Author: neil

The Generation Effect & the Next Generation

Calm(er) than the last few days.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs shared a video in her newsletter on the difference between making notes vs taking notes. What’s most important, as she rightly points out, is better recall, done by taking the time and making the effort to create your own notes.
It’s based on “The Generation Effect“: the brain is able to associate and recall ideas better when it has generated them itself, rather than simply read.  She suggests a simple 3 step process:

  1. Rephrase the idea using your own words & language
  2. Connect ideas together – use mental maps or visuals
  3. Build upon the ideas; don’t merely let them remain dormant in the notebook.

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An idea from Vitalik Buterin’s 2013 blog on bootstrapping a DAO has been on my mind lately, after my colleague reminded me about it again this week:

can we approach the problem from the other direction: even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?

If the 12 Beyond Budgeting principles expounded by Bjarte Bogsnes are considered too radical a transformation to go mainstream (yet), even when they’ve proven their effectiveness in several traditional organisation, can a technology centred approach work?

And in conversation with my teenage daughter, I realised that it doesn’t matter with the next generation as digital natives.  I have to explore this subject a lot more.

Habitual Renovation

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits has been recommended to me by a few people, so I have it down on my reading list.  One quote I heard Brene Brown recollect yesterday was this gem:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of my work, both personal and professional. The last few months have felt incredibly challenging on all fronts.  The one thing I have missed about my daily work commute (& not the commute itself) was the space to think slowly and act deliberately. With my desk becoming the place for work and pleasure and reading and writing, the only thing that I’ve (not always regularly) done to compensate for that time has been my walk.

[I did do two walks today but forgot to take a picture so here’s another one from yesterday of angry looking skies]

Listening to BB refer to Clear’s quote reminded me – again – that my list fluctuates between things to set up a system and tasks to complete in pursuit of the goal. I tell my 10 year old all the time, you can’t work on more than one thing at once, and it’s advice I should follow myself.

This image on James Clear’s site  simply, elegantly, nails my problem. 

Some of my habits served me well in a past life.  These habits take time from my day and they now seem like a unsurmountable wall between what I am doing and what I really want to do.

Appearances are deceptive. Building a system that lifts the level of my ‘default performance’  is what this 100 days exercise is really about: committing to, and deliberately, consistently building (or renovating) my own system to adapt to the world I’m now in.

 

Spencerian Recap

Two weeks in, I’m feeling a little more confident about the capitals. Not entirely oval, & nowhere near perfect. It’s progress nonetheless.

The last two weeks (& will keep growing as I add to this album) look somewhat like this. Today I wrote out the capitals I’ve done thus far – and apparently forgot A again 🙂

Strategy & Flying in Formation

It was a solitary walk this afternoon, under an overcast sky today, listening to Brene Brown & her sister Barett Guillen riff on the subject of feedback. I stopped to take a picture here. The tide was in, the skies looked ominous, and lots of people were out, despite the lockdown restrictions loosening from next Monday onwards. We (me too!) clearly can’t wait to socialise!

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Anyway, the podcast conversation between the sisters was riveting. Two things stood out for me:

  1. The analogy that BB uses when describing how she moves between strategy and operations, “balcony” and “dance floor” as the third space, or “the stairs”. You’re either watching the dance from the balcony, or are in the weeds of execution on the dance floor. You learn to move from one to the other, and help others do the same.
  2. The ‘move’ happens not by jumping from the balcony to the dance floor & then worrying how to get back to the top – instead walk down a 5 step staircase, one step at a time.
    (& I her admission while she was describing this to BG that she feels like she’s never actually explained it that way to her team! Yes, she’s used this the context of “paint-done” but not in this context of thinking at different levels)
    The 5 C steps: Color: Physically, what does this look like? Is this an email, a direct mail piece? Do we want just copy or images too?
    Context: Why are we doing this? How does it fit into the company’s mission? Goals? Strategy?
    Connective Tissue:     When is this due and what other actions, deadlines and initiatives are reliant on this? What other pieces should we model this after to ensure consistency?
    Cost    : How much should this cost to complete?
    Consequence:  What happens if this isn’t completed on time?

*****

While I was listening to the podcast, I observed this pattern that the birds seemed to follow, not just the V formation but the way they flew in a wave-like manner. I’ve never noticed that before.

In Pursuit of Excellence? or Perfection?

Another glorious day for a walk on the beach.

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At what point in the progress of any piece of work is it “enough”? If more than one person is working on it, who gets to call “enough”? Deadlines are often the default way this decision gets made – there’s no more time left to do any more work so that’s that.  And I’ve seen enough – pun intended – to know that is most often the case.

I tried to drive a different approach today just because I could. No frantic last minute stuff; instead I created enough momentum that the rest of the team were able to finish work on the document with a good night’s sleep to spare. It was not just good enough, it was precisely what was required. Everyone’s said so.  AND YET:

What I observe is that there’s usually someone who wants to keep working on it. Something else can be changed, even though as a team, everyone felt comfortable with it. The extra effort will break something, need some more last minute work, etc etc.

I wonder if the habits we build over our working life ensure that even when things are ‘enough’, we can’t bring ourselves to accept something as done. The pursuit of excellence is a noble endeavour, and I’m beginning to notice that many folks (sometimes me included) are obsessed with the pursuit of perfection, mask it as excellence, and drive everyone around us crazy.

Take a break, go for a walk with your loved ones, I say.  I did & it was a glorious afternoon for a walk 🙂

Spencerian G

The letter G is demanding!

The exemplar is beautiful, almost perfectly proportional. And to imagine this was all handwritten – the control, hand-eye-mind coordination required, and the quality of the tools to pull this off nearly 80 years ago is remarkable!

Anywhere the Wind Blows

I am truly grateful that I get to live near these parts, get to go on a walk every day with someone I love dearly, and get to do it in the middle of the day too if I choose to.

It was a pretty windy afternoon walk today.  The wind was in our faces, and it was strong enough to whip up small waves over this large body of water. Minutes after I took this picture, the wind changed direction somewhat (how does that happen?) and we walked back home with the wind blowing in our faces again.

My (poor) analogy about some of the things that have been on my mind:
Vision was knowing I had to get home in time for the next meeting. Strategy was knowing I had a couple of paths to get home in the rapidly changing environment. Tactics was holding my cap down and twisting my body to provide as little a surface area as I could against the wind so I could walk briskly.

Reflecting on it, perhaps some of the reasons for my failures have been an inability in the moment to distinguish between strategy and tactics, and forgetting completely about the vision. In other words, just going where the wind blows.

And a reminder when I got back home to stop and appreciate the flowers