Weeknotes 322

Photo of the week:

This week I did:

Lightweight governance

I did some thinking about lightweight governance models. One of the most interesting elements of lightweight governance compared to heavyweight is the assumption of competent users. It replaces prevention with education. Add a feedback loop to take the strategic into the implementation and the implementation to the strategic, and it starts to look like a usable governance model.

The app-ification of work

This week’s irregular ideas email was about how organisations use technology to mediate their relationship with those who work for them.

#ThingsIveReadRecently

20 things I read about governance, canvases, temporal knowledge graphs, alt-text, inequality and innovation, APIs and product management, platforms, content and design, communications, inclusive research and management.

And I read:

Putting the ‘S’ back into ESG

NPC’s briefing on how charities can ensure social issues are considered in environmental, social and governance (‘ESG’) frameworks talks about how charities and companies can work together. It fits in the second means of effecting change that charities use, influencing others to help those that need it.

And thought about:

Integrative goal-setting

The Rotman School of Management defines integrative thinking as: “…the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”

I’m really starting to like the idea of using integrative thinking for goal-setting where multiple outcomes are all positive and you work on all of them, but as they are conflicting goal only one can be achieved. It embraces uncertainty and increases success.

Elephants

Of everything I’ve read and thought about in the last year or so, the parable of the blind men and an elephant has had the most effect on my thinking. It reminds me that all perspectives are equally right and wrong, and we never really get to the ‘truth’ of the thing.

It tells me that different people understand different things in different ways, and rather than arguing for a single view or trying to get a holistic view, we should embrace the differences even if we think it causes tensions.

Maybe the parable of the blind men and an elephant is the first of the uncertainty embracing product management thinking tools I’ve been looking for.