People Don't Change

It all started, strangely enough, with The Apprentice.  For those of you who recall, this show takes a bunch of young business up-and-comers, preferably with entertaining personality "issues", and pits them against each other in contrived contests.  At the end of the show, the two teams are judged, with much pomp and circumstance, by none other than The Donald, Donald Trump.

Inside The Donald is a rebel with a Mohawk trying to get out.

I have to admit, I quite like The Donald.  Perhaps because I think that a man so ostentatiously ridiculous while raking in so much money is pulling one over on all of us.  He's a better straight man than Bud Abbot.  Also, I'm impressed that the guy made millions, lost it all, and then made millions all over again.  I mean, I'd be happy to manage that feat once.

Anyways, at one point on the show somebody asked Trump what advice he would give to young wannabe magnates watching the show.  Trump's words:  "People don't change."  I'm not sure what I'd been expecting but it certainly wasn't that. 

The words immediately struck me, because this is something that is so contrary to popular thinking.  The two main religions in the culture we call The West are Christianity and secular humanism (which is basically Christianity without out all the mysticism and miracles mumbo-jumbo).  Both have personal transcendental change as part of their mythos.  In Christianity, the self is profoundly changed upon acceptance of Jesus Christ into your heart.  In secular humanism, the myth, inculcated through a slew of schmaltzy after-school movies,  is that "you can be anything you want to be, if you try."  Indeed this later quote was more along the lines of what I expected Trump would offer when asked for advice.

The truth is, of course, you can't be whatever you put your mind to. A knock-kneed kid genetically pre-disposed towards poor hand-eye coordination may want to play in the NHL.  But it ain't gonna happen. 

People often say, "if only I had it to do over again, I'd do it differently." And yet, we do have it to do over again.  Every morning when we wake up, we have the choice of transformational change, of completely turning our lives around and becoming one with our ideal self.  The past is behind us, the future an open book.  You can say, "From now on I'll be like billionaire, philanthropist, daredevil and raconteur Richard Branson." Or in my case:  "Today I will start making use of all those fantastic organizational tools at my disposal so that I'm not in a constant state of confusion as to where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing."

But it doesn't happen, does it?  No matter how hard you try you still wake up with yourself every morning. Not Richard Branson.  Not Adam the Suddenly and Miraculously Organized.  I've been giving myself Stuart Little pep talks for thirty-five years on getting more organized.  The only thing that's changed about me as I look in the mirror, is the lines etched into my forehead, the crow's feet around my eyes.  I look at that slowly sagging face and wonder where that 18 year old rebel is.  I still feel like I'm him, though that middle-aged responsible-looking person staring back it me belies it.  I still feel him sneer at the fancy letters after my name, my tiny suburban empire.  I hear him whisper in the twilight between awake and dream:  "Burn it.  Burn it all."

People don't change.

It may sound like I'm being Captain Buzzkill here, but that's not my intent.  I don't tell the kids on my soccer teams, "What?  You wanna play for Chelsea when you grow -up.  Well, kid, why doncha put all your wishes in one hand and all your crap in the other and tell me which one fills up first."  Kids are still finding out about themselves; you don't want to tell them "stick a fork in it, kid, you're done."  But my son—great little soccer player by the way—is  a little older now and I am starting to drop the hint that, on top of all the work that's required to become a professional athlete, some of it is just drawing the right cards in the genetic poker game.  Elite coordination and athleticism, strength, competitiveness, drive, focus.  Gretzky scored 378 goals as a ten-year old.  That wasn't all from hard work.  I'm sure there's plenty of kids who probably tried harder than Gretzky who didn't score ten.  You have to concede that there was more than a little talent involved with Gretzky.  So I tell my son to chase his dreams, sure, but there's something to be said just for the sheer enjoyment of playing the game.  I'm crap at soccer, but I still love playing.  Not to mention the pints after—but he's  a bit young for that yet.

Of course kids set extraordinary goals for themselves, and that's OK.  Grown-ups, on the other hand—at least moderately self-aware ones—have become attuned to their natural strengths and weaknesses.  They don't want to be Batman anymore.  The wise thing to do is to align your goals with your nature.  I took a Master's Degree in Environment and Management, and, further to the "Management" end of that program, we had to undergo a battery of personality tests.  Of course I, like the others in the class, hoped the results would show that I had executive leader potential written all over me. 

But alas, 'twas not to pass.  Now, looking back, it makes perfect sense.  One of the traits of top CEOs, apparently, is optimism.  I'm an inveterate pessimist.  I've tried to be an optimist.  After all, an optimist, as well as perhaps having the potential to be a CEO, is also probably a happier person.  But I've come to the (rather pessimistic) conclusion that it is simply beyond the purview of my will to change from a dark person to a light one.  Then there's the aforementioned organizational deficit. Did I mention that I'm also easily distracted by shiny baubles, metaphorically speaking?  Also, that 18 year old rebel lives inside me still.   I often wonder if all the other middle age moms and dads coaching soccer or sitting around some work meeting have the same voice in their heads:  "You are not one of them."  Or maybe it's just me.  I have no idea.

Sorry, was distracted by that shiny bauble for a moment.  Back to the task at hand.

People don't change. 

And because they don't, you should align your goals and wishes with who you are.  For people with a natural sense of who they are, this is second nature.  But others perhaps carry around illusions of themselves.  For example, they want to lead, despite having repeatedly demonstrated a lack of any talent for doing so.  When you're deciding what you want to do with your wild and precious life, know thyself.  Speak honestly to that person in the mirror staring back at you. 

The Afghanistan Hangover

OK, let's drag this blog up back from the dead.  I'm home from Afghanistan, and it's back to work, kids, school, coaching and music.  And the blog!  It' s been hard to find time to put together the blog in the September school/sports  tsunami.  However, I realized that, while in Kabul, I had oodles of time to research and massage my blog posts into pretty polished pieces. 

But then I thought that pretty much everything I write is scintillating, so I don't really have to spend all this time and sweat putting together the perfect post.  Wing it.

So while I was over there I got laid off from my permanent job with Environment Canada.  Actually I got laid off, jumped to another job, and then that position was eliminated too.  So I went through the seven stages of grief while I was over there and came out the other end ready for a new challenge. 

Well it turns out they still managed to dredge up yet another position for me to do in the gummint. Please stay, they asked, you are still a valued member of our management team.  Well excuse me if I can't feel the love! 

So then it was the tough decision, as so eloquently phrased by The Clash:  "Should I stay or should I go now."

My inclination was to pull up stakes and open up my own company.  But then, my party-pooper wife asked me if I had any kind of plan.  "You've known me 15 years, " I said, "Have I ever, once, had a plan?"  When I go on to my Great Reward, you can stick the following epitaph on my tombstone. 

Anyway, my argument failed to convince her, so here I am back as a snivel servant.  The dream of opening up my own company is not gone, just postponed.  Apparently I have to come up with a plan first.  Sheesh.  Serioulsy though, she had to deal with a lot while I was over in Kabul, and it wasn't fair to get back and throw away my career for another adventure.

And honestly, I should be grateful to even have such a dilemma.  And I am grateful.  Many of the workers laid off from Environment Canada are 50-something career bureaucrats landing in a tough job market. They're the ones that have it tough right now.

I was kind of self-congratulatory about having come back from the war psychologically unscathed.  But I'm not quite so unaffected as I thought.  For instance, I've lost interest in the news. 

It's not that I'm disengaged. I just find the media a distraction now.  In the immortal words of Jane's Addiction "The news is just another show." After what I've seen, outrage over a bike lane on Thurlow just doesn't ping on my GaF meter.  I used to find those foreign affairs editorials in the weightier tomes like the Economist  so insightful.  But I can't get into them any more.  I think those writers, for the most part, have a memory of about four months.  Anything that happened more than four months ago is happening for the first time.  "OMG, Israel and Palestinian Territories Miffed at Each Other!"  "Iran Saber-Rattling!"

I think what happens with these foreign policy analysts is that they have to stay so on top of things, geopolitically, all the time, that their heads get filled up with a constant barrage of low quality information, and the old stuff gets pushed out.  It's like those poor guys who only have a memory of  15 minutes.  Before that and it all fades to mist.  So these unfortunate souls are  in a constant state of "Oh my God, this is unreal.  I gotta write this down."

The other thing I noticed since I got back is that I am horrified by the waste.  The Afghans were very efficient.  Everything got used.  Even what they threw away was mostly cleaned up by the vagrant kids, then the dogs and then the goats.  We waste so much.  At least a third of our food, apparently, ends up in a dump.  Not just the food, but the water, the energy, the mindless consumerism of "toss it and buy a new one."  I wouldn't say I'm angry about it.  I think it's just human nature that we don't conserve unless we're forced to conserve.  I just feel a bit like I'm living in a vomitorium.

And finally, I always had this sense of entitlement.  One of the more unappealing aspects of Canada is that we are a little oversubscribed in the area of smug. 

Canadian William Shatner demonstrates Canadian smug.

I suppose I had it too; the idea that Canada was such an oasis of serenity in a world of chaos because we were doing it right.  Well those poor shoeless waifs in Kabul didn't do anything wrong except have the misfortune to be born in the armpit of the planet.  And most of my prosperity comes not from my sterling character and limitless drive, but from just being lucky enough to have been born here. 

In other news I'll shortly be publishing a few stories and a couple of books through Smashwords, and I may as well warn you now that I'll be flogging them here mercilessly.  More on that later.  Much more.  Ha ha ha.

The Mind-Bending Math of Probabilities

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

    —Edward Gibbon

This is the first of a short series on probability and statistics.  You remember, the bit about if you have 3 white marbles and 3 black marbles and you simultaneously draw 4 random marbles what are the odds of grabbing exactly 2 black ones? (Answer: 9/15 or 60%).

We are bombarded by probabilities and statistics everyday, yet for most of us our intuition actually works against us.  Like the guy who thinks that the more lottery tickets he buys, the better his chance of winning money.  In fact, the more lottery tickets you buy, the better your chance of losing money.  Think of it this way:  If you bought one lottery ticket, you might hit the jackpot.  But if you bought all the lottery tickets, then (since the total winnings are always less than the total income generated from ticket sales) you are guaranteed to lose.  Put another way, buying more lottery tickets for a specific draw will increase your chance of a winning ticket, but will decrease your chance of winning money.  This is because the odds are stacked against you from the start (the "house" always ends up ahead), and therefore every dollar you spend, in a probabilistic sense, loses you money.  As a poker pro would tell you, the entire scheme has a "negative expectation."

In other words, gambling is a tax for people who can't do math. 

This is especially true for the case of BC, where the government runs the lottery and, being the government, affords itself shameless odds.  Take the game Sports Action.  All you need to do in this gamble is to call the winner three sports games correctly and you're a winner. If you're a die-hard hockey fan, what could be easier?   Just pick three sure things and you're off to the bank.  Well, not really.  What's a "sure thing" in hockey?  Say Vancouver versus Edmonton in 2011 (or Oilers versus Canucks in 1986, if you prefer).  Even then your odds are maybe 80%.  So what are the odds of calling two sure things?  That would be 80% x 80% which is (0.8)² = 0.64.  Two sure things and we're already down to a 64% chance.  Calling three games would be (0.8)³ = 51.2%.  So intuitively you might think you have an 80% chance of calling three "sure things" but in reality your odds are little better than 50:50.  Did I mention that if they do a lousy job on the odds and the lotery company that runs Sports Action ends up losing money in a given weeks, they can cancel the whole week's tickets and not pay anyone out?  That, my friends, is what is known in the business as a sucker bet.

OK, try this one:  

You’ve flipped Heads 9 times in a row.  What are the odds of flipping Heads again?

Got your answer?

Here’s where things get tricky.  The odds of flipping Heads on a fair coin ten times in a row are easy to figure out:  1 in 2¹⁰ or 1 in 1,024.  So it might be intuitive to you that the odds of you flipping one more Heads is 1 in 1,024.  I mean, there's no way you're going to keep that streak going!  But this fails to account for the fact that you’ve already flipped nine Heads in a row.  The odds of that were (before you started) 1 in 2⁹ or 1 in 512.  But now that you’ve already done it, the probability is 1.  A probability of 1 means 100% or certainty.  And you are certain that you’ve flipped nine Heads in a row.  So thinking about it, even though you’ve already flipped nine Heads in a row, your odds of flipping Heads again is simply 1 in 2, otherwise known as 50:50.  Probabilities predict the unknown or the future; the known past has a probability of 1 because it happened. 

It's this peculiar notion of luck that screws up people's rational analysis of the situation.  Our intuition tells us that after a streak of good luck, we're do for some bad luck, despite the fact that your odds of bad luck are the saem as they were before you had the god luck.  Nothing has changed.  I wonder if the idea luck is genetic or learned behaviour?  Does it occur in all cultures?  I should look into that.

Want another mind-bender?  How about this:

Say you plan to roll a die 20 times. Which of these results is more likely: (a) 11111111111111111111, or (b) 66234441536125563152?

Marilyn vos Savant, who was famous for having the Guinness Book of World Record highest IQ in the 80s (before, apparently, they did away with the highest IQ record), answered:

In theory, the results are equally likely. Both specify the number that must appear each time the die is rolled. (For example, the 10th number in the first series must be a 1. The 10th number in the second series must be a 3.) Each number—1 through 6—has the same chance of landing faceup.

But let’s say you tossed a die out of my view and then said that the results were one of the above. Which series is more likely to be the one you threw? Because the roll has already occurred, the answer is (b). It’s far more likely that the roll produced a mixed bunch of numbers than a series of 1’s.

Is she right or wrong?  Think about that. I'd be interested in your comments.

Statistics and probability are important factors in a lot of research science.  But they are notoriously difficult to understand, as the above puzzles demonstrate.  As a matter of fact, of Ms. vos Savant's four most controversial puzzles, all of them have been concerned with probabilities. 

Let's hear your answers!

Ayn Rand and Objectivism: The Loathed Philosophy

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American philosopher and novelist of the mid-20^th century, famous for her works The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).  She founded the philosophy of Objectivism and is credited with giving rise to the political offshoot of that philosophy, libertarianism.

Love her or hate her—and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground—she was a ferocious intellect who developed a complete and integrated philosophy from basic principles.  She was an uncompromising figure, given to a rather harsh derision of anyone who disagreed with her.  Even libertarianism, a political movement she helped launch, she considered an unwanted bastard child of her philosophy.  Her novels were a financial, if not critical, success.  She became politically active in the 1940s, participating as a "friendly witness" in the infamous US House Un-American Activities Committee, which blacklisted many Hollywood figures including Charlie Chaplin, who left the US.  She gathered around her a group of acolytes including future luminaries such Alan Greenspan (Chair of the Federal Reserve).  Later in life she was struck with lung cancer, and signed up for government-assisted social security and Medicare (to the schadenfreude of many of her adversaries on the political left) and died in 1982.

She called the philosophy Objectivism because she believed that the real world was objective—it existed as real things independent of the observer.  The way to know the world was through reason, a noble capacity unique to humankind.  She rejected all forms of mysticism, including religion.  She believed that humans, as rational beings,  were born with natural rights.  Chief among them was the right to life.  She believed that property was fundamental to life and therefore the right to property was also fundamental.  No man, she said, had the right to initiate force against another.  Force was widely defined: it didn't just include physical force but any type of coercion backed by the threat of force.  For this reason, she believed that taxation by the government was wrong.  She believed in the will of the individual, the morality of rational self-interest, the good of free market capitalism.  She opposed all forms of collectivism and statism.  The role of government was to protect individual (as opposed to collective) rights, through police, army, courts and an executive branch.  Any other role of government was illegitimate.

She was pro-abortion, a feminist, supported Israel in the 1967 war, considered homosexuality disgusting (though, true to her beliefs, she opposed any government intervention in it).  She condemned altruism, rejected animal rights, rejected capital punishment,  and opposed any form of censorship.  I'm guessing she wasn't a big fan of unions.

Two good quotes that nicely sum her philosophy are:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. (Atlas Shrugged)

and

I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

I, like many curious teenagers, read Atlas Shrugged.  After Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which had a profound effect on me, and which I highly recommend) it was my first "important" book.  It's a real behemoth, over 1000 pages.  It's basically about a dystopian future America which veers towards severe statism, where the government starts taking over everything, even posting armed agents in company boardrooms.  As a result, a number of captains of industry, including the hero John Galt, withdraw their services (that would be Atlas shrugging, for the metaphorically tone-deaf) from the US and set up a shadow state where laissez-faire capitalism rules.  The government, having enslaved the people, collapses and there's a nice happy ending. 

It was a dreadful book as far as I was concerned.  Sure, many find the philosophy itself, particularly the rejection of altruism, to be loathsome, but I just thought it was poorly written, with wooden characters and a didactic voice that never stopped bludgeoning me.  At one point there was a speech by the hero, John Galt, that lasted over 50 pages.  Just repeating the same message over and over again.  I think I finally threw in the towel at that point.

Does that man you're going to make a 50-page speech?

Atlas Shrugged has been rather cattily called the "gateway drug" for right-wing philosophy, as it is apparently widely read by young readers.  If anything, it inoculated me against far right politics through the sheer pedagogy and intolerance of other views.  Others were obviously quite impressed though.  Ron Paul, the iconoclastic perennial runner-up in US Republican nominations is has a large dedicated following, and the Tea Party movement has its philosophical home in libertarianism.

Although I hate the leftist nanny state mentality as much as the next guy (probably even more) I reject the idea (never stated, but always implied in libertarianism) that the government is inherently evil.  That given half an inch, they will seek to enslave.  The government, in a functioning democracy, is us.  And when we, as Rand does, cast the government as the villain, we cast ourselves.

Nor do agree, fundamentally, that the ultimate goal of a man should be his own happiness.  Happiness can be a rather shallow goal—give an addict his fix when he needs it and he's good to go.

I don't see the philosophy as workable.  Indeed, subjugation of the proletariat by capitalists led to the overthrow of imperial regimes and the institution of communism in countries such as Chin and Russia.  Our government's allowance for the collective bargaining rights of unions was not done out of sympathy for the serfs, but because they were afraid that, unless they granted workers rights, a communist revolution would take place here.  That was a very real fear in the early to mid-20^th century.  Workers rights—collective rights—as far as I'm concerned, created the middle class, which was an engine of prosperity.  And countries with little government do not rank very high on the various wealth indexes and usual have poor human rights records to boot.

And some goods are simply not amenable to assignation of property rights, so loved by the libertarians.  Take air, for example.  How would you assign property rights to air?  Think about it.

Finally, I find a major internal inconsistency in Rand's work.  She states that fundamental rights (life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness) are derived as a result of man's capacity for rationality.  (Aside: Does that mean that a person incapable of rational thought, say someone severely brain-damaged, should not have rights?)  So rights are inherent, natural.  But how, in Objectivism, can you be born with a right? After all, you can't see, hear or smell a right.  Where is it?  It is not an objective thing at all.  It exists only in the minds of men, and therefore, by definition, subjective.  The Founding Fathers of the United States get around this by simply invoking God:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights.

The rights are there because God put them there. End o' story.  But Objectivism rejects all forms of mysticism.  So it opts, instead, for this rather weak stand-in of Man's Noble Rationality.  This just in:  we aren't actually all that rational.  Collectively, many times, we behave in a way quite similar to a pack of outraged baboons. We constantly follow notions and impulses we barely understand.  Take those yahoos who rioted when the Canucks lost to Boston in the Stanley Cup final a couple of years ago.  Afterwards the one question everyone had of these kids—who often had no criminal behavior in their pasts—was:  Why?  They simply couldn't answer.  "I don't know."  Remarkable.  See also a related post I wrote on the subject of Free Will.

A true Objectivist, to my mind, would consider a person to have rights only to the extent that those rights were real and palpable (i.e. objective) and that there was some force in place to ensure that right.  Such a view would hold that the government—a government of the people as we live in a democracy—created those rights for us. 

Anyways I suppose I could have written off Any Rand and Ron Paul as just crazy as fruit bats, like a lot of people do.  But even though I personally find their philosophy detestable on many levels, they offer a certain intellectual integrity that I think needs to be respected.  Plus, I'm hoping that Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann and the North Iowa Tea Party (below) will be impressed with my philosophical refutation of Objectivism.

Life at HQ ISAF

Dusk at HQ ISAF after a sweltering day.  The Headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force is located in the heart of Kabul, in a fortified green zone also housing several embassies, and ornate, gilded Afghan houses occupied by ex-pats and wealthy Afghans.  The camp is quite small--the inner running loop is not even a kilometer—but, in the daytime,  home to over 2000 soldiers, civilians, diplomats and Afghan employees.  Not surprisingly, as this is a war, this is a 24/7 operation.  There’s always people around you where ever you go.  Folks here talk about, when they get home, how they love to wander around an empty house and luxuriate in the solitude.

Everything here is shades of grey and brown—the camouflage uniforms, the great blast walls surrounding you, the metal containers that contain offices and “hooches."  Everything except for the flapping of the bright flags of dozens of nations in the hot twilight wind.  Some Americans celebrate the 4^th of July with a volleyball game in the floodlit court.  Officers from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the US, Turkey, Romania and a myriad other nations.  There’s enough brass here to outfit every bar in Dublin.  The mountains of Kabul, with their sprawling square, mud-brick dwellings climbing up the sides, are visible over the twenty-foot blast walls, past the watchtowers and through the miles of coiled razor wire.

The view outside my base.

Rzaor wires, blast walls, check points: a reality for the citizens of Kabul.

The camp is dominated by the “yellow building,” which was previously the hub of a renowned military sports club.  Sports, like most everything else, were pretty much banned under the Taliban, and the building fell into disrepair.  When coalition forces seized it, it had been used basically as a toilet and cooking fires had been used in the middle of many of the rooms.

Headquarters, ISAF.

Nearby are the Destille Gardens, not much bigger than a large backyard, but a haven that is the envy of nearby bases.  Here you can rest in the gazebos or under the desert stunted trees and watch the fattest cats in Afghanistan in their comic attempts to snare the garrulous birds.  Many nights it hosts a special-event barbeque.  With all these countries present, national days roll by regularly.

Destille Gardens (aka Dusty Old Gardens) decked out for Canada Day.

My hooch is basically a metal container, probably about the size and appearance of a boxcar.  We have it pretty good at HQ, and there’s only two to a room, and I end up with about sixty square feet of personal space.  Bed, wardrobe, table, chair.  Online is the lifeline for many here, and we spend evenings viddying back home, or watching movies. The web is frustratingly slow and sketchy, but it’s there so we don’t complain.

A rare rainbow in Kabul.  Right over where I live too!

You really don’t complain about much here.  Its HQ.  If you want to moan about it, there’s always somebody to remind you of what it’s like in a combat outpost in Helmand province.  Or what life is like for the refugees swarming into the outskirts of Kabul.  We’re here for those soldiers and those people, not to get a tan.

The food here is, well, I guess what you’d expect when you get British multinational to provide sustenance to suit the culinary peccadilloes of 50-odd nations.  It provides the necessary nutrients to sustain life, let’s put it that way.  Yesterday they had hot dog soup.  There are a couple of other places to eat on base, a pizza joint and a burger joint, that, in the end, just make you miss pizzas and burgers back home.  Still, in comparison to the fare at the dining hall, it’s pretty good.  Or “Afghan good” as they like to say here.

The gym is another highlight, though.  They’ve got a court, a spinning room, a weight room and a treadmill room, and plenty of classes and activities to make it easy to stay in shape.  I was about 220 lbs when I got here and now I’m 195.

Alcohol is strictly verboten on base (except for the two we were allowed on Canada Day—Yay!), and fraternization with the opposite sex is not allowed.  After more than ten years , the bureaucracy of the military has had time to assert itself and the list of Do’s and Don’ts is lengthy and detailed, prompting one friend of mine—a veteran of many campaigns—to remark, “I remember when war used to be fun.”

The best thing about it is the people you meet, from all over the world, all cast into this remote, violent, backward place to deal with seemingly insurmountable problems.  Fighting the insurgents in six regional commands throughout the country and along the Pakistan border, training Afghan police and military (who have a nasty habit of occasionally turning their guns on you), dealing with a democracy imposed over top of a tribal feudal system we do not understand.  Logistics, intelligence, engineering, planning and operations in a hostile environment, thousands of miles from home and family.

These challenges forge a strong camaraderie, as strangers from strange lands like Texas, Sicily, Queensland, Manchester,  Dusseldorf , Kuala Lampur, the Faro Islands and Reykjavik become your family. Sure the bad guys are out to get us, but its amazing, even in the thick of it, how we can all have a good laugh.

The mosque outside the walls is calling the faithful to prayer now.

Four more weeks to go.

The Entrepreneurs of Kabul

Today I went on a tour of a number of recycling facilities in Kabul.  I'd heard rumours about Afghan capability to recycle various goods, and I wanted to see for myself what they could do, so when a local Afghan contact offered to take me out on the town, I jumped at the opportunity. 

Also, I'd been informed that trucks carrying sewage, ostensibly to the Kabul sewage treatment plant (STP), were in fact just dumping it in ditches.   I wanted to witness this as well, as well as determine if any of these trucks were being paid by us.  Our drivers are paid to deliver their load to the STP.

Easy right?  See if any of these trucks were illegally dumping and report back and hopefully get the problem fixed.  Sorted.  Move on.

Well, we did see some trucks dumping sewage in area next to the sewage treatment plant.  They got a little testy when we pulled up and took some pictures so, discretion being the better part of valour, we pulled out of there post haste.

But then we went around back to where the sewage treatment plant discharges, and it occurred to me that the treatment plant wasn't doing much good. 

The Kabul STP is an old Russian relic that had been originally designed to serve a very small area, but it now serves all of Kabul, currently numbering around four million inhabitants.  It simply cannot meet this capacity and subsequently it discharged what appeared to pretty much untreated sewage to a tributary directly upstream of the Kabul River.  (Click to enlarge.)

Near the discharge of the sewage treatment plant near the Kabul River.  This is basically untreated sewage.

The entire area stunk of raw sewage, and the river was covered in scum and was literally bubbling with toxins.  What's worse, is that the area is inhabited, and there are farms in the area that use the water as irrigation.  The elders told of children being sick and getting growths on their faces that sometimes lasted a year.  The locals would use the "water" to wash their harvest in, and would be on their knees in the muck all day doing their farming.  The river also floods in this area, and the people living here get their water from shallow wells.

Fields irrigtaed by, basically, raw sewage.  The burlap sacks is where they put the vegetables, to keep them from drying out during harvesting.

Women toiling in the fields.

But there's no money for a new treatment plant, and with the list of other pressing priorities—not the least of which is the security of the Afghan people, especially after the vast majority of coalition forces leave.  Meanwhile the problem becomes worse as war and economic refugees increase the burden on the city's scant infrastructure.

So what started off as a little problem soon became a large intractable mess.  This is typical of many problems in Afghanistan, as you attempt to address a small problem and realize that due to decades of war and poor governance....  There's no economy to fall back on.  There's little government to fall back on.  There's no infrastructure to fall back on.  They are on their own.  Eye Opener Number One of the day.

Then it was off to tour some scrap metal and plastic recycling facilities.  Again, this was a real eye-opener for me.  Not only do Afghans have the capability to recycle, but they do it with ruthless efficiency, and always have.  There is no waste here.  Opportunistic garbage dumps are first scoured by the poor for anything of value, and then the dogs have a go at them, and lastly the goats come in to eat anything organic that's left.

The plants themselves tend to be labour-intensive.  For several workers, their job is to take incoming plastic and hack it up with knives, before it goes into the machine to be shredded.  

My job is to hack up the bucket and put it in the machine.

At the scrap metal plant, about a dozen workers pulled a red hot bar from a furnace and passed it through a number of rollers to turn it into rebar (those steel rods used to reinforce concrete).  They all shook hands with me and I noticed a few of them were missing fingers.

Pulling the superheated steel from the furance.  By the way it's 36 deg C outside.

Rolling the red-hot cast metal into rebar.  

As is the Afghan way, we stopped for tea many times and I got to hear from the entrepreneurs running the various factories.  It's not often they see a white guy out and about.  They talked about the international organizations like ISAF (which is essentially NATO plus about 15 other nations operating as the coalition forces in Afghanistan) and the UN and others, holed up in their fortresses, and occasionally zooming about from Point A to Point B, with little real interaction with the Afghan people.  But for all that, they worry about what will happen when the coalition and US forces leave.  They talked about the difficulties running a business in Afghanistan.

One owner told me that he dresses like his workers, and drives a beat-up old car.  (Afghanistan is the Toyota graveyard of the world; about 90% of the vehicles here are old Toyota Camrys and Corollas).  It simply doesn't do to show signs of wealth here, because then you become a target for kidnappers, warlords and corrupt officials.

The final place I visited was a fabrication plant.  Here, the owner had all his workers in hard hats and gloves, with welding glasses.  Workers had to strap themselves in if they were working at height, and there were even labeled first aid stations.

These people have managed to create thriving businesses under daunting circumstances. "We appreciate the efforts of our international friends, said one fellow with an only slightly cynical smile, "But all Afghans know we must do this ourselves."

All in all, a very eye-opening day. I would despair trying to wrap my head around how severe and intractable their challenges here are,  but heartened by the entrepreneurial spirit, resilience, candor and hospitality of the Afghan people.

As my tour guide told me, dropping me off after a long day in the desert sun:

Qatra qatra darya mesha.  A river is made drop by drop.

The Bureaucracy's Management Fetish

There was an interesting piece in the Toronto Star (The Treasury Board’s inefficient mission for efficiency, June 25, 2012) concerning a recent Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) initiative to spur innovation in the civil service of Canada.  The article points out how an exercise to achieve greater efficiency in the civil service became hopelessly inefficient. 

The TBS basically oversees all of the bureaucracy of Canada; the civil service of the civil service if you will.  The Canadian public service includes about 200 departments, agencies and crown corporations comprising about 283,000 bureaucrats (about 0.83% of the population).  It's the biggest organization in the country.

This particular initiative involved offering civil servants cash-money if they could come up with innovative ideas that would save the government money.  It looked god on paper.  Anyone, in theory, could float an idea.  If the idea didn't result in policy changes and if it saved more money than the actual award, a worker bee in the hive could walk off with $10,000.

I've worked in large bureaucracies most of my career.  And of course, since I basically inhabit the philososphere, I spend a lot of time thinking about how they operate. Here in Afghanistan I have occasion to study the most advanced form of this particular phylum: the multi-national military environment.

As an environmental scientist, I've likened the bureaucracy to essentially a kind of ecosystem, filled with creatures that have adapted over time to survive and thrive in this unnatural environment.

The bureaucrat in his natural habitat.

In a true ecosystem, innovation and competition are the engines of survival.  But, of course, the civil service, being the government, has no one to compete against, and no clear bottom line against which to measure its success.  In theory, success should be measured by the satisfaction of the people of Canada.  In practice, since it is ostensibly run by politicians, it's also about getting the ruling party reelected.

It’s a very centrally-controlled, hierarchical structure.  Information flows very well from the top down, but not so well from the bottom up.  Now, we've known since the days of Adam Smith's The Wealth Of Nations that a centrally controlled economy is much more inefficient than a distributed economy where individual agents act in their own interest—enlightened self-interest is the term Smith used.  It seems intuitive to me that the same would apply to an organization.

The mandarins of the civil service are concerned with consistency and control, retaining decision-making ability at the top.  To my mind, you can't have that and expect an innovative workforce.  Innovation is grown, not imposed.  It arises from individuals coming up with a new idea so that they can do their job more efficiently or effectively, and that idea catching on with others.  In nature, most innovations—normally manifesting as genetic mutations—don't work.  Now and then, however, you get one that increases the fitness of an individual making it more likely to survive and procreate, passing on the innovation to the next generation.

I'm not blaming the mandarins or the politicians.  I firmly believe that Canada, being a democracy, gets exactly the civil service it deserves.  As implied above, innovative ideas often fail.  The media, being the media, don't report on successful civil service innovations, or successful anything for that matter.  

(The media report bad news, not good news.  Perhaps the same reason Shakespeare's tragedies are considered more important than his comedies.  Why?  Some aspect of human nature. Perhaps it's a built-in efficiency of our minds.  Why waste precious conscious thought on what's going right; it's what's going wrong that you, from a survival standpoint, needs to know.)

Sorry—drifted off there.  Anyway the media will be all over the screw-ups like a pack of starving chihuahuas on a pork chop.  And since politicians who get bad press tend not to get re-elected, you end up with a pathologically risk-averse organization.

The folly of those on top, I think, is having the hubris to think that they can change this.

I've always been impressed with the caliber of people who rise to the top of bureaucracies.  I've found the General Officers here in Afghanistan to be competent and sharp.  The government bureaucracy I worked for in Canada, similarly, seemed to me to have very able and hard-working people in the higher echelons.

But the system they presume to run is not dead.  To continue my ecosystem analogy, it is very much alive.  Look at the common etymology of the words "organization" and "organism." The senior managers may be the conscious brain of this organism, but they overestimate the importance of the conscious brain.  Even in a human, with the most advanced brain function in the animal kingdom, the conscious mind is far more limited than we assume.

We can't tell our heart to stop beating, our lungs to stop breathing.  We can't turn off our fear of heights or love of strawberries.  Even to stop a habit like drumming your fingers when your bored takes a supreme and sustained effort.  You can decide not to act gay, perhaps, but you cannot decide not to be gay.  The base motivations that drive us bubble up from some primordial id that we do not understand.  Many of the decisions we think we make, we don’t actually make, or, put another way, we can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will.

In other words, the brain of the human organism or the civil service organization does not control in the manner we commonly think it does—rationally collecting, processing and analyzing information.  What's more, the human organism's sensors relay accurate information to your brain, for the most part.  Imagine if your eyes only transmitted information it thought your brain wanted to see.  This is frequently what happens in large organizations.

It is, in fact, very difficult to change who you are in any fundamental way, and similarly it is very difficult to change what the civil service is. 

In the government, for example, Human Resources reform has been a perennial fixture in attempts to transform the bureaucracy.  It's takes too long to hire people.  It's difficult to fire people.  Annual evaluations are a resource-intensive paper exercise.  The thicket of rules, regulations and policies is stultifying.  And yet, despite these bright and determined people at the top, and despite their stated desire to make HR more effective and responsive, HR remains essentially the same beast it was in the 60s when it was called Personnel. 

And all the management models of the past forty years—Quality Management, Learning Organization, Results Measurement, Change Management—hang like hunting trophies in the corridors of the TBS, and yet the civil service is essentially the same animal it has been for decades, heck centuries (the word Byzantine, meaning unnecessarily complicated, comes from the royal court of Byzantium).

The reason the civil service is the same as it always has been is because it is adapted to its environment, and, because it is adapted, it resists change.  The reaction to this resistance is for the "brain" of the organization to introduce more neurons (managers).  They’ve made a fetish out of management: time management, people management, project management, crisis management, process management, information management.  The resulting level of control at the worker bee level is simply not conducive to innovative thinking. To quote T.H. White, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."

So what's the answer?  Who knows.  I'm great at pointing out problems; not so hot about doing anything about them.  Maybe I'll introduce a new fad called Organic Management and make millions.  Treat your company like a garden.  Like Chauncey Gardner said in the 1979 classic film Being There.

P.S. Rats!  Just did quick Google and there's already whole slew of "Organic Management" websites.  So much for that get-rich-quick scheme,