Slack is fully integrated into my life. Over the course of the last six months, it’s become a rarefied default application for me. It’s still early in the day and the coffee hasn’t kicked, but I can’t think of the last application that became default. Probably Twitter? The communication gap that Slack is filling is… more
DJ and I play Destiny. I’ve never met DJ, but each week he and I and a dozen or so other regulars are sitting on our respective couches, chairs, and bean bags tackling the various parts of this gorgeous first-person shooter. You can play much of Destiny by yourself. There are daily missions on various… more
Dunbar’s Number is a favorite blunt diagnosis for the pains that affect rapidly growing teams. The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250 describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads. What was simple from a communication perspective becomes costly. What was… more
Written in 1965. Rings painfully true today.
Defense arousal prevents the listener from concentrating upon the message. Not only do defensive communicators send off multiple value, motive and affect cues, but also defensive recipients distort what they receive. As a person becomes more and more defensive, he or she becomes less and less able to perceive accurately the motives, the values and the emotions of the sender. The writer’s analysis of tape recorded discussions revealed that increases in defensive behavior were correlated positively with losses in efficiency in communication.
I’ve been hating on status reports for a long time and it comes from my first knee-jerk reaction when my manager asked for one. My unspoken thought was, “Why, wait, what?” I didn’t understand big companies, I didn’t understand politics and bureaucracy, all I understood was that it felt like a waste of time to… more
Aimee Groth on Quartz:
In its highest-functioning form, he says, the system is “politics-free, quickly evolving to define and operate the purpose of the organization, responding to market and real-world conditions in real time. It’s creating a structure in which people have flexibility to pursue what they’re passionate about.”
Reads delicious and the Wikipedia page on Holacracy is also worth a read. Per that page, most of the adopters who are using Holacracy in practice read to be smaller companies. I think communication, roles, and responsibilities are much more fluid and easy to discern at this size which makes these organizations great test beds.
What happens at 150+ employees is a different situation. Communication becomes fundamentally more expensive and that’s when we inflict all sorts of new structures, roles, and responsibilities on our teams. It’s also when such cancerous growths as politics starts to take root and because the team has become so large, it becomes harder to inoculate against these culture killing developments.
If ever there was a company to give Holacracy a legitimate chance, it’s Zappos, but I’d like to see a report card in a year.
When I do speaking gigs, I open with a few questions to get to know the audience. I’m looking for a couple of key demographic numbers to gauge how much to focus on and tune different themes in any given talk. I ask: How many self-identified Apple people? (Typography jokes = ok.) How many engineers?… more
Each year, the race to get a ticket for WWDC is on. Even with early warning, the window of ticket availability shrinks with every passing year. 2013 being no different: 2 minutes. Capping the number of tickets is a classic Apple move: we’re going to create a sense of exclusivity by creating an artificial constraint.… more
When I do a talk, I introduce myself as “Rands. That guy who sounds like a fortune cookie on Twitter.” I relay this introduction with a mixture of joy and sadness. For me, the joy arrives when I successfully distill a complex thought down to fit the 140-character restraint of Twitter. These blurbs can easily… more
On the list of ways to generate a guaranteed negative knee-jerk reaction from an engineer, I offer a single word: process. Folks, in order to make sure that we hit our ship date, we have a new bug triage… process. You’ve heard the groans and you’ve seen the rolling eyeballs and made the fair assumption… more
