#work (328 links)
- Doorman fallacy - A quick explanation jaakkoj.com
You can think of the doorman fallacy as an extension or example of the Chesterton's fence fallacy: getting rid of the fence (doorman) without fully understanding why it was there in the first place.
- TBM 423: Why Defining Teams Is So Hard cutlefish.substack.com
Hint: It’s not some magic skill.
- TBM 422: Exception, Presence, Delegation cutlefish.substack.com
AI can reproduce the artifacts glue people produce, but it cannot reproduce the connective tissue: the judgment, the legitimacy-building, the social bridging. Remove them, and you get the thing leaders keep complaining about: “I don’t know what’s happening, no one is escalating, everyone is working in silos.” The question is whether we’re genuinely rethinking how authority and judgment flow, or just automating old models faster. We’ve just removed the people who made it work, and now we’re blaming the playbook.
- Another about face on productized services linkedin.com
Today it's so easy to spin up an AI solution to a problem. The temptation then is to sell that as a product. Now your inbox is filled with pitches for AI products, but just like back in 2005, what clients really want is someone to work with them, advise them, figure out solutions for their unique situations.
- TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI cutlefish.substack.com
When organizations say “AI can do what the glue people did,” they are looking at the output layer and missing everything underneath. The risk isn’t just that the AI-produced artifacts will be lower quality. It’s that removing the people and assuming AI covers it eliminates the judgment, social infrastructure, and adaptive capacity that made those artifacts matter, while creating the appearance that everything is still being handled.
Oops.
- Notes on going solo: celebrating 6 years of Studio Self joanwestenberg.com
Keep it small, keep it opinionated.
- "Collaboration" is bullshit. joanwestenberg.com
When you strip away the product marketing and the dev relations and the blog posts and the funding rounds and the fuckery-upon-fuckery of it all, we’re left with a simulation of collective engagement - but very little else. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome.
- TBM 403: The Seduction (And Folly) Of Rollups, Points, and (Most) Time Tracking cutlefish.substack.com
I were to leave you with one idea, it is to go back to the ideas in How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard. The basic idea there is that you can measure far more than you think, but only if you’re clear about what decision the measurement is meant to support, accept uncertainty instead of chasing false precision, and choose measurement approaches that reduce uncertainty at the lowest possible cost.
- Why AI won’t wipe out white-collar jobs economist.com
Employment among “business operations specialists, all other”—a grab-bag combining process design, co-ordination and analysis—has jumped by almost 60%, with solid wage growth to match.
- How to benefit from the conversations you have at work economist.com
Demonstrable curiosity about other people’s experiences and ideas can benefit everyone. Asking questions, not cutting people off, pausing to digest what someone has said rather than pouncing on breaks in a discussion to make your own point: these are not enough to qualify someone as a supercommunicator. But in plenty of organisations they would still represent good progress.
- Every organisation has some madness — Katherine Wastell katherinewastell.com
You can design structures, processes and plans, but nothing will take hold unless human behaviour changes too. Behaviours are the foundational levers of change. But they’re rarely taken seriously because they’re hard to attach to quantifiable goals.
- TBM 389: Overthinker! cutlefish.substack.com
From a young age, being accused of “overcomplicating” or “overthinking” things felt like a dismissal of who I was.
Between reality and models.
- Let's stop confusing execution with delivery linkedin.com
Delivery is about output. Tickets closed, features shipped, velocity charts trending up. It's visible, measurable, manageable. Execution is about system design: how your organization actually turns intent into outcomes. It's the invisible architecture that determines whether you're learning or just busy.
Helpful framing when working with feature factory places.
- GOV.UK’s firebreak: why and how we spent a month working differently – Inside GOV.UK insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk
- Altoids by the Fistful § Scott Smitelli scottsmitelli.com
Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.
- TBM 366: Empowered For Delivery, But... - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
For mission command to work, you need clarity of intent, high trust, coherence, the ability to escalate without penalty, and a culture that values the "process" of providing feedback and problem solving[...] By contrast, tech often adopts the language of mission command (e.g., autonomy, empowerment, intent) without investing in the hard infrastructure of trust, shared context, and safety necessary to escalate.
- WIP It Real Good | @johncutlefish's blog cutle.fish
- TBM 330: (Un)common Sense Playbook - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
This is a great example of how a mix of common challenges can stymie the common sense playbook. The mix of optics pressure, a "guarded" toxic personality, low trust, and a swamped partner is hard to surmount. Even an experienced manager will struggle in this situation.
- Leadership is like juggling noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com
Being in a leadership position, particularly one where you hold ultimate responsibility like CEO or MD, is like juggling lots of balls. Some of those balls are made of rubber and some are made of glass. The rubber ones you can drop, as they will bounce, but the glass ones you can't drop as they will shatter. The skill is to work out which ones are rubber and which ones are glass.
- Directly Responsible Individual vs Single Threaded Leader | by Oliver Hu | Keqiu’s Management Notes medium.com
STL is short for Single Threaded Leader. Different from previous approach, this [...] makes the leader exclusively dedicated to a project. The individual ONLY works on this single top level initiative.
- Your team needs a tech lead, not a lead techie · Machines, Code, People zuehlke.github.io
A tech lead should be a multiplier for the team, and adding code to the repository does not help in this regard. After all, it makes much more of a difference to help ten developers be 10% more effective than to contribute a mere 0.3 full-time equivalents of coding power.
- TBM 305: Stop the (Goal) Cascade Madness cutlefish.substack.com
Goal cascades are compelling, but they don’t work nearly as well as we think they do.
Good Grauniad summary.
- Team Topologies Community team-topologies-community.mn.co
- TBM 315: The Self-Sealing Argument Trap cutlefish.substack.com
The punchline: We frequently get pulled into Catch-22 arguments and discussions. No matter what we do—at least the normal gut options—we lose. But awareness is a gift.
- Words on Founder Mode randsinrepose.com
- The Bozo Explosion Lives On | The Heretic theheretic.org
It is on us to create the environment to allow people to become the very best version of themselves. Start by giving people an A – and allow them to live up to it.
- Advising Clients Ethically — 2Bobs 2bobs.com
Whether you call yourself an advisor or consultant (or not), David has seven core ethical principles that should govern advisory work.
This is great.
Small agencies with weak positioning tend to find new business tough.
- Brandification, not blandification - Why brands need to stop falling into copycat functionality creativepool.com
Companies everywhere are investing heavily in paid social, websites and CRM programmes but agencies are increasingly using similar techniques, emulating each other’s functionality and using the same tonality. Done in the name of optimisation and best practice, it might deliver in the short term, but long term, brands are shedding their personality.
- Ask HN: What would you do for developer experience | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
Has some great comments around “talk to people” and “don’t impose”.
- The importance of defining terms on every project, and how to agree them gathercontent.com
A look at the importance of shared vocabulary for projects with some non-tech world examples and showing how digital teams can benefit from this.
- Critical effort: why we reach a goal (or not) deprocrastination.co
Discomfort is also a prerequisite of doing something new. When you're solving a problem in a different way, it won't be immediately understood by others and you'll get a lot more head shakes than nods of agreement. To get through that, you need to be ok with being uncomfortable. The bigger the change, the longer you'll be uncomfortable.
- The unfortunate math behind consulting companies longform.asmartbear.com
Hiring even one person creates a lot less profit than you’d think, and launching a product rarely works out.
- Dovetail helps non-profits find a digital partner dovetail.network
- I’ve developed a more nuanced view on Scrum since working as a contractor | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
Now, after seeing [Scrum] from an adjacent (but not subjugated under it) perspective, I think it is a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: taking developers who can’t or don’t want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them.
- Surviving Burnout lifeofaudrey.com
The first thing I know about burnout is this: burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions but having no meaningful control over those outcomes.
So everyone, in the first decade of the 2000s, said: I turned off my notifications. I do one thing at a time. But what we didn’t realize is that even when you jump over to check the inbox and come right back, it can be just as damaging as multitasking. When you looked at that email inbox for 15 seconds, you initiated a cascade of So if you have to work on something that’s cognitively demanding, the rule has to be zero context shifts during that period. Treat it like a dentist appointment. You can’t check your email when you’re having a cavity filled.