Weeknotes #265

Admin on 27/08/2021

Photo of the week

Great Wheal Charlotte

All that’s left of a now abandoned tin and copper mine on the Cornish coast.

This week I did:

Turning dreams into reality

I think a product managers job is to turn dreams into reality, ideas into things, abstract concepts into real understanding. Usually that means bringing those dreams crashing down. In reality, things take longer and are more complicated than people’s ideas and expectations. I’ve spent quite a lot of time this week trying to let people down gently as I smash their dreams of a perfect product that automates all the boring work, achieves operational efficiencies, and provides mind-blowing user experience. Such is the process of gathering and refining requirements, distilling and filtering them down into a manageable scope of work.

The end is nigh

I’ve been working on the introduction and conclusion for my dissertation, and hope to put all the sections together and finish it this weekend. I’ve learned a lot from it and reached conclusions I didn’t think I would. I will be glad when it’s done but I’m also going to miss studying and the pressure it puts on me so I’ll definitely need to think carefully about what I focus on in the coming months.

I thought about:

The future of influence at work

Gaining influence at work used to be about people getting to know people, and it’s still very much that way in meeting-orientated organisations, but as remote work shifts towards more asynchronous communications methods the way we build our influence at work will change. Influence will come from written and pictorial communication rather than spoken. People will demonstrate the quality of their thinking in how they create diagrams or write convincingly, rather than ow they talk in meetings. It starts to make influence somehow more evidence-based than using relying on social cues. Written language, although still completely open to interpretation and misunderstanding, has more of an agreed understanding, but visual communication requires learning a new language. All the concepts of design; information architecture, use of space, size, proportion, etc., it all becomes necessary to understand into to understand the diagrams. So, influence through visual work isn’t as easy as just using images, diagrams and maps.

Selection mechanisms

I could call this a ‘prioritisation method’, but the word prioritisation is so overused that it’s lost meaning, so I prefer to call the stuff I’ve been thinking about ‘selection mechanisms’. It’s basically about choosing the right criteria to judge something by and how you get information for each criteria to make the judgement. The three criteria for the selection mechanism I’ve been using this week were: How essential is it? How complex is it? How certain is it? So, for example, if a requirement is essential, doesn’t have lots of variation to make it complex, and is well understood to make it certain, then we’ll put it in scope. Why three? Because we usually have two criteria, e.g., the Impact Effort matrix, because it makes it easier to represent in a diagram, and I want to explore how having three dimensions leads to better more nuanced decisions.

Game theory for project planning

What if, rather than project planning being able coming up with ‘the one and only plan for how things are supposed to work out’, we used game theory scenario planning to explore multiple ways projects could work out. What if, all the people who are on the project and a few others to play external actors, played out hypothetical scenarios for different ways the project could happen. And what if our understanding of project plans was based on possibilities and potential outcomes rather than things being fixed and changes being considered deviations?

And read:

Charity management

I started reading Charity Management: Leadership, Evolution, and Change by Sarah Mitchell. It is full of challenging questions, like ‘are charities making a significant difference?’ and ‘can they do better?’,and interesting ideas like charities as innovators for the state (I may have mentioned that idea before), how the diversity of the sector is a strength and a weakness, and how market mechanisms do or don’t work for charities. So far, it’s a really good book.

Developing Mastery in a Digital Age

Kenneth Mikkelsen writes about how leaders need to use learning to lead successfully. I like the idea of ‘Seek, sense, share’, and have previously read about leadership as sense-making, which seems to fit into what Mikkelsen talks about. It’s an ‘input-process-output’ approach and perhaps doesn’t seem to consider connecting and compounding as parts of the process, but it’s very interesting nonetheless. I think I’ve decided, for the moment at least, that I’m interested in leadership from the perspective of someone who is lead. Almost everything I read on leadership is from the perspective of helping people become better leaders, perhaps with the assumption that good leaders automatically create followers. I wonder why there isn’t much written about being a good ‘leadee’?

This week I’m grateful for:

Seeing dolphins

I went to beach one evening. I took my laptop and notebook but forgot my short and diving mask. As I sat there writing random ideas and staring out to sea I saw dolphins arcing out of the water a few hundred metres away. I’m so appreciative of the life I lead and I hope I never lose that.

Weeknotes #263

Admin on 13/08/2021

This week I did:

Show me the data

Spent some time this week working on data processes and understanding how and where data is collected, processed and stored to see if there is anything we can do to improve the consistency of collection and efficiency of processing without disrupting any existing processes that rely on the data. It could be someone’s life’s work to understand every piece of data from where it starts, where it goes, how it’s used. But not mine. I’ve developed a framework for how we understand different types of data and how the usage of the data defines how generic or specific it is, which helps us understand the best way to collect, process and store it. Given that it’s business critical data this whole piece of work needs greater robustness and consideration, so testing out my thinking by how well the framework (which is really just a visual representation of my thinking) communicates the context for what we design next is important.

Ahead of schedule and on target

I finished analysing the information I collected for my dissertation which puts me a week ahead of schedule. Next is writing a case study from the analysis that ‘builds theory’ around the innovation processes used in charities. And I scored 80 on my last exam (who knew I knew so much about Blockchain) which puts my overall score for the modules (which make up 40% of the overall grade) at 70.1. Right on target. Distinction with the least amount of effort.

Read and listened to this week:

Rethinking your position

The Knowledge Project podcast episode with Adam Grant is the kind of podcast episode you can listen to again and again to get the most out of it.

Charity innovation stuff

I’ve found lots of interesting papers on innovation and the charity sector which don’t fit with my dissertation but which I might come back to, so I’ve added them to the notes section of my website.

And thought about:

Top-down or bottom up?

What’s the best way to plan lots of pieces of work? Should you start at the top with a goal and work down defining the things you need to do to achieve the goal? Or should you start at the bottom with all the work you know about and build up into the categories where things naturally fit? Top-down applies a structure, bottom-up is more emergent. Top-down seems better for planning against external constraints like deadlines, bottom-up seems less likely to miss things and better at spotting connections and dependencies. Anyway, this is the planning tool I want.

How to compare things

We usually leap to doing the thing we need to do rather than figuring out the mental model or thinking process that we need to apply in order to do the thing effectively. Comparing things is an obvious case. We know we need to compare five similar things in order to pick the ‘best’, and we might have a vague, intuitive idea of what ‘best’ might look like based on experience, but we don’t really have any means to judge what makes one nearer to ‘best’ than another. Luckily, there are only two types of comparison to choose from: absolute or relative. Absolute has preset criteria to judge against. Relative compares one thing to another. If you were comparing dogs to see which was the most intelligent you would need an absolute definition for intelligence, and then whichever dog got closest would be the most intelligent. If you were comparing dogs to see which was the biggest, you would compare them relative to each other, you wouldn’t have an external criteria to judge them against. Choosing how to compare things before comparing helps to compare them in the right way.

Q4

My masters will be finished in September. Then what? What shall I do with everything I learned about innovation and how it’s used in the charity sector?

This week I’m grateful for:

Open-mindedness

The open and creative thinking of some of my colleagues as we’ve explored the way forward for projects. They’ve given me the space to work through my thinking about things rather than requiring the single right answer.

My growth area this week:

Always being right

I’ve started to realise how much I try to prove that I’m right. So, personal kaizen, what 1% improvement can I make on this? I’m going to start by trying to build my self-awareness of it, try to catch myself doing it, and maybe keep a note of the situations it occurs in, asking myself ‘What problem am I solving for this person?’, to help me understand if the stuff I’m saying is for them or for me.