yesno

That was a good meeting!

People are strange. They are capable of powerful shows of unity at the decision phase, when everyone’s watching, and become saboteurs the minute the door is closed behind them. Execution is…painful. I could include a list of problems here but everyone knows them already: we are always talking about them, abstractly, like they only happen elsewhere.

Talk is cheap

Saying that an organisation has no silos is not the same as there being no silos. Talking about cooperation is not actually cooperating. If it was that easy, we could just say, “we have more revenue this month, tada!”

Keeping that level of unity requires emotional labour (coordination is a more bureaucratic term) and a je ne sais quoi which I’ll call quixotic tenacity. Ergo, it’s not for everyone.

Deadlines? What deadlines?

Often a decision is made without thinking backwards from a reasonable end date. Work just starts in the general direction of finished. I’ve noticed that people aren’t willing (or able) to estimate how long a project could take. This may be out of fear of failing to meet expectations; it might involve communicating with others to nail down timings, and that’s annoying. There’s an organisational layer for this kind of prevarication: OKR. Three months are a comfortably long time. But Parkinson’s Law probably takes affect well within a week.

The only good deadline is the day before starting work. We all did this at school or uni anyway, back when we actually had time to be lazy. There’s nothing like the cold sweat of the last minute and the creeping dread of humiliation to motivate one to greatness.

This is awesome: List of good habits 🤔