Weeknotes 483
I did:
Dialectics
Most of my work this week seemed to be about talking to people or getting them talking to each other. And although, of course conversation is good, how we converse matters too. That’s where dialectics comes in, it helps us arrive at the truth through reasoned argument.
- Delivered a retro and planning session. As always with retros, the session is the easy bit, making changes after it is the hard bit.
- Prepared for another retro I’m running in a couple of weeks.
- Went to a planning session to help teams figure out dependencies they have with each other.
- Chatted to our director of strategy and marketing about behavioural science in product design.
- Wrote some discussion docs to get people talking about how to assessment opportunities and how to bring more coherence to teams working in adjacent spaces.
- Started setting up an insights library to provide a single source of information to help teams be more evidence-led. One of logic tests buzzing around in my head is that product decisions should be highly reliable, valid and reproducible. That means, if someone else looks at the same data as the product team, they should reach the same conclusion.
- Thought about the post-study product space around alumni networks and careers. It’s an interesting space to figure out value because the commercial relationship with the user is (mostly) over.
- Chatted about weeknotes, which I have to include in my weeknotes for the meta-ness of it all.
- You know you work with amazing people when they send you poems.
A year of task tracking
It’s been a year since I started using my new task tracking system. That I’m still using shows me how successful it is. It’s a personal kanban approach with Today in the middle, all the past tasks to the right and all the future tasks to the left. Each item is tagged with the project, whether its a task or meeting, how many minutes the meeting lasted. And other things like whether it contributes to my objectives. It’s all in Notion, which means I have graphs showing all that data.
Tasks completed: 1524.
Minutes spent in meetings: 32,685.
I’ve haven’t figure out how yet, but I’d like to be able to calculate the flow efficiency of each piece of work. I have the data for how many tasks each project has, how many meetings and how long they last, and what date the work started, so it should be possible.
I read:
The fewer managers a company has, the stronger its culture
This post talks about organisational culture as infrastructure and operating system and what happens to it when organisations flatten their hierarchy by removing managers. In short, removing hierarchy removes hierarchical culture, which needs to be replaced by some other kind of culture.
The rise of Agentic Shopping
Interesting post from Marc Abraham on AI doing your shopping for you. The use case Marc talks about involves the agent monitoring the price of an item and purchasing it from the retailer with the lowest price. It’ll only be a matter of time before our AI assistants are making more complicated purchasing decisions, so every company that sells on their website is going to have to get ready.
NHS app to become default patient communication channel
I get the logical mistake. If you want digital transformation, you expect it to be on the internet. But why would any organisation operating in the 21st century think that single channel is the way to go, and more importantly, why would you choose a channel that relies on the written word when so much of the existing communication is spoken? It will demand a lot of changing user behaviour and expectations to get people to think of using an app first, and even more behaviour and expectations change to get NHS staff to write clearly. If you use the NHS app and see the notes your GP adds, you’ll know what I mean. Moving to a written communication channel means moving to a written communication culture, and that is a big move.
Talk to each other, work together, be helpful, check things are going ok
My most read post this week is my four principles for great team work. Some universities and training providers link to a few of my posts so I can always see when they are running a course in my website analytics.
I thought:
Flywheel or marginal gains
I have some additional thoughts about what might make escalators and mazes succeed or fail. Escalators suffer from the marginal gains problem. That is, while in the early days small improvements can have outsized results, it takes increasing investment to get further gains. Soon enough, optimisation stops working. Mazes have a different problem. To keep people in the maze they rely on self-reinforcing feedback loops that give users reason to stay. Without some kind of flywheel of reward, where a user takes an action and feels some emotional consequence which makes them act again, users will leave the maze.
Powers of data
Evidentiary- prove something happened.
Explanatory- show how it happened.
Predictive- suggest something will happen.
Blank slate vs building-on
Pondered a bit on the tendency to start from a blank slate when tackling a new piece of work versus looking for ways to build on what already exists. I guess creating the systems that serve as ratchet mechanisms to allow for building-on can seem like more work than starting from the beginning each time, but it’s the only way to create bigger and better things.