Toots from 2024-02-18#
“What we often see after unwanted events is a focus on individuals. Part of this may be what I re…#
“What we often see after unwanted events is a focus on individuals. Part of this may be what I refer to as an inappropriate simple-to-complex attribution error…The focus on individuals and their errors is a ‘first story’ perspective, characterised by high personalisation, low complexity, and low context.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“Communication to this novice developer must do more than simply tell her what to do with the cod…#
“Communication to this novice developer must do more than simply tell her what to do with the code. It must explain, instruct, guide, encourage, and above all, convey some amount of empathy around the very hard task of learning all the things one must know to move beyond the novice level.”
https://www.kristen-foster-marks.com/post/your-engineers-need-communication-skills-part1
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“We had tons of ideas of things that might work, but there were personal reasons to keep going to…#
“We had tons of ideas of things that might work, but there were personal reasons to keep going too. We knew that within our org, we had to show growth or the team would get dispersed to other places. There was no option within the operating model for sustainment. Instead, we kept overproducing.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“Right now the evidence from declining products is that product management is overfocused on development, namely sequencing features and exploring shiny things, and underfocused on outcomes. We — I count myself among the product clan — are collectively prioritizing business fantasies of growth over commitment to real user needs, with long-term profitability as a casualty.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“Wherever “bias to action” is a value, deliberately killing ideas is not likely to get you promoted.’
Indeed.
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Endlessly-up-and-to-the-right as a guiding principle is enticing, but also impossible.
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“In other words, assume that everybody whose actions contributed to the incident made the best po…#
“In other words, assume that everybody whose actions contributed to the incident made the best possible decision based on the information they had, and the constraints and incentives that were imposed upon them.”
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2024/02/17/what-if-everybody-did-everything-right
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Another way I’ve backed into this is to investigate events that do not produce undesirable outcomes.
A successful deployment is often the default assumption, although what constitutes “success” is usually fluid. How much work is required to sustain the non-event? Are there things people are doing that they already recognize as “risky” but are also “normal”? What’s the collective effort to maintain the illusion of stability?
Today’s “normal” behaviors are tomorrow’s “faulty deviations” .
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Me after reading another Forbes article extolling Elon Musk’s Twitter staff cuts and how employee…#
Me after reading another Forbes article extolling Elon Musk’s Twitter staff cuts and how employees can be replaced by LLMs.
