The label passive aggressive is oft ascribed to others but rarely subscribed to. When you deploy this label your accusing the other side of acting both with a hidden agenda and out of weakness. Note that the accusation of a hidden agenda is usually an indirect way of admitting that you haven’t a clue what the other side is on about. Notice also that the accusation of aggressive is a step toward admitting that the other side has power. Negotiating power. The exaggerated language is a failed attempt at self deprecating humor. Humor about the of the fear this realization has engendered.

A black and white model of negotiation might hold that it’s what you do when your not acting. In that characterization it becomes the opposite of acting, i.e. passive.
But real negotiation is work. The work of negotiating is the work of finding a common understanding. That search involves uncovering workable models of the other sides agendas.

One frame to shovel all this into is ‘coordination problems.’ Some coordination problems are solved by command control; which is typically viewed as masculine. Some coordination problems are solved by emergent behavior arising out of common cause (pool of common practice). This is often called community and typically viewed as feminine. Of course all the real systems and interesting systems are in the middle space between these two fantasy worlds.

Power is found in both these systems at their network hubs. Which is obvious in the tree topology of the command and control hierarchy; and even in the more complex variations on that where different dominions of authority (say: management, engineering, marketing, pr) are overlaid. Efficient, stagnant systems may have no conflicts to be resolved at these hubs; but that’s rare. The function of the nodes in the topology is to both execute the ritualized parts of behavior but more interestingly to resolve conflicts – i.e. to do the negotiation. In a hierarchy this puts the guys in the middle nodes into interesting role of bridging between two differing world views. Which opens them up to the accusation that they are two faced.

In the community coordination systems the network hubs draw all their power from their role as negotiators; though that’s rarely the term used. Social networking is another name used. The powerful role in these systems works off the energy created by the diversity of world views found across the hubs contacts. Moving information and resources around to create common cause. Telling engineering about what marketing has discovered. Connecting somebody in manufacturing with somebody in engineering that might know somebody who can resolve the problem de-jour. Like the middle manager in a command and control hierarchy the hub can be accused of unclear loyalties.

Of course this is all terribly over simplified. But the male-bossy-hierarchy model is more likely to see the female-chatty-networking as passive aggressive.

I very much liked this list of design traps. It’s taken from the middle of a paper (pdf) by the always brilliant Phil Agre. In that context Phil is talking about the problem of designing a technology rich system that will presumably transform an existing large social institution, libraries. But it’s a really good list for all those situations where your designing a system that is expected to transform behaviors in an existing institution.

The trap of …

• … presupposing standards
• … deriving political consequences
• … automation
• … assuming rapid change
• … command and control computing
• … inventing a new world
• … blaming resistance
• … assuming away intermediaries
• … technology
• … designing for a limited range of cases
• … presupposing transparency

I want to chew on these a bit, so hopefully this posting will get revised over time. These are my restatement of what Phil writes, which is of course much better.

Standards: Never presume things are interoperable. Standards are hard work and only rarely emerge. Let’s repeat that, they rarely emerge. Most systems are heterogenous aggregations with much, if not most, of their substance in the glop that inter-connects their parts.

Politics: Never assume your technology leads to your desired political outcomes. This one’s facinating because consensus that the work at hand is creating a social good is always a constructive driver of large change. It maybe a near certainty that one will get piled on. But! Systems design is a thicket of unintended consequences. This one’s very entangled with the standards, hierarchy and intermediary traps.

Automation: Designs reshape roles, they don’t meerly automate existing chores. At first blush you may look at your system as lifting a burden off some actor in the old system; but it is useful to realize that in fact you are negotiating the nature of the work. This is often why system designers tend to automate other people’s work, not their own. This kind of negotation is politics; not in the big idea sense but the complex local politics of successfully integrating diverse points of view and need.

Rate of Change: Chips, communications, and network effects can grow amazingly fast; meanwhile social, physical, and economic systems are be very resilient, durible, and slow to change. System design takes place in the huge space between. Any assumption you make about real rate of change should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Note the irony in the standards trap mentioned earlier: assuming standards, and hence interoprablity, is the presumption that there is a stable durible social foundation you can build on.

Hierarchy: Phil’s argument here is that historically computer systems drew most of their funding from hierarchtical organizations both commercial and milatary and that has created a bias in our tool kits and mind sets. True. But that’s not the only reason why edge emphasising design patterns are so scarce.

… more later

Phil’s paragraphs on these are at the tail end of section two of the paper (pdf).

The book I was looking for was not on the shelf, but this was a few books down. The original copyright is 1904. Prudence Hyde renewed the copyright in 1938 by Prudence Hyde. The five great philosophies?

• Epicurean Pursuit of Pleasure
• Stoic Self-Control by Law
• Platonic Subordination of Lower to Higher
• Aristotelian Sense of Proportion
• The Christian Spirt of Love

But then I’m sure you knew that. The author was William De Witt Hyde, a president of Bowdoin College. (Amazon)

There is a delightful pattern in collaborative design I usually label “ships in the night.”

Two designers posit different solutions to the problem. Mr. A advocates plan A, and Mr B advocates plan B. They debate the merits of their respective plans and then adjorn.

During the night Mr. A thinks about the merits of plan B. Mr. B thinks about the merits of plan A. They both begin to come around to the other guys position. They think how noble it would be to give in.

They also puzzle a bit on the cost of their plan. Mr. A begins to think about how hard his plan really is. Mr. B thinks about his plan’s complexity. They both begin to become a bit fearful of their plan. They think what a burden it would be to own the plan, particularly one that was in dispute.

The next morning they return to the discussion to discover they have switched sides. Ships in the night.