tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86507169541981318652024-02-20T03:47:10.284-08:00Debugging VelocityHow to make software delivery fasterLaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-41250747301094256272022-10-07T06:01:00.005-07:002022-10-07T06:01:10.068-07:00The Kindergarten, the Construction site, and the Assembly Line<p>Last night, I went to a local meetup where we played Legos. It was an event organised by <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/krzysztofniewinski">Krzysztof Niewinski</a>. In particular, it was a simulation workshop of large scale product development using alternative organizational structures. But there were lots of colored bricks involved. And the specs were pictures of the end products that needed to be built. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/logo_specs_151311699587e684bb75a1784158e914_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/logo_specs_151311699587e684bb75a1784158e914_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/logo_specs_151311699587e684bb75a1784158e914_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/logo_specs_151311699587e684bb75a1784158e914_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/logo_specs_151311699587e684bb75a1784158e914_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Without getting into too much detail, we covered 3 alternatives with the same group of 20 something people: component teams, cross functional teams of specialists, and finally "T-shaped" interdisciplinary teams where everyone could do everything. In short, we were experimenting with output using alternative ways of working. Each round took roughly 10 minutes.</p><h3 id="26dtp">Here's what happened</h3><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/lego_game_results_580298aa91fb6a526796e9b7842d76fd_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/lego_game_results_580298aa91fb6a526796e9b7842d76fd_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/lego_game_results_580298aa91fb6a526796e9b7842d76fd_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/lego_game_results_580298aa91fb6a526796e9b7842d76fd_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/lego_game_results_580298aa91fb6a526796e9b7842d76fd_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>In the first round, we had specialized component teams each dedicated to working with only two different lego colors, a supply team, an integration team, a quality team, and 8 different product managers who wandered from table to table. Sound familiar? Kind of like a <strong>massive </strong><a href="https://blog.launchtomorrow.com/2013/07/software-construction-metaphor-broken/"><strong>construction site</strong> with lots of project managers</a>. Or in a large company developing and installing software. Most of the building teams sat around doing very little in practice. There were lots of bottlenecks and confusion around getting supplies and exact requirements. I had a chance to engage in chitchat with my table mates. And a stressed out senior executive that walked around and yelled at anyone for not doing anything.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/construction_site1_5a12d85f80d6959054a2a1b20dfbbcf1_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/construction_site1_5a12d85f80d6959054a2a1b20dfbbcf1_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/construction_site1_5a12d85f80d6959054a2a1b20dfbbcf1_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>The second round, we continued to have individual performers who were specialists, but they worked together, which resulted in a <strong><a href="https://blog.launchtomorrow.com/2019/07/how-to-derive-expected-velocity-from-strategic-dates-2/">lean assembly line</a></strong>. The time required to first output went down almost 50%. But there was less top down control. And more legos on the table, relative to the previous round.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/assemblyline_817ca5faa2490dd00a691638398a805b_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/assemblyline_817ca5faa2490dd00a691638398a805b_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/assemblyline_817ca5faa2490dd00a691638398a805b_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>And finally--the last round--everyone pitched in and contributed how they could. There were still some constraints, in that people working outside of their expertise could only use their left hand. Despite that, it only took a minute to get the first outcome, so almost 9 times faster. But there were lots of extraneous legos on the table. It was lots of fun, and it was a very tactile learning experience for everyone who pitched in. Just like <strong><a href="https://blog.launchtomorrow.com/2019/10/how-to-simplify-a-complicated-process-so-that-even-a-2-5-year-old-would-understand-them/">kindergarten</a></strong>. </p><h3 id="e49dt">What does this mean</h3><p>This boils down to control, profitability, and speed. This is just as true for startups as it is for large companies. Most of the conflicts among co-founding teams boil down to differences how founders value control and money, according to Harvard professor and researcher Noam Wasserman in <a href="https://amzn.to/2LTz43U">Founders' Dilemmas</a>. In big companies, any larger product development program will implictly or explicitly make a call on these three, based on how the work is organized. It depends on what you optimize for, as Krzysztof the facilitator pointed out. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/foundersdilemmas_6a4b6bfe5cd6b5e51c5438b558e8f3b4_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/foundersdilemmas_6a4b6bfe5cd6b5e51c5438b558e8f3b4_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/foundersdilemmas_6a4b6bfe5cd6b5e51c5438b558e8f3b4_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>The construction site was optimized for control, especially of costs. There were enough people to do the work, and enough legos could be procured if you were willing to wait. But the level of resource scarcity locked up the system, relatively speaking. And it took a long time to finish anything. </p><p>The assembly line required a slightly larger up front investment but the speed at which things happened increased dramatically. Even though the constraints on each individual were exactly the same. As an expert in yellow and green bricks, I was still only allowed to touch these, even though the configuration was completely different. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/kindergarten_08f93078ef0da5c137a935d600b0ed0c_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/kindergarten_08f93078ef0da5c137a935d600b0ed0c_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/kindergarten_08f93078ef0da5c137a935d600b0ed0c_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>The kindergarten required even less top down control and more resources, as well as trust that the teams will get on with it. There was be a higher use of resources (lego blocks laying on the table). At any given moment, you won't know exactly what is going on, because everyone is contributing and collaborating. The teams were releasing stuff like crazy. So at that point, does it really matter that you need a bit more money up front? If they are releasing stuff so quickly, presumably this translates into revenue, which keeps the kindergarten afloat and then some. </p><h3 id="etstv">Choosing the metaphor works that best for your company</h3><p>The way you organize the work matters. And it feeds into culture. Larman said "<a href="https://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Larman%27s_Laws_of_Organizational_Behavior">Culture follows structure</a>". In a software context, it means you want to allow for chaos and experimentation. And not really just squeezing features out of development teams. </p><p>As a company scales from a successful startup to a larger company, the trick is to keep enough of that "kindergarten juice" in the culture and in how the work is organized, in order to allow your company to continue innovating. If the emphasis on control changes as a product matures, you can introduce more of that as needed. But do so consciously, and watch your <a href="https://blog.launchtomorrow.com/2019/11/why-new-tech-products-usually-stumble-and-how-to-prevent-it-at-your-company/">output and outcomes </a>like a hawk. </p><p>By micromanaging the process, even as an assembly line in a feature factory, you're still missing out on pretty big upside (assuming you care about having lots of new products released). </p><p>That said, even a kindergarten needs boundaries. So that the teams don't cut corners in quality for example. That's kind of the point. There are a handful of non-negotiables around safety, health, and security in a kindergarten, and everything else is optimized for discovery. </p><p>So for a bunch of interested strangers on a random school night, who dug into a few alternative structures and held everything else constant, it was clear that there could be very large differences at play. 14x faster, not 14% faster. These would be results any agile or digital transformation program would love to achieve. That said, it wasn't clear if these differences came from structure only, or the culture around it. And if culture is involved, that could be what's preventing the massive change in the first place.</p><h3 id="f825f">Key Takeaways</h3><ul><li>The way you organize work matters, and it feeds into the culture, particularly in a larger company.</li><li>By organizing work, you will be making choices about tradeoffs among variables that matter. </li><li>Control, in particular, seems to be inversely related with learning and speed. </li></ul>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-17671832918542043352022-10-07T06:01:00.003-07:002022-10-07T06:01:07.222-07:00The 2020 Guide to Planning New Products using Story Points<p><strong>Due to his glasses, Michael's estimate of Jane's distance from him is 14.3% further away than she actually is--at any given moment. How would you describe his estimate?</strong> </p><p>Precise, but not accurate. </p><p>Wait, what's the difference between the two again?</p><p>Precise means the numbers you are seeing are repeatable. Often down to multiple digits after the decimal point. You can be pretty confident that when you do the experiment again, you'll get the same result. </p><p>But that's not necessarily true with an accurate result. An accurate result is one that is close to the actual value. For Michael's scale to be accurate but not precise, it would be producing numbers close to the actual value, but not the same number each time. In estimating knowledge work, accuracy bests precision.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/accuracy_precision_0af605ae0aa0347ead12f161b54e28b4_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/accuracy_precision_0af605ae0aa0347ead12f161b54e28b4_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/accuracy_precision_0af605ae0aa0347ead12f161b54e28b4_800.png" /></picture><figcaption>accuracy and precision 2x2 </figcaption></figure><p>This above 2x2 applies to estimation of work in a knowledge work context. Ideally, everyone involved wants estimates to have both high accuracy and high precision. But at the beginning of a new initiative, it will most likely be low accuracy and low precision. Because at that point you know the least you possibly can. From the example aboce, Michael's estimate lies in the top left box. However, what we actually prefer to that is the bottom right one...if we can't have the top right. High accuracy makes it much easier to plan out the upcoming work. </p><p>One way of skewing towards accuracy and away from precision is by making it difficult to be precise. Instead of trying to estimate absolute sizes of stories, i.e. 3 days, we can estimate only relative size, i.e. 2 story points. </p><p>Relative sizing gives us enough to negotiate business priorities given the size of each story, without tempting fate in terms of blaming: "You said it would only take 3 days, and blah blah blah". This isn't healthy, productive, or fun. So why even go there? </p><p>These relative sizes still allow for some reasoning; however, direct numerical inferences are deliberately imprecise. For example, you can add up how many story points there will be for a larger epic. You will need to allow for a lot of variance on the individual stories. But on the basis of the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers">law of large numbers</a>" from statistics, this variance will tend to average itself out. Based on this you can get a feel for how one epic compares to another for example.</p><h3 id="emh1j">1. Estimate story points directly </h3><p>For this, the first place to start is the Fibonacci sequence, as a way to express relative size. They're numbers. The sequence itself is very simple. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the preceding two values. This ensures that it roughly doubles each time a new number is generated, but not precisely (Hah! low precision!). </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/500px-FibonacciSpiral_svg_e09c38569cbda95dc22d49f79761857f_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/500px-FibonacciSpiral_svg_e09c38569cbda95dc22d49f79761857f_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/500px-FibonacciSpiral_svg_e09c38569cbda95dc22d49f79761857f_800.png" /></picture><figcaption>The Fibonnaci spiral formed by drawing a curved line from opposite corners of squares</figcaption></figure><p>There are visualizations of the Fibonacci sequences like the one above, where you can see that there is a clear difference between each step. In practice, this type of sizing will help you get beyond a "to do list", where everything seems to be the same level of effort. It's not. And that's the point.</p><p>Here is a recommended breakdown in my favorite free tool for estimation: <a href="https://www.planitpoker.com/">planitpoker.com</a>:</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/fibonnaci_a3c7ab508f69545d0d10818efce4e3da_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/fibonnaci_a3c7ab508f69545d0d10818efce4e3da_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/fibonnaci_a3c7ab508f69545d0d10818efce4e3da_800.png" /></picture><figcaption>Above 20 story points, you probably need to break it down into smaller stories...</figcaption></figure><p>It's typically good to top out at a maximum size to make sure that stories stay small. Over a certain size it just feels too big, and the estimation discussion stops being useful. At that point, a big story should probably be broken into smaller subtasks, each of which should be estimated using the above sizing numbers. </p><h3 id="9k0ro">2. Translate T-shirt sizes into story points</h3><p>For teams struggling with letting go of absolute estimates, the T-Shirt approach gives you the best of both worlds. Essentially you have the team estimate using relative T-Shirt sizes. Then you translate the team's input into story points. This reinforces the relative nature of story points, while still giving you something more concrete to work with for velocity purposes.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_5f0becd10e9bddc4a93ba7d27278d9d9_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_5f0becd10e9bddc4a93ba7d27278d9d9_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_5f0becd10e9bddc4a93ba7d27278d9d9_800.png" /></picture><figcaption>Use TShirt sizes and translate them to story points later</figcaption></figure><p>Using the planitpoker.com interface, you can set it here:</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_planitpoker_e36fb4353de2f692727d680404cb6ce0_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_planitpoker_e36fb4353de2f692727d680404cb6ce0_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/tshirt_sizing_planitpoker_e36fb4353de2f692727d680404cb6ce0_800.png" /></picture><figcaption>Flip to the TSHirt sizing option to go ahead with this approach</figcaption></figure><h3 id="cqri7">3. Ron Jeffries' option of 2 days max/task </h3><p>This option came out of a big debate years ago on the scrumdevelopment yahoo groups mailing list. I admittedly have never tried this myself, but it's worth considering as an alternative approach to estimation. Or a thought experiment at minimum. Basically, at the time Ron Jeffries (<a href="https://twitter.com/ronjeffries" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@RonJeffries) </a>was arguing against estimation in general. He posited that:</p><ul><li>we should stop estimating</li><li>limit stories to 2 days of work </li><li>if you expect a story to take longer than 2 days, then break it down into multiple sub-stories</li></ul><p>This way, you significantly reduce the need for an explicit estimation discussion. And you can manage workload and scope based on the number of issues you want to complete. If stories are assumed to be of equivalent size at a worst case scenario, i.e. 2 days/story, then you can derive your delivery date from the number of stories you have. Assume all remaining stories take 2 days, i.e. the worst case scenario, and add the number of work days to today's date.</p><p>In practice, stories are often larger if they have "business value" and therefore can't be easily broken down. Thus it's hard to pigeonhole them into such a framework. By business value, I mean anything that would be of value to a customer for non-technical reasons. But you can put such a limit on sub-tasks of stories. And therefore just count the number of sub-tasks. </p><p>This approach kind of turns software development into a release checklist of stuff that must be finished. All of the tasks are small. It also means that there are a lot of stories and tasks flying around. This require extra management & coordination work to maintain it. Either by the team or a delivery manager.</p><p>And also I suspect it's hard for senior stakeholders to see the forest for the trees, if you just have a long list of tasks. What will be done by when? Even though you can change the order of what's done, it's hard for anyone who isn't intimately involved with the details to understand what's happening at a glance. </p><p>Finally, I do think in this case you lose out on the design discussions which happen during estimation. You only break down stories or tasks if they are "too big". Therefore, you won't ask questions like "what is the best way to approach this?" before starting the work. It could impact the quality of what's delivered. And also get team members to spend time on work that is thrown away or low priority. In my opinion, this is human nature. We need to be deliberate about priorities; if we're not, they won't happen. </p><blockquote>So here are a couple of aspects of this approach this <a href="https://ronjeffries.com/articles/2015-01-02-hours-estimation/">Ron himself points out</a> when using this approach to figure out when we'll be done:</blockquote><ul><li>What if all stories were approximately the same size. Then what could we do with story estimates that we couldn’t do with story counts?</li><li>What if all stories were one acceptance test? What could we do with story estimates that we couldn’t do with story counts (or, now, acceptance test counts)?</li></ul><h3 id="6f788">4. #NoEstimates</h3><p>Finally, as an honorable mention, there is the whole #NoEstimates argument, which has been popular in software development circles. Basically, the approach claims that:</p><ul><li>There is a lot of scope uncertainty for most of a software project, often more than the first half of the overall schedule (i.e. >50% scope variation)</li><li>Making estimates takes time and therefore is expensive, particularly if there are tight deadlines and high costs of delay</li><li>Estimates don't contribute explicit value to final customers (i.e. they are about internal company operations and for planning purposes only)</li><li>Holding the team accountable to time estimates means that they are incentivized to sacrifice other aspects of the work, such as lowering quality or accruing technical debt, which isn't visible but with material consequences </li></ul><p>There a number of other nuances. Basically for any knowledge work where there are a lot of dependencies (like in software), you might be better off not messing around with estimating at all. Just get on with the work.</p><p>Personally, I think estimation sessions are useful mostly for the purpose of having a priori <em>how I'd do this</em> discussions. #NoEstimates throws the baby out with the bathwater. </p><p>Also, by their very nature, most tasks on a large project will take different amounts of time (assuming we don't take the approach from #3 above). And technical people are the best placed to figure that out and share it with everyone. They have a unique and often common perspective, which the rest of the company lacks. </p><p>The team doesn't work in a vacuum. So timing becomes important, if not critical, to getting the full value of the efforts being made.</p><h3 id="bsi03">Doesn't all this estimation just mean there is less time to do the actual work?</h3><p>This concern boils down to one of efficiency. Usually, the asker assumes that the time to complete something this fixed and that the team's primary goal is squeeze out as much as output as they can in that time frame. </p><p>In practice, though, effectiveness trumps efficiency. There is not point in doing something quickly, if it doesn't need to be done at all. To use the old Steven Covey analogy, is the ladder leaning against the right wall?</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_efa6a95bfd79fc2ce9b281183f5f55d0_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_efa6a95bfd79fc2ce9b281183f5f55d0_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_efa6a95bfd79fc2ce9b281183f5f55d0_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_efa6a95bfd79fc2ce9b281183f5f55d0_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_efa6a95bfd79fc2ce9b281183f5f55d0_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a href="https://unsplash.com/@marcschiele" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Marc Schiele</a> | Source: <a href="https://unsplash.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unsplash</a> | Is the ladder leaning agains the right wall?</figcaption></figure><p>And for better or worse, product teams of 2 or more people have exactly this problem. In addition to coordinating work among everyone. New product development is fraught with uncertainty, including technical uncertainty in many cases. So what the team investigates, validates, and builds in what order is critical. While efficiency is a concern, any time spent on making the new product development more efficient is likely to be thrown away if the goal changes. So efficiency won't matter in that case anyway.</p><h3 id="necm">Case study: Distributed estimation </h3><p>A pretty common trope nowadays is that larger companies have distributed teams, often across many locations and time zones. In the early days of agile, it was quite difficult to estimate under these conditions. A lot of the nuance and genuine discussion required was simply lost in the ether. And until recently, the tooling for distributed work didn't exist. Well, that's changed.</p><p>At most client sites, there will already be some kind of story tracking system in place such as <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira" rel="nofollow">Jira </a>or <a href="https://trello.com/" rel="nofollow">Trello</a>. It is possible to add a "story points" field to the template for a story. Typically, this involves speaking with the owner or local administrator of this system, but is relatively straightforward.</p><p>We don't actually need any more functionality in the story tracking system. It's nice to be able to display the story points where relevant afterwards. Jira, for example, has quite useful reporting based on story point estimates right out of the box. Trello has addons. Other agile management systems presumably have the same. </p><p>On a typical planning sessions, the product owner or business analyst (BA) spins up a session of <a href="http://planitpoker.com">planitpoker.com</a>. One of the nice features of this system is that it doesn't require you to set up an account or even really authenticate. Once a 'room' is set up, the BA shares out the link to everyone estimating. Everyone can sign onto the board without setting up an account. </p><p>At that point, typically I am sharing my screen with either the description of the story or any relevant collateral such as a spreadsheet, a <a href="http://miro.com">miro board</a>, or showing and explaining why the current version is missing a feature. I enter the story tracking id into planitpoker.com after we've discussed what it is. And then everyone votes on the number of story points to estimate the complexity of the task. Once this is complete for everyone, we look at the distribution of votes. If it's wide, we discuss and vote again. We keep doing the same until it's pretty much the same across the team. If for example, we decide that a particular story is a 5 story point size, we just type in that value into Jira or Trello. </p><p>You don't need any fancy or even paid plugins to do this. It's enough to be able to share your screen and have a discussion with everyone involved. In terms of estimation, the heavy lifting is done using planitpoker.com. Once a round of planning poker finishes, it can be discarded. And then you type in the estimates in the story tracking system, where you need them later. </p><p>When stumbling onto this approach, I think the key learning was that you don't actually need everything to be done in your main story tracking system. All you really need to do is have a good debate, and then store the outcome of the estimation. And the conversations you have while estimating are the most important art of the process anyway.</p><h3 id="ckhkl">Case study: use T-Shirts for first cut of backlog estimation, then translate to story points</h3><p>In this scenario, we had a large team, a massive scope, and a lot of uncertainty around exactly how the product would work. I felt we just needed to get started on the work in order to reduce the technical uncertainty behind the work. So forcing the whole team to spend hours or days estimating something they don't understand would have been a waste of everyone's time. If they started the work, we could have more meaningful estimation discussions later. For context, this was an infrastructure project.</p><p>The architect involved had put together a big graph in <a href="http://draw.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">draw.io</a> for how the entire system would work. It had rapidly become a symbol in the company of something highly complicated that nobody, except for him, actually understood. What didn't help was that developers in the company didn't have much experience with cloud technology. And it was relatively new stuff, even for him. </p><p><strong>Steps taken:</strong></p><ol type="1"><li>Put together a vizualization or map of the scope which needs to be built, which was particularly necessary here given that we needed to build infrastructure.</li><li>We listed out the ~47 different pieces of work, most of them mapping to components of the big drawo.io microservice cloud to a spreadsheet. </li><li>As the architect felt uncomfortable assigning story points given the level of uncertainty, I asked him to use TShirt sizing for all 47 items. </li><li>If you need to do this yourself, start with what you think is average and assign them all an M. Compare everything else to those items, i.e. this is a little smaller so it's an S, whereas this is really minor so it's an XXS.</li><li>Given all of the above are sized, map the TShirt sizes to Fibonnaci sequence numbers. For example, XXS is a 1. XS is a 2. And so on.</li><li>Then use those numbers as story points and continue planning from there. </li></ol><p>Using this slightly circuitous route, we got to a story point estimate which I felt was accurate. It wasn't precise,but that was acceptable at this stage. And the development team got started quickly on the work.</p><h3 id="adhop">Case Study: Estimating roadmap items (to appease overachieving stakeholders)</h3><p>Sometimes there is pressure to plan out a big roadmap up front for a new product. The justification that I often here, is that we want to know when "we're done". Personally, I don't feel knowing that is actually useful, especially from a business perspective. What I'd prefer to focus on is getting to first revenue and profitability. Estimating something a few years out in detail--when you barely understand it--is just a waste of time. And likely to be inaccurate.</p><p>All that said, it's useful to know your options for the future, and to also have some idea how much effort adding any given option will take. At a high level, that is probably good enough. </p><p>To keep everyone happy, the simplest approach is to use TShirt sizing of Epics. Some things are relatively small and quick. Some are huge. Some are in-between. The development team are the best judges of that, since they will need to do the work. </p><p>Clearly the TShirts for epics (groups of stories) will not be equivalent to TShirts used for stories. If you are pressed to translate the epic TShirts into story points, I'd suggest provided a range estimate for each one. For example, an M size epic is 6-10 weeks. Range estimates can still be used for planning, but aren't explicit commitments to deliver on a specific day. And they're good enough to identify if you know up front if you'll be late.</p><p>Some estimation is better than nothing at all. It's useful to just do a quick pass without going into all of the minute detail when brainstorming a roadmap. And T-Shirt epics give you the flexbility to do just that. </p><h3 id="6a4f9">Case study: Nitty-gritty technical estimation in person </h3><p>Geek out time, analog style. In one office! This experience, as well as similar ones, convinced me that estimating in person works best...if you can swing it. Fly people in if you have to. :)</p><p>In the early days of when I was a developer, my team and I inherited a codebase in C++ of 17 different components. Most of them were written using Borland C++, a compiler that was once cutting edge but had since largely fallen out of mainstream use. In addition to the compiler, the code used a lot of abstractions specific to using libraries shipped with the compiler. We decided that we need to get into a more up-to-date environment, to take advantage of the significant performance gains in newer compilers and also so that it would be easier to work with (and probably recruit more help for). </p><p>With an architect and another developer, we booked a small meeting room for half a day, to plan out the work. First we talked about what needed to be done. As we discussed each story, we wrote them down on index cards. We stuck them on the table, because we wanted to see all of them at once.</p><p>Then, to estimate, the work we also went analog. Essentially, we took the business cards of a former colleague who'd left the company, and wrote the Fibonacci sequence on the back of a handful cards. Then each of us took a set of the cards. We started discussing each index card, one by one. We each used one card to indicate how many story points worth of complexity lied behind each task, laying it face down on the table. Then we flipped over the cards. If there was a difference in the numbers, we got into technical discussions to convince each other that the story was simpler or harder than we expected. </p><p>After a few hours of this <strong>estimation boiler room</strong>, we had a lot of questions about one particular component which we didn't know that well. So we waltzed back to our desks to spend the afternoon looking at the existing code, and to inform our estimates even further. Finally, the next day we reconvened and finished off the complete estimation session for the entire piece of work. </p><p>Once we had the aggregate story point estimate, we provided internal company stakeholders a relatively narrow elapsed time range estimate based on how long our story points typically took. This gave them enough information to be able to plan around our efforts, especially the pessimistic estimate. The range estimate was also intentionally not precise, even though we did feel it was accurate at the time. </p><p>In practice, the estimate was correct, although the route to get there was kind of roundabout. Most of the tasks we did involved making a breaking change to the code in the new compiler. Then cleaning up the errors and warnings which resulted. The lists of problems were quite long, but then often making one fix suddenly fixed 30 errors in one go. So in short, we couldn't have really known this up front anyway. </p><p>But the estimate was close enough to be useful for planning purposes. </p><h3 id="4b3io">Key takeaways</h3><ol type="1"><li>You don't need to do the estimation in your main workflow system; you just need to keep track of the estimates there.</li><li>TShirt sizes can be mapped to story points if needed. This helps overcome resistance or speed up the process if people are uncomfortable. </li><li>You can estimate stories or epics at different levels of resolution. If you want more accurate estimates, you need to invest more time. </li><li>At the brainstorming stage, you can get something useful with a light touch estimate involving one or two senior technical people. </li><li>At an operational stage, more precise estimates help adjust the plan, but they also help everyone on the team understand the work and implicitly get their buy-in on the approach to be taken.</li></ol><h3 id="aquoc">Invitation</h3><p>If you'd like to get early access to my upcoming book on improving velocity to get to market faster with your new product, sign up <a href="https://agilelasagna.lpages.co/velocity-early-access">here</a>.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-12384429598781052672022-10-07T06:01:00.001-07:002022-10-07T06:01:05.958-07:00Why over-focussing on velocity causes the opposite effect<p>Following up on the slightly longer analysis of <a href="https://blog.launchtomorrow.com/2019/11/why-new-tech-products-usually-stumble-and-how-to-prevent-it-at-your-company/">overfocussing on output and velocity</a>, I think there are a few things that are overlooked with a pure velocity based model. Most of them have been known for decades in the software industry. They are squishy. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/squishy_2b04224713f048141bc644d0c17f1e09_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/squishy_2b04224713f048141bc644d0c17f1e09_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/squishy_2b04224713f048141bc644d0c17f1e09_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><ol type="1"><li>It's essentially a Taylorist factory where most of the interest is in efficiency, and not on outcomes. by Taylorist, I mean <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor">Frederick Winslow Taylor</a>. In fact, Kanban originally came from manufacturing. Cost accounting is the beginning of the imposition of a Taylorist model, to describe something more nuanced than what you see in a factory. (please comment and say why if you disagree). By using velocity as a yardstick, you pervert velocity's purpose and dilute its usefulness. </li><li>As per <em><a href="https://amzn.to/2DflJ1a">PeopleWare</a> </em>by Tom DeMarco in 1987, most new technology development problems are actually people problems, either on the product development team, or with respect to the customers. </li><li>Outputs are assumed to be linear. This is patently not true for knowledge work. Even in 1975 at the time of the <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month">Mythical Man Month</a></em>, it was already acknowledged that adding people tactically is a major blunder in the context of creative work. </li><li>More recently, I've fascinated by <a href="https://amzn.to/34eaRwd">psychological safety in the team</a> as articulated by Amy Edmonson as an underlying factor influencing actual performance.</li></ol><p>At its core, companies care about being able to release quickly. Velocity and story points are just one way to get at what's happening and why it's taking so long. But it's essentially an internal process. At some level, it's just bureaucracy created to manage product creation...on its own usually not valuable to customers.. So in and of themselves, if the teams provide value and can show they are doing so, then velocity doesn't matter.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-53005005392879601932022-10-07T05:38:00.001-07:002022-10-07T05:38:48.124-07:00Managing Risk the Agile Way: Like a Hedge Fund<p>Manage risk. Despite having backlogs, Agile doesn't manage risks--explicitly. In 2007, <a href="https://radar.oreilly.com/2007/09/hedge-funds-are-software-compa.html">Paul Kedrosky noticed</a> a rather peculiar ratio. The ratio of software developers to non-developers at a major quant fund versus a major software company:</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.oracle.com/">Oracle </a>(56,000 empl.) -- 1:8 (one developer for every eight employees)</li><li><a href="https://www.rentec.com/">Renaissance Technologies</a> (178 empl.) -- 2:3 (two developers for every 3 employees)</li></ul><p>It's not too much of a stretch to say that hedge funds are a new type of Software Company. After all, they have more developers per capita than the latter, and they generate more cash flow per capita, if they are any good. Hedge funds also provide a fantastic template for how software companies and projects could be run. Risk management separates the men from the boys. <strong>Well-run hedge funds make financial decisions quickly, consistently with the spirit of the agile manifesto. They cannot afford to let any bureaucracy get in the way of “high gamma” execution.</strong></p><p>In fact, a hedge fund is just a company too, with the main difference being that they have a disproportionately large pool of capital to invest in the markets. As a thought experiment, I explore hedge fund approach to investing to new software projects, specifically to compare a waterfall approach to an agile approach. All software investment projects have embedded real options. Many analytical tools exist when investing with options, and many of them are surprisingly relevant in a new product development context.</p><p>Every greenfield software development project, from the moment it's just an idea discussed by the team, is a bet on what clients or prospects want. Even if the project is being custom made-to-order for one client, it's possible the client's actual needs will be verbalized differently, once he sees a prototype. In addition to technology unknowns, development projects also face a number of other unknowns, especially in the context of marketing. Who exactly will need it? What problem will it solve for them? How many potential users exist? How do we effectively find and convince the potential users to buy this software once it exists? That's why it's reasonably easy to understand new product development as a bet the product team makes.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/dice1_b9a7a6e00fc50f91a378eee6f4d5cc10_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/dice1_b9a7a6e00fc50f91a378eee6f4d5cc10_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/dice1_b9a7a6e00fc50f91a378eee6f4d5cc10_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/dice1_b9a7a6e00fc50f91a378eee6f4d5cc10_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/dice1_b9a7a6e00fc50f91a378eee6f4d5cc10_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Copyright: Copyright 2007</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Don't make detailed assumptions about the distant future.</strong></p><p>Like tax returns, project plans in software development are largely intricate works of fiction, i.e. based on a true story. Instead, you can make supremely detailed tactical short-term plans, where:</p><ol type="1"><li>your context doesn't have time to change as much</li><li>you can integrate your product development as quickly as possible with paying customers</li><li>you can prove that a market exists for the new product, and that the concept is even viable</li></ol><p>You are trying to discover an unmet need in the market which your prospects will be crazy about. Then, you actually have a chance that your bet will turn into a<a href="https://app.storychief.io/funding-new-product-development"> Demarco Project B</a>. Then you will be thinking like hedge fund, really understanding and calculating the value of your immediate real options.</p><p>In this case, you are investing in a real call option. You have a small initial outflow at the beginning of the project, to generate a minimum viable product. Your losses are limited to that outlay. Your net present value (NPV) will be negative. Based on the standard criterion for accepting an investment project, you should reject such a project if the NPV is less than 0. Nevertheless, within a few iterations, you may generate a product that starts generating revenue. This revenue stream may exhibit exponential growth. In financial option terminology, the real call option has high gamma.</p><p><strong>What does this mean for you operationally?</strong></p><p>If you are using an Agile approach, you already keep track of your call options in a product backlog. A product backlog is an ordered list of potential features, or user stories, for a product. In the context of a new product, the product backlog's most important function is to help you, as the product/business owner, prioritize this list, primarily based on the expected payoffs of adding a feature. Once you finish enough of a product that you can sell it, you start getting a lot of feedback about everything but the development process, so it would be ideal to have the flexibility to adapt to market conditions.</p><p>This list, while it may look rather dull, is potentially revenue-generating magic in the future. In fact, you can view it as a list of real call options, like the exchange traded derivatives variety. A backlog is effectively a portfolio of real options. An option portfolio is more dynamic. Its value depends on your business context. A number of interesting implications come out of this new model.</p><p>In fact, this is where Agile and Scrum metaphors around the backlog as a “feature idea inventory” break down for me. Typically, the product backlog is described as an inventory of potential features, where they are hoarded and stored. In my mind, a warehousing metaphor is somewhat lifeless and static. You don’t take into account the potential features’ value, when doing NPV financial analysis.</p><p>After getting an understanding of the market where a company operates, VCs just calculate a “fudge factor”, as a proxy for how much they believe the company will actually generate revenue. They use the denominator to override the value of the company’s real options on the product backlog. The value of these options will effectively decide whether the project will be a Demarco Project A or Project B, yet they aren’t taken into account explicitly at all.</p><p>In a high-tech environment like IT startups, return on investment (ROI) is more likely to be driven from adding new revenue streams than from controlling costs and budgeting. From an income statement point of view, the top line (revenues) is much more important than the bottom line (net profits), because we work in such a young and rapidly expanding industry. You can use NPV to trace cash flows down to combinations and series of tasks, and to estimate when you might be able to start selling in the future. Alternatively, you can also explicitly value your backlog items as real options. This way, you keep track of one list of fully developed features you need, so that you can prioritize much more dynamically-as you start selling and getting market feedback.</p><p>As a result of taking into account these dynamic scenarios, you have a much more accurate project valuation, at any point in time after the first calculation period used for the estimation! Moreover, <strong>NPV on its own systematically underestimates the value of most software and internet R&D projects, because it ignores embedded call options in the product backlog, which typically have high values in a volatile industry.</strong> If you calculated their value, and added it to the NPV cash flows you estimated, you can then use the NPV criterion of being net position with more precision. You will be taking into account the true value of what you get, when you invest in that project.</p><p>This is the key business difference between agile and waterfall. Waterfall handcuffs you into making estimates of a long term NPV, without explicitly allowing for optionality. Thinking about a product backlog as a portfolio of options is a much finer-grained approach to risk management, particularly when combined with software demos at the end of iterations. Then, you can legitimately claim you run your software project portfolio like a hedge fund manager.</p><p>Statistician E.P. Box quipped, "All models are wrong, some are useful". I would add that some models are more useful than others.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-6408929979595743842022-10-07T04:00:00.001-07:002022-10-07T04:00:31.804-07:00How to befriend time when you're in a hurry<p>Miyamoto Musashi was a legendary renaissance samurai poet and painter. He invented the technique of fencing with two swords. According to legend, he won over 60 sword fight duels. He was so talented, that he killed an adult samurai with a wooden sword at the age of 13. He single-handedly fought of an ambush wrought by a samurai school. Personally, he fought in 6 wars. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/musashi_miyamoto_eeb44bd80764b01405df0b139042d218_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/musashi_miyamoto_eeb44bd80764b01405df0b139042d218_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/musashi_miyamoto_eeb44bd80764b01405df0b139042d218_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Musashi Miyamoto on velocity</figcaption></figure><p>These Rambo-esque legends weren't his greatest contribution, though. On his deathbed, he penned a treatise on strategy called "A Book of Five Rings". As he had the ability to kill of so many opponents in duels (i.e. being on the right side of 60 duels), he became a master of the psychology of battle strategy. The book contains his insights into how he thought about this process.</p><p><strong>“Whatever the way, the master of strategy does not appear fast….Of course, slowness is bad. Really skillful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”</strong> Some people can cover 120 miles a day without breaking a sweat. Others will look tired within a minute of starting to run. </p><p>What's really at stake here?</p><p>How you feel about urgency and speed is a reflection of your habits in a personal context. If you have bad time management habits personally, then of course you will feel discomfort about time going by. And the opposite is also true. If you have good habits and you live in accordance with your priorities, you look forward to time passing. It works in your favor. </p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_3d852805883915c7cf96f8e6c0d54f6b_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_3d852805883915c7cf96f8e6c0d54f6b_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_3d852805883915c7cf96f8e6c0d54f6b_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_3d852805883915c7cf96f8e6c0d54f6b_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_3d852805883915c7cf96f8e6c0d54f6b_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a href="https://unsplash.com/@theformfitness" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Form</a> | Source: <a href="https://unsplash.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unsplash</a> | Aiming for the above with my stretching routine</figcaption></figure><p>I can definitely see this when I do my daily stretching routine. Even though I might not be happy with the point where I started, if I do my stretches every day, my flexibility increases. And I see progress over time. So I look forwards to time passing, because if I have increasingly better results.</p><p>This observation is fractal. In a professional context, it's about the quality of your company's systems. <strong>If you have well thought through and optimized systems, you look forwards to achieving your goals. Time feels like it's on your side.</strong> The competition isn't as important as the stopwatch. Like in a road race. If you have poor systems, you're constantly harried and monitoring and firefighting. And there's no time to do anything longer term.</p><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_8ce6460c9e5423078280b12e4cec3404_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_8ce6460c9e5423078280b12e4cec3404_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_8ce6460c9e5423078280b12e4cec3404_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_8ce6460c9e5423078280b12e4cec3404_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_8ce6460c9e5423078280b12e4cec3404_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a href="https://unsplash.com/@diesektion" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Robert Anasch</a> | Source: <a href="https://unsplash.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unsplash</a> | Time is on your side if your company has well thought out systems.</figcaption></figure><p>If I can extend the metaphor a bit to building shareholder value, particularly in software companies or in knowledge work: "Wealth is built with time as an asset, not as a liability". </p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-90970529911050119862022-08-01T04:45:00.001-07:002022-08-01T04:45:07.057-07:00Diagnosing remote burnout with Toms Blodnieks<figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hea3uo_0aa9210fbfd5ddb6229228abb4e4599d_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hea3uo_0aa9210fbfd5ddb6229228abb4e4599d_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hea3uo_0aa9210fbfd5ddb6229228abb4e4599d_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hea3uo_0aa9210fbfd5ddb6229228abb4e4599d_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hea3uo_0aa9210fbfd5ddb6229228abb4e4599d_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Toms Blodnieks</figcaption></figure><h2 id="64td2">About Toms Blodnieks</h2><p>Toms Blodnieks is the COO & Head of Product and Business Development at DeskTime. During five years at DeskTime, he’s helped the company grow and expand. Toms’ interests include marketing, sales, customer experience, user experience, and SaaS products. He’s a time management expert and paranoid planner who likes to plan everything and every day – from small things to large projects. His current motto? Done is better than perfect.</p><h2 id="58sgm">Video Interview</h2><figure class="video strchf-type-video regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><div class="embed-container"><div style="max-width: 100%; position: relative; padding-top: 56.5%;"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c792j7UO-ak?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" title="Toms Blodnieks on diagnosing remote burnout" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div></div></figure><h2 id="2m1bj">Links</h2><ul><li>overtime article: <a href="https://desktime.com/blog/is-overtime-worth-it">https://desktime.com/blog/is-overtime-worth-it</a></li><li>DeskTime blog: <a href="https://desktime.com/blog/">https://desktime.com/blog/</a></li><li>Toms <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/toms-blodnieks-925a0855/">on LinkedIn</a></li></ul><h2 id="dh25h">Transcript</h2><p><strong>Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. Today. We are speaking with Tom's blogs and Tom is the COO and head of product and business development at desk time. And during his time at desk time, he's helped the company grow and expand. And he's interested in marketing sales, CX, UX, and SAS products. And. I'd like to start actually with a question around your current motto done is better than perfect. What does that mean for.</strong></p><p>Hi. Yeah. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Happy to talk about these topics. Don is better than perfect is because there are a lot of things that we want to do, how we want to build the software or webpage or whatever we do.</p><p>And we always want to do more and more. I'm getting perfect out there, The perfect just takes too much time. And it's probably too late, so let's get out the MVP. Let's get done it so people can see, so we can get the first feedback, the first expressions and then we can do the next steps to get it perfect. So done is better than waiting for.</p><p><strong>Okay. Great. Great. So one of the things that you and your team have done is a quite detailed report around around remote at the moment. Could you tell us a little bit about that project.</strong></p><p>Yeah the project itself this is a time tracking tool.</p><p>We offer time management, time tracking, attendance tracking project, and cost tracking for businesses, for freelancers, for everyone who needs. So we have a lot of data. And so desk is in business for more than 10 years now. So almost more, actually more than half a million people.</p><p>Actually the end users have used desk time at this point. Time to time. Take these data out and make researches. And our content team likes to write about actually. What's happening in the world and relevant data and the remote work or hybrid work and all the COVID data and how the like the breaks, the working habits have changed and stuff like that.</p><p>This is last few years, a huge topic that are marketing and content team is dealing with searching for data and checking out the countries, most productive countries. How. Everything is changing, but that specific research that probably you're talking about, which was published in earlier this year on Forbes is just showing that Comparing previous years with remote time. We see that remote workers work more. And it's it's not 10% more. It's even more like it's at least one hour per day, more than regular office or hybrid worker. In weekly basis, it's at least five, six hours more than regular worker per month. It's even almost 30 hours more. It all goes to burnout and it all goes to unhealthy work style. So you don't take proper breaks during your day, or you just work later in the evening. So you lose connection with family, with outside habits and stuff like that. That's one of the topics that we talk about that's one of the options or issues. Why desk time is useful or any other time tracking time management tool for businesses for freelancers why you need to look. At your timings, how you work. When you work, how much you work and how often do you take breaks? Do you like live healthy life and the life is not about work only.</p><p>So yeah, work is very important of course to earn money, to grow and learn and do business. But a lot of things to do outside the working hours. So we sleep eight hours, we work eight hours. And then rest of the 10 things that we need to do, we need to do in only the eight hours we have left in the day.</p><p>So how can we do that? So it's very important to manage the time correctly.</p><p><strong>How do you define good work life balance versus what you're seeing now. Let's start there before digging more into specifically burnout.</strong></p><p>Yeah, from our findings and from our experience and interviews that we can tell that the work life balance in first case is that you have freedom somehow the flexibility to do things that you as a human need to do. And again, this is also one of the things that we do at desk time.</p><p>And we like that. We can take our two hours, half a day off if we need to go and do something with our kids, or we need to go to the doctor or we have some kind of family issues or something, and we can do that. And then the flexibility and the time tracking gives us option. Also for our managers or team members that everyone knows where we are, how much time we have worked, what how we done.</p><p>And that's all there with data. Not only saying yes, I'm working. And I have done everything, but really there is evidence and data, that proof of work, which is very important. Because we all want to be honest for each other and then tool, like DeskTime gives that opportunity and that's yeah, good work life balance starts with that.</p><p><strong>How do you think about it as a, as a manager, in terms of the people that you work with? Do you have any kind of expectations or guidelines around when is too much? For example?</strong></p><p>Yeah, of course. Each company is different. So in our case in our team in our company, we have agreed on several terms that for example how many hours we actually need to work.</p><p>Like this is also one of the, part of the work life balance in our team, we. Expect to work 35 hours a week. So we don't ask for 40 hours. We don't ask to be at work like eight and a half or nine hours. We just want that there is clear working hours, seven hours a day, 35 hours a week. The flexibility, the work life balance also gives you option to work less some days and then work more in some other days.</p><p>But. That's too much would be if you work like only two days 17 hours a day. You have, in two days you have worked like those 35 hours and then the rest of the week you take off, this would be too much. Yeah. But in a normal basis we work like average seven hours a day. Then you can be flexible.</p><p>You can come at work later, like until 11, for example, In the morning and then you can work later in the evening and take the midday off and stuff like that. So you can manage your time yourself, but if you will be needed during the daytime from 10 to four, for example we will schedule a meeting like in, in a, in advance, of course if you have a calendar open and there is really no strict busy time.</p><p>So such options we have agreed how we work and give a lot of flexibility and freedom for employees. So they can really have good work life balance in their lives and be happy at work. They can, they're more effective than working during the working hours. They're more happier.</p><p>And yeah and families are happy.</p><p><strong>And it works. Yeah. Do you have any internal guidelines or agreements in terms of meetings? Like meetings versus other types of work? Cause I think that especially initially was a difficult point for people new to remote work at the beginning of the pandemic.</strong></p><p>Yeah. Yeah. We have talked about that. We have teams and each team lead our manager of the team. We have biweekly meetings with those with our, so with our CEO and we talk over all the uh, Logistical things that we need. And that includes also how many meetings we have.</p><p>Every week we have all hands meeting with all our staff and we publicly show the data of desk time. What time has taken for which project client thing, and one of the projects we call it is meetings. And we always see how much time we take in the meetings. And then there are like expectations and that's.</p><p>Managers. Yes, they would, they will have more meetings than like regular teammate. And but also we see that meetings don't take more than 30% of the weekly time. So this is for manager, it's a good result. And yeah that's what we. Doing so trying not to have too much meetings, but also if we need a meeting, then we do that.</p><p>If it's really, but we try to follow the, that we have agenda for the meeting and we try to do as short as possible, as precise as possible. And then we write notes in the end of the meeting to understand what we have gained from this meeting and what are action steps. So in this case when we think like that about the meetings it's quite okay.</p><p>And the timing seems to be okay as well. That 30% of the time in meetings comparing what I have read and see in in similar or other companies that. 70%, 60%, even 90% for some weeks in the meetings. I think it's crazy. There's no option. You can manage those meetings and not even any other work outside the meetings.</p><p><strong>yeah, exactly. Do in your. Tool or in your company, do you have a way of tracking or do you track something like like energy levels of people who are involved and how that maps to, to the time being used out of curiosity.</strong></p><p>Yeah, the energy level is nice approach. We haven't done that.</p><p>We are thinking about how to really get some AI into our system because now it's more based on real actual work by the. Mouse keyboard like video calls, audio calls typing writing and an office workers more So we don't have any like energy levels that we could, somehow that people could rate how they feel or stuff like that.</p><p>And then we have some kind of report showing that after six hours people rate they're like feeling already worked out yeah that's something we are thinking in the future about to adding and. Getting more data from like humans. But yeah, at the moment we are like comparing the time, actually work.</p><p>Then we have like automatic timers that are tracking how we work automatically. Then there is a manual timer we can turn on when we need like to do some kind of brainstorming more and then irregular work. And then of course, if we have any meetings, then we have integrations with calendars.</p><p>So they get the information from calendar to desk time. And then we see that all the overview in reports how many calendar meetings we have been, how long how many brainstormings and how many automated time tracking and stuff like that. So everything is then all together in one system, getting all the data together.</p><p><strong>From your point of view, as a executive or say from, for, or from a point of view of a senior manager, do you then see aggregated data and you're able to see trends within the company or are your clients able to see that, that level of data.</strong></p><p>Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure that's something that we are always like listening to our clients customers how they're using the data, what what they like and what they want to see more or detailed or what's too much. And what's easy to understand. There are some things that really been used and are very popular to, for example, divide programs, webpage applications, everything that we do in productive, unproductive, and neutral statuses.</p><p>So they like to see that how much actually time we spend productively, for example they follow what's been doing and updating the statuses. What's productive. What's not for team. And I know that companies are using also that they. To get gain the productive time, for example.</p><p>So they set less hours per day, but as a productive time like we are, we ourselves, we have just seven hours working. That's our like KPI for a day or 35 hours a week. Other ones like to look at the effectiveness percentage. So effectiveness percentage again. Indicates how much productive time versus working hours have been done.</p><p>So you can set different working hours per each, for each day and then the effectiveness percentage shows you the, how much you have done from that. And then our recommended effectiveness percentage is 80, 85%, which is very good then. And then yeah, that's some so different metrics that Users are using</p><p><strong>In terms of speaking of effectiveness, in terms of comparing how people spend their time relative to say a high level outcome or a goal is there ways of tracking that or is that just on a, let's say a project let's say or something like that, that you track within desk time?</strong></p><p>How does that. Yeah, you it's it's again, it's there is a possibility to follow details if you want, and if you need those details for, I don't know, client billing or something, and yeah, there is a project task client based options that you can track. And also you can see an overview of that time and then you can see details what have been done if I'm working with client a, so what I have done for that and then I can give specifics.</p><p><strong>Just jumping back a little bit to a comparison you made at the top of the conversation. Other than the increased volume of time people are spending in front of a computer working. Are there any other interesting data points that you've noticed in terms of comparisons of how people were working before march, 2020? And let's say, now?</strong></p><p>Yeah there's really a huge blog in our website where I don't know, like three, four, or even more blogs per week writing about different articles and data is one of the top articles that we are analyzing. So it's maybe, I don't know, at the moment, all of the.</p><p>Key metrics and the analysis, but some of some points that following, yes, this is the remote work how it's been changed and the other one, which is well recognized and very interesting statistics is about breaks . And if we see that The previous study, which was like much earlier than the COVID hit, but it was made five years ago.</p><p>About people, the most productive people, how they work at that time, it was that people like to work 52 minutes, like average at the computer and then taking 17 minutes break by average. So that was one pattern we saw from those who have the most productive hours percentage effectiveness. The average data was and now when we after the first wave of the COVID, when there was a complete lockdown and really most of the people worked remotely we see totally like different data. Working hours from 52 minutes have grown to hundred and 12 minutes, which is almost two times more.</p><p>So they, they didn't step away from the computer for twice as much time. But what's the worst thing is that the break from 17 minutes have raised only to 26 minutes. So they have worked almost two times more at the computer, but the break wasn't two times more. That's compares a relate to, to the remote work that everyone just works more.</p><p>And then takes less breaks shorter breaks. And which is not healthy. We have made videos with like sport doctors that really talks about how often do you need to take, break what you need to do at the break?</p><p>And no one of them says that it's healthy to work almost two hours nonstop and with such short break. The data are out there. , each of the customers can see the data for their specific teams or the whole organization and take actions and really react. So someone is like, Keeping eye on how much hours nonstop or in general working someone is taking action on how much time is spent on meetings.</p><p><strong>With this 112 minutes Still roughly the same level of let's say effectiveness where it's productive work or is it all kinds of things has the overall effectiveness gone down at that time?</strong></p><p>Yeah. I think I don't have the data at the, in front of me at the moment, but yeah, that's a very interesting question that if they're like being productive because one, one other what I remember now, if you ask this is about overtime about overtime. It's interesting seeing that for each teammate mostly there is some kind of hour.</p><p>You need to work per day. So an overtime is what you work more than those hours per day. And what is interesting the study and the data shows that if you work over time, and then more overtime, you go that less productive, less effective. You are you start Like changing the applications.</p><p>You don't use the productive applications anymore. You take more breaks then. And then the time in overtime is really not structured and not productive, not effective, not the overtime is like the, I think the article was the overtime is killing or something about like that. So yeah, that's something as well.</p><p>We try to educate our users. Short overtime is okay. Occasionally very is okay. But constant overtime is not it's bad for business. Bad for humans.</p><p><strong>Yeah, definitely. Send me a link. I'll happy to include it in the show notes. Just so people wanna check it out</strong>.</p><p>Yeah. Sure.</p><p>Thank you.</p><p><strong>Let's dig a little bit deeper specifically into burnout. What would you, in, in the data, how would you be seeing it or defining it? Of let's say individuals when they're at a point where it does look like they're burned out, literally?</strong></p><p>There are some things that as I, I like to say that desktop time data is.</p><p>Like the part of the statistics or data that helps you talk to people and only desk time data is not like fully relevant to analyze and make decisions only based on data . So we need take other things combined with desk time data. And one of those is like for at least.</p><p>Last few years everyone is talking about managers about teams that you have to have a one on one meeting with your manager. So this is the time when you. Talk a little bit more, not only work related things, but also as a people, as a human as a as how you feel, how you do, and then you definitely see the differences.</p><p>If there is any, if there are any changes, time to time, and then you can. Get the desktop data and analyze. Did he work more, did he like work less? Did he had less or more productive or effectiveness or something and you see those changes of habits or something and That's how you can manage the, and see also the burnout</p><p>clearly of desk time data. Of course, it's not possible to see the burnout without any AI or as you mentioned marks of energy or something because people are different. And I like to work a lot as well. Of course. It's not good. I know, but and my family sometimes are not happy, but. At least, I feel that I'm not burning out, but just, I like to work more.</p><p>So there are people who can work more and they easily 10, 11, 12 hours per day, and that's fine. And they recharge during the weekend, for example and there are people that the seven hours are limit and they, if they work more than seven hours per day, that's there, like in few months there will be in chair with the psychologist or something. So we need to take this HR aspect as well and not only the data driven the data is something that shows and helps, but you need to have this human approach as well. To understand.</p><p><strong>Yeah, of course. The data's only part of the picture and if anything, only with diagnosis.</strong></p><p><strong>So basically what you're saying is that if there's changes over time, that are concerning, that would be how you'd figure it out from what you see there.</strong></p><p>Yeah. That's one of the options, for example. Okay.</p><p><strong>Yeah. I'm asking partially both from a, how do you look at a person, but also if you can see whether it spreads to teams cuz A an old episode of of this podcast actually talked with a guy named Jules Turner, where he was saying that quite often, if there is burnout it's not just the one person it's often somewhat systemic, at least at the team level, if not even further, potentially. Would you be able to see a whole team kind of drifting in a bad direction? Or is that not something that you would expect to see in in, in data that you're collecting?</strong></p><p>No, definitely. I think it's possible to see actually we have a personal experience with that in our team as well.</p><p>We were so focused and wanted to finish one of the features we related earlier this year. So we saw an increase of hours working. We saw an increase of meetings and and then talking to those people, it was clearly understandable that they are in stress that they want to finish as well.</p><p>They feel that management is asking and wanting to finish in time and That's clearly saw was possible to see from data. The 10 times are changing the different times and also talking to those people, seeing them in the office. Getting feedback it approved, this is not going too good.</p><p>It's yeah. So yeah, definitely. It's possible and it was team wise. Yeah, definitely. So it was a team wise not tell me the one person.</p><p><strong>For managers in this kind of a situation, what's worked for you, what kind of I guess advice would you give in terms of in terms of what to do in this kind of a situation?</strong></p><p>No. Like the situation how to resolve that it's quite easy. I think most important and is to see that something is going bad. Something is going wrong in in, in, in good timing. Because if you see that only in six months or once a year, when you do annual some kind of screening review.</p><p>Yeah. Or reviews or something it's too late, but with help of data of time tracking and then everything we saw that. Like first month was okay. We saw that indication then the second month was that we see, it's never, it's not stopping that we need to talk over. So we did that in less than 60 days and not waiting for 360 days.</p><p>I think that's the most important part, but how to deal with that then? Yeah. You need to take the what's the situation. In our case, it was a development project. And the development team was that what was involved, how we just went through the deadlines, went through the expectations and everything and, or we do the MVP, what we need to do.</p><p>Changes on that, or we extend the deadlines or we change the scope in some other way. So there are different options and then need to look at specific case. But the most important when you see the problem to act right right away, basically when you diagnose it interest.</p><p><strong>Interesting.</strong></p><p><strong>Interesting. So out of curiosity, when you have like entire companies using desk time is who's typically the person that, that that kind of makes it happen within a client company?</strong></p><p>Yeah that's a good question. We just have renewed our personas, which is very, which are very important to understand who is your.</p><p>Client which, who is your buying person? And yeah, it's still showing that we know our industries that mostly this can be used by it industries, different kind of companies in it, it sector marketing and advertising agencies are using a lot. And HR HR C. Who is that who initiates or buys is depending on the company size?</p><p>So if it's a small company, then usually the whole company is using the tool for everyone to be equal. And that's usually one of the top executives Who's making that decision also testing together with the team and deciding. But if we are looking at the larger companies from hundred to thousand people companies, which are medium company, medium size big companies there are team leads who are looking for those.</p><p>So there is specifically maybe development team is the one who initiates that we would like, and we need the time management or project management or. Something then we are finding that and then offering, and then slowly upgrading to other teams in the company as well and growing like that. But so yeah the team leads and time to time, there are HR people which are like, I think yesterday or two days ago, I had the meeting with one company that their HR indicated that they would need to like time tracking something that because the executives didn't know exactly what time, how much time and when their employees are working they've been, they're giving a lot of flexibility to come less to their office and going home earlier and then working from home and, or.</p><p>To avoid the traffic and stuff like that. And then they said that, yeah, they just need the proof of work. That everything is fine, that everything is doing their project. And if they see that some kind of project is not going as smooth as it needed or was predicted, then they can take a look if the time spent on that project at all or something or less than planned or something. And those are the data that we can see with any like different kind of modern technologies. And I like the era we are living in that a lot of things can be done. And then with the help of technology, HR technologies, HR weeks tools for hiring that I appreciate the communication tools, the video calls, the webinar tools like great,</p><p><strong>yeah. Yeah. And I'm curious how these implementations go from the point of view of the employees. What's the typical way that it that it works when you do have a rollout and I guess at a team level or at a company level?</strong></p><p>Yeah. Yeah, of course. That's very important. That's Depends if the executive or the team lead has talking with the team before decision of testing out tools.</p><p>And it's very important to give the instructions to explain why we are doing that. What are the outcomes we are? We want to see and correctly implement with correct settings, because for, in our case we have a lot of features that like half of the teams are not using different details of how we spend our time and.</p><p>for them. It's not needed. So for them, those who it's not needed. So do the communication the right way that they understand that this will not U be used for us. This will be turned off and we will follow the projects the client time so we can bill correctly, or we can we can manage our proof of work or we can manage the clocking clock.</p><p>With a reason why it's really needed and explaining that that, that is important. So we help as our side as well, of course, with with emails, with educational materials. But we can't be next to that executive or team lead who decides to do that and put the words in, in their mouths.</p><p>Correct way. And explain, because this is yeah it's like serious for it's. Maybe it's maybe easier for slack or any other tools that are clear that we are for communication. Although I know that's Microsoft teams are used to also to see and follow the green light to your, that indicators.</p><p>Yeah. Your online or not. So that's not the way it's probably meant to use, but</p><p><strong>slack has it too</strong>.</p><p>oh yeah, actually. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah. So for example, I have like different example of different company that is using a car GPS systems and they really are helping for people to automate their reports of fueling how much gas they use.</p><p>And and then kilometers miles they drive and stuff like that. They don't need to write themselves anymore and then put their reports. Everything is. But of course it can be used as a car tracker as well, which is not good way to do that and which employees don't like. So it's very important to explain and educate how we will use and get the trust from employees, from the teams as well.</p><p>Of course.</p><p><strong>Great. Thanks Tom. This has been a blast. Thank you for sharing all of your data and your insights and your wisdom with us.</strong></p><p><strong>And what's the best place for people to, to visit, to find out more?</strong></p><p>Definitely. If you are interested in data, was it best pen dot slash blog? That's where we write and post our blogs. Of course we share everything and all the information and statistics in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn our CEO is actively active member of Forbes council.</p><p>So follow there as well, but all of the desk time. People, mostly I think are in LinkedIn and open to talk, open to connect. So me as well find me on LinkedIn and let's get together. Let's do some podcast webinars contents, data. Yeah. Happy to talk and then share.</p><p>Okay. Wonderful. Thanks Tom.</p><p><strong>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-72129706780829348272022-06-28T01:00:00.001-07:002022-06-28T01:00:30.541-07:00Range.co on meetings with remote introverts<figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hbgv23_d648a8a1c78b3df3a014105bb688d648_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hbgv23_d648a8a1c78b3df3a014105bb688d648_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hbgv23_d648a8a1c78b3df3a014105bb688d648_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hbgv23_d648a8a1c78b3df3a014105bb688d648_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1hbgv23_d648a8a1c78b3df3a014105bb688d648_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><h2 id="5vfa2">About the speakers</h2><p><strong>Dan Pupius </strong></p><p>Dan Pupius is CEO and Co-founder of <a href="https://www.range.co">Range</a>, communication software that empower and strengthen teams, built specifically for the needs of the modern workplace. He has an MA in Industrial Design from Sheffield University, and a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Manchester. In past lives he raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle.</p><p><strong>Jean Hsu</strong></p><p>Jean Hsu is the Vice President of Engineering at <a href="https://www.range.co">Range</a>. Prior to Range, she built product and engineering teams at Google, Pulse, and Medium, and co-founded <a href="https://coleadership.com/">Co Leadership</a>, a leadership development company for engineers and other tech leaders. She’s also a co-actively trained coach and has coached engineers, tech leads, managers, VPs of Engineering, and CTOs. She loves to play ultimate frisbee and lives in Berkeley with her partner and two kids.</p><h2 id="6teq7">Links for more information</h2><ul><li><a href="https://www.range.co">Range</a></li><li>Dan Pupius on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/danpupius/">LinkedIn</a></li><li>Jean Hsu on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanyhsu/">LinkedIn</a></li></ul><h2 id="ecno1">Resources mentioned in the show</h2><ul><li>get three months of range for free with coupon code <strong>MRT2022 </strong>which you can apply at checkout</li><li>In his first book, <a href="https://geni.us/CodeLawsLessig"><em>Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</em>,</a> Lawrence Lessig suggests that our behavior is regulated by four main forces: law, social norms, market forces and architecture.</li></ul><h2 id="5tmpr">Video interview</h2><figure class="video strchf-type-video regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><div class="embed-container"><div style="max-width: 100%; position: relative; padding-top: 56.5%;"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WkNl8E6wZ6g?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" title="Range.co on meeting with remote introverts" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div></div></figure><h2 id="fgl28">Transcript</h2><p>[00:00:00] <strong>Jean:</strong> my team is all introverts. How do I, how do I get them to engage in these meetings?</p><p>They don't say anything. So I just call on them, which of course increases the anxiety of going to these remote meetings that you're going to be called on to, to, share your opinion at any given point. And so we do a lot of things. Like we have built into range meetings.</p><p>We have a spinner and so it shows everyone. And then, we have a check-in round where you spend the spinner and then everyone gets a chance to share how they're doing. If we were discussing a topic and it's a few people, if I notice that no one's saying anything, sometimes I'll set a timer and say Hey, I'm going to give you two minutes.</p><p>Just think about this question. And then we'll use the spinner to go around the room and everyone will share, what was surprising or any insights you had. And I find that puts a lot of introverts more at ease, where they have a little bit of time to think about it before responding. And they know that they're going to have to respond. It's pretty mind blowing. How many insights, really good insights come out of that where people might not willingly volunteer them if you were just like anyone have anything to share, but if they know they're going to get called on they'll think of what they want to share.</p><p>[00:01:05] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. Today, I am super excited to be speaking with the team from range.co I've got Dan Pupius and Jean Hsu, the CEO and CTO, respectively. Let's start a little bit with range itself, what is it exactly that inspired you to build this kind of a system, Dan?</strong></p><p>[00:01:55] <strong>Dan:</strong> So first off, thanks for having us it's good to be here and the important topic, especially given the state of the world today. So fundamentally today range is a set of integrated communication tools that empower and strengthen teams. So we've built it specifically for the needs of today's world.</p><p>So work is more complex. Teams are more distributed and people are seeing more purpose, seeking, more purpose in their work so that some of the underlying principles. And at the core is a product that allows for teams through asynchronous check-ins. So it's a little bit like you're a virtual standup.</p><p>We integrate with all the tools. So it's really easy to see your work and what you've got done. And then we have integrated team building components, which help build a sense of belonging and connection throughout that ACS process. Around that basically at its core, we have a synchronous meeting, facilitation tools goal set setting, and then a team directory.</p><p>So really we're building a suite for remote work.</p><p>[00:02:45] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>When was the first moment that you started building something like this? Just in terms of timeline? Is it directly after the pandemic started or...</strong></p><p>[00:02:56] <strong>Dan:</strong> so we founded the company quite a while ago. So as some background, Jean, I worked at medium along with my co-founder Jen.</p><p>So Jean and I were engineering and Jen was in people ops. And at that time, we were experimenting with alternative ways of managing the company, shall we say? And we saw the opportunity for tooling. So we actually had some internal engineers working on some tools to help us coordinate. And that was really like where we started having this idea of Winston Churchill said, “we shape the buildings, and afterwards they shape us”.</p><p>So if we build the software thereafter, the software shapes us, like what would it look like to build a new class of software specifically designed to encourage the behaviors that we think are important in today's workplaces. So that became the impetus for range. And we started in 2017 and. Product and customer discovery.</p><p>We had early traction with remote teams and then since the pandemic, obviously everyone's going remote and the value prop of remote oriented tooling has become very clear to everyone.</p><p>[00:03:48] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Yeah, I have to say the least. Sure. Come March, 2020 how did things look as things started to, heat up for you, I would assume?</strong></p><p>[00:03:57] <strong>Dan:</strong> Jean, you joined after the pandemic, right? Thanks for remembering.</p><p>[00:04:00] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>Yeah, I joined in the summer. Very different. From what I've heard from you, pre pandemic, early days of range of oh, is this a market? Some skepticism, I think after the pandemic and ever after everyone went remote, it was like, oh, clearly this is a huge pain point. Like team alignment and team communication tools for remote teams. And yeah, I joined, I think at the summer of 2020</em>.</p><p>[00:04:21] <strong>Dan:</strong> That's all right. And the peak.</p><p>Yeah. So in pre pandemic, we had customers we'd been taking a lean approach. So we had, we've been working with development partners since day one, essentially. We had big names like Twitter quite early on yeah, like Gina alluded to while I was like religion for people who saw the need for something like this, who cared about culture and cared about productivity and engagement and belonging, it wasn't a widely held belief and it was a bit of an uphill battle.</p><p>But when everyone was forced into this remote world and many of them hadn't been remote before just like the pain was just the amplified. So the need for a new way of working a new way of coordinating was much more.</p><p>[00:04:55] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>You guys mentioned alignment specifically, so which of the features, most dig into that or what, what seems to help the most?</strong></p><p><strong>Is it the the goal setting or is it the async check-ins </strong> <strong>how do you think about that?</strong></p><p>[00:05:07] <strong>Dan:</strong> So async check-ins is really the core. And if you think about what alignment means, it's not just about. It's not just a, like a cognitive thing of like information.</p><p>That's a feeling like we all feel aligned, right? So it's feeling like you're in the same boat. So checking in creates a habit, it's a rhythm. We have these culture building components, which help you actually feel like a team. So even if you're working on disparate work streams, you can, you feel like you're all contributing to a greater whole, and then it provides visibility into the work that's going on, which helps you understand how your work fits into the bigger picture.</p><p>And then the goal setting is a bit more about the north star and helping have a sense of purpose and tying your day-to-day work to an organizational objective. And even when, in many companies who are doing okay hours or, high-level goal setting is often very hard to connect day-to-day work to that goal.</p><p>So, range is designed to make that easier.</p><p>[00:05:55] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>I think a lot of times people think of the work getting done and then the connectedness and the feeling of being on a team of separate things. And so they'll have project management tools and that's where the work gets done. And then they'll okay.</em></p><p><em>Every quarter I'd be like, oh, we need to do something team building related and then, pay an external party to run a, cooking event or something over zoom. They're like, okay, we check the box. Like we did the team building or the kind of social connectedness part for this quarter can we get budget for next quarter?</em></p><p><em>And I think the unique part about range is it's all integrated. So you do your async check-in and then you answer your team building question that then you can go ahead and read everyone's answers.</em></p><p>[00:06:32] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>So what about the decision-making component of alignment? Like group decision-making? Is that, is that when the teams go and define their north star metric or how do you see customers doing that?</strong></p><p>[00:06:46] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think the way we think about Ranger's role in that is about building the foundation. So about building foundational context of what work is happening and what needs are emerging in the organization, but then also the foundational relationships. So imagine you're in an office you come up the elevator site your day, you make eye contact with Jean across the office.</p><p>You go over to the. The coffee kitchen, make a coffee and have a chat with someone, all these little moments these really informal ad hoc belonging cues is the term. And they're just a way of reinforcing the relationship. So range takes over some of the responsibility of those belonging cues which helps you believe that you're on the same side, you're on the same team.</p><p>And that you're like in the same tribe. Based the human instincts. So then when you go into these situations of having to make a decision or have a, a synchronous conversation over video chat to discuss some nuanced strategy, you have that foundation. Whereas if you come in cold it's just very hard to get into the flow and into the creative state, if you're feeling disconnected and essentially unsafe from a psychological point of view.</p><p>[00:07:43] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>I think people often think that that sense of belonging. Much the kind of default to thinking that, okay, remote teams, it's much harder to build that you need to spend time in person. I think one thing we've seen is that's not always necessarily true. Like we, we ask the team building question every Monday. That's like, how are you? How was your weekend?</em></p><p><em>And you can upload images. And so we get to see like pictures of people's picnics, their living rooms that they're painting, just like all the things they've been doing that. Share broadly with a team if you were in an in-person office. And we're doing that with such intentionality.</em></p><p><em>And we also get to see, of course people's pets and kids, and all sorts of more personal elements of our lives. I'm on zoom as well.</em></p><p>[00:08:24] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah, I think the worst version of remote workers it's incredibly sterile. You're isolated, you're alone. The only interactions you have with other humans are transactional.</p><p>Approve this tickets, or assign this this task and that's not going to lead you to make good creative, good decisions. Either you're not going to get the most out of people. That's fine if you're running a factory, but within creative work, which requires novelty and inspiration.</p><p>So we think a lot about how do we create the conditions where you can actually have these like higher functioning interaction.</p><p>[00:08:54] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>So what about working with developers? In terms of I guess these queues and in particular, this connection, I think because I, myself am pretty much an introvert. I think a lot of developers also tend to tend more in that into that direction. How how do you get that in ways that it doesn't feel let's say imposed but at the same time, people do feel like they can join in?</strong></p><p>[00:09:23] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>Yeah. We find that the async elements really do speak to people who. It may not be in an in-person office, the loudest person in the room.</em></p><p><em>Like having async check-ins where you can add more context about how you're doing. We also do a lot of optional game times, things like that, where you can join, but if your head's down in something, you don't have to join or a lot of like audio only syncs. So a lot of different ways to cater to people who have different preferences. I'm a pretty extreme introvert as well. And so like, almost all my one-on-ones are like audio only, or I'll go for a walk. And I actually find that it helps me pay attention to what people are saying more than just I have to look straight at the screen because this person is like, expecting me to be paying attention.</em></p><p><em>Not having to worry about what I'm, what facial expression I'm making.</em></p><p>[00:10:07] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah, I'm also massively introverted. And I think the thing that we don't realize is that introverts still want human connection. It's just difficult. And so how do we make it easier for them? And early on, actually we saw, we did some studies where people self identifying as introvert versus extrovert and the introverts engaged more on the the team-building features that extroverts and the hypothesis was that the extroverts have their social needs fulfilled elsewhere because they're able to seek it intentionally, whereas the introverts don't have as many opportunities to, to find this connection. So they, we're creating this easier way of connecting actually.</p><p>So I think it actually speaks well to a developer audience.</p><p>[00:10:44] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>The way that we run meetings also really is well-liked by introverts, because I think when I've been running these like effective meeting sessions, and one thing that people often bring up is oh, my team is all introverts. How do I, how do I get them to engage in these meetings?</em></p><p><em>And they'll say they don't say anything. So I just call on them, which of course increases the anxiety of going to these remote meetings that you're going to be called on to, to, share your opinion at any given point. And so we do a lot of things. Like we have built into range meetings.</em></p><p><em>We have a spinner and so it shows everyone. And then, we have a check-in round where you spend the spinner and then everyone gets a chance to share how they're doing. If we were discussing a topic and it's a few people, if I notice</em> <em>that no one's</em> <em>saying anything, sometimes I'll set a timer and say Hey, I'm going to give you two minutes.</em></p><p><em>Just think about this question. And then we'll use the spinner to go around the room and everyone will share, what was surprising or any insights you had. And I find that puts a lot of introverts, more at ease, where they have a little bit of time to think about it before responding.</em></p><p><em>And they know that they're going to have to respond. It's pretty mind blowing. How many insights, really good insights come out of that where people might not willingly volunteer them if you were just like anyone have anything to share, but if they know they're going to get called on they'll think of what they want to share.</em></p><p>[00:11:56] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah. I think also creating other opportunities to surface things you want to talk about. So that's another power of async is that it allows people to engage in the, on a timeframe that's comfortable for them. So if they think of a meeting topic, ahead of the meeting, or even after the meeting to bring to the next one, that's that should be totally fine.</p><p>You don't have to be on the spot thinking like, what should I talk about? Because some people in that context, it's just they freeze. It's like deer in the headlights. Really speaking to different types of communication and also information processing. Some people prefer to go away and think about things and come back 24 hours later with a feedback.</p><p>So how do we build organizations where we actually cater to all these different types of types of people?</p><p>[00:12:31] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Dan, you mentioned experiments. What was what was your approach? Was it more kind of structured customer development? Was it surveys?</strong></p><p><strong>Was it, how were you, or were you going about doing that out of curiosity?</strong></p><p>[00:12:42] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah. Early on it was it was it was all of the above. And we had a psychology advisor, so she was an organizational psychologist who who worked with us. Obviously, you're working with companies with their consent and understanding.</p><p>We would look at some of the data that they were sharing and what insights could we take away from that. And there's some pretty cool things that came out of it, which we haven't productized yet, but in the future it would be really awesome to revisit. Cause I think. Wait, when an organizational psychologist goes into a company they tend to do surveys people.</p><p>So self-reported, and it's very time-consuming. So what we found is some of the data range could provide insights in a very short amount of time that, would take multiple hours of interviews. And then we just did, did a lot of user feedback and user testing.</p><p>So to be clear, the tools that we're building at medium was very different to range. It was the principles that were interesting. It was that the software provides architecture and that architecture can support organizational behaviors.</p><p>In an organization Lawrence Lessig talks about this actually in I think it's the new Chicago school of economics. But that behavior is motivated by forces of laws, norms markets and architecture, and in modern workplaces. So many of our behaviors or norms like named channels in slack this way, send an email on Monday.</p><p>With the reports, don't do this, do that. And it's really hard for people to remember it. It's really hard to onboard and it's really hard to sustain. So if you think of software as a type of architecture, that can actually facilitate behaviors, you can make lives a lot easier for everyone and make organizational behaviors more resilient.</p><p>So that was like one of the key takeaways. So we had a team directory that made it very easy for people to reallocate their time. So I'm spend 20% on this project this month. And that made it very easy for Jean and I as like managers to know what people are working on. So I think that was like the key takeaway and that filters into the range of products.</p><p>[00:14:29] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>When we were working at medium together, we were in the office, but it's really important to have a place people can go to learn about people when they're working remotely cause you don't get to be like, oh, that's the person I see across the office. Now, I need to ask them for something for this project I'm working on.</em></p><p><em>Let me, they, I they've smiled at me a few times, so I know that they're a friendly person. So actually when Dan and I were still at Google we actually had probably the counterexample to the type of interactions we're trying to build where like I had been trying. Get some code committed into the code base that Dan was a tech lead for.</em></p><p><em>And I think I was probably one year Gmail, front end. And I was on a separate team was trying to work on a Gmail lab that I had started. I don't remember exactly the interaction, but I think it was just purely through code review where Dan had, it was probably fielding a lot of external teams trying to put code in the Gmail code base.</em></p><p><em>And I think he said something, just like probably slightly negative. And I remember telling my coworker that I wanted to TP his office. Cause I was like, so offended by this negative interaction we had, that was completely async I didn't know what he looked like. I didn't know anything about him.</em></p><p><em>I guess we think of remote work as like the last two years, but teams were working remotely. He was probably. We were on the same campus. We were just like, probably a few buildings apart and just like never interacted in person. Building some of that positive sentiment, like async foundation of trust so that, when things like this happen, you have some sense of.</em></p><p><em>Oh, this is like a human with a life outside of work and probably has a reasonable reason for responding the way they did, which is just</em>, <em>it's just a very funny beginning to our working together because now it's vastly different.</em></p><p>[00:16:07] <strong>Dan:</strong> Yeah. Yeah. I think that's like a, an important lesson there, which is, it goes to this transactional state of work.</p><p>And like for me, I was just getting all these change requests. And the only context I had in the change request was an LDAP name. And the LDAP name didn't seem human to me. So I would be requests in a very transactional way. And, we were getting inundated. Tons of people wanting to integrate with Gmail and it was causing some like technical debt issues.</p><p>So I was probably like shutting it down quite quickly, but over my time at Google actually, I started using, we had an internal team directory at Google. So when I get a code review from someone, I would go off to the team directory actually look at them, see their photo with the, some of the history. And it would like humanize them a bit more.</p><p>And then I'd come back and I'd actually be much more reasonable and friendly. So it wasn't, I wasn't intentionally being mean. It's just, I was I'm curious. That was before or after we had that. I think it was much later. Yeah, I was when I was on Google plus I was on the infrastructure team. We had 400 people contributing to our codes code base.</p><p>So we were defending the code base against 400 seemingly random people. And that sets you up for a lot of conflict, like us and them. So by humanizing people through the tools, and I think slack did this really well early on, you can actually change some of how you interact with people because know, you humanize the recipient and then that can increase the level of discourse.</p><p>So in range, profile photos, everywhere people's moods you can hover over and see like some backgrounds, Wednesday, birthday, what their pronouns like, where do they live? All this, seemingly superficial context that has nothing to do with work is really important in helping frame the conversation.</p><p>[00:17:38] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>Yeah. And Luke, you're asking about and engineers and who I tend to be more introverted. And I I think it's especially important for engineers because if you just default to like code reviews, right? Like code reviews are super transactional. Usually it's, people think that their main job is to point out the things that are wrong, but like very rarely do you get comments like, Hey, you did a really great job on this code change. Like this section looks great, right? Like you just get the kind of what could be better? And so I think without some intentional, like positive sentiment building, it can be pretty, pretty hard to be like, oh, this person really doesn't like me.</em></p><p><em>Or this is so challenging.</em></p><p>[00:18:14] <strong>Dan:</strong> Code reviews is another good example that can often go off the rails for many reasons. And when we think about coders, architecture github pull request templates are really valuable, right? So we have one which nudges you to. Like, why are you making this change? Why should the review of starts? Are there any tickets are excellent and contexts that they should be aware of? And then we have a funny one, which is a gift of how does this change make you feel? Actually, you can divert some of the things that often go wrong with pull requests of like, why the hell are you making this change? I don't understand. I don't have any context about this change. And then also just make, adding a bit of fun to it as well.</p><p>[00:18:49] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>So speaking of context, how. How do your customers use range to build context as they're going about, their team interactions?</strong></p><p>[00:19:00] <strong>Dan:</strong> Jean, You said about how you use range to manage, maybe that's like a good example.</p><p>Yeah. Yeah, I guess I start my day in range. I share my plan. So I'm not a very like getting things done. Like I don't have a separate to do list. So I use range as my, what I'm going to do that day. And then it's nice. Cause then it's communicated externally.</p><p>And then by the afternoon, when I'm feeling in a slump, then I can just check on what I said, I would do that morning and kind of get back to it. But then after I check it. See what everyone else has said. Maybe later once everyone has checked in, first I'll see all their answers to the team question, which today was like, how are you, how is your weekends?</p><p>I get to see how everyone's weekend was. We can also really easily see everyone's main focus for the day. And that'll give me a bit of ambient context. If I know oh, this engineer is working through this one feature usually people will. Integrate or bring in the they'll attach their, like a asana ticket to the check-in and then they'll add some context of hoping to get this done today.</p><p>So that makes my job easier. So as we're planning for next week or next cycle, I don't have to go around to every engineer and say, Hey, what's the status on this thing? Feel like I'm nagging them or micromanaging them. Every other Thursday, I sit down with the product manager and designer and we are able to piece together from like range check-ins like where everyone is on their projects. And then that makes it easy for us to plan for the next cycle.</p><p>[00:20:24] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>Then</em> <em>we also have team dashboard where, because everyone checks in with their mood every day. So green being like good to go, yellow being like a little bit iffy and red is pretty much like I'm in crisis.</em></p><p><em>So we can see over time a two week period of the team's mood trends. And if half the team's yellow and a few reds here or there. That's not great. And so I'll, check in with people during one-on-ones maybe bring it up in a team meeting of Hey, is it the work or is it external stuff either way?</em></p><p><em>Let's figure out how we can alleviate some of the pressure, maybe think about cutting scope or moving out a deadline further. So that's one of the most useful things that I use kind of day to day with range.</em></p><p>[00:21:04] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Mostly JIRA, I think yeah, JIRA, slack of fuse different, like speaking of async check-ins I remember I had tried a M for awhile, tried a kind of a slack bot to do stand ups or something, but the thing that was missing, actually what you brought up Gina was really interesting. The thing that was missing for me was first of all, the relationship of what the person wrote in the daily stand up to their daily goal.</strong></p><p><strong>And then also how that maps to what the group was doing or trying to achieve. And that's we tried for a while, just completely canceling stand-ups and doing it only async, but then that was the kind of weak spot let's say, right?</strong></p><p>[00:21:47] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>Yeah. What I've heard from teams who do that is Usually that all gets funneled into like a slack channel.</em></p><p><em>And that's just like this black hole where no one reads it. Everyone just puts in there. You know what I did yesterday, what I'm planning to do. And then it just no response, no reactions. And that kind of defeats the purpose of a standup where you feel. That's a good opportunity for you to tell people they're blocked, but if they never read your check-in like that's, they're not going to know that you're blocked.</em></p><p><em>And range has something that's called flags. And so you can flag when you're blocked or if there's things that need discussion and that those things can bumped up for higher visibility. So like they just don't get lost and then you can also slice it to see okay, let me see check-ins for everyone on this team.</em></p><p><em>Or, everyone that I work with. And sometimes I'll look at the whole team, rather the whole company, rather than just the team you can depending on what you're looking for, you can look at different views.</em></p><p>[00:22:36] <strong>Dan:</strong> So tools like JIRA and Asana, definitely essential. And they're great for building a backlog and kind of understanding where you are in the grand scheme of things, but it's pretty hard to get a sense of in the moment what's happening and what's changing and what's stuck.</p><p>It doesn't really show you that Delta. And if you think about what happens in a standup it's often you get that data point every day, I'm working on ticket 451 then, and then you're sensing in the background. Wait a second. Is that it's not the third day in a row that they're working on this ticket and then you have to make the meaning of that was just this person that stuck.</p><p>And that doesn't need to happen in. Like in person either, that can happen asynchronously. So range really surfaces the sort of the deltas and the, and how work is changing and moving through these phases. And then there's a lot of work that happens outside Jira. So you have calendar events, you may be doing interviews.</p><p>There's Google docs, confluence. Work is spread over so many places. So range brings that all together. And maybe the reason that ticket isn't moving forward is this person's been sick for three days, or maybe it's that they've had a lot of interviews. So surfacing that context is really valuable for managers.</p><p>[00:23:35] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em> I think the other thing that the stand-up slack bots don't do is they don't integrate into other tools. Like range check-ins, if you flag anything, it'll show up in the meetings. So if we have a team meeting it'll share all the flags that haven't been resolved and we can review them there.</em></p><p><em>And anything that needs to be discussed can be pulled over to the agenda. So just much more integrated. So it's not just check-ins is the side thing. And then this is where the work gets done. Like it's all part of the same system.</em></p><p>[00:24:01] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>So I guess the key thing is that it's pulling together everything really, so that at least you've got this overall view</strong></p><p>[00:24:07] <strong>Dan:</strong> One of our the customer said they said that Jira is the place to go see the state of a project; range is get where you go to see a state of a person she says the state of a person or the team.</p><p>Yeah that's interesting, but you could maybe get an office setting a little bit, right? Go to where this team is sitting and you get a sense of oh, everyone seems really low energy. Or, someone seeming really upset, but with everyone, you don't see them unless you're in meetings.</p><p>And you really have no idea if you don't have a tool like range or some way to check in on folks async or I guess you could be in meetings all the time, which is also not great, but you wouldn't have a way to know people are having a rough day or like they just went through something really frustrating.</p><p>[00:24:47] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>How do you think about balancing async and sync correctly, both within your company or within the products?</strong></p><p>[00:24:55] <strong>Dan:</strong> Don't get us wrong. We think synchronous communication is incredibly important. We just think that's historically the default. So it's more of a.</p><p>To get people to go asynchronous and synchronous is a crutch. Cause it's, it can be easy, but there's certain things where, async is going to be really slow. So anyway, there's like nuanced conversations, the nuanced discussions decision-making also like deep team building and emotional connection.</p><p>You. You can go a long way with some of the async tools, in-person is really where it's at. So we do things synchronous is important. I think the reality of the modern workplace with distributed teams and people needing flexible schedules is it's just the amount of time when you can have synchronous time is so much shorter, so you have to optimize it.</p><p>Yeah, so we, we really think about like, how can we maximize the value of that time you spend together and move everything that doesn't need to be synchronous outside that meeting.</p><p>[00:25:44] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>We'll often do things like say there's some company announcement, right? Dan or Jen might share something by email the more just transactional Hey, this is what's going on.</em></p><p><em>But if they think that it's something that people might have a reaction to, like I might check in with people in one-on-one so that we can just say, Hey, did you read Dan's email? Do you have any thoughts or concerns about it? And so like pairing async with more of the status update and then following up with synchrony.</em></p><p><em>Checking on people, how are they feeling? Their reactions? That can be really useful. And then then we're not spending that time in the one-on-one like sharing all the updates, like with each person, just like trying to use that synchronous time, but a bit more efficiently.</em></p><p>[00:26:22] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. Fabulous. Do you have any particular suggestions in terms of team building? I guess you mentioned the thing the image at the beginning of the week or just team-building yourselves within your company. What works in a way that that everyone feels comfortable with.</strong></p><p>[00:26:45] <strong>Jean:</strong> <em>I'm pretty enthusiastic about better meetings. And I think that's one of the areas that people have gotten used to bad meetings, inefficient meetings, I'll say. And I think that could be a place where if you're a facilitator for a meeting, familiarizing yourself with the tool, setting it up using the spinner, that could be a really good place to just like immediately.</em></p><p><em>Way better experience, right? Like one half hour, one, one hour meeting where you have an opening round where you have an icebreaker or just like checking in on how people are doing and the one at the end. And then having more structure in between where you can take notes. I think that could be like, choose your worst meeting and run it on range because it'll be a night and day difference.</em></p><p>[00:27:27] <strong>Dan:</strong> The meta point there is that there's a lot of ways of Engaging and growing and building, but there's also many work processes that are just so poor that they are actively making people feel less engaged and less happy and more burnt out. So often removing some of those things first is probably like the best bet.</p><p>If people are in. Eight hours of meetings a week. And they're not feeling that they're worthwhile, they're not feeling listened to and not feeling engaged in those meetings. They're going to become less happy with work less connected to their colleagues. And any team building you do is waste it because it's just it's like a band-aid.</p><p>Fixing your team processes is step number one, and building a cadence of communication, getting into the rhythm. And then you can build on top of that to get better connection. Better camaraderie. Then you get a bunch of the benefits.</p><p>That's great. Just on the spinner, how exactly does it work? Do you put what the values are in there? So you can put anything you want, like people's names</p><p>it's pretty simple figured ones</p><p>or</p><p>if you imagine and it's also a bit silly, right?</p><p>It's designed to be silly. You have attendees of the meeting, which should get sync to your Google calendar. So we bring in names and photos and then it's literally, you press a button and it spins. Who's it going to stop on? So it's like the wheel of fortune. And it's probably not your work context, but And the reason is it's a bit of levity.</p><p>It stops one person going around the room and like randomly picking person. That's are you the person that's going to get left the last, every single time? Are you like super anxious about the call order. And it just, it's just a way of just making it a little bit easier to have everyone engaged and get a moment to speak.</p><p>And a lot of the evidence suggests that if you speak early on in the meeting you're more likely to speak later, so that has a bunch of positive impacts on inclusion for people of different backgrounds and personality.</p><p>It also takes the onus off the facilitator to remember who has spoken. So if you were to go around the room in a physical room, it'd be pretty straightforward, but on a zoom room, you have to keep track of who's gone. Or then sometimes people do this thing where they're like, whoever just went like call on the next person. Everyone has to keep track of who's gone and who hasn't gone. And then sometimes someone gets left out and then they, they make up stories about why they were excluded or like someone whose name is maybe a little bit difficult to pronounce, like no one calls on them. And then they're like always last and just like removes a lot of that.</p><p>[00:29:45] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Yeah. Yeah. I like alphabetic basically. Get everyone on the call to just do freedom by first name.</strong></p><p>[00:29:53] <strong>Dan:</strong> But then it's the same every time. So you got like poor Andrew and who's always ready? And zebedee, who's he's always last.</p><p>And then some of the other things we have, we know we have a topic timer, so you can make sure that overrun certain topics, you can shut them down and you can track action items and notes. As Jean said earlier, you can bring in work from the asynchronous check-ins. So you can review, essentially the review people's stand-ups or certain flagged items.</p><p>Yeah. I've been running panels with the meeting tool. I had one, one panelist who, you know, the first time she saw it and I clicked the spinner. She's whoa can we talk about how cool that spinner is? I need this for all my meetings. yeah, it's just a simple thing, like going around the room and calling on everyone, just yeah. It's just like an unnecessary piece of friction. We just removed that.</p><p>Yeah, no that's simple, but very effective.</p><p>[00:30:47] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>So where do you suggest people go to find out a bit more about range?</strong></p><p>[00:30:52] <strong>Dan:</strong> So you can go to www.range.co. It's a self-serve product, so feel free to sign up. Free up to 20 users. And if you would like to try the premium .Version, happy to extend the coupon to the listeners of managing remote teams.</p><p>So we'll include the details in the show notes. Great. And then yeah, reach out and talk to our team. We're always on the intercom chat.</p><p>[00:31:14] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>Great. Thank you for coming to chat today and sharing your insights and talking about the platform and your journey.</strong></p><p><strong>So</strong></p><p>[00:31:22] <strong>Dan:</strong> cool.</p><p>[00:31:23] <strong>Luke:</strong> <strong>It's been a blast. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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<a href="https://www.codeproject.com" rel="tag">CodeProject</a>
</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-63255761546613920532022-05-26T02:00:00.001-07:002022-05-26T02:00:38.978-07:00Listening with Raquel Ark<figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1h8e7vk_71828a136ebfde317a2ffa42a3a32f5e_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1h8e7vk_71828a136ebfde317a2ffa42a3a32f5e_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1h8e7vk_71828a136ebfde317a2ffa42a3a32f5e_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1h8e7vk_71828a136ebfde317a2ffa42a3a32f5e_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-remote-quiz-1h8e7vk_71828a136ebfde317a2ffa42a3a32f5e_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><h2 id="4gv5q">About Raquel Ark</h2><p>Born and raised in Puerto Rico and Ohio, USA and now living in Germany, Raquel has over 25 years’ experience managing, coaching, facilitating, and training communication and leadership for tech, chemical industries, NGOs and academia. As founder of listening ALCHEMY, Raquel is very curious about the conditions and capacities to hold a listening space that connects and inspires so that communication has more impact. She has been researching and experimenting with listening beyond traditional training and has learned from and collaborated with listening scientists and professionals.</p><p>She is the podcast host for, “Listen In with Raquel Ark” focused on listening in teams and organizations beyond what we typically consider. Raquel spoke on the TEDx stage about “Growing Your Listening Superpower".</p><h3 id="2n0fq">Links</h3><ul><li>tedx talk: <a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F7wgFrKRjYiA&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://youtu.be/7wgFrKRjYiA</a></li><li>podcast: <a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcasts.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Flisten-in%2Fid1457489060&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-in/id1457489060</a></li><li>Raquel's website: <a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Flisteningalchemy.com%2F&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://listeningalchemy.com/</a></li><li>LinkedIn profile: <a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fraquel-ark-b2067613%2F&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://www.linkedin.com/in/raquel-ark-b2067613/</a></li></ul><h2 id="15sfa">Resources mentioned on the show</h2><ul><li><a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Fhbr.org%2F2018%2F05%2Fthe-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change</a></li><li><a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fchannel%2FUCoHQJLiTvAX7vHlj4p4AHMw%2Fvideos&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoHQJLiTvAX7vHlj4p4AHMw/videos</a> (Laura Janusik)</li><li><a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Flisteningalchemy.com%2Flisten-in%2Fevidence-on-listening-training-and-workplace-performance-with-guy-itzchakov%2F&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://listeningalchemy.com/listen-in/evidence-on-listening-training-and-workplace-performance-with-guy-itzchakov/</a></li><li><a href="https://api.leadcamp.io/anywhere/abe144bf/redirect?t=https%3A%2F%2Flisteningalchemy.com%2Flisten-in%2Fleaders-and-asking-questions-the-surprising-discovery-of-what-is-needed-to-find-solutions-and-build-relationships-with-niels-van-quaquebeke%2F&l=bc7f6398-9c5d-4c97-8771-0c22685d536c&u=294654e7-0115-4e9c-aff6-9241ad124b1f&se=a09e0c75-cc62-48df-8d19-dbaad501f959">https://listeningalchemy.com/listen-in/leaders-and-asking-questions-the-surprising-discovery-of-what-is-needed-to-find-solutions-and-build-relationships-with-niels-van-quaquebeke/</a></li></ul><h2 id="21hi7">Video Interview</h2><figure class="video strchf-type-video regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><div class="embed-container"><div style="max-width: 100%; position: relative; padding-top: 56.5%;"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1YMDIx07Vcs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div></div></figure><h2 id="6oq4k">Transcript</h2><p>[00:00:00] If I listened to you and you're on my team and I'm your boss, you're more likely to go beyond your roles and responsibilities. Your poor performance will go up if I listen to you and you're more likely to trust, and you're more likely to be engaged in your job and stick around.</p><p>[00:00:20] <strong>Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. Today, we are speaking with Raquel Ark, who is a TEDx speaker, a communications expert, in particular in listening. And this is , of course an absolutely fascinating skill that all of us have some experience in, but there's always</strong> <strong>some potential room for improvement, at least certainly my case. before we get into listening itself, could you say a few words about. Puerto Rico and how that's tied to your interest in listening.</strong></p><p>[00:01:29] Sure. So it's really great to be with you here, Luke. And I'm looking forward to our conversation.</p><p>[00:01:37] Puerto Rico. So I was born in Puerto Rico. And grew up there until I was around nine years old. And then I my parents got divorced. So then I spent my summers in Puerto Rico and vacation in Puerto Rico. It's a great place to take a vacation. And then I spent I was in school in Ohio. And the reason why I tell you that is because yes, Puerto Rico had a huge influence.</p><p>[00:01:57] And I'll tell you about that in a moment, but also growing up between two cultures throughout my life, that also made a huge difference. And I think you've experienced the same thing, with growing up and under seeing that people see the world in different ways.</p><p>[00:02:10] Puerto Rico it's a beautiful island.</p><p>[00:02:12] If you ever have a chance to go, it's close to the equator. The weather's about the same all year long, except for rainy season and dry season. We used to go to the beach almost every day. So every day we'd go to the beach. And so the beach was my place to to play. To have fun to be with family and whatnot.</p><p>[00:02:36] And I didn't realize the full impact that playing in the waves had with me until later and how that was connected to listening. And what I realized later is being with waves and listening to waves, especially when we would go camping on the beach and falling asleep to the waves and then waking up with the waves that that was a time where I was really present.</p><p>[00:02:58] There's nothing else existed. It was just the waves. And that impacted a lot on how I perceive being present, which is really important.</p><p>[00:03:11] I lived on the the west side of the island where the beaches are calmer.</p><p>[00:03:14] So we didn't have as many waves. And yet if you go up about half hour, 40 minutes north, that's where the surfers are and that's where the bigger waves are. And we used to go there and body surf and We would also go camping on an island called Mona island. It's one of the islands of Puerto Rico. And there, when we would go camping, we would have to go snorkeling for our food because we couldn't carry everything with us.</p><p>[00:03:42] And so my dad would do spear. We use a spear fish, spear, what do you call this? Use a spear to get the fish anyway. So I would go with him and I, there was this one time where we we would have to, we would get to a reef. It was like a bridge and we'd have to swim under this little bridge of a reef to get to the other side where the water was deeper.</p><p>[00:04:05] And that's where we could get the bigger fish. And so we had gone fishing and as we came back, here's the thing with the ocean, the current changed. And all of a sudden we were trying to get under the reef, but instead the current, the waves lifted us up and slammed us on top of the reef and reefs are very sharp.</p><p>[00:04:22] And my dad he's a doctor tried to save everyone. He tried saving me, but while he was doing that, he actually slammed on top of me. So we kept, we couldn't get out. We kept slamming against that reef over and over. And eventually though we got over, so we just got a little bit cut up, but it was a really scary experience.</p><p>[00:04:42] And what I remember back at that time, I was around nine years old is during that situation, my dad was freaking out, but I was really calm. Like I had no fear at all. I knew that we would get over. And as a child, you're like, what is my, what? Just leave me alone. We're going to get over.</p><p>[00:05:00] And so it was, if you can just imagine it's like this, like rhythm of this waves kept going, coming back and forth, but eventually it moved us over and I knew it would. And then we were, I knew it would be okay. So bringing that back to listening, there are the waves that are calm that can put you to sleep or wake you up to play in.</p><p>[00:05:19] But there's also those ones that crash, and that's like conversations where things just seem to be crashing over and the importance of staying calm and knowing that we'll get through to the other side, if we can stay as calm as possible.</p><p>[00:05:31] <strong>So just so we're clear on exactly what you mean. Can you give an example of great listening?</strong></p><p>[00:05:37] One of my one of the best bosses I had, even in our group team meetings, she would always have everybody talk first, so she'd have her little notebook with all the topics she wanted to talk about and you'd see her like scratching things off as we went through.</p><p>[00:05:50] And then sometimes it went, it would get to her. Then sometimes you'd have something left on the list and then talk about it. Or then she would just share stories if everything was taken care of. And she always had us talk first or even a one on one. She always had me talk first and I noticed this. So I would always try to, get her to talk first and it never worked.</p><p>[00:06:08] And I actually interviewed her on a podcast. Like she's so good, but I realized now, like in group meetings if you have a, if whoever's of highest, the hierarchy is the highest higher hierarchy. If they speak first, it will shut down voices for the rest of the group. So you cannot speak first if you, and then they complain that everybody's not speaking out and they want to hear their voices, but if they talk first, then people aren't going to talk, so you really have to hold back.</p><p>[00:06:35] <strong>Yeah. Yeah. It's so the. The challenge that I had. I think initially when I first started leading teams is that I wasn't setting enough context at the beginning of the meeting. So I think there is a need to do that. But after that yeah.</strong></p><p>[00:06:53] But that's describing the situation.</p><p>[00:06:54] That's not asking for opinions or giving your opinions and your advice necessarily this getting, having that clarity.</p><p>[00:07:00] <strong>And then, can you say a few words about what the impact of listening is based on your experience or your research?</strong></p><p>[00:07:08] I do some workshops. We did empirical research on these teams over a period of time.</p><p>[00:07:15] To see what the impact was of the listening training I was doing that I've been doing. We're just coming up with the results right now. This is in tech. They're not teams, so they're in the same company. We measured them and then we measured them two or three weeks later. Over time.</p><p>[00:07:30] <strong>Yeah</strong>.</p><p>[00:07:30] they perceive themselves as better listeners there. What was interesting is they didn't necessarily feel like their team listened to them better, but it wasn't a team training. So that kind of makes sense. But what they did feel like they had more voice. . They felt like they had more voice and they felt more belonging in the organization.</p><p>[00:07:49] I think this is my little theory on things. I think that through listening, you understand what other people's interests are, what their needs are, how to connect with them and you build relationships. And therefore then when you do speak to them, then you're more likely to speak in a way that connects versus just what I thought I had to say, or I feel more confident because I paid attention to what's important. And I know what to say that connects and matters. And I think that's where that voice comes in. And then from there they get positive feedback because it connected and it helped. And that's the belonging.</p><p>[00:08:27] One guy, I was just thinking about one example, we met a month later and reflected back on what they'd been practicing and what they'd learned. And he said that he used to always figure out when to say something. he knew what he wanted to say before the meeting and tried to get it in. And now he goes to meetings and he sits back and listens and then he makes connections for people or then says something that matters. And he feels like he's contributing more and it's much more relaxing. He feels much better and it's connecting more and he's getting positive feedback.</p><p>[00:08:56] So I think that's what's happening.</p><p>[00:08:59] <strong>So you've moved a few major times, complete changes in cultures. Is there a difference to how people listen in different cultures?</strong></p><p>[00:09:10] That's a good question. Now, what I'm telling you is based on my personal experience so I don't have the research on this, but there is a lot of research that talks about how cultures do listen differently, who use silence differently, or cultures that talk on top of each other.</p><p>[00:09:25] There's a lot of research in the intercultural world, but what I have noticed in the German language. So I live in Germany now, which is even a different culture in the German language. The verbs don't come until the end of the sentence compared to the English language. And I wonder, I find that in general, Germans tend to be better listeners.</p><p>[00:09:48] And I wonder sometimes if that's because the verb comes at the end, 'cause you don't really know what's going to happen until the end of the sentence. Yeah. Where in English, we tend to hear the verb and then we guess what's going to happen afterwards that we jump in. I wonder if that doesn't influence.</p><p>[00:10:06] <strong>That's interesting. Why is it that people find listening hard? Usually? Or my assuming that people do find it hard and people find it very easy.</strong></p><p>[00:10:19] Before I answer that, maybe I'll ask you, what do you find hard about listening?</p><p>[00:10:25] <strong>I think there's a lot of potential for me personally, to be in my own head and not enough with the other person., maybe that's just, my own thing sometimes it's not an issue at all, but when I am struggling, it's usually for that reason where I'm time shifting ahead thinking about what's about to happen. Something along those lines that would probably be my most common difficulty with</strong></p><p>[00:10:47] You're not the only one where that I would hope.</p><p>[00:10:52] I hear that so often and I experienced it myself that often, we're thinking about what we want to say, and there's this famous quote, we listened to respond for them to understand. And that's because often we're thinking about where we have distractions, internal distractions, and part of the reason for that.</p><p>[00:11:10] Our brains think a lot more. About a thousand to 3000 words a minute. And people are only speaking, about 175 to 200 words a minute. And our mind, there's a lot more going on our mind that what we're saying or what the other person is saying. So that doesn't, it's not really an alignment, but that's one major reason.</p><p>[00:11:29] I also had a software engineer once tell me, after he'd been through this listening workshop, he said, you know what? He goes, I don't even think it's I listened to respond. I think I'm listening to judge to evaluate. And I thought that was interesting. I like that. That's really insightful. So we listening to respond.</p><p>[00:11:47] Are we listening to evaluate how are we listening? And To go back to why is it hard? Often we think, especially in our work, of how we bring value to figure out, what is it that I bring to the table? And what we don't realize is that, especially for leaders and managers, that when we listen to someone and we're really present, so we've, we try to clear our mind as possible.</p><p>[00:12:14] You will have thoughts, just notice when you wander and bring yourself back and then try to be fully present. But when we are without judging, And that you're really trying to understand the other person's perspective. The person who's speaking will actually be able to get more creative, will be able to come up with the ideas themselves.</p><p>[00:12:37] You're actually helping them to think smarter so that they can take responsibility for the work that they're doing. So often we want to jump into help, but if you give them that space in time, then you're helping to develop other leaders or other, so something to think about. And then that gives you more time as a leader.</p><p>[00:12:55] <strong> It also feels to me like there's an element of of thinking versus feeling I think with listening. I for me personally, I'm again, I, again, I don't know the research particularly well but that it, if I'm thinking too much, it's too much about. This kind of, I guess the rational brain says is fast or something.</strong></p><p>[00:13:17] <strong>Whereas if I'm trying to connect with the other person and also empathize or sympathize as I'm listening to them, then that makes it easier a little bit. But I don't know if there's anything that you've heard of like that before.</strong></p><p>[00:13:34] Right now you're talking about what's your purpose there, right?</p><p>[00:13:37] Are you wanting to connect with the person so that you can develop trust and work well together? Are you just trying to get some data so you can take with it and do your thing, what are you trying to do? And that's I think there's what most of us think that we can listen better than we do. So the fact that you actually saying, oh, I don't know if I do that. Or I have these times that's much more, you're much more self-reflective than often is the case. Okay. So often we think we're better than what we are, but none of us do a good job with everybody. There's certain people that we listen well to in certain conditions, in certain ways, we tend to have patterns on how we listen and who we listened to. And so part of the practice is to start to become aware of this and then to challenge ourselves, to listen in more ways to more people under different circumstances, especially when things get tough. Which is when it gets hard.</p><p>[00:14:35] And often when things get hard we will, our bodies triggered into that reactive fight or flight, and this is where your, the emotional part also can shut off. And we're in our own world. And we have our own biases and we have our own assumptions and that gets in the way. And we will only hear what we think, and we won't really hear everything else.</p><p>[00:14:57] We won't even hear everything that's in our own minds, and so when that's the case if you are able to stay calm and to be the one to listen and ask questions, you will help the other person to calm down. Because that listening is the way to get to psychological safety. And you can tell when that person starts to feel better, because all of a sudden they'll have another perspective.</p><p>[00:15:22] They're trying to persuade. You try to convince you. And then all of a sudden something will shift. And instead of persuading you they'll start expressing themselves. And it's almost like they're thinking about thinking through things themselves. And at that point they'll actually recognize that there's different, there's more than one way to look at things. And you'll start to notice that in their language that there are different perspectives. Instead of saying that my boss is horrible, but oh, in this situation, he's like this, but this situation he's like this. So they'll start to see different perspectives.</p><p>[00:15:53] And they're more likely to listen to your perspective afterwards because the parent, because the parasympathetic system has kicked in and then that helps also with the emotional triggers that have just occurred.</p><p>[00:16:07] <strong>Yeah, I've really interesting. It reminds me of book a book. I was reading recently how to talk to science deniers.</strong></p><p>[00:16:13] <strong>And yeah, no it's quite I guess that's almost the most extreme case, or at least for someone like me. I, I guess people have different views on this stuff, but but in terms of, for example, Flat Earthers or something, or I'm, I don't even want to go near political topics but yeah it's it's yeah, it feels like there's just so much conflict between people and cause they're unwilling or unable to listen and then it sets, what to do in those situations, is it just trying to listen to yourself and seeing what happens or and in these kinds of heated discussions, for example, that people get into online or offline.</strong></p><p>[00:16:58] So you're asking a really big question, right? Sorry. So you asked how you're asking if there's a conversation that comes up, what's the best way to respond, right?</p><p>[00:17:09] <strong>Yeah. If it gets heated and yeah, the let's say the other side is, has a very different view than you do, for example.</strong></p><p>[00:17:19] Yeah. I really believe that often if you want them to listen to you, you have to be the role model for us to give them an experience they may not have had from somebody else before. So it may, so if you really want someone to be open to other perspectives, then, the best way to do it is to start by listening and not listening with an agenda, being willing for you to change your own mind.</p><p>[00:17:46] And then if you do it in that way and think of a more long-term process not just a one-off thing, then the chances that they might come around is higher. Because when you do that, then they may start to listen to themselves. You create a space where they can hear themselves. Let me give you an example.</p><p>[00:18:07] There was some research done with managers and they put a good listener or someone who listened well with one group and then a listener who was distracted with another group of managers, with the group where the listener was distracted, those managers perceived themselves, they only saw the strengths that they had, the only, the good things about them.</p><p>[00:18:30] The one with the good listeners actually become, became much more aware of their strengths and their weaknesses, which is a more realistic perspective of their performance. And so they're showing that listing helps more complex thought patterns. That's more complex thoughts, so they can see that there is both strengths and the weaknesses.</p><p>[00:18:51] There's the times where it works, where it doesn't work, which is more realistic. So if you have someone who's very extreme in their thoughts, then practicing, listening. So you might have to find your way to stay calm and to really move your agenda aside, and move your opinions aside and to ask questions and be truly interested, like you really are interested.</p><p>[00:19:13] Then the chances of that person becoming less extreme is much higher. And they've done research with really tough topics, on. Do you bring the body of a terrorist back home so they can be buried with their family, like really tough conversations like this.</p><p>[00:19:29] They did that in Israel and and it showed that even in those types of conversations with a good listener, people will become less extreme and more open to conversations with others, but it takes, that's a huge muscle to practice. And so I think it's really important to practice and in situations that are not as extreme first.</p><p>[00:19:49] Yeah.</p><p>[00:19:49] But that when that moment happens, you can take a deep breath and no matter if you want that person to listen to you, you start by giving them an experience they may not have had by anybody else. </p><p>[00:20:03] <strong>Yeah. No that's great. Yeah. No, thank you. Since you got interested in the topic, what was the biggest surprise in the research that you found on listening specific.</strong></p><p>[00:20:13] In the beginning I had done a lot of listening. I had been, I studied interpersonal organizational communication, so listening was part of my program. But it was more active listening. You listen to someone and then you paraphrase back. But I realize now that's just one tiny piece and that actually can sometimes get in the way of real, the real stuff that has impact what I didn't realize.</p><p>[00:20:33] A lot of times, I listen so I can do my job better or to listen to the customer or to listen to what the needs are. What I did not realize is that just by listening, that it helped the speaker. I did not realize that just by listening, the speaker can become more creative, that the speaker actually will perform better.</p><p>[00:20:56] If I listened to you and you're on my team and I'm your boss, you're more likely to go beyond your roles and responsibilities. Your poor performance will go up if I listen to you and you're more likely to trust, and you're more likely to be engaged in your job and stick around. I didn't realize that part.</p><p>[00:21:15] It takes practice and we can learn. It's not something that just happens. I thought I was pretty good. And so I was just trying to help others. And through the, this, through these years, I've realized, oh my gosh, I can't, I need practice every day.</p><p>[00:21:29] And I can learn a lot from others too. And no matter, I think it's a lifelong. And and that the training, you can't just talk about the benefit of listening. So for all of you listening, you can listen to this and think I'm going to get better, but actually it takes experiencing and practicing to get better.</p><p>[00:21:46] And then yeah, having time to talk about it and think about afterwards.</p><p>[00:21:50] <strong>So what exactly do you mean by practice then?</strong></p><p>[00:21:53] And then what do I mean by practice? So even if you find somebody and you let you just say, Hey, I'm going to listen to you , I want to hear what you have to say, or someone comes to you, they ask you for an answer, how do I fix this problem before you answer to say, Hey I have some thoughts, but I'd love to hear what you're thinking first and talk me through what you're doing.</p><p>[00:22:16] And I'd like to hear your ideas first. I'm going to give you a five minutes and then if you want to hear what I have to say, I'll be happy to share, but let's start with you first and to practice listening. You might be surprised at what might happen. To practice not interrupting, so you can practice on your own like this.</p><p>[00:22:33] But like in training programs, like when I do training programs, I don't talk a whole lot. I give a little bit of input, but often I have people experience listening in really playful ways or in different ways. And then having time to reflect back afterwards, what just happened often. They'll actually, people will actually respond in ways that the science is showing and then I can tell them the science afterwards and that anchors it.</p><p>[00:22:58] So for example just having two minutes, not interrupting, just only listening without not saying anything and then taking turns or practicing. If you tell a story, people can listen to you better. And to practice that. Where all the focus on a person for five minutes and only that person has that the attention before you switch to the other person.</p><p>[00:23:24] We practice things like that. Those are just simple examples.</p><p>[00:23:29] <strong>Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes sense. What about dialogue? Is there a way of practicing structuring dialogue, or are there good ways of doing that? Cause I think for storytelling, it's, it's a great skill. It's both to tell. And then as, as pretty much as we're saying also listening to it but if you want to be entering into a topic and exploring it, how would, how do you practice that or think about structuring the practicing.</strong></p><p>[00:24:01] So here's my question. Before I answer that.</p><p>[00:24:03] When you think of wanting a dialogue, like what is the outcome you'd like to have in a dialogue? Are you thinking in terms of a group or are you thinking about one-on-one? Let's say one-on-one just to keep it simple, because I think with a group, it pretty gathered. There's a lot, there's a lot of other factors at play too, even though there's some really simple stuff you can do with groups, just so you know.</p><p>[00:24:22] <strong>Okay. Let's okay. Let's start with one-on-one and then move to groups. </strong></p><p>And are you talking in general, are you talking more like leader, team lead with their. </p><p><strong>Let's say team lead. Yeah. With a one-on-one situation team lead with a person on the team, for example, in a meeting on a call, that kind of thing.</strong></p><p>[00:24:44] So first of all, I think if you can do some prep work before that is really helpful, you don't have to. I've talked to a lot of people in one on ones and they just show up without preparing. And I find that, especially in the tech industry, if you have people who need time to think that it's helpful to have at least an agenda or a couple of topics or something ahead of time that people prepare and you can even prepare an agenda, a little one short one in terms of questions, because if you do it in terms of questions people are more likely to think about the answers versus coming for the answers.</p><p>[00:25:24] Because it's just getting information. So that's one thing</p><p>[00:25:28] also. If they do bring their topics to you to find answers have them start thinking about, do I want to share some information and update you? Do I need information from you? Do I want to brainstorm ideas or do I need a decision made? I think you don't always have to do that, but to start helping your team think about what's the purpose of this communication topic?</p><p>[00:25:51] How do I want you to listen to me? Do I want to listen to you? Do we want to listen to each other? What is our purpose that can be really helpful because often people don't think about that. But in the moment as a lead, it's really helpful. If you can ask them questions, listen first, before you give your ideas and answers, because I find that the higher you are in the power hierarchy, if you speak first, the chances that the other people won't speak, or they'll just say what they think you want them to say will be the case. So to get them used to talking first and listening first asking questions that help them think further. So it's more than you getting information, but it's more like trying to understand how they're thinking through something and their process, and to give that space in time.</p><p>[00:26:42] And when they're silent and come to a pause to wait, don't jump in because it could be that they're thinking about what they just said and trying to reflect on whether there's more to say, often we jump in and we interrupt and they're still in their thinking process. So not to do that. So wait and see if they're really finished and ask, is there anything else before jumping in and usually when you ask, wait. Usually that's when the good stuff comes. So that's something I would really recommend practicing, and then you can respond. It's not that you can't but then when you respond, you're responding in a way that's connecting more to where they're at. Often we jump in thinking we know where they're at, but we're actually responding in a way that's not very helpful.</p><p>[00:27:34] And it might be, they take care of their own challenge before or their own issue before you even say anything. They've taken ownership of it. So that's something to listen first, ask questions, even in feedback, getting their thoughts first, before responding.</p><p>[00:27:49] And it could be, they say everything you wanted to say, or then you add an example or you can add from that and help them to think about other things that could be really helpful. If there's a crisis, then you got to just take care of things. But if there's not a crisis and you have a little bit of time, what usually surprises people is that because the quality of listing is there, then the conversations actually are more effective and don't take as long.</p><p>[00:28:13] <strong>Over time they become shorter because you just understand each other better.</strong> Yeah. And the, and they start to get, they start to build trust and they start to be able to be more vulnerable or ask for help and things that may not have done otherwise</p><p>[00:28:31] <strong>so what about groups then?</strong></p><p>[00:28:32] Yeah, with groups what do you find is the biggest challenge in groups?</p><p>[00:28:38] <strong>Usually group dynamics. Especially when starting with a group I think there's a pretty big disconnect between how I relate to each person versus how the group acts. And then if something as simple as sitting there waiting, with, for example, video off, as someone talks for five minutes and then not really wanting to break out of that comfort zone where they aren't, where they're not involved for example, and that, and I think there's a group dynamic component to that.</strong></p><p>[00:29:13] <strong>Whereas I'm certain each of the people individually actually. Are engaged are interested that's one part of it. You see it in workshops too, right? That's, what's what like icebreakers are for just to get people into that forward momentum.</strong></p><p>[00:29:28] <strong> That can help if it's the right type of activity for that group of people at that moment. At least from what I've seen</strong></p><p>[00:29:37] I know that we had a conversation about how you manage meetings and workshop style and having different ways of interacting and trying to adapt to the group.</p><p>[00:29:44] In general, you do a lot already. When it comes to groups, I'm going to tap into the research, the listening research. The biggest impact on whether listening can happen. Quality listening happens has mainly to do with the they call in dyads. So the pairs. So when you put people in twos that has the biggest influence on listening. It's not whether people are "good listeners" or the context. The biggest influencer is the person that they're with on whether the listening happens or not. So when you think, even in groups, the more you can facilitate this, what you talked about, being a facilitator first. Maybe facilitate where people meet in two's first. You can put people into breakout rooms where they can think through a question between two people before bringing it into the larger group. Then they're more likely to speak out.[00:30:41] That's one thing. So to remember that in dyads, they're more likely to have a voice and to think through things. If they're in pairs before coming into a bigger group, the bigger the group is the less likely people are going to speak out. So if you can facilitate ways that you can still get answers or help people to think through things before coming to a bigger group than they're more likely to say something because they have had time to talk to somebody else about it.</p><p>[00:31:04] So this is important then when it comes to the group I find that if you have a group that meets on a regular basis to have some communication guidelines on how we want to listen to each other. To even talk about that it makes a huge influence. So if you have a team guideline and then to check in to see if it's working or not what people want because there's different styles, some people more process people, they need an agenda. Other people need to have a little bit of interpersonal friendly talk at the beginning. So you start to talk about that. What do people need? And then how can we create an environment that everybody's needs are fulfilled? So if you can do that, it's really valuable.</p><p>[00:31:44] And then there's a structure called the listening circle. It's like you're sitting around the fire, passing the talking stick around. But even virtually online is possible. It's great! Where you have certain guidelines and then you have a structure where the facilitator basically calls names in a specific order. And I tell them, when I call your name, take a moment just to notice, is there something I want to say or not?</p><p>[00:32:12] And if not, just say pass, and then we'll keep going around the circle and you always call the names in the same order. And it's okay if you don't have something to say now, because we'll come back around and you'll have another chance. And so what happens saying that there's a structure telling the circle that you're going to go around, that you don't have to speak if you do not want to.</p><p>[00:32:34] And you can take a moment to think about it and that when you're not speaking and you really listen to the other person, what happens is that then The introverts are glad that they're noticed, but that they don't have to say something. It's not like the tension on themselves, but then because they don't have to say something and they can say pass, then they feel less stressed.</p><p>[00:32:58] And usually they say something after the second or third round. For the extroverts, because they know they'll get their chance. They don't have to always be thinking, when am I going to talk? They spend a lot of time thinking, where am I going to get my voice in because it'll get to them. And so I find that people who talk a lot actually end up maybe talking less over time.</p><p>[00:33:18] It's more equal between people who speak and who don't speak. And they also actually are more relaxed because they don't have to work so hard to figure out when they're going to talk.</p><p>[00:33:28] It equalizes the conversation. But to make sure you go around a few times, until the time is up or until everything's been said can be really helpful.</p><p>[00:33:38] And usually groups will love it once they trust the process, they might think it's a little weird at first, but once they trust the process, they really love it. And it's so relaxing, like physically relaxing, like they feel better. Yeah. And that's when you realize those power dynamics is taken away.</p><p>[00:34:00] Just in terms of group, I think we're just at the beginning of that. There's there's more research happening right now with teams.</p><p>[00:34:06] Actually one podcast you'd probably enjoy listening to was, is with Dr. Guy Itzchacov. We did a short podcast and we talked about the listening circles there too, where he's talking about listing training and the impact on teams also under high pressure environments. And so that might be something really interesting for you.</p><p>[00:34:24] I'll send that one to you. And then probably the one with Neil van Quakebeke he talks about asking questions, but he, they did some research on whether questions, if you ask questions, if that helped get rid of the bad apple team, they thought so, but then they did this research and it didn't work, but with, and then they found out later that it wasn't the asking questions.</p><p>[00:34:48] That asking questions is just the spark. If you didn't listen afterwards, then it won’t make the difference. It was actually,</p><p>[00:34:57] this is where it's taken for granted.</p><p>[00:34:59] <strong>Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those. I got like a good, it sounds like it's a great ritual basically, and that kind of calms the head chatter around participation and, I'll get my turn when I need it and if I need it. Interesting. So what are listening playgrounds?</strong></p><p>[00:35:14] <strong>Cause you organize these things. What are what is that exactly?</strong></p><p>[00:35:18] So I've realized that a lot of my learning through listening over time, after I thought I was already good. And then I realized, oh, I have a lot to learn. Happened through having playful experiences the, my mentor, my, one of my biggest mentor, every time we talk, he comes up with something new and playful, and I'm also have learned to do that over time.</p><p>[00:35:38] And And because of the research, showing that through experiencing that we actually get better. And so I decided to prototype some listening playgrounds. I called them super power playgrounds to see if in a short period of time, if you bring a bunch of people together to try some playful things around listening, without even explaining everything I'm explaining now to you on the podcast, just to experience things and to see.</p><p>[00:36:06] We can do some micro learning through experiences with different people and see if that would help. And so I did that in March every Friday, I had a group of people who prototype that with me. There were 16 people who I reached out my, in a smaller and in that group in a smaller group to see what that would be.</p><p>[00:36:26] And we had people from all around the world and all different ages and different cultures. We had everything from students to people who are executive managers to software engineers, to UX, to consultants. We had every different cultures and it worked. And so I was also challenging myself to really focus on small bits and to be able to do something within 45 minutes.</p><p>[00:36:53] Yeah, which is not always that easy. And and to make it fun and playful that it was playful and fun and it went so well that I'm going to start doing them once a month in June and just see what the response is. And I'll open up, open that up to a wider group just to come and play and practice and then go from there.</p><p>[00:37:12] <strong>Great. If you have a blink or something, happy to put it in the show notes for people later one question that I like to ask guests is do you have any kind of team-building tips , from a listening perspective</strong></p><p>[00:37:27] so some examples of what to do.</p><p>[00:37:30] <strong>Yeah</strong>,</p><p>[00:37:31] just to circle back to what I said before with groups. , if you can facilitate listening with your team, you will start to create bonds. And if you can do it in all different ways in twos and groups of threes and circles, or have having people take turns or sharing stories or sharing experiences that will really have a huge impact.</p><p>[00:37:57] And it's really quick. So there's one example there's something called a story carousel where you put people into groups of two and you can have them share a story of some sort. So one of the ones that I love to do, especially when you're working in multicultural environments is to share a story about your.</p><p>[00:38:17] So I give people a few moments just to think about a story about your name and it can be why your parents named you the way they named you, how they found it, how they came up with your name, it can be the, your name has a meaning. It can be that like my, like Germans have a hard time pronouncing my name.</p><p>[00:38:32] So I talk about that. And then you put people into groups and they take turns. So that one person talks about their names story for two minutes and they have the full two minutes. And then you shift to the other person where that person shares their story about their name for a full two minutes.</p><p>[00:38:48] If a person finishes early, like a minute, then the person listening can ask questions to help, be curious. They don't, they shouldn't interrupt not to interrupt too quick. But if that person has the full two minutes, but not to go over so that there's equal time and often when you have these interactions with names, you learn so much, it's not just the name. You learn a lot about that. Person's culture about their family. You learn things that will help you work more with that person in the future. So I'll have people do this and then I'll bring them back to the group and you don't have to do this, but I have people notice, what did you learn about that person that will help you work with them more in the future?</p><p>[00:39:29] You've just learned something that will help you do that. And often they find often they find common ground or, they start to feel connection with that person. They see them as a person.</p><p>[00:39:38] Another story I'd love to use is, think about a time that someone helped you at work or think about a time that you helped someone at work. Like these are all different levels of stories and just a couple minutes, each story, and you learn a lot about that person and what they find helpful, what their strengths are. What's important to them, what their values are. I start listening to them. And and we even virtually in that moment, we were impacting each other physically.</p><p>[00:40:09] You actually feel physically more connected to that person you're more energized, or you might notice that you feel happier, not just the content and people, if you can help people notice that, then you'll start how they impact the interactions, how they impact each other, that has a huge impact on team bonding.</p><p>[00:40:28] <strong>Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you. And one other question, are there are there any particular resources that you would recommend, that you commonly find yourself recommending to people or giving, or something like that.</strong></p><p>[00:40:49] Besides your book . Yes. There is an article that with a Harvard business review that was written by two scientists on this thing, who've done a metadata analysis on listening, Dr.</p><p>[00:41:05] Avi Kluger and Dr. Guy Itzchacov. I always laugh because I say his name wrong. Dr. Guy Itzchacov. And they talk about how listening helps people change. And if you know it in our work environment, there's constant change and people have a hard time with change. And so they really lay out the listening science on how listening helps people change and how giving feedback without listening can actually be, can actual actually lower performance whether it's positive feedback or negative feedback.</p><p>[00:41:41] And so th that's a really great article to understand this. And why just by listening that helps your team change or helps people and change projects, how that process does that. So that I recommend a lot because it realize how big this listening is. There's a lady named Laura Janusik who has a YouTube video channel where she gives lots of just short tips, listening tips, and we can.</p><p>[00:42:13] We can, I can give you the link to that video, but that's really nice for just really practical, basic listening tips that can be really helpful for people in all different types of situations. And she's also, has those, the science as well as the practical side of things. And I think that's what a message I think is really important.</p><p>[00:42:33] Like for me, it's really important that it's not just what we think, but what is the science showing? Because there's a lot of science coming out just now, right now. There's a lot of stuff we're just discovering. Now it's becoming more visible. And what are the practical, how does that partner with the practical side of things?</p><p>[00:42:52] So those are a couple of things that I recommended<strong>.</strong></p><p>[00:42:55] <strong>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One resource of yours that I'd highly recommend is your TEDx video. So that's your talk is there anything else anywhere where people should go to check you out or where are you typically are on social media?</strong></p><p>[00:43:12] You're welcome to check out my podcast. I have a podcast where I interview people who are doing things with listening in ways that are probably surprising all different areas. So all the way from the scientist to you know, trainers, but also to people working in tech and how they're using it.</p><p>[00:43:30] And so you can get a lot of different resources there. That might be interesting. You have to pick pick and choose what suits you. And, but there's a lot of really good stuff there. I think there's a lot of people doing a lot of great stuff and listening. And so you might be surprised at what's there and I'll be having some more videos coming out.</p><p>[00:43:49] In the next half year with some of the newer science that's coming out, but we still have to do the recordings and I'll be doing that with my mentor, Dr. Avi Kluger. He's one of the best or one of the scientist, who's doing a lot of the work. That's really furthering the stuff where I'm understanding a lot of stuff.</p><p>[00:44:04] So we'll be doing some stuff, but that's coming up soon. And that's based on the findings that they have with listening at work. So that's really important. How can we bring more listening into organizations and into teams and how can we bring it into more at a more systemic level integrated into the stuff that we're doing.</p><p>[00:44:22] And I think if we can learn how to do that, and we're at the beginning of this. We can have a lot more influence on our productivity and actually people feeling better because there's a lot of problems right now with burnout and whatnot. So this will be really important if people are interested in that, then they should definitely reach out because a lot of us are trying to figure it out right now on how to make that work better.</p><p>[00:44:44] Yeah. Yeah. But otherwise LinkedIn reached out on LinkedIn. That's where I post stuff. I'm on Instagram, but LinkedIn is probably the place where I spend more time.</p><p>[00:44:56] <strong> </strong> <strong>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-30755042576470127212022-04-27T02:00:00.001-07:002022-04-27T02:00:49.573-07:00Jim Kalbach on designing remote collaboration<figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1h62vkg_8cd7092b2df23f0804d161ba120b2476_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1h62vkg_8cd7092b2df23f0804d161ba120b2476_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1h62vkg_8cd7092b2df23f0804d161ba120b2476_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1h62vkg_8cd7092b2df23f0804d161ba120b2476_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1h62vkg_8cd7092b2df23f0804d161ba120b2476_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at mural</figcaption></figure><h2 id="d665h">About Jim Kalbach</h2><p>Jim Kalbach is a <strong>noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy</strong>. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.</p><p>Jim is also the author of three books: <em>Designing Web Navigation</em> (O’Reilly, 2007), <em>Mapping Experiences</em> (O’Reilly, 2016), and most recently <em>The Jobs To Be Done Playbook</em> (Rosenfeld, 2020). He is also the Co-founder and Principal at the <em><strong><a href="https://www.jtbdtoolkit.com/">JTBD Toolkit</a></strong></em>, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content. Jim blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.</p><h3 id="4k1vs">Links</h3><ul><li><a href="https://mural.co/">Mural</a></li><li><a href="https://experiencinginformation.com/">Blog</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/jimkalbach">Twitter</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/">LinkedIn</a></li><li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/James-Kalbach/e/B001IGHRG0%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share">Amazon</a></li></ul><h2 id="5ska">Transcript</h2><p>[00:00:02] the combination of visualization and guided methods and structure to your meetings, it gets rid of zoom fatigue. When I first heard that term, I was like, what? What's that? Because I didn't experience it myself. And the other thing that I thought was what you need to be a little bit more intentional about how you're getting through your day of.</p><p>[00:00:20] Yeah. And so that's my biggest piece of advice is to structure and design. Essentially collaboration design, right? Design your collaborations.</p><p>[00:01:01] <strong>Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the managing road teams podcast. We are here with Jim Callbox today. Jim wrote two wonderful books, the jobs to be done playbook and experience mapping. Jim is also chief evangelists for mural. And Jim knows the in and out of whiteboards, which I think are an absolutely critical tool for. Remote work or possibly even hybrid work. But I guess we'll get into that in a bit.</strong></p><p>[00:01:29] <strong>So Jim, could you say a few words about what it is that kind of got you. Into white boarding. And how you lend to at mural in the first place, your varied product background?</strong></p><p>[00:01:43] Sure. So I spent a lot of my career in design and innovation teams, a couple of different companies, both internally in large organizations, but also externally as a consultant looking at things like human centered design and design thinking and innovation broad.</p><p>[00:02:03] And in 2015, I got contacted by Mariano's Suarez, Bhutan, the CEO of mural. They were very small company back then. And I joined the team because I had been steeped in design and design thinking, which is an important target for me. Very creative types and creative type of work, which I was very familiar with.</p><p>[00:02:26] But in my previous role, I worked for Citrix, the makers of go to meeting and go to webinars. So I was in the remote collaboration space as well too. And I always felt that one of the biggest challenges of remote collaboration was creative work. How do you get a team of designers or, an innovation brainstorming session?</p><p>[00:02:47] How do you do that with. Folks. So when I came to mural, it was really a combination of those two interests, my interest in remote collaboration in general, but also in creative work and design thinking type work.</p><p>[00:03:02] <strong>So why are whiteboards so helpful in. And remote collaboration and remote work.</strong></p><p>[00:03:08] Yeah. I have this concept of what I call the digitally defined workplace. Which if you think about it in terms of jobs to be done that a team collaborating. Four or five core jobs that they need to get done. They need to communicate in real time. They need to communicate asynchronously.</p><p>[00:03:28] They need to have a shared space where they gather documents and things like that. And if you walk around any office building, you'll also see evidence of a need for the job of collaborating. And a lot of people say I'm not a creative or I'm not a designer. I don't collaborate visually. And I've had people tell me that.</p><p>[00:03:48] And then I will go over to their workplace and it's full of sticky notes and there's a whiteboard behind them. And there's flip charts all over the place. All of that type of work is visual work, it's not happening in an Excel sheet. And what happens is that tends to happen outside of the computer actually.</p><p>[00:04:04] Particularly before the pandemic and when we took the office away from folks during the pandemic, for instance, there was this need, right? So I think from when I think about white boarding it's actually a need that you have when you collaborate to express yourself in a visual way to draw a square and a circle and connect them with a line and say, we need to get from point a to point B as a team.</p><p>[00:04:27] There's an aligning effect that, that has right by expressing yourself visually you're able to elevate the conversation and express yourself in a different way. Then you can, if you're just talking or if you're just typing.</p><p>[00:04:39] Visual collaboration is complimentary to other modes of collaboration that we had that we already had, whether we knew it or not. We already had it with sticky notes and flip charts and whiteboards in our office. And the digital version of that gets that job done for us.</p><p>[00:04:53] When we're collaborating in a team, we need a way to express ourselves visually, even if you're in finance or HR. Again, this isn't just for creatives. This is work in general. Has this need to to be expressed and represented visually.</p><p>[00:05:06] <strong>How are you defining collaboration here? Exactly.</strong></p><p>[00:05:09] Yeah, that that's a great question. And we're working on a more precise definition, but it's when two or more people come together and they have a specific challenge or problem that they're trying to solve with a common mission, that there's a common purpose for this group of people to collaborate.</p><p>[00:05:27] Typically, when we talk about collaboration here at mural, we're thinking about workplace collaboration. But we also serve educational institutions. So there might be a student project team, government organizations. And I think that definition still holds true group of people coming together, bending for a common cause.</p><p>[00:05:45] And trying to problem solve for a common cause that could be very temporary. It could be a single session and a group of people come together dynamically. It could be a permanent team of people that come together. it can be ongoing collaboration, between people and teams as well, too.</p><p>[00:06:01] So I think about all of that as collaboration, essentially individuals, human being. People coming together and trying to solve a problem together. And they do that through interactions. There are certain interactions that that they have. And again, just going back to my previous response, there's a certain type of visual interaction that collaborating teams have always needed.</p><p>[00:06:23] That the idea of a virtual whiteboard, isn't just, oh, it's another tool that does the same thing as my other tools. It actually does something fundamentally different for that collaborative.</p><p>[00:06:33] <strong>So fundamentally different because it's digital or</strong></p><p>[00:06:37] because there's visual because it's visual that I can, right now we have audio and video here, you and I can also type in the chat if we were also expressing parts of our conversation, visual.</p><p>[00:06:49] It will take the conversation to a different place and to a different level in terms of understanding, we can actually model what we're talking about and we can see it. I can see what you're thinking and you can see what I'm thinking in terms of shapes and sticky notes and arrows and all kinds of things.</p><p>[00:07:04] But it also allows for a different level of participation as well, too, because when you're talking or typing, it tends to be the tr the traffic is regulated one by one only one person can talk at a time when you're thinking visually, actually multiple people can be expressing themselves at the same time.</p><p>[00:07:21] So it actually gets it gets more inclusion and you potentially get a more diverse type of perspective that can be represented as well, too. So it's all of that. When I talk about visual collaboration, it's all of that.</p><p>[00:07:33] In the post pandemic, modern world, if we're not talking about doing that digitally, and if we're not talking about doing that in the cloud, where it's we can't go back to is taking pictures of whiteboards and transcribing and sticky notes. We're going back to the office, but we can't go back to that. We have to pretend like we're in the 21st century work is now digital, including the visual. It would be, imagine a memo coming around your office.</p><p>[00:07:57] Remember we used to do memos and used to have a name and you check it off. Like I saw this memo. And then the memo to imagine. Yeah, it sounds funny now, but that's essentially what did very visual collaboration was before the pandemic was essentially like communicating like a memo. We send an email, we send a slack.</p><p>[00:08:14] Why isn't our visual collaboration, digital, Nan. I think that's the wake-up call that people got during the pandemic. And this category of whiteboard is now more and more commonplace. I can't tell you how many times Luke I'll pull up mural and people will be like, oh yeah, we've used this before.</p><p>[00:08:29] I didn't get that before the pandemic before, what is this thing? So I think we've gotten sensitized to this metaphor of a virtual digital. But for me it still goes back to that fundamental job that it gets done when we're talking and having a conversation, particularly if it's a complex problem solving that problem visually.</p><p>[00:08:48] It literally offloads cognitive space. So we can think better together. We literally think better together when we're collaborating visually. And it's really that that I'm most interested in the technology. Yeah. Technology is important, but it's really the effect and the impact that visual collaboration can have on a team.</p><p>[00:09:07] Yeah. Yeah. I think in my experience, it's. Everything that you mentioned, but it's also visual interplaying with the conversation and back. So it's, it feeds on each other. Yeah, exactly. You build meaning in a different way. Like you can have a really interesting conversation with somebody and get to a new point.</p><p>[00:09:24] I'm not saying that's not that I can even have really meaningful slack conversations. But very often there's a type of conversation and problem solving when you really have to get together and get along. And you have to be able to include a lot of voices. So diversity of perspective, and the problem is complex, right?</p><p>[00:09:43] It's those types of conversations and interactions that, that, where visual collaboration. It's not just, it's not just another way to think. It's a different way to think as a group of people, it actually elevates your collaboration in a new.</p><p>[00:09:59] <strong>It's interesting. You also mentioned schools and education working in a software context that quite often the problem with software team faces is that they have a complex problem. And if they're all remote, then a whiteboard is actually a great way to do that because it's it's like learning is the biggest bottleneck in this type of work.</strong></p><p>[00:10:19] <strong>Yeah. What are your thoughts on the application of in the context of problem solving specifically Mike and whiteboards. What are things that, that you've seen people do that, that work well with with whiteboards?</strong></p><p>[00:10:32] One of the, one of the effects, one of the phenomena that we see, we call it a blank canvas paralysis.</p><p>[00:10:40] That if you just pull up a blank canvas and you have a group of people with a complex problem that they're trying to solve and say, okay, go there's this lack of knowing where to start, particularly if there's a group of people who's going to go first, what are we doing? But I think there's a fairly simple and prevalent solution to that, which is to use what we call guided math.</p><p>[00:11:03] So from design thinking, for instance, there's a whole class of methods out there where you can actually break down the challenge that you have into smaller chunks. And instead of just improvising the collaboration. So a lot of people think about whiteboard as being white blank. That is, and then you fill it in with scribbles, but you can actually pre structure the conversation.</p><p>[00:11:26] Using the tool like mural with guided methods so that I can get a group of people and have the playbook, so to speak the rules of engagement. We're not just improvising the conversation on a blank whiteboard, and then it's it just grows organically or not. You can actually say, let's do an exercise like rose gardens.</p><p>[00:11:43] Rose thorn. Bud is a great exercise to analyze a problem from different angles. The roses are the positive things that Thrones that a negative things in the buds are there potential things. If everybody just takes two minutes and puts rose storm buds, and then you cluster. So it's okay. Heads down for two minutes then cluster.</p><p>[00:12:00] Okay. Now let's prioritize the clusters and you can vote on those. Okay. Now let's put those on a two by two matrix to see what we're going to do next quarter. You can actually get from point a to point B. Let's say you're planning a sprint or you're planning the roadmap for next quarter. You can get from point a to point B, not by staring at a blank canvas together and scratching your head, but actually structuring the conversation and structuring it.</p><p>[00:12:25] So I can give you the instructions and you can print them out on a PDF, but I can also just show you, Hey, we're going to do rose thorn, bud clustering, prioritization matrix, and then go into the roadmapping so that your collaboration is not improvised. You actually have a score.</p><p>[00:12:39] I'm a musician, right? So I think. Sheet music, I can have the sheet music, so we're all reading from the same score, that's something that, that we think is funding will fundamentally change collaboration is if it's a lot more deliberate and a lot more.</p><p>[00:12:56] <strong>Yeah, I can definitely see how for somebody new to it, that would make it a lot easier. It's an interesting interesting problem. Similar to when you're writing and you have a blank page.</strong></p><p>[00:13:06] Yes<strong>, </strong>exactly. And I like to think when I structure a meeting or workshop, I do it spatially. So I started in the upper left of a canvas.</p><p>[00:13:14] I like to go right and left. Some people like to go top and bottom, but I'll put a big number one. We're going to do this together right now. I have instructions there and then I put a line and then you move over and then I do number two. So my, my meeting agenda is represented visually. We're going to go from left to, it also lets everybody know that I'm working with what we're going to do. They can see the beginning and the end before we even get started and I just moved the team across. So it's almost as if the visualization and the canvas is facili facilitating my meeting for me, I'll even put breaks in there oh, we're going to take a break at this point.</p><p>[00:13:47] We're going to do this for an hour. Take a break, come back through this. So the meeting agenda is spatially represented on the canvas as well too. And then we fill that. Through the guided methods, we fill that in with stuffs that, and that gets us to, to our answer at the end. Again, it's being about being deliberate about collaboration and about designing that collaboration experience.</p><p>[00:14:07] And I think the canvas adds a whole new dimension for that.</p><p>[00:14:10] <strong> You briefly mentioned in passing the effect on alignment that working this way has, why do you think that is?</strong></p><p>[00:14:18] I think because there is a when you're thinking about, let's just say a digital whiteboard, it allows people to express what they're thinking in a different way or even.</p><p>[00:14:29] Cause sometimes, you might go into, let's just say a sprint planning meeting and there's a set of requirements and somebody will read them off or discuss them. And then there's a group of people sitting around, what's in their mind, what are they thinking? Do they understand those in exactly the same way?</p><p>[00:14:44] If we could get them to express what they're thinking as well too. So this idea of participation is really important. You can then see if you're all aligned or not. Literally see it. Do we all have the same. Of what we're headed towards.</p><p>[00:14:58] Jeff Patton, he wrote a book called user story mapping. He has a great great little cartoon in. Where there's three people. And at the beginning they have like thought bubbles and one has an orange, a triangle, and the other's thinking of a square and the other thinking of a circle. And I've been on a lot of projects where everybody nods and says, yeah, we're all together. But then if you looked in their minds, they actually have three different opinions or mental models of the thing that they're trying to solve for. And then the next frame of his cartoon is they put it out on a black. They actually put their circle and they said, oh, we're not aligned.</p><p>[00:15:31] So this idea of expressing yourself visually helps you then negotiate your different mental models so that you can get closer to a harmonized view of the world.</p><p>[00:15:43] <strong> One of the things that are really Useful in terms of alignment across departments, is this whole idea of customer experience mapping? You've written about it., quite a lot of depth and nuance if somebody was thinking about doing kind of a customer experience map for the first time, how would you suggest doing that kind of thing to help align with.</strong></p><p>[00:16:04] Sure. And I think, for me, just get, just to relate that back to your previous question to a customer journey map for me is essentially a collaboration tool. It's a way for some people to go out and observe the customer experience, right? Cause not everybody in an organization has contact with customers.</p><p>[00:16:22] But the people creating the map maker would have the luxury of being able to. Talk to people and investigate data around the customer experience. And they could take that data and write a 50 page report on it and say, here's all the things that we found and send around a 50 page report.</p><p>[00:16:39] But we know what happens with 50 page reports when they get sent around, people don't read them or they don't connect. What's on page three with what's on page 17.</p><p>[00:16:48] Alternatively I could take that information, that insight that I gathered and represented visually in a single.</p><p>[00:16:54] And that's what a customer journey map is. It's a compression of observations that you've made about the outside world human experiences in some way. And I compress it into something that gives an overview. And by visualizing that overview, I get this massive compression of information. 50 pages of, written texts would be a single overview where I can actually see cause and effect in the same overview.</p><p>[00:17:19] So I can say, oh here at this step, if we mess this up, that's going to cause this effect downstream. And it's also something that's compelling and engaging. So the idea of creating a journey map is creating these compelling, engaging artifacts that represent a lot of information.</p><p>[00:17:36] And the key point there is an alignment from the inside to the outside. We want our perspective as an organization to align to the. Perspective. That's essentially what being customer centric is. But then that diagram, that artifact becomes a collaboration tool inside and I call that insight.</p><p>[00:17:54] Alignment. So there's two types of alignment you're looking for. I want to get the outside in perspective, but then I got to get the teams that are trying to deliver that experience that you want aligned as well too. And the visualization helps with that as well too, because the marketing team can see itself in a journey map.</p><p>[00:18:11] The product team can see itself in the journey map. Everybody in the organization can see how they fit into the bigger picture in a single overview. And it becomes a collaboration tool at that point. Let's discuss, what are we going to prioritize next quarter? I'm just using that as an example, and you can have a conversation.</p><p>[00:18:28] So for me, the visualization of a map, a journey map is really it's to create an artifact that you can have a conversation around and you can use it as a diagnostic tool with a team to collaborate and come up with the solutions and the answers to the problems that you find together. So knowing that I think has impacted.</p><p>[00:18:46] You're trying to do two things, align the outside world to the inside. And you're also trying to foster a conversation as well, too. So the map maker, before you get started, you have to keep that in mind. And there's lots of different techniques that you can use. And methods out there.</p><p>[00:19:00] There's customer journey maps and service blueprints and mental model diagrams. And that's what I talk about in my book that you mentioned all these different types of maps, but they're essentially trying to do the same thing, which is trying to do these two different types of alignment.</p><p>[00:19:12] And the simplest place to start is with the chronology. Typically we think of an experiences things that happen to individuals over time. So it's a chronology and then there are different layers of information and the chronology is usually represented as columns and the layers of information are usually represented as rows.</p><p>[00:19:32] And I start journey mapping with actions, thoughts. And what are the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the people that I'm studying over time. So if you have a timeline and then put actions, thoughts, and feelings, that's a great place to get started, I think.</p><p>[00:19:45] Just to make it a little more concrete? Yeah. How would you describe a company that's aligned with the customer, but not aligned horizontally as you were saying? What does it, what does that look like? Yeah that's actually common. I think, cause particularly in the past five and 10 years, I think.</p><p>[00:20:00] Data about the customer experience is not lacking in organizations. We have everything from surveys and NPS and live usage, data of digital products research teams that go out and do qualitative research. Usability testing is common. We don't necessarily lack information about our customers and what they're experiencing, but is it actionable?</p><p>[00:20:23] And I think that's really the purpose of journey mapping as a verb. It's not about the map, but it's not about the now. And it's about the mapping. There's a process of creating the map and there's a process of having a conversation around the map. It's really trying to make sense of the data that you're getting about the experiences that you create, right? So they does not add, we're not lacking data. What we're lacking is a way to actually interpret that data and to make sense of it. And again, that's a collaborative exercise. So a journey map helps you do both of those things make sense of it because what you can do is overlay activities.</p><p>[00:20:57] I was talking about guided methods, right? I think my next book on journey mapping is going to be a series. Guided methods. Once you create the map what are you going to do with it? There's all kinds of prioritization techniques. What's the most important point for us. What's the most important point for the customer?</p><p>[00:21:13] Do those align? Where's the biggest pain point where you, our competitors Excel and we don't, and you can use that model of the world, the map itself as a springboard into analysis, and conversation. On top.</p><p>[00:21:26] <strong> You mentioned the outside in view and I guess you're referring to the jobs to be done angle. Mental models and job maps, I think we're closest to the customer. How are these tools and approaches useful for let's say strategy for.</strong></p><p>[00:21:43] From a jobs to be done perspective, there's an artifact called. Which is really not looking at it. Doesn't look at your relationship with a customer as a paying customer. It's looking at what they're trying to get done independent of your solution. So it's similar to a customer journey map. A job map is similar to a customer journey map, but it has a different perspective because it's not about your solution.</p><p>[00:22:07] In fact, in jobs to be done, we go a great line. To expunge, any reference to technology solutions or methods in the language, and we're not looking at how do people become aware of my solution? How do people decide to buy my solution? Why do they stay loyal to. Those are the three points of a customer journey map, by the way.</p><p>[00:22:26] We're really looking at what are they trying to get done independent of my product or my solution. And that gives you an independent view of the job to be done. When you're talking about jobs to be done, you your unit of analysis is the job.</p><p>[00:22:39] And a job map represents that individual. So you can actually then say, okay, where is the biggest point of intervention? If I understand what the individual, the people that we're trying to solve, if I'm understanding what they're trying to get done independent of my solution, just what their objective is.</p><p>[00:22:56] What we can then do is say, where are the biggest levers? Are there points of intervention where strategically we would make the most difference or strategically where the market and competitors haven't So you can actually find new playing ground at a strategic level from something like a job map.</p><p>[00:23:13] And guess what a job map is also visual, and it has that same effect. It's something you can put up and use as a conversation piece and do another layer of conversation and analysis through guided methods and visualization to come to, an agreement within your team.</p><p>[00:23:30] <strong>Just to , jump topics again, digging further into the question around collaboration what are the most. Common are the most important jobs around working together remotely in general? How do you think about that?</strong></p><p>[00:23:45] I think about it in, in two layers actually. And this is a model that I'm hopefully going to be writing about a little bit more in the near future.</p><p>[00:23:55] when a group of people come together, I think there are two fundamental jobs. That they have in front of them at the highest level is they come together and this is why they come together is to solve a problem or a challenge. There are methods and then there's a workflow to get that done. And we can look at models of innovation or design thinking process. Agile has its process to help teams solve problems.</p><p>[00:24:18] I think there's another layer though, that became very evident during the pandemic, which is teams have to connect. At an interpersonal level. W one thing that we learned during the pandemic is work is social.</p><p>[00:24:31] And I don't mean you have to like your colleagues and things like that, but there are two or more human beings coming together, collaborate. Guess what? They bring their human beingness, their human humanity with them. And there's this very social component to work as well, too.</p><p>[00:24:45] And what we've found is one of the big challenges coming out of the pandemic is discussing. Now that people are, did feel disconnected. And there's studies that show this as well, too, that okay. I'm working at home now, during the pandemic and I can be productive personally, but team productivity and team connectedness is suffered. So that what we're seeing is projects get going. And again, even everybody might be individually productive, but the project has to start over. Because the teams weren't aligned because they're not connected, or people are very dissatisfied with their work condition because they're not connected to their colleagues anymore at a human level.</p><p>[00:25:24] When we're thinking about designing a collaboration experience, I think you need to think about how are the teams going to solve their problems together? How are they going to get from point a to point B, but how are they also going to connect. And we have to make that deliberate in the past, it was basically well went to the office together and that the connection magically happened, the water cooler moments, the happy hours, the cat, the Cantina, meeting our colleagues, the coffee breaks and things like that. Without those things. Or you can, those things still exist, right? Because you still go to the offices and meet in person, but we can't assume that's always going to happen with that within every team that I think we also have to make that other layer, we have to make both problem solving and connecting as human beings, we have to make that.</p><p>[00:26:07] And there are ways to do that, that if we're collaborating remotely, there are exercises and activities that we can do to help get to know each other a little bit better. And I'm not talking about, team building activities. Those are good. But those happen, like what, like once a year, once a quarter or something like that, I'm talking about every time you connect, what, where are those little moments where you're connecting and reflecting?</p><p>[00:26:29] As a team about yourself and about the group of people. it's not about making friends, I'm not talking about, Hey, you have to be, you gotta be, you gotta be a social person. Now it's just about connecting, as a team, there has to be a cohesiveness there at a human level as well, too.</p><p>[00:26:45] So solving problems and connecting, I think are the two big jobs that a team has to do to collaborate.</p><p>[00:26:50] As you were mentioning that, I think a really. Difficult point, is the first moment a team comes together? What are your thoughts on that? About how to structure that possibly with the use of some somehow, using a whiteboard</p><p>[00:27:05] that's that's what we do at mural.</p><p>[00:27:07] We even have templates and things for like team kickoff, and Again, just thinking about those two facets are those two jobs to be done. We need to solve a problem together, but we need to connect. So if I were structuring a team kickoff, I would want to have everybody introduce themselves and disclose something that they're comfortable disclosing.</p><p>[00:27:25] I'm not saying again, it's not about making friends, but there is a relationship. There's a work relationship that you have to build with your colleagues. And I would also want to get aligned on what's the problem we're trying to solve. And I would have activities that would be interleaved. Right again, it's not about saying, oh, we're going to take a day off and do team building.</p><p>[00:27:43] It's about every time you interact, even at the beginning of a project, how are you going to get to know each other as people? What's the modus operandi of each of these people? What are their perspectives that they're bringing to the table from their jobs and their role? What are their motivations, right?</p><p>[00:27:56] How are these people as individuals? What type of person are they? Those types of activities and conversations. As well as what's the problem we're trying to solve right together. Google ventures did this study on high performing teams. And one of the most important factors that is a leading indicator of a high-performing team are things like psychological safety.</p><p>[00:28:17] Do you feel safe speaking up in front of that group of individuals that you're collaborating with? Dependability. Can you rely on them to get done with they're done, right? You don't build psychological safety and dependability. If you're only focused on the problem solving side of things, you also have to be deliberate about building up those relationships in those ties.</p><p>[00:28:37] So I do feel psychologically safe and I do feel like I can depend on my colleagues. So it's again, it's at the beginning and it's to your question. It's really important to establish, that playing field that we're going to talk about psychological safety and dependency, maybe not directly, but it's going to be something that we're going to be actively and deliberately trying to build.</p><p>[00:28:58] <strong>Yeah. Project Aristotle was quite amazing at Google.</strong></p><p>[00:29:02] <strong>You you've got the two books you also have have the toolkit and the other things you do around jobs to be done. Could you say a few words about.</strong></p><p>[00:29:10] Sure. So know, I've been looking at jobs to be done almost for two decades now, and using it in my own work.</p><p>[00:29:18] But about six or seven years ago, I started to teach a course on jobs to be done so that I could learn what are the questions that people have and figure out what the best way. To answer those questions or what's the language that I need to use to explain jobs to be done. And that was prior to writing the book.</p><p>[00:29:35] So when I wrote the book, I felt fairly confident that I understood just to be done, but I also understood how to explain it and really break it down, but I'm not done. I think, and the field's not done. It's not like jobs to be done is static. after the book came out, we me and my business partner created a.</p><p>[00:29:54] An online resource called the jobs to be done toolkit JTBD toolkit.com and there's some online learning there where you can do some video courses. We also have live training that we do, but there's also some resources there some articles and things, and we do monthly. We do a, what we call a community.</p><p>[00:30:11] Where there's a group of two or three dozen people who are interested in jobs to be done, I interview one of them and then we have a big open conversation and really that, all of that, what I just mentioned was really to keep the conversation going. Around jobs to be done after my book to, to make it alive.</p><p>[00:30:26] Cause you write a book. It's static. It's ink on page on paper, but I wanted to continue the conversation because for me, the book is just a point in time. I did a lot of work before the book and the jobs to be done toolkit is what I'm doing after the book.</p><p>[00:30:42] <strong>What would be your key advice for people now? The pandemic started over two years ago now. They've seen whiteboards, they've seen mural. They've seen, they've tried. Out a bit. I think initially there was a lot of stressing around, general technology and it's going to be overwhelming and spend half the meeting, just getting the thing, working.</strong></p><p>[00:31:03] <strong>What would you say are the, let's say key tips for people nowadays in terms of getting the most out of using whiteboards?</strong></p><p>[00:31:09] Yeah, I think I think some of the initial trepidation is gone, but I still think. We need brave people to step up and lead conversations and design collaboration experiences.</p><p>[00:31:22] One thing the pandemic taught us was that a lot of meetings and a lot of collaboration and interactions with our colleagues was improvised. And I think when you're in person, you can get away with improvising a little bit more than you can when you're remote.</p><p>[00:31:35] And part of zoom fatigue for me, by the way, is that we basically just took our calendars and replicated it in zoom meetings, but then we didn't ask ourselves, did we need to meet at all? We also didn't ask ourselves, what are the rules of engagement? How are we going to get from point a to point B in this conversation?</p><p>[00:31:52] Because if you're just improvising on zoom, it's a lot more obvious that there's no real deliberateness or intentionality behind the interactions. So I think we need brave people to say, okay, we have this new set of technologies and this new work environment, which is sometimes remote sometimes in person sometimes.</p><p>[00:32:11] And to step up and be brave to be brave enough to use your imagination, to invent new ways to collaborate. The thing that I would orient to towards is using things like guided methods and there's thousands out there that you can find, right. For icebreakers, how to start a meeting, how to decide together, how to, brainstorm.</p><p>[00:32:32] To use deliberate methods to structure the interaction, to be a lot more deliberate about how you're going to collaborate. So you're not just improvising because again, improvising on zoom is what leads to some fatigue. Here's what I find. If you have a mural canvas open and you have an activity that's structured and you have a timer, okay.</p><p>[00:32:48] Everybody has five minutes to put their best idea down. Okay. We have 10 minutes to, to prioritize this. Time goes by so quickly. I get that a lot in my workshops loop that people go, how did you feel? Four hours so much? And I wasn't distracted people. Aren't distracted and they're not fatigued from it as well too.</p><p>[00:33:04] It's the structure that I put to it. I don't mean structure in terms of rigid. It's just that there's a game plan there. I have a game plan and I have the materials and using neural, I visualize. So everybody can see it and everybody can interact with it.</p><p>[00:33:17] So the combination of visualization and guided methods and structure to your meetings, it gets rid of zoom fatigue. When I first heard that term, I was like, what? What's that? Because I didn't experience it myself. And the other thing that I thought was what you need to be a little bit more intentional about how you're getting through your day of.</p><p>[00:33:35] Yeah. And so that's my biggest piece of advice is to structure and design. Essentially collaboration design, right? Design your collaborations.</p><p>[00:33:43] <strong> That's fascinating. And actually one thing you mentioned hybrid have you seen any kind of interesting ways teams or companies are using using neural and in a hybrid context?</strong></p><p>[00:33:56] Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I think that's key that, that digitally defined workplace that I talked about, I think that's what is going to make hybrid a lot more. W I have seen teams doing the opposite. And by that, trying to let the people who are in person continue to work with sticky notes and whiteboards, then letting them, continue to sit at a desk without their own laptop or device.</p><p>[00:34:19] I don't think that's going to lead to a good hybrid experience. I think the better hybrid experience is to say whether we're in person. Altogether in person, whether we're hybrid and it's mixed. And whether remote, we have to be thinking about how are we going to do this digitally,</p><p>[00:34:34] and mural, just to focus on the digital whiteboard component, we do have apps for large touchscreens. We have apps for mobile devices. So if you are in person and you're entering a hybrid collaboration session with colleagues who are remote show up and have a device that you can interact with, because guess what? There's audio and video. There's. How do you chat with the people who are remote? And then if you have a virtual whiteboard, you're going to want to do that virtually as well too.</p><p>[00:34:59] I was just talking to somebody who said, yeah, we got together altogether. We were in person, they deliberately met in person and then they wrote things down on sticky notes and flip charts and they said, oh, what are we going to do tomorrow?</p><p>[00:35:13] Like they had no game plan. Once you put something out on a sticky note, they were like, oh, somebody's got to do it. And then you do the old fashioned. Let's take photos of it. Let's transcribe it. But as soon as you put something on a piece of paper, it's static. And I think what we have to be thinking about is fluidity, right?</p><p>[00:35:29] Because your day and day to day, you're going to move in and out of all of these different modes, you're going to have a call at nine in the morning, everybody's remote, then you might go to the office and half of the people are remote. And half of the people. And then later in the day, you have a meeting with your colleagues who are all in the office and the next day it's going to be a completely different combination on a daily basis.</p><p>[00:35:51] Each of us are going to be moving in and out of these different modalities of working remote hybrid, in-person hybrid, in-person remote. You're going to be going back and forth between these and your project is going to be going back and forth between these on Monday. We're all remote on Wednesday.</p><p>[00:36:06] We all go to the office together in between where all. So your project materials need to be fluid as well too. And move in and out the way to do that is to be thinking digital from the beginning. And we call that a digital first mindset, right? No that's great. That's great. .</p><p>[00:36:22] <strong>So the books are experience mapping and the jobs to be done. Playbook. There's the jobs to be done, toolkit, a website and is there any other place where people can look you up to find out more?</strong></p><p>[00:36:37] Sure. I hang out a little bit on LinkedIn and if you want to reach out on LinkedIn and say hi and connect to me, I'd love to connect with folks who are like-minded.</p><p>[00:36:46] And then also. So it's at Jim callback on Twitter. I'm a little more active on LinkedIn, but I also I'm a little bit active on Twitter and things. I'll see it right away and retweet or comment or something like that. So LinkedIn and Twitter are another good place to find me. Great. Great.</p><p>[00:37:02] Thanks very much, Jim.</p><p>[00:37:03] <strong> </strong> <strong>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-6470615921010620902022-03-31T02:00:00.001-07:002022-03-31T02:00:54.500-07:00Managing asynchronously through the Russia-Ukraine war<p> My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.managingremoteteams.co">Managing Remote Teams</a>. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. </p><p>In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, I speak with Liam Martin. Liam has been a remote work advocate for a long time, as a successful serial entrepreneur and innovator in this space. We dig into how being remote and asynchronous freed him up to respond effectively to the evolving Russia-Ukraine conflict, supporting his Ukrainian team creatively.</p><h3 id="6kemo">About Liam Martin</h3><figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1h448bg_a45a1693f9ef8bfab3871ab15c47039d_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1h448bg_a45a1693f9ef8bfab3871ab15c47039d_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1h448bg_a45a1693f9ef8bfab3871ab15c47039d_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Liam Martin</figcaption></figure><p>Liam is a serial entrepreneur who runs Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference — Running Remote. Liam is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc, Mashable, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat, and many other publications specifically targeting the expansion of remote work.<br/><br/>Liam has also co-authored a book - Running Remote - focused on remote work methodology. In this revolutionary guide, Liam and his co-founder, Rob Rawson, have unearthed the secrets and lessons discovered by remote work pioneering entrepreneurs and founders who've harnessed the async mindset to operate their businesses remotely in the most seamless, hassle-free, and cost-effective manner possible.</p><h2 id="48cr">Transcript</h2><p>[00:00:00] Are you in Poland right now? Or are you in. Are you somewhere else? I think we are from Poland.</p><p>[00:00:08] <strong>I am from Poland. Yeah. So I'm from Poland, but I grew up in the U S and I'm back in Poland. And I lived in London for awhile.</strong></p><p>[00:00:14] So I've got two of my team members from Ukraine that we ended up getting to Poland, and three of them were not able to to make it out, which was half of their fault and half our fault we should have actually just dragged them out of the country, but they refuse to go.</p><p>[00:00:35] And and it's quite rough there. And I'm sure it's probably really rough in Poland right now because there's just a kind of. For refugees that are coming across the border from what I understand it.</p><p>[00:00:45] <strong>Yeah. Yeah. I think we're up to 600,000 at the moment. And we've got a a housemate, my parents own that was recently empty outside the south of the city.</strong></p><p>[00:00:56] <strong> We accepted a family of about 11 there, so they're just, as, give them a place to just figure out what's next possibly stay there for a while.</strong></p><p>[00:01:07] So let me know if there's if I can make a donation or something like that, just for, to get them, like food for the next month. We've been trying to figure out what we can do here. We've actually had I've been in talks yesterday with. With a space X, because we got our, we have guys in Poltava and we have guys in Kharkiv, one guy in Kharkiv, and we can't get into Kharkiv, but we do have a courier that can get us into Poltava. We got solar arrays and a power bank system.</p><p>[00:01:39] So effectively they're power independent at this point. And it's not something that's going to run their entire home, but it's going to run basically Their computers and wifi and maybe a lighter too, or something like that. But if you can't get any communications up and running, then, there's no point in doing any of those things. And it's been a bit of a difficult time trying to get in touch with them with space X. They did that finally get back to me and they said we'll try to connect you with somebody today, but hopefully we can do it because I don't think they have more than a week before all those supply lines.</p><p>[00:02:14] <strong>Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing rope teams podcast. Today. I am speaking with Lee and Martin running remote and the running of our podcast and the founder of time doctor and Liam in his Vilnius spare time is also writing a book.</strong> And whenever when, again, by the way, we'll never write one here.</p><p>[00:03:12] So the only one. So if you want to read a book written by me, this is the only book will be available. Yeah, there we go. There we go.</p><p>[00:03:21] The remote work world was a cottage industry before the pandemic, right? There was a very small amount of people there. We ran the largest conference on remote work In 2019. And that was 700 people in Austin, which we had to cancel, which was going to happen in April of 2020 was projected to be a thousand people.</p><p>[00:03:45] So that was at work right there like that was the ecosystem a thousand people. And and in, in January of 2024, approximately 4.5% of the U S workforce was working remotely in March of 20, 20, 40 5% of the U S workforce was working remotely. This is the biggest transition since the industrial revolution, but the industrial revolution took 80 years.</p><p>[00:04:08] We did it in March. And one of the things that I recognized when that transition occurred, Was that almost everyone. And I lovingly refer to these people in the book is pandemic panickers the people that I got phone calls from G 20 countries saying, Hey, we have 400,000 workers and we want to transition to remote work tomorrow.</p><p>[00:04:34] And my answer is I'm not the person to call and their response to me was who else do I call? You're one of those people that picked up the phone because it was such a small community. And so what I recognized was that. Everyone that's currently transitioning to remote work and is currently working remotely is effectively recreating the office remotely.</p><p>[00:04:57] So they're not recognizing all of the work that the remote pioneers have done over the last two decades to be able to understand that managing remote workers is not like managing on-premise in the office workers and the methodology that I believe that the vast majority of the remote work community basically built was asynchronous management.</p><p>[00:05:20] What we call the asynchronous mindset inside of the book, and the book specifically focuses on how to actually take that methodology and deploy it inside of a remote team, a hybrid team or an in-office team. It doesn't actually matter because we've recognized that we think that asynchronous management is actually just a better way to run a business, whether you're remote or.</p><p>[00:05:45] <strong>So let's dig into that a little bit. So what exactly is different about managing your synchronicity versus just typical management?</strong></p><p>[00:05:57] So I think that you got reached out to, by vice Shelly. If I remember correctly by Shelly was the initial person that reached out through email to you. Me and by Shelly had been working together for years. She's managing the outreach for podcasts. And the last time that I spoke to by challis synchronously was about four months ago. So in that four month interim. We've worked on multiple different projects together and all of that work has been accomplished without me requiring to be in the same physical time zone as her, for a meeting.</p><p>[00:06:39] I think of it almost as the Netflix model versus the old school television model. I don't know if you're old enough for this, but for me, I remember trying to watch friends, the TV show that would come on at Friday night at 8:30 PM. If I wasn't in front of the TV at 8:30 PM. I would miss friends. I would miss that episode and I would have to actually listen to a rerun six months or a year later.</p><p>[00:07:07] Netflix is an asynchronous model. I choose when to actually consume that content. And basically that's exactly the same methodology that's implemented inside of businesses today, the employees inside of the organization can choose when to become distracted with what pieces of information in order to actually become more focused and more productive inside of the organization.</p><p>[00:07:32] There's a great book called deep work by my friend, Cal Newport. And I looked at all of these.</p><p>[00:07:46] I would love some pizza too.</p><p>[00:07:55] Yeah, no. And also pizza. So basically. The methodology is really trying to reinforce every single employee needs to reinforce what, as I said before, my friend Cal Newport coined, which is deep work, the ability for every single individual inside of an organization to have everything at their disposal to solve really hard problems inside of your organization.</p><p>[00:08:23] Because at the end of the day, any corporation is fundamentally just solving difficult problems. The more difficult problems that you can solve at a faster speed, the faster your organization grows. So the assumption is that you need collaboration and disruption and synchronous interactions in order to actually accomplish that goal.</p><p>[00:08:45] What the remote pioneers have discovered as that you do not need this system in place to actually achieve fantastic growth inside of your.</p><p>[00:08:54] <strong>So on the count Newport point. In his more recent book the world without email, he's talking about the hive mind so basically this whole idea of busy-ness ,</strong> <strong>being notified through slack or teams or something what do you, think of that?</strong></p><p>[00:09:12] We use slack but I turn notifications off another really good app that you can use as twist, which is. I slack design specifically for asynchronous work, run by mirror and to do list. They're at the tip of the spear when it comes to asynchronous communication and management.</p><p>[00:09:32] But I believe that any disruption, so inside of these organizations, the assumption is that getting an answer right now, we'll speed things.</p><p>[00:09:45] This is exactly. And this comes off of the premise, which I was, I wanted to touch on before, which is the idea that collaboration is good. And the more collaboration you do, the better your organization will be the reason why that occurs is because everyone has a sunk cost fallacy. They all get in their cars and they drive to one single place.</p><p>[00:10:05] They spend 90 minutes of their Workday driving to this one place every single day. And then they say, okay it's a collaboration buffet as much information as you possibly can. As much collaboration as humanly possible, it's indirect as much as humanly possible rote first organizations where that didn't occur, recognized we have an Alec heart method we can choose when we want to become distracted with collaboration.</p><p>[00:10:28] And they actually discovered that you need significantly less collaboration to actually achieve the same returns. And also more counter-intuitively sometimes collaboration actually has counter-intuitive effects towards everyone's overall productivity.</p><p>[00:10:43] I always say that if there's less than three people talking in a 10 person meeting, then those other seven people should just leave the room and get back to work.</p><p>[00:10:53] <strong>If people are actually participating in, they should be there. Whereas everyone else it's enough to yet inform some other way. And otherwise it just ends up being too much of a thing about status.</strong></p><p>[00:11:03] It's a component of ego that works into this as well.</p><p>[00:11:06] And this is the other thing that I've been discovering while I studied some organizations that have gone back to the office as well, and figuring out why they went back to the office. And one of the underlying parts of this conversation, which no one really wants to talk about is a lot of these business owners liked the idea of having an office, where there were a thousand people in that office and the vast majority of the time he got to tell those people what to do that gave that person a power trip.</p><p>[00:11:43] I worked in a coworking space for a couple of years. And I have this woman in the book, this character in the book that I refer to as a tech startup Karen. And so she she would always yell to her other employees right in front of my desk and speak very loudly. I knew absolutely everything about her business and she never spoke to me. She didn't even know who I was. one time I remember her having a conversation with one of her employees, it was dressing her employee down and she said, listen, we need to get more revenue from local companies like Shopify and time doctor. And then the employee who knew me and everyone else knew me in the office, except for his woman who owned half the office. Just giving you context here. He said, you mean Liam's company. And she said, what?</p><p>[00:12:34] And then she just pointed to me and I pulled out one of my AirPods and I was like, yes, but obviously I heard everything that she was saying. I had been working in that office for two years. She didn't even know who I was and there's this presumption that, because I just sit at my desk and I'm quiet and I'm a relatively introverted guy and I just work away at my job that I'm not important.</p><p>[00:12:57] I think we're sitting on a new business model, a new way to be able to extract labor from the workforce. And I think it's just fundamentally going to be a more efficient model once you implementing synchronous work. So it's not going to be a choice for those people.</p><p>[00:13:11] You want to keep your really nice office. That's great. I really liked my horse, but I'm going to buy a car. It's just a more efficient model to be able to get around.</p><p>[00:13:20] <strong> Let's dig back into collaborations specifically. So you said that there's some counter-intuitive things around collaboration. What did you mean there exactly?</strong></p><p>[00:13:30] Counterintuitive assumption that I discovered was that the more collaboration that you have inside of an organization, there is almost an exponential diminishing in returns. So the first hour of me of a meeting is incredibly productive, but then the fifth hour of that meeting is actually very unproductive.</p><p>[00:13:52] And so optimizing towards the minimum viable dose towards all of the synchronous versus asynchronous interactions is actually something that people should think about. And no one actually thinks about those things. No one says to themselves how much time should we spend in meetings? Has anyone asked that at any corporate meeting ever or any organization?</p><p>[00:14:16] No, because they think meetings are always good. Meetings are always going to make us move forward. When in reality, in my analysis meetings in sometimes counter-intuitively actually keep you exactly where you are or in the worst case we'll be back.</p><p>[00:14:34] <strong>Yeah. I liked the rule of thumb in the book by a high output management by Andy Grove, where he talks about the rule of thumb that about 25% of a manager's time should be in meetings.</strong></p><p>[00:14:48] There you go. And that's like in a high-performance culture, right?</p><p>[00:14:50] In our organization and this isn't just something that this is something we invented, but it's been adopted through remote pioneers is the concept of the silent. So every week we use a Sonos or project management system.</p><p>[00:15:03] And I talk a lot about how technology is now, the office and the manager. And so a sauna actually works as both. So we have all of the issues that we want to discuss in our weekly standup meeting. And we discuss those things. They synchronously. So on some of these issues, we might have 40 to 50 comments, but if you've actually come to a conclusion, we take that conclusion. We put it to the top of the ticket and then we basically check that particular issue off. And if we have less than three issues that we can't solve a synchronously, we don't have a meeting. So we usually. Once or twice a month on average, where we'll basically just have a backlog of a lot of these issues that are not, that can't necessarily be solved.</p><p>[00:15:52] And the vast majority of the time, actually, ironically, when I've been looking at the tickets that can't get solved, it's almost entirely due to the emotional state of some of the team members inside of that meeting. It has nothing to do with the actual logistics or the hard data inside of those problems.</p><p>[00:16:13] <strong> Yeah, collaborations that interesting one. It also depends on exactly how you define productivity too. It's going to be different in every company, every industry, that kind of thing. </strong>I <strong>What are your thoughts on the relationship between the two in a remote.</strong></p><p>[00:16:26] If I speak to 10 companies and I asked them what productivity means, you get 10 different answers. So I completely agree with you. When I look at companies that are hyper-growth companies, right companies that grow more than 50% year over year and stringing more than two of those years together, that's the definition of a hyper-growth organization.</p><p>[00:16:49] The best variable that I can define that equals productivity is: solving difficult problems that produce some type of innovation in the market that give them a strategic advantage in comparison to all of their competitors. So anything that you can do to be able to optimize for that is really the core piece that I see inside. Basically any company. And I think asynchronous management is one of the best methodologies that you can implement to be able to achieve those particular goals,</p><p>[00:17:23] so if you have really intelligent people inside of your organization, what should they be spending the vast majority of their time doing? Should they be managing other individuals? Absolutely not. That's actually the worst expenditure of their time.</p><p>[00:17:40] Don't put someone who has a PhD in artificial intelligence and have the manage other people, they should actually be executing on building, an AI model as an example. Should they be sitting in meetings? Absolutely not. They should actually just be focusing on solving those very difficult problems and anything that you can do to be able to put more of their productive Workday into that time is really the model that I think that inevitably everyone will adopt.</p><p>[00:18:11] Also, when you take a look at where people put their time the concept of the eight hour work day and the five hour work week, that's also a really incorrect way to look at productivity. What I really look at is what's the meaningful amount of output over, let's say a one month period, if you want to get super nitty-gritty on it. Cause I love looking at time. One of my other companies is time doctor recognizing that probably for those types of individuals, they can really only put in four hours and it can vary. The actual number is about four hours and 16 minutes, but on average, four hours per day of time into solving difficult problems.</p><p>[00:18:51] And if someone can deploy four hours into solving those difficult problems, you're going to be way more successful than the old model. I have a meeting at 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Then I get into work from 9:00 AM to 1130 and then I go to lunch and I get distracted for the next hour and a half. Then I go into a meeting after lunch, and then maybe I get another hour at the end of the day.</p><p>[00:19:12] Forget about that. We have like silent communication days. So days in which we shut down slack and all of our project management systems and our email, and we just focus entirely on getting deep work done. And those are some of the most productive days that we have all month because everyone can remove all of these distractions and just focus on getting those big, hairy, audacious goals solved.</p><p>[00:19:35] <strong>Still on the theme of some extent, collaboration. When you are collaborating with larger group around solving difficult problems, how do you make sure that people stay effective? So not so much efficient but that they're working together in a way that remains effective when you're doing this asynchronous management.</strong></p><p>[00:19:57] So a lot of the times people have to get better at the written word. That's a big part of asynchronous management and proper collaboration.</p><p>[00:20:05] The other variable that I'll jump us over just for a second is the way that collaboration and the way that ideas were moved forward in synchronous organizations are almost entirely connected to and extroversion.</p><p>[00:20:22] So inside of asynchronous organizations, I believe that we're going to see the rise of the introverted leader, which is a very rare type of leader. We do see it in people like Elon Musk, as an example, he's an introverted leader, right? He's very much, I don't know if you've ever seen him speak in front of large groups of people, but he's horrible.</p><p>[00:20:43] He's very bad at communicating his ideas. He hasn't had any, maybe he has had training, but probably it didn't really stick. He's not good at solving those problems, but he is really good at having fantastic ideas that he can bring to fruition that he can execute upon.</p><p>[00:21:00] So inside of the old synchronous model, it would usually be the captain America, six foot, two football captain guy that would come in and say, I have an idea. It's going to be called Twitter for cats. We're going to call it katter.com. We're going to invest a billion dollars into it. And then everyone is convinced because he's just very charismatic at communicating that information.</p><p>[00:21:23] But then the person that's sitting there saying this is incredibly stupid. You're an idiot for even thinking about it because there, they don't have that same level of charisma and they can't convince people in the moment. They don't actually have their ideas adopted.</p><p>[00:21:40] Inside of asynchronous organizations. You can sit and think and reflect upon all of the communication that's happened from top to bottom and people that have that ability to be able to really craft fantastic ideas and also convince people through text form are usually the people that are going to have their ideas adopted at the end of the day.</p><p>[00:22:02] Basically better ideas will be adopted more often when we collaborate asynchronously.</p><p>[00:22:07] It's very difficult for me to be able to communicate synchronously, but in text form, I can think about my ideas and I can communicate my ideas a lot more elegantly than I can on a podcast as an example. It hasn't been utilized until literally the last five years effectively when asynchronous work really started to pop up as something that companies were seriously thinking about implementing inside of their companies.</p><p>[00:22:35] <strong>One thing I wanted to ask about is given the context now, , let's say the attack on Ukraine and the pandemic, big external risks for companies. You're your CEO. How does a company being a synchronous deal with that? So to speak.</strong></p><p>[00:22:56] With Ukraine, this is a perfect example because I've never communicated more synchronously in the last few days than I've done in the last few days. So it's been a lot of synchronous conversations with our team members in Ukraine and then also our team members on the borders with Ukraine as well.</p><p>[00:23:16] We did get some of our team members out. Some of our team members are still in Ukraine and that is to me, the difference between management and leadership. So whenever we meet with people and we talk to them I don't need to know your numbers because that's already documented inside of all of our project management systems that we already have.</p><p>[00:23:40] We don't need to necessarily discuss what your goals are because we've already clearly defined what those goals are. What I talk about is how are you doing? What's going on in Kharkiv right now? What's the situation, how can I help you? Where can you go next? Those are the things that are really important and what your numbers were is probably the least important part of not only obviously these people's lives, which is way more important than any type of money that we'd make inside of the business, but more importantly, in a grander context showing people that we care about them as friends of ours. And not just coworkers. And those are the ties that I think will bind companies together, way better than, zoom calls on at 5:00 PM on a Friday where everyone must do culture at gunpoint,</p><p>[00:24:39] it's a 5:00 PM. Everyone gets together. We've got some beers that have been delivered to you, and we're going to play cards against humanity, but not the fun kind, the HR friendly kind. And we're all gonna sit on this call for the next 90 minutes. If you do that, pull your people, make it anonymous, ask them if it's.</p><p>[00:25:00] I could guarantee you 80% of them eat it and they do. They don't want to do it anymore.</p><p>[00:25:06] We bought a whole bunch of Oculus virtual reality headsets. We bought them for everybody. And we said, if you guys want to go play VR together, you can do it on company time, just go ahead. And what we were measuring was how many people would voluntarily get together to be able to do this type of thing. So measuring the dividend off of an investment into culture is the only real way that I actually think that you can see culture and you can see whether or not you're building meaningful culture.</p><p>[00:25:38] All this culture at gunpoint is fundamentally not going to be useful.</p><p>[00:25:42] <strong>Yeah. Culture is a big one. Definitely. It's like there's the play aspect of it, but also how things are actually done, how decisions are made, how the work is done. Once you do get into a remote environment, the subjective, the emotional side of that suddenly feels a lot stronger than it would be necessarily just in your office.</strong></p><p>[00:26:01] We talked about culture so often inside of the tech startup world. No one really knows what that is. It's such a used term that everyone now we're first. For everything. From sociological perspective, culture is what unique actions and activities does your group do that other groups do not? That's the sociological definition of culture.</p><p>[00:26:26] When I looked at that and I said to myself, okay, what really defines our culture? Before the pandemic, we were a road that was a very unique thing. Not many other people did that. We also hire from anywhere on planet earth, we're in 43 different countries all over the world. That's a very unique variable that we have, we also have a very open liberal, democratic mindset towards ideas inside of our organization.</p><p>[00:26:50] So I've had a meeting with someone that was thinking about getting a a sex change operation one week. And then the very next week we had another team member that was thinking about getting a second life. Those are very unique things. And then you assemble all of those pieces together. You package that. And then you deliver that to your prospective new employee, your new team member. And instead of saying, Hey, this is who we are as a company. Don't you want to join us? I actually have the reverse perspective. This is who we are as a company. You better know that before you get into this, because otherwise this isn't going to work. So if this is not what you're interested in this is not the place for you. And I actually use it more as a weeding out device, as opposed to a unifying device, which is we have a very liberal perspective towards the way that we operate our business. The ideas that we have inside of our organization. There's a lot of different ideas, but as long as you don't hurt anyone else, you're welcome inside of this company.</p><p>[00:27:57] About a year ago, I believe base camp ended up having a very difficult time where about a third of their entire organization left. And it's funny because I love those guys. Their books have been seminal to me in terms of just where we're going in terms of not just remote work, but work in general and how to run a business, particularly a tech business. But even those guys, I think, fell into the trap of saying what is culture? Their culture kind of got away from them and they didn't stand up for what they truly are. And they let that culture be co-opted by the people inside of their organization, because they were trying to use culture as a unifier, as opposed to a divider. And I actually think that the vast majority of the times you should use culture as this is who we are. If you don't like. Please don't take this job because you're actually going to hurt more than you help. Long-term</p><p>[00:28:50] <strong>that's interesting. Flip there. So how was writing the book itself?</strong></p><p>[00:28:57] Horrible for someone who has a, it was, so I had a. I had a collaborator who worked with me on the book, who is actually a seasoned writer.</p><p>[00:29:13] And I remember sitting down because we're working sync, we're working asynchronously. We work on this big Google doc together, and I remember spending an entire day on about two paragraphs coming up with a core concept, which was actually around how platforms are the new office and trying to communicate to in-office environments.</p><p>[00:29:36] What we mean by platforms are the new office. And he saw me working on these two paragraphs all day because you can see that inside of Google docs. And so we just ping me on slack Hey dude what'd you doing? Like I'm seeing what you're doing here. And it's, it seems like you're having some trouble.</p><p>[00:29:53] So we jumped on for a zoom call for five minutes. I explained what I was trying to communicate. And he wrote a version that was way better than the six hours that I had spent trying to work out those two paragraphs. And he said, listen, in the future, write down your broken thoughts, put it in the Google doc. And then let me worry about actually turning it into something that's going to sound good.</p><p>[00:30:17] So that actually ended up accelerating the book quite a bit, but it's just taking all of these pieces of information that outside of, maybe a thousand companies that were running remote first pre pandemic, which is insane when you think about it and these methodologies that have been built over the decades, I'm trying to basically encapsulate that and try to get that to the massive community of people.</p><p>[00:30:46] That are now saying I'm working remotely now or I'm working from home. But they missed the biggest part, which is actually how to do it.</p><p>[00:30:53] <strong>Right now? March 20, 22. So two years later what's the biggest misconception people have about remote work?</strong></p><p>[00:31:03] almost every single phone call that I've had with a pandemic panicker that's tried to transition towards remote work is some version of, should I use slack or Microsoft teams? Should I use zoom or should I use Google meet? And if you're asking those questions, you don't actually know what questions to ask to solve your problem.</p><p>[00:31:33] So that's a big part that I think that almost every single company doesn't recognize, which is they're simply trying to recreate the office.</p><p>[00:31:42] And if I'm on zoom calls eight hours a day I had a friend of mine who he said, oh I think I've set up the perfect system. Everyone just logs into zoom at the beginning of the day at 8:00 AM. And we're all on this like big keyboard little heads. And then anyone can ask anyone else a question and can just go into a little separate room and talk about it. And I said do you think your employees. Like that, do they think it's a productive use of their time?</p><p>[00:32:16] And he said, I think so. And so we pulled them anonymously and found out that it was like 95, like one guy, like out of the entire group, everyone else said, no, I would much rather not do this. There were other ways to be able to communicate. There are a lot more effective and that is fundamentally asynchronous work again.</p><p>[00:32:35] It's this assumption that synchronous collaborative communication is the be all and end all. If you open up any MBA book, you'll see a ton written about how these types of collaborative synchronous versions of communication are the way to be able to build a business when in reality, actually, even though it speeds you up in the short-term in the long-term, it creates a much slower moving organization.</p><p>[00:33:06] I use the word bureaucracy a lot, but don't think about going to the DMV in the United States is bureaucracy think about efficient focused bureaucracy.</p><p>[00:33:16] Think about a military organization it's incredibly efficient at achieving a particular goal because they have processes and systems if you were. Almost all of the command structures that I see in the militaries across the world. People are given a goal, but they're not actually told how to achieve that goal.</p><p>[00:33:35] So they're given their own individual autonomy to be able to get to the goal that has been set inside of the organization. In that case, the vast majority of our military</p><p>[00:33:46] we have the same mindset inside of companies,</p><p>[00:33:48] if you're my man. And I am telling you what my metrics are. And then you tell your manager what my metrics are. And then that manager tells the boss what my metrics are. This is an incredibly inefficient system. We have the internet. We have the ability to be able to communicate seamlessly across planet earth, within a moment. I can see everything that everyone is currently doing, and I know the targets that everyone has, and I know whether they're achieving them or not achieving. Do I look at them all? No. Could I look at them all? Yes.So that's the differentiator again, inside of asynchronous organizations that synchronous organizations didn't necessarily seem to happen.</p><p>[00:34:28] For me, I never worked in one of these companies I've been working remotely for almost 20 years. So it was such a shock to me to see that's the way that business was done. Because I was built on the methodology, which is. I need to build a business in which I cannot communicate to anyone synchronously, I can not have a physical meeting or a phone call or a video call with everyone inside of the organization. If that is true, how do I build that business? That was basically how we came up with asynchronous management and not only companies like mine, but dozens of other companies that have now become incredibly successful organizations today.</p><p>[00:35:08] <strong>So why was there such a driver back then for you? What was going on that you needed to do it asynchronously specifically?</strong></p><p>[00:35:16] So for me, it was really just my own personal perspective on freedom. I spend six months out of the year traveling when it's not COVID, a lot of our other team members do the same thing. Some of our team members are digital nomads, so they work from their computers. Or from their laptops anywhere on planet earth. And I realized that if I didn't have to make work a place, then I could live a life that is significantly more rewarding, at least to me then being in that cubicle or even being in the best office on the face of the planet, right?</p><p>[00:35:56] I've got the cash to be able to get a really nice office somewhere if I really wanted to. But is that fundamentally going to make me happy? I decided that it isn't. I'd much rather spend my time in Mexico city or in Playa Del Carmen or in in Bali or Barcelona in Spain. These are the places that I'd rather spend my time. Travel actually is one of the best things to make you a well-rounded individual to understand different cultures.</p><p>[00:36:22] We're talking about the the Russian Ukrainian war that's happening right now. The key to world peace is there should be one day a year. If I was the emperor of the world this would be my international holiday, which is every single person on planet earth flies somewhere else and has dinner. A group of people and a culture that they've never encountered before. And if you do that, you discover that everyone on planet earth wants effectively the same thing. And that's what travel has done for me. It's made me a much more, I think interesting person than when I was before I discovered travel in my early twenties. And once I started getting on that train, there was no getting off for me. So I wanted to be able to build a business that really encapsulated that and allowed me to be able to have that type of freedom. And only for myself, obviously I was starting it for myself, but then everyone that works inside of the company can have that freedom as well.</p><p>[00:37:26] <strong>What about scaling up when you're working in synchronously. How does that work when you've got a completely change as the company grows? How you manage things? How does it scale and what are the key takeaways you had as you've grown your company?</strong></p><p>[00:37:38] That's one of the other key advantages of asynchronous organizations. Process documentation is effectively everything that the company does, everything that every individual does inside of the company is written down and documented, processed and digitized.</p><p>[00:37:58] So by challis, who reached out to you, there's about 40 different process documents that apply to the outreach of booking podcasts. Everything down to what kind of emails we should send, what follow-ups we should send the one-page press sheet that I have, how I schedule that meeting, what tools that we use to be able to do that the followup process. It's all documented.</p><p>[00:38:27] So by Shelly becomes the operator of that process and not the owner of that process. And those are two very separate things.</p><p>[00:38:37] If people become the owners of that process, then they all have sacred knowledge. And if all of a sudden, there's effectively, almost a world war that breaks out well, what happens to all of that information? It's lost for other forever.</p><p>[00:38:54] So instead when you become the operator of that information of that knowledge of those processes, then you can number one, make sure that process continues on regardless of the individual. But more importantly, you can scale that process because the actual process is also the manager.</p><p>[00:39:12] The documentation is not meant to be easy to understand. It's meant to be impossible to miss understand, and it's a very small shift in people's minds. But if you get to a point in which you say to yourself, nine out of 10 people on the street can come in and look at what's written down and get it and figure it out. And. Then you've got credibly, powerful weapon that you can use to be able to have, not just one person doing outreach, but 20,</p><p>[00:39:49] you get my point, which is the ability for having process documentation inside of an organization allows for scale to happen almost instantaneously because the processes are not only very easy for other people to understand, but more importantly, they actually provide the managerial layer.</p><p>[00:40:07] Another thing that we saw and that I've talked about in the book is that asynchronous organizations on average had a 50% thinner layer of managers. Then on-premise synchronous organizations because of the lack of that game of telephone. No one actually communicates how to do something on a very small scale.</p><p>[00:40:28] Do they communicate how to do something in comparison to synchronous organizations or communicate those metrics up the chain, which is classically what a manager does in the vast majority of synchronous organizations that I encountered. So all of those jobs are basically redundant inside of asynchronous organizations and therefore the person is saying to themselves what do I do?</p><p>[00:40:50] The only thing that you should really do is focus on whether or not that person's happy with their jobs and thinking structures.</p><p>[00:40:59] <strong>So going into the process documentation a little bit, you said that my salary was an operator of the process. So how was the process adjusted as requirements change or improved over time? I've seen that to be a difficult point for companies.</strong></p><p>[00:41:16] The processes change with time. They're an organic model as opposed to an inorganic model and they're built on a Wiki system.</p><p>[00:41:23] If you go to Wikipedia is a perfect example.</p><p>[00:41:26] You can actually go to the debate tab on any Wikipedia entry and you'll have the discussion about what the version of. Article was six months ago, 12 months ago. And what it should be tomorrow, right?</p><p>[00:41:41] So there's active debates that are occurring inside of all of these processes. And the same thing effectively happens inside of our company and a bunch of other asynchronous organizations as well.</p><p>[00:41:50] So the process is the law of the land, but anyone inside of the company can actually change those laws. And if by Shelly says, I think I figured out a better way to be able to email people for outreach, for podcasts. And she can back that up with quantitative information and. You've convinced the stakeholders inside of that process. If that's a superior process, then that's the new version of the process that's adopted.</p><p>[00:42:16] In some contexts, if it's something that we need to redo quickly or something that like we just had a couple of years ago, we had a major change towards the Google algorithm. So it changed a lot of our search engine optimization processes.</p><p>[00:42:31] We paid people to be able to create more efficient processes. So every process that you could offer. And change. We would literally pay people out for it as a bounty. That's another really fast way to build out your processes is just pay people say, Hey, every process that you build that I accept, I'll give you 50 bucks.</p><p>[00:42:50] You will have processes coming out of your ears.</p><p>[00:42:52] Then that's the part that you need to control, which is when you release that money, you need to make sure that those processes are something that you would actually follow.</p><p>[00:43:00] a lot of the times, if there's a process that computer science engineer will put together, someone will read those processes. That's in another department like customer service and we'll say, okay, does someone on customer service understand this process enough that they could theoretically do it from a layman's perspective? If the answer is yes, then the process is adopted. If the answer is no, then again, you have made it easy to understand, but not impossible to misunderstand.</p><p>[00:43:34] <strong>So when you start with a company, helping them become better at remote, what's the first thing that you do in terms of that?</strong></p><p>[00:43:41] If we're moving towards an asynchronous model, the first thing that I would do is implement.</p><p>[00:43:46] What are the biggest time sucks of your day? What do you spend the most hot your most time doing?</p><p>[00:43:51] And more importantly, after that, what sacred knowledge that you have, which is information that you have, and no one else has, I think about, ancient Egyptian priests, right? They had the sacred knowledge, which gave them power over everyone else.</p><p>[00:44:08] You need to get all of that stuff out. And this is also sometimes very difficult inside of organizations where you have a lot of B players that are saying to themselves the moment that I give away the sacred knowledge, you're going to fire me.</p><p>[00:44:26] And in some cases, actually that might be true. Maybe this person really does need to leave and there they have no value other than they're the only ones who know how to process payroll. And no one else knows how to do this in the company. And if we lose this person, we can't process payroll next week. That's definitely something you need to actually have more than one person know inside of the organization. Ideally everyone should be able to have access to that type of information. But what</p><p>[00:44:56] <strong>I to know about payroll</strong></p><p>[00:44:59] in terms of the actual mechanics of it.</p><p>[00:45:01] Yeah, I get it. So what I tell those people that are scared about that is what I'm trying to do is create an environment in which you no longer have to be dependent upon doing just this one thing and only you doing it. This will free you up to be able to solve much bigger problems inside of the company and be able to solve problems that are new as opposed to solving old problems, which honestly, when you ask people really, what they love to do inside of their work. It's solving unique problems particularly the insight of technology companies, but in brick and mortar companies as well.</p><p>[00:45:43] So optimizing all of that information, getting that on a system and then empowering everyone to be able to get access to that information.</p><p>[00:45:53] The next thing that I would do is all of your goals. So we have a quantitative longitudinal measure for every single team member inside of the. So every single person has a goal that can be measured in some type of quantitative way. It's not get more customers as an example, that is not a goal. It is you need to increase the amount of leads that are coming into the website every month by 10%.</p><p>[00:46:19] And if it's 9%, you haven't achieved your goal. It's 11% you surpassed your goal. We review it every quarter and we report it every week, not bi-weekly or monthly every single week, so that you have that granularity and you have that longitudinal data. You can see those blips in the data and we make sure that's documented automatically.</p><p>[00:46:41] So no manager should ask you for that number. That number should ideally be completely automated, meaning the employee responsible for that goal and that metric doesn't even need to actually put it in anywhere. It just automatically happens. But in some cases that's not going to be the case, but on Monday morning, I'd better see those numbers there because that's a core part of your job.</p><p>[00:47:04] So that information can be communicated to everyone else. Once you have those two pieces in place, then you're going to actually do the scariest part of a transition towards asynchronous. And if you do those first two steps, you're actually doing better than 80 to 90% of companies that are in corporate America today, surprisingly which is crazy.</p><p>[00:47:24] But the third and scariest step is giving that information to everyone else inside of the organization. We believe that if everyone inside of the company has the same informational advantage as the CEO of the company, then they can be much more effective at their jobs. Number one, but then number two, when difficult decisions need to be made.</p><p>[00:47:49] When you have as much information as the CEO, you usually recognize why that decision needs to be made. And you agree with it. We have EMPS rating of 72 right now, which is best in class. Apple has 86, which is the best on planet earth. Most companies have EMPS ratings of about 30 and that is employee net promoter score.</p><p>[00:48:16] So net promoter score is how much would you use this product from one to 10 EMPS is how much would you prefer working at this company to one of your friends from one to 10? That's the only question that we ask and we ask it every quarter. And the reason why we have such high EMPS is because they say I've never worked in a company in which I know more about the company than the CEO.</p><p>[00:48:42] That is the single most important thing that gives them value, which is they know everything that I know, they know everything that the executive team knows, and it really does empower them to be able to say, yeah, this is why we had to make this very difficult decision. This is why we had to let this person go.</p><p>[00:49:00] Or this is why we had to pivot in this particular direction because of this. And it really helps with building the trust and autonomy inside of organizations that I think as of right now, a lot of companies are currently.</p><p>[00:49:18] <strong> I was joking about the payroll,</strong> <strong>do you follow an approach to being open about salary also like buffer did in the early days?</strong></p><p>[00:49:25] Or what's whatever we're actually, we did run that experiment and it ended up resulting in a significant amount of disruption to our companies.</p><p>[00:49:37] We do follow Buffer's model when I think about it. So we have geographic locations where we'll have a base salary and then we'll have additions to that based off seniority. And then that information is available to everyone, but it's bands, it's not specific salary amounts.</p><p>[00:49:55] So you don't know that Leah makes 106,000, but you do know Leah makes between 80 and 120,000 as an example because he's within that band</p><p>[00:50:05] <strong> Last question in terms of chief human motivation, I think often that is tied to salary and at least some traditional corporate America, it's very tied to the specific person. What are your thoughts on how that affects collaboration in a remote environment. On software teams even though you have these methodologies like scrum, where you retrospect as a team, when you deliver as a team and you do everything as a team, it starts to break down because everyone gets paid individually and has HR processes individually. What are the differences from asynchronous or remote?</strong></p><p>[00:50:50] That's something I didn't necessarily look at in a deep way, but I see it. And just in terms of how people are paid, as it applies to asynchronous organizations, it's an interesting point.</p><p>[00:50:59] I can tell you the way that we look at that problem. So we have two separate basically silos of pay. When we look at increases just last year, we had zero to 5% increase for everyone in the company dependent upon the growth of the organization.</p><p>[00:51:21] So what was the growth? What's the goal for the company? We want to grow 78% year over year. Okay. if we surpass our goal, everyone will get the 5%. If we meet our goal, everyone will get two and a half percent. If we don't meet our goal and dependent upon how many points we are below that maybe we're going to get one to 2%, that's zero to 5%. And this is just that these numbers change dependent upon the year that we're currently working on it.</p><p>[00:51:49] The second silo is individual additions to that goal. So what did you do as an individual that helped move that particular core number forward and that zero to 5%. So where you absolutely critical towards the success of meeting our goals? Yes. You get the full 5%. Were you doing a generally good job? And everyone was generally happy with. You got a two and a half percent or, Hey, you know what? You actually didn't do a very good job. The goals that we set were misunderstood and you didn't hit the numbers that you were supposed to hit, you're going to get a 1% or 0% increase.</p><p>[00:52:30] So if the company meets all of their goals and you were an extraordinarily successful team member, as it applies to those goals, you'll get 5% plus 5%. You'll get a 10% for the year. And you know that there are people that get that inside of the company. I didn't get that. I can tell you at the end of the year. That is information that we we do give everyone the core number, right?</p><p>[00:52:58] Zero to 5% for company growth and goals, because everyone knows that individual number we do keep private reason being is because we don't necessarily want to. Embarrassed, any particular team member that maybe wasn't getting a piece of information that they would have had, but also take into consideration that's something that when you think about the only information that we keep from the organization or serve from the rest of the organization are just pieces of information that might embarrass other team members outside of that our P and L is public.</p><p>[00:53:32] If you work in the company, you can have access to it. We updated every month. The we have an interactive dashboard. How many customers we have? Who are they? How are they growing? How are they compressing? What's our churn rate, right? How, what experiments are we doing inside of the company? We have something called Thursday updates, which is every department head actually breaks down the four to five core things they did that week. And then it links to all of their core metrics for that particular department. And anyone in the company can get access to it and play around with it. And they're not just the ones that we prepare for that update. They are the actual tactical documents that we work off of.</p><p>[00:54:11] So again, that's pretty scary for some people I've pitched this to quite a few synchronous organizations and they've said, hell no would never do that because they think actually a lot of people are going to quit. But the other thing that I would push back to them, which is maybe it's time for them to quit.</p><p>[00:54:29] Maybe you shouldn't have these people working in your organization. If they're so easily going to quit, there's something wrong with your culture. There's something wrong with your mission and what the goal of this organization is. That is creating this environment where people want to jump ship, at the first hint of something going wrong inside of the organization.</p><p>[00:54:55] If you just are totally honest with everybody and upfront, they will respect you a lot more and they'll want to work at your company.</p><p>[00:55:00] <strong>Great. Is there any particular place that you want to direct people?</strong></p><p>[00:55:05] Bobcat's would be great. I think running remote.com is the best spot to go. We are going to run our in-person conference, May 17th and 18th in Montreal, Canada. I don't know if I can convince you to come Luke, but I think it would be awesome if you did.</p><p>[00:55:22] It's fantastic. And it's going to be really nice. It's. Time. So it's not going to be cold. we've just removed a lot of the mandates. So it's very easy to be able to get into Canada at this point with with COVID. And then outside of that, probably the YouTube channel is another really great resource.</p><p>[00:55:40] youtube.com/. That is a place where you will be able to get access to all of our talks for free. So we publish all of our talks after the fact obviously going to the conferences, the best thing to do, to be able to have in-person communication and networking with people. Even asynchronous companies have like team retreats every year.</p><p>[00:56:02] We think of running a remote as a team retreat for remote work and the remote work community, but all of those talks are up there for free. And if you have any questions, you can just pose it there and I'll get back to you.</p><p>[00:56:13] Oh, and also the book so running remote.com/book, that's where you can, pre-order the book. And there's a ton of different partners that are really doing a fantastic job at helping us out with launching this thing. So we have a lot of re really great pre-order offers for people that are interested in purchasing the book right now and getting a whole bunch of extra stuff.</p><p>[00:56:37] <strong>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-64069915581436299672022-02-01T02:00:00.001-08:002022-02-01T02:00:39.361-08:00How to Get Remote Teams into Flow with Diane Allen<figure class="image strchf-type-image regular strchf-size-regular strchf-align-center"><picture><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1gvcodn_40cb1f518acf513626adeaa74660b575_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1gvcodn_40cb1f518acf513626adeaa74660b575_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x1200-layout714-quiz-remote-1gvcodn_40cb1f518acf513626adeaa74660b575_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><h2 id="1pcbd">About Diane Allen</h2><p>Diane Allen, The ‘Own Your Potential’ Speaker and Violinist, is an Award-Winning International Speaker, Peak Performance and Flow State Expert. She is known for her Experiential Keynotes that have helped thousands of people around the world to break through their performance gaps and unleash their potential. Her proprietary process helps to increase the bottom line by empowering people to be at their best anytime, anyplace, no matter how high the pressure. She was the Concertmaster (lead violinist) of the Central Oregon Symphony for 15 years, a well sought-after Violin Teacher of 28 years, and the author of Sixteen Music Workbooks sold worldwide. She has been the keynote speaker for Women’s Conferences, Talent Development Professionals, Human Resources Associations, along with many others. Her flow state work has been published on IDEAS.TED.COM, and her TEDxNaperville talk has been elevated to the main TED platform. For more information please visit <a href="https://dianeallenspeaker.com/">https://dianeallenspeaker.com</a></p><h2 id="drlg5">Links</h2><ul><li>homepage: <a href="https://dianeallenspeaker.com/">https://dianeallenspeaker.com</a></li><li>TEDx talk: <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/diane_allen_how_to_find_flow_and_lose_yourself_in_it">https://www.ted.com/talks/diane_allen_how_to_find_flow_and_lose_yourself_in_it</a></li><li>download her flow kit: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/whitepaper2021">https://tinyurl.com/whitepaper2021</a></li></ul><h2 id="8thss">Transcript</h2><p>[00:00:00] <strong>Welcome. Welcome. Welcome back to the managing remote teams podcast. And today we have Diane Allen who is a speaker, a performance and flow state expert. And she's led the as the lead violinist, the central Oregon symphony for 15 years, and also taught violin for almost 30 years. And Is basically a flow expert.</strong></p><p>[00:00:29] <strong>And I've invited her today to talk about how flow operates amongst groups of people and individually, and how we can apply that in our remote teaming contexts. So Dan, how. How did you get into music originally? Let's start there. Maybe.</strong></p><p>[00:00:51] I am very fortunate to have been raised in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a hotbed of world class cultural organizations, including the Cleveland orchestra.</p><p>[00:01:03] Now I know that people who are aware of the classical music scene have their favorite orchestras? I know that the Cleveland orchestra is in at least the top five worldwide. You could pick yours. Of course I'm pretty biased. And and so my mom was the one who would fill up our family calendar with cultural events.</p><p>[00:01:23] We went to Shakespeare plays. We went to the Cleveland museum of art and of course we went to the York. And there was a particular concert. I was so little Luke that I was sitting in this seat and I couldn't like th the chair would fold up on me. Like I was so little, I couldn't, my legs couldn't hold the chair down.</p><p>[00:01:45] Those bounty where the bottom of the sheet bounces back up. Yeah. And I was that little we're sitting in the Cleveland orchestra and they played Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at the time, all I knew was that as soon as the conductor gave the downbeat, the force of the music literally felt like it pinned me to the back of the chair. I had goosebumps all over. It felt like my hair was sticking straight out. It was so intense. And when you're, this is the classic idea of group flow, you get a core group of people in flow, and then it just exponentially influences everybody in the audience. You've got everyone United through this music and I experienced that.</p><p>[00:02:34] In in that very young age. And when my parents said, so what do you want to play? I had already found fallen in love with the violins, watching their bows go up and down. And so that's how it all started. It was literally a flow experience, a giant group flow experience with just a tremendous impact.</p><p>[00:02:57] <strong>That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think those early years are critical in terms of getting getting people interested in music, for sure. In terms of flow how do you. Define it for practical purposes, I guess when you're going into work with someone or work with a group.</strong></p><p>[00:03:15] I'm so glad that you asked that question because people hear the word flow state and they go running. They're like, okay yeah, that's pie in the sky, thinking kind of thing.</p><p>[00:03:25] And it's woo or whatever. But the practical application is what I am. About the flow state is a state of mind. The neuroscience is such that there's a release of hormones into our brain and they're all the peak performance hormones. The ones that help have us rise to the occasion, the ones that, that set us up to, to go beyond what we've ever gone before.</p><p>[00:03:54] And they are. Followed by the neocortex AMSA, which dramatically increases learning speed and the prefrontal cortex temporarily shuts down. And this explains why. Talk about flow is losing all sense of time and losing like a sense of yourself. And that's because the prefrontal cortex, when that temporarily shuts down, your internal critic is silent.</p><p>[00:04:18] And so you're free to follow all of these other thoughts that without shutting them down. So it's literally a thought pattern. It's something that physically happens within us now. How people describe it I'd like to call them the key indicators of being in flow state, because this is helps people to become aware is losing all sense of time, losing all sense of self ideas and insights coming in from out of the blue things, coming together with a sense of ease.</p><p>[00:04:46] Let's say you've been practicing this one tennis stroke over and over again. And you're struggling one day. It just happens with these. So it's like maybe you're in the middle of you're grappling with something at work and it's clunky and it's awkward.</p><p>[00:04:58] And then one day you lose all sense of time. You're highly productive and it just comes together with these. So that's why you use these key indicators to say, oh, I remember when I was in flow states. There's also a positive feedback loop, this, which we're going to go in depth with, because this is key for.</p><p>[00:05:18] Individual flow and group flow. So on an individual basis, the more you get into your flow state, the more you get out of it because you're operating at such a high standard, and then you get excited. So then you get more into it. So that's this positive feedback loop and musicians talk. It's like the more I get into the music, the more I get out of it, the more I get out of it, the more I get into it.</p><p>[00:05:43] And then the last. Which hits on the mental health spectrum is that you people do feel happiness. This is why flow is positive psychology. This is taking the look at what are we like when we're at our best and when we're at our happiest state and how can we reverse engineer that. That's basically what positive psychology is.</p><p>[00:06:08] So we do feel elation. We do feel exuberating we do feel joy and purpose when we are in flow.</p><p>[00:06:17] <strong>The positive feedback loop you were mentioning, is this kind of the details of how you slip into that state or what do you mean by that?</strong></p><p>[00:06:28] It's just a key indicator that you are in it. Okay. That's how I would best describe it right now, but That positive feedback loop occurs on an individual basis, which is where we have to start. And then we could build onto group flow for. Yeah. Okay. Okay.</p><p>[00:06:48] <strong>When I've came across this concept originally, I think it was actually also in a music context. Cause it was an an, a biography of Eric Clapton's where he was talking about being in flow. But I think there, and then also looking at six-month all these work, like I think at least at the time it was very It was clear what the characteristics of flow were, but in terms of a not quite prescriptive, but like a how to, of getting into it.</strong> <strong>It was a little bit hard to pin down back then.</strong></p><p>[00:07:17] Yes. Let's talk about that.</p><p>[00:07:20] <strong>Okay.</strong></p><p>[00:07:21] So a flow was triggered at the intersection of skill and challenge, so let's see You're a manager and you have an employee that is underperforming and and you're scratching your head. Why? You could actually have a dialogue with them and ask them, are you feeling challenged by your work?</p><p>[00:07:41] Because if they're not, that's not going to ignite that flow state, that's not going to interest them right now. It could also be that the challenge is so high, that it shuts them. If you think about dialing things up and dialing things down, there's a sweet spot. So for example, if the challenge is not enough, then you need to up to the challenge, give them a greater challenge in a way that they respond.</p><p>[00:08:09] So for example, for one person, a timeline is a challenge. Okay. You have to have this done by noon today. And some people that's going to knock them down. It's going to get in their way. But some people, they really rise to that occasion. So you have these conversations with people, ask them what, what challenges you, what are the things that you like to be challenged by then?</p><p>[00:08:33] If the challenge is way too over the top, then it's a matter of having a conversation and breaking it down into small. Challenges so that they can, step their way up.</p><p>[00:08:43] For example, I can practice here in my room, but there's something about being on stage that brings on that challenge piece. So typically when I'm on stage, I know that I'm going to play better than I do in the practice room. It just it, it ignites the flow. And so when you mentioned Eric Clapton, the thing is that musicians and artists, we regularly practice getting into flow. This is something that everyone's wired for, but it's just so happens that in the arts we're more versed in getting into it.</p><p>[00:09:21] So it's a matter of okay. If you get into your flow state and you're cooking in your kitchen, you love making bread. Let's say it's sourdough bread, right? Let's get really specific here. And you've got lots of different challenges with sour dough bread. I don't remember what they are, but I know that they are, as the people who are really into sourdough bread, we'll go on about all of the different channels and you can get lost in all sense of time.</p><p>[00:09:46] And so now we get to your second question, which. Mihai cheek sent me a high was very like how do we get into it? And this is where my Ted talk comes in because I had to figure out how to get into it on a daily basis as the lead violinists of an orchestra, because it, my, it, I had to always be at my peak. So I reverse engineered it.</p><p>[00:10:13] So let's say you're in your kitchen. You're making your sour dough bread . Okay. Where you are as in your kitchen, that's where you get into your flow state. The most, what you're doing is you're making sourdough bread. That's what you're doing on the outside. The real question is what are you doing on the inside?</p><p>[00:10:36] So one, person's going to say I'm being strategic. Someone else, with regards to sourdough bread, right? Somebody else might say, I'm being creative. Somebody else might say, oh, this is all about problem solving for me. I love the problem solving somebody else might say, oh, this is nurturing. I'm nurturing my family. I'm pouring my love into the bread that I'm cooking for them. And so everybody gets into their flow state in their own unique way.</p><p>[00:10:58] What you do on the inside is your project to figure out because this is your most compelling internal self motivator. And if you're a manager and you're working with somebody, this is the conversation you have with them.</p><p>[00:11:14] The first question is where are you when you get into the first state, the most, what are you doing is the second part. Outside. Okay. I'm working on a spreadsheet on the outside. What are you doing on the inside? That's that coaching piece. And then why is the last question? Why is it so meaningful?</p><p>[00:11:35] Because purpose pulls out the best in all of us. So where, what, why I have that? I have a handout for this. We'll talk about that later. So it's a worksheet that, that people could use to for themselves and to coach other people through. I call this a flow strategy, what you do on your, on the inside is your most compelling internal self-motivator and knowing what you do on the inside.</p><p>[00:12:00] Information that you can use to get into your flow state on purpose and make it less elusive. Why it's so meaningful as your most compelling as external self motivator and knowing your, knowing what purpose is really pull at your heartstrings. That helps you to tap into your flow state with purpose.</p><p>[00:12:27] And so I call this a flow strategy, what you do on the inside and why it's so meaningful is your first strategy.</p><p>[00:12:36] <strong> You identify your internal strategy to be able to then transfer it to other contexts? Is that,</strong></p><p>[00:12:42] so it was first of all, to repeat it, I'm having a bad day. Okay. Let me remember. I sour go.</p><p>[00:12:50] It's just not going well today. Okay. Maybe I just need to throw out the batch. All right. Now I'm to remember, oh, it's nurturing. I'm not feeling like I'm nurturing right now. Let me get into my nurturing spirit. And I'm being silly, but you get it.</p><p>[00:13:03] if you're working on an Excel spreadsheet and you're grappling with it the, Another really important thing is that interruptions are the biggest killer of the flow state.</p><p>[00:13:12] And 90 minutes is a really good arc of time for people to turn off all distractions. If you're working from home, put the sign on your door, shut off your cell phones, and just. Even if you're feeling like you're grappling with 90 minutes, something's going to happen midway through and you'll tap into flow.</p><p>[00:13:33] If you just dedicate 90 minutes to whatever topic you're working on, whatever you have to do. That's another way to set yourself up. On an individual basis, you want to figure out what your flow strategy is, so that you can repeat it. Yeah. And get into it more regularly. So you can have those peak moments of high productivity out of the box, thinking things, coming together with these and enjoy your work. But what you said was, okay, now, do you take it to other areas in your life?</p><p>[00:14:08] And yes. So I'll give you my example. My first strategy for playing music is on the inside. What I'm doing is I feel like I'm sharing the message of the music. Why that's so meaningful is for me music is a universal language. So that experience I had when I was so young at the Cleveland orchestra, where everyone is United through the music was just a really profound experience.</p><p>[00:14:33] And so I have been on stage with audience sing-alongs where everybody's together through the music. And I'm up there crying in the middle of a concert because it just moves me. So bringing people together through unity is a purpose for me. What I'm doing on the inside is I'm sharing the music. So I was Transitioning away from the orchestral career inches speaking and you know what that means when you're changing career, you have to go networking and I hadn't gone networking in years.</p><p>[00:15:02] Super fish out of water and I'm at this event. And if we're looking at skill and challenge, right? So obviously talking is this. And connecting with people is a skill. You could talk about all these skills and it was just really awkward trying to break into these conversations. And I found myself, actually, I left the room came back and I was like, you know what?</p><p>[00:15:28] Isn't talking to people away from me to share. And aren't these new connections uniform. And it occurred to me that I could use my flow strategy with my music in a conversation. And that's all it took. I started talking with people. I started telling stories. I started having fun. I was sharing experiences, asking them questions and I was able to really enjoy myself.</p><p>[00:15:54] Using your first strategy to get you to thrive when you're outside of your comfort zone is a big piece.</p><p>[00:16:00] <strong>I can imagine how that could be used in different ways. What about with groups? So you mentioned initially that it spreads. Let's say you have one person in a group, like on a remote team. That's in a flow state. Yes. What happens then, or yeah. What happens then? Or what can you do if anything, to help the group get into flow?</strong></p><p>[00:16:25] it does start on the individual level. I noticed that the more I got into the music. The more my students would get into the music. The more I got into the music, the more the orchestra would get into the music.</p><p>[00:16:40] And the more I got into the music, the more the audience got into the music. And so Stanford researchers on the topic of influence have specifically identified that passion is persuasive and confidence is contagious. Going back to the positive feedback loop. Okay. So that is where on an individual basis, the more you get into it, the more you get out of it, more you get out of it, the more you get into it.</p><p>[00:17:12] So in order to understand how this works in a group situation, let's take a look at biology. How do positive feedback loops function in biology. So you can tell I'm like getting all excited to share this I'm smiling. So apple trees let's take a look when an apple is exposed to the gas, ethylene it ripens, but when apple ripens, it releases the gas ethylene.</p><p>[00:17:43] So now all of the apples around it are exposed to that guy. And so then they will ripen. And so because of this apple trees are known to ripen all at the same time. So instead of a chain reaction, it's exponential. So when you get one person in their flows, Yeah, this is how I led the orchestra. I knew I had to be in it.</p><p>[00:18:11] Okay. And I knew that it would be infectious. And which is a terrible thing to say during COVID, but. Contagious. We're talking about being contagious in a good way. So good contagiousness. So if we take a look at the heart math Institute, their findings are that the electromagnetic field of the heart reaches out 15 feet all around you and the brain only. So when we are tapped into our flow state, both on purpose and with purpose, not only are we engaging all 40,000 neurons in our heart, but we are exuding our energy, 15 feet all around us. And so you could tell, even though we're remote right now, I am filling this room right with my energy.</p><p>[00:19:06] So that becomes that contagiousness. And so like ethylene to apples, the energy, we exude 15 feet around us gets all of the people around you into their 15 foot circumference, just like the ethylene to the apples. This is why we have group flow experiences in music all the time.</p><p>[00:19:30] <strong>And is it also quite exponential slash instantaneous or it is.</strong></p><p>[00:19:37] Okay. Let me give you an example. Chief operating officer of a medical center. She came to me because she was having communication issues with her team and they she's a quiet person. And she said that people would interrupt during the meetings. She couldn't figure out why they would be so rude and then they would point a finger at her for lack of leadership.</p><p>[00:19:58] We figured out how does she personally get into her flow state? We have to start with the person. So the first question is where are you wedding? You get into your flow state the most for her it's at work. What are you doing on the outside? She's having one-on-one conversations with people.</p><p>[00:20:19] What are you doing on the inside is the second question for the what part? And she said, I put aside my thoughts and I deeply listen. Deep listening is known to get people into their flow state. Why is deep listening? So meaningful for you? And she said it was because the deeper she listens, the deeper she connects and connection is what touches her to the.</p><p>[00:20:50] So at our next team meeting, she opened by stating the main objective of the meeting and that she wanted to take the time to listen to each person's point of view. So she set herself up to listen to get into her super power. as she's listening to each person, she was astounded because. Everyone else was listening.</p><p>[00:21:19] Yeah. And then as soon as the last person finished speaking, there was like one of those pauses. And because she had just created this space where everybody was listening to each other, they had this spontaneous brainstorming session, all of a sudden they're solving problems with all kinds of innovative solutions.</p><p>[00:21:37] So she initially got into her. By herself. The last thing she was expecting was that it was going to trigger that synergistic state of group flow. That's what happened. I'm going to share one more story with you.</p><p>[00:21:52] <strong>Yeah, sure.</strong></p><p>[00:21:53] Linda, she she's a high school math teacher. She's a friend of mine and she received a grant to to develop. It was high school math to develop a high school math program that teenage students can relate to. And so she assembled a cohort of teachers and they began the brainstorming session and the closer they got to the deadline, the less creative they were. So this was a case where the deadline was a challenge,</p><p>[00:22:21] it was like somehow getting closer to the deadline was overwhelming them. So she, she asked me, what can I do? How can I lead my team through their creative slump? So what we did was we started with Linda's flow strategy. Where are you when you get into the flow state, the most I'm in the kitchen.</p><p>[00:22:38] What do you do? Painting and she likes doing abstract painting. And if you don't know what abstract painting is, it means that it's there's it's made up there's no, it's not like you're painting an apple or an object or anything okay. So she's doing abstract painting. What are you doing on the inside?</p><p>[00:22:55] And I kid you not, she says I'm looking for patterns out of chaos. Everyone gets into their flow state and such a unique way. And for her to have that self insight. Why is finding patterns out of chaos, meaningful for you? That's the last question why? And she said, because those patterns become knowledge and knowledge becomes power and freedom.</p><p>[00:23:20] And this is exactly the kind of thinking you need to create new math curriculum.</p><p>[00:23:29] She was well-suited for this right now. Now you can't make this stuff up, but I love this example because it really hones it. And exactly what makes Linda tick and when you know your first strategy and it's different for every one of us, how you get into this optimal state of thinking is what makes you tick, it's as unique as your thumbprint.</p><p>[00:23:56] Okay. She goes back to the team. She brings me in, we talk about the three questions to where the what and the why we did peer to peer coaching. They all coach each other through finding their flow strategies. Then we took the question of why is it so meaningful? And we applied it to the project of designing curriculum that meant high school math students can relate.</p><p>[00:24:21] Obviously it's meaningful for these teachers, right? So we unified them through one purpose. Cause everyone's flows strategies. They have their own purposes. So we unify them through one purpose for the math curriculum. Last step is remember skill and challenge. So we took a look at the challenges and we walked through and clearly identified all of the challenges that they were facing.</p><p>[00:24:49] And we mark them down. They talk them through and after, like there was really very little to do after that because they just spring to life with that information. And Linda said that they stayed creative through to the end of the project and they far exceeded her expectations.</p><p>[00:25:06] So those are a couple examples of really how all of these pieces fit together.</p><p>[00:25:11] <strong>The order in which it works is quite interesting. in a more technical context, there's this word orchestration, which is how all of this comes together. Like in an orchestra, which, you know, a lot more about, than I do .</strong> <strong>There is a certain pattern and a certain order, which</strong></p><p>[00:25:26] and music being, being a universal language, you're not dealing it's operating on a different level than speaking language, right?</p><p>[00:25:33] Yeah. Different part of the brain and all that category. Yeah, no, these are great.</p><p>[00:25:37] <strong>Are there any resources or things that you've found over the last year and a half since all of this craziness started that that really changed things for you in terms of, in terms of the topic of flow or professionally any interesting resource or something like that you might want to possibly.</strong></p><p>[00:25:56] If you're familiar with Adam Grant, who's a very well known organizational psychologist. We had a New York times article in April and it was coining at that time, the the predominant emotion of 2021 in April of 2021 was. The topic of languishing and and we do languish when we're, I've had to struggle with it too with the isolation and not having, the social contact and stuff.</p><p>[00:26:33] And so I've had to be proactive about making sure that I do call my friends regularly and I do, do social zooms and things like that. But languishing on the mental health spectrum is exactly halfway. So you have depression at the bottom flourishing at the top languishing in the. And guess what the solution was.</p><p>[00:26:55] Luke and I, Adam Brandt in the New York times, it was to get into your flow state.</p><p>[00:27:02] There's a second article that came out in Lee. This is the best one to leave. In October, I was October 13th, 20, 21 Harvard business review. I don't remember exactly what the title of it was, but you can find it easily.</p><p>[00:27:20] And it's what people can do to engage employees now. What can you do now? And there, what they did was say comb through all the research and they came with the top three tips. That, that people can implement right now. Number one was connecting what people do to what they care about. And if you just check out the flow strategy system exactly on what people care about.</p><p>[00:27:51] So if you want to really help somebody as a manager, who's struggling, who's feeling disconnected and at least help them to connect. What their work is to something that they really care about. So that's in the Harvard business review. Look that one up too. Yeah. Yeah. I think I recall that also, but yeah, no, that's great.</p><p>[00:28:15] They're both great. They're both great articles. Absolutely.</p><p>[00:28:17] <strong> In terms of, next steps or things you would want people to look at?</strong></p><p>[00:28:20] I have A URL for people to go to and I will send it to you in case I recited incorrectly right now, but I'm pretty sure it's HTTP colon slash tiny url.com/white paper, 2021. If you go to that, you're going to get three resources. You're going to get. A link to the Ted talk, which is a synopsis of everything I talked about.</p><p>[00:28:49] However, there wasn't time in the talk to go through the group flow, it does go in depth with the individual. I have a flow strategy worksheet that you can use for yourself and to use to coach others. And then I do have the white paper there for people to see how to apply this. What are the steps to apply a culture of at the workplace.</p><p>[00:29:15] It's interesting stuff. I took a look at it recently yeah highly recommend it.</p><p>[00:29:18] You can email me directly if you have any questions. If you want to talk more about this Diane @ Diane Allen speaker dot com. Okay, great.</p><p>[00:29:28] <strong>Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-52172801623959196252021-06-24T14:16:00.001-07:002021-06-24T14:16:06.668-07:00How to use flowcharts when collaborating remotely<p>My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.alignremotely.com/">Align Remotely</a>. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. Find out more at <a href="https://www.alignremotely.com/">alignremotely.com</a>. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, I speak with Trevor Ewen, CEO of the <a href="https://stg.software/">Southport Technology group</a>, a technology consulting company specialized in serving non-technology businesses. We get rather practical in this episode, specifically exploring flowcharts. While primarily coming from the software world, a flowchart can be used to communicate a complicated idea visually.</p><p>In this episode, you will discover:</p><ul><li>Why the ethos and management practices behind building open source software can be quite powerful</li><li>Why flowcharts enable asynchronous workflows because they communicate concisely on a complicated topic</li><li>How to use flowcharts to break down a complicated scenario so that anyone can understand it, even a non-technical user</li></ul><h3 id="3tqj">About Trevor Ewen</h3><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1gd4jd4_eaa3f9d70b268073f14ec65f0839cc41_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1gd4jd4_eaa3f9d70b268073f14ec65f0839cc41_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1gd4jd4_eaa3f9d70b268073f14ec65f0839cc41_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1gd4jd4_eaa3f9d70b268073f14ec65f0839cc41_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-quiz-remote-1gd4jd4_eaa3f9d70b268073f14ec65f0839cc41_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Trevor is an experienced software engineer and project manager. He's overseen full stack teams in clean energy, insurance, finance, and media. Notable engagements include Morgan Stanley, HBO, Bloomberg, Honest Buildings (now Procore), RunEnergy, Black Bear Energy, and PRco USA. He has an MBA from London Business School and an MBA from Columbia Business School.</p><ul><li><a href="https://stg.software/">Southport Technology Group</a></li><li><a href="https://southportventures.com/">Southport Ventures</a></li><li>Trevor's <a href="https://linktr.ee/trevorewen">social media profiles</a></li></ul><h2 id="a2gpo">Transcript</h2><p>Trevor, welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. </p><p>Thanks for having me live.</p><p>Can you say a few words about, What you do and how you got to where you are at the moment. </p><p>Yeah. So I'm a software engineer by training, and I think that's probably the most relevant point of information when thinking about my background, when you do this, you start up your career.</p><p>Usually just taking orders from the older developers and learning how to fix bugs and works through the application life cycle. And. Because I graduated from college in 2010, I entered a terrible labor market. So I was ready to take whatever came my way. And I had the good fortune of ending up at a digital agency and started working with some of the bigger companies in New York that weren't specifically tech companies, but had a big tech component to their business.</p><p>Think about banks or media companies and the like, and as I went through that, I did. People do at that time, I joined a startup at one point, then joined another small agency and made a lot of twists and turns to the point where I would say I'm relatively self-sufficient in terms of the skills that you can gain in the workplace and wanting to go out on my own and innovate more on the business model side, as well as continuing to do technology services and software develop.</p><p>Okay, cool. How you fared under the last year in terms of the pandemic ? how have things been in terms of that? </p><p>I regret saying this to some extent, but it was actually a pretty good year for me because it did allow that close time to just hang back, being a force remote situation.</p><p>So we were not pushing against the grain, my partner and I at all, everybody was working remote. And so all of a sudden, the talking point that we'd have to have with a lot of people about being a fully remote business and why that's okay for us. It just went away because everybody was doing it.</p><p>And that was really nice as a lower point of friction. The other thing I'll mention is I was finishing up my MBA, which actually just finished up in 2021. And so that was negative from that side because of , not being able to be in person for a lot of the education there. some of the positives though, were that we, my classmates and I, lot of other people in the program.</p><p>Have to get in the habit of connecting virtually more. And I think that was something that wasn't happening as much. And this is really critical too, because it's a pretty global group of people. One of my early issues going into the program that I went into was, how am I going to stay in touch with everybody?</p><p>It just, it's just hard to maintain connections when you know, people are not in your life on a day-to-day basis. And broke us all apart, but it also brought us together in some virtual ways that I find the whole group is a little better at reaching out to each other and said, Hey, are you available for 15 minutes zoom or 30 minute chat?</p><p>That just wouldn't have happened as much before. , I'm trying to see the silver lining. there was a lot of negatives. I think of our customers held back their spending a little bit because it was just a wait and see situation. One of our customers are. oldest and most loyal customers in the auto industry.</p><p> Going back to the original period in 2020, when lockdown started, I don't think there was a consistent thesis on what was going to happen with the auto industry that turned out to be a record year. And now, the used car surplus is so low that they're getting inflated prices, but I don't think anyone would have predicted that early on.</p><p>So there was a little bit of slowness in terms of people investing. </p><p>In terms of the patterns of keeping up with your various friends and colleagues in the MBA program, what actually worked well for you? </p><p>In-person is always nice. And we had prioritized that, so it was a.</p><p>Just for some context. So it was a specifically global program. It was a half at London business school and half at Columbia business school in New York. And so we would actually, prior to the pandemic, we would travel to each one monthly and spend a week together there. And that is absolutely the best part about the program and the fact that you're getting these pretty close relationships with people all over the world.</p><p>Obviously once the travel stopped, we were, in some cases, the people from the smaller countries or countries just where they didn't have the ability to travel into Europe or the U S they just had to stay, put and take everything virtually. No, I had the good fortune of being in New York, so I could at least go to Columbia, but I didn't make it back to London after February, 2020.</p><p>And, I think everyone was shook up about it. We still had a good year of the program together and they just made a priority to reach out. It's a lot of WhatsApp, as I'm sure you can imagine which we are already doing, but then there was a little bit more of the impromptu zoom conversations.</p><p>And another surprising thing that happened is people started building other relationships that maybe had not been so strong before. You get cut off from this existing group of people that you hang out with a lot. And you just can't see them. So you're going to start building new relationships.</p><p>So it's very strange to see the, the people I spent all my time with in 2019 and 2020 in the class, I think we're just, with a few exceptions, very different from the ones that I spent more time with after that. And a lot of that just had to do is where were the travel restrictions?</p><p>But you mean people locally where you live and not like in the student body. </p><p>So it was that there was some local. So obviously yes, there was, I saw the New York people more often, but there was also people who were just more able to travel. For instance, depending on what country they come from, people coming from the UK, France or Spain had an easier time getting into the U S versus say, we had several colleagues from Russia or Algeria.</p><p>Those places were just less likely to be traveling. So I think that was the big change and really a shift that was mostly negative for them. And, only partially negative for us because at least we had a large cluster of people in New York, locally. Yeah.</p><p>Interesting. In terms of the business, how big is it? What. What types of customers do you have, and you mentioned automotive. How does it work? </p><p>The company is called south port technology group and we do custom software development. We're focused on a, I did another show about this recently, but we're focused on a non-technical buyer and some people hate working with this kind of customer.</p><p>I really enjoy it. And I think there's a lot of advantages to it. This is typically a company that may actually do, anywhere up to $50 million in revenue annually. So they could, it could be a fairly sizable company, but their primary offering is probably not technology. And they have looked at the budget or at least have a back of the napkin understanding of their budget, that they wouldn't hire developers on staff.</p><p>And that's our best kind of cost. One of the things I like about it is having worked. I've done agency work or work by the hour in the past done what is effectively a high-end staff augmentation, where we come in, we were paid very nice contract rates, but we work with the existing tech team.</p><p>And a lot of that is covering up, performance or staffing deficiencies in the organization. And so you end up in this team situation where. You're not working with the people that would really help accelerate the project. Usually there's a problem.</p><p>That's brought you in the door and some people really thrive in that environment. I think I do okay in it. But I think long-term the culture weighs me down a little bit. So what I've enjoyed about this is these are genuine, only good businesses. They have a technology problem. They have even a good amount of money allocated to solve that.</p><p>But the gap is they don't have the amount of money that it would take to hire a dev team, which are really good senior people, two to three really good senior people is going to be over a million dollars a year. So there's a huge gap between zero and a million dollars in your technology planning that, there's a lot of companies who need something right around there.</p><p>And we like working on something more boring things, something made with the back office or the operations side of the business. Oftentimes. Personally speak to in the organization. It's someone I refer to as the champion. It is not only thinking of projects on their side, but also thinking of ways to get us doing more projects for them.</p><p>It's often an operations manager. Sometimes these companies will refer to this person as an it director. But it's not the way you'd think of it. Then it directors have a large firm, which has a very specific set of responsibilities around network security. They're really more just the person, the man or woman who knows the most versus the technology, the software.</p><p>They're like a utility person who has all the planning. Yeah. So it's interesting. We, it's not industry specific auto insurance is one that's one of our oldest customers. We've really enjoyed working with them. We're getting a lot of green energy stuff. And I can't tell if that's just because there's so much growth and need there, which is obviously a story.</p><p>But the other side of it is I do know a few people in that industry. So those relationships have propelled us in that direction. </p><p>Interesting. You mentioned before the call that you found flowcharts to be really helpful in this kind of remote work context. Let's dig into that a little bit more. Yeah, what why flow charts? What are they helpful? </p><p>Yeah, I think that was the original launching point for our conversation. Let me step back a moment and talk a bit about how we staff up a project. So I think you're familiar with the fact that hiring good developers is hard and if you're not, I'm sure you'll talk to many guests who could agree with that statement.</p><p>It's one of the things we've tried to do with our staffing up is utilize a model that's very common and open source software. And open source software. It seems almost completely bizarre to people who've not been in this industry, but the idea is that you have a code base that's out there and hundreds, if you're really lucky, maybe thousands of people all over the world can just make contributions to it.</p><p>And because they're, hopefully skilled developers or people following the spec, you can actually have meaningful contributions and these things can just get formed. Out of the ether, I think of it a little bit like a home building and Amish communities which is, just everybody from the village to starts coming in and helping to build a home from the home is exactly the barn of the home it's raised up.</p><p>It's a similar thing and it's very async and It's just cool. And a lot of great software is created this way. I think that makes some people nervous, but there's really just a lot of the amazing core software that we use in so many applications today is developed in this way.</p><p>Yeah. I wanted to do is bring as much of that as possible to our staffing model. There's a couple of things that are really nice. It's about one is it obviously allows you this asynchronous workflow, which helps us with times. Yeah. And we work primarily with offshore developers. So I don't want to keep them on some kind of schedule with us.</p><p>I do have to have some overlap just so we can communicate, so there's a certain, degree east usually right around Turkey, we're all, it's harder to hire people farther east than that, just because of the time zone issue. And obviously Europe and south America is fine, especially when you're in the.</p><p>And they, they will make contributions just like an open source software developer will, except in this case, someone will be private customer software, they'll make pull requests to it. And because they're working in this manner, I'm also treating them much more like that. So instead of having a morning meeting and saying, okay, here's the priorities for today?</p><p>And here's what we're doing. I need to almost have this sense of anonymity with the developer and to do that, we use project management systems like anybody. And the devil is in the details, but in this case, everything's in the details. So we try and load up these issues so that they could be picked up almost generically by any of the developers who work with us.</p><p>And we do assign it to certain people. we, they have certain skill sets that we look for obviously, but we're trying to give them something that if they wanted to do this without talking to me, they probably could do it and get the pull requests going. And then for that, you just need a whole nother level of detail.</p><p>Documentation's big. You gotta be able to write a lot about what's going on. Explain how a problem works. I use links to code all the time. So I'll use get hub has this great feature where they have links to a specific line in the code and I'll point out, Hey, here's what this is doing. You need to replicate this behavior or something like that.</p><p>That's been incredibly powerful. I use a lot of screencasts have a screencast on almost every issue, just like in a walk through something. And that way there, in an async way, getting my actual feedback on what they're doing. And then the last one, and one of the most powerful tools is flow charts.</p><p>She brought up and so we'll use lucid chart or draw.io. It doesn't really matter which one you use. And we're creating flow charts that are in a very simplistic decision tree format. So I think you're probably familiar with that format, right? The blocks and yes, no diamonds. </p><p>Yeah. Diamonds and rhomboids and parallelograms on an angle and that kind of thing. And arrows of course, between them. </p><p> Yeah. Lucid chart. I, I issued Wiziwig tools for a long time. I always said, I didn't want to use a Wiziwig. I want to have a tech space. And there was actually there is one open source, right? Heard that it has a text-based where you could just create a little text file and we'll create the flow chart for you.</p><p>But lucid chart is really good. They've improve the product so well that I can build something very quickly with that. I have been using that mostly. And this idea was given to me probably a decade ago by a very talented UX designer. Someone. Yeah. Let a big UX team. And she just said, this is the way I get into every decision makers workflow really quickly.</p><p>And I start, making them agree to an actual flow chart because this is going to expose all the side issues and all the other stuff they are not thinking about when they initially asked you for that shiny new. </p><p>That sounds really interesting. So someone let's say you're, let's say you're starting with someone and you're working with the decision maker what do you ask them to do? Or how do you actually structure the conversation? </p><p>Sure. I'm using flow charts, mostly I'd say the 90% cases for my developers, to give them information</p><p>internally,</p><p>but I will do it to clarify with decision-makers from time to time as well. It depends how much ownership we have of the project versus them. There's a difference. I'll say there's a different scale. There are certain people who are really particular about what they want and then there's another kind of customer.</p><p>And to be honest, I prefer this a bit who, who lets us just take it and says, we'll go with best practice on this one. And that's really nice because it just saves us time, saves us iteration cycles. And because we've done it before we can get them pretty good stuff.</p><p>But what I would do with the decision makers they'll come to you and they'll have, the happy path version of it. So they say this should except apple man. I want you to, just to be able to use apple pay now to buy this item and what they're not thinking about is what are all the attributes of that?</p><p>The flow chart gets into, okay. If the apple pay transaction is accepted, yes. You pay that's happy path. But on that note, On the, on the rhombus is going to be well, what if it doesn't get accepted? Do we allow users to save their apple pay into the profile or is it something they enter new all the time? Are we allowing them three transaction limit and then saying, Hey, you got to choose another method. Do we have some kind of scam protection for people who might be able to might be trying to use apple pay. That's not theirs. I haven't even integrated with that API. There might be other considerations as well.</p><p>What kind of error notifications are we giving people? Are we emailing people later about failed transactions? So you'll have what, in the mind of the stakeholder was just a line, do this, then this, it becomes a much more. Complicated web, but also pretty well-defined. And I think it's the simplicity of it because the blocks are yes or no, a thing happened, you really have to, you have to hone in on what, what happens when that specific problem happens and not a kind of a generalized view.</p><p>I do think, a lot of people defining requirements and customers can get, they can get lost in abstraction. When they want to talk about a problem or they'll do the famous, oh, just do it the way Facebook does it, of course you want to tell them they have one of these slow charts back there too.</p><p>There's a giant decision tree is probably a team of five or six people who built this thing. So they're going through the same process and they're making different trade-offs in you because maybe they have a more intimate relationship with apple and they actually do have. Some backdoor into the security API or something like that.</p><p>I don't think apple provides back doors, but it's just starting to think about why you wouldn't be able to do it the way LinkedIn does it or why you could, and then what is that way? And then let's write that down on the flow chart too. And it's harder to argue with at the end and by the way, it's just great.</p><p>It's deliverable too. You give that to the developer. Okay. Here's what we talked through with the stakeholder, go build this and they understand it. It's like magic for them because most code is written in that linear decision like format. If else statements is primarily what you're working with.</p><p>Okay. So with decision-makers it's more of a requirements gathering type tools in a way.</p><p> Yeah. </p><p> Have you ever used it to explore how they themselves make decisions or does that getting a bit too Meda?</p><p> It is pretty meta Yeah, I don't, I can't say that I have wouldn't be anything wrong with that.</p><p>I think that's an exercise. I'd go through with a closer collaborator, probably more so than a customer. But certainly someone who I'm working closely with and want to get a gauge of what they're actually prioritizing. That would be helpful. </p><p>And one of the things I've started to start to think about in terms of the way we're looking at customers, which might be related to this is what is their level of defensiveness. So how bad does an issue impact them in terms of how they view the system and how do we tailor a solution to them? Better help them with that. . I've done very generic up until now, because I do want to try and standardize things as much as possible. It's just something I'm constantly trying to improve on. But I would like to also have a risk scale that I apply to different customers. And I think the decision tree could help because it would say if this person really wants the error notifications and states to be well-defined, and they're probably very concerned about these things happening, as opposed to someone who says, oh, we'll just figure it out.</p><p>When the customer is need. And that really is two different personalities that you get. We had a no, a small issues for one customer is, oh yeah, no problem. They'll just email us and for another customer it's well, this is a big deal, right? Part of that has to do with the way they perceive their own business or their brand.</p><p>I think it's also the kind of customers they're working with. So if they're mostly consumer oriented or have a fragmented base, Businesses that they work with them. Stuff happens. It's not a big issue. The companies we've worked with who are delivering a product to larger businesses, much larger than themselves, and obviously much larger than us, banks, places like that. They want the systems to work and what that means exactly. We don't take shortcuts on security for instance, but I think there is just a trade off on stability questions. Did we do a one-week testing cycle or a three week testing cycle? That's up to you.</p><p>You're going to have to decide how slowly you want to release this, but the three week will be safer for your customer experience. So I think that's the, that is the one area where I'd use it. Cause I haven't started to think a bit more about these risk profiles that people have. </p><p>Okay. So then let's flip to the other. So in terms of internal processes, we have clearly for requirements communication and that kind of stuff that that's to some extent where were, where they came from in the first place. What about for things like internal company processes that aren't related to code or delivery or that kind of thing?</p><p>Yeah. Do you use them at all? Or how does that work?</p><p> Starting to so this is interesting now, so we have two sides of our business, right? My day to day is running the south port technology group arm. And my partner is involved in a business. That is working on acquisitions. So where we're buying small software businesses, either buying the company or just buying them as an asset purchase.</p><p>Yeah. And that's a fascinating, different areas, obviously super related. We're working together on it. He steers the ship more day to day. And one of the big things we do there is we use analysts. And yeah. I also have summer interns to work the process. Yeah. Because it's a pretty tight knit sourcing process.</p><p>There's a lot of procedures they've got to learn really quick to ramp up on. So we're yeah, we're building up the knowledge base. So we've had a Wiki going pretty much since we started with the intern program and we're gonna move on to some new interns this summer when the summer term starts after schools are out.</p><p>And, my hope is to just get them up and running in about a week. And the big thing we do is we source a lot of businesses. So we are pulling down and it just, it's a classic funnel type process. So we're pulling down maybe sick about 10,000 companies and just saying, does the company match on a number of filters?</p><p>Now the filters can be listed out on the spreadsheet, but there are some of the more nuanced things. One, I think visualizations are great. I just think people like them, but just how certain are you about something? Cause there's ambiguous. So you could say let's filter our company on, it's gotta be in the U S or Canada.</p><p>Okay. Pretty easy to figure that one out. And if you don't have the data point, okay, fine. You can figure it out. But beyond that, it's pretty easy. But then there is, we want to have certain kind of customer service. That's a little more ambiguous, right? I can't quite tell if this product is serving a business buyer or consumer or prosumer buyer.</p><p>And in those situations, we want to have flow charts for them. The interns in particular, just look at it and say, how certain about this decision are and always use simple scales, odd numbers, anyone in the creative arts will tell you that. And so it's one to three or one to five usually.</p><p>So are you really certain, are you medium? Certain, are you not. And on the really surgeons, we just want them to go with it because it would just waste our time to take a second look on it on the medium toss up, and maybe we have them weigh it on a number of other factors. Is it in a niche we really like, is it, does it look like it's got good marketing or, some other characteristics that we're looking for the business.</p><p>And on the low end, you said you got to throw it over the fence. You got throw it over to us. Like you have no certainty about this. And we're trying to bucket these things so that, our interns work with scripts because we, we've developed a lot of automation so that they don't have to manually do this stuff.</p><p>They'll just run a script and we'll pull down the data and ask them to rate things. And, we want to have the script and be able to say exactly what the flow chart would say. I'm very certain I'm I meet him certain I'm not very certain and then do something accordingly. So there's a weird way in which that flowchart would allow us both to design the actual system the interns are gonna use, but also inform them as to how they're supposed to make the decision and think about what they're doing.</p><p>And it is, a human tendency to just go for the middle one. If you give people three options. So you want to also create a incentive for them to go higher, low. And sometimes that just means removing the middle option as well. Trying to just make sure it's a rare choice or having four, although yeah.</p><p>Even numbers, </p><p>a lot of the creative people say that's a bad idea, but I don't know. Maybe I should try it. We're big into experimenting so we will try it. </p><p>Do they also create these or modify the ones that you have or is it more just something that you thought about, and then like, how does, how do these things live?</p><p>So to speak? That's a good question. </p><p>I want to get them more into it so far. It has been a pretty one-way street. My partner will do this. He comes from a user research design background. He's very familiar with this and he will go more in depth for different kinds of tools as well, tools that I'm not even super familiar with.</p><p>My, one of my things is I'm. I'm like an inch deep and a mile wide, I'm not a flowchart expert, but I do use it aggressively, in terms of how we get these processes, these software processes done. That's probably the only topic I'm really deep on is actually building out the software.</p><p>But I want them to do it. I'm like an evangelist in my own company for screencasting. I say, put it in a video, just make it easy. And then also any kind of visual. Charged for it say, you can write five paragraphs or you can give me a pretty quick flow chart on this.</p><p>It's not hard to do. And I think the proof of that is, they asked for the license, I'll obviously give it to them. I don't want to give people the license if they are not going to use something anyway. But but if someone is really excelling in doing that'd be fine. And the screencast at this point is, lucid chart is very affordable.</p><p>And I actually, I think the free version would give them a little while, but the screencasting is awesome. Pretty much free at this point. I don't know if you've seen the new Google thread that it product. No, I haven't actually, it's very nice. It's a, just, it's a Chrome extension and it's, it's now my screencasting tool.</p><p>What I do is just very quickly, let you record a video, obviously record your screen. You can record your camera too, or you can take it off. You could be in the corner. You would, if you want to narrate over the screen and then it integrates directly with your Google workspace organization.</p><p>So it can create a link that's only shareable within the organization or a public link for the video. And that's pretty much all I ever need. I'm just creating tons and tons of videos, putting them into different issues in the project management system, wherever. So you just drop a link and then people can watch it pretty much.</p><p>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.</p><p> So going back again on flowcharts, so you mentioned that you use them to reduce the uncertainty around how to classify things. Curious about any particular cases where that happens . What does that mean? Exactly. </p><p>Sure. Here's a good example. And I didn't quite use the dishes and tree flow for this. It was slightly different and that's probably. Good to highlight here too, is that you don't have to be super strict. I like those decision trees a lot. Cause a lot of times you are dealing with a linear process where things happen and then X X, but this one was actually about a permission system.</p><p>And it was a needless to say it was a complex permissioning system. So the customer had spent hours explaining it to me. I had intuited it, a lot of it had to do with the unique characteristics of their business model. So you think about the generic permission system is there's an anonymous user, there's a member and then there's an admin and maybe above that, there's a super admin.</p><p>And it's just, it's a Russian doll of permissions, where they're all, the super admin has everything and everybody below him has slightly less. And. Once you get into business use case specific permissions, it starts getting really weird. And especially when different kinds of users based on the kind of user that they are, can do different things and should do different things, especially when you have a two-sided market, which was the case for the system.</p><p>And what happened was, the industry is solar power and there was two sides of a transaction. The permissions were set up, according to that, each side did different things, depending on what it was. And on top of that, there was also just a high level administrator and, they could do whatever on the system.</p><p>So I would have issue after issue with the developers saying why is this different than this one over here? And I would try and be clear. There was two sets of issues, right? And say, this is for this side of the transaction and this is for the other side of the transaction.</p><p>And they would still just come back to me, oh yeah, don't know why this behavior is different than over here. These should be the same thing. They're both users, they're both admin. And I said this is a different kind of Edmond. It's a different kind of user. So what I did is I just finally, know, bit the bullet did the full line chart that just showed here's how all the inheritance patterns work on the permissions and.</p><p>Repeatedly referenced that, tech head on about 15 different issues. And all of a sudden, understood like the realization was that the container unit for the permission was the kind of organization that uses or was in. And they had not really internalized it. There was just a big difference.</p><p>There's two kinds of organizations and why they would be different. </p><p>And then, on top of that, in addition to the hierarchy itself, we had a, a certain amount of description texts at the bottom, just stating, this is what these things are just to let you know right in the theoretical transaction here. Here's what side of it they're representing. So I said that was a good,</p><p>that was a good recent one beyond that. It's the day-to-day experience of, I, the thing I always say is you can solve this in the requirements so you can solve it in chat. And so there was a certain kind of person who just likes to have their day broken up into a million pieces by everyone asking them for requirements all the time.</p><p>I have no problem with people have genuine questions about it, but, to the extent that I can get them as much detail up front, I want to do that. So creating that flow chart is the thing I'll do before I even tell the developer about the issue. And it's partly out of respect for them so that they don't have to spend their whole day. Figure it out. Yeah. </p><p>Listen, there's a certain kind of person, sometimes you're so overwhelmed in your business that you just hire somebody and you say, listen, I don't know what's going on. I need you to track down a bunch of information, but the offs there is you have to pay that person a lot of money and they have to have a level of thinking that goes beyond their specific skillset. So they have to know a ton about your customers. They have to know a ton about the internals of your business. They have to have, an appropriateness meter in terms of the kinds of things they're asking about or the kind of things they're doing.</p><p>It's just not something I can rely on any developer to do . Instead, what I want to do is focus on hiring developers. The very specific skill of being good at programming. And then if they have growth that they want to do in some higher areas, that's fine too. Like we can have that conversation, but the vast majority of these guys aren't coming to me saying what I really want to do is piece together, all the various requirements coming from all your customer emails and the nuances of their business, they want to just get to work on something. there is money to be made there.</p><p>The people who are willing to do that, that like work and piece it together. That's a, that's an extremely valuable skill. But in my case, we want to keep that money, frankly, on the company side, on the management side, because we just feel like we owe it to our developers to give them clear requirements.</p><p>Cool. Yeah. Where do people find out more, or get in touch with you or reach out to do that? So you can check out south port technology group@stgthatsoftwareandthensouthportventuresisjustsouthportventures.com. And you'll see those two sites look fairly similar. People can hit me up on LinkedIn if they like Twitter as well.</p><p>Happy to have a discussion I'm at Trevor underscore UN so just my name at the underscore in the middle and yeah, I'm in New York. So if people are around, that's a not a good reason to give me a shot. Yeah, that's great. </p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-417095527576369342021-06-12T02:00:00.001-07:002021-06-12T02:00:32.761-07:00On axiology in project management with Traci Duez<p>My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.alignremotely.com/">Align Remotely</a>. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. Find out more at <a href="https://www.alignremotely.com/">alignremotely.com</a>. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, I speak with Traci Duez an expert in axiology, or the study of value, in the context of project management. It's all too common to focus on the mechanics of delivering projects, while missing the whole point of the work in the first place.</p><p>In this episode, you will discover:</p><ul><li>What the three hierarchichal dimensions of value are, and why they matter on every project you will ever run</li><li>What axiology has to do with a Nobel peace prize nomination</li><li>When a discovery phase creates or destroys value for the customer and how to go about it effectively</li><li>How to collaborate while taking into account potential biases</li></ul><h2 id="3qbag">About Traci Duez</h2><p>Traci has been teaching project managers, program managers, and portfolio managers for the past 10 years for the Project Management Institute. how to implement the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) with the human souls that work on your projects and in your organization. Traci uses the little-known science of axiology - the study of value and human value judgment to show leaders how to use all three dimensions of value to create an engaged and productive team.</p><ul><li><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/traciduez">Traci Duez on LinkedIn</a></li><li>Traci’s company website: <a href="https://www.breakfreeconsulting.com/">Break Free Consulting</a></li></ul><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1gbsk4s_b5ed2f352bdbd3f4179443038f7603b7_800.png 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1gbsk4s_b5ed2f352bdbd3f4179443038f7603b7_1600.png 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1gbsk4s_b5ed2f352bdbd3f4179443038f7603b7_800.png 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1gbsk4s_b5ed2f352bdbd3f4179443038f7603b7_1600.png 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1gbsk4s_b5ed2f352bdbd3f4179443038f7603b7_800.png" /></picture></figure><h2 id="89bq8">Key Takeaways</h2><p>People matter more than than the mechanics of projects, particularly how they perceive and generate value.</p><h2 id="6t94h">Transcript</h2><p>Tracy Duez welcome to the managing remote teams podcast.</p><p>Thank you. Pleasure to be here. </p><p>Sure. So can you say a few words about how you got into axiology in the context of project management?</p><p> Oh, yes. Great question. Axiology was presented to me when I was the director of an it consulting company. I had a lot of project managers that I employed and and it was more from a personal perspective.</p><p>At first, when I was introduced to axiology, I took this assessment and I had. Never taken an assessment like that before it took 10 minutes to take and rank two sets of 18 items, and then it spit out this report. Didn't tell me about my personality or behavioral style. Cause I know how to manipulate that.</p><p>I know how to make sure those assessments say what I want it to say, but this one this one I couldn't trick in any way. I didn't know how my boss would want me to answer it so that I could show him that I was brilliant. And so I started to look into axiology to say, okay what was this?</p><p>Now? I would love to say it was because I wanted to know the science behind it. And I was really curious, but I'm going to be very Frank with you and that it was so that I could manipulate the assessment. The next time I took it. So I could tell my boss what I wanted to tell my boss. But anyways, I found this science and axiology is the science of value and human value judgements.</p><p>And I think that's what project managers do is they create and generate value. And so that's one side of it. And then the other side of it is it measures how you think and how you make value judgements. Which is the other side of project management from the project manager side in terms of how do I think and how do I make the best choices in the best decisions in order to create the greatest value.</p><p>So how did your boss actually reacts after he saw it? </p><p>Great question. He didn't know what to do with it either. My boss didn't react to my assessment in any way. He reacted to his, and it said that he was a creative genius or something. So he was like, yes, this is the best assessment ever. And that he should be running a strategically running the company. See, I told you guys.</p><p> It really measures your capacity to think in a specific dimension of value, it doesn't measure whether you actually do it or not. So that's part of it, but he assumed that, because the assessment measured that he's obviously that way and that we just didn't appreciate how strategic and how much of a big thinker he was.</p><p>Yeah, it wasn't about me.</p><p>Okay. So if axiology is the study of value, then how does it, or you define value then?</p><p>That's terrific question. My background is my degrees in chemistry, which, makes me a little bit of a nerd. I was really a lazy chemist. And so I got into kind of robotics and computers and became a geek, which is how I ended up leading an it consulting firm. And so axiology, while when people look at it, they think, oh, this is like psychological or psychobabble or something along those lines. It's actually based in math, it's based in trans finite calculus and set theory. So I told you I was a geek and a nerd. However, it's also very practical.</p><p>It's very practical. So when it comes to relating to project management and the science is really about three dimensions of value, where most of our lives, we just deal with. With two dimensions of value. And so that's basically what it taught me and it taught it from a mathematical perspective.</p><p>People always say who determines the correct order of these things that you rank? Cause when you take the assessment, you ranked two sets of 18 items and People will say who determines the right? Nobody determines it, math determines it. And so it isn't based on statistics, which most behavioral assessments are like, they'll have you rank these things and then you, they go and they observe you.</p><p>And then they come back and statistically say, oh Because she did this, or he did that and these measurements match up then statistically that's relevant. So this isn't based in that at all. It's just based in math. And it's basically, we were asking you does your personal hierarchy of value, which is what we ask you to do rank a hierarchy of that between two sets of 18 items.</p><p>Does it match with the mathematical hierarchy of value and then where it does. Is where you have the strongest capacity to see value and to make great choices and where it doesn't. You have what we call a cognitive bias, meaning your brain has filtered out some of the information that it needs to make a decision, a good decision from that perspective.</p><p>And so you might not want to use. That thought habit or that perspective to make your decisions. So anyways, it can be very powerful for a leader as well as for a team. </p><p>What is, what's this mathematical hierarchy of value? Exactly. </p><p>Let me give you the kind of layman's. Terms of this value rather than getting in to transplant that calculus and losing your audience, let's just do it kind of high-level.</p><p>So there are three dimensions, hierarchical dimensions of value that everything on the planet falls within. I'll start with the lowest. So the lowest dimension of value is what we call systemic. And so this deals with. Systems as in the name, but it deals with things we make up in our head. So ideas expectations as well as policies and procedures and rules, that those aren't things that exist in nature.</p><p>We as human beings create them in our brain, right? So a project plan, perfect example is systemic where we're trying to lay out a system of how things will work. So that's the lowest dimension of value. Now it's not worthless. It's just worth less when you take that system and create something measurable or tangible from it.</p><p>So you have your project plan and you create a thing. Yeah, I was in it. You create a program, an application, whatever it happens to be, and now it's measurable and tangible. And so anything that you can measure, you can sense in some way, see taste, smell, measure. Those are extrinsic. So that's the next dimension of value extrinsic.</p><p>And when we work in project management, I've read the different versions of the PIM Bach from a project management Institute. The whole book is almost in those two dimensions of value. What are your best practices? And then what are the metrics? What can you use to measure them? Which by the way, that's still a system, but when you actually do the measuring that work that's extrinsic.</p><p>And so axiology tells us that those are the two lowest dimensions of value. Again, not that they're worthless. There is value in all dimensions of value. The highest dimension of value is what's called the intrinsic. And so I often ask project managers like what's a successful project. So Luke, what's a successful project.</p><p>How do we determine if a project is successful? So I come very much from a products, slanted angle, and I think it's largely based on whether or not it was the customer was satisfied. And not necessarily the internal machinations of it. Obviously you don't want it to be late and all of that, but that only matters to the extent that the customer cares about it.</p><p>I love what you just said, because if you talk to. Typical project managers, they're going to say is it on time? Is it on budget? Is it within scope? That's determines a successful project. Those things are systemic and extrinsic. And so I ask project managers when I speak in front of the chapters or different organizations as, Hey, have any of you ever had a project that was deemed successful?</p><p>That was over budget late. And maybe outside scope and they say, yeah, sure. Yeah, we have you ever had a project deemed unsuccessful that was within scope under budget and on time? Not so much, but yes, there have been people that do that too well. That's because you're only measuring in two dimensions of value.</p><p>And Luke, what you talked about was is the client happy? Intrinsic is about the personal or spiritual. It's about the human experience of the extrinsic thing that we've created from the system. So every project plan creates a product, something, and it, that isn't the greatest value that you can get from it.</p><p>It's what does that product do in the lives of the people who are paying for it or the people who are using it? And that intrinsic value is infinitely more valuable than the product itself or the plan that's used to create the product. Does that make sense? Yeah. I It makes sense to you cause you, you had basically said that early on, but we can show that mathematically.</p><p>So the system is a one or a zero. And the extrinsic is a number you can place a value on a pen that I have or an iPhone or whatever. There's a certain value, a thousand bucks or whatever it is, but that tool, that product is invaluable depending on how you're going to use it. So taking the iPhone, especially now in the pandemic, that's the only way we get to see people's faces sometimes.</p><p>And. When my mother-in-law passed away last April, that's the only way we could say goodbye was through an knife, not, I was one of those frugal people that said, God, who would pay a thousand dollars for an iPhone. Then when it came time to use it in that way and experience that thing, that extrinsic thing in that way, it was priceless.</p><p>I'd have paid whatever I needed to pay in order to say goodbye. And that's how axiology fits into to project management. Although we've been trained so often to just focus on the low or two dimensions of value, the extrinsic and the systemic, even our schooling teaches us that right.</p><p>Is it just a matter of perspective on that this the customer perspective on to all of it? Or is it more than that? </p><p>Yeah, that's a great question because. It's a little bit more than that. The whole basis of axiology, if you trace it back to, and I'll talk about formal axiology, which came about in the fifties and sixties a guy by the name of Robert S. Hartman put this together. And he was it was actually German raised in Germany fled the Nazi regime and. He was a genius. He had a PhD in math, PhD in philosophy. He had a JD law degree just an amazing man. And when he fled Germany, Nazi, Germany, he made it his life's mission to organize good the way he saw Hitler organized evil, and that.</p><p>Mantra went with him throughout the remainder of his life. And he passed away in 1973 after he was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. So here's a guy who had to figure out one thing. If he was going to organize it, he had to know what is good. And so how, and this goes to what you were saying in terms of subjective, right?</p><p>So how do you know what a good product is? How do you, what's a good project. Let's just say you're running a project, Luke. What's a good project.</p><p>Something that's serving some kind of needs of a particular person or a group and yeah, and fully serving it, not just attempting to, but actually doing so. That would be my definition. </p><p>Yes. And that's not too far off by the way, from what Hartman discovered, because people, if I were to say, okay, what's your definition of good. How would you define good.</p><p>Good. Okay. Nothing is good when.</p><p>Clearly when it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. This is where people go, look, thank you. Because this is where I went to. It was like it's not bad. It's not evil. So we're describing it by telling you what, it's not right. We're giving you a definition. And then some people will say, oh it's it's beneficial.</p><p>It's productive. That's what. That's what good means, right? It's it doesn't cause any harm. Okay. If that is the true definition of good, how can we have a good criminal? Wow.</p><p>Because you can say, oh, that guy's a good criminal, but what are you really meaning? You're not meaning he's beneficial. Robin hood is in that category now. Yeah. A good criminal is a guy that gets away with whatever crime he's committing or she's committing. That's what we would consider.</p><p>Yeah. Good, good. As an effective, but not necessarily good as in. Good. Not in terms of that, right? If it all depends on how we define the word. Good. So Hartman spent a decade trying to figure out because of this mess that we'd gotten ourselves into here, he's trying to figure out a definition of it.</p><p>And he said that a thing is good. This is what he came up with when it has all the attributes needed to fulfill its purpose.</p><p>When it has all of the properties. Needed to fulfill its intention. So now the subject, if part is the intention or the purpose, and then we come up with the attributes to it. So for a good criminal, I'll just go with the criminal, right? What's the purpose. The first let's say they're they steal stuff, right?</p><p>The purpose is to steal stuff and get away with it. And maybe even resell it on the black market, whatever. Okay, great. That's your purpose? What are the attributes that you need to be a good criminal? And in this case we could come up with some, would you agree? They need to be stealthy. I don't know what fine black clothing.</p><p>I don't know what it is, but you can just put a little cartoon together. Okay. So thinking of your current project, what's the purpose? And this is where most project managers, I just want to say fall short, but I don't mean that it's intentional or that it's just that we end up focusing on attributes and properties before we fully focus and hash out the intention or the purpose of the project.</p><p>Part of that, I think is just that it's actually quite hard. you need to do discovery and that costs time, that costs effort, it takes a while before you really get at the essence of the problem that you can solve often. And if you make a plan before you've gotten there, then you know, the value of that plan is limited.</p><p>Absolutely. And that's where we see people cutting back as well. We see people cutting back on the discovery and the requirements and coming together to decide, Hey, these are some of the requirements that we have. Are we going for all of them? Or which ones are we really going to focus on? And what's the clarity around the purpose and the intention of this project. That's what we need to spend a lot of our time. </p><p>There and okay. What are the attributes that we need in order to complete this so that it satisfies all dimensions of value. So that delivers systemically it's effective, it's efficient in getting it out. It creates a product or service that is measurable, tangible, according to the parameters that we decide. And then it impacts the lives of the people. Who we want to impact who are going to be impacted by this and focusing on all three dimensions of value here at the very beginning, because the rest of the project will fall out.</p><p>And if your team knows very clearly what the purpose and intention of this project is and what the intentions are of it are not, which is where scope creep comes in, right? They start this with make up their own things. What it's not intended to do now. Those self leading teams that we want. We start to have them because we all go always go back to this purpose or intention and we know what a good one is.</p><p>So how do you going back to this discovery? How do you make sure you don't burn too much of the resources you have on discovery? </p><p>Another great question, right? How do you make certain that? One of the key reasons why we either a burn too much or B end up creating a product or service that doesn't serve our clients full, fully their needs fully is because we don't Keith Ferazi calls team out.</p><p>We decide who is going to be impacted by this work. And those are the people we talk to. That's it. And so this is going to be I used to work in pharmaceutical. So this project is going to impact the quality assurance laboratory. And so we'll talk to the quality assurance laboratory and we'll talk to.</p><p>The people over the quality and we'll talk to the VP of quality and then that'll be it. But we don't talk to finance. We don't talk to research and development. We don't talk to any of those folks. And so we end up with a perspective that's very narrow. Now. I'm not saying that we take the attributes from finance, from R and D from the other marketing.</p><p>We don't necessarily take those as part of our equation, but we take time to go talk to them and say, Hey, this is what we're doing. Does this, can you see this impact you in any way? And you may get some really amazing ideas that could actually save the quality assurance department. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money.</p><p>Yeah, we don't team out that way typically, because we think it's going to add more scope to the project. When in fact it doesn't have to, it may actually take away scope from the project because you may find out that they have a system that you were going to recreate that you don't need to recreate. No.</p><p>I don't know. So for me, that part of it, how do you know when it's too much? It, I think we always assume that we've done enough and we haven't and you don't, it doesn't need to be a big burn rate to do that. Just include them at the very beginning. </p><p> I'm just trying to figure out how to fit it into more of a project framework, as opposed to product as in product there's concepts like continuous discovery. In certain contexts, it's going to be much more natural to work towards more of a project. You don't want to burn a lot of just the lapse time, not even resources, but elapsed time on discovery when you've got to go and create value or the sum of it, even if, because then you won't have enough attributes to actually. Create the thing at the end, that's going to make the customer happy in the first place.</p><p>Part of that loop is also, we tend to focus a lot on it, more so than the team, more so than the individuals and people on the team. Do we typically figure out who on our team can see intrinsic value really well. Can see extrinsic value really well or systemic. I will tell you the answer is typically no, in the tens of thousands of people that I've worked with because it's usually the systemic person who is the loudest. And that's usually the one that we listened to. It's the one who understands the systems and the processes and this, and they dig into these details and blind everybody too. The other dimensions of value. And we ended up focusing there on the lowest dimension of value and then the loudest, because they're usually the most emotional direct demanding, because systemic thought occurs near the part of the brain that is right next to the emotional part of the brain, the rational logic peer in your prefrontal cortex, doesn't create a whole lot of emotion, but that's where the extrinsic part.</p><p> Of our project is thought of. And then the intrinsic is in the deeper part of the brain where the feelings and emotions are around. What's this going to feel like when it's done, what's this gonna look like? And so certain people on your team have abilities and capacities in each of those dimensions of value.</p><p>And. We don't always listen to them, especially the intrinsic people. Cause it's hard for them to come up with the words while the systemic guy is going through all of this stuff. Or even the extrinsic is going through all this knowledge and stuff that they have. And and we're not listening to the other side of it.</p><p>Because there's no place for emotions in business. Is there.</p><p> To change topic a little bit and slightly? What about dependencies? So things like resource dependencies or dependencies within a plan in terms of like task breakdown, that kind of thing. How do you see that through this extrinsic view this third view, third eye view, </p><p>the third I view the intrinsic. As you're putting that plan together,</p><p>how is that typically accomplished?</p><p>Okay. So for example, on the resources side, I think quite often you've got a fixed pool of resources in the company you've got, would say a handful of projects going on at the same time. And then there's a certain people whose skills you want on certain projects at certain moments in time.</p><p> The thing that I've always been trying to avoid in that kind of a context is that we don't want a situation where the client is forced to accept things that are only possible because of internal constraints, for example, such as resource constraints. That's just like the resource one, then there's similar, like ordering task type dependencies, you can also potentially talk about, what are your thoughts?</p><p>so I find that, and I don't know if this is the case for you, Luke, but I find that in many organizations. The project managers are given the project and they put together the plan, and then they're given access to these resources and then they've got to figure out how to use those resources to deliver what they've been asked to deliver. And it's a very non-collaborative problem-solving process to get these things done.</p><p>And. I believe in a more collaborative problem solving process where we get together. And we talk about what's going on and we talk about what this means to the company, what this means to our clients, what this means to the team, because there are some team members who they're in this bucket of having these certain skills and they're just tired of it.</p><p>Like they're really good at it. I was really good at managing projects and I hated it, but they just kept having me manage and manage more projects because I was good at it until finally I had to quit in order to do something I really wanted to do. And that's the intrinsic side of it. You can get so much more from people when it's measured between 40 and 80% more cooperation productivity, and buy-in from people when you see them as human beings, but most of the time in a corporation and in these kinds of environments, we see them as human doings and we are actually lowering their productivity, lowering our delivery,</p><p>our effectiveness, are efficiencies because we don't see them as human beings. And so how can we collaborate more? What collaboration is all around questions. And so we teach a collaborative problem solving process where we bring people together. And not only that, but we understand what a person's skills are, but also what are their desires?</p><p>Who is it that they want to be? Not just, what do they want to do? And why don't you sometimes when I ask people, who do you want to be? They'll say yo, no, that's not. That's still what you want to do. Who do you want to be? Is a completely different one question. It's what kind of man, woman, individual do you want to become like at your funeral?</p><p>What do you want people to say about you? Do you want them to say, oh my gosh, that Luke, his Gantt charts were priceless. The colors. He had really great risk management plans. Oh my gosh, that Luke was just, this might not be like the top of the list thing you want people to say about you. So what is one thing you want somebody to say about you at your funeral?</p><p>And just for instance, I don't mean to kill you off.</p><p>I'm dead. I'm dead. Okay. They'll say that. Yes. Yeah. How do you want to be described? What kind of words do you want to hear? From your family, from your colleagues, how do you want them to describe who you are?</p><p>I think I've already heard some of it, but certainly kind is something that seems to come up and it's something that I try to focus on with varying success, but yeah. Yeah. In that let's use that as a that's fine. Absolutely. And so the, every role that you play in your life, you want, you only want to take on roles where you can practice being kind, which is probably almost all of them, but you want to have all of your roles, your extrinsic roles, support, who you want to be intrinsically.</p><p>And when we have that matched up, there's a formula. It says be times do equals have when, who you are aligns with, what you do, you're going to have great success. You're going to end your Workday feeling fulfilled. In organizations, when you allow that when you create an environment that allows that to happen. That's when your question about dependencies, not that there aren't arguments, Luke don't get me wrong, but that's when they take care of themselves because you know what a good organization is. You understand what the purpose of your company is. Then you understand what the purpose of your projects are. So you can understand what good attributes are to those. And then you use the intelligence, the emotional intelligence, as well as the technical intelligence in your organization. To keep everybody moving in that direction. </p><p>The other aspect of it is you understand what people want, who they want to be and what they want to do, and you get them all moving in that direction. So dependencies has to do with this collaborative problem solving where you pull everybody together. You talk about the problem. The problem is we have limited number of resources and we have these three high priority projects. Okay. So how can we accomplish our goals for our customers with this constraint?</p><p>And you break everybody out, three people into a group, and here's the question. What's your solution. What's your solution. You will end up collectively with a much better solution than any one, two or three project managers could have ever come up with on their own. And people say, oh my gosh, we don't have time to do that with every question.</p><p>Okay, then keep delivering lower level projects, but it doesn't take that much time. It can take 15 minutes, 30 minutes and you will come out of there not only with a great solution, but with buy-in from the rest of the people, they will feel intrinsically valued. Like you valued them as human beings, not just human doings.</p><p>And those are the processes that a lot of companies are missing. And so when I go into a company, these are some of the things we implement and right away, they start to see value from those processes. It's not just about the technical side in many cases.</p><p>How does this apply in an agile environment? </p><p> I give talks on agile all the time and how the agile manifesto fits right into The hierarchy of value.</p><p> I forget the agile manifesto. Now it's been a few months since I talked about it. They say, Hey, we value the things on the left, but we do things on the right more. It's true. Actually, illogically the things on the right are more valuable. Then the things on the left. So it fits very well into that framework and in agile and a lot of when we get into like self leading teams and things like that being able to take a look at. And teach people the hierarchy of value and how to use their best thinking to make choices rather than using their biases to make choices.</p><p>But just raising that level of awareness increases the results and productivity seven to 10%, just one simple that level of awareness. I love working with folks who work in an agile environment. Because. It is about short sprints to value, basically.</p><p>More and more. I hear the opinion that, especially these big scaled agile frameworks, they're becoming almost more waterfall than waterfall yeah, precisely because they don't have that manifesto aspect to it. It's just super, detailed monitoring and planning out months ahead of lots of teams. This isn't what it's about supposed to work. If you really get at the essence of the spirit of it. Even though you're using the rational the first layer stuff, the system stuff.</p><p>For me, my perspective on seeing that happen, exactly what you described is because it's more from an emotional standpoint, people are afraid. And so they believe that if they get all of these months and months planned out in advance, we have something to which to hold people accountable and that makes them feel good that they have somebody to yell at when the value isn't delivered.</p><p>I believe I'm going to yell at people. Yeah. And excuse me. Fear has a lot to do with what you're talking about because agile isn't meant to be that way. You have to trust in order for agile to work. Yeah, absolutely. </p><p>How was this approach relevant for team leads or leaders? </p><p>For leaders themselves, this is all about self-leadership. And I think a lot of times we want to go learn leadership skills when we can't even lead ourselves. How many times have you said, oh, you know what, I'm going to start. I'm going to start my exercise program on Monday. Because you can only start things on Monday. For some reason. I don't know why you can't start on a Thursday or whatever, January 1st.</p><p>Yeah exactly. And so we can't even lead ourselves to do the things that we say we're going to do, but we're going to learn leadership skills in order to lead others. And I think that putting the cart before the horse, as they say sometimes gets in our way and it erodes our confidence.</p><p>And so we think, oh crap, I can't even eat a salad instead of those big burgers or whatever. Even though I told myself I was going to, how am I going to lead this team? When you become a better self leader, leadership naturally flows from that. And that's what this can help with figuring out what's going on up here in a way that allows you to be a better, you.</p><p>Which allows you to do better things and then have greater success. </p><p>During the last year, has there been any difference in terms of how it applies to remote teams compared to how it used to be? </p><p>What we're discovering? As a use of this over the last year is really helping. And this may not be directly associated with specifics of project management, but it's just of people in and employees.</p><p>And we've really looked at it from a mental wellness perspective because we've noticed that teams that previously were thriving are now. What they call languishing. So it's not that they're depressed or terrible. But they're not thriving either. They're not flourishing, they're in this language.</p><p>And so what this, what we've found is that this, our tool helps people understand what's going on up here and how to shift their perspective so that they can see. See ways to thrive in ways to F to flourish and really increase their own emotional intelligence of what's going on. So emotional intelligence, I believe in a model where thoughts create emotions.</p><p>And emotions, give us the energy to take action. And the action leads to our results. I call it a tear model T. And so a lot of us see our actions and we see the results. We see the top of this model, but the emotions and the thoughts, we don't really have any insight into. And so this assessment gives us optics into our thinking.</p><p>That's creating these emotions. And once you can see that you really are able to. Look at it and make your own choices and decisions and get out of the languishing and shift into the flourishing again. That's fascinating. Yeah. </p><p>When you get started within you company that you're working with or somebody wants to just even get a sense of, is this the right approach? What do you do or what should they do? </p><p>One of the things that as I talked to, I don't know how many, it's over 70, 80 PMI chapters around the world.</p><p>One of the things that I do is I offer a free assessment so that you, that assessment, that Dr. Hartman put together that measures how individual people think and where they think the best, but also where you might have some cognitive biases. I offer a free assessment and a, like a really short. It's four, 15 minute videos course that shows you how to use the report. This report, isn't about putting you in a bucket it's about helping you understand how you think and how to use your cognitive assets better.</p><p> by the way, in this assessment, unlike personalities and all that, you don't need to share your results with other people because this isn't about.</p><p>Your boss treating you in a certain way, because you're a green or you're a yellow or you're, whatever. This is about you taking accountability and responsibility and ownership of your, of yourself, of your thoughts of your talents and bringing them to the world. So what we do is we assess your team and we compile the results.</p><p>And I can get a link for your listeners to just go try it out, take that phrase and you'll learn more through that process. We can probably put it in the, we just put it in the show notes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's pretty simple. It's my VQs VQ. M Y V Q S because as we measure value judgment, quotients.com and then we'll put slash.</p><p>Great. Where can people reach out to you to find out more other than your survey?</p><p>Then my survey LinkedIn is usually the best place to to reach out to me, just I don't know that there's too many other Tracey do as it's Tracy with an eye out there, but delete, reach out to me on LinkedIn. And and then we can continue the conversation and you can ask any questions there as well.</p><p>I'm there almost, so that's the best way. </p><p>Great. Thanks a lot. </p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-55347818042793549252021-05-24T02:31:00.001-07:002021-05-24T02:31:05.637-07:00How to combat difficult situations at work with Jeff Harry<p>My name is Luke Szyrmer, and if you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.alignremotely.com/">Align Remotely</a> and I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. Find out more at <a href="https://www.alignremotely.com/">alignremotely.com</a>. In this episode we chat together with Jeff Harry, originally a play specialist who started using play to help heal toxic work cultures.</p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1ga71h1_2bc3054c8c8f2b819385c7f4cd026288_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1ga71h1_2bc3054c8c8f2b819385c7f4cd026288_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1ga71h1_2bc3054c8c8f2b819385c7f4cd026288_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1ga71h1_2bc3054c8c8f2b819385c7f4cd026288_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1ga71h1_2bc3054c8c8f2b819385c7f4cd026288_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Upon listening, you will discover:</p><ul><li>How to combat difficult situations at work, especially when it already feels unsafe to do so</li><li>Why you can increase productivity by paying attention to when your team members have fun</li><li>Why starting strong at a meeting helps improve how people feel about the whole experience</li><li>How to apply improv theater techniques in a remote setting to get creative and bond your team</li><li>How to express appreciation for specific remote team members</li></ul><p><strong>About Jeff Harry</strong></p><p>Jeff Harry combines positive psychology and play to help teams/organizations navigate difficult conversations and assist individuals in addressing their biggest challenges through embracing a play-oriented approach to work. For his work, Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers of 2020 and has been featured in the NY Times, Mashable, & Upworthy. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day.</p><p><strong>Notable quotes</strong></p><p>A lot of people use the remote setting to not have a lot of discussions, but to avoid a lot of conversations, they're like, Oh, we don't want to deal with that toxic person to be bored because they don't see each other on a regular basis.</p><p>It was just like, okay, I guess what was the problem? Should they get and hope we get goes away?</p><p>We actually have a scapegoat. We had where the person where we're like, all right, I'll blame everything on this stuffed animal goat, and as people start to do stupid things like this, or try these things, they realize like it's a lot of this stuff is absurd. Really be gossiping, or getting really angry. David, because he didn't, refill the paper tray, or he didn't nail like that.</p><p><strong>Biggest takeaway</strong></p><p>As someone who's dabbled in improv in the past, a lot of what Jeff said felt right...although he was probably preaching to the choir when speaking to me, and that wasn't really news for me. What was surprising was his view that most companies have used the pandemic as a way to avoid hard conversations. If you aren't deliberate about facing people issues, they won't go away. It's even harder now with the pandemic. A good framework for these conversations is Jonathan Raymond's accountability dial from the last episode coincidentally, but beyond that trying to create an improv theater mindset with deep listening seems to be how to solve the problem for good.</p><p>I also really liked the practical tips around expressing appreciation for team members in a remote context. It helps if you really know the person, but if you don't, Jeff's advice should help you with coming up with a thoughtful gift or expression of appreciation.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-89857779713013701152021-05-03T02:00:00.003-07:002021-05-03T02:00:30.310-07:00Remote Accountability with Jonathan Raymond<p>Today's guest is really special guest, whose body of work I found really helpful as a practitioner in the context of delegation and remote accountability. Usually the topic is full of platitudes and hot air when you read stuff online, but Jonathan has thought very deeply on the topic and come up with frameworks that empower you to go and solve real-world issues you face, as you'll hear on these episodes.</p><p>In this episode you will discover:</p><ul><li>how to hold people accountable in a respectful way, without feeling like you've been taken for a ride</li><li>what accountability really is, and what it means for you as a leader</li><li>how lockdown has changed how leaders hold their remote teams accountable</li></ul><h2 id="46fj5">About Jonathan Raymond</h2><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g889sq_b3b16af70c5a9d9e59e5951f68cb1d74_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g889sq_b3b16af70c5a9d9e59e5951f68cb1d74_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g889sq_b3b16af70c5a9d9e59e5951f68cb1d74_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g889sq_b3b16af70c5a9d9e59e5951f68cb1d74_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g889sq_b3b16af70c5a9d9e59e5951f68cb1d74_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Jonathan Raymond is the CEO of <a href="https://www.refound.com">Refound</a>, a leadership training company that helps organizations unlock high-performance through transparent conversations about growth and accountability. Jonathan spent 20 years building careers in business development and personal growth before realizing he could have the best of both worlds by starting his own company. Now, he uses those skills to advise CEOs and organizational leaders on how to create a people-first culture that drives results. His goal is to provide Refound’s clients with a partner they can trust and a program that gives managers an experience of how they can make work a better place, one conversation at a time. Jonathan is an experienced CEO, Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker (Inc. 2018) and the author of Good Authority, How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For. He lives in Encinitas, California. He is madly in love with his wife, tries not to spoil his daughters, and will never give up on the New York Knicks.</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.refound.com">Refound.com</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanrefound/">Jonathan Raymond on LinkedIn</a></li><li>Download the goodies Jonathan promises <a target="_blank" href="https://refound.com/managingremoteteams">here</a></li></ul><figure class="image regular "><a target="_blank" href="https://feed.managingremoteteams.co/"><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_bdd3ccc4189a6f47efcf5ca98e875bb8_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_bdd3ccc4189a6f47efcf5ca98e875bb8_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_bdd3ccc4189a6f47efcf5ca98e875bb8_800.png" /></picture></a></figure><h2 id="eg7ds">Transcript</h2><p>Luke: Jonathan, Raymond, welcome to the podcast. </p><p>Thanks. And </p><p>so can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of accountability and delegation? </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: Fairly simply realizing that I was a lousy CEO when it came to delegation and remote accountability and feedback and coaching, and I was pretty good at the vision and strategy and okay, where do we want to be?</p><p>And what does it look like and thinking about products and things like that. And I thought I was okay at the delegation and feedback and remote accountability and I wasn't. And so I realized back in this was probably 2013, 2014, seven, eight years ago that I needed to change something. Something substantial about my approach to leading and managing teams.</p><p>I also saw my managers who were mostly around my age, a little bit younger at the time, like mostly in their thirties. They were really struggling and people, this was, pre way, pre pandemic, pre all the crazy things that are happening in our world right now. And people were really struggling with how creating a space for their teams to perform at a high level based on the company goals or the team goals.</p><p>And. Be really human and give people the development that they were looking for, the autonomy they were looking for. That's where I started. We'll get into where I ended up, I just became really passionate about. This topic of conversations and where every organization that I was a part of, whether it was part of organizations that I was in a leadership role in, or that I was consulting or coaching to that everybody seemed to be struggling with this.</p><p>And I was like, okay there's gotta be a better way. So that's where I started. </p><h2 id="9v4a5">Challenges with remote accountability</h2><p>Yeah. That's how I discovered the book too. I was looking for , anything around this because it just felt like I wasn't doing very well. With this particular thing so in terms of the the process of getting into it, what were the first. Challenges. That you overcame as you started getting into this area?</p><p>Luke: The first was really a mindset that I had talked about a lot in good authority, which was like, like most people, I grew up in a education system, family system, cultural system that rewarded and incentivized me based on my individual contributions.</p><p>So I became really good at my individual contributions. Knocking off the things in my inbox and, moving things forward that were, that seemed important to me. And I started to shift that perspective and I started to see that was not my highest value anymore as a team leader, while it was my highest value as an individual contributor, that, that mindset of solving problems and fixing things had become a liability.</p><p>And all of a sudden I had a team of people, whether it was eight people, 20 people, a hundred people surrounding me in some sort of way. The more that I used that muscle that I re that I really knew the worst things got. So the more I was the one who was the fixer of problems and the solver of things, the less the team performed.</p><p>And the less that I did that, the more that I said I don't know. I've got an idea for how to do that, but how would you do that? Or, Hey, I've got some ideas for how we might do this. And of course I've got some ideas, but I don't want to put my ideas out there first because the tendency will be to go with my ideas and they may not be the best ones.</p><p> If we want to go deep, pretty soon in our conversation here, it's really about identity. It's really about who do I think I am. And what, and how do I think I add value in the world? And as an individual contributor, we think rightly that we add value through our individual contribution and when we're called into a position of leadership, at least in my view.</p><p>And I think this is a widely shared view these days more so is that we have to change that self value. We have to say, Hey, wait a second. My self value is about empowering others. It's about lifting up others and creating the conditions for other people to go to places that they've yet to go. I'm good at taking myself to places that I, you have to go, but my job is to get other people to go to places where they you've got to go.</p><p>And I had a CEO of a fortune 500 company recently say to me, something that you never would have said to me a year ago, where he said. Jonathan, what I realized is that it's my job to create the emotional conditions for high performance. And I was like, wow, okay. My job is done here. That's the kind of stuff you don't hear.</p><p>It takes a while. So that's the mindset shift from individual contributor to team leader. 80% of it is mindset. There's tactics. We'll get into the accountability dial and we'll talk about delegation there's but it's about a mindset shift and that's the hardest part. </p><h2 id="tkkf">What is accountability, really?</h2><p>In terms of accountability. Let's start there. What is it really when it's working well? </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: Here's what it's not, or it's not only a lot of people say accountability is like doing what I said I was going to do. Okay. Fine. That's fine. But that's the table stakes, right? And most people don't even do that. And especially in big companies, they suffer from a lot of people, not doing the things that they were going to do. </p><p>But to me, accountability is about the way we go about things, it's not just about the tasks in your inbox, but it's the way you go about it. Did you communicate in an effective way? Did you collaborate across the team? Did you give people fair warning around changes? Did you acknowledge when you messed something up and you didn't just say oops, You said, oops, that was on me.</p><p>And because it was on me, here's how I'm going to fix it to make it easier for you. Nobody does that in our world. That's accountability. Accountability is I screwed up. I made things harder for you. I made your project go slower. I messed something up for you saying I'm sorry is worthless. It's better than nothing.</p><p>But accountability is going to saying Hey, of course say, Hey, sorry about that. And I'm going to take it upon me because I'm the one who took the action that resulted in harm in some way, I'm going to take the next action, which is I'm going to fix it. I'm going to undo. I'm going to, I'm using the word damage, even though it's a bit extreme, but I'm going to proactively undo the damage or the harm that I did.</p><p>That's accountability. That's where that's the top of the mountain, what we're going for and what we coach leaders and executives on. And the more and the higher you are up in the org chart, the more meaningful it is when you do accountability like that. And the more obvious it is when you don't and the more harmful it is when you don't, because everybody goes this culture talks about accountability.</p><p>We talk about ownership. We talk about living our values, but they don't do it. The work that I do is oftentimes with, senior leaders, but, or, but we're working organizationally and that's so to me, accountability is about how we show up in our roles. </p><h2 id="21nki">How to avoid beating people over the head with accountability</h2><p>Luke: How do you move from accountability being this code word for beating people over the head with a bat, the type of accountability that you described?</p><p>Jonathan Raymond: Organizationally, what we do is we ask a lot of questions. We're a pain in the ass that way. So when we'd go into an organization, we're typically not working with one person we're working with a team or a division, oftentimes it's a whole company. And we ask a lot of questions that people like, Hey, so if I use the word accountability, what does that mean to you?</p><p>What does that mean in this organization? And people have a wide variety of answers. And then we asked them, we said what should it mean. It should mean X, Y, and Z. It should mean if somebody is going to delay a project that they should come across the hall real or virtual. We let the organization define what accountability should be.</p><p>And then oftentimes we'll ask questions like, okay. So let's assume the level of accountability in the organization like, Oh, let me say it this way. I had a CEO come to me and say accountability is one of our core values. So that's great. That's wonderful. What happens if somebody isn't accountable and he said, what do you mean? And I said what are the consequences? If you said accountability is a core value, what are the consequences? If people don't behave in an accountable way? I guess there really aren't any. Okay you don't have accountability as a core value. If there are no consequences and it doesn't mean firing people, although sometimes that happens, like if there are no consequences to accountability, then you don't have accountability.</p><p>So we ask a lot of questions around what does accountability mean? And different people have different assumptions. And, it's if we use the word excellence, if we asked 10 people, they're gonna have 10 different definitions. So we ask a lot of people in the organization. What does it mean?</p><p>What should it mean? Now, what would it look like if accountability was operating at a really high level in this organization? Okay. We would be doing this, and this. Okay. Does everybody agree that those are good things? Yeah, that would be awesome. Okay. So now we move it out of the realm of of a negative and something. People don't want to, something that people do want because it's attached to an outcome that they care about.</p><h2 id="7mbln">Remote accountability and delegation</h2><p>Luke: Let's move on to delegation, because I think that's actually the thing that probably helped me the most. Why do people struggle with delegation so much?</p><p>Jonathan Raymond: Especially in larger companies and where there's know layers of leaders and managers we're afraid of the poor work coming back on us. Or it's not happening fast. Like we oftentimes have a manager or a leader who's in some form or another, under a lot of pressure breathing down our neck about a results.</p><p> We talked about the conditions for a second, though. A few minutes ago, the conditions are ripe for me to not delegate or to not delegate fully. I'll give the easy stuff. I'll give the stuff that has like a list of one to 10. Go do these things, but it's, but at the conditions are ripe for me to hold back.</p><p>The parts that are, that involve a little more creativity that involve more context that involve a bit more risk. The inertia is in favor of me holding back. Versus letting go. So you have to proactively work against that. That's the reason why it's so hard is because we believe even if it kills us, if you look at the inner world of most managers and leaders, you'll see a lot of burnout and a lot of overwhelm, we believe that the only way that we're going to survive.</p><p>And get promoted is by doing it ourselves, getting it done, making sure like we're a constant, this constant state of making sure polishing, finishing all of that kind of stuff, because we were afraid. And as a parallel to that, we don't know how to do it any other way. So what would be the alternative? I don't do that.</p><p>If I let go. I know it's going to happen. It's going to be a disaster. This person's going to be sloppy. This person's going to be late. This person's going to be blah, blah, blah. This person's going to do an okay job, but I'm going to have to redo it. Anyway, we have this whole sort of in the legal world, we'd say they say the parade of horribles, right? This parade of horribles that goes through our mind of all the things that are going to happen if we genuinely truly delegate. So we don't do it because we don't have an alternative for how would I do that in a way that doesn't necessarily guarantee me that doesn't happen, but reduces the risk. Substantially. And without that, I'm not going to delegate. </p><p> And that's what the accountability dial in. A lot of the other tools in the book are for how do we mitigate the risks? How do we create moments where we can delegate and give the people feedback in real time of what happens when we do, what did they get, right?</p><p>What did they get wrong? How do they improve so that we can improve our own abilities to delegate and the flexibility in our system.</p><h2 id="2ss3j">Delegating under uncertainty with remote accountability</h2><p>Luke: So the difficult thing to delegate is the thing that's big and hairy and uncertain and unknown, which especially nowadays there's a lot of that. Yes.</p><p>There's a lot of that. </p><p> How do you start? Do you need to break it down into specific tasks? Do you need people to do it for you suggest how they would do it? </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: I'll give you one example. One example. A lot of managers would benefit from thinking a little bit more like a mentor apprentice type of relationship.</p><p> I think people do this in engineering to some degree. If I want someone on my team to be able to do something well, me telling them to do it well, isn't going to work most of the time, me explaining to them what looks like it might have a little bit of effect, but nothing is going to have the same effect as me showing them how I do it. Step-by-step. What are the micro moments? What are the questions that I'm asking of myself as I'm going through a piece of work? Because they don't know what those questions are. </p><p>So as a leader, who's who grows through the ranks, who gets promoted, what people don't understand is the reason why you're promoted.</p><p>Nobody ever talks about this. The reason why you're promoted is because you've demonstrated to somebody that you understand, context, it's that simple. You understand the context of the work. And so they're willing to give you more of it because you understand the little bit of the why and you show up to it the right way.</p><p>But then we bring it up. People will keep a team of people around us and we don't delegate. We delegate the work, but we forget to delegate the context. And so the way to delegate the context is to go. </p><p>So let's use sales for example. So if I, rather than me telling a sales person a hundred times how to do a good sales call, I want to go through one minute. Of a sales call that I did and stop the tape a hundred times and say, okay, right there. Why do you think I asked that question? Oh shit. I don't know. And then I want to get them thinking about why do I do the things that I do relative to this really important task they're going to learn way faster and what managers think that is.</p><p>So they say, Oh, I don't have time to do that. And it's nuts because you spent so much time now managing around the absence of that. So if you would just say, Hey, look, I'm going to spend five minutes a day this week in a spirit of learning where I'm going to sit down with one person on my team on Monday, and for five minutes, I'm going to really teach them how to do something that I know how to do that.</p><p>I suspect they don't know how to do, or they don't know how to do it the way I know how to do it. That's how you start to break it down there. There are other things we could talk about as well. But what I've seen over and over again, </p><p>I'll give you another related example where a manager and she's a very senior leader, but in a very large company and she's struggling with delegation. And she said I keep going to these meetings. I keep going to these regional meetings because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The why I'm afraid something bad will happen, but whatever. And I said, okay, great. So I said, Catherine, what are the questions that you ask yourself? As you're sitting in on those meetings and she thought, I don't know, I just do. I just do it. Okay. I bet if you take, let's take five minutes right now and I want you to write down. What are the five most important questions that you're asking yourself, as you're listening to this other team share this information. She did it in 30 seconds. once I asked her the question, she knew exactly what the things were and I said, okay, great. Now write that in an email and send that to your direct reports and say, Hey, here are the questions that I ask myself. When I go to these meetings, these are the questions that I want you to ask with whatever other questions you think are important. I'm not going to those meetings anymore. And that's what she did.</p><p>And she hasn't been, since it's been six months, she doesn't go to those meetings anymore because she'd got it out of her head, she got the context out of her head onto a piece of paper, into ball, an email, and sent it to the people, explained why those things were important. And then let them be smart.</p><p>Let them go too. And then they made it better. Because there's a bunch of questions she wasn't thinking of. Cause she's operating at a different level. Hope that's helpful. </p><h2 id="413jp">Why context matters when holding remote teams accountable</h2><p>Luke: Let's go into context a little more because this is something that I've been thinking about lately. It's this thing that obviously is there but what is it exactly? And then an organization, for example. </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: Think about it this way. One of the things that leaders often struggle with myself included all leaders struggle with this in different ways is that we say a thing. And we don't understand why our team, even though we said the thing, and maybe we even said the thing three times, we don't understand why our team doesn't understand the thing that we said in the way that we set it. We don't understand it. It's reasonable. Why we don't understand it. And the reason why is they lack context. So what does that mean? They weren't in. The 50 meetings prior to that moment where people hashed out all the nuances and debated the ideas . They didn't marinate with that content. They didn't work on them in all of these passive ways, over a period of time. Leading up to that moment when we said the thing, we've all of this context for what's behind it and why it matters and how it's different than this other thing that we could have said, but we didn't say how, why it's white has to happen on this timescale. And, but we spent a bunch of time arriving at that statement and then we make that statement and we think someone else, another human being is going to understand it in the way we understand it. It's crazy. </p><p> So it doesn't work. So that's one form of all of the nuance, all the debate, all the critical thinking or lack of critical thinking, all the pressure, all the stress, all the emotion.</p><p>Maybe there was a heated conversation about why that was so important. And then somebody shows up on a team, a couple layers in the organization and says, Hey everybody, we're doing this now. And everybody's what are you talking about? I thought, why is that important? Like yesterday you said this was important and all the context got lost in that conversation, right? All the, why all the, why does it matter? Who does it matter to? Why does it matter more than this other thing? All of that stuff gets lost and then we wonder why doesn't the team perform at a really high level? </p><h2 id="bf3vq">How to delegate with context to new employees</h2><p>Luke: In the context of people, especially junior people who are very good, who joined and then I want them to be more involved for example. And then if you give them too much context there. Practically doing my job. Which obviously isn't good for them or good for me either in terms of it's a waste of their time. And yeah. On the other hand, I want them to have enough context so that they bring their full selves to the work. So it isn't this kind of thing where I just go and tell them what to do and give them to do this. How do you give enough context without overwhelming people to, to basically go and do their job? </p><p> Jonathan Raymond: for me, it's a line item that should be in your one-on-ones that's sometimes spoken about, and sometimes is it depending upon the week or the month? click on that a little bit? Exactly. As you said too much context, not helpful. It can be debilitating, not useful to little context. So it should be a conversation. It should be, from the moment somebody is like, starting with me, so I have a new guy on my team, but I'm going through this right now. And we're trying to figure out that balance of like how much context is enough, how much is debilitating, where he's swimming and how much of it is not enough.</p><p>And so we talk about that, right? So rather than me. Trying to figure out exactly how much context he needs. It's a regular conversation or a one-on-one. It was like, Hey, do you feel like you have enough context for this? Some things he surprised me. He was like, Oh yeah, I totally get it. I talked with Sarah and blah, blah, blah. I totally get it. And other things he's I don't really know. Can you say a little bit more? And so that's a feature. A line item in our one-on-ones is context maintenance, so to speak where we're in conversation about that. And I'm going to give him feedback, which you with accountability dial, which maybe we'll talk about in a couple of minutes, I'm going to get some feedback.</p><p>When I see him operating either without enough context or being debilitated by too much context. And that's the purpose of the accountability dial. And the feedback methodology is to be able to say, this thing right now. I feel like we're spinning our wheels on the strategy piece of it.</p><p>And I want us to live in a tighter box there. So can you think of about that and how would we move that forward? If we just said Hey, we're going to, we're going to lock in. This is what we know. We know that it's imperfect, but this is what we know. How do we move it forward over the next. 30 days, 60 days.</p><p>So I'm going to give my feedback at that level as well, so that he can understand, from my perspective, is he operating at the right level of context? Some people use like the right altitude. Is he doing the work with the right level of altitude? So I think it's an ongoing conversation.</p><p>And people will tell you, right? They will, if you do a survey and they say I don't like, if you do a survey and whatever tool you use and people say, I don't understand my job. I don't understand what I do here. It's the most frustrating thing for like HR leaders and CEOs. How do people not understand?</p><p>Like we tell them we, what we do, all these things right. Because they're lacking context, right? And so they need managers to help them understand why their role matters. And what's important about it. And also to remove things that are not important. That's the fatal flaw of most managers and leaders. They don't declutter the inboxes of their teams in an effective way. And so people are like you never took those other things away. So I guess I have 27 priorities. Yeah. I'll try to work on all of them, yeah. Yeah. </p><h2 id="bfle1">What is the accountability dial?</h2><p>Luke: So accountability, dials. What is it? </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: I realized painfully not only as a CEO, but as a manager, when I was giving feedback that I thought was reasonable and was reasonably toned and was reasonably challenging. I thought that the way that I was doing that was okay. And I realized this is, back in that same period, seven, eight years ago, that what I thought was reasonable and properly toned and reasonably challenging was way too heavy handed was way too intense, was bringing way too much authority for people to be able to hear.</p><p>And so as a result, what I was getting was defensiveness, victimhood, people blaming other people blaming other systems, people shutting down and I didn't understand. I cried. I was like how is this happening? Like, all I said was blank. And what I didn't realize was that the binary nature of my position in the organization and I can be an intense guy, but it wasn't just that the combination of my position and my own personal intensity was causing people to shut down.</p><p>So I decided to create a better way for myself. Refounded and exist. The book didn't exist. I was just working as a leader in the team, senior manager, but it was working in it on a bigger team. And I started to slow down and I said, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bite-size this.</p><p>Instead of giving my feedback, I'm gonna break it down into five components and see what that does. And what ended up being the accountability dollars. These five stages mentioned invitation conversation, boundaries, and limit, which we talk about extensively. And we'll share some links for some people to check out some things about this is I said, okay, I'm just going to start with a mention and see what happens.</p><p>I'm just going to say to the effect of, Hey, I noticed in this morning, stand-up I noticed this, I don't know what to make of it, but I noticed it. And then I'm just gonna shut up. And I wasn't going to make a theory or maybe I had a theory, but it wasn't going to out my theory or a conclusion or make a judgment or dictate an action.</p><p>I wasn't gonna do any of those things. And what I found was by just starting with dimension, I started to spark self-reflection. I started to spark curiosity in people. I started to spark people's taking on the thing that I saw as their own. And taking it from me, which is what I wanted because I saw something, I didn't know what to make of it.</p><p>I just knew it wasn't good, but I don't have the context that they have about the customer ticket or the product sprint. I didn't have that context. I just knew something was off. And so what evolved from that was these five stages where the mention is just the simple Hey, I noticed this.</p><p>I'm not making grand conclusion, tell me what you think of this. And that was the key that unlocked it. And then we went to the invitation, which was, Hey, I noticed a couple of things. I noticed the pattern. I don't, I have a theory about why that's the case, but I'm not sure that it's being addressed in a compelling enough way.</p><p>And then we went to the conversation to talk about the impact that it was having. And then we went to the boundary to talk about what happens if this doesn't get fixed? And then we went to the limit when we said, okay we're, we've done all the coaching that we can do. And what I found was when I started to do this for myself, and then I started to teach people this, 70 years ago that it unlocked something really magical on a team where people felt like they had space to work on themselves without feeling undue pressure.</p><p>Are feeling under the gun to make the dramatic behavioral change because people are not capable of making dramatic behavioral change in short periods of time. It doesn't work that way. Behavioral change takes time. </p><p>So the feedback cycle, the accountant ability to doll is honoring the true nature of behavioral change is we need information. We need information that comes from a place of curiosity. We need pressure. We need someone who keeps their attention on the thing that they want us to change. Doesn't just go away. It doesn't say it once and then forget about it forever. Every teenager knows how to work with their parents, right? If you say the thing once, and then you forget about it, they learn. Okay. All I have to do is duck. For a minute, the storm will pass. I don't have to change. So there's a bunch of ingredients for how to facilitate behavioral change that we've honored with the accountability doll. And that's the primary tool that we teach, not just for managers with their direct reports, but a lot of the times with peer-to-peer co managers, co-leaders, co executives in an organization.</p><p>And we also teach it for people how to give feedback up. So it's a framework for how to start and maintain. A conversation in a way that doesn't create defensiveness and people shutting down and people feeling like you don't understand, why is that coming out of left field? Because it's has consistency.</p><p>It has care. </p><p>Luke: Yeah, I think that it helped me the most was that it allowed me to say things that I was noticing how without feeling like I'm going to be cutting someone cutting out under the legs or something. </p><p>Yes, exactly. </p><p>In my particular case, I had, certain situations that I wanted to do something about it, but at the same time, I didn't really have a good structure. This way of looking at it from the point of view of a coaching conversation helped a lot, I think in terms of being able to actually raise issues, but in a way that was exploratory and collaborative. </p><h2 id="bt5ta">How to delegate with undermining people</h2><p>Jonathan Raymond: There's something you said just before, which, which is I can't impress upon enough. It's so important is that we, what we don't realize is how easy it is to undermine people. It's so easy to undermine and disempower and cut the legs out from somebody. And it's so difficult to recover. You've done that. And that's it. There's one thing that people get from the book is how exactly what you described.</p><p>How do I say what I see? How do I talk about what I see in a way that doesn't do that? Or at least minimizes the likelihood. </p><p>If you've got somebody on your team who's just gets triggered at anything and you'd be like, there's nothing you can do. You're gonna have to deal with that in another way.</p><p>But how do we operate as leaders and managers, especially because people have so much going on outside of work, our world is so screwed up. And so many ways there's some, depending upon where you live, the version of the screwed up is different. But people have a lot going on. And it's so easy even before all of that to undermine and disempower people.</p><p>So we need a way to talk about what's real, to be honest, to be truthful, but in a way that doesn't undermine people and take the legs out from them before they've had an opportunity to get better. </p><h2 id="cbu4l">Remote accountability when letting someone go</h2><p>Luke: We talked about the beginning of the noticing and the deepening what about when you're getting towards the end, when you do realize someone just isn't interested or capable to do what you want or what the organization needs? How does this mindset help them? And you?</p><p>Jonathan Raymond: So a couple of things with her, which I found really interesting what the what the data has shown over time is that when you use the accountability dial, and again, the mindset that we talked about at the beginning, not the accountability dollar as a weapon, but as a coaching tool, When you do that, you will find that you have far less of a need to have those difficult boundary termination conversations.</p><p>Because one of two things will happen. People will receive the feedback earlier and make the changes that you want, or they will opt out. And this has organizations that are using the accountability, though. What happens is that people, when they're getting feedback, Where they can't hide. Where, how they're behaving, how they're showing up.</p><p>They're not being collaborative. They're not doing the things that they said they were going to do when they start to get feedback about that. People go, you know what? I don't want to be here anymore. I don't like, that's not a good feeling right now. Some people will keep going, right? Because some people will push through for one reason or another.</p><p>But so those two things that knocks a lot of people off, some people will change. That's the hide, the ideal outcome. And some people will leave. And then you have this third group, of people who won't change or won't change fast enough or can't right. And maybe that's just, it's just not, they don't, there's a capability issue.</p><p>There's just not, there's a talent gap. That's fine. It happens. Is there, it starts with framing that up to be able to, and this is a question that I will often ask, I'll say, okay, give me a behavior. I'll ask you. So Luke. Give me a behavior. It doesn't have to be a current person on your team, but someone in the past that was behaving in a way or showing up in a way that wasn't what you needed from them at the time.</p><p>What were they doing that wasn't good or effective or good enough? What was the behavior? </p><p>Sure. So it was a developer who would finish a piece of work and give it directly to the quality assurance team without checking that what you just did actually works. </p><p>Okay, great. So I'm going to give this person the ability to stay on your team, doing exactly that thing.</p><p>Not following the process that you need handing it directly over instead of that intermediary step. And they're going to do it exactly that way for the next 10 years and stay on your team. How do you feel about that? Not great. How about five years and and more importantly, not just me. I think other people that we're both working with also so five years you want to keep me for five years.</p><p>There was a pattern. I was escalating it and yeah. At a certain point I realized that this, yeah this isn't working. </p><p>So what, where we get to without exercises, we should note in larger organizations, especially, but even in smaller ones, sometimes what I'm about to describe isn't as clean a process.</p><p>Like you, you have HR, there's a lot of messiness to this, but to frame up that conversation, and what I've found is that we, the behavior like the one that you were describing, <strong>there's a timeline that you have in your head, by which that behavior needs to change. And it is almost never longer than 90 days.</strong></p><p>It's not a day. There's some willingness. Hey, if I saw some progress, if I saw some willingness, if I saw a little bit of movement, I would be willing to let this play out for a little bit longer. So it's not a day, but it's not 90 days. And somewhere in there is your boundary in your head of how much longer you're willing to deal with this.</p><h3 id="cp2dh">Remote accountability and the invisible 90 day boundary</h3><p> In its current state, the only problem is we haven't told the person that. So the boundary, which is stage four in the accountability dial is to have that conversation. Hey, so we've been, and this is the key we've I've made some mentions about it. We've been in this conversation. We've been talking about the impact, you've been, doing your part to try to work on this a little bit, but for whatever reason where I think we are is it's not changing or it's not changing enough or fast enough, That's how I'm seeing it.</p><p>And I want to talk about what are we going to do about that right now that might happen in 90 days for a certain type of behavior? Probably not. Most of the time it should happen pretty soon, right? Like within a couple of weeks or 30 days, or we can't let a lot of time go by before we have that, what the conversation is and then the boundary.</p><p>And once, once you've used the first steps of the accountability dial and you're coming from from a coaching mindset, that's why I'm being a bit of a broken record. What you'll find is that conversation's a lot easier to have. And then you're in this, you're in a room, maybe it's a zoom room, but you're in a room with a person and you say, Hey, here's how I'm seeing it.</p><p>How are you seeing it? Oh, and then what you will get is people feel like, yeah, I know what you mean. I'm really struggling because of these, in these things. And I've really tried and, whatever it's okay. So let's put a frame around this. What would a boundary look like? What would a consequence look like for you to, that would help you.</p><h2 id="7u616">Inverting responsibility on the employee </h2><p>Make this change. I get that. It's hard. I get that you've been operating a certain way for your whole career or one year or whatever. I get that the last manager didn't make a big issue of this. And I get all of those things. What's an agreement that you and I can make so that you can change this behavior in a way that's positive.</p><p>That feels like a meaningful change for you. And that I also get what I need from your performance. What would that look like? Can you take, can you, my direct report, I'd love for you to sleep on that. Let's stop her one-on-one or let's finish our one-on-one today. We'll talk about some other stuff and let's revisit that next week.</p><p>And I'd love for you to do some thinking. I don't want to be the one to say this and this doesn't happen then blah, blah, blah. That's not how I want to lead this team. I would rather you come and say, Hey, I get it, Luke, I get it, Jonathan. I understand why you're frustrated. I understand what the problem is.</p><p>Here's my plan for how I'm going to change it. What do you think? That's the outcome that we want, right? We want them to author like people, you hear people say smart people say the employee should offer the one-on-one. Great. How often does that actually happen? Very rarely, except in the supremely motivated person.</p><p>So this is one of the ways that you get the, you have to get your, the people on your team to be offering their own destiny by asking them questions. Hey, rather than me come up with a plan how about you come up with a plan. I'll do this. I'll give you feedback. I'll we'll talk about it. It's not, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you come back with the first draft.</p><p>That's what the boundary conversation should be like.</p><h2 id="7ic6m">Remote accountability under lockdown</h2><p> Luke: Yeah, this tool was super useful in the context of remote teams. I'm wondering how. You, your clients, people around you, how they fared now that everything has moved to remote only with the benefit of these tools or as or if they're learning them, let's say during the lockdown period, what they're getting out of it.</p><p>Jonathan Raymond: I've noticed two primary themes that have emerged. So when we used to do everything in person I'm almost everything in person. And then when COVID hit and, whatever it was, the last February. March. And we sent him, I was like, okay what's the, what are we going to do now?</p><p> We shifted the entire business to online as we had to. What I've found was two things happened at the same time was managers and leaders who were already under enormous pressure already under enormous strain that went like TEDx. Where the level of burden, emotional and mental space that managers and leaders were being asked to hold TEDx off the charts.</p><p>And now we don't have the social benefits of physical space from that. A lot of teams were remote already, but for teams that were in person that had gone through remote, it was really difficult. The first theme was things got way harder.</p><p>And the other thing that I found was. People almost defaulted into becoming more of a coach out of necessity was they ended up in so many more conversations that were the types of conversations that I was trying to get them to have in 2018 and 2019. But in 2020, they started doing it out of necessity and they started, ended up doing a little bit of therapy, right? A little bit of life coaching, a little bit of. Ministry in some is they ended up doing a lot of the things that people like me have been telling people that they needed to do for a long time. People started doing this and they started using the accountability dial to frame and create boundaries and structure around that conversation.</p><p>Because once you open that door, it's really easy to go too far. It's really easy to find yourself making excuses for people being too understanding, being too empathic. And then it comes back on you because you're not delivering the results that you need to deliver as an editor. So that was so things got way harder.</p><p>The team one and the accountability dial really helped people create boundaries around those conversations. I'm a coach to my that's my job. My job is to facilitate the growth of my team. But it's not my job to be their therapist. It's not my job to be their marriage counselor. It's not my job to be their relocation specialist. Those are not my jobs, but I need a way to talk about that. That doesn't undermine the good relationships stuff that I'm building. </p><p>Luke: Where can people find out more? </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: We've got some links. I'm assuming it'll be refound.com/launch tomorrow. If it's not, we'll fix it in the show notes. I'm sure. </p><p>More like <a href="https://www.refound.com/managingremoteteams">refound.com/managingremoteteams</a>. </p><p>Jonathan Raymond: That has a video course on the accountability dial that people can check out. A link to good authority, which you can get everywhere. Of course, Amazon, but other places too. And a one-on-one meeting guide, we've got up there on the page, a ways to get in touch with us. So there's a bunch of free stuff. There's some other stuff in there too for people to check it out and learn more about this approach. </p><p>Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you very much.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-18918149801030162012021-05-03T02:00:00.001-07:002021-05-03T02:00:29.291-07:00How to setup your remote team for success<p>My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.alignremotely.com/">Align Remotely</a>. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Joe Houghton. Joe has seen the long and the short of it with respect to remote work, and now teaches and consults on the topic of how to setup your remote team. </p><p>Upon listening, You will learn:</p><ul><li>Why it's easy to assume everyone has the same setup, even that's rarely true</li><li>Useful kit and tips on optimizing your WFH setup as a manager-somewhat back to basics but still practical as I picked up a thing or two</li><li>how to be more intentional about casual interactions</li><li>how to relax your brain in 2 minutes, if you are constantly in front of a screen</li><li>how to combat team member loneliness, a big challenge nowadays especially for extroverts who like being in the office</li><li>how to communicate standards of performance when everyone is remote</li></ul><h2 id="9h649">About Joe Houghton</h2><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g7redb_774343122ad85ce7424f05693daee32d_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g7redb_774343122ad85ce7424f05693daee32d_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g7redb_774343122ad85ce7424f05693daee32d_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g7redb_774343122ad85ce7424f05693daee32d_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g7redb_774343122ad85ce7424f05693daee32d_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Joe is a professor at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business and a management consultant and coach with a 20-year career in international business with multi-national companies running IT and Business teams developing</p><ul><li>remote salesforce automation software,</li><li>then telemetry systems and</li><li>later managing teams all across the globe.</li></ul><p>By the early 2000's he was a global manager with General Electric, before moving into his current academic career following an Executive MBA at Ireland's top business school. In 2005 he co-created and now directs the Master's in Project Management at University College Dublin Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Joe teaches and advises on remote team setup and learning to businesses, and charities via Houghton Consulting.</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/joehoughton/">Joe Houghton on LinkedIn </a></li><li><a href="http://www.houghton.consulting/">Houghton consulting website</a> </li></ul><h2 id="22isn">Transcript</h2><p><strong>Joe Houhgton, welcome to the podcast.</strong></p><p>Thanks very much. Thanks for me. Yeah.</p><p><strong>So can you say a few words about how you got into the topic of remote and helping people adapt to remote work?</strong></p><p>Yeah. I've been using remote for 15, 20 years now, I do management consulting. I'm a professor at the business school in Dublin where I teach business. And one of the courses that I teach is remote working and managing virtual and distributed teams. I've done many. Contracts and stuff where I'm running teams remotely and I had 20 years in big business up until about 2000 where I ran multinational teams for large corporations in to include GE.</p><p>So I've got a lot of experience of working out of a laptop and out of a suitcase and also managing and interacting with teams. Yeah, all over the world.</p><p><strong>So how have things changed relative to the nineties? It would seem a lot of technology would have shifted since then and how have people's attitudes towards it change?</strong></p><p>The technology has become more accessible. If you cast your mind back to the nineties, that's 30 years now, isn't it? It's scary. We didn't have laptops like we do now. They were big luggable if you had one at all, we didn't have tablets. We didn't have mobile phones and stuff like that. Whereas these days we just don't even think about this stuff. We have a screen in our hand or to our hands, almost all the time. We had very early. Connections very slow connections. All that stuff has improved for a lot of people, but not for everybody.</p><p>I'm in Dublin, in Ireland. In, in main Dublin, you've probably got pretty good internet. You go outside of Dublin and head West, even in Ireland. And you've got people living 30 miles away from me who have a calling. Connections. And I finding it very difficult to work from home. So even though perhaps the accessibility to the technology has improved over the last 20, 30 years, it's by no means for everyone. And it's by no means ubiquitous even today. Perhaps styling we'll sort it out.</p><h3 id="aoluo">Setup for remote team performance</h3><p><strong>From what I remember when working in the nineties, I think most of it was email-based in terms of communication, out of necessity between offices. So it still was in the office, with much higher bandwidth, I think certain things become possible, which weren't before.</strong></p><p>Indeed. I remember being in charge of teams, writing kind of Salesforce, automation, software, early distributed databases working with things like Lotus notes. Early, early kind of systems to, to share sales information or marketing information across large sales forces, for instance.</p><p>But we were hugely constrained by bandwidth and very often, People would have to leave their computer plugged in overnight for that big presentation to download at 56 K or whatever it was that we were using at the time. So yeah, it's gotten a lot easier with the speed increases.</p><h3 id="4mf26">Setup for remote team communication</h3><p><strong>So let's go here. You help a lot of people. Adapts to remote working individually. What's the most common thing that you see that they believe that's true about remote working, but actually isn't, especially when they're first getting started.</strong></p><p>Communication fundamentally is the thing that drives the way we do business together.</p><p>Whether you're in person or whether you're working on the end of a zoom call or a WebEx or teams call or whatever the fundamentals around communication don't change, but they just get more difficult. And I think people who are forced into or find themselves having to work remotely, underestimate the challenges around communication that not being in-person.</p><p>Boring. And particularly for managers. If you're responsible for managing teams or coordinating projects, that kind of stuff, it can be very easy to overlook the added managerial load and current in terms of time, in terms of being proactive, in terms of ensuring things that you've got.</p><p>One big problem that I see a lot of people do is that they assume that because they've got a good connection and they've got the right care to, and they've got a fast laptop and everything that everybody else in the team has to. And almost always, that's not the case, particularly you've got a global team and you've got people in different parts of the world. So access to bandwidth will be different. People will have different types of kit. People will be running different versions of the software and they're not all upon same space.</p><p>So what you have to do is you have to be much more intentional. You have to do things like an equipment audit. You have to do a skills audit. You have to find the lowest common denominator between all your people, wherever they are, and play to that because you can't play to the highest common denominator.</p><p>You can't assume everybody can download stuff on 5g within 10 seconds. If somebody is on a really slow dial-up connection and some people still are.</p><p><strong>Can you unpack communication a little bit more? Because that's a previous guest has pointed out that within communication skills, you've got everything to what, a nurse might mean when dealing with a patient to, making a presentation in front of 75 people online while sitting at McDonald's like I did in the past. What do you mean by communication?</strong></p><p>The most important part of communication is actually seeing each other as people and not as cogs in a machine. It's very easy in business, particularly when you're remote to go to task based interactions immediately. .</p><p>What that loses is the five minutes before the meeting that you would normally have had in the office where you meet around the coffee machine. Yeah, all the water cooler and you're just having that catch-up chat and you're asking about the kids and how your weekend went and all that kind of stuff. But when we get onto zoom, we don't tend to do that. We don't tend to do that chit chat. It's two o'clock. Let's start the meeting first agenda point bang.</p><p>We don't know whether you're having a bad day. We don't know whether something's happened at home or whatever, and because we're all remote because we're not physically connected. I've not had time to see your body language before the meeting. I've not had time to see that you're down the line and you've put your game face on and you've jumped in and we missed that perhaps.</p><p>That's the first bit of communication is just be aware of each other as people and know that everybody's going through a hard time, because I don't think anybody isn't going through a hard time at the moment. And I don't care whether that's the president of the company. Or whether that's, some mid-level manager or whether that's somebody further down the food chain, everybody's going through problems. So we've got to treat each other kind of like human beings.</p><p>Then there's the stuff that you, you mentioned, that they're doing the presentation from the middle of McDonald's. You've got to adjust your delivery. To the small screen, talking to camera is really difficult if you're not used to doing it, just getting used to talking, into a screen and into a camera is very difficult for people.</p><h3 id="fqo7k">Physical setup for remote team work</h3><p>For instance, just the physical setup of your office. The best thing I bought last year was a $15 laptop stand. This laptop stand allows you to put a laptop up instead of sitting flat on the desk. It allows you to put it up at an angle which eases the top, where the <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcam </a>is to Island.</p><p>Just that completely transform how you come across on screen. Yeah, so because my camera's at eye level, if you look behind me, all the verticals are vertical. And the horizontals are horizontal and it doesn't look like the camera's looking at my nose or whatever, we're at the right angle. And there's no kind of cognitive dissonance in terms of what's in the background.</p><p>So you got to think about how you're coming across. I've got you on a second screen behind my laptop. Okay. And I'm talking to you to, to your image on the screen and I've got you right next to the <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcam</a>. So it looks like. I'm looking straight at you because you were right next to the <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcam</a>. So little things like this can actually cause quite a lot of difference on how you come across in how you're perceived by the other people in the meeting, by the people that you're trying to communicate with.</p><p>And that you're also trying to listen to them and you're trying to communicate to them. But if they, let me move my eyes down to the bottom of my screen. Now, if I carry on talking now, It's a completely different beast. Isn't it? In terms of the communication. Cause I'm not looking at you. I'm my eyes are down.</p><p>Whereas when I come back up and I'm looking at you again, we've got that connection. So there's a bit of training for people I think required for a lot of people. Who've moved online to just be aware of this stuff, get some decent lights, have some lighting from the front because so many people will sit themselves with a window behind them.</p><p>No lighting, it looks like that old queen video, the fishermen video where, you know, all the lighting in the wrong place and everybody's eyes look dark and horrible and all the rest of it. So coming across well on screen is something that doesn't just happen. You need to actually work at that.</p><p>And I think you need to help your people. Do that. I spend a lot of time with my university students coaching them on this kind of stuff, because at the end of that course, they're going through a job. And at the moment, all those interviews are going to be over zoom or they're going to be able to teams.</p><p>So they better be able to come over well within that first five minutes, because you only get that one chance to make that impression.</p><h2 id="d42io">Kit suggestions for remote team setups</h2><p><strong>Yeah, absolutely. I guess the good news is that these are mostly things that you do once and then take advantage of it.</strong></p><p>Yeah. Yeah. You only have to buy what and you only have, but you probably do need to buy a little bit of kit.</p><p>If you're going to be working remotely, don't just assume that the laptop <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcams</a> going to be good enough because they're, most of them are not. Most of them pretty awful. You need to maybe invest 5,000 books in a decent <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcam</a>. You need to buy a couple of lights. Yeah. And these ring lights that you see advertised now, they're great.</p><p>One or two of those, either side of you just giving you a bit of lighting, stuff like that can make a huge difference. And as I say, a laptop stand. As well, because that makes a huge difference. So an external keyboard so that you can be a little bit further back and a <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMic">decent microphone</a>. Yeah.</p><p>The most important thing about video is the audio. You know that you run a podcast, but most people don't get that. they don't even think about it. So buy yourself a<a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMic"> little USB mic</a>. It will. So below triple the quality of your audio. And again, that means that you come over more clearly, that what you've got to say is heard better and people will, take you on more credibly if they can hear you well.</p><p>And if you come over well,</p><p><strong>Yeah. And one of the, one of the things that came across sorry the that I found super helpful as a one of these<a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/DockingStation"> docking station </a>things too. Cause then you could hook up <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMonitor">multiple screens</a> and see more at once, that's another piece of gear.</strong></p><p>And some research done on the fact that, you tend to be more productive as a remote work. If you have a second screen that you can use, you've got more real estate, you can have more windows open at the same time. You've not got that switching cost of switching between applications on one small screen. So that's pretty, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, cheap these days. So you don't have to to splurge out a lot. A little trick there , black Friday last year I went online and enriched Mr. Bezos a little bit more. But I spent, I think 250 $300 on a <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/TVasMonitor">42 inch 4k TV</a>. Which is now mounted on the kitchen wall I'm very often down on the kitchen table, but I have that second screen.</p><p>Now I have a t<a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/TVasMonitor">wo inch 4k TV </a>on the world. Now the children still don't know that's a TV. We will <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMonitor">monitor </a>HDMI cable into the laptop. Good to go. Yeah. And that was $250-$300. So yeah, I'm not paying through the nose for a super-duper computer <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMonitor">monitor</a>. The high-def TVs are great now.</p><p><strong>So going back to communication, so one is </strong>“<strong>Treat people like people when you're connecting remotely</strong>”<strong>. Two is get decent gears so that you aren't facing kind of difficulties getting the message across. Is there anything else in particular in terms of communication that on a kind of day to day operational basis, particularly when you're with a team of people that comes to mind?</strong></p><p>You've got to be more intentional if you're running a team or even if you're part of a team because you don't have the casual interactions.</p><p>Now there's this technology that can help these days, with Slack, we've got things like, all this presence technology that lets you know, that the other guys in the team are wrong. If you like, they've got the little green dot next to that thing, and you can ping it quick texts, or you can mention them and exchange information.</p><p>So set up something that works. And it might be WhatsApp. It might be Slack. It can be, any of these different tools, but set something up that allows multiple channels of communication. Because for most people sending a zoom link and everybody connecting at a particular time. And so it's easy now.</p><p>It's very easy to do, but it's a hoop to jump through. And what you need to do is you need to break down as many barriers to. They the general chit chat, interactive type communication as you can. So the more ways you can set people up to, to be able to interact easily the better.</p><p>I've heard of some teams now. Where, they all agree. They're all working from home between certain hours or whatever. And they'd just say we'll just open up a Google meet or we'll open up a zoom call or whatever, and we'll all just be on. And if you no in the room, you're not in the room, doesn't work.</p><p>Don't worry about it. But it just means we can all have seen each other in the screen and we can chat to each other if we need to unmute ourselves. If we can't. And that kind of stuff works quite well. Now, not everybody likes that. And you've got to respect people's home spaces and , it doesn't always work, but that kind of stuff can be quite useful.</p><h3 id="eloip">Meeting setup and how to plan them beforehand</h3><p><strong>Do you have any tips on organizing meetings?</strong></p><p>Another little tip that I've used is. Are you finding at the moment that some days your kind of schedule is blocked out hour by hour and you get to the end of one meeting and it's 10 o'clock and you're straight onto another meeting at 11 o'clock and then another one at 12.</p><p>O'clock another estimate. A little trick that I've started to use with some of my teams is we always stop meetings at tend to. Yeah, we start meetings on the hour and we stop meetings at tend to the hour. So we never run up to the hour that just gives everybody 10 minutes of downtime because most people don't do that.</p><p>Maybe the next meeting that they're going to be, it probably starts on the hour because most meetings tend to stuff on the hour or the half hour don't they know. And when I have a staff meeting at 17 minutes past Just think about building in those little chunks of downtime in the day.</p><p>When I schedule a meeting, we never run a meeting more than 50 minutes without a break. So if we're running, say a two hour meeting, the tend to is a break time now, so tend to up to the hour, right? Go outside, walk around.</p><p>There's a little exercise that, that I saw out of Stanford university a few months ago. And it's really simple. You just hold your finger up in front of your face. Like this. Look at something 30 yards away and look at your finger and do that five or 10 times quickly. It forces your eye muscles to move in and out. And it gets you away from that. What, one meter away from the <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedWebcam">webcam </a>that you've, your eyes have been fixed to for the last 20 minutes, half an hour, 45 minutes or whatever.</p><p>And it's incredible how that actually just relaxes your head. During a break. So I put that in, when the coffee cup comes up from break or whatever, I just go and do the, I exercise as well, walk outside for a minute little things, but these things make a difference.</p><p>And then if you can schedule a few minutes at the beginning of the meeting before you start the meeting, just to do catch up. Just to say to her, Hey, how is everything, how are you doing? Yeah. And tell everybody we're going to spend the first 10 minutes of each meeting, just doing catch up, just bring you a cup of tea or your cup of coffee or whatever it is. And we'll just tell each other how things are going. No, no work discussion. That's for a little while longer you got to build this stuff in now. Cause it does happen and you have to be much more intentional. With your remote teams and your remote people for this stuff.</p><p><strong>So speaking of promote teams, you were saying that you teach about management and virtual team management. From a teamwork perspective, what are the differences between in-person versus remote? Let's say in the literature and the academic literature.</strong></p><p>It's funny. The academic literature doesn't specifically differentiate a lot of the team bonding stuff and a lot of the tin communication stuff is the same.</p><p>It's just more difficult. Okay. The only kind of classic definitions of a virtual team are that you are separated by distance and you're communicating electronically. And that's it, so that's most of us, most of the time, these days, isn't it. But. It's the fact that there's more hoops to jump through and the communication isn't quite as effective.</p><p>On a zoom call, as it is in-person because you do lose the body language. You do lose the verbal cues that you just pick up better. Somehow when that person's in the room and you're listening to them, even though our cameras are pretty good these days, the <a href="http://recommendedbyluke.com/RecommendedMic">microphones </a>and the speakers are pretty good.</p><p>You don't actually get quite the same amount of information back. So you've got to be more intentional. You've got to listen harder. Don't always feel you've got to come back with an answer when people are talking sometimes just. You don't have to come back with an answer. You don't have to give them anything, but you just have to let them share. And really think about what they're saying and then reflect back. What you've just heard. This is a really effective technique in remote working.</p><p>Okay. So you said something and I say okay. Can I just tell you what I think you just said and then you tell them back in your own words. And that's called reflection, but what it does is it .Confirms understanding. Cause they're hearing back. What you thought you'd heard. There's now a confirmation that what they just told you was heard and understood.</p><p>Now that's really important because remote workers very often feel isolated. They very often feel unheard. They very often feel unseen. Feeling positively heard is a really important skill for everybody who is working remotely to develop.</p><p>It keeps people motivated and it keeps people feeling that they're part of the team rather than just this person, out wherever they are in the world that we're just using to get a job done.</p><p><strong>Is there anything that you see that related to working from home that people should start doing that they aren't, or that they aren't doing enough.</strong></p><p>Okay. As I say, I'm in Dublin, in Ireland, yesterday the Irish government released the new legislation about disconnecting. So now in Ireland it's enshrined in law now that you're allowed to disconnect that you were allowed not to be on all the time.</p><p>And I think this is important. And I think increasingly we're seeing it in, in, in different countries around the world. Because it's a problem. I'm just as bad as everybody else. Yeah. I live in my laptop but it's what I've started to do now. Sundays, for instance, Okay. Unless there's just some crazy fire going on that, has to be dealt with.</p><p>I don't open the laptop on a Sunday because the drawer is too much. Isn't it? It's almost like a drug, isn't it? We're almost addicted to our devices now. I don't open my laptop. I don't do emails. I don't. Anything, I don't process any videos. I try not to do zoom calls. Nothing, a laptop free day.</p><p>Now, not everybody can do that, but getting to a point in the evening, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, whatever it is, close the laptop. Have dinner without a screen setup for remote work. Yeah. Talk to the wife, children, and or the husband or whoever you've got it around or whatever. So the disconnection thing is important.</p><p>I think that's really important.</p><p>Another thing that a lot of people perhaps haven't done on, and again, it depends on your home situation, but if you can find a space at home to make the work space. And it could just be a desk under the stairs. Okay. But if you can find a place that you can make the work space, try and just work in that one place.</p><p>And then when you step away from that, your home is your down space, because what we're doing is we're losing that disconnect. When you go to the office is work and home is home. But we've lost that to a large extent, recently. And it's very easy to lose that when you become a remote worker, if you sit on your bed or you sit on the sofa with your laptop.</p><p>Then your bedroom shouldn't be. A space where you've got work in your head, your bedroom should be a safe space to relax and to sleep. And the same with you, sofa.</p><p>I never take the laptop in the lounge. So when I walk into the lounge, I'm not working, I'm going to be playing with the kids over, maybe watch a bit of TV or whatever. So try and create some kind of separation within your home environment between a workspace and a non-work space.</p><p><strong>Is there anything that you see that you think people should stop doing that it's really unproductive or not good for them or something else?</strong></p><p>Give yourself breaks. I find at home, I can sit down at eight o'clock in the morning and the next time I get up, it's one o'clock and I've done four or five straight hours staring at a screen, working solid all the rest of it. You're less productive than you think when you do think. I'm working really hard.</p><p>I'm working. I'm really busy. Yeah. This is fantastic. I've just done five solid hours. Yeah. Who are you fooling? You've done five solid hours and you wrecked and your hands are act. And probably those last two hours were pretty unproductive.</p><p>So set an alarm every hour. Yeah. And just give yourself five minutes. Walk away, walk outside. Breathe. Yeah. Do your eye exercises , twice a day, take half an hour and walk around the park or walk around the block. Okay. Get a little bit of exercise. People are not doing this. Not everybody is doing this. And this is so simple. And there's loads of research to back all this stuff up about, the need for regular short EXOS and you only need 10 or 15 minutes.</p><p>If you've got one of these watches on it, it beeps at you doesn't it. And it says, get up and walk around, get your next standout or in, and stuff like that. You need eight more minutes to get your move goal and all the rest of it. Listen to these things. Cause they're actually those algorithms are quite clever.</p><p>And it's nice, they've gamified it. So do get exercise and do, give yourself breaks. That's why, the 10 to the hour thing works really well. Encourage your people to just give themselves as little bits of downtime and set the working expectations for your teams. We have to allow people to set these schedules because they're now sitting at home. And the schedules don't set themselves automatically by having to commute to work and then come home. So that there's still has to be more proactively managed. I think. Bye. Bye everybody.</p><p><strong>I was talking with a friend about the standards that you set as a team lead of when you send emails to the team for example or how you communicate. There is a certain element of showing an example that. At least implicitly people are going to expect to follow. What are other specific things, that leaders can do themselves to help model the right approach to their team?</strong></p><p>I think that's a great question. And the question is almost the answer, isn't it?</p><p>So you have to model the behaviors that you're looking for your people to, to take. So if you don't want people bugging you as a manager at 12 at night or whatever, don't be sending emails to them at 12 at night saying, is that presentation ready? I'll need to do it in the morning.</p><p>Okay. Once you people know what's expected of them, and they know that you've got these kinds of breaks, Allowed, if you like then you stick to those as well, because if you're sending emails outside those times, that's no good.</p><p>A very simple little thing is adding something to the bottom of your email. So it says, you may have received this email outside of normal working hours, however, Yeah. I don't expect you to answer it outside of normal working hours. Feel free to leave it until the morning or after the weekend or whatever. Because again, when we're working in different times zones, I might be sending it in my working hours and it comes into your email in the middle of the night.</p><p>Yeah. Yeah. So that's very common when we're working across multiple times and instances. Having something like that in your email and getting all the team to, to use that type of thing again, it's just a little visual signal, isn't it? That that things are okay.</p><p><strong>How do you think things will look a few years out in terms of the worlds of work and teamwork and we're, where are we going in your opinion?</strong></p><p>Anybody who doesn't have to have hands-on in a physical location. I think we'll be in a hybrid mode going forward, but that's going to need all kinds of changes. That's gonna need legislative changes. That's going to impinge on things like insurance. We've got a tsunami of insurance claims coming</p><p>because to be honest, the last year has been this honeymoon period. I think where everybody has said, you've got to work from home and don't come into the office. So many companies haven't done anything about. Sending proper chairs home to people or getting them the right equipment.</p><p>And I think there's going to be, there's going to be some interesting times ahead around all that stuff. Interesting. Yeah, I never thought about that.</p><p><strong>So where's the best place for people to reach out and find out a bit more about the consulting they do?</strong></p><p>Consulting: <a href="https://www.houghton.consulting ">https://www.houghton.consulting </a>is the website.</p><p>I do a blog as well at substack.com. And I quite regularly put articles on there about, working from home and optimizing , remote working and stuff like that.</p><p>And yeah I enjoy doing, mentoring and training both in-person where that's appropriate, but increasingly remotely via zoom now. So yeah, anybody's interested and I can help feel free to reach out and give me a shout.</p><p><strong>Great. Thanks a lot.</strong></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-41814733638230835482021-04-19T02:01:00.001-07:002021-04-19T02:01:06.074-07:00How to start large scale change initiatives<p>This is part 2 of the interview with Mike Burrows of <a href="https://www.agendashift.com">Agendashift </a>fame. In this episode we go into two of Mike’s tools which he uses to kick off larger scale change in organizations. You will discover two really practical change management tools that bypass employee's natural resistance to change:</p><ul><li>how to organize and prioritize organizational learning when implementing big changes</li><li>how to discover a lot of potential outcomes your company can pursue together with everyone in the company</li></ul><h3 id="3rj10">About Mike Burrows</h3><figure class="image large "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g6hjt0_78cbb45599a4d859242e255638ed6779_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g6hjt0_78cbb45599a4d859242e255638ed6779_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g6hjt0_78cbb45599a4d859242e255638ed6779_1000.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g6hjt0_78cbb45599a4d859242e255638ed6779_2000.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g6hjt0_78cbb45599a4d859242e255638ed6779_1000.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is the author of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition March 2021), Right to Left: The digital leader's guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020), and the Lean-Agile classic Kanban from the Inside (2104). Mike is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban and for his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy. Past leadership roles include global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and interim delivery manager on two of the UK Government Digital Services ‘exemplar’ projects.</p><ul><li><a href="http://agendashift.com/book">agendashift.com/book</a> redirects to the main page for the 2nd edition. </li><li>Most other things would be under <a href="http://agendashift.com/resources">agendashift.com/resources</a>.</li><li><a href="https://uk.linkedin.com/in/asplake">Mike Burrows on LinkedIn</a></li></ul><figure class="image regular "><a href="https://feed.managingremoteteams.co/"><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_800_cce9c60861acfb8fdfad469708a77781_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_800_cce9c60861acfb8fdfad469708a77781_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-1200x800-layout1483-1g5jfqt_800_800_cce9c60861acfb8fdfad469708a77781_800.png" /></picture></a></figure><h3 id="audr0">Transcript</h3><p>Two things I wanted to ask about. In terms of easy ways for people to get started. So one thing that you've come up with that you've already mentioned change band. So what is it and how would you do it? </p><p>Change ban? It's a, at one level, it's a Kanban simulation game. No way to, to teach people how Kanban works and it's based on feature band and which is. I forget when I came up with feature and feature band was the first thing I opened sourced, and never regretted open sourcing it. And I went and sourced a lot of my stuff ever since. </p><p>And feature ban. It's very clear that you're modeling a development process, a for Columbo design four or five column for design, and, the stages typically end up looking design build, whatever. And it's fine. And actually as a teaching tool in the technology space, it's been very popular.</p><p>It's used all over the world and you can teach metrics and things like that with it as well. The one of the later stages of playing the game and the beauty of it is it starts simple. Although it's clear that it doesn't work very well. And then we make, an intervention or two, and suddenly things start to work a lot with certainly work flows a lot more smoothly.</p><p>And more importantly, in fact the players of the game find that they collaborate a lot more, and the big takeaway feature that both feature ban and change ban is the relationship between work and progress and collaboration. And it's very, it's a very pleasant surprise. Is it instead of when you do something lean based, the temptation is to think that, the only learning point is that when we control our work in progress, then the system is going to perform more productively and faster, and the worst of it.</p><p>But actually the relationships in work in progress and collaboration is a wonderful learning now. I wanted to get away from it being modeling, a development process, and I followed Jeff Anderson's lead and I, and this was years ago now you're reading around in the lean startup literature.</p><p>And in various lean startup books, you'll find Kanban bowls that are built on valuable, feasible, usable, and the feature band board design the the column names aren't valuable, feasible, usable, but their tuned map, they do map to those. And that there's some prescription descriptions and the on the board and in the deck that explains the the relationship and the great thing about that, is it valuable? Is it feasible? Can we agree, an acceptable way forward? Is it sticking music? Is it working for people? Is it delivering the benefit that we expected? That sounds a bit less like a drug development process, and we found that people from outside development respond to it a lot better than they do to a, to feature that.</p><p>And we've simplified a bit, made it a bit more fun. We've abandoned the metrics module and that we let the Kanban trainers teach that in, with feature panels or whatever. And we're focused very much in States on what a learning system looks like. We actually get points.</p><p>Experiments can everything in the changement system as an experiment and it can succeed or it can be rejected or use rejected rather than failed. We treat rejection as an active and positive step. It's very artificial it's, but it's just a game, every time we complete my item, we get the chance to choose an item to reject.</p><p>So complete an item or a rejection item. And you get points, you get as many points for rejected items as you do for accepted items and the the scoring system actually Rewards, an even spread of acceptances and rejections a reward for maximum learning and making sure that every stage of the process is contributing to learning as well. And we don't want to get into too much technical detail though. </p><p>So it's a set at one level it's simple and fun way of learning Kanban and get in that space main takeaway of, when your limit your work in progress, then there will be more collaboration. And it's just less than you need to come down in scrum teams know this as well. Scrum team should know this as well. </p><p>And at another level, it's teaching you about experimentation hypotheses lean startup, thinking about how we reflect on our learning and realizing that you've probably learned a lot more from the items that you rejected than the ones that succeeded.</p><p>And we, you start to introduce, what our hypothesis looks like, how do you frame your hypothesis so that your guaranteed, however, it ends up to generate some learning. And what's interesting about where in the process that it failed and so on, what on earth were we thinking when we prioritize this piece in the first place and it got this far, and then we rejected them. And those are, that's a question we don't ask ourselves often enough. And we don't typically have a forum for asking that question as directly as that and where the insight from answering that question is likely to go anywhere useful. So that's an interesting question to walk an organization design as well.</p><p>So these are all topics that are very much about the agenda. Ships is very interested in. So all that sort of conversational stuff, outcomes, organized, generating outcomes organizing. Then that's the first three chapters. The last three chapters is much more about how do we organize ourselves so that we are continuously learning, so that we're adaptive. How do we frame our work? How can we, find solutions in a creative, innovative way? And, finishing with the, the, the serious organizational stuff, the viable system, stuff that to do deliberately adaptive organization, wholehearted organization, and so on.</p><p>And tying that to, well-tested models, viable system models. I said been around for decades tying it to what's been happening at the organization development space in the time that agile has been around has undergone a revolution of its own. </p><p>Change management in the nineties was, choose a solution, sell it, roll it out, leave a comment, and then choose new solution deliberately noxious about it. But whole system consulting process or core process consulting. It doesn't mean, process management, the process of the change process and the conversations that need to happen. And then more recently dialogic organization development, generative organization development. And in fact, there's a model called the generative change model and by Marshack and Bush. So it's coming from the academic organization development space and the model maps almost one-to-one with a gender shift. It's amazing. Almost fell off my chair when I read the dialogic ID book. And and again, when I read the generative change. Book it's a real paradigm shift. This has happened in the ODI space, that has quite a lot of parallels with the paradigm shift that happened in the technology space with that joint. And there's a lot that they can learn from each other.</p><p>And I just love connecting to these different models and integrating them and seeing what we can reconcile them and seeing what we can learn in the process. And and so on. </p><p>Another tool that you mentioned is the 15 minute photo since it's 15 minutes, that sounds like a good place to start for people. What is it and would people go about doing that? </p><p>The name is from obstacles to outcomes. That's the photo bits in 15 minutes. So it's quick. Our description of it is our clean language inspired coaching game. So we are teaching people how to have some coaching conversations using the clean language questions, and the really cool thing about it is not me standing at the front, asking the questions, it's me organizing people in table groups or breakout rooms. And then either having informal conversations as a whole group. And anyone can also ask a question that anyone can answer type conversation.</p><p> And then the second time round, a more intense version where we're rotating the one-to-one conversations around, around the table. So everyone gets a turn as being the coach. Everyone gets a turn that being the clients, everyone gets a turn at being described, Whiting, all the outcomes down. Everyone gets a term turn at being the observer, the safety officer or the timekeeper, and so on all the things that observers to. And it's based on a quite small subset of the overall set of clean language questions.</p><p>So clean language, I should say. It comes from the therapy world as a number of coaching tools. And there are different ways that you can use it. And use it in a way that's appropriate to the contract that you have with the people that you're working with. I'm very clear, I'm not the therapist.</p><p>I want to design 15 minute votes, so it's not therapy, it's, how do we get, how would we take our list of obstacles and turn that, in a way that has clear business value, turn that into a list of outcomes that we can then organize. And by construction, those outcomes are related to each other. Interestingly, so basically in a, given an obstacle, what would you like to have happen? And that turns it into a, into an outcome. Nine times out of 10, you can always ask it twice. If you don't get an outcome, you can clarify obstacles or you can clarify outcomes with what kind of, if you say, if your obstacle was you said rubbish stand-ups so like what kind of rubbish or what kind of stand-ups what could terrify that's a bit more and probably unnecessary in that case.</p><p>And then what would you like to have happen? You say something about that you would want what kind of to clarify just those three questions actually. Oh, and once to have what have mentioned that, then what happens? So you go within what happens, takes you from outcome to outcome and with what would you want to have happen? What kind of, and then what happens? Just three questions. They do 90% of the work in 15 minute folks. </p><p>So I, but there are some others now what's happening when. What happens before? Where does that come from? And so on. And that's some rules you use the question was on the card verbatim. Most of the questions have an X in them, which are for the client's own words.</p><p>And when better stand ups, then what happens, that's just a silly example. What kind of better standards, where do those better stand-ups come from? What happens before better? Stand-ups is there anything else about better stand ups? And what's forcing the coach to do is to actively listen.</p><p>And the more subtle thing about clean language is that you're actually helping the client to build a model. No, you're not saying when you said X, did you mean Y and sort of them losing their train of thought, or have you thought of Zed again then losing their train of thought, instead of you are going words, they're going with them or going with their words and helping them build up a picture that perhaps they've never built up before.</p><p>It's really funny then what happens? It's such an easy question to ask. It's only three words and the longer version and when whatever it was, you said, then what happens is a few more words. We're still not many words, and what's more, the client knows it's coming and even so it can take them as a surprising amount of time to answer.</p><p>And that's very revealing when, so often we're heads down doing our work, and forgetting why we're doing it. And forgetting about, what it'll do for our customers when we've delivered it and what they will then be able to do. And so on. And "then what happens?" Questions. It's all about, consequences. And so much of it, isn't about what makes the work meaningful.</p><p>every time I see people think hard about the, "then what happens" question. We give ourselves so little time for thinking about why we do what we do. And that's part of the power of the game. Yeah it's a great thing. </p><p>Yeah. So agenda shift the new version that's coming out next month? </p><p>hopefully. So by the time this goes out, I hope hopefully it will be out in the UK. It's actually ordered all the already available for pre-order. The print version the Kindle version suffered a minor delay, but I'm hoping that by a launch date of the 29th or thereabouts, certainly by the end of March, I'm hoping that it's gonna be available. In print and Kindle versions, and it'd be going outside on other ebook platforms as well. And so whether it will be out to more platforms by the end of March, I am not 100% sure, but certainly be available in some forms. And in that timeframe, </p><p>Okay, great. We'll definitely leave a link in the notes. And and also I guess the main place for all the resources is the gender shift.com </p><p>or I'm going to <a href="https://agendashift.com/resources">agendashift.com/resources</a> specifically for the, that comment. It's pretty easy to find the resources page. So you can find some of the things that we talked about, the 15 minute FOTO, all of the resources around that our feature ban and change ban the outside the strategy review and so on.</p><p>You'll find that so very easily. There's a cheat sheet as well, actually just published another couple of weeks ago that helps bring together all that sort of 15 minute FOTO stuff and the strategy review stuff. And it will it's a new way of listening guide to the first couple of chapters, at least to the book as well.</p><p>Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you very much. </p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-88867612922338400682021-03-26T03:00:00.001-07:002021-03-26T03:00:24.965-07:00How to set effective boundaries when managing remotely<p>My name is Lukasz Szyrmer. If you are new here, I am the author of the book <a href="https://book.alignremotely.com/">Align Remotely</a>. I help teams thrive and achieve more together when working remotely. In this episode of the Managing Remote Teams podcast, we speak with Remote work influencer and PeopleOps expert Ali Greene. Ali is keen on equity in labor markets as well as making everyone’s life at work better through self-awareness. Setting effective boundaries is a critical skillg. She’s also the coauthor of an upcoming book on the subject.</p><p>Upon listening, you will discover:</p><ul><li>why you have to help people unlearn behaviors that were quite common in an office</li><li>where effective boundaries come from and how to set them</li><li>practical tips and tools to work more effectively with remote teams</li></ul><h2 id="c4rs3">About Ali Greene</h2><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g5bari_c6d7db9a0e72462bcdeff507e6a731d9_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g5bari_c6d7db9a0e72462bcdeff507e6a731d9_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g5bari_c6d7db9a0e72462bcdeff507e6a731d9_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g5bari_c6d7db9a0e72462bcdeff507e6a731d9_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/Managing-Remote-Teams-podcast-3000x3000-layout6-1g5bari_c6d7db9a0e72462bcdeff507e6a731d9_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>After four years of full-time travel as a digital nomad, and almost 40 countries visited, Ali decided to retire from full-time traveling (for now) and from DuckDuckGo where she was the Director of People Operations right before the pandemic and the "remote work" shift took the world by storm. Ali is now currently based in Spain. She is the Founder of cohana.io. She also works with Oyster, an HR platform for globally-distributed companies, as the Head of Culture and Community. Ali is a frequent speaker and podcast guest, chatting about topics near and dear to her heart: remote work, community building and organizational psychology. Ali has also recently been featured as a "Remote Expert and Influencer to Watch". She is the co-author of the upcoming book Remote Works.</p><ul><li><a href="https://cohana.io">cohana.io</a></li><li><a href="https://remoteworksbook.com">remoteworksbook.com</a></li><li><a href="https://oysterhr.com">oysterhr.com</a></li><li><a href="https://duckduckgo.com">duckduckgo.com</a></li></ul><h2 id="7ol86">Takeaways</h2><p>The insight that healthy and effective boundaries start from your own self-awareness, as it helps each team member to do the same. Effective boundaries actually start from your own self-awareness as a leader. Because you doing so helps each team member to do the same. It opens up the discussion. To set up a healthy arrangement for everyone. </p><p>Modeling the right behavior, I think is quite powerful. </p><h2 id="9stvf">Transcript</h2><p>Allie Green, welcome to the podcast. Could you say, could you say a few words about yourself and how you got into remote as a topic? </p><p>Yeah, so I have been working remotely. This is funny. I just looked at the. Exact date a few days ago, cause I saw a post on LinkedIn.</p><p>That was a poll of how many years have you worked remotely? And it was six years ago. During the summertime I was living in New York city doing an hour commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan to sit on my computer all day and. I am not a city person. And I was really quite unhappy living in the city. And I had questioned for a long time.</p><p>Why companies, especially companies that dealt with the internet and technology and knowledge workers, weren't making things more flexible and fun and innovative with how you're working when they're making such fun and innovative products. So I ended up. Super cliche. I ended up leaving that job.</p><h2 id="9ujpb">Ali’s delve into the remote work world </h2><p>I backpacked around South America. I went to Machu Picchu. I had. A lot of hiking and reflecting and thinking about what I wanted to be doing with my life. And I was lucky and fortunate at that time to be able to stay close with the company I was working with and ended up consulting with them on human resources.</p><p>And through that consulting experience, I really learned about this world of remote work because their office was still very much in Manhattan and I was responding to emails and South America. I then went and visited my family and. Michigan and did virtual learning and development sessions and workshops with them.</p><p>I moved to Philadelphia and I was able to do most of my work completely online and every so often would pop in. To the office because it was fun. And I wanted to build the relationships with people. </p><p>And so thinking about that experience six years ago and where it's taken me so far has been really interesting because through these six years I've had experience managing remote teams.</p><p>I helped grow. The people ops team from scratch at my former company, duck deco while traveling the world full time. And so not only working remotely, but what does it feel like to work remotely in a country where you don't speak the language and don't know how to properly cross the street, which was scary when I first moved to Vietnam and people just would fly at you and their motorcycles.</p><p>And so it was really a wild experience. The four years I was at DuckDuckGo, I became. Just so passionate about how remote work can change lives. And it definitely changed my life in terms of the fact that I'm now living in Spain, but there's so much social impact there as well.</p><p>And so when I made the decision to leave duck duck go a few weeks before the pandemic strike last year, I had no idea what things were going to turn into and how many people were going to have to be thrown into this world of remote work. Coming from a place of so much fear because of everything that's going on in the world, instead of the excitement that I faced when I started working remotely.</p><p>And so now I really split my time in two ways. One is I'm the head of culture and community at a company called oyster. And their mission is to really help make companies be able to hire, pay, provide benefits to people all over the world and make it really. Easy and do it in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. And so I think it's really incredible just to be able to really close the talent gap worldwide and make sure it really. Awesome. Intelligent people are getting very challenging, exciting jobs. </p><p>And then it also had a company called Cohana. And my mission there is to just educate and advocate for remote work and what that can look like. So having opportunities like this is really exciting for that. And through that company, I am currently writing a book with a coauthor who lives in Boston and it's meant to be for. The everyday team that's working remotely and be a fun, fresh kind of honest look at what you can do to make that remote experience work better for everybody.</p><h2 id="779gp">Ali’s remote experience</h2><p>Lots to dig into there. Just to quickly check. So duck taco is, are they fully remote or no? </p><p>So Dr. Goh has been fully remote from the very beginning and they do have a small office. It's quite funny. It's in this little town outside of Philadelphia. And at any given time, it's more like a coworking space. And so people that are local that might want to just get a change of scenery would pop in and out.</p><p>Anytime that I visited the office during my time being there, there'd be like equal number of humans and dogs. So there's always go to the office. But when I was Working at duct deco, I lived and traveled to Asia, South America, Europe, Canada, where we had employees living, but also I traveled as a digital nomad and worked from all of those places.</p><p>And so it was remote in terms of the culture, how things got done, how people looked at the work there just happened to also be. An office with a very cute duck. And it looked like a castle. Yeah, no, I actually grew up in Philly, so yeah, I never actually met a Gabriel or that kind of thing, but I kinda know that no, the area Philly has a special place in my heart.</p><p>I lived there for a year. It was a great year and I love going back. My family's from the area. Whenever I get home sick for the U S I think of Philadelphia.</p><h2 id="5o2nf">What is PeopleOps</h2><p> Just to clarify terms, so what exactly do you mean by people ops? </p><p>Yeah. So this is a fun question. I think that the people ops terminology has. Had a little bit of a facelift and it's evolved throughout the years. And so I very much look at people operations from a wider perspective than maybe some people were, I think, through not just traditional human resources.</p><p>So things like, entrance checklist, onboarding, hiring benefits, but also any strategic decision, a company's making anything that they're going to start to then operationalize. How are they? Going to roll out that process, those frameworks and teach employees at accompany, how to work effectively with each other and how to manage that change and how to understand what the standard operating behaviors of a company are.</p><p>Which is a term I like to use to describe just what are the formal and informal norms. How do people work really well together and things of that nature.</p><p> I guess that lens is quite useful, particularly in the context of a pandemic starting. So what have you seen in terms of, the companies that you've spoken with, or, how they've dealt with the changes that were happening quite rapidly.</p><p>I think the biggest. Area that was struggling for people, leaders of teams, people, operations was not knowing how long this would last and the sheer impact it would have on everybody's day-to-day life. And so if you think back to last year, I know for myself, I was in France when they announced the lockdown and it was supposed to be two weeks.</p><p>And I think any company that. Is looking at a situation where it might just be a two week situation can say okay, how do I approach my employees working from home for two days? What do they need to take from the office to be productive and successful? What happens if just some people take that time off and use their holidays, or if they don't have access to everything they need, can they still get most of their job done?</p><p>And. Finish up certain projects when they returned to office. And I think this was really unique and industries like the legal field, where a lot of stuff is still being printed out and facts and not everyone was going to take like a fax machine home with them. And so like most immediately I think just that initial shock of okay, we can prepare for two weeks, but I don't think anybody knew to prepare for a year.</p><p>And so from that perspective, Looking through the lens of tech and security, I think was surprising to most people because long-term, how do you make sure that you're teaching your team how to be secure and use VPNs and have policies around that? And then I think from a behavioral standpoint, it was, Oh, we can just recreate what we do in the office, because this is a very temporary thing.</p><p>And it hasn't been temporary because we're now a year into it. And so somewhere. In this past year, I think that smart leaders realized it's not temporary and they were treating it like a temporary situation and they want to just start to learn and educate themselves around how to evolve, to make remote working, be more sustainable for their company.</p><h2 id="7cl3a">Return to the office, effective boundaries, and culture</h2><p>And so I think that's what we're seeing today. Is a lot of leaders there. They're talking about what does a return to an office look like? What is the goal of the office? If we go back there and if we don't go back, what do we want the remote lived experience for our team to be? Because it likely shouldn't be what it was in March, April, may of 2020.</p><p>So in terms of the cultural changes in the way things work in teams. How have these managers have caught on that? It's more of a longer term thing. what changes they introduced that you've heard of, or that you've come across.</p><p>Yeah. So one interesting project that I worked on last year for a client of mine was looking at their harassment and code of conduct policy. And that might not be interesting for most people. I am, a little bit of an HR geek after all, but what was interesting about this policy is so much of it was written to be about what happens at after work events and in person, and so questioning the what is the scope of this going to be if employees choose to get together? Outside of what is working hours? Are you going to be the type of remote company that has standard working hours or core working hours or a work whenever, wherever policy and depending on your answer to that, what if people get on a zoom call and are just, hanging out and they work together and somebody says something that offends someone else, how does a manager step in and know how to handle that situation?</p><p>So I think that's a really A really interesting thing to think about in terms of. Before you even get there, like that's the worst case scenario is that something's happening. That's going to go against the code of conduct, but in writing a code of conduct, you learn, this is what we want to promote as healthy, good behavior for our company.</p><p>And now how do managers lead by example, maybe they need to learn a little bit more about, using Slack and talking about talking in Slack in a way that's both professional and fun. So people can feel like vulnerable to just be authentic and be themselves and have conversations and carry on getting to know their coworkers, which is a huge benefit for a lot of people at work. And so that was quite an interesting project that I worked on, where I had the lens of a company that felt very confident in the office. And then didn't know what scope to consider when moving remotely. </p><p> it sounds analogous to my whole rabbit hole of searching, what productivity means. In an office it's somehow. Was more obvious, but as soon as you get everyone remote and only remote, then it's suddenly, there's all of these things, which you assume were true, which actually aren't. </p><p>Yeah, I think about it in the way that remote is a magnifying glass and anything that the company has been doing becomes more obvious in a remote setting.</p><p>So if they're very good at developing KPIs and goals, It's obvious when someone's reaching those goals, even if they're not in an office and I've been advocating for remote work while before the pandemic hit. And I remember two or three years ago, having conversations about remote work and how amazing remote work is, and people would always push back to me.</p><p>Then the first question I would always get asked by people is if you're a manager managing a remote team, how do you know if they're working? It just made me laugh and also get frustrated at the same time. Cause I was like if I was a manager and an office, how do you truly know if your employees are working?</p><p>They might be sitting at their desk behind a computer, but they could be online shopping, like taking a. A news article and like catching up on information, trying to buy a plane ticket for their vacation. Cause they're so frustrated at work. Like you see them typing and you see their face, but those things don't equal productivity.</p><h2 id="7bhqv">Self awareness and effective boundaries</h2><p>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. One of, one of your insights that you've had being in this space for awhile, while is the importance of leader self-awareness in a remote context. Why is that so important in your opinion? </p><p>Yeah. So this is a big focal point of the book that I'm working on and we're starting with self-awareness because everything stems from that.</p><p>And it's this idea of know thyself and. Once you learn more about yourself as a leader, you'll be able to do a few things. One you'll be able to better communicate that. And in doing so, you're leading by example for your employees to have self-awareness and share things that they might need in order to work more efficiently or effectively.</p><p>An example of that is, do you know when you're most productive during the day? And if you don't know that about yourself, how can you help your team? Especially if they're transitioning to remote work for the first time, understand what activities, give them energy, what activities drain energy and how they should structure their day since they don't physically need to be in an office from nine to five anymore.</p><p>And so having self-awareness can help lead by example, it can help build trust and grow relationships. And I think it also identifies. Leaders gaps. And so it can help even with things like hiring, like what type of person do you need on your team in order to. Support or fill in any holes that you might have in terms of behaviors that, that the leader has to be successful.</p><p>So something like that might look like if you're a leader and you're quite introverted, and now you're working remotely with your team, are you going to feel confident and comfortable? Bringing them together to have a space that's a shared virtual space for people to get to know each other as a means to build trust and build a relationship.</p><p>If you're not, is there somebody that you can hire on your team that loves that stuff and really wants to champion bringing people together and be more of the cultural leader within the team. And so when I think of manager self-awareness, I really also break down managers by types so they can start to understand like what their persona is.</p><h2 id="de94f">Defining effective boundaries</h2><p>What about the role of self-awareness and defining effective boundaries for yourself and with the team? How does that play out? </p><p>I love that question. I love boundaries also. This is something I talk about quite often. I think some of the core components of working successfully remotely are clear expectations and boundary setting.</p><p>And so I think boundary setting comes after words. You really need in order to create clear expectations? This was a mistake I made when I was a manager for the first time I remember having. In intern on my team. And I would give that intern in assignments and, I said, okay, this needs to be back to me by Friday it's Tuesday today.</p><p>And this is what information it should have. And then I would get upset because on Wednesday, I didn't know how far along this person was in the process. I assumed that. That person would get the project back earlier than the deadline, not on the deadline. And then I realized that's not fair. And that's an expectation that I subconsciously had and never shared with somebody else.</p><p>And so in that experience, I learned my own self-awareness and was able to put down effective boundaries with myself that if I give someone a deadline, I respect that deadline. And if I mean something different than I need to set new expectations and respect that. And so I think what. That means for self-awareness self-awareness will help you create expectations.</p><p>Once expectations are created, then you can draw a line in terms of boundaries and understand what that looks like where's the limit. And then you can have a clear idea of when that's being broken or not broken. And also self-awareness helps with understanding what to do if a boundary is being tested and how you want to handle that conflict.</p><p>Okay. And where you're flexible and where you're not flexible.</p><h2 id="eku7d">Effective boundaries and remote flexibility</h2><p>So do you have an example of that? </p><p>Time zones? I think time zones is going to be huge for companies that choose to not just be remote friendly, but also fully distributed and really respecting and understanding. If people have things going on in their life where they cannot work in the evenings even if it's daytime for the majority of their team and like, how do you handle that situation?</p><p>And as a manager, what norms are you going to create on your team to respect someone's boundary of. I can't physically work at this hour or attend a meeting. Nothing's going to stick in my brain. I'm going to be tired. It's going to ruin my next day in terms of my mental health and my physical health and understanding what that means for work and drawing healthy, clear and effective boundaries on when people can turn off for the day and pick up the next day.</p><p>Yeah. Yeah. What I found that was interesting was that when when I was running a pretty distributed team, I think in the people who are more in Asia, they were used to in those offices or in their locations, they were used to working in the evening because everyone there works in the evening almost.</p><p>I don't know, to what extent it was just the office or literally pretty much the whole the whole industry. Just because people are used to it. Does that mean that it's right? </p><p>Yeah, exactly. That's true. That's absolutely true. Yeah. Then conversely, like with people working in Latin America I feel bad asking them to get up, and I know before the sun is up in this particular case, if it's close to the equator it's always 6:00 AM anyway. Maybe I'm just justifying myself into it. What do you think this, but</p><p> I think this is where awareness comes into play. So I learned And I was lucky enough to travel around the world for four and a half years. And so I learned this because I was thrown into different times zones that I am solidly an afternoon person. I don't function well and want to get up and do work right away.</p><h2 id="1v2t0">Effective boundaries that increase productivity</h2><p>I feel my best if I can get up and do some sort of physical activity to get my blood pumping, to get it out of the way, whatever. That's my strong suit. I also am a daytime social person. So during the day I like to meet with friends for coffee. I get my energy from being out and about in the daytime.</p><p>And I don't mind working later into the evening because after I feel that personal sense of reward, I'm super excited to jump into my work. So today, for example I woke up, I did yoga. I went for a very long walk. I think I hit my 10,000 steps. I had a picnic lunch with a friend and then I came home and I started to do a little bit of work.</p><p>And now we're chatting. And that was true of my routine anywhere in the world that I personally was. So even when I went back to the U S even though, then all of the stakeholders and my teammates might be there, I still wanted to start working around two or 3:00 PM and work later into the evening.</p><p>Because I knew that was what was going to produce the highest quality work. So where I'm going with the story. And besides that, being a daytime person can be fun is that this is where self-awareness comes in. And so if that's true about yourself and you can share that with your team and then ask your team questions.</p><p>Like when do you feel like you have the most energy to sit and not do uninterrupted work? When do you like. To be the most engaged in conversations. How many conversations can you have back to back before you feel like you're drained or getting zoom fatigue? And if you can start asking yourself and asking others, these questions, you can start to understand what works best for some people, and you don't have to make assumptions that certain people prefer working in the day, or don't mind getting up early or find staying late because it's.</p><p>Culturally like more acceptable in the country they're working from. And from there, there's this idea that I love instead of like business hours for meetings and people at ham at home, can't see me doing that. Like air quote thing. You change it from business hour meetings or the majority not inconvenienced is another method that I see a lot of remote companies go to an idea that I like to call like the most respectful meeting time.</p><p>And if you think about that, it's like, when is everybody most productive? Who are the key decision makers on this meeting? Let's prioritize a time that works for them. And maybe it means someone in the U S is waking up for a 7:30 AM call and that's 7:30 PM in Asia. Those aren't really normal. Business working hours or meeting hours for either person, but maybe both of them are happy to talk at that time.</p><p>And so it works. </p><p>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the most complicated was being in Europe, trying to organize a call with both the U S and Asia at the same time. Yeah, personal preferences start to become the question. You have to get really good at asynchronous communication.</p><h2 id="2nc8s">Effective work-life boundaries</h2><p>Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Going back to the topic of boundaries, what about work-life boundaries from a, from an individual and a team perspective? How have you seen people navigate that? Or now during the pandemic, what's what seems to be working or not working in that area? </p><p>I feel for people that have kids home during this pandemic, I think that's been something that even the most seasoned leader in people, ops person is still struggling with to figure out.</p><p>And I think. Even though it's been a year still understanding that is an ongoing challenge and we're working in the midst of circumstances that are not normal and haven't been normal for a long time. And to maybe change the expectations accordingly first and foremost, I think is hugely important when it comes to work-life boundaries.</p><p>You can't control if you're on. A zoom call and your child fell down the steps and you have to go take care of them. And so what I do love about this is this idea of having empathy again in the workplace and really thinking about introducing like your whole life into your work and through that vulnerability, having your team understand that sometimes things are going to have to take priority.</p><p>That is not work-related. And. Having that team camaraderie to have people pick up the Slack maybe one day, because the next day they're going to need some time away from work as well. This might sound idealistic, but I really do love seeing that in teams. I've seen companies that have Slack channels for like parents to chat and to like share resources and things like that.</p><p>Other ways in terms of work, life boundaries And that I think are great, especially during the pandemic is using your voice and Slack to carve out intentionally your boundaries. And so something that people do at oyster is when they start their day, they'll say, Hey and Slack, and share a gift or a picture or something that's been like, on their mind to start off their day, their cup of coffee, whatnot.</p><p>And at the end of the day Sign off. So people know Hey, I'm not here today. That might work for some companies that might not work for other ways that I've seen happen is setting expectations every Monday of what. Your week looks like, and when you're available to do heads down work, and then on Friday, revisit those points and every week just say Hey, today, Monday, Tuesday, I'm available from this time to this time, Wednesday, Thursday, this and this.</p><p>And people can just pin that note wherever they're communicating and go back and see when people are available. Blocking calendars as well as a way to set boundaries. I. Was it for it's so weird. Sometimes as someone who's so deeply involved in tech, the tech that I've only started using during the pandemic.</p><p>And one of them is like Calendly. I love Calendly. And I very much block off times. Not because I'm not available, but because I know I'm not going to want calls. And I also, you can limit by type how many calls you have a day. So you can say Oh, virtual coffee, Versus internal calls versus external calls and limit it to two or three a day.</p><p>And I think that's a perfect example of using a tool to not only make something easier, like scheduling a meeting, but also to protect your boundaries. </p><p>Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that works we use something called Microsoft planner to indicate, so it and I think some people, some teams also use outlooks at a separate shared calendar to, to do that.</p><p>And that kind of seemed to help a lot, but yeah, it's tough. It's not easy. </p><h2 id="cp6nt">Ali’s R<em>emote Works </em>book project</h2><p>Tell me a little bit more about the book. </p><p>Yeah. So the book I'm really excited for working title is remote works and I'm writing it with a good friend of mine who I met while we were both working remotely from Cape town. And we actually like. It's so funny because we wouldn't have even been friends or co-authors if it wasn't for remote work.</p><p>And so remote work is such a cornerstone of our relationship, but we actually met because our. Where are our coworkers at two different remote companies were married to each other. And through the great vine realized that we were both going to be in Cape town, working remotely at the same time. And so they introduced us and we had coffee and we walked on the beach and we chatted about remote work and all the places we've traveled to.</p><p>And I was like, one of those feelings of Oh, this person I'm going to collaborate with on a cool project at some point. We planned a coworking retreat. And now we're writing a book and the book for us is really like we have been working remotely for many years before the pandemic happen.</p><p>And both of us happen to do it while traveling full-time, which adds a whole layer of complexity. When you're working a full-time job for a company that's fully distributed and has serious growth goals and productivity goals. And through that experience, we really just wanted to share. A more down to earth, relatable and fun business book around.</p><p>What are things that managers should know about working remotely and bringing remote work to their teams specifically. And so I think managers like everyday managers, the ones that are helping push forward projects, the ones that are coaching individuals that are struggling, especially right now.</p><p>They're the heartbeat of the organization through the pandemic, I haven't noticed a ton of resources available specifically for that group of people. I think there's a lot for individual contributors around how to be more productive, how to set up your remote work routine, how to turn off at the end of the night.</p><p>I think there's a good amount of conversations happening for leaders. How do you create a remote work strategy? What are some of your remote policies that you should put in place? But. It's the people that you work with and communicate every day, that's going to make your experience positive or negative.</p><p>And so giving people one, a wide variety of perspectives, because we're bringing in case studies and other people to share their experiences, to share our own stories and what we wish we knew when we started working remotely and three providing interactive. Written workshops that they can then bring back to their team and make decisions together is going to be the power behind the book that we're working on.</p><h2 id="4qidp">Hiring during the pandemic</h2><p>Yeah. That's that sounds great. Yeah, I totally agree. I just made the connection. Since you were at a high growth startup, you said, serious work. So in terms of the The actual hiring processes of people when they're remote. You've done it before the pandemic. I guess you have some insight into how it, how things are going on now. How have things changed if at all? </p><p>And yeah. Yeah. So I think the biggest changes with hiring remotely now is that. Everybody has some sort of remote work experience.</p><p>And so that's interesting in a hiring process for a couple of reasons, one is, I think candidates are starting to really question remote work culture at certain companies. Either the candidate loves it or hates it, who knows, but they probably have a point of comparison where before they didn't. And I think that is putting a lot more good responsibility on hiring teams to be able to articulate.</p><p>What the expectations are at a certain company in terms of working remotely. I think things like, do they have standard core hours or can people just get worked on whenever they want? How many meetings should they expect to be in a week? What tools they use and do people have certain tool preferences?</p><p>Is that enough to walk away from a really cool job that remains to be unseen. But I do think you're starting to get like the Assan and camp, the Monday camp, the, like the notion camp. And when it comes to onboarding, that's going to be huge too. So you have to help people unlearn behaviors that were quite common in an office.</p><p>If you're not getting a response from someone like casually going past their desk and like stopping to say hi, and then throwing in your ask about work, that they were meant to get back to you. Which is something I did when I worked in an office and people weren't getting back to me fast enough, like what is fast enough mean?</p><p>So it's about, teaching people it's not about. Sending multiple pings to someone it's about setting proper expectations. The first time of when do you need this by, in what time zone, how is it going to impact the success of a project if they don't get it and help everyone learn things like prioritization skills, which I think are going to be huge skills that we'll be hired for.</p><p>So that's like candidate looking into to accompany company, looking outwards. Awesome. Like people are starting to really realize they don't have to rely on local talent to build out their team. They can hire from all over the world underserved communities and countries where people might have had to move in order to get successful jobs.</p><p>Now, can I have access to really challenging jobs and the money that they're making can then go back into their local community. And it has this huge social impact mission, which is a huge focus of oyster. And I think that's incredible because people. Once interesting, exciting jobs. And it doesn't matter where you are in the world.</p><p>If you have the skills to do a job, you deserve a chance to do it in a way that's going to bring you joy. And so I love that aspect of remote hiring. The whole world is your candidate pool. </p><h2 id="bdprp">The whole world is your candidate pool</h2><p>Yeah. Let's dig in on that a little bit. In terms of job markets converging, is that happening or in terms of things like salary ranges across countries for let's say similar roles or not really now that everyone's remote.</p><p>I think this is something that we're going to see play out in the next couple of years. I think right now there's a lot of healthy debate coming up around what this means. Ultimately, I think that eventually it'll be a global market rate that people are looking at in order to justify salaries, but I don't think we're there yet.</p><p>And so the common ways that companies will choose their salary strategies as one, a market rate for everyone in the company, this is the one, this is one of the things at DuckDuckGo that I was just so proud of to be part of their team because they pay. Everybody the same salary for the same level of the company, regardless of, not only like where they were located in the world, but what their functional area was.</p><p>So someone in marketing or people ops that was junior level, we get the same as the junior level engineer, senior level people would get the same. Across the board. And I thought that was just like extremely unique. I'd never had seen that anywhere else, but what that did was send signals that it was about how they were driving forward the business in terms of impact and in terms of how much oversight that person needed to be successful.</p><p>And that was what the company valued. And so that's what they paid against. So that's one strategy that I just love. I think there's. Other people that are very articulate about explaining other types of strategies, such as paying on local market rates. That make sense for them. For me, this has been a year of exploration on the topic.</p><p>And I'm still learning a lot about how, what the trickle down effect is on. Local economies. What does it mean? And depending on the day, I have a different opinion. So am I the best person to like, very adamantly take a side where I feel like a few years ago I would have adamantly taken aside, but what I do hope from all of these conversations, these debates, these sharing of facts and perceptions is that companies will start to ask themselves.</p><h2 id="e4md">Salary strategy in a global labor market</h2><p>And I think this is the most important question when it comes to salary. How do we want our salary strategy to back up our culture, our values, and what we as a company think is going to help make the company the most successful and what is the impact of this person going to be? And I think that's going to be an interesting.</p><p>Series of questions that leaders are going to ask to have to ask themselves is if we choose this strategy, what does it say about our values? If we choose the strategy, what does it say in terms of like how we value our people? And if they can answer those questions in a way that feels. Good and honest and true and does gel with their culture and their values.</p><p>Then I think that's a sign that it's the right thing to do. And if there's out of her point where they have a salary strategy and they ask themselves those questions and people feel uncomfortable, or can't confidently say that publicly, then maybe they need to reevaluate their salary strategy.</p><p>It is somewhat, industry dependent. I was listening to a podcast actually talking about Amazon where it's it's very different on the AWS side where everyone's basically a technical type person versus people working in the warehouses where, the whole business model on the e-commerce side is just, it's about thin margins and trying to get as much as they can out of everything, including the people. So it's not a thing against the people. That's how that whole industry works. It's just something that's constantly top of mind also, being here being here in Poland. Historically it was more of a low-cost country and now things are changing a little and </p><p> What I would hope for the future is as more people have opportunities to work remotely and have more choice on what type of team they want to join that. Those market rates will fluctuate and hopefully like maybe money will be distributed more equally across the world.</p><p>And that might mean that in certain areas, the cost of living goes up, but the salary and earnings potential goes up. And in other places it goes down. But if we start to give people more free movement, because they're not attached to a city because of a job, how will that reset an equilibrium for the whole economy?</p><p>I don't think I did well enough in economics and university to like, know the answer from a super like rational or mathematical point of view. But I imagine that places like San Francisco and New York housing is out of control expensive there, but how many people had to move there in order to get these really interesting high paying jobs.</p><p>And if those people choose to leave. How many people are going to leave. What's the impact of that going to be on rent? What's the trickle down effect. If all, if those people choose to move to new places and more people are moving into those places and you have to build amenities there, I can imagine that those places rents would increase.</p><p>So I do think we're at a beginning where lots of people can make predictions, but nobody knows for sure how this is all going to shake out. </p><h2 id="630rf">What oyster offers managers looking to hire in remote markets</h2><p>absolutely. Absolutely. With oyster, how so you're saying that you're trying to create something where people can be hired regardless of where they are. What's at a high level, what's the approach? Is it like a service, is it a piece of software? What is it that you're doing? </p><p>Yeah. So is there as software as a service company and. What's really great about what they're doing is one of my biggest challenges when I was working in people ops is this idea of okay, we want to hire somebody and they live in this country.</p><p>One are they an employee? Are they a contractor? Is there employee? How do we set up a business there? What does that look like? If they're a contractor, how do we give them benefits? What is the compliance of this country? It's confusing. It's challenging. It takes a long time to figure out. And so what oyster does is remove a lot of those headaches from the people ops person.</p><p>Bye. Then themselves being an expert in different countries and collaborating in ways that help people, ops people be able to make that decision. And so one of the things they offer is like contractor risk assessment. Should, what is the risk of hiring this person? As a contractor also goes back to.</p><p>Like, why should someone just because they live in another country, have the burden of figuring out things like benefits for themselves. Why can't we offer benefits for these people and treat them as if they were, full-time workers in our country. And so thinking through things like, what does benefits look like in Greece versus Lebanon versus the U S and how can we make sure that people are being treated fairly and then finding ways to systemize that and offer that for people asked to hire people more effectively around the world. </p><p>Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no I do remember this thing, things similar to this coming up. Yeah, I think was, it was, I think it was vacation times have a strange way of a cruise. Clearly, it was very specific to that. Regulatory environment within that country. And even though it's nice to think in terms of, in terms of global and lots of countries, he does have a slightly different reality that you need to somehow adjust to. </p><p>until there's internet country or all countries decide to agree on certain things, which I don't think is going to happen in my lifetime. Just having the resources and the expertise and the knowledge to be able to navigate the rules everywhere and then treat people better than fair, I think is going to be really important in terms of cultivating a great remote work experience in the future. </p><p>Yeah, absolutely. Great. This has been a blast. Thank you very much for hopping on and yeah, all the best with the book. Thanks so much. There are some interesting questions in there that got me thinking as well. So it's fun. Yeah. That's great.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-92118068293226818042021-03-22T06:15:00.001-07:002021-03-22T06:15:06.132-07:00Individuals and interactions over processes and tools<p>Of the four main claims in the agile manifesto, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is the one which is the most violated and missed. Particularly by people keen on implementing agile processes by the book. It's easy to start thinking immediately in terms of processes and workflows. It's a trap. It's just a habit. In most cases, managers create processes and workflows to compensate for a lack of trust among people in a team.</p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/team_sprit_ramsaler-300x300_78e152980ccdc86b9004fd517702e6ac_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/team_sprit_ramsaler-300x300_78e152980ccdc86b9004fd517702e6ac_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/team_sprit_ramsaler-300x300_78e152980ccdc86b9004fd517702e6ac_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/team_sprit_ramsaler-300x300_78e152980ccdc86b9004fd517702e6ac_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="individuals and interactions" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/team_sprit_ramsaler-300x300_78e152980ccdc86b9004fd517702e6ac_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>individuals and interactions matter more</figcaption></figure><p>When communication breaks down, each team member does their own thing. It's just "heads down". While this may increase the lines of code they produce, it's unlikely to produce more useful and working software. Regardless of whether I've worked alone or in a team, quite often discussing a feature before I begin work on it, I get insights which I wouldn't have gotten on my own. The additional perspectives are invaluable. This ranges from how it might look on the UI, to what the main purpose of a feature is, to how to implement the relevant data structure or algorithm. This type of exchange happens because of good team interactions. </p><h2 id="6pdko">Good vibrations</h2><p>It's really peculiar and hard to measure, but the feeling of interactions is still important. This "soft" part of software development, especially how it impacts effectiveness, is probably the most important part.</p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/luke_doing_improv_0fff5a52182754258db0559e93286e14_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/luke_doing_improv_0fff5a52182754258db0559e93286e14_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/luke_doing_improv_0fff5a52182754258db0559e93286e14_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/luke_doing_improv_0fff5a52182754258db0559e93286e14_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/luke_doing_improv_0fff5a52182754258db0559e93286e14_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>“Yes, And” in improv - Luke collaborating on stage</figcaption></figure><p>In improv comedy, there is a concept of "Yes, And". When developing a scene, two improv actors enter the stage with absolutely nothing but their imagination. Once one of them starts, the other immediately responds to the "offer" of the first. That offer becomes "reality", for the purposes of the skit.</p><p>This happens on the language level too. When coming up with dialogue, improv actors, dare i say comedians, always try to accept what the previous person said. <strong>Saying "No" or "Yes, but" kills the dynamic of a scene.</strong> It decelerates. Rapidly. This is the essence of collaboration. If the environment is such, that everyone can build on everyone else's creative ideas, it accelerates the rate at which these ideas come about. </p><p>It's not only about the "communication saturation" which scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland has mentioned in the past, where there is a larger number of connections among project participants. In particular, on the infamous<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2816856_Borland_Software_Craftsmanship_A_New_Look_at_Process_Quality_and_Productivity"> Borland Quattro Pro project</a>, they delivered 1 million lines of code in 18 months, with a team of a few people. There were many more discussions with project managers and testers than you would have on a typical project. Team leads dialed in individuals and interactions, thus achieving an incredible outcome.</p><h2 id="bkh4b">The quality of individuals and interactions</h2><p>Here <strong>the focus is on the quality of the interaction</strong>. At each step forward, you advance it. You are moving rapidly forward. You discover what you are making as you make it. It requires full attention. It requires being plugged into what your teammates are doing, as you want to run with any offer they make.</p><p><strong>If you thinking giving a presentation in public is hard, try making one up on the spot, with a few coworkers. </strong>While this might seem a bit wacky, it's actually a highly refined set of skills practiced in the improv theater community. While the actors don't know what any particular scene will be about before they start, each actor submerges himself into what everyone else is doing. As a result, they find ideal ripostes to every offer. The scene’s conflict is discovered organically. Tension builds. It culminates. And then the troupe completes the scene. Pure creativity comes from being completely plugged in to the situation. And from listening closely to other team members.</p><p>This improv meme has been on the fringe of the agile community for a while. I suspect its because there is a strong desire for focusing on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. People never seem to stop amazing me, especially the amount of creativity which others find in themselves. In a team setting, the culture in which a team operates allows for this type of free-flow of creative ideas. This assumes that everyone feels safe enough to offer ideas as they are created. That's where this Agile principle of ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’ puts you.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-38147779720158890452020-07-31T01:01:00.001-07:002020-07-31T01:01:16.054-07:00Introducing the Align Remotely podcast<p>I’m excited to share that I’m finally launching a podcast, after a few almost successful attempts in the past. </p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/stencil_soundwise-small-cover1_cd042d9a112b2ed5176e640f02e3e151_800.jpg 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/stencil_soundwise-small-cover1_cd042d9a112b2ed5176e640f02e3e151_800.jpg 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/stencil_soundwise-small-cover1_cd042d9a112b2ed5176e640f02e3e151_800.jpg" /></picture></figure><p>The Align Remotely podcast will focus on leading distributed teams and everything associated with that topic, like leadership and operations to help achieve together, now that nearly everyone works from home.</p><p>In addition to the actual recording, the show notes will also include a visual representation of the discussion, a transcript, as well as any other resources mentioned during the discussion. This should help make the contents skimmable and also useful for anyone who prefers a more visual way to consume audio content. </p><p>The first episode was recorded with James Newson, who is a technical specialist around remote work. We cover any potential issues and possibilities around hybrid working, for when the coronavirus epidemic is over. And there is a lot more to it than I thought, because usually I was just leaning on company IT to “sort it out”, without having a proper think-through.</p><p>You can find out more at https://www.alignremotely.com and look for the podcast whereever you consume your podcasts. The first episode is over<a href="https://podcast.alignremotely.com/e/1rnkp6z8"> here: https://podcast.alignremotely.com/e/1rnkp6z8</a></p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-5800735163816003752020-07-10T05:24:00.001-07:002020-07-10T05:24:45.780-07:00Why the silo megaphone effect undercuts your ability to align<p>The biggest challenge I've had with building alignment as a team leader was the "silo megaphone effect". In the past, I've attended a number of surreal stakeholder meetings attended by: </p><ul><li>head of product</li><li> head of delivery</li><li>a technical person</li><li>a head of QA</li><li>or possibly other managers. </li></ul><p>Each participant makes statements that--on their own--made absolute sense. For example, the QA person argued for keeping a certain standard in terms of quality. The delivery person wanted to bring in the date as much as possible. The product person wanted to throw in as much scope as possible to make it easier to sell the product. I understood what they were saying. I could fully understand why they were saying what they were. They genuinely believed they were arguing for the overall benefit of the company, as a whole. </p><p>Nevertheless, if you juxtaposed what one manager was saying against the other, it was less than clear what the overall priority was. And this is exactly what I call the <strong>silo megaphone effect</strong>. </p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/silo_megaphone_effect_4cb028d1c30544d3ef7024e729009be6_800.png 1x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/silo_megaphone_effect_4cb028d1c30544d3ef7024e729009be6_800.png 1x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/silo_megaphone_effect_4cb028d1c30544d3ef7024e729009be6_800.png" /></picture></figure><p>Each manager spent a lot of time with their respective team. So they had agreement amongst themselves as to the best course of action. But when meeting across department boundaries, the communication broke down. Nassim Taleb noted that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). In particular, each manager running a department has a certain set of objectives and assumptions that are reinforced by discussions with people he's managing, resulting in rather surreal coordination efforts.</p><p>The silo megaphone effect refers to the tendency for managers to specifically argue what is best for their particular functional area. The inadvertent focus is on local maximization. This happens by default, despite everyone having the best of intentions. </p><p>I've fallen into the trap myself, of arguing for a short term benefit that will bring in the schedule at the expense of properly solving a problem at an organizational level. Sometimes the schedule pressure was just immense.</p><p>The main way that I dealt with this was to cross-reference statements from different stakeholders, and then ask for further clarification. The aim was to achieve what’s called “referential integrity” in a database. Where every data point is fully linked up to every other data point. Ultimately, in order to delegate effectively, we needed to agree what the ground rules were. This way we could communicate them to the teams, and hold ourselves accountable to them. </p><p>Read more in <a href="http://reccomendedbyluke.com/alignRemotely">Align Remotely</a>.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-76648924019389590522020-07-02T02:44:00.001-07:002020-07-02T03:11:48.353-07:00Why addressing errors effectively lies at the heart of team performance<p>No one wakes up in the morning excited to go to work and look ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. While it's not true of everyone, I think it's fair to say that anyone who gets a job wants to be there and usually wants to do well--for the purpose of self-respect. Look at how elated most people are when they accept a job after getting an offer. It's when they enter into the "systems" at a particular company, that everything usually takes a left turn. </p><figure class="video regular "><div class="embed-container"><div style="max-width: 100%; position: relative; padding-top: 74.9455%;"><iframe width="459" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7TRbdXpM4B0?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" style="position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 0px; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe></div></div><figcaption>Modern Times (1936) trailer: capturing the essence of managing </figcaption></figure><p>In established companies, it's sadly common for employees to be habituated in a context of fear of failure. Especially if there is a lot of pressure from management to perform at a high level. There are ambitious goals, often coupled with a lack of clarity on how they will be achieved. In practice, employees focus on looking busy (however that is defined). They end up fearing failure, of not living up to expectations.</p><p>As a manager, there is a fine line to draw here. You don't want to set the bar too low and cause everyone to just slack off. The starting point here is one of psychological safety; according to the research, this is one of the main factors driving high performance in teams. In particular, how you handle errors, failures, or surprises in a way that keeps the team accountable while enabling them to believe that they will be listened to--if they speak up.</p><h2 id="abf6v">Common error types </h2><p>According to Amy Edmondson in <em>The Fearless Organization</em>, there are 3 different types of errors which happen professionally, and their meaning is largely driven by context:</p><ol><li>mechanical errors in a highly repeated process that just need to be minimized in frequency: this is what Modern Times parodied</li><li>interaction errors which result from highly complicated relationships, especially in a larger company</li><li>thwarted expectations around a goal in the context of experimentation, often a surprising result of an experiment </li></ol><p>A large part of the challenge of large companies is that they treat all errors as if they were all #1 by default. This approach may be tied to political gamesmanship. But not everything is just a deviation from a standard (regardless of who actually decides and imposes that standard). Especially in knowledge work like software, where completing something requires you to learn something you don't know up front. Edmondson quips, “For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge!” </p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_1252cfc5196529cef4819925a91a08a4_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_1252cfc5196529cef4819925a91a08a4_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_1252cfc5196529cef4819925a91a08a4_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_1252cfc5196529cef4819925a91a08a4_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="I don’t know who dropped this in Leeds city centre but I feel their disappointment. " src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_1252cfc5196529cef4819925a91a08a4_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/@rojekilian">Sarah Kilian</a> | Source: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure><p>In my software experience, most of the problems encountered, especially around people and process, were due to #2. Company systems were wrong, inadequate or just misaligned. Unfortunately, this typically meant that a person or department was singled out and blamed. I tried hard to bring the discussion back into a discussion around how the work was done, and if something could be done to prevent a similar problem from re-occurring. </p><p>The last type (#3) is essentially an opportunity to improve the company, the product, or the workflow, packaged as an intellectual surprise. Sometimes, the team would come across a much better way to solve or define a technical problem than they had originally wanted to do otherwise. This was particularly common in the early days of designing a large system. The same can be true on the business side, if the company is open to experimentation on that end. These are so valuable, that most innovation circles try to maximize the number of these errors through structured experimentation and record-keeping, in order to speed up overall progress. </p><h2 id="98lfe">Be open to taking ownership and admitting mistakes</h2><p>From the perspective of psychological safety, it's critical to start with assuming any error is a #2. This includes assuming that the leader in the system is responsible for the system. More importantly, he is also part of the system. Which means that the manager needs to be open to letting their ego bruised, and be willing to admit mistakes in front of their fellow team members, in the service of improving life for everyone. Once I did this enough times with my team, they realized and eventually believed that I was genuinely interested in optimizing how the team worked. </p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_b8ee04add445d8f36c39c08af6a4b6af_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_b8ee04add445d8f36c39c08af6a4b6af_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_b8ee04add445d8f36c39c08af6a4b6af_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_b8ee04add445d8f36c39c08af6a4b6af_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="Set of four brass vintage skeleton keys on neutral background. Very steampunk look!" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_b8ee04add445d8f36c39c08af6a4b6af_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/@jentheodore">Jen Theodore</a> | Source: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure><p>Essentially the way to solve the misaligned expectations problem (bar too high vs too low) is to view the work as a system. And that way, you depersonalize the work enough, that fears become less of a driver for action. Instead, employees follow their genuine interest in improving their own work life. This allays fears of failure. And gets everyone more involved and excited. </p><p>Ultimately, you care about the output your team produces, so focus your management on that, rather than on policing individual effectiveness. Paradoxically it produces better results.</p><h2 id="118u1">Key Takeaways</h2><ul><li>Psychological safety lies at the heart of high performing teams</li><li>Most commonly errors are assumed to be individual mistakes, rather than the result of complicated interactions gone wrong.</li><li>Get the team excited about improving the workflow</li></ul>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-45706168661922296032020-04-15T02:01:00.001-07:002020-04-15T02:01:21.085-07:00How to measure how much a #remote team is "gelling"<p>"No, you see, you have to monitor what people are doing. If you don't do that, people will just do a minimum of work," Alessja said.</p><p>I used to run this same team, and everything felt faster. They were talking to each other to figure out how to pass things along. And things just happened. True self management. And now the performance fell apart. It had devolved into everyone working on their own tasks again, as I was trying to coordinate a number of teams simultaneously.</p><p>"I don't feel comfortable with that", I countered. By increasing control and trying to force people to go faster, you'd likely get the opposite effect. I had in mind my previous experience at the <a href="https://www.launchtomorrow.com/2019/12/the-kindergarten-the-construction-site-and-the-assembly-line/">Lego event</a>. Moreover, there are other ways to <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cultures">keep discipline in a new product environment</a>. </p><p>"I tend to agree", the senior executive on the call diplomatically concurred.</p><p>Was I just being naive? I'd already managed this team in the past. At this point, I was running a program that included it, just shipping something new. I couldn't figure out what's wrong.</p><figure class="image regular "><picture style=""><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_e6619f1e379048704d5d69e2f932a05c_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_e6619f1e379048704d5d69e2f932a05c_1600.jpg 2x" media="(max-width: 768px)" /><source srcset="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_e6619f1e379048704d5d69e2f932a05c_800.jpg 1x, https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_e6619f1e379048704d5d69e2f932a05c_1600.jpg 2x" media="(min-width: 769px)" /><img style="" alt="" src="https://images.storychief.com/account_4808/unsplash-image_e6619f1e379048704d5d69e2f932a05c_800.jpg" /></picture><figcaption>Photographer: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/@markusspiske">Markus Spiske</a> | Source: <a target="_blank" href="https://unsplash.com/">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure><p>Throughout the day, people would reach out to me if they needed something during the day. And it felt increasingly like a hub and spoke system. Not like the well-optimized flat hierarchy I was hoping for. With me as the hub of anything happening. And the bottleneck-in-chief. </p><p>Instead, everyone was being held accountable individually for their contribution. By team leads. Which I had agreed on, in order to lower my own overwhelm when dealing with so many people. But now I was having second thoughts.</p><h3 id="5h3kd">What happened?</h3><p>Later that day, I started thinking about metrics again. The team felt like it was going a lot slower than it used to. Strictly speaking, <a href="https://www.launchtomorrow.com/2019/10/how-to-choose-a-useful-measure-of-incremental-progress-for-your-team/">velocity </a>was low. Much of the current work was just bug fixing. We didn't initially have enough of an infrastructure to ship new features with integration tests; even though now this infrastructure existed, a big gap existed between where manual testing happened and where <a href="https://www.launchtomorrow.com/2014/01/automated-testing-make-anyone-money/">automation </a>was. </p><p>On a lark, I checked the <a href="https://www.launchtomorrow.com/2019/10/how-to-choose-a-useful-measure-of-incremental-progress-for-your-team/">cycle time</a>. And it turned out we were up to a median of approximately 9 days per item, across the whole program. Including the team who had previously achieved 36 hours of median cycle time. Something was off--systemically. </p><h3 id="62n4c">What was different?</h3><p>I realized that factor I overlooked here is the team dynamic. <strong>And we previously had a team dynamic that arose, when we were introducing habits to reduce cycle time. </strong>In particular, to minimize the handoff times between functions. Like make sure that code is reviewed quickly. Or that we don't take on too many issues into the sprint, parking the majority in "awaiting" states.</p><p>In effect, cycle time is correlated enough with how well a team interacts, that it can serve as a measure of the team dynamic. The quality of the interactions. Because there is just one goal for everyone, regardless of specialty and seniority, it becomes easier to work as a team. And handoff work among people effectively. </p><p>While in large organizations, cycle time highlight how work floats between silos, it seems to work at a team level also. </p><h3 id="384cp">Key takeaways</h3><ul><li>In addition to measuring the raw time of taking a task from start to finish, cycle helps measure how well a team is functioning, if there are no major organizational constraints. </li><li>As it is accurate in "real-time", cycle time can be used to experiment and improve delivery team dynamics. </li></ul>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-25349093011933501532020-03-30T05:32:00.001-07:002020-03-30T05:32:24.692-07:00What is your biggest question about working remotely?<p>Just to pick up where I left off last week, my daughter and I managed to get back home. And currently we are under quarantine for 2 weeks. Fortunately, without symptoms so far. We're very lucky that so far nothing particularly bad has happened. And slowly the disease is starting to hit people we know or our friends' parents.</p><p>Today I wanted to ask about your shift to working remotely, especially if you haven't done much of that so far. I've run remote teams for a few years, so I'm hoping I may be able to help with any questions or concerns you might have. </p><p>On my end, I think the biggest new challenge is the childcare one--working in parallel with becoming a full time homeschooler. That means re=prioritizing. On the fly. Overall spending more time with kids is a good thing, but somewhat painful in the short term. For example, it's difficult to pretend business as usual, when a 5 year old pretending she's a mermaid in the background, flapping her plastic tail on the ground. </p><p>Just reply to this message with your question/questions or leave a question in the comments on the blog.</p>
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</div></div>LaunchTomorrowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02664764981703923471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8650716954198131865.post-77393457247357662522020-03-19T12:17:00.001-07:002020-03-19T12:17:48.836-07:00Why Covid-19 numerical models overlook the reality families face<p>It all started innocently enough. </p><p>As I've been working remotely for a few years, I felt I hadn't been taking much advantage of it. So when my mom invited me to Cancun with my daughter who's in preschool, I figured "why not?" As long as my team had everything they needed and were clear on priorities, I could go. Moreover, I could just work from abroad. The only real difference was my time-zone availability. Beyond that, nothing changed for them. </p><p>For me, it just meant getting up for 6 am meetings. But being much closer to the equator helped rationalize this. Particularly since I already had a team member in Columbia, even closer to the equator with 6 am sunrise, 6 pm sunset. </p><p>While there were a few news reports about Corona virus in Wuhan province in China, there didn't seem to be much to be concerned about. My wife bought a box of face masks for our flight just in case. My daughter was excited about the face masks, at least initially. Kind of like Halloween. </p><p>You can probably guess where this is going.</p><p>At the airport, when we were walking around with our face masks, people gave us somewhat awkward looks. Although we weren't the only ones, we were one of a handful of people with masks. Both in Warsaw and later in Zurich.</p><p>When we got to Cancun, the world went #CovidCrazy. Suddenly, borders started closing, starting with the Polish one (for everyone except citizens) but we still had to get there in order to cross the border. We almost boarded our return flight but decided not to, as there would be two changeovers and a bus ride across the German-Polish border, with hours of backlog. Not ideal for travelling with a lot of luggage and a preschooler. </p><p>Then to get back to Poland, all of the connecting flights became impractical, because those countries shut down their borders. Even though we'd only be changing flights, we'd have to cross the border at the airport to pick up and drop off our luggage while changing airlines. </p><p>Finally, it looks like the Polish government looks like it may organize direct flights via the national carrier back to Warsaw. But still waiting on confirmation for this. Without it, we'll be in Mexico until the international lock down resolves itself. Or more accurately, in self-quarantine so that we can travel at a moment's notice. </p><p>We live in volatile times. It's funny how I recently penned a few posts about proactivity, while remaining flexible and not locking into a rigid plan, as the optimal strategy. Clearly this is a mindset which helps now. </p><p>Like a number of friends with split up families with dependents around the globe, both kids and seniors, the realities of the advice that comes out of mathematical models are a bit more complicated than it would have been for me as a single or even childless young couple. Kids can spread the disease but not have much symptoms. Grandparents face the risk of death due to lack of absolute numbers of ventilators. All that said, I am happy that I am quarantined among family and able to take care of them and myself. I'm hopeful that this situation will play itself out eventually. </p><p>There must eventually be some kind of way to restart flights using some type of nearly automated pre-certification of health/lack of Covid-19. The Chinese have some kind of device that measure body temperature from a few meters away. We just need to start thinking through what we can change in order to continue containing the virus, while giving people some ability to remain mobile. </p><p>Also, there have been a number of efforts among makers to come up with technical solutions to the expected shortfall of ventilator masks, like that of my friend Sal: <a href="http://diyventilators.com/">http://diyventilators.com/</a>. If you are interesting in helping out, join the chat at that site and say hi.</p>
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