Tag: decision

Piss Up in a Brewery

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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“Trompenaars’s model of national culture differences is a framework for cross-cultural communication applied to general business and management, developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. This involved a large-scale survey of 8,841 managers and organization employees from 43 countries.

This model of national culture differences has seven dimensions. There are five orientations covering the ways in which human beings deal with each other, one which deals with time, and one which deals with the environment.”

From Wikipedia.

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The last course, which was in design phase when I dumped it, was to address problems of cross cultural communication and the tensions inherent in it. I {we} have had plenty of instances of Franco -Britannic cultural differences. If one side imagines that the way they do things is right and dandy it can be very difficult to show to them other ways. They may get ultra-defensive and imagine themselves more highly organised and efficient than they actually are. One might have to learn new ways and adapt to the system in which one lives. These “growing pains” can cause premature baldness. One can be seen as pushy and not “sympa”.

There is a balance between nanny state control and last minute.com freeform. There is also a need to decide and stick to said decisions without continuous flexing. Making shit up on the fly can cause clusterfucks of considerable dimension. Preparation and planning prevent piss poor performance.

One of the things I never put on my CV as a bullet point was

  • Able to organise a piss up in a brewery.

It does not sound like an important life skill but it is. One of things that I am good at is organisation which needs contingency. Organisation should be, wherever possible, simple and clear. The person who has oversight needs to be updated and exercise that over sight. Although not my natural team role I have ended up being Monitor Evaluator on a number of occasions to keep things on track. Slippage is a real problem.

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner identify France as a diffuse culture in which so-called responsibility is spread out and it is not clear who has oversight or indeed if there is any. Process has been developed and used but rarely questioned and updated. Demain, quinze jours, are not as bad as the Jamaican “soon come”. But time is vague like many other things.

As a INFJ timing is important to me and sticking to what you say about time is vital. I can’t help it but people running late irks. I have literally thought while waiting, “shall I just go home, fuck it!”

I am anticipating a hip-replacement operation. It is down to us to organise a pulmonary and cardiovascular screening before a meeting with the anaesthetics geezer / geezer-ess. We have to order and provide crutches and compression stockings. We have to organise full blood tests including blood typing. The surgeon will have blocked out a space in his diary. No bugger has yet done an assessment if it is safe for me to return home. There is a quasi-magical assumption that everything will fall into place. A couple of cardiology outfits have suggested a screen a week before the operation!! Really?

If there is a problem and the operation needs cancelled there is no lead in time and the slot will have to be abandoned. This kind of “planning” makes me nervous. It lacks foresight. It may be the way things have always been done but that is not good logic.

The possibility for fuckwittery is huge and the probability of things which are time critical going wrong, high.

In the UK no civilian would be given responsibility for collecting very expensive granulocyte-colony stimulating factor from the pharmacist and giving it to a district nurse for injection prior to a harvesting of stem cells. The factor is temperature sensitive. To trust this kind of thing to joe public is in my opinion unwise. The key thing could go very badly wrong and everything need re-scheduling. Do normal people really understand temperature dependent reaction kinetics?

“But that is the way we do things….”

The feeling that I {we} have to be on this is an unnecessary added stress.

Am I a control junky?

Am I sane?

Will this aid my post operative recovery?

Should I just go with the flow in this case?

In my view professional organisational oversight might be a better approach. I could tip up at hospital and have a whole day of tests done a couple of months out. The go / no go question would be answered and, if needed, some interim medical adjustments made ahead of time. Rather than a week before finding out some kind of unknown heart anomaly.

I understand that the summer is in the way and that everything stops for summer. Unfortunately this is not in my cultural DNA.

A bit edgy…

The Putative 2025 Council Meeting

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In the blue books opus the Tibetan outlines centennial council meetings, the next of which is due this year and others on the quarter century. He prophesises that by now there will be many initiates of varying degree incarnate along with a multitude of disciples. He hints that the stage of the forerunner may be drawing to a close and that the externalisation proper may commence, is commencing or may be underway. These writings are older than I, they predate the “swinging” sixties.

As is well known, no plan ever survives first contact.

In this schema the initiate Jesus was executed in Palestine two thousand years ago allegedly at the behest of the Sanhedrin and Pharisees. That carnal, violent, in meat, execution coincided with the initiate Jesus taking the fourth or renunciation initiation during which his physical plane body ceased to function and was no longer habitable. His form was rent, his causal vehicle split. According to some religious texts there were a number of proximal notable scale physical plane phenomena concurrent with these events. One could argue that the karma caused then is still in effect today and currently so. Those effects are in the news. The events in Palestine had the initiate Jesus overshadowed by the master in the office of Christ. He too was going through an initiation process. Shortly after his physical plane death, the adept Jesus took the fifth initiation and technically became the master Jesus. Simultaneous the master in the office of Christ took the sixth and seventh initiations.

We had renunciation and revelation for Jesus, decision and resurrection for the Christ. The “energies” for these events were “grounded” for the first time in a very “concentrated” manner, unleashing events for humanity. These seemingly minor insignificant events in a small two-bit country changed the face of the planet over the upcoming centuries. The sceptic may underestimate the significance of this “concentrated” esoteric occurrence.

According to the Tibetan, the council meeting will “decide” what it needs to do to best help humanity to prepare for the return of the Christ. Following the internal logic of the opus. The Christ will not be a simple third degree initiate as Jesus was upon his incarnation as a nirmāṇakāya and carpenter to be. We might say that the Christ will be a very different kettle of fish entirely.

I think it fair to say that humanity is going through a very materialistic and ungodly phase. There is division anger and blame. Currently humanity sits on its hands while brutality and death unfold. It seems that it can “justify” this to itself and still sleep at night. The propaganda against Islam is now fully embedded in the Western psyche. Who is madder a mullah or a Hasidim. Who is more retrogressive? Stuck in the past?

Humanity is very complacent and the climate change deniers have persuaded humanity that it is OK to continue to gorge to excess and ruin the “garden of Eden” into which it was born. The temptation of materialistic excess is beyond “biblical” in proportion which may elicit a planetary supra-biblical response.

It is my own view that humanity needs several wake up calls of truly epic proportions. Things need to get very much worse before people will stop pissing about with “images” on social media and actually do something less fatuous. Pontificating on soap boxes does not address planetary crisis. At the moment I see the USA as making the planetary situation worse, they no longer provide a good lead and are going down the plughole of their own selfishness and paranoia.

You can warn people about the timescale of karma, about how it ripples out from things like brutal epicentres. But in the heat of the moment and full of bile and anger they are not willing or able to listen. They believe murder and outright bullying can be justified.

It does not occur to the USA that its is behaving like a teenage bully in the hallway locker rooms of one of its “safe” high schools. It feels justified in swaggering and beating the shit out of anyone who does not kneel and kiss its arse.

Such are the days of our “enlightenment”.

In many ways the situation needs to be very dire before there is a strong enough planetary and human call, an invocation for the Christ to return. In some ways there is nothing new that needs to be done, humanity is fast heading down the shitter without any additional input. Maybe instead of externalising the hierarchy should again withdraw and wait a few more centuries until it is shit creek barbed wire canoe time….

Coming to a Head – Decisions

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Quite a while back someone suggested to me that I write a course on “Decision Making” and stupidly I accepted. Without blowing my own trumpet unduly, that course is widely applicable up to the very highest levels. But of course, no big-wig or big-cheese, would ever accept that they need to learn and otherwise be educated about their quasi-divine decision making.

I use this little slide to frame things.

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At the moment various indicators are incoming apropos of an impending decision.

I’ll speculate that I am way more decisive than average and that I am unafraid to make unilateral decisions. I rarely feel the need to discuss, chin-wag or otherwise chew things over.  This appears to surprise some.

To give an example.

A few months back I had a zoom call with a European VC I was acquainted with a long time ago. I was seeking clarity as to how the VC community might see me based upon my past enterprises and what to do with my current circumstances. He said that, based upon the narrative I gave him about a company I co-founded, I would be considered “difficult” to work with and that “French deals don’t travel”. He hinted at “reputation” but would not be pressed. On this basis I dropped any plan to look for VC funding to start a company and shelved the faint notion of a France based start-up. The omens are not good. There are barriers, showstoppers from the get-go.

One can not always know when one is aiding / advising a decision. It can be unwitting or conscious. One could be a deciding factor without having any idea thereof.

The recent CAT / CT scan data concerning a largely fused thoracic spine consistent with a diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) diagnosis is a factor to add to the decision making funnel. There is no treatment, it will only get worse. This is a factor suggesting that house downsize increases in importance. This DISH will not ameliorate my COPD as the bony growth is already impinging on my right lung.

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Soon we will test the back to blighty notion with a visit to Jersey to see how it feels to be surrounded by people largely anglophone. This notion points at moving to a low-cost, less desirable, region of the UK property market. A significant contrary factor is the anecdotal poor state of the NHS. The French system has been very generous to us in terms of funding and accessibility to care and prompt diagnostics.

We are in a beggars cannot be choosers state in that we don’t have hundreds of thousands of pounds to pay for private healthcare. Things here are in motion and work well. Don’t fix what is not broken.

There are no real personal anchors for us here, to keep us tethered. A lot is due to happen in the next month or so and that is when the funnel will close. This blog and my patent are up for renewal, for example.

Things, whatever they may be, are coming to a head, or in other terms the funnel is starting to pinch. These funnels are unidirectional and not reversible.

The feeling is that “things” are coming to a head. The fact that I looked out the slide above is indicative…

The Problem of Both And

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

This “problem” can be found on all sides. It stems from the desire to have both one thing and another. It has a root in idealism but also in an unwillingness to choose or decide.

At the moment relatively wealthy humanity is accustomed to having multiple up to date electronic devices, frequent new cars, foreign holidays involving air travel and conspicuous consumption which is sometimes diarised for show in social media. Yet in the back of the mind there is the spectre of anthropogenic climate change. There is a weak desire to slow this down. People want both their current way of life and to limit the ravages of global warming. Most approaches to planetary heating back “solutions” which do not significantly impinge on current lifestyle.

This is an obvious fallacy.

But it is one that is not addressed because in affect it is taboo and politically very unpopular. In wanting both and decisive action is delayed and put off. The advocates of striving to limit climate change themselves travel by air. People cross their fingers and hope we can limit climate change without changing our behaviours. The fairy godmother of technology will wave its magical AI wand and ta-da we have a solution for global warming. In the meantime, business green washes to keep the greenbacks rolling.

There is an awful lot of kidding and people are willing to be kidded because their conscience is assuaged by flashy on tone public relations. Look the oil manufacturers and producers are transitioning to green alternatives…😉

“Phew, I can have my holiday in the Maldives after all…”

Elsewhere I have predicted that the impact of climate change needs to get catastrophic before humanity wakes up. By which time it will be very late, perhaps too late.

We saw it coming, we did fuck all.

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“Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospect; it has to be shattered before ascertained.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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Humanity has a monkey with its hand in the cookie jar mentality. Inside the cookie jar are lovely cookies. We put our hand in it to extract the cookie but we cannot pull it out with the whole cookie in hand. The villagers are coming with sticks. We are so tempted by the cookies; we do not want a beating by the villagers. What to do?

This is a catch 22 which stems from greed and desire. In the absence of desire, there is no dilemma. Drop the cookie and get the hell out of Dodge. But it is a lovely cookie with banana and chocolate chips….

I cannot have both the cookie and avoid a beating.

No desire, no greed, no problem. Let go. Do a runner.

Most catch 22s stem from wanting something, some desire or some ambition. They are based on preferred outcome. In the absence of these the dilemma dissolves; it is a figment of mind and emotion.

Humans have a face in a jar problem. Inside the jar is their face, their social self-image, which they are clinging on to. They may want to resolve a relationship or ameliorate it but they are burdened by their face which they hold clenched in their fist. They are unable to shake hands whilst their fist is clenched tight around the mask of face. So, for most of their lives they walk around with their face clenched bare knuckled in fist and never know the freedom of an open palm free of social encumbrance. They may want to save both their face and a relationship. However, this is impossible, humans are stubborn and before long, it is too late.

You can see this human folly all around you.

Life is not a quantum superstition state. Sooner or later the both-and must be measured and collapse into either-or. The coherence of the both-and is finite. Decision is not something people are fond of.

Sometimes nature, the universe, or a planet will make the decision for us…

Wanting both-and is greedy.

LIFE is way bigger than petty human want and desire…