We get frustrated when we undertake activities when we cannot see the value they derive. Inevitably this is the response of our team as well. Everyone wants to be doing things of value. The goal then is to make sure you can draw the line between those that do generate value (focus on those) and those that don’t (eliminate those too) and ensure you are doing the same for your team.
Someone can tell me that putting my hand on fire is going to hurt. I don’t need to experience it for myself – whether I know you or not – I’ve seen what it can do to a piece of wood and can draw the conclusion myself, irrespective of how well I know you. However, when the scenarios are less than known, how much we trust the source doling out the knowledge adjusts how much…
It’s a statement we often say to ourselves as we sit in a meeting that we aren’t speaking in and aren’t contributing too. As the meeting progresses, we say it more and more to ourselves, over and over again. It’d be rude to just get up and leave and call it a day (you wouldn’t do that in person, remotely, some might notice). The key is in evaluating next time and politely decline. Meetings aren’t…
The running joke was that people who didn’t understand technology didn’t reset their VCR clocks. And yet we did it for our alarm clocks, no worries. It’s not because we didn’t have enough knowledge to read the manual, but rather more likely that users in general determined there was no need for a VCR to have a clock when many had a watch and/or were committed to not needing to know the time. When DVD…
In comic books, we call it the gutters – the spaces between panels where the reader envisions the transition, things happening, work being down, and actions happening. In software, this is the space between the tickets you are assigned to work on and the code you write. The gutter exists, stuff happens between those two things, thinking emerges, design happens, and we don’t always know what it all is, but it happens there – it’s…