Weeknotes #282
This week’s photo:
This week I did:
Starting
It was my first week at RNID. The team is great, the ways of working are great, and the work we’re doing to make life more inclusive for deaf people, those with hearing loss and tinnitus is great. I’m already starting to see where I can add value and am really excited about the work we’ll be doing next year.
Sending
Sent the eighth Irregular Ideas email and got a new subscriber. This edition included my strongly held belief that Dirty Dancing is the greatest movie of all time. No disagreements.
Signing
Completed module 3 of the British Sign Language course. It’s starting to include grammar and sentences which are a bit more challenging than single words, and I need more practice to remember the signs, but I’m enjoying this kind of ‘either you know it or you don’t’ kind of learning.
UDTL
I finished the ultimatedigital.tools landing page and added a few more tools. I’ve got lots waiting to be added so I’m going to make a concerted effort to get through them next week. Still doing a rubbish job of marketing it though.
This week I read:
Charity Digital 2021
Dan Papworth-Smyth shares a few of his favourite charity digital things for 2021. These campaigns
How to Productize Yourself as a Writer
Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad and writer of the No Meetings, No Deadlines post talks about writing, building, and productizing yourself on the The Digital Writing Podcast.
Never less of an expert
Sam Higham’s thread about the 12 product management lessons he’s learnt so far.
And lots of other stuff on my reading list.
This week I thought about:
Big things vs small things
It’s much easier to do small things that feel like they don’t have many consequences if you didn’t do them than it is to do big things that feel uncertain. I get excited about doing big things but then I focus my time on doing little things, and I’m trying to figure out why. For example, I wanted to explore the idea of the charity of the future as a DAO. It’s a big idea, almost impossible to create anything so its really more of a thought experiment, and no one else is interested in it, but to me it’s exciting and leading edge. And yet I spend much more time writing the Irregular Ideas newsletter which just includes a few quirky little ideas. Why aren’t I focusing one the big uncertain stuff? Is it because its far less tangible, far harder to make it look like there is progress, almost impossible to imagine an end game? I think I need a drastic rethink.
The pace of alignment
For a while I’ve been tweeting about how difficult it is to maintain alignment when the things that are supposed to be aligned move at different speeds, and using videos to illustrate it. This week I learned that there is science behind it. Yeah science! It’s called ‘shearing layers’ and it’s based on the work of ecologists and systems theorists. The idea is that there are processes in nature, which operate in different timescales and as a result there is little or no exchange of information between them. Architects have applied this thinking to buildings and Gartner applied it to software applications in business and trademarked it. I think it can be applied to knowledge work, and product management work specifically as it often has alignment as one of its goals.
True opposites
Another interesting concept I learned about this week is ‘integrative complexity’, which is the technical term for being able to hold multiple perspectives and possibilities at the same time. Typically, when we’re trying to make a group decision we try to get everyone to have the same perspective on the assumption that it’s necessary for agreement. Integrative complexity suggests that not only can a group have different perspectives but individuals can too, and still make good decisions. Opposing perspectives don’t have to be a barrier to decision-making. Good decision-making (another essential aspect of product management) is usually assumed to rely on consensus and shared perspectives (hence all the stakeholder management), but integrative complexity offers a way of approaching decisions that embrace different perspectives.