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In that case, I have have less confidence in being able to tell what is and isn't passive. I thought that organising teams to invent things would be considered proactive.

Well, all we need was start up a team and told them to do X, while not providing much details or rationale, compounded by splitting our focus across three different projects. I woulda be fine with focusing only on skyslider or sanitation, but not both.

For example, why the heck are we using rivers? There could be settlement shitting in the river. Instead, we could do the smart thing and survey all available water sources and rate them for cleanness, taste, and conveniences.

And maybe we get lucky that we don't have to use Tanaka screws and we can just use gravity flow.

And we also didn't justify in-universe for why we want an aqueduct. Now we have engineers doing what told without being given good reasons to do them.

Also: EJ points out problems I didn't know we have, like defense related issues.
 
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Well, all we need was start up a team and told them to do X, while not providing much details or rationale, compounded by splitting our focus across three different projects. I woulda be fine with focusing only on skyslider or sanitation, but not both.

For example, why the heck are we using rivers? There could be settlement shitting in the river. Instead, we could do the smart thing and survey all available water sources and rate them for cleanness, taste, and conveniences.

And maybe we get lucky that we don't have to use Tanaka screws and we can just use gravity flow.

And we also didn't justify in-universe for why we want an aqueduct. Now we have engineers doing what told without being given good reasons to do them.

But none of what you just said sounds "passive"? Those are just complaints you had earlier about justifications that aren't relevant to passivity vs activity.

We wanted a thing to be done, so we set things in motion to get that thing done. That still sounds active to me.
 
But none of what you just said sounds "passive"? Those are just complaints you had earlier about justifications that aren't relevant to passivity vs activity.

We wanted a thing to be done, so we set things in motion to get that thing done. That still sounds active to me.

We just tell them we wanted X done, and somehow expected X to get done with zero problems. That's not very active at all.

Our jobs is to get ahead of the problem to ensure its smooth progress. We're lucky that we got surprisingly competent subordinates on the skyslider research team and avoided the problems I thought we have. Now we can focus on helping them be faster in prototyping.

Look at aqueduct. What are the problems and obstacles we need to clear?

1) Compromising or creating holes in the walls.
2) Ensuring the cleanest water source is possible. The river is convenient and close, but maybe not very clean.
3) Motivating the civilians to do a good job. That mean giving them clear reasons why they want an aqueduct.
4) Time and money. How can we speed up construction and ensure that the project isn't cost prohibitive?
 
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We just tell them we wanted X done, and somehow expected X to get done with zero problems.

No? Of course there are going to be problems. That's what a design process is: a series of problems that you need to solve. But it seems like you expect Hazou to design the aqueduct personally, when the point of putting together a team of engineers to do it for him is so that he doesn't have to.

EDIT: Let me put it this way: I don't think that building a house yourself is more "active" than hiring a construction crew to build a house for you. It's just more work for the same result, and they both come from a positive action that you decided to take.
 
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No? Of course there are going to be problems. That's what a design process is: a series of problems that you need to solve. But it seems like you expect Hazou to design the aqueduct personally, when the point of putting together a team of engineers to do it for him is so that he doesn't have to.

I am not saying we should solve every tiny problem in engineering and surveying an aqueduct. Part of making plans is that we anticipate problems and place solutions in front of it to ensure its speedy success. That could be design, or it could be project management.

Let go back to skyslider:

I anticipated that prototyping speed to be a potential problem. I want to suggest scale models and emphasize the importance of prototyping. Luckly, I didn't need to do that. The engineers went ahead and smashed my expectation. They prototyped three models within a week, and Kunihiko was methodically documenting everything that flew and trying to figure flight out. Great and fantastic!

Now, they are going to keep prototyping and trying a lot of thing, which is great. How can we help them prototype even faster? We could assign more engineers to the project to design a man powered wind tunnel so that they could do wind tunnel testing of scale models.

Note that we didn't try to solve the minuta of skyslider designs but tried to help it along toward a faster resolution.
 
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I am not saying we should solve every tiny problem in engineering and surveying an aqueduct. Part of making plans is that we anticipate problems and place solutions in front of it to ensure its speedy success. That could be design, or it could be project management.

Let go back to skyslider:

I anticipated that prototyping speed to be a potential problem. I want to suggest scale models and emphasize the importance of prototyping. Luckly, I didn't need to do that. The engineers went ahead and smashed my expectation. They prototyped three models within a week, and Kunihiko was methodically documenting everything that flew and trying to figure flight out. Great and fantastic!

Now, they are going to keep prototyping and trying a lot of thing, which is great. How can we help them prototype even faster? We could assign more engineers to the project to design a man powered wind tunnel so that they could do wind tunnel testing of scale models.

Note that we didn't try to solve the minuta of skyslider designs but tried to help it along toward a faster resolution.

But this is again getting away from the actual point, which is "in what sense is assembling a team to solve a problem for you 'passive'?". My position is that it isn't. It's not like we spent the update discussing with the clan over whether or not we should commit resources to getting the problem solved. We just went ahead and did it. And I thought that sort of thing was exactly what the QMs wanted.
 
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Estate
  • Proclaim Uplift as the Goketsu Clan philosophy.
    • Goal: Give everyone in our clan a reason to go above and beyond for our cause.
    • Main thrust: This world may be a cold, dark, and unforgiving forest, but we will give everything we have to clear a space for all of us, civilian and ninja alike to thrive.
    • We must all give everything we have for this dream of a better world.
We might want to also emphasize how uplift is compatible with the Will of Fire, or people might start thinking we're being heretics.


Ebisu
  • Act reasonably with regards to our long-term goals.
This seems a little vague to me. Might want to clarify what reasonable actions we want to take.
 
If you use the vote tally, something's probably going to get fucked something firece, so I'm going to repost my plan after the update just in case.

Also, I realized that if the timeline is going to be one week, 1 Brevity XP is honestly not worth that much in exchange for making a more complete plan with better scene opportunities. (I just want @eaglejarl to write more updates in the style of The Strange Life of Goketsu Haru dammit)

[X] Action Plan: Structural Reforms
Wordcount: 399

Run ideas past the clan where applicable.
  • Ebisu
    • Act reasonably with regards to our long-term goals.
  • Estate
    • Proclaim Uplift as the Goketsu Clan philosophy.
      • Goal: Give everyone in our clan a reason to go above and beyond for our cause.
      • Main thrust: This world may be a cold, dark, and unforgiving forest, but we will give everything we have to clear a space for all of us, civilian and ninja alike to thrive.
      • We must all give everything we have for this dream of a better world.
  • Kagome​
    • Get clearance for sealwork - at least blank production, possibly research.​
      • Do whatever is necessary to do so.​
    • If cleared, begin research into chakdar.​
  • Reforms​
    • Projects:
      • Sanitation
      • Goketsu and affiliates ninja working conditions.
      • Goketsu civilian living standards.
    • Apply the following process to all projects.
      • Team-building
        • Convene a commission to study the problem.
          • Sanitation:
            • Include local residents, medical experts, and us.
          • Ninja working conditions:
            • Empower Haru, Atomu, and Reo to conduct review of possible improvements.
              • Suggest they adopt a similar structure.
          • Civilian conditions:
            • Empower civilian leaders for this purpose.
              • Give explicit, signed, and legal contracts to permit them to speak frankly to us with no risk of retribution.
        • Construct the problem.
          • Get every stakeholder (including us) to be able to answer:
            • Why do the problems matter?
            • For whom do they matter to?
            • Who needs to care more?
            • What will a place with better conditions be like?
              • What would be a measurable end-goal look (or smell) like?
        • Deconstruct the problem into solvable root causes, creating a branching diagram.
          • Based on which root problems are more solvable than others, create an initial, limited, and detailed plan of action.
            • The plan should be limited to a week.
            • Execute.
      • At the first iteration end time, meet with the team.
        • Evaluate:
          • What worked.
          • What we learned about implementation, assumptions, and the landscape for change.
          • What our next steps are.
        • Make sure to write down notes in the meeting to maintain institutional knowledge.
      • Begin spreading the word about our efforts - and successes! - in various reforms, according to the project.
        • Goals:
          • Create network of people interested in our successes
          • Create network of authorizers when we look to export the reforms
        • Key constituencies:
          • Tower
          • KEI
          • ISC
          • Clan members (not Clan Heads!)
          • Civilian neighborhood leaders
      • Draft new plans of action with a similarly limited timeframe, implementing recorded lessons.
        • Execute.
You missed a key step. We also need to ensure that we meet with everyone working on our values projects daily. In order to ensure that the meeting stays on topic, we should encourage everyone to stay standing during that time. We could even give it a pithy name, like standing up time.
 
[X] Action Plan: The Will Of Uplift
WordCount:134

Run ideas past the clan if possible
  • Ebisu
    • Act reasonably with regards to our long-term goals.
  • Haru: Clarify Uplift, your will to change the world
    -Stress Haru's freedom to choose, it's not an order
    -He must know, how wrong the world is
    -Does he want to change this unfair world?
    -Ask Haru to join Uplift
  • Sky-slider Team:
    -Talk with them, try to see how receptive to Uplift they are
    -Who is capable? Get to know them
    -Reasoning: You are but one men, you need a team, you people that can help you make reality of your vision and comrades to help change the world
    -In short, find the ones that will be your trusted helpers,in the future, the will of uplift won't grow by ninja hands alone
  • Tsunade: Organize a meeting, not urgent

Basically, actually recruit Haru in Uplift, Start creating a team of trusted civilians(For now the engineering team) and start organizing a meeting with Tsunade for a long term alliance: 2/3 Scenes(depending on the Ebisu one), all in my opinion interesting.
Also, finally posting my first plan after times and times of stopping short of making one.

EDIT: Praise Kos The QMs!For it granted me Eyes Now i too can wordcount plans!
 
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but I'm not particularly invested as long as we get a Noburi/Yuno date in the next update
Unlikely to be onscreen. I'm simply not feeling it.

I hope it's on autopilot. But if we made the first monthly payment 1 month after talking to him on Jan 19-21, that's Feb 19-21 which is after Oro. So we might have never set it up in the autopilot system. Hopefully Mari remembered. Whereas if we made the monthly payment on Feb 1, when we played with Naruto, than Mari needed to have paid him. Hopefully we told Mari about our deal with Ebisu.
As a general rule, you can assume that offscreened simple commitments like paying bills will be handled.

Also, I realized that if the timeline is going to be one week, 1 Brevity XP is honestly not worth that much in exchange for making a more complete plan with better scene opportunities
I strongly suggest against this idea. The brevity bonus exists because 300 word plans USUALLY can fit within the bounds of what @Velorien and I can write in one update. Writing longer plans just means we don't get to everything, and that gets annoying (at least for me).

In that case, I have have less confidence in being able to tell what is and isn't passive. I thought that organising teams to invent things would be considered proactive.
EDIT: Let me put it this way: I don't think that building a house yourself is more "active" than hiring a construction crew to build a house for you. It's just more work for the same result, and they both come from a positive action that you decided to take.
Okay, that's an entirely fair point. Let me see if I can find different language, since you're right that "active" isn't the right word. Really, what I'm looking for is a word that encapsulates "fun to write, by my particular selfish standards."

Not-exhaustive list of various factors that contribute to making things fun to write:
  • Agency
  • Initiative
  • Impact on the world
  • Risk of failure
  • Consequences for failure
  • Escapism. Writing about ninja solving problems with magic is more exciting than writing about some guy having a meeting over donuts and coffee
  • Inspiring speeches
You don't need all of these, but more is usually better.

Compare:

"Go out into the monster-infested woods and punch monsters in the face so that they leave you alone long enough to use MEW to build an aqueduct."

vs

"Hire some guys and have a meeting to figure out how to build an aqueduct."


The second is much more logical and likely to work, but it also lacks any excitement.


Kunihiko was methodically documenting everything that flew and trying to figure flight out. Great and fantastic
Note that the vast majority of what he's documenting is utterly useless. Color, provenance, texture, etc. He doesn't know what's important, so he's writing down absolutely everything he can think of.


EDIT:

SV says 141 title included, but i don't what method the QMs use to count words
Google docs word counter, and the title isn't included.
 
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I would prefer to vote for 200-word plans, ideally even shorter as shorter plans tend to be more focused and interesting as a result.
 
Compare:

"Go out into the monster-infested woods and punch monsters in the face so that they leave you alone long enough to use MEW to build an aqueduct."

vs

"Hire some guys and have a meeting to figure out how to build an aqueduct."

(considers)

To be fair, we can definitely do that first one once the design team gives us a blueprint for where best to MEW. That sound like a good idea to anyone?
 
Note that the vast majority of what he's documenting is utterly useless. Color, provenance, texture, etc
Writes down... "Wind spirits are colorblind, lack a sense of touch, and don't care about history"

Escapism. Writing about ninja solving problems with magic is more exciting than writing about some guy having a meeting over donuts and coffee
What, writing about Hazō reinventing agile project management and running stand up meetings isn't thrilling and exciting to you?

Fun fact: At the start of the month, my wife and I started doing agile management for our household. Turns out it's actually really effective at getting stuff done, moreso than anything else we've tried so far.
 
Compare:

"Go out into the monster-infested woods and punch monsters in the face so that they leave you alone long enough to use MEW to build an aqueduct."

vs

"Hire some guys and have a meeting to figure out how to build an aqueduct."
So, uh...if we did both would it satisfy you? Like, if we had the boring meetings but also the punching, would you be happy writing the latter with the former being implied to have happened?
 
Writes down... "Wind spirits are colorblind, lack a sense of touch, and don't care about history"
That seems optimistic. Some useless properties are likely to be correlated with gliding, either by random chance and experimental noise, or as consistent byproduct of common cause - e.g. light and heavy materials originating from different suppliers.
 
We could just go and start the scroll hunt. Go make contact with Jiraiya's contacts at the Shrine and start feeling things out. Would be an active plan
 
Just to be clear, @eaglejarl, Hazou having forgotten about Ebisu is still accurate given this line?
"—putting together the curriculum for the new school that I'm building here on the property, negotiating with Ebisu to continue his training program for the five of his KEI students who survived the Collapse, reviewing Mari's suggestions about what to do with the Merchant Council—"
 
What, writing about Hazō reinventing agile project management and running stand up meetings isn't thrilling and exciting to you?
Agile is actually really elegant and impressive with all the feedback loops and fault tolerance built into it. Its possible to do nearly everything wrong and still have it sort of work. I personally find it interesting just from the perspective of how its designed. I'm super fun at parties.
 
Are you feeling Hazou converting Yuno to Uplift via an inspiring speech?
Right now? I just got to work on a Friday and am already ready for it to be over. Not feeling stoked about much of anything right now. :p

Just to be clear, @eaglejarl, Hazou having forgotten about Ebisu is still accurate given this line?
Yes. It's the "didn't come to mind" type of forgetting, not the "information is not in my brain when I look for it" type of forgetting. i.e. What I did wrt Ebisu.
 
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As a general rule, you can assume that offscreened simple commitments like paying bills will be handled.
Sure. It's just that Hazou forgetting about Ebisu made me worry whether this would be an exception to the general rule.
"Go out into the monster-infested woods and punch monsters in the face so that they leave you alone long enough to use MEW to build an aqueduct."
Would you still enjoy this if it was a ninja we hired for the aqueduct construction who did this, instead of Hazou himself?
 
First Plan, so I'm not really sure if it works.

[X] Action Plan: Conferences and Conflagrations
Wordcount: 248
  • Talk with Mari about Noburi, maybe she has insight to why he's hedging so much around Yuno
    • Concern for our brother, he's better than this
    • Yuno's a good friend and deserves better
  • Check with Asuma if Ino is cleared to know about Isan.
  • Talk with Ino
    • Explain Noburi/Yuno weirdness, with or without fine details as per Hokage approval
      • if not, admit to a Tower-restriction on certain specifics. Honesty is Hazou's thing and Ino is trustworthy friend and Leaf Citizen.
    • Ask for help settling things with those two
      • two heads are better than one
      • Maybe have those two talk it out over a meal, with us there to help mediate?
    • Honestly state, without CCnJ
      • Hazou knows he's earnest but is self aware enough to know he's not subtle. This requires a delicate touch, something that we're not that good at
      • While setting those two up for marriage would be nice, that's not the goal. We see two good friends in pain because of things left unsaid and their pain causes us pain.
      • We trust Ino
  • Check with Kagome, are we still influenced by the Out?
  • Discuss Scroll Options with Clan
  • Leave instructions for Secretaries to set up meeting with Ebisu, then go into the monster-infested woods with Yuno and beat monsters in the face
    • Stress Relief
    • Bonding with a good friend
    • Also makes monsters leave us alone long enough to use MEW to build an aqueduct.
 
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word count: 256
[X] Action plan: The quest for the scroll
  • Run ideas past the clan where applicable.
    • Meet with Ebisu. Get the results of his training.
      • We'd like to see a demonstration of his results.
      • If appropriate, send a report to Asuma.
    • Clan discussion: Condors.
      • If the Scroll's taken, Conjura won't be cooperative because Leaf also houses the Pangolins. It'll be caldera'd for Pangolin support or lay fallow until Conjura's hunted down (which may take years).
      • However, an elite social-spec might manage to negotiate for powerful jutsu/summoning contracts in exchange for moderating Pangolin aggression or (clandestinely) providing Conjura resources.
      • If Mari'd be up to it, get her OK to present the idea to Asuma.
    • Summoning Scroll Hunt:
      • We have the information needed to start the mission.
      • Final preparations:
        • Prepare disguise kits.
        • Pay any reasonable amount to recruit some firepower/support. Possibilities:
          • Mari:
            • Pros: Works best with the team, incredibly talented.
            • Cons: Retired, might not be able to spare her from political work.
          • Snake:
            • Pros: Good relations, talented.
            • Cons: ANBU.
          • Anko:
            • Pros: Social-spec, Mari's friend.
            • Cons: Is Anko.
          • Tsunade:
            • Pros: Most talented ninja available.
            • Cons: Difficult to recruit.
          • Other ninja? Follow the clan/Mari's recommendations.
      • Send recruited ninja with Hazō, Akane, and Haru to Todoroki Shrine.
        • Enter the town disguised as merchants or religious supplicants.
          • See if we can get on a boat for the last leg of our journey, we could disguise ourselves as sailors.
        • Meet with Jiraiya's contacts. Look for anyone who came from Sky or Moon in the past 20 years, civilian or ninja.
    • Have a clan member turn in Jiraiya's notes if we aren't back by the end of the contest.
 
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