Agile
What are Systems of Delivery and Systems of Transformation – And Why Do You Need Both? (via Leading Agile)
Systems of delivery are Agile processes (e.g., Kanban, Scrum, SAFe) that help you see what’s working and not working. That only gets you so far — you need to change what’s not working and systematically overcome impediments. That’s why adopting some Agile practice by itself won’t inherently make you Agile.
Creating Systems of Safety (via Leading Agile)
This is my first foray into this podcast, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I jotted down several useful concepts:
- It’s not about telling people what to do (command and control). However, teams do need structure at first. Sometimes the best move for a servant leader is to tell their new team what to do.
- Teams need autonomy with guardrails. If you don’t know where the guardrails are, you get in trouble.
- Good leaders replace themselves with those below them.
- People need a roadmap and they need to know where they fit.
- Metrics: predictability, quality, throughput.
- Zero hierarchy is a fallacy. Anything great requires a team, not one person taking the credit. You also can’t have anything of significant complexity without middle management of some kind.
- Leaders at the top are both risk-averse and risk takers.
Business
Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation (via Harvard Business Review)
The paradox most businesses face is that they’re expected to deliver predictable, reliable results which is at odds for discovering tomorrow’s model. BEANs (behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges) should be simple, fun, trackable, practical, reinforced, and organizationally consistent. One example BEAN is to create a “fail wall” where people share what didn’t work so others can learn.
Career
You Didn’t Get That Internal Job You Really Wanted. Now What? (via Harvard Business Review)
- What more can I learn in this job and/or from my new manager?
- What am I dissatisfied with or what else do I want in this role?
- What’s a realistic time frame for things to change?
- What am I most passionate about right now? What’s the unique contribution that I make?
- Do I still think I have much to learn and give at this level? Am I more excited about doing this job in another part of the company?
- What other more senior job functions will offer the right blend to leverage my experience and grow my repertoire?
- Have I hit a non-negotiable in my current situation? Are external hires consistently getting better deals than me?
Don’t Let Impostor Syndrome Derail Your Next Interview (via Harvard Business Review)
- Understand the goal of the interview process — to stand out as someone who people want to work with. Your resume tells what you know but not what it’s like to work with you.
- Practice, practice, practice — don’t go in cold; run some mock interviews.
- Calm your nerves — take a short walk, try some breathing exercises
Communication
What Aircraft Crews Know About Managing High-Pressure Situations (via Harvard Business Review)
Crises in modern situations are often too much for one person to handle; the hierarchy must be flattened, and people must be actively integrated into the workflows and decision making process. Leaders need to use their teams as resources to cross-check decisions.
How Your Organization’s Experts Can Share Their Knowledge (via Harvard Business Review)
“Training sessions that pay the knowledge forward, challenges or case studies, campfire-style meetings, and translation, which involves learners documenting the knowledge.”
Culture
Burnout Is about Your Workplace, Not Your People (via Harvard Business Review)
Because of it’s financial and emotional toll, burnout is now listed in the ICD-11. Practices like yoga and mindfulness only address the symptoms; the disease is the work environment. A survey listed unfair treatment, unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity, lack of support from the manager, and unreasonable time pressure as the top five reasons. Motivation (recognition, responsibility, purpose) is different than hygiene (salary, work condition, status). Ask what people want instead of blindly assuming.
What the “Best Companies to Work For” Do Differently (via Harvard Business Review)
- Put people first — you need profit to survive, but that isn’t your purpose; it’s to improve people’s lives
- Help workers find and pursue their passions — “the surest way to improve performance is to give people something they like doing”
- Bring people together on a personal level — this is about forming deep social bonds
- Empower people to own their work
- Create a space where people can be themselves
Leadership
A Guide to Collaborative Leadership (via TED)
Leadership typically takes the form of the hero. In our modern world, no one person has the answer. We need radical interdependence, not heroes. Heroes only declare their intent once they have a plan; interdependent leaders declare the goal first, and then work with others to create a plan. Heroes see people as either competitors or followers; interdependent leaders need others to be successful. (I also learned that B corporations are a thing.)
Process
4 Organizational Design Issues That Most Leaders Misdiagnose (via Harvard Business Review)
- Competing priorities — put decision-making systems in place
- Unwanted turnover — design roles around outcomes, not people
- Inaccessible bosses — managers need a narrower span of control (i.e., have fewer direct reports)
- Cross-functional rivalry — you need aligned incentives and metrics to get everyone working together
Our weekly book club blog post covers exposing unplanned work and prioritization strategies.
All You Need to Know about HITRUST CSF Certification: Costs, Timelines & Effort (via Chandra Osborn)
My company (Lirio) is pursuing this certification as we handle healthcare information. Health Information Trust Common Security Framework is a superset of other security standards (HIPAA, HITECH, PCI, COBIT, NIST, FTC, etc.). The article lays out what it takes to get certified, which looks very similar to getting CMMI or ISO certified.
Protect Your Time at Work by Setting Better Boundaries (via Harvard Business Review)
- Block off time in your calendar
- Book meetings close together so you’re forced to end one to go to the other
- Set up focused work time — close the door, turn off notifications, use out-of-office notifications on email
The Lesson to Unlearn (via Software Lead Weekly)
This post covers how we learn in school: to pass the test. Tests rarely measure how well we know the content. “Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game, or they’ll be surpassed by those who do.” In general we let the tail wag the dog — e.g., being attractive to VCs instead of making a good product.
How do we decide what to work on? (via Software Lead Weekly)
Most of the shops I’ve worked in couldn’t use this process because there are too many moving pieces. It’s interesting to see, however, how other companies prioritize and execute on work.
What Makes a Good Goal? (via Software Lead Weekly)
Swiffer didn’t set out with a goal of “invent a better mop”, they started with the problem of why people weren’t mopping their floors. The goal then became “Make cleaning the floors significantly faster and easier.”
Security
Sizing Up Your Cyberrisks (via Harvard Business Review)
Cybersecurity isn’t an IT problem, it’s a business problem (as most companies rely on IT to function). You must understand critical business activities and risks, what systems you need to support, the types of cyberattacks and their consequences, and who your adversaries are.
Society
The Increasing Pace of Modern Life and How We Can Adapt (via TED)
Our biology hasn’t kept up with the ever-increasing pace of life. There were many good pull-quotes in this talk; for example, “If all of these faster technologies were supposed to free us from drudgery, why do we all feel so pressed for time?”
Technology
Why “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Work Anymore (via Harvard Business Review)
For the last 30 years, the focus has been on doing more of what we understand but faster. The author suggests some shifts that will require a different approach than “move fast and break things”:
- Digital to post-digital age — Moore’s Law is coming to an end, and the future (quantum, neuromorphic) aren’t well understood.
- From rapid iteration to exploration — we need to understand how the new tools will work sooner rather than later
- From hypercompetition to mass collaboration — we’ll need to work together to develop what’s next