posts

I had a strong affirmative reaction to this passage when I came across the other day.

Every movement must constantly reconfirm its goals and objectives, returning always to its prime point, to the reason for its existence. Otherwise, there is a danger of methodology becoming all-important, obliterating the movement’s original objective. When this happens, even a movement that may once have achieved spectacular growth will find its wheels spinning uselessly, and in the end it will grind to a halt.

If a movement persists in stressing quantitative targets and the means to accomplishing them, even though its members do not support and accept its aims and objectives, a sense of coercion will come to prevail. This saps people’s initiative and enthusiasm; they grow negative about taking action. They lose all their joy and vitality. When that happens, even the loftiest of movements eventually reaches an impasse.

When the aims and objectives are understood and agreed upon, however, the next step is to set clear goals. Whether for an organization or for an individual, it is crucial that the goals be as concrete as possible. Having a goal makes things more exciting, more worthwhile; also, we experience a profound sense of joy when the goal is finally achieved. Once a goal has been decided on, it is important to give thorough consideration to how to best accomplish it.

Ever since joining SGI, I’ve felt very strongly that it is an exemplar of global organizational design. It was touching, then, to read this terse but thorough explanation of effective performance management that fits on one page of The New Human Revolution Volume 2.

In essence, it says that organizations need:

• The why (reason for exerting effort), and then
• The what (concrete goals), and then
• The how (plan to achieve those goals.)

I use this distillation all the time when designing and assessing performance management systems; from my experience and study, I think this is the easiest way to explain the cornerstones of modern performance management. It’s delightful to see it in a book from 1994, describing a mentality that was at the forefront of the organizational design of the SGI in the 1960s.

Consider these three situations:

• You’re at home on a Saturday when your phone blares. A page has escalated to you. One of your teams has been dealing with a data integrity issue that has caused a production outage for the last 30 mins, and the current incident commander doesn’t know how to proceed. What do you do?

• You are tasked with launching your company’s flagship product to an overseas market. None of your team members are from this locale nor speak the language. The product only operates domestically right now. What do you do?

• One of your company’s client-operations teams is asking for advice on choosing software tools to help them scale. You volunteer, since you’re a founding employee and once managed client relationships yourself. What do you do?

Take a minute or two to think about your answers to these questions.

Got them? Good.

Now, ask yourself:

1. Why did you make the decisions that you did?

2. How satisfied are you with your own explanation?

If you answer falls short of “extremely satisfied”, I hope you’ll find something useful in this series of posts.

In this post, we’ll describe a framework for identifying what kinds of decisions we should be making in any given situation. In subsequent posts, I’ll enumerate some exercises that I find useful to help teams make decisions together.

Carbon pricing reduces a nation’s emissions by gradually increasing the cost of emitting greenhouse gases.

It’s easy to see how this works for goods and services that are both produced and consumed within the country (domestic goods.) However, what should we do about Canada’s many imports and exports?

I grew up in a time and place where being identified as nerd put me at risk of abuse. Constant teacher surveillance in class meant I was likely to only be teased or, at worst, have a chair pulled out from under me during lessons. Once outside, though, the gloves came off. I needed to monitor my social interactions very carefully to avoid being piled onto.

This last little while has been bumpy, but I’m still making progress.

Hiring an early-stage manager can bring up powerful fears of making a bad hire.

• What if they ruin our culture?
• What if we lose good people because of them?
• What if they cause harm?

Another sort-of seven days. The high point: My first published letter to the editor! I am clearly well-prepared for retirement.

Here are the last seven days of action.

Flameshot is a great free screenshot tool. Here’s short guide on how to set it up to work well in Cinnamon.

I mostly wrote this just so I could have an excuse to use Flameshot.

This year, I’ve resolved to do one thing every day to take action against Climate Change.

Toronto, the city I call home, went into a second lockdown two days ago.

Have you ever hired for a job you didn’t understand? It’s scary. If you don’t know how to do the job yourself, how can you assess what a strong candidate looks like?

In this post, we’ll see how to modify a well-researched interview methodology to quickly build a process that helps you hire for the unknown in 4 steps. And, in the spirit of incrementalism, you’ll have something useful after each step.