This week we discussed sections 3.12 through the end of the chapter.
3.12 — Scaling consistency: designing centralized decision-making groups
- Positive freedom — the freedom to pick things. Negative freedom — freedom from things happening to you.
- Jameson asked how we felt about negative freedoms vs. incorporating bleeding-edge technology. For positive freedom, it’s the ability to pick certain frameworks because they’ll be the future. For negative freedom, it prevents you from picking a framework only two people use (i.e., likely to get you into a bad spot later). Jameson asked how one would know something will be “the future.” Jamie said it’s mainly about risk management because things move so fast now. Netflix does both: You’re free to pick any language so long as it runs on the JVM.
- Geoff liked that the failure modes for a decision-making group where enumerated: domineering, bottlenecked, status-oriented, inert.
- There’s a real concern when people make decisions where those same people aren’t impacted by the decision. For example, architects that haven’t written code. Dennis has seen “inert” where everyone is busy and they don’t have time to get to these decisions, or where people aren’t allowed to do things they need to do.
3.13 — Presenting to senior leadership
- “Prepare a lot; practice a little. Leadership presentations tend to quickly detour, so practice isn’t quite as useful.” This is different than how we typically prep for presentations.
- Jamie said that even with conference talks, if he sees the speaker get a curve ball and they falter, it shows they may not know the subject as well as they claim. It’s better to say “I don’t know” than to BS.
- Jamie shared his experience with graduate-level presentations for his geology program where the audience would deliberately poke holes in presented arguments. Geoff said this sounds like defending your thesis.
- Dennis liked the concept “start with the conclusion,” and it made him want to reframe the conference talks he’s given. Jamie added that this is like an abstract for a scientific paper.
- Jameson has had execs tell him that he has two sentences to explain a concept or they won’t read it.
3.14 — Time management
- We discussed the idea of performing a quarterly time retrospective where you look at your calendar to see where you’re spending your time. Office 365 uses MyAnalytics on your calendar and can give you insights. Put stuff in your calendar based on topic. Also, Microsoft Teams can tell you who you talk to most often. This requires discipline, assuming you track everything on your calendar.
- Geoff said time tracking has overhead, coming from someone who has tried several systems long-term, many of which he ended up dropping.
- Several months ago Dennis looked at his calendar to see how much he was in meetings. That made him miserable because he felt he had nothing to show other than being present.
- Time tracking can backfire by surfacing real problems (e.g., we’re spending too much time on something than we should be) such that leaders can feel threatened by hearing bad news.
- Houston asked whether reflecting on your time is a useful exercise unless it solves a specific problem (e.g., I have no time, where is it going?).
- People schedule meetings even though you’re already booked. This is a culture thing, where others believe their meetings take priority over already committed meetings).
- Stuff can be dropped. If it’s important, it will come back.
- Prioritize work that enables future work to be done more easily.
- Dennis mentioned this paper: “Better Testing, Worse Quality“
- Size backward and work forward. The book talked about skip-level reporting where you’d potentially need to talk to several people, which takes time. Houston asked how you’d be able to make time for this? Dennis said to ask your direct reports who you should talk to.
- Jamie has seen calendar blocking (i.e., book large sections of time as “busy” on your calendar) be effective.
- Although we didn’t talk about all of the tips, this chapter has many good techniques.
3.15 — Communities of learning
- “Brief presentations, long discussions.” It takes some of the burden off the presenter, too. It keeps the learning more engaged and organic.
- Houston wished he would have had this chapter three years ago when he was trying to set up lunch-and-learns.
- Having fast-paced talks such as PechaKucha can be more engaging.