Archives September 2021

Oops, September is nearly over and here is the summary of posts for August:

Uncertainty

What are the odds?

Imagine that you have bought a ticket as a space tourist. You ask what are the odds of survival and they tell you “Astronauts have a 97% chance of survival” (true). Then you ask “yes but what are *my* chances of surviving *my* trip?”.  Nobody knows.
This post is really interesting. So many people are incapable of accepting the fact that the future is unknowable. I spoke about it on this podcast

VUCA hype

Seen on social media: “don’t fall for the VUCA hype”. Let’s examine the situation…

Humanity

Share the rewards

At Teal Unicorn, we coach our clients to share bonuses.

When people don’t flourish

You can’t measure a knowledge worker but we can assess someone as a person, not a machine.   The team knows who is not pulling their weight.  If we have good relationships they may know why too, and sometimes be able to help.

Parenting

There are interesting parallels between parenting and management. Cherry and Rob recently wrote a book on parenting in Vietnamese in conjunction with our son David. This is how we view raising teens. Look at how similar this is to the ideas of better ways of managing.

Consulting

What is a consultant?

What is a consultant? We use the term carefully.

Predatory consulting

”£3m for 8 weeks of consultancywork: McKinsey given contract to adviseUK.govon tech project business cases”Seventy five thousand pounds a day.

Anybody who believes an outside agent can swan in and deliver that kind of change in 8 weeks is smoking something.

And a moan…

Audio and video vs text

I almost never consume podcasts or videos. Text is better.

When workers complain of burnout a pet answer is work smarter not harder. It is true that we can  increase throughput to reduce overburden. What is not true is that we can increase throughput while we are in a state of overburden.

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The real world is always always VUCA. We create tight boundary conditions to at times force it to behave in ways that are other than complex but that is an unstable temporary arrangement.

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I often say “Blame the system”, with the intention of redirecting the sentiment onto something inanimate. The next step is to learn not to blame anything, to mature to more positive emotions.

I can redirect blame away from individuals in seconds. To learn not to blame takes years.

This is not the Black Swan. The next incident is not necessarily unimaginable, you might quite likely be able to conceive the scenario.

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Knowledge only actually exists in people’s heads. What is called knowledge management is just an attempt to capture a snapshot. KM should be facilitating people talking to each other.

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