In Bridge as in Life

In the arcane world of duplicate bridge* there is an adage that if your opponents never make the contracts you double, you are aren't doubling enough.

* [Duplicate is one of my favorite recreational pastimes—there's something deliciously weird about being at a major tournament where you're in a hotel ballroom for three hours straight with hundreds of card tables chock-a-block with players and no one is speaking above a whisper.]

The operational principle here has an analog in cooperative group dynamics: if you're never sporting any arrows in your chest, you're probably being too wimpy. Mind you, I'm not advocating assholery—there's plenty enough of that without my being a cheerleader for it. Rather, I'm talking about having the courage to speak up when someone does something than seems off in the context of a group you're both in.

While it's no doubt worthwhile learning how to voice feedback in ways that are less likely to be provocative, there are no guarantees. At the end of the day, if you're regularly speaking up, then you're occasionally triggering reaction. It goes with the territory.

To be sure, there are number of ways that giving feedback can land awkwardly:

1. You may have misunderstood what happened
Perceptions, amazingly enough, are not the same as reality. While I think reactions are a decent motivation for speaking up, it can be embarrassing when you got it wrong, and you're reaction is out of line.

2. You may not know the full context
Even when there's no discrepancy about what happened, or what was intended, you may not know enough of the background or the specifics of the situation to understand the choices being made and what they mean to the key players. Maybe you only heard or saw part of the exchange. Simply put, your reaction may be out to lunch and not helpful. At a minimum, it'll be irrelevant; at worst, it can be trigger a secondary first that's more dangerous than the one you thought you were putting out.

3. Your group may not have any agreements—or even understandings—about acceptable ways to deliver feedback or to work constructively with tension
As a consequence you're on your own when speaking up. The default for most of us is to deliver feedback as we would want it to be given to us, which, unfortunately, may have no bearing whatsoever to how the other person prefers to receive it. In short, it's a crap shoot and good intentions alone will not necessarily see you safely across No Man's Land.

4. You may get creamed for calling someone out
Voicing critical concerns can result in your being the target of backlash criticism ("How dare you question what I did?"), even if there are agreements in place that what you did is "supposed to be OK." In all probability, the theory about how your group wants to support feedback was developed while people we're responding from their mammalian brain; the reaction comes from a dynamic moment that is being processed by their reptilian fight-or-flight brain. Uh oh.

One of the key measures of a group's maturity is the environment it creates for constructive feedback. When people get punished for speaking up, it's a bad sign. When there's curiosity in the presence of upset, that's gold.

• • •

One of the trickiest dynamics is when there's legitimacy to the concern yet rawness to its expression. Often, upset with the transmission will obscure the substance of the concern. Not only are you at risk of obscuring an examination of what happened, but you'll have to negotiate outrage at the way it was expressed. Not pretty.

In such a dynamic, you'll likely have a multi-car accident and it can be awkward knowing where to start and a challenge keeping the focus in one spot long enough to ease tension there before the second intrudes upon the first. Here's how it works: Let's say Jesse is upset with something that Kim did (or didn't do) and that upset leaks into the way Jesse gives feedback to Kim. Now, in addition to Jesse's original upset, you also have Kim irked with how Jesse delivered the news. What to do?

Pick one of the two (probably whichever seems the most upsetting) and work that through before getting to the other one, promising all parties that everyone will get a turn being heard and having their concerns addressed. Hint: In the example above, if you start by focusing on the aggressive way that Jesse gave feedback (Kim's reaction), you'd likely begin by hearing from Kim about how the feedback landed, which would not be comments about the behavior that triggered Jesse; it would be about how Kim felt attacked by Jesse. Then, when you asked what Jesse heard, you'd be looking for a reflection, not why the forcefulness of the criticism (an attack) was justified by Kim's original behavior. In short, you need to keep the focus on one thing a time, and not let the examination devolve into a ping pong match, where the protagonists are exchanging salvos instead of information.

It can be done! Really.

• • •

I find it amusing that one of the key skills in making cooperative dynamics work is being able to bridge to those sitting across the table from you when the stakes have been doubled by distress, and that I occasionally find inspiration for cooperative dynamics that crosses over from doubling at the bridge table. It's a funny how inspiration works sometimes.

The Good, the Wet, and the Unplumbed

In the next day or two I had been hoping to do some trench work out back of Ma'ikwe's house, to repair a leaky water line from our newly constructed cistern. Ma'ikwe was going to scare up a couple of strong backs to help with the digging and I was going to handle the plumbing. We were thinking the whole affair might be managed in half a day (providing only that we successfully aggregated all the replacement parts needed to effect the repair).

But those plans got washed away yesterday as northeast Missouri was blessed with 3.3 inches of liquid sunshine. It's hard to believe we had a drought last year.

(When I was just a sprat, I spent many summers between ages 8-16 at a boys camp in northern Minnesota. It's where I learned wilderness canoeing and how to tie a tautline hitch—both of which have stayed with me for decades. The camp director, Doug Bobo, used to tell parents with a straight face, "It never rains at Camp Easton… occasionally we get some liquid sunshine; but it never rains.")

While the rain was poorly timed for next week's trench welfare, at Sandhill we were more fortunate. We hit the weather perfectly for transplanting our sorghum seedlings. Starting Thursday morning we were able to get all 100 flats in the ground by Friday afternoon—mere hours before the rain arrived. Whew! 

While the flats all have the same outer dimensions, they have different numbers of cells: some have 200 (10x20) and others have 242 (11x22). Either way, it was a lot of sorghum seedlings—perhaps 22,000—enough to plant about two acres, not quite half our average crop. It takes a five-person crew to transplant sorghum and it's one my favorite agricultural jobs, in part because it takes a five-person crew. That is, it has to be done cooperatively, as a group.

One person drives the tractor (being careful to keep the rows straight and properly spaced). The other four are riding on the transplanter, which is an ingenious ground-driven device that allows the crew to put in two rows of 4-6 inch high plants with a near-perfect stand in about five minutes per 100 yards. Even though the tractor is just puttering along in low gear, it's a beautiful sight to look up at the end of a pass and see a long line of upright green seedlings where there had been just bare field minutes ago.

The four people on the transplanter are assigned two per row, with each pair alternately placing seedlings into the rubber grips of a revolving wheel that, in sequence:
o  Receives plants
o  Clamps them
o  Opens a furrow in the ground
o  Releases the plant into the ground
o  Allows a squirt of water into the furrow
o  Pushes the furrow closed, tamping the soil against the plant
o  Comes around for another pass

There are six rubber grips on the wheel, which means that six seedlings are planted every revolution. It's a pretty trippy implement that we only use once a year.

The reason we do a substantial portion of our sorghum crop as transplants (rather than direct seeding, which is far less work) is that we're organic and it can be very difficult maintaining weed control in the row. All farmers rely on cultivators to kill weeds between the rows; but that doesn't touch the weeds that grow in the row with your crop. While conventional farmers mainly rely on herbicides, we have only three choices: a) rotary hoeing; b) hand weeding; or c) transplanting.

Option A is running a mechanical device with curved metals spikes over the rows at moderately high speed, such that it disturbs the top inch or so of soil but no deeper. If you time it just right the deeper sorghum roots will survive what is lethal to foxtail—our biggest weed problem. At least that's the theory. For this to be effective, there is a narrow window where the weeds are vulnerable and the sorghum is not. If the fields are too wet to cultivate during that window, you won't kill the weeds.

Option B is something we'd rather not do, but occasionally need to if we're going to have a decent crop. There's been many an August over the years where community crews will go out to the fields at first light to hoe in the rows for a couple of hours, before the summer sun drives us from the fields.

Option C is the payoff for all the extra labor devoted to planting the seedling trays and riding the transplanter. When you insert 4-6 inch high plants into a bare field, the weeds can never catch up to the head start given the sorghum plants and we needn't worry about weeding in the row.

All of that said, we don't do our entire sorghum crop as transplants, because we don't want to put that much investment in a system we only use once a year, and occasionally the weather conditions are such that the direct sown crops outperform the transplants. Think of it as hedging.

Now if I can only get the mud to dry out in Ma'ikwe's backyard, I'll be all set. 

(Farming is highly weather dependent, and the weather is highly undependable, which leads to almost unlimited opportunities for humility—and frustration if you're under the illusion that you're in control. While farmers often complain about rain inconveniencing their outdoor work plans, they know better than to complain too loudly—just try living without it.)

Working a Hairy Eyeball

Recently I was facilitating for a group that I've worked with a number of times—a community that was familiar with a lot of my thinking (as well as my penchant for graphic metaphors). While I was being given background on a complicated topic, one long-term member confided, "You know, it'll be one of those hairy eyeball topics."

Momentarily bewildered by that phrase, I paused. Then I laughed. "Actually," I said, "I think you mean it's a hair ball, which is bad enough."

The biggest challenge with complex topics is not knowing where to start (almost anything can work); nor is it figuring out the best way to subdivide the topic into digestible chunks (there are often a number of productive ways to slice and dice big things into manageable yet meaningful flllets. The hard part is holding clearly the ways each subtopic relates to others and having the discipline to keep the group focused on one at a time.

The challenge is the lure of interrelationship—the ways that the answer to one subtopic almost always impacts how you answer others, and it's damn hard—especially when you're first getting under way and don't have answers to many other subtopics to guide you—to resist the temptation to jump to another, related topic before completing the one you're on. What I urge groups is that they assume for the time being that they have an answer they'll like to related questions—they just don't know yet what it is.

Using this approach you can productively chip away at an iceberg. Eventually all you'll have left is a pile of ice cubes, with which to cool your celebratory drinks at having completed the Herculean task of cleansing of the Augean Stables. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

Another big benefit of this divide-and-conquer approach is that it generates momentum, which is important to group morale. That is, when your bites are smaller, they're easier to chew and swallow, and each one gives the group a discrete experience of progress. You can check something off your To Do List and actually observe the number of remaining topics diminish.

Here are a couple of traps:
o  Some people don't enjoy being narrowly focused on one subtopic. They find it inhibits flow and stifles creativity. 

While there's no doubt some truth to that claim, all too often "free range" equates to "free of product." That is, when a group is all over the place—even when no one is off topic (which isn't that high a bar when the topic is broad)—it can be the very devil figuring out what to do with stream of consciousness input. While flow and creativity are valuable commodities, they don't guarantee success per se. 

Better, in my view, is that you offer a clear construct (a defined non-trivial subtopic) in which flow and creativity can flourish—gently, yet firmly, redirecting folks who start coloring outside the lines.

o  Some are consistently lured by the idea of prospecting for the mother lode: a unified field theory that will be a simple solution to the complex issue at hand. The idea is that sitting with the gestalt of the whole issue (and not limiting the conversation to fragments) will allow for a breakthrough understanding that will elegantly resolve the whole mess in a single stroke of brilliancy.

Because this strategy is occasionally successful—perhaps just enough to reinforce the desire to search for the Holy Grail each time—it can be difficult to get some members to give it up. It can have the addictive quality of buying lottery tickets: once you've managed to win once, it can be borderline irresistible not plopping down a couple bucks every time you're at the gas station.

The nuance here is knowing when a topic is complex enough that the piecemeal approach is a surer bet. The main clue here is the number of pieces. Simply put, the more interesting components (ones for which there is not an obvious and overwhelming group preference) there are to the consideration, the less likely it is that the group can weave a pleasing tapestry with all skeins on the loom at once.

• • •

At the end, after all the threads have been addressed as subtopics, you have to see if it all hangs together well. It's not uncommon that there's some tailoring needed at this stage, to make sure you have a suit that fits handsomely. But don't be daunted. It's almost always the case that last minute rehemming (and hawing) entails less shock than discovering at the prom that your new suit of clothes doesn't include pants—or enough fabric to cover your hairy eyeball.

[For more on this topic, see my blog of Sept 23, 2008, Untangling Hair Balls.]

Community Leadership and Lessons from the Hive

In order for honeybees to survive cold winters, the workers surround the queen in a ball, conserving heat by dense packing. When the bees on the outside of the ball get cold, they rotate positions with those on the inside, so that all can survive. Although operating on a different time scale, healthy communities are rather like healthy hives.

If you conceive of a community as a living organism there is a core of committed individuals that collectively comprise the heart, and I want to write about the relationship of the heart to the whole, and what it takes to maintain a vibrant heart.

In a healthy beehive there is exactly one queen at the center. If there are ever two they will fight until one dies or is driven out. If a hive loses its queen it will try to make a new one (by feeding larva royal jelly); if the larva are too advanced to make this adjustment, the hive will die—unless the apiarist is able to requeen it in time.

Communities, however, are more nuanced on the matter of leadership. To be sure, some have a single charismatic and inspirational leader, a la the beehive. While there is definitely trickiness in such groups to pulling off leadership succession without loss of vitality or dynamism—partly because strong queens tend to suppress the development of queen-like qualities among worker bees—it can be done if the reigning queen has sufficient awareness of the need to groom a successor, and there is enough quality material to work with among the disciples.

While the charismatic leader model is historically the most stable and long-lived in the sweep of the Communities Movement—think Oneida (John Humphrey Noyes), the Shakers (Anna Lee), and even Kerista (Jud Jerome)—most groups listed in FIC's Communities Directory today make decisions collectively, depending on the group's wisdom, rather than on the wisdom of any single individual. This model (which is almost the exact opposite of the charismatic leader model) relates to the beehive in that there is a cadre of members who hold the leadership center, and in a healthy group the composition of the cadre rotates over time.

Further, it is the responsibility of those in the heart to judiciously invite the outer bees into the center, rather than expecting them to fight their way in, or to wait until the inner bees die off. Thus, a healthy heart will not only pump a steady supply of nourishing blood to the entire corpus of the group, it will offer a permeable membrane such that there is a clear pathway by which newbies (new bees) are able to become the heart.

Like with a hive, in a healthy community every bee need not be highly skilled, fully integrated into the group's culture, or equally capable of leadership—they just need enough members with those qualities to establish a strong enough flywheel that the rest of the hive is pulled along. The leadership cadre, or heart of the group, needs to consistently articulate the community's common values and be walking their talk—incorporating those values into their everyday lives. The core sets a tone. If the note sounded is clear and melodious, harmony ensues, creativity flourishes, and joy abounds. Friction leads to compassion and resolution; rather than brittleness and divisiveness. Newer folks will respond to the positive modeling like, well, a bee to nectar.

The key here is that in a healthy hive the core bees take the initiative in welcoming the outer bees into the opportunity to serve in the core—not to be drones (or clones), but to make their own choices about what frequency to buzz at and what flowers to frequent in service to the hive. 

In community, it behooves us to be all we can bee.

Group Works: History and Context

This entry continues a series in which I'm exploring concepts encapsulated in a set of 91 cards called Group Works, developed by Tree Bressen, Dave Pollard, and Sue Woehrlin. The deck represents "A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings."

In each blog, I'll examine a single card and what that elicits in me as a professional who works in the field of cooperative group dynamics. My intention in this series is to share what each pattern means to me. I am not suggesting a different ordering or different patterns—I will simply reflect on what the Group Works folks have put together.

The cards have been organized into nine groupings, and I'll tackle them in the order presented in the manual that accompanies the deck:

1. Intention
2. Context
3. Relationship
4. Flow
5. Creativity
6. Perspective
7. Modeling
8. Inquiry & Synthesis
9. Faith

In the Context segment there are eight cards. The keystone pattern in this segment is labeled History and Context, so that's where I'll begin. Here is the image and text from that card:  

History and Context hugely influence how the rest of the patterns are invoked. Pay attention to why things are the way they are and what the people coming expect. Tune in to discern when to respect the existing culture vs. when it benefits to stretch toward something new.

People see reality through the lens of their experience. If the topics to be addressed have had a rocky history, then loins will be girded when revisiting them. If the group has not had success dealing with distress, than you can expect there to be tension whenever there is tension.

Sometimes change (in formats, facilitation style, setting, time of day, etc.) will help a group open up to new possibilities—while the past is prologue, it need not be fate. Sometimes change will be unsettling, and you can ask the group to swallow too many new things at once. You must gauge the group's range and resilience. Does it slant more toward risk tolerant or risk averse? Sometimes the group will be ready for a change out of frustration (we've been stuck for a while; what have we got to lose?); sometimes the group will open up to experimenting from a sense of security (we trust our base and the strength of our connections; if this doesn't work we can always return to what has served us well in the past). More, you need to be sensitive to how you are perceived by the group and its willingness to trust you. 

The image that accompanies this pattern is evocative. Where one remembers flood, another—perhaps someone who has never known high water—sees only dry ground. Neither is wrong, yet it may require a strong construct to bridge the swirling eddies that separate these realities. Unexamined, imagine how differently these two people would respond to a proposal to purchase a boat? What would be prudent to one would be paranoid to the other.

Context comes in many flavors. Let's walk down the aisles of your local Context Mart and peek at what's on the shelves:

o  Relationship to Cooperative Culture
In the mainstream culture, meetings are a civilized battle (at least they're civilized most of the time; sometimes they're vicious). The dominant society is competitive, hierarchic, and adversarial. If you're operating in a cooperative group, there is an attempt being made to turn those things around—to think and act collaboratively instead of competitively; to be curious when people disagree with you, rather than combative. While the cooperative theory isn't that hard to lay out, it ain't easy undoing a lifetime of conditioning and living up to cooperative ideals in the dynamic moment—especially if it's about something close to the bone. 

Hardest of all to navigate is the situation where Person A is being enthusiastically cooperative and Person B is being defensively reactive. On the one hand, you want to honor B's viewpoint and make sure the train doesn't pull out of the station with them still standing on the platform. On the other, you want to object to their uncooperative energy and reestablish a collegial and creative atmosphere to continue the examination. 
 
o  Relationship to Meetings
As a professional facilitator, I believe that practicing one's craft is an important step in getting better. When I work with students learning this skill I urge them to be brave and volunteer often to run meetings, so that they'll get this practice. I tell them, "Hey, the bar is really low. Most meetings are just awful and you almost can't help but offer a better experience, even if you're just a beginner. While your performance may have been only so-so, most participants will think it was fine."

For the most part, people in Western society think of meetings as a necessary evil, as something you try to survive—certainly not something to look forward to. Even if your cooperative group is trying to do better in this regard, you need to be aware of the possibility that meeting participants are at different places along the journey to rehabilitating meetings as an opportunity for celebration, connection, and collaboration.

If one participant dreads meetings, while another squirms in their seat in anticipation, you have a decided gap in context that you'll need to navigate.

o  Relationship to the Topic
Not everyone identifies as a stakeholder on every issue (thank God), and people tend to behave differently based on how much they care about the outcome. More nuanced still, people will behave differently based on whether prior engagements with that topic have gone well (by their lights) or gone poorly. If it went well last time, then it will probably be smooth sailing again. If it was tough sledding last time, then it will likely be a slog.

Unconsciously, we tend to expect that future engagements on a given topic will be a continuation of past engagements. While that may not be good thinking, it's human nature, and we're better prepared for meetings when we have a sense of participants' personal history with the topics queued up for consideration. It's especially useful to know if there's been what Yoda might describe as "a disturbance in the Force."

o  Relationship to Other Stakeholders
Sometimes the trickiest dynamics are not the identification and balancing of values underlying positions, but the damaged connections and/or low trust between the people active in the consideration. 

This can play out in a number of ways:
—Personality clash, where one person's behavior is found irritating, independently of what they're saying.
—Unresolved tension, where an unhealed prior hurt leaks into the current situation.
—Poor track record, where there is skepticism about the reliability of a person's commitments to a project because they've flaked out or under-performed in the past.
—History of selfishness, where there is low trust in the speaker's ability to think in terms of what's best for the whole.
—Power imbalances, where there is a reaction to strong statements from someone too new to the group to have established credentials. Or, going in the other direction, a reaction to a well-established member who appears to expect deference by virtue of their years in service, rather than because of the strength of their thinking.

o  Relationship to the Facilitator
While the ideal facilitator for cooperative meetings is skilled, neutral on the topics, and well prepared, sometimes you have to settle for less than that. Participants can have doubts about the facilitator in any of these respects and that perception can undermine the facilitator's effectiveness just as surely as their making poor choices.

o  Relationship to the Setting
The size and shape of the room; lighting; time of day; quality, variety, and arrangement of seating; acoustics; and presence or lack of visual aids all have an impact on the atmosphere and energy of the meeting. Good facilitators give conscious thought to these factors in setting things up to create an environment congruent with the kind of meeting desired, and in a way known to be conducive to productive engagement based on knowledge of the group. (Heart sharing tends to go better in the evening, with the chairs in a circle and soft lighting. Business meetings typically benefit from a morning slot, with good natural lighting, and the chairs arranged to focus attention on a projector screen, flip chart, or easel.)

o  Relationship to the Format
Even though people always bring their emotional and intuitive selves to meetings (just try checking them at the door and see how that goes), that part of our humanness is not always welcome. Lacking agreement about whether to work emotionally at all—and most groups do not have explicit agreements about this—there will be predictable tension between the "Product People" who believe that meetings should be principally focused on addressing issues and solving problems, and the "Process People" who believe that meetings should only proceed in ways that enhance relationships among members.

While these two views are not inherently inimical, and can learn to play nice together, you can usually witness a manifestation of the awkwardness between them whenever there is a request to have a sharing circle, where people are given the opportunity to use valuable plenary time to speak from their heart, perhaps to clear the air or to establish the breadth of the environment in which an issue will be considered. It is expressly not a time for problem solving. What may be pejoratively styled as woo-woo navel gazing by the Product folks may be considered the gem of the meeting by the Process contingent, and this conextual gap will need careful navigation.

o  Relationship to Speaking in Group
If you take into account that many fear public speaking more than death, it's hardly surprising that in any normal group you'll have members who find it awkward to state their views in front of everyone. What's show time for some is no-go time for those whose tongues are frozen with fear. Thus, you need to think about how to make input giving more accessible. (Small group breakouts can help, as can a culture of responding first with what you like about hat was just said, rather than with "but… ")

o  Relationship to Stamina and How Long the Group's Been Sitting
There's an art to managing the group energy and sequencing agenda items such that the heavy lifting (when the need for high focus and resiliency is greatest) is attempted when the group's energy tank is closer to F, rather than edging toward E. 

Most people need blood flowing to their brain to do their best thinking (duh), and that translates into avoiding heavy agenda right after a meal (when blood is otherwise busy in the stomach) and getting traction on tough topics within 30 minutes of people sitting down. By and large it's unproductive to ask a group to sit longer than 90 minutes without a break or a movement exercise, so a good facilitator won't open up a large can of complication unless there's enough of the 90 minutes left to get the worms back in the can, or at least well tagged and into holding pens before it's time for a break.

• • •

As you can see, context and history have a lot to say about what gets said and how it's heard. Flying blind, or worse, simply assuming that others will relate to topics and the meeting environment in the same way that you do, is sure to lead to unpleasant surprises. There might be a flash flood coming at you out of a clear blue sky.

Mail Dominant Behavior

Last Thursday I finally made the switch to my spiffy new MacBook Pro Retina laptop. It's now five days later, I'm still trying to iron out all the wrinkles adjusting to my new email program—Mail (which comes bundled with Apple computers). Maybe I should call it "Male" for stubbornness.

As I disclosed March 12 (Operating at the Edge of My Technological Tether), I've had to let go of my beloved Eudora, the only email program I'd ever used (but which is now no longer supported and can't be run on my new machine) and the move has been klunky at best.

o  While I was able to import all my old email files (great), I lost any reference as to which ones had been read and responded to (not so great). 

o  All the email that I ever authored (which is about half of my records—the other portion being emails sent to me) has been time stamped as of the day of the transfer, May 9. It's an absolute bitch losing any ability to sort my work over the last 14 years by date.

o  About 50 emails that I recently disposed of from my In Box (representing the last couple days of work before the transfer), suddenly relocated back in my In Box, as if the last few days were caught in some Groundhog Day time warp, giving me the unwanted opportunity to refile them. Although I didn't see an image of Bill Murray, I saw plenty of other things I'd already seen plenty of times. Ugh.

o  I have not yet figured out a way to keep two files open and visible on my screen at the same time. While that may not seem so problematic, here's the deal:
—It's common for me to realize in the midst of composing one message that I also need to send another and it's convenient to pause temporarily to take care of that late-breaking need without losing my place with the first one. 
—I have developed a management style where I'll start an email that I don't have time to finish and then leave it open—to immediately capture the gist of the point I want to make and to help me remember to get back to it, as open files are easier to keep in view.
—It's often helpful when cranking out a bunch of personalized emails that rely on the same basic text to: a) queue up a copy of the master; b) go to a different window to record that that individual was notified; c) copy the email address of the next person in line; and d) go back to the master message and tweak it appropriately for the new recipient. I need three documents visible on my screen to pull that maneuver off expeditiously.

o  Mail has a Draft folder, a Sent folder, and an Outbox. Eudora only has an Outbox, but there was a way to mark emails as to whether they were if draft form, queued to be sent, or actually sent. While I don't reckon either system is better than the other, Mail has this annoying habit of keeping a copy in Draft for a while even after it's been Sent. More than once now I've moved both the Draft copy and the Sent copy into storage, only to discover that I now had (unwanted) duplicates. Sigh, another victim of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

o  I have no idea (yet) where attachments that have been sent to me are stored. Sometimes I can remember that a document exists as an attachment but not the date that it was sent. Knowing where attachments live on my computer is fairly useful. With Eudora I knew where that was, but my clever new computer is playing a coy game of Hide the File. (Who's in charge here, anyway?)

o  At first I couldn't figure out how to change my signature (at the bottom of emails). Now I can't figure out how to have one appear as a default, instead of requiring a cut and paste each time. I had as much fun with cut and paste to last a lifetime when I was five; at 63 I have no urge to relive kindergarten unneccessarily.

o  My first full day using Mail I tried to send a reminder and a draft agenda for an important conference call scheduled for later that day. When the time came, almost no one showed up on the call because I relied mostly on listserves to get the word out and the ic.org server had bounced my messages because I didn't look like me. Grr.  

Fortunately I have friends (notably Rachel & Tony at Dancing Rabbit) for whom this stuff isn't all that difficult and who are willing to patiently hold my hand while I experience email growing pains. While it seems a stretch at this point to project that I'll come to love Mail, my more modest goal right now is simply to be able to play nice together.

Today I'm trying figure out if I've got Mail… or Mail's got me.

39 Steps Toward Community

Today Sandhill Farm is hosting its annual May Day party, marking the anniversary of when the two founding couples (Ed Pultz & Wendy Soderlund, and Ann Shrader & I) first arrived on the property back in the spring of 1974. That's right, Sandhill has finally reached the same age as Jack Benny—39 years old.

Because we tend to give greater homage to the extension of longevity when it reaches decade milestones—"Lordy, lordy look who's forty" will happen next year—I thought it might be nice to give a little love to 39, which doesn't ordinarily get much time in the limelight.

Aside from my quip about Jack Benny's perennial age—a schtick that he milked for decades as a vaudeville comedian with legendary durability—it turns out that there aren't that many well-known references to 39. Luckily, I've never let relative obscurity stand in the way of a good story...

With a little refection, I've come up with three ways to celebrate 39:

1. Gestation
Humans typically take 38-42 weeks to incubate from conception to birth, and 39 weeks is considerate the target minimal length for full-term babies. The idea being that if babies are left in the oven at least that long they are much more likely to be born with fully developed brain, liver, and lung functions—all of which are rather handy.

So, while 13 is often considered unlikely, three times 13 is favorable—at least when it comes to human babies. And, of course, this is '13, so it all comes together.

2. Three Suits
As a road warrior I face a steady diet of logistical challenges. Fortunately, having only three suits in my closet is not one of them. In today's more casual business environment my work as a process consultant and as a nonprofit administrator rarely necessitates that I change out of jeans and knit shirts that don't have tears or holes. As a professional, the point of clothes is to dress well enough that people aren't distracted by what I'm wearing, and in most situations today a dress suit would come across as formal and stuffy—which is not the tone I want to set with clients I'm hoping will open up in my presence.

While my wardrobe isn't challenged by my travel schedule, my card playing is. Duplicate bridge has been one of my favorite recreational pastimes since I took it up a bit more than 13 years ago (there's that number again), and my playing time is frequently interrupted by my travel schedule. While I'm occasionally able to shoehorn some time at an out-of-town bridge club into a free afternoon or evening, mostly I just play when I'm home on Wednesdays (which is when there's a game in Kirksville MO). 

In the context of a deck of cards, you see, three suits equates to 39 cards. While it's generally an advantage to be void in one suit when playing bridge, I don't consider it an advantage at all to have a void of card playing in my weekly routine.

3. Hitchcock 
Growing up in the '50s and '60s, one of the best known film directors of my youth was Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense. Before cranking out such critically acclaimed hits as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Torn Curtain (1966), he did a movie in 1935 called 39 Steps, which took its name from a 1915 espionage novel by John Buchan.

The story hinges on a spy ring in Britain that has 39 components, each ignorant of all but the steps immediately in front of and behind themselves, excepting an idiot savant who doesn't know the import of what he knows, and which the protagonists are ultimately able to get to spill the beans. 

While the plot of the film may be a bit unlikely, a lot of people thought that Sandhill's chances of seeing its 39th birthday were just as unlikely, and here we are.

Though I think that Sandhill's 39th step toward a more cooperative future will be far less nefarious than a spy ring run amok in Britain, I recognize that conservatives may find the association I've posited between Sandhill and Hitchcock more apt. Oh well, it's hard to please everyone. 

As I tend the sweat fire today, reflecting on all we've accomplished over 39 years and enjoying the company and companionship of the scores of friends and neighbors who will help us raise a glass, I promise to let Republican dismay intrude on my enjoyment.

• • •

By the way, Jack Benny died in 1974, which means he took his final curtain call just as Sandhill was getting started. While any putative connection between Benny and Sandhill is rather fanciful (I've never even picked up a violin) it's only appropriate to take this moment to honor him in passing. I'm thinking a Jack & Coke in the early afternoon might be just the ticket.