📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

DEEP Framework: Documenting Decisions, Events, Explanations, and Proposals in Your Org Summary: The DEEP framework emphasizes the documentation of decisions, urging the recording of the rationale behind business and general decisions. It also stresses the importance of documenting events such as meetings and town halls, highlighting the need for summarization. Furthermore, the framework encourages documenting explanations, especially in the context of onboarding, as they often involve repeated material. Lastly, it emphasizes documenting proposals or ideas, allowing individuals to present their rationale to others and providing time for considered reactions. The acronym 'DEEP' serves as a reminder for teams to consider the documentation created within their workflow. Transcript: Speaker 1 So I came up with an acronym as well, and I call that acronym deep. I think you'll identify with some of these. So deep for decisions, if there's ever a decision, then you should record the rationale for it. And we've talked about it endlessly on our tech radar's decision record systems. But I extend that to business decisions as well and general decisions as well. So similar format. Then there's events. So you have a town hall, you have a meeting, all of those are events, right? And you better document them for the benefit of other people. And when I say document, I mean, summarize, sure, you can have a recording or snippets of recordings if they are useful for people, but the summary is the more important thing. Then there's explanations, and I found these very useful in the context of onboarding, because there's a lot of explainer material that gets repeated in onboarding. And those are definitely great candidates for documentation. And the last one is proposals. And I called that proposals, but really I'm trying to talk about things like ideas. So let's take an example. I want to use this new library on my project. I have a certain rationale for it. Let me write down the thought process. What value is it going to bring? Let me present it to everyone. Everyone has the time to consume it. Oftentimes we go into decision making with a lot of cognitive load, where, you know, Ken explains in rapid fire things that he's been thinking about for the last 15 days. And now I have to consume it in the next 30 minutes and give Ken a year or nay. It's really difficult because Ken's done all the deep thinking, I need the time to process it and writing gives me the time to process it, right? And I can also not give knee jerk reactions, but considered reactions. So proposals, and that starts to include design documentation, idea papers, any kinds of proposals that you make on the team. So that acronym deep is a good trigger for teams to kind of hold on to and think about what is the documentation we're creating in the flow of work.

Asynchronous Collaboration — Getting It Right

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Left unchecked, your team members move from one task to the next, doing the easiest things, the things someone asked them to do, or simply the things right in front of them. Especially as stress increases, prioritization effectiveness declines. In one study of 43,000 encounters of doctors and patients, researchers found that when the workload was heaviest, physicians prioritized their easiest cases, leaving the most severe cases to wait the longest – a tendency known as “completion bias” (Gino and Staats 2016). Among all professions, it can be easy to get sucked into an endless stream of activities that feel like progress but that leave tomorrow looking much like yesterday.

The Leader Lab

Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger

Adversarial instead of truth-seeking engagement is baked into so many aspects of our society Summary: Our society often relies on adversarial advocates for decision-making, but this approach doesn't lead to the truth. We need a cooperative effort where people are open to changing their minds and acknowledging different perspectives. This applies to civic organizations, legal systems, political systems, and even neighborhood associations. We tend to punish those who disagree with the established opinion, leading to a lack of pluralism. We should strive for diverse viewpoints and a cooperative search for the truth. Transcript: Speaker 1 There's a thing wrong with our society which is we have even the institutions that work reasonably well in our society are still often built around adversarial advocates in which the Idea is i will argue as passionately as possible for one side you will argue as passionately as possible for the other side we will deploy whatever resources we can rhetoric money etc And somehow we like to think that by i don't know interpolation that will arrive at the truth and that's totally not true right i mean i we know that there are lots of types of decision-making Where that's a disaster where what you need is not these two sides each of which are deliberately undercutting the other as effectively and including viciously as they can but you want Everybody to be willing to change their mind openly publicly to be willing to publicly acknowledge the point that the other person is making and you want to sense that people are cooperatively Working together toward the truth but that's not how most civic organizations work it's not how our legal system works it's not our political system works nowadays maybe there was Some golden age in the past but it did probably not it's not even how neighborhood associations work right i mean there may be some diversity in how homeowners associations work internally Although i regret to say i don't think that's usually true because they're usually very self-selected groups of people who are quite vocal but once they arrive at a decision they're Like good old-fashioned Maoist democratic centralists you know like well we represent the neighborhood and this is our monolithic opinion and if somebody shows up and says well i Live in that neighborhood but i i actually don't agree then they they get piled on and punished and if somebody says i'm an environmentalist but this environmental organization doesn't Speak for me or i belong to this racial or ethnic group but i don't necessarily agree with what the claimed representatives of that group say that group wants they get punished again A lack of pluralism but i think it's not just a lack of diversity it's this notion that the way to get make decisions is for everybody to hammer their stake as firmly into the ground as they Can

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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