the mind of paloque

When I started working, I was often tasked to draft some advisory letters for our clients. Frequently these drafts would return to me with many corrections and comments which instructed me to write the advise from the client’s perspective.

As a person, I found the concept of adopting someone else’s perspective was reasonable, but very difficult to practice. I would often get that perspective wrong time and time again.

I believe we all are entrenched in the things we know and hence also expect others to do so as well. We often expect to be able to immediately be on the same wavelength as another person we are communicating with. Often we say things in short cuts with the expectation that others would immediately understand what we mean. This is especially true in many environments.

On occassion we are also scolded if we try to spell out all of the details to people who already know the subject matter: some people are just damned impatient and don’t want us to test the understanding first.

Yet, there are times when we say something that others would stare at us with blank looks. Do we recognise these signs? Do we intepret them correctly? Do they understand what we are trying to say? It would take a person with relatively high EQ to pick some of these signs up, and tailor-make their communication delivery accordingly.

Often we remain unconscious of these different perspectives. The results vary from negligible impact to disastrous. Do we chance disasters? Should we make the extra effort to clearly spell out our thoughts… nevermind the potential scolding? Are we emotionally aware that we need to change our perspectives or are we caught in our own self importance?

“With great power comes great responsibilities”, famously vowed by the wall crawling Spider-man.

With empowerment comes accountability. I just wonder how much of this is practiced in the real world. Or is there no empowerment and thus no accountability? Do we hide behind consensus decisions of large committees? What happens when something goes wrong? Whose head goes?

Empowerment is a big thing. “Don’t play play” says PCK. Yet, do we all recognise this? How many of us grab empowerment with both hands, but seek consensus for decisions we are supposed to make? Then do we point the finger to others (who gave their consensus) when something that is subsequently proven wrong, instead of taking the accountability upon ourselves?

Admittedly, I too am guilty of this having been trained in organisations where consensus decisions are commonplace. Perhaps once in a while we need to act like true entreprenuers, and make decisions ourselves (as empowered, of course), and take the blame when things go sour, and take credit when things go well.

Mindsets need to be changed, but naturally it will have to be relevent to the situation. In war, the generals do not seek consensus whether they should send their troops into the battlefield. Death and destruction is what they have to be comfortable living (or dying) with. In a fast moving world, we need to act quick. Empower people whom you trust to make the right decisions and drive the accountabilities to them.

I am pretty new to this blogging thingy. But what is a blog if it is not a rant?

I am curious about all the fuss that surrounds the subject of blogging. I’ve personally been a website experimenter from the mid to late 90s. I’ve built websites using WYSIWYG tools, then moved on to pure HTML scripting, and then experimenting with Perl… and now using PHP (but with very little coding work). All these are avenues for expression. In some ways all these forms of expressions are to me no different to blogs.

Only thing is that blogs are a little more specific, I guess. More like a personal journal of sorts.

So anyway, I’ve been playing with Postnuke, PHPnuke, PHPbb and currently Drupal and Wordpress. I must say that I like Drupal as a community content management system (CMS). However, it is not for the beginner I must say. The installation is not easy, and there are still many bugs. Despite this, I prefer Drupal to any Nuke CMS. It is far more flexible and allows for better theming using CSS rather than hardcoded tables.

As for blogging tools… nothing beats Wordpress in my view. What an easy to use blogging tool. But really what is a blog?