We just got back from an incredible 2.5 weeks in South Africa. I have a lot of processing to do… but what I will say for now is that the sunsets in Africa are still the best in the world. Don’t @ me, it’s just science.
Also, here’s a Spotify playlist of chill South African jams that I think you will enjoy. Give it a try!
I’ve always said that when I grow up I want to write like Paul Ford. Well, I’m all grown up now. I still don’t write like Paul Ford, and he still writes absolute gems like To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare—in my opinion the final word on the value of the humanities:
A programmer sneers at the white space in Python, a sociologist rolls their eyes at a geographer, a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory. They, we, are patrolling the borders, deciding what belongs inside, what does not. And this same battle of the disciplines, everlasting, ongoing, eternal, and exhausting, defines the internet. Is blogging journalism? Is fan fiction “real” writing? Can video games be art? (The answer is always: Of course, but not always. No one cares for that answer.)
The Johari Window: A Guide for Leaders by Sheril Mathews is a very helpful post for leaders about a model I wasn’t familiar with:
The Johari Window is a 2x2 matrix that captures how we communicate based on self-knowledge and how others see us. It’s a disclosure-feedback model of awareness based on principles of feedback and learning. It can be used for increasing levels of openness, self-awareness, and self-understanding. This makes the Johari Window a particularly relevant tool for leaders and managers.
Sheril goes on to explain the model in detail, and how to increase the size of the top left corner of the matrix, called “The Arena”:
This is the public space. It’s the part of ourselves—behaviors and feelings—that we’re aware of, and so are others. All information is known to all parties. We move freely within this space and it fosters open communication.
Anne Helen Petersen brings some much-needed clarity to the meeting overload debate in The Root of Over-Meeting Culture. It’s worth reading this one in full because she takes her time to lay out the argument logically, but a few of things especially stood out to me.
When their team was fully in the office, managing probably felt straightforward. Most people managed by, well, looking and walking around. That was the heart of it. Now, figuring out what your team is doing, and how they feel about doing it, it’s a lot more work. So managers not only feel like they’re doing more work — and less productive themselves, as workers — but they also feel like they’re doing a worse job, and have less insight into what their reports are doing.
This is a good point that I don’t see talked about much. One of the reasons that RTO policies have become so prevalent is the lack of visibility that managers feel about the work their teams are doing. There are way better solutions to this problem than forcing a return to the office (regular async updates, clear priorities, etc.), but that seems to be the default approach to deal with what is essentially a communication problem, not a presence problem.
More talk about prioritization = more manager confidence (that their reports are doing the things that matter most) and more employee confidence (that they’re doing what they should be doing). It’s difficult to understate just how powerful this sort of clarity can be.
Related to the previous quote, +1 to this! No one on the team should be wondering if they’re working on the right things, and what they should be doing next. This is, in my opinion, the most important job of the 1:1 meeting, and why that meeting has to be (at least) weekly.
I have all the reservations about AI that other smart people do, but one of its real potentials is summarizing meetings in a way that makes people feel like they understood what happened and whether or not their input is needed after the fact without having to attend the actual meeting.
Another big +1 to this. Gong does this incredibly well by summarizing sales calls, pulling out action items, providing searchable transcripts and call insights, and more.
There are some pretty wild stats in the post about how meeting time has increased 252% since 2020. Some of that is necessary because of the shift to remote work, but not all of it. We somehow still view meetings as the default solution to figuring out what’s going on in an organization. I wrote Good / Bad Remote Worker before the pandemic, but I think this principle is more important than ever:
A good remote worker always thinks about collaboration through the lens of asynchronous communication. Remote work naturally creates great environments for deep, focused work, so it makes sense to optimize for asynchronous communication. This lets everyone get involved when it works best for them — and when they are ready to give something their full attention.
A bad remote worker tries to recreate an open office environment through too many meetings and other forms of synchronous communication. Meetings aren’t inherently bad. But unnecessary meetings and synchronous feedback sessions undermine one of the most significant benefits of remote work and should be used sparingly.
I love Tracy Durnell’s blog—it’s been in my RSS reader for a long time. In Building community out of strangers she makes a case for personal sites to be more… personal.
I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip of sunshine, the stream in the dappled light of an open forest, the neat-looking conjunction of lines on the wall they passed on their morning walk. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff—the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town—on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity—this is too beautiful not to share.
I love that perspective—and this is exactly why I follow so many personal blogs. And yet I’ve always been a little scared to go there on this site. I’m supposed to be a professional! This is work!
Well, I think that 20 years into doing this tech thing for a living it’s time to start sharing a bit more about all my interests, not just the product stuff. So I guess this is your fair warning that you might start to see more of that here!
PS. Tracy also updated her blog roll (remember those!?) and I am definitely going to add one here as well.
My work at Jeli so far has given me a new lens on “incidents”—both in the software world and beyond—that I didn’t have before. These “failures” are everywhere around us. But are they really failures? Or are they ways for us to learn more about the systems we work within, and how to improve them? I think it’s the latter, and My $500M Mars Rover Mistake by Chris Lewicki is another story that showcases that…
The core lesson I’ve drawn from my rover ordeal is best expressed in these words: Let your scars serve you; they are an invaluable learning experience and investment in your capability and resilience.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that we now have brain scan research that shows that Zoom fatigue is a real thing:
The brain and heart readings suggested that videoconferencing led to significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, drowsiness, and negative feelings, as well as less attention and engagement, than a face-to-face lecture. The questionnaires also showed the volunteers felt significantly more tired, drowsy, and fed up and less lively, happy, and active from videoconferencing than face-to-face sessions.
Just so we don’t make the wrong conclusions based on this… the research does not mean that remote work is bad for you. It does mean that we need more communication to be asynchronous, and rely less on synchronous, office-analogous methods of communication when we work remotely.
I wholeheartedly endorse the RawSignal team’s take on performance reviews:
A great performance review is not an evaluation conversation, it’s an alignment conversation. It shouldn’t be a conversation about which things happened, it should be a conversation about which things matter. It’s an opportunity for you and your person to get onto the same page about where you’re seeing the work differently, because that is informative in terms of how the next year is going to feel.
It’s been a bit quiet on the blog lately, so I thought I’d bring back the link roundup thing I used to do quite a bit. Here’s some stuff I read and enjoyed recently outside the regular product/business topics I usually write about here…
Very good summary of The OpenAI Keynote by Ben Thompson. This bit stood out to me:
The fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is acceptable, because to the customer ease-of-use is worth the loss of accuracy.
I’ve been following Craig Mod’s work for over a decade and know what to expect, yet his reflections on “Aloneness” took my breath away.
The real shitter is that if you’ve inured yourself to living in this state of aloneness, it can be difficult to break the habits that have led to it. Aloneness as default becomes comforting, and habits built around aloneness feel palliative because they’re known, and we tend to repeat familiar actions, even if they hurt us.
Great essay by Anne Helen Peterson on how friendship changes over time—including a period she calls “The Friendship Dip”:
Right now, the way our society is organized, we have a prolonged stretch of adulthood that is not conducive to forging or sustaining friendship or community. In many cases, I’d say it’s actually hostile to it.
Everything about the new U2 show sounds amazing. So sad I don’t have tickets.
Zoo TV had predated reality TV, fake news, social media—all these things. Bono had heard about this new venue in Vegas with nearly 20,000 seats, custom sound and an incredible screen that was akin to the whole audience having a VR experience. In the post-Covid era, it was appealing not to have to travel every night
Every new house in Portland uses this font for the house number, and now I can’t get this article out of my head. “The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen”:
As Neutraface house numbers have become too commonplace to ignore, some now associate them (along with gray paint jobs) with neighborhoods overtaken by construction and renovations.
Feels like spam is about to get a lot harder to detect… “Inside the Underground World of Black Market AI Chatbots”:
We’ve got folks who are building LLMs that are designed to write more convincing phishing email scams or allowing them to code new types of malware because they’re trained off the code from previously available malware.
And finally, for my fellow Northerners… “How to light the dark months” has some excellent advice—not just the normal stuff we’ve all read a thousand times.
Lighting winter is an art and a daily practice, an act of survival and a gesture of love. Here are 10 ideas for fighting the gloom in the dark half of the year.
There’s some good insights in this year’s 2023 State of DevOps Report. It’s well worth skimming through. Things like this aren’t exactly surprising, but it’s nice to have some data around it:
Teams with generative cultures, composed of people who felt included and like they belonged on their team, have 30% higher organizational performance than organizations without a generative culture.