My favourite links from around the web 2020 — Getting better at work and random things of interest
By: Tom Connor
Tags: Leadership Development, Work, Tom Connor, Blog, 2020

To start, I found this concept of The design squiggle

early in the ear and came back to it continually to help explain the progress of work:

I discovered David Hodes

at the beginning of they year via his book “More than Just Work” and then found his website, which is just a treasure trove of knowledge on Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints and related ideas. Two of the best:

Five commandments for high performance execution —

How much throughput is the system generating?

What operating expense is being consumed to generate that throughput?

How much is invested in generating the profit arising from the difference between the throughput and the operating expense?

How long is what the system’s doing going to take — that is, what’s the lead time or turn-around time?

How reliable is system performance — that is, what is delivery to promise like?

What is the quality produced by the system — that is, how much product or service is either rejected or reworked?

Practical Wisdom — Drum Buffer Rope —

Balance the system to match the demand while reducing costs by removing unneeded extra capacity? The manager who thinks this way, trying to perfectly balance supply and demand across a connected sequence of steps is in for a nasty surprise.

With the newly ‘balanced system’ (all work-centres at 10 capacity), production consistently falls short. Why? The manager discovers that common cause variation means that each of the steps in the process has only a 90% chance of processing their full quota of 10 notifications per day.

weekly email has been a source of equal parts learning and amusement for me when it arrives every Saturday morning in my inbox. His thoughts about Tech and the digital economy I find very interesting. The way he blew apart the WeWork business model; His many observations on the US higher education system post Covid; and some of his more general writing for instance about FedEx or on the luck he has experienced in his life.

This great post highlighted how US election maps are wildly misleading

provided a summary of 3 Frameworks for making decisions. I found this complemented my own post on the subject of MAP frameworks:

Framework 1: Reducing Dimensionality

Framework 2: Mediating Assessments Protocol (MAP)

Framework 3: WRAP

Writing in Medium, Aiden Kenealy

has a thoughtful post on the Four simple habits of exceptional leaders that I found useful to refer to through the year:

Habit 1: Re-framing problems to motivate and empower.

Habit 2: Focusing on what we can control — By focusing on the things we can have control over, and ignoring those that we can’t, we can ensure that our energy is best spent on achieving productive future outcomes.

Habit 3: Becoming process orientated, not goal orientated — By focusing on improving the way we and our teamwork to achieve our goals, and forming habits of always seeking to improve how we work, we will ensure our goals are continually met and exceeded.

Habit 4: Making it about other people. By ensuring others can succeed around us, we can empower them to achieve their goals. In doing so, our own goals then become much easier to achieve.

This post and youtube presentation on Agile was one o the best introduction I have ever come across —

Stripe CEO Fast — Patrick Collison —

Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. For instance Kelly Johnson and his team designed and delivered the P-80 Shooting Star, the first jet fighter used by the USAF, in 143 days. Source: Skunk Works.

Relevant to 2020 (well any year!) Erik Bern wrote —

Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by opportunity cost

It might seem obvious the way I put it that opportunity cost is the thing to blame. But it’s not. Human psychology works in weird ways. People love to conclude that something wasn’t done because they are stupid, or possibly lazy… Your friends aren’t stupid, just busy.

I am always looking at tools to help improve how we work

and have found the Value proposition canvas to be particularly useful. This post is the best primer on the subject I have come across and I found the Mario Bros analogy particularly useful.

The Value Proposition Interface Canvas makes it explicit how you are creating value with your API for your customers and how you are providing value. It is a tool that helps you to systematically understand the customer needs and to design API products your customer want

John Salvatier — Reality has a surprising amount of detail

Again, you might think ‘So what? I guess things are complicated but I can just notice the details as I run into them; no need to think specifically about this’. And if you are doing things that are relatively simple, things that humanity has been doing for a long time, this is often true. But if you’re trying to do difficult things, things which are not known to be possible, it is not true.

The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success…

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. …This means it’s really easy to get stuck.

Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.