Weeknotes 488
I did:
The multi-inheritance problem
This has been on my mind this week: “Multi-inheritance raises questions about which goals, values, and standards are taken into account and introduces the possibility of systems changing the goals, purposes, or standards of the organization. Under these premises facilitating the creation and improvement of sociotechnical systems is not a matter of optimization and resolution, but of supporting the ongoing negotiation of goals and actions.” (Winters, et al. 2014). And I did this stuff too:
- Had a great intro chat with one of our junior product managers. We talked about product manager behaviours such as planning ahead and taking initiative.
- Went a feedback session on our new strategy.
- More interviews.
- Facilitated another retro, doing another two next week. I’m pretty much Mr. Retro at this point.
- Chatted about the difference between working in the organisation and working on the organisation, and who’s responsible for which.
- Started talking about the idea of a ‘principles and practices group’ of cross-functional experts who can coach teams on agile, stakeholder engagement, analytics and evidence-backed decision-making, etc.
- Venkat Iyer talked at our community product of practice. He’s brilliant!
The numbers
Number of minutes in meetings: 1640. Beats my previous record of 1590.
Number of tasks completed: 51. Back up to an average of 10 a day.
I read:
Digital transformation is about making organisations machine-readable
I really like Adrian Ortega’s definition of digital:
“Digital as the condition in which the world is rendered into discrete, transmissible units of information, enabling systems — human, organisational, and technical — to sense, interpret, and act across distance and time. (…) As a working definition, this means organising our work, services, and systems around information that can be sensed, shared, and adapted in real time. (…)
Digital transformation then means reshaping how an organisation learns, decides, and delivers by using data, design, and technology to respond to real needs. It’s about replacing static, hierarchical processes with adaptive systems that sense what’s happening, make sense of it, and act quickly to improve services and outcomes.”
It fits nicely with definition of digital transformation: converting organisational structures and business logic into a machine-readable format.
What Sam Altman just taught us about OKRs without meaning to
“OKRs are what you push. Health Metrics are what you protect. Knowing the difference might save your company.”
Small acts of maintenance
“I’ve been thinking about the things we fail to maintain, because maintenance is slow, boring work that’s easy to put off. We’re drawn to new projects, new strategies, new tools — things that promise progress. Meanwhile, the things our teams and organisations rely on age and decay, becoming harder to use or understand.”
I thought about:
I’ve been working on the first assignment for my MBA this week so most of my thoughts are about analysing organisational culture.
Structures and behaviours
If we want people to show behaviours like collaboration, but we structure teams in ways that keep people apart and use things like RACI to tell people they are singularly responsible for something, we shouldn’t be surprised when the structure beats the behaviours. I wonder how we might redesign RACI to bring people together rather than push them apart.
Insights from retros
I’ve done a lot of retros lately, and one day I’ll do some kind of meta-analysis on them, but my initial observations are that things go wrong when we treat wicked learning environments as kind learning environments. That means, when we expect things to be predictable and controllable, and fail to realise that things are actually uncertain, ambiguous and constantly changing, then we aren’t going to be able to respond effectively.