On Getting Organized

I'll start this personal essay by admitting that I'm just not very well organized by nature.  I'm a geographer; I specialize in place and location so you'd think I'd have some pretty good organizational skills at least at navigation.  And I do have a very strong  mental compass, but unfortunately it's poorly calibrated.  I'm sure we're traveling west but we're going south. I'm certain we should turn left -- but no, it's right.  I've written about this before -- my great humiliation -- and that kind of thing happens too often. I also lose my keys, forget people's names and sometimes go downstairs to get something just to wonder what it was.  I once even thought someone had stolen our car, because our parking place was empty as we drove past ... in our car.  "Where's the Volvo!!!?" is now a family joke.  But I do keep trying.  

Link Here

For example I read book recently called The Organized Mind; Very interesting NYT bestseller, with a lot of nice insights.  I started it in a coffee shop and  read a few chapters before I realized I'd left my phone in the washroom.  So that's me.

I've listen to several audio courses on my half hour bike commute and one was on memory. There are different kinds of memory, I learned, and they use different parts of the brain.  One type is echo memory, like the vague recollection that someone has asked you where their book is.  "huh?  what? oh it's in the living room." Vision also echoes for a second or two -- that helps our brain create fluid surroundings from a series of visual snapshots.

Link Here

Then there is procedural memory. This is the kind that lets children pick up the rules of language, this is what we often use to drive.  It's muscle memory, learning by doing.   Flashbulb memories are the kind that are suddenly stamped in your mind --- the car accident, the breathtaking view, the rude remark, the epiphany -- that sort of thing.

Then there's episodic memory, this is "memory" in everyday language.  What did you have for breakfast, what did Ms. X say today, where did you set your binoculars, and so on.   When people age, I learned, they often lose their episodic memory before the procedural memory goes.  They won't remember what they had for lunch but they can still play the violin.  And though our memory parts work independently they collaborate to form a conceivable story line. If there's a gap or contradiction, they make things up.  According to Dan Kahneman (I'm paraphrasing), the mind is a machine designed to find shortcuts. Kahneman and Tversky were the fathers of Behavioral Economics.  He wrote Thinking Fast and Slow.

So what does this have to do with organization?  We can use the different parts of memory to our advantage. For example, there's a trick called "method of loci," which has been around for a couple thousand years, in which you visually attach things you want to remember to a fixed procedural sequence.  That sequence might be a familiar routine 1) waken 2) brush teeth 3) dress, 4) feed cats, 5) make coffee, etc. Each of these conjures up a different physical location.

Let's use it. To remember five grocery items, go through the rooms.  Imagine being awakened with a splash of milk to the face, brushing your teeth with celery, finding a bucket of ground beef in your closet, instead of a cat eating at the bowl, it's a  big loaf of bread on legs.  Stir your hot coffee with a cheese stick and see it soften and melt.  The sequence can go on and on ... eat breakfast, get coat, go to garage, get in car ...  each location provides a "hook"  for a robust visual memory.

It was another course, mental math, where I learned about the "major system" for remembering numbers.  The main idea is that words are more meaningful than digits, so you turn the numbers into sounds.   0 =s, 1=t/d, 2=n, 3, m, 4=r, 5=l, 6=g/ch/sh, 7=k, 8=f/v, 9=p/b, and then turn the sounds into words. The phone number: 367-8212 becomes "magic fountain.". People who are good at this memorize a noun and verb for every two digit number, maybe three.  01=seat/sit 58=leaf/love 74=car/cure.. Then you can put together sentences quickly. I found a few Android apps for this.

The best memory hack was this, however: Half of remembering is learning it in the first place.  If you want to know where your keys are, remember to always put them in the bowl.  A place for everything, and everything in its place. The same principle -- half of remembering is learning -- works in the abstract too.  Let's take the example of  names.  Imagine a group of strangers meeting, six people in all, you're one.  Each shares their name once -- that's five short moments, just at the same instant you may be trying to make a good first impression.  "Hi I'm Justin Devinberg." ... Whaaa? Everyone might as well throw their business cards in the air.  But you can prepare in advance to catch them.  "I'm Eileen Goodwin" [OK... she leans to one side because of a short leg, and that's good, because it's a circular race and she'll win.]   There, but that took a few seconds.  If you need more time, you can buy it.  When I tell someone my name and they ask me "Is that Eric with a c or a k?" I can pretty much guess I am being processed. 

But there's so much more to organization than remembering things, names, and numbers.  I picked up a new and popular book called The Life -Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo,  a Japanese woman with a bad case of OCD.  She talks about hurrying home from school as a girn to tidy up her siblings' closet. She's horrified by soap residue on a shower rack. She recommends touching your stored clothes now and then to reassure them that you care.

But she also has some good ideas, one is folding all your clothes in rectangles and filing them in

My actual drawers.

drawers, but upright, like books.  I've done it, even to socks, sweaters and underwear. You can see everything you have when they're not piled up and flopping around; and it's very democratic -- every item has an equal voice. And there is no "off season" box in the basement because there's more room.  This is because you apply another critical principle: if it doesn't bring you joy, get rid of it. She recommends applying this to clothes, books, papers, and mementos -- in that order.  She also talks about jewelry and kitchens, never mentions workrooms, tools, or digital files, but the principles are easy to transfer.

It was surprisingly easy to go through my stuff. I found I had been wearing some clothes I don't like just to save wear and tear on those I do like. Gone.  I'd been keeping some mementos that had lost their meaning or even brought me pain, not joy.  Gone.  My book collection contained whole sections I was done with, and which had no sentimental value.  Gone.  Bag it up, move it out, but don't let anyone pick through it first, Kondo says, because they might want you to keep something for their own sentimental reasons, or because they just don't understand what's going on: you're getting orkondoganized.

Try this one: look at your stuff -- if you found that in the alley, would you bring it in?  If not, maybe it belongs in the alley. And that's not even Kondo; I came up with that one myself, years ago.

Technology is so useful for organizing.  One tool I've adopted is Microsoft Access, although others would do as well.  This is a "relational" database with which you can take any number of tables of information and link them together with a shared unique field which is simply an ID for that row of information.  That's why, say, student ID, neighborhood name, Census tract number, etc are so useful; they can reach out and shake hands with any other table containing that same information.  And if Joe can shake with Sally who can shake with Sue, then Joe can talk with Sue as well.  I have linked tables for faculty, students, courses, and schedules ... and with a button now I can generate reports: when a particular class was last taught and by whom and what was the enrollment, with percent attending on a sample day and a summary of student course evaluations ... bam.   What different courses did a particular faculty member ever teach, and its average enrollments when taught daytime, or night ... bam.  Checkbox the courses a new advisee might find most interesting and print out their description, frequency and usual term its offered ... bam. How well does this draft schedule satisfy every major -- daytime/nighttime students, graduate and undergraduate? ... bam.  What are the enrollment trends in the last 10 years, for all courses combined serving one major concentration? ... bam.

Some databases just don't lend themselves to handshakes -- they have no linking field. But you might still be able to map them if you have street address, zip code, an intersection, latitude/longitude, police beat, City ward, or any other geospatial identifier. And if you can map it, you can use location itself as the linking field -- it can shake hands with that.  So all the data in a table that contains street address can now pour over into the table that contains police beat.  You can calculate new information too: distance from, number within, area, length, buffer zones, average values of something in x for all the x's inside each area of y. And this is the easy stuff.  GIS is the sandbox where databases that didn't know each other, can meet and play. 

There is nothing like a map to organize information than includes some sort of spatial marker.  Like some of these I've linked below. I basically make maps all the time.  

Interactive Org Chart, try it!

My maps have evolved such that I now also make flow diagrams and charts, which in a sense are maps in a different dimension. They are linked in the appendix.  One is a spiral showing five years of work that goes into one university budget.  There's one that identifies amazing complexities in the hiring process for part time faculty members. There's is a circular calendar showing a full cycle

Student view of college

 of department chair duties.  In another, I offer an alternate policy on the making of policies, elsewhere I suggest a more efficient way to update course schedules, and here's two of my favorites: top left #1: an interactive full-university organization chart. Rather than the traditional top-down org chart, with one person at the top of a pyramid, this one puts each employee into center stage, surrounding them with their supervisors and direct reports.  Cooler still, I think is #2 to the right: an organization chart from the student's perspective: there's

Constitution Explained (a video)

academics, support services, extracurricular activities, etc. Step in and follow your interests.  Both of these are prototypes, because they were well ahead of their time -- but that's another story.


Maybe my best traditional flow diagram is of the Faculty Constitution (explained in a video to the left); it's an unreadable, convoluted set of articles, that parse out like this.  And a close read suggests, to me at least, ways to improve it.

And here below are some of those other graphics I've mentioned.

---

Annual Chairs Calendar	Science Building Room Use	Non-Auto Travel to Campus
Catalog Revisions	Policy on Policy Proposal	Odd hiring process
Comparison of Tuition Costs	Foster Closed Traffic Reroute	5-year Calendar of Univ Budget

---

This brings me to the best and deepest organizational tip for today.  It's an organization

system called Getting Things Done, created by David Allen in 2001.

The basic idea is that you clear your mind by downloading all the "actionables" into an elaborate to-do list, with all then tags and features you could imagine -- and a robust retrieval system that might contain a search tool you've designed like this: "What can I do, when I'm in my office, in 10 minutes time, on project X, sorted by priority."  Or "who did I ask an important question more than a week ago, to which they didn't reply, and get me that email please."  My GTD copy was old; Allen was talking about physical file folders in desk drawers, rolodexes, etc., but I searched for a 3rd party app and found plenty.  I settled on one called IQtell, by Ran Flam circa 2013 because it's super robust, very customizable, inexpensive and they have great support. I wrote a blog about it when I started; I like it even more now.    

YouTube Video, it's 23 minutes long.

Now that I've been using the system for awhile, I gave a little talk on GTD and IQtell to colleagues at the Faculty Research and Creative Activity Symposium  this year. Finding my paper sandwiched between "“Extinction by by hybridization? A probable fate for a native cattail species" and "Using worms to understand human neurodegenerative diseases" I personally invited friends who I know are busy and might like the program.  And I was right. Mostly they were too busy to attend.  But a half dozen sent regrets and for them I packaged up my presentation, added some live parts, and posted it on YouTube. Someone apparently shared it with others who shared it again and this video has had more than 1,000 viewers in just a couple of months.  For me, that's viral.

I had an interesting conversation with my son recently, who is 22 and becoming nuanced in political skills and group dynamics.  He's like me in being naturally absent minded -- let's say distracted -- and although the messes he leaves around don't bother me so much, they do bother his mother. We talked about the unspoken communication between people -- things like body position, eye contact, and the welcoming pauses in conversations. They're obvious when you think about them, they are hugely influential, but generally go unnoticed. And while we were talking about this, another obvious/subtle communication occurred to me.  When you exit a room, you may leave traces of yourself behind, and these continue to remind people of you.  "Let's say you leave a tidy place when you go back to college," I suggested to him.  "Every time we walk past your bedroom it'll sing your praises. "He's neat!  He's clean! He's organized! He's considerate!  He's respectful!  He's appreciative!  He likes his room!  He likes us!"  And that will go on for months with no further effort on your part..

Leave this behind and it represents you for months or more.

So I thought that conversation went well, and I took a look in his room after dropping him off at the train station. What exactly was the room saying about him?   I couldn't quite tell; it had it's mouth full, maybe I didn't want to know. So I took this picture and then went all Kondo on it: I cleaned it myself, No big deal... but I've learned that while some people don't care much about a mess, everyone seems to be ok with order.

Lessons from the Faculty Senate

I became Chair of the Faculty Senate September 9 2014 just by sitting at the first meeting of the term. I didn't run, someone nominated me, I wasn’t asked if I accepted the nomination, I abstained when voting, but here I am anyway.  It has been an interesting year; this is the most diverse group I’ve worked with, and it had a pretty good structure as described in the Constitution, but in practice it was shambles.

The Senate consists of 22 people from all colleges and the library and a few others. The President is a non voting member and attends every meeting.  It must be an uncomfortable seat for her, as someone recently pointed out, because it can be a fiery group, she constantly takes heat, and there's constant pressure to remove her; some members claim other members are intimidated, and that's just hard to verify.  But at one point this year we took a ballot vote that would probably have removed her -- and it failed, so apparently it's not such a problem.  It seems obvious to me that the Senate benefits from having the President there.  After all, all we do is advise her.

When I take on a big job I often try to get my bearings with a simple principle or two.  This is what I arrived at.  1) enforce rules that exist.  For this, I read the Contract carefully, and the Bylaws, and I rely on Robert’s Rules, which are designed exactly for fairness and efficiency 2) repeatedly encourage the Senate to consider that respectful dialogue, openness, and compromise might lead to more gains for faculty than adversity would do.

Not everyone was on board with these notions.  Firstly, Robert’s Rules is foreign -- they're called for in bylaws, but not really used much, as far as I can tell.  We generally prefer free-for-all discussions, intimidation, dominating chairs and sometimes dominating members, meetings that are purely informative, micromanagement, or nearly endless argument followed by unilateral decisions – or no decisions at all.  Secondly, the Senate has had a longstanding reputation; when I'd asked my first department chair if I should run for Senate in 1990 the word "snakepit" came up.   I didn't run.

I've found the senators to be a wonderfully diverse bunch, with different attitudes and opinions, just as you would hope.  Some are angry, some are quiet, some more thoughtful, others are eagerly vocal, many are opinionated, some are suspicious, and everyone is smart.  Most of them show up for meetings, which we doubled to twice a month.  There’s a little bullying that goes on now and then, but not bad -- no fistfights yet.  This mix makes for some pretty good disagreements.  Bob advises (Robert's Rules and I are on first name basis by now), that the chair should  facilitate discussion and not jump into it; I've found that this takes personal vigilance.  When necessary, Bob says, I can pass leadership to the vice chair which allows me to express myself as fully and as forcefully as I choose. The first few times I tried this, the vice chair objected -- so I’ve been a little lenient on myself since, and speak to a motion, a little, now and then.

So how did we start.  Early on, we disbanded the subcommittees that weren't active (all of them).  We all came up with seven most-salient issues, formed committees around them and the committees went to work.  After a few misfires -- like the day we passed a motion unanimously, then immediately passed another unanimously to reverse it -- we arrived at a pretty good system.  Committees form clear motions and vote on them.  These motions are presented to the Senate along with any dissenting opinion from committee.  The Senate then owns the motion and can fix it, table it, postpone it, kill it, replace it, send it back to committee -- and, if it comes this far, vote on it.  All the little rules necessary for this are followed, in order to make sure it’s not railroaded through.  That structure has worked Ok . After the year, we've done this:

•   Established secure shared space, online, for document sharing and collaboration by Senators, and listservs for every subcommittee
•   Called a top administrator to the floor to explain a non-standard hire -- we got some concessions
•  Fixed many policies which were ready to be carved into stone, returned a few for full rewrites
•  Repaired some bylaws of a new group so it fit in well to overall governance structure
•  Scoured through the Faculty Constitution, heavy editing, and highlighted some major proposed changes for special consideration
• ... after deliberation, sent a referendum to all tenure track faculty members to consider allowing non-tenure track faculty to vote campus-wide and in departments that choose to allow it
• Prepared major bylaws revisions
• Planned a retreat in the Fall to improve Senate communication
• Developed a secure method to conducts voting and referendums on line, and got the Assembly (tenure track faculty) approval to use it
•  Asked for and received a forum in which vice presidents explained some sticky budgeting issues
• Formally reconsidered the role of the President on the Senate (status unchanged)
• Revised and implemented an evaluation tool for six top administrators, and distributed the results in a carefully limited way

Then one day, at the penultimate meeting of the year, with an agenda already packed with time-sensitive issues, the galley unusually crowded with union members, a sponsoring senator brought to the floor an anonymous note proposing a no-confidence vote for the President and Provost.  This, of course, is a big deal.  It's quite unusual for a University to actually conduct such a vote, which can be a signal of great discontent. 

Now, our bylaws are not crystal yet, but they seem to allow new agenda items with a majority vote – and we’ve done it before.  This item was approved for including on the agenda.  When it came up a half hour later there was brief discussion, a call for a paper ballot, and after maybe 5 more minutes of discussion someone called the question (previous question would be the formal term), 2/3 wanted to vote and it passed.  A No Confidence vote for both president and provost is now going out to the Faculty Assembly, just like that.

I dutifully went back to my office and followed through with Senate decisions of the day: a note to the president asking for a forum on the budget, two referenda on non-tenure faculty role and these two No Confidence Votes.  Because of the new, electronic, voting system the link was in every Assembly member's inbox by the end of the day.

…

But then I started thinking how quickly that went, and how diametrically opposed to my own position encouraging cooperation this was, and how I didn't join the discussion by stepping down as chair,  how we hadn't discussed the ramifications to the university jusst as things ewere turning sour downstate.  Maybe other senators might be having the same misgivings. Such a vote threatened to undo all the work toward collaboration -- shared governance -- we had accomplished over the year -- and I had been under the impression Senators were on board with this optimistic path we'd been on.

Of course my opinion doesn’t matter anymore than any other voting Senator’s, but then I've been busy facilitating the meeting and as chair and I hadn't shared my own concerns fully. Might others feel, in retrospect, that that motion had gone through a little too quickly? After all, what is the purpose of the vote? What's the hurry? Who is the intended audience?  Might a no vote affect state appropriations, enrollment or alumni donations?  All these things, after all, impact the budget, 95% of which is personnel -- and most of that is faculty. Also, what would we hope to learn that we didn’t just learn from the last administrative survey that just went out (its last question was "has this person been doing a good job").  And might it lessen the value of an NEIU  degree, for alumni?  

So with the expectation that we might want to think about this a little more carefully, and the knowledge that the motion did not specify a time frame for the vote, and the fact that there was no urgency on the matter, and Robert'Smith Rules allowing a body to reconsider a motion already made, I took the bold move and hit the pause button on the ballot tool I had just activated.  I explained my reasoning in a note to the Senate, and in another to the Assembly. This was not a Stop button, mind you, just pause -- until the Senate met again.

And then the mail came rolling in. Some of it was thankful: 

• “I’m glad you finally came to your senses about this,”  
• “I’m behind you 100%” 
• “ I want to commend you for your way of handling this.”  
• “Good for you!! You have to stand up for the the fair process.”  
• “Decisions have to be made rationally. I support a truly fair and collaborative process. I'm behind you 100%.”

But most and the loudest and the ones with the long cc’ lists were more like this

• "I’m going to do everything I can to marshall opposition to you."
• "I've read your statement, and I still condemn you. This action is totally indefensible."
• "Erick Howenstine's unilateral suspension of the confidence/no-confidence vote for the university president and provost is unacceptable."
• "You are not the Faculty Senate; you can't make decisions for the senate as if you were a monarch."
• "The honorable action at this point would be to resign as Chair of the senate."
• "Frankly, this action calls into question your entire decision-making process. As far as I'm concerned you are not fit for a leadership position of any sort at NEIU."
• "What were you thinking?!!"
• "Your action is an egregious abuse of your position. …It is utterly shameful."
• "It is outrageous that the Senate has been hijacked by the chair like this."
• "There is no precedent or rule to justify the contempt you have shown"

[I found out later that the Union President had alerted all the members that 

I had "unilaterally withdrawn" the vote]

I have to be honest, my feelings were a bit hurt; I felt as though Id been struck by lightning while dutifully pushing a wheel barrow of bricks up the hill --  or had I been beaten up by thugs in an alley.  The latter seems more like it; it was personal.  And eventually, through the day of phone calls and name calling, I took a long view of the dialogue.  I checked especially to see how Senators had responded; I knew we’d need a majority vote to reconsider (Robert's Rules would not let me independently put this back on the table), and it seemed we were very unlikely to get it.  No, the court of public opinion was pretty loud and clear on this one, so I hit the Play button on the survey, and the counter started ticking again. Another no confidence vote in a time of fiscal crisis.  Maybe I am being too dramatic, but the image of a suicide bomber comes to mind.

In the aftermath I learned a few new things about people.  In a situation like this it is easy to parse out the emails to see what the opinions was – "wait" or "don’t wait."  But some people are willing to put themselves way out there with allegations like this one:

“Erick committed a grave violation of Faculty Senate procedures in a number of ways (e.g., not following Robert's Rules of Order, violating the NEIU Faculty Constitution, etc.).”  

I asked this person, "what did I violate," “where?”  Of course I knew in advance that the move would be unpopular among some people, I knew my action was against the spirit of the motion, that is, the spirit as defined by those same people.  But I know Robert's, and I know the Constitution.  If I did violate one of these, or bylaws, I'd like to know so I don’t do it again.  Yet I could find nothing.  And I only got the non-response: “no, YOU tell ME where it says you CAN!”  That doesn't help me, sorry.  I know other people too who go around pretending to be lawyers, threatening lawsuits.

I'm fine with people disagreeing, that's actually very helpful.  I'm even able to register the disagreement when it's embedded in personal attacks.  And then there are the personal attacks themselves;  now a little slap or punch is excusable -- after all in the heat of things people get a little testy, and there was that misinformation that had been circulated.  But vitriol is a different matter, and I noticed when bullies have bully-buddy alliances they can ricochet messages between themselves to look like a whole crowd of people; of course they have to copy the world to give that illusion, and sound furious enough that no one who disagrees with them would dare respond.  But, that doesn’t mean that their actual opinions are of any more value, or should carry more weight, than any other person.  Little bullies.

The vicious, public, personal attacks directed at me did hurt at first, but less so when I thought about how easy they are to write and what kind of person you’d have to be to do that.  I even received a letterbomb or two afterward -- after I’d resumed the apparently ill-considered ballot and even had apologized to everyone.  Then comes the guy who will come in for a last stomp after the fight.  Might as well just write “Hi, I’m a Dick. Signed, ____” because that’s the way I read it. 

So now there will be a No Confidence Vote at my university, for the President and Provost.  Well, I tried to get us all to pause and consider the consequences, but no, we didn't seem to want to.  It certainly reflects real frustration on campus, no doubt about that.  I have to think bullying also may play a role. And a lack of familiarity with good process. Lack of decency  Maybe disinterest.   

So, as the vote goes forward, I feel as though something hadn't been said at the right moment: "shouldn't we wait a bit?"  Over the year, Robert's Rules has been very helpful and fair, so I looked at the rule book again because something about this didn't seem thoughtful and fair.  No, I was reminded, the chair can step down to have normal speaking privileges if he/she passes the chairmanship to the VC until the motion is dealt with.  I could have suggested we discuss it more, and postpone the vote. If I'd just done that I'd feel a lot more comfortable, regardless of the outcome.  

POSTSCRIPT: The discussion at the subsequent meeting was very interesting, because some members wanted me impeached but instead, we crafted -- together -- a motion like this: "The results of the No Confidence vote and (previous) administrator evaluation be used primarily internally, to highlight longstanding faculty concerns, in a series of university-wide forums."  

... passed almost unanimously.  I think that'll be a nice outcome after all.