Reductio ad Absurdum
I got a note recently from someone halfway across the world, asking about a detail in my white paper about quantifying the quality requirements of a system. The query me ponder for a moment before I came up with a reasonable response, but I think it highlighted something that applies in a broader sense as well. Read more
Evolving Perspectives
Filed under: Agility, Leadership, Process, Quality, Teamwork
It seems that at any point in time, the current beliefs we hold to be true are sacrosanct. We are entirely convinced that we are correct as we use these beliefs to guide our way through life. It also seems that if we look back in time, whether that is 50 years ago, twenty years ago or only five, we can identify some beliefs that were powerful then and laughable now. Can we learn anything from this? Read more
From Training to Education
It is interesting to see what happens at some point in almost every workshop I run. Just after talking about some topic, often a topic where I get up on a soapbox and go off on a rant that takes us well beyond the standard training fare, I’ll have a few people come up to me at the next break. Almost in unison, they suggest that their managers need to hear what I had to say about this topic. For me, it’s an indication of the difference between training and education. Read more
Certification vs. Education
Way back in 1939, the great and powerful Oz had this to say to the Scarecrow, who was in search of a brain:
“Why, anybody can have a brain, that’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pucilanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have.
But they have one thing you haven’t got – a diploma.
Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatis Committeatum, E. pluribus unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D. (Doctor of Thinkology).”
Receiving that piece of paper didn’t make the scarecrow any smarter, as evidenced by his screwing up pythagorean and isosceles triangle theorems. He clearly received an empty credential.
More than seventy years later, we still struggle to recognize the distinction between certification and education. Read more
Best Intentions
We’ve all been in situations where we find ourselves slogging through our work, and the focus (if there is any focus at all) is to get the work done, rather than get it done well. Certainly household chores can fall into that category, and around the office there are similar activities like month-end reporting that can feel more like drudgery than uplifting activity. It becomes easy to find excuses for not getting the work done, procrastination becomes an art form, and while the result might pass muster, it certainly isn’t a masterpiece. When the core work we do starts to feel this way, when we just want it done and over with, it’s time to rethink what’s going on. Read more
Leveraging the Frog in the Pot
Everyone has heard of that metaphor of a frog in a pot of water: put the little guy in hot water and he’ll jump right out, heat the water gradually and he’ll just hang out there. The gradual changes are too subtle for him to perceive them and do anything about it. This explains why a lot of team environments are the way they are, and might even give us an idea about what we can do about it. Read more
Pushing Too Hard
We often make commitments to get things done within a given timeframe. Whether the time constraint was handed to you or you chose it is moot, as long as you have agreed to the commitment. If that time commitment is firm, and you find that it is not looking possible at some point, strange things start to happen. Read more
Focus on the Craft
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell provides a rule of thumb that people will get good at their craft after they have spent 10,000 hours plying it. He talks about the Beatles and their years in small clubs in Germany, Mozart and his long tenure in music, and describes the early years of Bill Joy and Bill Gates as well. I’ve heard similar 250,000 word rules for writing (I’m well past that mark and think there’s still lots to learn), and the practice time put in by some of the sports greats is legendary. Seems there is something to all this: that time – lots of time – is an important part of becoming good at something. Raw talent or innate genius will only get you so far. Read more
Planting Seeds
When it’s time to act as a catalyst for change in an organization, the last approach you want to take is the old ‘bull in a china-shop’ method: taking charge, giving orders, ignoring feedback, making demands. While you may end up delivering the proposed changes and maybe even an accurate analysis of what really needs to be done, you will fail in the end. There will be massive overt push back and passive resistance, and you will likely sour the team’s attitude toward change in general. A better approach is to think of yourself as a farmer, and to plant seeds. Read more
Where Do Lessons Go?
A good part of a formal closing for any project is a discussion of lessons learned. An even better approach is to get the stakeholders together to gather these lessons, both good and bad, in the form of a comprehensive retrospective. Unfortunately, in most cases, these lessons learned would be more appropriately called “things we should learn but are doomed to identify as lessons again on our next project.” Read more
Clarrus Proudly Sponsors VanQ
