A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
Team vision
This was my recent conversation with one of our teams:
Team: “We’re stuck as a team, we have a hard time prioritizing, planning, and executing… and we don’t know what to do.”
Me: “Well, why don’t you go back to your vision?”
Team: “That’s the problem. Things have changed and somewhere along the line, we lost it. We think it would be easier if you brought us the vision.”
Sometimes teams can reset the vision on their own. Often, they need external help. They need someone to provide enabling constraints under which they can do their work.
I decided to provide them with some guidance, but with a disclaimer. External vision will always be somewhat generic, without explicit tasks and technical details. It will contain guidelines and principles to steer their everyday life, but they have the autonomy and obligation to turn those guidelines into specific prioritization and execution choices.
Just a few days after they have embraced a new vision and made it their own, they felt that it unstuck them, helped them make better choices and move forward in the same direction.
Lesson learned: never forget the power of the vision and the leadership’s duty to facilitate the process if the team has a hard time aligning with the rest of the organization.
Interview of the Month
Digital nudging with Fabio Pereira
Fabio Pereira is a speaker, writer, and technologist dedicated to a very noble cause of raising the digital consciousness in the world. We spoke about digital nudging and the power that organizations building digital products have over our lives. Hint: it’s more than you think!
Show notes:
– Fabio recommends: Predictably Irrational, Hooked, Indistractable, Nudge, Thinking Fast and Slow
– Bias Codex is a list of known cognitive biases
– Center for Humane Technology
– Deceptive design patterns (also known as “dark patterns”) are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.
Hand picked
Floating Point Math – You may think you are a good technician, but do you know how much is 0.1 + 0.2? I also thought I knew
The State of Value Stream Management Report 2022 – Second annual edition of this report is available. Value Stream Management is one of the hottest approaches to optimizing your organization end-to-end. The report gives an overview of the implementation steps and current trends in applying the technique.
5 reasons why CI/CD is vital to your organization’s value stream – Matthew Skelton explains why CI/CD is not just a lump of automation scripts, but a key organizational capability.
What Are the Greenest Programming Languages? – If you’re into ESG regulation, or you just love our planet, this one is for you – find out which programming languages are more energy efficient!
5 Minute DevOps: DevOps or SRE? – In this 5-minute post, Bryan Finster explains how many popular terms relate to DevOps. Don’t let others drag you down into meaningless discussions about definitions.
On-call pay calculator – Good people from incident.io have developed a free on-call calculator for calculating how much everyone is owed for being on-call at the end of the month.
Running More Low-Severity Incidents Is Improving Our Culture – Dan Condomitti shares how FireHydrant helps create a culture that destigmatizes incidents and supports learning.
Read with us
Digital Nudge: The hidden forces behind the 35,000 decisions we make every day
Nudging is the art of gently influencing people’s behavior by using well-known ways of how our brains work. When used for a good cause, it is a valuable ally. When used for illicit or amoral cause, it is a dangerous weapon.
In this book, Fabio Pereira demystifies these mechanisms and makes us more aware of what influence digital companies have over us.
