Let’s start off defining what I mean by “rubber wall”. A rubber wall is anything that feels like the more you push, the more you are pushed back. It’s very different from solid walls, which are those that you feel the solidity right as soon as you touch them. Rubber walls tend to be much more solid than regular walls, but the problem is that you don’t see that at the beginning, because when you are testing a wall you are just applying a little pressure to see what happens and rubber walls give you the (wrong) feeling that they are easy to push and go thru.

Of course, the above is a social metaphor.

A rubber wall is a person that wants people to feel they are wide open but, at the very end, they are not.

I have a problem with rubber walls. I don’t start with a confrontational attitude, but I do like confrontations when respectful and open minded. Interestingly enough, rubber walls give the impression they are respect and open minded at first (unlike solid walls), but at the end, it turns out that it’s much easier to confront with solid walls then with rubber walls.

I’m starting to model academia as a labyrinth of rubber walls.

I was lucky enough to get exposed to the growth of a complex process (the apache software foundation) since very young, before having experienced any other process, and still with the naive feeling that processes are just invented by incompetent people to keep the status quo. I was lucky enough to appreciate how process can help and how simplicity is not an objective metric by far (which is why everybody thinks a process is more complex than it needs to be, but the people that actually made it).

And this is why I do started to appreciate politics as a process and why I can appreciate the complexity of the MIT organizational diagram and why I can go out with people from business school without feeling like an alien landed from another plant (which is how scientists turn out to be at times).

The problem is that I get frustrated with rubber walls. I never learned how to deal with them. In the ASF there are all the solid walls you want, but just a few rubber walls and those appear to be in key positions (of course, because of their very nature)

I tried pushing very hard to break them, but it didn’t really work: rubber walls are not just solid walls that turned flexible overtime, it’s just the way they are.And they are flexible exactly because they hate confrontation so much that if you force them into one, they are going to stand firm with even more intensity and push you away. The process can continue almost forever.

Cutting holes doesn’t work either, those walls are terribly compact, even if highly flexible. And, sometimes, these rubber walls are actually an entire set of layers of rubber walls, you drill a hole thru one and there it is another one right after.

The only way I was able to deal with rubber walls in the past was to sit there and wait for them to disappear. Eventually it works, just takes a looooong time and lots of trust in what you are doing (my continuous state of self-questioning doesn’t really help there).

Now, the question is: should I invest time and energy to understand how to route around rubber walls or I should just sit back, relax and try to have a good time even if this means not get anything done in my job?

Oh, BTW, yes, I admit: I am a rubber wall myself.