Weeknotes 301
Did this week:
Safe measures
Been thinking about the problem of measurement for improvement in a safe way. It’s easy for measures to feel like criticism, so how can we have measures that are clearly of the system and not of the person and the work?
And I worked on how the Team Topologies four indicators of high performing organisations for achieving a faster flow of change can be used to measure product development process performance.
Virtual citizen
This week’s irregular ideas newsletter was about becoming a virtual citizen and whether nationality has to be tied to locality, and about what might happen if there was a marketplace for changing nationality.
Bought a new phone
My phone stopped charging, and as I use my phone as a hotspot to connect my laptops to the internet I needed to replace it quickly. The interesting thing for me was putting the response plans that I wrote ages ago into practice. I spent some time doing a risk assessment of my life to think about what things could go wrong and what I could if they happened. Phone not working is a minor one, but it’s good to know that planning was worth it.
Read:
Progressive Organizational Structures
Organisational structures are fascinating. What is the best way to organise a group of people to work on lots of different things but all towards the same goal? Corporate rebels have collected ten organisational structures that are rooted in practice. Lots to think about.
10 principles for making collective progress
This review of existing approaches and principles for making progress towards shared visions for social change is fantastic. It’s great to see Collect Impact as the first approach on the list, and that a network approach to systems change is included.
Thought about:
Product’s iron triangle
Project management has the iron triangle of scope, time and budget, so I was wondering what the product version is of this. Paul Brown suggested the Mobius loop. I need to read more to understand its use but it seems like exactly what I was imagining the product version would be. Being a loop implies the ‘never finished’ nature of modern products and connects user, outcome, delivery and measurement.
Failing on purpose
There’s a lot of thinking in tech and product about failing fast, learning from failure, etc., but I was thinking about how despite recognising failure as a learning opportunity, why we still try so hard to avoid it. Wouldn’t we learn more and better if we welcomed failure, even failed on purpose? If we see a potential failure, shouldn’t we allow it to fail for the learning opportunity it presents?
Understanding scale
I think scale might be one of the hardest things for human brains to grasp. From the smallest to the largest known scales in physics, the way the scale of networks has such a significant effect on behaviours, and how difficult it is to know if the understanding you have is accurate.