Interesting Readings #6
Every week I read about technical leadership, management and personal development and I share my notes and thoughts with you all.
This week it’s been quite hard for me.
This is a shorter edition, but I wanted to go ahead and publish it.
Learning "something" is better than "nothing".
My daughter is in the hospital and luckily she is doing ok now.
I was off work and with limited time for doing anything else.
Reading and writing helped me taking my brain off the constant worry in the evenings.
Is that the best thing for me? I am still figuring out.
Personal & Well Being
The Pitfall of familiarity ( Read more )
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) inspired this article. I haven’t read either book yet. But this was a good introduction for me. I found more resources to dig more into both books. I will definitely add them both to my reading list.
"System 1" (Think Fast) / our intuition relates to cognitive bias.
We collect experiences and our brain is capable of elaborating information at speed.
We are also capable of more rational and deep thinking ( “System 2“ - Think Slow).
In “System 1“ our mental associations and our brain ability to filter out information can lead to bias.
To simplify, our brain is lazy and if we can get an answer to a problem “without thinking”, we will do so.
This example, is an interesting one, where most people would use System 1 and give a wrong answer:
A bat and a baseball cost $1.1 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does a baseball cost?
If you answer $0.1, congratulations again, you’re in the majority!
A lack of familiarity can force us to use “System 2” (Slow thinking). This can bring better results as illustrated by this example
In his seminal book ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell tells a story of a study in which two people are asked to judge a student’s Big Five personalities by just observing their dorm room. Of the two observers, one is a total stranger to the student, while the other is their close friend.
To everybody’s surprise, strangers did better at predicting the students’ personalities than their friends on 3 out of 5 of the Big Five. The two personalities they fail to predict well were extroversion and agreeableness — two metrics that can’t really be estimated without actually interacting with the person.
Intuition is also referred to in a positive way. It is responsible for our survival. The speed at which it operates, can be very important in our professional world.
The issue with this skill we have is: “What are the boundaries where you can trust intuition?“.
The good news is that our brain is quick to update our mental associations. We can get better at fast thinking with new experiences and by new perspectives on things. This is where using our “slow thinking“, can help our “fast thinking“ to get better.
This topic caught my eyes for a while. If you also got more interested at the end of the newsletter I have attached more info.
Safe to Fail: A Journey in Reviving My Creativity ( Read more )
I liked reading this. It connects to the imposter syndrome that I covered last week. The message that stuck with me is that: quantity breeds quality. In other words, if we are still stuck or not creative, showing up and trying could be the solution.
I had a similar experience. I was writing the content for a learning session for the aspiring leaders in my company. The topic was about team management and ways of working. I took a storytelling approach. While I was happy with the idea, I struggled with the execution. I never felt inspired. Was never good enough. But, I completed and delivered the session. The key was trying. Writing, editing etc…
And if you are wondering, a little voice inside me is still asking “Was it good enough?“
Here is a good story taken from the article above.
A ceramics teacher divided his class into two groups.
One group would be graded on the quantity of ceramic pots they created over the semester — the more they created, the higher the grade.
The other group only needed to produce a single pot — and would be graded on its quality.
Come grading time, the highest quality pots actually came from the “quantity” group. The “quantity” group — in creating large amounts of work — had created opportunities to learn from mistakes and discover what worked. The “quality” group, in just theorizing about how to perfect clay, didn’t actually get as far.
People and Teams
How to communicate when Trust is Low ( Read more )
This is something I personally find hard. It is hard to do good work without Trust. However leaders, face situations like this more than we think. It may be a new relationship or a difficult one. I found the advice in the article relevant and useful.
Boring meetings suck ( Listen to the podcast ) & The surprising science of meetings ( Read the book )
This panel discussion about meetings was easy listening. Everyone has experienced boring meetings.
Nowadays we spend so much time in meetings.
But, how many of us have thought about improving our experience with meetings?
I like the analogy with films. Why do we like to go and watch films? Why do we dread so much attending meetings?
The main takeaways I took were about:
What's in it for me?
Meeting Interactions
Static agenda
What's in it for me
Often the problem is that there is no conflict… Nothing is at stake.
This means that people don't feel engaged enough.
Start the meeting with a clear outcome and make sure that the people in the room find it relevant for them. If you don't you may be wasting time and energy.
Meeting interactions
Meetings, compared to films, have a great advantage.
You can interact with other people. We can play a part and change the outcome of the meeting.
A way to start improving our meetings is to seek feedback.
Let's ask people what they think and what we can improve.
If we know we are not great at this, we can ask people to join and help us. Giving purpose to people makes people more engaged.
To enable more interaction it is important to make sure only the relevant people are in the room. Research says that more than 7 people in a meeting starts to be ineffective.
Static Agenda
Another interesting take was about the agenda.
Having an agenda is important. But not having flexibility can prevent more natural interactions. For example, this can happen when we set a time for each agenda item.
This can hold people back from joining the discussion.
A way to improve is to define an agenda in advance. Before the meeting you prioritise the most important items. We engage in discussion allowing people to discuss what matters the most.Technology and Delivery
Technology and Delivery
Cost of convienence ( Read more )
This is a beautifully written article about the (ab)use of abstractions. I don’t even try and add “abstractions“ here with my insights. Go ahead and read. 🤓
Anything but tech debt ( Read more )
This is an inspiring article. It made me think, if the issue with technical debt is more related to how we communicate it. Are we using the right language? Is it really worth using such a broad label or can we use more descriptive terms?
I have often been that engineer (and later that manager) struggling to come to alignment with my stakeholders on when and how to pay down tech debt. So often, those disagreements were emotionally loaded and frustrating on all sides. Looking back, I realize how often the source of that disagreement was a fundamental misunderstanding of what the work was and why it was valuable to the business.
Appendix
[…] The Pitfall of familiarity
There are a number of cognitive biases we have to watch for. Productivity Games, conveniently arranged them with the acronym “FaST”.
Frequent exposure
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehood is repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguish from truth
In other words our preference will be based on environmental conditions. A way to work around this is asking ourselves “Is this the best option for us. Or is it just the one I was most exposed to?“
The status quo
Loss aversion. The average person would weigh a loss twice as much as a gain.
”What am I losing while keeping the status quo?”
Tunnel Vision
”What you see is all there is”.
Our brain is able to infer knowledge based on limited information while neglecting ambiguity and suppressing doubt.
We should pause and ask ourselves, why may the opposite be true.