Happy Friday! From my brain this week: The French brigade, rest, maps, scale and not arguing with strangers on the Internet.
Thoughts from the week…
- Had a good chat with someone from a similar organistion doing a similar thing. Always a very useful investment of time. It’s incredibly easy to get stuck in your own context and become blind to things that are otherwise accepted as givens.
- Reflecting this week on why I sometimes find it really difficult to rest. Some of it is guilt when I’ve not made as much progress as I would like and therefore I’ve not ‘earned’ the rest (this is a crappy line of thought that I need to challenge). Some of it is being unable to select an activity which feels restful in the way that I need it to be.
- Something to work on next week is to build in some intentional rest breaks, and perhaps experiment with some different activites to see if anything works better.
- I’ve just started watching The Bear and I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to learn more about the kitchen brigade system. I’m generally interested in how people organise outside of the office environment, mostly because I wonder if there’s some useful transferrable knowledge. It’s a very hierarchical system which makes sense in the context of trying to reproduce something (in this case food) to a high standard on a repeatable basis.
- I am reminded again that the map is not the territory. We tend to cling to artefacts to make sense of things, especially things that are hard to hold the entirety of in our minds. It’s all too easy to get overly attached to the map and forget about the reality of the territory.
- Scale matters. An approach taken from an organisation with 1000 colleagues is unlikely to work in an organisation with 100. Is it also inherently easier to scale up rather than scale down?
- I might have to institue a ‘don’t read the comments on provactive trending posts’ rule for LinkedIn. This is to prevent the need for an adjacent rule, which is “don’t argue with strangers on the Internet”.
- Just hit retrospective number 38. We do these every two weeks on a Friday afternoon as a team. Whilst most of our work is extremely *not* agile in nature, I have found this regular reflective practice to be useful in talking about successes and frustrations.
- The most frustrating frustrations are the things that tend to pop up on a semi-regular basis. But I think that as long as you’re experimenting with different ways to address them, then it’s a discomfort that’s worth tolerating.
Interesting things…
- Prescient blog post from 2012 underlining the importance of owning your own bit of space on the Interwebs – “Your words are wasted” – https://www.hanselman.com/blog/your-words-are-wasted
- Why do some work related activites feel weirdly uncomfortable in an office environment? Like reading a work related book? – https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2023/08/07/a-subversive-sixty-minutes/
- What Publiic Digital thinks about AI – https://public.digital/2023/08/03/artificial-intelligence-looking-beyond-the-hype