Close
đŹ The Surprising Power of Simply Asking Coworkers How Theyâre Doing
đ¤ Facebook Maybe Not Singlehandedly Undermining Democracy With Political Content, Says Facebook
đ What is the Zollman effect?
đ Unnervingly good entry in the “what languages sound like to non-speakers” genre
âď¸ Could a Peasant defeat a Knight in Battle?
Quotation-as-title from Marcus Aurelius. Image from top-linked post.
I’m putting this together quickly before heading off to the Lake District camping with my son for a couple of nights. I’m pretty close to burnout with all of the things that have happened recently, so need some time on top of mountains and under the stars đď¸
Slack Connect is about more than chat: not only can you have multiple companies in one channel, you can also manage the flow of data between different organizations; to put it another way, while Microsoft is busy building an operating system in the cloud, Slack has decided to build the enterprise social network. Or, to put it in visual terms, Microsoft is a vertical company, and Slack has gone fully horizontal.
Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
The difference between consulting full-time now versus when I last did it in 2017 is that everyone adds you to their Slack workspace. This is simultaneously fantastic and terrible. What’s being described here is more on the ‘Work OS’ stuff I shared in last week’s link roundup.
See also Stephen Downes’ commentary on mini-apps that perform particular functions inside other apps.
Advertising funded businesses are aware that the minority of visitors want to give consent.
They are simply riding the ad train and milking the cash cow for as long as they can get away with before GDPR gets enforced and they either shut down, adapt to a more sustainable business model or explore even more privacy invasive practices.
And the alternative to the advertising-funded web? Charge for services. And have your premium subscribers fund the free plans.
Marko Saric
This is interesting, and backs up the findings in this journal article about the ‘dark patterns’ prevalent around GDPR consent on the web. The author of this post found that only 48% of people clicked on the banner and, as the title states, only 9% of those gave permission to be tracked.
There are some who are alarmed by the nature of the creature that the DfE has helped bring to life, seeing Oak as an enterprise established by a narrow strata of figures from DfE-favoured multi-academy trusts; and as a potential vehicle for the department to promote a âtraditionalistâ agenda in teaching, or even create the subject matter of a government-approved curriculum.
John Morgan (TES)
I welcome this critical article in the TES of Oak National Academy. My two children find the lessons ‘cringey’, not every subject is covered, and the more you look into it, the more it seems like a front for a pedagogical coup.
Journal entries should provide not only a record of what happened but how we reacted emotionally; writing it down brings a certain clarity that puts things in perspective. In other cases, itâs a form of mental rehearsal to prepare for particularly sensitive issues where thereâs no one to talk with but yourself. Journals can also be the best way to think through big-bet decisions and test oneâs logic.
Dan Ciampa (Harvard Business Review
When I turned 18, I decided to keep a diary of my adult life. After about a decade, that had become a sporadic record of times when things weren’t going so well. Now, 21 years later, I merely keep my #HashtagADay journal up-to-date.
But writing things down is really useful, as is having someone to talk to with whom you don’t have an emotion-based relationship. After nine sessions of CBT, I wish I’d had someone like my therapist to talk to at a much younger age. Not because I’m ‘broken’ but because I’m human.
Thereâs nothing like a crisis of survival to show peopleâs true natures. Though Iâve written a good deal about tumultuous times, both fiction (English Passengers) and non-fiction (Rome: a History in Seven Sackings), I canât say Iâm too interested in the tumult itself. Iâm more interested in the decisions people make during such crises â how they ride the wave.
Matthew Kneale (THe GUardian)
I don’t think I’d heard of any of these books before reading this article! That being said, I’ve just joined Verso’s new Book Club so my backlog just got a lot longer…
Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.
No oneâs really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now weâll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.
Cory Doctorow (Locus Online)
I’ve quoted the end of this fantastic article, but you should read the whole thing. Doctorow, in his own inimitable way, absolutely eviscerates the prediction that a ‘General Artificial Intelligence’ will destroy most jobs.
Header image by Patrick Hendry
I’ve read so much stuff over the past couple of months that it’s been a real job whittling down these links. In the end I gave up and shared a few more than usual!
Image via Kottke.org
These things caught my eye this week:
Header image via Dilbert
Today’s title comes from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which is an incredible book. Soon after the above quotation, he continues,
The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.
John Berger
That period of time when you come to be you is really interesting. As an adolescent, and before films like The Matrix, I can remember thinking that the world literally revolved around me; that other people were testing me in some way. I hope that’s kind of normal, and I’d add somewhat hastily that I grew out of that way of thinking a long time ago. Obviously.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that we cannot know the ‘inner lives’ of other people, or in fact that they have them. Writing in The Guardian, psychologist Oliver Burkeman notes that we sail through life assuming that we experience everything similarly, when that’s not true at all:
A new study on a technical-sounding topic â âgenetic variation across the human olfactory receptor repertoireâ â is a reminder that we smell the world differently… Researchers found that a single genetic mutation accounts for many of those differences: the way beetroot smells (and tastes) like disgustingly dirty soil to some people, or how others canât detect the smokiness of whisky, or smell lily of the valley in perfumes.
Oliver Burkeman
I know that my wife sees colours differently to me, as purple is one of her favourite colours. Neither of us is colour-blind, but some things she calls ‘purple’ are in no way ‘purple’ to me.
So when it comes to giving one another feedback, where should we even begin? How can we know the intentions or the thought processes behind someone’s actions? In an article for Harvard Business Review, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall explain that our theories about feedback are based on three theories:
All of these, the author’s claim, are false:
What the research has revealed is that weâre all color-blind when it comes to abstract attributes, such as strategic thinking, potential, and political savvy. Our inability to rate others on them is predictable and explainableâit is systematic. We cannot remove the error by adding more data inputs and averaging them out, and doing that actually makes the error bigger.
Buckingham & Goodall
What I liked was their actionable advice about how to help colleagues thrive, captured in this table:
Finally, as an educator and parent, I’ve noticed that human learning doesn’t follow a linear trajectory. Anything but, in fact. Yet we talk and interact as though it does. That’s why I found Good Things By Their Nature Are Fragile by Jason Kottke so interesting, quoting a 2005 post from Michael Barrish. I’m going to quote the same section as Kottke:
In 1988 Laura and I created a three-stage model of what we called âliving process.â We called the three stages Good Thing, Rut, and Transition. As we saw it, Good Thing becomes Rut, Rut becomes Transition, and Transition becomes Good Thing. Itâs a continuous circuit.
A Good Thing never leads directly to a Transition, in large part because it has no reason to. A Good Thing wants to remain a Good Thing, and this is precisely why it becomes a Rut. Ruts, on the other hand, want desperately to change into something else.
Transitions can be indistinguishable from Ruts. The only important difference is that new events can occur during Transitions, whereas Ruts, by definition, consist of the same thing happening over and over.
Michael Barrish
In life, sometimes we don’t even know what stage we’re in, never mind other people. So let’s cut one another some slack, dispel the three myths about feedback listed above, and allow people to be different to us in diverse and glorious ways.
Also check out:
Header image: webcomicname.com
I’ve written about this before, but this HBR article explains that successful teams require both psychological safety and cognitive diversity. Psychological safety is particularly important, I think, for remote workers:
Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is a dynamic, emergent property of interaction and can be destroyed in an instant with an ill-timed sigh. Without behaviors that create and maintain a level of psychological safety in a group, people do not fully contribute â and when they donât, the power of cognitive diversity is left unrealized. Furthermore, anxiety rises and defensive behavior prevails.
If you look at the various quadrants in the header image, taken from the HBR article, then it’s clear that we should be aiming for less hierarchy and more diversity.
We choose our behavior. We need to be more curious, inquiring, experimental and nurturing. We need to stop being hierarchical, directive, controlling, and conforming. It is not just the presence of the positive behaviors in the Generative quadrant that count, it is the corresponding absence of the negative behaviors.
When you’re in a leadership position, you have a massive impact on the cognitive diversity of your team (through hiring decisions) and its psychological safety (by the way you model behaviours).
How people choose to behave determines the quality of interaction and the emergent culture. Leaders need to consider not only how they will act, but as importantly, how they will not act. They need to disturb and disrupt unhelpful patterns of behavior and commit to establishing new routines. To lay the ground for successful execution everyone needs to strengthen and sustain psychological safety through continuous gestures and responses. People cannot express their cognitive difference if it is unsafe to do so. If leaders focus on enhancing the quality of interaction in their teams, business performance and wellbeing will follow.
Everyone, of course, will see themselves as being in the ‘Generative’ quadrant but perhaps the trick is to get feedback (perhaps anonymous) as to whether that’s how other people see you.
Source: Harvard Business Review
Leadership is a funny thing. There’s lots written about it, but, at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships.
I’ve worked for some great leaders, and some shitty managers. This Harvard Business Review article describes the usual three ways those in positions of power get things wrong:
The key derailment characteristics of bad managers are well documented and fall into three broad behavioral categories: (1) âmoving away behaviors,â which create distance from others through hyper-emotionality, diminished communication, and skepticism that erodes trust; (2) âmoving against behaviors,â which overpower and manipulate people while aggrandizing the self; and (3) âmoving toward behaviors,â which include being ingratiating, overly conforming, and reluctant to take chances or stand up for oneâs team.
But there’s another, potentially even worse, category:
Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams. Absentee leadership resembles the concept of rent-seeking in economics â taking value out of an organization without putting value in. As such, they represent a special case of laissez-faire leadership, but one that is distinguished by its destructiveness.
The problem with absentee leaders, as the article explains, is that they rarely get weeded out. There’s always more pressing problems to deal with. So the people who report to them exist in a professional feedback vacuum.
The chances are good, however, that your organization is unaware of its absentee leaders, because they specialize in flying under the radar by not doing anything that attracts attention. Nonetheless, the adhesiveness of their negative impact may be slowly harming the company.
If leadership is about relationships, then the worst leaders are those who show poor emotional intelligence, don’t invest in building trust, and provide little constructive feedback. If you’re in a position of leadership, it’s worth thinking about this from the point of view of others who interact with you on a regular basis…
Source: Harvard Business Review
