{"id":1803,"date":"2018-01-09T22:24:14","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T21:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1803"},"modified":"2019-10-04T17:50:41","modified_gmt":"2019-10-04T16:50:41","slug":"the-art-of-rounding-things-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1803","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Rounding Things Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a large part of my early career spent designing and testing telecoms billing systems, one of the inexact sciences that I still find intriguing is the word: “rounding”.\u00a0 I remember one client making millions of extra pounds with the Finance Director requiring their new system to round-up every recorded minute as opposed to rounding them down – even though it was against the regulations.<\/p>\n

Yet rounding errors and rounding up and down is a small part of the “art of rounding things out”.\u00a0 The circle is probably the most drawn, painted and elegant symbol in Art that continues to enthral us, whatever age, gender, colour or creed we are:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Source:\u00a0https:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/jhilts\/round\/)<\/em><\/p>\n

Rounding things out is an almost innate human need.\u00a0 And some are better at it than others!\u00a0 Indeed Belbin allocated one of his nine famous team roles to the “completer finisher” – defined as follows:<\/p>\n

The Completer-Finisher<\/strong> is most effectively used at the end of tasks to polish and scrutinise the work for errors, subjecting it to the highest standards of quality control.<\/p>\n

Strengths:<\/strong>\u00a0Painstaking, conscientious, anxious. Searches out errors. Polishes and perfects.<\/p>\n

Allowable weaknesses:<\/strong>\u00a0Can be inclined to worry unduly, and reluctant to delegate.<\/p>\n

Don’t be surprised to find that:<\/strong>\u00a0They could be accused of taking their perfectionism to extremes.<\/p>\n

(Source:\u00a0http:\/\/www.belbin.com\/about\/belbin-team-roles\/<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

Surely a very useful person to have on any team – particularly as the team comes to the end of a task?\u00a0 Somehow, though, in the modern world, completer-finishers do not seem to be so highly valued.\u00a0 Technology firms with meteoric values and no customers just want to get on and create the next feature.\u00a0 Dreams and visions win over completed circles.<\/p>\n

The recent big storms hitting North Western Europe was another reminder for me that we continue to pollute our oceans with plastic – and that we are taking\u00a0very little effective action to curb the rising trend of more and more plastic being dumped daily into the ocean.<\/p>\n

Any rising consciousness of rounding things out is increasingly drowned out by the advertising industry pushing for the convenience of fast food and throw-away packaging.\u00a0 “Someone else’s problem.\u00a0 Let me get on with my life.\u00a0 I’ve got too much else to worry about than where my rubbish will end up!\u00a0 In any case, I don’t have the space for all those extra sorting bins in my tiny flat!”\u00a0 Roughly the words from a forty-something London urban female I met recently.\u00a0 She comes from a different planet from the one I live on.<\/p>\n

I suppose that some of my angst on this subject stems from spending a year in Berlin in 1980.\u00a0 If it could be fed to the pigs, it was.\u00a0 Otherwise, if it was rubbish, it was very carefully disposed of by folding it up or squashing it.\u00a0 Disposal of rubbish was very expensive because the number of landfill sites inside The Wall were scarce.\u00a0 Programmed about such things in my early ’20s, I suppose I have kept a consciousness that most London forty-somethings would think quite abnormal.<\/p>\n

I’ve never particularly seen myself as having the characteristics of a completer-finisher.\u00a0 However, the older I get, the more concerned I am becoming over the lack of importance attached to round things out.\u00a0 Indeed, after a recent Circular Business Design workshop we ran, I coined a new term “Telosonance” meaning “having concern for where something might end up”.\u00a0 From the Greek word “Telos” meaning objective or end-result” and an ending sounding like resonance, it creates a word for something that we don’t seem to have in everyday use in the English language.<\/p>\n

Maybe the “art of rounding things out” is a similar idea as Telosonance?\u00a0 Except that it is the consequential action<\/strong> that follows a concern or feeling that things, people or places are not lined-up to complete the disposal of the\u00a0thing-in-question in an elegant way\u00a0 – in other words – “to round things out”.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure the Finance Director of the dodgy telecoms company that I worked with those many years ago would have worried about any of this, but it is a subject that is close to my heart at the moment.\u00a0 I truly believe that we need to applaud the ways that completer-finishers think about problems.\u00a0 Sooner or later, we are all going to have to worry about where things end up and help find elegant ways to round-out and clear up the mess that we have made over the past 100 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a large part of my early career spent designing and testing telecoms billing systems, one of the inexact sciences that I still find intriguing is the word: “rounding”.\u00a0 I remember one client making millions of extra pounds with the Finance Director requiring their new system to round-up every recorded minute as opposed to rounding … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Art of Rounding Things Out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[116,80,40,32,36,51,57],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DQGK-t5","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1327,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1327","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":0},"title":"Mirror > Signal > Manoeuvre","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"15\/08\/2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The speed awareness course that I wrote about last week focused on stopping distances. Since then, I have been thinking a bit more about reaction times - because that is the part that, as a driver, you control. \u00a0Once you put your foot on the brake pedal, it is all\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Attention"","block_context":{"text":"Attention","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=78"},"img":{"alt_text":"Rear-View-Mirror-Sky","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lornemitchell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Rear-View-Mirror-Sky-300x198.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1435,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1435","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":1},"title":"Into the Vortex","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"24\/07\/2014","format":false,"excerpt":"After the feeling of being stuck. Of being bogged-down. Of going round and round in circles, the thought\u00a0changes. \u00a0What if round-and-round gets you somewhere? Life flows. Events line up. Coincidences happen without any effort. Dreams start to crystalise in elegant ways that you had not expected. \u00a0You deepen your ideas\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Ideas"","block_context":{"text":"Big Ideas","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=42"},"img":{"alt_text":"Water twirl 20110903-7(210).jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lornemitchell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/4185211-small-copy-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1599,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1599","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":2},"title":"Zen and the Art of Business Conversation","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"06\/08\/2015","format":false,"excerpt":"It is August and the holidays are here! \u00a0For many, July and August are the months for rest and recuperation and spending time with family on holiday. \u00a0For those that live in the northern parts of the Northern hemisphere, it is a time for getting some sun on our skins\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Art"","block_context":{"text":"Art","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=69"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lornemitchell.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/IMG_0532-225x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=7","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":3},"title":"Form Follows Function – or does it?","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"11\/06\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Louis Sullivan, the American architect is said to be the person who originally coined the phrase in 1896, in his article \u201cThe Tall Office Building Artistically Considered\u201d. The full text is as follows: It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, Of all things physical and metaphysical,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Design"","block_context":{"text":"Design","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=5"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1789,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=1789","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":4},"title":"The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"13\/12\/2017","format":false,"excerpt":"It's fascinating how aspects of Westernised Zen philosophy came out of Hitler's Germany. Below is the link to a paper called \"The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery\" with some extracts below that to prove the point. http:\/\/citeseerx.ist.psu.edu\/\u2026\/download;jsessionid=CB13F300\u2026 'Eugen Herrigel\u2019s \u201cZen in the Art of Archery\u201d has been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Envisioning"","block_context":{"text":"Envisioning","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=40"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":130,"url":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?p=130","url_meta":{"origin":1803,"position":5},"title":"When it’s Time to Quit","author":"Lorne Mitchell","date":"26\/08\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the first of a new series of \"Thursday Thoughts\".\u00a0 Please do sign up for future editions by completing the form on the THURSDAY THOUGHTS? tab above and I will send you an email in the future every Thursday to stimulate your thoughts! Having spent a few weeks struggling\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Architecture"","block_context":{"text":"Architecture","link":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/?cat=35"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1863,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1803\/revisions\/1863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lornemitchell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}