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2020-10-15
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Oh, Dune references? "If you deploy without rhythm, it won't attract the CAB."
Oh, Dune references? "If you deploy without rhythm, it won't attract the CAB."
I shall not CAB. CAB is the mind killer. CAB is the little death that brings oblivion...
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.
"We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science."
"Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest."
Hmm. I'll add this to the curriculum of the DevOps Academy 😄
“There is no escape—we pay for the technical debt of our ancestors.”
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” - Frank Herbert in his foreword to Project to Product.
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical executive team that makes sense. But the real executive team is always one step beyond logic.”
Using GitHub as a consensus engine for policy/standards is fascinating. Seems like collaboration platforms should look into creating effective consensus tools - that provide some intelligence around how well the input supports an actual consensus. It touches back on the need to connect disparate POVs within a complex organization to make effective decisions.
👍 thanks for being part of the panel and bringing this topic to light!
I was FTPing binaries from a related DC ASAP. No outage, just heart attack.
I did, however, stop tax calculations in Argentina for a month, so...
I did take down Sun's DC during peak EOQ shipping for about an hour though. Killed the root process.
So much fail is why we should never have prod access except via pipeline. 😄
You were fortunate to be in an environment with that safety. It's the system allowing the rm-rf * to happen, rather than the individual
exactly - and it turned into a great conversation about investing in resilience
"Set up conditions for ppl to learn fast." @chawklady #psychological-safety
"Set up conditions for ppl to learn fast." @chawklady #psychological-safety
@chawklady People sometimes focus too much on the word "fail" and forget you're supposed to be learning something from the execution failure. The experiment is only a failure if you learn nothing. I'll try the "learn fast" angle, it might resonate better with some people. Thanks for sharing that idea
I just told a UX designer on my team this AM that one main goal for a pilot is "speed to learning" rather than making it perfect
The requirements are wrong
We misunderstand them
They will change before we deliver@bryan.finster That "the requirements will change" statement is a tell tale of someone who "didn't get it" yet. They are usually thinking of a big deployment (which is not what we want, to begin with). If we deploy small, simple and fast, they better change the requirements as we go, otherwise chances are we are learning nothing
Yes, the above is my problem statement for designing a system of delivery that overcomes that truth.
"They will change" is a symptom of assuming that the unknowable is knowable
@jonathansmart1 Very true, or worse, that "the boss' opionion" equates "knowable", at least as far as one is concerned to keep their job. Sad times....
Nod, smile, say yes and then show value regularly. IME, usually people eventually pivot from 'requirement' as a thinking error, to how can we next maximise value
I tell teams, "we're trying to see if this is what the user needs. The expected outcome is we're probably wrong. How much wrong do you want to be?"
"Having a seat at the table for you to contribute further empowers you and creates a virtuous cycle." @drjgoosbysmith YES! A seat at the table enables ppl to have some confidence, some hope of success,
That 'sense of belonging' is so essential - well said @nazia.ali
I feel that mentorship is still, for most, an untapped trove of treasures. I'm glad we are talking about this now as something we should be searching for with intent
Mentorship is so important. I'm mentoring a new value stream architect right now. She's awesome, but has some of my old bad habits. I tell her stories of my fails. My mentor does the same for me.
Mentor and mentee relationships seem to have a natural magnetism - something that can't be forced or insincere.
I agree. in all of my mentor / mentee relationships, we are partners.
That is such an important point about the mentor need changing @drjgoosbysmith - many (most?) of my early career mentors have now retired. They still advise me but I look at this awesome community as a collection of new mentors.
I'm not sure I would even know what it would look like to be in a mentor relationship.
Some suggestions: A former boss or colleague (stay in touch!), a leader that is a peer to your boss, a senior peer in your group (including broader group)
(To the answer of how to find people who may be potential mentors).
Email a panelist. Find her on LinkedIn. I always had to find/assign people to be my mentors. Onward.
I asked people here if I could contact them and bounce ideas off them. It's useful to have people with an outside perspective in executive leadership roles you can talk to when you're trying to figure out how to communicate to that level.
@bryan.finster Interesting... I would never even have thought to do something like that.
Pro tip @letitia.soulliard all of the speakers from other companies are eager to share. DM them. 😉
"Confidentiality factor powerful to create safe environment to enable growth. " @nazia.ali
Almost all of my mentors are virtual and outside of my company
@drjgoosbysmith Great point. That's where Radical Candor needs to be part of the dialog with your mentor, otherwise all you have is a babysitter
A mentor is not necessarily someone more experienced, more senior
Some of the best mentoring, IME, is new graduates mentoring "senior leaders"
I have always assumed everyone I meet can teach me something
Not clouded by years of cognitive biases. If safe, holds the mirror up.
@chawklady - WE need more leaders who are willing to do this for people, especially if they are not their direct reports.
2@drjgoosbysmith I would posit that "Timely, Direct Feedback" should be added to your list of Ubuntic Fertilizers 🙂
A personal retrospective approach seems to be a good start. Start / Stop / Continue is one framework that can work well.
“won’t learn in an echo chamber”, surround yourself with different views.
Me: how am I doing? Mgr: Keep doin' what you're doin' Me: [leans in] no, really... how am I doing?
Me: how am I doing? Mgr: Keep doin' what you're doin' Me: [leans in] no, really... how am I doing?
Mgr: how are you doing? X: Great! Making great progress on X, Y, Z Mgr: No. How are YOU doing?
Mgr will get a better response if sincerely ask “How’s Life?” vs. How are you doing? or how is it going?
@drjgoosbysmith - Hey we have to keep our own gardens weed free too, right?
@drjgoosbysmith What abt experiences where young women have a hard time finding mentors in a male oriented workforce due to perception of unprofessional attraction?
I say find a male mentor then. There is one man in that organization that is willing to help you learn something. While I have had powerful Black female mentors, my older, White, male mentors have been SO instrumental. They shared with me ideas and possibilities that I sometimes had NEVER considered.
I mean - in an environment where the men sometimes avoid mentoring women - b/c it's "safer" for them to just mentor other men?
From that perspective, I try/hope to demonstrate through my speech and actions that I'm open to mentoring anyone regardless of gender, but I can't point to anything specific that I do as a specific nod toward women. Is there something I could/should be doing or saying?
That happens a LOT. But when a person sees that you welcome the criticism and act on it, that person will often feel a little bit more comfortable. Also, it may be relationship building first. Or, don’t even MENTION the word “mentor.” I might just start by asking questions. Most of my career I’ve been the only female, only Black person. When I started I was the youngest. NO ONE has ever asked to mentor me. I just took the leap and expected the best. Only 2 were not receptive.
Relationship building first - YES! To obtain a level of trust and to observe work interactions.
Also so true - in fact as you advance in your career the more frequently you are both a mentor and a mentee! Both are rewarding. I learned about the term DevOps first some someone I was mentoring! (this was back in 2010)
I would always ask colleagues and even managers for feedback on my performance they would say "Great" or "Keep Doing what you're doing". Now when I am asking for feedback about ways to improve my performance I'll ask specifically "What is one thing I could have done differently?" that way it puts the onus on the person being asked to give at least 1 thing I could do better.
Not even necessarily better, just differently. It calls back to the point about unique perspectives.
I once worked somewhere where work/life balance was so out of whack that I started calling it life/work balance.
My favorite new take on that one is "work life harmony". Balance implies some 50/50 split - which is not real
Ive also heard/used work life integration... Now that I type that phrase it has taken on a 10X meaning in the covid era...
@paula.thrasher totally agree! I had another sr. leader call it "Work Life Fit". She had the same arguments you did. It's not a balance. But I do like "harmony" better.
I like "harmony", especially because sometimes one or the other will need more attention for periods of time for whatever other force majeure events. "Balance" does imply 50/50 and "harmony" could vary from person to person, depending on personality, life situation, preference, etc
I talked to Kent Beck abut his crushing imposter syndrome. It helps to know he feels it too.
I have often reminded staff working for me who are feeling imposter syndrome that 90% of people feel this - and the alternative is hubris and narcasissm - treat it as a sign you are open to learning.
If Kent Beck has imposter syndrome, we need to call it something else. "Growing pains", maybe, @drjgoosbysmith? 🙂
@paula.thrasher Yes! I've become at (more) peace with my Imposter Syndrome and feel glad it's not Dunning-Kruger Effect!
@drjgoosbysmith what's the relationship between imposter syndrome and intrapersonal inclusion? they sound like they're neighbors.
Also, Ed Schein wrote a book called Long Live DEC, DEC is dead. It broke my heart to read. DEC was a company ahead of its time. STILL the best corporate environment in which I worked. It was an engineer’s company.
When I hear someone say "I am just.." I get triggered. I have to say something. You are more than that.
It's a sign the person does not value what they are doing. Everyone is doing something important.
Funny thing is that the people who don't feel imposter syndrome are typically the ones who don't know enough to understand they know very little. They are very loud too...
THIS --> "Give yourself some grace" @chawklady Have compassion for yourself.
Every new role I have has me second guessing myself until I settle in. @diamond.f.lee7 - it never stops and it's one of the things that we have self reflect on so we can improve.
It's like so many other things, we have to own that aspect of our selves and figure out how we move forward.
If it's not uncomfortable we're not growing. But Imposter Syndrome is more than being uncomfortable, I think it's mostly losing confidence that we are going in the right direction, or that everything we have done so far was the right thing to do. For me, having a mentor has helped to keep those misperceptions in check
i didn't feel comfortable with work/life balance until i felt financially secure enough to be fired. i admire anyone who can do so before that.
That is one of the reasons I so admired Tony Dungy. Leadership sets and reinforces such an important workforce value. Dungy told them to give it all during the day and GO HOME. https://coachesinsider.com/football/integrity-tony-dungy/ Fair work life balance was a key theme in the model’s “Fairness” dimension.
If you don't learn to say no when you need to, your body will say it for you in the form of illness/burnout/disease See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi#:~:text=Karoshi%20(%E9%81%8E%E5%8A%B4%E6%AD%BB%2C%20Kar%C5%8Dshi),stress%20and%20a%20starvation%20diet.
@drjgoosbysmith yeah. that. i read his post just after he wrote it and that story has stayed with me since.
Thanks Jeff. I recently did an updated burnout presentation for an internal RedHat event. I still break put in tears every time I see my slide with the picture of that beautiful young man Carlo.
PS: I can’t wait to see @jennifer.hansen and the rest of the Capital One team present their amazing experience report this afternoon — our first plenary session this afternoon! They’re so good!!!!
Loved this panel! Loved the interactive aspect of this discussion too. Thank you!
Many Thanks @drjgoosbysmith for facilitating this insightful panel. Well done!!
@anamos21252 Happy to have an open discussion about Red Hat - I'm also in the DMV, we have a big office here in Tysons - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfosborneiii/
thank you @chawklady @drjgoosbysmith @jennifer.hansen @nazia.ali @anamos21252 @diamond.f.lee7 and Shreya Chatterjee - so many great reminders about asking, listening, giving, receiving and LIVING in the interdependent web of life. @genek101 this was a great panel - well-curated with this morning's lineup 🙏
@jennifer.hansen I’ll reach out to you next week — I’d love to brainstorm with you on how to creating opportunities for great interactions outside of the conference!!! Cc @mvk842 @jeff.gallimore 🎉🎉🎉
yay - it’s so sad to see the Slack (for example) quiet and empty between DOES conferences
Amazing to see the way @drjgoosbysmith facilitated this excellent panel to talk about so many important things. Thank you.
I’m rewriting the first one with a publisher at a LOWER price point than the academic publisher set!! It should hit Amazon in late Spring!! Thanks for your comments and support!
@moonmaster9000 and....we are back to the office office......
until COVID hit anyways...
@zoe not really. There's no litmus test for it. I think of it as an experience of working or playing with others that is fun and meaningful and challenging, and marked by colearning, caring, and safe-making (which I'll cover in the talk).
but I also think words fail to really capture the experience. It's something probably almost everyone has experienced, but may be surprisingly hard to really capture it in words. Poets probably do it best.
Salesperson: "As this poem clearly shows, Radical Collaboration is..."
I had this conversation before at work with some of our teams that used to be very concerned about org chart authority and a means to validate work. We say that there is still a supervisor role, but it's shared by everyone in the team
ditto. I'm certain the top brass only thought Agile Air Force when it was first used 😉
I always park in the pickup area at Home Depot. The app changes all the time - and the changes make sense
they have given a number of talks at OSCON that help explain how they manage inventory and comms. really cool stuff
wondering if Teal Organizations is going to come up
I can tell you that it's not because I have never heard of a Teal organization--anything you can share before I start googling?
From the book Reinventing Organization and the related material I’ve seen I think the dynamics feel very similar to what you’re describing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buurtzorg_Nederland is one of the case studies.
the discussion of authenticity reinforces the connection to Teal for me.
http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Teal_Organizations
We develop a sensitivity for situations that don’t quite feel right, situations that demand that we speak up and take action, even in the face of opposition or with seemingly low odds of success, out of a sense of integrity and authenticity. < from the wiki
Patagonia is one of the teal poster children: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00344?gko=30876
Collective learning needs psychological safety, both happen at the team level
you need to be vulnerable to do that kind of learning
I’ve always liked this diagram of what’s required for true collaboration: http://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/collaboration.jpg
from https://stratechery.com/2013/the-uncanny-valley-of-a-functional-organization/
Ben Thompson has some phenomenal stuff - fully recommend. I actually read the uncanny valley article when I started at my new company (my VP came from Microsoft)
(finally @jtf references something I know off the top of my head - my conference bingo card is now complete...)
Completely agree products or services around psychological safety should be designed with care in mind and to avoid the punitive
reminds me of the story in Maverick! of the factory workers taking on the support roles
including the factory workers painting the factory the way they wanted
Yeah, that warning against weaponisation resonates so much - so easy for unintended outcomes to emerge when we try to change cultural behaviours
Completely agree, it's hard work to focus on your people but with the right intention and care it can be transformative.
oh definitely - it is so worth making these changes. I think people get discouraged when they try things and it doesn't work because they never considered "how can people implement this change in a way that backfires?" better to start with "this is a good idea" and "this is how it might go wrong" so "let's take care" 🙂
How do you see constructing RC workspaces in a 100% remote environment?
I think the idea would be the same (the makers themselves know what furniture, tools and "spaces" work best for them) but would obviously would look different when everyone is distributed. Tools like http://sococo.com that reduce barriers to distributed information collaboration come to mind. What do you think?
I agree they would make (and remake) the space and choose the interactions that suit them.
In the context of a large organization with 1000+ employees, have you seen models of success with rc workspace autonomy you can point to?
@nickeggleston the ASK system at Pivotal scaled surprisingly well. We made our workspace what we wanted it to be by sending an ask@ email. And who was empowered to say "yes" to our asks? Our pivots at the front desk. They were called "Directors of Happiness"
Giving them the job of unblocking happiness and putting them directly with their customers was a really good combination - Works very well for most teams
Dan Pink’s drive describes how central autonomy is (along with purpose and mastery): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
BINGO - another book Ive read and something I refer my coworkers to. Also fully recommend
this is an incredible firehose in a conference of firehoses... how do we get the book??
I don't want to mess with your intrinsic motivation but I'm looking forward to reading it 🙂
http://www.mattkparker.com has a form for sign up. Or just follow me on twitter (realmattkparker) or linked in (matt-k-parker) as I'll promote myself on those platforms ☺️
Just had a look on the website... it's quite light... do you have any blogposts or anything anywhere?
If you take the transcript of today's talk, add in some of the bits you said you were skipping, add some links.. that would be awesome (and would also be a trailer for the book 📈)
Me again... just going through my files and noticed your slide deck in the dropbox has only got the intro slide
Publishing history!! @moonmaster9000, you're stealing my heart! ❤️
@moonmaster9000’s book is tentatively schedule for a 2022 release. Come follow IT Revolution to learn more!
Please write a book that will teach me how to sell this next (it turns out its really hard)
Loved that @moonmaster9000 - can't wait for the book.
@moonmaster9000 Cheers!🍻 Loved the ran out of time on a recording #bossmove - very authentic and vulnerable of you
👏:skin-tone-3:looking forward to the book @moonmaster9000
@moonmaster9000 so engaging! Do you have any other talks online we can watch, and how do u prefer to be contacted?
Hi Nix! Nope, that was my first talk about this topic. I've teased a few things on my linkedin and twitter. Twitter (@realmattkparker) LinkedIn (matt-k-parker) and email (<mailto:moonmaster9000@gmail.com|moonmaster9000@gmail.com>) are all good ways to get in contact with me.
Really beautiful talk, weaving so many threads into the tapestry. 🙏
I'm afraid it will be a while before the book comes out (2022) but in the meantime I hope to give more DOES talks. You can also find me on linked in (matt-k-parker) and twitter (realmattkparker) and email (<mailto:moonmaster9000@gmail.com|moonmaster9000@gmail.com>) and I'm always down for consulting with orgs that want to explore what radical collaboration could look like for them.
@moonmaster9000 That was really thought provoking. Thank you for raising the ideas that support radical collaboration. Touches on a yearning to work in that kind of environment
@moonmaster9000. That was a very interesting presentation. I would love to know more about it. My first thought was, how do you make sure work gets done on time if you are on a support team without someone overseeing the work?
Thank you Anthony. The most surprising thing about performance to all of us raised on the 20th century "carrot-and-stick" mentality is that people work best when they're intrinsically motivated to do so--and that extrinsic incentives reduce performance--whether those extrinsic motivators be rewards, like bonuses (or even just a positive "performance review" by your manager and the compensation bump that goes along with ), or punishments, like reprimands, PIPs, and the like.
@alonigro Jeffrey referenced a really good summary above in https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/archives/C015DUDD9C5/p1602790675457800 of the concept Matt references
Is it weird that I’m nervous about a presentation that’s already recorded and is just being played back??
You are doing well… as a fellow Professor I have your back…
Purdue University Global, so teaching on-line, I am weaving DevOps and Cloud into all the courses I teach so that the students do not get out and caught unaware of the movement.
Oh, I forgot to mention that!!! Hahaha! I was going to say that after I gushed about your AV setup! 😆 Thank you @mvk842!
I was teaching for the UNH IT program up until this year and was trying to start bringing some of those concepts into my Network and System Admin course. Some successfully, some not.
I work in the Central IT organization: Division of Information Technology (DoIT), and I primarily deal with all sorts of web hosting environments (Several hundred mix/match of things out on a fleet of Plesk servers, and over 1500 sites out on a wordpress multisite installation)
Yeah, I do get asked by the Chair from time to time when I drift from the “developed course” to much… like I allow for students to use AWS free tier related to Virtualization… when they were wanting them to do on laptop runtime vms…
Anyone else from higher ed (IT staff or otherwise) joining in today?
I guess I am double dipping, as I also work Ellucian, the ERP that specializes on Higher Education.
Yep, we are a Banner school. I’m now overseeing application admin across USNH so I’m learning all sorts about our ERP
Thank goodness that much of the DevOps community is built on open source, which is critical for higher ed and other non-profits. That said, we have not purchased a GitLab license because that’s become so critical to our work.
So my teams would be the ones that would build, support, the Cloud Banner environment, including the connection back to campus and to 3rd party vendors.
We are still 100% on premise for ERP. We want to move to a cloud-based ERP because continuing to run and manage that level of infrastructure just makes no sense and doesn’t give us any strategic benefits.
I feel you on the Institutional Data that's locked away. We've done a "good" job creating organization structure (silos) that match the system structure (per Conway's law), and have installed our own Dragons as well. But...there is movement to get that stuff opened via API's! (soon, I've been told)
I agree, it would free your teams to do more interesting things… Do not fall into the trap of cutting your team, repurpose and use them to do the other fun projects that still get asked of you..
Absolutely. We’ve already been cut. We now need to move to the cloud to get out of the hole and then we can start using our staff to do new, interesting, effective things.
Sort of not Dev Vs. Ops, but in Higher Ed, quite common to have HR ERP/Student ERP/Financial ERP vs. everyone else
^^^ I love this. It’s like silos are part of the human condition — it’s why I loved the @pdmoore talk, where it was Salesforce vs. Netsuite vs. etc., each with their own parochial goals!
Once I saw the "Wall of Confusion" concept a few years ago, I was seeing those silos, incentives and disincentives as something like walls of confusion between each of these students/professors/development/application owners/app admins/sysadmins
@phil.jochimsen I know what you are talking about.. we have to connect many other apps to Banner or Colleague, every school in the University seems to have their own pet connection to the CORE ERP..
One of the cool (and somewhat overwhelming) aspects of my new position is that I’m overseeing ERP, but I also own all of the teaching/learning applications and other core enterprise apps so I’m working to break down some of those walls
Releasing drupal things every 10 days is actually pretty good. We can't move that fast with it.
@david.blezard Well, I envy your position to be able to de-silo 🙂
@cncook001 Thanks! Much of the credit goes to my team who built some really nice pipelines and processes.
@david.blezard we have started using Synth Testing with Datadog, so that we are not using clients as the test… we test complete before tuning the apps back over…
I’ve thought about seeing what we could with a monitoring service instead of building ourself. I’ll have to check out Datadog.
love hearing about your journey @david.blezard in our SaaS product I do have to say sometimes when customers try to automate test to our production, they get caught by DDOS prevention because their automation is trying to login too many times in a short period
Really loving the camera setup of @david.blezard — what a great additional perk of the job! And great presentation! Thank you so much, David!!!
@cwookie643 Yep, I’ve flooded APIs before and gotten locked out!
Great Talk, if you have any questions about Cloud Banner, feel free to ping me, glad to help anywhere I can..
@genek101 Thanks for the feedback and the opportunity to be involved. I’ll also let our classroom tech team know that you like our learning tech! They have great systems in place.
I’ll lurk in the #ask-the-speaker-more for a while if anyone has other questions or wants to talk more.
Hi, @tdietrich!! So much looking forward to meeting you — I’ve been meaning to reach out to you for nearly a year. (And PS: I’d love for you to know that @tal is one of my favorite people in the world!)
@tdietrich task switching is the #1 complaint on my teams…
and yet we keep building and using more tools and integrations to create more opportunities for context switching
I love Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi!!! And it took me weeks to finally be able to say his name — I learned there are a couple more syllables in there than I had originally thought! (It was such an influence for me in Unicorn Project. h/t @mik)
Have u also been following Dr Seligman on optimism and happiness?
My team has "focus time" blocks on our calendars during certain times of the week to try to give us uninterrupted time. I'm hoping to find some other ideas here as well.
we have shifted, the On-call to include normal day, and have 1 week duration, during that week no project work, all Break-fix, after that they get 6 weeks to work projects…
+1 to on-call including the day, so you know when your capacity to product/customers/etc will be reduced
we've also brought business people into the support streams on this sort of schedule, so everyone gets contact with customers, contact with our service from their eyes, about 1wk per 2mo
yes, and the ones that are on call use that time as way to find things that can be automated away to reduce number of calls.. so while no project work, there is work on reducing interruptions.
@tdietrich is that 6 hours/person/day?
yep, here is the source if you are interested https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/06/01/interruptions-at-work-can-cost-you-up-to-6-hours-a-day-heres-how-to-avoid-them/
The slide deck in dropbox and git only shows a single template slide not the full slide deck. Can we get the full slide deck?
We also encourage scheduling focus time, even for managers. We refer to as "maker time," which comes from this old Paul Graham post: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
We do maker time too. But, are there ways to do this that doesn't exclude folks who work differently (a la @nicolefv’s point that WFH and productivity are personal)? In other words, coordinating a respect for maker time but not standardizing when/how maker time gets scheduled?
We don't have any standards around it's use - beyond respecting when others choose to schedule it. We just try to educate about the benefits and encourage it's use.
@adam.li - the above link was how I started to realise the importance of Developer Experience
I'd also recommend this one. https://jaxenter.com/aaaand-gone-true-cost-interruptions-128741.html People need https://jaxenter.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324339204578173252223022388.html%22 to go back to their tasks after a major interruption, but the plot deepens if you’re a programmer. Add at least 10 minutes to the forced break (the minimum amount of time you need to start editing code again) and there you go — that’s a solid half hour you lose whenever someone approaches you. It gets worse if that interruption is https://jaxenter.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://thetomorrowlab.com/2015/01/why-developers-hate-being-interrupted/%22 https://web.archive.org/web/20150317230234/https://thetomorrowlab.com/2015/01/why-developers-hate-being-interrupted/
did @tdietrich just slam her phone on the desk to make a point? 🙂
I've seen "No Meetings X-day" (usually Wed or Thu)
I see a lot of attempts at this. it seems to slam against other flexible working ideals, eg part time people. Getting 2-3hrs undisturbed is gold, so half day chunks.
we did that and it just moved the meetings to after-hours on other days of the week…
Tasktop has "Flow Fridays" (I think?) that operate that way.
My Teams have done "No meeting Fridays". Goals were focused work or learning journeys. It worked to a point. It's hard if it's not company-wide since you get invited to meetings across other orgs.
meetings with the rest of the org seems to break this ideal. I've found that putting in 2hr "meetings" in my calendar works better, because there are still gaps to sync with others.
Lucas, do you have part-timers (eg people that work 3 or 4d/week, or are split between two teams), curious if that's influenced making time for getting into the flow
You could also have a team agreement where your calendar actually shows Out-of-office those days.
I've done this with Friday afternoons blocking 1 to 5PM. The tricky part is not allowing it to fill up with meetings that couldn't fit during the earlier part of the week.
james: +1. I think when people see fully blocked out calendars they just assume something's flexible in there and throw sessions in. it's the balance between prioritising high quality interactions and collaboration, and thinking/doing time.
We do something similar, one of the more frustrating things is the number of meeting invites we get even when we are clearly busy in the calendar. Setting autodecline for meetings solves this, but at the cost of having to auto-accept all other meetings by default which is not a trade off we are willing to make.
i too am in search of the "best way" to block out time...the various methods I have enabled are short lived as they are only as strong as leaderships spine....if they fold and ask "to make an exception for blah blah" then it starts to unravel...
Goes to psychological safety again. How can one of my direct reports refuse a meeting request from my boss's boss or peers without feeling worried.
@martin391 I've noticed that too. Sometimes I feel like the only person that actually looks for someone to be free before booking a meeting.
I try to assume that I don't get sent a lot of meetings because others do look at my busy time. But I get enough invites over my busy times that it's hard to think the best of people 😄
@nl_does being empowered to refuse a meeting from the management hierarchy is one thing, and i've seen excellent leaders re-inforce this. The fun grey part in the middle is more collab meetings with non-managers in other parts of the org that just want to get stuff done.
@james_feudo which is hard to do if the next gap in schedule is days away. Reducing default meeting times to 20 or 25min has a big impact on making more time, putting pressure on concise goals and outcomes for using collaborative time.
Its hard to scale no meeting days, chunks have worked better in my experience.
Its hard to scale no meeting days, chunks have worked better in my experience.
@nicolefv Showed data that your are correct @tdietrich
@tdietrich do you have hints on scaling these chunks of no-meeting time with teams or orgs that work across many time zones. eg global?
eg "that 2hr block you made for yourself is nice, but it's also the only overlap with US-East and Europe"
i think it has to start from the bottom up, groups of people that most commonly work together negotiating to find chunks, giving each other feedback and iterating to find something that can last
What's helped me is either going on do not disturb or closing down the mail & IM clients so I can't be interrupted.
good idea. I'd take something that can last as "next 2-3 months", and "between daylight savings changes" (prevalent for north/south hemisphere interactions, and between states that do or don't participate)
making it safe for people to speak up... is how blind spots are found. have seen the reverse work to devastating results. "we don't want problems, only solutions". Great way to not be told the house is on fire.
Completely agree that managing info flow to staff is really important. So easy to have things spin off out of control from the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong person.
Completely agree that managing info flow to staff is really important. So easy to have things spin off out of control from the wrong message at the wrong time to the wrong person.
Like the idea of that "focus statement", fits well in a standup or "start of day" style post.
@tdietrich Can you elaborate on the "Poke" (not confrontationally) example you gave?
I have a colleague that shall remain nameless who loves to play devils advocate. They playfully warn folks before poking at their approach or idea.
Great presentation @tdietrich. A lot of good info and good discussion here! Thanks so much!
Loved the talk, @tdietrich! It’s great that people are paying attention to these psychological factors and research.
Hope you got 1 nugget to take back with you to try and improve your and your team's situation
Solos are the single biggest deterrent to cross enterprise collaboration and innovation in companies of all sizes but particularly large well established companies. Sent from my iPhone
Yes - solos are great but it really takes a choir. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: