Welcome to my newsletter! Each week, I spend my learning time reading online and reading books. My main goal is to go deeper in my learning and share it with you.
Personal & Well-Being
Difference between creative and uncreative people [Read more]
📌 We can all be creative. Creativity takes time. But, it has become much more difficult with the way we experience things nowadays. There is an urge to confirm ourselves and share with others and move on. Yet it is by digging deeper that we can get meaning. We may even produce something that can produce meaning for someone else.
Other related readings: train your brain to be more creative
Take a break from focus not from distractions [Read more] or the book
📌 Nowadays distractions are central of our lives. They are everywhere and sometimes we fail to recognise them. As soon as boredom kicks in, we have to do something and fill that time with distractions.
In your personal life it may be your phone at work it may be Slack or email. While we can’t avoid distractions, we can re-educate ourselves and take more control of our time again
What I have started to do personally is:
Check my phone every 30min for max 5 min. e.g. at 9:25 and 9:55, I have 5 min. I do that every hour and every day(If I miss that slot, it is lost…) Timely stuff are exception to this rule.
I set up a personal SLA with a priority ranking for my Slack and email. e.g. DM/mentions on Slack are a top priority.
In terms of outcome, I found myself using my phone more purposefully. I felt more focused and less stressed.
Other related content: 6 Ways to Leverage the Untapped Potential of Think Time
People and Teams
Team Dysfunction Mini-Series
Episode 1: Absence of Trust (Read more) or the book
✅ In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.
⚠️ Teams that lack trust dread team meetings and are reluctant to take risks in asking and offering assistance to others. Morale tends to be quite low and turnover quite high.
💡 Building trust is an ongoing activity and doesn’t happen overnight. It’s important to share experiences together, build up credibility and understand the unique attributes of each team member. As a leader, you have to demonstrate vulnerability first. In order to open up your team to take risks, you have to take risks yourself. However, this must be genuine.
Practical activities you can do:
Personalities Profile (the company provides that already)
360 Feedback
The coaching habit Mini-series [Read more]
Episode 1: Focus on the real problem, not the first problem
When people start talking to you about the challenge at hand, what’s essential to remember is that what they’re laying out for you is rarely the actual problem.
And when you start jumping in to fix things, things go off the rails in 3 ways:
you work on the wrong problem
you do the work your team should be doing
the work doesn’t get done
We need to resist the temptation of problem-solving and ask more questions.
📌 For example we can ask people “What’s on your mind?” and we get some answers, we can dig deeper with questions such as: “What else?“ or “What’s the real challenge here for you?“
With other people, you may get a proliferation of challenges. They share lots of problems. However, you need to focus on the real problem. So again ask the question to narrow down what’s the real challenge. Resist the temptation to jump straight in…
Inspirational quotes
💡 I’m not interested in the debate about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It’s completely irrelevant. What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. (Matt Ridley - The Rational Optimist)
💡 The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. (Simon Sinek - Start With Why)
Delivery and Technology
Adaptive, Socio-Technical Systems with Architecture for Flow: Wardley Maps, DDD, and Team Topologies (Read more)
This article takes very important concept and put them together to enable better business alignment and flow.
When building and improving adaptive, socio-technical systems, we need to consider the system as a whole instead of focusing on local optimization of separate parts. We need a holistic approach that involves perspectives from business strategy, software architecture and design, and team organization, e.g., by combining Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design, and Team Topologies
The combination of Wardley Mapping, DDD, and Team Topologies provides a powerful holistic toolset to design, build, and evolve adaptive socio-technical systems that are optimized for a fast and sustainable flow of change and can evolve and thrive in the face of constant change
Create Effective Presentation Decks
When it comes to making an effective presentation I previously learnt about the following:
Set the expectations from the very beginning about the topics you are going to cover
Tailor your deck to your audience. It should be clear for them the “What's in it for me“
I took a class last week, hoping to learn more. The main take aways were about the visual aspect of slides.
Too much content is clearly distracting and we should all know that. A presentation, should be only a visual support. It’s useful therefore, making sure the content is concise and minimal. Sometimes a picture is much better than words.
Finally I realise I use quite a lot bullet points. While bullet points are useful, they can be also distracting. We can use different approaches that: such as using icons, separate in different slides, use objects etc..
Here is a link to find some ways to do that.
Wise choice starting with TRUST - that underpins everything.