I was reminded recently of this great post in Source about asynchronous meeting practices. In it, Sisi Wei describes a process that combines real-time discussion with inclusive facilitation principles and good documentation habits. One way I like to think about these kinds of systems is to imagine the collaboration happening in three phases: before a real-time gathering, during that gathering, and after. What kinds of structures and supports can you create that help people to participate fully, wherever they are, in all three phases?
Recent entries from the blog.
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Here’s an evergreen post from Ann Friedman, about how to map constructive feedback. On her matrix, the x-axis runs from people who know you to people who don’t, while the y-axis charts feedback from rational to irrational. The top two quadrants are great sources of good feedback (even, I’ll note, when it’s delivered poorly); the bottom two quadrants consist of frenemies and haters you’re better off ignoring. A great shorthand for when you get shitty feedback.
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I have several thoughts about this post in the Times about the shift from “inclusive” to “belonging” in the context of diversity work. The first is that language around this work is, and always will be, changing. As words proliferate, they can easily become coopted, subverted, or merely stale, and often a word change is a way of shifting the conversation in order to bring some movement back to the work. This is normal, and very likely inevitable, and we’ve already seen it happen with past moves from diversity to equity to inclusion and justice and so on. But noting that the language is changing opens up space to ask what a particular change is moving toward, and what becomes more or less possible with that movement. As the article notes, the shift to “belonging” creates an opportunity to engage with people from privileged backgrounds while also potentially excusing the system (or those people) from needing to change. I’m not convinced that tradeoff is the right one. Personally, I try to avoid the shorthands and talk more openly about how this work is about dismantling white supremacy, or ending oppression. Will increased belonging help us achieve those ends? Maybe. But not on it’s own.
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Ted Chiang: “For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out. No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination. It’s their willingness to look unflinchingly at their own role in the system that will determine whether A.I. leads to a better world or a worse one.”
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Now’s a good time as any to re-up Astra Taylor’s very good piece from 2018 about the “automation charade.” There is a lot of handwringing going on about how AI and related technologies are going to eliminate jobs, but as Taylor notes here, that claim has been made before, and usually doesn’t play out the way people expect. “Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid.” That said, If you’re reading this blog, you’re more likely to be working on the systems that do this deskilling than you are to be deskilled yourself (at least in the near term): which begs the question, what are you going to do about it?
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Speaking of scaffolding, I’m in the process of prototyping some new programming around the always-challenging topic of feedback. I’ve written about feedback before, and likely will again, as it continues to be a common, and often thorny, subject. Which leads me to the current experiment: I’m opening up a small number of short, focused coaching sessions—called “lab sessions”—specifically oriented around the topic of feedback: how to give it, what to do with it when you get it, how to think it through, and more. Think of these sessions as a pop-up laboratory where you can quickly and safely form a hypothesis, test it against what you know, then take your findings back to work. Sessions are always totally confidential, but I intend to use trends I glean from them to inform future programming.
Lab sessions are free but very limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Learn more about lab sessions or book your session today.
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John Cutler has good notes on creating a writing culture, including a neat definition of what that is: “A write-and-reading-and-feedback-giving culture requires time to think, process, and respond. Writing isn’t the end goal: thinking and improving is the goal.” I’d expand on that to say that the output of the writing isn’t even the goal—it’s the process of writing, reading, and gathering feedback that delivers the real benefit. In other words, a writing culture is very different from a documentation culture. Cutler mentions that documents should be living, to which I’d add a caveat: some documents need to live, and should be governed as such. But plenty of docs are just the debris left behind after some collaborative thinking has occurred, and it’s perfectly ok to let them decay.
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This post from Andy Revkin is about tornadoes, but has a great and very relevant definition of risk. He writes, “Risk is the probability of harm, not the probability of storm.” That is, it isn’t the tornado (or the pandemic, or the earthquake) that creates risk so much as the lack of means for surviving it—tools like storm shelters, building codes, and vaccines all mitigate that potential harm. I like this for thinking about risk generally: you likely can’t stop or even predict storms in the form of bank failures, market collapses, or new competitors. But you can consider what you might need to defend yourself in those circumstances. The question then becomes not how to avoid the storms but how to prepare shelter for when they inevitably arrive.
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Rayne Fisher-Quann writes about isolation as being in opposition to living, and while her topic isn’t work per se, it feels like the lessons she shares hold as much truth for how we live while working as how we live while doing everything else. “Relationships with other complex, flawed people are beautiful and transformative and fulfilling, but they’re also inherently maddening, infuriating, hurtful, stressful, and yes, triggering,” she says. Sometimes I worry that the discourse around work (intentionally or otherwise) shunts us into thinking that the fewer interactions we have with other people the better. But the people are the work, not a distraction from it. Even when—especially when—it’s the people who create our biggest challenges.
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I’m not sold on the pitch of this piece by Aki Ito—that middle managers need to be “saved”—but I do think there are two good lessons in here: first, the old adage that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers, also works in reverse—a good manager will keep someone around (and doing good work) even if they are frustrated with the larger organization. Second, there’s a discourse that returns every few seasons in which management is talked about as if it were dead weight, as not the “real” work. In addition to just being wrong, that discourse serves to deter people from seeking management roles, leaving management to be filled by those with fewer skills and even less support. I won’t argue that some organizations don’t have too many layers of hierarchy (plenty of them do) or that middle management isn’t often a fraught and problematic role (I’ve been there, and it absolutely can be). But the act of demeaning management is a self-fulfilling prophecy: commit it and you will receive exactly the bad managers you deserve.
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This post from Kate Manne (author of the very excellent Down Girl) is about weight loss but also includes her description of what she calls the “harder-better fallacy,” defined as the belief that “that which is the most difficult to achieve is deemed the most worthy, regardless of its actual desirability or value.” I find this to be a very applicable framework to a lot of reflexive habits, among them the persistent idea that the more difficult or challenging career path must necessarily be the better one. Manne wisely asks, “is there a practice in your own life where you think you might be buying into the harder-better fallacy? What do you gain by so doing? And what might you stop losing if you were to give it up?”
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Recent and unfortunate research into workplace misconduct shows how common it is for people to sympathize with perpetrators rather than their victims. I think there’s a tidbit of guidance here for leaders who want to avoid this fate, however: the research showed that people who “endorse values such as deference to authority, in-group loyalty, and purity” were more likely to disbelieve accusations. That strikes me as a list of values we can and should purge from our workplaces; in their place we can cultivate egalitarianism, healthy conflict, and transparency—all of which make us safer and more likely to succeed where other teams do not.
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Good news for anyone who’s ever had to sign a non-disparagement clause in order to receive severance (or who may yet be asked to do so in the future): they are now null and void, according to a ruling from the NLRB. These clauses have been famously difficult to enforce, operating mostly in the realm of fear; but people from minoritized groups had good reason to fear more than others, and this eliminates that disparity. For managers and leaders, this means there’s a little bit less to protect you should you ever show someone the door. But that’s a good bit of incentive, as far as I’m concerned: the best way to avoid having any tea spilled is not to make it in the first place.
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I’m on the record as being a supporter of remote work for lots of reasons, but I’m not happy to have another one to add to the list: too many corners of the country have become unsafe to live in, with both reproductive and gender-affirming care newly criminalized. Oklahoma has effectively banned gender-affirming care for people of all ages through a prohibition on insurance coverage. In Texas, obstetricians are fleeing the sate because they can no longer give adequate care without fear of recrimination. In Idaho, the only hospital in the town of Sandpoint has stopped delivering babies, forcing people to travel 46 miles to get prenatal care. And that’s only a sampling: it’s clear this is a trend that is only going to pick up speed in the months ahead. Families need to be able to move to where they can be safe; no one should be asked to choose between their health and safety and their job. Remote practices won’t stop this appalling assault on human rights, but it may give people some options for surviving it.
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“The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems,” write Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski in this piece for Dissent. What stands out to me is what a break that is from the not-so-distant past, when people flocked to work at tech companies in part because of a genuine belief that they’d be doing some good in the world. Whether or not that was a reasonable belief back then, it’s become harder to sustain in the years since. I think it’s an often unremarked-upon aspect to the broader problem of burnout in the industry: it’s hard to stay committed to doing work you don’t believe is doing good (or, worse, if you worry it’s doing harm). And there’s a lesson there: if you’re trying to address the problem of burnout (whether in yourself, or in your peers), you’ve got to consider that it isn’t only the amount of work or the pressure, but also whether people believe in the work at all.
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Wise words from Ethan Marcotte, who notes his discomfort with “adoption” as the sole or even primary metric for design systems. I’ve made the same choice in the past—adoption being the one thing that was readily measurable. But just because something isn’t measurable, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Good design systems have the ability to impact the quality of communication and alignment among designers, engineers, product managers, and their peers. Maybe you can measure that—maybe you can’t—but either way, it’s worth attending to.