half-step away from the root.

And as far as D getting two chords when everybody else gets just one? Well, maybe that's why it's called the dominant.

Living Large

For someone who is not the least bit afraid or reluctant to speak in public, I am still quite nervous when I play music in the presence of others. My stint on stage at the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp was a breakout moment for me.

And last night was another step forward when I took the stage for open mic at the Red Light Cafe and got the chance to play with my favorite band, Cedar Hill of Atlanta. I sang "Bring Your Clothes Back Home." When else can you stand up in public and sing "Sure I'm sitting there watchin her flip-flop-a-doopie, oh Baby."

 And in a bar no less :-)

Bucket List...check...check...check

So there I am backstage at the Clayton Center for the Arts in Maryville, TN. I'm trying to stay focused on my solo that will be coming up in just a few minutes while the stage manager corrals my group in the wings. While I'm standing there, Stacy Phillips (Reso players, yeah, THAT Stacy Phillips) comes up and gives me some mic tips about the resophonic. "Let the mic point here--not there--and during your solo, step in and flatten the guitar out."

Wow, thanks.

Then Ivan Rosenberg (yeah, THAT Ivan Rosenberg) gives me some reassurances that I'll do fine. While he's talking to me, Kenny and Amanda Smith go walking by me.

Wow, wow.

Then I hear them announcing my band and I hear them say my name. The handler herds us onstage. The sound technician positions the mic exactly where Stacy had said it should go. The mandolin player kicks it off and we do our song, "Love of the Mountains." My solo part comes up, I step forward a bit and turn my guitar a little flatter and away I go. Fifteen seconds later I'm done and the crowd applauds for me.

OMG Wow!

That was Friday, June 24, the last night of the Steve Kaufman Acoustic Kamp. At the start of the week, my class instructor asked us to go around and play a little so he could get a gauge on our relative skill levels. I completely froze up and could barely remember anything I had ever played. Eventually I stumbled through "Grandfather's Clock." So I signed up for the band scramble. That's where you put your name in an envelope for your instrument, and on Friday they randomly assign you to a band. You're given 45 minutes to come up with a vocal and an instrumental (along with a band name). Then the competition begins in front of all the other campers. That's one way to get over your fear of playing in front of others. What was I thinking? As it was, my group won and that earned us the distinction of getting added to the Friday night concert as the opening band.

Well, it all turned out well--as the beginning of this blog documented-- and it was the thrill of a lifetime to be on that stage (and to not screw up).

And it was the lesson of a lifetime. I am honored to have been surrounded by these great musicians and witness first hand their humility and ability to listen all week to students and encourage them. Their universal talent across the board was to hear a student play and filter it down to one thing the student was getting almost right. They ignored the good and the truly awful of what you did and went for the one thing that could make you better--the logical next step. And that's all it took.

My personal thanks to my instructors, Mike Witcher and Ivan Rosenberg, for neither berating me nor trying to make me great (in one week). Thanks for accepting the player I was and leaving me just a little better than when you first encountered me. And thanks for teaching me how to make that happen on my own now, week by week.

Did I say Wow?