A Good Mission Statement is Hard to Find

Everyone and their dog are writing mission statements these days.  The problem is that they would be better off not doing so.  

A good strategy for gaining insights into a company or organization should be a careful read of its mission statement.  The problem is that the statements are often downright unreadable, and the meanings are ambiguous.  Some organizations seem to view it as an opportunity to pull out their handy DEI Terms for Idiots.  For other entities, though, it's as if the mission statement has become a kind of confessional where, by simply alluding to particular ideas or images, their actual perspective or ulterior motives become clear.  The writing quality can definitely convey quite a bit about the organization tht brought it to the page.  A good example of a somewhat lousy mission statement is found at Oregon Housing and Community Services.  In case you're unfamiliar with the agency, this organization has seen controversies erupt over its inept handling of grants and awards for those it serves.  Whether it's its backlogs or its sobering audits, it has not been a stellar example of competent customer service for Oregonians.

That's part of the reason why a phrase in its mission statement caught my eye and gave me pause a few years ago. Let's examine it in its entirety, with the sections of concern highlighted.

Our Vision
All Oregonians have the opportunity to pursue prosperity and live free from poverty.

Our Mission

We provide stable and affordable housing and engage leaders to develop an integrated statewide policy that addresses poverty and provides opportunities for Oregonians.

What we do

Oregon Housing and Community Services is Oregon's housing finance agency, providing financial and program support to create and preserve opportunities for quality, affordable housing for Oregonians of lower and moderate income.


OHCS administers programs that provide housing stabilization – from preventing and ending homelessness, assisting with utilities to keep someone stable, to financing multifamily affordable housing, to encouraging homeownership. It delivers these programs primarily through grants, contracts, and loan agreements with local partners and community-based providers, and has limited direct contact with low-income beneficiaries. OHCS' sources of funds are varied and include federal and state resources that have complex regulatory compliance requirements, and thus stewardship, compliance monitoring, and asset management are all critical functions played by OHCS.

The first highlight is not such a big deal, but it feels a tad sloppy.  For instance, why is it necessary to refer to income levels at all here?  Why not simply say something along the lines of qualifying Oregonians?  The third highlighting of to just reinforces the idea that this was not written with a great deal of care.

The third highlight is more the concern.  It has limited direct contact with low-income beneficiaries?  You don't say.  Well, okay, first, why is this admission so critically important to refer to within the context of their statement? Maybe in the applications or the associated staff procedures, but this seems an example of someone misunderstanding the broad purpose of the mission statement.  Second, the use of contact with the low-income beneficiaries suggests something negative.  Do they wish to avoid contact?  Is it because this somewhat derisive or condescending phrase actually betrays their mindset?  One wonders.

I had the opportunity a few years ago to raise this point of language with a few of the communications staff. One younger employee clearly got it, understanding the problematic nature of this phrase, but the others seemed completely oblivious. It's unfortunate that poor writing can reflect so poorly on the agency staff and its authentic mission and goals.

So, what are your favorite examples of terrible mission statements?

  

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Remembered

 

I am reading Tolkien's letters as well as a book offering a fresh look at the Inklings entitled The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer. The letters, in particular, convey a wonderful sense of who Tolkien was outside his work as a scholar and professor. Daily life accounts provide poignant insight into this complex figure.



With all of this reading on Tolkien and Lewis, it recently occurred to me that I should create a short video concerning our visits to the gravesites of these two great authors. I decided to include two sections about Cambridge and Oxford. All featured photos are culled from my images from two different trips to the UK.

Despite the fact that Tolkien was not particularly impressed by the bard, I decided to use incidental music from Shakespeare's plays for the first two featured music tracks.  This is followed by a poor recording of mine from Tolkien's parish, St. Aloysius Catholic Church. (For an interesting article on Tolkien and the Catholic Church, see here.) The home shared towards the end of the video is where Tolkien and his wife resided for many years in Oxford. We visited Sandfield Rd as my sister-in-law and her husband lived across the street for some time.  The person speaking for about a minute while we are walking is my brother-in-law.

I hope you enjoy this brief view from the UK! I'm concluding this with Tolkien's letter to his daughter a few days after the death of his friend as well as a compilation video I found on YouTube of Tolkien video.  My short video is at the bottom of the page.

To Priscilla Tolkien [Written four days after the death of C. S. Lewis.] 26 November 1963

Dearest, Thank you so much for your letter. . . . . So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years; but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us. I had a mass said this morning, and was there, and served; and Havard and Dundas Grant1 were present. The funeral at Holy Trinity, the Headington Quarry church, which Jack attended, was quiet and attended only by intimates and some Magdalen people including the President. Austin Farrer read the lesson. The grave is under a larch in the corner of the church-yard. Douglas (Gresham)2 was the only ‘family’ mourner. Warnie was not present, alas! I saw Owen Barfield, George Sayer and John Lawlor3 (a good mark to him), among others. Chris. came with us. There will be an official memorial service in Magdalen on Saturday at 2.15 p.m. It was very sweet of you my dearest to write. . . . . God bless you. Daddy.

Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition (p. 478). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

    

Telework...Is it for the Dogs?

 

For nearly the last three decades, my employer has tended to swing like a pendulum to one side or the other of the current business trends.  When not busily exploring required change management or DEI lessons, I remember being told at length why teleworking would never work for state government; that didn't last so long.  I get it... Many aspects of teleworking are super convenient.  You save money on parking and commuting costs and even get a little more sleep to boot.  If you have personal errands, they are much easier to do on breaks.  This may be a critical perk if you need to care for a loved one.  The list goes on.

There is a downside, though.  There is a loss of connection with colleagues.  You may also run into situations where, there often being a written record now of even the most spontanious question, casual bouncing off of ideas and processes becomes effectively discouraged.  Where you might have wandered down a couple of cubicles and brainstormed a problem with a colleague, it may become a little more complicated for some of us to do that today.  Another element for me is learning and development.  Back when I began new roles, one thing that always helped me was to listen to my colleagues, and sometimes my colleagues did likewise.  We all learned from each other.  I learned to tailor my phone conversations based, in part, on some of the great people with whom I worked closely; I patterned some of my techniques after their effective practices.  This kind of thing becomes a bit difficult for the teleworker.

There are always other ways to improve one's work, of course, but losing that feedback loop from one's colleagues can prove a negative.  Sitting day after day in one's empty house can also prove to be a tad isolating.  How would the employer who accepts teleworking take steps to make it a healthier environment for all its workers?  I don't think the answer is to necessarily drop it in its entirety, but it seems if there were more opportunities to come together as a workplace or unit, it would be a good thing.  (And don't subtly discourage it by requiring the use of leave time to attend.)  Let's face it: Teams is great (I guess), but it is no replacement for face-to-face communication where relationships are built and strengthened.  In a day and age where so much of our lives represents a "connection illusion," creating a virtual workplace seems to betray a certain ignorance of human nature.  If you peruse the internet for information and studies on the darker side of teleworking, there is a lot out there to read.  Many studies have been conducted in this area, and I am sure many more are underway.  Some of the negative observed consequences are interesting.  From a blurred separation of home and work to isolation, telework isn't necessarily all it is cracked up to be.

I am thankful that I am not beginning my career with this professional experience to look forward to for decades to come.  Looking back on the memorable office times- the laughter and the shared sorrows- these were spent in the presence of other human beings and not isolated in a house miles away from colleagues who oftentimes became friends.

 

Reviewing the Seestar S50 Smart Telescope

When I purchased the Seestar S50 last March 2024, I had high hopes, and initially, the telescope met or exceeded these expectations. As a nature photographer, I enjoy photographing new things. However, astrophotography always proved difficult. I was seeking something I could remove from the box and, after some initial setup, immediately target the desired object—whether that object was within or without our solar system.  At first, the telescope worked as described. I could set it up, which includes calibration of the compass, adjusting the level, and syncing to iPhone, and then instruct it to Go to the Moon. It went off with some pretty satisfying results. Even without photo stacking, the quality was a notch or two above acceptable, but not high resolution.  

Then, the updates began. As soon as Seestar began sending updates, the problems started.  The first issue became an inability to go to the moon.  The telescope would go to within .01% of the location and stop.  If one gave up and canceled the mode and tried manually navigating to the moon, it would appear much like the sun without the appropriate filtering.  I tried reporting the issue, and Seestar support was quite awful, acting as if this was an entirely new issue for them.  Of course, I knew from my Facebook Seestar groups that this was a known bug resulting from a bad update.  Seastar demanded screenshots, reported tax liabilities, personal secrets, etc.; you get the idea. They were not the picture of cooperation and helpfulness they liked portraying themselves as.

So, to add insult to injury for purchasers of this $500 bunch of optics and chips, Seestar decides to send additional updates before fixing this problem.  While this update includes “cute” starfield effects, sadly nothing remotely helpful to address the prior issue.  Meanwhile, I learned a workaround in one of the FB groups by which you can go to a deep space item first and then successfully go to the moon. I have no idea why this usually works, but it does.  Still, instead of having the equivalent of a new car with all the bells and whistles, it’s feeling more and more like a Vega.

The next issue developed with yet another update. I didn’t even recognize it until others mentioned it; I assumed it was the cold. The telescope’s visual output goes dark after about half an hour of viewing. Again, this may be a temporary issue addressed with a future update or a convoluted workaround. Still, as of right now, it seems yet another user stumbling block to enjoying the purchased product.

It's an interesting (modern) problem in that today's unit is not the same machine it was described as when purchased; it has been fundamentally altered by incompetent user updates—error built upon error, rushed to production. On a side note, ZWO, a Chinese company, manufactures this telescope. If you’re anything like me, you’re trying to avoid buying goods from China and instead opt for US or European options.

So, what do Seestar S-50 owners do with a telescope that seems incompetently supported? One thing is for sure: I would steer clear of any other products from this company, particularly until they demonstrate competence in updating all their product lines.

Update: One lesson I recently learned about this telescope was the importance of shutting down and completely recalibrating after each move from one part of the property to the next--even on the same night.  Doing this last time seemed to improve performance quite a bit.

Saint Faustina and a New Catholic

I've been participating in a Sunday morning class/discussion group on Saint Faustina, which raises some interesting points. (First, you can learn more about this video series from the Augustine Institute here.) We came into the Catholic Church from the Protestant tradition, and I don’t accept "new" things easily. However, one of the reasons we ultimately joined the Catholic Church was the ministry of John Paul the Great. In short, when I understood that this man supported this message and, in fact, made it his life’s mission no less, it seemed apparent that there must be great truth in what Saint Faustina brought to the Church.

 

I have always been interested in eternal time, and a tiny facet of our Sunday discussion hit upon this concept. I tried to go back to the video we viewed to watch the section of interest again, but this is something my parish purchased. I then thought, well, I will view a video of the August 17, 2002, dedication of the Divine Mercy Shrine in Krakow-Langiewniki, Poland, but that was easier said than done. Several sites had John Paul the Great’s Homily, but no one had the event video. After an hour of searching online, I changed my search terms to Polish via an online translator. This brought me to the link below; I only found one.

 

After all of this drumroll, I am not sure my observation is worth it. So, the video from the Augustine Institute that I mentioned in the first paragraph fulfilled the prophecies of Saint Faustina on the day of the dedication. This raises an interesting question. Assuming that the prophecies were indeed fulfilled, were they fulfilled to a degree through John Paul the Great’s own knowledge and readings of the saint’s predictions before that day or by something more external? In other words, was this a self-fulfilling prophecy? (Another similar example of this is found in the Third Secret, which concerns killing or grave injury to a pope.  Were the prayers of the faithful for John Paul the Great following the assassination attempt enough to alter one unfixed possible outcome of the world's timeline?)

 

But then I considered a difference between fulfilled prophecy between Judeo-Christian and, say, those revealed by Greek tragedies. Take Sophocles’ Oedipus, for instance; while the man at the center of the Oracle of Delphi indeed did those terrible things, his involvement in his own demise was shut off from him; he was not a party to the knowledge. (Of course, that's the point with Oedipus, but you find a similar sort of non-voluntary cooperation in the tragedies.) On the other hand, consider passages such as the one below.

 

10  Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” 11 And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. 12 For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. * 13 This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. 14 With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. 15 For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.’ 16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. 17  Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

 

PRESS, IGNATIUS. Ignatius Bible: Revised Standard Version - Burgundy - Second Catholic Edition (p. 2434). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

 

There is an interesting sense in which a person (such as John Paul the Great) is invited to participate in God’s plan of free will. In contrast, Greek literature may betray a different, more predestined sense. Of course, looking beyond the tragedy genre, we see examples in Greek literature where the protagonists use the information from the oracle for their own advantage, such as when Odysseus visits Teiresias. I don’t believe this sort of cooperation lessens the significance of an associated prophecy being fulfilled. In fact, I think the voluntary cooperation may even further solidify it.*

The video also touches on coincidences, saying there is no such thing in God's plan. While this may be a slight overstatement, it's largely accurate. It also holds true for the author. Nothing more quickly sends a work of fiction to the trash than the author relying on haphazard coincidences to move the plot forward. Of course, this only makes sense since God is the Author with a capital A,

 

Other interesting dimensions of the dedication, such as the eternal time dimension, make nice content for another post. Still, due to the associated links, these few paragraphs have already taken most of the evening.

 

Related Links

The Dedication Service

The Poland Trip (including homily)

John Paul the Great's Page on Vatican Site

Saint Faustina / Mary Faustina Kowalska

Saint Faustina Resources on Catholic Answers

Saint Faustina Diary (Amazon)

*Having begun writing on this topic, the complexity is potentially more significant than I realized. Possibly not the best observation for a blog post.

A Legacy of the Arts (Colliers)

 

John Collier's The Annunciation

I invite you to drop by and visit the new Legacy of the arts page created and dedicated to three generations of my wife's family (and my wife): Carroll Collier, John Carroll Collier & Mildred Collier, and Kimberly Erickson.  

A Legacy of the Arts

New Online Photo Gallery / Studio

 

It's been a long time coming, but I have finally put together an online place for people to browse or purchase my nature photos.  The original idea was as an aid for the homesick Pacific Northwesterner, but anyone can benefit from a nice framed photograph on the wall.

If there's a particular photo (not appearing) that you might be interested in, feel free to reach out.  

I hope to see you around!  

Pacific Northwest Photography by Karl Erickson