Weeknotes 316
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Autonomous empowered teams
Had some interesting chats about the precious currency of authority and the kind of environment where teams are empowered to achieve goals in the best way they can. The challenge is in how to create a safe space for the team to show what they can do so they can build trust and gain a little decision-making authority, and use that to create more space to show more of what they can achieve. It’s a slow shift. More empowered teams have been shown to be more productive and proactive than less empowered teams and have higher levels of customer service, job satisfaction, and organizational and team commitment, but there that doesn’t feel like sufficient reason for the power shift. Some of the literature talks about how vital top management support is for autonomous teams to be successful, which of course is necessary to prevent power struggles, but I’m not sure that fits the philosophy of empowered autonomous teams.
Building cathedrals
This week’s irregular ideas was about building things to last. It talks about how in an intricately interconnected world, nothing we do has no effect, unless of course it just doesn’t last long enough.
The future of donations
I did a very small bit of work on this blog post that I’ve been struggling to finish for week’s now. I can’t quite figure out why I haven’t been able to focus enough to get it done. It’s part of my 21st Century Charity course, so it is part of something I want to do, and I have time boxed for it, and yet I still can’t get it done. Maybe it’s because the work still isn’t small enough to be deliverable in one box (which is something the things I do get done each week have in common).
Read Recently
This week’s reading list thread included collaboration, UX, the small web, design systems & service patterns, decision making, product lifecycle, nocode, responsible & inclusive design, machine learning.
And I read:
User Stories; Why they exist
This is a really nice intro to user stories. It inspired me to read some more on boundary objects, which are the theoretical underpinning of user stories. Boundary objects bridge gaps between social worlds and domains of knowledge, such as between a user and a developer. They are flexible enough to be meaningful from both those perspectives but stable enough to convey accurate information. The key to a good user story isn’t really it’s format, it’s in how it provides coherence between different people, contexts, understandings and implementations.
Tools for Good
This site has a list of tech for good projects and the nocode tools used to build them. I wonder what the use of nocode says about the digital maturity of organisations like small charities. Does it show more maturity because they are choosing to create digital things that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to create, or less maturity because they aren’t creating digital things in connected, coordinated, sustainable ways?
And thought about:
Thoughtless
I don’t seem to have thought about very much this week. A combination of busy times at work and being on beaches and in the sea, perhaps.