Weeknotes #276

Roger on 12/11/2021

Photo of the week:

Dinosaur footprint

What I did this week:

Build time

My focus this week has been on tying up loose ends to give the development teams clarity and a good foundation of knowledge to get into coding. Three teams working on three different systems at the same time and all coming together to create the product. After the past few months of design work it feels good to see the building start.

FutureSkills

I started FutureSkills, a guided learning email course (of sorts) about developing the twenty skills research from Nesta says will be more important for a successful future career. So far, I’ve set up the website and email automation and am working on the content for the emails. My target audience is those working for large corporates going through a digital transformation who want to develop the skills to improve their career in that type of organisation. It’s a bit of test for applying creator economy techniques outside the creator economy. I’m hoping to get the emails written by the end of the year and keep telling myself that I’ll actually market this project.

Irregular Ideas

I sent the third email for Irregular Ideas. Still finding it interesting to write about random ideas but I’m not doing anything to promote it and get new subscribers. I need to figure out how to split my time better so that I spend time marketing these projects otherwise I’ll never learn what works.

Blog every day

As part of NoBloPoMo I’ve blogged every day in November so far. None of them are great blog posts, they are all much more about exploring and expressing ideas. Using the NoBloPoMo thing as a motivator has been really helpful in getting me to put the extra bit of effort into writing up my thoughts and posting them, which I wouldn’t have otherwise done. The goal, through posting every day, is to build the habit of turning my thoughts into blog posts. This doesn’t mean carrying on with blogging every day, just with not stopping with thinking about thinking, but to actually do something actionable with the thoughts. This attempt feels more successful than my October attempt which I got backwards and was thinking of things to write blog posts about rather than thinking about things and then writing about them.

What I thought about:

Most of the things I thought about I turned into blog posts, but thoughts that haven’t made it that far yet…

Roadmaps

I rewatched C. Todd Lombardo’s Mind The Product talk on roadmaps as I’ve been thinking about them a bit this week. I’ve been wondering if part of the confusion with roadmaps is that we usually start with the artifact of the roadmap and then try to back fill it in order to make it make sense. What if we started with a list of pre-requisites and you can’t start your roadmap until you have those things.

Doing & failing

How do we learn? Do we learn by doing. Or do we learn more from doing and failing? I do all the projects I do, mostly as an opportunity to explore ideas, but also to learn. But I’m not sure what I want to learn. Is the doing of the projects sufficient for learning or do I need to get better at feedback loops?

Craft

Craft is such as interesting concept when thinking about the modern, efficient, process-driven workplace. We want people to be good at their their work but do we want them to become crafts people? Julian Shapiro’s says craftspeople, “make work the best it can be”, Ray Dalio says, “contribute to the whole and you will likely be rewarded”, and I’ve been trying to develop some ideas about connected work where the way we work optimises the system of the organisation rather than focusing on individual contributions. Our old idea of a crafts person as being a singular master of what they do is quickly becoming out of date. The craftsperson is the one that affects the whole system the most.

And read this week:

Posthuman Thinking

I watched this Introduction to Posthuman Thinking by Kay Sidebottom. I’ve been interested in Posthuman ideas for a while, thanks to Kay. For me, posthuman thinking and it’s move to decentralise the human being (especially the able white male representation of it) provides the philosophical underpinning for the move to systems-shifting product design. It’s important stuff.

Trends

I’ve known about Trends.vc for a while but never looked into it. There are lots of interesting reports on Productized Services, Digital Products and No-Code.

My reading list

Almost everything I read I add to this list.

Growth area this week:

Showing & telling

I’m increasingly realising that I have a gap in my skills about how I show work rather than telling about it. I’m not sure how best to approach it but I’ll keep thinking about it.

Mission and measurement don’t mix

Roger on 12/11/2021

On one hand, we hear organisations talk about mission and vision, goals and direction. Abstract things. Intangible and immeasurable. Lofty ideas and ideal outcomes.

On the other hand, those same organisations want to know the schedule, measure the progress, manage the resources. Concrete, tangible things. Outputs. Inventory.

Philosophically, this distinction is thousands of years old. Heraclitus thought that everything changes all the time, that the world is in constant flux. For him, intangible things that are constantly in a state of becoming, much like the sometimes unachievable missions of organisations, can never be, they can never materialise. Parmenides viewed reality as static. In his world you can measure things, they are predictable. It is his thinking on which we built most of our scientific knowledge and our ability to measure the world and our activities in it.

The problem isn’t us having these two views on the world or wanting to have a vision of what could be achieved and a schedule for achieving it, the problem is expecting to be able translate between them. Our organisations can have a mission, and they can measure and manage their efforts, but we can never connect the two. The schedule doesn’t tell us if we’re heading in the right direction. Mission and management don’t mix.

Non Functional Knowledge

Roger on 11/11/2021

Non Functional Requirements are used in software systems design to describe how, and sometimes how well, a system does what it’s supposed to do. They might include things like reliability, security, usability, or anything else that sets the constraints and restrictions for what the system does. They are different from functional requirements which describe what the system should do.

Maybe social systems like teams and organisations require Non Functional Knowledge in how and how well their systems behave. Maybe the depth of Non Functional Knowledge of those acting on and being acted on within the system has a bearing on how successful the system operates.

We need to know more than just what the work is, we need to know how to do it, how to do it well, and how to do it as part of an interconnected system that involves lots of other people.

Copy and paste

Roger on 10/11/2021

Copy and paste is probably the most impactful productivity tool in the modern workplace.

Imagine not having it. Think about having the rewrite everything that you want to move within a document or from one document to another every time.

Now imagine what more we could copy and paste. Think about what copy and paste actually enables and what it means for how we conceive of work.

Copy and paste, of text and images, of templates, but more importantly of ideas, means not having to start from scratch every time. It means always being able to build on what went before because what went before can be easily taken into a new context. Copy and paste is a ratchet mechanism that enables progress to occur, work to become more efficient, ideas to build and grow.

Every time you creating something new, ask yourself how you can do so in a way that makes it easy to copy and paste next time you need it.

Replacing isolated work with networked work

Roger on 09/11/2021

There are two ways to do undertake a role. In an isolated way or in a networked way.

Working in isolation sees the job as having a defined remit of only doing the work that your job title implies or your job description defines. It regards individuals as separate from each other and producing discrete outputs that are then used by others acting in isolated ways.

Working in a networked way sees the role as part of an interconnected system. It means working to improve how the organisation works as a whole ahead of what works for the individual. Connected working contributes to the overall activities and performance of the system, it recognises that global optimisation is a better goal than local efficiency.

How do we work in more networked ways? Smaller and less self-conscious contributions might be way. Collaboratively producing a document might be a small example. Recognising that there is organisational gain to be achieved by sharing knowledge could be another. Informal coaching and feedback between lots more people.

Once it’s on the internet you can’t get it back

Roger on 08/11/2021

I had a slightly surreal phone call. It was from someone inquiring about something I’d been involved a few years ago. After the call I wondered about how they found my number. A quick Google search and I found lots of websites had my phone number. In promoting the thing I’d been working on I had added my phone to a website. Lots of other websites scraped that website and so it’s data became their data.

A product manager, or someone assuming the responsibilities of a product manager, made choices about how those websites were going to work. They considered ‘their user’ as the person visiting their website and wanted to provide a wide range of information. They assumed that data on the public web is free for all to use. And they probably didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about the original owner of the data, how they should have some control over how that data is used, and what problematic or harmful things could result from it being used in ways they didn’t intend.

Today, product managers working with public data sets or building products that allow users to share information about themselves publicly have no excuse for not considering the wider impacts of their choices. It’s irresponsible to assume that because data is open for all to see that this means it’s free for all to use. It’s irresponsible to push the responsibility for making those choices onto users and not inform them of the risks or give them the tools to manage the data they share.

Luckily for me, the thing I was working on was very niche so I don’t expect much interest and I’m pretty good at ignoring phone calls, but it made me think about how once we’ve added something to the internet we lose control over where it goes and how it’s used.

Your attention isn’t yours

Roger on 07/11/2021

Meetings distracts our attention, making it hard to achieve purposeful work. Advertising grabs our attention, convincing us to buy things. Economists and information management theorists pontificate on attention, attempting to understand how we use this limited resource.

A World Economic Forum study says that every day we send 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, and 65 billion WhatsApp messages. “By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally – that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day!” There is too much data, too much content, for anyone to even make sense of, much less make use of. What should we pay attention to?

Trite advice tells us to ‘focus on the present’ or ‘pay attention to what matters’, but in the constant stream of things coming our way that do in fact need our attention, the trick is not to give it over to one thing but to be able to make conscious, informed choices to shift it to where it is needed for that moment.

But what if our attention isn’t really ours. What if attention is only the result of having something to pay attention to. What if, without things to distract us from our work and convince us to buy things we have no attention. So perhaps the most important skill we can learn, then, is that of where and how to place that attention in response to all those things and move on as the next new thing asks for attention without becoming overwhelmed.