Weeknotes 333
This week I did:
Traffic management
Our quarterly planning went really well. The next bottleneck to improve how our work flows is in how we move from uncertainty to (some) certainty about what the work involves. It’s going to be an interesting challenge as there are lots of variables, lots of different perspectives, and no single definition to be reached. Need to think about some experiments to try next quarter.
Humans out of the loop
This week’s Irregular Ideas was about generative AI and what it might do to human culture. “Culture builds on what went before, but when humans build culture they do it in messy, tangential, reactionary ways. When AI builds culture it optimises for efficiency, sameness and incremental change.”
Playing with GPT-3
I asked GPT-3 a few product management questions and got some answers.
I read/listened to this week:
What a Social Systems Perspective Teaches us About Change
I’ve been listening to The Liberators podcast. Lots of the episodes are really good as they are based on research which gives them more validity. This episode is about the social systems view of the company, and in particularly the idea that people don’t make the team, the team makes the people. I’m interested in how to create the right environment for the team, and this is an interesting theory to build on.
I thought about:
Single and double loop learning
I thought a bit about how we might use single and double loop learning to identify how to tackle problems. Single loop learning is about improving within the system, double loop learning is about changing the system. Perhaps even by simply asking ourselves the question of whether we should tackle problems from within or from outside.
Less like geese, more like sparrows
Teams might work better if they behaved like sparrows, which respond to each others behaviour to adjust where they’re going, than geese, which require a leader to follow and alignment.
Letting go
Had lots of opportunities to practice letting go this week. Not sure I’m doing very well.