No, this Blog is not dead. I think about it often; I just don’t have as much time as before to update it. I started taking some remote classes (what was I thinking?) and they are pretty much devouring every spare second I have, so this blog, along with most of the rest of my life, suffers.
I am learning lots of neat new things that apply to astronomy management, though, and I am anxious to get them up here eventually. One concept I am pondering now is the use of hard commitments in astronomy. In the real world, a hard commitment is used to signal your intentions to competitors. It is designed to get them to act on your intentions and as a result, it is characterized by three things: visibility, understandability and irreversibility. For example, if you make a press release saying you are going to expand production, that is visible and understandable, but fairly easily reversed. On the other hand, if you invite the press to witness the unveiling of your new $26M factory, that adds a level of irreversibility to your signalled intention. Your competitors are going to have take your increased capacity into account when they plan their strategies.
There are lots of applications of this concept in astronomy management. For example, if a manager asks you to join a new working group to address issue X, or join the team of project Y, you may be wondering if it will be worth your while to do so. Will your eventual solution to issue X ever get listened to and implemented? Will project Y ever really happen? What if, instead, that manager told you that project Z was killed so that project Y could get have the resources it needed to succeed, or that the chair of the new working group is a new employee whose full time duty is to solve issues like this? Wouldn’t you be a little more convinced that your time would be well-spent? Showing real, hard to reverse signs of commitment to a project helps others commit to it as well.
You can apply this concept as well to claim scientific capability ground in telescope operations and instrumentation. I still think we should be cooperating more with each other, in general, but there are also appropriate occasions to clearly signal your intentions if you want to make something actually happen on a desired timescale. A hard commitment is one way to do so.
Stick around, and I may some day write about how a hard commitment helped make a dream happen at our observatory.