Lack of trust

For me, my insight into my own lack of trust seems to make me better able to be compassionate about lack of trust in others.

Later

A good weaponeer becomes a target

Many people at LANL, including me, have a mindset that drives them to working harder and harder and learning more and more.

For most, including me, this mindset seems to be derived from persistent feelings of inadequacy - "If only I could be a little more productive, if only I could learn a little more, then I would be an adequate person."

This underlying feeling of needing to do a 'little more' makes such a person an easy target of manipulation by others.

All the others have to do is hold the carrot of adequacy a little out of reach and keep it out of reach. Then we all chase after it.

The only winning strategy is to stop the chase. To say to ourselves, I am adequate and will do the chase only if I get rewarded well enough. I will complete this task well but will only do another task for you if I am rewarded well enough. Otherwise, I will chase something more rewarding. As we have found out, the nominally high salaries can easily become a trap.

Just a thought (one that for me liberates me from a lot of not so good behavior.)

Cheers

Pre Nanos

Many vocal people seem to think that Nanos caused all of the current turmoil at LANL.

Based on talks with friends who have been here since the '60s, there is a more likely story. In this story Nanos and LANS are effects not causes.

Back when Harold Agnew was the director of the lab, the Lab had great power. Scientifically, it was the most productive high quality physics organization on the planet.

Agnew decided to challenge Congress in a game of power. His approach was "We are great. We understand science. We will do what we want with the money that you give us."

Congress won this battle. It got rid of Agnew as director and forced the selection of less powerful directors thereafter. The quality of science at the Lab declined slowly but steadily.

Later, the USSR collapsed and the need for the development of nuclear weapons incessantly decreased. The weapons complex became less politically powerful as other constituents could now make cogent arguments to move the money elsewhere.

LANL, assuming that they had won the Agnew led battle, chose to send less than stellar personnel to DOE on change of station assignments.

The weapons complex was losing political clout and LANL was losing political clout within the weapons complex.

Later on, Wen Ho Lee et al., LANL's enemies (enemies partially created and fed by LANL itself) in the Washington bureaucracy saw a chance to decrease LANL's power further. On the rallying cry of "safety and security", they could get a director in place who would work badly with LANL staff and culture (Nanos). This would make the difficulties of the Lab more obvious. The scientists at LANL obligingly played their part by attacking Nanos and not seeing the bigger picture.

The attack on Nanos allowed the next step of the plan to unfold - putting the Lab out to bid for a consortium that included a private company, preferably one not listed on any stock exchange.

This brings us to today. LANS appears to have been told that they are to create a pit production facility here. Bechtel wins by building lots of buildings. Scientists and many others are RIFed and/or leave.

LANL disappears until a significantly large national crisis arises. Then, phoenix-like, a new LANL arises somewhere. The large national crisis that created LANL and gutted many other faltering organizations was WWII.

So we seem to have come full circle in 60 years.

The only thing left to do is to protect those current employees who are motivated enough to learn to protect themselves.

Anonymity 3

Part of the trained lack of trust is the feeling that a person is safe by being anonymous.

They are safe in the sense that they cannot be attacked directly.

They are very unsafe in the sense that anonymity prohibits team building. An organized team can beat the anonymous every time. It will beat them without the need to know which anonymous person is which.

Trust

For LANL employees to come through the predicted layoffs decently, each employee has to start to trust at least one other LANL employee.

LANS, whether the members of upper management actually trust each other or not, works like a team with a specific goal.

It is very difficult for many players, each of whom does not trust the others and each of whom has differing goals, who will not function as a team to beat a team.

Unfortunately, LANL, for many years, has trained its workers to trust no one else (think of all the turf wars, the infighting, need to know, and the compartmentalization). Thus it is difficult for these employees to start to trust even a few people in order to protect themselves.

back to life, a bit

With the recurring rumors of large (>1500) layoffs at LANL and LLNL and with my ability to help these people, this blog and some of the others are likely to come back to life again.

I am sad that the layoffs, which seemed inevitable a year ago, are coming true and that no one has been successful in stopping them.