Welcome to Pflogging!

Admin — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 09:33:14 -0600

Welcome to my site. I use it as my sandbox for playing and interacting with technology, ideas, and information, and honing my skills at communicating and demonstrating this stuff to others. I hope you'll find it useful!

I don't have a dream of building a huge internet presence through this effort, or getting rich from ad revenue, or selling my services. I just get personal satisfaction in explaining principles and experiences I've found useful, and sharing this stuff with my business associates, friends, and broader communities that I interact with. I've also found that communicating these concepts is often difficult "in the abstract", and believe hands-on demonstrations and dynamic examples that put things "in motion", and allow interactions with these concepts, are much more effective than static books and articles. read more »

You mock me, and it's good!

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:49:16 -0600

Timelines

Bryan Pflug — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:17:45 -0600

A timeline is a a graphical representation of a linear sequence of significant events which has occurred during the accomplishment of some activity. A timetable provides a corresponding, forward-looking series of pre-arranged events, organized as a tabular list, and is used to plan and track such activities for performing and reporting on future work. Each of the events associated with these timelines and timetables may be comprised of either top-level milestones or more detailed inchstones. read more »

Translating abstract needs into concrete actions

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 11:38:44 -0500

People that are on a development project often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unravelling this lack of clarity be a tricky thing to do. Development relies upon effective communications, and achieving this foundational capability requires that all parties consistently understand the meaning behind the words that they are using. Such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined synthesis of concepts, and clear and written elaboration and allocation of derived details. Each of these steps involves conscientious and persistent attention in order to be successful.

Juggling competing interests

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:10:19 -0500

In the summer of 1982, large American banks lost close to all their past earnings (cumulatively), about everything they ever made in the history of American banking—everything. They had been lending to South and Central American countries that all defaulted at the same time—“an event of an exceptional nature.” So it took just one summer to figure out that this was a sucker’s business and that all their earnings came from a very risky game. All that while the bankers led everyone, especially themselves, into believing that they were “conservative.” They are not conservative; just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug. In fact, the travesty repeated itself a decade later, with the “risk-conscious” large banks once again under financial strain, many of them near-bankrupt, after the real-estate collapse of the early 1990s in which the now defunct savings and loan industry required a taxpayer-funded bailout of more than half a trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when “conservative” bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs.
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Faith, hope, and change

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:53:04 -0500

Faith and hope are as much a part of political reality as they are in change programs within businesses. As I reflect on the daily political landscape that pretends to offer us information to make sense of the 'most important issue' in the upcoming election (the economy), I offer the following two articles for your consideration. I think these two articles are important to digest together. Both have the feel of the kind of unbiased analysis, reflective discourse, and unvarnished truth that must accompany any true reform in our national debate on such topics (a reform that is desparately needed).

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Trust, critical thinking, and decision-making

Bryan Pflug — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:15:20 -0500

There is no longer much public debate about whether global warming is occurring or not. Articles like 'Mass extinction study casts cloud on future' paint a bleak picture of what lies ahead for the earth's population. But wait, if the future is cloudy, wouldn't things be cooling down?

My flippant remark is intended to reinforce that it is sometimes a bit hard to sort out sensationalism from hard science in policy-making for significant issues in society; too often, there is a 'rush to judgement' regarding major changes, when history indicates that such haste is rarely necessary, and when it is, the related decisions have as much chance to cause more problems as they do to fix the original situation. Often, the situation is simply more complicated than it appears; true science would expect that hypotheses would be developed, predictions made, experiments performed, results widely reviewed, options analyzed, and consensus established over a long period of time. But when a 'crisis' occurs, too often, this wise course is abandoned. read more »

What in the world is going on?

Bryan Pflug — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:26:04 -0500

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend an excellent lecture by Margaret Thatcher, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In it, she indicated that the world was going to be changing radically as a result of those events, and that it was not clear what new direction it would take.

Below is a link to an excellent paper that was presented several weeks ago by Herbert Meyer at a Davos, Switzerland meeting which was attended by most of the CEOs from all the major international corporations. It provides a very good summary of what he considers to be today's key trends, and a number of interesting perspectives that one seldom sees in such analyses. read more »

Processes, Mental Models, and Improvement Dynamics

Bryan Pflug — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:12:24 -0500

The word process is an abstract concept. As a result, its meaning is often dependent upon the context in which it is used, and the mental models of those who are using the term. The dangerous part of this is that people can carry on conversations about them, and believe that they are talking about the same situations, even though they are actually discussing several, fundamentally different things. As a result, they each can think that they are communicating about the same 'process', and can go away from that conversation with the mistaken impression that they all agree on something meaningful, or all have a shared vision of what it will take to transform something. What is really going on is that consensus is typically achieved by adding ambiguity, rather than removing it.

As an example of these different 'mindsets', consider the following: read more »

The new Geopolitics

Bryan Pflug — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:48:04 -0500

In the first five months of this year, American businesses and households have spent $49 billion more on gasoline than in the first five months of 2007, according to Cameron Hanover, in a recent New York Post article. Compared to early 2002, (the last time gas was around $2 a gallon) our bill is more like $122 billion more this year. These prices affect more than just gasoline; wholesale heating oil/diesel is up 93.3 percent, and natural gas is 45.3 percent higher than a year ago, and is at the the highest in three years. George Soros, who controls a $17b hedge fund, is predicting these levels are not sustainable, and thinks prices will crash soon. Of course, he's a guy that isn't afraid to manipulate things for his own personal benefit and beliefs. read more »